expressing fondness by swearing

I proceeded to buy at least one book at the next four shops XD BUT look at this haul, I'm so so so excited about iiittttttt

(I'm particularly excited about the Baldwin essays because, since becoming a team leader at work, I have a lot more free time sitting around in foyers, so I've been meaning to buy a tiny book I can fit in my work bag and leave there, and this will actually be perfect! and Penguin's published a whole series of essays like this at $6 each, so when I finish it, I can just go and get another uvu)

also, I finally went to Amplify, which is a bookstore that only stocks books by people of colour, and has such a fantastic selection, especially of Aboriginal authors!! I had a real hard time choosing just one book to buy, with the shortlist including a beautiful volume of African folklore (which, thank god, my friend bought, so I get to borrow it off her one day <3), one about the Aboriginal community and colonisation specifically just in the Hawkesbury River area (with chapters that covered about five years each, so you know it's going to be in-depth! :D), and an absolutely enormous tome on the history of blackface...

(though it did also demonstrate the importance of intersectionality and the pitfalls of purely identity-based value judgements, because I also spotted Fukuyama's The End of History there, which... yeah, I guess one can't deny he's a person of colour... but it doesn't exactly fit the sort of revolutionary tone of the rest of the shop XD)

holy shit, though, it's been a long time since I went book browsing like this, and when the fuck did books get so universally expensive??? I know everything's more expensive now, I'm not expecting them to be 15-20 bucks anymore, but most ordinary books were 30-35 dollars!! the only normal-sized book in here under that was Revolutionary Yiddishland, which was still 25! what the helly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(on a much more personal note... my friends almost universally bought a lot of fantasy/fiction, with a smattering of psychology/self-help/memoir in there. which is. [sigh] fine. it's fine. I'm not ashamed of my taste or choices, but I know they're different, and normally that's fine. but it did come in the same day that [a] I asked if anyone would be interested in getting Runescape to play with me, because they've been having these Stardew Valley nights, which I don't play, but I've gotten back into RS because I've had a bit more free time than usual, and I thought it'd be fun to play with a friend... and not a single person responded; and [b] over the course of the day, I realised from snippets of other people's conversations that a friend I was previously very close to is having some major relationship trouble/drama that I knew absolutely nothing about... which is fine, I get it, you can't just text everyone you know when you're going through something, it's nothing personal, etc, and we've both been crazy busy for the last few months so we haven't been catching up as much, and I missed the last big group thing, etc, etc...