Shooting high.

While I was home, Mom and I spent a good fraction of one day hauling unwanted books to Rainbow Books Hawaii, a fantastic used bookstore in Honolulu. To my surprise, not only did they take about a half of our books, they also paid us for them. Unfortunately, calculating which of the hundreds of books they would take, and those books' relative value after years of gathering dust on our shelves, took a few hours. Meanwhile, Mom and I got comfortable perusing Rainbow's shelves. There was an extensive Hawaiiana section, in which I emersed myself, after a time moving onto Asian American Literature, which I unhappily came to the realization was somehow filed next to "porn." I don't see the connect there, and it certainly wasn't alphabetical. At any rate, I averted my eyes from the large breasts and they averted themselves from me, and we were, you know, co-existing just fine . . . that is until a local man opened the front door, walked in, smiled at me, passed me, and then plunked himself down in the porn section. After that, I quickly moved onto Contemporary Literature, which was in another aisle.

As I was searching the stacks and avoiding the porn peruser, I was feeling pretty excited. There were so many books! In the world! Someday, maybe, some young girl would be looking for my name under Asian American Literature or Hawaiiana, and she'd be running to another aisle to avoid a porn peruser! I, too, could be among these stacks!

Then I realized that perhaps I wasn't shooting high enough if my aspiration was to be among the discarded stacks at a used bookstore.