Monday, January 05, 2009
Last night I felt like a pile of sludge, so after working out briefly this morning I spent a couple of hours cleaning like a mad housewife. It seems counter-intuitive that scrubbing stray hairs from behind a toilet should make me feel better about life; they could gather together into a massive brown tumbleweed, for all I really care. I only dislike the idea of having to push aside a hair forest every time I make water.
Pars prima of my errand-running for the afternoon consists in purging myself of a few books that I do not particularly need. The list:
Elie Wiesel- NightMost of these I read in high school and have clung to for little reason, other than especially liking them. But let some other kid read them fo' cheaps. I had two copies of Tess, which is probably unnecessary.
Harper Lee- To Kill A Mockingbird
Lord Byron- Byron's Poetry
Barbara Ehrenreich- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Thomas Keneally- A River Town
Elizabeth Winthrop- The Castle in the Attic
Jerry Spinelli- Maniac Magee
F. Scott Fitzgerald- Flappers and Philosophers
Robert Cormier- Tenderness
Thomas Hardy- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Anzia Yezierska- Bread Givers
Thomas Keneally- Schindler's List
My housemate has mentioned I may have his old bike, which needs tire replacements; if this does not prove costly, I will wheel it down to the shop (pars secunda).
Labels: bicycle, books, Byron, Elie Wiesel, errands, hair, Maniac Magee, Nickel and Dimed, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Keneally, To Kill a Mockingbird, toilets, working out
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 10:43 AM]
Less Than A Month Until I Am Rid Of My Little Effer
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Although the annual, official celebration of toilets occurred earlier this week, now seems the best time to reflect on how drastically different life would be had I never sat upon or viewed one, for after what I ate for dinner this evening, tomorrow will be a day spent intimately with that which receives the feasts of my bowels.
The non-existence of such receptacles as toilets would necessarily have precluded the existence of my neurotic fear that an over-sized spider will crawl out of one, bite a chunk out of my ass, and bring about an agonizing and premature, though somewhat comic, death. I saw Arachnephobia when I was six or seven, and never since have I failed to check under, over, around, down, into, and through for spiders or other potential death-causing beasts.
Were the world bereft of toilets, I would not be as well-versed in English poetry, for the toilet has been where I tend to read such material: poetry differs in density, as does a cheeseburger or a blueberry that has passed through my digestive system. With a poetry anthology, therefore, one may consume it in one sitting, or interrupt it and return later without completely severing the flow of thoughts required for reading the entire text. Prose literature-reading on the toilet hardly ever works.
To discuss this further would be to digress farther from the task of gathering research material for a paper I am supposed to have been writing all semester.
Labels: anxiety, Arachnephobia, beasts, bowels, death, digestion, dinner, literature, poetry, research, spiders, thinking, toilets
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 4:47 PM]