between apathy and compassion

A lot of people over the years, including my dad and my grade 4 teacher, have thought I was smart. But there is new evidence to the contrary: about four or five times today I have opened my freezer and peered inside, in hopes that some new food would have mysteriously appeared in there, so I could eat it. Isn't there some proverb about that being the definition of crazy--performing the same action over and over again but expecting different results? Oh well. It's not like grade four teachers have never been wrong before.

I am having this bizarrely cheerful day, possibly because the end of the semester is finally feeling real, and because yesterday I put the books for my exhibition in their cases--I have that refreshing sense that even if I STOPPED WORKING RIGHT NOW, refused to bill another hour, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Everything additional I do is just gravy. So I did what everyone does when they feel unusually chipper, like a sudden weight has been lifted: I cleaned my whole apartment. It was like I was channelling some stranger. I even DUSTED. Normally I would rather move than dust. Or, as Carolyn Mark says, "why clean when you can dim the lights?"

Also, I finished reading this book, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart:


It's about intrepid, charming orphans, good-hearted narcoleptic adults, and mind control, three elements that appear in most (if not all) great children's fiction. And it was pretty good, if overly long. The main reason I wanted to buy it (or rather, convince my dad to buy it for me), though, was the cover illustration by Carson Ellis. And it turns out that she has done a bunch of poster art for a band I am rather enamoured of, The Decemberists. And then I found a four-foot-long Decemberists poster with art by Carson Ellis, on the internet (where else?) and I ordered it, and now I have some mail to look forward to. (I can't find the poster anymore... it seems I may have purchased the last one on the entire world-wide information superhighway. But buyolympia, where I ordered it from, has free Decemberists MP3s--the legal kind, I assume, since it's from their record label. woot.)

This constitutes crazy, karmic convergence of consumption (or carmic, if you value alliteration over correct spelling). Except not evil like that description makes it sound. For some reason, it makes me unduly happy when things I like are related to other things I like. For example, Sarah Vowell wrote this book of essays I love (Take The Cannoli) and she is on This American Life, which I like beyond what the word "like" can possibly convey. Or Joss Whedon, who has made three of my favourite TV shows in the history of TV shows, does a cameo in the second season of Veronica Mars (which is the fourth of my favourite TV shows in the history of TV shows) in which he says something like, "Renting cars is a basic human need, like eating or sleeping or trying on shoes." And actually, now that I think about it, I read this interview with Ira Glass in which he was talking about how great Buffy is/was. This poster thing might be almost on that Sarah Vowell, Joss Whedon scale, people.

My cheerfulness, then: it's the school thing, and the clean apartment thing, and the books-in-their-cases thing, and the ordering-four-foot-long-posters-in-the-internet thing. Now if only I could solve the food thing. Without going outside.