Favorite part of the conference I went to last weekend, upon reflection...

I think my favorite part of the conference I just went to was this one women's history panel, where I sat in back and this one early 50s black prof whose work I had read (which I realized after I saw her nametag after she had sat down; I had never met her before or even seen her picture anywhere, as I remember) sat down by me and while wearing a vaguely African yellow-and-orange top and a shorter skirt and a scarf on her head kicked off her high-heeled shoes and stuck out her stubby little nyloned legs and rested them straight out on the chair in the row in front of her and all the time she was there talked to me and did that black call and response thing like she was in church. When one prof on the panel was talking about how lots of women religious revised their orders' rules after Vatican II but their liberalizations were struck down from Rome, the prof next to me looked over to me and just shook her head and said loudly, "Men," and then she held up her fist and moved it down quickly and diagonally and was like, "BAM."

Another time when they mentioned some woman's name and a few people in the room giggled, I asked her what that was about, and she asked me how old I was, and when I told her, she told me that she was the evangelical woman who said in an advice book that you haven't lived till you met your husband at the door in Saran Wrap and whipped cream.

Another time during the panel when a prof was saying she was interviewing nuns who had been involved with civil rights work, one of her intervieweees, a white nun, started crying and talking about how she held Jimmy Joe Johnson or Jackson (I can't remember in his name, everyone else seemed to know who she was talking about) in her arms because she was nursing him as he died, and she realized how the United States made African-Americans die for justice, and she's never gotten over that. Anyways, as soon as the prof said the nun had said she held this activist in her arms as he was dying, the prof next to me's voice got deep, and she just looked out and shook her head and was like, "good lord, good lord," and kept shaking her head for the rest of the story.

Pimple / Paper.

This week I had a pimple form between and a little above my eyebrows, like one of those dots that Indian women wear or paint on or whatever the heck they do to that dot to make it be on their forehead. I left it alone because it didn't have a head, and then two days ago it felt like there was a dull ache beneath it from the pressure of something deep under the skin, so I got my fingers around the pimple from the bottom and gave a firm squeeze, moving the material up, and a bunch of shit burst out of there and flung itself across my finger nail. It wasn't too liquidy, but more of greasy congealed white clumps with a very little bit of liquid around them. It's been a good month for pimples.

Yesterday at the black neighborhood bar I went into the toilet stall to get some toilet paper to blow my nose, and not only was there not any toilet paper there, but there wasn't even a toilet paper holder or a dent in the wall for one or leftover screwholes from where a holder had been and was removed, instead there was just a bunch of small white bar napkins like they put your beer on on the window ledge behind the toilet. This bar is the same bar where the bartender keeps a baseball bat behind the counter just in case something happens -- I kept thinking of that yesterday and laughing for some reason while I was sitting there.

Number quiz #2 -- American Airlines flight attendants.

Q: In what year did the seniormost flight attendant of American Airlines join the company, and now has seniority in picking flights over the rest of the 19,000-some flight attendants employed by the company?

Number quiz #1 -- cell phone contacts list.

Q: After cleaning out my cell phone contacts yesterday of people I never call, how many people do I have left?

Off I go.

The last reception was last night, so it was a third night in a row of drinking. I can't take a shit this morning and am now off to the airport, so I'm really hoping a drunk shit doesn't hit me when I don't have access to a private washroom and a washcloth so I can wash the brown wateriness out from my ass-crack after it hits.

Addendum: Deaf prof etc.

So the deaf prof was telling me that her kids giggle at the Song of Songs's erotic imagery when she teaches it, the shit like where the lover's neck is compared to an ivory tower, and so she's been asking people what they compare their lovers to when they praise them. As it turns out, the answer is celebrities. She says that a class doesn't go by where she asks that question and somehow Brad Pitt's ass doesn't get brought up.

Deaf prof etc.

Today I was talking for an hour and a half with a prof who I had met at a panel yesterday, and when like half the way through it came up that she was deaf except for a hearing implant, I was surprised. It's only thinking back now that I realized that she maneuvered us to a bench away from a lot of noise and would turn her face away from me (i.e. her ear towards me) when I was speaking. It was completely natural to me, I never even realized she controlled things so I didn't recognize her disability at all until she told me about it.

Yesterday I also found out about the sexual escapades of Kuwaiti adolescent males. Because sexes are more rigidly separated here than there, a guy's first sexual experience is usually jerking off with another guy, and it's not talked about socially but it's known to happen among all male friends of a certain age and is just kind of assumed to be a normal teenage indiscretion. In terms of ass-sex, bottoming isn't seen as pleasurable, so what happens is that if guys get that far as teenagers they have a one-for-one "you nail me then I nail you" deal except for if one of the guys is from a tribe with a lot more status, in which case he gets to nail the other guy twice for the other guy's once nailing him.

Also, since being hairy is associated with masculinity and topness, the rare hairless Arab guy always ends up getting targetted in high school for being a bottom by everyone who knows him, which just up being socially awkward since his being hit on is so pervasive and he's not even necessarily gay or liking to take it.

Napping / "Welcome to the Pocket State".

This conference has been tiring me out with the long hours and the drinking, and then last night I got woken up six times by one of my roommates snoring, so I've been like the walking dead all day. I just came back to nap and found two of them sprawled out on the beds in the room watching football and daytime television to open windows and a lamp on, so I kind of mentioned that I was hoping to take a nap, so the one moved to the other bed and was like, "There you go," and then they mentioned when I asked delicately that they weren't going to any sessions until this evening. Isn't that fucked up, not even to go to a bar and watch a football game when you're in a different town? I swear that the lowest form of life is people who watch television in the daytime with the lights on. For some reason I was raised to think this, or I've thought this due to something in my upbringing, but I don't know what or why... People like that are the kind of people who think that when something doesn't bother them, it doesn't bother other people, which is the level of thinking of a toddler who covers their eyes to hide in hide-and-go-seek since they figure that if they can't see the seeker the seeker can't see them. The cockrags.

On the other hand, everyone love the idea of California as "The Pocket State", my dad's phrase he came up with this year. He says that if the U.S. is a pool table and you tip it up on end, all the oddballs roll down to the one corner and end up in California. For some reason women especially laugh at this.

On another note -- a note not mentioned in the title to this post! -- today I made a 'three-peat' of the free "new members continental breakfast" at my conference.