Maybe I should go back and explain my week from the beginning.

Wednesday, I took my car in to be fixed. Various people had assured me that Midas was completely and utterly the wrong way to go on this one. My estimate was completely looney, and they knew this guy who could do it much cheaper. But D. pointed out that faceless corporations are much better for this sort of thing just in case something goes wrong, and besides, Midas has the lifetime warrantee.

So, I took ze little purple car to Midas. I had, clenched in my hot and sweaty fist, the estimate I'd been given the last time I was there. The Head Mechanic looked at the estimate, looked out at ze little purple car, looked at the estimate again, and cursed to himself for a bit. Apparently, when his flunkie had done the estimate, he'd done it for an entirely different car.4

The long and short of it was that Little Purple Cars seem to need special titanium mufflers personally autographed by DaVinci in gold flake paint, but, since it was his flunkie's screwup, he would give me this magical muffler for the same price as the one on the estimate.6 The only drawback was that he would have to specially order it, and my car wouldn't be ready for six hours, instead of the one hour he'd said on the phone.

Not a problem, I said. I grew up in Zenith. I'll catch a bus downtown, and chill with the locals for a few hours.

I ended up at the library. It was a little surreal. At some point since I'd lived and breathed Library in my youth, the whole place had been redesigned. I couldn't even find what I thought of as the Zenith Library anywhere inside. Not just rearrangement of shelves. There were entire staircases I didn't remember.

It was really starting to mess with me a little. Finally, I figured out that the whole public area was the addition. If I chose to go beyond the little roped off sections, I'd find everything I remembered as the library turned into offices and storage or something. That helped. I wasn't in the library of my youth, but it wasn't a Twilight Zone episode either.

I picked out a Terry Pratchett because it seemed like something I coud read straight through in five hours 7 and then I started looking for Infinite Jest I'd first seen the book maybe a month ago, and thought, My. That is a large book. At the time, I'd decided not to buy it, because it was pretty expensive, and there was a chance it would turn out to be a painfully sucky large book. But then, everywhere I went, I seemed to be hearing people talk about this book, all rave reviews. So, I thought I would check it out of the library before investing the $20 for this paperback. 8

So, I read the Pratchett 9 and checked out Infinite Jest with my Cowtown library card. The woman assured me I could just drop it off at the Cowtown library when I was finished. Man, does this interlibrary thing rock. I got food. I somehow completely forgot to stop in Satori, for, um, something.10 I took the bus back out to Midas. I did it all carrying this unusually large book.

Driving home, I was amazed at how quiet my car was. The muffler had been shitty for so long, it was kind of a shock to realize that my car really doesn't have to sound that way. Even a week later, I can't get over it. I'm driving everywhere. I can hold my head high in the drivethru. I no longer dread pulling up next to nicer sounding cars at intersections. I love my car. I really, really do.

When I'm not making completely superfluous car trips, I'm reading Infinite Jest. Seriously, that's like all I've done for the past week. And I'm only on page 500 or so, about halfway through. This, my friends, is a book.

It's an amazing book, and not just because it's so fiendishly large and complex. It has maybe a hundred characters, and a few dozen subplots. There's this tennis academy, see, and this sort of rehab halfway house in the same town and...11And it's screamingly funny in places. And it's almost horrifying in others. And it has hundreds of endnotes.12 And I can't stop reading it.

There's just so much to it. I'm pretty sure I'm missing at least a third of the connections I'm supposed to be making. As soon as I finish it, I think I'm going to have to start rereading it again almost immediately, so it all begins to make some sort of sense. The book is primarily about addictions, and here I am, flat out addicted. It's probably kinda ironic, but I don't care. Must read Book. Book is Life.

Sunday, D.13and I drove to Ankh-Morpork. The plan was to buy a PSII multitap, and get the hell out. We found out the mall and BestBuy close at 6 on Sundays, so, in a fit of pique, we decided to spend foolishly at MediaPlay instead. I cautioned D. that we had about $40 to spend. We went our separate ways. I came back with $25 of books (including my very own copy of IJ, which, even at 300 pages in, I knew I desperately needed) and he came back with $45 of Lara Croft t-shirts and Resident Evil figurines. I flinched, and pulled out the Drug Money. I explained that this was where the money came from.

He went d'oh, and I thought he got it, but then he wanted to go out to eat, and we blew the original $40, which left us with absolutely zero money to play with.14 I'm tempted sometimes to put him in charge of finances, just for a month or so, so he could maybe get some sort of real world comprehension of what money and lack thereof means. But then I think about how bad that would be. If he happened to think of the rent first, the rent would get paid, maybe. If he saw something shiny on the way to the bank, rent would not get paid. It's that simple.

