this shall keep me safe from the hot mexican sun

I think I've said this before, but I am deeply upset at the fact that Polaroid cameras will soon be extinct. (The film is being discontinued. Curses on all digital cameras! They're doing for film what e-mail did for letters.) Polaroids are so beautiful. I hate that they will soon be no more.

Grace claims that everything Dan Haseltine sings echoes. But this is coming from a girl who is reading The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria for funsies. So I wouldn't take anything she says too seriously.

So I finished this month's short story today, remarkably ahead of schedule. Therefore I think it would be a smart move to go ahead and start working on January's short, but I have no idea what to write about. Not even the slightest hint of an idea. I want to try something a little gutsier, without any characters so heavily based on people that I know, and maybe even try something as adventurous as a plot, but I just don't know. I don't know how much my lazy muse can handle.

I also finished Drown today, Junot Diaz's debut, a collection of gritty, lovely short stories about a family from the Dominican Republic and the disillusioning American dream. He's great. I want to read his latest, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Southern Pines was just perfect; I do so love that family.

I found an old notebook of mine today, my speech class notebook when I was 15. I covered the front and back with quotes from my favorite authors at the time. Judging from the notebook, my favorites were Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Shakespeare, and the French-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco. I forgot about my teen obsession with Ionesco. Such a random one. I read almost all of his plays and a good number of his essays; I remember particularly identifying with his dislike for Victor Hugo. He was a funny one.

"One can prove that social progress is definitely better with sugar."--Ionesco, "The Bald Soprano"

Our house won some architectural award and while I was upstairs, ironing napkins, I reflected that Mom had made the place look like a page straight out of "Southern Living." It did look pretty today. Kelsey and I hid in the closet, watching "Arrested Development," while people walked through the house, trying to stifle our laughter. One woman burst in on us in the dark and said, "Girls! What a lovely room... oh, dear, well, bye," and then left awkwardly. I don't know what happened.

Grace does not believe that John Jacob Astor went down with the Titanic.

(Title: Buster Bluth.)