Books and Boo Boos

I hope your weekend was fabulous! At the very least, it was probably better than mine, having spent Friday evening through Saturday afternoon getting tested for some suspicious chest pains at an undisclosed hospital here in Charm City. The good news is that I'm as healthy as a horse. The bad news is I still have the pains. They're shorter in duration and magnitude of pain now, so I'm hoping if I ignore them, they'll go away all together in a few more days. On the bright side, I got to do a lot of things I'd never done before, like have a CT and jog on a treadmill and wear electrodes, get EKGs, eat hospital pancakes, expose my breasts to a lot of people, get woken up at all hours of the night for serial blood tests (cardiac enzymes), and listen to people puke. I love hospitals when I'm not a patient. There's always something going on—it's a rocking joint, you know? I always wanted to be a doctor, but aside from my general lack of chemistry and math skills, I am too sensitive to smell. The whiff of an indigent or a putrified, pussy wound (that is, pus-filled wound that smells) would send me running.

Anyway, I have decided that I would have to be on death's door before I go back to the hospital. So much waiting...if blood isn't spurting out of you, it's safe to say you will wait. And wait you will. Medicine isn't Jiffy Lube. Not yet, anyway.

Per Litblitzin's nudge, I'll completed my list:

You're stuck inside Farenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

Hmm. Probably the Price of Salt, an elegant lesbian novel written by Patricia Highsmith under a pen name in the fifties. Nothing raunchy happens, but it's a nice romance in which neither character commits suicide at the end or returns to heteroland, which is amazing for when it was published. Anyway, I'm sure some upright housewife somewhere would have burned it if she found a copy. Or maybe a copy of Bear magazine.

As for books I'd like to burn, probably Bret Easton Ellis' entire canon. Not that he has a canon. Or deserves one.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I loved SE Hinton's Tex (Tex) and Dallas (The Outsiders) when I was younger; I also had a crush on both Franny and Zooey (Franny and Zooey) and Archer Newland and the Countess Ellen Olenska (Age of Innocence).

The last book you bought is?

I honestly can't remember. I'm too cheap to buy books. I either check them out of the library or get them free from the Book Thing. Actually, now that I think about it, I may have bought a book about the Zodiac killer from a thrift store in New Mexico a few months back. I have no idea where it is.

The last book you read?

The Dive From Clausen's Pier for our book club. I've also read a bunch of old Story magazines.

What are you currently reading?

The Dreamer's Way, a book on meditation by Jon Kabbat Zin, a bunch of old Story magazines, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.

Five Books You Would Take to a Deserted Island?

This is too hard! This is like naming five CDs I would take to an island. There are too many books! I guess I would have to take large ones I haven't read yet but want to, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1) and the works of Jane Austin in one of those fat volumes (2). Also an anthology of hand-picked short stories (3), the plays of Shakespeare in one volume (4), and a blank journal for writing (5). Is that cheating? Too bad.

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Upside-down Hippo. Crumblord, and JWER, are you playing?