I've been writing now for a really really long time.15 It's probably time to stop now. The Book is calling me again.

*****

1. I've decided not to worry about it, or even mention it ever again. It's probably really really boring to see every entry start off with a rant about how much I write or don't write lately. So, no more. Sometimes I feel like writing. Sometimes I don't.

2. Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace.

3. This one isn't really important. This is just me glorifying in this footnote technology that I think I've figured out here. Carry on.

4. Presumably, a little blue car, or perhaps red. I don't know a lot about cars.

5. You know, I really think I'm abusing these footnotes. Look at all the longwinded drivel I'm exposing you to tonight. I am far too cute and clever for my own good sometimes. Oh, and by the way, fnord.

6. So, D. was right. Go figure. Three cheers for faceless corporations!

7.Jingo, if you must know. It was amusing in places, but not his best work. I give it a six.

8. Yeah, that's what I thought too. Did I mention how unusually large this book is?

9. I'd just like to say that I didn't approve of the main change I noticed in the library at all. There used to be maybe a dozen comfy chairs spread out among the magazine and newspaper racks right by the front desk. They rocked, and were exactly what I'd been thinking of when I first formed the plan of an afternoon at the library. But they were gone. They'd been taken out during the remodeling, to discourage vagrancy, or something. We certainly don't want anyone reading in the library fer chrissakes. Not even a thought for a young lady who certainly isn't a vagrant, who just has a few hours to kill and not a lot of money, and who will eventually resign herself, grumbling, to a not particularly comfortable desk on the top floor. But I digress.

10. Ok, you got me. I wanted to buy drug paraphenalia. Specifically, a bowl for this pipe Alice had given me.

11. A half dozen paragraphs of increasingly gibberish plot summary have been deleted here, to preserve the sanity of all.

12. These things that I've got here are called footnotes, because they are at the bottom (or "foot" as we English nerds like to say) of the page. Endnotes, in contrast, show up at the end of chapters, or, in this case, at the end of the entire work. But you knew that. Maybe, just maybe, I'm becoming a little mad with this mighty footnote power a little. Or maybe not.

13. Since I'm wildly throwing footnotes everywhere tonight, this seems like as good a place as any to slip in a minor addendum to the whole alias thing.

a)I hate 'em. I'm not going to exert any more thought to them than I already have.

b)Some people don't have them because I am very lazy, and figured that in terms of legally bindingness, their common name is already an alias. Yahn, Wej, KC. These are not the legal names of these people, so I'm not damaging their anonymity by referring to them this way.

c)I think it adds a certain surreal element to have a few people without any aliases at all. Where exactly is the line between fantasy and reality? Do I even know?? It's wacky! Besides, in the greater scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter. I talk about Anne sometimes. I mention Jake occaisionally. No one who doesn't know me is going to figure out that one of these names is real, and one isn't. All it really does is mess with the Taus' minds. Which, of course, is always a good thing.

14. It's one of the most frustrating things about him, this ability he has to always spend all the money, as soon as I say we could maybe spend a little. I try to counterbalance this, by operating at varying degrees of No Money. Level 1:I have money. Level 2:I have money, but that seems like a silly idea and I would prefer to save the money for something else. Level 3:I have money, but technically, it should go for bills instead Level 4:I have no money, unless I get creative and start embezzling it from one of the various stockpiles. (kinda like levels 2 and 3. The only real difference is how negative I'm feeling about having to do this, and how much trouble borrowing money from other part of the budget would hurt, in the long run.) Level 5:I have no money. Technically, I think we're at level 4 right now, but all the money I have is not only kinda earmarked for Rigid's 21st birthday, it's in loose change. So, it's Level five till I work again on Thursday, and then it will still be really damn close to level five till D. gets paid on Friday. However, since I only plan on spending $200 or so of his check, I'll instantly be back to having four or five different discretionary funds, which is the way I really like to run the budget. I used to think my mom was a freak. She'd always have to look in several pockets of her purse to assemble any given amount of money. But now, I do the exact same thing. I'm reasonably sure she wasn't thinking "OK, this part here I'm embezzling from the Drug Fund, but I can put it back on Friday..." but I bet anything it was the same underlying principle.

15. Even longer than you think. I started writing about 11 this morning, took a short break to pick D. up from work at 2, and continued writing until the computer self-destructed at around 3:30. Luckily, I'd saved a chunk of it in WordPad when I became curious about whether I was doing these footnotes right or not. Then, a two hour laundry break with KC. Then, a little more Book while D. Napstered. Just now, about two hours of reconstructing the part that had disappeared in a puff of smoke. I'm telling you, I invested a lot of time into this entry today.

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