Another person: On the train.

When I was on the train last night, I was drifting off to sleep and all of a sudden I heard this heavy bass beat from a radio in an other quiet car. I could see some other people looking around too, and I tried to lay back for a while, but finally I decided to stroll up the car and see what the heck was going on. Anyways, like six seats up on the opposite side of the car there was this really big black woman laying back in her seat and holding her cell phone up to her ear and playing music on it. I asked her nicely if she could turn her music down, and she was super nice and said she was sorry she bothered me, and that was it.

A few hours later, though, after I had woken up and went to go see what time the train would arrive -- we were slightly delayed -- I ran into her when I was coming back to the car, and she started apologizing and telling me how she really wanted to sleep and she sleeps to music, but all she had was her cell phone on her, so she decided to play that and was hoping no one would hear. We started talking, and it turns out that she was coming in to Chicago from Jackson for the weekend and was getting ready to stay out to 4am that night with her friend and had been pre-gaming by drinking appletinis on the train from a thermos. "We be a hot mess come Sunday," she was like," 'cause I got my walking shoes on." She also told me how she always feels like a tourist riding the elevated subway, and this time she told her friend that she wants to go on the part of the subway that goes underground.

One person: At a Jamaican restaurant.

Yesterday after the conference got out I went down a sidestreet in Ann Arbor to a Jamaican restaurant I had seen from a street I was always walking down to get to the conference. There was this young kid sitting outside at a table drinking a glass of water and just watching the world go by, and when I went to go in the restaurant, he asked if I needed some help. It turns out that he's the owner and has had the place for five years ever since he moved to the U.S. from Jamaica and he works there everyday all day long, usually ten or eleven hours. The place was kind of hot and had a tv going and he was telling me that he lets people sit there as long as they want and never kicks them out, because he's trying to have the only laidback place you can eat in the entire city. It was like this little piece of Jamaica had been transported to a sidestreet, I swear. I really love how he was just sitting outside drinking a glass of water all day on a not-all-that busy street, not listening to the radio or reading a magazine or anything like that. The guy lived upstairs from his restaurant too.

Kitty khaos.

I've hit a couple vintage clothing stores here in Ann Arbor since I've been here. In the one I was just in, a Hello Kitty salesman dropped in to check on if the owner had seen his samples. He was a hipster with a thin close-shaved beard and a gut and a dirty t-shirt and longer green cargo shorts, and he had a primo metal briefcase with his samples of jewelry and wallets. He had this whole spiel and was talking about how vintage clothing stores and Hello Kitty go together but surprisingly Ann Arbor is an underserved area for Hello Kitty merchandise. Surprisingly, there was confusion since it turns out that in the few days since he'd dropped off his samples a different Hello Kitty salesman had also been by and droppped off some samples.

Went to that Patti Smith concert.

I went to the Patti Smith concert last night. The music wasn't my type of thing, but I enjoyed it. She was very real and was never put-on or lazy and she really enjoyed herself on stage. She was also very kind -- she had three different people up on stage to jam with the band, two unannounced (the one was from the opening act and was announced), and once during her talking between songs when someone sneezed she was like, "God bless you." I don't think I'd want her as a friend, but I'd want her as an aunt.

For her music, she did a fair number of covers, since I guess that's what her last album was about -- the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop", some song that sounded like "Gloria" in the chorus but had different verses and really rocked out, it was the best song of the night, and then "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" as an encore, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" during her main set. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was compelling in the "hello" part, since she channeled all these complicated emotions and was like "hello/ hello/ hello/ hello/ hello/ hello/ hello/hello/ hello/ hello", but the verse lyrics are pretty awful slowed down, with that shit about being stupid and contagious and then the "here we are now entertain us" part, not to mention the rhymes in the part where the teens aren't sure if it's their mosquito or their libido. It made you realize how insipid that pseudo-poetry was, and how Patti Smith could wring more genuine emotion out of the word "hello".

