Imagining the Reader Before Me

If you know me well, you know that I'm all about borrowing books from the library. Why waste money on 300 pages of literature when you're only going to read it once - maybe twice - and then toss it up onto a high shelf only to collect dust and yellow? Moreover, why kill more trees than necessary? (Forget I ever said this if I ever win the lottery and can afford to start a dreamy collection of original first edition books of my favorite reads.)

Well, as I was reading my worn and smelly borrowed copy of Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," I stumbled onto something that you'd never find in a brand new copy from Borders: a previous borrower's to-do list! Oh, my heavens, what I found wedged between pages 56 and 57 were like buried treasure: a glimpse into another woman's daily world. Being female and Korean, I can be quite nosey if I don't keep myself in check. Judging from the range of stamped due dates on the yellow library slip at the back of the book, this was the to-do list of some semi-O.C. female undergraduate or graduate student attending Penn sometime between November 2005 and August 2006. The clues: the hand script is fairly neat and the content includes the words "Godiva," "Shakirra tickets," "mommy" and "wedding." Need I say more?

From the following notes, I can come up with many fun trivial stories of hypothetical Penn girls who may have created this to-do list. The funnest part is that, no matter what life I concoct for her, she's always an H&M shopping fiend (the kind that wants oh-so-desperately to be trendy but will never be because she's too much of a control freak to be fashionably artsy enough) who interns for Quirk Books (the white note is actually written on a piece of Quirk's company notepad paper), a publishing company founded by the author of the ridiculously popular worst case scenario survival guides which you may have had the pleasure of encountering at your local Urban Outfitters.




Ah, how I get a thrill out of the smallest glimpse into another person's ordinary daily life. Tee hee hee...