It was a dark and stormy night.

At my high school bible retreat, my counselor told me about the time a person had written her term papers. My counselor had been sick, and her father was in the hospital, and it was mid term season; so while she was gone, her room mate did all her dishes, and all her laundry, wrote two papers and an essay (with drafts included), and gave them to her.

My counselor said, "It meant so much to me, but she'd never understand, because she's not a Christian."

1.) Turning in somebody else's work is LYING, which is a sin, and also cheating, which is unethical and unfair.
2.) Who says she doesn't understand? Doesn't that seem just a TAD sanctimonious?

It irks me, still.

My Idea to get into grad school

I am going to go through all the words in common usage in the English language, and assign them a gender to assist in Freudian analysis of... everything. We haven't beaten this horse quite to death yet, have we?

Swords, forklifts and bank statements would be phallic. Wells, the sky and car keys would be vaginal. No shades of grey, no gender-neutral words like German has, no words which represent sexual union. Just, a binary dialectical interpretation of the world around us.

They're gonna love me.

Colonoscopy Sweepstakes!

Thank You, CBS.

Iconoclasm

I would like to build a birdhouse for an ostrich, and place it in my yard. It would be ostrich-high, with appropriately sized cut-outs to accommodate the bird's body and long neck.

I would SHIT if an ostrich showed up.

Also, I would like a terrine of fish, baked in a chicken-shaped mold. A terrine of chicken shaped like a fish would also be acceptable.

I once made a man cry in a bar.

This guy was drunk and kept grabbing by hand and putting it on his body. since I was sitting next to my friends and they would sometimes become involved in conversations which did not include me, I tolerated him and stayed where I was seated.

Anyway, I finally got sick of him and started asking him about his life, which I correctly assumed to be a string of recent bad decisions.

"You had a wife? Why did she leave you?"
...
"Oh, another guy. A friend?"
...
"A BLACK GUY? (I faked shock) You know what they say about black guys."
....
"Well that's sad, did you have kids?"
...
"Two! and they stayed with their mom, didn't they?!"
...
"And now they won't have anything to do with you will they?"
...
"And how does that make you feel?"
...

And then he cried and i told him that life was bad and then he bought me a beer and we drank together as he cried.

I had a weird experience, when I was 8.

I hated my third grade teacher. Looking back on it with an adult's perspective, I wasn't wrong to hate her. She was awful. Mean, Lording her authority over a bunch of 8 year olds. Who is really impressed with themselves, that they can recite the multiplication tables faster than a third grader? Who?

In some twist of sadism and good intent, some of her decisions ended up being positive experiences, if challenging and ill-timed. As a reward for good behavior, we watched Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 silent film, famous for a scene in which a crowd of people are gunned down in a melee of fascist fervor and gunfire. I remember most clearly the shot of a baby buggy rolling down the stairs, careening toward disaster, with no one to stop it. As the oldest of four, and then a child, I was really affected by the scene, more than I would be as an adult. Time has given me the power to intellectualize my emotions, but as we little catholic school children filed into the hallway, neatly, silently, I think I felt the scene etch itself into the malleable and private whorls of my brain.

As another reward, she read us Hemmingway's short story "Hills like White Elephants," and afterward delineated the morality involved with abortion. Another story we read was "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Ambrose Bierce's piece about a civil war soldier hallucinating in his dying moments, while being hung off a bridge.

In the pragmatic way of children, I did not indulge in self-aware shock, but single mindedly analyzed the spare, affecting style of all three pieces. Potemkin is a silent black-and-white film, its message is a naively revolutionary one, but I couldn't gather that at the time. Hemmingway was a journalist early in his career, and is famed for his economy with words. Bierce wrote in a style gleaned from press releases. I think the aesthetic of the pieces shaped the way I value art and literature more than any other pieces.

I have no moral, maybe there is no moral.

Bookends to my trip:

My aunt and uncle took in Jack and me for the weekend, they were lovely! We drank some wine and communed with their dogs. AND their monorail cat--

Grand Isle

Friends in NOLA. OR-- i give up formatting this stupid blog.

~Pic by Dean Coady. Thanks.

NOLA cemetery tour.

~st. louis cemetery II, we looked for Marie Laveau's grave for HOURS.


~I see a humerus, at least one femur, ribs, the handles from multiple caskets, and the front of a pelvis. If I had handled the pelvis in a lab, I might have been able to estimate the sex of that individual. The pubic symphysis (spot where the two bones join in the front), is more angular in women, and more rounded in men, especially at the posterior aspect.


~Ghosts need steps to stand on top.


~Spells




~These little bottles of liquid seem to be popular with ghosts. I don't know what it is, I can't read the text.
















~what a badass! "Could have witnessed the end of the world without trembling." He's my HERO.