She also talked a lot about Aqua Teen Hunger Force and how the castle in the opening credits is from southern Jersey where she's from and she knows it, but that the street sign there says "Belle Isle" and so she feels this connection with Detroit and went there because of it.

She also was saying about how her new pet peeve is Bush selling arms to Saudi Arabia. At one point when she was leading up to that and was like, "I have a pet peeve, and when you have a pet peeve, you have to tell it to someone," this black woman sitting way behind me was like, "Mmm-hmmm" really loudly, only when I turned around, there were no black people there, only this one mid-fifties white woman who would go "Whoo!" all the time and would say shit like "Patti, you kick ass!" all evening long at an inappropriate volume and at inappropriate times. I think somehow she managed to channel all the coolness she's never had right at that moment and shot her coolness wad all right then without even knowing she'd done it.

Most everyone was in their fifties and quite respectable looking. Some people brought their autistic teenager and he spent the whole evening standing up and rocking back and forth. He was wearing a turquoise t-shirt. Next to me and my colleague was a middle-aged Italian lawyer who's in Ann Arbor for the summer on some exchange program to learn about American law and loves punk; she says she knows it's weird as a lawyer, but she likes it, and she was appalled that Patti Smith wasn't selling the hall out like she always does in Italy. She had big frizzy hair and was wearing all black and had a nice smile and laugh.

German ditty about smoking up.

My colleague told me this famous German poem about smoking up:

Am Morgen ein Joint
und der Tag ist dein Freund.

Translated it's "A joint in the morning/ and the day is your friend," but it's nice since "Freund" is pronounced "Freunt" at the end of the sentence and makes a rhyme with "Joint".

A few interesting mistakes going from German to English.

I forgot to write this, my colleague from Leipzig made two really interesting linguistic mistakes in speaking English yesterday where you could see her German-ness came out:

1) When I was asking her if she had gone to any other good concerts recently, she was like, "Of course I have! I have so many great concerts this year seen!" (She was separating "have" and "seen" and putting "seen" at the end of the sentence, just like you would in German.)

2) When I was telling a story about chickens being genetically modified with genes from eagles for higher egg-laying, we kept talking more about the chicken breed, and she kept saying the word "eagle-chicken", as in, "Perhaps my aunt should buy an eagle-chicken!" (She was making a compound noun out of the two concepts, something along the lines of "das Adlerhuhn"; this type of thing is something German is notorious for.)

Those were the only two really telling mistakes out of our like forty-five minute conversation.

Definitely going to see Patti Smith tonight.

A colleague of mine from Leipzig who looks like Paris Hilton -- tall, blond, good makeup, slightly narrower forehead, though, though she has the same fashion sense -- yesterday she wore silver jewelry, black pants, and a pink t-shirt that said 'Princess' in sequins on it -- loves Patti Smith and so we're skipping the reception tonight to go see her. My colleague was telling me how she went to see Nine Inch Nails earlier this year and she's pissed at herself for not going to see them earlier since the concert was so good even though she never sweated so profusely in her life because of the crowd and the venue, but how her absolute favorite is Marilyn Manson and how she was able to get a ticket to his latest CD release party through connections and got to meet him and how she was greatly impressed by how tall he was, and how he was made even taller because of the high heels he wears. She was also saying how this one Goth festival she went to this summer back in Germany was odd since it was all these thirty-five year old Goths sitting around being peaceful with their young children, and how all the stands at the festival sold baby clothes in black and with Goth-y frills and stuff like that. The security guards there, she said, had nothing to do since everyone was so peaceful, so they just sat around and smoked and drank beer with the Goths and every once in a while bitched about the hip-hop festival that they had to man the following weekend and how they were dreading it because of all the fights that usually happen with hip-hop fans.

My colleague is also interested in the Freemasons and has visited several active lodges in Germany.

Had some housing issues.

