My shit this morning

The grapefruit I had yesterday afternoon surfaced in my post-coffee shit this morning. Lots of those little citrus bits were floating on the top of the toilet, and when a few hours later I lifted up the toilet rim to go take a piss, there were a couple brown spatters attached to the underside of the rim, I had shit out that grapefruit with such violence. Mostly, the shit was nothing but grapefruit bits and brown water with little mucky clumps here and there, somehow.

Manilow spiel.

My one Dutch friend who's very good at that sort of thing came up with a good spiel to use on the older women who'll be at the Barry Manilow concert I'm going to next week. He said to say that my girlfriend and I got in an argument, and that I'm here to try to understand her better, and if they ask why, say that she said I didn't understand her and she demanded I go, only I said no, and now I'm going shamefacedly behind her back and she doesn't know I'm there. He then said to say that I think I might know what she means, but then I should say a small criticism of Barry, like I feel like he's a little too smooth, and that way the ladies there will eat it up and be sympathetic to my plight and fall all over themselves to try to help me understand Barry better. He said a certain type of woman loves to insert themselves into relationships and be maternal in a quasi-sexual way, and I just have to bring it out of them.

Sunday School lessons.

This Jewish couple was telling me that when their daughter was five, she kept asking them why she was Jewish, and her mom explained to her that it was because her parents were Jewish and that she would learn about it now when she started going to Sunday school in a few months, and afterwards when she grew up she could decide if she wanted to go on being Jewish or not.

A few months later, their daughter had their first Sunday school lesson, and the teacher taught all about how Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldees and eventually went to Canaan. When she got home, her parents asked her what she had learned at Sunday school, and she was like, "If I don't want to, I don't have to follow my parents' gods!"

Caramel Cob.

When I was at the drugstore this afternoon with my dad picking up my grandfather's medications, my dad was checking out and asked me if I wanted anything, and I didn't, but then I saw a tray of Caramel Cobs sitting on the counter -- they're these caramel corn packs packed into the shape of an ear of corn and put in a plastic sleeve that's half transparent and half corn-silk and -leaf graphic -- and threw it on the counter and had him buy it for me.

There was this slightly plump late 30s lady with dyed red hair and a lavender sweatshirt with flowers embroidered on it standing next to us at the counter, too, so I was like, "Man, did you see that Caramel Cob, isn't it the coolest thing ever?", and she was like, "Yeah, they remind me of that one movie with the children, and the you know...", and she seemed confused and her thought trailed off.

"Oh, 'Willy Wonka'?", I was like, finishing her thought.

"No, 'Children of the Corn'," she was like, and when she said that, this big blast of alcohol-smelling breath just whapped me in the face.

Black Market / Nymphos.

Back in WWII my great uncle didn't smoke and so sold up the cigarettes he saved to Russian soldiers in Berlin for $20 a pack and got enough to buy a house for him and his wife when he got back. Mickey Mouse watches were $500 a pop but he didn't have any to sell, he said. What he did have to do, though, is go around to the Polish DPs and tell them in his rudimentary Polish that the war was ending and that they would soon be returned to their homes, and he said all they did was swear and swear at him.

My godmother was saying that when she was down in Florida cleaning out her dead mother-in-law's house, she and her girlfriends who she went down there with to do it took one afternoon to check out an antiques store downtown in the town near the house, and the guy there told them to check out the shop across the street, and that the owner of that shop was nice and they should go talk with her but that she was a nympho. When he said that, my godmother was like, "How do you know?"

Schnoodles.

Me and my dad visited an old friend of his, and she and her sister, both widowed the past few years, recently adopted sister schnoodles (schnauzer-poodle mixes). One's browner and more schnauzer-ish and a little thing, and the other's pretty white and more poodle-ish, and my dad's old friend who had the browner one said that she eats and eats and eats but never gains any weight. "I got the anorexic one," she was like, and my dad was like, "Yeah, like that one woman, from the brother-and-sister singing duo," and then they all started talking about how sad it was, and how much they all used to enjoy Carpenters music.

Prosecution // World of Warcraft.

Yesterday night when me and my one friend and her brother were talking about horse insemination, her dad started talking about how years ago the county police had to follow up reports that this one farmer was fucking his horses and camcording it and running an interstate porn business out of his home. As it turns out, it was true, though the police had to show the judge a couple videos of the guy fucking the horse and fellating the horse or getting fellated by the horse (he'd rub liquid oats on his dick to get the horse to lick it; he never actually put his dick in the horse's mouth) in order to get the warrant to go in and do a legal search of the guy's house and barn. They could only prosecute the guy under state business law, though as part of the sentencing they confiscated the guy's horses and limited his contacts with him, though my friend's dad was saying that was stupid, since the next thing you know the guy was fucking and fellating and getting fellated by the cows and sheep he still had on his farm, which, of course, weren't part of the sentencing terms since the courts had only put horses into the terms and not all livestock in general. "What can I say," he said. "We were naive."

On another note, I heard that in "World of Warcraft", since you can personalize your characters, you almost never run into two gnome warlocks or human paladins or whatever that look the same, but pretty much everyone who plays as a dark elf ends up having their characters look exactly alike, really tall and stringy-looking with white eyes and long long ears, even though the same huge range of characterization is available for the dark elves as it is for the humans and gnomes and whatever the fuck else creatures you can play as (orcs or goblins at the very least, I presume?; you can customize eye color and body type with the dark elves, though no ear length customization is available for the dark elves, though - I wonder how the game designers overlooked that possibility).

As I understand it, then, for some reason, there's a beauty standard for dark elves within the virtual world of the game, or at float among the people who are driven enough to buy the expansion pack that lets you play as a dark elf (perhaps drawn from beauty standards or lookist expectations for dark elves from the fantasy genre as a whole?). It's odd, though, that that kind of thing only surfaces in "World of Warcraft" there, with the dark elves.

Two evangelical stories (part II of II): Birthday.

When I was over yesterday at my friend's family's house, her brother was saying that their neighbors who were over the previous day are evangelical, and they were saying how they were getting ready for Christmas, only they don't really do Christmas since it's too commercial, so instead they celebrate Jesus's birthday and they bake a cake for him and everyone brings presents and they sing 'Happy Birthday', only since Jesus is a real reason to celebrate, they sing it twice.

Two evangelical stories (part I of II): Lucre.

The gas stations in town are pretty much a monopoly run by this one oil company, and they charge ten cents higher for gas than anywhere in an hour radius, and everyone in town bitches about it, though the oil company people say they give the money back to the community, which is only half-true, since they only really give (and they give big) to the evangelical church their family belongs to.

Anyhow, my dad was telling me and my mom that last summer the one son from the oil company bought his wife a Hummer and a new pair of tits, and whenever she'd be driving around in her Hummer with her tits, guys in town would look at them as they passed by and be like, "I paid for those."

"But they're only 90% the size she wanted," my dad was like. "They tithe."

Sayings.

I have two new sayings:

1) A new oath, "My left nut!", so when people say something like, "Isn't everything fantastic?", I can be like, "My left nut it is!"

- and -

2) When a song is on Top 40 radio where it's a chick singing over acoustic guitar, I'm always like, "This song makes me feel like a lesbian."

My mom on music / Nun / My one friend on "Clumsy".

I've been having Top 40 radio on a lot this week hoping to catch that one Fergie song "Clumsy", and my mom's soundly hated all of it, except for Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls", which she finds kind of catchy. She didn't understand exactly what the bass line to "Stand by Me" was doing in the song, so I had to explain to her what 'sampling' is. She said me and my from high school are both listening to Top 40 radio since we both don't want to get old, though I say it's since the music is good and I like being in on the vibe, and my friend says it's since the music is good and she's never been in touch with the vibe before and likes it, since back in high school she was stoned most of the time, as well as derisive towards pop culture that wasn't the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

In fact, that same friend from high school was telling me that when she had study hall with the post-Vatican II nun who taught us religion, the nun would let her go outside and smoke during study hall, only she told her to do it off school property on the other side of the railroad tracks that ran by the school, not to let anyone see her do it and of course to shut up about it to everyone, and if she did get caught smoking, to say that she had asked to go to the bathroom and had taken off on her own.

