Two days missed! Not good.

So I did manage to finish "Freedom" during a long evening of reading where I was able to take off from work early. The night was a good one, and quite an anomaly, since it was about 5-6 hours of straight reading and a bottle of wine. I forgot what it's like to just have the evening to yourself without a job breathing down your neck or doing something more "exciting." In any case, although I was generally down on Franzen in the middle of the book, I think he does a marvelous job in last 200 pages or so. At least until the full heat of the action dies and the epilogue kicks back in…which doesn't quite feel right to me. After exploding the emotional core of the book into a thousand pieces with a powerful surge at the end of the book, the very last section of the book just felt off in tone. I suppose I was satisfied with how everything turned out, but I also simply didn't expect that to be the way things would turn out. (This is an excellent review.) In any case, I like the book more now than I did when I was in the middle of it. And I really do think that it is a book that tries and succeeds in embodying an era and a mix of ideas from this time. Maybe that's why people care about Franzen. I'm not sure that this book will feel like anything in 50 years, except as a cultural artifact of our times.

Other than that, work has been pretty easy. I closed my first deal as a senior…even though it was as plain vanilla a deal as they come and I still managed to get a little fried over it. I'm left with only a single deal to work on, which I have to admit is much better than the 3-6 that have absolutely killed me in the past. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And squish me. But whatever.

I recall only a few other details from the past two days, which is both good news and bad news because I'm supposed to be recording these details, but is also verification that I should probably continue: Cooked some sort of random purple cabbage and sausage dish. Cooked raw italian garlic and parm sausage in a skillet, let all of the fat get rendered, put the sausage to the size and added half a head of purple cabbage, which was thoroughly coated with the fat and olive oil, added a spoonful of garlic, added a spoonful of brown mustard mixed into a small bowl of the beer I was drinking and poured it over the top until the cabbage cooked down to a shiny deep purple, and then added the sausage back in. Turns out that was excellent. Other details: Watched The Office, which appears to be good again. Went to a semi-holiday party with K's co-workers. Watched TNF at a bar.

And now, packed a whole buncha shit into a suitcase and I'm off to Camel Back Mountain for skiing! I fucking missed skiing. I am going to ski the fuck outta that mountain. D and M managed to get us a cabin of sorts (with a gas fireplace, lame) and a bar, so K and I will be joined by D, M, and R and J for a weekend of drinking, eating and skiing like mad. Dear god I hope work does not fuck me.