I’m sitting in class, sipping on a can of Barq’s Famous Olde Tyme Root Beer and polishing off a small bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos.  I’m having a hard time staying focused.

It rained a lot last night. It was kind of a weird rain though. There were times where I felt like I was on the set of The Truman Show and someone was flicking the rain switch on and off.

The husband is out of town this week which means I’m left to fend for myself.  Fend against my own paranoia, my own laziness, and my own bad habits.

I’m a little paranoid about writing that he’s out of town because I worry that someone will read it and decide now is a good time to rob us.  Yeah, I know.

Usually I get pretty lazy about school work.  And usually, it’s the husband that’s getting on my case to hurry up and finish during the week so we won’t be stuck at home all weekend.  I finished writing a paper last night but I didn’t get around to putting together my powerpoint presentation on pathological gambling.  I’m almost done reading the memoirs of a pathological gambler (that has been pretty fascinating) called Born to Lose by Bill Lee.  I can’t wait until I can start devouring my to-read-for-fun list.  It’s runs 14 books deep, not counting that whole magical wizard kids series.

Luckily, we haven’t had to turn on the A/C in about two weeks (I love double paned glass & insulation!) so I haven’t had the opportunity to forget to turn off the A/C.

The strange phenomenon that always happens is that I see myself becoming ultra-responsible in his absence.  I wake up earlier in the mornings for fear of oversleeping, I clean the house more often, and I eat healthier.

Unfortunately I have a big stack of school work waiting for me so I can’t indulge in me-time with good books, shopping, web surfing (I’m way behind on TED talks!) and television.  So my nights are quiet, in front of my laptop, at the dining room table, with one of my cats sleeping on my lap.

I’m actually an introverted person, I’ve always loved spending time alone, I think the husband has just become an extension of self (or the other way around?) and it’s a weird feeling to miss yourself.

I really like Twitter.  Thanks to everyone who has kept me entertained on there.  Special shoutout to RawkHawk who reviews music albums.  A recent fave tweet: “Snow Patrol - A Hundred Million Suns: Sounds like a mega-church’s dream worship band creating mostly secular ballads in moody chords.”

Haha, I knew that album sounded familiar.

Good thing the husband’s coming home soon.  If he weren’t, I’d probably start undertaking projects like the two below:

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes — Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne

You probably saw this book in my sidebar about a month ago.  It’s an interesting little read with a very useful table of contents that lets you jump around to the topics you’re interested in and skip the ones you don’t care for.  The book was published in 2007 so the information is relatively recent.  Here are some of the more interesting tidbits (I’ll skip the references for easier reading):

• 3 million American adults have turned online dates into a long-term relationship or marriage — that’s the same number of couples in America who say they met in church.
• On average, Americans work over 1,800 hours per year, substantially more than most workers around the world.  Although we get fewer vacation days per year than other Western countries, we let more than twice as many go unused.
• Since 1970, the number of women lawyers in America has grown 2,900%.
• Today in America, there are three times as many professional tanning parlors as there are Starbucks.
• 7 out of the 10 night-owl nations (large percentage of people go to sleep after midnight) are Asian.
• Noise reaches the potential for permanent damage at about 85 decibels. Hair dryers come in at 90. Noise on a subway platform is 105. In an airplane cabin, it’s 110. At a rock concert, it’s 120. Apparently nine seconds into a rock concert, you experience hearing loss.
• 63% of American households have pets.
• The percentage of split-ticket voters has gone up 42% since 1952.
• Between 1972 and 2004, the combined prison and jail population in the U.S. went from 330,000 to over 2 million.
• About 1.5 million children in the U.S. between the ages of 8 and 18 are vegetarians.
• The society with the largest proportion of centenarians in the world is the Japanese island of Okinawa.
• The typical vacation-home buyer earns just $71,000. The median income of investment-home-buyers is $85,700. The median purchase price of second homes is under $200,000. Second homes are a middle-class craze.
• More than 1 in 3 Americans aged 25-29 have a tattoo.
• The U.S. adult population as a whole is about 49% extroverted.  Surprisingly, nearly 60% of the most enthusiastic tech users are extroverted.
• About 40 million adults in the U.S. regularly visit Internet pornography sites.  That’s more than ten times the number of people who regularly watch baseball.
• The average video/computer game player is 33 years old.
• The average age at which Americans lose their virginity is 16.9.
• In Italy, a whopping 82 percent of men aged 18-30 are still living at home with their parents.

