Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "When one has no character, one has to apply a method." - Albert Camus

Reading: Voltaire, Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories

Listening to: the original cast recording of Candide

Decluttering accomplishments: filed various odds and ends of paper

2 October 2002 - Voltaire on the Metro

First, the Papua New Guinea travelogue is up. It's lengthy and has lots of pictures, but I think it's fairly interesting. By the way, the last of the artefacts I had shipped (a garamut drum, a woven crocodile, and a bark painting) arrived today.

Secondly, Robert has kindly offered to relieve me of one decision. Namely, he has advised me not to cut my hair. I was really thinking of just a slight trim (an inch or two), reddish highlights, and/or learning to make French braids, but it's nice to know his take on it. Along those lines, I saw this "hairigami kit" at the drugstore and was vaguely tempted, but I suspect it would turn out that one needs better behaved hair than mine for it to work.

I also figured out that I could really avoid ironing if I got around to taking some stuff to the dry cleaners. Not that I've actually done that, but it's nice to have a solution.

Then, I have a couple of brief customer service rants. My credit card company has a phone number on the back of the statement to call for a change of address. The only catch is that the phone number has been disconnected. Doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence in the bank involved. I did do the change of address by calling customer service and enduring their form of phone death.

The worse phone death was my auto insurance company. Particularly since the reason I had to call them was a screw-up on their part. I got a notice saying that my policy would be cancelled in two weeks due to non-payment of the premium. Since I'd paid the premium nearly two months ago (via credit card, when I switched the policy over to Virginia), I had to call them. It took four levels of phone tree menus and a 20 minute wait to talk to a person. I ended up faxing them a copy of the credit card statement showing the charge for the policy, but they still say they have to turn it over to their research department. They did put a hold on the cancellation, but it's all very annoying.

On a more positive note, what an ending to last night's Buffy episode! The giant worm thing annoyed me, since it was obviously recycled from a couple of previous episodes. And I preferred Spike's old hairstyle. But that ending - wow!

As for what I really wanted to write about today, one of the really nice things about living here is riding the Metro to work. I have a short walk to the station. In fact, roughly half of my walk is within the station. Anyway, since I'm at the end of the line, I can always get a seat in the morning and I can typically get a seat for a bit more than half of the ride home. Which means I can read during my commute. Not only do I read, but I notice what other people are reading. Newspapers are common, particularly the Washington Post. Tom Clancy seems to be retaining his place on the best seller lists. There are always a few folks with Bibles and one or two reading self-help books (either psychology or business related).

So I suspect that anybody else making similar observations finds me quite eccentric. Last week, I was immersed in one of the lesser novels of Daniel Defoe. As it happens, Defoe is among my favorite novelists and his plots would be dismissed as trashy were he writing now. If your stuff is read for enough years, it becomes a classic. This week, I'm reading Voltaire. And, even worse, I find myself smiling and suppressing a laugh or two. I finished "Candide" today and it measures up to its reputation. I knew the story because of the Bernstein musical, but I didn't know how light in tone the writing was. I did manage to restrain myself from humming "what a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe" when I read that chapter. I'm looking forward to starting "Zadig" on my way to work tomorrow.