I just finished Ilium by Dan Simmons. It was highly entertaining, full of lovable characters interwoven in three parallel storylines that kept up the pace throughout. My only quibble was that I had no idea a cliffhanger was coming until the last chapter! Now I’m caught without the sequel, Olympos, and about to go on a two week road trip with my family. Bah.

Something else that bothered me was the number of typos in the book. It felt like a near-final draft to me, and several times I had to resist the temptation to grab a red pen and start circling things. There are words accidently doubled (”what what”); certain idioms are used dozens of times (”I’ll wear your guts for garters”); wrong names are used (”Siri” instead of “Savi,” and once while referring to Big Ajax, someone accidently says “Little Ajax” instead); and the worst offender is a reference to Achilles’ fancy-schmancy shield which he gets only after Patroklos’ body is retrieved. None of these errors ruin the story by any means, but I would think editors could be a bit more careful in a book about to be published.

Enough ranting. Besides Ilium, my summer reading has thus far included Waking Up Screaming, a collection of stories by HP Lovecraft; Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice; Milton’s Paradise Lost; and Foundation by Isaac Asimov. As these books have been recommended to me, I recommend them on to you! I devour books because they are so tasty.

Ah yes, you should check out Zenzoa if you haven’t recently. I’ve been busy with more than just reading! I’ll leave you with more classics-geek humor:

I once saw an ad for makeup that handled “acne, freckles, and other skin conditions.” Since when did freckles become a skin condition? I’ve always been fond of my freckles. I guess these companies need to make women feel insecure about their own appearances to get them to buy more cosmetics. In India they have whitening cream, in America they have tanning lotion; wrinkles and grey hair are old and ugly; lips must be red, eyes kohled, cheeks blushing, armpits and legs smooth. You get used to seeing beautiful women smothered in makeup, and become dissatisfied with the natural, normal human beings we are. But truly we’re just as good without additives. If not better.

“I would not enjoy touching vermilion as much as your own skin and I do not enjoy looking at flesh colour as much as your own and I would not enjoy seeing your eyes covered with make-up as in good health.”

— Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, 10.3

Communication is difficult. There are so many layers involved: what you want to say, what you should say, what you want to be understood without saying, what you actually say, and what other people actually hear, which is usually completely different anyway. Then there are the emotions and unconscious thoughts that get expressed through prosody, body language, and facial expression. For example, I’ve been told I have this “you’re stupid” look I give people without even meaning to. For future reference: if I give you this look, I apologize — I don’t actually think you’re stupid. Unless you’re my brother.

I’m kidding, Max! But seriously, I’m finding my little brother rather intolerable as of late. Max is about as annoying to me as gerbils with unclipped toenails sliding across a blackboard. I have crawled on my belly half submerged in eel-infestested water, for heaven’s sake — why can’t I handle one adolescent boy without rolling my eyes and making snide remarks? I mean, the remarks aren’t even witty! To make matters worse, he looks up to me, and I am proud of what he has done and what I know he can do. We just can’t talk to each other without fighting, though we can hold perfectly normal conversations with everyone else in the world. Me plus Max equals headaches all around.

My solution, to Max and the cold, is to go for a walk. It improves my mood for at least as long as I’m gone, if not longer. At night Auckland looks like a sea of stars. It is by far the most beautiful cityscape I have ever seen. And then there was yesterday’s sunset, a golden fire in the sky that made the clouds into poems of light. I was staring so intently at the sky, I almost stumbled into a bicycle on my way home!

So I’m being distracted by the sky and my brother, but what I can’t communicate, even to myself, is why I can’t focus. I’m restless and I don’t know how to settle. The important emotions seem to have fled to someplace warmer, and I’m left acting pretentious, annoyed, frustrated — the shallow ones. I can’t commit to any of my own projects, and I end up just doodling, reading, or baking, and not feeling fulfilled or relaxed even then. What made Reed or Bainbridge different? A sense of home, permanency, community? Here and now I feel out of place, out of phase.

