The Sundays, "static & silence"

Top Three Things I've Discovered / Can't Wait to Have / Existences About Which I Am Thrilled

1.) The Sunday's titular album. The album Sixpence None The Richer couldn't make after "Kiss Me." Thanks, Amanda!

2.) "Rebel Sell," a book by the Canucks Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, which I do not yet own (my birthday is in late March) but which I must due to simple nuggets of truth such as nyeh : "the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years." Which claim attempts to wake up those of the "counterculture" and the "anti-establishments" and show them that the black-market strains of skepticism toward the mainstream has long - indeed, may have always - been co-opted by the very forces of consumerism that that skepticism purports to criticize and eschew. Anti-consumerism is itself a consumerized cultural production. Like most theories and phenomena in the modern world, I'm sure that in some yet-to-be-processed way this has everything to do with DFW's "E Unibus Pluram" (which details the problems TV, via irony, poses to practitioners of postmodern American fiction).

3.) "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. Neither do I have this yet, but the Times Book Review has a fascinating review of it by David Brooks. You should read it. Among the jawdropping examples that support the general thesis that good, sound decisions can be made in seconds (due to aeons of natural selection's neural editing, one supposes) are these: that versed researchers, viewing a short clip of a newlywed couple's conversation, can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether a newlywed couple will be married 15 years hence; that students evaluate a teacher's performance just the same whether they've watched a 30 second clip of the teacher or spent a semester under her/his tutelage (particularly striking, that last).

Top Three Oddities / Pressures That Have Me By Turns Worried & Befuddled

1.) The Job Search, capitals much Deserved. But I'm feeling better about it by the day. Chances are that my feelings & optimism on this front will follow a classic bell curve, with confidence and inner sunshine rising as more applications enter the system, and the hook of my future is gently nibbled upon, and then there will come that rollercoasterish moment of suspended flight before the incipient plummeting. That won't happen, though. I can ride that coaster forever.

2.) Neighbors. Would you ask your neighbor to steam-vacuum your carpets? What if you'd met this neighbor last month? What if you paid him $50 to do it, over his reluctances a) to do the favor in the first place and b) to take the fee? Would you pay him the money, go shopping with your daughter, come home, figure that the carpets could use not just another complete cleaning at your own hand, but three more complete cleanings, thereby rendering moot the cleaning your paid neighbor's just completed? Would you then in explaining to the neighbor what you've done, i.e. finished more completely the job he'd not done to your satisfaction but which under typical societal codes you would have done yourself, and then, amid the sense of guilt thusly inspired in him, ask him to return the steam-vacuum to the store? Neither would I.

3.) The poetics of post-post-modernity. More to come on that score imminently.