Past Week's Ledger

Days covered: 6/25/08–6/30/08
Miles traveled (airplane): 3,240
Miles traveled (bus + taxi): 536
Weddings attended: 2
Rehearsal dinners attended: 1
Strings of lights strung: 10
Cars driven: 2
Wedding brunches attended: 1.5
Tuxedos worn: 1
Suits worn: 1
Dates: 1
Diet Cokes drunk: About 196
Club sodas drunk: See above
Cigarettes smoked: Indeterminate
Dances danced: 10 (approx.)
Fun had: Lots
Times read Infinite Jest, spring 1997 to present: 2.269 (and counting)
Favorite passage from third re-reading (thus far):

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them [Quick backstory: Schacht, like “the rest of them,” is a student at an elite tennis academy, and is subject to quarterly drug-screenings; hence—since Schacht and the rest of them use “substances” (some, as we’ll see, more than others)—the need to buy “clean” urine to use in said tests—ed.], it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schacht doesn’t even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant ‘drines like Troeltsch or suffer from thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself. The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover from substances and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he’s learned to go his own interior way and let others go theirs. Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller — which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given substance, so interested does he become in the way he’s already started to feel. He’s one of these people who don’t need much, much less much more.