We were sharing tea and herring

I caved. I broke down. I knew I shouldn't, and I did. I bought some books. I resisted for so long, but it all came tumbling down today. Half Price Books is like heroin. In a good way. So, the books, and the reasons-
'The Temple of Gold' William Goldman- Same guy who wrote(abridged) 'The Princess Bride'. I've been meaning to check out his other stuff, and this was all of 38 cents. Awesome. I like it so far, I'm about a third of the way in. It's very readable without being brain candy.
'Wild Dreams of a New Beginning' Lawrence Ferlinghetti- Ummm. I took an online what-poet-are-you quiz a year or so ago, and it said I was this guy. So I thought I should check it out. From the quick glance in the store, I liked it. I'll have to look closer.
'Reading Lolita in Tehran' Azar Nafisi- Okay, this one I'm grouchy about. Because I already own it. My mom gave it to me a year or so ago, and it's really good, though I never finished reading it the first time. I got distracted and busy. Anyway, my copy is all packed away, and it's a required text for my engaging lit class, and I have a terrible track record with libraries. I never want to/remember to return the books. So I bought another copy. Damn.
'Running With Scissors' Augusten Burroughs- It's now a movie. I haven't seen it yet. I've vaguely heard things about both the book and the movie, and that is a good enough reason, to me, for me to buy it.
'The Satanic Verses' Salman Rushdie- So I started reading this in a library a year or two ago, but left it there when I left. I really like his writing, having read 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories', and 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet', and 'East, West'. This is supposed to be the best. It's about time I read it for real.
'The Inheritors' William Golding- The guy who wrote Lord of the Flies. I want to see what else he's done, as you never really hear about it.
and finally, 'A book of Luminous Things, An International Anthology of Poetry' edited by Czeslaw Milosz. As I've said earlier, I'm discovering that I like poetry. But I don't really know what I like yet. So of course, I should get an anthology. And this one had a pretty title, and a wide range of poems included.
So, 7 books for 45 dollars. Not too shabby. I think I maybe could have done better at Twice Sold Tales, But Jill was driving me, and she doesn't really like it there, and it was a pretty easy compromise.
Tomorrow I'm going to see if there's a gym that will give me some cheap or free month or two week trial membership. This whole rain and cold thing is starting to make me twitchy. At first I just felt kind of hibernate-y and a little stagnant, but now I'm starting to understand the phrase 'cabin fever' in a personal manner. It's very strange, feeling too cold and small to ever leave my bed, but being really antsy at the same time. It's also making me constantly hungry, which I've been fighting by drinking massive amounts of water, but that doesn't help. So anyway. Tomorrow, taking a stand against the lazy tendencies.
There was something else I wanted to write about, but it's slipped my mind.
This wasn't it, but Vanessa and I are doing our presentation on magic. Specifically Penn and Teller. Kind of. We're going to start off with the quarter trick from Kids in the Hall, and then talk about the history, or rather, examples of magicians, and magic in literature, like CS Lewis and a few contemporary things, and the two recent movies that have been made, blah blah blah. And then at the end we're going to do this great card trick. So at the beginning, we're going to say something like "This is our presentation, we'll be talking about these books, and some trends and we've also got a quick video clip that Vanessa recorded, it's really enlightening, and we've also got a card trick of our own" and then we'll talk about the books, and then we'll pull out a deck of cards, have some one pick one, we'l try to guess it. We will, of course, get it wrong a few times. At which point, we will give up, people will give us looks and laugh a little. We will say " okay, well, moving on to the video" and play it, introducing it as something or other. We push play, and it's a weather report. I nudge Vanessa and whisper loudly to her about "did you record the right thing?" and just then, the weather announcer says "Big news, this just in, is this your card?" and holds up the card our lucky classmate has picked. It will be fabulous. We're meeting up tomorrow to go over it more specifically. We have been having great fun making all sorts of jokes about dissapearing from the room. Maybe switching to doing a report on performance art, and just not showing up.
I really wish I could remember what it was I wanted to mention here. It was vaguely interesting, I think. Oh well. I may not update for a while, I don't know how much internet access I'll have in California.