just some things

Occasionally, I go through periods of time where writing anything seems very difficult. These periods are usually characterized by a heightened state of delight in everything I do and a crazy-fast sense of time floating past me.

That is exactly what is happening now.

Whilst it happens (and whilst I enjoy it), here are a few things on my mind. I will talk about them in greater detail either through written words of the future or through whiskey pours of the future.

1. I am six pages into the latest Chuck Klosterman book, Eating the Dinosaur, and he has already articulated exactly what it is I find so compelling about interviewing strangers. Say what you will about Klosterman, and hate him because you're supposed to hate him and because he's just too snarky for you or something, but I continue to find his essays more spot-on and compelling than most things.

2. Speaking of compelling and reading books and finishing things, I finally finished Anna Karenina, fueled mostly by a certain Christiana's ridicule. I have a serious and somewhat hilarious aversion to weak female characters (it's a bad idea to ask me how I feel about Emma Bovary or the female antagonists of Hold Steady songs), so it comes as little surprise that I occasionally have trouble engaging with Anna as a character. However, my struggles with this all came to a screeching and irrelevant halt when I reached the passage where Levin decides he's going to mow the fields alongside the peasant workers.

The written word is powerful, and when it works correctly, it makes you want to throw it aside and devote yourself to sweat and labor.

3. I know what I guess amounts to a lot of people. I spend most of my days being amazed at how smart and how fun and how funny and how productive they are. This seems very simple and very stupid but it never ceases.

4. Two days before the onset of my twenty-ninth year, I would like to announce that I believe all previous versions of myself would be really very happy with how I turned out. With the possible exception of me at age four, who would be really upset that I never figured out how to be a professional mountain climber.

To her, I say "there's still time!"