For over a year now, I’ve been droolingly coveting Delicious Library, a Mac-based piece of software that acts as a beautifully designed digital library – cataloging all of your books (and movies and games and music) with the touch of a bluetooth scanner, USB scanner, or manually entered ISBN number. It even syncs with Amazon to let you search for books with the merest hint of the title, and add the right one to your digital bookshelf. You can check out books to borrowers by just dragging a book onto their name and setting the return-by date, and they’ll get a handy little email reminding them not to set your book on fire instead.
You can also, once you’re done inputting your entire library, search the whole collection by all kinds of factors – all novels that are listed in a certain genre, for instance, or which reference Samoa.
I’m not sure you can tell how much I’m hyperventilating with excitement through the screen. Because I just bought it. Stuart’s been mock-resisting it for a year, telling me I don’t need to be any more organize-crazed than I already am, but he’s wrong. And what’s more, he can’t do anything about it.
See, Stuart’s going to Berlin for four days without me after Thanksgiving, so I figured I deserved the kind of gift that’d keep me happily buried in my apartment organizing things for that weekend. Once he gets back and all of our books are digitally archived and cross-referencable, boy, HE’LL be sorry he went to Berlin without me. In more ways than one.
As you can see from the timestamp on this post, I’ve been playing with it for well over two hours. I’ve already input all the books that are lying around on my office desk, languishing for want of a third bookshelf for the living room (shuttup YES we need it). I ordered an inexpensive USB scanner but I’m not even sure I’ll need it, since the Amazon-link makes it so easy to just search for the title without getting up from your laptop.
And you know, when I happily typed in my financial details to purchase the license, I actually asked myself why everyone in the whole world doesn’t have this. Perhaps my myopic tunnel vision doesn’t allow for the whiff of a possibility that everyone in the world isn’t as in love with cross-referencing as I am. Or libraries. Or puppies. I mean, come on.
Oh, and while I’m at it? I’ll be alphabetizing our shelves. Why not, right?
That Sean Paul song, Give It Up To Me? The way he says the word “horny”? IS HILARIOUS and makes me laugh every time.
It’s like, “ohhrny”. If the entire song is designed to get some girl into bed, surely THAT would catapult her right back out of it in gales of laughter?
Do not ask why I’m listening to Sean Paul. It’s housecleaning day, okay? Cut a girl a little slack. [While you're at it, absolve me for listening to FutureSex/LoveSounds on repeat.]
I hate that Stuart’s not getting back until Monday and I can eat Skittles for lunch and stay up until 2AM watching crappy television and no one will yell at me for it. You know what else I hate?
That gross dreck that gets under your fingernails when you peel an orange with your hands.
That jerked-awake feeling when you’re falling in your dreams.
Being in a meeting full of coworkers where no one is responding to the cheesy request to “share out” about a work challenge and being the only one with a cringe-sensitivity meter TOO HIGH TO STAY SILENT ANY MORE.
The fact that the cork strip at the top of my chalkboard at school is JUST high enough that I have to get on tiptoe to reach it every day when I post our daily agenda.
Ayn Rand. OH MY GOD. The fury.
How, in Gmail, when you click in the handy reply box below an email, the page reloads with a fresh reply box. Just get RID of that feature already and make it so that I have to click the Reply button.
People bastardizing the English language [and not for fun, like totes or obvs]. Seriously, incentivizing? And in a work meeting, this gem: learnful!
The Black-Eyed Peas.
That inevitable moment where there’s a label or a price tag on something and you go to peel it off and you know you’ve got a firm start on that edge corner, man, you really showed that edge, you got it solid and then it starts, oh sweet merciful Mary it starts to separate and you just KNOW you’re going to only pull up half the sticker and spend three to seven minutes removing gooey paper from the product and then another three to seven minutes removing THAT from under your fingernails, oh yes.
Man, I really hate that stuff. I feel sufficiently full of articulate rage to go conquer this beautiful sunny day now. Your turn.
All the cool kids are doing it. C’mon. Just give it a try. It feels good. I’ll bet your mom won’t mind. You know, it gets me kind of hot.
And other exhortations of peer pressure AS WELL.
