The Hotel New Hampshire

I keep beginning halfhearted entries and then finding a need to reboot my computer and forgetting all about the half-written entries and so rebooting without bothering to save them first, and then when I do remember about their existence I decide they weren't really worth posting in the first place.

I'm having an extremely quiet weekend. Inexplicably, the huge majority of my usual online friends have lately vanished for indeterminate but apparently very long time periods, and I'm missing all of them—but most of all arsenothelys, who I'd really like to talk to right now and am missing quite intolerably—so I currently have no one to talk to, and even going on AIM, which usually brings crowds of dozens crashing down all around me immediately, doesn't provoke a single word from anyone this weekend. But it's not that bad really—I'm still stubbornly refusing to ever take the initiative and message anyone else myself, and if I were all that desperate for conversation I expect I'd probably get around to learning that hitherto unacquired skill. Instead I'm just settling into an unexpectedly silent weekend, spending almost all of it in bed with a book.

The particular book I've spent the weekend in bed with is called The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving, which was highly recommended to me by Jeremy when he saw it lying around at my apartment, and his recommendation drastically increased the speed with which I got around to reading it. I'm definitely impressed with it. In particular by its treatment of rape. I could swear the author himself was raped. If he wasn't, then he's got some kind of world-class genius for figuring out how to write about it.No—even if he was raped, he's got some kind of world-class genius for figuring out how to write about it. I'm definitely impressed.

And now I shall go crawl back under the covers with it. Currently I'm about two thirds of the way through.

Miscellaneous Musings and a Public Service Announcement

Goodness, this book gets better with every page. I shall definitely have to hunt down more books by John Irving now.

Five actual human beings showed up to chat with me this afternoon, for quite a long while actually—and one of my several vanished friends has sort of reappeared, though I'm not exactly sure what's going on with him and I get the impression he's feeling rather the worse for wear. At least he doesn't seem to be planning to disappear entirely, though. So I feel less lonely now.

Also, I finally managed to open a jar of strawberry jam which I first attempted to open when Jeremy was here, and I couldn't get it open, and I had a strange aversion to asking him to perform the traditional male function of opening jars. I've always managed to get my own jars open before, so that ability should not just suddenly vanish when a male is present. So I stubbornly put the jar back in the refrigerator and have been wrestling with it ever since. Today I finally got it open! So I have been consuming large numbers of strawberry jam sandwiches in delighted celebration.

And now, we interrupt this journal entry for a public service announcement.

It has come to my attention that a great many poor deprived people on my friends list are using ancient out-of-date LJ clients that don't do any of the fancy friends-list-organizing, automatic-HTML-code-inserting, and spell-checking stuff that mine does. The Windows users among you should definitely all download the latest version of the Semagic LiveJournal Client which was just released six days ago. Follow the link. You'll be thrilled with what you find!