"Sweet mother of Christ"

I'm already so happy I decided to be a part of Infinite Summer. I'm finding Infinite Jest to be just as challenging and twice as funny as everyone had said it would be. I had some difficulty right up front with there being so many characters in a room all at once, and I'm reading and trying to figure out who they all are and where they stand at the same time Hal is. It made my mind spin. I'm sure that's just what DFW intended; to throw you into the fray with Hal, to understand his anxieties. I laughed out loud after Hal's rant on Kierkegaard and Camus and Dennis Gabor being the Antichrist. And when the director exclaimed "Sweet mother of Christ" shortly after, even without yet understanding why, I was ecstatic.

The section on waiting for "the woman who said she'd come" is a fantastically hyperbolic example of the ritual of smoking weed. At least from what I remember (cough, cough) everyone had their little things they did before they sat down to smoke. Make iced tea, clean the coffee table, take off your shoes, feed the dog; all the things you wanted to be sure you didn't have to do after you smoked. This section just took it to an extreme multi-day nihilistic affair, and it was spot on. I've never known anyone that 'addicted' to pot, but I'm sure the anxiety and paranoia and mind games you play with yourself while waiting for your next (and always last) fix applies to other drugs as well. Again, I laughed out loud several time in this section.

I'm still catching up, and my mind is racing every day in a good way (in they way David Eggers alluded to in the foreword), but it's going well.