I was going to try and write an in-depth review of a book I just finished, but realized I didn’t want to about two minutes into my first paragraph. I deleted the words in hurried keystrokes, backtracking until the text box was blank. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book; it is this: I have an awful memory, an obscenely limited vocabulary to express how I actually feel about the book, and I know I wouldn’t do the text justice. OK, so I realize I should have said the title decades ago: Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I picked it up from Brookline Booksmith on a whim (I had read Running with Scissors and thought it was slightly fantastic). It’s about Burroughs’ struggle with alcoholism and the impending death of his close friend, Pighead. He takes you with him to Group therapy and AA meetings, into crackhead apartments and seedy bars. It hit close to home, as the cliché goes, but only because I know a recovering alcoholic. For the first time, I could actually get it, you know? What she went through. The constant internal struggles and the consistent realizations that she might lose everything, but she’s just so damn comfortable this way. The story is great so I’d recommend it to anyone (which is why I deemed it worth mentioning in the first place even though I didn’t go into much more detail).
Besides the reading, everything else is pretty great, too. I enjoy my internship (I’m a publicity intern at Da Capo) and I’m lazing away the first half of my summer. I wake up early and I come home at five or six. I watch television with my roommate; I eat pasta, then Oreos; and I dye my hair red just because I can. This is my hurricane eye. These are the days I can rest before the stressful takes me and tugs on my hair and tells me nothing is really OK. I know what is coming at the second half of my summer. Summer classes. Grades. A trip to California that may surprise me in the worst ways. But it excites me, too. The thrill of the unexpected. My heart beats rapidly in my chest just thinking about it.
Oh snap.