29 September 2004

It just occurred to me that I don't know when I last watched "Monk," and "Monk" is the closest thing I have to a show that is "mine." This is why I didn't watch "Farscape," people: I couldn't wander away for months at a time in the middle of the season and then expect to pick up the next show wherever it was. And the TV show I have liked best in the last...er...eight years?...is still not enough motivation for me to make sure I turn on the TV or tape it.

Books do not do this to me. Books do not wander away if I spend an evening drinking tea and having supper and buying books and fetching Mark. Books do not reveal crucial plot points while I'm gone. Don't get me wrong -- I am not anti-TV conceptually. I think it's a good thing there is such a critter. But it isn't mine. Like the neighbor's dog: hurrah for them that they have one, but it's not mine.

I'm having a hard time imagining what could motivate me to keep up with a TV show if "Monk" couldn't. Maybe a major life change. I don't know.

Anyway, we helped Dena move Monday night. It was the easiest helping-people-move I've ever had, because she'd hired movers, so they were doing all the up-and-down-stairs-with-boxes crap. They didn't do everything they were supposed to and charged her more than they should have, but it's done with, and she has (most of?) her stuff (mostly?) undamaged.

Yesterday I finished a couple chapters on Sampo and ran some errands and finished reading Mother Aegypt and Other Stories. I really didn't like the last sentences of these stories, mostly. They felt like tin cans tied to a bumper. They felt like the last sentences to stories other than the one I was reading, but not in an illuminating way. For awhile I kept trying to see how they might change the story completely, twist it around into a different story, but I don't think they did. I think they mostly just clattered along after. Now I'm reading T.A. Barron's The Lost Years of Merlin as part of my contract work. So far it's not blowing me away or annoying the heck out of me. I'm not very far into it, though, so give it time to do one or the other.

There is laundry. There are errands. There is a book to finish.

Sampo Countdown:
Chapters begun but not finished: twelve.
Chapters not yet begun: four.