You know you are poor...

when you have to spend 30 minutes wondering if you really need that diet pepsi you want to buy on your break.

Oxford Street

Alain de Botton's latest tweet: It takes a resilient spirit to keep faith with humanity after a walk down Oxford Street.

The uber busy Oxford Street in London

new job, but life is still the same

I figure it is about time I wrote about something other than Thoreau. Not so much b/c no one cares about him or what he has written -- except me -- but because I had to return his journals today as they are on hold for someone else.

Talking about books, I got a job at my local library. I worked there before. This will be over a year and a half since I have worked: 6 months I spent in London where I wasn't allowed to work, and it took me a year once I returned home to the States until I could get a job. That was due in small part to the current economy, but (I will admit) mostly because I had great trouble not playing the early 20's slacker still living at home.

Some thoughts:

David Cameron is a Tory and the new prime minister of Britain. He is the youngest at 44 to hold this role. I believe he is naive, elitist, and despite his somewhat good looking appearance and eloquent speeches entirely wrong for the office. God (if you exist) save Britain!

I want the temperatures to remain in the 50's. I like it now, cool at night, warm during the day.

A british friend sent me a link to an online video service whereby I can watch any British show that is currently playing in Britain for a small fee of about 10 dollars a month. This excites me. I can watch EastEnders again.

I can't pay my loans. I have so many of them. Even with a job, I can't pay them all. And I can't figure out how to lower them because no one service will consolidate all the loans.

I will be in debt for the rest of my life.

I'm looking forward to working in the library again, but I hope it doesn't become too much of my life. I don't want to be consumed with whether all the books have been shelved or patrons complaining about 15 cent fines.

Life is like a mini (or, if you will, a macro) version of hell.

I don't trust doctors. I really like the one I have now but he told me during one appointment that he was going to give me three shots but only told the nurse that I was to get one, which resulted in the nurse not believing me when I related to her that he told me three and her then having to confirm with the doctor before administering the three shots which, in doctor world, meant that I had to wait another 20 minutes in a cold, overly-light, sterile white room staring at fat-intake charts on the wall. He is also my mom and dad's doctor. He tried to convince my mom that she has diabetes, until he realized that he was actually looking at my dad's medical folder. He is young -- about 30 -- doing his rotations and despite the possibility that he could kill me through inattention he is a nice and sympathetic doctor.

I really like tea. Drinking it makes me feel safe, like being covered with a large duvet.

I would like to date a guy who is not married or over the age of 32. British accent is not mandatory but it would certainly add to the illusion.

the 'trick of science'

I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my imagination. It is what it suggests and is the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no service and explain nothing...If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient...Just as inadequate to a pure mechanic would be a poet's account of a steam-engine. If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?
...

We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. Ah, give me pure mind, pure thought! Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law; let me see more clearly a particular instance of it! Much finer themes I aspire to, which will yield no satisfaction to the vulgar mind, not one sentence for them. Perchance it may convince such that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy. Dissolve one nebula, and so destroy the nebular system and hypothesis. Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed.

By perseverance you get two views of the same truth.

Thoreau's simple grave in Concord, Mass.

---
pg 101 - 102, The journal Henry David Thoreau, introduction by John R. Stilgoe

thoreau -- leaves

Even the dry leaves are gregarious, and they collect in little heaps in the hollows in the snow, or even on the plane surfaces, driven in flocks by the wind. How like shrinking maidens wrapping their scarfs about them they flutter along!
pg.107, journals

boring life

it's curious how being away from your usual routine and existence for a day and one night makes you, when you get back home, despise everything that you've always known -- like reading inane facebook messages, or looking at the houses and trees that you've seen outside your window since you were 10. I felt this on an even greatest level after coming home from London in '06 and '08. But then you manage to slip back into your same routine and you don't despise the usual but rather become inured to it or even like it again. I think that people who commit the same routine or live in the same place all their lives must not realize their own potential. And I also think that, when looked at your life objectively by being away from it for some time, everything becomes that's you've known becomes deplorable, because you have been "in it" for so long.