This is me.

All Friday posts, in my opinion, should be prefaced with this:

Such a classy picture, no?

According to that oh-so-accurate (insert slight sarcasm here) personality quiz, I am personality type INTP, or an architect. I'm moderately introverted - no lies there; I'm pretty shy - and a very rare specimen of human. Apparently, my personality type makes up only one percent of the entire human population. Lolwut.

The rest of that analysis is all lies, of course. It says that I'm able to concentrate better than any other type, but I'm the worst procrastinator in the world. If I can start my homework at two in the morning and still sleep at least one hour, I'll do it. Therefore, final verdict: lies.

As Of Now

Books I'm reading:

JPod, Douglas Coupland
The Dark Tower IV: Song of Susannah, Stephen King


This week: 406 pages


Sentences of the week:

1. "Occasionally someone would ask to see 'the baby' and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, 'What is that?! A dinosaur?' Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think that people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms." Wesley the Owl, Stacey O'Brien

2. "Mark brought shame upon the family after he signed up for the local community college's Clown Program. He says the program will put him into the clown fast track, but he's now dead to us." JPod, Douglas Coupland

3. "'We’re having a contest – we’re trying to see if there’s any way to hold a knife and walk across a room and not look psycho.'
'And?'
'It's impossible.'" Same book as #2


What can I say? These quotes are funny. I do think, though, that you can walk across a room with a knife and not look psycho. (It has to be a butter knife.)

JPod, Part the First

First reaction after reading Part 1 of this book: OMG. This. Book. Is. Amazing.

It's possibly the most random, most randomly hilarious book I have ever read. I'll let the words speak for themselves. Below are some excerpts.


"The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps. Greed kind of helps, but it looks ugly, and at parties people avoid greedheads, so there goes your social life."


"Don broke his arm skiing in February, but six weeks in a splint and he's tickety-boo. Laurie got her accreditation and is now a fully qualified dental hygienist. Mark brought shame upon the family after he signed up for the local community college's Clown Program. He says the program will put him into the clown fast track, but he's now dead to us."


"'I was in a fourgy with these three BMX chicks I met last weekend, and it was a dream come true, and then this one chick puts on a Raggedy Ann wig and a red foam nose, and says, Look at me, I'm Ronald McDonald, and I freaked.'"


Based on these quotes, it's kind of hard to tell what the book's about, but it's a satire novel about six cubicle workers with last names beginning with J (hence the title) who are "bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company." These workers, each extremely abnormal in his or her own way, do anything except get serious work done. For example, they each write letters to Ronald McDonald asking him to choose them for his mate.

The most awesome part of the book is Ethan Jarlewski's (the main character's) mom. Ethan's mom is a pot grower who seems hilariously amoral. When a biker figures out her marijuana operation, she kills him by electrocuting him. She also collects some overdue marijuana money from another biker by shooting his foot. She does this all in a sugary sweet manner reminiscent of other normal moms. The contrast is so great that you wonder if she has split personalities.

I think it'd be great to have a mom like that, minus the killing aspect.

Fluffy, Fluffy Owls

I love animals, so it's appropriate that the first book I blog about be about animals. More specifically, a single animal.

The book is titled "Wesley the Owl" by Stacey O'Brien, and it is possibly the saddest and cutest book I have ever read. In it, Stacey, a biologist, adopts an owl hatchling to raise, consequently falling in love with it. The owl, quite literally, falls in love with her too. It's like Hogwarts and my biology textbook met up and had a love child, complete with 'the power of love' and everything. Except, of course, there's no magic or noseless megalomaniac bald guys who love snakes a little too much.

Stacey O'Brien talks of The Way of the Owl, which entails never breaking promises and loving only one mate per lifetime. Owls become deeply attached to their one mate to the point of willing themselves to die if their mate dies. I find this incredibly moving. It's certain that owls have emotions and souls, as the author says, based on this act alone, but we humans have too much of a superiority complex to consider that the animals we coexist with are just humans with feathers or fur.

But anyways.

I definitely recommend this book. I laughed and cried through most of it, and I guarantee you will too. Unless of course you hate animals, in which case you can redirect to that blog about young adult vampire romance novels which is located in the failsauce portion of the interwebz, kthxbai. Just know that no one I know has ever cried while reading *insert shudder here* Twilight.

Hello

This is the blog I've created as an assignment for my etymology class. In it, I will (as the description aptly indicates) be blogging on books and cute things. Mostly books. Woo.

Truthfully, I love to read, but I've never been able to find the motivation to even pick up a non-assignment related book since high school started. I guess this class is now my motivation.

And so we begin.