Also, that same friend heard Fergie's "Clumsy" after I was telling her about it, and liked it for the same reasons I do, it turns out. She loves how the overproduced techno-ish beats and yelps of Fergie contrast with the underpolished sampling of Little Richard's "Girl Can't Help It", though she's not as exceptionally fond of the spoken word middle-part where Fergie talks about how when a guy dumps her her world just crumbles until the love bug crawls back up her dress and bites, at which point the song goes back into the Little Richard sample...

I really do love spoken word parts in songs; they take me back to the early 60s, and I think there should be more of them. I should make up a list of emotional first person spoken-word parts from popular songs, maybe after I do that list I'm thinking of of songs where they translate the chorus into French for a chorus or two, like Melanie's "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" and Blondie's "Sunday Girl".

Saw my friend's mother yesterday.

I had dinner with my friend's mother yesterday. We went out and got margaritas and some quesadillas at the local Mexican restaurant, and talked a lot about meditation and creative visualization. She encouraged me to write "Perfect health is the natural state of my being" and put it on my bathroom mirror so I would see it a lot. She used to be a court reporter and keeps a bundle of sayings like that in shorthand tucked into the plastic wrap of her current pack of cigarettes she has so if she's out having a smoke she can leaf through them and read them, though once she told me she was embarrassed since she had her cigarette pack out on the table when she was having dinner with a friend and a friend of her friend's, and the friend of her friend's, it turns out, knew shorthand and started reading out loud what she had tucked into her cigarette pack, and she got really embarrassed, though she didn't tell me what it was that got read out loud.

She was saying, too, at this one New Age store store she went to this year they had stickers saying "WEALTH" and "HEALTH" and stuff like that so you could slap them on whatever you were drinking and drink in health and wealth always so those things came to you through the power of positive thinking. I said I wasn't sure if that would work, but I sure as heck wouldn't have a cup in my house that said "DEATH" and always drink water out of it. She agreed.

She then told me that one of the worst things she ever saw in her life was at this New Age bible study she used to host, where a member told everyone that she was going through a lot that week because she had just found out that her cancer had come back, and you could tell, my friend's mom said, that everyone was thinking that it came back because this woman hadn't thought positively enough, and so she went up to comfort her afterwards since no one else had at all during the session. Too much of that positive thinking stuff is all about getting, she was saying, and there's nothing in it beyond that.

A couple months ago, too, she went to a Reikki-and-meditation retreat, and when she laid down on a bed with this one Reikki symbol, she got an intense headache and it didn't go away until she got up. She said it wasn't evil spirits, though, since she doesn't believe in them, but it was just her energy and the symbol's energy not jibing. She told me that a little part of her still believes in evil spirits from being raised Catholic, but if she had to steel herself to go into a Voodoo temple, she wouldn't cross herself or do anything like that, but rather imagine herself in a ball of light and tell herself she was protected before entering. She did admit, though, that finding a Voodoo doll under your bed with a pin stuck in it could probably kill you, if you thought it would.

"But," and here she got serious, "What always bothered me, is what about the dolls no one sees?"

Memories of California.

When I first got off the plane in San Diego a month or two ago, everyone I was seeing was tanned no matter how old they were, only everyone's skin was just a little more wrinkled than it should have been at their age. One tanned guy in his 40s was even reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", and I was like, "Shit, I haven't seen that in years."

When I got to my friends' hotel room -- I had gotten a hotel room with some people for the next three nights, but then when I ended up buying my ticket I was forced to come in a day earlier and so was left without a room until some people I leaned on said they'd let me sleep on their floor in this boutique-y hotel they were staying in downtown -- I took them to the bar to buy them drinks as a thank-you, even though it was ten at night and we were jet-lagged and none of us felt like drinking that much, though we all had excited energy because of the conference coming up that was starting the next day.

Going down through the lobby, there was this late 20s couple standing up at the main desk, a white guy with gelled-up spiked hair and a collared shirt with the collar turned up, and this really tan blonde girl with stark straight mega-dyed blonde hair going to her waste, and in a black cocktail dress and these incredibly high heels, and the guy was just standing there casually with a big hunk of her ass in his hand for like all of five minutes while he was talking with the woman at the front desk. "Come on, is she staying here?", he was like, and while the woman kept telling him that they couldn't release info one way or another on guests, he was like, "But we just saw her downtown a couple hours ago, she must be staying somewhere, come on, is Kelly Clarkson staying here?" The girl the guy was with didn't do anything, really, but just stand there and provide ass for the guy to reflexively hold.

At the bar, the bartender was a dick, and turned to talk to this other bartender he was talking shop with, this guy with his back to us who was in hiply-torn jeans and a white collared shirt (with the collar turned up!) and a big poof of brown hair like he was PacSun model. We sat down at a couch behind all this, and when the other bartender our bartender was talking with got up to leave, it turned out that he was 40-something, only you couldn't tell it from the back since he was dressing like he was 18.

California was fascinating.

Puerto Rico.

Miss Puerto Rico Universe's gown tested positive for pepper spray! To be honest, though, I'm amazed that a fellow Puerto Rican had enough wits and enough initiative to think this one through and pull it off.

Today I was eating at a hamburger place and they had "REAL HAMBURGER" decalled in their main windows, and I was thinking to myself, "No no no, 'HAMBURGER REAL'!" Kudos on the bilingualism, though.

One Easy Way to Fuck Up Your Children...

The "Elf on the Shelf"!:

This charming tradition began for our family when my children were very small. Plagued by their desire to know how Santa really knew who had been naughty or nice, I searched through the Christmas decorations for a plausible explanation. Nestled among them was the answer; a small elf doll from my own childhood. With that discovery, the idea for the elf tradition was born.

At our home the elf would arrive around the holidays, usually at Thanksgiving. His sole responsibility was to watch my children's behavior and report it to "Santa" each night. The next morning after the children awoke, they discovered the elf had returned from the "North Pole" (with some parental assistance) and was hiding in a different place. My children would race each other out of bed to try and be the first to spy him in his new position.

Over the years the tradition was perfected and rules were even introduced. For example, to better preserve his mystique the children were not allowed to touch him; however, they were allowed to talk to him. For obvious reasons, he was not allowed to reply. Eventually, my children even gave him a name - officially adopting him into the family.

Unwittingly, the tradition provided an added benefit: it helped the children to better control themselves. All it took was a gentle reminder that the "elf was watching" for errant behavior to be modified...

I saw one of these at a Hallmark today. What a fucked up tradition. It's like Chuckie meets George Orwell.

Blurting.

My mom was saying that this one lady at her work who has a couple kids in college was talking a couple months ago to her and another lady about her dog and how sick it had been and how she and her husband were going to get surgery for it but it was going to be $1500, and my mom said she was shocked, and before she knew what she was saying, she was like, "Euthanize it."

The lady was kind of shocked herself, and was like, "He's a member of the family."

My mom shrugged, then, I guess, and was like, "Yeah, but fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money."

The lady then kind of huffed and was like, "Well, you don't have a dog, so you don't understand."

"No," my mom was like, "But it's still a lot of money."

My mom still says that was an appropriate response, and she says the dog didn't even last half a year after the surgery. She was like, "The dog was going to croak, so why not croak it sooner?"

Rabbit.

When my brother was eleven years old, he got a rabbit, and when he wrote to the state 4-H office to see if they had any information about rabbits, they sent him a bunch of recipes.

Christmas pageant.

Yesterday I went to my friend's little nephew's Christmas pageant at his daycare along with his grandma and his sister. The procession in was chaotic; all the kids held battery-operated candles, but would bolt from line to go hug their parents, or stop and wave to them and hold up everyone behind them. For one song they sang the daycare workers stuck floppy fabric antlers and flashing red noses on them; for another, "The Twelve Days of Daycare," they came in one by one and held up signs with something for each day of daycare (one cubbyhole, two snacks, etc.), and my friend's little nephew held up his sign, "seven superheroes", but he turned it around and was looking at the picture of the superheroes for the rest of the song and so no one in the audience really saw the sign. For the manger scene that close out the pageant, they dressed my friend's little nephew up as a shepherd with a brown robe and a brown piece of cloth tied around his head and a shepherd crook, and three little blonde girls were dressed as sheep in these costumes with cotton balls fluffed out around them. After they processed in and someone was reading a version of the nativity story, my friend's little nephew, who's like three or four, started turning to the little girls, stamping his crook on the ground, and being like, "Say 'BAA!'", or, "Lie down!", with the girls standing around and one or two of them occasionally saying "Baa."

