dick jr. jr.

Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are having a baby! Hahahaha EEWWW!! Babies with receding hairlines!

Bush on Mary Cheneys Baby - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog:

"Q: Tony, in an interview with People Magazine, the president was asked about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy, and said he’s confident — he believes she’ll be a loving soul to her child. In the past, he said that he believes the ideal is that a child be raised in a married family with a man and a woman. Does he still believe that’s the ideal?

Mr. Snow: Yes, he does, but he also believes that every human life is sacred and that every child that comes into the world deserves love. And he believes that Mary Cheney’s child will, in fact, have loving parents.

Q: Does he believe that children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are at a disadvantage?

Mr. Snow: He does not make comments on that, and nor will I."

WorldNetDaily: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

My dad, who is losing his mind - and I am semiserious about this - suggested yesterday, in the middle of a heartwrenching recollection of memories from our first house in Santa Clara, that I had "problems" because I was given milk "made from beans" when I was a baby. Everyone else got formula, he told me, but I got milk from beans.

And yes, it's true. I was a fiend, especially for the sweet soy milk leeched of nutrients that the Chinees like to drink with breakfast. Yes. But what exactly was dad talking about? I had to read this to find out:

WorldNetDaily: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

debt ellis

I owe NYU $20,926.50. FYI.

ATL

Dear sweet ATL, thank you so much. You're one of so few people who don't make me feel like an ATLien, and that's just about the highest compliment I can give to anyone right now.

I wish I had the time or energy to blog, write in my journal, write narrative hip hop operas, or any of the other things I used to do to keep my brain thinking about itself and polished like a smoove white pearl inside this carbuncled oyster I call my head, but things just aren't as they used to be. I'm going to trial with two teammates for my clinic in March, and that means my life is just about dedicated at all times to a little room in Furman Hall that somehow manages to feel like family.

Which is to say, there is so much I wish I had time to write about, especially about my amazing Thanksgiving vacation and the people who make me at home, but I don't have much time to spare. I will say that Stephanie and I drove a total of 34.5 hours - 18 on the way there with an overnight in a $66 motel in First Royal, Virginia, with us trying to hush Boo so he wouldn't bark and wake up the proprietor, and 16.5 on the way back with us taking turns sitting in Interstate 81 traffic - in a silver PT Cruiser, which we used to port us from our home base in her lesbian aunt's home in Suwanee, Georgia to various suburban Atlanta locales where Chino-Taiwanese-Americans congregated. I met about ten of her family members, a sort of nerve-wracking experience since we had to stay closeted for the sake of the grandparents, and worked for two half days in their frantic and cramped shao bing you tiao stall at the neighborhood food court, burning my elbow on the shao bing oven but learning to make a mean sticky rice roll. Piano was played, Harvard was spoken of approvingly, Thanksgiving dinner was a pesco-vegetarian hot pot, and .03 gel pens were bought at the Korean cute stationary mart. Boo frolicked in the backyard but not before getting two puncture wounds and an inch-long tear in his tail from a mean akita bitch. I was warned to expect the South, but what I got - barring those anxious moments in a North Carolina gas station when I nervously watched Stephanie queue up for the bathroom and prayed to Chinese Jesus that we would not be gender-policed and called little Chinese boys - instead was a tour of a vibrant Chinese community in the 'burbs. It was enough to take my mind off law school, mercy mercy, and make me wake up on Monday morning with the delicious aftertaste of glorious endogamy and a slight reluctance to drag myself out of bed.

But the next post will be all about how, within a day, law school made me renew my hatred for the world. What? NYU allows NYPD to use the law school buildings as surveillance posts for undercover cops spying on drug deals in the park? I smell an organizing campaign, ladies and gentlemen, and I think I've found the sad sucker who's gonna spend her next few weeks dealing with this one. Oops.

bingo

TRINKET, for 90pts.

Sorry for the blogging hiatus, everybody. Nothing is happening except the busyness, the grind, the uneventful lapsing of time. And ATL and I are going to ATL in three days - a 17 hour drive? Through D.C., Richmond, Winston-Salem, Durham? A flight by Dodge Neon!

marathon souvenirs

the bad news: two of the toenails on my left foot are black.

the good news: new pair of toenail-earrings for me!

marathon!

Here's a quick recap of my NYC marathon 2006 experience, and I hope by the end of it you'll all see why every New Yorker should try to run it if he or she is capable.

I left sweet dear Stephanie's house at 5:10 a.m. to shiver on the platform for the J train, which carried me partway to Battery Park City - I had to hitch a ride with some lost Westchesterers down to the bus pick-up location with a nice Columbia med student and a pushy Brooklyn woman who kept saying her goal was to break four hours.
It was about 40 degrees out and I was wearing cast-off clothes I found in the school donation bin because I knew I'd have to be waiting around for a while before the race started - and I was right! The buses ran continuously from Battery Park to our starting point just on the other side of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in Staten Island, and I arrived at around 6:40, with three and a half hours before the starting gun. I killed time by fighting 40,000 for the murky coffee, had a donut (hooray for corporate sponsorships bringing totally inappropriate things to marathons -- donuts, Coors Light, etc.), but finally ran out of things to fight for and so I poked head- and arm-holes into two plastic bags, layered them under my sweater, and lay on the grass with an official marathon guidebook as my pillow and shivered into not-sleep for an hour. After a bit of that - dozing off only to be awoken by the loud conversation about Dean Karnazes next to me - I pulled myself to the bathroom line, waited 45 minutes to use a port-o-potty, and then hauled my baggage to the UPS trucks lined up in the Fort Wadsworth parking lots.

Of course, I was too miserly to even throw away the free sweater I'd worn expressly for the purpose of throwing away, so I checked that and just piled on a couple more plastic bags to keep out the cold. (This later engendered a lot of Incredible Hulk-esque garment ripping, which made me feel very strong!) But other people were less shy about casting off their belongings...so imagine 40,000 people, each with two articles at least of clothing to shed, throwing sweaters, sweatpants, gloves, hats, fleeces, blankets, sleeping bags, pillows, parkas (!) to the sidewalk where we were lined up! This had the effect of creating a small mountain of clothing that you'd have to climb over just to get into the corral area where runners milled about before advancing to the start. There were grinning volunteers stuffing clothes into plastic bags, so I assume that some of the stuff is salvaged and not just trampled and ruined and completely discarded -- but I still felt the same sense of shame that I felt when I watched the world's tallest sugar skyscraper competition on the Food Network, the chagrin that accompanies profligacy.

Blah blah. So I was pushed up to the head of the Verrazano, where we lined up to start. We weren't exactly lined up. I think the more appropriate image is that of stunned heifers in a cattle farm, lowing with confusion and pointing all in the wrong direction. The professional men started just before the open field, so we got to watch the strong and the skinny launch off from our vantage on the upper deck of the Verrazano. This is when I first started crying -- as soon as the gun went off, the speakers started blasting "New York, New York" and everyone started singing along, waving their hands in the air. The volunteers were cheering us and there were some MTA guys sitting on a big truck in the median of the bridge shouting at us to run our hearts out, and I had a big stupid grin on my face that stayed there until mile 10 or so.

What the marathon planners don't tell you about the Verrazano is that it is structurally unsound and will one day collapse from the weight and motion of 80,000 feet pounding on it. It felt like running on a mattress. Every 100 feet or so the bridge would take a big dip, and the whole crowd would go, "Whoaaaaaaaa!!!!" and keep running. I was dodging plastic bags, sweaters, sweatpants -- all of that, people were still casting off on the bridge. I spotted a very expensive pair of Sugoi gloves that I was tempted to pick up and deliver to my sweetly awaiting girlfriend at mile 7 but by the time I thought to take it, a hundred feet had trampled it and I was beyond turning around anyway. Not that I could have -- I'd have been swept away by the pushy-shovey dense crowd.

At mile .75, still on the bridge, there were a bunch of men lined up pissing off the edge of the bridge. Why the fuck would you need to pee 6 minutes into a race?

So we got off the bridge, rounded a corner, and immediately were greeted by cheering fans on 90-something street. At first they were sort of sparse, but as soon as we got on 4th Avenue it was a big party. I ran along the left side giving high-fives to the kids and smiling like an clown, then around 40th Street switched over to the right side to start looking for my friends. Sonia saw me somewhere in Sunset Park and hit an amazingly high note and rattled her tambourine feverishly, and then a couple blocks later I saw AiLun and friend. So the prospect of recognizing people made me stare out into the crowd between miles 2 and 6, and I swear I looked at the ground not a single time - the miles just flew by because I was so distracted by all of the cheering fans. I caught Steph at our first arranged meeting place, St. Marks and 4th Ave, and she handed me a gel packet while I stripped off my sweats and a couple of well-meaning lesbians shouted incomprehensible things at me and Steph - "Take a picture! Do you need balance? Do you need balance? Take a picture!"

I devoured the gel cause my breakfast (donut, bagel, tea, powerbar, gel at mile 2) didn't cut it. It was the second of six gels I ate over the course of the marathon, each one with about 40mg of caffeine. Yesssss, drugs. I think I only made it because of the steady supply of calories and caffeine, and realize now that part of the reason I tanked at mile 16 in the Philly marathon was because I had eaten nothing the day of the race or the day before. Lucky for me, there were delicious, calorie-rich sports drinks at almost every mile, and sweet street booty Steph had planned to plant herself at miles 7, 14, and 20 for gel handouts. (I never bothered to buy one of those fancy gel holders, which are basically elastic belts with loops for you to stuff gel packets into...probably something to buy for the next marathon.) The mile 7 handout went off without a hitch, and then Steph took off for the G train to meet me in Long Island City.

