The World According to Bertie - Alexander McCall Smith (2007)

Hilarious for reasons he probably didn't mean.

"Anyway," she said, "I've learned my lesson. From now on I shall look for a very different sort of man."

"One to whom you can talk?" Dominica regretted saying this the moment she spoke, but Antonia appeared not to have taken offense.

"You know that I'm writing a novel about the early Scottish saints," she said. "Well, I shall look for a man who is the modern equivalent of the hero of my book."

Dominica picked up her glass of green ginger wine and glanced at Antonia over the rim. "Are we being practical?" she asked. "Are there any saints out there?"

Antonia met her gaze. "I'm sure there are. It's only a question of finding them."

"And, it will have to be an unmarried saint."

Antonia nodded. "Naturally."

"But where exactly will you find a contemporary saint?" said Dominica. "It's hard enough to meet any half-decent man these days, let alone somebody saintly."

Antonia thought for a moment. Then she said, "Saintly men presumably go to church. I shall find one at St. Giles, perhaps. Or at the Episcopal cathedral over at Palmerston Place. I find episcopalian men rather interesting, don't you?"

Dominica stared at her neighbor. She wondered if she was perhaps not quite feeling herself, if she needed to see somebody. First, there had been the ridiculous affair with Marcus. And now there was this absurd notion that she would meet a man in church. It really was ridiculous, she thought, quite unrealistic. Risible, really.

-The World According to Bertie, Chapter 72

Long My Motto

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make. ... And these things that have mattered for thousands of years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink merchant in his laboratory invents a new kind of mischief.

Good-Bye Mr. Chips, James Hinton (1934)

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

"There have been courtier philosophers, lens-grinding philosophers, and even engineer and strategist philosophers; but no philosopher, so far as I know, was a wholesaler." - Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, "Arsenic"

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but there are genre I think I like, that, whenever I actually read them, I remember that I don't (Southern Gothic comes to mind). Likewise, there are genre that I repeatedly forget that I adore. Like scientific memoir.

"Promethius had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture." - "Cerium"

The Periodic Table (1975) is one of several volumes of memoir Primo Levi wrote, but, where the other works focus on the time during and immediately following his internment at Auschwitz, this one describes his life in vignettes related to his chemistry training and career. The chapters are named for and themed around chemical elements (Iron, Mercury, Sulfur) - thus the title. To the extent that chemistry is addressed as such, there's nothing scientifically academic about the work, and, though a reader with no chemistry background might not fully understand some of the activities described, that shouldn't make it inaccessible, as every Levi pulls every detail to serve the humanity of the story.

Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptable, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptable things. - "Cerium"

Certainly, as a quasi-chemist (a chemical engineer, actually, but I have to pass for a chemist occasionally) with a literary bent, I love to get this view of someone like Levi, but the fascination of this perspective goes deeper than shared education. Levi is the object of any number of descriptors: novelist, essayist, critic, resistance fighter, Holocaust survivior. But, and this is what's so fascinating, what was his main occupation, for most of his work days, for most of his life? The trade he chose in his youth to pursue? Chemist. And not a chemist like Levoisier, or Linus Pauling, or Peter Debye, people who discovered groundbreaking phenomena or won Nobel Prizes or got obscure units of measure named for them. Levi was an industrial chemist - mostly, he solved problems in paint formulations when the product wouldn't dry properly.

Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles... - "Potassium"

I find this incredibly inspiring. Modern popular philosophies of fulfilment suggest that actualized existence can only occur when one aligns the maximum possible number of daily hours with the most rarefied calling to which one can attain. In other words, you can get life to work, if only you demand the freedom to live in unreality. It's good to be reminded that ordinary usefulness doesn't preclude greatness.

