Plans for tonight.

The friends of my one Dutch friend are going to a lesbian karaoke bar and I got invited along... I can't for the life of me figure out if it's lesbians singing karaoke, or they have karaoke, and you can only sing acoustic guitar-backed, kind-of-whiny songs like the Indigo Girls, or maybe that "I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It)".

Martinis / More cuts.

Last night I went out to the martini bar to meet a friend who was in town. I got there a bit early, so I sucked down a regular martini with olives and watched some trans-sexuals do lip-synching acts (they do that a lot at the martini bar). This one white one put on an entrancing second number where she sang a really slow, tastefully emotive song while wearing brilliant white-blue contacts and had her blonde hair upswept into a mohawk while the sides where shaved, and while wearing this tight black net thing that had these opaque black fabric flames in it that covered up her nipple and hoo-haw areas.

The card reader was there that night at the table in the corner, too, and I was totally going to get my reading done since I'm a strong believer in vibes and the vibe was right that night, but the place was crowded and I had just about finished my martini when my friend came, so we left to head out to another bar.

At this other bar, later, there was this half-dressed middle-aged leggy Mexican woman with almond eyes staggering around in a Tina Turner wig.

When I got home, toast got stuck in my toaster, and when I was trying to pry it out the bottom, the side of my right index finger got slit on a metal part and started bleeding profusely, and it was still bleeding when I was brushing my teeth before bed, where drops of mixed blood and water and toothpaste foam would drop into the sink.

Cuts / Conversations.

Last night when I was chopping up a carrot the knife slipped and I cut across two of my fingertips, so for like forty minutes I was leaving bloody fingerprints on my cutting board, on my cabinets, on my vegetables, everything, even though the cuts were small and not that deep and I thought they'd scab up fast.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I was talking with the (black) check-out girl, and when I asked her how her Christmas was, she said that she had gotten messed up on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas Day, so it was a good time, I was like, "And did you have a chance to spend any time with family?", she was like, "I don't have family like that," and I felt really embarrassed.

Today at the coffee shop, I was talking with the (black) counter guy, and when I asked him how his Christmas was, he said it was good, only there were a lot of kids running around and it drove him crazy, and his girlfriend had skipped out from his family function since she was raised Jehovah's Witness and she still has a hard time dealing with stuff like that. After talking a while about how that's crap, he was like, "Next year, I'm gonna break her down and make her go," and I congratulated him on his Christmas spirit, which he found hilarious.

Lost my book.

I lost my book somehow when I was back home visiting friends on my way back to school, one of the cheap paperback books I get at garage sales and keep in my coat pocket to read if I'm bored but I won't get worked up about if I ever lose it:



The version I had had this lovely cover with daisies on it and really flower-y writing, saddly, but I am comforted to know that someone will find the book somewhere and be shocked by what they find, which is almost as good as the look on people's faces when they see me reading a book like that.

People on the train.

I met some interesting people on the train today, in reverse order --

3) An older Midwestern white woman who sat down with me in the dining car who had been in Abu Dhabi (sp.?) helping the airport there create an expansion plan. She kept talking about all her degrees, but when she asked if I would like to work in New York and I said it was too yuppie, she trashed it left and right and said she liked how Chicago is down to earth.

2) A well-dressed (dark jacket, subdued colored scarf) just-the-other-side-of-middle-aged white lady who I sat down with in the dining car when I was looking for space to spread out and do some Greek reading, and who turned out to be a Classics prof who knew people in my department. She did Latin satire, and was able to answer some questions I had about ancient philosophy.

1) This older white lady who was sprawled out on a seat when I first entered the train, and was covered in a blanket and had a neck-thing on for sleeping and looked like she didn't have that much money, and when we started talking, I found out she lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and when I asked her if she worked for the university, she was like, "Yes, I write about cheese," and it turned out that she was a science writer who worked on departmental newsletters that got sent out to dairy industry people about current research. I offered her a sausage from my unopened 4.5lb bag of sausage that the local convenience store owner in my hometown gave me the other day, and she laughed when I said I'd do it, even though it would cause the smell of sausage to waft throughout the car and give the Amtrak riders one more thing to complain about.

Also in the dining car was this really fat middle-aged woman from West Virginia who was wedged in the booth so her fat hung up on the table and down in below it, and who was in a "THIS BE ME LUCKY SHIRT" St. Patrick's Day shirt with a clover on it, and who would tell anyone who'd sit by her about her personal problems (her daughter had a boyfriend that she really loved but who broke up with her since he didn't feel like buying her a Christmas gift, her husband who's 61 left her for a 27-year old who wants his money and now her kids can't stand their father, etc.), and who would talk on her cell phone occasionally, though never about personal things, oddly.

Also also, when I went to the bathroom, I let this older black lady go ahead since I said I was just going to go brush my teeth and I could wait, and later on when I went back to my seat she gave a little smile-head nod thing to me.

Picture of Obama!

Artemis just e-mailed me a picture from the time when me and her saw Obama picking out his Christmas tree:

It looked a lot closer up in person.

Woke up this morning to a text from a friend:

My plane had in-air mechanical failure & we just did an emergency landing. I counted five fire trucks!

I called her and it turned out that as soon as her plane left Orlando and was just about to cross the Florida border, something was burning and they had to turn off the in-cabin air and turn around. They didn't use the slide, and when I called she was back in the terminal waiting for the next flight.

Dog names / coffee cups.

I'm staying at the house of my one friend from high school and her husband's house, and they just got a couple months ago a half-year old Golden retriever that had been pre-named "Bentley". I couldn't stand the name since it's kind of yuppie and doesn't roll off the tongue, so I kept calling it "Bender", and now her husband has started calling the dog "Bender" and is kind of pressuring her to change it.

Also, we went to this hipster breakfast place today -- the cook is tattooed, there's random 50s roadtrip souvenir shit on the walls, the food is kind of upscale yuppie-ish, there's a pirate theme in the logo on the menus and the doors -- hipsters are so predictable! -- and my friend after she got her coffee asked me to grab the empty coffee cup overturned on the placesetting next to me on the counter and give it to her, and it turned out that that one was dirty too, so she had to make do with the coffee cup she had, which had shit on the rim.

That reminded me back when I was a waiter at the local Big Boy back in high school. This one waitress Karen who smoked too much and said she hated everything about the restaurant (the manager, the people, the smell that stuck on your skin when you got home) but stuck with the job since the chain offered health insurance, used to have her after-shift coffee served to her in a white and not a brown cup in the booth where she'd count up her tips, even though customers would always get regular coffee in brown cups and decaf in white cups so that way waiters and waitresses walking around freshening up coffee with a pitcher of regular and a pitcher of decaf wouldn't have to ask customers who had what coffee and interrupt them.

Anyhow, one time I asked her why she demanded her regular coffee in a white cup, not a brown one, and she was like, "You can't tell the cup is dirty with a brown cup."

Years later I ran into her at the local coney island downtown, and you could tell she was very sick. I wanted to ask her about whether her health insurance came through for her when we talked, but it really wasn't the time or place.

Plus, years earlier I had heard a rumor she was excited about the Bob Evans opening up in town, since they offered health insurance too and it was her chance to leave Big Boy. Maybe she switched there and her insurance story was complicated.

What you do when you go to high school in Wheaton.

So, before I left for break to go visit my parents, I ran into this gone girl I know who grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, home of Wheaton College (the grand-daddy of all evangelicals in the U.S.), and also known sometimes as "the evangelical Vatican".

Anyhow, she said that back in high school the bad kids used to go occasionally t.p. the Theosophical Society.

Update.

I had dinner with my friend at her parents' house the other night... Her dad is the brother of my one friend's mom who's a kind of New-Age-y 2nd wave feminist who sweeps around the house wearing a muu-muu all the time and smokes a lot, and exudes this very comforting vibe.

Anyways, he was saying one time he went hunting with her ex-husband, and he came across some deer shit and he picked it up and rolled it between his fingers, and was like, "This is five hours old."

"Hmph, I'm never shaking hands with him again," a friend of my one friend's dad was like, who was also over for dinner.

Later, the one friend of my one friend's dad, who is on disability and runs the local food pantry, was saying that the worst thing is when people don't give an answer right away when you ask them how many people are in the house, since you can tell they're thinking up some inflated number and how to justify it, and you have to challenge them since the number of people going there is up and donations are down. There's been a lot of lying lately, he said.

Two songs.

I've heard bits and pieces of MIA's "Paper Planes" on the radio forever now, but somehow I never listened closely until the other day -- it was a nationwide Top 40 program, and Ryan Seacrest was like, "I just cannot get that song out of my head, folks!", too! -- and then I realized that it was the first gangster song I've ever liked. Usually I've made fun of white people like that, but what do you know, now I've turned out to be one.

I've also heard Beyonce's very self-serious "If I Were a Boy" lately, though it makes me always think of a Steve Martin line, "If I was a woman I'd sit around and play with my breasts all day."

Did some Christmas day visits.

