Please call me to talk about the book I just read

A lot of things have happened in the past week. I'll give you a brief rundown at the end, but first I really want to write briefly about How to be both by Ali Smith, because holy God was this book good. It was so good, in fact, that I find myself feeling frustrated that I'm not taking an English class right now where I can discuss it with other students, especially because the folks on the Slate book club podcast have gotten so many things wrong, in my opinion (and I can't tell them that! It's so frustrating!). Have you read this book? Do you want to talk to me about it, in very great detail? Please also listen to the Slate book club podcast about this book and then call me, I am totally serious, it's driving me crazy, I've got all these ideas and it really doesn't make sense to write a blog post about them because no one is going to be able to follow it. I'm literally thinking about reading it again right now, I liked it so much. What's wrong with me? No one knows.

Ok, so a few other things in my life:

• As you've probably seen, I passed my thesis defense. I have some editing to do this week, but it will be turned into the grad school by Friday and then I'll just have some formatting to do on it. The end of graduate school is (though it's very hard, and a bit sad for me to believe) in sight.
• I just bought tickets to go down to St. Louis the weekend after next to see Becky's senior fashion show (!!). I am so excited, Becky is incredibly talented and it will be so good to see all of her hard work in person and on stage. Amazingly, this will be the first of her fashion shows that I've been to, and I can't wait to see it.
• Yesterday, sort of on a whim, I auditioned to sing the national anthem at a F-M Redhawks game. Most of the author auditionees were children, so I felt like kind of an asshole, but I had some nice conversations with a lot of them (I have it, for example, on good authority that if you're looking for a good book series, you should probably check out The Sisters Grimm. The eleven year old who recommended it to me even had a pretty exciting theory about who is behind the scarlet hand, but I won't spoil that for any of you right now). Anyway, as you probably already know, I'm an exceptionally talented person, which is basically what they told me during the audition. I can't say for sure that I've got it in the bag, but let's just say I'll let you know when a good time for you to come catch a minor league baseball game this summer might be.

There are probably some things I'm forgetting in here, but I felt like you all needed at least a perfunctory update on my life so that this blog doesn't devolve into me being like, "Someone call me to talk about the book I just read" all the time, which is literally always a danger. But seriously, call me to talk to me about the book I just read.