Monday, November 24, 2008

Books, and Doomsday(s)

Well, thanks everybody for the book recommendations. I'm going to check out a bunch of those books, I think. (Sarah: Bolano's been haunting me for the past week. There was an article on him in Paste, a piece in the Onion's A/V Club, and just yesterday morning I saw a woman reading an article about him in The New York Times. It must be fate.) I've also been milling over a set of short stories by Hawthorne, the first book in George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, and maybe Foucault's Pendulum by Eco (which I've begun but never finished). I'm trying to balance the intellectual (since I'm skipping school for several months) with the entertaining (since this is more or less a vacation), so we'll see how this all shakes out.

But keep the book recommendations coming. Even though I'm quickly running out of packing space--actually, I'm probably already over-full--my list keeps get updated.

That being said, I have no idea how I'm going to fit everything in my 1.5 backpacks. My travel pack is only 40 liters (not that huge) and my day pack is about half that size. Packing for four seasons (since winter will be kicking in while we're in Patagonia) is turning out to be quite a challenge. My pack was perfect for summery travel in Central America and Bolivia/Peru, but I'm worried about fitting in enough clothing to cover everything from trekking in Patagonia in March to hanging on a beach in Honduras in June. Not a terrible problem to have, but my packing list probably exceeds my luggage by about 40% right now. Nuts.

That's a minor problem. The major problem is the grading and term-paper-writing bind I find myself in these days. I need to finish my students' portfolios by Wednesday morning, then immediately begin writing my term paper for my Renaissance tragedy class. And Thursday is completely shot to hell (the good kind of shot to hell) because of all the planned gluttony. And Wednesday is drinking and playing video games with Ben. But things need to happen, and fast.

I won't even go into the fact that the subletters for our place bailed last week. Bastards. So there's that, too.

Every day, I have to fight the urge to go to the medicine cabinet, swallow Jessie's entire supply of Xanax, and hope that it puts me a coma for precisely one month.

3 comments:

Billie J. Pilgrim said...

1. I would like to make it known to your readership that my Xanax is for flying. It's not just like, something I take.

2. I forgot to mention that I hope to bring Woman in White (Collins) and Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin). They're both long, can be considered academic, and relate to South America. Huzzah, what what.

kAb said...

No fair. Your century is better for travel reading. I might just have to go ahead and pack The Faerie Queene.

Billie J. Pilgrim said...

yeah, you might just have to go ahead and be the only one of us who reads that.