Today I didn’t have to go looking for fun, a surprise package from Erin brought it to my doorstep. It’s a Better Late Than Never necklace, and it is the precious.

Thanks, Pocket.

Helen Jane had a birthday!

So we had wine and cheese.

And a late night by the fire.

Total disregard for bedsprings. Take that, mattress.

Yes to the disco dancing skater. Shake it, sir.

My college roommate and friend since seventh grade just had her second baby, and she’s a hum dinger.

I forgot how holding a two-month-old baby can be like hitting an emotional reset button. Hello, little baby.

We spoiled our dinner.

Thrift store shopping. I refrained from buying this organ just because I thought the keys were pretty. I am a grownup now. Even though I could have turned it into an awesome credenza.

I should go back.

Chinese takeout, reruns of The Office, no pants.

The best parts of The Rachel Papers:

“As with most people who pass for sensitive, obsessive types, I simply can’t get enough of things to get worked up about — an interest.”

“On the way out I heart-rendingly bought Rachel a 3p postcard of Blake’s Ghost of a Flea, offering it to her with boyish diffidence. She (quite rightly) kissed me on the cheek…”

“I experienced thrilling self-pity. ‘What will that mind of yours get up to next? I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.
Steady on. What’s so great about going mad?
But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.”

“‘I couldn’t agree more, Sir Herbert, though I confess I’ve never looked at it from quite that angle… The so-called new philosophy, ‘permissiveness’ if you like, seen from the right perspetive, is only a new puritanism, whereby you’re accused of being repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on. You’re not allowed to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your instincts again — moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness — just as the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. Both codes are reductive, and therefore equally unrelated to how people feel: so fucking give me a scholarship,’ or words to that effect.”

“I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: ‘No hard feelings, everyone, but I’ve thought about it and it’s just not on, is it? It’s nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best. -C'”

Vocab list:

prolix – Unduly prolonged
hamartia – tragic flaw
cor – a unit of measure of capacity
etoliated – pale
detumescence – subsidence of swelling or an erection
atavistic – recurrence of a past mannerism
emetic – an agent that induces vomiting
blacking – subject to boycott
donnish – relating to a university don
equably – marked by lack of variation
post-prandial – after meal
skirling – emit a shrill tone
imprecation – curse
adamantine – unyielding
fecund – intellectually productive
viva – used to express goodwill or approval
mendacious – deceptive
borstal – reformatory
spinney – a small wood with undergrowth
plus-fours – loose sports knickers made four inches longer than conventional knickers
prelapsarian – before the fall of man
invigilate – supervise students at examination

U.S.A. v. Japan.