trinityofone

Yesterday was a glorious, glorious day. Yesterday was Anansi Boys day!

For those of you who don't know, Anansi Boys is the new novel by my personal lord and savior, Neil Gaiman. I've been looking forward to it for...okay, years. And I wasn't at all disappointed. (Yeah, I finished it already. What? Like I was going to read just a little bit of it and stop.) It was terrific--it made me really happy, which few books can do. I'm going to post a more spoilery reaction later, but right now I just want to say: yeah. Go read it.

However, Anansi Boys wasn't the only awesome new book to come out yesterday. Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff also debuted. I had the privilege of getting to read this book a few months ago (one of the few perks of employment at Barnes & Noble? Occasional review copies), and it's fabulous, one of the reasons this has been The Summer of My Crush on Canada (the other being, of course, my dear Rodney McKay, and I really can't go a whole post without at least mentioning SGA, can I?).

Rakoff is an essayist--his previous book is Fraud--and in this collection, he delivers two essays in particular that just floored me. "Love It or Leave It" is about Rakoff's decision, after 22 years of living in New York, to become an American citizen--and his subsequent very mixed feelings:

This all feels like monumentally bad timing, or possibly the entirely wrong move altogether. Just two days prior [to his swearing-in], the front page of the paper had two news stories. The first was about how Canada was on the brink of legalizing gay marriage, and the second told of an appeals court in the District of Columbia Circuit that ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are legally outside the reach of the protections of the Constitution.

Ouch.

Equally ouchy is "Beat Me, Daddy," an examination of what the fuck is wrong with the Log Cabin Republicans, "the largest gay and lesbian organization in the GOP." Rakoff, who is gay, puts a lot of effort into trying to understand why anyone would want to ally themselves with a political party that, well, hates them, and the result is fascinating and, frankly, heart-breaking. A lot of Rakoff's essays are like that--but you should still totally read this book. In fact, that is why you need to read this book: because we need to be talking about this stuff, and Rakoff's a great person to lead the discussion--unflinchingly, and with humor.

So yeah. Shoo. Go read.

So last night I dreamt:

*Long, extended nightmare about spiders*

*Blissful couple of seconds in which I am following one Lt. Col. John Sheppard around a supermarket. Slowly, he turns and smiles at me...*

Person I used to know and have absolutely no desire to see ever again: Hey, look who it is! It's trinityofone!

Another person I used to know and have absolutely no desire to see ever again: You look really weird. Are you sick?

Yet another person I...you get the picture: Why are you wearing pajamas?

Person I used to know, had a humongous crush on, and was spurned by: Hey, that guy you were with just shrugged his shoulders and left.

CUT TO:

*Me, in the kitchen of our old house in Vermont, hitting a raw egg with a tennis racket*

WHAT? What does that even mean? Where does something like that come from? Is it a metaphor? I'm confused.

In other, positive, news, I quit my job. Wheeeee!

Music choice a joke no one will get, except maybe psychopepsquad, but only if she's really paying attention. And on crack.

Er, hi.

So, since I last updated, I've:

*Worked many long hours at a job I'm finding increasingly mediocre despite the fact that last night I got to sell a gay sex book to Amanda Bynes, who took care to tell me it was "for a friend";

*Failed to secure housing in Dublin, which is bad;

*Met monanotlisa, which was good;

and,

*Gotten hopelessly addicted to Stargate: Atlantis, much to my own shock, believe me.

Er, yeah. So about that. I think I'm going to want to post about this now. A lot. And unless I'm greatly mistaken (please, please let me be greatly mistaken) I don't think many (any?) people on my friends list are into this show. (Besides the people I just friended...hiiiiiii!) I see two solutions to this problem. This first is that you all get into it...right now! Go read daughtershade's introduction (with pretty pictures); then read astolat's A Beautiful Lifetime Event. That should be all it takes, really. Although I'm a little unsure of my pimping skills, to be honest. I forced spazatron to watch two episodes and I couldn't crack his anti-SGA resolve. (Damn you, spazatron! Damn you and your stony, stony resolve!)

Option two, of course, is that you shake your heads and with wry smiles upon your infinitely tolerant faces, ignore my odd geeky ways. You can also comfort yourselves with the knowledge that if I have something fandom-y to post about occasionally, the volume of my posts in general tends to increase as well. So that means SGA!squee with a side of B&N bitching! I can hear you shouting for joy from here.

So, in summary: work sucks. Rodney rocks. The end.

Two days ago, I ran into Joss Whedon (almost quite literally) at the Whole Foods in Brentwood. This makes twice that I've seen him and utterly failed to have the courage to say anything.

Yesterday, I met mciac for lunch and shopping, and with some borrowed courage, applied for a job at Barnes & Noble. I really, really want this job. Light a candle, say a prayer, do a voodoo ritual for me...

Capped off the day by going to see Howl's Moving Castle at the El Capitan. (Yes, I know: "el" means "the." But that's the name of the theater! Saying otherwise would be weird.) It was terrific. I think I liked Spirited Away more, perhaps because the mythos was more exotic to me, but Miyazaki + Diana Wynne Jones? Fab combination.

And why has it been so long since I've read any Diana Wynne Jones? Not to mention: E. Nesbit or Edward Eager. I miss my childhood!

Though not so much that the dream I had last night in which I had to move back into my childhood home didn't totally freak me out...