I'm rather disappointed that I don't have a life now. It's hard to balance right now. Despite getting a membership with the outing club, I haven't been on any trip since they cancelled the moonlight canoeing. Not been sociable etc etc etc you know the rest. Instead of fitting into the american crowd I tunnelled deeper into my chinese sensibilities and embarked on a massive chinese song download. I'm so not going to fulfil my birthday wishes.

On the other hand I'm reading really brilliant books for my writing seminar/workshop. The beauty of the prose just makes me sigh in wonder. There was Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son which was a genre unto itself- hallucinatory fiction. The narrator spends half his time intoxicated with heroin. I'm so going to do badly for that paper. And then now we're doing Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried. I like all that vietnam war controversy and the emotions it stirred up. Watched a documentary on how they picked a design for the war memorial in washington and how it generated so much criticism. But I'm really not good at picking out the underlying notions. I need a haircut right about now.

"I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't what the lawyers did. It wasn't what the doctors did, it wasn't what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together."