2.02.2009

Text

Damn.

KFR has been pretty text-heavy of late, Kanye West videos notwithstanding. This is due to the fact that I do not spend enough time pooping around on the internet to scrounge up funny pictures, nor am I comfortable taking tons of pictures myself while about my quotidian routine. You, my loyal half-dozen, suffer the boring-ass consequences, and for that I am sorry.

Re: text, two things.
  1. For fun, I've started reading Beauvoir's The Mandarins*. For me, Beauvoir is and always has been one of the dynamic existential duo. She was a philosopher who also happened to be a novelist. I've never read any of her stories before; I've used her philosophical essays (Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Pyrrhus and Cineas) and her autobiographies in writing about her life and thought on the one hand and existentialism and politics in general on the other. It turns out...she was a damn fine novelist! Who knew?! The Mandarins is her fictionalized account of the elite intellectual circles in Paris right after the Liberation from the Nazis in '44 and so far I've found it to be a pretty gripping exploration of sex, death, cocktails, despair, and the quest for existential authenticity. Nice!
  2. This dissertation thing is just out of hand. In my mind, I can see where everything is supposed to go. I have my big framing arguments, I have the books and articles I've read that I need to work through in the body of the writing, I have ideas about how to work in historical context. But damn if I can get more than a few paragraphs out each day.
On an unrelated note, it was 70-something degrees today in SC. I saw the first "yep, there's gonna be water rationing" article headline on a local rag yesterday. I'm still not all worked-up over it, but having never lived in a place with water-rationing before, I'm a little trepidatious about how it's going to work. Do we start bathing in gin?**

P.S. The extra cup of coffee I had today during section kind of messed me up. This is like your best friend breaking your collarbone and stealing your woman. What the hell, coffee?!

* I'm reading it in English. I just can't be bothered to read it in French.
** Hope hope hope.

6 comments:

FOSCO said...

One summer in Charlottesville (VA), we had a severe drought and water rationing. I'm not sure if the CA version will be similar. As I recall, most restaurants stopped serving complimentary water with your meal and most public bathrooms substituted antibacterial handwash for soap and water. These were both slightly unpleasant, but not the end of the world

Also, as I recall, my apartment complex started adding a surcharge to monthly rent to cover additional water costs. That was not cool.

kungfuramone said...

Swell. Because I *like* already paying 1075/month for the wee one-bedroom downtown.

Elizabeth M. said...

Nick and I can give you the run down of good practices during a drought. We both came of age during the last "oh my god we've never seen no a dry year like this" drought twenty-five years ago (it lasted fifteen years, BTW). You don't have a lawn. That's a good first step. Mostly it's about not being stupid and building too many houses. And you haven't done anything silly like that.

Chrissy said...

Ah water rationing! Things I recall about it from my childhood in LA are:
-watering your lawn ONLY at night (if at all).
-water available only upon request at restaurants.
-short showers - NO baths (the horror!)
-we put a brick in the tank of our toilet to "trick" it into thinking it was fuller than it was.

There were some other things too, but basically its about doing anything you can to keep your water costs down, cause it gets expensive.

Ransom said...

Yeah, dude. I feel your pain and confusion... Having coffee turn on you in any way is just no fun. It's supposed to be there for you, for fun, for profit, for enthusiasm without the burden of a reason.

kungfuramone said...

If coffee ever *really* betrays me, as it has you, Ransom, I will get on the nearest organ donor list for a new digestive track that very day. I am terrified at the prospect.