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Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.
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Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood

I had hoped to avoid duplication, but failed to look ahead when answering 'a book I've read more than 3 times' -- Watership Down by Richard Adams. Although since I didn't read it for the first time until I was 11, I could mention prior favourites, which were The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling from age 5 or 6, and White Fang by Jack London from age 7.

[/boring]

Upcoming Days )

I made a cobbler for the first time tonight (or rather, the first time by myself), with some windfall apples I found in the back garden. Every time I cook, I seem to manage to find novel ways to fuck it all up. In this case, I didn't realise until it had been in long enough to burn all the sugar in the topping that I'd accidentally set the oven to 'grill'. I sprinkled a new layer of water on it and switched it over to the 'fan oven' setting, but I'm not sure if it's rescuable even so. :-(
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Day 20 – Favorite romance book

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Not much to say about it that wouldn't spoil it all, but I recommend that everyone read it. It's one of those all-around perfect books.

Upcoming Days )

Also: it's cold now. So cold, so windy.
mhuzzell: (Default)
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, of course. Given that it was a graphic novel to begin with, it wasn't much of a stretch to see it transferred onto the screen -- and is probably also why it worked so well. It still had to leave out a bunch of stuff, but not as much as most books.

Upcoming Days )
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. After all the hype about it, I expected it to be just about unbearably awesome. Or at least pretty awesome. Or at least good.

I suppose my opinion of it wasn't helped by my having listened to an audio version of it read by some guy with a really annoying voice. And I couldn't even get away from it, because I listened to it during K's and my somewhat-ill-advised bus-tour of western Europe, in situations where it was dark or I had already finished my other book and I was tired of all my other music and so I was just trapped with it, it or boredom or having no auditory barrier between me and the other bus passengers and ugh. Ugh.

Anyway, had I not been in that situation, I don't know that I'd have finished it at all. It was just so boring and self-righteous and absurd! Not even the good kind of absurd. It was like a whole book of talking to your boring drug-obsessed friend who doesn't have much of anything to say about anything except drugs. Which, in retrospect, is probably about what I should have expected. After all, it mostly was my boring, drug-obsessed friends who went around calling it so very very awesome.

(I quite liked the film, though!)

Upcoming Days )

Incidentally, I am also disappointed in my ability to complete a 30-day meme within a month. Shame on me!
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book

Here is where all that intra-meme continuity business pays off. From John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."


Upcoming Days )

In somewhat-unrelated news, two articles:

The Big Society - Anarchy With A Middle-Class Twist? Utterly predictable; I've been kind of waiting for it ever since this whole 'Big Society' bullshit was announced. Pretty disappointed that the journalist provides approximately zero insight or criticism -- I thought the Huffington Post was supposed to be one of the 'good ones'?

Meanwhile, this article -- from The Economist, of all places -- actually makes me pretty happy. And I guess its being in The Economist in the first place is part of that: environmentalism and sustainability, as values, seem to have finally become mainstream. Finally! I mean, I agree with one of the commenters that the behaviours showcased are just 'low-hanging fruit' and the harder changes will be harder to implement and so on and so on, but... it feels like for most of my life I've been shouting at a wall of willful ignorance, just trying to persuade people that there is a problem to be fixed in the first place. Now finally, finally, there seems to be a general consensus that climate change is happening and sustainable behaviour is something we need to think about and Something Ought To Be Done. It's been such a long and slow time coming that it's crept up on me, but I think it is finally here; the "climate skeptic" holdouts look increasingly crazy, like the ones (often the same ones) who still insist that the earth was created 6000 years ago with all its plants and animals intact and unchanging.

