It’s Furious Balancing

I know I mentioned before in this blog that I have nothing against red roses. Red roses are fine. Red roses are okay. Red roses are boring as all-get-out and take no imagination and no effort to procure. If a hapless swain^{1 2} were to present me with red roses, I would accept them graciously, like the first runner-up in the Miss America Pageant.

I found these beauties at the Busch’s in Dexter, Michigan. Since I’m in the middle of a thumping sinus headache as yet untouched by caffeine and extra-strength Vicodin, this is about all I can manage for a blog post today.

Well, that, and a quote from the book by which I’m currently ensorceled³, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl.⁴ Some of the reviews I saw on amazon.com were not kind. There was one customer review entitled “Lots of Words” which concluded that the reviewer would recover by reading Hemingway. I have little, if anything, kind to say about Hemingway. Ah, well. To each his – or her – own.

Since I love lolling about in words and language like some people enjoy lolling about in silk sheets, I’m enjoying this book tremendously. Allusions and obscure references abound. My favorite!

In any event, the first quotable bit I found was some advice from the professorial father to his daughter on organizing (documenting) one’s life:

Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids,⁵ because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back — somewhere by the radiator — who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.”

I found that apropos, but perhaps every blogger would find it apropos.

In any event, my headache has receded to a dull roar behind my right eye (frontal sinus), so I will present you with another Visual Aid and then run off to the world of Telon to work on my diplomacy and tradeskill levels. Game on.

* * * * *

1. And we all know that I’m just surrounded by hapless swains, being happily married, in my 40′s, and a member of the “Future Crazy Cat Ladies Who Knit Their Cats Tiny Sweaters” Club. [↩]
2. I’m pretty sure I can’t put a footnote within a footnote with the plug-in I use in WordPress, but if I could, I would insert something here about how my headache-ridden brain is thrashing about insisting that the plural of swain is swine. [↩]
3. Either with one “l” or two, the spell checker says I’m not spelling this correctly. I’m sticking with one “l,” like I do with canceled, which looks incorrect, but isn’t, and anyone correcting me on my spelling is drawn into the trap like an insect caught by an ant lion [↩]
4. Sometime close to 1:00 a.m., I realized that I would need to own every book written by her. Then I realized it was her first published book. [↩]
5. The author’s capitalization, not mine. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under Books, Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.