Splurge

Well, all the hoarding of my Bongs & Noodle gift cards is at an end. I've been hoarding them pretty well since Christmas – I bought and returned Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Atonement, but that doesn't count – and today I spent most of them. But money well-spent, I think, and now there will by joy in my heart.

I bought the following:

Vampire Weekend's CD. I've had "Oxford Comma" stuck in my head ever since Neil Gaiman mentioned it on his blog a little while ago, and I've been thinking for a while that I should do something radical and buy a CD. I haven't bought a CD since Phantom of the Opera when I was about, I don't know, thirteen maybe? But I wanted to support Vampire Weekend because I like "Oxford Comma" a lot and because they are an indie band (hooray for that!) and because they are cute, like children who are still deciding whether or not they want to be collar-popping sorts of people or tattoo sorts of people.

The Go Fug Yourself book. Oh, how I love that website. I love it to pieces. I discovered it a few years ago, when I was still working at Co-Op, and it has been an ongoing love affair since then. And now I have it in book version!

A book called Forever by Pete Hamill. I tried to get it from the library when I went today, and they didn't have it. They didn't have it in Fiction so I went and looked it up in the catalogue, which claimed that it was in Large Print, so I went over there with my conscience saying "You shouldn't take books from Large Print when you can read just fine! You should leave those for little old ladies!" and the other part of my brain assuring my conscience that the little old ladies didn't want this book and if they did it was just too bad. At which God promptly reached down His sacred hand from heaven and swiped it from the Large Print section. I even got a librarian to come help me look for it. No good. It was gone, gone, gone. Two other unfortunate things happened in the library (see below), but anyway I really wanted to read Forever – it's about a guy who can live forever as long as he never leaves Manhattan, and it's meant to be very swashbuckling – and I went and looked at it when I was in Bongs & Noodles, and then I saw that the main character, he has the same birthday as the main character in a story I'm writing, and – as with the story I'm writing – this is a relevant point to his family. (It is also my extremely cute little cousin's birthday, and he does things like include "gnome hats" in his school lists of things that are cone-shaped.) So sign from God. So I bought it. Fingers crossed.



You want to hear what happened at the library? Well, first, in the grand tradition of male librarians JUDGING US, the librarian who was checking us out JUDGED US. Robyn and I were talking about voting, and how important it is, and how much we admire her friend for being proactive about registering all their friends to vote, and how chagrined we are that a very, very smart friend of ours declined to vote in the primaries, and anyway the librarian said "I guess you two support Obama or Clinton?"

And I said, "McCain supporters also want people to vote. Everyone wants people to vote."

And he said, "Nah, it's just your age. I figured I was safe."

You know what I hate? When people tell you you're only liberal because you're young. Nuh-uh! Shut up, librarian-stupidhead. If you can't recommend other books that we might like based on our present selections, don't say anything at all!

The other thing was way more of a bummer. Today in the library I was walking through the adult fiction section, and a string hit me in the face. In actual fact it was the string of a sign that used to hang there and I guess had fallen down, but when I felt it on my face my brain just immediately assumed it was like in Albertson's where they have balloons floating around in certain areas and the strings are just dangling down and you can pull them down and buy/play with the balloons. So in my mind I was like, "Oh hooray! A balloon! This is so unexpected!", and I reached up and pulled the string to get the balloon.

But no balloon. It was such a let-down.