My one friend from high school invited me over to join her family at her grandparents' house for gift-opening and dinner, so I did that yesterday afternoon. They had a gag-gift exchange, and her cousin got a giant rubber nose that you suction cup up in a shower and gives out green oozing shampoo through a nostril when you squeeze it, and her uncle got a stuffed chihuahua that humps your leg if you turn a switch on its belly on.

Her aunts and her mom and her and me and her cousin also started to play this dice game, where everyone starts out with seventy-five cents in quarters and you roll as many dice as you have quarters, though no more than three, and the dice goes around in a circle, and for every six you put a quarter in the middle, every five you pass a quarter to the person on your left, and for every four you pass a quarter to the person on your right, though we had a hard time remembering whether 4 or 5 was left or right, though we finally remembered that "right" has 5 letters and "left" has 4, and you do the opposite of that.

"Imagine doing this when you're drinking," her one aunt who works at the funeral home said.

Later, her other aunt called my friend a whore since she was doing so well, then took the dice from her and promptly rolled a 4.

"Where does that go again?", she was like, fingering a quarter.

"Four to the whore," I was like, and everyone got the giggles.

Later, on the way home, I stopped by to see my one friend's sister and my one friend's mom who's a kind of New-Age-y 2nd wave feminist who sweeps around the house wearing a muu-muu all the time and smokes a lot, and exudes this very comforting vibe, though my one friend's sister was zonked out on the coach from being tired out even though her two kids were up still playing with their toys.

Anyhow, me and her mom talked about the calendars I saw at the gunshop, and she was saying she always found that sex and violence were linked on some primal level.

From that, she talked some about her ex-husband who used to love to hunt, and how on Christmas he bought her a rifle and taught her to shoot, and the first deer season they went hunting, they shot a few rounds at a target at one of his friend's properties, and when she shot her round off and she and her ex-husband went to go check the target, right away he was like, "Nice shot, [her name], that wasn't anywhere near the deer," but he hadn't even looked at the target, and in the little black circle behind the deer's shoulder there were her bullets, all a hair's breadth apart.

Later, when they walked out to the blind, he said she could shoot first at anything but a buck, and when they were waiting there, after a couple hours this beautiful buck with a huge rack steps out and is a hundred feet away standing just like the target, and her ex-husband got his new rifle ready -- he was always buying new equipment and sights, she was saying -- and click, nothing happened, and he tried again and click, nothing happened, and then the buck wandered off and like five minutes later he heard a shot from over by the blind from where his father was, so they ran over there...

When they got there, it turned out that his dad had shot it, and the buck was lying on the ground still breathing, and she wanted them to finish it off, but they tried to convince her that it wasn't breathing since they didn't want to shoot it in the head, since her ex-husband's dad wanted to mount it. So, she said, they'd alternately be like, "No, it wasn't breathing," when she'd point out its chest intermittently heaving, and sometimes like, "But it's not in any pain," to say anything to convince her.

But, her ex-husband was so pissed that he didn't get the buck, that he went back to the blind to hunt more, and left her and his dad to field-dress the deer and drag it back a a few miles to the car, and the thing turned out to be 150lbs, and her dad had had a heart attack not half a year earlier.

"Looking back, I realize how wrong it all was," she was like, and said that you would think that he had killed so many bucks in his life, he would have given the first shot to her no matter what came in front of the bait pile in front of the blind.

Was at the gunshop the other day.

My dad took me and my brother down to the local gunshop in the small town just south of me the other day, to show me all the work that's been being done on it since he started helping out the local garage owner who's starting it up to renovate it. There were security windows installed, as well as cinderblock walls ran through with metal struts, so no one can break in, and a walk-in vault with an electronic padkey where the really expensive guns are kept (though to me the pistols and rifles looked just like the ones elsewhere in the shop).

There was also a calendar of a perky blonde girl in a black bikini holding up a pistol as if about to fire.

Anyhow, the garage owner and the owner of the local convenience store/small grocery store were in there drinking beers, so my brother and my dad got some, though I just had coffee, since I had just woken up. At one point, though, my dad went to the fridge for some reason and found one of those sausage sticks I like there, so he brought it out for me and was like, "Hey [my name], snack on this!", and as soon as he did that, the owner of the local convenience store/small grocery store started being like, "So [my name], you like those? Do you like them mild or hot?" in that really excited way of his, since he was born in Greece and likes giving away things to people. I tried to stop him, but the next thing I know he called up his store across the street, said he was tipsy and didn't want to come over, and told the counter girl to bring over an eight-pound bag of snack-size sausage for me, which she did, entering the gun shop with it balanced up on one hand like a waitress carrying a full tray.

Later, me and him talked about the Bible some, too, and he said it's an endless and endlessly interesting area to study, and that everything in the future is in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

My brother at one point was also saying that all his neighbors up in the Upper Peninsula know that his dog likes to chew on deer legs, so whenever they get one, they drive by and throw the legs in the driveway for his dog, and that right now there's eight of them out there in various states of chewed-uppedness.

Test / Ethics.

So, my dad turned out to be a "Fieldmarshal" personality according to the Meyers-Briggs test. So, lately he's been goose-stepping around the house and then every once in a while stopping to take off his baseball cap and point at his bald head and shout out in a German accent, "Mein Herr!"

In winter when the roads are ice-y I always wonder about the ethics of driving through yellow lights -- yes, it's illegal, but is it better to try to stop, and then slide into oncoming traffic if you hit a patch of ice at the intersection?

Number / Reason for the Dream I had Two Nights Ago?

Today I went to the DMV to renew my license. When I took my number, it was "69", and the old lady at the desk had to announce it.

I think I might know why I had that one dream two nights ago - my mom had set out a DVD that was an interview with L. Ron Hubbard in my room that had come through the library donation bin and she had taken for me, and I saw it sitting out right before I went to sleep, and I got a chill like I always do whenever I see L. Ron Hubbard's face, or think about him.

Had another dream last night.

I dreamed I was in bed, and a demon was over to my left in my bedroom, the very same one in which I was actually sleeping, and he (the demon was male) held such power over me that I couldn't open my eyes or even summon up the power to get out of bed.

Addendum.

One of the books my one friend's mom showed me was this book by excommunicated Mormon heretic cum lesbian separatist Sonia Johnson, "Wildfire: Igniting the She/volution". It was written in the late 80s, and flipping through it with my one friend's sister we came across this chapter entitled something like "The AIDS Crisis: Men Making Their Problems More Important Than Women's Problems Once Again," where she argued that though AIDS was horrible, it was more a gay men's issue than a lesbians, and that you had all these grown men being matronized by everyone and though the situation was horrible, to infantilize their community was to cut short the necessary discussions and growth that could come out of it, and to postpone dealing with problems like domestic violence and discrimination against women once again.

"Wow," I was like, "She kind of has a point."

"I know, doesn't she!", my one friend's mom was like.

Saw my one friend's mom and sister the other night.

The other night I went and saw my one friend's mom and sister... The mom is the one who's a kind of New-Age-y 2nd wave feminist who sweeps around the house wearing a muu-muu all the time and smokes a lot, and exudes this very comforting vibe.

At one point, we were going through her shelves looking for some old feminist books she had mentioned, and when I found one and went to take it down from a high shelf, she was like, "It'll be dusty. Blow it!", and then laughed at what she said.

She was also saying how she always found confirmations of patriarchy back when she was a court recorder. She said that it was a bitch to indicate interruptions in a transcript -- you'd have to put in hyphens and then the interruptor's name in brackets followed by their comments and then go back to the original comments -- and whenever there was an expert testifier, the males would never get interrupted, but like every woman who was an expert testifier would be interrupted on practically every comment, and she'd always be putting in the brackets.

She also said that she hated doing all the typing, and that one year when there was a bunch of CSC cases coming through the court -- Criminal Sexual Conduct cases, she explained further, all involving kids -- she was very glad when the judge would begin his sentencing remarks, since it would mean type up two more paragraphs and then stop typing for that trial.

Anyhow, she said that for like a month all the CSC cases were for girls, and then one day it was for a little boy, and when he began his sentencing remarks, she was glad since she would be going home soon, and then like four pages later and the judge was still going on and on about how the little boy was traumatized for the rest of his life and how hard it was for him to get up there and testify, she was thinking to herself that that was bullshit since the little boy hadn't faced worse CSC or circumstances different from any of the little girls who had been through the court that past month.

She also said that patriarchy is exemplified by the one time she saw "Deliverance" -- she was disturbed for days afterword by the male rape scene, whereas that never happens with female rape scenes in movies since it's old hat.

My mom on her generation.

My mom was saying that the other night that she thought Clinton squandered his presidency, and that Bush wasn't any good either, which pisses her off, since her generation had her chance and now it's gone, now the torch is passed on to Obama and those younger.



"Tells you a lot about the Baby Boomers, huh?", she was like.

Etc.

At the coffee shop where I was working yesterday, I noticed that the room capacity was "69".

