If my cell phone supported ringtones...

...I would leave my settings on "ring" rather than "vibrate" all the time.

The Danish Haven: Two more silverfish.

There were two more silverfish in the Danish Haven last night.

When I came home last night from drinking, I decided to tap the tasteful chrome base of my upright softly-lighting crepe IKEA lamp, and a quite large silverfish skittered out to the right of it and I squashed it with the upper part of my house sandals, and then had to walk across the floor with that part of my foot upraised, so the remains wouldn't rub off and stain my tasteful natural-fiber IKEA carpet with dark brown accents that pick up the wood of my vintage 1950s lamp on one of the nearby sidetables. I was able to pick the silverfish out of my sandal tread with toilet paper, and its torso was about the size of three halved toothpicks bound together.

After I got out of the shower and turned my floorlamp back on, I saw a smaller silverfish skitter out from and then back into a gap in the wainscotting.

How many hardcovers did I drop off today?

An amazing 12 hardcovers! I had a lot of room in my backpack again today (though unfortunately I discovered the zipper-chain is becoming loose along one side of the backpack). Yesterday by the time I left the library around 2pm 9 of the 10 hardcovers I had dropped off earlier that day had already been taken by people.

Three liters...

...is how much extra virgin olive oil I went through at home this year. Checked the quantity this morning.

Dinner out and a gay martini.

I was out for dinner yesterday with a few masters students who just got back to town at this one chic Thai restaurant with creative drinks. I got there a little late, and the waiter had already taken their drink orders and carded them, but as soon as I sat down, he hopped over to the table and leaned right in and asked what I wanted and didn't bother to card me and gave me all the attention in the world throughout the meal, though later when my one friend decided to finally order a drink, he carded her again, though he had already done that when they first sat down and she was thinking of maybe getting a drink.

Anyways, I finally decided to get a "saktini", a martini made up with sake and strips of lemon and cucumber peel, but instead of saying "sock-tini" (="sake" + "'tini"), I insisted on saying "sack-tini", so when the waiter came back to get my drink order, I leaned in and was like, "I would love that sack-tini." He didn't notice.

Prescription meds: Very much available in India.

I guess in India at a lot of pharmacies they hand you back your prescription once it's filled, so it's easy to go from pharmacy to pharmacy and get as much codeine you want or whatever you want. A friend of mine was studying Malayalam this summer and said half the grad students there were fucked up most the time from either way too many uppers and way too many downers.

Today...

...I left out an amazing 10 hardcovers on the free book cart! I had a lot of extra room in my backpack.

At the black bar near my house again: winks, theft, and a little Earth Wind and Fire.

Me and a guy I know who's been doing research at the university archives for the past few days went out for drinks last night, so I took him around to several bars, including my favorite one, the black neighborhood bar near my house. I didn't pay much attention to the jukebox beyond noting that at one point Earth Wind and Fire's "September" was playing, though at one point I looked over towards it and this forty-something black woman with red hair and a leopard-inspired shirt caught my eye and smiled.

Also in the bar was this one bum who I saw sitting out on the sidewalk over the weekend who's lanky and has dreads and wears a mock leopard-skin-covered cowboy hat and a metal-stud-studded leather jacket, and who is trying to sell packs of incense and Indian meditation booklets to get back to California, he says. He was kind of walking around and standing near the bar and was making me a little nervous, and he kind of stood by the bar to my left for a while after the person there left -- the bar was decently full -- and all of a sudden a black guy from a couple seats over was like, "Hey, I saw you, you don't do that," and the bum threw a dollar back on the bar and was like, "Hey man, I wasn't doing anything," and ambled out the door when the bartender walked towards that end of the bar to find out what was going on.

The mysteries of shit: four times, and one like corned beef.

After drinking last night, I shit an incredible four times this morning. The first was shit that had been churning around all night that I could feel when I got up a couple times to take a piss, though it was a by no means necessary shit when I went to go take it -- i.e., I could have easily held it longer -- and, interestingly enough, it smelled like corned beef and sauerkraut, like the sandwich I had had before bed two nights before! The next shit came a little ways into my morning coffee, and the third shit a little after that, and the fourth after I had finished my Hebrew lesson for the day and was about to leave the house. I think overall quantity-wise it was more like three shits than four, because I forced the first one.

Two incredibly inedible eggs.

I eat a hardboiled egg every morning with breakfast and keep like seven of them hardboiled in my egg rack so I can just wake up and swing open the fridge and shell one, but when I went to go do that yesterday with one, the hardboiled egg inside had a very pale yellow matte appearance and didn't smell like a normal hardboiled egg, and my finger accidentally went through the egg when peeling it. I tasted a little bit and I immediately got a strong vomit reaction. I came to the conclusion that the egg must have been rotten when I boiled it, and, oddly enough, the second egg was the same way, though the third wasn't and neither was the one I ate this morning, though they were from the same carton.

Dropped off like 6 or 7 hardcovers today.

Another Mary Higgins Clark and Robin Cook among them, but this time a Maeve Binchy too.

Quality conversation with my dean: Music music music.

