Did my big presentation today.

After class, people were coming up and thanking me and being like, "I love how you stood up."

Bookmarks.

Some library people were telling me last night that they pin up interesting bookmarks they find in books on a bulletin board in back of the circ desk. The best one they've found yet is a polaroid of a woman in camo holding an assault rifle with the words "Miss ya!" written underneath, with a smiley face next to it. They were envious that at the library where my mother works, the librarians have found in one book a toothbrush being used as a bookmark, and in another a piece of bacon (raw).

Dreams and hallucinations.

A fellow doctoral student I know was telling me yesterday that her Arabic class homework was taking a lot longer than she thought the previous night, so between that and a short paper she had to get done by the next morning she was up till after 3am and then napped on the couch in her living room instead of going in to bed and waking up her husband, especially since she had to be up by 6am.

Anyhow, at one point, though, she looked up from the couch and the light was on and there was junebugs as big as basketballs hovering in the air all over, and then a plant grew up from beside the couch and wrapped around her and held her to the couch. She said that when she first saw the beetles she was telling herself that they weren't really there, she was just hallucinating from lack of sleep, but after the plant thing, she actually woke up on the couch and the light was off and realized that she wasn't really hallucinating, but rather dreaming that she was hallucinating, an important distinction.

P&P: Pentecostals and Puerto Ricans.

Some scholars have argued that many Latinos become Pentecostals in the U.S. although such a move is stigmatized by their fellow (Catholic) immigrants because it allows them to join the U.S. Protestant majority while maintaining Catholic folk practices like healing, exorcism, and whatnot.

Today I flashed back to my mother talking about being a stewardess on the New York-San Juan flights in the late 1960s. All the stewardesses hated the route because it was noisy and there was baggage everywhere, since all the Puerto Ricans would cram the overhead bins and then put suitcases by their feet and even in the aisles, so you couldn't even push the drink cart back and forth or have a moment of quiet in back if it was a bad day and you had a headache... The stews, too, would call it "the Roach Coach", and warn new stewardesses against it by talking about the time that this one Puerto Rican woman had her dead baby tied in a blanket and put in her legroom under the seat in front of her, since she was taking it home to bury it but didn't feel like checking it or have a suitcase to put it in.

Making friends everywhere (pt. 1 of 2): Artemis.

So there's this one smiley, cool undergrad girl at the card swipe-desk at the gym entrance who I've been friends with for a while since she's talkative and I'm talkative and I've liked her ever since the day there was this older woman bitching at her for like ten minutes and holding up like twenty people behind her and, when I got up to the desk and asked her what was the deal with the woman who was bitching, she was like, all smiley, "Oh, I don't know, I wasn't listening, they don't pay me enough to care."

Anyhow, yesterday was the first time I ran into her since Thanksgiving, so I asked her about hers and she asked me about mine, and when I mentioned I went to a local cafeteria with a friend from the holiday meal, the other girl at the card swipe-desk, a pretty girl except for a slightly large nose, was like, "Did you know the owners are Greek?", and when I said no, she was like, "That always makes everything better."

Anyhow, when I was on the way out, the girl I knew well was gone, but the other girl was there and so when we said bye, I introduced myself and asked her name, and she was like, "Artemis," and I was like, "Oh, just like Artemis of Ephesus!" When she said she didn't know who that was, I explained to her that she was the manifestation of the Greek goddess Artemis at this huge temple in Ephesus that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and that since she had been syncretized with this weird Anatolian fertility goddess she had just rows and rows of breasts, like over 300 of them. When Artemis didn't say much, I was like, "Some scholars say that they're actually necklaces of bull testicles since they bulls were often slaughtered in her honor, but that's a minority scholarly position, most scholars think they're breasts." At that point the kid next to her, this unshaven squatty jock guy with greasy black hair who looks half-Mexican and had been listening the entire time kind of looked over, so I just went on and was like, "She's in the Bible," and then I explained how in Acts Paul is said to have drawn people away from her cult when he was in Ephesus. After that, though, Artemis was still looking dazed, so I said goodbye and took my leave.

Donovan's planning a university...

...because he wants to promote Transcendental Meditation in Scotland! David Lynch is chipping in and they're touring raising money right now. The Scotland university is going to be the UK equivalent of the American one in Fairfield, Iowa.

The Stones (pt. 2 of 2): Beauty tips.

Q: What's Mick Jagger's secret to looking eternally young?

The Stones (pt. 1 of 2): House.

Someone I was talking to two weekends ago was telling me about a friend of hers who bought Keith Richards's old house in the Hollywood Hills. When her friend went to go plug something in in the bathroom, they somehow accidentally shifted the metal outlet plate, and a hidden internal motor slowly retracted the plate, revealing a cubbyhole full of syringes and heroin. I guess there were a lot of these hidden stashes all over the house, and a surprising amount were still full of stuff, probably because Keith Richards had forgotten about them.

Dropped an egg last night.

Last night when I came home from hipster karaoke, I was pretty tired, so I had some reheated vegetable lasagna and a hardboiled egg. When I was rounding the corner of my table to sit down and start to eat, the steaming egg rolled off the spoon I was holding it on --- it was too hot to handle -- and whacked the floor at the angle, splitting in the damnedest way I've ever seen. The top shell-and-white just rolled off in one section, attached to the rest by just a section of boiled white, almost like the top half of the egg had flipped open and was hanging off open the egg at an angle, and the yolk rolled out onto the floor from in between the two sections that were open. It was weird. I wiped the dust off the egg on my sleeve and then ate it, then.