I assumed that the cheering sections would taper off quickly, but it was maniacal after we hit BAM at mile 8 and turned into Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. We ran down Lafayette, I think, and the street was so narrow and both sides were packed with spectators that it felt like the marathoners were suddenly running through this enormous, mile-long, friendly gauntlet. The pace slowed and some runners grumbled but I was just happy to be waving and smiling as if they all loved me, they really, really loved me. The crowds tapered off as we got to south Williamsburg, then picked up again around N. 7th and Bedford, and then there wasn't much (except dear Spear!) until after the Queensboro Bridge.

All this focus on the crowds is to say, of course, that I wasn't thinking at all about running, at least not until mile 14 or so. I would stare into the crowds for miles at a time, and then realize with a start that I was going on much slower than I was capable of going, and would start moving my feet faster, and then would lapse into distracted, open-mouthed staring at the crowds again. I got stuck behind the world's hairiest person somewhere in Queens - we ended up finishing the race at almost the same time, but his hairy back kept bobbing in and out of my vision - really, this person's back hair was as thick as the hair on many people's heads. AMAZING. He was sort of a carrot. I'd get a glimpse of the back hair and then feel compelled to reach it, to touch it, to be fanned by the breeze that first passed through it, and I'd pick up the pace and approach him.

Of course, it was much harder to see him on the Queensboro, miles 15-17. There were no spectators, and around this point people started walking. The incline wasn't so steep but present enough to remind you that this was a marathon, goddamit. I took it slow and focused on my right third toe, which was bumping up uncomfortably against the end of my too-new shoes. Also at this point the shooting pains started in my shins, but that gave way to shooting pains in my toes by mile 18-19. Which accompanied the throbbing pains in my ankles (miles 11-14) which I recognized were a result of running on one side of the sloped street versus another, which catalyzed some zig-zagging across the street on my part to stretch out the opposite sides of my ankles.

The pain was not unbearable, clearly, but it did kind of suck. I was distracted from it on First Avenue because the crowds were so thick and the street so wide that I felt compelled to perform - it was like a slow, agonized gay pride parade and you just have go right down the middle of the street smiling and doing your thing even though your thigh-high platform boots are killing you and yesterday night's santorum is still drying on your hemerrhoids because everyone is watching you and expecting you to be here, queer, and sweaty. But on Fifth Ave between miles 21 and 26, holy fucking shit. I wanted to walk but I don't think I could have, because I felt that if I stopped for even a second, I wouldn't be able to motivate my legs to keep moving. The problem with not training for a marathon and running it anyway - well, there are lots of problems associated with that - but the major problem was that while my heart and lungs felt just fine with the exertion, my muscles just felt like 99 deflated luftballons, pulled pork, cappellini, baleens, bricks. And then there was mile 24, in the park, when all of sudden my left hamstring and my right calf were seized with tetanus and I just felt the entirety of my being was just a head and brain and my onerous mission was to haul around the remaining 125 pounds of my leaden body by telekinesis. My brain directed my hands to slap my thighs in a frantic attempt to get them to work, and then I had to repeat inspirational mantras to myself in order to continue. Most of them were along the lines of "Relax! Just relax!" or "Huff huff huff DO IT huff huff huff!" but other were more like "Brains! Brains! Brains! (on every step)" and the chorus to Erasure songs.

Finally there was the turn at Columbus Circle back into the park, throngs of people, bleacher seats, and mile markers that read "400 more yards!" and "300 more yards!" At 200 yards I broke out into a hobbling sprint and crossed the finish line, nearly crying, at 3:59.04. I raised my arms weakly, noticed that no one noticed or cared, and then lowered them back to my sides and listed over to the myriad post-race stations that the marathon planners had so deviously concocted - foil blanket receipt, medal receipt, photo station, chip return, water, bagel, baggage pick up. I finished at 2:10pm but then didn't actually exit the park until 2:50, nearly hypothermic, gnawing on a plain bagel like a hound on a leather shoe. It took 45 more minutes for poor Steph to make her way across the park to find me, and then we booked it home on the L train for a feast of ramen, brussel sprouts, and fatty fat fat. Another little known secret: the best part of a marathon is the post-race gorging, which I feel entitled to continue at least through mid-December.

And then there are the fun post-race facts that no one tells you about, like being unable to bend your knees for days, and not being about to round corners. If I had a nickel for every time I've run into a wall because I overestimated my ability to turn, I'd have at least $2.85!

3:59.04

is how long it took me to run the NYC marathon yesterday. Almost no training! I'm happy about the time. I'll write a blow-by-blow later, but suffice it to say, for now, that my thighs are so sore that I can neither ascend nor descend stairs and my kneecaps feel like they are shattered icebergs. Yow!

mom's lian oh recipe

here's to using one's blog to remember recipes!

lotus root
bamboo
mu-er
shredded carrots
garlic
soy sauce
japanese white wine
broad bean chili paste
sesame seed oil
sesame seeds roasted
white pepper
rice vineagar

chop and pan-fry/steam and mix.

one lost favorite photo

in palo alto

For the third time in as many months. Before the car even pulled out of SFO, my dad managed to warn me of the perils of kidney theft in China. Ah, home.

best birthday gift ever

wow, i just got the best birthday gift ever from the best friends ever! and the best girlfriend ever initiated it!! see below.

**Subject: Fw: URGENT: [Bananarchist]'s Beautiful Corpse/Birthday gift**

you know [bananarchist] loves word games. on the occasion of her
birthday, this friday, we're presenting her with an experiment
in collective story-writing. (this game is actually called "dark and
stormy night," but "beautiful corpse" was more likely to get your
attention, and they're kind of the same thing minus the surrealistic
drawing...or maybe just minus the drawing.)

in addition to being an experiment, this is also a surprise. so,
please quickly ADD 1-2 SENTENCES TO THE STORY BELOW, following the
format given (Your Name: blah blah blah...), and then immediately SEND
THIS EMAIL TO ANOTHER ONE OF MANDY'S FRIENDS. please try to avoid
expired emails or junk mail accounts and try to make contact with
another reliable storyteller, since we have roughly 96 hours to
complete our tale. in order to avoid rampant free-ridership, please
just forward the story to a single person, and check the list of
contributors to avoid duplicates. (if you're stuck and only if you're
stuck, please send this back to NAME_REDACTED@gmail.com .)

on friday 9/29 at 8pm, whoever is in possession of this email should
conclude the story and forward it one final time to
bananarchist@banana.com. here's hoping this works! thanks for playing.

_________________________________________

S. Hsu: "On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Mandy awoke with
a strange sensation in her chest and the distinct impression that
something was different."

R. Kottamasu: "She cast a glance toward her feet but found her sight
line unexpectedly blocked by a pair of hilly protrusions in the
bedsheets."

I. Brito: "She poked one of them gently, gasped and all of a sudden a
second pair of protrusions sprouted from the sheets."

A. Offner: "She clamped her eyes shut and tried to remember: had
there been any inbreeding in her family?"

M. McOwen: "No, she thought, her relatives disliked each other too
savagely to permit any clan tango."

N. Legnani: "Daring to open her eyes once again, Mandy raised the
covers ever so gently, so as not to disturb the perplexing
protuberances which seemed to have a life of their own, and was
mesmerized by the source-- now revealed-- of
her matutinal anxiety."

J. Ryoo: "Indeed, these perturbing protuberances were fuzzy,
gelatinous, green-and-pink-polka-dotted,
rose-laced-with-patchouli-like-a-retired-hippie-smelling,
my-little-pony-theme-song-singing, girating, giddy ANTENNAE sprouting
ever so gracefully from her knee caps. And, yes, they really were
singing (at the top of their high-pitched pipes) the song that
disturbingly goes like this: 'My little pony! / Pretty pony... / Love
to play with her beautiful hair!'..."

DSR Maru: "After groggily wiping her eyeballs, mandy looked a bit
closer at the strange beings that seemed to be emanating directly from
her prepatellar bursa. It was then that she realized that they were
merely lip-singing; the actual perpetrator of the aweful cacophony was
none other than David Bowie, cowering over her bed as if he were
Jareth the Goblin King."

SSR Maru:"'Bowie!' Mandy exclaimed as she fumbled with her bed clothes
startled to be seranaded by her one-time hero. 'Stop that god-awful
noise. What happened to you?' She grabbed the gelatinous antennae and
held them out like flowers to Bowie as a peace offering.
'Uh...s-s-s-sorry...I l-l-l-l-ove you.'"

B. Han: "He quieted. Coolly elegant, David Bowie sat down in the
battered chair next to Mandy's bed. Crossing his legs, he checked his
eye-liner in a small Italian-made pocket mirror and lit a cigarette.
His lighter then lit Mandy's proffered antennae, as an exhalation of
smoke washed over her face."

J. Hoffman: "When the smoke cleared Bowie was gone. All that remained
in the chair was an eyeliner pen and his still-lit cigarette
smoldering through the faded grey velvet. And she looked down at her
knees, and she found that her antennae had shrivelled up from the heat
and that they had turned into wings, broad insect wings like the wings
of a dragonfly, and when those wings started to unfurl she felt
herself carried up and up out of bed and through the window of her
bedroom into the sky..."

