Getting back to normal.

My dump this morning was massive and fibrous, though still on the "I needed to wipe too much" side. Give me a few days and my bowels will be back to normal, though then going home for Christmas will fuck it all up again.

On another note, the other day when I was coming home I was going to go into the dollar store that I live above to get some vinegar since I needed it, and there was this black girl outside with a cute dog (beagle-Australian shepherd mix, I found out), who accosted me as soon as she saw me going into the store to ask me if I could get some dish detergent for her, since she had to stay outside with her dog she was walking, and she had just remembered she really needed some detergent. I was like, "Sure!", and she introduced herself ("Ebony"), and I got her her detergent.

After I came out of the shop, we ended up talking some, and it turns out that she graduated from Boston College around the same time as a girl I went to high school with.

"Do you know [full name of the girl I went to high school with]?", I was like.

"I might," Ebony was like, "The name sounds familiar..."

"She had red hair and I think in college she dated this guy Patrick from New Jersey," I was like, helpfully.

"That sounds like Boston College," she was like, "and it doesn't help at all. Same goes if she was dating some guy Michael from New Jersey, there was a lot of those too."

Song / Shit / E-mail.

I forgot - at karaoke a couple Tuesdays ago, this one hipster guy sang Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time". He did a confident, unironic delivery sort of thing, and it really worked as a song, so I've been humming it on and off since then.

My shit is getting back to normal, since I've begun to eat a lot of vegetables again. It emanated little red clouds of dye this morning, from all the raw beets I was snacking on yesterday.

Also, I couldn't go this past Tuesday, but my one Dutch friend and his one German friend who I'm also friends with now went to see some movies and invited me along, but they didn't say which ones, and I asked out of curiosity, and I got this e-mail today:

movies were milk, which i found annoying - now all actors want to have gay roles after they did retards - so much for the gay movement, and slumdog millionaire, an english bollywood whihc [sic] was ok but not too good.

I am glad I got to see the "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" doc last weekend, though I wouldn't recommend it to non-Patti Smith fans... There's no way I'm going to go see "Milk", either, though I like Gus van Sant... He was too soft on the Peoples Temple, and I hate biopics ("Ray" almost made me go shoot myself, that shit was so bad, every time I go see a biopic I end up regretting it).

a dream - one of my loveliest.

I had a wonderful dream last night. I dreamed I was hiking with a friend (can't remember who) through these gorges in this American countryside of rolling hills, and on either of the walls of the gorges were these stone houses cut into them, with small stone window panes and yellow opaque glass (couldn't remember the word "opaque" there for a second, I almost wrote "impaquable", almost like "implacable"), and one the top of the hills were fenced pastures, and somehow me and my friend were inside the houses at one point and there were these vast entrance halls with roomy staircases and red carpets, and you could still look out the little yellow windows, which were kind of odd since the windows totally made you think nothing of the like would be inside.

Then, I walked out of the gorge and turned a corner, and I was in this Michigan harbor city in front of a soft-serve ice cream place both of which I recognized in teh dream, and I looked back and could see how you couldn't see the gorge from the city, and I was like, "Oh, so that is where that is!", and then I went down to the beach by myself and walked and looked back at the gorge, you could just barely see it through the trees, while my friend went back to his hotel (I think my friend was male).

On another note, after making hummus last night and mashing the chickpeas with my hands, like twenty minutes later I was brushing my teeth and going to go to bed, and I noticed hummus all mashed and dried up in the hair on the back of my hands, somehow I missed a spot while washing.

(I like mashing the chickpeas with my hands; people may make fun of it, but if you called it "rustic" and sold it at Wholefoods, I'd get at least $11.99/lb. for it.)

Also, my shit this morning was really nasty; it had a sharp stink, and held together though it looked all smear-y. Between that and the nasty instant coffee-and-chicory mix I'm trying to make my way through so I can have the damn can, I just smell that shit and it makes me want to vomit, it wasn't a good morning, despite the great progress I made over breakfast on a new Greek translation I started.

Jeans wore out.

My jeans have a hole on the left inside leg, from rubbing up against the right inside leg, though the right inside leg does not have a hole, it's only just about to get one.

Had a drink with a friend tonight again.

I had a drink with my intense, somewhat depressive bookseller friend tonight at the bar he's been going to for over thirty years. Some of his friends I've met before were there - the odd conservative guy who reads military history; the Irish guy who ragged me about blowjob culture among American teenage girls - and one who I haven't, this tattooed white-haired pony-tailed Vietnam vet named "Bucky" who was telling me about how he grew up on a farm and was used to slaughtering animals like lambs and pigs, it doesn't bother him to not get his meat in plastic, you should have seen his friends's faces the time they were throwing a lambroast and he woke them up at 8am to go chase a lamb down and kill it, they were like, "What the fuck you waking me up for so early, Bucky?"; and who sympathized with my bitch about what assholes bikers (=bicyclists, not motorbikers) are, and said that if I ever hit one with my car, to sue their family first and say I'm so traumatized I can't even get in a car again for fear another dumb-ass biker will come out of nowhere and slide under my car, because if I don't, they might get my house instead of my getting theirs.

He also at one point told me about these girls in his town where he grew up, who grew up on a pig farm. Since everything on a pig farm smells like pig shit, these girls did too, so they couldn't get a date for the life of them, which was a shame, since they were nice-looking girls.

Anyhow, right when everyone was finishing drinking, Bucky invited everyone by to go blow a joint at his house, and when I politely declined and he began talking more to the others, he added, "And if you can, bring over some broads."

"Brats?", I was like, perking up. "I totally could go for some brats right now!"

Earlier in the night, the Irish guy talked about how in the mid-80s he lived in Downey, California, which was home of the Carpenters. I asked him what it was like, and he was like, "Sometimes ye'd be drivin' and a feller'd say, 'That home there is the Carpenters's', and ye'd see this modest-like home there that looked like nothin' perticular."

"Really?", I was like.

"[my name]", my one intense, somewhat depressive bookseller friend was like, "Haven't you ever been to the West Coast? It's all like that. People out there are whores for celebrity."

Dream.

Last night that I was presenting a seminar paper to a group of professors and fellow students, and I hadn't reviewed it right before my presentation, and when I was looking at it right there in front of them in response to their criticisms and trying to explain myself, I realized that the font on my computer I had used was like handwriting, only really bad handwriting, so for entire sections of my paper I couldn't read what I had thought, and I realized they couldn't have either...

Somehow, that writing was both from me, and through my computer, and thus it was really messy and I was responsible for it though it was mechanically reproduced, which I really don't understand, especially since the mechanically-reproduced writing was legible in other parts of the paper.

Also, somehow at one point I was humming a song with them and correcting them on melody and lyrics, only I'm forgetting now what it was, though I had the song in my head when I woke up this morning and all the way into the early afternoon.