Snails
"No. Yes and no. I don't know," Franny said. She looked down at the menu on her plate, and consulted it without picking it up. "All I want's a chicken sandwich. And maybe a glass of milk. . . . You order what you want and all, though. I mean, take snails and octopuses and things. Octopi. I'm really not at all hungry."
I have to say this book (Franny and Zooey) is growing on me. For the first 15 pages or so I was beginning to write it off as something I'd be glad I had read, and short enough not to be too bad to trudge through, but Salinger's character development is really beginning to intrigue me.
On that note, it's been a day full of deja vu and strange coincidences.
I received the movie all the Real Girls from Netflix today and watched it. Not super-great, but definitely at least a little inspiring — I think it's one of those where the [obscure] story it's based on is probably a better read than the movie is a viewing.
On the other hand, Zooey Deschanel is definitely nice to look at, and the fact that I started reading Franny and Zooey one day, and watched a Zooey Deschanel movie the next (and yes, she was indeed named after that character, though a gender switch happened somewhere along the way there) struck me as at least a little coincidental.
The other thing that seemed odd is that in a search earlier for the snails and octopuses quote (because I'd left the book in the car, frankly, and was too lazy to go get it — God bless Google), there were no less than a half dozen pairings of Franny and Zooey references with the following haiku, by Issa:
katatsuburi
soro-soro nobore
fuji no yama
which translates roughly:
little snail
slowly slowly climb
Mt. Fuji
I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but there must be something archetypal there.
Otherwise, during a [very long] meeting today, (yes, it's a good day for square brackets — what are [you] going to do about it???) as I was packing up and getting ready to leave, I looked down at the other people in the room and was struck with a tremendous sensation of deja vu. And then (if that weren't enough already), the feeling that I was looking at these people and getting a sense of deja vu triggered a second sense of deja vu, liked I'd once before had deja vu in this precise scenario. Is recursive deja vu a real concept? Can you feel like you've experienced before that feeling of experiencing something before? I wasn't sure what it meant, or if it's an argument for deja vu being nothing more than a psychological hiccup, and in this case I was swift enough to consider the hiccups in the field, so to speak, while I was still hiccuping. Regardless, at least my recursive dreams seem less weird.
Speaking of the past, (yes, I know I'm rambling, but good stuff comes out of these rambles sometimes), I had a great vegetarian snacky lunch of samosas and dahl at Cosmic Cafe today (I love their tamarind curry — I dip everything I can find into it until it's all gone), and I don't think I'd been there since we moved away from the Infomart building the first time, and I was reminded of a date I'd had about 6 years ago (which I was telling a friend about last night — perhaps an inspiration for today's choice for a lunch destination, not to mention that it's really scary that this date was 6 [SIX!] years ago — square brackets, thou shalt not escape calumny! Get thee to a nunnery, go!).
ANYWAY, I'd met the girl while working at the Borders bookstore when I first moved to Dallas, and, intending to intrigue her with the uniqueness of the place, took this girl on a long pilgrimage-like non-spending-change-on-the-tollway-because-I-was-poor hit-every-light-along-twenty-miles-of-Preston-Road trek down to Cosmic Cafe. Unfortunately, she was a very, um, serious fundamentalist sort of Christian, and once the food was nearly gone, I found myself party to the following dialogue (as best as I can remember six years later, of course):
She: Do you mind if we go someplace else to talk some more?
I: Sure. No problem. What's up?
She: Well. . . . [looks around at various Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufist murals on the walls] There's just so much Godlessness in this place I really can't handle it — seeing the symbols of Satan all around me is almost just too much to bear.
I: [stifling giggle] Um, okay, sure. There's a [struggling to conceal sarcasm regarding the irony of it all] Starbuck's up Preston a way. How's that?
She: That would be great thanks for understanding [as if it were one rushed sentence].
I: Yeah?
She: Yeah.
Starbucks theology notwithstanding, it was funny because I just don't get it sometimes. Just a thought, but, perhaps, if you're that tempted by a picture of badly-drawn-Buddha on the wall (famous for the soundtrack to "About a Samana," by the way, but that's a different story, altogether. Ha.) to abandon your faith, you might possibly be a member of the wrong faith? Or at least have far bigger problems than what international deity's semblance overlooks your basmati rice and curried vegetables? I don't know. It was still funny. I guess on that note, I'll end with another Issa haiku:
world of Buddha’s law—
even a dog on winter
makes a pilgrimage