Ruins of Desert Cathay

 The other day I received a text from my friend Linda, our eminently great office manager in the Core, which went something like:

LG: "Are these yours?"

GS: "Of course. Who else?"

LG: "I was thinking maybe Wehmeyer."

GS: "Nah, it can't be Steve, these books are about the desert."

Despite Stein's complicated legacy, his story is fascinating. He's buried in Kabul, Afghanistan, and one of my true nerd aspirational goals is to make an homage to his grave.

I guess I found this amusing because when did I become the person who was naturally associated with the arrival of odd old books? The answer, of course, was decades ago. It's also a testament that my friend Steve was the second choice, and that I'm so associated with the desert (another one of those desert-loving English, as SW is wont to opine) that it is a natural foundation for an inside joke.

The other night I was swapping texts with my friend Cyndi and Mike on a Saturday night on what we were doing. I had to admit that it was 8:00 and I was reading a 140 year old first hand account of a Hungarian explorer of western China - and would soon be transitioning to Czechoslovak New Wave cinema on the Criterion Channel. I cannot believe that I'm single.