Yesterday evening I took little Demetrius straight from daycare to Borders because I still hadn’t gotten my Little Bro a birthday present. The excursion was by all measures a success. Demetrius had a ball crawling around the science fiction section and striving to pull every book off every shelf at ground level (he does this at home, too, but of course Borders has about a hundred times the number of bookshelves we do at home, and Demetrius loves a challenge). I was able to re-shelve all the books Demetrius grabbed before he folded, spindled, mutilated or drooled excessively on any of them to the point where I would have felt guilty enough to pay for them. I did get the intended book for my Little Bro, along with a couple of books for myself. And I resisted the urge to rant at the high school kid working the cash register when he gave me the canned spiel about pre-ordering the latest Dan Brown book.
Of course, I’m an optimist – you could just as easily play up the failures, namely that Little Bro’s present is going to be unavoidably late (his birthday is today), or that I shouldn’t be buying new books for myself retail when there are perfectly good libraries and used book stores out there (curse your seductive red Buy One, Get One 50% Off stickers, Borders!!!), or that I shouldn’t have been on the verge of ranting about Dan Brown to begin with. A store’s gotta make a buck, and it’s not like anyone put a gun to my head.
I think I come across as pretty laid back and non-confrontational, and that’s true, but I’m very opinionated. I am, as Adam Corolla used to say of Dr. Drew back in the glory days of Loveline, a man of great paaaaaaassion. I just try to keep my opinions in perspective. They inform and influence my actions and my decisions and that’s pretty much the end of it. I don’t think that people who disagree with me or things I don’t like should be censored, outlawed, or smited out of existence. I don’t see contrary opinions as a threat to my legitimate self-actualization. (That sounds nine-ways-to-Sunday-beyond-ABSURD when I put it like that, but so help me I’ve met people whose life philosophy could pretty much be summed up like that.) So, yeah, based on the couple of pages of Dan Brown I’ve skimmed through, I think he sucks and I’m not going to be buying any of his books, and in the right frame of mind I might get unreasonably worked up about it on the inside. You can’t control your feelings, but you can control the way you express or act on them, that’s my really trite motto. So I’ll let it slide when the thought of pre-ordering hackwork makes me throw up a little in my mouth, and I’ll pat myself on the back for keeping the bile to myself. (Except for the blog, obviously – I have to vent SOMEwhere.)
As far as acquiring more books and threatening to someday indeed have just as many bookshelves in my house as in your average Borders, what can I say, it’s a weakness. A sickness, even. I have no philosophical defense.
The tv pickings were pretty good last night, and I got to see Derek Jeter tie Lou Gehrig’s all-time Yankees hits record because NY/TB was the ESPN Wednesday night game. I also got to see Jorge Posada come in as pinch-hitter and rock the go-ahead three-run dinger. (I know the strategy for putting in a PH is so that something exactly like that might happen, but it never happens! So that was cool.) By 10 p.m. the choices were the end of the Yankees game, Mantracker, and Top Chef Las Vegas – Top Chef won out (thus raising the odds that someday someone in my house will break down and buy some Mantracker DVDs). Tonight, on the other hand, there’s only one viewing option, really – the NFL season opener. Go Steelers!
That last paragraph introduced a handful of things that could be entire posts in their own right – baseball records! Las Vegas! My wife the Steelers fanatic! TV on DVD! – but they will have to wait, I suppose.
Testes, testes.
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