Rounding up people to campaign for Obama.

So, I'm going to campaign for Obama tomorrow in Indiana tomorrow and yesterday when I asked the one Mormon student in my program if he wanted to go canvas with me, he was like, "You mean like go door to door?", and when I said yes, he was like, "So you mean like being a missionary? I've got a handle on that!"

Today, though, he said he couldn't, saddly, and he was sad too since he's a big Obama supporter.

Monkeys scare the fuck out of me.

So, yesterday I was talking with a primatology grad student, and I was saying how monkeys scare the fuck out of me, and she started telling me about how the chimp troop her advisor studies throws rocks at her when they're pissed off for some reason.

She was also saying how twice she's been surrounded by gangs of hissing rhesus monkeys - once by like four on an NIH five-acre compound, and once by like thirty in some exotic location where she was studying male coalitions, and the females caught their attention and stopped the males fighting long enough to have them gang up on her, a researcher. She says rhesus monkeys are like knee-high, and when they feel threatened they encircle you really close and bare their fangs and hiss and slap the ground, and also reach out their arms suddenly to grab you, and if you look them in the eye or move you're fucked, which she would have been when like thirty of them surrounded her, if her partner hadn't distracted them and let her back away.

Summer's here.

I have that particular kind of sweat around my balls from wearing long pants on too hot a day.

Also, I have a mild sunburn from reading outside in the sunshine, which was pleasant until some smokers got upwind of me (wanted to go stand upwind of them and fart, but didn't; I've still had the worse gas, all day).

Got my hair cut, and highlights, today.

So, I got my hair cut, and highlights, today. The highlights make me feel summer-y and want to go tan by the lake, though that won't be happening for another couple weeks yet, until we get no wind and about ten degrees higher, which is sad, since I really feel like going and lying out in the evening sun today.

Anyhow, Tennille has been watching a lot of movies, she said, which is unusual for her, but last night she baked up some chicken and sat down to watch a DVD of "Why Did I Get Married?".

"Oh, Tyler Perry?", I was like.

"Yeah!", she sad, and her face brightened, and she was like, "Do you like him?"

"Actually, I've never seen any of his movies," I was like, "But his Madea character seems funny and I really want to see them."

Tennille then said that she liked Madea a lot and expected her to do a cameo in the movie she watched, almost like an Alfred Hitchcock thing, but she didn't.

We then started talking about salsa lessons, and I told her how I had gone last night (they ended up letting me in; though the girl who sends out the e-mails is a tight-ass, the instructor is this lowkey 35ish Spanish woman with a tight white shirt that says 'SALSA' on it in silver sequins who just told me to stand in the front row and watch the steps close) and she was saying how she loves to salsa, but doesn't know how to that well, and how last time she was out dancing some guy asked her to do that hip thing more and she was like, "Yeah, right."

When I started telling her about how a friend's Spanish coworker used to hold these all night salsa parties that would go till like 5 or 6am and the place would be like ninety-five degrees inside and sweaty from all the people dancing, and there would be a huge trough of sangria in the kitchen, we started talking sangria recipes, and she said how her sister makes some sometimes with a recipe she got from the back of a wine bottle. She also was saying that she gets sangria at restaurants a lot when she goes out, but sometimes it's not that good.

"You know who has good sangria?", she was like.

"I don't know," I was like, "Who?"

"Hooters," she was like, "It tastes so good with a basket of hot wings. You get some sangria and a basket of hot wings, and it's just like you're in heaven."

At the end of the hair cut, after she had taken the foils off and washed my hair and cut it and tossed some styling wax in, when she went in to go take off that robe they drape around you to keep the hair off your clothes, she leaned in and whispered and was like, "Like we tell them at the other salon, 'Now you're pimpin'."

NEWSFLASH!

Michelle Obama's pizza order --

"medium, thin crust, cheese only".

. . .

Also, all day today I've had the worst gas, and every time I get to the end of a long fart, it seems like a little piece of shit will slip out, right at the very very end of the fart, though it hasn't yet since my sphincter closes just in time, though it's been close a few times since I let the fart probably go on too long since I want to get as much fart out of me as I can and that brings me dangerously close to actually shitting myself. My farts also really smell like eggs, which kind of makes sense since I had my Sunday-night omelette like I always do and a hardboiled egg this morning with my burnt toast and strong coffee like I always do, but which kind of also doesn't make sense, since that food routine usually never has given me gas like I have now ever in the past.

Gonna have to suck it up tonight, maybe...

