Visiting applicant.

A visiting applicant to my program sat in on a seminar today, and a lot of people went to lunch with him beforehand. He was really cool and had blonde hair and a ponytail and a brown cordoroy (sp.?) jacket and stuff, but when in the seminar he sat forward to write something, his sleeve pulled up and revealed a big orthodox cross tattooed on the underside of his wrist.

Snot.

Last night when I was at a bar meeting people for drinks in honor of a friend's birthday, I went to take a piss and when I got some toilet paper to blow my nose, big hunks of solid green came out. I did the neti pot when I got home, but when I woke up again this morning, I had small yellow chunks, and then after I did the neti pot -- at first no water would come out when I stuck the spout in my nose! -- more opaque whitish pieces came out. I took a benadryl and I can feel more pieces of some indeterminate color lodged way back up behind my left nostril.

Went to $4 martini night last night.

I went to $4 martini night last night. My one Dutch friend who's always up for drinking met up with me there, and we each had about five.

The place also had a transsexual dancer who would come out once an hour and dance up and down the middle of the lounge and people would hold out dollar bills for her, which depressed my friend; he used to date an Israeli belly dancer, he said, and he said just seeing this belly dancer made him think about how she probably makes shit for money and desperately seeks attention.

Last night when I got home I was bound up pretty bad and in the middle of re-heating some vegetarian gumbo over brown rice to eat at 2am, I had to run over to the bathroom and take a massive, dark-brown, dense-smelling shit. I had a similar shit this morning, as well.

On a side note, my Latin TA told me to cut it out because I couldn't stop laughing when he kept saying "B-DAG" over and over to refer to some language reference work with the acronym BDAG -- isn't a "b-dag" short for "bull dag", which is a really butch lesbian?.

I've also been thinking about how I like the phrase "got annihilated" for "getting drunk", only I can't use it since it only works with slackers, when they're like, "Dude, I got totally annihilated"; the multi-syllable word elevates the vocabulary's sound while the meaning degrades it, and also it riffs off of how slackers can't get motivated about anything, though they can get motivated to get drunk, only the phrase is passive so it's as if this getting massively blitzed was something that just happened to them.

Also, I found out that $4 martini night isn't just Wednesdays -- it's also Tuesdays and Sundays. I'm stoked.

Friday - Saturday - Wednesday - Friday - Wednesday.

Two Fridays ago everyone I knew got an acute case of karaoke retardation and dropped out on me at the last minute. I ended up going out for drinks with people at a local bar and ended up running into my friend who I watched "Hairspray" and "Valley of the Dolls" with not too long ago, and she was there drinking with her Belgian friend.

As it turns out, they would have been game for karaoke but it was already too late to head out. She was telling me that once when she was in a bar in a small town in Pennsylvania with a friend, they sang the theme song to "All in the Family" and everyone went nuts, and at the end of the night when it was time for last song everyone started pounding their beer mugs and chanting for them to go up and sing it again, which they did. We started discussing, too, how the songs from "Valley of the Dolls" had been stuck in our heads, but both of us couldn't remember the melody and would start humming the theme to "Mahogany" instead, but we didn't have that down and her Belgian friend corrected us; he knew the song really well because it would be played every week on Belgian radio when he was growing up to start off this contest-show featuring the work of Belgian songwriters hoping to hit it big. At some point someone pulled out an iPod or iPhone or whatever those things are that can hold video clips now and showed me a clip from the Muppet Show, but at that point in time things were getting pretty fuzzy from the whiskey.

The next day, the Saturday before Halloween, I went to go see this death-metal rock band "Captured by Robots!" which is where this MIT grad rigged up this perverse animatronic band and programmed them to play along to his singing, only he created this back story where they're these evil robots from outer space who've come to take over the world, only since they can't do that yet, they've captured him, a guy who only really wants to sing folk songs, and chained him to the middle of the stage and make him sing and dance death metal for your pleasure. He also wears an S and M mask and somehow has microphones rigged up so he can throw his voice to the different robots so they can browbeat and humiliate him on stage and occasionally make fun of him for being Jewish (he is in fact Jewish and goes by the name "J-bot").

Sadly, though, for whatever reason, this guy has decided to do political shows and has the robots dressed up like political figures and he wears a George W. Bush mask to sing, which is retarded. There were only two cool parts to the show:

1) He had Secret Service plants in the audience, so when people started giving him the finger, he would yell out "Secret Service, get that man!", and then some guys in suits would come out and tackle whoever was giving him the finger.

2) The opening band had this fat lead singer crammed into dress that showed her jiggly belly, and she invited a guy dressed as jackalope on stage to take her picture with him. There were also four mid-20s girls dressed as old women who were wearing loud floral prints and tons of gaudy gold jewelry, and as we were heading out the fat lead singer was out on the street in the middle of them posing for a picture and all at once they were like, "1 - 2 - 3 - BEA!" and the photographer snapped the picture.

The following Wednesday, everyone retarded out on me for $4 martini night.

The following Friday, I went to go hear Jens Lekman, the Swedish singer-songwriter. I had to wait outside with all these hipsters for tickets. One of them was this tall skinny redhead guy in tight tapered pants and a navy-blue truckers cap and a really skanky handlebar moustache, and he was on his cellphone being like, "So dude, what's up with all that bullshit with Tom and his LSATs?"

Inside the concert, too, my friend's friends were hipsters, mostly, and I kept saying, "I cannot believe that Jens Lekman is here! I hope he plays "Fernando"; every time I hear that song I could just shit." No one laughed.