Maybe my blog moved over to LiveJournal when I wasn’t looking… Oh, but I’m not really full of angst or suffering horribly, I swear! Well, not until Max finds out I wrote about him, anyway. :)

The Aborigines have a non-linear perspective on time: instead of hours marching past at their monotonous pace, time passes based on subjective human experience. Those periods when time just flew by while you went through your little routine unawares? Those periods were simply unsubstantial compared to a few moments of true excitement, emotion… experience. Life goes in fits and starts; why shouldn’t time?

I suppose I’ve been busy, but the days just melt away. A certain respect for time has been pounded into me that make sitting by complacently difficult, even when I want to give time wings. I’m afraid it won’t give them back.

It has been two weeks since I started my job for Fern Digital. I have been documenting use cases for their software. It’s only part-time, but the hours I spent at their home-based office seemed like eternity. Even taking an hour to go hiking around the nearby nature reserve wasn’t enough to keep me from feeling cramped and unhappy. Office work is just not for me; I need human interaction, sunlight, creativity! Now, lucky me, I can work at home, but even with the increased flexibility in my environment, my brain would not stop from slipping into a coma if I had to do this full time.

Meanwhile the household drama continues, lots of stress and emotion. Nothing we humans can’t handle, but stress kills faster than time. The crazy weather helps set the mood, changing one minute to the next. I wish it were warmer, but the thunderstorms are awe-inspiring.

These weeks are feeling like a long, deep sigh. I’m just waiting to breath out again.

New Zealand is not my place. It’s beautiful here, and the people are nice, but it doesn’t call to me. Apparently it doesn’t call to my family either: moving to New Zealand has made my mom realize how much she misses her family, and my brother realize how much he misses the academics of Bainbridge High School. But as they struggle with the logistics and the emotionally-charged issues surrounding the sudden decision to move back early, I have come to learn how much my life has become separate from theirs. I think it helps them to have me around as a neutral party, someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of without making promises or commitments, someone with so little stake in the final decision that the conversation doesn’t turn into an argument. I sit in the middle of the turmoil, watching these people I know so well, whose lives are lived as one — a family — and the tension between them only makes the bonds of a shared life the more obvious. And somewhere along the line I was given a lot of slack so that now, in some way, my own life is independent.

I could leave if I wanted and travel the country, go on some grand adventure by myself. But I have my projects here — I might even get a job. It seems too much like running away, and anyway, there’s a lot of adventuring to be done right where I am. Yesterday I went caving with my dad in Waipu. Other than the Oregon Caves National Park, they were my first limestone caves. And my first wet caves. I even got to do a vertical entrance and exit in Bouquave, an unexpected (and not entirely welcome) surprise when we couldn’t find the proper ways in and out. That one had some tight squeezes, and the stream went up to my knees in some places. After a particularly tough spot, only my dad, the trip leader Trevor, and I continued. The exit was a free climb through a vertical hole of rocks back out to the sheep fields. Quite tricky! The Waipu Tourist Cave, on the other hand, was mainly just scrambling over muddy rocks, a much simpler task; but oh, the glow worms! When we turned off our headlamps, they became like the night sky that never was: millions of green-white specks of light so bright that you could see the ripples in the water below. Truly breathtaking.

Speaking of stars, I am currently reading about my favorite angel, the Morning Star, Lucifer. That’s right, Hum 110 didn’t satisfy my hunger for classics (however mild that hunger may be) and so I find myself halfway through Milton’s Paradise Lost. The cosmology is not my cup of tea, good and evil too clearly defined, like black and white. Plus Eve’s happy subservience drives me up the wall, even if Milton meant it as social commentary. It is still more gripping than X-Men 3, though less so than House, a television medical drama that I started watching recently. Here’s a weird coincidence: the director of the first two X-Men movies, Bryan Singer, also directed The Usual Suspects, and of all things, House! And he’s directing the new Superman movie. Hopefully one movie this summer won’t be a disappointment.

In other news, my lack of respect for George Bush just keeps growing as he tries to make his personal bigotry in to a federal law banning same-sex marriage; an Amazon tribe that can’t count is threatening Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammer; I got some poi at last (for twirling, not eating), but my self-consciousness keeps me from practicing (read: whacking myself in the face) while others are present; and as always, I have a million half-born ideas floating about.

I feel like I’m living in a dream sometimes.