After the pageant, there was cookies and punch in the daycare kitchen -- sugar cookies with green frosting and sprinkles or brown frosting and embedded M&Ms; the punch was something red, with rainbow sherbet tossed in to make it fizz -- and this one girl who worked at the daycare whose husband used to work with my brother and whose younger brother graduated with me from high school, only from the public school in town, showed me some Christmas pictures of her sons that she had taken that day, and started telling me about how her brother who I know is now a paramedic for some private ambulance company in Detroit. I guess a lot of times when they bring people out on stretchers people go alongside and try to get in the pockets to see if they have drugs with them, and just yesterday when they were putting a guy with a gunshot wound in the throat in the ambulance, a guy walked up to the stretcher with a pistol and finished the job right there, and the paramedics just stepped aside since they're not allowed to carry.

They also had bowls of chocolates out in the kitchen, too.

Books / Blacks / Styles / Marriage.

Today my mom was telling me how this one coworker of my mom's at the library where she works at is a techie, and how often a local priest comes in to consult him on techie stuff and they end up sitting at his desk and talking about that, so my mom's been planting books people have donated on his desk in case the priest comes by, weird shit like "How to Hit on Your Boss" and "How Not to Be an Asshole". She's been putting them in a drawer the priest is likely to open, so maybe he'll open them and see them right on top.

Today I was looking at the supermarket at an advertising poster for "High School Musical 2":

It definitely always seem like light-skinned blacks are the marketable ones, it seems.

Today I was at a local coffee shop and a gaggle of kids were there since school was out. You could see the style lag from urban to rural areas, especially with the guys; one even had a faux-hawk.

Today I called up a friend from home who's now living downstate to find out how to spell her little niece's name since I'm going to her Christmas Pageant tonight and I was making her a card, and my friend was like, "Oh, by the way, I don't know if you heard this, but I got married."

"Fuck," I was like, "When?"

"[My name]," she was like, "You're supposed to say 'Congratulations.'"

Supermarket samples.

Back in the city the yuppie supermarkets have water crackers with imported brie. At the supermarket just now in the town south of where my parents live, the supermarket sampler had ham and sliced-up block colbyjack on cheez-its. There also was another sampler with a few tostitos and a ready-made avocado-refried bean-sour cream-cheddar cheese taco dip.

Talking about fat people.

This past weekend me and my parents went to a Christmas concert put on by the local chamber orchestra and its youth counterpart, with an a-cappella interlude by a group of women all in black with snow flake wraps around their shoulders. My mom was like, "Look at the conductor, she has hers cut longer in back so it covers her ass." I was like, "No!", and my mom was like, "What, she's a smart woman, I would do that too if I had stand and show my ass to the audience for a half hour."

Later, when the orchestra came on stage, one of the violins was this absolutely gigantic woman who was incredibly round and was wearing black pants and a white blouse, so I nudged my mom and was like, "Look she came dressed as a snowball." My mom laughed so hard she cried, and when she finally stopped she told me that she had just been thinking the same thing.

A little after that, my dad asked about why did one violin walk on and play a note and then everyone played after her, and I was like, "Everyone tunes to her, she's the first chair," and my dad was like, "No," and then was like -- and remember, this violin was also pretty fat, though not as fat as Snowball -- "She's at least the first two chairs."

Talking about shit.

I find it really interesting that my circle of friends from high school, all of whom have gone on to get at least a master's degree, are fascinated by their shit.

For example, last Christmas when me and my friend who is doing environmental urban design got together for margaritas, the first ten minutes of our conversation was shit jokes, about our personal shit.

For another example, when I went to belly-dancing lessons this past Friday in Kalamazoo, my one friend from high school took me to her friend's house for pizza beforehand, and she went in to the bathroom to shit and when she came out, she was like, "Don't go in there, that shit was stinky," and since I misheard her, I was was like, "Come on, do we really have to know that your shit is sticky? What have you been eating anyways?" She then was like, "I said 'stinky', but it was that, too. I kept wiping and wiping and it wouldn't be done. It was like I had a brown crayon sticking out of my ass and I kept just wiping the tip of it off with the toilet paper."

She also told me later about how a couple weeks ago when she got mild diarrhea (sp.?) after a night of micro-brewery drinking, she took like four or five shits in the morning, and never turned around to look at the toilet, since she never does since she's a woman and has to squat to piss. When her husband came home, he came out to the living room mildly storming (he's a very calm person) and was like, "Why the fuck does our toilet look like a Denny's restroom?" When my friend went back in to look, she saw that she had sprayed watery shit halfway back up above the waterline of the toilet, only she had done that like three hours ago and it was all dried now. She said she went in and doubled up toilet paper and tried to pick it off through the toilet paper with her fingernails, which she said was the nastiest shit ever.

On another note, when I saw her brother and her three year-old nephew this past weekend, her little nephew asked his dad to take him to the toilet, and then when he was walking there put his hands on the back of his pants and made a pushing-in type motion -- he had an accident, it turns out, and like my friend's brother was saying, "He was trying to shove the head back in the turtle".

Two sets of old people.

When I was in the train station yesterday, this old white woman with big coiffed hair and a fur coat and purple stretch pants had her boots off because her feet were sore and had her toes out in the air and was curling them, only all her toenails were really green from fungus, and looked ready to fall off.

On the train walking to my seat I saw an old couple pulling out big ziploc bags of popcorn they had made for themselves for the ride. I felt like I was channeling my grandmother and was like, "Goddamn old people and their fixed incomes." She used to say that a lot about the old women at the one bar she went to, since they'd buy beer there but eat out of their purses bags of chips they'd brought in with them. "They say they have no money," my grandma would say, "but I know her husband had a nice retirement from Ford's, and she has the money to go blow at the casino every weekend." It was one of those things that would just set her off, if you brought it up to her.

McDonald's food waste.

At the end of the night when they throw the leftover unsold food from the foodwarmers in the dumpsters, a lot of McDonald's now have employees go and pour bleach over it so the homeless and the poor can't raid them and get it.

Physical.

I got a physical this afternoon since it's been years since I've had one and I've been eating a lot of eggs lately and I want to know what my cholesterol is. My terminally-unmarried Dutch friend was in the waiting room making an appointment to pick up his STD results, since he's getting checked before he goes visit in January this girl he's kind of getting serious with long-distance. To the young girl at the desk he was like, "What a pain, I should just settle down and marry this girl."

Also, the woman who did my bloodwork's name was "Velvette".

Went to $4 martini night again yesterday.

I got there before my friends and so had a gin martini at the rather-full bar -- there was only one stool open, right next to me -- and this mildly dumpy mom type came up and asked me if anyone was sitting there. I was like, "No, I'm just waiting for a couple friends and we're moving to a table," but then after she sat down, I was like, "You know, if I had had my shit together ten seconds ago when you asked me if anyone was sitting there, I should have been like, 'You are.'"

Fruit / Moose.

A friend was telling me that this girl she has a sublet with didn't tell her that she's massively allergic to fruit, so one day when she was peeling an orange in the living room, the girl stormed in and was like, "What are you doing!?!?!" When she was like, "Peeling an orange, I like them," the girl was like, "I guess that's fine, I'll just be queasy all day." I guess once, too, this girl was once standing near a crate of apples and woke up four hours later in the emergency room.

I was thinking of moose yesterday, too. If you hit them with your car, they fuck your car up more than deer, since you clip their long legs and their entire body falls right on your hood and windshield and smashes the shit out of it.

Catchphrase / Car Crashes / Hookah Lounge.

I was thinking yesterday of this one thing my dad says a lot, "He doesn't know shit from Shinola!"

Some people I was talking with yesterday were talking about car crashes. This one guy's friend hit two deer at once in Minnesota, and when he got out to call the tow truck and the police, his car frame started on fire and the whole car actually burned.

The other guy, who's from Egypt, was saying that the worst care damage he's ever seen is this one car that hit a camel and was completely totalled, with the hood being driven into the front seat.

The hookah lounge owners near me continued to be assholes when I was there last night. Like a year ago there was a limited power outage in my neighborhood and they weren't affected, so I grabbed my laptop and went there and bought some tea and dicked around online for a bit, but the place started filling up and the owners cut the wireless so I'd leave. Yesterday when I was in there I bought one large herbal tea and then got a refill of hot water -- I trash-talk those folks every chance I get; and I'm not giving them money -- and they had these free Turkish chewy candies on the counter, so I got one of each flavor right in front of the owner, cherry and apple and melon and strawberry. The cherry was absolutely fantastic, so I went to get another, but the owner had put the bowl of free candy under the counter so I couldn't have anymore, the jackass.

