More books.

My next batch of books going to the library:

My copy of Eileen Barker's "The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing?" next to the library's copy (I figure someone going to check it out just might take it), and then somewhere in some English lit section I left a book on book terminology and collecting.

I think part of pruning my collection is to get rid of what's easily replaceable, or check out-able from a library. I could use the Moonie book at some point in teaching if I ever teach about cults - it's a classic on recruitment, and exploded a lot of myths about cults - but hey, that won't be anytime soon, and you can always get another copy somewhere, and I can do that then, and it will save me from lugging it around in all my moves before I finally teach that class (if ever).

Recent nightmare: Bars and diners.

I dreamed the other night that I was in the black neighborhood bar, only in my dream it was a cinderblock off-the-highway diner in the middle of a big parking lot - though, it was cement floors and high ceilings in this diner like a warehouse - and it was night.

I was there for hours with old friends having a good time and laughing, and at the end of the night when I'm on the other side of the bar (getting drinks, I think), this red-faced drunk Asian guy in a dirty flannel shirt pulls out a knife at one of my friends, and holds the tip against the lower part of his throat (right where it's going into the chest), and makes him lie down on his back on the booth seat, holding the tip of his knife against his throat all the time.

I'm still thinking it's a drunken joke all this while, then suddenly he shoves the knife in, draws it down to the chest, then picks it up and cuts a slit at the top and the bottom, then reaches in to open up the little "doors" he made in my friend's throat.

At this point in my dream I'm getting woozy, so I tear my eyes away, run out the back door, and run into the parking lot and hide behind a building while calling 911. I'm looking around the corner at the black neighborhood bar to make sure the guy isn't coming after me when I feel sick, and wake up - and at that point I jumped straight out of bed, I was so wide-awake and horrified.

...I think what probably caused this was my going to see "The Lovely Bones" earlier that day, since though it's not graphic, in a dream sequence the murdered girl is in the bathroom looking at the serial killer who killed her taking a bath, and there's blood and mud everywhere, and a suggestive barber's razor sitting on the edge of the sink...

Used books.

Since I have a deposit in on my new apartment in my new neighborhood - I have to sign the lease this week - I've been figuring out how to get rid of a lot of books from my current apartment, since there's no place to donate them in the area, and a lot of them aren't really worth taking with me, so it's a good time to pare down my collection.

So, I've been taking a few in each day, and then putting them in the library shelves at random points.

Today, I put the Better Homes and Garden Meat Stretcher Cookbook on the shelf between some books on biblical exegesis.

Unexpected comparison (though it makes a lot of sense).

In the past three days, 2 profs (including my advisor) have said I'm like Sarah Palin...

Since I have shit written all over my hand.

In the neighborhood I'm looking at...

When I was up the other day at the neighborhood I'm looking to move to looking at apartments, I was going from meeting the broker at one complex to meeting the broker at another, and when doing that, I passed a younger late-20s (black) mother with this cute 3 or 4 year old walking a few paces behind here.

"C'mere, sugar lump," the mom said to the daughter, and held out her hand to her and the daughter ran up smiling to take it.

Email from my mom.

I got this like a week ago:

...

I had a patron yesterday, name, Krystle Cleare.

XXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOOOOO

Moma

Birthday party!: Happy things, and Books.

That one Spanish guy I know had a birthday party a couple Saturdays ago, so I got to go and meet a lot of his friends from the Romance language department.

I ended up talking to the (Mexican?) artist wife of this Mexican-looking literature student, and I made sure to speak slowly, but genuinely try to engage her.

Like I always do, instead of asking people how they're doing (since that way you just set yourself up to hear complaints), I asked her to tell me about something happy or interesting that had happened to her this past week.

"Oh wait," she was like, "I must uh think, I cannot say now."

"Oh," I was like, "Did nothing happy or interesting really happen to you this past week?"

"No no," she was like, "Many things such as this did happen, there are so many! I must uh think," and then she told me about a good job evaluation from her day-job, and then some great response she got to an art piece of hers.

"And," she was like, "On Wed-nes-day, I enjoyed a sex party with my husband, it was very much fun."

. . .

Later, I was talking with an Italian student and was asking him if he had to make everyone in the world read one book, which book would it be, and he immediately said that he thought that no one should ever be forced to read a book, so I re-phrased it and asked him to name the one book that he thinks it would be better if everyone in the world had read it.

He said the Iliad, since Homer is so foundational to all of Western culture.

Like a few minutes later, the Spanish host came up, and I asked him the same question, and he also said the Iliad, since (he said this part in different words, though) it is so foundational to all of Western culture.

(He had been no-where near us, he really had the same response!)

Anyhow, I was kind of disappointed with their thinking. Why make a book requirement an intellectual pissing match kind of thing, when you instead you could have everyone read a book that would maybe change their lives? I myself would require that everyone read Miriam Williams's "Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult".

Too many people think "not me" when they hear about people who get into really fucked up religious groups, and I think it's important to hear from someone who's not accusatory about how their youthful idealism and over a decade of the most productive years of their lives got sucked up into positively insane shit, and the extremities of human behavior that that led to.

Why I Like Yuppies.

I was thinking the other day that Europe really doesn't have yuppies, instead they have the bouergeoisie (at least that's what I saw in the Netherlands, if I had to use one word to describe whole swathes of the nation, I would use the word "bourgeois").

To my mind, the difference is that yuppies know they're trying to be chi-chi, while the bourgeios just are it - and, therefore, at least the Americans are working with this idea that they're coming from some sort of common background, even if they're trying to get past it or ignore it.

And thus, even when this idea that you come from a common background is being stifled, it nevertheless can often be a starting point for certain beneficial sympathies that are helpful for a society: niceness to outsiders, for example, or a certain sort of populism.

(When I've heard the Dutch defend their social welfare system, they usually say it makes economic sense or something business-y and transactional like that, I've never really heard them justify it on humanitarian grounds.)

The poor Dutch, I really do think they're constitutionally incapable of a kind of genuine empathy, and it's their national culture that did it to them.