Till Sunday: A short video for you.

I will not be blogging again till Sunday, probably, so till then, here is a short video for you ("una peliculita para tu"?). Imagine watching it in a darkened movie theater on a full-size screen so it takes up all of your senses entirely, like how I first saw it.

The last I'll write about the Great Porn Debate: Ron Jeremy's hypothetical daughter.

The last question of the night -- someone asked Ron Jeremy whether he'd want his daughter in porn. He started out by saying that each debater had their Achille's heel, and the pastor's was about masturbation (solidly against), and his was this question. Quite frankly, he said no, because he hoped his daughter would finish high school and get a college education, and most women in porn weren't at all educated and looking to do something with their lives.

Yet more about the Great Porn Debate...

Miscellany:

Ron Jeremy was saying he could make it as a slob because he was in heterosexual porn and it didn't affect his body image any, but the really fucked-up male stars are in gay porn, because that's where you have to have a body like from Chippendale's.

The pastor is travelling with his wife and kids on the bus, and he was saying Ron Jeremy is really good with them and puts them to bed even. I guess Ron Jeremy has a masters in education, even.

In the audience there was this tall old guy who stood up to ask a question, and he read off an index card about how 90% of porn movies are crap and then segued into how he's never been in a regular sexual relationship and then asked what they thought could be done to help people be ready to enter into loving adult sexual relationships. When the pastor said something, the guy yelled out, "Oh yeah, and I bet everyone needs to be saved by Jesus Christ!" After the pastor said a little more, the guy started saying something about pedophilia that I couldn't hear and the audience gasped, and the moderator who looked like Ryan Seacrest started talking over him and going into the next question.

So, about that porn debate...

So, more about the Great Porn Debate --

I asked a question about people either Ron Jeremy or the pastor had known who had tried to transition out of the industry and the problems they had faced. Ron Jeremy immediately began speaking about how he'd been denied movie roles because of his work in porn, and the same things had happened to friends, except if they were in a Trey Parker/Matt Stone movie, since they cast porn stars a lot. The pastor talked more about women in porn not having job skills, whereas the men had usually had had careers before entering porn (car salesman, commercial photographers, he mentioned) and could get back into them without any problem or penalty after leaving. Ron Jeremy rebutted the idea of a woman's past haunting her by saying that the only case he knew where a woman's past in porn was exposed was this one star who sat on a schoolboard in Tennessee, and her husband leaked it because they were going through a divorce and they were in a custody battle. He said many people change their appearance after being in porn, and hardly anyone (even huge stars who've been in 200+ films), since the films don't enjoy as wide a release as Hollywood films.

Two quick sidenotes --

The pastor's mom blames him for the pornographic spam she gets in her e-mail. She says that they know that she's his mother, and he keeps telling her to switch from AOL.

When this woman kept challenging the pastor about something and making no sense at all but was being really belligerent, he was like, "I don't know, your problem is beyond me," which response totally won over the audience.

Am tired.

Today I'm tired and can't get shit done, not only from the drinking, but also from reading too much of that Carpenters bio. Yesterday I started reading in bed at like nine-thirty and the next thing you know I look up and its midnight

BUT ---

I felt like I had only just begun.

Lips and heels.

My lip hurts. A month or two ago my Swiffer broke, and I had to repair the handle with duct tape. That repair was getting weak today when I was cleaning my apartment, so I duct-taped the handle again, only when I was biting off the duct tape to tear it, some of the duct tape attached to a chapped part of my lower lip and tore off that chapped part of it.

This reminded me of Ann Arbor, and the best and the worst decision I made during my weak there --

The best decision was after the roommates had left and taken the toilet paper with them, not to try wiping my ass with a washcloth and then washing the washcloth off with soap and water until my ass was clean, because shortly after I contemplated doing that, the painters showed up, and who knows what would have happened if I had been in the middle of that when they rang the doorbell and I couldn't answer (the landlord had given them the key).