Friday night, Friday night, Friday night's all right.

On Friday night this one guy was telling me about the first cheap liquor he ever got hammered off of, Black Velvet... In middle school he accidentally came across some where his parents kept it, under the sink in his house, next to the Drano.

Before that, though Friday night post-seminar dinner at my prof's house was a trip. She made chili for the entire class, which made me really, really happy. It only could have been better if she had sent some leftover chili home with everyone, because there's nothing I love better than some chili and a cup of hot coffee in the morning. But, she didn't, but I had a fun time anyways.

The one French guy in my class who I talk Spanish to had gotten one of those full-head buzzcuts, and I told him it was a "power haircut", and very forceful looking, and I would do a black power fist and hold it out in front of me every time I said the word 'forceful' to him when I was complimenting his haircut. He asked me if it was "French tough", and I told him that was an oxymoron, and when he told me to fuck off, I said I was kidding, and that we should go find an immigrant and kick the shit out of them because no matter how hard they try they'll never be French.

My one doctoral student's husband does modern art, and me and him got a German student talking about how the German government funds a lot of artists and how whenever he's home in Berlin the thing to do is to go around the city with friends and drink and visit art installations. I then told them that for me, there is no better art exhibit than the interactive art exhibit that that one artist made where goldfish were put in blenders and were set out so people could hit 'frappe' if they wanted, because it told you about people's souls. My one doctoral student's husband said that it was juvenile and gimmicky, and I agreed that it was a gimmick, but I said the gimmick really, really worked, since who wouldn't want to hit the 'frappe' button, and that tells you something about people, too, though as it turns out, they didn't, and they thought the exhibit should be shut down, so I was like, "If you were there and you saw someone going to hit the button, would you reach out and stop them?", and they were like, "Of course not," and I was like, "Well, that tells you something about people's souls too," and I started talking about the Milgrim experiments and how people could be complicit in fascism because of social pressure not to interfere.

After this me and some other people started talking with the Frenchman again, and somehow the philosopher Leibniz came up, and since I don't know philosophy, I did that cocktail party-trivia thing I always do (e.g. my conversation thread about stuntwomen I always bring up; at cocktail parties I really don't talk with people, instead I always keep interjecting slightly relevant trivia and completely derailing conversations), and talked about how when Leibniz was dying on his deathbed in his 80s, he bragged to his friends with his dying breath how he was dying a virgin and had never known the embrace of a woman.

They said that was bullshit, so then I told them how Descartes used to nail puppies to walls to dissect them, since he wanted to know anatomy and thought that animals couldn't feel pain.

Then, of course, they also said that that was bullshit, but they wanted to know which histories of philosophy I had been reading, since they wanted to read them too.

A couple hours and several more glasses of wine later, my one prof was saying several years ago how when her mother died and she and her sister were cleaning out her house, she found her first book, which she had dedicated to her parents, in a Ziploc bag tucked away in a closet. Her mother had never read it, she said, but her mom always put things she wanted to preserve in Ziploc bags, and she started saying how parents can have their own way of honoring things, even though they may not quite get what you're doing.

The coffee shop on campus that day, too, had been selling gallons of milk for a dollar because someone forgot to cancel that day's order and they were overstocked right before break, so I had had two gallons of milk I was taking around in a plastic bag, and I had tucked it in the snow outside my prof's house to pick up and take home afterwards... I figured it was white milk in a white bag in white snow behind a bush where you couldn't see it from the street -- in the fall I'll have to tuck chocolate milk in a paper bag into a pile of leaves! -- so if someone found it there and decided to steal it, they would need the milk more than I did and it was only two dollars, so what the fuck did I care, though of course it was still there when I left and so I picked it up and took it not home, though, but to a nearby bar where everyone in my seminar decamped after the dinner-and-drinks thing at my prof's house had finished up. People proceeded to get hammered, and the milk was a good joke prop. When people were ordering cheap shots and being like, "Man, I so do not care what I drink next," I would hold up my plastic bag all hanging low and distended with two gallon of milks and be like, "Milk?" That kept getting funnier and funnier, and on the fourth time a guy actually accidentally snorted back whiskey into his nasal cavity, he was laughing so hard, like drunk people do. He wasn't drinking Black Velvet, though; he was drinking Old Crow, someone else entirely was drinking Black Velvet.

When people, too, were asking me why I had that much milk, I would hold it up and give a big smile and say with a mug and a semi-theatrical voice, enunicating each word distinctly, "I love to save," and then I would tell them the story about my one friend's dirty aunt where that was the punchline of a story once when I was interacting with her.

I'm still loving Rihanna's "Umbrella".

I'm still loving Rihanna's "Umbrella". The other day I heard that it's rapidly climbing the list of 'the top ten most popular songs of the last decade' and is about to overtake "Mambo no. 5". Great job, Rihanna!

Dream from a couple nights ago...

A couple nights ago I dreamed that I was in my hometown in the early summer on not too hot a day, and I was walking towards Main Street down the sidewalk next to an old service station that isn't there any more, and the town festival was going on, even though there wasn't anything on Main Street in my dream though there always is in real life for the festival. Anyways, I knew Judy Collins would be there and for some odd reason I knew her personally in this dream but not exceptionally well, and then I see her walking across the street away from me to the sidewalk on the other side, her ambling across the road diagonally since she was also heading towards Main Street, so I called out, "Hey, Judy!", and she kind of half-turned and gave an over-the-head wave, and for some reason she looked like a dressed-down Debbie Harry without makeup, though in my dream I never questioned that she was Judy Collins. The street was kind of dry and dusty, too, like we hadn't had rain in a long time.

Greeting -- New Obsession.

All day when people have been asking me how I'm doing, I've been like, "Fantastic!", and when they ask why, I'm like, "Rihanna's 'Umbrella' just got nominated for best song and best album of the year... I am *stoked*." People's reactions are telling. Two people I talked to have both said they're very happy, since the song makes them happy whenever they hear it. I liked that reaction.

My new obsession, however, is Fergie's "Clumsy". I think I like it even better than "Umbrella", maybe because it reminds me of the scene from "Female Trouble" where Divine careens around a grocery store shoving steaks up under her dress to steal them while the song "The Girl Can't Help It" plays in the background. I can't find that shit on YouTube, which makes me wonder what the hell YouTube is good for, then.

Thought of the day.

Does English "munch" come from that one Latin word "to eat" that surfaces in Italian as "mangiare"?

BREAKING NEWS!!!: Exorcisms.

Well-placed sources in the local archdiocese just told me the reason why the Church finally decided to authorize an exorcism recently, something they're extremely hesitant to do unless a likely case first passes a huge battery of psychological and other tests and then shows clear signs of demonic possession...

Trivia -- Mormon polygamists, Anabaptists.

Someone was telling me that they went to the son of a family friend's high school graduation in Montana a few years ago in this community with a huge Mormon polygamist population -- he said you'd drive by a house and there'd be nine trailers in a line set up down the yard next to it, one for each wife -- and at the graduation, they kept saying the name "Jessup" forever, and it seemed like most of the class had at that name. He thought at first that someone in the class had died and the high school kids were paying tribute in the way that high school kids do like when someone dies in a car crash, but then he realized that it was actually all the polygamist kids, or at least the school-aged portion of them that had made it through graduation.

On another note, someone else was telling me about their experiences with reclusive Hutterite communities in North Dakota, Hutterites being a less well-known Anabaptist group who live in separated communities like the Mennonites and the Amish in the northern great plains by the U.S.-Canada border. They still speak German, and they pretty much just eat potatoes and fatty German recipes that were brought with them from the Old World when they emigrated. I guess when the older community members give blood, you can see a layer of fat floating on top of the blood in the syringe once it settles. Their bread is supposedly kick-ass -- best bread ever, it was described to me -- but when the person who I was talking to got the recipe, she found out that for one batch (and remember, the whole community is fed off of a batch) the secret ingredient is the fat of twenty-nine chickens.

Also, all Hutterite couples have sex at least once a day -- structured into community life is a post-lunch "nap time", only school-age kids are in school then, and older folks take care of babies, so pretty much everyone who's left who's eligible for naps is married, so not much sleeping happens then, apparently.

