transference

I am on a selling frenzy. In the last week, I have sold my guitar amp, my two bikes, and my futon, and have promised away a prized Ikea Poang chair and a bass amp as gifts. A woman came over from Bed-Stuy tonight to buy the futon. Her email address was "littlelocks" and her name showed up as "Peacefully-Blessed," but she signed her emails "Patricia." Two years ago when I was tearfully looking for apartments, I almost moved in with a woman, who, like Peacefully-Blessed, preferred descriptive names, and signed her emails Zaftig Beauty. I loved her. I loved them. Peacefully-Blessed showed up at my house two hours late with a Pacific Islander man upon whom I immediately bestowed a cursed North Face bubble goose that has been stowed under the futon for a year - I've tried to give it away twice, to no avail. Dari the PI man took it. I helped them bring the futon down to the front door and then I said BYEEEEEE! and fled upstairs with the cash before they could decide that the station wagon they brought was too small for the futon. (They got it home. I just got a text from Peacefully-Blessed that reads "We just got it up to my apt. Thank you paz y amor.")

Now there is a hole where the futon was and the living room echoes. I am on a premature selling frenzy, because I still have a month left in New York and now I have nowhere to sit when I go on my Lost-watching orgies. Now I have to sit on the floor to watch Matthew Fox sucking Evangeline Lilly's face, and the floor is hard and covered and dog hair and little pieces of raw chicken. I just started feeding Boo a raw diet, not because of weird ideas about dog nutrition but because I don't want to buy a 20-pound bag of dog food and have 10-pounds left at the end of the month so I'd rather just buy 5-pound bags of chicken thighs once a week. The math doesn't work out. Also, a raw diet means Boo lifts big pieces of raw chicken from his bowl and then sprays chicken innards everywhere as he chaws it down. So that in turn means that when I procrastinate and resist reading the four months of Tart Law I haven't read, I must sit amongst pieces of chicken and piles of hair and half-chewed rawhide "Retriever" rolls and a pile of homeless curtains to watch television.

I have also run out of things to sell. I am hunting around the house looking for other people's possessions to sell. Stephanie is in Vancouver for the weekend for a conference called "Trans SomaTechnics." It sounds like DJ equipment but it's actually about homos. Stepho said she was intimidated because she kept getting emails from a person who identifies as a "femme gimp" and she worries she won't be able to charm the crowd by being the most outré cool person there, but I have faith in the winningness of her wild mullet and buttonless button-up shirts. Anyway, I'm lonely and I have a take-home final to do in Art Law, the oxymoronic jumbo shrimp of the law school curriculum, which I couldn't care less about, which I forestall by selling things I need to people I don't know. Brusque Bruce from Sheepshead Bay brought a cop friend named Danny and absconded with my beloved amplifier yesterday night with a firm handshake and a pile of twenties; sweet Shawn from East New York with barbered dreadlocks and impeccable clothes bought my zippy gray bike for his lady friend Kiora this morning. How much is my dusty milkcrate filled with salvaged softballs and baseballs worth? Half a jug of Dr. Bronner's soap? "Civilization and Its Discontents" or "The Second Sex"? My Goodwin Proctor deck of cards? I have a pair of needle-nosed pliers that don't close properly...yours for $15. Baby, buy buy buy!

It's finals! It's finally finals! It's finally the final finals! I'm off my rocker! This season I have a new shirt to replace the Super Mario Bros. shirt that I usually spend the week in - Stepho bought me a giant kelly green shirt/pup tent at ComicCon that has a picture of a little frog in red pants on the front. He's saying, "I'm wearing little pants to cover my genitals!" The shirt is a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which we learned about in Art Law, or at least we heard about, or at least I just vaguely recall those syllables emerging from the muckety muck of lecture one day in January. WTFOMG. I expect in four or five days time to be complete free of degree requirements, God Bless America, Peacefully-Blessed, Zaftig blessings, I will see you all in a few.

why i love my law school friends

Re: an upcoming pickup baseball game: "I have a glove, and I also have a baseball inlaid with the Constitution!"

We're going to throw the Constitution around!

doodles

What I doodled during a morning phone conference and afterward. It's not that I'm not paying attention, it's that I must doodle in order to concentrate.

embarrassing

I paraphrase the New York Times: Microchipping your pet is environmentally friendly because of all the gasoline and paper you save not driving around looking for your lost pet and not putting up flyers.