The worst decision was to shave in the deserted apartment, since my razor had gotten banged up but there was an abandoned leg razor in the shower that I chose to use to shave before heading in to the conference; it worked fine enough, but when I was getting the little miscellaneous hair around my mouth, I went in for an angle and ended up slicing open my lip, which sucked. It wouldn't stop bleeding for like ever.

On a sidenote, I was thinking how some things just don't disgust me. When I was putting olive oil on my floors this morning, I just put the dirty paper towel up to the jug and swished olive oil on it, I wasn't worried about dirt getting back into the olive oil that I cook with. This was made real to me when at the bar just now my Kuwaiti friend went to the bathroom and out of boredom I started picking apart the callouses on my feet left over from popped blisters and chewing on the hard pieces of skin.

Was drinking.

I met a Kuwaiti friend and had two (heavy) shots of Old Crow (probably about four-and-half or five shots, they pour heavy). I don't like to drink this early, but he wanted to meet after class. He was telling me that back when he was in Kuwait, you couldn't get bibles anywhere because of anti-proselytization laws, so whenever he and his parents were at hotels, he'd whip open the drawers to get at the Gideon bibles because to him they were like contraband, only he was always disappointed at how boring they were.

He was also telling me about how he went to the Yearly Kos convention because an Arab friend of his was sitting on some panel. He was saying that the name "John Edwards" was everywhere; people were always talking about him at panels, and if people you were talking to were talking about some candidate, they were always talking about John Edwards, though never for any particular reason. He also said that the convention was slightly more rainbow than you'd think, but absolutely everyone had a laptop, whether they were typing away on it or having it plugged in and charging.

My mother's worried about my drinking.

My mom has been growing older and so has been getting on my back more about shit she never used to. Lately, she's been worrying if I've been drinking too much, so in response to an e-mail from her yesterday, I wrote:

Will write more later -- don't have energy now. Spent all morning cleaning myself off after waking up in a puddle of my own vomit.

--[my name]

Today she wrote back:

Why do you continue to torture your mother? She loves yah!!!!!!

She should be thankful that I'm not popping Quaaludes like Richard Carpenter in his prime.

Cleaned up my apartment today.

I cleaned up my apartment today because a friend's little brother is coming through town and needs to spend the night, and the place was covered in dust. After sweeping, it still took 2.5 Swiffers (counting both sides of each pad; I flip over the pad and use it so I don't waste anything) to clean up the dust from 3 weeks of open windows and then three weeks of closed windows during vacation. I also found a dead roach, which I don't understand how that happened -- I never leave food out, and the place is immaculate. Maybe it crawled up through the dried-up drains when I was gone, and then starved to death because it couldn't find any food in my absence?

Also, one wooden chair I had got scratches on it, so my dad had recommended I use a paper towel dipped in olive oil to wipe over the scratches to disguise them. I did that, and then over all the scratches in the hard-wood flooring where the tenet before me, a porn-loving silent Asian type, had left them from his furniture over the course of his five years in the apartment. Even around the doorposts where he had spilled some liquid and let it set, which you can tell because the stain was massively discolored, the olive oil worked wonders.

After I had spread olive oil over a good portion of the floor, only then did I wonder if I was providing food for future roaches.

Brigham Young on creationism.

It turns out that among Mormons, Brigham Young was a lot less dogmatic about certain biblical points than others. To demonstrate this, Joel Barlow's Mormons and the Bible quotes Brigham Young on p. 92, from "stenographic notes from an unpublished sermon of October 8, 1854":

When the Lord had organized the world, and filled the earth with animal and vegetable life, then he created man... Moses made the Bible to say his wife was taken out of his side -- was made of one of his ribs. As far as I know my ribs are equal on each side. The Lord knows if I had lost a rib for each wife I have, I should have had none left long ago...

I really don't understand how shit works.

Yesterday evening I felt like I had to go to the bathroom, but all I had was two very small, thin, compact, and slightly-curved pieces of shit that lay at the bottom of the toilet, in the little depression where everything gets whisked away. Was that from all the coffee I had earlier that day, and if so, why wasn't the shit blacker? This morning I smelled my strong coffee brewing and I had to take a shit, and it was a little watery with yellowish pieces, and then like forty minutes later in the middle of my Hebrew lesson when I had finished the cup of coffee, I had to shit again, and it was large normal size pieces of shit, only less compact than usual and having the same shade of yellow as the previous shit, and it frayed a little bit at the edges during soaking. In less than eight hours, I had three very different types of shit. Honestly, what's up with that?

