T is for Tryagainlater

I finished Everything is Illuminated. It made me laugh, it made me cry. It also made me tres confused at times, I have to admit, due to all the time shifts. It's about a young American Jewish guy who goes on a quest in the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. In one of my favorite passages in the book, he's explaining to his young (not Jewish) Ukrainian tour guide what a shtetl is:

"A shtetl is like a village."
"Why don't you merely dub it a village?"
"It's a Jewish word."
"A Jewish word?"
"Yiddish. Like schmuck."
"What does it mean schmuck?"
"Someone who does something that you don't agree with is a schmuck."
"Teach me another."
"Putz."
"What does that mean?"
"It's like schmuck."
"Teach me another."
"Shmendrick."
What does that mean?"
"It's also like schmuck."
"Do you know any words that are not like schmuck?"
"Everything I can think of is basically schmuck. The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck."

So anyway, I'd recommend it. But now I can't see the movie. The movie always sucks after you've read the book. Yes, it does. Name one exception.

I got three David Foster Wallace books out of the library, which pretty much exhausted the David Foster Wallace collection in Alameda County. One of them was *gasp* "upstairs. I usually don't venture out of "Fiction", which is downstairs. I'd been contemplating putting Nikolai Gogol on the reading list too, based on recent events that have come to pass, but it's all getting way too literature-y for me. WHERE DOES IT END?! I haven't read any of the cerebral stuff yet. I think my eyes have gotten bigger than my brain, as the expression goes. But, for now, my decision's been made for me: The book I really wanted at the library, Sue Grafton's latest, has generated a waitlist 41-people long. That's no exaggeration! I need to move to a county that either reads less in general or enjoys "Literature" over "Fiction".

My first bike race was supposed to be this coming Sunday. I even have my race kit. But conditions will be less than optimal. Severe storm warnings (Thursday, Friday, and Sunday), and people tend to crash in crits as it is. Plus, I'm only now coming back from some horrible head plague that's been going around, that lasted days, that filled my head with so much pressure I thought my eyeballs were going to explode, and that did not respond whatsoever to Afrin, by which Mom The Nurse swears. She kept telling me I must be doing it wrong. How hard can it be to take Afrin?! Maybe I should practice with other snortable drugs. Or maybe I should try snorting Smarties candies. Someone once told me they snorted ground-up Smarties when they were sick (makes for a much more enjoyable post nasal drip). I can't remember who it was. Anyway, I think I almost died in my sleep several times over. I kept waking with a start, feeling suffocated. And I haven't exercised in a week. That's 47 decades in "sedentary human" years. So it looks like I'll have to sit this crit out, if it happens at all. Which means I'll have to summon all that courage again! Woe is me!

Woe is me P.S.: I spent exactly 1.5 hours socializing on New Year's Eve before coming home exhausted and head-plaguey at 7:30 pm to watch The Nanny Damned Lame-Ass Diaries.