Dream from a couple nights ago...

A couple nights ago I dreamed that I was in my hometown in the early summer on not too hot a day, and I was walking towards Main Street down the sidewalk next to an old service station that isn't there any more, and the town festival was going on, even though there wasn't anything on Main Street in my dream though there always is in real life for the festival. Anyways, I knew Judy Collins would be there and for some odd reason I knew her personally in this dream but not exceptionally well, and then I see her walking across the street away from me to the sidewalk on the other side, her ambling across the road diagonally since she was also heading towards Main Street, so I called out, "Hey, Judy!", and she kind of half-turned and gave an over-the-head wave, and for some reason she looked like a dressed-down Debbie Harry without makeup, though in my dream I never questioned that she was Judy Collins. The street was kind of dry and dusty, too, like we hadn't had rain in a long time.

Greeting -- New Obsession.

All day when people have been asking me how I'm doing, I've been like, "Fantastic!", and when they ask why, I'm like, "Rihanna's 'Umbrella' just got nominated for best song and best album of the year... I am *stoked*." People's reactions are telling. Two people I talked to have both said they're very happy, since the song makes them happy whenever they hear it. I liked that reaction.

My new obsession, however, is Fergie's "Clumsy". I think I like it even better than "Umbrella", maybe because it reminds me of the scene from "Female Trouble" where Divine careens around a grocery store shoving steaks up under her dress to steal them while the song "The Girl Can't Help It" plays in the background. I can't find that shit on YouTube, which makes me wonder what the hell YouTube is good for, then.

Thought of the day.

Does English "munch" come from that one Latin word "to eat" that surfaces in Italian as "mangiare"?

BREAKING NEWS!!!: Exorcisms.

Well-placed sources in the local archdiocese just told me the reason why the Church finally decided to authorize an exorcism recently, something they're extremely hesitant to do unless a likely case first passes a huge battery of psychological and other tests and then shows clear signs of demonic possession...

Trivia -- Mormon polygamists, Anabaptists.

Someone was telling me that they went to the son of a family friend's high school graduation in Montana a few years ago in this community with a huge Mormon polygamist population -- he said you'd drive by a house and there'd be nine trailers in a line set up down the yard next to it, one for each wife -- and at the graduation, they kept saying the name "Jessup" forever, and it seemed like most of the class had at that name. He thought at first that someone in the class had died and the high school kids were paying tribute in the way that high school kids do like when someone dies in a car crash, but then he realized that it was actually all the polygamist kids, or at least the school-aged portion of them that had made it through graduation.

On another note, someone else was telling me about their experiences with reclusive Hutterite communities in North Dakota, Hutterites being a less well-known Anabaptist group who live in separated communities like the Mennonites and the Amish in the northern great plains by the U.S.-Canada border. They still speak German, and they pretty much just eat potatoes and fatty German recipes that were brought with them from the Old World when they emigrated. I guess when the older community members give blood, you can see a layer of fat floating on top of the blood in the syringe once it settles. Their bread is supposedly kick-ass -- best bread ever, it was described to me -- but when the person who I was talking to got the recipe, she found out that for one batch (and remember, the whole community is fed off of a batch) the secret ingredient is the fat of twenty-nine chickens.

Also, all Hutterite couples have sex at least once a day -- structured into community life is a post-lunch "nap time", only school-age kids are in school then, and older folks take care of babies, so pretty much everyone who's left who's eligible for naps is married, so not much sleeping happens then, apparently.

Additionally, I heard about this one guy's friend, and they stopped by a roadside Mennonite stand to buy pies, and as soon as the teenage girl stepped out of the farmhouse in her bonnet and smock to come help the customers, the one guy's friend was like, "Oh baby," and as soon as she stepped into the stand, he proceeded to hit on her, which was the most awful thing ever. I guess his opening line was him leaning on the pie counter and being like, "So, what do you do?"

The best thing since sliced bread:

Saints' pictures for your cell phone, in Italy! Saddly, I don't think they have my favorite, Saint Margaret of Antioch:

I love how she went after the devil with a hammer. Forget John Paul -- *those* were the days of muscular Christianity.

Talked with a Turk yesterday.

