The lengths I go to for our planet...

When I got back from visiting my one Dutch friend in St. Louis, something smelled a bit funky in my apartment, though when I checked the fridge, everything was fine.

When I went to the kitchen table, where I had left out some fruits and vegetables – bananas, oranges, apples, potatoes, and onions – everything looked fine at first, until I noticed that some moisture had been trapped in the bottom of the bag, and there was a bit of mold growing on the potatoes.

I opened up the bag and found one rotten potato that I threw out, otherwise I punched holes in the bag and am trying to eat as many potatoes a day as I can, starting with the moldiest ones first (I peel the skin and the mold off 1^st for each potato, though, of course).

The first dish I made was a potato salad with boiled potatoes and onions with an oil-and-vinegar dressing with some dried herbs thrown in. The 1st bite I took tasted moldy, and then I just realized it was the taste combination of rosemary and thyme.

man i'm sore.

i had the world's longest day the other day - up at 6:45am, long day of work, hit the gym for 1.5 hours late afternoon as a treat, then to the sex documentary, though because the location is a bit hard to get to by public transportation, i had to walk 25min. there and back (it's actually faster than walking to a bus or subway stop, waiting, and then taking it in to transfer to where i need to go).

(the sex doc was about the porn industry, a very mixed documentary... conversation after was interesting b/c a feminist pornographer was there who added insights like how sex in porn is in highly unnatural positions so it's easier to film, and so it's that much harder for the actors to do, and that most mainstream porn actors do escorting on the side since it's higher paid and actually safer, since although it's different clients, they can use protection.)

i slept like 9 hours that night, and was sore and a space cadet all the next day. somehow i managed to get a lot of reading done, but i wasn't in the right headspace to talk to people when i met a worker from the local community-organizing group to go door-to-door in an apartment building down the block from me...

going door-to-door in that building was tough, too - i didn't realize it, but it was a lot of low-income and drug rehab housing, so people would open up their doors and they would be out of their heads and incoherent, or have these wild, empty eyes, and when you looked in the door, it was a 10x10 room with no paint and a mattress on the floor...

beforehand i stopped in through a community meeting in that apartment building that the community organizer was speaking at, and one lady there said she had been homeless and had slept in the snow, and no-one should have to go through that.

another guy at a door was a vet who lives on $800/month, and says he doesn't go to soup kitchens as much as he should, but there's so many fights and violence in the dining rooms that he doesn't want to deal with.

Another casualty of my apartment.

The other morning I was up really early and taking a shit, and I reached back to get my nail clippers, which were sitting on top of the back of the toilet, and the sleeve of my torn-up old sweatshirt that I wear in the morning flopped against something, and the next thing I know the little glass that holds my toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste was lying on the floor, shattered...

I had had that glass in storage forever – it was about four inches tall, and had a small emblem of a cow embossed on it in a medallion – and only started using it last spring, when I found it during my move.

unexpected self-injury.

the morning i was leaving st. louis, i asked my friend for some tape so i could get the dog hair off of my sweaters. he got out a roll of duct-tape, and i would some around my hand and went to bite it off...

and the sticky side got attached to my chapped lower lip, and when i removed it, it took chunks of flesh off.

My one Belgian friend defended Zwarte Piet.

The other day when I was on campus I ran into my one Belgian friend who's a classicist, but not one of those classicists, and I asked him if the Zwarte Piet tradition existed among the Flemish.

As it turns out, it did.

"Yes," he was like, "And some people think it's racist, but I don't know. We have so few black people in Belgium, and it's hard for me to evaluate something that is such a fond memory from my childhood. And in any case our liberal education system makes up for it."

That night, I hung out with some people at the student bar, including a person in my program from Texas and his wife, who is also in my program and is also from Texas via India and Kuwait (her parents are originally from India but ran businesses elsewhere and ended up in the U.S.).

"That tradition isn't that odd," the guy was like, "We have people who dress up like that all the time in Texas. Only they pretend to be Indian."

"Yes," his wife was like, "And they talk like this," and she did a stereotypical heavy Indian accent.

"And they throw samosas at the heads of children who behave badly!", I was like, and at that his wife mock-scornfully was like, "No, what are you talking about, they throw chapatis."

Later, too, me and her were talking, and she was like, "I can't believe [the one Belgian guy, who she also knows] said that. But, that's the thing about racism, no-one thinks they're racist."

Then, she said that she never tries to accuse people of being a racist, but rather asks them very very hard questions which kind of make them reflect on their prejudiced sentiments, though she comes across misogynist statements more often than racist ones.

"Really?", I was like, "I thought you usually just reached down and gave the guy's balls a hard twist."

"That too, sometimes," she was like.

Two books I checked out of the library on the same day:

1) John Water's "Role Models".

2) A translation of the complete correspondence of Jerome and Augustine.

a (black) woman story: library coffee shop.

The other day I was in the basement coffee shop of the university library, and I looked around to refill my water bottle, only there wasn't a fountatin or a place to do so, so I hopped inside to ask the student cashier, and she said she'd fill it in the sink.

"Sorry if I cut in front of you," I said to this younger (black) woman who had walked up to the counter just after I did.

She just batted her hand and made a "no problem!" face, and at that point the student cashier came back and said that regularly they couldn't do this, but it was a one-time thing because they were out of bottled water, which they usually sell to people.

"Man," I was like, nicely, "Did you guys pay the library to take out the water fountains down here? That's something Republicans would!", and with that I said thanks again and left, and noticed the younger (black) woman laughing to herself.