friday night i sat at the bar of a new ramen place with a book and didn't get too far into it before the guy next to me wanted to chat. why not, i was all for it, even though he volunteered early on that he was a hedge fund manager. I still found him somewhat interesting until we somehow hit politics and i discovered that he hadn't voted because he found clinton and trump equivalent. I asked if he had any regrets and he doubled down. ugh. I have no patience for that.

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this evening i tried again at the bar with more success altho i'm not sure how i feel about paying 20$ for the privilege of reading my book in not my living room. I'm alternating between rereading the harry potter books and Arudhati Roy's God of Small Things. It's slow going on the latter because that book is so beautiful and also so agonizing, and somehow I feel every line in a place - i think i can say in my soul - that was easily accessible twenty years ago when I first read that book and I lived to feel like that. But now somehow it's almost unbearable to feel feelings that intense, so that I can only read a few lines at a time and then i have to close the book because it seems like a wave of something will overwhelm me and I won't be able to stand it. How did that happen.

8:10 p.m. - 2017-10-16