Well, it's been a Lost Weekend, what with one thing and another . . . It seems to me that, if memory and copious experience serves, they'll all pretty much be lost from now until May. Ah, well, price you pay, I guess . . .

But I did manage a bit of time working on my classes and such; my goal for this weekend and next is to get a real Leg Up on the prep work for my classes, since once papers hit, I'll be pretty well buried. And there was one happy serendipitous occurrence: I went to the bookstore to get The Kite Runner, my book club's book for next month. Since I was purchasing this with the remainder of my gift card from my colleagues at Pharmacy, I got a few other books, too (taking advantage of Borders' buy-two-get-one-free deal). One of the others that I picked up was Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chick Klosterman, which is one of the most delightful books I've read in a while. It's a cultural critique, basically; Chuck is an early 30something whose insights into media, particularly, strike me as very apt. (Of course, sometimes he goes into college-dorm-room type rants, as he does in the essay about Billy Joel, and sometimes his reasoning is so specious it's just really absurd. And his self-confessions - like, for instance, the time he got fired as a baseball coach for a team of nine- and ten-year-olds because he told the concerned mothers who'd called a meeting with him and the Park District Board of Directors, "Why are you telling me how to do my job? It's not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies" - are sometimes painfully lunatic.)

Nonetheless, I found a few essays that were [a] not too profane and [b] not too misogynist to use in my FY comp class. One is about the Sims. It's really terrific; I like this excerpt the best, although I must warn you that it's a PDF . . . Just read from the part where I put the asterisk to the part where I indicated the end of the excerpt.

Ah, well. Tomorrow's the beginning of another week . . . I better get some rest so I'm ready . . .