Additionally, I heard about this one guy's friend, and they stopped by a roadside Mennonite stand to buy pies, and as soon as the teenage girl stepped out of the farmhouse in her bonnet and smock to come help the customers, the one guy's friend was like, "Oh baby," and as soon as she stepped into the stand, he proceeded to hit on her, which was the most awful thing ever. I guess his opening line was him leaning on the pie counter and being like, "So, what do you do?"

The best thing since sliced bread:

Saints' pictures for your cell phone, in Italy! Saddly, I don't think they have my favorite, Saint Margaret of Antioch:

I love how she went after the devil with a hammer. Forget John Paul -- *those* were the days of muscular Christianity.

Talked with a Turk yesterday.

I met a Turkish girl at a bar yesterday, through friends. Her name sounded Turkish, and she had gray eyes, so I asked her if she was Turkish, and I was right.

(I hadn't heard a devoiced r at the end of words, a tell-tale sign of a Turk -- at the ends of words, Turks make their "r"s sound like "sh"s -- but I figured the rest was enough to go on, and I was right.)

After I did this, she told me that people sometimes ask her what religion she is, and she says Muslim, and then people are usually like "oh", though once someone was like, "Really? But you dress like a slut!"

Artemis, the Sequel - Fruit Swap.

Yesterday I saw Artemis at the gym, working the swipe-out desk alone, so I said hi to her -- she smiled when she saw me, so I can't have offended her that much, I presume-- and then she asked me how I was doing, and when I said busy, she said that that was the general state of everyone nowadays, it being finals period, and at that point I segued into apologizing, and was like, "By the way, I'm sorry if I got a little offensive talking about Artemis of the Ephesus the other day, and bull testicles and stuff." She said she didn't mind at all, and then I asked her what she was studying -- she had a book out on the work desk that she was really reading through -- and she was like, "AP European History."

On another note, yesterday night I was talking with my one black friend in her 70s who works sometimes the guard desk at the main library on campus, and she ended up trading me her apple she had for the grapefruit I had brought along as a snack, since she felt more like a grapefruit than the apple she had brought with her when she packed up to go to work that day. I offered her the banana I had as well, and she was like, "No thanks, I don't put anything in my mouth you got to peel the skin back on," and laughed uproariously.

Sheet - Shit.

So a friend I was catching a beer with on Saturday was telling me that he was off of whiskey for a while, since he had a bad experience with Jack Daniels where he ended up vomiting in bed and then taking his sheets to the bathtub and running water over them since he associates water with cleanness and all things fresh, but the tub actually backed up and all he got was this big, kind of murky tub that smelled equally like bile and Jack Daniels, since your stomach never really does digest whiskey. He said he ended up throwing the sheets out, which would have been highly symbolic since what got him drinking was this great one night stand on those very sheets that would have been fantastic except for the girl not telling him that it was just for once, which made him go on a spiral of drinking and depression that culminated in him vomiting on the sheets he fucked her on, only it wasn't that symbolic since he's been depressed since then anyways... He was telling me that in an ideal world his depression would have gone the way of the sheets at the time that he disposed them.

On another note, I hear the hot new drug is to shit in a jar, let it ferment, and then you go huff off of the jar with the aid of a plastic bag. It's cheap, and it supposedly really fucks you up.

That one Rihanna song.

I just can't get over "Umbrella". I've known that song forever, but for some reason on Friday I just got hung up on it. The title is cheesy and is instantly dated, but it's feel good, and I think it always will be for people who have been around at the time that it hit big. I think all this week, when people ask me how I'm doing, I'll be like, "Man, I am *totally* obsessing over 'Umbrella'."

That said, I find Jay-Z's rap really weak, though I find it admirable that he's been involved with both "Umbrella" and "Crazy in Love".

Silverfish - CDs - Las Vegas.

I was drinking at the student pub with people after class on Friday, and after we were there for a while, I thought I saw a roach skitter up the brick pillar and come to a stop halfway up, but when I went up to examine it, it was actually just a large silverfish.

When that one Journey song about a midnight train and believing came on, one of the people from the seminar who had a few beers in her just started smiling, and then she told me that her boyfriend from her sophomore year of college had his apartment broken into at the beginning of that year and all his shit stolen, but since he had had 3 CDs in his car at the time, he fortunately had those ones left, and so after that whenever she'd come over to have sex, he'd let her pick which of the three CDs to put on. She said he had Journey, Supertramp, and Hootie and the Blowfish, so now whenever she hears Journey or Supertramp, her mind starts to wander and she finds herself getting a little bothered.

She also told me about her weekend in Vegas a couple weekends ago where she and her girlfriends were at some swank club and ran into Frankie Munoz. She says he's a good dancer, for a guy with a mohawk and the face of a twelve year old. He wisely invested in parking lots, which allows him to be sat at tables with $600 bottle service.

Did my big presentation today.

After class, people were coming up and thanking me and being like, "I love how you stood up."

Bookmarks.

Some library people were telling me last night that they pin up interesting bookmarks they find in books on a bulletin board in back of the circ desk. The best one they've found yet is a polaroid of a woman in camo holding an assault rifle with the words "Miss ya!" written underneath, with a smiley face next to it. They were envious that at the library where my mother works, the librarians have found in one book a toothbrush being used as a bookmark, and in another a piece of bacon (raw).

Dreams and hallucinations.

A fellow doctoral student I know was telling me yesterday that her Arabic class homework was taking a lot longer than she thought the previous night, so between that and a short paper she had to get done by the next morning she was up till after 3am and then napped on the couch in her living room instead of going in to bed and waking up her husband, especially since she had to be up by 6am.

Anyhow, at one point, though, she looked up from the couch and the light was on and there was junebugs as big as basketballs hovering in the air all over, and then a plant grew up from beside the couch and wrapped around her and held her to the couch. She said that when she first saw the beetles she was telling herself that they weren't really there, she was just hallucinating from lack of sleep, but after the plant thing, she actually woke up on the couch and the light was off and realized that she wasn't really hallucinating, but rather dreaming that she was hallucinating, an important distinction.

P&P: Pentecostals and Puerto Ricans.

Some scholars have argued that many Latinos become Pentecostals in the U.S. although such a move is stigmatized by their fellow (Catholic) immigrants because it allows them to join the U.S. Protestant majority while maintaining Catholic folk practices like healing, exorcism, and whatnot.

Today I flashed back to my mother talking about being a stewardess on the New York-San Juan flights in the late 1960s. All the stewardesses hated the route because it was noisy and there was baggage everywhere, since all the Puerto Ricans would cram the overhead bins and then put suitcases by their feet and even in the aisles, so you couldn't even push the drink cart back and forth or have a moment of quiet in back if it was a bad day and you had a headache... The stews, too, would call it "the Roach Coach", and warn new stewardesses against it by talking about the time that this one Puerto Rican woman had her dead baby tied in a blanket and put in her legroom under the seat in front of her, since she was taking it home to bury it but didn't feel like checking it or have a suitcase to put it in.

Making friends everywhere (pt. 1 of 2): Artemis.

So there's this one smiley, cool undergrad girl at the card swipe-desk at the gym entrance who I've been friends with for a while since she's talkative and I'm talkative and I've liked her ever since the day there was this older woman bitching at her for like ten minutes and holding up like twenty people behind her and, when I got up to the desk and asked her what was the deal with the woman who was bitching, she was like, all smiley, "Oh, I don't know, I wasn't listening, they don't pay me enough to care."

Anyhow, yesterday was the first time I ran into her since Thanksgiving, so I asked her about hers and she asked me about mine, and when I mentioned I went to a local cafeteria with a friend from the holiday meal, the other girl at the card swipe-desk, a pretty girl except for a slightly large nose, was like, "Did you know the owners are Greek?", and when I said no, she was like, "That always makes everything better."

Anyhow, when I was on the way out, the girl I knew well was gone, but the other girl was there and so when we said bye, I introduced myself and asked her name, and she was like, "Artemis," and I was like, "Oh, just like Artemis of Ephesus!" When she said she didn't know who that was, I explained to her that she was the manifestation of the Greek goddess Artemis at this huge temple in Ephesus that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and that since she had been syncretized with this weird Anatolian fertility goddess she had just rows and rows of breasts, like over 300 of them. When Artemis didn't say much, I was like, "Some scholars say that they're actually necklaces of bull testicles since they bulls were often slaughtered in her honor, but that's a minority scholarly position, most scholars think they're breasts." At that point the kid next to her, this unshaven squatty jock guy with greasy black hair who looks half-Mexican and had been listening the entire time kind of looked over, so I just went on and was like, "She's in the Bible," and then I explained how in Acts Paul is said to have drawn people away from her cult when he was in Ephesus. After that, though, Artemis was still looking dazed, so I said goodbye and took my leave.

