What's up!

What's up, everybody? I thought I'd take a little time out to write a post.

Things have been pretty good. Except for the fact that I have a sore throat cold. I still have high energy most of the time but damn the sore throat makes talking a real chore. I've been working consistently 40 hours every week, which is good. Especially considering the fact that a lot of peoples' hours got cut recently. You know how it goes in retail. Blah, blah, blah...

I'm still doing a lot of morning shifts but now they're at least giving me some night shifts so potentially I can be at the store at any time. I actually think that if you're one of the special chosen ones to work early mornings or even like 9,10, 11, 1130am, that they want you there early because you're one of the better workers. Everyone fights for those early hours because they all want to get done with work and go hang out with their girlfriends, wives, families, whatever. The morning shifts at work are a much more adulting shift than the late shift.  

In other news, I've been doing the open mics at the Sugar Mill Saloon on Ventura Boulevard. That happens every week on Tuesday nights. Sometimes I sing solo with just acoustic guitar. Simple songs like Hendrix. I've been doing Purple Haze and Hey Joe. Other times I do instrumental jams with another guitarist named Dave. He's a great player, a true acoustic player.

I've also been reading a lot. Since finishing Kant's Critique of Judgement and the Critique of Pure Reason, I've also finished John Crowley's Engine Summer, and just last night on Valentine's day I finished Cecelia Holland's The Angel and the Sword.

Holland is a historical fiction novelist with some twenty novels written. I learned about her through my dad, who vouched for her one and only science fiction novel, a feminist [joanna ross' the female man] space opera called Floating Worlds. It spans twenty years and five hundred pages. It's a true epic, one of the best science fiction novels in the canon. Check out my review for Floating Worlds here.

Anyways, The Angel and the Sword is a great novel about Roderick the Beardless, a 9th-century European story about a Princess named Ragny, of the blood of the last rightful ruler of Spain. She runs away from her father who tries to force her to marry him. She disguises herself as a man, becomes a knight, and saves Paris from being overrun by Vikings. She even falls in love. This story has everything folks. 

The remarkable thing about the Angel and the Sword isn't even the great, realistic historical aspects and the non-psychological character stylings of the characters [the Hemingway model, the action is plot]. Rather it is the main character herself. Ragny/Roderick is simply a captivating woman. She struggles hard in a fierce world dominated by men [and Vikings], and she faces down every obstacle in her way. Strong female lead! 

Next, I plan on reading The Republic by Plato. Finally, after reading so much philosophy, I'm reading the original texts of Plato. I'm a modernist but in a way, I think Plato was a modernist too, of his time. Everybody knows about the allegory of the cave. That is such a modern concept, especially in a postmodern world.

Just finding the time to write more has been a struggle. I'm usually really tired after work and now that I'm working mornings too, half the time I have to go to sleep somewhat early. Oh, the agony! How I wish I had more time to read books, write, and play guitar. However, it's good to just sit down and write, whatever. Writing anything seems to suffice, I get a real thrill out of just writing down on a blank canvas and seeing what turns out. Sometimes the writing is meh, but oftentimes there's a little something, a little flair, that I see, and I say, "Hey, that's pretty cool." To more flair!