Was at the black neighborhood bar Thurs. night.

So, when I went to the black neighborhood bar on Thurs. night - dropped by after being at the student bar - they played some Smokey, Patti LaBelle, some little-heard Earth Wind & Fire, and everyone went nuts went Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" came on the jukebox.

I queued up Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me", but it didn't play before I left.

I should be more specific with the song titles, but they were gone from my mind as soon as I heard them (a lot of stuff I didn't know).

An older black lady, shorter, broader built but not fat, with dyed blonde hair and an orange-tan leather jacket was dancing in the aisle by the bar.

Also, Larry the Queen of 53rd Street came in in a floor-length fake fur coat with black and white stripes in it, kind of like Cruella de Ville, only a different pattern.

Addendum.

Spring has always been my least favorite season, but for some reason I can't stop looking at the buds on the trees this year - they're so beautiful.

2 things.

1) I found a stone in my hummus yesterday. It's homemade, so I assume it was in one of the bag of chickpeas that I had used. I only made the hummus two days ago, too, so I guess I found it pretty quickly.

2) It's been raining lately, so the trees are budding. It's so lovely, esp. when you look down the street and see the light green buds on the branches forming a kind of arch all the way down the street.

Went to the sex documentary thing last night.

So, last night I went to the sex documentary thing again with my one friend who works at the rape crisis hotline.

The topic was elementary education about homosexuality, and the discussion afterward turning into a broader discussion of how to effect political change.

When the issue of inflammatory terminology came up, Steve the BDSM guy said that BDSMers get stuck with everything, including Sodomites, and when I brought up how that one religious right group would change terms in articles linked to its page from "gay" to "homosexual" since they thought "homosexual" was more inflammatory, and they got caught because athlete Tyson Gay became Tyson Homosexual, he laughed, and was like, "And that's a lot harder to fit on the back of your jersey, too!"

Later, the swinger lady said that with her three kids, and this was back in the early 80s, she made sure that they had gay babysitters and made a point of having her gay friends over to the house as couples, as well as explaining what homosexuality was so that they knew there was nothing wrong with it, and grew up being open and thinking nothing of it.

She also added she herself grew up strict evangelical and was one for a long time, and went off on a tirade on the close-mindedness of the religious right, and how when they say the path to hell is broad and the path to heaven is narrow, they're really talking about people's minds.

When me and my friend left, this one bigger early-30s black lady who kind of dropped as an aside during discussion that she's a sex worker - a pro-dom, I wonder? (= professional dominatrix, I think) - and often feels stigmatized when talking to liberals and always wears this nice black-and-white houndstooth coat gave me a hug and a double-cheek kiss like the French do, and said something like "See you next Tuesday."

Afterwards, when my friend and I left and debriefed about everything, we started talking about the swinger lady's being evangelical. "Wow," my friend was like, "She really has done everything."

Also forgot...

On Sat. I was at this one party at a grad student co-op, which had the coolest home-made bar ever, where they put six buckets full of specialty cocktails high up on a shelf and had siphons running down to shower-heads that would sit in special wooden mounts attached to a portable bar, all made out of two-by-fours, and you'd pay them $2 and you'd get a full glass of a really awesome cocktail... My favorite was the "Admiral Nelson", which was gin and something on chipped ice, with a lime and a cucumber slice on top.

Anyhow, I ended up talking to a (white) 30-something English teacher from a nearby school who was there. She told me about the time she got flesh-eating bacteria on New Year's Eve from walking around the city at 2am in new shoes and getting blisters which quickly popped, and then at a party afterwards at this dirty apartment in the hispanic section of town kicking her shoes off and walking around on her lacerated flesh because her feet were so sore.

Later that night I heard there was a band playing in a bedroom upstairs, so I went up and opened the door and there was like five people sitting on a bed watching a full bluegrass band in the corner, and my upstairs neighbor who I pretty much just only know by sight was on guitar with a harmonica attached to it.

Aside.

I forgot -

On Sunday I went to go see a couple short documentaries about everyday life in the Palestianian territories with my one Dutch friend, and when I gave him a call earlier in the day to confirm that we were still on to see them, I said that there might even be a chance that his pregnant Israeli bride might have a bit part as a gun-toting, Palestinian-hating oppressor, since the films were made when she was in the army.

"I hope so," he was like. "That would be hot."

A quote from Epictetus.

I was reading the 1st/early 2nd c. AD Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus and am paraphrasing him -

Because he always was renouncing dependence on external material things, people said he was funny and that that was no way to live a life, and he said that if you weren't acquainted with the medical arts, you'd think that cutting open an eye wasn't the first stage of healing it, but it is.

