The fact that I'm writing so frequently today should tell you how little I'm doing, puttering about the house.

I have, however, cracked open The Corrections again, a book I've been dying to read for ages but barely read beyond the first thirty pages after I first bought it. I have now worked up to page 186 and I'm really into it, although it's very depressing to read. Life seems to be a real malaise, you know, no matter which character the author focuses on at the moment --- the retired parents, the discontented children, or their even more disillusioned spouses/significant others. I still do think good books are about acknowledging without adornment or foofaraw the hard knocks of life, but too many pages of it in one sitting would do me in. I'll pick it up again tomorrow.

My editing job also got delivered tonight. I'm going to proofread a local arts journal of about three hundred pages in exchange for some money. I'm excited about the money, but I'm also excited about editing. I haven't done this --- correcting student essays and scripts doesn't count --- since the summer of 1996 and I really got a kick out of it then. Call me anal retentive, but I like neatening other people's writing, so long as I don't have to do the actual creating and writing so much myself. (The fact that my Gripe/Thoughts website languishes this year is proof positive of that.) So we'll see how this goes. If only I could make a living out of it --- and it's really something that isn't bound by geography either, and I could work at home, with or without kids, and I should stop now because it's so unlikely that's gonna happen.

Whoops, plans have changed. I need to go pick Terz up from his wedding dinner and I'm taking the train downtown, so I guess I'll bring The Corrections along for reading too.