Lovely colors.

The other week when I was walking out by the quarry park, there were these orange flowers in bloom, and they were quite arresting to look at, when you'd be walking up the slope and just see a patch in the evening sun.

Though, they weren't quite everywhere, and it seems like they liked southern exposures with good drainage.

Like a week later, I was biking by the lake, and bunches of yellow flowers this time caught my eye, in the way that they were set among the green with the blue in the background, all in that twilight sunlight.

I do like looking at greenery in pretty vistas.  It's nice to pause and not look at a book or a phonescreen sometimes, but instead just look at reality.

Nasty books.

The other week when I was working at the library, someone mentioned that they had had a whole cart of smoke-y books, and when I asked what was up with that, they said that someone who must have been a chainsmoker had returned a lot of books, and that they were all discolored and just reeked.

A few days later when I was back in at the library, then, I had a huge cart that took forever to shelve because of all the shifting that I had to do, and then when I finally got to a better section, I suddenly noticed that the books were all yellowed and there was a slight smell of cigarette smoke in the air, and I realized all of a sudden that I must have had the rest of the books from the chainsmoker.

As I was shelving, it was just crazy.  One book was from a magazine series, and its spine had totally become a different, nastier color than the mild lavender spines of the other books it was sitting between.

Labels had changed color, too, from a mild off-white, to a yellow that looked like darker pee.

What horrible personal remnants to leave behind you, just sitting there out in the library tucked away among the other books.

But, I bet the person who had those books checked out is weird and somehow a lot of fun.

They were all in Chinese or Japanese language or something, just characters on the spine, no English apart from a few letters on the call number label.

A plant of mine has died.

Of my 3 seedlings in 2 pots, 1 of them has died, the 1 smaller 1 sharing a pot with another plant.

Leaves had been falling off for a while now till hardly any were left, but I was hopeful because a new stem had shot up from near the base.  But, the main stem withered back, and then the new stem fell over, and now you can see a small dead black area at the base of its little trunk, so now the roots aren't getting sunlight from anywhere, and it's all just fated to die.

I have no idea what went wrong, I was hoping that it would find a will to live.

A story of a friend's ex-lover.

So, the other week when I was out for drinks with my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes, he opened up a bit more about the straight uneducated cross-dressing Puerto Rican who he dated for years.

I had already known that they had met at an erotic bookstore, but now he said that before that the guy was in this weird space as a straight crossdresser for years, and he would go to gay clubs on the excuse of copping drugs and then would go and take a guy home, only just when that guy was expecting something much different, "the lingerie would come out."

Odd bar sight the other week:

A quiet green parrot with a very orange beak, who people would pass from shoulder to shoulder, and who was sitting at one point on the bar near me while someone fed it fries from a take-out tray, and then when they weren't looking it dipped its head into the tray to go and eat more fries, and you could see its tongue flicker in and out of the side of its beak as it was gnawing on a fry..

"That parrot looks kind of sad," I told the guy with the take-out tray.

"No, he's just cool, he rules this place," he was like.

. . .

I'd been to the bar before.  It's next to an industrial area strip club on the outskirts of downtown, and my one (modern Czech literature) professor friend has been going there lately.

"This is next to a strip club," I told her.

"Yeah," she was like, "I know!".

Then she told me that she's never been to a strip club before, and when she told someone once at the bar that, they said never to go next door because it was "crusty."

"To me, that sounds perfect," she was like, and she said that it made her want to go there even more.

New directions.

It's so exciting to have a draft of my dissertation turned in again.

Right now I'm just working three days a week at the library, continuing to apply for jobs, and am turning in new directions.

I ordered books on how you write proposals to find agents for non-fiction books, and am outlining and undertaking political op-ed articles again.

It's so nice to have the time again, and the freedom.

Revelation of a colleague:

The other week when I was out for drinks with that colleague of mine from Comp Lit, he revealed to me that he was raised by his grandparents, and that they were into an esoteric channeling cult.

He said that when you come into their living room, they have a few pictures of eminent channeled entities right there on the wall, and then there's a little alcove closed off by a white curtain, where they keep statues and all of their religion books, in sort of like a shrine.

We talked for a while, and it turns out that they were raised a type of Mormon, and so I fished around and put my finger on the fact that they like that the cult doesn't believe in hell, but rather in a permanent state of improvement.

"There's always some reason something appeals to people," I was like.

My one colleague then confided that his grandmother often says that she doesn't want to live any more, but rather wants to ascend to the next level of being.

He also says that they lost all their friends years ago and it's just the two of them, and once some old friends visited them and he realized when they were all sitting there how they used to have a normal life with regular interaction and stuff, but they just don't anymore.

He also says they travel out west like once a year for a retreat with the group.