Last night I had a dream that I was in this shitty apartment and a slightly older woman was showing me around, and as we went from the shittily-carpeted living room into the kitchen where there was a tiled floor, there was an evil spirit in the far corner by the built-in Lazy Susan, and though when I was in the living room and could abjure it from there with sworn oaths and the sign of the cross, as soon as I crossed over the little metal strip separating the carpet from the tile into the kitchen, my mouth would stop up, and I would feel this upwelling sense of anxiety, knowing that I couldn't do anything, and all I could do was contain the spirit from afar, rather than confront it, which someone like a real priest or exorcist or someone with real power could do.

On another note, I've talked my parents into taking the Meyers-Briggs personality test, only they didn't feel like taking it online, so I had to cut-and-paste the questions into a Word document, print it out, then take it home so they could circle the answers. Then, my dad was tired and my mom didn't feel like doing it, so I had to read them a lot of questions so they would finish the test. My favorite part was when it was this yes-no question "I almost always stick by my principles," my mom was like, "Less and less," then she said that that was the fun part of getting older.

Also, after they had both finished the test, my parents started making up yes-no questions for each other as if they were on the Meyers-Briggs test, and since my mom had just cooked my dad's favorite stuffed cabbage casserole recipe that evening, she was like, "My wife cooks better stuffed cabbage than my mother," and my dad was like, "Not any more!", since my grandma on that side is getting kind of senile.

Finally got around to reading the Newsweek special election issue.

Yesterday I finally got around to reading the Newsweek special election issue. I found these to be the highlights (paraphrasing since I'm not going to go back and hunt down every single quote, though I did find the last one so you get the full story):

1) When asked by a friend if she would stab Karl Rove in the back if she passed him in a crowd -- since, after all, he seems to be the guy who spread the news in the South Caroline primary eight years ago that their Bangledeshi adopted child was from John McCain and a black prostitute --Cindy McCain was like, "No, the front".

2) In order to avoid the 5-20 lbs. that candidates put on by eating everywhere they go, Obama would always get takeout from all the small restaurants he stopped at, and no one ever saw him eating. Friends, though, said that Michelle would "wolf down a cheeseburger as soon as she'd look at it."

3) Once early in the campaign when a South Side Chicago crowd was grumbling about Obama not being black enough, Michelle just looked at them and was like, "Stop that nonsense."

4) At a campaign stop in the south somewhere McCain called out from behind some photographers this fat older woman in a black t-shirt with the outline of two martini glasses embroidered on it in silver sequins, and when she got stagefright in front of all the cameras, McCain pretended to be in love with her and was like, "What, you're leaving me so soon?"

5) There's this report of top McCain aides doing karoake:

After the town-hall debate, Salter and Schmidt reunited with a dozen or so members of the traveling press corps at a karaoke bar in Nashville. It had been months since the duo had had a night out with reporters. Salter, who had sung in a band in college, was cajoled into singing a few tunes. Before long, and after a drink or two, he was into it. Under pressure from the reporters, Schmidt joined him for a chorus of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." Schmidt even sang "Rocky Mountain High," to squeals from the increasingly inebriated reporters. But then he went off and sat quietly. Schmidt looked worn out, his burly body weighed by stress and the woes of the campaign, his relentless stare dimmed by exhaustion. He ignored political questions and talked quietly about his family. Salter, on the other hand, had found his groove. Standing in the middle of the bar, dressed in his ubiquitous corduroy jacket, he bellowed "More Dylan!" until he had belted out every Bob Dylan song the bar had. Reporters sang loud, drunken backup and tried to get Salter to join them in boy-band dance moves. It was the first time anyone had seen Salter look as if he was having fun in a long time.

That sounds like truly awful karaoke. The one guy sounds like a jackass for commandeering the songbook, and then the whole backup/dance moves thing is typical of every drunken, self-absorbed group that ever comes in to a karaoke bar and behaves selfishlessly. This is the most damning thing in the piece, and I wonder that reporters involved didn't kill this piece, since the aides obviously couldn't. They all sound like a bunch of karaoke retards.

Addendum to the Addendum to the Addendum.

I forgot, when my mom was saying that maybe it was a Hindu or a Jehovah's Witness or a Muslim recalling my books, she was like, "[my name], you of anybody should know that."

Also, when my dad heard my mom say "Muslim", he was like, "I bet all the books on bombs at the library are checked out."

Addendum to the addendum.

Someone just recalled a third book from me! Another $3 per day in fines for every day not returned after December 26th.

Addendum.

Though the library at school was a desert by the end of last week, some grad student recalled a book from me this past Tuesday, and another one recalled another book from me yesterday, which means that I'll be accumulating $3 per day per book if I don't get them back by Dec. 23rd and 24th, respectively, which is impossible since I'm gone from school on vacation, like most normal people, who, being normal, would also never consider recalling a book during vacation (e.g., in the past I have refrained from recalling books I've needed over spring break for this very reason, that I didn't want to stick someone who is on vacation with fines).

Anyhow, I was telling this to my mom today and complaining that people who would recall a book during Christmas break are not from this planet, and she was like, "Don't be so narrow-minded, it could be a Hindu," and when she could see I was getting pissed because I wanted someone to bitch at and she wasn't playing the role, she added, "Or a Jehovah's Witness."

On another note, at the one coffee shop in my hometown that I go to, they have a box where you can put your cup buddies (the cardboard things that go around the cup to keep your hand from getting burned) so they can re-use them, if they're not dirty.

Visit Home (III of III): Marge.

I saw my godmother Marge recently, too. In her house she had all her Christmas bullshit out, stuffed snowmen and pine garlands and santa dolls and the like, but up on her main wall in the living room was this wreath made of dyed red ostrich feathers, with a red bow on it.

"That's out of place," my mom was like.

"Honey, look at that," Marge was like, "That's the real Margie there."

"It looks like a hooker wreath," I was like, and then Marge said she got it at a Lord's and Taylor like two years ago, and it's her favorite Christmas decoration.

After I had said later that I was sorry that she never made it out to see Tina Turner with me, she said that she's sorry she didn't go, but she saw three shows in December, the Rockettes and "White Christmas" and Madonna.

"How was Madonna?", I was like.

"Oh, that was a scene," Marge was like. "There were men running around in wedding dresses and everything," and then added that one of her friends pointed out a guy in a "MALE WHORE" shirt and was like, "Come on, Margie, we have to get you one of those!"

"So what did you think of Madonna, though?", I was like.

"I've always thought she was a slut," my mom was like, interrupting.

"She is!", Marge said, making a disgusted face, "And she's all into that kebob, I don't know what's up with that woman."

Later, Marge was also saying that she and some of her friends went to San Francisco on Halloween, and it was a sight. She said that when they were going through some neighborhood, they ran into a protest to outlaw cars in favor of scooters, and that there was this guy in a shirt cut down the middle and pants cut down the middle, with his ass hanging out of his pants.

She also said they took the bus at one point and walked to open seats at the back, which was a mistake since this guy in the back started talking to them a bit, and then lit up a joint. Her friend flipped out, and then the guy flipped out, and then they got in this huge argument till like ten minutes later they finally got everyone calmed down.

"So," Marge was like, to calm the waters, "What do you do?"

"I'm in distribution," the guy said.

Right before we left, Marge asked me how my program was going, and I told her how I was studying for generals exams and had like four lists of like sixty books to read through before being tested on them.

"Like holy books?", Marge was like. "It's still religious shit, right?"

Visit Home (II of III): Nuns.

When I was visiting my great aunt the nun, she was saying that the previous night she had had a dream that me and my mom were coming to visit her, and then here we are.

At one point her old friend (another nun) stopped by to say hello -- we've known her forever, she used to drive up my great aunt and her own sister who was also a nun, and when we would borrow our neighbor's big yellow pontoon boat to go around the lake, she used to pilot it in full habit -- and we talked a little bit, so since she was dwelling too much on her bad health, I decided to change the subject and tell her some happy news, so I told her about how Obama had wished me a Merry Christmas the other day.

"That's lovely, he seems like such an intelligent young man," she was like, appreciatively, but then she saddened and was like, "but I do hope he changes his mind about the babies."

After this, she talked a bit about how in her family there were seven sisters, and that in one year five of them died, and she was in church praying, "Jesu, will I be next?", and the child in the stained glass window smiled at her and she knew her time had not yet come.

Later, a third nun popped who who was a real talker, and after I said I study the history of Christianity, although she hadn't been a part of our previous conversation, she almost right away started up on this good-natured mini-rant about politics.

"Oh," she was like, "People are so afraid to say God anymore, especially the political candidates, unlike the way it used to be. All the Founding Fathers believed in a God who made us."

"That's right," I was like, "But most of them didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. They were all deists, the most they thought was that Jesus was a supremely moral man who we should all imitate,but no more than that, and that a bunch of superstitious miracle stories had accreted around his life. That's a lot different then Obama and McCain, who are both professing Christians."

She seemed flummoxed, and I added, "Though, McCain's pastor called the Catholic church the Whore of Babylon."