D. Ranganathan: "`Strange,' she thought. `I feel so free, so
weightless, despite my advancing years.' `You said it,' said Freddie
Mercury, who was reclining on a velvet couch held aloft by invisible
ribbons anchored to stars billions of light years away. Freddie
yawned and then sang a note so high that glasses across the universe
shattered, disrupting countless dinner parties. `Go ahead, try it,'
he said encouragingly.

E. MacLean: And Mandy couldn't resist. With David and Freddy as inspiration, she too intruded on every dinner party, blind date, and child's birthday party with her serendading voice, and her backup-singing knee-antennae. And her birthday-morning feeling was right: the world would never again be the same.

mexico photos, finally

cuius est solem eius usque ad coelum et ad inferos

"Whoever owns the soil owns also to the sky and to the depths."

earplugs

I woke up this morning at 5:30 with two earplugs in my mouth. Apparently I fell asleep with them in my hand and then had a dream that I was holding two delicious hard candies that had to be eaten.

fields medal

As always, Amy O. has put me back in my place. At a $4 per head dinner yesterday, she gave me the verbal equivalent of an exasperated slap to the back of the head by telling me that the only reason my blog is so self-loathing is so I can justify doing the things I feel so bad about doing. Why don't I just stop doing them? she said.

Touché! My mea culpa, my dear, and oh how me culpa. I am honestly conflicted about working for a firm but more or less committed to doing it for a couple of years after graduation. The reasons for this are many, but most of them start with the letter $. It's not that I want five houses on the islands; I just want my parents to retire.

Anyway, excessive explaining, as AO noticed, is tiresome. Besides, my week of 27 identical interviews is over, and now my mind is working on higher ground, or something. All I am doing, after a long day of mostly dull but nicely populated journal training, is reading about the Poincaré conjecture and eating roasted cashews. I bingoed last night in a Scrabble game - sPROUTs for 84 - but was beaten nonetheless, fair and square, by Raj's 90-something point bingo, *TARPULIN. I'm going to walk my dog later, when the rain is coming down, and then maybe work up some vague interest in the first couple pages of my property textbook. I'm saving for another blogpost, or perhaps the privacy of my real journal, the story about giving a stool sample this afternoon. I'm pretty sure whatever it is that is making my abdomen feel stomped on is an ulcer. Oh, boo.

firmiculture

I didn't write yesterday because I was too busy doing laundry at west Bushwick's favorite laundromat/post office/internet stand/Cristina studio to get any "face time" with my computer. ("Face time" is a new phrase I learned from this week. Usage is: "Aw, man, my firm sucks! They want me to put in all this face time at the office, I haven't gotten home before 1 a.m. since 1999!") The most interesting thing about my Thursday was the following exchange:

Irritating (and apparently irritable) disembodied voice: [squealing of tires, teapots at boil, dolphin songs, and other generic whines] Oh my Friday's gonna suck! I have interviews until 3:30!

Irritating (and apparently irritable) dyspeptic dog: [gnashing of teeth, souring of stomach] [sarcastically] Oh, you poor thing. I feel so bad for you. Poor, poor baby. [puts collegial hand on a plasma patch passing for a shoulder joint]

IDV: [coldly] Why are you being sarcastic?

IDD: Because I feel absolutely no sympathy for you. You could have cancelled your interviews. I don't feel bad for you at all.

IDV: [frosty as the lofty air] Oh...kayyy....

IDD: [grumbling, looks back down to folio, wanting to stab needles in everyone's eyes]

I thought about this exchange a lot as I killed time between the 11:20 and the 1:40 running loops on the rooftop of Coles Athletic Facility. The predominant thought was "I'm going to bite down on your eyeballs like they're peeled grapes" (this is the third time in two entries I have envisioned a font of aqueous humor blossoming forth from adversarial eyes), but then I also wondered whether IDV's pissiness 1) came in response to my totally out-of-place uncollegial sarcasm or 2) was a sign that she wasn't actually buying into the whole collegiality schtick and was being a real person by responding in kind to my bad humor. I think it's the former, only because I don't want to give her an inch of credit. This is the way I would narrate what happened: IDV was getting used to congeniality, which survives only as long as everyone is blandly nice to one another. Once congeniality is challenged with, say, sarcasm, then congeniality has no choice but to reveal itself for what it is: hatred in a lamb suit, patrician affect among the upper classes.

Anyway, as I write this I get angrier and angrier and want to retreat into a New England winter, snowbound and lonesome. Because highlights from yesterday also included an interviewer giggling about transpeople and other "weird topics," and a woman with the world's fattest diamond on her left hand speaking haughtily about how she didn't want to raise spoiled children like people in a certain Manhattan neighborhood did; and today, catching the last phrases of a monologue, "...and he was telling me he has five houses on the Islands and a place in Manhattan, and he gets them renovated whenever he feels like it...and I was like, 'That sounds pretty fun!'" I don't know what the Islands are. I don't know why it's fun to renovate your mansions whenever you feel like it...is it more fun than bocce, or a rollercoaster? So many interviewers have pointed out my all non-profit resume and told me, with sympathy, that they understood what I was thinking because they all had to put food on the table too. And then I wonder what kind of food $150,000 can afford that $35,000 can't...

The verdict, after a week, is uncertain. I'm conflicted, obviously. I could say it's all part of a journey toward losing my mind/religion that started when I pitched a friend's painting into a Harlem dumpster at the beginning of February, but who knows if that's fair to say, since I've been wringing my hands about breadwinning for years. Well, anyway, it's the weekend, so I'm sipping from a tiny bottle of mezcal and waiting for respite to find me.

the holder of this ticket assumes all risk, danger, and injury

Just as a week ago, a Mexico City metro map with an "Usted estes aqui" arrow spun me into an existential tailspin, the fine print on the flip side of my Mets vs. Cardinals ticket has me feeling pretty grim about the future of my profession and my future role in creating nonsensical phrases that will be printed in 6-point sans serif fonts on the backsides of everything that Americans find pleasure in doing. Kenji wants to know about the relationship between law and utopia? The answer is: antithesis.

I'm not just being grim because I had eight interviews today, and all of them were, one after the other, reasons to fork up $2 at a slapping booth for a swift blow across the cheekbones -- anything to wake up, bring color to the cheeks. We go through these idiotic rituals, which both sides freely admit are meaningless, and feign interest in each other's answers, when all we are doing is judging the amount of mileage, measured in prestige, that a student's As and Order of the Coifs will bring the firm, or the amount of lucre, measured annually in hundreds of thousands, that those hard-fought As and Orders of the Coifs will reap in reward. Why bother with telling me in great detail about your work, or the firm's culture -- and do you want to know about my summer? Or my "interesting" resume? Or my NAMBLA membership? -- when neither of us gives a damn?

I realized as I was walking down West 3rd this mid-morning -- which is something I try to avoid doing since even the slightest activity provokes a sweat deluge -- and sweat was pooling at my wrists where my black wool coat was draped and revealing Rorschachs on my shirt, that there is no dignity in this. Early Interview Week is watching contessas rummaging at a buffet, beads of lamb fat squeezing out from underneath their fingernails. The longer I spend listening to people talk about firms, the longer I think I'll stay...oh, eight years to partner...why not? Why not indeed, when everyone is so fucking collegial? People seem so thrilled to report that they have not been screamed at like a master screams at a slave, or that when strangers pass them in the office they smile and nod hello. And compared to the megafirms, these niceties matter! Of course! But is collegiality all I can ask for from my life? For the rest of my youth?

Collegiality seemed like a palatable but none too delicious fritter, but it was revealed for a potato in comparison with the vitality of my night's activities. There was a long trip on the 7 to Shea to witness the Mets slaughter (at least through the 7th inning) the Cardinals, then shabu shabu at Minni's in Flushing with Stephanie and Toby (the brilliant placisicist painter) and David (the hilarious archivist), and a long cab ride home with an all-Korean conversation in the front about Saigu (the L.A. riots) and Korean evangelism, and ghost stories and kvetching about Staten Island in the back. This wasn't the stale air of collegiality; it was the breath of life. There's more that I want than just what is barely tolerable, starting with good conversation, interesting people who are committed to the things they are doing, weirdos, pinkos, stories about moon observation, unflinching debates about lowering the age of consent.

Oh, but I complain. And I will work for a firm, providing they don't read blogs. I will have to continue to entertain myself for the next X number of years by imagining the suits in front of me are morphing in paranormal ways, like today, when I imagined one particularly blinky interviewer's wide eyes turning into white balloons and exploding in gore all over my new suit. The inappropriate jokes will have to continue -- today I told an acquaintance who asked me if her collar was in proper place that everything looked fine, except she might want to try to get the bloodstains out (shock, horror, nervious giggle) -- as tomorrow I think I'll tell the next person who asks how an interview went that it went great, I got a callback, twenty minutes is exactly the amount of time one needs to give a decent handjob. Listen for the sucking sound, gentle readers, that's the soul of me at the beginning of a long descent.

law ferment

Day two of 25 year-olds dressed like maitre'd's milling about a lobby rehearsing conversations with their clones. Firms are giving me desires I didn't even know I had. I didn't realize there was a schwag-shaped hole in me until I found schwag with which to fill it, and now my cup runneth over with mini-flashlights on mini-carabiners (the most irrelevant item), mints (which could thinly veil a semester's worth of coffee or copraphagic breath), gift certificates to nearby coffee houses, oversized plastic slinkys (the least useful), USB drives (the most useful), etc. If the origin of suffering is desire, baby, I'm sufferin' something bad. Because though I know that I do not need another fistful of mints, or another one of those endearing little boxes they come in, my fingers are swift and I pocket everything in sight. A tan Allen Overy baseball cap with a velcro closure? Cha-ching! There's a pyramid of booty in the middle of my bed, which I have not slept in for two nights, and when I come home in the afternoons I handle each item to make sure it's still there.

