Monday, December 29, 2003

I'm on vacation, and yesterday I slept for about thirteen hours, this after sitting in a chair watching television for the previous five or six.  Outside of that very welcome lull, I've kept very busy, largely with holiday preparations and celebrations, but for the past few days I've been trying to undertake a least a few home improvement projects.  There are about forty kitchen cabinet doors that have been sitting in our garage since we began our radical overhaul of the kitchen, about six months ago.  We quickly learned that cabinet doors are not an absolute necessity, and that in fact the kitchen looked just fine without them; particularly after the walls, ceiling and cabinets proper had been painted, and the floor replaced.  But we did recently start painting them, after a few struggles with matching the paint after a six month delay (Did you know that no two cans of paint are exactly the same?  Buy ALL the paint you need for a project at that project's outset).  I cannot tell you what a drag this project is.  We're using an oil-based paint, not by choice, but because the cabinets were already painted with oil-based paint, albeit of a particularly ugly hue.  Following suit seemed easier than sanding and priming the lot.  Thankfully, we removed all the hardware in April, but still, it's really only possible to paint one side of four cabinets per day, given space limitations.  And they each need two coats.  So, this project will take 40*2*2=160 days to complete, best case (i.e. we actually get out there and paint four sides every single day.  And I've already skipped a day).   It is just miserable to prepare paint, clean paintbrushes, etc. for what is really only about 30-45 minutes of actual painting.   After the painting is complete, we have to acquire and attach new hardware (pulls and hinges), then hang the damn things.  I was so frustrated this morning that I simply threw my brushes into a big bowl of mineral spirits, and put it by the side entrance to my house.  I should go fetch it before I poison a neighbor's cat. Over the past two days, I read Jim McManus' Positively Fifth Street.  It relates how he parlayed his $4,000 advance from Harper's into a fifth-place win at the World Series of Poker.   It's absolutely trashy (albeit in a very learned way), and very good.  I highly recommend it, if you are looking for a bit of highly diversionary mind candy.  However, the first ten-or-so pages consists of an absolutely gruesome - and in my mind, completely gratutious - recreation of a sex-murder (of Ted Binion, the owner of the Horseshoe, where the WSOP is held).  The dual plotline - of the murder trial and the poker series - dovetail nicely in the end, but it is best to skip the first few pages of the book, as I did.  Unless, of course, you are not upset by reading about someone being dispatched in a particularly painful, sadistic, and protracted fashion.  This is absolutely the most sordid book I have read in a long time (perhaps ever), but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  Jim McManus is a very sympathetic narrator/protagonist, which perhaps redeemed the entire book for me.  I learned quite a bit about the logistics of poker as well.   I'm not necessarily interested in poker, but this sort of brief glimpse into arcane bodies of knowledge are always interesting to me. I take the lifelong project of reading so seriously (too seriously, probably), that I'm generally reluctant to read books such as this one.  Why read such a thing, after all?  I'm entertained - albeit in a secondary, tertiary or even quaternary sense - by the things I typically read.  There is entirely too much entertainment in our culture (a belief which has much to do with my generally dismal view of movies, which I wrote about yesterday).   I suppose my willingness to spend a day or two happily immersed in this book has much to do with the fact that I spent the past four months reading and working with exactly the types of books I most dearly love.  This was the first time in my life that I have ever been able to do this.  By 'able,' I mean emotionally, intellectually able, as well as financially and logistically able.  I was not mature enough to do this in my early twenties, when I first attended college.  I didn't know who I was, or what I wanted out of my time in school, and therefore got caught up in poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical theory, etc.  I'm old enough, now, to have some immunity from academic trendiness, and am finally free to pursue my own interests, with a relatively full understanding of what those interests actually are.   So, I read this book, and I had fun doing so.      3:21:09 PM