"Really?", she was like, and my great aunt's friend chimed in, "But McCain, or his pastor?"

"His pastor did say that," I was like, "but McCain sat through that for twenty years, and somehow no one made an issue of that in the election. The whole thing is odd."

Somehow, the third nun then got off on a sidetrack and was saying how when she was in college she had a Latin course, and one day before the exam she was looking for a book and was next to the Latin section, and she just felt the urge to pick up some Bonaventure, so she just flipped open the book and read a bit, and the next day, it turned out that the very same paragraph she had read was on the test.

She also began to say farewell (she was a talker) and was like, "May God lead you!", and then that got her saying how she had lived and worked like an hour away from where my parents live, and how after her novitiate ended and she was waiting to be assigned, her mom said to her, "May God lead you," like she always would do, but then was like, "But not too far!"

Somehow, she then said that part of her family had the name that's the maiden name of Obama's mother, and then she began to say that she is hoping he'll change his position on the babies, and since the nun had already outstayed her welcome a bit, my mom was like, "Of course, sister, you'll just have to continue praying for it," and with that a a few other comments nudged her out of the room.

After our visit, before we stopped through a Tim Hortons for coffee, my mom was saying that she always got the impression of a hatchet from John Paul II, and that it was always his way or the highway.

"And," she was like, "it's not like I keep up with any of this, but what does the church have to show for such a long popehood, or papacy, or whatever you call it? I'm not saying that everyone has to be a great leader or that I could be, but you think that with what everyone says about him that he would have been doing something great, but I don't just see what it was with him, except that he was Polish and every other pope before him had been Italian. He didn't even seem that smart."

Visit Home (I of III): Parents.

My mom was saying that she dreads seeing a fat person in line in the library where she works, and then she corrected herself to say that she only dreads seeing fat women, not fat men.

"The fat women are really nasty since they're so unhappy, but the fat men are relatively normal," my mom was like.

"That's because all the fat men want is another sub," my dad was like.

When I asked my mom why specifically she dreaded the fat women, my dad was like, "You have no idea what they do to her, they sneak in back and steal her lunch sandwich..."

Saw Obama today!

[...This was post a bit delayed, started it yesterday and just finished it now, with now meaning one day before you'll see it since I'm trying to write posts ahead of time and stagger them since I'm on vacation...]

So, today after I bought some pastries from the schismatic nuns to take home for my parents and relatives as gifts, I had a coffee at a coffee shop across the street, and then as I was walking home past this Christmas tree lot next to a gas station and an apartment building, I saw like about two policeman on my side of the street, and a guy in casual clothes who was looking around a lot, and then some other guys on the other side of the street standing with their arms folded as they guarded each side of the entrance between the wire-mesh fence, and then there was a guy in the lot itself with binocs who was looking up at all the windows in the apartment buliding overlooking the lot. I figured it must have been Obama and his family, but there wasn't much of anyone in the lot, so I just continued walking on home with my pastry bag and a tart-box in my hand.

Like a block up, though, when I was on the opposite side of the street from where I get my hair cut, like two police cars followed by like three black SUVs with tinted windows followed by a couple more police cars passed me by, so I walked across the street and stood outside the hair place and looked down the street to see if I could see anything, and the Japanese owner waved to me from inside where she was cutting someone's hair, and then the salon countergirl who I had met once came out and saw what was going on, and we both started talking and agreed that we thought that the Obamas should be able to lead a peaceful life, but we wanted to see them anyways, so she ran back inside to go get her coat.

At that point, too, this girl who was in the salon comes out and says hi, and it turns out that it's Artemis, who had graduated high school last year but is still going to college in the city, and was home to visit her parents that weekend, and she was like, "Wait a sec, let me pay up and I'll come with you."

So, we wandered up to the lot and crossed to the other side of the street, where there were some planters that people were standing on, and we joined the crowd there that was all on their tiptoes trying to get a peek of Obama. While doing that I complimented Artemis on her hair, and she was like, "Thanks, but I actually just got a wax done," and so I re-affirmed that her hair was different from the last time I saw her, and still nice.

So, we stood there waiting and waiting, and all we can see is security people, including the one with binocs who was still around scanning all the windows, but the next thing we know, there's Obama besides the black SUV, and he's waving and being like "Merry Christmas!", and looking a lot shrimper in person than on tv.

Artemis was busy trying to snap a picture and somehow missed it, but like everyone else outside waved back and all at once were like, "Merry Christmas!", saying it together like a kindergarten class, only it wasn't quite like my kindergarten class, since the 'all-at-once' voice was pretty black-sounding, since like five-sixths of the people waiting outside in the crowd were black.

After that, the black SUV pulled away and I think I saw his daughters in the car, and I was very happy for like a few minutes, since it seemed like my friends were always running into one Obama or another in the neighborhood but never me, but then I was all pissed that I didn't see Michelle too. It was almost like, "Wait, she couldn't come out of the car and say hi too?", though I would never do that to the daughters, let them lead normal lives, but I do want their mom to jump for a crowd like their dad does, since they're both figures in the public eye.

Anyhow, I then went on my way to the local cafeteria up the block to get dinner since my fridge was pretty empty from my leaving the next day, and I threw my bags down on this table next to two black people doing some sort of business meeting, an older guy in a suit with a moustache and a clipboard, and this late middle-aged woman in a light pink jogging suit with a light pink "OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT" baseball hat on.

"Could you watch my stuff for a minute while I order?", I was like, and when the woman said sure, I was like, "And guess who just told me 'Merry Christmas'?", and then I dropped it on them that I was in the crowd who had just seen Obama outside the Christmas tree lot, and the black guy who was just sitting down at the next table over to both of ours stopped to listen to me too.

"Shoot," the woman was like as soon as I had finished, "I always just miss him!"

I told the news to the (black) girl next to me in line, too, and then I sat down and had my hamburger steak and onions, which was very good and juicy, though they messed my side order up and gave me mashed potatoes and gravy and a cob of corn rather than rice and gravy and a side of mixed vegetables.

When the woman in the pink jogging suit left, too, she stopped and knelt and gave me a half-hug/half pat on the arm and was like, "Now you have a good holiday!"

Also, I stopped by the dollar store to tell the news to the Palestinian owner who I know, and this black woman in line was like, "I knew you were going to say that," as soon as I had said my "Guess who just wished me a Merry Christmas? - Obama!" line, and she added that she's never seen him, though her daughter has a lot, since she goes to the elementary school that's like right by his house.

Addendum.

My friend also said that when she was an undergrad at the University of Iowa, it was mostly smart kids from small towns and not rich families who went to UI, while richer kids would go out of state - that is, unless they had really bad test scores, in which case they went to UI and usually were the frat kids and partied a lot and were always on the verge of flunking out. So, not only were they rich kids, but dumb rich kids, she said.

Anyhow, she was saying the worse time ever was one spring when kids were moving out for the summer, and these kids had tossed a lot of good stuff (furniture, electronics, that sort of stuff) on the curb since they were moving, and when they saw people picking through it, they came out and told them to go away, and started smashing their shit they didn't want up so no one else could have it.

Can't be friends with rich people.

So, yesterday when I was having a drink with my one friend from Iowa, we both got to talking how we've never been able to really be friends with rich people.

"I can't identify with someone who hasn't had to struggle," my friend was like.

Then, after a short pause, she was like, "I think I maybe could be friends with a rich kid who was disowned."

Later, she told me that one of the most awful things she's ever done was go up to a hipster at a bar once who was wearing a John Deere trucker cap and was like, "That's cool, my mom worked for John Deere, where do you work?", and when the guy said he didn't work for John Deere, she played dumb and was like, "Oh, then why are you wearing that cap? I don't know why someone would wear a cap for a company they don't work for."

She added that her mom did in fact work for John Deere at one time, and that she doesn't like how hipsters pretend to be salt-of-the-earth types, when they're really just a bunch of rich kids, mostly.

Proctored a standardized test this morning.

So, this morning I proctored a standardized test for high school students. This one perky blonde mom was there because her middle-school age daughter was taking it, and she talked way too much to me and the other person checking people in, and when I was nice and suggested she go to a bakery down the road and have a coffee and croissant while she wait for her daughter, she was like, no, i can't, i have to be here for my daughter in case she decides to stop the test, i told her not to be worried if she sees something she doesn't know, because a lot of older kids are taking the test, and then when we were like, oh, the woman smiled and was like, "Oh, she'll do just fine, I know it."

Later, I saw her waiting at a table right outside her daughter's test room. She had a little designer shopping bag with cord handles, and was making Christmas cards with scissors that cut decorative edges, and was hole-punching them so she could put ribbons in.

Also, after seeing an experimental opera last night with a couple friends - a friend of one friend was in it, the first musical piece which was a lot of voices and clinking plates and stuff was good, but the rest didn't hold my attention - I decided to pop in on this battle of the bands contest the one karaoke host here does every year, and the bar turned out to be the most awful hipster thing ever, so I left without even paying to go in to see the bands. The place was in a wearhouse and dark and cavernous and overpriced, and the staff was rude, and they charged me too much on my bill when I got some beer and chili, and then it turns out they were out of chili, so I got some chicken soup, but they brought me a cup when I wanted a bowl, and no one was cool anyhow, and when I could see into the back room where the bands were, it was cavernous and no one was there and they still wanted me to pay $10 to go in for like 40minutes.

