but my heart cried out for you, California

Eight days until I head back to Cali.

382 pages of Don Quixote left.

One more day of work.

An infinity of laundry to do before I can start packing...

Ten Precepts from The Art of War That Never Made It Past Sun Tzu's Editor

Cormac McCarthy rocks. He has rocked (in my eyes, at least) ever since I read All he Pretty Horses (which even ended up being a good movie with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz in the lead roles), and he's still on a roll. His latest book, No Country for Old Men is just as disturbing and chillingly, thoughtfully beautiful as All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian (which I couldn't put down until I was done reading it, and gave me nightmares, but I keep rereading it anyway), for example. I love McCarthy's disregard for punctuation and his brilliant, sparing use of words. If you haven't read any of his books, now is as a good time to start.

from All the Pretty Horses:

It was dark outside and cold and no wind. In the distance a dalf bawled. He stood with his hat in his hand. You never combed your hair that way in your life, he said.
Inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the front room. He went out and shut the door.
Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.

If the little doughnut shop of horrors didn't have cameras monitoring every square inch of the store, certain people would've had their coffee spit in at least once by this point in the summer. Seriously, though: I really don't enjoy having trash thrown at me just because some people (I'm endlessly amazed at all the ways in which adults can disappoint me) still can't handle hearing the word "no". And for the record, I don't like being called a "skinny white bitch", either. Gosh people, have some manners...it just would never cross my mind to talk to a complete stranger the way that some of these people talk to me every morning.
Every day is an intense lesson in humility, to look at it positively.

(There are decent people, too, people who ask kindly, "Do you ever take a day off?" and then press crumpled bills into your palm after saying the magic words "please" and "thank you".)