flights

Remember when you were a kid and you’d overhear grownups talking about insurance and taxes, IRAs, mortgages and interest rates? Remember thinking to yourself, do they really understand that stuff? Remember how boring it all sounded and how frightening it was to imagine that someday you might have to know about it too, that someday you might actually find yourself talking about it…voluntarily?

Anyway, since I left my last job, I’ve been forced to think about where to invest the money that was in my 401k. I don’t want to unwittingly pad the pockets of Haliburton or Tyco, so I’ve been looking at socially responsible mutual funds and the 100 Best Corporate Citizens according to Business Ethics magazine. I’m so PC, don’t you think?

Before I get off the subject of my "Japanese phase", I want to give props to Soko Gakuen, a private, non-profit Japanese language school in San Francisco, and the self-proclaimed "most comprehensive Japanese language school in California". I’m in the middle of my first class there, and I am very happy with it.

I’ve been re-reading bits of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy:
book 1 – Spring Snow
book 2 – Runaway Horses
book 3 – The Temple of Dawn
book 4 – The Decay of the Angel.

Basically in a Japanese phase, I guess. I’ve been devouring Murakami. Of his books, the only ones I haven’t read are his two collections of short stories (The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake) and Underground, his nonfiction account of the Tokyo subway gas attacks.

I have a strange need to share what I so love about his books, but I find it tremendously difficult to put it into words.

Each of his books contains a central mystery – a search for a missing person, for example – and that’s certainly part of what makes them compelling, like all good mysteries. So he clearly has a love for mystery, though he’s not at all a mystery author in the genre fiction sense of the word. There’s also a touch of sci-fi in his books, which in his case is more often considered surrealism and referred to as such by his critics and scholars.

There is a kind of melancholy that pervades his plots and characters, and a familiar vulnerability. There’s also an awkwardness – mostly mechanical – which could be a function of translation. None of this, however, gets at the heart of why I love his books.

When I finished reading ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. There was no sense of being gradually overcome by emotion, no lump in my throat. I literally burst. It is that thing I love about his books that prompted my outpouring, and I’m realizing I’m absolutely not able to put it into words.

His books have a kind of stunning clarity on a level that my soul seems to understand by my mind can’t package.

So, in the end, I’m failing once again to express what I like about his books, but I can safely say he’s my bedside table successor to Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy.

Saw ACDShe the other night. They’re an all-girl ACDC tribute band. I’m speechless. What’s better than hot chicks playing hard rock? As one dude in the crowd screamed, “Girls-who-rock rock!”

Incidentally, I spent some minutes before the show talking to “Agnes Young”, who works days as a flight instructor. She should totally be in the next Bond movie.

Check out these Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974 (thanks Rebecca).

I’m intrigued by the names the U.S. attaches to its military operations (most recently “Enduring Freedom” nee “Infinite Justice”). I just discovered several good lists (including this list) of such operations.

I’d comment on some of the names – some of them real head-scratchers – but I think they really need to speak for themselves. Incidentally, several of the sites listing U.S. military operations included this very creepy poem:

Then conquer we must, when our cause is just
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

(by the way, the above is actually a stanza from a verse of our national anthem)

Finally (and I know this is not a new observation in the least), but articles like this one, on the topic of Bush’s biblical rhetoric and religious motives, and military operations with names like “Infinite Justice” point frighteningly to Bush’s assumption of what he believes to be divine will.

A friend (who shall remain nameless) has lately become too cool to be tolerated…

Dave Eggers wrote a pretty eloquent rant on the notion of selling out (vs. being authentic or cool), which was reprinted by Harpers a couple of summers ago, but what Eggers misses (and which he is somewhat guilty of himself) is the pleasure we get out of being “in the know”. This person is the name dropper. This person is the one who needs to tell you he was at that show – before they were famous.

Of course the need to feel in-the-know extends beyond the realm of pop culture. It’s the whole reason gossip exists at all.

Anyway, I’m guilty myself. I wish I could more often just guilelessly like things.