D., of course, is optimistic. Maybe this means he wants to do interviews with everyone, and he just hasn't called me yet. Maybe the interviews today are for a different posiiton entirely.

Well, maybe. I'm still not looking forward to the call, though. How can I time this so he's there, but not actually interrupt his current interview? If I was smart, I would have gotten up early and called him at 8 when he walked in the door. I am apparently not that smart, though.

Stupid brain! Don't you see I'm trying to make life better for both of us? A little help, now and then. Is that too much to ask?

***

As predicted, I spent all afternoon yesterday reading Sandman Good stuff. There's good bits in all of them, but I think Preludes and Nocturnes is overall my favorite so far. That one just had me enthralled from beginning to end. Five down, five to go.

I was thinking about this ongoing discussion D. and I have. Books are cheaper than video games, but the video games take up less physical space. And he says he gets more out of video games, because I'll tear through a new book in an afternoon, while a good game can take him three or four days to finish. Yeah, but he almost never replays a game. He plunks down $50, lives and breathes video game until he finishes it, and then in a week at most, he's ready for another one. There are books I've read so often I can spontaneously start quoting dialogue.

And actually, we humor each others' excessive buying sprees, because we understand them. Monty actually put it best a while back: "I suppose I ought to decide on the proper number of books to own, but I've always felt that the number of books I wanted to own was 'all of them'." I can totally relate.

(Go read Monty. He's good people. He works for WoTC, he's a book-buying fool, and sometimes, he's funny as hell. He was whining the other day about how few readers he has, so as a random act of kindness, pay him a visit. Tell him I sent you, because I too am lookin for stats love, and he's a DamnHellAssKing, fer crissakes. Just think of the networking possibilities. OK. Just think of some random guy in Washington suddenly getting a dozen or so hits from a town in Wisconsin he's never heard of. Hilarity, I'm telling you. Helping me stalk someone is fun! Whee!)

The point is, before I got sidetracked by pimpin for someone I don't even know who probably gets more hits in his sleep than I've gotten, total, ever, is that D and I, we're collectors. And if you think about it, collecting forms of entertainment makes a lot more sense than collecting almost anything else.

Think about it. At the end of the day, what does a stamp collector have? He has a stamp. Sure, it probably makes him very happy, but is it going to change his life? Is he going to be so moved by uh, the little picture on the front, or maybe the particularly gummy back, that he calls all his friends and insists that they too go collect this stamp? Is he going to spend the night curled up in bed, enjoying his new stamp? Is he going to be browsing through his stamp collection in a few years, and think, "Hey, this was a really good stamp. I think I'd like to um, catalogue it, or inspect it, or whatever the hell it is I do with stamps again tonight."?

Well, maybe. Maybe stamp collectors have much more interesting internal lives than I'm giving them credit for. But I'm guessing no.

Hee. I'm just now thinking of something I read once qua stamp collecting. This kid, see, he started masturbating. He didn't want his mom to find out, so in his journal, he referred to it as stamp collecting. "I collected five stamps yesterday. The last one was a highly unusual color."

(Anne and I were watching Jeeves and Wooster, and Bertie said something about "Spode qua menace." Anne just cracked up to see such an odd word used correctly. She's funny that way. So lately I've been trying to use the word "qua" whenever it's even remotely appropriate. I think my use of it up there is slightly off, again, but it will make her smile.)

Ok. I'm totally babbling now. I should go collect stamps or something.

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