“So, where are you guys from?”

“He’s from here,” I said, “and I’m from Jersey.”

“Jersey, huh? 201, 551, 609, 732, 848, 856, 862, 908, 973.”

“What about the new ones? There’s 856…” My mom’s area code since she moved is 856.

“856, replaced 609.”

Close enough.

“And where are you from?” he asked Dan.

“Newton.”

“The Garden City.”

I was getting into this. “And I’m from the Garden State.”

“That’s right,” said the cab driver. “Exit four, NJTP.”

“Exit three,” I corrected, but I was wrong — it is exit four.

“You from Cherry Hill?”

“Close to that.”

“I requested four Beatles songs on this station,” he said, “but none of them have come up yet.”

“Which songs?” Dan asked.

“Rain, I’m Only Sleeping, I Am the Walrus and Run For Your Life. Do you know any of those songs?”

“Yeah,” Dan said.

“Rain, 3:02, I’m Only Sleeping 3:01, I Am the Walrus 4:37, Run For Your Life 2:18. What was the first Beatles song over three minutes?”

“Tomorrow Never Knows,” Dan guessed.

“Ticket To Ride,” he said. “3:12.”

The fare came to 6.50, but I gave him 10.00.

I am going to be preparing a vegan meal, so I am turning to the cookbook I own which contains a lot of complex and interesting vegan meals: The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, by Peter Berley.

The recipes are all excellent, but some of his advice is kind of dubious. He recommends “real, unrefined, coarse gray Celtic sea salt” which contains “the eighty-four mineral elements originally in the ocean” because these elements “harmonize with the human body’s own fluids.”

Conscientious cooks may also want to note the following sidebar:

The next time you drain water from a sink, notice the direction it flows — this will tell you what the natural force of the water is where you live. Water spirals in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. I like to maintain this harmony by stirring foods steadily in the natural direction.

Uh, okay.

Monday night’s driver is from Pakistan

You see that car there? That is police. I know because I am waiting behind him, and he is not moving so I honk the horn. He pulls me over, shines light into my face and says, “Show me your license.” I say, “How do I know you are police, you do not have a uniform?” He shows me badge like this, straight away, in my face. I say, “OK, I see you are police, what is the problem?” He says I cannot honk at police and I should look it up in the book. I say, “OK, I will look it up in the book.” He says OK and he will let me go this time, but next time it is two hundred dollar fine or remove my license! And then I look it up in the book and there it is, 213e paragraph three. No, I did not mind, it is OK, because back in my country… I am from Pakistan. Back in my country, everyone honks the horn, oh my goodness. You should be hearing it. Everyone — trucks, cars, busses, horse buggies, donkey buggies, motorbikes, bicycles. And everyone needs own horn to be heard — ooh ooh ooh or eee-aw eee-aw, oh my goodness you should hear it. That is why this country is great, because there is law and no one can honk the horn unless there is good reason.

Tuesday Night’s Driver is from Haiti

This is terrible, the North Koreans. They fire missiles over Sea of Japan, you know. Terrible thing. Everyone is angry. It is World War Three, I know. World War Three. It is so unfair. It is terrible that a few men decide everything for the whole world.

Trendy was sunning himself on the windowsill when a strange object in front of him caught his attention. He tilted his head to look more closely at it and then gently licked it. He paused and licked it again. The object leapt up into the air and smacked him in the eye. It was his own tail.

I chained my bicycle in front of a crowded bar with an open patio and then went shopping at Trader Joe’s. I came out with over thirty pounds of groceries which I crammed into my courier bag and two panniers. I felt pretty good about myself, ready to bear a week’s worth of organic provisions under my own power. When I unlocked the bike from its post, the rear instantly fell over, jamming the greasy chainring into my shin — the whole bicycle having been overweighted with self-righteousness and soy.

I got Reading Lolita in Tehran for Christmas and it was a great book, but it made me feel like kind of a jerk. There are people literally dying to read works of literature that most of us have, at best, fond memories of bullshitting our way through class pretending to have read. In addition to all the other books I’ll read this year, I decided to pile on some classics of English literature that I hadn’t read before or seen movie adaptations of. After some research and consultation, I came up with this list:

1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
3. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
4. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
5. George Eliot, Middlemarch
6. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
7. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
8. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
9. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
10. Jane Austen, Persuasion
11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
12. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

I’m going to read all twelve in 2005, although not necessarily one per month.

What’s been more interesting than the project is the vehemence of some responses from friends. There’s still a lot of hostility floating around these books that I suppose is tied up with their exaulted position in the literary canon and some hazy memories of dreadfully dull English classes. I’m hoping that I’ll find it a different experience to read them without a grade at stake, but in all likelihood my friends will be right, and this will turn out to be really boring.

You know how boats always have whimsical names, like Anchor Management or Run Aground Sue or Sea Me Go?

