"Who's Tom Manchester?" "He's coming to the party."

The conversation that created title to this post actually happened in a car maybe a month ago, but it didn't really have any relevance to me until recently. I'm reading this book called Babbitt. It's by Sinclair Lewis. It's about this guy named George Babbitt who's a total conformist. He has these incredibly mundane conversations. Example:

“Fine morning,” said Babbitt, lighting—illegally early—his second
cigar of the day.
“Yes, it’s a mighty fine
morning,” said Littlefield.
“Spring coming along
fast now.”
“Yes, it’s real spring now, all right,”
said Littlefield.
“Still cold nights,
though. Had to have a couple blankets, on the sleeping-porch last night.”
“Yes, it wasn’t any too warm last night,” said
Littlefield.
“But I don’t anticipate we’ll
have any more real cold weather now.”
“No, but
still, there was snow at Tiflis, Montana, yesterday,” said the Scholar, “and you
remember the blizzard they had out West three days ago—thirty inches of snow at
Greeley, Colorado—and two years ago we had a snow-squall right here in Zenith on
the twenty-fifth of April.”
“Is that a fact! Say,
old man, what do you think about the Republican candidate? Who’ll they nominate
for president? Don’t you think it’s about time we had a real business
administration?”
“In my opinion, what the
country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of
its affairs. What we need is—a business administration!” said Littlefield.
“I’m glad to hear you say that! I certainly am glad
to hear you say that! I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, with all your
associations with colleges and so on, and I’m glad you feel that way. What the
country needs—just at this present juncture—is neither a college president nor a
lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a
good—sound—economical—business—administration, that will give us a chance to
have something like a decent turnover.”

At first when I started reading it, I was really bored by it, but now I'm really starting to enjoy it. Everything I've read so far has been incredibly similar to conversations that could be me and everybody I know in twenty years, which would be really unfortunate. There's all of this really good irony which I enjoy and it's funny. Sinclair Lewis, good man.

I lost where this was going. I'm sure it had some really good tie-in to something in my life right now. Curses on my horrible short term memory. Anyhow, it's a good book even though I haven't finished it.

Let's see, it's been awhile since my last post so I feel like I should be filling you all up with the wonderfulness of my life and all the great things I've been doing, but off-hand I can't really think of anything that I haven't talked about before. Oh, we had LITs on Friday a couple weeks ago. I like saying it like that because it sounds athletic. Then people ask you how you did and you tell them you got a 25, 22, and 24 and they give you this funny confused look. It was a forensics meet. It was actually really fun. Sometimes by the end of those things I get really bored out and I just don't want to be there anymore but that didn't happen at all. This was especially great because I had felt really cruddy that whole day, but enough complaining. Why was it good? Well, I got a perfect score my first round, which is good because there only is one round at State. I met Jason Scheef who Blake and Evan are always telling me I have to meet him and I finally did, he seems to be a pretty cool guy.

There doesn't seem to be much else to tell. Play practice goes on and on, until next weekend.