Now, it's still going to be a long hard fight to get those in power not to make a bunch of shit worse while claiming to make it better, but I feel like an important ideological threshold has been crossed in acknowledging that it is a problem that needs to be addressed in the first place.
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Day 16 – Favorite female character

As with male characters, I don't have an overall favourite -- and in this case, I can't even pull an example out of A Clash of Kings, since it has no particular female characters who jump out at me as potential flavourite of the week. Thus, here are a few subcategorized favourites, in no particular order:

Favourite female villain: Cathy from East of Eden. Oh my goodness, she is just so deliciously evil!
Favourite female unreliable narrator: Iris from The Blind Assassin. I was pretty much onto her from about halfway through (and had my suspicions much earlier still), but she is a sneaky one!
Favourite female obvious-author-fetish: Susan Calvin from I, Robot (&pre/sequels)
Favourite Smurfette: Trillian from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

... And then I got distracted by TV Tropes when I went to get a link for 'Smurfette', and then suddenly it was 2:40 am. Goodnight!

Upcoming Days )
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Day 15 – Favorite male character

I really wish this meme would quit asking for favourites, because for the most part I really don't have them. In this case, I think my 'favourite' male character would just be whoever I happen to like in whatever I happen to be reading at the time. In this case that would be A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin, and I am quite fond of Bran. He seems like such a cool kid! Like someone I would really like to be pals with IRL, which is rare for book characters, even good ones.

And as for the rest? I am dredging my memory for potential favourites, but coming up with so many diamonds of roughly equal size that it hardly seems worth listing them. So I won't.

Upcoming Days )
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Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer

Yesterday I had a little blab about how I don't really have a single 'favourite writer', but ended up naming John Steinbeck for reasons of Future Meme Consistency. Today, for the same reason, I'm naming The Grapes of Wrath as my 'favourite' of his novels, even though in reality it's definitely a tie between that and East of Eden (which I counted for a few years as my Favourite Book Ever, until I read others that slotted themselves into joint first, including The Grapes of Wrath).

Upcoming Days )
mhuzzell: (Default)
Day 13 – Your favorite writer

As seems to be the case with most of my answers, I'm not sure I really have one. I like a lot of different authors a lot, and there are certainly some I could name as favourites in particular areas. David Foster Wallace has my favourite prose style. Katharine Kerr does my favourite world-building. Joseph Heller provided my favourite neologism / metaphor for my frequent angst. &c. But an overall favourite? That is tough.

I mean, should this be the person whose work I have most consistently enjoyed (the oft-mentioned David Whiteland), or the author of the book I like the most? And if the latter, how on earth do I pick from my full two-hands-ful of favourite books to select a favourite author? Well, I think I might have a guess. I'm gonna say: John Steinbeck. Even though I don't love, or even like, all the things of his I've read -- and, he having been so prolific, haven't read even close to everything he wrote -- but because:

a) He's the only author who has written more than one (fully two) of the books I consistently name when asked to list my favourite books

b) Looking ahead in the meme, those are going to be the books I'll want to name as answers to later questions, for consistency's sake. Because apparently I care about intra-meme consistency now.


Upcoming Days )

In non-book-meme news, it seems to have become autumn now. The festivals are over, Edinburgh is breathing a collective sigh of relief, the previously-mentioned buddlejas have retreated their pretty purple blossoms from their long brown fingers that poke (now ominously once more) over the walls of abandoned lots, and the weather has turned cold again. Not cold-cold, to be fair, but pretty damn nippy. And it is still August, at least for the rest of today. WTF, Scotland?

There are some ways in which central NC weather and east-coast lowland Scotland weather are not that different. In both cases, winter is short and changeable and generally only lasts from December to January. Autumn stays autumnal well through November, and the winter breaks and things start blooming in February. However, while NC summer lasts from about March through October, Scottish summer lasts from about July to July (if that). Just a long long spring and a long long autumn. Some years, the winter's so mild and the summer's so cool that it feels like the years just fade from spring to autumn and back again.

... I have more Thoughts about the weather, but I have to go to work -- lucky you!
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore

There are surely dozens, if not hundreds of books in this category, including most of the ones I read as a child, and especially as a small child. Were I to re-encounter Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree, I might find it charming, but I doubt I would feel the same love for it that I did as a three-year-old.

