ANNOUNCEMENT!:

No more posts for like a week or so, likely.

Snow's a-coming / Bus reading.

Yesterday I took a daytrip to a different neighborhood in the city so I could work on my one final paper at different coffee shops and have a change of scenery, and I ended up in the afternoon on the outdoor patio of this organic bakery in the yuppie/hipster part of town, and just as I was packing up my books and laptop to go home since my brain was dead and the sun was going down and it was a bit chilly out, this short, frantic-looking well-dressed woman in her early 40s (but looked late 30s) in a padded vest who had double-parked her car outside ten minutes ago was now coming out of the bakery with a tall to-go cup of coffee and a bag of organic pastries, and for some reason she accosted me and was like, "Snow is coming tomorrow!", and I was like, "That's why I was outside enjoying the sun today!", and I immediately began wondering where she was from, since she had a strong accent but I couldn't place her face ethnically. She laughed and said a few things I can't remember, and then went to her double-parked car, a newish sedan, and as she hopped in and drove away, I saw the license plate was an in-state personalized license plate that said --

VATICAN

When I got downtown and was waiting for the bus to go home, I ran into an art history graduate student I know who I didn't know was married and her husband, who was visiting from California, and since she had just finished her dissertation proposal the night before, they had spent the entire day out sight-seeing and had gone someplace for a nice late lunch, and were now heading home on the bus. The bus was packed and they sat a few seats behind me, and since I couldn't talk to them, I pulled out my book I had been reading and started reading, and like twenty minutes later when I looked up from my book and looked around, I caught the eye of the graduate student who I know and she smiled and was like, "I got a picture of you reading."

"Why?", I was like.

"Because you were really serious," she was like.

"Well, the book is good, but not so serious," I was like, and I held up --

She laughed, and this well-dress old black lady who was sitting in the row of seats between us gave out a chuckle and said, "I bet that is good," then she was like, "And did you see one time where he got a big smile on his face?"

"Oh," I was like, "That was the part where Tempest Storm came home on Christmas Eve from going out shopping and her husband accused her of having an affair and kept on yelling at her, so since she had always heard the scar on his face was from cut glass and he was afraid of glass, she took the set of crystal wine glasses that was one of their wedding presents and threw all twelve of them at him one by one."

They didn't say much, even though I forgot to add the next part where later in the night he got angry again and she went to leave to go be alone somewhere and collect herself and he followed her to the driveway and kept harrassing her and she tried to run him over with her car.

A long time ago, by the way, I had asked the art history graduate student to go to midget wrestling. She didn't go.

Cheryl "Salt" James's one regret.

From last week's N'Digo: The Magapaper for the Urbane:

Hip-hop trio Salt-n-Pepa have filmed a reality TV show to mark their comeback. The Grammy Award-winning band broke up in 2002 when Cheryl "Salt" James quit to combat bulimia and depression. The women did not speak for five years, but are now shooting The Salt-n-Pepa Show for VH1 as they attempt to resolve their issues.

"Our relationship started to go sour," James said. "We were having communication issues and it just got hard. And, I was getting worse and worse with my bulimia and depression. I knew that this could be very harmful to me. I just wanted to figure out who I was apart from this group. The way I ended things was bad. And, I’ve apologized. I’m still getting over the guilt issues over the way I did it..."

The born-again James is expressing her more spiritual side, leaving the raunchy lyrics and double-entendres behind, much to the chagrin of her once-and-current soul mate, who still embraces the more sexual nature of Salt-N-Pepa. With songs like "Push It," "Whatta Man," and "Let's Talk About Sex," defined the group's brash yet innocently catchy approach to sex, making the female rappers ground-breakers in the male-dominated world of hip-hop.

"I embrace Salt-n-Pepa, and I'm not ashamed of anything that we did," James says. "But I was a person expressing myself in my twenties. I'm a Christian now. I've had a transformation. Young people are so delusional about the music industry, and being irresponsible is very popular. I left that life and found a better life focused on things that are more important, like family and God. I don’t regret doing some of the songs in the past and that’s a big misconception. People have been saying ‘how can she be ashamed of what she’s done?’ And that really wasn’t what I was saying. I’m very proud of what we’ve done and I work really hard to build Salt-N-Pepa. It’s just that the way I expressed myself in my 20s is not the way I choose to express myself now. I was a different person then. I’m going through a transformation. My mind has been renewed and I have different things I want to say. But the only song I kind of regret, not even the whole song but the lyrics is, "If she want be a freak and sell on the weekend.""

