2003-01-14 - 4:00 a.m.
After working up enough courage to actually venture onto campus Friday night, I was rewarded by some illness that made me miserable for the next 48 hours. Maybe it's the result of getting drunk, smoking incessantly, and exposure to the cold, all while surrounded by people and their strange germs. Maybe it's tuberculosis. Scourge of the nineteenth century, killer of Mimi in La Boheme had the symbolic power of the bourgeois societal cruelty, TB acquired the symbolic power of the bourgeois societal cruelty yadda yadda yadda. I'm a sucker for symbolic power. The airport story broke just after sparkle and I had an extended joke that her chronic cough is TB. This is the kind of person I am: Me: "Hey, you haven't coughed for five minutes." Her: "Thanks for reminding me. [cough].
That reminds me that among my recent Barnes & Noble purchases (laziness extends even to shoplifting) includes David Brock's Bobos in Paradise* (*bourgeois bohemians). I don't know what everyone knows of this book, but it’s fun. A little dated already and overly influenced by D.C. yuppie culture—not that (unfortunately?) I consider that a bad thing—it's fun to read about what makes other people tick. . People like reading about people, period. Not indiscriminately, of course, but generally. Not that I'm going to tell you what's in the book.
I also bought Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking. Superficial, judging by the title, this is a very silly book, but it's actually written by an Indian chief and quite accessible. Or as a review on Amazon .com put it, giving the book one star, it sacrifices the rich complexities of Indian cuisine for the sake of simplicity. Which is what I want. And why Indian food? It just happened s that the one dish I taught myself to make out of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, the book I bought last year, was Indian-inspired, so I decided to go in that direction. Mom en en en mentium!
Eh.
