Biking sight:

As I bike home late at night through a quiet (African-American) neighborhood, a (fat) (late middle-aged) (black) man is sitting out in front of a retirement / disabilities home in a motorized wheelchair on the sidewalk on my side of the street.

It's lightly raining, and I silently nod hello to him, and he does the same back.

We're the only two people around.

Anecdote of my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes:

Back in the 90s, he and a friend were having lunch at the edge of this one park in Manhattan, and his dad was going to meet them there, and out of the corner of his eye he sees his dad, who's a police officer, circling the edge of the park.

Next thing he knows, his dad sees that he sees him and cups his hands to his mouth and bellows up the street to him, "HEY, WHERE DID ALL THE JUNKIES AND HOOKERS GO?!?".

"You know," my one art school colleague was like, "New York City really did change fast, just like that."

Two comments of my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes:

1) After we talked about my bedbugs and the effects of living in what he calls "the bug house", I mentioned that I get painful welts that I often scratch the skin off of to get relief, to the point where I have tons of unsightly ass scabs, and he was like, "My G-d, you're like a freaky Catholic saint with body trials!  You're like some freaky Magyar saint."

2) After talking about my successfully opening up a government investigation into discrimination at the art school, he began discussing the issue in terms bordering on a personality conflict, a common phenomenon among academics and one where I'm fearful about the consequences, so I made sure to gently point out that the step was serious and was taken in order to ward off any negative future consequences from the actions of malfeasant staff.

"Oh, I know!", he was like.  "I get you, you're like a 60s nun."

Beautiful sight at the beach:

The waves are huge, and in the troughs in between every wave, in one place right along the rocks the water can get so low because the bottom is so high, that the sand gets kicked up there and swirled around in all the waves that go by right before they crash onto the shore.

A disturbing dream of bedbugs:

The other week I dreamt-

I wake up in my hammock, and there on my bare left pectoral right above my nipple just starting to form are three bites in a slight horizontal row verging on diagonal going up towards my neck, with the bites just starting to rise and the skin getting pink beneath them.

I'm horrified, because I thought I had thoroughly boiled the hammock the night before.

. . .

(When I actually did wake up, I had no bedbug bites at all.)

A positive dream, for a change:

The other week, I dreamt -

I open up my mailbox, and there in it are 3 new issues of all the magazines I subscribe to, Rolling Stone, National Catholic Reporter, and GAMES World of Puzzles.

At seeing this, I'm very surprised, and pleased.

A tale of Long Island.

The other week - actually, the same night I heard the stories about the two trans*women I know from clubbing - I was talking at a hotel bar with 2 New York businessmen who were in town to sell television ad time for extreme sporting events.

We ended up talking a lot about "What's up with Bruce Jenner?", and I think it made their night, and it brought a lot out of them.

One mentioned that on Long Island, there's a lot of stripmall gyms for musclebound Guidos, and there's always saunas where the really muscly guys just hang out with towels on after workouts.

"It's not totally like this, but there's a gay strain in there, too, I think," the one businessman was like, the younger of the two.