Going to karaoke again tonight.

I'm going to karaoke again tonight, and I'm excited. I had gone to karaoke at a Korean place last month -- a group of masters students had rented a room with some student group budget money, and I tagged along for fun and ate the peking dumplings the Korean woman would bring in and sing a song every once in a while, shit to try out like "Mama Mia" (never again!) and old standards I hadn't sung too often, like "Superstar" and "Both Sides Now"; the real highlight of the night was finding out that this little petite Filipino girl could rap, and that my one friend can do everything from hair rock to her signature song, the Association's "Along Comes Mary" -- but the place just didn't have the atmosphere of the gyros lounge I like, or the hipster place.

In fact, I went to karaoke at the hipster place last weekend. The host is this 40-year old guy from Texas who sleeps on friends' couches on a rotating schedule so he can live a life of having his own band and hosting karaoke on the side, and not only does he have a huge mullet and these gigantic buck teeth with braces and a big old pot belly and this tuxedo-like sports coat, but he also hosts the karaoke in a very atmospheric basement of an American Legion Hall, and calls everyone who comes up to sing a "dreamer", which is incredibly endearing.

("Okay, our first dreamer of the night is [someone's name]", he'll be like, or, after someone does a good job like my one friend who does that Association song [though in this case she sang "Chain of Fools"], he'll clap a couple time and then say into the mike, "Wow, folks, we have a veteran dreamer here!" It's nice since on the one hand he genuinely recognizes how people live through their songs sincerely, but on the other hand it does also function to good-humoredly keep people in their place, since no matter how good you do, somehow you'll always still be a dreamer.)

Also endearing was the fact that he kicked off the night with Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", only in the very last repetition of the chorus, instead of saying, "My life my love and my lady/ is the sea", he kept saying "My life my love and my lady/ is karaoke".

Anyhow, I have to say that the high point of the night is that I made the host respect me, which was apparent from the first song. I ended up singing "Georgy Girl", and when he was like, "Okay, the first dreamer of the night is [me]", he then added that not only did I have to dig deep in the songbook to find it -- always a good thing! -- but that it was a song he liked and that it was the first time it had ever been sung at his karaoke night, so I was breaking it in. I fucked up the first verse since I couldn't drop down an octave -- the song was way the fuck too high since it's written for a woman -- but I did that on the second verse, and the host whistled along on all the whistling parts and did this little 'walk in place funkily' dance along with his whistling.

For that song, by the way, I got a free whiskey, since, I didn't realize at the time, the first dreamer of the night always gets a free drink.

To get back to things, though, by the end of the night when I got around to singing "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", I knew I had cinched the host's respect.

The best news of the night, though, was that my one friend who likes Dylan and Merle Haggard and their ilk I think got hooked on karaoke - he got a guitar a few months ago and has been practicing - and he did a really good job singing "Like a Rolling Stone", though, as I predicted, no one would clap.

(When my one other friend turned to me during the song and noted that he was doing a good job, I was like, "But no one will clap," and she was like, "For Christ's sake, why do you have to be so fucking prophetic all the time," though she was a good sport and admitted I was right after the song was over and no one clapped.)

The bartender liked us too. He was this short over-sexed Hispanic veteran, and since I had my hand in my pocket during "Georgy Girl", he told me I must have been squeezing my balls to sing that high. To my one friend who sang Dylan, though, he just told him a couple times what a good job he did. When I asked him what songs he sings, he said Tom Jones and then, giving a few pelvic thrusts to the air, said, "Maybe it's because I'm a lover." When I asked him to specify, though, he just shrugged and was like, "'Delilah', mostly".

Snot, and karaoke.

This morning when I used my neti pot, the water just streamed out in a strong flow, and as I watched it in the mirror, this huge piece of opaque, cream-colored snot (it kind of resemembled a big clump of cum, to tell you the truth, though it wasn't) just dripped right out of my nostril in the stream of water, and it made this big 'smack' sound as it hit the sink, that you could hear despite the continued sound of the big stream of water hitting the sink.