However, I think I can answer this most honestly by naming the series that falls most emphatically on both sides of that question -- used to love, don't anymore -- god this is embarrassing -- The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin. I was first given a few of these at the age of six, by the daughter of a family friend who would've been around 11 or 12 at the time, and was thus a Cool Older Girl whose tastes I sought to emulate. The books themselves were also about Cool Older Girls, who did grown-up things like babysit for other children and have weird emotional disagreements that I didn't understand at all. I was addicted immediately. For the next few years I read all of them I could get my hands on, working my way quickly through the stacks inherited from the aforementioned family friend, then plundering our local library for the rest of the series. God help me, I even read some of the Baby-Sitters' Little Sister spin-off series, although with a protagonist who was both my own age and an insufferable prat, they failed to hold my interest.

I read a whole bunch of other trash over the same period (The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley [whatevers], &c.), but my mother seemed to have developed a particular distaste for the Baby-Sitters. I don't know why she picked on them more than the others -- perhaps she sampled one -- but in any case, by the time I was eight she was trying desperately to distract me from them, telling me how awfully badly they were written, trying to get me to read something else, something better for my developing little mind. Which a) seemed a bit unnecessary, since at the same time I was reading all that trash I was also reading every animal book I could get my hands on, as well as various potted children's histories and sanitized biographies of major historical figures, and all sorts of other 'educational' type books (and, yes, even the occasional book from the high canon of children's literature); and b) only served to make me all the more aggressively voracious in reading them. At one point she even drew up a bargain with me whereby I had to read one 'good' book in between each Baby-Sitters book. The deal lasted for all of one book, and totally ruined Sounder for me, since rather than enjoying the story as I might have, I was only dragging myself through it so I could get back to my teen-adulation crack-pipe.

Fortunately, by the time I'd reached the age of the characters themselves, I'd gotten myself a bit of taste, and started seeing the books for the utter garbage they are. I'll never get those hours back, nor clear out the mind-clutter currently and inexorably occupied by the doings of insipid characters I now care little about (tucked away in the same overspilling mental files as 'all the lyrics to involuntarily-memorized pop songs' and 'overheard celebrity factoids'), but I've made a sort of peace with that. What still bothers me a bit, though, is that all of my peers' other childhood vices, with which I had little engagement, seem to have developed a sort of pop-nostalgic caché. Mario, Batman, Pokemon, etc. I played the last a little, but for the rest I've had to learn all the references from the wrong end -- much like how, having been raised on 'The Simpsons', I tend to 'get' a lot of the references therein only years later, when I finally get around to seeing this or that Classic Film. When questioned I usually tell people, as un-haughtily as I can, that I spent my childhood out in the woods catching lizards and playing with actual rather than virtual turtles (which is also true), and carefully neglect to mention The Baby-Sitters Club.

Upcoming Days )
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Day 11 – A book you hated

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. One that I am certainly glad to have read, given its almighty significance in the Western Canon and all (deserved or not, it's certainly frequently referenced), but which I did not enjoy reading in the slightest.

However, I'm tired, and I have a cold, so rather than either pretending I had any significant level of critical analysis when I read it at 16 (beyond "Jeez, this is pretty damn racist, even for a 19th Century novel" or "OMG could this language GET any more overwrought?"), or attempt to dredge up what remains of my brainpower to think back and analyze it properly, I'm just gonna direct you to Chinua Achebe (sorry about the poor formatting in that link; it was the only copy I could find online).

Upcoming Days )
mhuzzell: (Default)
Oh hey it's the book meme! But first, a riddle for you: What has eight fingers, two thumbs, and decided to do a page-a-day meme during the busiest month of the year? This guy lady! Now back to your regularly scheduled pontificating:

Day 10 – Favorite classic book

Apart from taking a rather literal meaning of 'books from ancient Greece or Rome' (in which I am woefully under-read), I have no idea what the boundaries are for the proposed set of 'classic books' from which I am supposed to select an answer. Indeed, although there's a great deal of overlap in proposed sets of 'the classics' of literature, the only thing that anyone really seems to agree on is that nobody agrees about what exactly makes a book a 'classic', and even on the rare occasions when a group of people agree on a definition, there's considerable disagreement about which books qualify. So I am a bit stuck. Also, it's 1:30 in the morning.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to answer "I reject the premise of this question", I'm gonna stick an imaginary pin in a mental card catalogue go with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, for what I assume are all the usual reasons. Good story, influential and important, deals with heavy shit while being actually quite lighthearted and funny, etc. (More importantly: unlike a few other possible candidates, it doesn't look likely to come up as an answer to later meme questions.)