I think I am mostly kidding. But there sure is a lot of furtive taking on my behalf here. Most nourishing were the two halves of eggplant sandwiches I nabbed and ate with bad posture while misanthropically ticking away at a computer terminal while my cohort compared notes about interviewers behind me. The appropriate gesture for their activity can be performed as follows: bunch together your finger tips, then move your thumb toward and away from them a couple of times. I took my lunch break to avoid the instructive session on callbacks, which probably would have been a good idea since now I have a couple callbacks but no one to answer the question, "Would it be impolite to take a shit in the office bathroom, if I needed to go?", and ran for three miserly miles on the Coles treadmill before expiring of heat exhaustion. It was a poor decision on my part because though I allotted myself 20 minutes to get back for the interview I forgot to allot any time for my face to de-rouge and de-sweat. So at my next interviewer I started things off by saying, "Sorry I'm sweating like a peasant!" The interviewer kindly offered to turn on the AC, which I refused, then offered again five minutes later, which I refused, then finally turned around halfway through the interview and turned it on unprompted. My nose sweat made a spot on my shirt...but I got a callback, so I guess things went just fine.

The best part of my day, though, was pushing the Soba Sensation Sauce out of the way with my chopsticks to get at the hot hijiki on my appetizer plate at Angelica's Kitchen, where I took dear sweet demanding (happy now?) Stephanie for her 2700th birthday - she had the Reuben sandwich, which smelled just like an August asscrack. We, or really just I, came up with a new system of pronouns to signify the insignificance of gender that is at the extreme end of continuing efforts to disrupt the gender binary: every time a gendered word needs to be used, substitute a nonsensical word. E.g., "She combs her hair" becomes "Chandelier combs corkboard hair." This is not to say that "she" = "chandelier" - it shouldn't be consistent. "She" can be chandelier, gently, bog, Memorial Church, a fine gust of windy warm, etc. Stephanie distanced herself from this idea and claimed, implicitly, that I was transphobic, or disrespectful, or maybe just backward, but I didn't take offense, since there was only one subject position at the table occupied by a queer (I mean LGBTSTGNC) feminist academic who secretly makes fun of the pinched pitch of Caeden's singing voice, among other racist, transphobic, xenophobic, anti-Seventh Day Adventist, counterrevolutionary targets for her/hir/hairy derision. Baby, you're the bestest. Happy birthday!

feeling not so (law) firm

Day one of the penguin extravaganza, 400 25 year-olds wearing well-tempered black suits with stiff shoulders, each one with some leathery folder and a tin of complimentary Schulte Roth LLP mints in hand. I would trade it all for one 425 year-old wearing a leathery tin of penguin mints. I've only done three interviews and I've exhausted my capacity for entertaining myself by horrifying my classmates with inappropriate jokes about the banality of our evil; the one about cyanide pills in the tin of mints got a startled polite chuckle from a new, similarly-dressed acquaintance whose name is either Annie, Katie, Sarah, Jessica, Prathak, Jamie, or Funes the Memorious - it's hard to keep track of them all when you go into a room to have the same conversation a couple times every day (Q: How do I like law school? A1: Oh, it's really fantastic and intellectually stimulating! A2: I hunger for its touch; when I tup I close my eyes and think of Vanderbilt Hall) only to emerge into the holding pen to delicately nibble at cantaloupe and rehearse the same conversation with one's classmates! Or maybe it's honeydew - I was corrected today by a friend for calling one the other, a great source of continuing shame in my life.

I've been riding elevators up and down D'Agostino Hall. Squeezing into them with 2500 pounds, the maximum allotment, of law student at a time. One guy made the following joke: "Hey, this is like when you get on a subway at the beginning of a long ride, and there's no place to sit down!" It was not an observation, but an attempt at a joke, which qualifies him as the world's most boring person, though perhaps superceded by his female companion, who giggled erratically at a high pitch; perhaps to flirt, but also perhaps because she found him genuinely funny, which is an infinitely more alarming prospect. While these jokes and flirtations were being exchanged, I noted the recently shorn perfect hairline of the 6'4" man with a tight end's built standing with the back of his nice wool suit pressed into my nose, and reminded myself to pray to Jesus to resurrect me like Lazarus following my soon-to-come several-years infirmity. I think my personhood can survive the next three or four years, so long as I continue to imagine that underneath their suits everybody has the texture and appearance of a formless uncooked Italian sausage.

Whew! I think I'm going about this interviewing thing the right way...mincing my words of derision on my very public blog, for example, which is linked to from my very public Friendster profile. I have fifteen more minutes to continue my "firm research," which thus far has consisted of blogging and Gmail chatting friends in Nairobi about renting a house over the winter in western Massachusetts. Just as I think it's idiotic that these poor interviewers should have to feign interest in the procession of preservative-laden cookies who regurgitate OCS lines at perfect pitch, I think it's stupid that I should spend any more time on something that is virtually guaranteed to me, she says, measuring the impressive length of her penis, and that I feel so ambivalently about. Harumph.

a friend

A very special friend, you asshole. Lover is for the salt-and-peppered, partner is a dance companion, girlfriends eat pints of ice cream and gossip about their boyfriends. Friend is just about the sweetest address there is. Azucar for mi chinita. We stay up at night because partition only tears apart the subcontinent. Let's not.

everything in it's right place

The school year started for me today, at midnight, and as if to say, FUCK YOU, CLOWN!, my somatic self immediately superceded the elf that produces rationality through the modulation of dials in my skull and now my body's stuck on school mode. Which is to say, the insomnia returns as soon as school does. Is that a sign of illness? Of food poisoning? Of lupus? Why are there mosquitoes in my room? Why do they bite my face as I lie in bed? Why can I not think of a single answer the potential question, "Tell me about yourself?"

Q: Tell me about yourself.

A: The R&D of solar radiation instrumentation have significant calibration requirements. The specialized optical laboratory YES operates to characterize products includes three major facilities for the measurement of spectral, cosine and absolute responses of optical radiation detectors.

Q: What is the greatest obstacle you have overcome in your life?

A: My knickers don't dance, they're just pull-up pants, so do the Rockaway. Lean back. Lean back. Lean back. Lean back.

Q: Do you think your grades adequately reflect your magnificent, many-faceted intelligence?

A: Two former New York City police detectives, who retired in the early 1990s and moved to Las Vegas, made their first court appearance Thursday after federal authorities accused them of helping the Mafia commit eight murders.

I'm so ready for my interviews! "Tell me about yourself" FUCK YOU! You're not the boss of me! Why don't YOU tell me about YOURself?!

My pants extend 4-5" past my ankles. I've been told that my shoes are "laughable." I bought a $10 folio at Staples, so that I can impress my interviewers with neatly printed resumes sandwiched between pleathered boards. I'm gonna wake up early and polish my teeth with buffing mittens so that my winning smile will cast a piercing gleam across the tri-state area. Today I did lat pull-downs at the gym so I can fan out my Bruce Lee backside; not in preparation for any career moves, but just because I can.

I write all this because a clown is secretly crying underneath his make up. But this is no secret, because when you cry with make up on, your make up streaks like a salt plain and you look like your face has been run over by radio-controlled toy cars. What you then have is a law student in clown's make up crying and ruining the make up. This is such a SHITTY METAPHOR. What I am crying about tonight is the geneaology of morality. It is like trying to find the geneaology of a unicorn. You might find a particular unicorn's father or mother, or even grandparents, but what good does that do when they don't actually exist? Morality, like a yeti, is elusive. The question is: is maturation 1) coffin nails on a once-pretty past; 2) a lowering of expectations, a narrowing of possibility, an acclimatization to varying degrees of less-than-happiness; 3) a defeat; 4) irreversible; 5) opportunity; 6) backpacks on cold fall mornings?

