• Submitted my art for the SGA Big Bang.
  
  
• Went out for anniversary dinner. Fondue is yum.
  
  
• Proposed to significant other, proposal accepted. Shiny black stainless steel wedding bands deployed. Really like our rings, they're interesting enough and no conflict diamonds were involved. (I don't care for diamonds or traditional wedding rings, so I wanted something fairly simple that would still stand out. And I especially hate gold-tone jewelry, no matter its material or form).
  
  Ignore my wrinkly "old man" hand. My hands super dry because of the recent shift in weather.
  
  
• Mrs. Bunny chewed my main mouse's cord in half and nibbled at my backup mouse's cord. Mea culpa, I should have been supervising her but wasn't.
  
  
• Finished reading In the Cut. I don't know why, but all of the sudden I wanted to read it. Must have lost my mind, as I knew how it ended and knew I wouldn't like it. Not my most shining example of the return to bookdom.
  
  Mini-review: Needlessly dense, dull, distant, stuffy, waste of time.
  
  Long review: Any possible edge is blunted by the slow meandering crawl towards a resolution. Dull vagueness isn't the same as mystery.
  
  The use of an unreliable narrator coupled with first person voice is pure laziness on the part of the author. Why bother writing the important parts when you can just say that the character doesn't have that information?
  
  There is no urgency from the characters, despite the protagonist's multiple brushes with murder and mayhem. She is attacked and also stalked by multiple men, yet doesn't seem to care. If anything, I felt she was suicidal and was simply waiting for death to conveniently appear, generously meted out by one of her improbably numerous male admirers.
  
  The ending appears as if by magic, and while clues and hints are scattered throughout the story and the plot inevitably to leads up to a climax, the build-up is incomplete and unfulfilling. It's probably meant to seem sudden and shocking but is instead abrupt and jarring.
  
  The book was considered edgy in 1996 for its portrayals of sex and female sexuality, but I find the sex suffers from romance-novel omission and euphemism even while struggling to shock with its pseudo-explicitness. And I find the faux-feminism of the book useless, the female characters are passive, letting things happen to them that most women I know would rail against or take precautions to prevent. In almost all the sexual encounters the men all take the lead. The lead character just accepts everything they do, she wants it in some way - even when she professes otherwise.
  
  The book is short, and doesn't make use of that at all. It could be a one-two punch in the gut, visceral and sharp but instead it's like one of those nightmares where you try to run but never move. I don't know what I was thinking. ::smacks own hand::
  

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: accomplished
he just sings whatever he's seen: Michael Penn - No Myth