duck-shaped pain

• I went to Hastings to see if they had any good used CDs (the answer, as usual, was NO). However, they did have a huge display of remaindered books, all reduced to a dollar each. That would be good all by itself, but they included two books I've actually been looking for (in the I-might-pay-full-price-for-this sense), which made it even better: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders [1] and The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten. [2]

• I found someone a part at the appliance store today without too much help. Special bonus: it was the correct part.

• "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", Roy Montgomery, from the Harmony of the Spheres CD reissue. [3] I bought the CD because I liked everyone else on it, except for Montgomery, who I didn't know if I liked or not at the time. While I had read about him before, this was the first thing of his I've ever heard, and it's pretty epic.

• The fresh black plum I just ate.

Here are some bad things:

• The checker at the grocery store tonight who, upon looking at my purchases (which included rice, eggs, plums, cilantro, chile peppers, limes, and an artichoke), said, "How come you didn't get any food?" I thought I heard wrong, looked at her sort of blankly for a second or two, and then she said, "You didn't buy any food. All you got was ingredients." Same woman also rang up my sweet potato as a TURNIP, the second sweet potato infraction at this store this month. Turnips were more expensive, too.

• Still not feeling good. Whatever it is, it keeps coming back and giving me hell.

• The thing I heard on TV today. I was getting ready this morning, and I turned on the set while I was getting dressed. I flipped it on the shopping channel for a few minutes, which was just enough to hear the presenter say (in regards to some toy that plays music and bleeps out the names of dance moves for kids to follow), "...and if one of your children doesn't do the right move or starts doing something on their own, the toy will tell them to stop it." She seemed very pleased by this feature, although she never explained how, exactly, an inanimate pink box would know if you were doing the correct hokey pokey or not.

• I haven't bought any music magazines for almost a year, since none of the bookstores around here carry either Magnet or The Wire, the two I usually buy. I'm much too lazy and cheap to subscribe, to don't bring it up.

• The fact that the older I get, the more I hate my teeth. I have horrible, horrible teeth. They're fairly healthy, they're just all crooked and weird-looking. One in particular looks terrible, but it's not a big health concern because it's not a real tooth (it replaces one that was knocked out in a car accident when I was in middle school). When the dentist was shaping it to fit the rest of the teeth, he ground down a bit too far and exposed some of the metal inside it. In the years since, the metal part has sort of oxidized and turned colors that are nice on clothes and cars but completely wrong for teeth. People get sort of unglued when they see it, so I've sort of mastered the art of hiding it. Someday I'd like to get a nice, new, non-alarming tooth.

[1] You have no excuse not to go out right now and get his new book, Pastoralia. I don't care what you try to think up -- whatever it is, it isn't good enough.

[2] A collection of food related essays I read last year, but do not own. Memorable mostly for its essay on ketchup, where the author divides the entire world of ketchup into the categories of Worse Than Heinz, Heinz, and Not Really Ketchup.