After a recent recommendation by the lovely Liz Fay (my new music scout and teaching inspiration), I've spent a handful of hours at Borders over the weekend happily turning through the pages of David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Not only do I share his distaste for blatant tourists, computers, and the ridiculousness of "gourmet" foods, but I also appreciate his ponderings on numbers ...

‘Do you have any idea how many grains of sand there are in the world?’ he asked. It was a question that had never occurred to me. Unlike guessing the number of pickled eggs in a jar or the amount of human brains it might take it equal the weight of a portable television set, this equation was bound to involve the hateful word googolplex, a term I’d heard him use once or twice before. It was the idea of a number and was, therefore of no use whatsoever.

I’d heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all the sand, grain by grain, from the eastern seaboard to the west coast of Africa, it would take --- I didn’t catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate on the single bird chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and build their nests, but their leisure time is theirs to spend as they see fit. I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, ‘You want me to do what?’ before flying off, laughing at the foolish story he now had to tell his friends. How many grains of sand are there in the world? A lot. Case closed (36-37).

My favorite stories in the book include: Jesus Shaves; Today's Special; Make that a Double; and The Nutcracker.com

My aspiration for tomorrow -- Find and secure a copy of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and begin giggling to myself immediately.

You can listen to some of the stories David has told on NPR.