It turns out that my friend from the mostly-all-girl punk band the Pussy Pirates had the lease dates messed up and her lease doesn't expire on Saturday, instead it expired yesterday, as I discoverd when I woke up to find everything cleaned out by her roommates and painters coming in to redo the place and get ready for the next tenents. She's on tour on the West Coast, but luckily I got in touch with one of her roommates and now I'm sleeping on the couch at his new place, so as it goes, I'm now living with three people that I never met before Monday. Thankfully they're happy stoners; even though my friend left all this shit at the house -- pirate paraphenalia, art her friends gave her, a giant foam rubber fat suit that she at one point incorporated in the act -- and they had to clean it up, they did it and now they're housing me.

Some summer reading: Music bios.

I'm reading "The Carpenters: The Untold Story". I hadn't realized that Karen Carpenter died of anorexia. I would write more, but I've only just begun.

My semi-rebellion: Guess who's playing a concert in town!?!??!?!

I found out that Patti Smith is playing a concert Thursday night, though it conflicts with the closing reception. I have one Scotch girl, one Dutch girl, and one Austrian girl, all papyrologists, on board, and one Austrian guy, who also is a papyrologist -- everyone is, here! -- is going if he can talk to some people he's trying to make fundraising links with by then, because if not, he'll have to go to the reception. The Austrian guy was saying that he used to listen to Patti Smith on his grammophone growing up. "I was much younger then," he was like, "but so was Patti Smith."

My temporary rooommates.

I haven't really talked with my temporary roommates. The one girl always gets up and is gone by seven-thirty since she has to get to work, but I never see her because when I get up she's in the bathroom and when I'm in the bathroom she leaves. But, she always smokes up before she leaves for work (or at least the two mornings I've stayed in the house so far).

The house also has a lot of pirate memorabilia -- a human skull sitting on the front porch and another in a bathroom cabinet, a rubber shrunken head also in the bathroom, a stained-glass thing of a skull-and-crossbones hung up in a front window, and other shit like that. Those Pussy Pirates are intense people, and loyal to their identity.

Other socialization yesterday: Religion in Europe, talked with some Brits.

Yet another Dutch girl was telling me about surveys about the state of religious belief among European youth. It turns out, she said, that people who like Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings are a lot more religious and a lot younger than Europe at large.

Last night I was drinking water with some British and Scotch people -- no water-drinkers they! -- and the one prof was talking about how he slips in pederasty jokes into his lectures, stuff like, "It's just like the Boy Scouts motto, 'Never leave your fellows behind.'" One girl who studies the oikos in ancient Athens also was telling me how she was a New Romantic and used to run around her town in heavy makeup and dyed hair and frilly shirts and listen to Duran Duran all the time. The one prof also started talking about how even though he still listens to rock bands like Yes and Genesis, he's changed a lot because of his four year-old daughter, and how he's already hoping for a son-in-law he can "go drink a pint with" since there's many awful kinds of boyfriends out there. He started going into some stories about awful boyfriend-types that really weren't all that awful, it seemed like, so I started telling him about a friend of mine from high school who was dating a dropped-out-of-high-school drug dealer who used to come up to her like he was going to give her a kiss, but then stick his hand in his pants and then wipe his fingers across her face and be like, "Hairy ball sweat!" He would do this at least a couple times a week. No one knew what to say, so I reaffirmed how fucked up it was and how he should hope that his daughter never dates a guy like that.

We had us a tenor to kick shit off.

At the opening ceremonies the other night they had an Ann-Arbor-based tenor come in and sing shit between speakers. Slipped into the program, too, was a publicity picture of him as a brooding man-waif -- go to Gallery 3 and it's the upper left picture, I can't link to it -- but it actually looked nothing like him since he has a broad face and isn't built slight like you'd think and they must have killed themselves to get that angle. Isn't that fucked up? Shit like that really points out societal beauty standards for men.

Drank a lot of water yesterday.

Yesterday at dinner I didn't have beers with everyone, but just stuck to water. This one Dutch girl who I was teaching slang to and who had gone out with everyone the other night saw that and said to me in her British-accented English, "Not 'getting hammered' tonight now, are we?"

What do you study?

Best response yet: "Ptolemaic interest rates."

Took multiple shits yesterday.