The Great Porn Debate.

Ron Jeremy wore an "I [heart] PETA" shirt, the pastor had his hair dyed black and had black pants on and white cool shoes and a turquoise sleek top with a solid color tie, which was all very hipster-ish and young. The moderator was a Ryan Seacrest knock-off, only I like Ryan Seacrest better.

(I don't like Ryan Seacrest.)

The bar at the theater had $4 Blue Moons with mandarin oranges in them.

So, where to start? I guess the most interesting thing is that the pastor mainly does his work at porn conventions. People in the porn industry often present themselves as advocates of free speech, and so they let the pastor in. Ron Jeremy said it's also great to have someone there to talk with people about getting out of the industry if they don't want to be there, since if they don't really want to be there, the porn industry doesn't want them. I guess the morning before the debate, too, they were on the radio show, and the host was saying that Jesus if he was alive would be outside porn conventions protesting, but both Ron Jeremy and the pastor turned against him and were saying that no, he would be inside getting to know people unobtrusively and helping them where he could.

Also interesting was that both the pastor ("Craig") and Ron Jeremy relied a lot on the principle of disgust, which I found surprising. The pastor spoke a lot about things like analingus (=rimming) and women getting their asses stretched out from taking two cocks at once, while Ron Jeremy would talk about kink-porn as something outside of the mainstream production companies, but in the tone of his voice and the way he was saying he'd never do it he seemed to be positioning himself against the weirder side of sex. I found this interesting since I once read the back of a book by Martha Nussbaum on disgust, where she argues that disgust should not be a primary force in affecting judgments on things.

(I never read that book, though, nor the interview to which I just provided the link; I just know what the back cover said and bring it up as a point in conversation at cocktail parties.)

One time the pastor talked about ATM porn ("ass to mouth") and how he was sitting around with a friend of his who had gotten out of the industry and the guy was saying that the women used to barf after blowing the guy who'd just fucked them raw up the ass, only they'd cut that out of the shot, and a good director would know when to get the actress a bucket so she didn't throw up all over the sets.

...More tomorrow, got to get going...

Update: Divine Healing Study Manual.

As of 5pm, gone!

Giving books away: "Take my excess volumes, please!".

There's a library cart out in front when you walk in the door of the main library on campus and I try to put books I don't need any more on it and see how soon they're taken. The two books I've put on there before were snatched up in hours: Burt Ward's "Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights", and the three heavy volumes of the Harvard Early Ukrainian Library's "Povest' Vremmenykh Let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis", one with a big coffee stain right across the middle of it. Today I put out a binder called "The Divine Healing Study Manual" from John G. Lake Ministries.

Learning Hebrew.

I'm trying to learn Hebrew this summer. I'd been lazy and all summer only got through one lesson, but now I'm trying to book through one a day. I finally got to written exercises, and I started writing the numbers on the left side of the page before I had to erase and start writing from the upper right:
It's very odd looking at the page and seeing my hand, but not knowing why since the writing system is unlike anything I've ever written and I don't know what's particularly me about it.

It's also interesting how I picked up a piece of scrap paper to start writing on. After I did this, I remembered that most of school exercises preserved from Antiquity are found on scraps of papyrus that had been primarily used for something else but had blank space available on the back or wherever.

The morning coffee.

Sometimes in the morning I wake up and need to take a shit, but I can't, but once I drink my coffee, which I make strong, I get through like half a cup and I need to go violently shit. Today it happened again; my shit was watery and a brownish-yellow, with little clumps of unidentifiable food floating here and there. Someone told me that a grapefruit and a cup of coffee in the morning is known as "the model's breakfast". Lord forbid what would happen if I ever had that instead of my usual egg and toast.

