I agree. There is always more to say when you're life is a steaming pile of shit. Nonetheless, I'm glad yours isn't.

Clean sheets and muffins are exciting. What kind did you bake? I have brown butter cornbread in the oven as I type.

Take it from someone who lives in a country where bathing is optional: come summer, you WILL hate this man.

(To be fair, most people here believe in personal hygiene, but there are a surprising minority who don't.)

If you're happy and you know it... Clap your hands! Tempest would dance around you for that one. How about complain that you are neglecting your writing?

"Life's A Happy Song", by Bret McKenzie, from THE MUPPETS. That's a good happy song--hell, it's a great song. I know I could think of others, but I'm on my iPad and can't type properly.

Those days, wanting to get everything done, are the best. You really need to take advantage of them when they come along. haha.

Glad work is really awesome. I bet in time you'll get so used to the BO and grumpiness that you won't think about it much anymore. I have one of those people too. Only some days I really get worked up about it anymore.

Hope the book club reading goes well.

Yeah! I'm kind of confused as to how it became so popular. Maybe emo kids loved the fact that it was simplistic and depressing, and they bought it en masse to fulfill their suicide fantasies, and that made it sell.

The only one of those books I've read was 13 Reasons Why. I read it because I had heard a lot about it and figured I should know what its about. I was really disappointed. It ws dumb and depressing. You said it much better than I could have!

Sorry, I couldn't get any further than the part about her intellectual formation as an acolyte of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. My loss, I'm sure.

Yeah! I heard so many good things about Thirteen Reasons Why, but I didn't care for it at all.

I think the problem was that I thought every single character was kind of dumb and passive. The narrator of the story is dumb and passive, just walking around town, listening to the tapes, not doing anything but feeling sorry for himself and Hannah. Hannah was dumb and passive all the way up until she made the tapes, which were mostly about how terrible everyone was to her, except that it was mostly regular teenager stuff, and I was like, "Okay, you hate yourself because everything sucks and you can't do anything about it, except also you hate yourself because shit happened and you didn't do anything about it but you could have?" Who am I supposed to root for in this?

SPOILERS
I was also bugged by the revelation about how that kid raped that girl at the party, and she said, "Well, obviously he isn't on the list of the tapes because he wouldn't pass them on," and that was it. No one was directed to tell the girl or tell the police; no one thought of doing that themselves; the entire subject was just dropped immediately after it came up. Hannah just wanted to talk about how terrible it was for her and then move on. Ugh. After that, I just had zero respect for anyone in the novel.

Thirteen Reasons Why was so disappointing. I'm glad to find someone else who wasn't totally blown away by that book.

The best book I read last year was The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. So good. It's a wordless graphic novel about a man who migrates to a weird country. The story is told completely through pictures to show the reader what it's like living in a new place and not being able to speak the language.