Now on my cubicle wall: To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you'll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists' Society. - "Nitrogen"

Additional Quotes

On the trade:

• ...all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted with this abomination. - "Chromium"
  
  
• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. - "Nitrogen"
  
  
• I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of [customer service]: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy. - "Uranium"
  
  
• I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine. - "Silver"
  
  
• I also know that, more often mania prevails over common sense, and alongside five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which nobody dares rescind only out of mental laziness, superstition, or morbid fear of complications. - "Silver"

On the war:

• We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins... - "Gold"
  
  
• Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether "Aryan" or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must or could resist Fascism. - "Potassium"
  
  
• During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly... - "Gold"

On rabbits:

• Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. - "Phosphorus"
  
  
• Those rabbits, by order of the commendatore, lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing any other damages, bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. - "Phosphorus"

On humanity:

• ...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. - "Argon"
  
  
• He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. - "Argon"
  
  
• In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. - "Hydrogen"
  
  
• ...we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one's head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise) - "Iron"
  
  
• That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves... - "Iron"
  
  
• Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page. - "Iron"
  

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

A long-time favorite that I wanted to re-read before seeing the film version recently released in somewhat narrow circulation. I'd forgotten quite how dismal the ending is, and afterward found myself too drained to consume narrative in any form for two days.

The movie was well done and enjoyable, incidentally. Emma Thomson as the mother was SCARY. The thing about adapting this particular story - Waugh wrote these characters with highly nuanced motivations, which would have required unusual genius - or a very, very long film - to portray on screen, so there were some plot shortcuts, the upside of which is that I now know exactly how many different sorts of human subtlety can be substituted by a love triangle (eleven, by my count). I also suspect it caught by surprise any number of the audience who had read the book without realizing how much of it was about homosexuality (don't laugh, you know it happens). All said, though, it still gets two thumbs up. And at least half a thumb is all for Patrick Malahide as the elder Mr. Ryder.

Notable quotes:

Charles's Father: I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you. (p. 25)

Cousin Jasper: Beware of the Anglo-Catholics - they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. (p. 26)

Father Phipps, on hair cutting: Nuns do it. (p. 37)

...that unmistakable English church-going pace, which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering. (p. 59)

Cordelia: Is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good? (p. 92)

Sebastian: It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war. (p. 101)

Lady Marchmain: Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. ... but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. (p. 126)

Lady Marchmain: It's very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. (p. 127)

...the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. "There's something chemical between them" was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in new form. (p. 129)

Charles, on Sebastian: He's ashamed of being unhappy. (p. 136)

Julia, on Sebastian: I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd behave like anybody else. (p.161)

Charles: D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem like quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense. (p. 164)

To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life. (p. 181)

Cordelia: She was saintly, but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. (p. 221)

I regarded men as something less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

Anthony: Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. (p. 273)

Charles: Why is it that love makes me hate the world? (p. 276)

Julia: Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful. (p. 287)

Cara: His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word. (p. 318)

Julia: ...the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. (p. 340)

Possession - A.S. Byatt

One line review: That must have been a lot of work.

Notable Quotes:

We are a Faustian generation, my dear - we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know. (p. 234)

The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality - Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. Sometimes I wish I had embarked on geology myself. (p. 242)

And then, really, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness. ... Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things. (p. 276)

At some point in their history their self-value changed into - what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. (p. 277)

So the human imagination mixes and adapts its current preoccupations may ingredients into new wholes. (p. 278)

At my life, the way it is - what I really want is to - to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. (p. 290)

The Know-It-All - A.J. Jacobs

This was a piece of fun I'd been putting off for a long time. In case you missed it, A.J. Jacobs, worried that the frivolity and pop culture-focus of his New York life (and of his job at Esquire) had placed him on a path of ever-increasing stupidity, spent 2002 reading cover-to-cover through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half-almanac, half-confessional memoir, this book records Jacobs's education and epiphanies, interlaced with his year's worth of office antics, family gatherings, and seemingly fruitless attempts to conceive a child with his wife, Julie. Along the way, he also mingles at a Mensa conference, interviews Alex Trebek, takes a speed-reading seminar, and wonders whether any of this was a good idea in the first place. Predictably, his daily hours of reading begin to color the rest of his life:

Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as "the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from." Huh. That's a strange concept, I think to myself. I've never even heard of it.