I came across these quotes written by Supreme Court Justice Simpson in Australia in my readings for class and he eloquently explains what I believe about people’s bad choices:

“Drug addicts do not come to their addiction from a social or environmental vacuum. This Court should not close its eyes to the multifarious circumstances of disadvantage and deprivation that frequently precede and precipitate a descent into illegal drug use.”

“Nor can I accept that the exercise of free choice in the use of drugs is always of equal dimensions. It is not every decision to use drugs that can properly or fairly be characterized as a decision made in the exercise of free choice. The will of an individual can be overborne, or undermined, not only by acts of another person, but also the pressure of circumstances. I do not accept that most drug offenders are truly exercising free will when they choose the degradation, despair, criminality and cycle of imprisonment that can follow the initial use of illegal drugs. The circumstances that propel the offender to use drugs are often, if not usually, beyond his or her control. They may or may not be combined with a vulnerable personality or even a weakness of character. Many drug offenders have not had the life experiences or the normal developmental path that permit a conclusion that the decision to take drugs was a decision made in the exercise of a free choice in the sense in which that phrase is ordinarily understood.”

Not that bad choices are excusable, or that all bad choices are a result of bad environments and circumstances.  But I just think that free choice isn’t always as readily available as we, who live a privileged life, imagine.

I definitely think there is a balance.  I think people should be more empathetic about circumstances, but at the same time, drug offenders need to take responsibility to repair the damage that has been done in their lives.  It’s a delicate balance in social work– advocating for those who need it, while empowering people to advocate for themselves and take responsibility for their actions.  For some strange reason, I think we crave a black and white conclusion on people’s poor life outcomes, we want to be able to say, “it’s their fault” or “it’s not their fault”. I think we need to move away from that in order to improve society.

“You know what Augustine says about time? Augustine describes time as a symptom of things in the world not being themselves, having to make their way back to themselves, by moving through time–”

“There’s a paradox there, of course, since what can things be but themselves? In Augustine’s view, we live in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and what we’re unlike is God. We are apart from God, who is pure being, who is himself, who is outside of time. And time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God. Rivers flowing to the sea, a flame reaching upward, a bird homing: these movements all represent objects yearning to be their true selves, to achieve their true state. For humans, the motion reflects the yearning for God, and everything we do through time comes from moving–or at least trying to move– toward God. So that we can be our true selves. So there’s a paradox there again, that we must submit to God–which feels deceptively like not being ourselves–in order to become ourselves. We might call this yearning love, and it’s just that we often mistake what we love. We think we love sensuality. Or admiration. Or, say, another person. But loving another person is just a confusion, an error. Even if it is the kind of error that a nice, reasonable person might make–”

– excerpt from short story, “The Region of Unlikeness” by Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

The fiction selection in The New Yorker magazine is real hit or miss for me. But when it hits, it really hits.

One visit to Domy Books and it’s gotten on my list of cool places to go in Houston.

It’s officially a bookstore but there are enough toys on their shelves to be a bonafide toystore. So much so that the Houston Press awarded it “Best Toy Store” in Houston this year.

It’s a quirky place. There are a lot of comic books and art books but there are regular novels and non-fiction as well.

The toys are the interesting collectible blind box, plastic, and vinyl figurines such as robots, animals dressed up as other animals, humans dressed up as animals, aliens, and other random things. Lots of KidRobot stuff. Here’s an example:

Meet Bones Labbit.

There was this one smoking panda that had the message “Liberado Hoy Por Cerveza Manana” on his T-Shirt. I only took three years of unfocused Spanish in high school but I believe that means “Liberated Today for Beer Tomorrow.”

What a bunch of jokers.

I know what you’re thinking. Bookstore with modern decor, weird Japanese toys and cashier with tattoos and trendy hair behind the counter. Overdone. Trying too hard. You woud think that’s the case but it’s not. There’s no DJ spinning music in the background. As you walk around the bookstore, you really start to believe that whoever designed the store and runs the store loves everything that’s in the store and isn’t trying to fit some sort of business model.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

“Domy is a progressive bookstore with a focus on editioned books, periodicals, video, and product lines that concentrate on national and international contemporary art and culture.

Additionally, Domy will produce exhibitions and events that highlight the store’s intersecting ideas thru a variety of media, including: works on paper, video, music, design and printed matter.”

I’ll definitely be back. I want to buy Craig Thompson’s comic book novel, Blankets, and I want to check out their patio cafe in the back. I think I spotted a waiter carrying waffles with strawberry topping.