I'm being delinquent and writing at work, I can't help myself.

Broken Vessels, Essays by Andre Dubus, so complex and saturated with meaning that I could literally cry.

The first story is about a year he spent renting a house for cheap, with came with the consequence of tending sheep. He writes:

"This was my first encounter with sheep. When I was a boy, sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero's cattle; or the hero's struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw that Christ's analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves."

Wisdom for today:

"Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people."

Today, without shyness and in front of the other interns, I announced that the murder novel I had been reading was simply too scary for me to handle. Thank god I did. Dubus is a pleasure in which I will indulge for the rest of the day.