I am really not here.

See! I really should be working. And what am I doing? Blogging. And I am not even an addict (yah OK, is denial not the first sign?).

Anyway. Just before sitting down to enter yet another Visa receipt into Simply Accounting, I take a moment to glance at birdinthehand's mother's blog (Hi my name is Ria and I am a Link-a-holic) and find this:

'That Thing Going Around on the Web Ring
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstacy and Effrontery by Jeanette Winterson. From the essay: The Psychometry of Books:

"The pleasure in a book is, or should be, sensuous as well as aesthetic, visceral as well as intellectual."'

I am not a member of that ring however, if I am not brain-dead when I get home tonight, I want to do this. After all, if I did it here I would be grabbing either the phone book, or the "Houghton Mifflin Canadian Dictionary of the English Language". Oh wait, there are a wack of Native oriented ecology and traditional knowledge books in the back. Give me a second........ ...... .....

Ack! It didn't work. Page 123 of "Earth, Water, Air and Fire: Studies in Canadian Ethnohistory" is a page devoted to footnotes. So unless I can gleem some sort of spiritual enlightenment from "5 Edward Mortimer's 1801 response to the government, quoted in Patterson, A History of the County of Pictou, Nova Scotia, p. 193" then the time I just wasted was really a waste.

Wait wait! On my third (second try produced a set of figures on some table of relative fish abundance) try I came apon this "The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway", By Basil Johnston.... Page 123 Sentence#5 "But suitable as this arrangement was with his wishes, the young man found his situation a virtual prison, his life a bore, and the outlook bleak."

There you have it. I have satified my urge to respond to this challenge and I am now left to wonder what higher power directed me to that book (my eyes were closed) so that I could worry about the meaning of choosing that passage.

Oh I know. Even though I chose this type of employment, I am bored. My outlook is pretty bleak, and I am trapped here in this virtual prison until at least at 10 pm tonight and I am coming to realize that I can't have this work done in time for tomorrow's deadline, whether I blog or not!

(sigh) bye.