Yesterday I spilled three different liquids on me while driving from Newark Airport to Rhode Island. True story! The first was Coke, inside my beautiful Italian leather purse. That was so incredibly annoying that when I later hit a pothole holding a full bottle of water and it splashed into my face during a phone conversation – no, I wasn’t using a hands-free set, spoilypants – I could only laugh, because at least this time I didn’t ruin an Italian leather purse, right?
So by the time I was within Rhode Island state lines with a totally dead cell phone (because when you buy a brand-new mobile, Krissa, they don’t fully charge it, and it WILL die on you if you talk to three different people for thirty minutes each), I didn’t think I could possibly trump the water spurting onto my face, until the cup of tea.
Hold on about the tea. Because it’s crucial to note that the reason I talked to three different people for 30 minutes each was because I’d just left Stuart at the airport and I thought I was cool, really, I’d taken him as far as I could and said a cheery goodbye. But I obviously wasn’t fine because when I stopped at Vince Lombardi to get some quick dinner, I encountered a snag in my cheer. I couldn’t eat. I was hungry, oh yes, hungry enough for Burger King, but lifting food to lips came smack up against the knot of sad in my stomach, which was busily spreading oily tentacles everywhere. So the food sat there on the empty Coke-soaked passenger seat, mocking me. Hence the phone calls, because good people are the only antidote to knots of sad.
Back to that tea. The cup of tea happened because I needed to pee really bad at exit 3B so I pulled over at a Mobil to use a payphone and update my parents on my drive. Which I didn’t have to do because the nice guy at the counter, when asked where the payphone was, insisted I use his mobile phone. He must have thought I’d walked in from 1996, who uses payphones, right? So I bought a cup of tea to make a sale for his samaritan gesture.
Then I decided, whilst driving at 70 MPH, that I wanted to throw the teabag itself out the window. Why not? So I rolled down the window and carefully placed the tea bag into the lid of the mug and held it out the window. Then, of course, the tea bag zoomed right back into the car like so many nervous chihuahuas and landed – where? – in my lap.
It was right then with the steaming teabag on my crotch, listening to some droning BBC podcast, where I think I fully absorbed that Stuart was gone for a week. I know it’s only a week, but when I hear myself say that it sounds like when alcoholics admit they know they have a drinking problem when you know they’re not going to do anything about it and pass them the whisky while you’re up. Rationally, I understand that it’s just a week. But everything about this distance, from the complex schematics to call each other without spending a fortune to the constantly adding five hours to the time, it jerks me back like a cruel joke to how it was two years ago. You could say I’m a veteran of long goodbyes and even short ones trigger malaise.
But back to the car ride and the tea bag in my lap. Let me tell you worst thing about all this, and no, it wasn’t the various liquids in my poor dad’s car/on my crotch/in my purse/on my face. It was just that malaise – that sharp stabbing realization that Stuart with his wicked sense of humor wasn’t in the passenger seat to laugh at my slapstick. I laughed enough for both of us but it’s not the same, is it.
Of course, the argument could be made that with Stuart there, he would have thrown the teabag out HIS window and ended up with hotcrotch. I’m just saying is all.
That’s Bow Bear, the veteran of so many overseas flights, going on his first without me. That’s because I insisted on packing him in Stuart’s suitcase, because I’m a sentimental old bean, did you notice?
So Stuart’s going to England for a week, to attend a work thingamabob in Bath and then spend a weekend with his parents which makes me happy.
If you didn’t know already, we haven’t spent a night apart since he arrived on October 7th, 2004. In fact, Boston’s the farthest away he’s been, and that was just for a day. Go ahead and mock, but I’m rather dishevelled about the whole thing. I’m going to browse on the internet for Bearded Warmth-Emanating Life-Sized Dummies that could feasibly occupy the space to my left every night, since our bed will seem so fantastically empty without him there to shuffle around and lightly snore and stroke my cheek when my teeth-grinding wakes him up. Will the dummy do that, do you think? I doubt it.
Luckily for me, I’ve got people. Not people that will take Stuart’s place, but wonderful lovely caring thoughtful people that have IMed and emailed and offered to hang out with me every evening and watch movies with me and generally make me smile and laugh and drink wine with me. I love my people like McAdams loves Gosling. Also, I’m fleeing northwards to Rhode Island tonight to dull the blow of the first few days by hanging out with my parents. Parents that are excited to get me all to themselves for two days.
Still. It’s going to be a little rough. Keep me away from sappy music this week.
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