More from Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)...

"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations" (44).

"Because I was the writing teacher, it was automatically assumed that I had read every leather-bound volume in the Library of Classics. The truth was that I had read none of those books, nor did I intend to" (86). Precisely!

"As Mr. Sedaris I made it a point to type up a poorly spelled evaluation of each submitted story. I'd usually begin with the high points and end, a page or two later, by dispensing such sage professional advice as 'Punctuation never hurt anyone' or 'Think verbs!'" (93)

About his sister, Amy: "Her fondness for transformation began at an early age and has developed into something closely resembling a multiple personality disorder. She's a Sybil with a better sense of humor, Eve without the crying jags. 'And who are we today?' my mother used to ask, leading to Amy's 'Who don't you want me to be?'" (134) So, obviously, I'm more like his sister than my namesake? Perhaps.

"A dopey letter is still a dopey letter, no matter how you dress it up; and there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring" (144). Yeppers.

"People in New York love to tell you how exhausted they are. Then they fall apart when someone says, 'Yeah, you look pretty tired'" (162). This occurs in every community, I would bet... because I've witnessed it.

What I consider funny notes from Naked, by David Sedaris...

When people would speak loudly to his wheelchair-bound friend, "Peg would beckon the speaker close and whisper, 'I collect the teeth from live kittens and use them to make necklaces for Satan'" (146).

"The cooking was done on a wood stove, and we slept on mattresses stuffed with what I could only begin to identify as high-heeled shoes" (162).

About Lutherans & jello: "There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmellows" (188).

"'It looks like you gained a few pounds,' he'd say. 'Keep that up and you'll never find a husband.' Find. He said it as though men were exotic mushrooms growing in the forest and it took a keen eye to spot one." (235).

On meeting his sister's in-laws at the wedding: "The scariest thing about these people was that they were sober. You could excuse that kind of behavior from someone tanked up on booze, but most of them hadn't taken a drink since the Carter administration" (243).

From his Holidays On Ice:

"How exactly do you break a lap? How did so many people get the idea to say the exact same thing" (32)?

"Santa ends the visit, saying, 'Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you'" (39).

I slept like a rock (I love that expression), but I'm almost too tired to function.
I think a bike ride, in the 'it-just-rained' weather, will wake me up.
Then, I'm making up a batch of my healthy pancakes... and stewing up some coffee.

p.s. I'm going to try out a chicken salad recipe this weekend; anyone got a good one?
p.p.s. Been going to sleep around 1am and waking up promptly at 9am. Eeeks. Somehow, that all got pushed back; I was zonking out around 10pm/11pm earlier in the summer. Huh. Odd. I have to change before the middle of next week.
p.p.s. New bedtime book: Naked by David Sedaris... took awhile to get into it, but I find myself laughing aloud to something on every page. Good stuff.

I've been asked to participate in a odd sort of book club.
But now, I need to figure out what book to hand over. It's very difficult.
And I discovered that I have itty bitty piles of books all over my dang apartment.
Like a miniature landscape of my brain bits.

The metropolis of Deborah Tannen overlooking the living room rug is near the
very small stretch of farmland filled with guides to astrology,
What Not To Wear, and the SATC viewbook of all the seasons.

In my home office lie little towns of alternative literature and research.
One city with three towers: David Sedaris and Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie.
Not to mention the skyline in my bookcase of the short paperbacks.
Siddhartha, The Color Purple, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, 1984, The Idiot.
I receive sideways glances from e.e.cummings' biography,
Paul Reiser's Couplehood & Babyhood,
and... The Truth About Diamonds by Nicole Richie.

Who knows what kind of craziness is at my campus office.

"They" say you can learn a lot about a person by, say, looking into their fridge
or looking at what they have on their iPod,
but I ask... What books do YOU have? And where are they located?