Let's begin with the rain. When I woke at 8, the crack in the curtains was letting in a particular shade of deep blue light reserved for overcast, pre-dawn mornings, the rain was coming down, and the wind was picking up. I hit the snooze button and rolled over.
The Creative Writing class had been told to expect the results of our semester hand-in on Friday by 5, but sadly, I was informed at 5 that mine might not come today.
It didn't.
That didn't stop me from checking my inboxes compulsively all day long, which at least gave me a respite from the second half of The Satanic Verses. The book's excellent (too bad about the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death), but it's 547 pages long, and I didn't want to spend the weekend with it. Struck me as strange to be reading a book that's still banned in some countries almost 20 years after publication. Granted, I can see where certain passages might be construed as blasphemous, but no more so than, say, the entirety of Dogma, or that scene at the end of one of the Vampire Chronicles where Lestat meets Jesus. Fatwa or no, Rushdie writes quality fiction.
The bright spot of the day was making (thanks to About.com) a halfway decent shrimp fried rice. The plusses? More shrimp than I'd get anywhere else, no scallions or sprouts, no soy sauce in those ridiculous packets, and significantly less fat (I used a Pam-like spray instead of butter or oil). The minuses? Scrubbing the pan when I was finished, egg that likes to stick to the pan, wrong kind of rice (all long grain or basmati at Tesco, curse them), and a slightly higher price tag than takeout (with student discount, Karen Wong's is £4.95, but I paid at least £3.50 for the shrimp and £1.50 for the rice packet. At least I had eggs and soy sauce on hand). Oh well, I'm learning, and I would have had shrimp left over if they hadn't been stinking up the fridge. I already pop popcorn in there, so I'm not going to subject the rest of the floor to odoriferous seafood.
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