I am

midway through this book, Netherland, that is made for me - the narrator is an intelligent but lost financial businessman in New York, and the book is being called the first great September eleventh addressing novel of this our post 9-11 era, and Obama read it and recommends. So, how interesting is it to read this passage knowing Obama read it and loved it? :

(This is after the narrator's wife tells him she won't come back with their son to New York from London by employing an intense political argument, and calls him Conservative, )

"... I should have seen Rachel's telephonic outburst coming, not least because the imminent invasion of Iraq had stimulated an impressive and impassioned opinion in practically everybody I knew. For those under the age of forty-five it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment-- or if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out. I could take a guess at the oil production capacity of an American-occupied Iraq and in fact was pressed at work about this issue daily, and stupidly. ("What are you saying, two and a half million barrels or three million? Which one is it?") But I found myself unable to contribute to conversations about the value of international law or the feasibility of producing a dirty bomb or the constitutional rights of imprisoned enemies or the efficacy of duct tape as a window sealant or the merits of vaccinating the American masses against smallpox or the complexity of weaponizing deadly bacteria or the menace of the neo-conservative cabal in the Bush administration, or indeed any of the debates, each apparently vital, that raged everywhere-- raged because the debaters speedily grew heated and angy and contemptuous."

For my part blogsters, I've been thinking about intimacy. I've written about this before, but intimacy is wonderful. In my life as it is, it takes its best form as talking after sex - I did this last Friday and my was it fun. I am personally unfamiliar with intimacy's seeming apex, Marriage. The heart of it, I find, is the numbers - being listened to and listening. Concerned with the concerns of another and having your concerns being concerned with by them. Funny that I get the best intimacy in funny bust up sextimes. I keep trying to dump my therapist and he won't let me. He has no sense of humour (compared to me). I think it's hilarious.

I'm feeling really happy. I guess something must be wrong. :)

I have made the comments registered people only. When the comments were these crazy japanese ... or were they chinese? things, I was frightened that they were a terrorist cell communicating by code. I saved them in a word document, I was so concerned about that. That's my deepest confession. But I don't think I'm paranoid - it was just very strange and then there was that person who said he was going to bring my writings to his class? It was strange. I'm not crazy.

I love you.

Alexis