Today has been spent primarily in the act of reading. I finished the final 40 pages of Roland Barthes and the last hundred pages of Low Red Moon. Since the weather was unusually temperate, somewhere in the low seventies, I opened all the windows in my apartment to air it out and make everything smell fresh again. In my bedroom is a sliding glass door in lieu of a window, and at one point while I was reading, I heard "Caw! Caw!" outside and nearby. I looked out and saw four crows on the roof of the building across from mine, just sitting there squawking at each other and occasionally hopping around. I'm not sure if just four crows comprises a murder, but it was interesting to see. Big suckers too. After a minute or so, something startled them and they burst off the roof in a flurry of blackness, like a fluttering patch of night (to steal a phrase from NeilG). Though for all I know, they could have been ravens or rooks; I'm afraid all corvids look the same to me.

This is also "Super-Saturday" for the US Open, so I watched some of my tennis favorites battle it out. Unfortunately, my man Agassi got beaten in the fourth set, though my other main man Andy Roddick just won his match in five sets and will be going to the finals tomorrow. Makes me want to go out with my racket and a tin of balls and play as well, though the court in my apartment complex is a death trap, constantly littered with leaves and pine needles and dirt to make you slide and crack your head open.

Yesterday was extremely productive. After class, I mailed off The Corrs: Live in London VCD to the cat who bought it on eBay, as well as sending off a little bit of non-fiction to Guideposts magazine, and buying some very cool stamps (American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes). I then went to Kinko's and made fifteen copies of "Last Fare" for my fiction-writing class. After work, I deposited my paycheck, and got an oil change and very overdue state inspection from Jiffy Lube.

Then I stopped in Borders because this weekend was a special student discout weekend, where you could take 20% off your purchase if you had a student ID. I had put off buying The Two Towers to take advantage of this, but I found out once I got to the cashier's counter that this promotion is a big steaming pile of crap. The DVD was sale priced at $19.99 from $28.99, and with the discount, I was expecting to pay only $15.99. Nuh-uh. The cashier ringing it up told me that since the DVD was discounted already, the 20% would only count toward the $28.99 price. At which point I burst into flames. The promotion on the flyer says you get 20% off your purchase, and nothing about conflicting discounts, nothing about only taking 20% off the original price. I mean, this is a student discount, which is helping out people with not a lot of money. Anyone could go in and buy the DVD for $19.99. I was so pissed off I told them to just void the purchase and left the store mumbling under my breath. This, along with the cancellation of the Preferred Reader program (which I used a lot), has most likely cost Borders one of their best customers.

Plus, Amazon has The Two Towers listed at $17.99, so Borders can suck it.

After that incident, I went next door to Lowes Foods and bought some badly needed groceries. Then last night, I drove over to the Madstone Theater (an upscale art house theater nearby) and saw Dirty Pretty Things which stars Chiwetel Ejifor and Audrey Tautou. It was an excellent movie, not at all what I was expecting, and the two stars gave phenomenal performances. I'll be seeing another movie tomorrow afternoon with my mom, but I'm not sure what yet. Last weekend, I rented House of 1000 Corpses (which was surprisingly good, if brutal), Solaris (which is a hundred million times better than the Tarkovsky version; I'll most likely buy this one on DVD), and Adaptation (which was offbeat and cool and self-referential).

I was invited to a get together at a coworker's house tonight, but am stuck at home because of a sour stomach. Bleh. Though they said they'll probably be going till midnight, so if I'm feeling better later, I may go. Though I also have a review to write, and a short story to work on, so we'll see.

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Now Reading:
Aura by Carlos Fuentes

Stories Out to Publishers:
5

Books Read This Year:
34

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
32