11:00 a.m. - 04.18.2004
Portnoy's Complaint
My weekend has been pretty good. Friday night I met this boy I know at the Gingerman and then we went next door to the Metro to see The Thrills. The show was good, but the company was better.
Saturday I went in search of the perfect pedicure (cheap and good) and I found it. Now my toenails are bright pink and ready for flip-flops! Isn't my sickly white foot attractive? Ha! Feet are gross and the least we can do is get a pedicure to make them slightly less gross.
After I left the salon I went out to brunch with a friend and then to this coffee house in our neighborhood to do homework. I'm reading Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint for my class and it is hysterically funny. It's about growing up a sex obsessed Jewish Boy in the 40's. Seriously, it is fucking awesome. I'm always so happy when I get to read great books for my classes. This, of course, does not mean I've finished it yet. My friend and I got distracted and chatted too much and then we went to our respective homes to take naps before going out that night. (Side note: I'm so happy my best friend now lives just two blocks away from me. My life has gone up a notch because of this fact!)
Saturday night we went to see Pinback and Enon at the Logan. It was thrilling indeed to be able to walk to a show, but the sound there SUCKS! It was fucking terrible. The vocals were super muffled and I could barely understand a word. Enon rather bored me and we left before Pinback finished. I guess it was hard to see them in such a big, crowded space after seeing them at Schuba's, a much smaller, barely filled space. The crowd was a disappointment, too. Not to sound like an asshole (snob, whatever) but I sort of felt like I was at a frat party or a sports bar. Maybe it was just where we were standing in the crowd, but there were an awful lot of super tan girls with Louis Vuitton purses and scrunchies in their hair. It was strange.
I'm seeing Peaches at the Logan on May 7th and if the sound isn't significantly better I'm not ever going back there again.
Today: brunch at 2 with aforementioned best friend and her awesome sister that I love and then studying. Tonight: that cool play that opens tonight and then the opening night party afterwards (as long as I'm not too tired).
Now I must get to my reading and back away from the computer...but first here's some of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, referring to marriage:
"How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together--the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn't it something more like weakness? Isn't it rather convenience and apthay and guilt? Isn't it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that 'love' that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullshit one another about 'love' and its duration. Which is why I ask: how can I marry someone I 'love' knowing full well that five, six, seven years hence I am going to be out on the streets hunting down the fresh new pussy..."
The main character is talking to his therapist, that's the whole book, just him going on an on about his fucked up childhood and relationships. He's extremely neurotic. It may not sound too appealing, but it's just so clever and so well done. Philip Roth is my new hero.
