Today is my last work day for three weeks. Though the weather is still pretty awful, I'm looking forward to resting, relaxing, and generally pissing away my time in pleasantly unproductive ways. Here's to time away.

I finished Kingsley Amis' book The Old Devils yesterday. It was a bleakly funny, surprisingly deep look into aging and living in general. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it was a nearly complete lack of positive adjectives. Anything remotely positive was denoted along the lines of "not entirely awful" or something like that. I naturally tend towards thoughts and expressions of that sort, ignoring beauty abundant seeing instead the awful and not quite awful. In stark contrast to this, I watched John Waters' movie Pecker last night. I laughed and laughed. Not only was it fun to see Baltimore in my Helsinki living room, it was fun to see someone poking fun of Art. Pecker was right, though. Beauty is all around us.