22/03/2002 - 3:52 p.m.

I'm afraid Richard was driving so fast, my brochures blew right out of the window.

Wow, I just got the mail, and the QE2 sent me a brochure. Me. Poor Hyacinth Bucket. I'm fairly certain I'm not at all the type of person she'd want sailing on the QE2. I'm probably far more impressed by this than I'm warranted to be.

I got some air force clothes. They've got ranks and badges and insignia all over them, and they were three bucks for the pants and the shirt. Sometimes I have to laugh at myself- how could somebody so anti-military buy military clothes? Well, the answer, I tell myself, is fairly simple: I just don't like what the military does. If we had one that just stood around in their uniforms like Buckingham Palace guards, I probably wouldn't have a problem with them, but they go out and do the fighting, which I don't stand for. Anyway, I'm almost certain that Viet-Nam protesters wore military clothes, so maybe there's a symbolic point there that I'm missing.

I have to go back to school on Monday. Sighs. I hope there wasn't anything I was expected to have done by then. If there was, I'm screwed. Ah well, I have been sincerely greatful for this vacation, and it seems as though it's been a lot longer than it actually was.

I forced myself to finish Pride and Prejudice last night. I've tried to read that book for about five years now and I finally managed it. If that's any indication of the way people acted and spoke in the early 1800's, I'm extraordinarily glad that I live now. I'm sorry, but, well, I hate all of that gossipy "character" crap that they get into and so I'd just started skipping over most of it- the problem was that there isn't very much more in there than that. At least when the Bronte's do it there's a plot eventually(except for Emily, Wuthering Heights sucks).

But I digress, the point is: I can't stand Jane Austen. I tried to read Emma and I gave up because it was so hideous. I don't care about some evil little matchmaker flirt intent on being a pain in the ass. I tried to read Sense and Sensibility but I only managed the first ten pages. People tell me that the last one, I believe it's called Mansfield Park isn't insufferable, so maybe I'll find that one and give it a try. But, really. There have been a lot of movies made of the books, and I could see that working, you cut out a lot of the "character" prattle and just do the plot line. I suppose, however, that the prattle is the only reason the books are intended to be read, as a study of the prattle. Oh well.

Next on my list of books- Crime and Punishment. Despite the title form, it was not written by Jane Austen, it was written by Leo Tolstoy. He was Russian. Very different sort of thing going on there.