I had to stop by the office of one of my deans today, the one who I got an Ebony, Jr., coloring book from 1972 as a gift when I ran across them sold cheap at a book fair booth this spring -- in Lil' Tuffy's ABCs, "B" was for "brothers", "I" was for "Isaac Hayes", and "P" was for "power sign", among others, and it turns out that her parents used to subscribe for her and her brother and sisters -- and we ended up talking about music stuff since her and her husband just dropped off their teenage son at a fine arts boarding school. Somehow we got to talking about the relative merits of songwriters and producers, and I was like, "It's like how in the 70s everyone wanted a song by that one guy from Chic," and she clapped her hands and went back in her rolley-chair and was like, "I love Chic!" Later in the conversation, I also mentioned Taste of Honey, and she was like, "They are so cool, who doesn't know the bass line from Boogie-Oogie-Oogie; I totally wanted to be the bass player when I was growing up, she's so awesome."

Odd dreams last night: several.

I had several odd dreams last night:

In one, I was with a friend who lives in neighborhood north of the city, and I dreamed we were looking at maps figuring out which subway line to take back to take to his house in case we were too late to catch the subway line that has a stop by his house. Only, the map looked nothing like the area he lived in, and the subway lines were all different, and he was living near a stadium and sections of ghetto, though eventually we figured out we could take the brown line to the northwest of his house and then cross across a deserted stadium parking lot if we missed the last train. We discussed whether we'd be robbed or fucked with crossing the parking lot at night, and we decided we'd probably be fine.

In my other dream, I was carefully going down this mildly steep hillside in Alaska with my brother and his girlfriend and in the tall grass in front of us I could see a couple places where the grass had been matted down from where grizzlies had slept, only when we got up closer -- I was in front -- this grizzly I hadn't seen reared up slowly and was standing on its back paws and I began to back away, wondering whether I should try to make noise so it wouldn't fuck with me, when all of a sudden it whapped its hands together once, and then it did it again, and then again and again and started walking off to its left, and at that moment I realized it was a tall person in a bear costume and the hillside had melted away into the studio audience of a talkshow I was on, and the steep hill we had come down was actually just the stairway down the middle of one part of the audience seats.

5 hardcovers this morning.

The ones yesterday went so quickly my head spun. I dropped off 5 today, including some Jean Auel, so we'll see how they do.

Funniest news ever.

Robert Jordan is dead. A friend of mine from high school's brother who had cerebral palsy used to recommend to me good sci fi and fantasy novels, and I slogged through four of those fucking Wheel of Time books before I figured out that they were uniformly awful. It's hilarious to think of all these people who will never have closure now. That saga sucked ass in a major way, and defines the pinnacle of ass-sucking.

Freaky.

I googled my uncle's address by his last name and town to get his address so I can mail him a thank-you note, and it kicked up the house address with the name of my grandfather who's been dead since before I was born. (My uncle moved back into his childhood home years ago.)

Black music/tv/theater.

"The Color Purple" is a black musical; "Wicked" is a white one.

"Seinfeld" never charted in the top-50 black shows during its entire run.

I'm continually amazed not only by how much black and white popular culture differ, but also by how things as audience-targetted as big budget musicals are tailored to different races.

The Color Purple: The theater, etc.

Like last weekend when I was downtown I happened to be just west of the streets where I normally am and I ran across the theater where the musical of "The Color Purple" was playing, and it was just after a performance, so swarms of black women from early 30s on up in all sorts of kente cloths and purple swathes of scarves and muumuus just flooded out of the theater and into my path, and I had to walk against them to go on my way, and as it happens, as I was downtown this past Saturday and was angling across downtown to walk up to an artfair where a friend of mine from home was working at, the same thing happened again, only I was stopped at the crosswalk with this middle-aged black woman from the audience and got to ask her how the play was. She had looked perturbed anyways, and was like, "Four hours, can you believe that?, the woman behind me was eating for four hours! She ate before the play, she ate during the play, and she was eating when we got up to go. I want to know, how much more can one person eat!"

"Well," I was like, "At least it wasn't carrots."

The woman actually like that, and laughed and lightened up a little.

N'DIGO: Keeping me up on everything.

I love the local free newspaper N'Digo.

Unfortunately, the "Miss Pulchritude" column isn't online for some reason -- this past issue she recommended eye makeup to readers and was like, "Don't confess last night's mess..." -- but, the very good "Press Play" music criticism column is available online, fortunately.

Recently, "Press Play" recommended Lil' Mo's "Pain and Paper" -- how great a song!

I keep in touch with everything, including my cool side and all popular music, through free local newspapers.

My brain's gone to shit today.

I like to keep my blog posts for the day tight and punchy and in some sort of palatable order, but I'm not even trying today.

Here's the male demo for Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me".

This is one of the few songs I know with an abortion reference besides "Piece of Paper". One day I should make up a list of abortion songs, as well as songs that have French sections in the middle (something I think of a lot). Also, songs with castanets.

Man, my brain is shit today.

I love Ohio State!

Go Buckeyes!

License plate I saw on Saturday:

MOGUL 2 B

A lot more oil....

On Saturday I bought $30 worth of olive oil in a big plastic jug. I did the same almost a year ago, and I'm almost out. It's weird to think of $30 of olive oil coursing through your veins, even over the course of a year. It's also weird to think of the 12+ sticks of butter I've had in that period sitting in a lump in my stomach.

Just dropped off 5 books...

I was cleaning my house this weekend thoroughly -- washed the windows and mirrors with newspapers and vinegar; re-stained the discolored fake wood-panelled kitchen cabinet with olive oil -- and I also started cleansing my bookshelf, so in addition to the one hardback Robin Cook novel I dropped off today, I dropped off three academic paperbacks (including a French copy of Ferdinand de Saussure's general course in linguistics) and "The Rapture: A Question of Timing".