Mystical aids: Candles, palms.

I find it interesting that in order to focus on the unity and diversity of the divine manifestations of God on earth, each linked with a certain color according to the Zohar, the Zoharic sages for meditative techniques would stare at the interplay of colors in a candle, or rub their palms against their closed eyes and watch the the interplay of colors inside their eyeballs. It sounds cheesy and slightly ridiculous, but these exercises would change their consciousness or maintain a changed consciousness when they interacted with the world.

Bonnie's Grapevine!

Saddly, N'Digo sometimes forgets to put online its best parts. Last week they had forgot to put online local radio host Bonnie DeShong's "Bonnie's Grapevine" column, which has her picture up among some grapevine graphics and this big stylized graphic of the words "Hey Baby!" written in these huge cursive italics. This is how it began:

"American Gangster" opened last week to great box office numbers, however, Denzel Washington is highly upset with all of you who bought the bootleg copy before it even hit the theaters. By buying the bootleg, you just hurt the success of this film.

It's rumored that some movie companies will leak a bootleg of a film starring African Americans so box office revenue will be low, meaning that non-African American movies will rate higher. If you just have to buy a bootleg, do it after the film has opened and after you have supported it by seeing it in the theaters.

What is up with Dog the Bounty Hunter? Duane "Dog" Chapman has a problem with his son Duane's Black girlfriend. Dog was going off on Duane during a phone conversation and referred to the young lady by the "N" word. The conversation was taped and given to the National Enquirer.

Now Dog is crying and begging forgiveness, saying he isn't racist. As all of these folks under the racist gun do, Dog reached out to Al Sharpton for understanding. Well Dog, before the tape was released, you apparently had no problem thinking, speaking, and acting in a racist way. What's up with that?

The column then goes on to a few other items, then Bonnie ends her column this way, in a font bigger than the rest, and italicized:

Until next time, keep your eye to the sky!

I really do love N'Digo -- it's the only free newspaper I get every week that I consistently read.

Dinner / The French / The Finns.

Last night we had a department dinner function in honor of a speaker who was in from out of town. The meal was enjoyable, except I had to get up several times to go to the bathroom to blow my nose, and once to take a massive shit which was brought on by the Subway meatball sub with extra hot peppers that I had had for lunch. The shit was explosive, and burning.

There's a French grad student in my department, and lately I've been greeting him with "Hola! Como estas?" He doesn't seem to enjoy it, and responds in French. I try to cajole him into speaking Spanish by telling him that Spanish is trashy fun, but he doesn't buy it, or at least buy it enough to want to respond in Spanish.

There's a Finnish grad student in my building, and I had loaned him an extra box fan I had had sitting around on the hot weekend when he first moved in, and I haven't really seen him till I ran into him in the entryway a few days ago. He was saying how he was stressed out from the workload at the university, and I commented that he was coping with the stress better than that one Finnish high school student who was in the news a week or two ago. He didn't respond too well, so I was like, "And he couldn't even commit suicide right, what kind of Finn is that?", to which he didn't respond too well either. Some nationalities are congenitally impaired when it comes to humor, it seems.

Me want product.

I'm fascinated by the word "product", as in, "Your haircut is nice, but you really need some product." A couple people have told me that, and Tennille did the same yesterday and then sold me some hairwax to mat my hair down when I want to look professional. Just using the word "product" makes it sound like capitalism has dehumanized us so much that we can barely think or string together grammatical sentences, and instead we careen from one store to another only looking to consume merchandise and all the while grunting out to ourselves shit like, "Me want product, love product, product good." When people were complimenting me on my new haircut yesterday, I'd launch into this rant and then my caveman imitation, and women tended to get a little uneasy, perhaps because the fact that they love product too much struck home with them.

Got my haircut today -- in fact, I got all of them cut!

I got my haircut by Tennille today. She did a soft scissor-layered thing to make me look more professional.

The receptionist was this younger black woman I didn't know, since she usually works Wed./Thurs./Sat. When the late 80s Club Nouveau remake of "Lean on Me" came on the radio, she was like, "That was my graduation song!", and Tennille was like, while cutting my hair and without looking over, "That was everyone's graduation song." She has this Caribbean lilt to her voice, too, and speaks pretty softly, so the delivery was even better.

