Took multiple shits yesterday.

Yesterday I took like three shits in addition to the one when I got up - twice at the conference, once more when I went home to take a nap. The first one was normal, the second too were of solid consistency and smelled mildly like alcohol. I guess the different consistencies were layered in my bowels like a parfait?

The first time I went to take a shit at the conference I got to see the bathroom graffiti in the chemistry building, where my conference is being held:

I like to lie
where my girl is shy;
I like to paste
below her waist;
She says "You gotta stay";
I say "Good day."

Underneath that in a different hand someone had written "--Robert Frost". If this was a papyrus I was editing, I would have written:

(2nd hand)
--Robert Frost

I don't quite get the paste reference either -- is that like envelope-licking or something?

Anyhow, when I went to wipe my ass, there was no toilet paper, so I had carefully hoist up my pants and move to another stall. There someone had written about whether it was better to go to b-school or be a surgeon, and someone had drawn up on the tile columns where you could vote which was a better career. People were writing things like how surgeons pay better, but their father was a surgeon and the specialty exams were a bitch so go to b-school since it's different. Someone too had drawn an "engineer" column as a career option and another person put under it, "The best of both worlds, hard classes and low pay."

Got hammered.

I got pretty hammered last night with some of the younger papyrologists, and when I got in the two gentle stoner folk were nowhere to be found but the Jack Daniels was gone and the ears were eaten off the chocolate bunny. This morning the walk in was horrendous because it's already hot and humid and sun shines directly down on you when you walk on the east-west streets. I almost vomited crossing a bridge to get into down -- the sun was shining down on me full force for the minutes it took me to cross it.

Arrived for my conference -- Housing, a sign.

I just arrived in Ann Arbor for a weeklong conference I'm going to this week. Like a couple weeks ago I rang up a girl I knew from high school but hadn't talked to in like five years but knew was living in Ann Arbor -- I called up her mother to get her number; her mom, the local Baha'i coordinator for my county, asked me if I had found out all the answers to my questions yet in doing my ph.d. so far -- and I ended up not only finding out that she's a founding member of the Pussy Pirates, but also getting a room to stay in for the week through her. It turns out that she moved into a new house like a week ago but her old room is still empty, so I'm staying with her two old roommates, who I haven't met yet but she describes as "gentle stoner folk". They left a key under the mat and some sheets out on the boxspring in her otherwise empty room, and welcoming notes in the kitchen. I left them out a bottle of Jack Daniels and a giant chocolate bunny my great aunt the nun gave me two days ago, and a note saying "Pick your poison."

On my walk in to the conference I passed a frat house that had "Harry dies!" spraypainted on it.

A response to Michael Moore's "Sicko".

Yesterday afternoon me and my dad visited an old friend of his and my mom's, and she got to talking about Michael Moore's "Sicko", which she saw not too long ago. She has good health insurance and so did her husband, who went through a pretty bad illness the past few years and got really good care, but she was saying she's more convinced than ever that there should be nationalized health insurance for everyone even though people like her would probably take a hit with quality of health care. I thought that was interesting -- you don't see that too often, people stating directly that they'd have them and their family worse off so other people can have it better.

Just saw my godmother's mom.

I just saw my godmother's mom after she stopped by my godmother's house after mass to have some bacon. I haven't seen Nana in a few years, and she has a hearing aid now, but she's as sweet as ever; she's Canadian and very nice. I was asking her how mass was, and she was like, "We had a black priest again, and he was longwinded."

Intestinal problems.

My dad was saying he's been shitting really liquidy for the past few days for some reason and he doesn't know why. Yesterday for lunch he had a can of Busch Light and an apple, though.

Family winemaking.

My dad was telling me last night that back when he was six or so my grandmother used to scrub out the laundry tubs in my grandparents' basement and my grandfather used to come back with big flats of grapes and my dad and my brothers used to have to clean up their feet and sit on the edge of the basins and smush the grapes for wine. After draining the wine off, my grandfather used to take a bedsheet and put all the dregs in it and squeeze it to get the last wine out. "You know, all that ethnic bullshit," my dad was like.