List and sublists and books and luck.

I love books. Travis, who worked all day and just got home at 1:30 am, is currently building me a third bookshelf to contain the overflow within my personal library. He's a good man.

Two anecdotes from the past week having to do with books:

1.) I've been having a hard time in school lately, mainly because I'm taking Biology and Literary Theory and have no idea what's going on in any of my classes. For instance, here are a couple of sample sentences from my homework:

a.) DNA polymerase pairs up an exposed adenine base in the parental strand with a thymine base in a free nucleotide.

b.) Modleski identifies the academic recuperation of feminism via masculinity studies a consequence of theoretical shifts as well, namely poststructuralism's antihumanist approaches to identity, experience, and subjectivity.

I can probably look every single one of those words up in the dictionary and find coherent meanings for each of them. Yet in context with each other... wtf? So needless to say I'm having to fight a huge battle just to coax 1,000 to 2,400 words out of myself on something I barely understand. Study breaks help, and one of my favorite things to do on an study break is re-organize my books. Which is exactly what I was doing two days ago when I found $70 cash in one of the volumes. It really does pay to read. Even if you're basically illiterate when it comes to reading the stuff that counts for a grade.

2.) I buy approximately 60% of my books on half.com. Don't ask me how I came up with that figure, it's just a very educated guess. Anyway, I recently spend an hour or two drooling over first editions of Haruki Murakami's 2002 short story collection After the Quake. First edition/first printings go for about $150, so I ordered a first edition/second printing for ten bucks. Lo and behold, a freaking pristine 1st/1st showed up in my mailbox three days later. It almost made me believe in a benevolent universe (don't worry, I got over it as soon as I went back to writing my Lit Theory paper).

Is this the most boring blog ever? Probably.

Critical? Yes. Theoretical? No.

Because I'm currently enrolled in a literary theory class which happens to focus heavily on gender theory, and because my enrollment in said class has forever ruined the way I process information, I can't help but wonder what Judith Butler (famed post-structural feminist) would have to say in regard to pop singer Usher's recent claim that black women are becoming lesbians due to a shortage of available black men:

“It can never be bad to have a foundation as a man—a black man—in a time when women are dying for men,” he says. “Women have started to become lovers of each other as a result of not having enough men. Are you not studying the stories? Wake up! Black love is a good thing.”
Source

I'm sure that Butler would go off about gender constructs being fluid and largely created through repetition of stylized acts which in turn establish a culturally heteronormative idea of "core" genders. Perhaps she would go on to explain to Usher, if he happened to be present, that sexuality is a largely performative act having nothing to do with black men, or men of any other color, or women for that matter. She might even go as far as to say "No, Usher. The wold does not get a little bit gayer every time that Flo Rida song comes on."


Or maybe she would just agree with me in thinking that Usher is a tool.

Treasure

Look what I found at Flea World today:


I am tempted to wear them, but also worry that they'd be easily lost. They've survived 48 years, it would be a shame to sacrifice them in exchange for a few days of display. What's a girl to do? Um, obviously celebrate her stellar purchase with a mimosa.

I'm sick and so is Soorya's sense of humor.

Me: I went to the doctor and it turns out I have the flu and a UTI.

Soorya: What the heck? Did somebody sneeze in your vagina?












p.s.- No.