I'm fucked for time -- BUT, a little bit on the clown memorial service.

In the graveyard by the showmen's plot they had folding chairs lined up with a piece of paper taped on them with the names of who they were reserved for written on them:

Drizzle
Sweet Pea
Milo
Jellybean
Deborah
Dotsie

More later. I'm pressed for time today because I have to run off to take care of some shit before going to the Great Porn Debate.

Garbage and a grapefruit.

Like the first week I moved in back in September, my one neighbor upstairs started rehearsing his keyboard one night after 10pm, and there was this huge racket from the pedals because of the thin floors, and when I went up and asked him not to rehearse, he switched to his acoustic guitar, not out of maliciousness but more out of cluelessness, and I had to go up and ask him again not to practice so late at night, which he did. Yesterday I was looking out my dining room window and I saw him go out on the back stairwell and throw his garbage on top of a full can and not press it down, but just lay the lid on top. He seems clueless. I think he's a chemistry guy in some sort of band.

A few of the grapefruits I bought on Saturday have soft spots and two already have got some mold. One I ate yesterday, picking out the parts on the other half where the mold wasn't, but with the other one today I just decided to throw it out since I was too lazy.

I'm also feeling guilty over the styrofoam takeout container I got from a Czech restaurant to take half of my lunch from there home in yesterday before walking over to the clown memorial service.

Clowns and porn (separately).

Today I went to a clown memorial service in honor of the more than sixty circus people killed in a firey 1918 train wreck. I was humming "Send in the Clowns" all day and texting lyrics from it to everyone I knew. One friend from school who I had texted "where are the clowns/ there are no clowns/ send in the clowns" wrote back and was like, "Maybe it's false advertising?", and then I texted back and was like, "maybe next year". You can't plan for shit like that.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Great Porn Debate.

Another Carpenters tidbit: When they played for Nixon.

From Ray Coleman's The Carpenters: The Untold Story, p. 143:

Their jitters were captured perfectly when, with their microphone left on accidentally before their performance, Richard could be clearly heard to say, "Who's the babe with Kissinger?" (It was actress Mamie van Doren.)

One Carpenters tidbit: Karen's college audition.

From Ray Coleman's The Carpenters: The Untold Story, p. 55:

Later, for a recital before the "jury" of professors at California State University, Karen was persuaded by [head of choral studies Frank] Pooler to repeat her imitation of a hair-lipped singer, which had amused him.

Ungrateful Frenchmen and their gestures.

At the conference this past week this one French colleague I met was saying that the only other paper on his topic he was giving a talk on was scheduled for the same time he was giving his talk, so since I happened to be at the other talk, I picked up the handout for him and gave it to him when I ran into him at a coffee break. He was like, "Oh, thank you so much!", but then he turned his back to me to go back talking to the people he was talking with. A similar thing happened with another Frenchman at school when I once did a similar unexpected favor.

I also have met a shitload of French people this past year. In the past, I thought their wacky gestures -- the eye-rolling, the puffing up the cheeks and blowing out their breath at stupid things, etc. -- was part of their individual personalities, but now that I've met a lot of them, I realize now it's not, and that I have to look beyond that.

Rushed out of Orchestra Hall last night.

Last night there was a free concert in Orchestra Hall and me and my friends from school booked it out of there in order to catch the electric train home since the bus schedule has been majorly fucked over by a rock concert in town and all the attending traffic. When we were hurtling down six flights of windy backstairs between old people, I really wanted to be like, "A plane just hit the north tower!", but I wasn't.

My library friend's parents.

I was talking tonight with my friend who works the library desk and she was telling me about how she's worried about her parents since they won't leave the bad neighborhood they live in and she's constantly worried about them. Then she was telling me about how they've been married sixty-two years but "the only thing they have in common is nine children and baseball." She was saying how this morning she was looking out from the choir at the church and her dad was at one end and her mom was at the other end. "They always at it," she was like.

She was also telling me how her mom feeds some kids she knows from the neighborhood who are drunks or on drugs and she's always telling her to stop, but her mom's like, "Don't you worry, God won't let anything happen to me."