"That's not cool," I was like, to the rude hipster girl who was manning the door to the back room.

"I don't care, it's my job to collect money," she was like.

"That's funny," I was like, "Apathetic cool people usually don't care about stuff like that and love money that much."

She didn't find that funny, so I left.

Honestly, hipsters are the least cool people on earth.

A happy or interesting thing: airport grace.

Since I can't stand people who bitch, rather than ask someone I meet how they're doing and risk them bitching, recently I've been asking people instead to tell me something happy or interesting that had happened to them this past week, so that way I don't get a response I don't want to hear.

(Though, twice I've gotten some doozy of an answers - one girl was like, "My mother got her shunt out," and one guy was like, "A friend of mine survived his suicide attempt," and when I asked if he was better now, he added, "He just came out of a coma and is still confused," and when I asked if at least it seems like the underlying issues were getting addressed, he was like, "No.")

So, when I was out with friends like a week ago, I asked this to this one girl, and she told me that when she was coming back through the Denver airport after Thanksgiving, she was in the airport T.G.I. Friday's and heard some people at a table behind her saying this really long, elaborate grace -- she then broke off and made clear that she likes things like this, that when people bring their culture and religion unobtrusively into public spaces -- and then, suddenly the people were like, "Lord, thank you for these bountiful nachos," and she turned around to see this middle-aged couple holding hands elevated across the table and with their heads bowed and eyes closed, and between them was this huge heaping plate of T.G.I. Friday's nachos, more than two people could ever eat.

"It struck me funny," she was like, "Because the nachos truly were bountiful."

Black neighborhood bar / Mexicans.

So, last night I went for a drink at the black neighborhood bar with a friend. They had a shitload of very nice Christmas decorations up - a tree, lights, garlands - and the day bartender who had put them up and does the Sunday afternoon football buffets was there, so I went up and hugged her and was like, "The place looks great!", and though she didn't seem to be able to place me at first she was like, "Did you like the tree!?!?!"

When I was getting a table with my friend - the bar was packed because of the football game on - we were just sitting down, and this black dude who was also just going to sit down was like, "Mind if I take this seat?", and took the seat my friend was going to sit in just before she was going to sit in it, and the (black) people next to us were looking like what was up with that, so I mugged a shrug to them and the one (black) woman ("Mickey") with a knit cap on then stood up, came over to me, gave me a hug and a kiss near my neck, and whispered in my ear, "I wanted you to know that that look you gave was so cute," and she touched my arm, when she was finishing saying that.

Later, she came over to our table and was talking with me and my friend, and at one point she turned to me and was like, "You know who you look like? Carson Kressley!"

"What is it, the shirt and sweater or something?", I was like.

"No," she was like, "It just looks like you could decorate or something," and then she was like, "I'm not saying you're gay or anything."

A little later, somehow we were talking about how she used to live in Seattle -- "It's a really tolerant place," she said as an aside, looking at me -- and then she began talking about Alaska and how she had some native friend from there who didn't want to go back - the story was kind of confused, it sounded like her friend was a lesbian or something, which made me wonder if she was too, it was kind of odd - and then she was like, "You guys ever been in Alaska?", and when I said my brother had lived there and I had visited him, she was like, "Did he ever meet Sarah Palin?", and then added, "Did you?"

"Meet her?", I was like, "I nailed her daughter!", and the woman laughed at that, though then she leaned forward and touched my arm again and was like, "You do know that's wrong, don't you."

Much later, at another bar, my friend admitted to me that she doesn't like Mexicans, and was saying that though she has Mexican friends, all the Mexicans at the restaurant where she manages are just a pain in the ass since they are all stuck in this machismo thing, "Which I don't get," she was like, "Because they're short, and from the sounds of it they're all fucking each other."

She then added that she does think Mexicans are lazy, and she hates it when people point out the long hours they work, since though that's true, they don't do shit most of the time.

Went to the gyros lounge last night.

So, last night after catching a movie downtown with my one Dutch friend, we went to the gyros lounge for a couple drinks. Like no one was there, except some regulars watching a show on the History Channel where they try to track down the Chupacabra and never find anything. Me and my friend were joking about it, and this one rough-looking older blonde woman with a santa hat on laughed and was like, "That's right, they look and look and never find anything, ha!", and then went back to scratching her lotto ticket.

Later, she and the guy she was in there with started talking some to us, and it turns out that they're Amtrak workers and they're put up in the city at this hotel like a block away like three times a week, so they come into the gyros lounge a lot for a beer or two after diddling around the city all day after they're off work.

The chicken pot pie I had was good, and the French fries had a pleasant meat taste to them from the oil they were fried in.

Addendum.

What with that one Dutch prof said, it was almost like, "Of course he's Serbian, that explains everything."

My one Dutch prof on Blagojevich.

Forgot --

Today at the holiday breakfast a bunch of people were talking about the Illinois governor scandal, and my one Dutch prof who is always very calm and well-spoken was like, "What I find hard to believe is his brazenness, his attitude that he could not get caught. That is very Serbian, and very dangerous. One can see how if a gun was placed in his hands there would be another Balkan war."

Holiday breakfast.

So, I just went to a holiday breakfast that school always puts on this time of year. I got there like a half-hour after it started, and ended up staying for like two-and-a-half hours, table-hopping with all the other people who wouldn't leave, and I ended up shutting the thing down with a bunch of black administrators from school, another white doctoral student, and a white professor, though she flaked and left before the rest of us.

One black administrator was talking about getting American Girl dolls for her grandkids for Christmas and how they liked them so much but they kind of broke the bank for her, and then when I asked her what she thought of them, she said they were a little consumerist like everything is nowadays for kids, and I was like, "But, at least aren't they better than Barbie?", and she was like, "Or Bratz, I am sorry, but those dolls are slutty."

Later, me and the white prof kept going up to get more biscuits from the breakfast buffet, and we kept saying how good the biscuits were. Finally, when the one prof was gone and the caterers who were tending the buffet were nowhere to be found, the same black administrator looked around to see who was listening, and then was like, "I am sorry, but those are not biscuits."

From that point on people started talking about cooking, and the one white grad student who was across the table from us was saying how growing up he did the cleaning and his brother did the cooking for chores, but now things are switched since his wife doesn't like cooking, and she does all the cleaning and he does all the cooking, including Thanksgiving dinner, when he did everything including homemade stuffing.

Some other black administrators down the table took up the theme, and were talking about oyster stuffing, and then the black FedEx guy who everyone knows came and sat down and had some breakfast since he was ahead of schedule, and he mentioned that he always added sausage to his stuffing.

Somehow, then, the white grad student across from me mentioned that he made his own pasta, and then the black FedEx guy mentioned that he had just bought a "Kwiz-a-nart" for three payments of $69.99 and that it did everything, and this one black administrator cracked, "Does it make pasta?"

Like I always do in these conversations, I bring up celebrity recipes and say how when you look at them a lot of them suck, like Ben Affleck's Chicken Piccata, but the one celebrity I've always wanted to make since it looks so good is Patti LaBelle's macaroni and cheese, which uses like three pounds of cheddar cheese and a gallon of half-and-half, which immediately everyone wanted to talk about.

"I add some sugar in my mac and cheese," the FedEx guy was like, "Because it's not like you taste the sugar in there, but if the cheese is bitter, it evens the taste out."

"What kind of cheese you use?", a black administrator was like.

"Once I used some sharp Vermont cheddar," the guy was like, "I thought I was all gourmet, but it was too bitter, and I said to myself, 'Boy, why don't you stick to what you know?'"

"Mmmmm-hmmm, that's why," the administrator was like.

"But why is she eating all that mac and cheese anyways?", another administrator was like, going back to Patti LaBelle, "That woman is a diabetic."

"She's got a recipe book out now," a third administrator was like, "She has a lot of recipes in there, including mac and cheese, and sometime she has one recipe for diabetics, and another for normal people. She shouldn't be eating that mac and cheese, though."

"No?", the FedEx guy was like, "That's right, she shouldn't be eating that, 'cause that's just an appetizer for her."

Abortion / Race.

So the other week I was talking with this scholar associated with the department, and he was saying that he's writing a chapter for a friend's book on denominational schisms and what causes, and then mentioned that abortion, though a controversial issue, has never caused a denominational schism. He said that it's definitely caused people to leave or switch congregations when the issue has been politicized one way or another, but he thinks that it's not as constantly in your face as something like having a gay pastor is; if a pastor had an abortion or had someone have an abortion, who would know, he said.

At the same meal, I was talking with the one black dean who I get along with. At some point I mentioned Angela Davis, and she gave a power fist, only half in jest, and mentioned that her dad who was a black studies professor in the 70s used to get in terrible arguments with her grandparents about how Christianity was the white man's religion.

