Long Story Short ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help! I have this book, a blank book, and on the cover it reads 'Friendship'. It also has a blurry, mosaic picture of people on balconies, wine bottles, waving streamers. I got it from my friend Chris on my 20th birthday. It was a nod to my love for journaling and an acknowledgement that he knew me well, even though I had spurned his affections for the entirety of college. The book has no lines on its pages, and for that reason I never used it to write journal entries. Instead I used it to record quotes from books that I read and loved. For most of my literate life I have read books with a pen in one hand, ready and waiting for the line that blows me away. Having a place to compile random quotes that I love was wonderful. The first quote in the book is from a book I read in 2000, "Waiting in Vain" by Colin Channer: "As I-nelik once told a woman who was threatening to leave him for a Mr. Body, 'With four months and a personal trainer I could be him. But how long', he asked her,'would it take him to be me?'" The book has ticket stubs from concerts I attended: Ani Difranco at the Saenger Theater, Beenie Man at the New Orleans House of Blues, Barenaked Ladies at the UNO Lakefront Arena, and the Louisiana Heritage Fair. Also, somewhat ironically now, the Southern Comfort Hurricane Festival on September 22, 2001. In my first apartment in Massachusetts, a space I could truly call my own, I would write out my favorite quotes from the book on looseleaf with a black marker and tack them to my living room wall. "Be happy for this moment...this moment is your life." "There is no such thing as a mistake. There is what you do and what you don't do." Both of these, from the movie 'Unfaithful', spent some quality time on my wall. As did, "Then he started magnifying everything, which is a big mistake because if you think too hard about anything it's bound to take the fun out of it" from 'Barrel Fever' by David Sedaris. The last quote in the book is from Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections", which I read sometime in 2003 or 2004; "She wanted above all to be a private person, an independent individual. She didn't want to belong to any group, let alone a group with bad haircuts and strange resentful clothing issues. She didn't want a label, she didn't want a lifestyle..." I feel sad that there are no more quotes in the book - two years worth of empty pages. I have made this request before with little success but here we go again: tell me your favorite books. Recommend something fun, inspirational, quote-worthy, or just Goddamn Worth Reading. I need to feel up some blank spaces. 11:36 p.m. - 2006-06-15 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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