It was gonna be The Pain but then it wasn't.

A couple of quick notes first:

1) The awesome Ranylt from Pajiba started a great new blog where Pajibans can post their delicious recipes. We seem to eat a lot of good food. I'm contributing with some Honduran/Latin American recipes and there's loads of good stuff there. It's called Godtopus Eats and it's great.

2) I can't believe the World Cup is over. One month every four years is just not enough to satisfy my cravings for yelling at the TV over the one sport I really care about.

As a whole, I think it was probably my favorite WC that I can remember after France '98. There were some excellent games, a lot of goals and some very exciting shakeups. New stars, big teams failing, little teams getting to where they had never seen before. It was just so much fun, and I can't wait for the next one.

As for the win? I don't think Spain deserved it, but I honestly don't think the Dutch deserved it either, though I would've been happy if they had won, because it's about time. My reasons why I hate Spain are manifold and not worth getting into now. I mean, they've won. Nothing I can do about it. I just never liked their team (with the exception of Casillas) or the way they played and never will. Plus it was a terrible final. I'm kind of glad we had a new champion. My choice to win it all would have been Uruguay, whom I think really surpassed anyone's expectations. Good job on Forlan getting best player of the Cup, though. He deserved it.

I did like Casillas, though. Dude's sweet.

It's over and that makes me sad. It was a good one.

3) I'm about halfway through Mark Danielewsky's House of Leaves. It's another one of those books that Pajibans rave about, and because I trust them I had to buy it even if the price was a little steep. And I've just been burning through it. I can't even begin to describe it properly. All I can say is that it's a deeply disturbing book about a haunted house (but much, much more than that) that's written all bizarre and confusing...it's just plain weird to read. And while I'm reading I might be a little disconcerted but not spooked, and there's long passages where nothing really happens, but when I put it down it just...it's worked its way into my brain, and it's just freaky. This is a terrible description but I can't figure out a way to word it properly. The book is formatted all bizarre, and there's a story within a story within a story and it all works to make you feel slightly off balance. It's quite an experience, but leaves me so spooked at night that I have to read a couple of pages of something completely mindless: in this case a 50c book I picked up at B&N) called Confessions of a Manhattan Callgirl, because I'm nothing if not a study in contradiction.

ANYWAY. Feh, now I don't even want to write about Twilight because it so pales in comparison to even that SECOND book I'm reading. I think I'll go take a shower --oh good lord it's 1pm I am so gross-- and then come back to The Pain

An irresistable pull.

Oh, no.

It's 2:30am and I can't go to sleep. My usual routine involves watching TV after I've turned off the computer. Then I get into bed and grab whatever I'm reading until I'm tired enough to stop. Taking off my glasses always helps expedite this process.

But every now and then, my reading material turns out to be something I can't for the life of me put down and stop reading even though I know I should because it's already very, very late and I really should just get some sleep.

This time, it's "The Time Traveler's Wife". It's my first book for the Cannonball Read (100 books in a year...I think I've done 50 before). I started it last week and haven't been able to put it down, and now that it's getting to the end I'm getting that feeling of dread in my gut because I don't want to finish it. In this case I also have a horrible feeling that the ending will leave me in a puddle of my own tears and I won't be able to sleep anyway. Sometimes I fucking hate really awesome books.

So even though my eyes aren't that tired yet, I decided to get up and try to make myself sleepy by writing this.

Doesn't work. Dammit. All I keep thinking about is going back to bed and finishing the damned thing already--might as well, right?

Of course right. Stupid book.