In Which Pesky, Inconvenient Empathy Strikes Again

13 May 2004

See, there's this horrible thing about my friends: they tend to make me more tolerant. Not of everything, not by a long shot. But it's a lot harder to growl and snarl about Some People if you know Some People's name and how they struggled.

I'm thinking about this with books that don't end. The Briar King was one of those novels that spent the entire time setting things up and shooting them straight to hell and gone. At the end of the book, what we had was a giant mess. It has a sequel, but it didn't really have an ending, not an all-conclusive one or even a really locally conclusive one.

And if it weren't for Alec, I would be scowling and twitching over that. But it is for Alec; I know full well that Alec would feel lucky if his book could be published all in one volume or if it had a clear plot arc wrap-up point somewhere in the middle. At this point, neither is looking likely. No padding or greed involved: he just had a long story to tell. So it's harder for me to impute worse motives to other authors, because there's our Alec.

Empathy. Pesky and inconvenient.

If you ask a certain little person whose birthday it is, he dimples up and says, "Robbie birfay" or something of the sort. It is most adorable, and I hope he and his mommy and daddy are having a happy one.

I've just had cobbler for breakfast. It feels very decadent, but on the other hand, it's mostly berries with oat/nut/wheat flour topping, and not very much brown sugar or honey. So I think it'll be an okay breakfast. If my breakfasts are too sugary, I feel nasty around 9:30 or 10:00, so I try to avoid that most of the time.

It's raining this morning, hard enough to make lovely tapping sounds on the roof and windows and keep me asleep until the decadent hour of 7:00. 7:00! What bliss. Also, it keeps me from feeling guilty that my chores for the day are errands rather than more poplar weeding and other yardish stuff. (I'll be picking up more crap at Home Depot, though; I think that should count, sort of.)

We've already had the plumber in this morning to fix a couple of leaks that needed fixing. The concrete person is supposed to come by and make an estimate on repouring the front step when (if) the rain stops. Tonight we're going to "The Golem" at Theatre Jeune Lune; I look forward to it. I haven't been to Jeune Lune, but I hear good things about it.

Other than all that, I'm working on Sampo and reading Scandinavia during the Second World War and also some of Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord. I'm not impressed with the latter yet, but I haven't gotten very far in it, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's not bad. It's just not good so far, either. It has time to get better, and I have time to let it. So all is more or less well.

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