About 3 people have told me in the last couple of days that I remind them of Pam from the TV show “the Office.” Hmm…interesting. Well, I like Pam, so I think I’m ok with that comparison. There is, however, no Jim at my office. Too bad. If only there was, then we could prank an unsuspecting (or perhaps suspecting, but still gullible) Dwight. But unfortunately, this is not the case. Nor am I engaged, for the record.
On a completely unrelated note, a few nights ago I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a couple books. Some good friends had given me a gift card to B&N, so I wanted to go look around to see what was there. I felt so powerful, walking through the door with my giftcard in my wallet. I looked around and thought, “I could buy anything!” Do not ruin my moment of euphoria with your practical considerations. For that one brief moment, I had the feeling that I could do anything, armed with my gift card. The store was mine!
I wandered through the aisles, looking at the vast array of books, and watched some of the people meandering through the store; there are all kinds of people who visit bookstores. As I walked through the Fiction & Literature section (I suppose fiction and literature are two separate categories. though they seem rather connected to me?) I spied a few books by an author whom I first heard of last spring in one of my classes, Italo Calvino. I bent down to inspect the books, and was arrested by the title, “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.”
I bought the book. I read the first story, the one titled, “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and it was delightful. It started out as a rather self-referential story that discussed how one goes about buying a book, which was wonderful because I had just gone through that exact process myself. It turned into an interesting (but also rather self-referential) story about a man at a railway station, and then turned into something else at the end…. This way of describing the story makes it sound strange and boring, but I assure you that this is not the case at all. It is actually quite clever and funny, and the story parallels itself. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend that you search out stories by Italo Calvino yourself. At the least, they may cause you to think about a few things (I always recommend thinking about life).
**edit** Now that I’ve read a little more of the Calvino book, I see that it actually is not just a collection of short stories, as originally thought. It is a collection of short stories, but it is also one story. I wonder how he wrote it, this one story which is not quite one story?
Posted by austin 