Have officially lived on the East Coast for over four years.

Must strive to reverse undesirable New England habits, including, but not limited to: not smiling at strangers on the street, deferring to awkwardness, inability to hold eye contact, expecting anyone who works a cash register to have a terrible attitude.

Meanwhile - allow conversations to transpire without first mentally projecting their course. Try to judge others a little less harshly when it often seems to be the path of least resistance. Remember that generosity is better unacknowledged than unpaid. 

The past few months have been dedicated to more movies than books. It’s a bit frightening to project so much of life on arbitrary works of supposed art (or perhaps it’s the other way around). There’s something comforting, or even unsettling, in finding a filmmaker, an artist, a writer, etc. who sees the world on the same uneven axis as yourself. And you realize - you’re not alone. Even if you’re sitting alone on your couch, eating an apple, engrossed in situations which simultaneously have everything and nothing to do with you.

Last month, I went to a Rachael Yamagata concert with @questionablepearls. The concert was wonderful, but also a culmination of many years of listening to her music under the most varied circumstances. Perhaps the most memorable is sitting outside the counseling office of LSMSA in Natchitoches a week or so after Katrina with a few displaced friends, wondering where I’d even be by this time next month. A girl from my high school in New Orleans approached me. She looked at my iPod and made a comment about Rachael Yamagata. It was probably a thirty second conversation. But skip to December 2011, and there the song is. The same as ever.

(via reaganing)

1. Long Day’s Journey Into Night - Eugene O’Neill
2. Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad
3. Guerillas - V.S. Naipaul
4. Regeneration - Pat Barker
5. Angels in America - Tony Kushner
6. Wolf Dreams - Yasmina Khadra
7. Darkness Visible - William Styron
8. The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Connor
9. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
10. Wit - Margaret Edson
11. My Loose Thread - Dennis Cooper
12. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, & Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
13. Proust Was a Neuroscientist - Jonah Lehrer
14. Possession - A.S. Byatt
15. Collected Poems - Frank O’Hara
16. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
18. 1984 - George Orwell
19. A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore
20. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
21. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
22. Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith
23. A Room with a View - E.M. Forster
24. The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
25. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
26. Collected Poems - Anne Sexton
27. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
28. Raise the High Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - J.D. Salinger
29. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
30. If on a winter’s night a traveler - Italo Calvino

Favorites bolded. Terrible are struck through.

Books Re-Read

• The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
• Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
• High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
• About a Boy - Nick Hornby

Re-reading is actually far more enjoyable, but I try to put at least four years between each re-read, so college favorites will have to wait a little longer. Wait for me, Brideshead Revisited! (Jk?)