in which i take a short break to share my bookreading quote journal highlights with you, my dear reader

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About Mil Millington (British)

(looking for keys) I'm a single degree of enraged frustration away from continuing the search along the only remaining path, which is slashing open the cushion covers, pulling up the floorboards and pickaxing through the plasterboard false wall in the attic.

A tragedy is the tale of a person who holds the seeds of his own destruction within him. This is entirely contrary to my situation -- everyone else holds the seeds of my destruction within them; I just wanted to keep my head down and hope my lottery numbers came up, thanks very much.

Presumably because I spent a previous life beating tiny puppies with thorny sticks, I had been cast into the Library at the University of NorthEast England.

After a few minutes, I noted from my PC screen - "You have 217 new e-mails" - that the server must be up and running again.

I never see [his face] anymore as he has had his face craned over his GameBoy at a permanent 45 degree angle since a little past his 5th birthday.
Jon is emotional and introspective, Peter carefully focused on learning how to kill a man with his thumbs.

Ursula: In what way, may I ask, can two bedrooms feel like three?
Pel: On an emotional level.
It's a nice place and it's eighteen thousand pounds. Eighteen. Thousand. Pounds. There are some houses that are actually on fire that cost more than that.
Ursula: Okay. But I want you to know that if anything goes wrong it'll be your fault. I'm holding you responsible.
Pel: Just so long as you're holding me, my darling.

Ursula: I'm pregnant.
Pel: Phew, thank God. I was beginning to think all of that sex was for nothing.

--a real estate agent tearing hundreds of pounds from our hands for doing next to nothing then laughing brayingly into our upturned faces before striding away to push small children into canals.

I'm not really a thinking ahead kind of person. (Though if you want someone to brood over the past, I'm your man).

Job interviews are unfalteringly horrid, but internal ones emphatically more so. For a start, all the sustaining fabrication that is normally the essence of interview technique is denied you as everyone knows precisely what you're like. You're also wearing a suit but aren't creating any smart impression; everyone knows you normally turn up looking like a week-old lettuce.
(during interview) I made little quotation marks with my fingers, the motion simultaneously waving goodbye to my immortal soul.

Improvement Day was a time set aside for all those Learning Center staff to meet without the pressures of day-to-day work. Everyone despised it with a sulfurous passion. Last year, because the date of it had leaked out in advance, Bernard arrived to find almost everyone had called in sick or reported they had a domestic crisis.

I was sitting in the office preparing some student usage figures that were part of the department's monitoring process (these are rather important for planning purposes, so I was putting quite a bit of effort into inventing convincing numbers).

(grocery store) The woman in front of me took some separators from their special slidey groove and divided her shopping into three eight-item-or-less chunks. I literally stopped breathing. There's a hypnotic quality to insouciant depravity on this level.

Roo shrugged. "It's hardly a great surprise that they (married couple) don't argue. I think you'll find that to have a personality clash people need to have personalities."

(parent-teacher conferences). Pel to Ursula: We're not going to ask to see their teaching qualifications again, it's embarrassing.
Ursula: Did I tell you what Vanessa's been doing at work?
Pel: Not for almost a day. The uncertainty has been playing on my mind.

(sex should not be described as "fun") The one thing guranteed to stop sex dead in its tracks is a laugh. Well, arse to that. Most stuff isn't fun; the world is eighty percent misery, suffering, injustice and gnawing existential bleakness. A further seventeen percent is sheer, suffocating boredom.

(ab-roller) This was still, like all exercise, deeply, deeply boring.

As I understand it, a midlife crisis is when you feel that your life is slipping away from you; you've achieved nothing and Death is starting to tap his foot impatiently. Well, I've felt like that since I was about seven years old. I am immune from a sudden attack of midlife crisis, because I've been having one since before I hit puberty.

mafioso guy: What's your phone number?
Pel: I laughed. No...mobile phones are for wankers.

Ursula: Who's moving in then?[as renters]
Pel: Just some women.
Ursula: Why women?
Pel: Um, their genes, I suppose.

(car chase) Looked like it was going to be a bit of a laugh, obviously, but then slipped imperceptibly into a seemingly ceaseless and harrowing dance with death during which I was only able to keep my sanity by focusing on the struggle to avoid soiling myself.

Love and Other Near-Death Experiences (same author)

"It's easy to be brave when you're suicidal, isn't it?"

Rob: "I mean, you read books. You're 'bookish'. Aren't books and sex pretty much an either-or choice?"
Elizabeth: "A notion that could only possibly have gestated in the low-ceilinged brain of someone who doesn't read enough books. Just think of Emily Bronte, for example: psychotically bookish -- but was there ever a woman screaming out so loudly for a good shagging? I even suspect that's why Wuthering Heights carries on decades too long rather than sensibly drawing the curtains a little after Cathy's death. It was Bronte saying, 'Look, I'm simply going to keep on writing this stuff until someone comes and shags me raw.'"

Jonnie Hungry!!!!

Ahahahah. He showed this after talking about how excited the news media was that they had a new story instead of boring campaign coverage...

chanting "Our Father" in staccato spurts

KD's new music rocks my world.

I'm praying, I'm chanting. I'm doing what's necessary.

Reading: At Prayer With The Saints; Psalms

SEXY BACK!

for some reason the original was deleted, but this clip is even funnier.

My lovelies have returned

this is from when comedy central made them return:
"We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."
-A Daily Show and The Coal-berT Report

more sassy quotes later...busy as a bee.

Q.P.S.I.

LQTM-laughing quietly to myself. really more accurate than laughing out loud.

QPSI-quietly planning strychnine intervention (thanks bay, where's the well?)

I can always count on my best friend for Important Facts about Strychnine. It seems it is even more effective than Acid in the Facewash, as killing methods go.

Poe and his Telltale Heart have always been my Number One Valentine.

Stephen Fry

From Moab is my Washpot, his autobiography.

Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. --E.M.Forster

Music was a kind of penetration. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar, or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Nothing else comes close.

On Cloud Nine

Bailey bought me an iPod with video!

I have the bestest friend in the whole Wilde world!