Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”> Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.

Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveler

Spoilers for a movie that came out in 1985.

Me: complaining about the Christmas concert.

Geoff: Really? I don’t know. I just zone out like twenty seconds in, go to my own place, like in the ending of Brazil.

Me: So, you’re comparing your child’s school Christmas concert to being tortured by a fascist, totalitarian regime?

Geoff: Maybe don’t tell Tesfa I said that.

(See review here.)

Geoff also thought there should be more math.

Here’s my own poem I wrote while reading poetry:

Maybe you saw on twitter that I have a migraine. Maybe you’re Geoff and don’t know how twitter works. I don’t know your business. But I was thinking of the quote:

everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

which may be Kurt Vonnegut from Slaughterhouse-Five. Or Cat’s Cradle. Or neither of those and not Vonnegut and I don’t know. For all I know right now it’s from a Taylor Swift song. In any case, here is my migraine quote:

nothing was beautiful and everything hurt

That is all.

I honestly don’t know how my life is going to top this.

Way back in the heady days of 2015, I requested an ARC of His Whole Life from Goodreads. What can I say? It was a different time when I thought just because I didn’t like Late Nights on Air wouldn’t mean I wouldn’t like His Whole Life.

And now we’re 2017. I haven’t won a Goodreads giveaway since this one. Trump runs rampant across the border. Parks and Recreation is no longer on the air. And I’m still not feeling the love for Elizabeth Hay.

I finally read it. There’s nothing really wrong with His Whole Life; I can’t point to something and be like “There. That. Right there. See what I mean?” I can’t even summon up minute distaste for the book. I honestly just don’t care. The best criticism I can come up with is that the book feels like a first novel, like there’s all this stuff that happens just outside the page which is hinted at to flesh out the characters, when it would have been better to drop the characters and instead focus on what is happening off the page. Plus a lot of dead dogs. Three, which maybe isn’t that much (more die, for example, in Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis), but too many for me.

So this book is a camel-hair tan colour for me, which always feels like a non-existent colour to me.

Sorry it took me two years to read. I should have just gotten it over with back in 2015.

His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay went on sale August 11, 2015.

I received a copy free from Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.

Many many years ago, I did database queries for an insurance company on overloaded servers. There were days where I would start my program at 8 a.m., and then, because of the aforementioned overloaded servers, it wouldn’t finish until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Out of this came a haiku, which I have now modified as I descend into the mire of submitting my faerie story to publishers so I can add to my list of polite rejection letters.

Very slow Meghan.

If my book is not published

I will kill you all.

Geoff read my haiku, then backed away, making sure to keep his eyes on me, but not make eye contact, as he did so.

Obviously, I am not going to kill you all. But it fits in the haiku nicely.

Seriously — who can do work when I could just watch this video on repeat all day:

I just realized, because it only has three chords, that I can play The Boy With The Arab Strap on my guitar.

Who often leaves comments on my blog and I reply to them and only realized today that all my replies to her comments had gone to spam. So sorry Lydia and thank you for your comments and sorry my replies went AWOL rather than thanking you for your kind words.