2 (black) women.

1) When I was shopping sales downtown with a friend on Sat. afternoon, I was trying on some summer-y collared shirts from the clearance rack, and when I came out in a brighter blue one with thin vertical dark pink/light red stripes in, the (black) manager with a headphone was like, "Oh that is nice, just look at that color, it pops", and she made this bursting motion with her hands outward from the shirt towards her eyes.

I then asked her about the second shirt I had found, white with thin red and pink stripes in it, and she thought it wsa nice too, but I asked her if it looked like I'd be selling cotton candy at a circus, and she thought for two seconds and then was like, "No, not at all."

Later, I discovered that I had left this really good store coupon that I had gotten in the mail at home on the kitchen table, so I went back up to the manager to ask if she could help me, and she called someone on the headset, figured out what the coupon was ($20 off any purchase $60 or over), and then said to tell them at the register that Lisa okayed it.

"Thanks!", I was like, and she was like, "No problem, candyman!", as I turned to go to the register.

2) On the bus coming back from downtown Sun. afternoon, I was boarding and the (black) driver kept beeping the horn and waving past me and being like "Hey! Hey! Hey!" and I thought someone was doing something behind me, but then someone behind me asked her what was up, and it turned out that there was someone dressed like a banana giving out free samples on the sidewalk, and she was trying to catch their attention so they'd come up and give her one too.

Late 60s movie...

So, last week I went to go see the late 60s movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" on the big screen. I had know that it was about two couples who discover sexual freedom and get involved with each other, but what I didn't know is that the whole 1st 10 minutes of the film is one couple at one of those 24-hour est-type seminars where you're locked in a room and no one can leave till everyone sorts out their issues.

That made me think of how one time this past year my mom was talking about how the training for when she was a stewardess... "I've always understood cults after that," she said, and then she explained that everyone at training was cut off from their family and they gave you a new vocab about everything and they watched you pretty closely and they kept you pretty regimented, and that they only let them leave the abandoned airfield outside of Houston (or was it Dallas?) where they had the training only once in all of 6 weeks, and that was to go to a mall for a short afternoon, and she felt herself acting differently, and since then she's always had a lot of sympathy for people who get into cults.

I also (on another, totally different track) remember checking out "The Thornbirds" from the local public library when I was in middle school, and being completely enthralled when the one woman's German lover begins to make love to her on a bearskin rug and she goes to turn out the light, but he stops her hand and says that he always makes love with the light on.

4 stories.

Thursday night at the bar I ran into this one bleach blonde, edgy-but-nice former masters student I know, and since her boyfriend the bartender with the huge fro, who is also nice, was busy, I said hi and invited her to sit down with me and my friends.

After talking about her hair some - she teaches and waitresses at night, and said once her hair caught fire because she stood too close to the heat lamp for the food when she was traying up an order; she said also sometimes her hair gets stuck with her boyfriend's because of the chemicals in hers and his texture - she told a few stories:

1) One time there was this younger (black?) couple at the restaurant and the woman when she came up to the table was like, "Damn, you are cute, do you like women?", and when the girl who I know said she was cool with that but she had a boyfriend, the woman at the table was like, "Well, are you open to cheating on him with my boyfriend here?", she was like no, and the woman was like, "But no, you have no idea how big his dick is."

2) Another time, this fatter (black) dude in a pirate hat and a dashiki (sp.?) came in smelling like patchouli and with a Dunkin Donuts bag, and he said he was just going to sit there and eat if that was okay, even though the restaurant is a slightly upscale Asian bistro place.

But, first, as soon as she came to the table, he leaned in toward her and said loudly, "I've given up my porkchops, but I have not given up my white women."

3) This other waitress has this deep scar on her tit you could almost stick your finger into with room. It turns out she went for a boob job in Tijuana since it was cheaper there, and the doctor was drunk and dropped a heated iron on her breast.

"All it left was a scar?", I was like. "I'm surprised the whole thing didn't burst like a big old tit pimple," and I added that I had seen those silicone bag things on 60 Minutes and would imagine they'd pop like that.

4) Back growing up in Minnesota, she lived on a farm and took riding lessons, and one day after lessons in the barn she came across some baby rats, very small and immobile and white and with their eyes not opened yet, so she told her trainer (? - the guy who gave her lessons?). He said she was a big girl and could kill them herself, and he usually took them down to the river, so she did that, but then she couldn't kill them, so she left them in the cloth she had picked them up in sitting down by the bank. A few days later she came by and they were shrivelled and dead, and she realized she had left them in the direct mid-summer sun on a day when it was like 105 degrees out, and that it would have been nicer to kill them than let them died like that.