extremey slow & incredibly tired

i am reading slowly. very slowly. partially, because i want to be reading slowly. i avoided reading jonathan safran foer's book extremely loud & incredibly close because of the post-9/11 content. what american girl in her right mind wants anything fashioned with 9/11 drama in mind? it just brings to mind all the impossibly bad poetry read at memorials and funerals.

i like him and the further i get into the second novel i've read of his (everything is illuminated) the more he crawls up my ladder of favourite writers. he is maybe-possibly hugging the ankles of steve erickson. and i am reading it slowly, because i enjoy how it swings between something like:

She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spend an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn't it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doiley...None of it moved her. She addreessed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in thingness.

...and something like the second narrator (a self-obsessed ukranian translator with blue & replendant eyes, who makes a tramp of a thesarus in every way possible) fighting with the narrator about why shouldn't he say "I dig negroes"?

if there's anything i hate more than not being able to read as often as i like, i don't know what it is. i try before i sleep, but that usually winds up with me slipping off into some dream where i am still reading the book. of course i wake up and have to backtrack in the actual book to distinguish what i actually read and what i actually dreamed. sometimes this is disappointing...


other things keeping me from reading:
1. packaging design
2. information design
3. public design
4. sleeping
5. redesigning my personal website (here) -for when i take over and change the domain- and business cards (no you may not see yet)
6. advertising
7. making tacos
8. taco design