bathroom reading

Not going to try to relate this one to Stifter.

Oh, I will miss my roomie. Phew, but still.

At some point, he started leaving all sorts of magazines in the bathroom to read while taking care of business. Sports Illustrated, his alum magazine, etc. etc. Sometimes I had the urge to take them out so that he would not take so long in there. But then I worried about what would happen if we one day ran out of toilet paper, and decided that I would put some things in there too. My alumnae magazine. Then I decided to put in some short reading material that I wouldn't mind if I dropped in water to read while taking a bath. So I put in Imre Kertesz's Kaddish for a Child Unborn, close to the time when I was leaving my program, thinking it was good reading for letting go of the diss idea for the time being. There are some worlds where one should be careful with one's nascent ideas. So a pal came to visit, and was like, "I'm so sorry, I hope it didn't hurt too much." I was like "what?" It turned out they'd thought I'd had an abortion, like a real one rather than a theoretical one. All because of that book. I guess my roomie grew up keeping only the most important and holy literature in the bathroom. I didn't realize how implicating literature can be, and so when posting pics of my place for a new roomie, was careful not to show many titles.

That's what I've been busy with for the last week, and finally resorted to some new means of advertising, some of ideas of which came from my temp work with real estate people. Which was fun-- they had me looking up wineries in the state and so on.