21 April 2003

I know that it's sometimes useful to read about books instead of reading the books themselves. In this case -- this Scando Lit book I started reading yesterday -- I need the overview of different authors to make sure I've heard of influential people, because influential to English Lit and influential to Scando Lit are not always the same categories. Obviously. And there are lots of people I haven't heard of. (There was, for example, a Mr. Kinck, who wrote erotic short stories. Oh dear.) But it's a bit tiresome to keep on with the book about books. I keep putting names on my list, people to look for in a library that has more selection. It's doing the job it's supposed to be doing. But the author of this book about books is under the impression that "objective" is the highest praise that can be bestowed upon a work of literature. So every other sentence comments about how objective a work is, or how much more or less so than previous work by that author, or by different authors, and it's starting to drive me a little batty. I got out The Aliens of Earth and read a couple of those short stories. I think if I was in a situation where I had to read about books more often, I'd probably have my favorite short story collections memorized from diving into them so often.

Anyway, I had no idea about Faroese literature before, and now I have an overview of it, so, live and learn. Which is the point.

We had a pretty good Easter, and I hope you did, too. I nibbled a bit at the Easter breakfast at church, and talked a lot, to a lot of people we hadn't seen in awhile, and that was good. And someone gave my favorite small people license to get slightly bigger. It certainly wasn't me, and I now have great sympathy for the grown-ups who exclaimed over how I'd grown when I was little. I think in some ways it was the best possible combination: it made us glad to have gone back this weekend, but it didn't make me sorry that we're not driving the 45 minutes up to that church every weekend. So that worked out.

I spent big chunks of time on the phone this weekend. It wasn't a substitute for having people around, but it was still good.

Mark has the stats on my journal, and evidently March was a much more novel-synopsis-search month, whereas April is a food-search month so far. And also, someone found my journal by searching on "bird crap." Uh, yeah. I mean, evidently I'm not getting a lot of hits for the stereotypical searches (although now that I have "Kinck" and "erotic" in the same entry, now twice...), but that one seems a bit odd. Who searches the internet for that? And why, why, why?

Well, I just did, to see how far down the list I was on google for that particular term. #50. Fabulous.

Rob suggests, in regards to the back injury comment of yesterday, that what I need is a Cheat Sheet for journal readers. It could include, he thinks, a cast of characters, a list of major events in the last several years, and a partial Scando glossary. (Heh. I don't think I use that many Scando terms, do I? Mostly things like lefse, and I even took pictures of that. (Oh, drat. I forgot to take out the lefse for Easter. We had garlic bread instead. What kind of a Scandichick am I, anyway?))

But anyway. The problem with a cheat sheet is that then I would have to decide who and what was significant enough to go on it and how those things should be labeled. Which is not as easy as one might think. Life is not static. What if these things change? How often do you update it? Who gets to count as important enough to mention? Do you remove people who have become less important? When do you decide that an event was really, truly crucial for people to know about? Most of the truly crucial recent stuff has not been mentioned explicitly in the journal in the first place. If I was the sort of person who didn't meet people or do stuff, this might work, or if I was willing to just say, okay, some people and events that are just as important will get neglected. But I'm not, in either case. So if you're reading along and thinking, "Who the heck is that?" or "When did that happen? What's that all about?", just write and ask.

It's raining here this morning. Late spring rains in Northern California are always kind of exciting for me, because I keep thinking, "Is this the last one? Is this the last one? Are we done for the season now?" Only this year, when I think, "Is this the last one?", I'm wondering if it's the last one, the last winter/spring rain I'll see as a Northern California resident. The week's forecast in the paper suggests not, but it's hard to tell how much they know.

I'm not sure I'm having a good brain day here. My hair behaves pretty well, but my brain, I just don't know. I woke up convinced that I'd done something (specifically) bad I didn't do, and I'm having a hard time shaking that feeling of being vaguely in the wrong. I think that reviewing all of my actions of the last 48 hours in hopes of finding something bad would be a poor idea, so instead, I'm just going to try to get things handled from my list and hope that it goes away. I'm sure that if I screwed something up, someone will let me know.

Maybe it's just that a lot of Scando Lit is kind of ominous, and that's been bearing down on my brain. Hmmm.