I met a Turkish girl at a bar yesterday, through friends. Her name sounded Turkish, and she had gray eyes, so I asked her if she was Turkish, and I was right.

(I hadn't heard a devoiced r at the end of words, a tell-tale sign of a Turk -- at the ends of words, Turks make their "r"s sound like "sh"s -- but I figured the rest was enough to go on, and I was right.)

After I did this, she told me that people sometimes ask her what religion she is, and she says Muslim, and then people are usually like "oh", though once someone was like, "Really? But you dress like a slut!"

Artemis, the Sequel - Fruit Swap.

Yesterday I saw Artemis at the gym, working the swipe-out desk alone, so I said hi to her -- she smiled when she saw me, so I can't have offended her that much, I presume-- and then she asked me how I was doing, and when I said busy, she said that that was the general state of everyone nowadays, it being finals period, and at that point I segued into apologizing, and was like, "By the way, I'm sorry if I got a little offensive talking about Artemis of the Ephesus the other day, and bull testicles and stuff." She said she didn't mind at all, and then I asked her what she was studying -- she had a book out on the work desk that she was really reading through -- and she was like, "AP European History."

On another note, yesterday night I was talking with my one black friend in her 70s who works sometimes the guard desk at the main library on campus, and she ended up trading me her apple she had for the grapefruit I had brought along as a snack, since she felt more like a grapefruit than the apple she had brought with her when she packed up to go to work that day. I offered her the banana I had as well, and she was like, "No thanks, I don't put anything in my mouth you got to peel the skin back on," and laughed uproariously.

Sheet - Shit.

So a friend I was catching a beer with on Saturday was telling me that he was off of whiskey for a while, since he had a bad experience with Jack Daniels where he ended up vomiting in bed and then taking his sheets to the bathtub and running water over them since he associates water with cleanness and all things fresh, but the tub actually backed up and all he got was this big, kind of murky tub that smelled equally like bile and Jack Daniels, since your stomach never really does digest whiskey. He said he ended up throwing the sheets out, which would have been highly symbolic since what got him drinking was this great one night stand on those very sheets that would have been fantastic except for the girl not telling him that it was just for once, which made him go on a spiral of drinking and depression that culminated in him vomiting on the sheets he fucked her on, only it wasn't that symbolic since he's been depressed since then anyways... He was telling me that in an ideal world his depression would have gone the way of the sheets at the time that he disposed them.

On another note, I hear the hot new drug is to shit in a jar, let it ferment, and then you go huff off of the jar with the aid of a plastic bag. It's cheap, and it supposedly really fucks you up.

That one Rihanna song.

I just can't get over "Umbrella". I've known that song forever, but for some reason on Friday I just got hung up on it. The title is cheesy and is instantly dated, but it's feel good, and I think it always will be for people who have been around at the time that it hit big. I think all this week, when people ask me how I'm doing, I'll be like, "Man, I am *totally* obsessing over 'Umbrella'."

That said, I find Jay-Z's rap really weak, though I find it admirable that he's been involved with both "Umbrella" and "Crazy in Love".

Silverfish - CDs - Las Vegas.

I was drinking at the student pub with people after class on Friday, and after we were there for a while, I thought I saw a roach skitter up the brick pillar and come to a stop halfway up, but when I went up to examine it, it was actually just a large silverfish.

When that one Journey song about a midnight train and believing came on, one of the people from the seminar who had a few beers in her just started smiling, and then she told me that her boyfriend from her sophomore year of college had his apartment broken into at the beginning of that year and all his shit stolen, but since he had had 3 CDs in his car at the time, he fortunately had those ones left, and so after that whenever she'd come over to have sex, he'd let her pick which of the three CDs to put on. She said he had Journey, Supertramp, and Hootie and the Blowfish, so now whenever she hears Journey or Supertramp, her mind starts to wander and she finds herself getting a little bothered.

She also told me about her weekend in Vegas a couple weekends ago where she and her girlfriends were at some swank club and ran into Frankie Munoz. She says he's a good dancer, for a guy with a mohawk and the face of a twelve year old. He wisely invested in parking lots, which allows him to be sat at tables with $600 bottle service.