games we play

Since my metaphors are a bust, then let me just stick to sweetly recalling the reasons I love you. Prominent among these many brazillions of reasons is your love for wordplay. No one is more adept with the screwiness and indecency of English, and Chinglish, than you. I would forego all the sleep in my life – as if I haven’t already! – to stay up late with you and laugh at the dumb puns we think of.

We have been thinking of turning the following list into an impulse-purchase book, to be published by a quirky imprint like Klutz and sold at the counters of franchise bookstores across the English-speaking world, and making sacks of cash, and then spending the cash on blow (JK, California state bar moral character committee, JK!!), but since you have temporarily devoted yourself to your dissertation and I have temporarily devoted myself to jumbling all of the elements of intentional torts and levels of constitutional scrutiny, I present it here, for other people to be amused by your big beautiful brain (housed as it is in your B.B.H.). We play these games with each other. You think they just kill time, but I think they make me crazy for you.

Smellera

This is a game of metaphors. I know I am supposed to be shying away from metaphors today, but I think if I had played this game more diligently then perhaps you would not have been offended by my nonsensical blogpost about those seven bright spots in the sky, because it would have made more sense.

The object of the game is to describe what the smell of an object would look like. You suggested the ingenious and silly portmanteau “Smellera” (smell + camera) as a name. One must disassociate the smell with the thing that produces the smell, consider the mood the smell evokes, and then describe another image that would evoke that mood.

Example: What would the smell of burning tires look like?
Incorrect answer: A flame consuming a stack of black rubber.
Correct answer: A little girl beaten by clowns.

Example: What would the smell of lilacs look like?
Incorrect answer: Crushed purple petals of lilacs. [That’s just too literal, folks!]
Correct answer: Four people staggering arm-in-arm down the middle of a city street just before dawn on a Sunday. One of them trips and the rest go down with her.

Respeck Direck

A simple game that mostly just makes fun of southeast Asians. (Did I write that? Oh, no! It’s backwards day! I actually love people who love music created by shaking nuts and bolts in a jar!) The game originates in an extremely tedious documentary about women-loving-women that you prefaced with your brilliant commentary one long night last May. The object of this game have a conversation incorporating as many words that end “-ect,” except to pronounce them to rhyme with “-eck.” A simple, easy-to-understand, direck game. Profoundly entertaining, but only starting in the second hour of play.

A-P-P-L-E

This game has its origin in something I saw when I returned to Brooklyn from a trip to California in the summer of 2006. You had put a single yellow Gerber daisy – I love those! – in a single-stem vase and attached a note that said, “I miss you, Lemcy!” Underneath “Lemcy,” in faint pencil, I could see that you had considered writing “Nuñez” but erased it. What was “Lemcy”? And what was “Nuñez”?

I soon learned that these were the results of a new game you had invented while I was away. The object of this game is just to create encoded words. The coding system is simple. Each letter of a word is replaced with an adjacent letter. For consonants, it’s the next or previous consonant. For vowels, it’s any vowel, and sometimes Y. Or sometimes you just ditch the requirement of adjacency and the different treatment of vowels and consonants, and you go with whatever feels right. Hence M-A-N-D-Y became N-U-N-E-Z and L-E-M-C-Y, and S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E becomes S-T-A-O-G-U-M-O-I. Most of the time the new words make no sense, but sometimes they’re great.

But you didn’t tell me the rules of this game and you started calling me Lemcy and left me to figure out what the hell you were talking about! This game is called A-P-P-L-E, because of some obscure reference to the cryptex in The Da Vinci Code.

For example, a recent actual email exchange:
Mandy: Oh Staogumoi, you're always the cleverest!
Stephanie: Nooooooo Lemc, YOU are the dmititits!

Bacne

Another very simple game. The object is to be the last person to say the word “bacne” on any given night. (“Bacne” is a portmanteau that describes the volcanic dermatological activity on the backsides of certain people’s brothers, and Gwyneth Paltrow. (I have seen the latter in person, and truth is an absolute defense to defamation!)) This game must be played in bed while both (or all) parties are extremely tired. The last person to say “bacne” wins, simple as that.

