16:19 Quench one thirst...

...and new ones readily line up.

I was scratching that huge cuddling itch of mine, and fairly well too with a safer scratcher than I'd imagine available, seen from a somewhat opportunistically impersonal perspective, when the next girl in the queue came crashing down on me.

I'm predisposed to continue about how it wasn't pretty, but the fact is that while it could easily have been the case, it wasn't really particularly unpretty either, just very painfully visible. I've been barking at it for days on end, it feels like, though it might have been more contained than that. Trust me to be the last to know, and you won't lose any bets.

Okay, so next in line was that desperately (or just vigorously eagerly?) wanting a soul mate to confide, or rather to discuss anything and everything with at great length and with passion, and I've been throwing myself at all the likely candidates and the usual suspects, save those (or she?) who said thanks, but no thanks. So to have some leeway and refuge from all of that, I dove into the Orson Mia lent to me last time I saw her (regardless of having picked up and gotten into my second Diana Gabaldon before starting with Shadow of the giant), hoping for some mind and heart stimulant to distract my attention from the lack of conversationalist stimulants on offer.

Now wasn't that the clever move?

Well, in a way it did work; I was distracted, but only as in getting a mudslide's worth of additional topics and thoughts and whatnot to feed into said lack of sheer talkomania, and now I'm mostly setting everything up to be a bomb detonating somewhere. So better to set it off here where casualties are few or at least able to opt out of the shards flying in all directions. :-) Because Card did it again, releasing a book that is so packed with emotion and thought and plot that you'd be a fool to pick up the book at any one time when it would be a bad idea if you ended up unable to put it down until you had read it all the way through to the last word. Card books often have that quality.

And sure enough I'm not quite as purged of the dream of being closer to Cissi, if she keeps showing up when the plot turns heart-wrenchingly beautiful and I want someone to hug out of joy and of wanting to share the moment or communicate the emotion or restrain myself from quoting some passage for her when she's clearly occupied with something else and I'd still just be spoiling the book for her anyway, in case she'd ever feel inclined to reading it herself. And, once there, winding away from the book for a while, puzzling over things like the specific diary entry she didn't read back when I did pay close attention to the continued slight puzzlement every time now of each new one she does seem to pick up and read, when I'm past paying close attention and just raise eyebrows with every new post I happen to notice being read.

This, by the way, is such an uninteresting tangent I'm amazed I even word it, but "stream of conscience" does that, so I'm sworn free. Ha! :)

The somewhat ironic side to this last (?) Shadow book is that it'll most likely leave me with an itch for a response book written my some Muslim voice the match of Orson, who would plead a balanced defense speech for an Islam that would strike as true as the scary pictures painted here, in a book that can't help but underline that Orson is Mormon and American in one package. I'm not going to claim the book is a vendetta, nor am I going to claim it's wrong in any allegations, verbalized or implied, but I'd be pining for a sane Muslim with the verbal and reasonal arsenal of Orson's own to meet up with a book or even just an essay to complete the picture. Fill in blanks, correct, retort, give other interpretations, mark hidden truths and strike false accusations, point out systems in place to stifle mindless fanaticism and perhaps strike back at Christianity. Because there is a lot that strikes chords with what has been available for consumption in media and in history books and in religion school book subject material, both for good and bad things and thoughts that make up parts of Islam and its culture, and it's very difficult for me not to feel that Orson's projections of where that might go are wrong.

But I would want a more insightful commentary. To the extent I'd consider looking for educated Muslim girls from sane, non-fanatic factions actively practising the religion and culture for an insider's perspective and picking up lots and lots about all the wealth of context not made available through this outsider's perspective book. Mostly so because I'd be very surprised to see Orson write or be able to write one himself, as would a Speaker for the dead, so to speak. (Not that Islam is dead or likely to die; I'm just after the trait of giving a fair full view and unbiased perspective, especially as much of the world of today lives in fear of Islamic fanaticism rather than of fanaticism itself, which is, I believe, the real disease at work, by whichever name.)

(Yes, also trust me to only be able to pick a girl for this; I don't think I listen well enough to or trust guys to see and pick up on the kinds of things I'm interested in. I know one, so far, not counting myself, and he is very much a non-Muslim, so far, anyway.)

I've also fallen in love with the alternative to nationalism (and totalitarianism, for that matter) presented, and utopias of one Earth, one Humanity under its own rule, past the kind of barriers, pettiness, spitefulness and territorialism at play today, bordering up the place to optimize for the good of the "us" at the cost of bad for the "them".

...Hey. I managed to lay down the book to write this. Maybe I should put off picking up the book again just this once, since it seems at all possible. :-)

• OrsonScottCard