Vowels collapsing.

My Hebrew Bible prof collapses the vowel in "caught" so it sounds like "cot", and so the other day when he was doing a close reading of the Tower of Babel story from Genesis in class and was talking about how much was just hinted at or left unexplained, he was like, "This text is knotty, and when I say that, I mean enigmatic, and not as in Maye West."

Marking up books.

I used to think people shouldn't mark up library books, and I still think they shouldn't, if they don't know shit, but I really appreciate analytical library notes in books I'm reading by people who know what the fuck they're talking about. So, all this week I've been reading this reserve book from the library here on campus and taking extensive notes on it, since it's a pretty famous recent book that's a total piece of shit, only you wouldn't notice it unless you were in the field or someone pointed it out to you. I guess I shouldn't mark up books because the library says I shouldn't, but I feel that I should be able to violate the rule on principle, and since I have those principles, I do. Does that make me a dick?

Talked with an actor: Jesus.

On the way home on the bus last night from dinner we had stopped at one point because a bus was stopped at the stop ahead of us, and then when we pulled into the stop, a hunched-over old black woman in a yellow raincoat got on, only her card wouldn't work and we were there for five minutes, so this 30-ish black guy with a closely-cut beard in a leather jacked was saying "what's going on?" with a few people around him, including this chunky 20-something black girl he was hitting on, so he was like, "1 2 3 'What's going on?'" and as soon as he said that everyone in our area yelled that up to the driver, and it turns out that the black woman in the raincoat was a nuts homeless woman trying to pass off an expired farecard and since no one would give her money she ended up having to get off the bus.

Anyways, after that I talked with the white girl sitting next to me, a short brown-haired homely thing with big tits in a lavender sweater and this zoned-out pleasant way of talking, and it turns out she was an actor, so I asked her about clothing and auditions (she says New York sounds like being in junior high all over again). She then asked me about what I did, and after I told her, she started saying that Jesus always struck her as a hippie. "He was like, 'Love everyone,' and, 'Gee, I don't have a place to sleep, so let's put up a tent here,' and 'Hey fisherman, come follow me!'", she was like.

"That's true," I was like, "but he also believed in an incipient eschatological kingdom."

"Really?", she was like, and then paused a bit. "Wow!"

After that, she asked me if we could be friends on Facebook.

Clothes, Africans.

A friend visited some people in Iowa City, and she was saying her friend's younger brother is finally supporting himself as an actor in New York and doesn't need to wait tables and shit like that. His big adjustment to New York, though, was to figure out which brands of consumeable goods he needed to wear around and to auditions, since people would look at what his shoes were and what his jeans were and what his cell phone and laptop and shoulder-bag and all that, and he said it was this whole social code he had just never experienced before.

My friend is also living in an African neighborhood now, and says you can tell Africans from African-Americans on public transportation by their characteristic ways of waiting, even when clothing and looks are otherwise identical.

New York Indian restaurant.

A prof today was telling me about this Indian restaurant in New York called "Gandi ji's Bar & Grill". He thinks because of the honorific "ji" that it refers to that Gandhi, only it served meat and liquor, which of course that Gandhi wouldn't touch.

Strung-out dance lady.

Last night I noticed how the female dance instructor who had been there the week before looks a little strung out -- she moves calmly, but she looks skittish in the eyes and has a little too much makeup on, which don't quite cover up the little wrinkles she has around the edges. She looks like someone who would really drink when you'd get her going, and chain-smoke a lot, and she strikes me as the type of person who would throw shit around and totally flip the shit out when she's going through the last stages of a break-up. I find her look kind of endearing, overall.

Went swimming again yesterday: onions, iced tea.

I had to run home yesterday afternoon to drop off all the food I had rescued for the week, and since it was still nice out, I through on some suntan lotion and went out to the lake. I had eaten some rice-lentils-onion stuff for lunch, and so I had been farting these great big onion-y farts all day. When I was waist-deep in the lake, I didn't need to piss for some reason, though I did need to fart, which I did, and it made great big onion-y bubbles in the lakewater.

Before going out to the lake, too, I had a nice refreshing glass of iced tea, and like I always do now when I drink a nice refreshing glass of iced tea, I think to myself, "Ah, Karen Carpenter's favorite food."

3 more silverfish (yes, 3).

I came in yesterday around 10pm and tapped on the floor-light; a 3/4-inch silverfish scurried out from under the nearby wainscotting and I squashed it, and I squashed another one of equivalent size that made a break for the wainscotting when I picked up the floorlamp with one swift motion emanating from my core.

Surprisingly, like ten minutes later when I was walking back into the living room from the kitchen, I stirred up another, slightly-larger one that had been hiding by the edge of the natural-fiber rug on the opposite end of the room, and I squashed that one too.

A dream: Paper-wedding.

I dreamed I got a wedding invitation from my friends who actually did get married this summer, only in alongside the invitation there was this double-sided swatch of colors, where each side was a row of alternating squares of color with words of good abstract values (e.g. "charity", "faith", etc.) printed alongside them. I can't remember the colors, except for a tasteful pale green in one row and a tasteful pale blue in the other, and each of those harmonized with the other color in its row, but the one row as a whole didn't harmonize with the other. Somehow someone then told me (though I wasn't in the room where I opened the invitation envelope) that this was part of a thing for the wedding, where you'd take it with you and choose a side to talk about with your neighbors in the pew ahead of you and the pew behind you, and get to know them, kind of like an icebreaker, only more meaningful. I also then heard that the bride would be wearing a paper dress, and I thought to myself that the paper-theme for the wedding had gone too far.

Blister in my mouth: Popped it.

Last night cooking I guess I took a bite of something hot, because I felt a blister in my mouth up towards the front right afterwards. I felt how round it was, then pressed down and moved my thumb and the liquid outwards till the blister popped, and right away I could taste the salty liquid inside, like a kind of salty meat broth, only more metallic, like blood. The flap of skin came off this morning when I was brushing my teeth. I got it out on my finger and looked at it, then ate it.

2 more silverfish.

On Saturday morning when I got up 6:15am to go put on coffee and get the heck out the door to proctor the GRE, a 2-inch silverfish skittered out from under the stove in my kitchen when I walked in there after flipping the light on, and I crushed it, leaving a big moist streak down the 1940s-tiling.

Last night when I came in, I picked up the upright IKEA lamp and shook it, as I've been doing for a week solid now with no result, and a 3/4-inch silverfish jumped out and sped under the nearby wainscotting before I could kill it.

Somehow, something in me likes my manner of dealing with the infestation. For one, it's environmentally correct, and for another thing, I think it goes against it inures me against material things, to have me not be tremendously bothered by what really are harmless insects living along with me.

Chicken wings, water bottle, proctoring.

I went to a reception Friday night with some friends at the city's contemporary art museum. Wolfgang Puck catered some really good chicken wings, and I had really bad gas, so I would separate from my friends, go grab a plate of wings, stand for a few moments eating a wing in a sparsely crowded area and let one rip, and then go back to my friends.

Yesterday and today I was sunning out on the lake near me. I would drink from a water bottle to hydrate, only I'd need to piss after a few hours, so at that point I went to go swimming in the lake and pretended to be easing into the cold water and so I'd start pissing as soon as I'd get my dick under the waterline, and then dive in and go for a quick swim and then go back to suntanning, no longer having to piss.

On Saturday morning I proctored the GRE. Whereas when I had proctored freshmen math and language exams a few weeks ago I wore jeans and a dark t-shirt and seemed unamused by anything, yesterday I dressed down in shorts and a summery t-shirt and sat at the front of the room and pushed back my toenail cuticles while I read a reserve book for class.