All of these things, and one fucking mosquito that has made my face into hot cross buns, keep me awake. Friends, mediocre acquaintances, and people who read this blog just because it's better than filling out shipping orders, repondez s'il vous plait.

un dolor de cabeza

Hello from the tourist hovel of Hostel Amigo, the latest less-than-stellar addition to the Mexico City "party" hostel circuit, where I spent three days last week but thankfully am only in today to steal free Internet access...hello! I'm blogging only because I can't do anything else. Yesterday night, I ate at a horrid little "vegetariano" restaurant in Oaxaca -- fellow travelers, avoid Flor de Loto at all costs, despite what your Lonely Planet, which approaches Biblical proportions as you plot your travels with your index finger holding the appropriate place in your Baedecker, tells you to do! I had enfrijoladas con quesillo and could feel the wrinkles of my stomach contracting in protest even as I shoveled the vile soupy mess into my mouth, but did not stop eating in time to avoid throwing up seven times whilst traveling by 7 hour overnight bus from Oaxaca to Mexico City, into first my plastic toilet paper bag and then into the deluxe bus toilet and having diarrhea that looked exactly like what oatmeal would look like if one melted an entire 16 oz. Hershey bar into it into that selfsame toilet. (Does using the word "selfsame" imply that I am a toilet? How does one use that word?) In a moment of foresight before boarding the bus, I bitchily finagled a plastic bag from the snack kiosk clerk in the bus station with the following conversation:

Me, green at the gills, swaying, speaking crappy piecemeal Spanish: ¿Tiene una maleta...plástico?
Clerk, lazily popping gum: No.
Me: Pero, ¿que es este? [points at plastic bags behind the counter]
Clerk: No, es solamente por customers or something else I couldn't translate
Me: Mi amiga (pointing at friend standing nearby with recently purchased bottle of water)...la botella de agua...comprar...
Clerk: No, ¿quien?
Me: ¡Ella! La botella...el botela...aqua enbotellada!
Clerk, dawdling, popping gum, generally dragging heels: ...
Me: ¡Por vomitar!
Clerk: [slowly and reluctantly handing over a red and orange striped bag]
Me: ¡Gracias, perro!

Yes, probably not a wise or polite or respectful idea to call store clerks perros because I cannot be understood, but that's not even the most belligerent I got on this trip. Two days ago my aforementioned friend was cornered outside a Oaxacan market by three incredibly short men who tried to pick her pocket. It all happened too fast for me to stop it, but she got them away with a loud "Hey!" Not knowing what had happened, I assumed she was being molested so shoved the offending shortie in the back as he passed by. Sad to say, my sympathetic nervous system, for the second time this trip, has shown itself to be useless. (The first time was during a bus near-accident.) I wasn't even able to see, let alone stop, this shortie from pushing me back and slamming me against a wall. Whoops! We glared at each other and then backed off. Maybe he didn't know I was a mujer? I'm fairly confident that I could take on a single 5'1" man but probably wouldn't've fared too well against three of them.

Anyway, the point being, I'm incredibly sick today. Sipping at a Gatorade bottle and pushing buttons on a computer as annoyed looking German boys wait to check their calientemail accounts. This trip has been rejuvenating and illuminating, if not entirely enjoyable. I've seen some pretty nifty things, which I will not recall one by one here, but I think I've decided after two weeks of impossibly early mornings and sleeping in bus stations that I'd like to get up earlier and also spend less time on buses and never look like I've been beached in a place like Puerto Escondido for too long, because damn beach style is GROSS. (Imagine the looks of stunned horror on those in the waiting room at the Pinotepa Nacional bus station, as a six-foot Scandanavian croquete waltzed by wearing nothing buy daisy dukes and a bikini whose tiny black triangles barely covered the rotisserie-tan skin around her nipples!) The streets of Zacatecas and Guanajuato were tranquillo, Mexico City was filled with very interesting pro-AMLO (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the losing presidential candidate in Mexico's version of the U.S.'s 2000 electoral fraud), Aculpulco was gecko infested and almost whitey-free, Puerto Escondido was like all of Santa Cruz condensed onto five blocks, and Oaxaca didn't have the "Taos-like energy" that a fellow tourist claimed it had but it certainly had food poisonous quesillo and pickpockets...but I must say that the best thing I've seen so far has been the man I saw walking down Calle de Murguía in Oaxaca last night. He was obviously deranged. He wore only a red t-shirt, and no pants, and as I walked by him he squatted on the ground and proceeded to take a shit right on the sidewalk! As cars zoomed by! As people dashed across the seat in horror! I was terrified but managed to sneak a glimpse behind me and I saw the silhouette of an urgent turd being extruded from him. Later I walked by and saw his product, very unimpressive. But still, ¡que interesante!

Okay, the Germans are really getting pushy. No more updates until I get back to New York, tomorrow. New York, sweet New York! How I've missed you! Your wayward son is returning! And me too!

where i'm at

This is something I just wrote in an email to an incoming 1L, my OUTLaw mentee. It's where I'm at, at the end of a too long and too short recuperative summer. I think I've turned into even more of a dullard in my middle age than I had anticipated I would:

And legal studies and practices...yeah, I think everyone goes into law school expecting to specialize in something, but 1) you don't really have to specialize in anything and 2) many public-interesty people change their minds and go the corporate route. Before I came to law school, I was working with LGBT activists and I was all ready to join the movement as a lawyer, but even my friends who were doing LGBT legal stuff were very grim about my chances of escaping law school with my ideals and my decision to work in public interest intact. The reason for this is that law school is, like the army, an institution set up to break down individual difference and to encourage conformity (through hazing rituals like a crazy 1L year, 24-7 contact with your classmates, esp in the dorms, all the same classes, lockers like in high school etc.), and in this case you are expected to cleave to the school's general interest in seeing its students make as much money as possible and donate as much in alumni support as possible. This is true of colleges as well, but law school is much more successful in making you do things you're not sure you want to do. Like when there is a frenzy to sign up for a particular event, like mandatory Early Interview Week preparation meetings, you might find yourself signing up without any real desire to or understanding of why you're doing it. Or at least I find this true of myself, because suddenly it seems like my grim soothsayers were right and I'm gonna do corporate for a couple of years despite my self-professed radicalism and non-corporate interests. Because I have to admit that it's much more attractive to make $150,000 a year than $40,000 a year. The disparity between a corporate and public interest salary is obscene, and even though I disdained what I perceived to be naked greed before I started law school, I find myself a month before the start of my second year ready to wear naked greed like an old, comfortable coat.

And now I'm going to Mexico for two weeks. Mexico City then Zacatecas then San Luis Potosi then Oaxaca then San Cristobal de las Casas then Palenque then Puerto Escondido or something like that. Lots of overnight buses in the jungle. Hope I don't fall over a cliff and die, but if I do, I love you all, except for the ones who done did me wrong.

Unbearably Cute Thing Dad Has Said #54,233:

"You know what I would do I won the lottery tomorrow? I would buy a $5 bottle of plum wine and drink it while watching Titanic with your mother. I love that movie."

[I'm back in Palo Alto for five days before a two-week trip to Mexico! Thank the Virgin of Guadalupe I'm not in New York for the heat wave. It was 50-something degrees on the water at AT&T Park in San Francisco tonight, where I watched the Giants take their ninth drubbing in a row.]

I got some traveling left to do

create your own visited states map

SCREAMED, 68pts

Finally, a bingo! I had the world's best letters, and could have done EMERALD or DREAMER too.

Snakes on a Plane!

I am so excited about this movie.

Snakes On A Plane Official Site Latest Upcoming New Movie Trailers: Samuel L Jackson, Rachel Blanchard Movie Trailer

Thanks for the mammaries!

John Lennon used to sing, "I wanna hold your gland" instead of "I wanna hold your hand" during concerts at the height of Beatlemania, because all of the music was drowned out by screaming anyway. When asked if it bothered him that he could not hear his own voice during concerts, he replied, "No, we have all the records at home."

I love the Interweb.

i am the most beautiful girl in all of japan

Why is that I am always doing this in pictures that are taken of me?

In related news, NYU's OUTLaw has a new blogup, with a link to at least two other pictures of me looking more or less like that.

hot hot heat

I got millet for brains today. It's the heat and the insomnia. One causes the other, one does not cause the other, post hoc propter hoc. Yesterday, I saw someone I haven't seen in eight? nine? years sitting in Think Coffee and I didn't want to say anything at all to her so I just found her profile on Friendster, which linked to her blog, which profiled some of the poetry she had recently written. And there she was, sitting in the middle of Think Coffee with a pen and a pad, perhaps writing the same poetry that will be read by generations of socially inept ex-acquaintances even as new generations of poetry are being produced. This summer has been a hallway of mirrors; you see what I mean?

So I'm so tired my eyes hurt to be open. Last night I puttered around the gym, lifting heavy things and setting them down again, feeling no great sense of accomplishment but just a damp wonder at the trivialities I cop to fill all the minutes of my day. In a fourth floor walk-up in Prospect Heights with an all-skin (snake?) rug, I watched an episode of Freaks and Geeks under a whirring ceiling sitting on a red futon as buoyant and large as a liferaft, then lay on the ground on thin sheets passing themselves off as a bed and talked with a dear friend until I had sufficiently shamed him into making out with me. Is that fair to say? I'm happy but alternately too hot and cold, with a boundless appetite, at the moment, for strawberry popsicles.

even more photos

more photos

photos from weddin' (thanks bernie!)

dune gatta dune gatta dune di ahhhh

The title is a phonetic translation of my third of a call and response song led at a wedding reception by Kutchi jain hip hop sensation V. Maru, the charismatic older brother of the college friend whose beautiful wedding this weekend left me happier than I've been in half a year. Coming back from Danbury, Connecticut via The Bernadine Shuttle and the Metro-North, I resolved to (1) devote more time in my life to the people whom I love and (2) facilitate groups hang-outs and (3) spend more time on art and less time on frivolity. (Frivolity is, of course, a catchall encompassing all manners of literal and metaphorical masturbations, including filling in the columns of an Early Interview Week Excel spreadsheet labelled "Firms," "City," and "Why I Might Not Lose My Mind/Soul/Identity/Friends By Working For This One"--a long, boring, tortured story of divorce-induced anxiety and fear of independence, etc, yaddah, blablabla.) At this beautiful wedding, there was the entire jain population of central Connecticut bedecked in oceans of intricately threaded sari fabric in colors that I didn't know existed, mountains of tasty namkeens catered out for our delectation, and virtually non-stop dancing, although I had to take a break during the raas garba because I thought one more minute of dandiya and I'm gonna dizzily spin myself like the tasmanian devil through the door--so I very respectfully lowered my sticks and fled to the bathroom to begin the fifteen minute process of preparing to pee, which involved dupatta removal, one handed dress-hiking, pants-lowering, etc. You see, it was the first time since my clarinet recital in 1996 that I've worn a dress -- really, it was! -- and while I felt as if I've been steadily femming since my butchy zenith (or nadir, for those gender crusaders among you) in 2001, apparently I have not been and I gave my friends a couple rounds of healthy giggling with my appearance. I just don't feel like myself unless there are cloth tubes around my legs, meeting at my taco in a zipper! (I forgot resolution #4 coming out of the wedding: refer to my crotch as a taco on every blogpost henceforth.) I'm kidding of course -- not about calling my crotch a taco, but about not feeling like myself, because even though I got a "sir" today while waiting in line at FedEx I still feel like I'm presenting more female than I ever have, and dresses are not a problem. Unless you have to pee; eh, whatever.

