I've painted my nails silver because

Oh, today was a slow day. We had a couple of school tours and they were mostly well behaved, although the chaperones for the first group spent more time talking to each other than watching the kids. I am not your babysitter, people. And why does the spell-checker not like the plural form of chaperone? Wait, it doesn't even like the word in singular form! What's up with that? It keeps trying to correct it to 'chaperon'. Huh, looks like Wikipedia isn't even sure. I suppose I could go grab a print dictionary but I'm far too tired and lazy.

Well, I finished reading The Real Life of Sebastien Knight and can I say, awesome? Yes, I can. I think Nabokov is one of my new favorite authors along with Jane Austen and Batya Gur. Anyway, the whole book is written in first person by the half-brother of the titular character. Knight, who had been a moderately successful author, just died and his brother is trying to write a biography about him. He does this in a sort of looping, dream-like way, interspersed with stories of how he came by certain pieces of information, vignettes of people Knight knew, and passages from the books he wrote. The brother's reminiscences are almost hazy somehow; they are woven into the backdrop created by other people's recollections recounted second-hand. He has his rose-tinted glasses firmly in place during the majority of the book and it's easy at times to get sucked into viewing his brother as nostalgically as he does. We don't get a first-hand account of Knight until near the end of the book and when we do it's a little jarring. Finally we hear about him in someone else's words, someone not caught up in his intimate affairs, rather than getting them filtered through his brother. The ending reinforces the disconnected relationship between the two characters and the feeling that the portrait painted throughout the book has less to do with reality and more to do with a young man who misses his brother.

Now I'm reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne because I wanted an adventure story. Verne's books are filled with a kind of wide-eyed wonder at the natural and man-made phenomena that surrounds us and it's refreshing to read about the excitement that comes from discovery by people who really have a desire to know. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was like that as well. For the main character of Journey, Axel, it's more than just a physical trial; it's obviously a spiritual one as well. It is his own coming-of-age story. Once he's proven his ability to literally go to the depths with his uncle for their science and curiosity, he'll be worthy of marrying the girl he loves. Oh, and he also doesn't want to look like a big coward. That's a large part of why he went as well. Because once your sweetheart has said, "Wow, that sure sounds like fun. I'd totally go if society wasn't constantly telling me that as a woman I have all the endurance of a newborn babe. I bet I'd look wicked in climbing gear." you can't not go. And I bet she would look wicked, too.