FEED ME A STRAY CAT (edited)

1) Quotation of the week comes from the Resident Female's friend, Karen McTactless, when discussing a personal problem she and her two white friends have with the three black women she works with: "I'm sorry that your men like us more than you, but have you had a conversation with yourself? It's not very pleasant."

2) I finished the new Chuck Pahlaniuk book, Haunted. It was very different from his other books in terms of structure, but in a lot of ways was better. Basically, the book is a series of vignettes about various people's lives held together by the central plot that they were all trying locked in a writers' retreat for three months to come up with their masterpiece. While once again the Pahlaniuk has a central plot that is pretty out there, the vignette forum allows him to display his writing style and interesting ideas in a quick and manageable way that may not have worked with any of the stories in a longer format. The book was basically a way for him to empty his assortment of cool ideas that he had had over the years, and it is a great display of his creativity and dark sense of humor.

3) So, in preparation for my upcoming return to the school (now in grad form!) I have been running through a suggested math book, and it looks like I have about another 30 or so hours of doing this over the next week and a half. Let me just say how excited I am that, instead of sitting around and watching South Park episodes and touching myself while thinking about the powerpuff girls, I've been remembering how to do differential equations.

4) I watched American Psycho for the first time in a long time last night. I forgot how great the movie was, particularly at the beginning, with the several touches they add. For example, my favorite scene:

Pat Bateman walks quickly on a lonely street and catches up to a woman at a light
They exchange a brief look
The lights turns green, and Pat and the woman walk at the same slow pace
Cut to: arguing with the dry cleaners because they can't get the blood out of his sheets.

5) Could someone explain to me why stock profiles have begun being posted in my comments sections?

Edited 10:57 AM

5) On a more somber note, and this is both true and very disturbing (for me at least), I just got a pretty tough letter in the mail. I'm enrolled in the National Marrow Donor Program, and I recently had been told that I was a preliminary match for a 36-year-old with Leukemia, and that they needed my permission to do further blood work to make sure I was a match. Not even a week after granting the permission for them to do so, I get a letter saying the guy had died. Now, I'm not trying to make light of the situation at all (quite the opposite, really), but did they need to be quite so honest? I mean, out of the blue, I get a phone call telling me some facts about this guy's life and asking for a signature, then a week later I'm told the person is dead. Couldn't they have just sent me a letter saying they won't need to extract my marrow? I guess I appreciate the honesty, but at the same time, I could just have been let off thinking I wasn't someone who could help this particular person and kept the illusion that maybe the person was able to get help. Instead, I'm left with this hollow feeling for someone I never met, yet have the nagging voice in my head saying I could have helped if they had just found me earlier. I don't know, it just seems so blunt and sudden a thing to find out; for about a week I was drawn tangentially into a person's life, mentally preparing to offer up a portion of my body to potentially help them, and like that I am told that the person is gone. Maybe I'm being selfish here, but I would much rather have just been told I wasn't going to be able to help. Regardless, I'm pretty unsure how to feel right now.