Networking event chitchat:

1) The networking coordinator I know says that in D.C., everyone's trying to make it, but they're not upfront about it like in New York, and instead there's all these little cliques and cabals and everyone is plotting against each other all the time, though you don't realize it at first.

2) The speaker of the week did fish conservation up in Wisconsin, so when we were all drinking later I asked him if he was trying to get Prairie du Chien to refreeze and reuse the carp after its annual New Years Eve Carpdrop (instead of a ball touching ground to signal that the New Year has begun, they use a frozen fish)...

He didn't know that event, so I had to explain it to him, and then he started laughing, and telling me about some hamburger festival that had slip-and-slides filled with ketchup.

Insight into the workings of a bar downtown.

The other week I was at the one bar downtown that has a lot of locals and a lot of cool tourists (!) that my one modern Czech literature professor friend had gotten me hooked on a while ago, and the one (older) (white) woman next to me at the bar turns out to have come into town for a conference every year for like 22 years, and to have always stopped by this same bar.

"You're late this year," the one bartender told her, when she surfaced this time.

Yet another dream of decay.

The other week, I dreamt -

I pull up a grapefruit from the little metal bowl on top of my fridge, and it's not only rotted all blue-ish mold and collapsed into the other fruit, but it's caused them to rot and collapse in with concave dents as well.

When I empty the bowl and salvage the couple of okay citrons left and then go to wash the bowl, there's a small bit of like a brown thick syrup at the bottom, and it takes forever to scrub off, it's so syrupy and stuck in there.

. . .

"That said about Foucault..."

That said about Foucault, my one modern Czech literature professor friend had a great one-liner when I drunkenly texted a few friends after a late night bar encounter with a (white) (straight) guy who was coming on to me, and I had texted them and asked at 1:02am on a Thurs. (Fri.) night -

What's the right response to, if I was gay, id go for you

- to which she replied -

Foucault.

. . .

A cynical thought from my library work.

Sometimes when I'm shelving books of or about Foucault, I think of how much time has been wasted discussing his half-baked and often historically ill-grounded ideas.

A dream of warm pizza:

The other week, I dreamt -

I'm in a warm cozy environment with wood slatted floors and racks going up the wall, and I look up and see several thick pizza squares that look really delicious on an upper rack a bit towards the ceiling, and they look delicious.

I pull up a stool and grab one, and think to myself that if I don't get it, someone else will, and that in any case it was a rare chance to treat myself with pizza just out of the oven from a really cool local place.

. . .

Great new phrase by an acquaintance:

"Pussy juice," meaning creamer or whatever that you put in your coffee to dilute it.

. . .

(The acquaintance is a Midwestern hippie chick white woman who I met through a friend who tells everyone that she doesn't "have a filter.")