Apologies for the digression. What I really want to write about is the euphoria that I felt all weekend in the midst of a 55-hour hangout some of my favorite people in the world. The bride and groom, in the tradition of frantic massive Indian weddings, could not spare time from the rigid schedule of outfit changes, dance preparations, mehndi applications, etc. and therefore like giant squid only appeared in passing and in folklore. I think I shouted the same twenty-second conversation back and forth between Sheela and Duncan on three separate occasions, which went something like this: "Congratulations! How do you feel? You look beautiful/handsome/not unclever! Are you excited? How has the week been?" and then "HOORAY!"s all around. But though they were absent, they cultivated an atmosphere of generosity and lovingkindness and silliness among their guests and united three hundred and fifty people in celebration. I know it's dicey to use a word like "lovingkindness" but I feel no self-consciousness in using it to describe a couple like Sheela and Duncan. As much as I reeled in appreciation for the ceremony and the celebration, what really floored me was the love I felt from the community that Sheela and Duncan were able to create. Waahh!

(Ooops, I reread that and realize that warrants a translation. "Wahh!" in Mandarin is not a lachrymose onomotopoeia but an expression of wonder, admiration, delight. As in "Waaaaah! You got into medical school at Ha-voor!")

The recap:

Friday we gathered at the Maru home for dosas and mehndi and an impromptu illegal fireworks display and some homemade folk entertainment (singing, dancing, jokes at the Smith-Rohrbergs' expense). We'd gotten up to Connecticut again via the Metro-North to the Bernadine Shuttle, an hour-long ride made short by conversations about Bernie's racy love life and anal sex in one's first year of law school. At the Marus, Bernie and I kept each other entertained by making the same jokes about our mehndi'd hands over and over again: pretending to backhand one another in the face with it, pretending that the designs were our names spelled in "Indian," saying we should tattoo matching prints on our faces so it would look like we'd been slapped, etc. I challenged Roona to talk through her teeth until midnight for a dollar; she refused. Brito sneezed and when Raj asked if she was sick and she said, "No, I just overate." Out on the lawn Roona told me that gullible was written on the ceiling and I looked up to find it. After we left for the hotel, I finagled a free beer from a German man named "Astro" on the middle of the dance floor of the "club" on the first floor of the Holiday Inn in Danbury, Connecticut, and I only had to refuse two invitations to grind and accept one in order to secure it (a prelude to the gender dysphoria to come). A couple of us obviously excited to be in each other's company wanted to hang out and lay on the carpet in front of the third floor elevator bank and whispering/guffawing until a paunchy moustaschioed man in his undies burst forth from room #303 hollering "Take your party elsewhere! Some of us are trying to sleep!" (door slamming, deadbolts locking) and then we moved to the stairwell and guffawed more freely therein.

The next day, Raj won the game of Scrabble we played with Rishi, Jennie, and Roona at Friendly's, but it was a close game (his well-placed QUERY, for 45 points, probably won it for him in the second to last round of the game), and Jennie and Rishi got their game on with their mad Telephone Pictionary and Psychiatrist skillz. Bernie and Brito spent the morning and afternoon "studying" in the nearby Dunkin Donuts -- Bernie for the MCATs, Brito for her biology doctorate exams -- but really all they did was wait for our crowd to walk by and spell words with our bodies for their deciphering by the side of the highway. (Bernie mistranslated as "PORKY" our more fitting "DORKY" semaphore.) Jennie and I got nekkid in the hotel pool at 3:30am on Saturday after an exhausting raas garba catered to evoke Mumbai street food (cf. earlier paragraph about dancing until tasmanian devil-like), and after half an hour of innuendo and inhaling chlorine and swimming underwater with my eyes closed so as not to dislodge the contacts we clambored back to our respective hotel rooms, where the evening's round of "Truth or Truth" (the grown-up version of "Truth or Dare") lingered into pillow talk with four people in the dark. I realized then that I know the best people in the world.

Sunday we managed to pack up and drag ourselves out of bed for the ceremony, held at the Waterview, which was indeed a view of water over some unnamed Connecticut river where speedboats towing tow-headed kids on innertubes sped back and forth, spraying wake. We were assigned to the groom's party, despite our knowing and loving Sheela and Duncan equally well, because Sheela had imported a banyan tree's worth of family ancestry to Danbury (cf. earlier paragraph about the entire jain population of Connecticut). This meant that we danced out with Duncan's entourage to the beat of a man in a red kurta banging on a two sided drum and shouting "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!" as another person orbitted dollar bills around his head. At this point we picked up sticks for an encore of the previous night's dandiya dancing, then dropped those in favor of wooden Chinese fans and bottled water, to make it through the two-hour outdoor ceremony under the July sun without dying of exposure. I and my favorite people in the world sat in a couple of rows near the front left, with Roona's mom sitting at the end of the row holding a parasol that kept dipping into the eyes of the people sitting behind us. I sort of left off of the ceremony at this point, because all 14 steps of the traditional wedding started blurring together. I realized at one point that I was totally singing unmelodious nonsense syllables while everyone chanted along with what must have been a familiar prayer; I don't know why, maybe because the spirit moved me, but most likely because I was so deliriously overheated despite the SPF 5000 lotion that I thought I really could speak Hindi or Gujarati or Sanskit or whatever it was everyone else was saying.

Sheela teared up during the seven steps and every feeling person in the audience lost it too, or at least I did, though I think I covered up by passing off my tears as errant drops of Raj's sweat. I sat next to somebody whom I was so happy to be sitting next to, and I don't mean the unknown Maru relative to sitting to my right. After the ceremony we peppered Dunc and Sheela with rice warmed in our palms and proceeded to the next six hours of cocktail tiffins and vegetarian feasting and some unbeliveably sweet performances, like the elder Marus doing the foxtrot before an audience dying of cuteness. I sat next to Bernie and Jennie in the East Asian ghetto at dinner and ignored all the healthy young Indians and Indian-Americans heterosexually flirting at my table. Bernie realized that her problem was just that she and her friends were just really weird and I responded by lifting the kameez of our homemade Kutchi dolls and backing it up into Bernie. Jennie made eyes at the babyfaced Casanova sitting next to her and we made a dash for the buffet line before our turn, since we had to leave early to catch the train.

Bernie, Raj and I left before I really got a chance to say goodbye to any of the people that I'd met, but I didn't mind, because I'm determined to meet them more than once a year at somebody's wedding. We drove back to White Plains, finishing off the last round of Botticelli (Raj, trivia master, was impossible to stump and so we never revealed his person; Dostoyevsky) with me feeling sedate, warm, and happy. I don't mind the sadness of coming back into subterranean New York if it comes after the sweetness of a long, sun-baked weekend with the best people in the world. I've been more or less useless today, daydreaming about open water and thinking about all the things I want to say. Thank you, Duncan and Sheela. Live forever!

hos at montrose

Spent the July 4th weekend moving Puck into her new apartment just a twenty minute walk from mine. Dog is happy with his new friends. Turns out my last post was clairvoyant or soothsaying or just plain right because the bike seat gave me what is known in the scientific community as "ingrown hairs" in an unsavory region of my body which gave me a weeklong scare as I NYU-bused from one doctor to another in search of the proper name for the unwanted toppings on my taco. My apologies for writing that disgusting turnaphrase. I've never either 1) referred to my crotch on this blog or 2) called my crotch a taco and I think I oughta stick to those rules. I think the best part about living in East Williamsburg is that there are long tracts of car-free space in which to bike around at race pace, leaning into turns like a motocross racer. The worst part about living in East Williamsburg is attempting to watch the World Cup soccer game at a bar at three in the afternoon at Bedford and trying and failing to find a seat in a pitch black bar where a hundred people with fake European accents and a couple of anorexics in tight tapered black jeans and big sunglasses tell you that you are standing in the way of their view or could you move because our friends are sitting here? Gah.

chocha

I need to get a new bike seat.

This one is ruining my crotch.

Golf failure

Dreams:

1) Michelle Wie failing at golf. She was 14 years old, 6'3", bedecked in pink Lacoste, chasing a dimpled ball with a swinging club as it rolled into sand traps and trail duff. She must have swung that thing fifteen times in the sand, striking the space around the ball (but missing her shot entirely) with an iron wedge, but thanks to a hole in one on the 18th, she still finished one under par. Up until that point, she had been 35 over par.