Later, she said that since her husband and son are so musical, people sometimes call them the Von Trapps, and that once when he was little she took her son to the play and he sat spell-bound through the entire thing, he likes music so much, and that people at intermission complimented her on his behavior, and said that when they had first sat down they dreaded having a kid behind them.

On another note, last week I went to a talk on campus about prisoner's rights, in honor of a black panther assassination that happened almost forty years ago in the city. Since it was a bunch of radicals during the presentation, the talk went long, and though I had sat down on the aisle to make sure I could leave if need be, a bunch of current black radicals came in late and they set out chairs between me and the entrance, so because I had to meet a friend at 8pm, little old white me had to get up with my schoolbags and overcoats and go through a crowd of young black men in leather coats and sunglasses who had been giving the power-fist all night and then during the Q&A part were saying how Obama is part of the capitalist superstructure and stops real change from happening.

It was awful, though I did get two plates of free Thai food out of the night.

2 Addendums.

I got the actual concluding prayer from "Medjugorje Up Close":

Mary, the Mother of Jesus. We thank you, Mary, here now, at the end of this book that we wanted to write for you. Thank you, our Mother, for the graces you have helped us to receive and to have from your Son, Jesus. Thank you for the book, so much more your gift to us than ours to you. Pray for us and for those who read this bookk, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Lucy Rooney, S.N.D.
Robert Faricy, S.J.
May 1986

Also, in thinking back to my calling my landlord to tell her about that girl at the end of the hall who had loud people over at 4:30am, I had all sorts of self-conscious editing on race stuff since she 's black... I made sure to identify her by apartment number rather than say shit like "that one black girl who lives at the end of the hallway", and I just said her friends were loud, rather than say they were "hooting and hollering" or something racially-tinged like that.

Though, I am proud to say that when I've called the cops a couple times about that one weird guy who parks his van outside my window with the radio on so loud that I can hear it throw my closed windows and his closed van windows, that I can say it's "an old white dude" - to think that I live in an urban community and that it's the white people's radios I'm complaining about!

Medjugorje / police / grapefruit.

Last night I finished this book "Medjugorje Up Close" I had gotten for a buck at a garage sale, about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a small Croatian town in the 1980s that are incredibly popular despite no official approval of the Roman Catholic church.

The book was on the pro-Medjugorje side and was written by a Franciscan priest and a nun who had visited there a lot, but what really hit home for me was that the book concluded with a devotional prayer of the both of them to their mother, Mary, that hoped their book would work for good in the world. Somehow it hadn't hit home for me before how devoted to Mary many people are, and the importance such apparitions would have for them, where they would read every message that comes through since it is from Mary, and Mary is the exalted queen of heaven who is the conduit of all graces. Usually you just think of people coming there to get healed or something, and don't think of the grave importance of the vision for them, because Mary herself is appearing on earth.

On another note, last night at 4:30am the one girl who used to throw parties all last year had friends over who were loud in the hallway, and a girl in my building called the police on them, and there were 3 police cars outside.

Last night, too, I was thinking of how like last week I ate a grapefruit right before going to buy something at the dollar store below my apartment, and the counter clerk asked me what cologne I was wearing, he liked it so much, since he thought the smell of the grapefruit on my hands from peeling it was a cologne or something.

The only time my father has gotten viscerally mad at me.

Like my freshman or sophomore year of college, I went home for spring break and used my parents' car to pick up one friend at her college, and then go to another college to see another friend and spend a couple nights there and hang out.

When I got back home, my dad was like, "So did you end up seeing anyone else?", since a lot of kids from my high school ended up at that college.

"Yeah," I was like, "I saw [some kid]," and when my dad asked what he had to say, I said I just saw him, I didn't talk to him, and then I went on to say how I always thought he was weird.

Now, I had already told my mom that I had seen this kid when me and my friend were at a stoplight in our car, and he was like a block up crossing the street, but I hadn't told my dad this, so he just assumed I had passed him on the street or something and ignored him.

So, then, this incredibly, visceral pissed look just crossed my dad's face, then, and he raised his voice and asked me what was I doing, that you never treat a person like that and no matter what you think of someone, you always stop and ask them how they're doing, and in any case you never know how someone is, people change all the time, but in any case you ask them how they're doing and acknowledge them.

Getting back to normal.

My dump this morning was massive and fibrous, though still on the "I needed to wipe too much" side. Give me a few days and my bowels will be back to normal, though then going home for Christmas will fuck it all up again.

On another note, the other day when I was coming home I was going to go into the dollar store that I live above to get some vinegar since I needed it, and there was this black girl outside with a cute dog (beagle-Australian shepherd mix, I found out), who accosted me as soon as she saw me going into the store to ask me if I could get some dish detergent for her, since she had to stay outside with her dog she was walking, and she had just remembered she really needed some detergent. I was like, "Sure!", and she introduced herself ("Ebony"), and I got her her detergent.

After I came out of the shop, we ended up talking some, and it turns out that she graduated from Boston College around the same time as a girl I went to high school with.

"Do you know [full name of the girl I went to high school with]?", I was like.

"I might," Ebony was like, "The name sounds familiar..."

"She had red hair and I think in college she dated this guy Patrick from New Jersey," I was like, helpfully.

"That sounds like Boston College," she was like, "and it doesn't help at all. Same goes if she was dating some guy Michael from New Jersey, there was a lot of those too."

Song / Shit / E-mail.

I forgot - at karaoke a couple Tuesdays ago, this one hipster guy sang Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time". He did a confident, unironic delivery sort of thing, and it really worked as a song, so I've been humming it on and off since then.

My shit is getting back to normal, since I've begun to eat a lot of vegetables again. It emanated little red clouds of dye this morning, from all the raw beets I was snacking on yesterday.

Also, I couldn't go this past Tuesday, but my one Dutch friend and his one German friend who I'm also friends with now went to see some movies and invited me along, but they didn't say which ones, and I asked out of curiosity, and I got this e-mail today:

movies were milk, which i found annoying - now all actors want to have gay roles after they did retards - so much for the gay movement, and slumdog millionaire, an english bollywood whihc [sic] was ok but not too good.

I am glad I got to see the "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" doc last weekend, though I wouldn't recommend it to non-Patti Smith fans... There's no way I'm going to go see "Milk", either, though I like Gus van Sant... He was too soft on the Peoples Temple, and I hate biopics ("Ray" almost made me go shoot myself, that shit was so bad, every time I go see a biopic I end up regretting it).

a dream - one of my loveliest.

I had a wonderful dream last night. I dreamed I was hiking with a friend (can't remember who) through these gorges in this American countryside of rolling hills, and on either of the walls of the gorges were these stone houses cut into them, with small stone window panes and yellow opaque glass (couldn't remember the word "opaque" there for a second, I almost wrote "impaquable", almost like "implacable"), and one the top of the hills were fenced pastures, and somehow me and my friend were inside the houses at one point and there were these vast entrance halls with roomy staircases and red carpets, and you could still look out the little yellow windows, which were kind of odd since the windows totally made you think nothing of the like would be inside.

Then, I walked out of the gorge and turned a corner, and I was in this Michigan harbor city in front of a soft-serve ice cream place both of which I recognized in teh dream, and I looked back and could see how you couldn't see the gorge from the city, and I was like, "Oh, so that is where that is!", and then I went down to the beach by myself and walked and looked back at the gorge, you could just barely see it through the trees, while my friend went back to his hotel (I think my friend was male).

On another note, after making hummus last night and mashing the chickpeas with my hands, like twenty minutes later I was brushing my teeth and going to go to bed, and I noticed hummus all mashed and dried up in the hair on the back of my hands, somehow I missed a spot while washing.

(I like mashing the chickpeas with my hands; people may make fun of it, but if you called it "rustic" and sold it at Wholefoods, I'd get at least $11.99/lb. for it.)

Also, my shit this morning was really nasty; it had a sharp stink, and held together though it looked all smear-y. Between that and the nasty instant coffee-and-chicory mix I'm trying to make my way through so I can have the damn can, I just smell that shit and it makes me want to vomit, it wasn't a good morning, despite the great progress I made over breakfast on a new Greek translation I started.

Jeans wore out.

My jeans have a hole on the left inside leg, from rubbing up against the right inside leg, though the right inside leg does not have a hole, it's only just about to get one.

Had a drink with a friend tonight again.

I had a drink with my intense, somewhat depressive bookseller friend tonight at the bar he's been going to for over thirty years. Some of his friends I've met before were there - the odd conservative guy who reads military history; the Irish guy who ragged me about blowjob culture among American teenage girls - and one who I haven't, this tattooed white-haired pony-tailed Vietnam vet named "Bucky" who was telling me about how he grew up on a farm and was used to slaughtering animals like lambs and pigs, it doesn't bother him to not get his meat in plastic, you should have seen his friends's faces the time they were throwing a lambroast and he woke them up at 8am to go chase a lamb down and kill it, they were like, "What the fuck you waking me up for so early, Bucky?"; and who sympathized with my bitch about what assholes bikers (=bicyclists, not motorbikers) are, and said that if I ever hit one with my car, to sue their family first and say I'm so traumatized I can't even get in a car again for fear another dumb-ass biker will come out of nowhere and slide under my car, because if I don't, they might get my house instead of my getting theirs.

