I was New Yorked once again today. To be "New Yorked" is to be forced into a trying situation (or, in plain and simple terms, get screwed) by the entrenched protocol of New York City. I was New Yorked today by the stationery monopoly which exists around Columbia. Or perhaps the industry monopoly in all the neighborhoods that actually have more of a use for stationery (to the morons who put a Staples in Soho...use your goddamn heads!) in keeping big box giants (read: CHEAP STUFF) out of their neighborhoods. My glorious New Yorking today was the purchase of 2 teensy notebooks for my Chinese class (mandatory, yes, otherwise I would be handing in sheets of loose-leaf) at an exorbitant 3 bucks/piece(!). The hilarious thing too was that I went into 3 "separate" stationery stores looking for these damn books before I found what I was looking for and much to my not-so-surprise, all three stores were owned by the same owner. Eesh. What can I say...I live in a city with sky high rent and life is expensive. 3 dollars a teensy notebook expensive.

I don't know how much more of this I can take. Another engagement!

Congrats, Karen (and this Ian character as well)!

New computer entitled "Fluffier." Mum wanted Fluffy, so naturally, mr IBM dutifully went to mum and now I have fluffier. Fluffier is a puny rendition of fluffy, weighing in at a meagre 4 pounds. Fluffier has a 13 inch screen and has a whole bunch of fairly powerful features and a pretty shitty (typically so) keyboard. He is a Fujitsu superlight LifeBook. He has a metal cover and generally looks like a very Asian machine. Poor thing. Dad would not hear of reincarnating Fluffier into an IBM body because their production has been taken over by "Lenovo PC" which screams, he cries, of Chinaland and all that is wrong with much of its electronics production methods. Thus dad was much more satisified buying Fluffier as he currently stands, born in Japan. Fluffier boasts a pretty big 60Gb appetite, and I will work on once again filling him with MP3s and now with all this extra space, a plethora of junk that I know I don't need, but certainly may want. YEEEEEEHAW.

I am working my way, quite quickly, through Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." I just may be becoming a feminist. Well truthfully speaking that's terribly unlikely, but this is the second book of what can be considered "traditionally feminist" writing that I can say without a doubt I agree with and thoroughly enjoy. Perhaps to be fair I will clarify that this isn't considered "traditionally" femenist. It's a sort of niche femimism which is markedly unique from the psychotic bra-burning-corporate-power-frau types. Anything I write to summarize Woolf's position would be a horrific oversimplification of what she has to say about women and their place in "modern" (circa early 1900s) society, but her tantalizing idea of a room of one's own and a living allowance coupled with the idea of the "Society of Outsiders" presented in "Three Guineas" makes for an interesting thought experiment. These two books are definite gems. I can't say I much enjoyed her fiction (any of it...I've hacked my way through "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway"), but her rapacious wit and razor sharp logic really carry her non-fiction works through. I think I will pick up a couple of other non-fictions, namely "On Being Ill" and both volumes of "The Common Reader." Before more thinking happens, an excerpt from "A Room of One's Own:"

"And I began thinking of all those great men who have for one reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written of, trusted in, and showed what can only be described as some need of or some dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex....But we should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery, and the pleasures of the body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to supply."

Perhaps in this day and age, it is all too easy to forget what it is the other sex "supplies." We live in an age of Condoleeza Rice (a highly respectable individual, might I add) -esque women who have clawed their way to the top of the male-created corporate food-chain. I suppose again that it is from this vantage point the "need" for the opposite sex seems diminished if not altogether annihilated. The fact of the matter may indeed be that one sex does not "need" each other in the strictest sense - as evidenced by the increasing number of women turning to sperm banks to start families in lieu of "Mr. Right," and men who are able to adopt unwanted children without a mate - but it takes Woolf's gently arcane politicized writing to alert us to the fact that life is simply "sweeter" with the opposite sex around. In a society where it may seem that we have progressed "beyond" the need for Woolf's calculated defence of a true feminine integrity, we are sternly shown the folly of our own ways by Woolf's strikingly pertinent observations of what one sex does to ignore or belittle the other. You're guilty of it and I'm guilty of it. Fuck this woman was smart. I conclude: Boys. Dumb, but I can't live without them.