Two sets of old people.

When I was in the train station yesterday, this old white woman with big coiffed hair and a fur coat and purple stretch pants had her boots off because her feet were sore and had her toes out in the air and was curling them, only all her toenails were really green from fungus, and looked ready to fall off.

On the train walking to my seat I saw an old couple pulling out big ziploc bags of popcorn they had made for themselves for the ride. I felt like I was channeling my grandmother and was like, "Goddamn old people and their fixed incomes." She used to say that a lot about the old women at the one bar she went to, since they'd buy beer there but eat out of their purses bags of chips they'd brought in with them. "They say they have no money," my grandma would say, "but I know her husband had a nice retirement from Ford's, and she has the money to go blow at the casino every weekend." It was one of those things that would just set her off, if you brought it up to her.

McDonald's food waste.

At the end of the night when they throw the leftover unsold food from the foodwarmers in the dumpsters, a lot of McDonald's now have employees go and pour bleach over it so the homeless and the poor can't raid them and get it.

Physical.

I got a physical this afternoon since it's been years since I've had one and I've been eating a lot of eggs lately and I want to know what my cholesterol is. My terminally-unmarried Dutch friend was in the waiting room making an appointment to pick up his STD results, since he's getting checked before he goes visit in January this girl he's kind of getting serious with long-distance. To the young girl at the desk he was like, "What a pain, I should just settle down and marry this girl."

Also, the woman who did my bloodwork's name was "Velvette".

Went to $4 martini night again yesterday.

I got there before my friends and so had a gin martini at the rather-full bar -- there was only one stool open, right next to me -- and this mildly dumpy mom type came up and asked me if anyone was sitting there. I was like, "No, I'm just waiting for a couple friends and we're moving to a table," but then after she sat down, I was like, "You know, if I had had my shit together ten seconds ago when you asked me if anyone was sitting there, I should have been like, 'You are.'"

Fruit / Moose.

A friend was telling me that this girl she has a sublet with didn't tell her that she's massively allergic to fruit, so one day when she was peeling an orange in the living room, the girl stormed in and was like, "What are you doing!?!?!" When she was like, "Peeling an orange, I like them," the girl was like, "I guess that's fine, I'll just be queasy all day." I guess once, too, this girl was once standing near a crate of apples and woke up four hours later in the emergency room.

I was thinking of moose yesterday, too. If you hit them with your car, they fuck your car up more than deer, since you clip their long legs and their entire body falls right on your hood and windshield and smashes the shit out of it.

Catchphrase / Car Crashes / Hookah Lounge.

I was thinking yesterday of this one thing my dad says a lot, "He doesn't know shit from Shinola!"

Some people I was talking with yesterday were talking about car crashes. This one guy's friend hit two deer at once in Minnesota, and when he got out to call the tow truck and the police, his car frame started on fire and the whole car actually burned.

The other guy, who's from Egypt, was saying that the worst care damage he's ever seen is this one car that hit a camel and was completely totalled, with the hood being driven into the front seat.

The hookah lounge owners near me continued to be assholes when I was there last night. Like a year ago there was a limited power outage in my neighborhood and they weren't affected, so I grabbed my laptop and went there and bought some tea and dicked around online for a bit, but the place started filling up and the owners cut the wireless so I'd leave. Yesterday when I was in there I bought one large herbal tea and then got a refill of hot water -- I trash-talk those folks every chance I get; and I'm not giving them money -- and they had these free Turkish chewy candies on the counter, so I got one of each flavor right in front of the owner, cherry and apple and melon and strawberry. The cherry was absolutely fantastic, so I went to get another, but the owner had put the bowl of free candy under the counter so I couldn't have anymore, the jackass.

Friday night, Friday night, Friday night's all right.

On Friday night this one guy was telling me about the first cheap liquor he ever got hammered off of, Black Velvet... In middle school he accidentally came across some where his parents kept it, under the sink in his house, next to the Drano.

Before that, though Friday night post-seminar dinner at my prof's house was a trip. She made chili for the entire class, which made me really, really happy. It only could have been better if she had sent some leftover chili home with everyone, because there's nothing I love better than some chili and a cup of hot coffee in the morning. But, she didn't, but I had a fun time anyways.