The reason I've never heard of Dundatree is that...I dreamed it. I read so much that it's invaded my sleep. I can't escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I'm making up my own facts, which I'm worried I'll confuse with actual facts. (p. 66)

Although it took me a few years to get around to reading this, the concept appealed to me the first time I heard about it. Reading the encyclopedia is the sort of thing I would do. I haven't done it, naturally, but as a child I could spend a few hours at a time perusing a volume or two of the (1987?) World Book. Another thing I had in common with Jacobs - I'm sure I spent a good portion of my childhood with an over-inflated concept of my own intelligence. (Actually, it didn't start out that way. For the longest time, I thought that breezing through school with perfect marks without cracking a book was supposed to be the norm, and that I just had the unusual luck of being surrounded by imbeciles. Then I figured it out. And relished it. A lot.) Still, a good part of me would like nothing better than actually to be smarter than I ever imagined myself to be.

A few more telling (and bookish) excerpts:

• "The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long." (p. 26)
  
  
• "Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes." (p. 55)
  
  
• "I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as a snack." (p. 89)
  
  
• "I like the story of how Marie de Gournay - a French intellectual at the time - fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book." (p. 210)
  
  
• "I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere." (p. 334)
  

Can the fishes see it's snowing?

I'm fairly certain that I was never a child. I feel more convinced of that when I read A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wonder, magic - they seem foreign to me, rather than nostalgic. I don't regret it - I don't pine for the youth I didn't live - but I do feel the gap in my own experience, as though I lack a great chunk of the vocabulary of human life.

My mother says I sprung from the womb aged 40. That would imply that I'm still growing into my soul. That's an odd thought.

I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tram car.
- Dylan Thomas, on Christmas Afternoon

I'm collecting favorite Christmas stories, essays, and texts. My list is short so far, but in addition to Wales it includes

• "Xmas and Christmas - A Lost Chapter from Herodotus" by C.S. Lewis. Published in God in the Dock, though I'm not certain of the original source. A classical anthropological expose on the 50-day Exmas Rush.
• "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris, in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. A cleaner, more joyous, alternative to the (nonetheless hillarious) Santaland Diaries. Listening to the author's reading of this is one of my own personal holiday traditions.
  

Always open to more suggestions to add to the collection.

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

"I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate, she said to herself. Not at my stage of life. I just cannot."

Penance

Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned.

I have been curing too much, and reading too little.

I'm working on a resolution to this conflict. In the meantime, my penance: identify and share ten new (possibly) literary quotations.

1. I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves. - Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947
   
   
2. Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein
   
   
3. By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. - G.K. Chesterton
   
   
4. I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. - H.L. Mencken
   
   
5. All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   
   
6. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
   
   
7. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann
   
   
8. Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer. - Brian May
   
   
9. One cannot review a bad book without showing off. - W. H. Auden
   
   
10. All movements go too far. - Bertrand Russell

Inspired again by housekeeping

"I live in my house as I live inside my skin; I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy, and more picturesque skins; but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine." – Primo Levi

Another cross post.

A Room of One's Own

Note: I've been neglectful lately, since I've been keeping busy curing my apartment. But I've missed being here. I started making a to-do list at work this morning, and the only think that came to mind was "I need book time." I couldn't think of anything else until I wrote that one down.

I was fascinated and inspired by last Friday’s post at Apartment Therapy: San Francicso linking to this recent Guardian photo feature. The Guardian photographed around 35 studies of top contemporary writers including A.S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, and Mark Haddon, then had the writers provide the commentary.

Observation is the power of the artist, particularly of the writer; and reliable self-observation is the power in its highest form. It’s not surprising, then, that this collection of writings should include insights of rare quality into personal style. Which should be interesting to all of us now cultivating our own spaces.

Some interesting things I noticed:

• Nearly every room featured includes red as either the primary or primary accent color (See Graham Swift's study in the photo).
  