2) X-rated dream that I can't really remember.

3) "Waking up" from the x-rated dream into another dream, of Katie Currie looking at me through the windows of a white colonial Provincetown house from the front porch swing. The debate in the dream was whether it would be rude to draw the shades even as Katie continued to stare, so that I could continue with my dream self's plan to lie awake in bed with eyes closed, agitated.

Fuck The Master Cleanse

Okay, I lasted through two days of lemonade. And then I had two slices of pizza, which were the most delicious slices of pizza I've ever eaten. I quickly followed the pizza with (1) an egg and cheese omelette and two slices of buttered toast, (2) an acai smoothie, (3) ramen with broccoli. Yessssss.

I realized that I could no longer continue with the diet because just 8 hours of it made me completely useless at work--I thought of nothing else but food--and yesterday I attempted to work on my memo and ended up staring at Fed. R. Evid. 407 for half an hour without reading a word. Bad! Even a fantastic gay Filipino movie (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, run don't walk to see it!) could not distract me from my hunger as I took guilty swigs of uncut Grade B maple syrup from the bottle during lulls in the action. Becca, a paragon of good lemonade diet, appeared to glow with health from her two days on the diet; she chastised me for "improvising" on the lemonade recipe--I'd replaced lemons with limes, Grade B maple syrup with Grade A, and eyeballed all the measurements because I didn't have a measuring cup--and said that's probably the reason my body was about to go into insulin shock/shutdown. Whatever, I said, the spirit of the lemonade diet was improvisation, since improvising on crazy is still just as crazy as the original crazy.

Anyway, point being, fuck that shit. I lasted about 48 hours. WEAK. I didn't feel "cleansed" though I certainly felt "constipated," and I look forward to a lifetime of unhealthy eating to return those sorely missed toxins to my digestive tract. Give me cholesterol and/or give me death, motherfuckers!

(Alas, I didn't see what my body would do if I chugged a quart of salt water. Perhaps this is an experiment for another day. Will blog updates as they occur.)

The Master Cleanse, Day 2

Day 2 of The Master Cleanse. I find that capitalizing words makes them seem not only more authoritative but also more Teutonic. Gno What I Mean? The first day of TMC was excruciating. I had to make an emergency trip to Chinatown in the middle of the afternoon to buy lemons and to C-Town (the grocery store, not to be confused with Chinatown) to buy grade A maple syrup because I hadn’t squeezed enough lemons in the morning to sate my burning, yearning, churning hunger. All day long I daydreamed about food—equal opportunity, really, anything and everything. Mac and cheese, pizza, ramen, fried eggs, pork buns, avocado sandwiches, parathas. Anything savory and not sweet and sour. While walking Boo to our fetch spot this morning I saw a mud-streaked sack of generic brand ruffled potato chips, and felt a pang of longing. Wow! Every time I felt hungry I took a couple gulps of lemonade, which didn’t so much satisfy my hunger so much as it filled in with liquid the empty clench of my stomach.

Some unexpected side effects:

1) The skin on my right hand feels like it’s been stripped a couple of layers, a result from the overzealous squeezing of about 10 lemons/limes. My forearm is sore. Why is it so difficult to squeeze water from a rock I mean lemon juice from a lemon?

2) My throat hurts. A result of the acidic lemonade and the cayenne pepper, I suspect.

3) My teeth hurt. A result of the acidic blah blah blah.


BM Watch:

1) An enthusiastic showing at the work bathroom early in the morning, requiring several polite spritzes of the air freshener so as not to asphyxiate my officemates.

2) Nothing else since then. Should I be worried? I haven’t been attacking the suggested digestive aids as I should be, but I can’t really stomach (ha!) the idea of chugging a quart of salt water and waiting around for the next two hours to shit my brains out. Just doesn’t sound like fun, people!

All right. The discovery of my roommate’s juicer late last night made the last two Nalgenes go down easier. It’s now time to make today’s batch.

The Master Cleanse

On a whim, and because my friends are doing it--just like if my friends jumped off a bridge would you do it? yes i would--I've decided to go on a ten day "lemonade" diet. (Details below.) Lest y'all worry that I'm disguising anorexia in wacky experiment's clothing, let me remind the audience that I have 0 body image issues and besides, anorexia would be much easier without two cups of maple syrup per day. So no, my goal is not weight loss but coproexperimentation, my favorite pastime. Apparently when one ingests nothing but lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, natural laxative teas, and quarts of salt water, one's digest tract is cleansed like a repentant sinner! Mostly what I'm looking forward to is the all-mucus bowel movement...slippery!

I predict I will last 14 hours. If I last longer than that I'll post periodic updates about my bowel movements (and even perhaps pictures, what with my new digicam and all!). Diet starts tomorrow A.M., or tonight if you count my cup of laxative tea as part of it...



THE MASTER CLEANSE OR LEMONADE DIET
Purpose:

To dissolve and eliminate toxins and congestion that have formed in any part of the body.
To cleanse the kidneys and the digestive system.
To purify the glands and cells throughout the entire body.
To eliminate all unusable waste and hardened material in the joints and muscles.
To relieve pressure and irritation in the nerves, arteries, and blood vessels.
To build a healthy blood stream.
To keep youth and elasticity regardless of our years.


WHEN TO USE IT?

When sickness has developed— for all acute and chronic conditions.
When the digestive system needs a rest and a cleansing.
When overweight has become a problem.
When better assimilation and building of body tissue is needed.


AND HOW OFTEN?

Follow the diet for a minimum of 10 days or more— up to 40 days and beyond may be safely followed for extremely serious cases. The diet has all the nutrition needed during this time. Three to four times a year will do wonders for keeping the body in a normal healthy condition. The diet may be undertaken more frequently for serious conditions.



HOW TO MAKE IT?

2 Tablespoons lemon or limejuice (approx. � lemon)

2 Tablespoons genuine maple syrup (Not maple flavored sugar syrup)

1/10 Teaspoon cayenne pepper (red pepper) or to taste

8 oz water, room temperature

Combine the juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper in a 10 oz glass jar w/lid and fill with the water.

Shake it up and drink. (Cold water may be used if preferred.)

Use fresh (organic) lemons or limes only, never canned lemon or limejuice nor frozen lemonade or frozen juice.

James Conway Sr., 78, a Founder of Mister Softee, Dies - New York Times

James Conway Sr., 78, a Founder of Mister Softee, Dies - New York Times:

There are words to the world's most annoying song!

"The CREAM-i-est DREAM-i-est SOFT ice CREAM
you GET from MIS-ter SOF-tee.
FOR a re-FRESH-ing de-LIGHT su-PREME
LOOK for MIS-ter SOF-tee...."

If you can't remember the tune, the first line (transposed to C major) is GAGEDCDCACBCDGEC...

elephant treadmill

So far, it's the trainers at the Alaska Zoo who are breaking a sweat trying to coax Maggie the elephant onto the world's first treadmill for a pachyderm.

Despite months of training using treats to entice the elephant to work out, the sometimes cantankerous African elephant is not much interested in using her treadmill to go for a brisk morning walk, or for that matter an afternoon or evening walk.

Maggie, for the most part, is chilling out.

Link

recap

Wow, this picture thing has got me excited. Here's a recap of this semester's more exciting moments.

Pointing to someone's ass.

New Orleans

Bell Biv Devoe.

Extra Super Hold

And here's a picture of an unattractive tomato roasting on the Henry Hudson, 24 miles and four ass blisters into the second leg of the NYC triathlon...damn right that's not a road bike, and damn right I left my granny rack on in the back!

pictures?!!!

Oh my god! I'm living in the stone age! I started my blog in 2004, before this whole "picture" thing happened to Blogger. Now you can post pictures?! So easy!!!!! Here is a recent picture of me at the 10th Street Russian Baths. I'm getting flogged by two men who only identified by their patronymics. With oak leaves. It only cost me $56!

micturate on this carpet

Would it be inappropriate to drop my pants in Furman 310 and spray the room with diarrhea? Or to replace the ugly piece of 3rd grader's "abstract art" in this cheap glass frame with a 24" x 24" picture of Kim Jong Il? Or my face photoshopped behind Kim Jong Il's glasses? Or to selectively pull all these mysterious cables out of the AV closet in here? Or to destroy the table and feed my torts books into the bonfire that I'll stoke with this lacquered wood? Or to hook a finger into the "emergency alarm" switch and disrupt 200 test-taking students upstairs? Or to punch the ceiling tiles into 1" x 2" strips and make a Jenga set out of them? Or pull up the dizzying grey-black-taupe carpet in an effort to locate that beating, beating heart? And to jump into the trashcan and sing Billy Joel's "The Longest Time" when security comes to cart me into the 1L subterranean detention center?

Stay tuned!

hey remember

i remember doing this last semester...slacking the whole semester, then cramming the last three days before the exam, and then slacking off on the cramming by blogging! except last semester i knew what the battle of forms was, i had a ruinous secret to live and hide, and i lived next to a park where i could watch pigeons in the widening gyre metaphorically enacting my anxieties over a frozen man-made pond. now i can't spell "contrax" let alone remember its concepts, i have a loose grasp on equal protection under the 14th amendment, and my secret stays with me in bushwick.

plus ca change, plus c'est don't remember the rest of that spanish saying. is "infingeable" a word? is "anti-non-counter-countermajoritarianism" a word? if a law student falls asleep in a public library, can she hear the sound of one wavy-haired professor professing?

bobby 7

residency on bobby lee 7th floor continues. why the undergrads (there are 17,000 of them, i counted) gotta be so fucking disrespectful? is this not a LIBRARY?! i must move to a more upper-middle class city where the rule of law/bourgeois politesse is respected. note to self: bring muzzles.

recipe for fun!