The one French guy in my class who I talk Spanish to had gotten one of those full-head buzzcuts, and I told him it was a "power haircut", and very forceful looking, and I would do a black power fist and hold it out in front of me every time I said the word 'forceful' to him when I was complimenting his haircut. He asked me if it was "French tough", and I told him that was an oxymoron, and when he told me to fuck off, I said I was kidding, and that we should go find an immigrant and kick the shit out of them because no matter how hard they try they'll never be French.

My one doctoral student's husband does modern art, and me and him got a German student talking about how the German government funds a lot of artists and how whenever he's home in Berlin the thing to do is to go around the city with friends and drink and visit art installations. I then told them that for me, there is no better art exhibit than the interactive art exhibit that that one artist made where goldfish were put in blenders and were set out so people could hit 'frappe' if they wanted, because it told you about people's souls. My one doctoral student's husband said that it was juvenile and gimmicky, and I agreed that it was a gimmick, but I said the gimmick really, really worked, since who wouldn't want to hit the 'frappe' button, and that tells you something about people, too, though as it turns out, they didn't, and they thought the exhibit should be shut down, so I was like, "If you were there and you saw someone going to hit the button, would you reach out and stop them?", and they were like, "Of course not," and I was like, "Well, that tells you something about people's souls too," and I started talking about the Milgrim experiments and how people could be complicit in fascism because of social pressure not to interfere.

After this me and some other people started talking with the Frenchman again, and somehow the philosopher Leibniz came up, and since I don't know philosophy, I did that cocktail party-trivia thing I always do (e.g. my conversation thread about stuntwomen I always bring up; at cocktail parties I really don't talk with people, instead I always keep interjecting slightly relevant trivia and completely derailing conversations), and talked about how when Leibniz was dying on his deathbed in his 80s, he bragged to his friends with his dying breath how he was dying a virgin and had never known the embrace of a woman.

They said that was bullshit, so then I told them how Descartes used to nail puppies to walls to dissect them, since he wanted to know anatomy and thought that animals couldn't feel pain.

Then, of course, they also said that that was bullshit, but they wanted to know which histories of philosophy I had been reading, since they wanted to read them too.

A couple hours and several more glasses of wine later, my one prof was saying several years ago how when her mother died and she and her sister were cleaning out her house, she found her first book, which she had dedicated to her parents, in a Ziploc bag tucked away in a closet. Her mother had never read it, she said, but her mom always put things she wanted to preserve in Ziploc bags, and she started saying how parents can have their own way of honoring things, even though they may not quite get what you're doing.

The coffee shop on campus that day, too, had been selling gallons of milk for a dollar because someone forgot to cancel that day's order and they were overstocked right before break, so I had had two gallons of milk I was taking around in a plastic bag, and I had tucked it in the snow outside my prof's house to pick up and take home afterwards... I figured it was white milk in a white bag in white snow behind a bush where you couldn't see it from the street -- in the fall I'll have to tuck chocolate milk in a paper bag into a pile of leaves! -- so if someone found it there and decided to steal it, they would need the milk more than I did and it was only two dollars, so what the fuck did I care, though of course it was still there when I left and so I picked it up and took it not home, though, but to a nearby bar where everyone in my seminar decamped after the dinner-and-drinks thing at my prof's house had finished up. People proceeded to get hammered, and the milk was a good joke prop. When people were ordering cheap shots and being like, "Man, I so do not care what I drink next," I would hold up my plastic bag all hanging low and distended with two gallon of milks and be like, "Milk?" That kept getting funnier and funnier, and on the fourth time a guy actually accidentally snorted back whiskey into his nasal cavity, he was laughing so hard, like drunk people do. He wasn't drinking Black Velvet, though; he was drinking Old Crow, someone else entirely was drinking Black Velvet.

When people, too, were asking me why I had that much milk, I would hold it up and give a big smile and say with a mug and a semi-theatrical voice, enunicating each word distinctly, "I love to save," and then I would tell them the story about my one friend's dirty aunt where that was the punchline of a story once when I was interacting with her.

I'm still loving Rihanna's "Umbrella".

I'm still loving Rihanna's "Umbrella". The other day I heard that it's rapidly climbing the list of 'the top ten most popular songs of the last decade' and is about to overtake "Mambo no. 5". Great job, Rihanna!