Sappy songs of divine love.

The one opening act at the show last night closed with this really shitty song called something along the lines of "God loves everybody" (the chorus was something like that too). It made me realize -- I'd also been reading 1 Corinthians 3 for class that afternoon -- that nowadays you see this treacly declarations of universal love, or something hateful, but you never get this idea of Paul's where we have to obey God and will be held accountable for this but have very little idea of how to do this, against which terrifying realization human divisiveness and hate dwindles into almost nothing.

My trip yesterday: Coffee outside right near a GNC.

Before going to a concert yesterday I went up to study at this one Arab-run coffee shop I've been to before that stocks good rugallah (this time it was shitty though) and has pleasant outdoor seating. I was talking with the owner a lot, who's an engineer from Syria. He's been having trouble sleeping, so I recommended some stretching exercises he can do before bed that I was reading about in Men's Health.

(My new obsession is prefacing things conversationally with the names of magazines, like, "Men's Health recommends stretching before bed for a sounder and more pleasant sleep." Yesterday too someone complimented me on my hair, and I was like, "Actually I'm getting it cut on Monday. Maxim recommends a six-week haircut schedule." In addition, I was talking about emo with someone, and they mentioned "Fall Out Boy" as an emo band, and I was like, "People Magazine often publishes photographs of Pete Wentz." I usually leave the remarks short, and leave it to the other person to pick up the conversation again.)

In addition, next door was a GNC that no one visited but had an incredibly hyperactive late 20s musclebound guy with a scruffy face and an earring and an attitude. He would come outside about every ten minutes and smoke a cigarette and had an incredibly visible trach scar, and he would lock the store always and go run errands, like he did when he went two doors down to the other side of the coffee shop to a gyros place that had rows of skin-on half-chickens roasting in their front window, and came out with his dinner in this grease-soaked paper bag. When he was going to and from the restaurant, too, he was whistling the bass-line from the White Stripes' "Seven Storey Mountain".

A kid on campus's patch on his book-carrier bag:

CHEER UP
EMO KID

(only the type is justified on the patch)

Books books books...

...11 hardcovers left on the free book cart in the main campus library today!

Confusion of people from afar.

Like almost always when I see someone from afar and it turns out not to be them, I'm uniformly embarrassed because I either think bad of them, like, "Wow, she's not really that fat," or it's not good about me, like, "Oh, that's a different black person."

Yesterday, though, I was sitting outside the main library and I thought I saw a student in my program, only it turned out not to be here, just someone stylishly-dressed like her (high boots, short skirt, big sunglasses), which wasn't a bad mistake to make, to see someone stylish and mistake them for someone else who's stylish.

Chinese grandmothers.

I usually don't feel immediately warm towards Asians I meet, but I've always had a soft spot for Chinese grandmothers walking their small grandchildren.

A big-ass silverfish in the Danish Haven.

Yesterday when I came home in the evening I tapped my light on but nothing was scurrying, and I tapped the lamp's base but nothing scurried out, and I dragged the toe of my house-sandal along the cracks in the wainscotting, but again nothing scurried out.

After I got ready for bed, though, and came out and tapped my light on again, I saw a 2.5-inch silverfish just sitting on top of the wainscotting behind the lamp. It wasn't going anywhere, so I squished it, and then wiped it off my house-sandal with toilet paper, which I then put in the toilet, where it surprisingly sunk, unlike snot-filled or shit-filled tissues. Are silverfish that heavy?

Another 12 hardcovers on the book cart today...

...including some Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, and "Hannibal".

Saint Ambrose was a dick.

I read this fact last year but reading it again today (here in Gillian Clark's Christianity and Roman Society, p. 103) made me realize all over again how Saint Ambrose of Milan was a dick, even in the terms of social norms of late Antiquity:

In 388 the bishop of Callinicum, on the Euphrates, encouraged monks to burn a synagogue. Jewish religion had legal protection, and the emperor Theodosius quite properly required the bishop to pay for rebuilding the synagogue; but Ambrose preached a sermon that Theodosius recognized as a rebuke, and Theodosius backed down.

Saint Ambrose was also famous for his influence on Saint Augustine when the latter was returning to the Christianity of his mother, but he really fucked that one up.

I can't remember the detail, but after I read this factoid this past year I read another about Saint/Pope Gregory the Great's treatment of Jews, which was a heck of a lot better than Ambrose's, but I can't remember exactly what Gregory the Great did.

The ins and outs of glass-blowing.

Glassblowers like dealing with occult shops since the people are really nice, but they also tend to have no money, so they can be a pain-in-the-ass that way, since they can't buy a lot of inventory at once or only order things spottily.

An amazing 9 hardcovers...

