Thursday, March 20, 2008

• May be offensive to Booksellers and Oscar fans

  This week has kind of flown by, which is weird because it’s been tough dealing with Mr. S and that usually makes for a long week.

  Today he’s mad at me for not having his car payment checks taped to his chair, because he might have wanted to rush in and sign them and he wouldn’t have been able to find them because they were on my desk.

  The reason they were on my desk? I’m afraid to put anything on or near his desk for fear it will never be seen again. There’s no way to describe how cluttered it is. This is because every time we receive a fax, he wants me to put three copies on his desk, and then he never looks at them, and then when we do our once-every-five-years cleaning, he throws them away. Really, it’s a great system.

  Plus, he can’t rush in and sign them. There are several checks and they have to be put in the right envelopes, and even though I try to make this easy for him, I know he would have a hard time getting it right. And then it would be my fault.

  This morning he lamented the clutter in this place (seriously, it’s hard to walk around in here now—it’s becoming like my great uncle Delma’s (known simply as “Unk” in my family)  house before he died: every square inch piled with completely useless crap, except for little pathways carved out). This is hard for me to deal with because I’m the anti-packrat. I throw away things I probably should keep. But honestly, there are only a few things I’ve thrown away that I now really regret and I’m glad I don’t have a house full of stuff!
  

  What I do have is a house full of books. I almost never buy books new except as gifts, because I can’t afford it and I usually don’t keep them after I’ve read them anyway.  I either sell them online, donate them to the library bookstore thing (where I also buy a fair number of books), or pass them on to a friend. Sorry to you bookstores out there, but that’s how I roll. Also, I use the library a lot. I’ve been using the library so much lately, and the books on my shelf at home have gone unread. I have a shelf of the books I want to read first, then a closet full of books I want to read after that, and then lots of books in the garage that will go into the closet when the ones in the closet move to the shelf. My goal for this year is to read all the books on the shelf (it’s actually three shelves). I don’t think I’ll actually be able to read them all, but I’d like to see how far I can get.

  I bring this up, anyway, because I pulled one of the books from my shelf the other day: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (I’m sure you all know he also wrote Into the Wild, but I think that’s sort  of an obligatory statement at this point), about the Everest disaster when 8 people died in one day. I’ve had it for years and for some reason it just never made it to the top of my reading list, even though I’d heard from several people I know and trust that it was a real page-turner. “Page-tuner” is actually putting it mildly—I’ve been staying up late, late, late reading this book. I should finish today. I don’t know anything, really, about mountain climbing, and I know a little about Everest from reading and seeing things on TV. This book so far makes me simultaneously want to climb Everest and not climb Everest. Not that it matters, since I’m not actually going to climb Everest.

  I always type "Into Thin Air" as "Into Think Air." Just like I cannot type the word "apple" (it comes out as "applie") correctly on the first try unless I really think about it. Another problem word: "lake" (lkake). Maybe I'm just a poor typist. Actually, there's no "maybe" about it.
  

  An aside about mountain climbing—when I was a little kid, like 5 or 6, I had decided that my profession would be “mountain climber,” having changed it from “mail lady” and before that, “bread truck driver.” Anyway, I remember thinking that to be a good mountain climber, I’d have to climb every mountain (possibly influenced by The Sound of Music). One time driving home from a family camping trip, my dad pointed out a mountain off the highway and asked if I knew the name of the mountain. I didn’t, and he told me it was Rattlesnake Mountain (I assume now that this is the Rattlesnake Mountain in Placer County, CA, or my dad might have just been making it up). Anyway, I remember thinking that Rattlesnake Mountain sounded pretty scary, but I said to my dad, “Well, I guess I’ll have to climb it.” I’m sure my dad remembers nothing of this, but I remember what I was wearing, even.

  Anyway, if you haven’t read Into Thin Air, read this book! It was a bestseller for a couple of years, I think, so there should be plenty of copies at garage sales and used bookstores. I already pledged my copy to someone, but if that doesn’t happen for some reason, I’ll send it to someone out there. It’s kind of puppy-chewed (bad dog!) but not in a way that affects the reading.

  Oh, and speaking of Into the Wild, it’s on DVD now and I highly recommend it. I also recommend the book in the strongest possible terms. That’s a book that has stayed with me for years (unfortunately, I didn’t keep my copy, but bought another one last year because Mack wanted to read it and there were like 500 holds on it at the library after the movie came out). RE the movie, I think overall that the Oscars and all that are just a bunch of self-congratulatory nitwits, but I did think that Sean Penn as writer and director (and definitely Emile Hirsch in the leading role) really got shafted by not even getting nominated. Hooray for Hal Holbrook, though.

  I had a Viso today and I feel like I've had about 70 cups of coffee.
  

  Nothing else for now. I have a couple of small, weird things about Mr. S, but later. Have to go home for lunch and walk the bad puppy. A tired dog is a good dog, I always say.

  Currently Reading Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster By Jon Krakauer see related

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