The New York Times is edited by idiots.

je fais du jogging

I jogged to school today, after vowing to do it for three years. "Jogging" is a euphemism referring to my slow shuffle over the Williamsburg bridge - WHICH, I noticed for the first time today, because I was not frantically biking past all the signs, was engineered by a man named "Lefferts Lefferts Buck"!

I almost died of heat exhaustion. It was 80 degrees in New York today. My mouth was as if stuffed with cotton balls and ceramic bisque. I got sunburnt and was incoherent for the rest of the day. Then I went to Shake Shack for lunch (thanks for waiting in line, Oliver!) and inhaled a cheeseburger and a strawberry shake and then booked it to NYC Costume to buy elf ears for tomorrow's comic con, then biked in a frenzy home and then passed out from too much exertion.

The picture on the front of today's Post was a teddy bear captioned "Islamo-nuts" something something "terrorist." This picture was display on a flatscreen in Madison Square Park behind an image of twitching cartoonish teddy bears. Why?

I love you all! I hate the L train!

violet

As much as I dislike its president, malign its managerial dysfunction, and begrudge Debt Ellis, NYU Law has been my home (and some of my heart) for the last three years, and I feel blessed to have met the people that I met through the school. You're all amazing. Law school has ruined me for non-lawyers because when I'm with them I pine for the ruthless analytical scrutiny that you're so well trained to deliver. When I'm with bricks, I long for a mounted flatscreen TV with an image of bricks. Reena would say that this is the part of the day when I get sentimental, generous with drinks, and become a ripe target for free Quiznos dinners - all true, and I'm about to graduate and fly far away, so Bananarchist is only going to get mistier and mistier in the upcoming weeks. Just a warning!

But really, I do, I do love you, I do love you all! If we canteloupe, lettuce marry! My dog is crying. Goodbye!

drinky

Who wants to go on a bender? Raise your hand!

fart law

I stopped going to my Art Law class because I couldn't stand how elitist my professor was encouraging everybody to be. She disseminates the idea that "Art" is some talismanic invocation that, once uttered, shelters what can best be described as steamingly arrogant shit from criticism - not high-falutin interpretive criticism, in which she and only the art-educated few might engage, but pragmatic criticism, say, from those who disagree that a wide public space should be vivisected by an artist's self-aggrandizement in the form of a giant iron wall - and that those who would criticize are philistines, fascists, and shunners of light. Then with the right side of her mouth she insinuates that only real art should be protected, and disparages the relevance of people like Jock Sturges, and because this is an untenable position for a First Amendment literalist like herself, she begrudgingly admits Jock Sturges his rights but make sure all of her acolytes in her 150 minutes of weekly self-inspection sessions know that she doesn't really think his art is of high enough quality to be considered among more critically-acclaimed artists. Sometimes it just makes me want to shout at her that her entire empire has no clothes on, but instead I opt not to go at all, or to go, sit in the back, and read Oliver's del.icio.us links instead.

what's annoying

is checking Facebook and finding each time that my boss has linked to yet another Hillary-supporting, Obama-bashing news story or photograph.

I can understand the fervor for Obama, since he's charismatic and new, but why would anyone get their tits in a twist for Hillary, that boring old second-run? One can picture Hillary supporters weakly waving index card-sized American flags, but one cannot imagine why they would want to do it with any gusto. And note that I'm not some huge Obama groupie. I was ambivalent about the Democratic ticket until I read this mere months ago. When centrist lawyers suggest abrogating due process for immigrants who have committed crimes, I stop thinking they're executive material.

spelling bee

I had very vivid dreams this morning: a drive from New York to Boston, tanks on I-95 bearing U.N. peacekeepers, a white Volvo station wagon crashing in slow motion in the rearview mirror, amazing new architecture on the Charles River, a ROC Embassy with a topiary in the pattern of the DPRK flag. My friend Matt K. also featured prominently in this dream but that might just have been because he was sleeping in the next room over.

