What I have been doing lately: Burying my nose in books

Tigger and I would spend all day out here if we could

I have had a life-long love affair with public libraries. We go through our rough patches. I get busy and neglectful. The libraries can be of varying quality. But in the end, it seems, I am destined to come back again and again to how amazing it is that I can, for free, walk into a building full of books, pick one, remove it from the shelf, take it home, and lose myself for hours. My weekend productivity is way down. My practicing suffers. Perhaps it's not the healthiest of relationships. It's admittedly a little one sided, and, for my part, borders on obsessive. At long last, I recently joined Goodreads. I haven't gotten much into writing my own reviews, but I've gotten a lot of excellent recommendations from friends and strangers by looking at what other people are reading. Those people who do write reviews are more often than not thoughtful and engaging in their commentary. Such a refreshing change of pace from the internet at large. My library branch here isn't huge. For its size, it has a pretty impressive fiction section, but the real magic is that I haven't found a book yet that the Austin Public Library system won't send winging my way just because I requested it on a whim. Look, I know none of this is news. But in this day and age, I feel like it bears repeating that public libraries are fantastic. Do I still buy books sometimes? Of course. Do I support Amazon in doing so? Yes, sometimes. But I'm never going to plunk down the money represented by the number of books I read from the public library any more than I would buy every single show I watch on Netflix or Hulu. And the books have the benefit of being available to me for free, and free of advertising. Can I stress enough how cool this is?

Time, Loss and Gain of

I see this view a lot

When I moved here, I lost a few parts of my life. Largely, I lost a lot of ways to spend my time. This sounds like an odd thing to be concerned about, I will grant you. It is annoying to have to spend an hour getting anywhere in Boston, whether you are walking, driving, or T-ing. In some ways, of course I don't miss that at all. But when you walk somewhere, you also take your time. You look into store windows. You scope out the apartment listings on that realtor you pass every day just because they're there. You stop for italian ice at that sketchy looking pizza place where you've never actually eaten pizza. On the bus, you read a magazine. On the T, you people-watch and are never bored (cranky or bemused, but not bored). Here, where everything is expansive everyone drives a car, only the poor and the hipster take the bus, and I spend about an hour every day just driving myself to and from work. As daily commutes go, I realize this isn't that bad. Some people commute for hours each way. But frankly, I think those people are psycho. Anyway, the thing is that even spending an hour in the car on a given day I have, on average, halved the amount of time I spend getting to and fro. And in the process, I've lost the little delays and distractions that make the journey interesting. So in a way, I've simultaneously acquired more free time and a lot more boredom. This doesn't even take into consideration the free time produced by living alone, by not having a TV let alone a game console, and by the relative desert of gigs that has been Spring in Austin 2011. But fret not, gentle reader! For I have not been sitting idly by, watching my life zoom past! Wait, actually I HAVE been doing that. But I have also been doing some other things. So I'm going to write a few blog posts about those things. I figure this might also make up for the fact that I've been completely terrible about blogging lately, as Aphy has often mentioned.