2007-11-24 2:36 p.m.

I'm in Pittsburgh! At a library! And I'm not even a homeless person or teenager studying! I'm not here with a friend that has a billion children! Holy shit!

I didn't know people (besides the aforementioned ones) even went to the library anymore. Turns out they do. And, they do it right here in Pennsylvania's "Squirrel Hill."

This Library is so Scandinavian futuristic. It's like the library designers force-mated Danish Design with IKEA and then injected the offspring with Beauty Steroids. Sleek, low, curved plastic chairs—green ones and white ones, egg-shaped blue pod-chairs, truncated rectilinear EVERYTHING. The furniture seems like it should be in an office waiting room on another planet.

The tabletops have oblique semi-opaque cells inside of them, like your looking into a milky, alien honeycomb. The ceilings are plated with twenty-foot-long sheets of shiny of copper.

Best of all, the place is wall to wall windows. That's probably because reading is boring, and any good designer knows that. So, by letting you see outside they help to distract and soothe your bored mind by letting you glimpse out into the clouds and sky and rooftops and leaves changing color—the kinds of things they write books about.

My favorite thing I can see from here is a clock tower. It's on the southwest corner of Murray and Forbes. The numbers are all in Hebrew. I happened to notice it when Claire came by to check on me. In mid-sentence I stopped and said, "Oh my god! It's always Jew-o-clock!" I think she said some other things to me after that, but I heard nothing. My attention was stuck on the Jew Clock.

Now my attention has been hijacked again. An Asian girl about twenty years old sits in front of me. She's using one of those Windows laptops that tries hard to look like a Mac. She's looking at pictures on her computer—browsing through thumbnails and enlarging the ones she's interested in.

The only thing is the pictures are of her, topless. And now she opened one that's a picture of what appears to be a nephew or something, completely naked.

This girl is awesome.

Maybe the library isn't so bad, after all.


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