Upcoming Days )

In non-book related news, it's been getting cold again, and the buddlejas have lost almost all their purple, and reverted to looking like long brown corpse-fingers poking over the sides of walls. What was that 'summer' I was talking about a few weeks ago?
mhuzzell: (Default)
Day 9 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving

This is a tough one. Like most people, I don't usually read books I don't think I'll like unless they're assigned reading, and (perhaps unlike most people) I generally go into my assigned reading with a fairly open mind, not pre-judging whether I think I'll like it or not.

Of the fairly small pool of books I had to read that I thought I wouldn't like, the only one I think I can say I ended up 'loving' is Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals -- and even here, it is a fairly academic sort of 'love'. I had been apprehensive about reading it because I'd just been struggling through his Critique of Pure Reason in another class, and expected this to be similarly impenetrable, but in fact I found the Groundwork to be pleasingly straightforward in its style. I also found quite a lot that I could agree with, and gained intellectual tools that have been invaluable in shaping my own thinking about morality.

Upcoming Days )
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
Day 8 – Most overrated book

I tried the same trick for this one as for the last: comparing my ratings to others' ratings on Goodreads. This time, though, there was a clear winner. The most overrated book is definitely Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein -- although I would extend this to all of his childrens' poetry collections; this one just happens to be the most famous of them. I wouldn't quite say I hate everything he's ever written, because I thought The Giving Tree was quite sweet, and I'm sure there must be a handful of poems somewhere in his many collections that I don't totally detest ... I've just yet to come across them. Shel Silverstein does awful things to children; he has ruined poetry for most of my generation, and I hear continues to ruin it for younger kids as well. But rather than raise my blood pressure further by talking about it, I'm just gonna copy+paste my Goodreads review:

Is there a way to give less than one star? I fucking HATED this book. I especially hated the way I was made to read it all through grade school; that I was taught that this is what 'poetry' is. It isn't poetry. This is easy, meaningless, chime-rhyming nonsense -- and not even nonsense with interesting language or ideas, like Lewis Carrol or (some of) Edward Lear. No, this is nursery rhymes but without the moral message. The wan, sugary pop-songs of poetry. Do not give this to your child.

Upcoming Days )

*I see from looking back at my last entry that I actually ended up just over the wire, rather than just under it, so it was technically posted 'today'. Still, it was cognitively yesterday, and more importantly, who really cares?
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
Day 7 – Most underrated book

Seconding [livejournal.com profile] awomanthatsblue's complaint about the superlatives. Jeez. Like, how do you even choose? I thought I'd be clever and try to find something on Goodreads that had a crazy low rating compared to what I gave it, but there are several of those, too. So I'm gonna take the same tack, and just go with an underrated book: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.

This may seem like an odd choice, given how ultra-famous Margaret Atwood is and all, but she's mostly famous for her later stuff, like A Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assassin. Now, the latter also happens to be among my Favourite Books Ever (will it make another appearance in the meme? I haven't thought that far ahead! Stay tuned to find out!), but The Edible Woman was Atwood's first novel, and also happened to be the first of hers that I ever read. And it floored me.

It was written in the early/mid-'60s, some years before it was actually published (1969), and Atwood describes it in her preface as 'more pre-feminist than feminist', saying that she hadn't had so much of a feminist awakening yet when writing it, and noting that the main character's options in life remain very much the same at the end of the book as at the beginning: trapped in a dull loveless job or a dull loveless marriage.

In an odd sort of way, I feel like its more-proto-feminst-than-feminist qualities are the perfect mirror for reading it now. That is, it is rich with metaphor and all the tools and ingredients for feminist analysis laid out bare, but without having any actual analysis in it, because it doesn't quite know how -- which is kind of precisely the point I feel we're at with feminism today. Sure, it's recognized, but it's also stagnated. Things have gotten a lot better than they were, but we're told that now that we can dress like men and own property like men and have jobs like men and keep our names &c. &c. that we should be satisfied and please just be quiet already, MEN are talking, I think I heard the doorbell, ooh I think the baby's poopy, yes of course I'll help you with the housework, darling, we are a team...

