Daily Routine

I did not really accomplish my goals that well today, although I made some progress. Today's schedule: got up at 10, ate cheerios, went to the gym, came home. B then made lunch (fried potatoes and onions, with eggs, as there was very little food in the house: it was really good. He is an excellent cook.) and then rested his back in bed while playing a computer game while I went grocery shopping. Next I drove B to the Unurban coffeehouse. I do not like it, because it always seems dirty, like the surfaces are all coated in a thin layer of old grime. Also, it attracts an odd crowd of amateur singers/comedians/performers who have not made it and are not likely to do so. I know that they probably just do their art as a hobby and this gives them a lot of satisfaction, but I still imagine them as failed wannabe stars, coming to LA to succeed in the entertainment business and ending up in the grimy coffeehouse instead. Therefore the Unurban always makes me a little depressed. B likes it for some reason though. I went home and tried to apply for jobs, but spent most of the time puttering on the internet instead (though got a little bit done).

Later the Unurban got too noisy with all the failed performers, and I had finished with the job stuff for the time being, so I went and picked up B and we proceeded to the nearest Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, aka the Miserable Hut. It is a little cheaply-built construction located in the middle of a parking lot with very limited indoor seating. Nevertheless it is always crowded because 1. it has parking (this is crucial in LA) and 2. there is nowhere else in the neighborhood to go, yet many students live here. The Miserable Hut is really a good illustration of many of the things that are wrong with LA: the need to drive everywhere (and thus the need for parking), the horrible traffic (and thus staying in the neighborhood), the ugliness.

I finished a book of Bunin's short stories there. The last book of his stories I really enjoyed, and thought that he outranked Turgenev, but this time I was bored and underwhelmed. They seemed repetitive and somehow escapist, like he was avoiding all real issues to hide in an imaginary past. I also finished a book by an Indian governmental official stationed in the Andaman Islands in the 1960s (sort of a random choice but the Andaman Islands intrigue me: one of the islands is still populated by "wild people" and has never been landed on by any outsider). They sounded like an expensive and troublesome property to govern due to the remoteness and lack of resources. Everything had to be imported except coconuts, and as the islands could only be accessed by ship for part of the year due to the annual monsoons, this was not at all convenient. One of the tribal groups, the Jarawa, was completely hostile to all outsiders and killed them on sight whenever this was feasible. To deal with this, the Indian government had cordoned off certain areas, guarded with border police, and just left the Jarawa to their own devices within the areas (the Jarawa could leave if they wanted to peaceably interact, the cordoning was for the safety of the rest of the population). From an American context, this decision seems really strange. But as there is still the unexplored island, I suppose the policy works well enough.

Tomorrow we will not be going to the gym (day off). Maybe we will go to the library instead (I am almost out of books!).