Donovan's planning a university...

...because he wants to promote Transcendental Meditation in Scotland! David Lynch is chipping in and they're touring raising money right now. The Scotland university is going to be the UK equivalent of the American one in Fairfield, Iowa.

The Stones (pt. 2 of 2): Beauty tips.

Q: What's Mick Jagger's secret to looking eternally young?

The Stones (pt. 1 of 2): House.

Someone I was talking to two weekends ago was telling me about a friend of hers who bought Keith Richards's old house in the Hollywood Hills. When her friend went to go plug something in in the bathroom, they somehow accidentally shifted the metal outlet plate, and a hidden internal motor slowly retracted the plate, revealing a cubbyhole full of syringes and heroin. I guess there were a lot of these hidden stashes all over the house, and a surprising amount were still full of stuff, probably because Keith Richards had forgotten about them.

Dropped an egg last night.

Last night when I came home from hipster karaoke, I was pretty tired, so I had some reheated vegetable lasagna and a hardboiled egg. When I was rounding the corner of my table to sit down and start to eat, the steaming egg rolled off the spoon I was holding it on --- it was too hot to handle -- and whacked the floor at the angle, splitting in the damnedest way I've ever seen. The top shell-and-white just rolled off in one section, attached to the rest by just a section of boiled white, almost like the top half of the egg had flipped open and was hanging off open the egg at an angle, and the yolk rolled out onto the floor from in between the two sections that were open. It was weird. I wiped the dust off the egg on my sleeve and then ate it, then.

Favorite part of the conference I went to last weekend, upon reflection...

I think my favorite part of the conference I just went to was this one women's history panel, where I sat in back and this one early 50s black prof whose work I had read (which I realized after I saw her nametag after she had sat down; I had never met her before or even seen her picture anywhere, as I remember) sat down by me and while wearing a vaguely African yellow-and-orange top and a shorter skirt and a scarf on her head kicked off her high-heeled shoes and stuck out her stubby little nyloned legs and rested them straight out on the chair in the row in front of her and all the time she was there talked to me and did that black call and response thing like she was in church. When one prof on the panel was talking about how lots of women religious revised their orders' rules after Vatican II but their liberalizations were struck down from Rome, the prof next to me looked over to me and just shook her head and said loudly, "Men," and then she held up her fist and moved it down quickly and diagonally and was like, "BAM."

Another time when they mentioned some woman's name and a few people in the room giggled, I asked her what that was about, and she asked me how old I was, and when I told her, she told me that she was the evangelical woman who said in an advice book that you haven't lived till you met your husband at the door in Saran Wrap and whipped cream.

Another time during the panel when a prof was saying she was interviewing nuns who had been involved with civil rights work, one of her intervieweees, a white nun, started crying and talking about how she held Jimmy Joe Johnson or Jackson (I can't remember in his name, everyone else seemed to know who she was talking about) in her arms because she was nursing him as he died, and she realized how the United States made African-Americans die for justice, and she's never gotten over that. Anyways, as soon as the prof said the nun had said she held this activist in her arms as he was dying, the prof next to me's voice got deep, and she just looked out and shook her head and was like, "good lord, good lord," and kept shaking her head for the rest of the story.

Pimple / Paper.

This week I had a pimple form between and a little above my eyebrows, like one of those dots that Indian women wear or paint on or whatever the heck they do to that dot to make it be on their forehead. I left it alone because it didn't have a head, and then two days ago it felt like there was a dull ache beneath it from the pressure of something deep under the skin, so I got my fingers around the pimple from the bottom and gave a firm squeeze, moving the material up, and a bunch of shit burst out of there and flung itself across my finger nail. It wasn't too liquidy, but more of greasy congealed white clumps with a very little bit of liquid around them. It's been a good month for pimples.

Yesterday at the black neighborhood bar I went into the toilet stall to get some toilet paper to blow my nose, and not only was there not any toilet paper there, but there wasn't even a toilet paper holder or a dent in the wall for one or leftover screwholes from where a holder had been and was removed, instead there was just a bunch of small white bar napkins like they put your beer on on the window ledge behind the toilet. This bar is the same bar where the bartender keeps a baseball bat behind the counter just in case something happens -- I kept thinking of that yesterday and laughing for some reason while I was sitting there.

Number quiz #2 -- American Airlines flight attendants.

Q: In what year did the seniormost flight attendant of American Airlines join the company, and now has seniority in picking flights over the rest of the 19,000-some flight attendants employed by the company?

Number quiz #1 -- cell phone contacts list.

Q: After cleaning out my cell phone contacts yesterday of people I never call, how many people do I have left?

Off I go.

The last reception was last night, so it was a third night in a row of drinking. I can't take a shit this morning and am now off to the airport, so I'm really hoping a drunk shit doesn't hit me when I don't have access to a private washroom and a washcloth so I can wash the brown wateriness out from my ass-crack after it hits.

Addendum: Deaf prof etc.

So the deaf prof was telling me that her kids giggle at the Song of Songs's erotic imagery when she teaches it, the shit like where the lover's neck is compared to an ivory tower, and so she's been asking people what they compare their lovers to when they praise them. As it turns out, the answer is celebrities. She says that a class doesn't go by where she asks that question and somehow Brad Pitt's ass doesn't get brought up.

Deaf prof etc.

Today I was talking for an hour and a half with a prof who I had met at a panel yesterday, and when like half the way through it came up that she was deaf except for a hearing implant, I was surprised. It's only thinking back now that I realized that she maneuvered us to a bench away from a lot of noise and would turn her face away from me (i.e. her ear towards me) when I was speaking. It was completely natural to me, I never even realized she controlled things so I didn't recognize her disability at all until she told me about it.

Yesterday I also found out about the sexual escapades of Kuwaiti adolescent males. Because sexes are more rigidly separated here than there, a guy's first sexual experience is usually jerking off with another guy, and it's not talked about socially but it's known to happen among all male friends of a certain age and is just kind of assumed to be a normal teenage indiscretion. In terms of ass-sex, bottoming isn't seen as pleasurable, so what happens is that if guys get that far as teenagers they have a one-for-one "you nail me then I nail you" deal except for if one of the guys is from a tribe with a lot more status, in which case he gets to nail the other guy twice for the other guy's once nailing him.

Also, since being hairy is associated with masculinity and topness, the rare hairless Arab guy always ends up getting targetted in high school for being a bottom by everyone who knows him, which just up being socially awkward since his being hit on is so pervasive and he's not even necessarily gay or liking to take it.

Napping / "Welcome to the Pocket State".

This conference has been tiring me out with the long hours and the drinking, and then last night I got woken up six times by one of my roommates snoring, so I've been like the walking dead all day. I just came back to nap and found two of them sprawled out on the beds in the room watching football and daytime television to open windows and a lamp on, so I kind of mentioned that I was hoping to take a nap, so the one moved to the other bed and was like, "There you go," and then they mentioned when I asked delicately that they weren't going to any sessions until this evening. Isn't that fucked up, not even to go to a bar and watch a football game when you're in a different town? I swear that the lowest form of life is people who watch television in the daytime with the lights on. For some reason I was raised to think this, or I've thought this due to something in my upbringing, but I don't know what or why... People like that are the kind of people who think that when something doesn't bother them, it doesn't bother other people, which is the level of thinking of a toddler who covers their eyes to hide in hide-and-go-seek since they figure that if they can't see the seeker the seeker can't see them. The cockrags.

On the other hand, everyone love the idea of California as "The Pocket State", my dad's phrase he came up with this year. He says that if the U.S. is a pool table and you tip it up on end, all the oddballs roll down to the one corner and end up in California. For some reason women especially laugh at this.

On another note -- a note not mentioned in the title to this post! -- today I made a 'three-peat' of the free "new members continental breakfast" at my conference.

This week /Last night / This morning / This afternoon.