He also at one point told me about these girls in his town where he grew up, who grew up on a pig farm. Since everything on a pig farm smells like pig shit, these girls did too, so they couldn't get a date for the life of them, which was a shame, since they were nice-looking girls.

Anyhow, right when everyone was finishing drinking, Bucky invited everyone by to go blow a joint at his house, and when I politely declined and he began talking more to the others, he added, "And if you can, bring over some broads."

"Brats?", I was like, perking up. "I totally could go for some brats right now!"

Earlier in the night, the Irish guy talked about how in the mid-80s he lived in Downey, California, which was home of the Carpenters. I asked him what it was like, and he was like, "Sometimes ye'd be drivin' and a feller'd say, 'That home there is the Carpenters's', and ye'd see this modest-like home there that looked like nothin' perticular."

"Really?", I was like.

"[my name]", my one intense, somewhat depressive bookseller friend was like, "Haven't you ever been to the West Coast? It's all like that. People out there are whores for celebrity."

Dream.

Last night that I was presenting a seminar paper to a group of professors and fellow students, and I hadn't reviewed it right before my presentation, and when I was looking at it right there in front of them in response to their criticisms and trying to explain myself, I realized that the font on my computer I had used was like handwriting, only really bad handwriting, so for entire sections of my paper I couldn't read what I had thought, and I realized they couldn't have either...

Somehow, that writing was both from me, and through my computer, and thus it was really messy and I was responsible for it though it was mechanically reproduced, which I really don't understand, especially since the mechanically-reproduced writing was legible in other parts of the paper.

Also, somehow at one point I was humming a song with them and correcting them on melody and lyrics, only I'm forgetting now what it was, though I had the song in my head when I woke up this morning and all the way into the early afternoon.

Conservation tip.

I think of this a lot when I'm sitting on the toilet taking a shit and blowing my nose --

If you throw the tissue you blew your nose in in the trash rather than the toilet bowl, it saves more energy, since it's less stuff for the waste treatment plant to strain out of the sewage and throw away, since if you throw it in the trash directly it goes to the trash dump directly.

I think I read this somewhere a couple months ago, and I took it to heart.

Celebrity / Cruelty / What Women Want.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Thanksgiving test.

Today I had a very odd Thanksgiving experience --

This cranberry sauce a friend's sister made had a lot of ginger and spices in it that overwhelmed the taste of everything else in the sauce, and in the sauce there were chunks of other fruits besides cranberries, but this one fruit, I sort of recognized the texture in my mouth, but I couldn't quite place what it was, since the taste wasn't there.

As it turns out, later I picked through the sauce, and I realized it was an orange. I couldn't recognize a large piece of a rindless orange slice in my mouth by feel without the orange taste to go with it!

Self discipline.

Today I took the commuter rail out to a college town to visit a good friend there who graduated from the masters program at my school this past year. Since she's an enthusiastic and inveterate jogger -- "Just a twenty minute jog!", she's always like, and it ends up being at least 45, and she's still going even though I'm dying and everything -- we did end going for a jog, though it ended up only being 20 minutes this time truly, since it was cold out and it was early evening and it was dark already.

We jogged down the main street of her town, and it was very difficult for me to jog past all these Indian groceries and hispanic supermarkets and know that I wouldn't have time on this visit to go in and look for coffee cans, and probably would never get back there to check, but I tried to push that thought out of my mind, by thinking that I shouldn't be so attached to material possessions.

But, I ended up staying longer and going out for dinner, and I did stop by those stores.

There were no new coffee cans for my collection, saddly.

Karaoke addendum.

Two things:

My other friend sang Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages"... I couldn't think of the song last night when I was blogging.

Also, karaoke host Will got drunkenly engaged the other night to this girl he's been dating for three months. They were so excited, they drunkenly called all of their relatives, and then the next morning, they woke up next to each other and were like, "Did we just do that?"

Karaoke return.

So, I went to karaoke tonight. Since karaoke hostess Jen is now doing a masters and doesn't host much anymore, her boyfriend does some of the emceeing, and when he started up the evening, he was like, "Hello, welcome to karaoke at [the bar name]. [my name, both first and last!] is here tonight. I'm [his name], and this is [his other friend who was working the karaoke machine]." It was a very nice return, as nice as the one waitress at the Chinese restaurant I used to go to bringing me a free bowl of hot-and-sour soup when I met there with my friends today.

Anyhow, the opening song was George Michael's "Faith". Usually, people suck it up on that song - that song gets sung a lot -- but the girl who did it had a nice voice, and there weren't like twenty people singing with her, so it worked.

Also at the night were -

This one karaoke regular from way back singing Beck's "Loser".

This really annoying skinny hipster kid who thought he was funny and had a high voice - he was at the table next to us, he sat down and took up the salt and pepper shakers in his hand and used them like racing car controls, he thought he was funny; the fact that his douche-y tablemate asked us to move our coats on the bench so someone else who never in the end sat down could sit there didn't help - went on to sing an absolutely inspired version of "The Humpty Dance".

(A question - why are there no black hipsters?)

This one fat white girl who was at the other table next to us and was practically hanging on me and was like, "What are you going to sing?" I found kind of annoying, but then she sang a very nice version of the Pointer Sisters's "I'm So Excited", which is a good karaoke song - upbeat, not done much, repetitious but not too much, and really nice if done with a good voice like she has.
(I should be so judgmental, both people who I found annoying did some nice stuff tonight.)

Also done for like the second or third song was this short white hipster with a deep voice during David Bowie's "Space Oddity", which was very good, but would have been better if it had been done later in the night when everyone was more hammered.

I myself did Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" - I love the song; I want the intro as my ringtone, if I ever get a cellphone that can support ringtones -- but, though the song is good, it's too low for me, as I discovered.

(Some time I should do her "Wishin' and Hopin'" as well, what a great song.)

The highlight of the night was my one friend doing Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" with a funk twist... I can imitate it, but not describe it. Every verse was done with a funk rhythm, and that's hard to do when you're bound to the original instrumentals of the song. It was almost as good as the one time like three years ago when he did a similarly funked-up version of the Beastie Boys's "Sureshot".

Replacement.

Today for some reason I was thinking of how a couple months ago I was talking with my one friend who got pregnant in college and is now a single mom with summer custody, while the dad and his new wife have her daughter during the year, and somehow the subject of death came up.

"If my daughter ever died," my friend was like, "I hate to say this, but I'd run right out and go get pregnant again."

Like ten seconds later she was like, "And that would be the most fucked up kid ever, because they'd always know that they were a replacement."

Another one from the list / Check-up.

So last night at the conference I kind of got a little tipsy again with this other student I know, the one who keeps a list of every guy she's ever slept with. At some point she started telling me about this guy who took her home, and there were handcuffs on all the bedposts, actually screwed in to the wood of the bedposts. She didn't use them on him, but she said it was weird to sleep there all night with them hanging there all around her.

Later, I was talking with the one Australian student in my grad program, and she said that that morning she had called her husband the randy Australian episcopal priest, and when she had said that she and her friend the girl who keeps a list were up way too late last night, he was like, "Oh, that's what happens when you have a pillow fight that lasts for just hours."

List.

So, yesterday at the conference I was talking with this one student I know who does biblical studies, and we were chit-chatting, and since she's kind of proud of the fact that she often loves and leaves guys, I turned the conversation to that, to see if she'd be up to anything much lately.

She hadn't been, but she did tell me that she has a list of every guy she's ever slept with, so she knows that she's not that out of control.

That said, number 14 is "that suited guy", since one time she brought this guy who had been in a full tuxedo in a bar home, fucked him, and then kicked him out since she had a friend in town who was sleeping on the couch, and after she did that, her friend woke up and was like who was that, and the student I know was like, "I honestly have no idea."

Odd pimple.

So, last night I had stripped down to take a shower and decided to take a shit, and it turned out really nasty, so after I wiped my ass, I ended up soaping up a washcloth to wash off the smeary, nasty shit caked on my ass, and when I wiping, I noticed by touch I had one big-ass pimple on my right ass-cheek, not in the crack proper, but still on the slope going into the crack.

I ended up backing up to the mirror and looking at it, and since it looked like a sweat blister that was ready to pop, and was kind of red like there was some blood in it, I went and pinched it, and this water with mixed blood came out, but not all of it, so I kind of had to feel around and squeeze it to get all the shit out of the pimple. The skin underneath kind of swelled up some from my popping the pimple and it looked a little angry, so I threw some antiobiotic shit on it, and assumed it would be all right.

Today, there's a surprisingly large scab where the pimple was.

I'm so excited.

I just found a new book to read:

"Monkey on a Stick".