• Unsurprisingly, many of the writers professed an antithapy for computers, so technology is rarely in great evidence. One surprising exception is Diana Athill, who, at nearly 90, expressed a pragmatic affection for the backspace key (“In one's late-80s one rather loses touch with one's extremities.”)
  

• The spaces are very real, very lived-in, very believable. Few are fastidiously tidy or exceptionally cluttered. And attitudes to clutter vary:

I just need to know where everything is before I go in search of things in my own head, and every time I look up from my desk it helps to see order, which is why the room is so crazily tidy. - Andrew O’Hagan

I don't mind working in a bit of clutter. It's your head that has to be clear. -Beryl Bainbridge

I always think of myself as a tidy sort, but this photo gives the lie to that. There is, however, method in the seeming chaos. Trust me. -Ian Rankin

From the “Know Thyself” Files

I envy people who have the ability to surround themselves with interesting things - beautiful little whichwhats that a burglar might want to steal, or amusingly whimsical doodahs, or thingummies full of secret personal significance. But it's not something that I can do, and it's no use pretending. - Michael Frayn

The objects in the room are in a way a metaphor of my mind. They are brightly coloured, or transparent, and are about intricate patterns and structures. ... Snails, towers, DNA. I like spirals. It looks like clutter but it's a kind of order. - AS Byatt

The computer desk is an ugly, ancient thing - but I don't suppose I'll ever replace it. I've written 13 books on it. And I'm the kind of person who can feel sentimental affection for a teak plank. - Rose Tremain

Roominess is my one requirement, I would happily write on a roller-rink. - Joshua Ferris

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. - Seamus Heaney

Only when I saw this photograph did I realise that it looks like a primary school library. … My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print! And my life always feels a little empty if I'm not learning something new (it's the piano at the moment). - Mark Haddon

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. - John Banville

Photo Credit: The Guardian.

Only Connect (Part 2)

My Howard's End essay has been going nowhere for far too long, so I'll settle for a quote list instead.

You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.

Ah yes--she had been a good woman--she had been steady. He chose the word deliberately. To him steadiness included all praise.

"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."

It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.

The businessman who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.

‘Nothing matters,’ the Schegels had said in the past, ‘except one’s self-respect and that of one’s friends.’ When the time came, other things mattered terribly.

The importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists.

Fabulous Phrases from (Mediocre) Books, Vol. 1

"...emerging dirigible technology..."

-Summerland, Michael Chabon

Occasionally, Someone Gets It.

When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional. In his ten years on the East Coast Howard had lost count of the times some loon from Massachusetts had heard his accent, looked at him pitiably, and said something like: Cold over there, huh? Howard's feeling was: look, let's get a few things straight here. England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April, and May - that is, in every month when warmth matters. In England letter-boxes do not jam with snow. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins.

-On Beauty, Zadie Smith, p. 27

Books and Cynicism - My Two Favorite Things

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

—P.J. O'Rourke

The Truth About Art

"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."

-Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1922-2007

Love's Redeeming Work is Done

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Died He once, us all to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

-from "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," Charles Wesley, 1739

What you learn when you smuggle books out of the library:

“Mersault spoke of a ‘mournful solace,’ and finally there was a name to describe the atmosphere in my house. I tested the phrase on my best friend, Rosie Murray, one afternoon as we walked home from school. “How’s your grandmom?” she’d asked. I said she wasn’t getting better, then announced: “The house is filled with a mournful solace.” Rosie frowned and said, “I never know what you’re talking about, but that sounds bad."

-Denise Gess – “The Most Important Book I Read” – on, The Stranger by Albert Camus

I hear you, ladies.

I hated childhood and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
-Anne Tyler

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-Ruth Rendell

On Books (3)

Via Tiny Little Librarian:

"Wonderful place, the library, where books and their accompanying escapism are free and ostensibly educational. If you eat to escape your moods, or shop, or have sex or drink, everyone says you have a problem. Read a book, and they think you're smart."

-from Dating Without Novocaine by Lisa Cach