Lighten Up Reading
Life is on hold. Twenty-eight days of sunset till sunrise food benders ended yesterday and have given way to Eid Al Fitr, a four-day holiday where nothing is open because the faithful stay at home and engage in round-the-clock gluttonizing. Nothing is open, nobody works; no visa; therefore no Internet connection, no plumbers to come fix our new home's many leaks a'poppin'. No carpenters to finish building wardrobes. No landscapers to lay down turf which would mean less sand in our diet. I'm stressed. She's stressed. Even the cats could use Zoloft in their Nine Lives wet food.
Times like this I usually turn to books that tend to lift me out of my funk when I see that all in all, my life ain't so bad. Things could be far worse.
If the bookstores were opened, I'd probably go out and buy another account of the World War Two seige of Stalingrad. First hand accounts of disease and starvation, frostbite and hypothermia have always lightened my gait.
I've had to make due with airport buys only partially read and set aside for days like these.
I've finished "One Fourteenth of an Elephant: Life and Death on the Thai-Burmese Railway". That made me appreciate cheap access to salt, a daily shower and not having to cope with cholera or beri-beri. Life ain't so bad having to drive to an Internet cafe.
I'm working my way through "Reading Lolita in Tehran" which is mostly about the suppression of intellectuals (by firing squad) in the first years of the Islamic revolution in the Rose's ol'stomping grounds. I can wear neckties and she can bare a suggestion of cleavage and nobody in Sharjah points rifles at us. Life is good.
If I can find my dog earred copy of Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", I might make it through the next four days with a glowing disposition.
Times like this I usually turn to books that tend to lift me out of my funk when I see that all in all, my life ain't so bad. Things could be far worse.
If the bookstores were opened, I'd probably go out and buy another account of the World War Two seige of Stalingrad. First hand accounts of disease and starvation, frostbite and hypothermia have always lightened my gait.
I've had to make due with airport buys only partially read and set aside for days like these.
I've finished "One Fourteenth of an Elephant: Life and Death on the Thai-Burmese Railway". That made me appreciate cheap access to salt, a daily shower and not having to cope with cholera or beri-beri. Life ain't so bad having to drive to an Internet cafe.
I'm working my way through "Reading Lolita in Tehran" which is mostly about the suppression of intellectuals (by firing squad) in the first years of the Islamic revolution in the Rose's ol'stomping grounds. I can wear neckties and she can bare a suggestion of cleavage and nobody in Sharjah points rifles at us. Life is good.
If I can find my dog earred copy of Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", I might make it through the next four days with a glowing disposition.
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5 Comments:
Have you ever tried using Stalingrad as a chat up line like the character on "Peep Show", then?
"Hey Baby, how would you like to unthaw my extremeties?"
I've heard a lot of good things about "Peep Show". You've reminded me to ask my Brit colleagues if they have any DVDs.
If I hadn't been sick, I'd have squeezed in this radical suggestion before darkness and still descended. Try yourself a Harlequin Romance. Oh, THAT's the cream of the 'thank you god my life is so sweet and wonderful' crop. Or crap. Your choice.
When you get back, welcome.
Actually, I respect writers of romance novels. A few years ago, after I outgrew my "I'm going to be the next Saul Bellow" fantasy (coming about twenty years after abandoning my "I'm going to be the next Jeff Beck fantasy"), I thought, maybe I'll write a romance novel under a pseudonym (Dolores Troupique)and cash in. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to just say it, more effort I think than clouding meaning with obscure, poetic Bellowesque prose--lemme tell ya.
Oh, well see, that's what makes a horse-race. You're the diplomat and I'm the one who thinks they actually start out with their world view and so it's not at all a tremendous effort. I know this not for fact, so am willing to be entirely wrong. Willing, but not able. Hahahahaha (only, not a hearty haha etc. but more of a cynical one).
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