Here and There

Okay, okay, I do have a strong work ethic, as is clearly stated on my résumé. Work ethic…work ethic. What does that term really mean?

To me, it simply means when there’s work to do, I do it. I don’t complain. I love tasks and lists and scratching items off said lists. A former boss told me he was asked by a potential new employer to state a weakness of mine. He said he struggled (at which I must’ve blushed) and finally pulled this diamond out of his ass: “Well, I guess it would be that he sometimes takes on so much work that it overwhelms him a bit, and he has to scale back somewhat.”

Ha!

That said, here I am, on the clock, there’s fuck all to do. So why not jot down (key-stroke, more like it) some of the minutiae floating across my synapses? Indeed…

Been reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. It’s the June book for my two-person book club. (Crap—must read 90 pages before end of the day.)

So far, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the book (a tired expression, I admit, but I still like it). I won’t summarize the book here, but will instead note a few impressions.

First, I feel the book can’t make up its mind what it’s about. Fine, it was written in the 1980s, a decade that couldn’t make its mind either. And all the ’80s theme’s are there: the mad trappings of modern life, Doomsday gloom and despair, divorce, kids, chewing gum.

Still, a book can control its flow, what happens to its characters, its plot. Oh well, I guess I could just resign to this book’s being a “mirror of the times” (an expression I’m not particularly fond of, by the way).

The other big complaint is that everyone talks the same. This isn’t exactly DeLillo’s first novel, either (that would be Americana, written 15 years prior). I just can’t suspend that disbelief. You can’t have a man, his fourth wife, her children and his, his colleagues and acquaintances all saying things like, “What does it mean to sweat?”

What else?

OH! That’s right. In a thoroughly belated show of responsibility, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the Bush Administration cannot hold extrajudicial trials for prisioners held at Guantánamo Bay. (Read the court’s opinion here.)

Legal scholars and experts are calling it a stinging rebuke to Bush’s presumed blank-check to fight the evildoers. I agree, and will now set out to read the text of the ruling (a favorite pasttime, I should add).

More to post later, should work remain slow…

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