I'm sitting in my hotel room at the Omni in Austin, Texas, ordering room service, drinking from the mini bar, and watching the silly romantic movie, Dan in Real Life.   My roomie, emmascully, arrives tomorrow.  Tonight I'm helping with Frrvrr stuff, and being unpredictably anti-social (I'm blaming my lingering cough, even though I'm drinking wine), but SXSW starts officially tomorrow.  I'm not getting old, I'm not slowly dying like David Shields keeps telling me, I'm just indulging whims.

I'm reading The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead by my most hated college professor, David Shields (well, after Tim Dean and whoever that teacher lele and I had for comparative history of literature class that we presented a group project on Basquiat in) (did Lele just get married?), and actually loving it.  Well, not loving it in the normal sense, but being fascinated by it in the slightly awkward sense.  The book is pretty much a meditation on aging and death, and employs all the lessons of micro-fiction that he pounded into my head over 10 years ago.  A truncated encyclopedia of how each part of our bodies and minds ago.  At some points, I feel uncomfortable reading it, as if I'm not entirely willing to think about aging and such... especially as 30 is pretty much the the tipping point at which all the ripening ends and the rotting begins.  I keep telling myself that I'm lucky to have slowly aging Japanese genes (they have the longest lifespans in the world) but then again pretty much everyone thinks they're immune to these morbid things.  At least, until we're old.

At the same time, I'm reading Please Kill Me which is an amazing book about the evolution of the punk scene and I guess about the indestructibility of youth.  At least, until it's not indestructible again.  It's definitely a good companion to the above book.

And then I'm also reading Moby Dick.  Ahoy.  Yee haw.