And from the other side:

It was all the more delicious for the effort. It’s great being home at Christmas, when food just keeps reappearing in the kitchen no matter how much you play with it.

I was struck immediately by the richness of language. Despite the fact that the music being played at the Starbucks I was reading it in clashed completely with the warm prose I was lost in it. It is obvious that this is a carefully crafted story. Not only do the main characters experience a non-linear timeline, the reader is introduced to their story in a different but still non-linear timeline. That any of this makes sense is astounding in itself. The only part I’m hesitant about so far is that the preliminaries pointing at the actual mechanism which will make the time travel premise possible are much more in the vein of hard sci-fi rather than the mystic sense we have so far, but I’m hoping this will play out in a way that fits well with the rest of the content.

I was particular enamored by a couple of the first scenes where the wife’s time traveler, Henry, meets himself at an earlier age. I am so used to depictions of a child’s wonderment being a setup for a fall that reading this particular episode in Henry’s life made me fall in love with him. Then not much later, in a different time and different pairing of ages, Niffenegger just as easily brings up every bit of loneliness I’ve ever felt right there in one page.

Maybe this is because I’ve always been fascinated by the idea not just of time travel but of visiting oneself in another time. I wonder quite regularly what my past self might have thought if he caught a glipse of what I was seeing at that moment. I remember reading a novel years ago that saw a boy get the ability to travel through time not entirely unlike this book. I wish now I could remember what it was called. Then of course there is Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which deals very explicitly with what might happen if we all saw a few moments of our own futures.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is already a very different creature from both of these. I only worry that I will read it too quickly and this so far enthralling story will be over too soon.

With the completion of the Tractatus Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy and he abandoned his studies, working as a schoolteacher, a gardener at a monastery, and as an architect, along with Paul Engelmann, on his sister’s new house in Vienna.

— “Ludwig Wittgenstein“, Wikipedia, Retrieved July 6, 2009.

I’ve heard people say that Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Now I know why. If I end up going into philosophy, this is what I want my career summary to be too. Publish one book, solve all the problems in the field, and then do some gardening.

Sure, Wittgenstein did come back to philosophy later and renounced much of his previous work, but for a while there he really knew what he was doing.

How cool is that? 1965 cool.

Yum.

I know a university campus can be a bit of an ivory tower, but this is just a little presumptuous, don’t you think?

In the dinning hall there’s a simple bug-zapper, and on this zapper, in big strong letters is, presumably, the brand: PEST-O-FLASH.

Immediately in my head I removed the first hyphen and pictured The Pesto-Flash, some kind of superhero who derives his super powers from Italian sauces.

Scratch that! A supervillain, who’s modus operandi is to use his super speed powers to add pesto to everybody’s food before they have a chance to eat it. For what purpose he might do this we can only guess, and would not doubt be one of the mysteries which keep us entertained. Perhaps it is to make everybody realise how great pesto is, driving up demand, this ensuring huge profits for pesto importers, of which he is naturally an investor. Or maybe his goal is to ruin everybody’s appetite from eating so much pesto, nothing but pesto, and helpless to avoid the pesto, that the world plunges into famine, until he (under a different guise, of course) is hailed as a hero for devising a way to eat without The Pesto-Flash tarnishing their foodstuffs, by which he becomes famous and wealthy and loved by all.

In any case, no doubt his arch nemesis (our hero) would be The Kelvinator, who would combat The Pesto-Flash by freezing his basil based weapons, ruining their flavour and rendering him completely impotent.

This is what two weeks of a vegetarian diet does to a person—they start imagining elaborate ways to rid the world of evil plant foods.

Apparently I was behind on my vaccinations. Combine that with all the extra goods required for going to rural areas in tropical countries, and I have lots of drugs to take. Something in today’s batch didn’t quite agree with me…

After my shots they told me to sit in the waiting room for 20 minutes before leaving. For about five minutes I’m fine, save for a warm arm. Then I start to feel a little light headed. Within seconds I’m sweating more than after a 2k erg test. I rest my head in my hands and take some deep breaths but I’m not feeling any better. Then I look up briefly, and across the room there’s a girl about my age staring at me looking more horrified and worried than anybody has ever been in the history of mankind.

Thankfully she asked if I was okay and went to get a nurse. “He’s breathing and sweating,” I heard her say from the other room. There was a bit of drama afterward, like me almost collapsing and needing a little lie-down in the hallway, but later when I was more or less recovered all I could think about was that look on her face, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s not even funny, but still I smiled.

It was all quite minor in the end, plus they gave me a lollipop afterward. No reason not to smile right?

(P.S. My malaria pills might give me vivid nightmares. Awesome.)

Also check out episodes two and three. “Is that Jesus? He’s off the hook!”

Me: “What’s for supper?”
Mom: “Um… a chicken thing.”
Me: “What kind of chicken?”
Mom: “A chicken… recipe.”

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