day 98 and faulkner

day 98:  in a word- historic.  we have a working telephone.

the sound quality is worse than terrible, but who cares?  on day 97, you are starting  to brainstorm your handle for a transistor radio.  day 98 is magic.

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so what kind a major wimp am i? the kind that goes to the beach for an hour - from 5.30 to 6.30 PM, mind you, and gets sunburned enough to spend the rest of the weekend sweating out the chills.  i'm pretty sure that i've lost all right to call myself a californian.  or at the very least, i'll have to tell people i come from yreka.  

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i hate not knowing the endings to stories.  (so i would have been right at home with the ancient greeks.)  i have, in fact, been known to leave movie theaters  close to the endings of romantic comedies to ask the concessions sellers if the couple ends up together, because otherwise it's just too suspenseful.   

so obviously one of my favorite things about the internet age is the ability it proffers to download entire seasons (and even entire runs) of a tv show at a time, so that you can watch it all at once and avoid finding yourself at a traffic light worrying about what's going to happen to izzy next week (for example). 

i knew that my semi-functional, insanely expensive internet sim card was the bane of my existence.  (you all knew it, too, right?)  but i really didn't realize to what degree, until i tried to download an episode of burn notice today, and found out that even after i made myself some tea, read an article about al franken and ate my 17th cup of chocolate yogurt, that there were still 19 hours remaining.  19 hours.  remember those days?  no, you don't, because i don't think even dial-up was even ever that slow.  

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if there is something romantic about living in the land before air conditioning, where the heat is oppressive from 9 am until 2 am, where women carry fans, and where windows stay open throughout the night, then there is something terrific, or sublime, in reading  faulkner in the heat.   the dust, sweat, and inertia is both the characters and yours; when someone finally jumps into the river,  you can feel the refreshing rush of cold water.  i had always thought faulkner's characters to be overdrawn, laconic and inscrutable, but now i think it was just the air conditioning, getting in my way.