Like six things.

1) I ran into an undergrad I know last night. He said he's seen "Batman: The Dark Knight" like twice, and both times he's noticed different things. The first time he saw it he was on something, and he noticed that whenever the Joker was in a scene, the incidental music had a buzzsaw playing underneath it softly, to the point where the listener would be discomforted even though they wouldn't realize that it was there.

2) To show you how much Starbucks has changed our culture - this morning when I passed by a slightly older, on-the-fat-side black lady in a sweatshirt and jogging pants begging on a corner across the street from a Starbucks - she was on something; she looked spaced out and was rubbing her back against the street lamp post - she every once in a while would say to no one in particular, "Anybody got any money for a cappucino?"

3) I got my haircut today. Tennille and I were talking and she said that if Obama's kids had gotten pregnant like Bristol Palin, something would have been made of it in the media. She also said that the Palin family weirds her out, and that she can't believe Sarah Palin is carting that baby out everywhere so late at night.

4) As I found out like two weekends ago, my one neighbor who I go down to Indiana to volunteer with for Obama is in love with raw cut-up beets, which was news to me even though I already knew she was a vegan. So, when I was at the grocery store this past Saturday, I got an extra beet for her and cut it up and put it in a little sandwich baggie and left it by her door with a little index card note that said, "Good luck with the marathon on Sunday - I hope you 'beet' your best time!", since she had to skip volunteering since her and her dad were running the marathon and since her parents were in town because of that she couldn't find the time to slip away and go volunteer.

Anyhow, when I got back to my apartment last night, there was a plate full of vegan chocolate chip cookies sitting on my doormat with a thank-you note from my neighbor. I'm not a fan of chocolate-chip cookies, but they had oatmeal in them and some cinnamon, so they were almost like oatmeal raisin cookies (which I like) but with chocolate chips and no raisins, so they were tasty. I ate a lot, threw some in my lunch, and then took the rest in to Tennille and the Japanese owner and everyone at the salon, since I don't want them to go stale on me (I don't go through that many cookies).

5) This morning I mailed my ballot again, and again I'm amazed at how together black people are when it comes to voting... The one black lady who works at the post office -- there's two of them, this one was the fatter one and her name isn't Linda, that's the other one, the other one also tends to have purple nails a lot, I can't remember the name of the one I talked to today -- basically laid out the entire system for me of how every township rents out PO boxes that are opened up once right after the polls closed by a representative from the Republicans, one from the Democrats, and one independent, and they count votes together, and so I shouldn't do registered mail, since there's no person to sign for my vote when it comes in. "And," she was like, "They're not going to count it, they're not going to count it anyways," and then she gave me her opinion on the first-time-ever citywide early voting that's happening now, even though a line was forming behind me.

I said, too, that I just was worried about my ballot getting delivered and shouldn't I go ahead and do delivery confirmation, and she was like, "No, and we can't guarantee delivery, you'd have to do Priority Mail for that, but listen to me, I'm trying to tell you that it will get there and save you some money so you don't need to do anything special to this letter."

6) I was reading Catherine Albanese's "Nature Religion in America" today about Davey Crockett, who said this about himself once after saying he was a 'screamer' and a 'horse':

I can walk like an ox, swim like an eel, yell like an Indian, fight like a devil, and spount like an earthquake, make love like a mad bull, and swallow a n*gg*r whole without choking if you butter his head and pin his ears back.

He said this on the floor of the U.S. Congress in a speech, actually... He was a U.S. Congressperson from Tennessee at that time.