Hard Knocks

Status: I'm whining. Pity party with a side of selfishness, indignation, and lots of WHINE. I want chocolate and cake and goodies and friends and anything that will bring on the slightest sense of happiness, no matter how false that sense may be and no matter how short-lived it turns out, or how much it will alter the evil bathroom scale... OK, strike that. I don't want the illusion, but I'll take the friends and chocolate. Or just the friends and a whiff of something delectable so I can refuse to have any and commence on self-punishment.

Poor MAP, you might say, what's the matter?

Nothing. Why do you ask? Because I'm whining? No, you see, I whine on a regular basis and you just haven't noticed yet. I growl a lot, too. And yell at unsuspecting relations and small, furry mammals (mostly dogs). But it's nice outside. The sun is shining, and I will shortly plunge into a dimension of pollen and outdoor messes to forget about the misery of living in a closed world that doesn't necessarily make sense and isn't necessarily fair, with all its rejection slips and lost/found bills that will never be paid, crusty laundry, dirty floors, and pint-sized ingrates.

Because it's not fair. More on that later (with or without whining, TBD).


What have I been reading???

love is a many trousered thing by Louise Rennison--

This is eighth in a long, seemingly unending series of British, funny teen-reads that I'm not sure counts as book reading. The really funny thing is that when I picked this up at the library, I wasn't sure if I'd already read it or not since I sometimes hole up at Borders, reading things I wouldn't want to buy but that my library hasn't stocked... Anyway, I got almost half-way through, skipped to the end, and verified that, yes, I did read this one. So how do I count it... uh... don't know.

Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock--

This one is third in a series called Dairy Queen. I liked the first book, didn't like the second, and kind of liked this one. Thing is, it's more of a literary teen book while I tend to like books of another kind better. Oh well.

And I am currently working on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck--

Wow. Talk about long-winded. You know all those things that agents and editors say not to do? -like laundry list descriptions and unending paragraph after paragraph of narrative description- Well, it seems this is exactly the kind of writing that got one published fifty years ago. I'm not sure I'll ever finish reading this 'classic', or if I want to.



Tune in next time when frazzled MAP gets a life.