Yesterday I took like three shits in addition to the one when I got up - twice at the conference, once more when I went home to take a nap. The first one was normal, the second too were of solid consistency and smelled mildly like alcohol. I guess the different consistencies were layered in my bowels like a parfait?

The first time I went to take a shit at the conference I got to see the bathroom graffiti in the chemistry building, where my conference is being held:

I like to lie
where my girl is shy;
I like to paste
below her waist;
She says "You gotta stay";
I say "Good day."

Underneath that in a different hand someone had written "--Robert Frost". If this was a papyrus I was editing, I would have written:

(2nd hand)
--Robert Frost

I don't quite get the paste reference either -- is that like envelope-licking or something?

Anyhow, when I went to wipe my ass, there was no toilet paper, so I had carefully hoist up my pants and move to another stall. There someone had written about whether it was better to go to b-school or be a surgeon, and someone had drawn up on the tile columns where you could vote which was a better career. People were writing things like how surgeons pay better, but their father was a surgeon and the specialty exams were a bitch so go to b-school since it's different. Someone too had drawn an "engineer" column as a career option and another person put under it, "The best of both worlds, hard classes and low pay."

Got hammered.

I got pretty hammered last night with some of the younger papyrologists, and when I got in the two gentle stoner folk were nowhere to be found but the Jack Daniels was gone and the ears were eaten off the chocolate bunny. This morning the walk in was horrendous because it's already hot and humid and sun shines directly down on you when you walk on the east-west streets. I almost vomited crossing a bridge to get into down -- the sun was shining down on me full force for the minutes it took me to cross it.

Arrived for my conference -- Housing, a sign.

I just arrived in Ann Arbor for a weeklong conference I'm going to this week. Like a couple weeks ago I rang up a girl I knew from high school but hadn't talked to in like five years but knew was living in Ann Arbor -- I called up her mother to get her number; her mom, the local Baha'i coordinator for my county, asked me if I had found out all the answers to my questions yet in doing my ph.d. so far -- and I ended up not only finding out that she's a founding member of the Pussy Pirates, but also getting a room to stay in for the week through her. It turns out that she moved into a new house like a week ago but her old room is still empty, so I'm staying with her two old roommates, who I haven't met yet but she describes as "gentle stoner folk". They left a key under the mat and some sheets out on the boxspring in her otherwise empty room, and welcoming notes in the kitchen. I left them out a bottle of Jack Daniels and a giant chocolate bunny my great aunt the nun gave me two days ago, and a note saying "Pick your poison."

On my walk in to the conference I passed a frat house that had "Harry dies!" spraypainted on it.

A response to Michael Moore's "Sicko".

Yesterday afternoon me and my dad visited an old friend of his and my mom's, and she got to talking about Michael Moore's "Sicko", which she saw not too long ago. She has good health insurance and so did her husband, who went through a pretty bad illness the past few years and got really good care, but she was saying she's more convinced than ever that there should be nationalized health insurance for everyone even though people like her would probably take a hit with quality of health care. I thought that was interesting -- you don't see that too often, people stating directly that they'd have them and their family worse off so other people can have it better.

Just saw my godmother's mom.

I just saw my godmother's mom after she stopped by my godmother's house after mass to have some bacon. I haven't seen Nana in a few years, and she has a hearing aid now, but she's as sweet as ever; she's Canadian and very nice. I was asking her how mass was, and she was like, "We had a black priest again, and he was longwinded."

Intestinal problems.

My dad was saying he's been shitting really liquidy for the past few days for some reason and he doesn't know why. Yesterday for lunch he had a can of Busch Light and an apple, though.

Family winemaking.

My dad was telling me last night that back when he was six or so my grandmother used to scrub out the laundry tubs in my grandparents' basement and my grandfather used to come back with big flats of grapes and my dad and my brothers used to have to clean up their feet and sit on the edge of the basins and smush the grapes for wine. After draining the wine off, my grandfather used to take a bedsheet and put all the dregs in it and squeeze it to get the last wine out. "You know, all that ethnic bullshit," my dad was like.