...got left on the free bookcart outside the main campus library today. A guy walking by talking to his prof was eyeing the Sue Grafton I pulled out of my bag.

Overall, I think Stephen King and Michael Crichton go the quickest. I wish Belva Plain and Mary Higgins Clark would go first -- that would be endearing, to think that the intense student body around here had a soft spot for Belva Plain and Mary Higgins Clark -- but they don't, they go after Stephen King and Michael Crichton.

Always the Enforcer.

Today I went to go get from the money from the ATM and there was a line 6 people long, and this kid was filling out his deposit slips at length at the ATM terminal and holding everyone up. I went up to him and was like, "Excuse me, if you're only filling out deposit slips, could you use the table over by the side of the room so other people can use the ATM? There's a line 6 people long behind you." He said something bitchy, but he moved.

Sometimes I wonder if it's a good thing to be enforcer of the public good.

I remember...

...the days when my shit used to be interesting. Lately it's been completely interesting; this morning's was massive and smelled like corned beef, but was otherwise uninspiring.

Another two novels...

I dropped off a Danielle Steele and a Michael Crichton today on the "free book" cart outside the gates to the main library on campus. Since school is back in session and I know a lot of people, I had to do it really furtively, so no one would think I read Danielle Steele.

Saw the documentary "Helvetica" on Friday.

On Friday I saw the novel "Helvetica", about the Helvetica font and the typographers who love it. Two interesting observations came out of the graphic designers who were the talking heads who peopled the movie:

1) They can't watch historical movies since the fonts are always all wrong.

2) One thinks that MySpace is a good thing, because it allows people to develop their design sense and shows a surprising amount of design sophistication among the public at large.

The ethos of science fiction.

I've been reading Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash", a cyberspace-related thing involving pentecostalism, and one of the more popular science fiction novels of the past 20 years, and it's been making me think a lot about the ethos of science fiction. For many people who enjoy science fiction, they enjoy thinking about "the big ideas of life", which is tied into science fiction formulas -- you take some element of the world we live in and extrapolate it megafold (e.g. government surveillance) or take a world like ours but makes something radically different (e.g. robots who can think but not feel like us have taken or are taking over) and see what observations pan out. With "Snow Crash", though, since it touches on something I know about, the whole thing strikes me as pretty shallow... It's like whoo-whee, religion is a virus, get it? Fuck you.

On that note, I think this type of "shallowly thinking the big ideas" thing is tied into the type of people who read science fiction. They were all beaten up in high school, so what they yearn for -- and who isn't a person who thinks that they're somehow better than everyone else -- is to think these big ideas and through that be better than the people who used to beat them up. Thus, you find the corresponding lack of deep characters or any empathy in science fiction novels -- everyone is either a snarky person who knows what the heck is going on (=the reader), or a flat character of the world (=everyone else). I wonder if science fiction readers ever grow up and read George Eliot. If they don't, they should.

Yet another four hardcovers...

Left out another four hardcovers just now.

A circa-World War II fundamentalist hatred.

I'm reading the history of Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission, the granddaddy of urban missions with meals and prayer services. A prominent fundamentalist wrote it, so it's more like a hagiography than a history proper, but it's still fun. He's writing a little after WWII and tries to paint a picture of the sins and vices that cluster around the part of downtown where the mission is, so he talks a lot about gin halls and loose women and their procurers and whatnot, but every once in a while (actually, twice) he mentions how among the storefronts there are lady barbers, which he mentions with disdain but obviously to titillate his readers, though I'm not sure why they're so scandalous.

Did environmental work again on Saturday.

The Aramark guy who walks around and applies pesticide to stumps is really cool and amicable and really knows a lot about wildlife. Out in the meadow we were in there was this little path trodden across the grasses and going around behind some bushes, and he was like, "It looks like there are some coyotes coming back here," and then, after a second or two, "Or that senator from Idaho."

Very good t-shirt, though not sure how to interpret it.

The t-shirt I saw an undergrad wearing the other day:

TOO MANY HIPSTERS
NOT ENOUGH CRIME

I'm confused: is that a comment on gentrifying areas (i.e., places aren't hip because hipsters have come in and displaced taco shops and whatnot with their boutiques and sleek bars), or a wish that more crime would happen to hipsters?

The Danish Haven: Silverfish and their Source.

The other night I got home and snuck up to my upright floor light to turn it on quickly to see if I could catch any silverfish, and oddly, none were under the upright light when I kicked it (or at least none skittered out), but one was perched up on the top of the wainscotting behind the lamp. I've also begun to notice that if I drag the tip of my house sandal across the gap between the wainscotting and the floorboards, occasionally a silverfish skitters out and then skitters back in. That makes me think they either hide there or have a nest there. I wonder if maybe I could caulk up that gap everywhere?