So, I'm not doing any more ballroom dance lessons this year since the next two sequences are uninteresting, though that can be a good thing since beginning salsa is starting up, and if anything salsa is the most useful dance I could learn since I know a lot of people who go salsa dancing, only, these lessons aren't given by a professional instructor, but rather by undergraduates, and I'm not sure if I'm ready to put up with the undergrad egos...

The fact, too, that I missed the first class and they're all weird about joining up at the second -- they make it look like you have to jump through hoops! -- makes me really hesitant. Just look at the beginning and end of this bullshitty e-mail some girl who's taking over the club sent out yesterday:

Good evening all,

Please arrive TEN minutes early to sign in. **Remember this is the last week to join all classes except the Ballroom classes (since they are not happening this week).**

Since it is the second week in all sequences, instructor approval is necessary to join the sequence.

Please arrive with sufficient time to dance with the sequence instructor since you will not be permitted automatically to join the class.

Please note: since all the sequences have started, you must pay $5 per class in order to join the sequence...

Membership Policy:

Membership can no longer be purchased. It can be purchase for the '08-'09 academic year from September 29th through October 17th (first three weeks). Membership will cost $100 for [our university] affiliates and $120 for non-[our university] affiliates.

Just a Reminder:

We do not allow unauthorized photography or videotaping during classes. Also, you may not give instruction to other students in the class. If your partner is having trouble with the step, please ask the class instructors or TAs for some help.

See you all later this week. If you have any questions just ask.

~ [the chicky-poo's name]

It's hard to describe this e-mail, since they just changed policies and some new girl took over, and she looks like a joyless tight-ass... Plus, what I marked in asterixes she used red in her e-mail to do -- who the fuck uses red in an e-mail like that?

You know, then there's the whole issue of calling undergrads "instructors" in phrases like "instructor approval", which just reeks of one big fucking ego trip, as does the fact that you can't help anyone out with a step -- maybe they're trying to prevent students making other students feel uncomfortable, but isn't that better addressed through a courtesy lesson than such a weird draconian policy that bolsters the instructors' fragile little undergraduate egos?

And, to start out with "Good evening all" and then the posed friendliess of "If you have an questions just ask" (thank god she left out an exclamation point! - I would have gone apeshit) is awful, as is her using a tilde to precede her name in the e-mail signature.

If they give me and my couple friends who are going tonight any bullshit, I'm going to lose it, I just know.

Kitchen ordeal...

So yesterday I had all these little errands to do and it was like a comedy of errors in my kitchen. In the morning I had pulled out a loaf of bread I had frozen only to discover that the bakery forgot to pre-slice it, so I had to leave it out to dethaw enough to slice myself, only because of the freezing-dethawing process, the crust started to fall off whenver I'd cut it once the loaf was unfrozen enough to cut, so there was all these crumbs and crusts just sitting around my sink while I cut.

Then, I had dirty dishes in my sink, and these two shirts with stains on them that I need to pre-treat, so all my work was under the shadow of these tasks I needed to get done, and I also had all my vegetables I needed to slice up, when somehow while slicing the falling-apart bread I bumped the cabinet and my one-litre thing of olive oil fell out and hit the floor and its plastic cap came off upon impact, spilling a ton of olive oil all over the floor, so then I had to wipe that up and use dishwashing liquid to remove the residue olive oil as best I could, while all the meanwhile some oil had somehow gotten onto my house-sandal bottoms and I was tracking that across the kitchen tile and the hardwood floor in the dining room, since for some reason the oil wouldn't wash off my sandal soles.

The reason the olive oil came out, too, is that I had been firing empty egg cartons in the cabinet with the idea that one day I'd take them to go recycle them, and even though they stopped recycling styrofoam a month ago, I kept putting them in there, since I couldn't bear to throw out all of the cartons -- the fact that I had like thirty of them saved up made the idea of throwing them all out at once that much worse! -- though the fact that there was enough of them in the cabinet to press down on the olive oil enough to make it susceptible to flying out of the cabinet at the bump of a door made me collect them all in like three plastic grocery bags to go throw out, though I was running late to meet a friend to go downtown for a concert, so I just had these bags of egg cartons sitting around my kitchen, while my counter was full of crusts and the floor was full of olive oil residue, and all the vegetables I needed to cut up were stacked in a heap on my very small kitchen counter, all of which made me exasperated at the time since my kitchen is claustrophobic in the first place and it's much worse when you have all these undone tasks crammed into it.

You know, though, now that I write this down, it doesn't seem like that much, though it did at the time. I guess I shouldn't pretend I have problems when there are people with real problems out there, like brothers and sisters who want to fuck each other.