I have this watch. It keeps dying, and my parents keep getting it fixed for me. Every time it’s returned, I feel like a cruel slavemaster clutching my hands on the shoulders of a runaway field-hand. I mean, I’m happy…but the poor little watch.

Like a grizzly bear preparing for hibernation, I’ve been gorging myself on literature (of my choosing) over break every minute that I’m not busy mauling tourists or eating pie. Had a second go-round with ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson, then, adequately blinded by technical jargon that might mean something to someone, read ‘The Long Goodbye’ by Masaki Yamada. Significantly less jargon than I expected, and a lot better than one might anticipate from its background. …It’s a novel after the second movie inspired by the manga Ghost in the Shell, translated from Japanese.

The story revolves around the character Batou, and (technically) his search for his dog Gabriel. Really it would be more appropriate to say that it revolves around Batou having an existential crisis, sparked by the loss of his dog, with the result that he blows up some things, some real, some imagined…but I don’t want to argue about word choice. I like Batou and his sarcastic way of life, and I’m a fair fan of the Ghost in the Shell movies, which made it easier to follow his thought patterns. Without that kind of background familiarity, however, I’m afraid the story wouldn’t be a very compelling one. And admittedly, the constant “questioning of his own humanity” line of thought got a bit tedious along the way. I always liked him better than the Major because he didn’t do that sort of thing in the movies. I suppose that after your partner commits a weird sort of forced marriage-suicide with an AI, you get a little critical of technology.

I made a weird historical jump, at that point, from reading about homicidal gynoids to Depression age geisha. ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is nothing at all like Yamada’s work, nor is it particularly like ‘Neuromancer.’ There are no razor blades imbedded under the nails of the ladies in this book, although, if anyone had them it would be Hatsumomo. I’m about halfway through the work now, just at the point where they’re pitting spitting eels against one another for the rights of a particular girl’s cave. …For having so much decorum, I think it would have been less vulgar if the girls had simply said what they meant. But hey, why not ruin snorkeling. At least now I know what I’ll be thinking about if I see a moray in Florida?

Less than a week until I grab a train Southbound. Fretting about it –taking a kayaking class with all Kinesiology majors might not have been the wisest choice for my pre-spinach Popeye type frame. On the upside, I’m told that the tide will carry me to Cuba if I get too tired to keep up. I always wanted to go to Cuba.

On the downside, I forgot my swimsuit.