strike that

heureux hasard

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that my new housemate Jamey – whom I found on Craigslist and spoke to exactly once on the phone and did not meet until last night when I arrived with my rolling suitcase – spent the first six months of this year working in the Netherlands, as I did last year. Let’s ignore that he then traveled to the Balkans, as I did, because who wouldn’t? Let’s ignore that, like me, he has no furniture and no car and uses peppermint shampoo.

And it isn’t that strange, really, that his bookcases are 80% the same as my bookcases, because Edward Abbey and Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut and John McPhee are pretty standard, and Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez and Pablo Neruda only slightly less so.

But really? Really he has the New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories in French? The one French book that I did not spitefully leave behind in Quebec, because I had found it in a cool bookshop in Homer Alaska and it seemed like such a marvelous idea – contemporary literature in French and English side by side – and because even then I didn’t really want to hold a grudge against a beautiful language indefinitely?

That’s just weird.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:00 PM