cat with a q-tip

I haven't finished reading the second part (haven't read the last two chapters) but i want to post today anyway. I can't not read now because i have a terrible hangover. But i will catch up during the week. I promise (this is so american).

A sentence: "You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours". I know it is still too early to say, but this might be my favorite sentence in the book. And i don't think that it is satiric. All the writing about the video tape is what i liked the most in this part of the book. A question: is it possible that they broadcast something like that? is it not prohibited to put real deaths in TV? I think it is. I have to admit that i felt sick reading about it, what is weird, because it is fiction, i mean, it is reality inside of a fiction, thus fiction, but i felt as if i were reading about something that had actually happened.

My answer to LD's question about what the book is nostalgic for is youth. "youth, divine treasure / you leave not to come again / when i want to cry i don't / and sometimes i cry without wanting to", that's an old spanish poem (translated by me...). "Strangers would come to wash his genitals", "he would forget how to eat, how to say simple words". Getting old and useless is one of the things humans are more scared of, more than dying. My girlfriend was telling me this week how one of her patients, a very old woman, (she is a psychologist treating old people) started having panic attacks when her son threw a "suicide pill" she had been keeping from the 2nd world war (in case you got caught by the enemy) in the garbage. Supposedly, there are a lot of those pills running around in this country. My friend says that old people's suffering when they realize they can not take care of themselves anymore is such that many would prefer to die, but of course we won't permit that, will we?

Ok, i have a problem with women in Underworld. I am still not completely sure why or how, but in general i am much more interested in men in the book. Hey, everybody using latex globes in the book... i had to think of the two american girls who where staying for a while at my place last autumn. They had some kind of hand cleaning lotion in their purses, so each time when we went out eating we could nicely clean our hands. I was fascinated. Even if they were aware that their fear to dirt and infection or whatever it is, was being used to make them consume, they couldn't stop it anymore.