Conservation tip.

I think of this a lot when I'm sitting on the toilet taking a shit and blowing my nose --

If you throw the tissue you blew your nose in in the trash rather than the toilet bowl, it saves more energy, since it's less stuff for the waste treatment plant to strain out of the sewage and throw away, since if you throw it in the trash directly it goes to the trash dump directly.

I think I read this somewhere a couple months ago, and I took it to heart.

Celebrity / Cruelty / What Women Want.

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Thanksgiving test.

Today I had a very odd Thanksgiving experience --

This cranberry sauce a friend's sister made had a lot of ginger and spices in it that overwhelmed the taste of everything else in the sauce, and in the sauce there were chunks of other fruits besides cranberries, but this one fruit, I sort of recognized the texture in my mouth, but I couldn't quite place what it was, since the taste wasn't there.

As it turns out, later I picked through the sauce, and I realized it was an orange. I couldn't recognize a large piece of a rindless orange slice in my mouth by feel without the orange taste to go with it!

Self discipline.

Today I took the commuter rail out to a college town to visit a good friend there who graduated from the masters program at my school this past year. Since she's an enthusiastic and inveterate jogger -- "Just a twenty minute jog!", she's always like, and it ends up being at least 45, and she's still going even though I'm dying and everything -- we did end going for a jog, though it ended up only being 20 minutes this time truly, since it was cold out and it was early evening and it was dark already.

We jogged down the main street of her town, and it was very difficult for me to jog past all these Indian groceries and hispanic supermarkets and know that I wouldn't have time on this visit to go in and look for coffee cans, and probably would never get back there to check, but I tried to push that thought out of my mind, by thinking that I shouldn't be so attached to material possessions.

But, I ended up staying longer and going out for dinner, and I did stop by those stores.

There were no new coffee cans for my collection, saddly.

Karaoke addendum.

Two things:

My other friend sang Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages"... I couldn't think of the song last night when I was blogging.

Also, karaoke host Will got drunkenly engaged the other night to this girl he's been dating for three months. They were so excited, they drunkenly called all of their relatives, and then the next morning, they woke up next to each other and were like, "Did we just do that?"

Karaoke return.

So, I went to karaoke tonight. Since karaoke hostess Jen is now doing a masters and doesn't host much anymore, her boyfriend does some of the emceeing, and when he started up the evening, he was like, "Hello, welcome to karaoke at [the bar name]. [my name, both first and last!] is here tonight. I'm [his name], and this is [his other friend who was working the karaoke machine]." It was a very nice return, as nice as the one waitress at the Chinese restaurant I used to go to bringing me a free bowl of hot-and-sour soup when I met there with my friends today.

Anyhow, the opening song was George Michael's "Faith". Usually, people suck it up on that song - that song gets sung a lot -- but the girl who did it had a nice voice, and there weren't like twenty people singing with her, so it worked.

Also at the night were -

This one karaoke regular from way back singing Beck's "Loser".

This really annoying skinny hipster kid who thought he was funny and had a high voice - he was at the table next to us, he sat down and took up the salt and pepper shakers in his hand and used them like racing car controls, he thought he was funny; the fact that his douche-y tablemate asked us to move our coats on the bench so someone else who never in the end sat down could sit there didn't help - went on to sing an absolutely inspired version of "The Humpty Dance".

(A question - why are there no black hipsters?)

This one fat white girl who was at the other table next to us and was practically hanging on me and was like, "What are you going to sing?" I found kind of annoying, but then she sang a very nice version of the Pointer Sisters's "I'm So Excited", which is a good karaoke song - upbeat, not done much, repetitious but not too much, and really nice if done with a good voice like she has.
(I should be so judgmental, both people who I found annoying did some nice stuff tonight.)

Also done for like the second or third song was this short white hipster with a deep voice during David Bowie's "Space Oddity", which was very good, but would have been better if it had been done later in the night when everyone was more hammered.

I myself did Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" - I love the song; I want the intro as my ringtone, if I ever get a cellphone that can support ringtones -- but, though the song is good, it's too low for me, as I discovered.

(Some time I should do her "Wishin' and Hopin'" as well, what a great song.)

The highlight of the night was my one friend doing Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" with a funk twist... I can imitate it, but not describe it. Every verse was done with a funk rhythm, and that's hard to do when you're bound to the original instrumentals of the song. It was almost as good as the one time like three years ago when he did a similarly funked-up version of the Beastie Boys's "Sureshot".

Replacement.

Today for some reason I was thinking of how a couple months ago I was talking with my one friend who got pregnant in college and is now a single mom with summer custody, while the dad and his new wife have her daughter during the year, and somehow the subject of death came up.

"If my daughter ever died," my friend was like, "I hate to say this, but I'd run right out and go get pregnant again."

Like ten seconds later she was like, "And that would be the most fucked up kid ever, because they'd always know that they were a replacement."

Another one from the list / Check-up.

So last night at the conference I kind of got a little tipsy again with this other student I know, the one who keeps a list of every guy she's ever slept with. At some point she started telling me about this guy who took her home, and there were handcuffs on all the bedposts, actually screwed in to the wood of the bedposts. She didn't use them on him, but she said it was weird to sleep there all night with them hanging there all around her.

Later, I was talking with the one Australian student in my grad program, and she said that that morning she had called her husband the randy Australian episcopal priest, and when she had said that she and her friend the girl who keeps a list were up way too late last night, he was like, "Oh, that's what happens when you have a pillow fight that lasts for just hours."

List.

So, yesterday at the conference I was talking with this one student I know who does biblical studies, and we were chit-chatting, and since she's kind of proud of the fact that she often loves and leaves guys, I turned the conversation to that, to see if she'd be up to anything much lately.

She hadn't been, but she did tell me that she has a list of every guy she's ever slept with, so she knows that she's not that out of control.

That said, number 14 is "that suited guy", since one time she brought this guy who had been in a full tuxedo in a bar home, fucked him, and then kicked him out since she had a friend in town who was sleeping on the couch, and after she did that, her friend woke up and was like who was that, and the student I know was like, "I honestly have no idea."