On another note, I think I'm going to karaoke tomorrow, and I've been inviting people selectively, and today at a lunch-thing I invited this one chi-chi older ph.d. student who has a short hair cut and always wears black and black glasses with slight horn rims and leather boots with noticeable heels, though nothing too tacky - she's a Unitarian-Universalist, and studies theology, and I imagine she's the type of person who buys over-priced cheeses and likes a glass of red wine at night and has like five specifications for her coffee when she orders at Starbucks - and after she said she was planning to spend Friday night at home with her sick husband and child she also was like, "Oh, I don't know if you want me to sing," and since she's kind of fond of me, I pushed her a little bit and was like, "Hypothetically, just hypothetically, if you did come, what would you sing?", and she was like, "Well, the last time I sang karaoke I was in Alaska, and it was late at night and I was really drunk, and I sang 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone' and made two vets cry, which made me cry too, I was just a mess," and when I was like, "Really?", she nodded tersely and was like, "Yes, but that was years ago."

Highlights.

Over the past couple weeks, I've seen two younger guys with full-head highlights, one with a dull blonde-red hair, and one with a grayish-brown. I'm wondering now if I'll seem less-than-cutting-edge if I get a few highlights in my hair like Tennille wants me to.

More from The Pimp's Bible: "The Human Bitch".

From the beginning of the 5th chapter of Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson's The Pimp's Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin:

CHAPTER 5
THE HUMAN BITCH

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines the word "bitch" in several terms, some are: a lewd or immoral woman; a malicious, spiteful and domineering woman; a female dog.

A loose malicious woman is like a loose malicious dog and both are defined as a bitch. The loose dog will mate with as many dogs as she comes in contact with; as many as eight to ten. She is an easy prey for all, and free. After the nights and days of adventure are over, she doesn't make it home with a crust of bread or even a bone. She usually has a belly full of puppies and doesn't know who the daddy is.

When a loose woman commits the same act, she is considered a human bitch...

I started A.S Jackson's Gentleman Pimp last night. It's nowhere as near as atmospheric or instructive as Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson's The Pimp's Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin. I have yet to read Iceman Slim's Pimp, the book that started the genre, or even order it. I wonder if I can get my university library to buy it?

Foosballers.

The stoner wall-eyed undergrad who lives diagonally above me and her nasty-ass stoner boyfriend decided to start playing foosball at 11pm yesterday night, so I went up and asked them to stop, which they did. The boyfriend is a jackass, since he wants me to tell him when I'm up, so they have the liberty to play foosball whenever during those hours, but I won't, since my position is that that bullshit doesn't belong in a residential apartment building, and if they want to play foosball to move back to the dorm, since when I'm home I want peace and quiet since that's what I pay good money for my apartment for, peace and quiet.

Memories of when I was in 3rd grade.

Yesterday for some reason I was thinking of when I was in 3rd grade, I was fascinated by astrology and wanted to read all I could about it, only when I went to the library I didn't realize that astronomy and astrology were two different things, so I checked out all these age-appropriate books about astronomy and when I got home and started reading, I was reading all about nebulas and bullshit like that, and I was really confused and like, "What the fuck is this?", since it's not what I wanted at all, but I couldn't remember the word "astrology", so I just didn't understand what was up, and I never did ever check out any books about astrology from the public library in my hometown, ever.

Advice to a friend.

So a friend who's doing her ph.d. at a regional state university is taking Spanish for shits and giggle and wrote me a frantic e-mail today:

So we have to write these short compositions in my spanish class... this is the assignment for tomorrow. Do you have any freaken suggestions??? I have no idea... and even if I did, how do you do this in 250 words?

Write an essay of 250 words answering the following question

What would you have painted if you had lived in the 16th century? If you had lived in a Hispanic country who would you have been? Why?

I told her she should say that because of the high rate of infant mortality in the 16th century, she likely never would have lived to paint.

The sad part, is that's also true for Puerto Rico today. That's why I'm voting Obama, for change. We've had too much of the same old for too long, and Puerto Rican babies keep dying while we sit around and twiddle our thumbs, one of the richest nations on earth. I still can't believe that foreign aid as a percentage of GNP never increased once in all eight years of the Bush administration. It's like those babies' lives don't matter, since they're darker than us. Honestly, it's just sick, and to think they keep on dying while we wait for change at home.