i finished harry potter

Because people who give spoilers are basically on par with violent felons, I'll refrain on saying anything about it, period.

Other than that, things have been going all right here, I suppose. Mom, Dad and Linc are all pretty busy, but I'm still waiting for word from Sparks and Jack is sick still from El Salvador, so he and I have been chilling at home. I emailed our landlord today and applied for a couple of work-study jobs in Ann Arbor for this coming year. However I'm still not sure what to do about spending money; SAT tutoring came to mind today as I searched CraigsList.

Judy and I went out for coffee tonight. It was nice to catch up, and also to drive around a little bit, as cumbersome and useless as the car is at the distances I was traveling (my house-Mayorga-downtown Silver Spring). She seems to be making the most of her summer, working at a nonprofit in DC and biking and although Bethesda is suffocating her, she's getting along fine. Talking about being abroad is nice in general--lord knows I've learned enough things and had enough unusual experiences to fill at least one decent conversation with anyone--despite the fact that it brings my mind to Vale and Rodrigo and Cecilia and the other people I miss and the people I missed the chance to get to know enough to miss. And Vale. But talking to someone who has been abroad recently is so much easier because the shared experience, although we may have gone to such different places, is very powerful.

Dad, Linc and I went to Deb's on Monday night. It was kind of boring and not very fulfilling, which is an unusual experience there. But really there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of tension in the house right now. Stress, to be sure, but we're not taking it out on each other. In other news, I've fallen back into my old practice of reading eight hundred books at the same time; right now they include: Super Fiction, Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme, Cotidianas by Mario Benedetti, Harry Potter (which I obviously just finished, but like 20 minutes ago, so it counts), and Ficciones, plus the usual New Yorker, Outlook, New York Review articles. I've been laying off the blogs, though. It's interesting, when I was in Chile they provided an intellectual link with the day-to-day issues that I care about at home and I drank them in effortlessly and eagerly. But now that I'm here they remind me mostly of sitting next to Vale in her apartment in Santiago de Chile, of how strange it was to be keeping in touch with the goings-on up here through the opinions of other people rather than just by simply being at home.

Anyhow I've got to rise and shine tomorrow, to await word from Sparks and then go to the dentist at 10:15. Hope I've got a car, walking there would suck shit through a wet paper straw, as a certain recent houseguest might say (although he was talking about the Yale University bureaucracy). One last note before I conk out: WHEN IS IT GOING TO FREAKING THUNDERSTORM!?!?!??!!? I feel ripped off.