(no subject)

I've been going slightly east to Halsted and then north on my rides home. Today, I'm going to go west to Damen, then go to Lincoln, to Lawrence, to Western and up to Asbury. Should be a little shorter, and there'll be different scenery. And it'll avoid the stretch of Sheridan south of Howard in Rogers Park, which is my least favorite part of my ride.

It typically takes me an hour and a quarter to get home by bike, which is about the same, and possibly less, time than transit takes. There was a strong headwind yesterday so things were slower. And I stopped at Jewel for milk and cupcakes.

Today I'm going to visit Kyttin after work for fancy Chinese buffet with crepes and sushi and stuff.

I'm glad to be getting home early enough to have time with Miriam. If I'd ended up with the evening shifts, I wouldn't have had much time with her after going home before bed, and we'd miss each other a lot. We're pretty stuck on each other. Instead, I get time with her in the afternoon, and my schedule has led to both of us getting to bed a lot earlier, which is a good thing too.

I was just asked to cover the desk at the student study and tutoring space until 4 o' clock. That'll give me about an hour of overtime. Fortunately, my bike lights are all charged up, 'cause it's getting darker out there every day!

Doggy!

There was a husky waiting for his people outside Jewel when I stopped yesterday. He wasn't there when I parked my bike, but he was tied up next to it when I came out. He sniffed my cupcakes and I had to tell him they were not for him. He was not sad, and sniffed my shoes instead.

I found out his name was Kimmick by examining his tags. He enjoyed the attention and got excited, starting to bark and trying to put his forepaws on me. I settled him down and gave him some pettings. His coat was so thick and soft! I petted and snuggled him for five minutes or so, telling him what a pretty boy he was. His heterochromic eyes were gorgeous!

(no subject)

I read a third or so of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." The writing is fantastic; I stopped because the future as depicted disturbed me. Maybe I'll come back to it another time.

I'm half way through Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's interesting, but a little dense and dry. I'll probably read it in bits.

I'm around half way through Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I saw the title when I was little and asked my parents what it was about. I don't really remember what they told me, but the memorable title stayed with me. When I saw it at a going-out-of-business Borders, I bought it. I'm finally reading it now.

It's a very interesting, difficult to explain, difficult for me to understand immediately, book about form vs function, classicism vs. romanticism, and maybe (I'm not quite sure) about mental illness and interpersonal relationships. I'm enjoying it. The narrator's explanation of how a motorcycle is really a collection of concepts wrought in steel made me happy. And this is the end of a sort of monologue by the narrator about the failings of a manual for assembling a rotisserie:

----------

"Well it *is* art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.

They're not sure whether I'm kidding or not.

"You mean," DeWeese [an artist and sculptor] asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together, I was actually sculpting it?"

"Sure."

He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.

-----------------

I'd barely even tried reading something for pleasure after Syracuse, and until now. I'm more me again.