This morning in the channel there was a rotted old tugboat towing a barge full of decaying machine parts, and the name of the boat was Children of the Corn.

Don’t mess with that.

Yesterday the wind blew my glasses off my face and into the street. A co-worker had to run out into traffic to retrieve them because I couldn’t even see the cars.

1. Basic Psychic Development
2. Kitchen Witchery
3. Beginner’s Guide to Mediumship
4. Egyptian Power Stamps
5. Reconnecting the Love Energy
6. Gay Witchcraft
7. Retire Your Family Karma
8. The Psychic Self-Defense Personal Training Manual
9. To Live with the Fairy Folk
10. Attacked by Poison Ivy
11. Magick
12. Your Guardian Angel and You

After I finished the novel, I was relieved to discover that nearly everyone, including Henry James, thinks the first third of the book is entirely too long and slow. And this is by the standard of other 19th century novels. Events do happen, and rapidly once they’re underway, and it’s no surprise that the 1996 film version compresses the first 300 pages into 20 minutes and the remainder of the book is covered more or less faithfully.

By the end of the book I thought I understood Isabel Archer’s character thoroughly, but I’ve been surprised to find readers who view her as an innocent and a hero. Certainly, there’s a lot for a 21st century female reader to admire: Isabel states that she may never marry, that she wants to spend her youth travelling and experiencing the world. I suppose these readers view her ultimate marriage to Gilbert Osmond as simply a fateful mistake borne out of her trusting nature. Instead I saw it as an inevitable consequence of her pride and her stubborn desire to subvert the wishes of the people who care about her.

Isabel does get to travel the world, but it’s an experience so uninspiring that it’s completely elided in the novel (the movie depicts it, bizarrely, in the style of a silent film). I read this episode as illustrating two points. In the 19th century, even a wealthy and unattached woman did not have much opportunity to actually do anything engaging — she can be at best merely a spectator. As Isabel’s “friend” Madame Merle remarks, “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl.” Beyond that, Isabel’s fault is that simply moving about in the world does not satisfy her. From the moment the book opens, she is flattered or proposed to by an astonishing number of men, and her response upon returning from this empty journey is to rush to the one person for whom none of her friends are advocating. She is self-centered and willful at heart, but charming and intelligent on the surface.

The movie makes some questionable changes to the story’s chronology. Readers are uncertain about Osmond’s motives until well after the marriage; in the film, well, he’s played by John Malkovich with the sneer factor cranked way up. While I’m on the subject of casting, I was disappointed to find Martin Donovan to be both sickly and mustached. Christian Bale is about 15 years old. Aragorn does get to make out with Nicole Kidman but his lack of scraggly beard and her 19th century beehive hairdo do not flatter either one of them.

I was a little baffled by Kidman’s Isabel jumping into bed with her dying cousin and making out with him, and then shortly after his funeral getting it on with Aragorn. The film also changes the ending from definitively tragic to ambiguous and hopeful. I was predictably enraged, but overall it’s not bad.

Next: Roman Polanski. The movie Tess does not star anyone from The Lord of Rings, and while it features both “Peter Firth” and “John Collin,” Colin Firth is disappointingly absent. I’ve already finished the novel and am plowing through Middlemarch.

The place having been rather hastily prepared for them they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.

“Which are my fingers and which are yours?” he said, looking up. “They are very much mixed.”

“They are all yours,” said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer than she was.

It’s a miracle that once women could bear arms and drive cars that they didn’t just open fire indiscriminately and then get the hell out of Dodge. It’s surprising because subjected peoples have historically undertaken some pretty violent retributions for past injustices. Western women’s transition from chattel to equal partner occurred with virtually no bloodshed, and even now women’s rights focus exclusively on issues relevant today, whereas hand-wringing over America’s slave-owning past or Germany’s Nazi one is still a going concern. In sheer numbers over the centuries, surely females have suffered at the hands of males more than any ethnic group under any other.

Nobody in this country is happy about about the way countries like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria treat their women, but their abuses have never provoked the kind of mobilized outrage that, say, apartheid did. In the United States I could write some of that off as trickle-down from U.S. oil policy and an unhealthy reverence for religious beliefs of any stripe, but I don’t see regular marches in the streets of Toronto about it either. We seem to regard women’s subjugation as just an unfortunate but natural primitivism, like weather gods or royal families.

The thing is, I love men. Men are awesome. Not only are they appealingly hairy and bumpy in all the right places, they aren’t judging whether my fashions are up-to-the-minute current, they don’t ask me about how I feel, and they offer useful skills like soldering, math, and opening jars from tall shelves. I have lots of women friends too, but they require regular maintenance and their friendships don’t come as easily to me. I get along well with guys, I have interests in common with guys, and they like me because they like women who are as smart, funny and independent as they.

So I have a hard time understanding why so many other men, historically and presently, can be such total raging assholes.