Here is your book, the one your thousands of letters have asked us to publish. It has taken us years to do, checking and rechecking countless recipes to bring you only the best, only the interesting, only the perfect. Now we can say, without the shadow of a doubt, that every single one of these, if you follow the directions to the letter, will work for you exactly as it did for us, even if you have never cooked before.
McCall's Cookbook (1963)
3:04 PM
at my desk, revelling in my newly clean apartment
The above quote is the opening of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1: Fundamental Algorithms, a book I have coveted for years, never able to really believe that I worked enough with the fundamental basics and challenges of coding (though I loved and respected them dearly) to merit the hefty price tag and substantial bookshelf real estate.
But now I am doing things every day that require that beautiful balance of complex and simplified ("These machines have no common sense; they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.") thought, and of course, it is the reason I came back to school in the first place.
It's funny: last night I was considering writing a brooding overcontemplative spew of whether or not my current schooling is really worth its exorbitant tuition immediately after transferring the thousands for this semester's bill.
In fact, I'm thrilled with this semester thus far. I have tremendous regard for all three of the professors I'm studying with, Prof. Siegel regaled us for a brief digression of his experiences with Knuth the other day, I'm just getting my toes wet with my abilities for teaching algorithms, or so I'm trying: I have a feeling that once another week or two have passed that I'll notice, along with the students, that we've been tossed right in the water.
--
And to give a little props to the original meaning to the above quotation, I'll join these lovely Southern ladies in posting my grocery haul for the week, a meme started by this post:
milk
tofu
eggs (from organically fed cage free chickens, dude)
quick biscuit dough, chicken breasts and thighs, and
chicken broth for making chicken and dumplings tonight
orange pineapple juice
blueberries
grapefruit
portobellos
grape tomatoes
green beans
greek yogurt (so delicious, and probably hard to find for
the non-New Yorkers, though as soon as you Atlanta people have
that Trader Joe's nearby, it stocks it: it's a million times
better than the soupy high fructose corn syrup laden yogurt
that's so common. It actually tastes naturally sweet and sour
and tart like yogurt should, and it was the first (immediate)
casualty of this haul: with some of the blueberries and a
little bit of honey.)
a freshdirect hand (dish?) towel they gave me for free,
because I am such a loyal devotée! how could I not be,
when they bring me all this delciousness, mostly straight from
local organic farms, arriving in my kitchen at 11am, and also
serving as my yummy yummy Saturday morning wake-up call?
Total: $42.26
--
Becky, if you see this entry beore I talk to you, how busy are you going to be on Thursday night with work people and NYC smoozing?
--
I'm late to go to the MoMA, I'm going to see an Algerian/French film, and photos and some Manet and I have this fellow's hat that he left at the party and he writes code for their website so he's going to get me and Shirley in for freeeee!
--
3:53 PM
downtown A train
Sometimes a while for the percolation of thoughts is good. Once there is a moment to attempt to purge it all, a moment is suddenly not nearly enough even to expel an unbridled stream of barely conscious recollections, and in the time it takes to record each one, rapidly and without much concern for language and poetry, eighteen more realizations circle one's head, teasing in their obvious knowledge that only a few will be caught, penned, forever immortalized.
And then once you throw words like that at them, they scatter, dash away in fright.
Oh, writing. What a brilliant and infuriating psychoanalyst you are. As self-involved and as painful. Maybe less so the former as the bar is raised. Maybe more so the latter.