This week I was throwing out my kitchen trash, which, as usual, is coffee grounds and eggshells and fruit peels and used teabags, but since they were encased in old plastic takeout trays -- since I live on old takeout that I get free through connections, I reuse the plastic takeout trays for kitchen waste so I use less trashbags -- when I went to go throw out the bins in the trashcan outside my door, the homeless guy who is on the corner always selling newspapers saw that and was like, "Food!", and ran towards the barrel after I chucked my shit in it and probably turned up my mixture of coffee grounds and eggshells and fruit peels and used teabags encased in plastic takeout trays. I felt awful all day.

Last night when I was crossing the street at the crosswalk, this white cellphone-using yuppie jackass in an SUV didn't seem like he'd stop, which scared the shit out of me. I almost slammed my hands against the hood like I sometimes do, but for whatever reason I didn't and just walked on by, and all of a sudden behind me I heard this guy saying, "Man, I thought he wasn't gonna stop!", and it was this black thug guy in baggy pants and a sports jacket. I said I thought the same and was going to whack his hood, but I've tried not to do that lately since you don't know who's in the car and if they're wrapped tight. The guy agreed with me and went off on his way.

This morning I used some product in my hair, that wax stuff Tennille sold me. It already had a little hair stuck in it when I unscrewed the lid, which made the product less appealing. It reminded me that the most consistenly filthy thing I encountered the times I've been a mover has been the cosmetics drawers of women. It's their hidden shame.

This morning I made sure to close the doors to my dining room so that room would get colder and the refrigerator will use less energy in my absence.

This morning someone was telling me about this one guy they know whose first name is "Epluribus", though he goes by his initials.

This morning I was reading about the dwindling membership of the Moorish Science Temple.

This morning I assembled a list of all the popular songs I know that use castanets, so that once I leave for a long weekend this afternoon, a long weekend in which I almost certainly won't be blogging, my faithful readers will have something to do instead of reading new posts that won't be there -- that is, think of more popular songs that use castanets, and post these songs in the "comments" to this post:

1) the Diamonds' "Little Darling"

2) the Ronnettes' "Be My Baby"

3) Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

(I think the new Hairspray musical song "I Can Hear the Bells" uses castanets as a retro touch, but I don't think I should count it since it's not really popular music.)

Ancient views of conception.

I was reading today a summary of typical views about conception in the ancient world --

The whole idea is that men have a vital fire that burns more strongly than women, while women are weaker and wetter, which is a double-edged sword: their vital fire burns weaker, and so they're smaller and stupider and their excess blood doesn't get burned up and comes out monthly, but their wetness and their blood is excess matter from which a human being can be formed, when the men impart their vital fire to them.

Interestingly, the vital fire isn't in sperm per se -- rather, when, during sex, a man's blood boils because of its greater fire, he channels the foam from this boiling through his dick and passes on a person when he blows his load. This foam is exactly that seen on an epileptic's mouth during a seizure, as both are caused by frenzied blood and are emitted from the body in a wracking spasm, though I'm not ever sure if woman ever tried to conceive from a foaming epileptic, or how that would be done, since it's a scene enough when someone just drops down in a room and starts having a seizure without an unmarried yuppie 30-something with a huge salary but no husband in sight leaping in and straddling his face as quick as you can say 'jack knife'.

(On a sidenote, would they even have had turkey basters back then, since they wouldn't have had turkeys?)

Also, puberty for men is when their fire kindles and burns the woman out of them.

Had a productive morning.

I had a productive morning this morning. My sinus seemed all dried out, and when I went to use the neti pot, the hot water went through easily, also making it seem like my sinus had dried out, but when I went to go blow my nose in the sink, absolute stringy gobs of green snot flew out onto the porcelain, along with little flecks of blood from my blowing my nose so forcefully, in one gust. After that, I did some Coptic and read a little Greek and Latin. I love a productive morning...

This morning was almost as pleasant as a few days ago when the bottom of my right ear lobe was vaguely aching, so I pinched around in it and just when it seemed I was pinching nothing and I'd leave my earlobe swelled up, a jet of fatty white boil stuff popped out from deep in to halfway across my fingernail, and then a dot of blood arose behind it and sat on my earlobe.

None of this, however, compares to the most satisfying boil I've ever popped.

Mystical aids: Candles, palms.

I find it interesting that in order to focus on the unity and diversity of the divine manifestations of God on earth, each linked with a certain color according to the Zohar, the Zoharic sages for meditative techniques would stare at the interplay of colors in a candle, or rub their palms against their closed eyes and watch the the interplay of colors inside their eyeballs. It sounds cheesy and slightly ridiculous, but these exercises would change their consciousness or maintain a changed consciousness when they interacted with the world.

Bonnie's Grapevine!

Saddly, N'Digo sometimes forgets to put online its best parts. Last week they had forgot to put online local radio host Bonnie DeShong's "Bonnie's Grapevine" column, which has her picture up among some grapevine graphics and this big stylized graphic of the words "Hey Baby!" written in these huge cursive italics. This is how it began:

"American Gangster" opened last week to great box office numbers, however, Denzel Washington is highly upset with all of you who bought the bootleg copy before it even hit the theaters. By buying the bootleg, you just hurt the success of this film.

It's rumored that some movie companies will leak a bootleg of a film starring African Americans so box office revenue will be low, meaning that non-African American movies will rate higher. If you just have to buy a bootleg, do it after the film has opened and after you have supported it by seeing it in the theaters.

What is up with Dog the Bounty Hunter? Duane "Dog" Chapman has a problem with his son Duane's Black girlfriend. Dog was going off on Duane during a phone conversation and referred to the young lady by the "N" word. The conversation was taped and given to the National Enquirer.

Now Dog is crying and begging forgiveness, saying he isn't racist. As all of these folks under the racist gun do, Dog reached out to Al Sharpton for understanding. Well Dog, before the tape was released, you apparently had no problem thinking, speaking, and acting in a racist way. What's up with that?

The column then goes on to a few other items, then Bonnie ends her column this way, in a font bigger than the rest, and italicized:

Until next time, keep your eye to the sky!

I really do love N'Digo -- it's the only free newspaper I get every week that I consistently read.

Dinner / The French / The Finns.

Last night we had a department dinner function in honor of a speaker who was in from out of town. The meal was enjoyable, except I had to get up several times to go to the bathroom to blow my nose, and once to take a massive shit which was brought on by the Subway meatball sub with extra hot peppers that I had had for lunch. The shit was explosive, and burning.

There's a French grad student in my department, and lately I've been greeting him with "Hola! Como estas?" He doesn't seem to enjoy it, and responds in French. I try to cajole him into speaking Spanish by telling him that Spanish is trashy fun, but he doesn't buy it, or at least buy it enough to want to respond in Spanish.

There's a Finnish grad student in my building, and I had loaned him an extra box fan I had had sitting around on the hot weekend when he first moved in, and I haven't really seen him till I ran into him in the entryway a few days ago. He was saying how he was stressed out from the workload at the university, and I commented that he was coping with the stress better than that one Finnish high school student who was in the news a week or two ago. He didn't respond too well, so I was like, "And he couldn't even commit suicide right, what kind of Finn is that?", to which he didn't respond too well either. Some nationalities are congenitally impaired when it comes to humor, it seems.

Me want product.

I'm fascinated by the word "product", as in, "Your haircut is nice, but you really need some product." A couple people have told me that, and Tennille did the same yesterday and then sold me some hairwax to mat my hair down when I want to look professional. Just using the word "product" makes it sound like capitalism has dehumanized us so much that we can barely think or string together grammatical sentences, and instead we careen from one store to another only looking to consume merchandise and all the while grunting out to ourselves shit like, "Me want product, love product, product good." When people were complimenting me on my new haircut yesterday, I'd launch into this rant and then my caveman imitation, and women tended to get a little uneasy, perhaps because the fact that they love product too much struck home with them.

Got my haircut today -- in fact, I got all of them cut!

I got my haircut by Tennille today. She did a soft scissor-layered thing to make me look more professional.

The receptionist was this younger black woman I didn't know, since she usually works Wed./Thurs./Sat. When the late 80s Club Nouveau remake of "Lean on Me" came on the radio, she was like, "That was my graduation song!", and Tennille was like, while cutting my hair and without looking over, "That was everyone's graduation song." She has this Caribbean lilt to her voice, too, and speaks pretty softly, so the delivery was even better.

Tennille was saying too how tomorrow is her 3-year old daughter's birthday and she's taking her to Chuck E. Cheese. We were talking about the animatronic band, and she was saying how out in the suburbs the animatronic animals do Blood, Sweat, and Tears's "Spinning Wheel", just like all the Chuck E. Cheese franchises used to do when she was growing up, but now the last few years the ones in the city have changed it up and they have the gorilla sing early Whitney Houston.