Went to a black Hebrews restaurant last night.

So, I had had indefinite dinner plans to get together and catch up with a fellow grad student on campus who's not only British, as I knew, but, as I just found out, also a vegan, which severely limits the restaurant options available, and complicates the whole thing to the point where it makes you just want to call the whole thing off and meet for a drink instead. Vegans piss me off like that; that's fine that they're vegans, but they shouldn't expect to just go and dine with everyone else.

But, I've had takeout from this one soul food restaurant like 20 streets south of campus that delivers to a coffee shop on campus, and since it's run by vegan black Hebrews, I decided this was the perfect time to figure out how to get there, and I ended up borrowing a car from a friend for the expedition, which wasn't much of an expedition.

The way there was uneventful, though I had never driven through the ghetto at night. People drove crazy and fast and passed on the right always or in the face of oncoming traffic, and it was pretty much just young thuggish black men walking around, and nothing was going except for lines at sub and gyro shops.

There were also a lot of cop cars; twice we passed them outside stores, with their lights on, and on the way back we had to take an alternate route at one point since some cop cars with lights flashing had blocked off part of the street.

The restaurant itself was also uneventful. It was pretty packed, and some other white people were just leaving.

After the waiter delivered the menus and I had already decided like five minutes ago, my one British friend was still looking at the menu and was like, "I'm not used to all this choice!"

Like two seconds later the waiter, this tall young black dude with a yarn, African-colored red-yellow-and-green hairnet on, came up to take our orders, and was like, "Are you ready to order, or do you need a minute?"

"We still need a minute," I was like, "My friend here's a vegan, he's not used to all this choice."

"Awesome," the waiter was like, and thumped his heart two sign and gave out a peace sign to my one British friend.

For food my friend got bbq tofu and soy macaroni and cheese and a side of string beans, and I got this chef's special which is like brown rice with vegetables mixed in and spiced breaded fried tofu... Mine was kind of dry, but my friend liked his.

Nothing else too much happened, except when we were all done with the meal and the waiter delivered our check, before he turned to leave, he all manly-like patted my one British friend on the shoulder and was like, "Keep it up, bro."

I manned up.

I always feel like such a pussy because I have a squeamish stomach, but the other day when I was at the Brian Wilson concert, I put my hand in my pocket where I had forgotten there was a mechanical pencil that I had put in there after putting a few entry clues into a crossword, and a huge chunk of the lead from the pencil got deep in between my cuticle and my nail and broke off, and though it hurt like a bitch, I couldn't get it out at the time.

When I got home and dug it out with a nail clipper, it was a quarter-inch long.

Surprisingly, I got it out without being squeamish at all.

I wonder how I would fare if I was ever in something like the Jonestown airstrip massacre, where the one congressman's aide had to sit in a tent all night with no medical help with like all of her one thigh blown off, and the remaining muscle gangrening, and trying to keep conscious until medical help arrived so she wouldn't go into shock and then die (she manned up and made it).

2 E-mails (2 of 2): My mom.

Got this e-mail from my mom today:

Mornin' [a pet name for me, derived from my full name]!

Recorded "Jonestown" for ya..............2 hrs. Also, the next program, which I've watched before was an hour long on "The Family", another cult. Recorded that one also.

Lovz ya, Mom

Dad got called to sub in Bio today at [the high school that I went to].

XXXXOOOOOOOOOO

We had talked about Jonestown on Sunday when I gave my parents a call since I had been reading a Jim Jones bio, and my mom mentioned that all the cable stations were playing Jonestown documentaries over and over since this week is the 30th anniversary of the mass suicides (actually, today).

2 E-mails (1 of 2): My neighbor.

From my neighbor, a (white) (female) lawyer and former head of my hometown's county democratic party, in response to an e-mail asking her about her night watching the election results:

I became very emotional.I was a very young child when Brown v Board of
Education was decided and racial integration had just begun. This is
simply wonderful although he will be dealing with horrific financial and
war messes made by Bush and the Republicans. Good for [your mom] volunteering!
Keep the faith. [her name]

I remember once she told me about being a campus activist in the early 60s, and how when she was having a confrontational meeting with this one dean and she read him this huge list of demands, at the end of it, she was like, "And what are you going to do about it?", and he was like, "I'm going to wait."

Walked around the neighborhood today.

An international friend was in town, so I showed her around the neighborhood today.

We went for pancakes at the one cafeteria that gave free food till noon the day after the Election in a "Breakfast on Obama" promotion, and I asked one of the black counterladies how that went.

"Whoo Lord," she was like.

"So there was a lot of people who showed up?", I asked, and she was like, "I couldn't even count them."

When I mentioned that I had heard Obama had showed up himself, she talked to another black counterlady right by her without even turning her head and was like, "Hear that? There's a rumor going 'round that Obama showed up."

When I was eating the pancakes, I noticed out the window that this second-story beauty salon with this electronic sign has a new rotaing posting on it:

HAIR BRAIDING

then

WAXING

then

EYEBROW

then

THREADING

then

JESUS

then

LOVES YOU

I also took her by the one shop where I get all my t-shirts and buttons, and though the owner wasn't there, saddly, just some English woman I've never met before, but my friend rifled through a rack of t-shirts I never looked through, and all of a sudden she pulled out this 4XL shirt on sale for $10 that was like -

VOTE FOR THE BRUTHA MAN

[picture of Obama smiling next to a checked box]

NOT!

FOR THE OTHER MAN

[picture of a sour-looking McCain with a big crossed circle over his face]

"Wow!", my friend was like, "I don't know anyone that big!"

After that, we went by Obama's house, and there was even more security than when I had been by there the week before the election; they now have even more of a whole nother street blocked off, too; and after that, campus, then we said farewell.

Fun Fun Fun: Brian Wilson concert.

So, I went to see Brian Wilson in concert last night.

Good for me, the concert was nowhere near full, so my entire section of people in the way back the management let set up in a section like twenty rows ahead of where we were. The entire time, though, I kept thinking, "I hope he doesn't take this to heart and this makes him break down again," so whenever he asked the audience to sing along or clap, I damn well did it, even though I hate that shit, since I feared the consequences.

Some of his motions to the music were really herky-jerky too, like one time when the lyric was something about love surrounding whatever, and he lifted both hands up and did this quick swat in, to make a gesture for "surround".

Anyhow, I particularly liked how during the intermission and after the concert, they had muzak arrangements of a lot of Brian Wilson songs, including his recent stuff, done in such a creative way that I bet he arranged them himself.

I also liked how he had a 16-piece band -- the sound was very full, and even though his voice wasn't the best, since he had written everything, you had to take the music in full as being him, and not just his voice, so it made you admire him all the more. I like how he must eat up a lot of money on tour to have that many musicians travel with him, but he does it anyways since he likes the sound (he must, that must be the reason).

It was interesting, too, how before the song "Add Some Music to Your Day", which I always thought had really cheesy lyrics, Brian Wilson was like, "Listen to this song, it has nice lyrics." All of a sudden when it was talking about hearing music when you're in the dentist's chair, or when kids go up to an ice cream truck passing by, I realized that that must be how Brian Wilson sees the world, and that he must really be lifted up by the incidental music of life like that.

Overall, though, I wasn't a fan of his new album, "That Lucky Old Sun". It didn't quite cohere, except for the last three songs, which were breath-takingly beautiful and about his mental illness, and I hate to say I liked them, since I hate it when someone prostitutes their life so clearly like that, and plus if they did that and the song sucked, you kind of are in this situation where you have to like the song because it's about them and their troubles (though the last three songs didn't suck, they were quite good, I just hate the possibility of a guilt trip making me like a song).

Dance Dance Dance: How could I forget?

How could I forget? It wasn't until last night at the Brian Wilson concert that I suddenly remembered, when I was at a conference a few weekends ago I ran into this one early 50s black prof whose work I had read, twice!

The first time I was rushing off to a panel in this tucked-away, distant room I had never been to before, and the hotel layout was confusing, and this one taller shrimpy white guy was stopped talking to this shorter black woman for directions to the same room, and it was her! I stopped and was like, "Now where is this room?", and after she told us, I tried to introduce myself since I really want to get to know her better and was like, "I think we met at a panel last year," and she just shook her head and was like, "Ump-uh, ump-uh," and she shooed me away and was like, "Not now, now now you're gonna be late," and when I still tried to re-introduce myself, she just kept being like, "Not now, not now."

That night, after hitting some receptions, I went to the main dance party at the conference, and all the older profs were out on the dance floor since they were playing oldies. I can't remember at the moment what song it was, but that same professor was out there by herself, doing this cool dance move where she had one foot planted and the other stomping, and with her opposite hand just kind of thrust her fist in the air. Later, she danced with some (black) friends her age to "Dancing Queen", and when the DJ was like, "And now, for the second time tonight, by request, 'The Electric Slide'!", she was out there with like forty other old professor doing the dance in tandem. I couldn't take my eyes away, and stayed around even though I was dog-tired just to watch everyone dance, and especially her.