Also inside the concert, Jens was going off on how the audience in Toledo the previous night sucked because of all the hipsters, and how he woke up that morning with the words of Billy Corrigan running through his head: "Tonight," he said dramatically, "Tonight," he said again, slowly, "We crucify the insincere tonight." The audience was a good third hipster, and they didn't seem to know what to do.

Jens's band dressed up in pale blue and white uniforms with Chinese embroidering on them that made them seem like odd little children, and Jens had rolled-up pants, and for some reason the DJ who would play electronic pants had one of those white Chinese hats on and my friends kept calling him "DJ Kato". The drummer was this blonde Swedish girl with big expressive eyes and the same kind of hat, only with blonde curls peeking out of it, and she could really keep a beat. The bassist didn't have a cap, and had a bowl haircut and looked like she was eight, though as soon as she would get off stage she would start pounding Red Bull.

Jens's encore song had this intro that totally sounded like "Heatwave", so as soon as that song stopped and he was taking requests, I was like, "Heatwave!", though he went on to play one of his own songs, then, oddly, "You Can Call Me Al".

Tonight is $4 martini night again, and I'm going. I've been telling everyone that I'll buy them their first three.

Deep-seated voyeurism.

Last week I attended an address by a prof from my department at an evangelical-sponsored talk on campus, and she opened by being like, "Since we're all together here, let me speak out loud the prayer I say silently before every time I address an audience," and she then asked God so that her work might be in accordance with His ends.

Today I attended another evangelical-sponsored talk on campus, and several times the visiting prof was like, "Since we're all believers...", and then he gave advice on how to witness to skeptical classmates who are "spiritual" but aren't into "Jesus spirituality that gets shoved down people's throats", and how you have to back off and later tell them that they should hear you out so that they can live in accordance with how God created them. Later he also said that "Crash" got an Oscar because it revels in moral ambiguity, which our society prizes.

Both times I felt very uncomfortable and vaguely titillated -- an intellectual titillation, not a physical one, though I felt it it my chest -- since somehow I wasn't supposed to be there listening and I wasn't included in their "you"s; I felt like someone with glass to ear leaning against a door. I think it's one thing to be shocked by the fact that many prominent boy band members were frequently molested due to the complicity of their parents -- I could hardly think of or speak about anything else for two days afterwards -- but it's another thing here, and it pushes my boundaries more than finding out about N*Sync members getting hummers or people telling me they've always wanted to nail a hot mom or the like... Going to evangelical talks is just outside of my voyeuristic comfort zone, I think, and all I can say is that for one thing I'm disturbed, and for another that I want more.

Slanders in Origen's "Contra Celsum".

In the first half of the third century the church father Origen wrote a refutation of this anti-Christian tract by a man named Celsus. I've been reading through his response for class (the tract by Celsus now only survives in the quotes Origen makes), and there's been some humdingers:

1) Origen claims that the Pythian oracle of Apollo prophesied because the deity's spirits came into the prophetess through her hoo-haw (though I think Tertullian said in the form of a snake? - I need to check this out).

2) Origen also says that Antinoos (Hadrian's gay lover who was deified after he drowned in the Nile) wasn't even enough to keep Hadrian from a morbid lust for women.

I love how these slanders are kind of like the sexual slanders that went around about Christians.

The first words in the Bible...

"Place by the Gideons -- do not remove."

Coffee troubles.

This morning I was so tired that I forgot to put my espresso maker on the stove and was waiting for it go get done when it wasn't even on the burner.

Three beliefs.

In New York Jewish circles in the late 1930s people would say that they believed in three things:

1) Die Velt (Yiddish, "this world").

2) Jene Velt (Yiddish, "the world to come").

3) Roosevelt.

All you have to do is dream: Dreams, not mine.

My friend who works the front desk of the main library on campus was telling me last night about how her minister at church was talking about Joseph's dreams and told everyone at church that they should keep a dream diary and write down their dreams right after they get up. She was saying she doesn't want to, and she hasn't liked dreams ever since she had this bad dream where her and her son were at it. "You mean like fighting?", I was like, "Noooo," she said, and she hunched over so no one could see and made that little fucking gesture in her lap with her fingers, one looped around and the other pointing and going in-and-out really fast in between the other.

Another time, she said, she was working with this one barber in the same shop, and he came in one day and said that he had dreamt about her last night. "So how was I?", she asked, and he was like, "I don't remember, but I sure did wake up my wife."

Much more to be said about Lou Pearlman, both good and bad..

There's much more to be said about Lou Pearlman, both good and bad. For one, he was a master choreographer. For another, even after Justin left N'Sync, he wished him nothing but the best -- in fact, he was a huge fan of his "Sexy Back".

Death Dream: Came to Pass.

Last Friday a friend was writing me that she thinks my one dream I recently had meant I had unsaid problems with my father, though I had been thinking, though, that it meant that my father would die. Like half a year ago when I started thinking back, I realized all of a sudden that I was old, and that I already know a lot of people among the dead, both people I know well and people I just barely knew. As I saw my dream, all of us who were there did not know the death in the room, but I was given sudden clarity to see this, before my father separated from the rest of us who were there to go away with his dead friend. I had been thinking, then, because of this, that he would die.

Last night, however, I heard about the marathoner who died in the Olympic trials in New York city, and it was someone who would run on a team in my high school's track conference years ago, and I just remember this kid beating the frick out of anyone in any race that he ever ran in, way back in high school. I'm now thinking that in my dream my father wasn't my father, but rather one of the many people from where I grew up, and that somehow I had foreknowledge of the death of this runner guy, maybe because the way he died made his death known to a lot of people and somehow this reached across to me several days beforehand.