Haircut tomorrow!!!: Will be seeing Tennille.

This afternoon I made my appointment for a haircut tomorrow, and the lady at the desk at the Japanese salon told me that my stylist will be Tennille. Since then, I've been humming that one song that goes

"Do it to me one more time/
Once is never enough..."

I hope I'm this happy after the haircut -- I'm switching to a slightly longer winter cut, and Tennille's never done that shit on me before.

"Girl, Martha Stewart is FAAAAAAT..."

On Saturday I went to go see Martha Stewart light the big-ass tree in the middle of the Macy's downtown that she had her company design ornaments for (last year it was Vera Wang, I heard). When I came in like three Macy's employees were directing people very perfunctorily, and I was like, "Excuse me, could you tell me which way it is to this Martha Stewart bullshit?", which they *loved*, and happily directed me in the way I needed to go.

As it turns out, though, the tree wasn't in the middle of the store, but up on the 7th floor in the middle of the store restaurant where the ceiling is cut out of the 8th and 9th floors so you have this really really tall ceiling over the restaurant. The 7th floor was packed with a bunch of older women well-dressed in knock-off brands, and so I was forced upwards to the 8th floor, the furniture section, where all the couches and chairs and hutches and stuff were still in place around the walled edge of the overlook onto the gigantic tree, and people were four and five deep sitting or standing in between the furniture as it allowed.

Interestingly, the hired choir off to one side on the 8th floor was African and they did carols and African-sounding things to the accompaniment of bongo drums and hand-claps -- there were otherwise no black people there, so maybe Martha decided she wanted an African-themed Christmas this year and had them ordered in? All the people down in the restaurant were white, too, so it was almost like a Christmas minstrel show, I thought.

Anyhow, when I finally worked my way into the crowd, it was really hot, and I felt bad for all the older women in back of me who couldn't see because pretty much the crowd was all older women who were shorter than me. The worst part of its being hot was that Martha was like a half hour late, and so me and this other woman who wasn't dressed up at all and had a loud laugh were wondering whether she would come down the main hall of the restaurant, or pop out of one of the gigantic presents that were stacked around the tree.

While we were laughing about this, someone reached over and was like called out my name, and it turned out to be a neighbor from down the road in my hometown. She had come to the city with her sister, I think, to shop, and when they came to Macy's, they found out the Martha thing was going on and came up to see. They then pointed out this fat woman in white at the edge of the Christmas tree room who was smiling and looked vaguely like Martha Stewart, except her white suit just draped off her tips and would have been a muu-muu if it reached the floor, it was that blousy.

"Is that Martha?", I was like, and when they nodded, I noted that she had put on the weight, and was like, "Well, shit on me, they should throw her on a silver platter and have some Chippendale's guys take her up to the podium! She looks like a fat old turkey from here."

I don't think my neighbor from home though it was that funny since after that they edged away and didn't talk to me again except for politely saying goodbye before they headed out, though after when Martha lit the tree I retold it to the woman I liked with the loud laugh and she laughed her loud laugh for that. At that point this odd old guy with a brown beard standing next to us turned to me and was like, "I'm surprised she's not in an orange suit," and when I asked about that, he was like, "She was in jail" and walked off, and as soon as he did that the woman I liked turned to me and said that that guy was weird and she had had to yell at him because he was talking out loud and saying Martha Stewart was the same as O.J. Simpson, and she had to tell him that it wasn't at all the same, Martha didn't kill anyone.

Me and the woman I liked talked more, and it turns out her grandfather, her father, and her husband all have worked at this local steel mill where the rats are as big as cats. Then, I left. Out on the street I called my mother and she said they've been airbrushing the shit out of Martha Stewart for years and that she suspects they use a body double for the magazine since she now looks like she's thirty, better than even a few years ago.

Visiting applicant.

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

Snot.

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

Went to $4 martini night last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday - Saturday - Wednesday - Friday - Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep-seated voyeurism.

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

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

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

Slanders in Origen's "Contra Celsum".

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

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

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

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

The first words in the Bible...

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

Coffee troubles.

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

Three beliefs.

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

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

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

3) Roosevelt.

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

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

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

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

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

Death Dream: Came to Pass.

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

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

The jokes just keep on coming...

This whole "all the boy bands everywhere from all time were molested" thing just gets me and makes me think:

1) The Backstreet Boys had to put out to get down.

2) Same as with the Michael Jackson trial, would a prosecutor ask if it was larger than life?

Posted out and it's the weekend...

I'm posted out. The only material I have in my back-pocket is a long-ass post, and I've just been invited out for drinks, so that shit's going to have to wait through my usual Saturday hiatus till Sunday or whatever.

That said, I've been asking people all day if they know that Nick Carter was molested because of the casting room couch for boy bands, and when I tell them to google "Nick Carter molested New York Post", I don't mention anything about how fat the guy who molested him is, leaving them to be even more repelled by the story. The few people who googled it still had horrified expressions on their faces when I ran into them later, but I figure it's their own impulses punishing them and creating the horror, kind of like that one goldfish-in-a-blender art exhibit from a few years ago (loved it, some of the best modern art I've ever heard of).

Nick Carter was molested.

There was a casting room couch for boy bands.

Germs / Germans.

Today in my Hebrew Bible lecture class I was two minutes late to class, so instead of sitting with my friends towards the front, I had to slip in a desk next to this undergrad, a mousey-haired thing with a clunky wood-bead necklace and a couple ornate silver rings on her fingers. Within two seconds of my settling in, she started pulling out snotty tissues and blowing her nose in them, and then she started to chew with her mouth open the gum that she had been chewing with her mouth closed, and I could just feel the mouth germs floating everywhere. She also leaned her head into her hands a few times, like she was thinking, "I'm so sick, why did I ever come to class?" The entire class I leaned as far away from her as I could.

I guess like last week some grad students were sitting around talking about how when they were kids during the summer their parents used to send them to camp to get rid of them, and this one German ph.d. student who was with them got pale and sat back in his chair and gulped and was like, "Camp?!?"

Close one, farting.

I was sitting outside the main library enjoying the last of the day's sun and having a coffee and a donut and doing some language homework, when a friend passed by and we ended up talking. After she left, I farted, and I felt something slip out, though after I finished up my homework and went to check, a couple probes of toilet paper between my ass cheeks turned up clean, fortunately.

The three times you can sleep with a college freshman:

1) When you're a high school senior.
2) When you're a college freshman.
3) When you're tenured.

Chapped.

My lips have been chapped this week, so I've been bitching, since I can't remember the last time they were chapped and it just annoys the fuck out of me. However, like two days ago, for some reason my chic black t-shirt was rubbing my nipples and chafing them and causing them to get hard which made them get chafed even more, so that put my chapped lips in perspective, especially when I took off my t-shirt and my nipples were sore and slightly hard and a bright red like a new sunburn.

Dance Dance Dance!!!: Hold / Harrass / Intimidate.

Two weeks ago at dance my friend who suggested lessons, who had been encouraging me to lead more strongly, was smiling her head off after tangoing with this shrimpy little blonde kid since he knew how to lead. When we danced right after that, she made me keep my frame pretty rigid around her, and it actually bothered me -- she's so small, and to dance properly her upper body really couldn't move the way I had her held, and the whole thing just seemed sexually violent, the way I would turn her that way and this way and it was like she had no life or will of her own.

This week we started waltz and cha-cha. I've always found it cute and not un-hot when older women hit on me, but there's a couple of them in the class that always seek me out to dance, and the firmness with which they grasp me makes me want to take a shower, since you just know they're going back home to think about me and touch themselves ad nauseam.

(It's interesting how dance class has taken me from being an abuser to being sexually harrassed... I feel like I can identify better with the range of human experience now, especially that of women. It's like on the days when I'm not quite hung over to the point where I have a headache, but I'm out of sorts all day, and it's almost like having a period, I imagine.)

I can take dance advice from the female dance instructor, but the male dance instructor I somehow feel competitive with and don't take advice as well from because I am somehow intimidated by him, though last night when everyone was waltzing in pairs he was just sitting back on the long laminate-wood folding table where the stereo equipment is set up, swinging his legs under the table and lip-synching to Sinatra's "Try to Remember" to no one in particular.