Last night, Raj rallied his friends to the bi-weekly spelling bee at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, which promised to be nerd fun but was, in fact, terrifying nerd fun. My mind blanked when I got up there to spell my words and I almost misspelled "ascension" - I blame this on my hunger - but I recovered, spelled it correctly, and ended up in third place. (I struck out on "capitatim.") I gave away my sandwich prize to Claire, who returned the favor by giving me her sandwich prize when she won the omniverbal grammar competition that followed the spelling bee. My voice shook! I'm supposed to be a litigator, and my voice shook! I vowed by text message to kill Raj for dragging me out there but in the end it turned out to be great fun. Raj amused the crowd (of his admirers) by declaring that parking on the moon should be legal. His friend Meera wanted polka dots on nachos. Stephanie leapt off the stage and clicked her heels in triumph after "tumulary," and I met a nice fellow named Ari whose grammar sucked, but we were all defeated by a friendless Williamsburgian who outspelled second-place Raj by six words and who, feeling deified by his victory, reached over to my beer as I drank from it and demanded a sip. Excuse me? I refused, even after he declared, "I've been tested!", and was made to feel as if I had denied Jesus his sponge of vinegar.


(Matt, Stephanie, and the judges. Stephanie is declaring that she wishes to be the present incarnation of David Bowie.)

I felt I was at home when I could see the mouths of the spectators silently spelling words that competitors failed to spell, as if it were so disgraceful that such giveaways as "ossuary," "vanadium," and "halophyte" should be so butchered, as if that disgrace could only be redeemed by the spectators' silent correction.

(Matt, Raj, and Meera.)

To the left of this photograph is Elam Blackman, a folk singer from Knoxville who went almost entirely ignored by the eight of us sitting in this room chatting. We felt awkward and impolite, and so we guiltily paused to listen to the guy whenever he addressed his dull folksy commentary at us ("This is a song about a trip I took to Mexico. I ended up sleeping on my ex-girlfriend's floor." It is time for folk music to die.), and then resorted to charades and text messages to communicate across the room without shouting over the music. We left after about an hour of this, and then trooped to the G train to wave goodbye. What nerdery!

shears

Am I the only person who feels uncomfortable trimming her pubes with 10" kitchen shears? Come on, product designers!

movie

Here's my first attempt at a movie ever, so don't judge my Windows MovieMaker skills. I made it as a thank you gift for a wonderful professor who wrote me a letter of recommendation.

hatland

Try not to Google the answer to this one (it's much easier than the previous puzzle):

Welcome to Hatland (population 1,000), an island country where there are only a few laws. They are:

(1) Everyone wears either a black or a white hat.
(2) No one can talk about the colors of their hats.
(3) No one can see the color of his or her hat. There are no reflective surfaces in the land.
(4) Each person who discovers he or she is wearing a white hat must go to the town square the next day and commit suicide.

(4) is pretty gruesome, but because of (2) and (3), there have never been any mandatory suicides on the island. However, one day, a shipwrecked sailor crawls to shore, and before dying, he gasps these last words: "At least one of you is wearing a white hat!"

What happens?

why i resisted facebook, the long story

I just learned not to be so cavalier with the feelings of people who mean me no harm.

So, instead, a logic puzzle: one hundred engineers are in prison. They are going to be executed the next day. The executioner will line them up in a column, each engineer facing the back of the head of the engineer in front of him. The executioner will put either red hats or blue hats on all of the engineers, but who gets what color hat will not be determined until the day of the execution. The executioner will begin at the back of the line, and ask that engineer what color hat he is wearing. If the engineer guesses correctly, then his life will be spared. If he guesses incorrectly, he will be killed. The only things the engineer may say are either "Blue" or "Red"; no other words may cross his lips. The engineers meet the night before to strategize about how to save the most lives, but because the prison is a panopticon, the executioner can hear what the strategy is ahead of time and alter his plans to thwart it - for example, if the engineers all agree to say "Blue," then the executioner will put only red hats on their heads. What is the maximum number of engineers that can be saved? (Hints: the answer is a code, many more than half can be saved, and engineers can be martyrs too.)

ceci n'est pas une mouth

Vulgarities.

people love a dog with a soccer ball

saturday pathos

Things I remember from today:

1. Dog-eared, weatherbeaten, shopworn, unfinished book called "Mensa Sudoku."
2. People ignoring or mocking the Bronx Leadership Academy High School French Club (the school I taught at in 2003-2004), whose members walked ten times across the Brooklyn Bridge trying to raise money for a trip to Montreal.
3. The human avatar of Comic Book Guy in Forbidden Planet, an NYC comic book store, asking a store clerk not to euphemistically refer to the McFarlane's Mercenary action figures as "independent defense contractors."
4. A proto-lesbian shopfest.

a visit to the met's musical instruments section

baby mix-up

bookface

I just joined Facebook after years of waffling and trepidation. Now what?