Thought for the weekend.

Los puertorriqueños gusta jamón, no jabón.

("Puerto Ricans like ham, not soap.")

Etc. from karaoke this past Satuday.

A girl complimented me for my enunciation during songs.

The host thanked my friend for singing Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher than the Rest" for the first time -- no one had sung it out of the book before, he said -- and then when my friend sat down, he was like, "Actually, I sang it here a couple months ago."

The over-sexed Latin veteran bartended gave my friend a free PBR for it, though, and one to me as well, though as an afterthought.

The Red and the Black.

A couple days ago I was walking on a sidewalk on campus, and there was this huge pile of orange-ish red vomit in the snow beside me. It was kind of congealed and frozen, so I figure it had been in the snow since the previous night.

A couple nights ago I went to go see some opera, and the only black guy in the cast played the role of the guy who betrayed the hero.

"Why is the black guy always the villain?", I asked my one Dutch friend, who I went with.

"And I was thinking that there's some white opera singer somewhere who's really pissed off that the black guy got the role again," he said.

White women talking too loud at coffee shops.

Pre-opera, it was two art girls who were in undergrad.

One was reading Plato's Republic and had tattoos up her arm, and was saying how she didn't pay to learn from TAs, and how there were some good universities in Europe for the same price where everyone spoke English.

She also said that she wanted to be a thoracic surgeon, and was looking to get back into a band.

The other wore this sweater that was way too big for her and had her hair hacked up in a sort of artistic way, and had this crazy diary that she had tons of writing and drawings in, including a pistol that she was drawing whose gun shaft became a dick shaft, and that squirted out the words "COCKED AND LOADED". She nodded at everything the other girl said, and sometimes replied to it in such a way that she restated it without adding anything, but she did it louder.

Messy piss.

Yesterday morning I woke up and went to go take a piss, but when I started pissing, my piss started spraying all over the toilet and the side of my bathroom sink, since somehow my head had retracted into the shaft of my dick somehow in my sleep -- maybe because of the cold? -- and made things messy. The worst part was that I had had a lot of green beans for dinner the night before, and my piss was a dark yellow and smelled something like raw green beans, only a bit nastier.

Talked with my (older black) friend Sunday night.

Last night I talked with my older black friend who mans the library security desk. While we were talking, now and then a person would come up and start to say that they didn't have their ID card, they were visiting from somewhere, etc., and she would start to listen, but after 5 seconds she would get bored, and she'd hit the button to open the gate and let them.

"I'm not supposed to do that," she was like, "But I figure, if you want a book, come in and learn."

She also said she didn't like Beyonce at the inauguration, and they should have gotten Etta James to come and sing "At Last" instead of her.

She also said at some point she was pretty gassy that day.

Later, when she asked me what I did this weekend and I said karaoke, she said she'd done that before, and when I asked what, she said some Aretha song I'd never heard of before.

I asked what she'd do now, and she said "At Last", by Etta James.

She then asked me what was my favorite artist to do songs from, and when I said Barry Manilow, she was like, "Who's that?".

She did know Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard", though, and Patsy Cline's "Crazy", both of which I sang this weekend at hipster karaoke (where, interestingly, the older hispanic bartender had torn out the downstairs men's bathroom and replaced it with two smaller ones, a mens and a womens because of all the female hipsters who come in on karaoke night, so they wouldn't have to go upstairs to go to the restroom).

Monkey / Africa.

A friend of mine whose father is African and who used to live there for a while growing up was saying that all his childhood he wanted a pet monkey, since he thought it would be a little friend, but his uncle got him this awful monkey that they kept chained up in a tree in the yard on a 3-ft. leash, and everyone was afraid to go into the perimeter. One time it got out, he said, and came into the house, and it surprised his mother, but finally she cornered it into the bathroom and locked it up in there, and made his uncle come and take it back.

We were also talking about pets and toys, and he mentioned how African kids often hammer out old cans to make something to play with.

"Did you see that when you were there?", he asked me, referring to my trip this summer.

"No," I was like, "And I thought African kids didn't have toys, since they start them not working at a young age."

celeb sightings.

So, the other night I was telling a (gay) friend from school about my inauguration day breakfast.

"That's nothing," he was like, and then he told me how last week he was in this one bar that happened to be really crowded on a weeknight, and in the corner there was a small table roped off, and there was Lance Bass.

"He's actually cuter in person than he looks," he was like. "And I had always thought of him as the ugly retarded one."