February's End

A list of very slightly inconvenient things to happen to me right before our engagement pictures which are only mildly important:

- I have insomnia for like 5 nights straight which makes me look super beat.
- I break out in various places of my face due to lack of sleep and PMS hormone surge.
- I gain 2 lbs in a week. The first time I've gained ANY weight since I lost weight like 6 months ago.
- I get a haircut and for the first time in a long while I get a haircut that I actually really dislike and feel like I can't work with or hide.

So, basically, my body has conspired against me to give me dark circles beneath my eyes, ugly hair, huge zits, and looking as chubby as ever.

I hope these pictures die and go to hell.
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All the Names by Jose Saramago

If any of you were planning on reading it, I'm gonna go ahead and spoil it for you:

In the end, the registrar is in on the madness, he doesn't get fired, and the woman is dead.

I think it was somehow about the way the lives of the dead interweave through the lives of the living and we can't separate them out. Maybe it was about how life lives on long after death. (More so if someone fusses with all the records and erases the date of your death and no one is ever there to correct them).

I want to know what happened with the ground floor apartment lady. I want to know what his journey back into the darkness really meant. I want to know why or when or how the registrar came to love her too.

I found the book relatively difficult to read because all of the sentences are VERY long. Sometimes an entire page length long. Each sentence is about so many things you forget what happened at the beginning of it, and I constantly had to re-read entire sections to understand what was even going on! I don't know if this was a style adopted by the writer or if it was just the way it was translated.

I think I could spend a lot more time post-read contemplating the various parts of this book. In fact, weeks from now it may still be edging it's way into my thoughts.

But I really have no time for that. I'm onto my next book! If I can finish it by the end of this week then I will caught up with my goal.

What next? A book by another Portuguese writer: The Implacable Order of Things by Jose Juis Peixoto.