Tempus fugit

I seem to be sucked into a vortex of progressively more incompletion. I say I’ll do something tomorrow, and I do it eleven years later, and I’m actually proud of having completed it at all. I write here that I’ve got such-and-such on the old todo list, and the odds of my doing that such-and-such are often quite on the slim side. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m doing instead. It’s not as if I’m sitting around playing games or something. In fact, one of the things on my todo list is playing some games. I’m not watching a lot of TV. An hour a day, no more, a regular diet of a handful of new shows and a few classics (I just put Fry and Laurie at the top of the Netflix queue, for instance). I’m not sinking into endless sybaritic dining experiences, course after course of lavish dishes accompanied by the finest wines, while a string quartet plinks away on Papa Hadyn in the background. I’m not even wasting all that much time writing this blog, usually, unless I get off on some particular hobbyhorse I feel should be explicated. In other words, I have no idea where the time goes. And I need more of it. Damn.

I recommend the Milan Kundera in last week’s New Yorker, which I read last night (I can’t even keep up with magazines). It’s about world literature, local literature, parochialism, the aesthetics of fiction, and all kinds of good stuff like that. I am adding The Omnivore’s Dilemma to my select reading list over on the right. This is not a book about the horrors of food processing, an update of Upton Sinclair for the 21st Century, although there is plenty of discussion about the horrors of modern agriculture from a holistic ecological perspective. This is much, much more, a meditation on eating, pure and simple. Any book that explains both the history of corn and counterarguments to Peter Singer is worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. I will report that I enjoyed Monster House more than any other movie I’ve seen recently, including all sorts of well-received films that have virtually put me to sleep (I do watch films on weekend nights only, so it’s not as if my time is being sucked away by cinephilia). I have purchased tickets for Curtains based entirely on the out-of-town reviews. Yeah, it’s hardly indicative of a deep love for theatre such as Joe V’s, where he can whistle the infernal airs from every show closing on the first night for the last 20 years, but I’m a mainstreamer who saw all your classics back when they opened, except for maybe Show Boat and Oklahoma, as in, Jeez, I’m not THAT old!

CLG suggests that the recent weather is the result of El Nino. Given the choice of blaming the weather on, well, the weather, or blaming something on George Bush, I will always take the latter course. Except maybe we could blame Iraq on El Nino. That would work.

Tomorrow is Lexington. Tonight, assuming that I do anything I’m planning to do, I should get the data loaded into Classic TRPC. I should also finish the Nostrum I started yesterday, finish the argument form I was talking about, pack up for a smooth exit in the morning and generally get things in order for the four-day weekend. We’ll see.