There's not much you can say to people who claim to agree with you and then refuse to acknowledge how their actions belie their words.

Upcoming Days )

*So, I guess I missed a day there -- and am right under the wire for missing a second. I wasn't even sure I had until I looked at the date on the last entry to get the list for this one, because that is how hectic my yesterday was. Really nice, but hectic. Anyway, nobody said these thirty days had to be consecutive! Right? Right?
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
Day 6 – A book that makes you sad

Oh my goodness. There are authors who make me sad for at least some (if not most, if not all) of the time I am reading with every book of theirs I read. Derrick Jensen, for instance, or John Steinbeck. Political stuff in particular tends to make me angry-sad, on which note, I'm gonna go with The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, here, given that it is particularly relevant these last couple of years, as the neoliberal governments of Europe and (anglophone) North America finally have an excuse to apply it to their own countries.

*despairs*

Upcoming Days )
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Day 5 - A book that makes you happy

I can think of a lot of books that have made me happy. Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-Classical Logic made me intellectually giddy, as have a few other texts, articles, etc. Peter Gelderloos' Anarchy Works filled me with hope, not just for the ultimate practicality of anarchism, but by also providing a good and succinct way of explaining it to sceptics. David Whiteland's books made me feel all puzzle-happy.

However, the only book that I can think of that consistently makes me happy is ... oh god do I have to say it? ... Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It's not just that I'm a total nerd who likes well-reasoned linguistic arguments. Fowler was a funny guy, y'all. I don't always agree with him (and some of his arguments are well out of date), but I'm nearly always entertained, and usually end up distracted from whatever it was I'd opened it to look up in the first place.

Upcoming Days )
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Day 4 – Favorite book of your favorite series

The stories in the Deverry books span over 500 years, and are not presented linearly (which is awesome because I have a short attention span the juxtaposition of past and future events shows the effects of the one on the other, without having to overstate it). We see many of the same "souls" in successive incarnations, apart from a few with particularly long lives who span several lifetimes of the others. What this means is that, for me, it's easier for me to pick a favourite time period/set of character incarnations within the series than it is to pick a particular book.

My favourite time period in the books is the 800s, in which a succession crisis plunges the kingdom into civil war, and we follow our long-lived magical hero as he helps his personally-groomed Rightful Heir win the throne back from the most powerful opposing faction. It echoes a lot of the real history of wars over kingship which plagued mediaeval Europe, without being obviously derived from any of them. It is also, to me, one of the most heartrendingly tragic sequences in the series -- in the Shakespearean sense of tragedy, in which you can see the inevitable doom coming to the characters given their own personal flaws and follies, but they don't see it, and so their deaths come crashing down around them like a thunder of fate.

Anyway, if I had to choose a particular book, I'd say The Red Wyvern, which is the one with the heaviest focus on this sequence.

Upcoming Days )
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
Day 3 – Your favorite series

Gotta be [livejournal.com profile] aberwyn's Deverry Cycle. Fantasy novels in which there is an internally consistent magical system, and in which we see the (realistic) material means by which Fantastical Adventuring takes place in a technologically less-advanced society -- and see that society develop socially in response to technological advances and human(/elf/&c.) migration? Oh yes please. Also all those 'it's a good story/ies' and 'I like things that fit together in a well-woven non-linear fashion' sorts of reasons, but mostly, I'm just a huge sucker for consistency.

Speaking of which, a special mention for a special sort of non-consistency that also works magical wonders has to go to the series/book-in-4-parts The Knot-Shop Man, by David Whiteland, who is also responsible for the best thing on the internet.

Upcoming Days )

In other news, I have been in utter despair feeling sad about a number of Big Important Things going on in the world, like this and this and these (and reactions thereto). But I guess talking about books I like has made me feel a little better? So maybe I should get off the internet and go bury my head in the sand A Game of Thrones? Guess so. Also on the agenda for tonight: sleep!

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