Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably. More noticeably, Harry Potter 2-4

6 July 2002: perfect

RDC is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, and I suppose for effect I should put the title in Spanish. Cienta annos de solidad is my guess. Anyway. Spanish has all these tenses English doesn't have that make the book read less magically-realistically in the original--more of a suggestion that the carpet flew than a statement of fact, or something like that. He's been quizzing me about English verb tenses, and I can distinguish perfect from imperfect verbs but I goofed on participles. The word "gerund" came up. Where the hell did that word come from, and why is it so ugly?

I just found my earlier write-ups for the Connecticut trip and am blending my two versions. I forgot my father's Stand by Me moment in the second-written, first-posted version of that day. Now I have another one: Chris writing fuck gerunds along the grain of his grammar book. We now return to our originally scheduled Stephen King-less lisa.

Jessie has rebutted my version of the "take a brown one" story. But honestly, in my own head, "Can I have a piece of paper to destroy?" is almost rigorously synonymous with "Can I attempt to fold a paper crane?" She had to finish my crane's head. And didn't even look at her own (not brown) instructional version while she was folding it.