… cool in UD‘s office (I’m a bit overdressed for the weather, so I’ve put the air conditioning down low), where, having finished with her traditional Jesus I Can’t Connect to the Internet Help Me Computer Guys Who Live in the Basement of My Building and Make Everything That’s Wrong Right ritual (she has to visit the guys every time she returns to campus after being away for more than a month), she has now turned her attention to syllabi, introductory lectures, and textbooks.
The city’s the warm late August city, with less humidity than usual, but with huge gobs of sunshine which – now that she’s gotten over her connectivity-related annoyance – makes UD very happy.
There’s a new cushioned bench down the hall from UD‘s office; on the wall behind it a large black-lettered sign says
RESERVED FOR HISTRIONIC LANGUISHING
which, when UD caught sight of it, occasioned histrionic giggling.
On her way to the bookstore just now, to buy a copy of a course text she’s supposed to get for free but she can never be bothered to fill out the desk copy form, UD – still chortling over the languishing bench – began to sing Randy Newman’s Guilty which considering her upbeat mood is a strange choice. She loves the line It takes a whole lot of medicine / For me to pretend that I’m somebody else, and singing it in the (suddenly relocated to the basement – is everything now in a basement?) bookstore, I thought of Robin Williams, and of these two, described as doomed by self-loathing. (“A self-loathing so intense it would devour them both.”) UD read this article – about the doomed self-loathers – while getting her hair cut yesterday in preparation for looking passably respectable at the beginning of the semester (her look steadily deteriorates week by week, but she starts out okay). But she had to stop reading this article; she had stopped reading an earlier VF article and had tried this one, but she had to stop reading both of them. The first one – Marella Agnelli’s astonishingly boring account of way high-style life – simply put UD to sleep. Her disappointment with Agnelli’s total inability to evoke cosmic luxury reminded UD of this passage from Paul Fussell’s Class:
At the very top, food is usually not very good, tending, like the conversation, to a terrible blandness, a sad lack of originality and cutting edge. Throughout his pitiable book, Live a Year With a Millionaire, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney records memorable meals, and they sound like this: “Crab bisque, then chicken with ham biscuits, Bibb lettuce salad, and finally… a huge ice cream cake.”