Silverfish bites, and bites.

Like over the past two weeks I've noticed when I get up that I have a bite or two on myself when I get up in the morning - once a couple near my belly button, and then once on the back of my upper right arm where it meets my shoulder. It looks like mosquito bites to me, but I haven't seen any mosquitos in my apartment.

Also, a few times over this same period when I've come into my apartment late at night and turned on the lights, I've noticed a small smudge above the wainscotting near the fall wall between my chair and my upright IKEA lamp, and both times they've been silverfish, which I've killed.

Bar review.

Some friends of mine went out last Friday after I met them at a concert, and then barhopped till ending up at a Mexican nightclub till like 4am.

One of my friends who I had seen said her one memory was dancing with this really short guy, and her hitting her chin on his cowboy hat when he looked up at her.

Later in the weekend, though, I was at the student bar ran into a couple of the Spaniards who had gone along, one really tense Catalan guy who smokes a lot, and another, shorter guy who's his friend and who is in the Spanish lit program at my university ("Jesus"). I asked them how the nightclub was, and they immediately started complaining how you had to pay $5 for these little cans of beer.

"Shit," I was like, "How can the Mexicans afford it?"

They just stared at me, so I was like, "I mean, what sense is having a Mexican nightclub, if the Mexicans can't go there."

They paused some more, and then Jesus was like in strong Spanish accent, "My father ees Mexicahn.

After a pause, then, he was like, "Just keeding, mahn," and slapped my arm.

More beach reading.

So, I was doing some more reading on the beach on Monday:

Hugh of St. Victor's "About the Sacraments of the Christian Faith"

and

Bernard of Clairvaux's "Sermons on the Song of Songs" (selected).

None of them quite work out as well as tanselming, though I was thinking you could make sunburned jokes with Bernard (though that makes me groan just thinking about it).

The weather was so nice, that I was out there for five hours, and stopped every hour-and-a-half to 2 hours or so to swim and refresh myself.

Translation Group Discussion.

The other day me and the one second-career doctoral student in Jewish studies and I met like we do every week to translate and discuss 4th Maccabees, and we got hung up on this one verb in the description of the martyrdom of the faithful Jew Eleazar, who the ruler was trying to make eat pork and renounce Judaism but wouldn't. We were especially talking about the verb translated as "threw him down" in 4 Maccabees 6:25:

There they burned him with maliciously contrived instruments, threw him down, and poured stinking liquids into his nostrils.

I had thought that the verb should be translated "cast up (on the fire)", since the preceding verse mentioned that they led Eleazar to the fire, though that wouldn't make much sense since his head would have to be hanging off the fire for them to pour liquid down his nostrils, but the second-career doctoral student student thought it was more like "flip over", as if Eleazar was slumped over and they pulled his head back to pour the liquid in.

We discussed this for like ten minutes, as well as a couple other alternatives, and even drew a couple pictures with stick figures on the chalkboard in the library seminar room, and then agreed that we were being very academic about something really really awful that had really happened to someone in the past.

I have to stop going to 4am bars.

So, on Wednesday I went out for half-price martinis with friends, and, like happens often enough if I have the energy, I ended up shutting down some 4am bars.

By the time I got home and got ready for bed, I was brushing my teeth at like 6:30am, so when I finally got up to do work at like noon, I didn't feel like I had to brush my teeth, since I had already brushed them at a time that would have counted as my morning brushing if I had had to get up really early.

Also, one of these days I'm going to come home and it's going to be just before sunrise, and I want to walk to the lake to see it. It was just a tad too early when I got home that night, but one of these everything will be flowing and I'll go down and see it.

Tanning + Anselm.

The other day I was doing what I have been doing a lot this summer, slapping on some SPF 9000 and going out to the beach in the afternoon if it's a nice day and then sunbathing while I read some books for my qualifying exams, in this case the "Cur Deus Homo" of Anselm of Canterbury.

Later, when I ran into my one friend who's a second-career doctoral student studying Islamic mysticism when I was heading back to my apartment, I told her I had been tanning and reading Anselm, and then I grinned and was like, "I was tanselming!"

Forgotton story of the black neighborhood bar: Defaced currency.

Somehow I forgot this -

A while ago when I was with one of my (white) friends at the black neighborhood bar, I took out my billfold to pay for drinks and when I pulled out several singles, on one of them I noticed that someone had scrawled in dark ink:

B R

And, when I looked closer, I noticed that the word "ONE" on the back was spelled in between on the dollar bill itself by the Treasury Dept. or the U.S. Mint or whoever designs and prints bills, so the bill then spelled out:

BONER

I showed the bill to the (black) bartender, who then showed it to the (female black) day bartender, who then showed it to a lot of other people, and everyone was yelling out "boner!" and chuckling, since everyone got a big kick out of it.