When I want to laugh

I've been feeling a bit anxious lately, what with my first real world job at a mental hospital starting monday (gasp), and the realization that I really, really suck at math and thus need to study my ass off for the GRE, lest I do badly and not get into grad school. I'm what people call a spiraling thinker. A spiral of pure and utter darkness in which I almost always end up dead or homeless or living in an apartment with nine cats. It's funny how anything from missing the bus to doing badly on a test always ends up this way in my mind. When I'm spiraling this bad, there's only one person that can save me- David Sedaris.

Sedaris seems to be as paranoid sometimes as me, but he has something I lack. Sedaris is funny. I mean really funny. Not the kind of funny that ends just as abruptly as it started. I mean the kind that creeps up on you, that comes after looking at something many of us have seen before, and making a curious and witty remark on it. "When you are engulfed in Flames" is his latest set of essays, mostly centering on gross or unfortunate situations and observations. Upon finishing this book I was still unsure of myself, but I thought, at least I don't have an open sore above my crack, or struggling to get my message across in foreign countries, nor of course, am I engulfed in flames. Thanks for reminding me of that Sedaris.

Our world, made unreal, and then real again

I just finished reading Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, and I must say I'm impressed. Millhauser received the Pulitzer for Martin Dressler but I hadn't heard much else about him. When I ran into this collection of short stories joined by a common theme of obsession, I'd figure I'd give it a shot. Millhauser opens with a cartoon of a cat and mouse chase, a story we are all familiar with. He is able, however, to take the familiar and turn it on his head, using something we know to illuminate something we hadn't thought of before. The book is divided into three parts: Vanishing Acts (tales of our obsession with lost things and people), Impossible Architectures (which is about our obsession with the fantastic and unreachable), and Heretical histories (which presents our obsession with forms of the past). His stories seamlessly weave together elements of magical realism, in which worlds can exist where people literally die from laughter and build towers to heaven, with the truth that lies in our world, which can only be presented through the use of impossible images. While Millhauser sometimes suffers from telling too much and not showing enough, he makes up for it through his control of language, in which he is able to pull us back and drive us in again. In the end I was left wondering which world was more true, the one Millhauser created for us, or the one we blindly walk through everyday. It's a great read, and I recommend it.