Spring break on campus

While others attend to more noble endeavors, I look for shoes online. Turns out my dream pairs are in children's sizing, which I noticed just before rewarding myself for my bags-of-pasta spend-next-to-nothing diet with a pair. (I know, Happiness lady, treats are bad. But what can I say? Shiny ballet flats are no vice, in moderation. Now off to make chocolate cake.)

Where, I mean where, do people find shoes? My office lies at the intersection of lower Manhattan's two shoe streets and... nothing. OK, not nothing. A lovely and very shiny pair of $28 ballet flats... a half-size too small. None in my size.

Once you get into the DIY mode, cakes from scratch, haircuts self-inflicted but not visibly so (or so the polite have told me), it's hard to accept the price, yes, but also the imperfection of that which must be purchased on the outside. I mean, I'm not about to buy the materials to make ballet flats. But I know just the ones I want, ones that don't exist anywhere other than my brain.

Speaking of that alleged organ, Zola's L'Argent is turning out to be less about The Jews than I'd imagined. Unless things get especially Jewy in the final 200 pages, there seems to be a whole lot more about Catholicism, modernity, and nudity than Jews and their omnipresent kesef. In that I will be writing a term paper on the novel and its Jews, I'm hoping these last 200 pages, unlike the first 300-ish, are filled with usurious cabals of all kinds.