Instead of posting a concatenation of completely random things about the past three days ...

... I think I must just post them as they come to me.

Here's one.

On Friday I was reading horoscopes from our school's newspaper out loud to evil_grapefruit. "What's mine?" she asked. "I'm Pisces." I read it; it started with "A deus ex machina will save your week ... " or something like that.

"A what?" she interrupted.

"A deus ex machina," I repeated.

"Oh," she said. "I thought you said 'a day of sex maniacs.' " I laughed, and thought about how funny it would be for a day of sex maniacs to save one's week...

"Unceasingly vociferated"!

On the way home yesterday, when the CD we were listening to had finished, Al took it out of her car's stereo. She put it against her nose as she's been doing all weekend (if not longer; I only noticed it this weekend), and then gave it to Sarah--who, as the front-seat passenger has DJ duty. Then Al said, "You konw what I think? I think someone should read my homework to me."

I don't think she was being serious, but we both offered. I got to do it, probably not because I'm reasonably familiar with The Italian (I'm reading it myself; we're in the same class) but because I was sitting next to her backpack.

I read for a while, and we stopped in Sauk Centre to stretch our legs and buy things at the gas station, and since Al was tired of driving, Sarah drove after that. But Al said she liked having someone read to her, and I said I didn't mind doing it I probably understood it better that way, because reading out loud requires greater understanding--probably brought on by a slower, more constant, more thorough pace.

(On the back of our edition, it says this book has a "pacy narrative." Our professor brought this up in class, because he said that really doesn't mean anything. It has a pace; so what? It has to, to be a narrative. That doesn't mean it's a good pace, or a fast pace; he will freely admit that the book certainly does not have that. Anyway, I just thought of that when I saw "pace" at the end of the previous paragraph.)

So I continued to read, and Al (and Sarah, whether she liked it or not!) continued to listen. It was a little do-it-yourself audio book, and while I don't have that good a voice--and I read rather sarcastically sometimes, and I stopped to make fun of words, let Sarah cough, take a sip of water, or deal with questions from the audience about the Inquisition--I "unceasingly vociferated" (a phrase from this pacy narrative that we particularly enjoyed) until we got back to Morris.