(pizza for lunch + pizza for dinner) * two weeks = "funny" feelings!

colbert v. bush

remember when i cared about more things than just the chevron doctrine? me neither. but here's a reminder of the sad state of the world.

YouTube - Colbert Roasts Bush 1-3

ache-itecture

Among the many reasons I hate NYU used to be its love for profligate architecture, as evidenced by the recurrence of unused atrium spaces (c.f. Coles and Bobst). Bobst in particular, what with those NHL-reminiscent, suicide-deterring plastic walls around the catwalks, the suicide-encouraging tesselated tiles, the suicide-encouraging panopticon, and - most of all - the goddamn waste-of-space atrium. Think of the premium on downtown real estate, probably something like $500,000,000,000 per square foot. And here is an empty space within a building that could probably fit an entire building. I'd guess that 60% of the available space inside Bobst goes unused except to echo the erratic date-stamping from the circulation desk.

And this used to bother me quite a bit, especially when I think about NYU's predatory relationship with real estate in the Village and NYU's population of alienated undergrads whose desires to commit suicide are not met with preventive care but, literally, cheap plastic barricades - this institutional monster!

But now, having spent the greater part of the last three weekends sitting on the seventh floor of Bobby Lee, west side, watching the Roca twins from Cooper Union pacing the 6th floor catwalk with nearly identical pomade-meringued hair, seeing my studious misery mirrored in the poor posture and sunken eyes of all of the students hunched over carrels on the 2nd-9th floor, getting my blocked view of Silver, with cigarette breaks every six hours or so...it must be Stockholm syndrome! How I learned to love the atomic Bobst.

I'm half crazy, Daisy!

inky pinkies that describe late april

Prolix frolics. Terrible wearable. L train smell train. Hairy cherry. Surgery perjury. Cybersex Khyber-Mex. Albatross gal lacrosse. Knickerbocker liquor locker. Awesome flotsam.

administrative what what?

I'm feeling a little arbitrary and capricious...or is it unreasonable...or am I just in a critical mood? Or maybe it's all a big San Francisco predawn fog? Gulp.

extra ordinary

Two consecutive nights of extraordinarily vivid dreams. Unnerving verisimilitude so I'm waking shaking. I can't remember any of them except the one I had between Snooze #2 and Snooze #3 this morning...but how do hours pass in dream time when only 10 real-time minutes have passed? This dream involved L. throwing a hooked dagger at my head. It thudded into the drywall above the doorjamb. Then I sobbed and told her not to move to my neighborhood, the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop on the L and M.

(Oh my God, is my dream brain so brilliant as to make the connection between Myrtle-Wyckoff and the L and M trains? I just recognized the symbolism. Whoa. My dream brain is smarter than my real brain.)

In unrelated news, my Admin prof has just filled two chalkboards with two nonsensical lists. The chalkboards keep rolling up as she tries to write on them. They include such insight as "zing the driver," "M.A.A.D.", "full-press law enf. of MSU laws," "free cabs @ night from bars," "rethink suburbanization?", "congestion mitigation." I guess all that is not nonsensical, but it's written on the board like this: "public transportation-->free cabs @ night from BARS-->MAAD training driver standardization size press passive air bags zing public choice--> curfews consumer technologies enforcement truck laws command and control driver economc consequences externalities rethink?"

goddamn friday why'm i in the library

...printing reams of paper in the library? There's a catalogue for novelty sci-fi bobbleheads. I leaf through it while waiting for "The Instruments of Presidential Command: Executive Orders." I had read "instruments" as "sinstruments," which would have made for much more exciting reading. Among the sci-fi characters in the bobblehead catalogue: Marshall (Mathers III), Smeagol, Cheech, Chong, Kip Dynamite, Michael Myers. I want bobblehead Legolas. Is this wrong?

Another character in the catalog also reminded me of other things that might be potentially wrong. For example, is it bad that as recently as twenty years ago I was "excited" by things like (1) the metallic undergarments that Carrie Fisher sports in that scene in Star Wars when she's chained to Jabba the Hutt and (2) Robocop's mouth?

legless

Dream. "My" white shepherd Georgia Brown and my boyfriend/border collie Boo are lying in the living room at 93 Grattan Street but my apartment looks nothing like it should. The day is overcast. Georgia and Boo are poking noses into each other's fur. They're roughhousing a bit, passing a ball back and forth. Georgia lunges for the ball and accidentally bites down onto Boo's hind leg. It snaps off like a dry twig and Boo lets out a yelp. I hurry to pick up his leg, which is about as big as Lincoln log and is bloodless except for a circle of red buried underneath black fur. Boo is crying but not bleeding. I know I can save his leg if I can find a surgeon, so I place the leg on the kitchen table so Georgia won't eat it and I run out the door looking for a veteranarian. There's a parade or riot passing by outside, or maybe it's just Penn Station at rush hour, but I'm being jostled and disoriented by a people. I need a surgeon! I keep shouting, but I'm lost in the crowd. Perhaps half an hour, an hour, several hours pass. I worry about leaving Boo's wound unsutured but I can't think of what else to do. Finally, I give up and return to the apartment. A team of surgeons in green scrubs are gathered around the kitchen table, upon which Boo lies panting. I look to his leg and see that it has been stitched back with big caricaturized white loops. It's comical but also effective, and Boo looks up at me with his optimistic border collie stare. I'm so happy he's restored. I ask the surgeons what happened. One of them removes his surgical mask and says, "Well, we just couldn't wait any longer." I know Boo will be good as new in a couple weeks, ready to play fetch again.

I don't know if watching this video had anything to do with my dream: http://www.break.com/index/2legdog4.html

faith in the DoD

The Department of Defense: (1) incredibly stupid or (2) scrambling to justify spying against a law student organization best known for gay trivia night and panel discussions?

Subpoena This: OUTLaw

well that was disgusting

Let's apply some statutory interpretation techniques to the "vegetarian Peking spare ribs" that came upchuckily up last night around 3:45 a.m.:

1) Plain Text: I think this is the kind of oxymoronic language that even the Stevenses and the Scalias can agree to call absurd. Ribs? Wheat gluten pressed into patties are not even the simulacrum of ribs. Unlike veggie burgers that come painted with black charbroil lines, here there's not even the outline of a bone to suggest what this wheat gluten patty might've been. There's less than a ball a yarn's chance in a roomful a cats that this wheat gluten pressed into patties came from anywhere east of the Gateway Arch. "Peking" my ass.


2) Intent: What were the framers of the Vegetarian Paradise 2 menu intending to do when calling these pressed wheat gluten patties "vegetarian Peking spare ribs"? Legislative history suggests scrivener's error. Scrivener's omission: lack of ironic quotations around key terms, like "spare ribs" and "Peking." Scrivener, please correct this? He would prefer not to.

3) Purpose: What was the purpose of the menu item? Historical context suggests that this menu was written in 1992 at a time when federal agricultural subsidies had been reduced and the nation's wheat farmers were overburdened with the season's unusually successful crop yield, which in turn flooded the wheat gluten market and sent prices through the floor. In framing the menu, the owners were trying to achieve the twin goals of 1) relieving the wheat gluten market by encouraging the consumption of gluten products and 2) making some big vegetarian bucks in the land of plenty. Actually, who'm I fooling? I haven't paid sufficient attention in my Admin class to actually understand statutory interpretation. I still can't distinguish purpose and intent. F*k this!

Takeaway(s): Vegetarian Peking spare ribs. They'll break your heart and steal your wife. You'll wake up feeling vivisected. You'll spend $9.95 on them and wish you had gotten the Crispy Soul Chicken instead. You'll pack your cheeks with them and eat them over the course of your four-month spring hibernation (vernalation?). You'll cry, you'll die, you'll handover your checkbook. Vegetarian Peking spare ribs: Just Say No. Or Not Often.

we had a steak knife that we lost in the impossibly narrow chasm between the counter and the refrigerator. it was nothing special: not particularly sharp, serrations worn to smoothness, the plastic grip probably melted from times when we left it too close to the pan of frying tofu. i've thought so much about this steak knife the last four days. i imagine seppuku aimed at the heart, slowly, easing in, stainless steel against the valves to my left ventricle - as if there were nerves down there, as if i could feel it! and the feeling of it just like a breeze. i don't know why this image gives me comfort.

don't you call the wellness center: it's the ideation not of suicide but of surgery, a precise cut that'll remove the offending bits. i find that topical analgesics don't do the work of the surgeon's scalpel. spiritual healers just voodoo economists, acupunture just a underenthusiastic version of just what the doctor ordered.

now this knife is, in my mind, solace. so i have dreams that like bells' tolls attack sharp and decay over the course of days, and all the relief i can think of is just holding the steak knife against a wall and leaning my chest into it. and again the feeling of it just like a breeze. i just wait for medical technology to advance to such levels that the effects of this selective self-surgery match my expectations for it. i think i need to throw up two pounds of vegetarian "peking spare ribs." right. now.