Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

16 Aug 2002, 14:50 p.m.

A kid today asked one of the cashiers, "Do you…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

A kid today asked one of the cashiers, "Do you know where the bathroom is?" Extremely cute.

Years ago, I patronized a library that gave out such classic bookmarks as "41 Ways Books Are Better Than Drugs." (This may have been in Missouri.) I remembered this book recently, possibly while ringing up a book on cannabis cultivation (danger! search requests! danger!), and I thought of various items on the list that I now considered untrue, e.g., "When someone comes to visit you don't have to hide your books; you can leave them on display on the coffee table" or "No one ever went to prison for selling or buying books." Good ol' Margaret Sanger puts the lie to that last one, I think.

UC Berkeley orientation starts in a few days and classes start in about a week and a half. The freshmen remind me that I gotta move out of this college town someday, if I don't want to live the rest of my life half-dead with wistfulness. But at least they're good for business.