Tennille was saying too how tomorrow is her 3-year old daughter's birthday and she's taking her to Chuck E. Cheese. We were talking about the animatronic band, and she was saying how out in the suburbs the animatronic animals do Blood, Sweat, and Tears's "Spinning Wheel", just like all the Chuck E. Cheese franchises used to do when she was growing up, but now the last few years the ones in the city have changed it up and they have the gorilla sing early Whitney Houston.

Haircut tomorrow!!!: Will be seeing Tennille.

This afternoon I made my appointment for a haircut tomorrow, and the lady at the desk at the Japanese salon told me that my stylist will be Tennille. Since then, I've been humming that one song that goes

"Do it to me one more time/
Once is never enough..."

I hope I'm this happy after the haircut -- I'm switching to a slightly longer winter cut, and Tennille's never done that shit on me before.

"Girl, Martha Stewart is FAAAAAAT..."

On Saturday I went to go see Martha Stewart light the big-ass tree in the middle of the Macy's downtown that she had her company design ornaments for (last year it was Vera Wang, I heard). When I came in like three Macy's employees were directing people very perfunctorily, and I was like, "Excuse me, could you tell me which way it is to this Martha Stewart bullshit?", which they *loved*, and happily directed me in the way I needed to go.

As it turns out, though, the tree wasn't in the middle of the store, but up on the 7th floor in the middle of the store restaurant where the ceiling is cut out of the 8th and 9th floors so you have this really really tall ceiling over the restaurant. The 7th floor was packed with a bunch of older women well-dressed in knock-off brands, and so I was forced upwards to the 8th floor, the furniture section, where all the couches and chairs and hutches and stuff were still in place around the walled edge of the overlook onto the gigantic tree, and people were four and five deep sitting or standing in between the furniture as it allowed.

Interestingly, the hired choir off to one side on the 8th floor was African and they did carols and African-sounding things to the accompaniment of bongo drums and hand-claps -- there were otherwise no black people there, so maybe Martha decided she wanted an African-themed Christmas this year and had them ordered in? All the people down in the restaurant were white, too, so it was almost like a Christmas minstrel show, I thought.

Anyhow, when I finally worked my way into the crowd, it was really hot, and I felt bad for all the older women in back of me who couldn't see because pretty much the crowd was all older women who were shorter than me. The worst part of its being hot was that Martha was like a half hour late, and so me and this other woman who wasn't dressed up at all and had a loud laugh were wondering whether she would come down the main hall of the restaurant, or pop out of one of the gigantic presents that were stacked around the tree.

While we were laughing about this, someone reached over and was like called out my name, and it turned out to be a neighbor from down the road in my hometown. She had come to the city with her sister, I think, to shop, and when they came to Macy's, they found out the Martha thing was going on and came up to see. They then pointed out this fat woman in white at the edge of the Christmas tree room who was smiling and looked vaguely like Martha Stewart, except her white suit just draped off her tips and would have been a muu-muu if it reached the floor, it was that blousy.

"Is that Martha?", I was like, and when they nodded, I noted that she had put on the weight, and was like, "Well, shit on me, they should throw her on a silver platter and have some Chippendale's guys take her up to the podium! She looks like a fat old turkey from here."

I don't think my neighbor from home though it was that funny since after that they edged away and didn't talk to me again except for politely saying goodbye before they headed out, though after when Martha lit the tree I retold it to the woman I liked with the loud laugh and she laughed her loud laugh for that. At that point this odd old guy with a brown beard standing next to us turned to me and was like, "I'm surprised she's not in an orange suit," and when I asked about that, he was like, "She was in jail" and walked off, and as soon as he did that the woman I liked turned to me and said that that guy was weird and she had had to yell at him because he was talking out loud and saying Martha Stewart was the same as O.J. Simpson, and she had to tell him that it wasn't at all the same, Martha didn't kill anyone.

Me and the woman I liked talked more, and it turns out her grandfather, her father, and her husband all have worked at this local steel mill where the rats are as big as cats. Then, I left. Out on the street I called my mother and she said they've been airbrushing the shit out of Martha Stewart for years and that she suspects they use a body double for the magazine since she now looks like she's thirty, better than even a few years ago.