Friday, October 13, 2006

evening

Okay, I Want A Do-Over

Like that book.  I actually ended up sending it to a total stranger.  Go figure.  Uh, hi total stranger (and total stranger’s lawyer), I hope you like the book…and really, who couldn’t use a few do-overs?   Man, life is crazy sometimes.  From now on, I only befriend ordinary average everyday people who I can meet or who have met people I already know.  No more friendships with strangers in far off lands, ones that get snow, eh?  Oh, I say that now, but I’m sure in a week or two I’ll run across another interesting blogger who seems nice and normal, and whose lies I’ll only find out in the distant future.  In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the friendship, assume everyone is who they say they are, and happily live in my fantasy world of honesty.

SL, if you’re out there anywhere - ya got me.  Totally suckered in.  However, I can’t be all that mad because you gave me fantasy football and The Daily Show.  Seriously, you deserve a prize for just that.  I hope you’re somewhere not doing harm to anyone though.  You don’t need to lie - your personality was fine all by itself and you didn’t need to be anyone else.  Of all the people who lied to me online, you did the least amount of damage to me.  I’m more puzzled than hurt.  Why would someone who was so smart and had such a wide variety of interests, need to be someone else?

the wee hours

Replay - One of The Two Coolest Books I’ve Read

I recently sent a book to a friend.  I wanted to send something entertaining, and I wasn’t looking for anything particularly deep.  This book is one of my two favorite books of all time.  My brother and I have both read it numerous times.  It vaguely resembles “Groundhog Day”, but it’s about a man who dies of a heart attack at the age of 43, and is reborn at 18, knowing what he knew at 43.  He gets to relive his life until he reaches 43…each time.  The first time I read it, I fantasized about making lots of money in the stock market with the current knowledge I have.  Now that I’m older, I just think about do-overs.  There are a few things I’d like to fix, like college.  I’d like to actually try and get a degree.  I’m not dumb, I could’ve actually made something of my professional life.  Well, okay, I’m redoing that now, but it sure would’ve been easier had I done it when I was in my twenties.  Alas, the things you know when you’re in your forties are so not the things you know when you’re in your twenties.  In my early twenties, I knew all the lyrics to Olivia Newton-John songs, how to write terrible poetry, how great Iovino’s bbq chicken was, and I really really liked Tom Cruise.  I also had really poor taste in most of the people I chose to date.  That probably relates somehow to liking Tom Cruise.

I didn’t mean to send any sort of deep message to this friend, but I suppose in afterthought, maybe there is a message.  Luckily, sometimes do-overs are still allowed in life.  For instance, me getting an actual career at 42.  It’s not the career I would’ve chosen at 18 or 25, but it does have some significance now.  Anyway, whether or not the book has any sort of meaning (and I didn’t plan it that way), it’s just a good entertaining book.  So, read it.  And if you’ve already read it, let me know, so together we can wait years and years and years for them to finally make the movie.  By the way, ironically, the author died in 2003, of a heart attack.  At least he made it to 59 this time.  But, maybe he’s coming back as an 18 year old.  That would be super cool for him.

See, I even liked it in last year’s book meme.  But now, I have the fifth meaningful book to add to that meme - Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger.  So now you have my two favorite books of all time in one, one blog entry.

 

The book description from Amazon, if my vague insistence that you buy it isn’t doing it for you: Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn’t know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again—in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle—each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: “What if you could live your life over again?”