Tuesday 10:22
Wednesday 8:16

Zoomed through Wednesday. I got the theme (It's a pretty clever one. One long vertical answer, CROSS DRESSING, crossed 5 other long clues which contained some form of salad dressing, i.e The Italian Job, Hail Caesar, etc.) early and all five theme answers were simple after that, filled with no other crosses. I didn't start particularly fast, though. On a clue for "Blue," I spent far too long looking at ER_TI_ before getting the (in retrospect, obvious) answer. Real pros just see that letter strong and don't even bother with the clue. Nothing else is even a word (You specifically need the R, though. EXOTIC and EROTIC would both fit otherwise).

I guess that's an okay number of parentheticals but I can go deeper. It's interesting to me, because at least as far as I can remember having a writing style, this has been part of it. Even in my journal-keeping days, you can find nested parentheses. My penchant for asides gave my blog its name. That's why I was particularly gobsmacked by Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace when I first encountered it (1999-2000). The book is a behemoth, clocking in at 981 pages (I actually read this in college, which is retarded considering all the other required reading I was supposed to do). But oh wait, there are nearly a hundred more pages in smaller text. The book is littered with 388 endnotes, found in the back (you need two bookmarks while reading) Some of those notes are several pages long themselves and have their own footnotes (in even smaller text at the bottom of the page). This, truly, is the epitome of parenthetical writing. I sought out a lot more of his writing after that. Some of his essays go even further, with boxes and arrows like a flowchart, pointing you away from the main text to an aside. This is awesome! This guy writes the way I want to, he's hailed as a genius!

And then he fucking killed himself.