Street surprise.

When I came home from a concert last night, walking up the street to my apartment building, I saw a large pool of chunky tomato bisque-colored vomit on the sidewalk, and then I walked like five steps more, and found a smaller pool of the same colored vomit.

This morning, too, when I was walking into school, on the sidewalk on the same street on the other side of my place, like thirty feet further I found a small pool of the same vomit, again.

More snot.

My third cold in the last ten weeks is finally clearing up - I can sleep through the night now without waking up since I'm choking on post-nasal drop - but this morning when I did my neti pot, though, even though the water poured on through my nostrils in giant gushes and I wasn't blocked up, when I went to blow in the sink, huge, thick ribbons of snot flew out into the sink, and were a color like if you kept mixing olive paint with eggshell paint till the olive got really really light.

When I poured the water through a second time, nothing much happened, it seemed, except from some stinging at the end from the salt, but when I went to blow, this sticky-looking booger about the size of two pencil erasers flew out from somewhere deep within, and it was a bright yellow with hints of dark brown, and it used to be really crusty way back somewhere in my nostrils before the water drove it out, I could tell. I wonder where the fuck that came from, though, it was so unlike the other snot. For a minute I thought it actually had a little scab in it and the brown was congealed blood from a slight bloody nose I must have never noticed, but when I looked at it, you could just tell it was festering bright yellow snot, not blood.

Astrology "coulda beens".

I remembered this weekend why I coudln't get into astrology as a kid, despite buying a few books on it in middle school -- the star charts were impenetrable, and I couldn't figure out how to cast them myself, and this is the pre-internet days before a computer could do it for you. If I had been born even five years later, it would have been a much different story with me and astrology.

Memories of this Summer: "War and Peace".

This summer a film center downtown was playing all four parts of this famous eight-hour Russian movie version of "War and Peace" here and there over the course of two weeks, and me and a friend of mine went to catch the first two-hour part, and ended up staying for the next two that night since they happened to be playing and the movie was like crack and each segment ended on a huge cliffhanger where either people died or the romances got more entangled or whatever the heck else is in the movie for cliffhangers.

Anyhow, after we left the film center at like 10pm and went to go home -- the fourth and last part wasn't playing that night, and we had just got out of the third segment, which was two hours of the Battle of Borodino, two solid hours of people firing and dying and armies clashing, no romance whatsoever, which was fucking sweet as all hell -- we were on the bus home talking about plot developments and the romances and the scenes we loved, and this old person dressed in black sitting behind us leaned forward and was like, "Excuse me, are you discussing 'War and Peace'?", and we were like "Yeah, definitely," and they were like, "My, only on the bus going back to [our university]," and you could just tell how self-satisfied this person was that they were living in a university neighborhood, so I let them preen for a few seconds and then was like, "But we saw the movie."

T-shirt.

When I went gallery-hopping Friday night at this open studios thing, the most interesting gallery was the one featuring stuff by these graffiti artists, and in the backroom a couple early 30s black women also had jewelry that they made out of their house, which they showed me. There also were t-shirts hung around the edges of the room, and when I looked at them, they were in all these different styles and all these different fonts and colors and whatnot, only they all said --

FUCK YOU

I'M STILL ALIVE

Homeless person encounter (II of II): Bridge.

Last night when I was walking with a friend across a bridge downtown, this homeless person who was panhandling held out his cup to us as we passed and was like, "Any money for Jack Daniels research?"

Homeless person encounter (I of II): Underpass.

Like Friday when I walked into school, there was this black middle-aged homeless guy sitting under the underpass near me, rocking back and forth and screaming "fuck you" over and over and over. When I returned home later that evening -- I had met friends at the bar, and the one was telling me about the bake sale at her Episcopalian church last Sunday, where the cakes usually went over a couple hundred dollars -- two dozen Easter cupcakes with jelly beans on top and pastel frosting went for $400! -- and one cake, a sand castle made out of rice krispie treats with a large fruit roll-up octopus draped over it, went for like $800! -- and when I walked under the underpass, I assumed the homeless person was gone since it was quiet and everything was still, only when I walked past this pillar, he was on the other side, and as I was walking by not noticing him he shouted out "Parlez-vouz francais?!?!?!" at me and made me jump.