july 1st

today i finished the manga "monster" by naoki urasawa. it is absolutely riveting. i couldn't put it down for the last week or so. at first i was able to read about one volume a day, but yesterday and today i went through four or five. and for a little while in the afternoon i was lost between reality and some strange mix of international espionage, murder mysteries, child psychology, and tidbits of moral lessons about family and normality. and for a while i couldnt distinguish between la jolla, ca, and frankfurt, dusseldorf, and other eastern european cities.

and then i was reading some articles about basic science questions and was once again shocked at the incompetence of basic american science knowledge. which means, i realized my own knowledge was sufficently deficient that i needed badly to get to a library, pronto. that's how i rediscovered the "public library", and got a library card to the san diego public library system.

at the la jolla library, i searched for the fundamentals. a post-mtv, blog generation internet addict like me has less of an attention span than a high schooler, so i decided the best way to approach my reeducation would be to search the children's section for science fundamentals books. and that's what i got...the thinner, more pictures available, rudimentary explainations, the better. of course i threw in a few history/social science books (the atlas of our presidents and their times!) and i wanted a book about all of america's wars, but they were only available at the downtown library.

so now i have my summer reading. i ended up reabsorbing some basic physics over a glass of whiskey at the pool. i'm hoping that between manga and science, i can eventually become a great doctor like monster's kenzo tenma. the moral of this story is: find the library. turn off that computer.