Entry 15: Books

I finished Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl today. I thought it was excellent – tragic, but a great book. Actually the diary itself is not tragic, but the epilogue obviously is. The diary is just normal teenage thoughts (albeit in remarkable circumstances), the types of things that everybody goes through at that age – quarreling with you family, wanting to be independent, going through weird physical changes, being curious about sex, etc. Throughout the book Anne talks about how, although she is outwardly talkative, inside she is so private and nobody knows or understands the really Anne. This made me laugh, because, of course, this is what all teenagers think, when the actuality is everybody understands you a lot more than you know, because everybody thought the same thoughts you did when they were a teenager. You are just too obliviously self-absorbed to recognize that everybody can see through you.

Anyway, that’s my first book down on the big list. Next up is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I leaped-frogged a bunch of spots, because books were checked out, or I had already read them, or some other reason. I started at number 8 on the list and now I am on 16. (Apparently, I am moving in multiples of 8.) Honestly, I am not super excited to follow up Anne Frank with Lolita – one young girl being terrorized by the Nazis, another by a pedophile. It’s not the most pleasant sequence of stories, but Lolita is next up on the list, and I already checked it out. I actually started it once before when I was about eighteen, but I couldn’t keep my focus. I did that with quite a few of the “classics” (some of which I have read subsequently). In retrospect, I think my reading skills at that age just were not strong enough to hang with anything much beyond Bo Knows Bo. It took me a few years in college to really become a decent reader. I'm still a pretty slow reader, by the way, but I'm persistent. Slow and steady wins the race (which is why you always see sprinters walking their races slowly and steadily).

Speaking of racing, I'd been getting into a grove running over the past few weeks, but I tweaked my hamstring somehow, which sucks. It’s just the tiniest tinge, but I can feel it, and I know if I’m not careful it will just nag me for months. I can still do some exercises, but I can’t run, which is irritating, because it’s such great cardio. I just don’t feel like I get the same work out on an elliptical machine or an exercise bike. Plus, the treadmills at the gym are the only equipment with little TVs, and they frequently show US sports. The commentators always say weird things like “Tom Brady is a throwing star” or “And the New York Yankees win the match five nil”, but still.

In other news, I shaved today for the first time in about a month. It was long overdue. I need a haircut too. The idea of growing a huge beard and growing my hair long (if that’s still possible) is always intriguing, but it never works, because it looks so terrible and gets so annoying that I have to get it cut. I just need to find a barber now. There are about five hairdressers on my street, but they all look like expensive places for women. I just need like a $15 no fuss, no muss cut – nothing fancy. That’s one of the underrated annoying parts about moving to a new place, finding somewhere inexpensive to get a decent haircut. I'm damn close to that point in life some guys get to where they just get a set of clippers and give themselves a buzz cut whenever they need a haircut, but I'm not there yet.