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right, okay, so today's book report is about someone who will love you in all your damaged glory, by raphael bob-waksberg, known to most people as the guy who created bojack horseman. i care absolutely 0% about bojack horseman (i don't really watch cartoons) but the title of this short story collection just... insert that lil nas x song here. i felt a bit read, okay?

the thing about the short stories in this is that they're all a little bit welcome to night vale. one of my favourites is about planning a wedding, but you have to, like, sacrifice goats and buy a symbolic metal egg, instead of the fucked up wedding stuff that we do in our own universe. there's one where two people on the subway so desperately want the other person to say something that they sit on the subway for SIXTY YEARS. there's one where a theme park mascot is genetically engineered out of ten dead presidents and is incapable of speaking in anything but gibberish and the costume designer for the theme park falls in love with it. sometimes this works for me, and sometimes it really doesn't. 

i loved the wedding one because, not sure if i've mentioned this online, i'm currently SURROUNDED by wedding talk. the only high school friend i had just got married. three, yes three, of my coworkers are currently engaged and their weddings are literally all we talk about at lunchtime. and as someone who is single (despite my repeated attempts to qualify the situation as "it's complicated", at the end of the day, i Am Single) and having a biological clock moment at 24, like, it's kind of fucking depressing to hear about it, because i'm never going to get to have what they have. you know? so on the one hand it's hysterical to read about these people arguing over the correct number of goats to slaughter, but it does also genuinely feel nice when these people have the "listen, this situation is making us hate each other but i want you to be happy on this day because i Love You" conversation. 

i also liked the one about the quote-unquote serial monogamist who sees the ghosts of the people she's been with all over new york city. in a metaphorical way, this story was not particularly Night Vale. because i get that! part of me can't look at the roller rink at city hall without remembering going ice skating there with my ex on one of our first ever real dates. there's a used bookstore that's always going to contain the third date i went on with the last person i went out with because we spent so long poring over the antique books section. it's romantic and it's awful all at the same time. 

then there was "short stories", "rules for taboo", and "lies we told each other", which all illustrate a relationship without going too deep into it in ways i thought were sort of clever. broad sketches and the like. 

and there were other ones i liked and a few that i REALLY DIDN'T (the dead presidents one just weirded me out beyond belief if i'm honest) but overall it was an enjoyable experience reading it and one of those books that made me feel Extremely Twentysomething on the subway. not intellectual in the same way that devil in the white city made me look, and also why am i even thinking about these things, but like, a caricature of the Mid Twenties Single Zillenial Commuter. 

cause it's like, on Tuesday I had a monumentally bad day, for reasons that i'm not going to go into because we'd be here all day, but by the end of the night i was exhausted and i wanted to Go Home and desperately desperately wanted to have someone (and if i was imagining a specific someone, What About It, i had a whole other three sentences here and then got paranoid about "what if this person ever finds my DW someday and reads this post and thinks it was creepy that i thought this when we weren't even dating") who would pick me up from the train station and let me stay over and hold me after i got done crying in the shower about the bad news i received and the extremely stressful experience we had driving home and just... i didn't want to have to sleep alone. that's the thing, to this day, that really messes me up. is the sleeping alone. i don't know. so i lay alone in my queen size bed with my stuffed animals and Imagined enough to calm myself down and go to sleep. 

damn this was supposed to be a sort of funny sort of incoherent post about books, like usual, and then i got really intimate. oh well. nobody reads these

several of the older men i know (my boss' boss, my dad, my grandfather) were supremely impressed with me for reading erik larsen's the devil in the white city, which simultaneously tells the story of the chief architect behind the chicago world's fair and hh holmes, the serial killer operating in chicago at that time. this is a Book For Dads tm. i was not all that into it. the tone is a little weird because larsen is, at points, reconstructing dialogue and conjecturing about events in a tone that... kind of implies that the book is a fictional thriller? like there was a massive cognitive dissonance for me between knowing that these were real events and also knowing that larsen was just making some of this shit up. it was weird and i didn't like it. not that i had anything against the style really -- like, i love love LOVE procedural television so i can appreciate a thriller even if it's not what i usually read. but something about this one just didn't jive with me. (even if i did feel Smart and Intellectual reading it on the subway.) 

speaking of things bedeviling the city can we talk about how i woke up this morning and found out the aqi had been in the 200s overnight because of a fire the next state over?? after i stayed out late in the park with friends and walked... brb checking google maps... 2.5 miles (holy shit? was it really that far?) home for funsies and then slept with my FUCKING WINDOW OPEN because i still haven't put in my window unit because itll go from 89f one day to 70 the next. i really need to suck it up and buy an air purifier for my bedroom or something because god damn. i hate living through historical events