A friend's Thanksgiving.

My one friend from Pittsburgh comes from a really fucked up family where he and his sister pretty much took care of themselves in a falling-apart house on the wrong side of the tracks in which a tree once grew through the floor.

Then, when we were texting over Thanksgiving weekend about family shit and the holidays, he texted me this -

I had cashews and sardines and jerked off all day on Thanksgiving.  Well, I did a little work also.

. . .

2 art student comments: So wonderful.

1)  One of my art students said she got so excited when she was home over Thanksgiving weekend and was watching the dog show with her parents, and up on TV came an exhibited bulldog owned by Patty Hearst.

2)  In class discussion, one of my students said she was very struck by some violent aspect of deprogramming in a cult deprogrammer memoir.

"In what way?", I was like.  "Was it shocking?"

"No," she was like, "Not especially, not after everything else we've read for this class."

Odd smell in my bedroom.

Because I put up plastic on the windows and my bedroom is poorly ventilated, it often smells musty in the morning.

Lately, however, it's started to get the mild smell of horseradish.

Oh, to have known Katy Perry.

From Katy Perry's concert film, it seems like she moved to L.A. with dreams of stardom and to get more freedom from her Pentecostal upbringing, and for a long while she had no money and would just go clubbing in blue wigs and whatnot as she started to break free and discover the world.

I bet it would have been super fun to party with her in those days.

She's super real, has a good heart, and seems upbeat and fun.  My kind of person.

Thoughts on teaching controversial sex issues.

When I re-teach my sex class, I think I'll do optional attendance units on campus rape and radical feminist criticism of transgender women.

What's the point of a university, if not the vibrancy of ideas?

Campus rape is a hugely important issue, and the radical feminist criticism is both influential and in some respects substantive, as well as representative of historical trajectories of which students should be aware.

The latter is often accused of being transphobic, but engagement should always precede and inform criticism, I think, and I'll make clear from my coverage of pronouns and discussion of my work that I try my best to be a transgender ally.

I'll def. make both units optional attendance, though, so students who might have visceral and disabling reactions can choose to absent themselves from discussion.

A weekday morning text...

...from my one friend who runs an integrated homelessness / domestic violence shelter:

[Her toddler daughter's first name] just dropped her doll and i swear she said, aw fuck!

I texted her back -

Blame the daddy.

My friend thought that was funny.  She likes it when I poke gentle fun at her husband (they both have the same sense of humor that way).

Student compliment...

One student in my art school class on cults said she recommended the class to her roommate, to take next semester!

I told her that that was better than warning her against it.

Overall, I'm glad that at least one person has liked the class!