Performance / Nice Day.

On Sat. night I went with my one Dutch friend to go see a Kuwaiti friend's sister's performance (or, more accurately, the projection of a drawing of hers onto a backdrop while other people did shit in front of it), but we got there late and we couldn't get in for the first half -- it was this weird small performance space up on the 2nd floor, and you had to go up a narrow stairwell, and when we got in it was this long room with dirty drywall and a couple rows of chairs set up in back near some projection equipment -- so we ended up talking with the hipster girl who was house manager/managing the desk at the top of the stairwell, and looking through the program guide, where the description of our one friend's sister as "Kuwait-born artist" made it sound like she was 40 and jaded and would sweep around the room in some revealing Westernized dress.

Anyhow, when I made fun of that, the hipster girl was like, "I'm Arab too, my family is Lebanese."

"That doesn't count," I was like, "They're all Christian, they're not violent enough to really be Arab."

"That's not true," my one Dutch friend was like. "In the civil war Maronite Christians were cutting off people's ears," and that both took me aback as well as the hipster girl, who was already taken aback, but then I was like, "Oh, well that must in the gospels as a footnote to 'Turn the other cheek,'" which hit my friend as funny but not the hipster girl

On another note, Saturday was a beautiful day, and I walked down to the lake to sit in the sun and do a crossword. There was a lot of people out, including this black couple and their little girl who was on a bike with training wheels, and she got a little ahead of them on the sidewalks, and so the dad was like, "Hey, Cashmir, wait up for us babe, wait up."

Walking back to my house, I looked down an alley and saw some late 20s threatening-looking (black) men sitting on milk-crates around a hibachi.

Also, I went into the dollar store to buy an eraser, and when the (Arab) owner greeted this (black) guy who walked in and asked him how he was doing, he responded, "Oh, everything is everything."

Since I also didn't want to buy a four-pack of erasers for a dollar, the owner sold me a loose one in the cash register drawer for a quarter.

Also also, a bbq place near me was also closed because of the mayor's dumpster task force. The restaurant had put up a sign, though, saying they'd reopen as soon as they bought a dumpster, so I guess the mayor is trying to balance the city budget by making people buy dumpsters.