Drat this working for a living all to heck.

Last night we went to the bookstore.  I hadn't been in a bookstore since just before Christmas, and it was wonderful to go into our favourite bookstore and smell that bookstore smell.  Mmmmm.  I've been staying out of bookstore because (a) I am erratically employed[1] and there is no saying that the books I buy today might need to have been rent tomorrow, and (b) I buy many more books than I have read, and if I really need a new reading experience[2] I can just go to my piles (yes, plural) of unread books.  But the pleasure of selection in retail therapy is a difficult addiction to break.

And then, once there, there was the issue of coolth.  I knew I was going to write this entry, with the title of "the pleasure of selection", and so then I have to be able to say that I bought books of sufficient worthiness for anyone to think I have sufficient gravitas to be worth reading when I comment about the pleasing things I have selected.  Which anxiety turns out to be a great winnower of the dreck.

[1] - as per tradition, my next new assignment was offered to me on the last day of my current assignment (yesterday).  I have a part-time receptionist stint coming up in a week for an unknown amount of time.  Keeps me internal; keeps me in rent.  Okay.

[2] - I am currently slogging through "The Importance of What We Care About" by Harry G. Frankfurt, which is making me re-realize that I don't care about philosophy.  I bought it on the recommendation of someone on afp for the essay "on Bullshit", which may or may not be good.  I haven't made it that far.  I have the same attitude to reading as to food: no throwing away things that are unpalatable - that's wasteful and waste is a sin.  Things must be eaten all up and things must be read from front to back.  Ugh.