Things I Would Write About If I Could

OK. I should have something to say about Emily Gould by now, but I don't. I haven't read her article and I'm not going to read her article. Because life's too short and I've started reading The Radetzky March again, again because I first picked it up in the Fall, and hungry for plot and confused about my own writing, I could appreciate it then but not love it. Now, two days into my reintroduction to the book, I love it and think it's well more important than Ms. Gould. At least to me, and since she was writing about what's important to her I think that my choice not to write about her is appropriate.

I would also blog about politics, if I could, but I can't, since I'm completely checked out from what's happening in the world, other than to note there's a new speaker of the house in Iran, which seems like mildly good news if only because the new speaker, Ali Larijani, is described as a rival to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's a bad guy and apparently a poor steward of the Iranian economy to boot.

Also, I could blog about my brother. When I last saw him, he asked me why I never blogged about him (except to complain about his huge gas guzzling SUV) and I said maybe I would blog about him. How about every Tuesday, I said. Here's what I'd do, I told him. "I'll write a screed about you. I'll call it, 'My brother sucks.'" But, frankly, my brother doesn't suck. Save the car, he's a pretty decent guy. Granted, he's obsessed with gear and cool gadgets, which I don't get. Granted, he doesn't bring his own grocery bags to the supermarket, which I think is poor planning and vaguely rude to the universe. Granted, he prefers to live in place where he can't see his neighbor's yard, which I think is plain weird. But he smokes a good turkey, he's always ready to serve up a good tipple of bourbon, and, he's grown out of the annoying habit he developed at 17 of eating large quantities of cake and ice cream and taunting me, actively, while doing it. It's not that I was so shy about the cake and ice cream back then, it's just that he ate the SUV-style portion of the stuff. Me, I was even then more of a Prius kind of girl. So much for my Tuesday screed. Besides, it's Thursday. Maybe by Tuesday, I'll be a little more caught up in the world.