I just read The Stranger, by Albert Camus.

I'm not sure what to think yet, though it certainly is something that I'm glad to have read in the context of other things I have read. I'm really not sure. I'm not sure of much these days. I feel like while I was reading it I thought of Murakami's protagonists, caught up in a society that pushes them along a path, ending up in strange places but never really feeling like they'd made a decision.

I'm at a stage right now where I'm simply reading and absorbing a lot, and my brain is processing it on a level that isn't connected with language or decision making but is important nonetheless. The things I'm most looking forward to reading are more short fiction, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Beckett, Hesse, among others. If anything, I've only read longer works by any of these people, and I think about how I never really appreciated Kafka until I read his short parables, most much smaller than a page.

It seems some people really understand things, but I'm not one of them. I guess math, to me, is concrete, but only because I'm not smart enough to see where it starts to become fluid and ethereal.


unrelated journal entry

Laundry is a slight mystery to me. The exact workings of it vary, but there are times where I will pile clothes in a corner until at some late night moment they are suddenly clean and I will fold them neatly and sort them into a drawer.

I find showers to be a simple joy in life and take a certain pleasure out of washing my hair or having a few minute sit on the shower floor. Sometimes I will shower multiple times in a day. This is probably wasteful, but I admit to having many flaws.

At the least, I am probably a being of complicated smells.