so, other than complaining about how i have so much to do and no time to do it, here's something cool that happened:

i just finished reading this book called the piano tuner, by a young man named daniel mason. the book is quite good, in a very heart of darkness sort of way (which is funny, because i hated heart of darkness)... it's about this piano tuner named edgar drake who is summoned by the british crown to tune the piano of an eccentric surgeon-major who lives in the northern reaches of burma. because the surgeon-major has made considerable advances in foreign relations in northern burma, the military tries to oblige his odd requests. edgar drake is not a very assuming character; in fact, he's pretty ordinary and somewhat of a loner. you definitely like him, but you can see that he's not a very interesting man. anyway, he gets consumed by the goings-on in his travels to and through burma and by his relationships with the effusive surgeon-major and a local burman girl named khin myo. it's a very interesting read, and i rather enjoyed it (except for the last paragraph, which seemed kind of incongruous, although i know it was the author's way of circularly connecting back to the beginning of the book).

so anyway, i finished the book, and read the acknowledgments in the back to discover that he's local... he used the libraries at uc berkeley, ucsf, and stanford to research his book. he also thanks a number of individuals, including one with the same name as my current landlady. thinking it was a long shot, but a possibility since he's local (and she works at ucsf), i asked her if she knew him. she does, in fact, know him quite well-- the name in the acknowledgments is her, and she actually has a copy of his pre-published manuscript. she took my copy of the book to get it signed for me. how odd.... very cool, and somewhat surreal... i guess i don't really associate the names on covers of books with real people that you might somehow actually be connected to in some way! he's probably a pretty fascinating person, and hopefully at some point i'll be able to meet him. my landlady also told me that he just got back from brazil and is working on another novel at the moment. :)