1. How glad am I that blogger.com doesn't allow you to see how many people read your stuff? When it comes to this little space in the world wide web, I'm pleasantly clueless as to who really reads my posts. A couple friends, my parents.... I'll never know and I'm totally cool with that. My work blog, on the other hand, presents a dashboard that makes me absolutely crazy. I am bizarrely driven to load stuff onto the site in hopes of watching numbers go up, not down. This must be -- almost -- what it's like to be a TV reporter and have to live through sweeps. Gah.
2. Less about my neuroses, let's look at other people's.
3. This bookshelf reminds me of Lost. Only 46 more days until the season premiere!
4. Reading Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, I'm struck by how fake most descriptions of the Depression are when written by people who didn't live it. Sorry, that's a little unfair. Elizabeth Hay's A Student of Weather certainly speaks to a sheer grittiness of the times, and Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan covers off a sense of hopelessness. But Laurence's work is something else. You can almost smell the times in the pages. No one in Morag's childhood is beautiful, not even a little bit. Laurence does not put makeup on these people, she does not make them better than they are. She gives them massive fault lines that you could absolutely sink into if not for the fact she brings you back to her present (the 1970s) again and again.
5. I think we'd all like to know a little bit more about how this blind date ended. Because I'm thinking it couldn't have lasted very long. Perhaps Quebec's best friend called her on the phone to make sure she could escape after 30 minutes if things weren't going well. Yes, girls do do that.
6. More poetry, please. It's what a good life needs.