I won the first and last time we played this game!

Bacne!

I'm China Work on My Korea

One of my favorite games of all time, also a simple one. This is a game of puns on geographical names. The object of this is to have a conversation incorporating as many geographical names as possible. Everyone wins in this game.

For example:
Mandy: Staogumoi, get Djibouti in the kitchen and help me roast this Turkey!
Stephanie: Lemcy, I Canada right now! I’m China work on my Korea by finishing up this dissertation!
Mandy: Jamaican me horny. Does that Sweden the deal?

Lettuce Souprise You

There is actually a salad buffet franchise in the metro Atlanta area called “Lettuce Souprise You.” I’m not sure who thought that one would be a good idea. This game is just another variation on the pun theme, except using words related to foods found at a salad buffet and describing feelings of excitement or “souprise.” Example: “If we cantaloupe, lettuce marry!” and “You will always have a pizza my heart!”

Closely related to Women’s Reproduction, another pun game using words describing parts of female anatomy. Example: “Do you want to go out for fallopian food?” “Sure, as soon as this show is ova.”

Mondegreens

This is a game of homophony, and isn’t something we created but is something we practice. The rest of you may be familiar with this one. A mondegreen is a word or phrase that is homophonous with another. “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” is a pretty famous mondegreen. The way you make this game ours is by using your B.B.B. housed as it is in your B.B.H. to come up with incredibly weird shit. See, e.g., http://bananarchist.blogspot.com/2007/12/step-on-me-shoe.html. I am supposed to understand that, “inspiritu?” I can’t even think of an example to put here because I’m not half as clever as you.

How Big is a Crumb to a Mouse?

This is not necessarily a word game but is another game we play. It is a game of comparisons. It began because for years I have wondered the question in the game’s title, “How big does a crumb seem to a mouse?” The conclusion that you came to was simple: “As big as a biscuit seems to you.” I found this delightful, and for one hot summer we filled lazy hours asking these questions to each other. The object of the game, I think, is pretty clear, and I will illustrate by example rather than explain.

Example: How big is a ping-pong ball to a dog?
Incorrect answer: As big as a fist to you. [The answer is incorrect because it should be compared with an object of similar shape, color, texture, or theme.]
Correct answer: As big as a softball is to you.

Example: How big is a hamburger to an elephant?
Correct answer: As big as your kawaii Japanese hamburger erasers are to you.

Example: How big is a water bottle to an ant?
Correct answer: As big as a grain silo to a cat, or a sperm whale is to a minnow, or the Lipstick Building is to you.

This game is related to Miniature Dinner Party, which is not a word game at all but just a flight of fancy we like to take from time to time. We imagine how we could have a dinner party where we serve edible simulacra that will make our guests feel like tiny people. We could steam entire heads of broccoli and pretend each head is just a spear – because broccolis are fractal dendrite formations! – or boil and peel a thousand potatoes and fill a baby pool with potatoes and have our guest hold two hiking poles like chopsticks and pretend the potatoes were rice! We could spear whole chickens on sugarcanes and call them kabobs. This is also an endlessly entertaining game, and is closely related to Giant Dinner Party, where we do exactly the opposite and serve edible simulacra meant to make our guests feel like giants. Baby corn is always on the menu.

Acrostics

We fell in love fast and furious in the fall and winter of 2005-2006. For certain reasons that will go unenumerated here, we had to find a clandestine way to communicate with each other. Turns out we hid in plain sight, and I filled my blog, and you yours, with our secrets to one another. The object of this game is to tell your lover you are sorry for the ways you have wronged her, and you have faith now, and you will do better. You should do this in as direct a way as possible, e.g.:

But now I’m back in Palo Alto, and it's harder to communicate these things from afar. Unclear why I'm here. You can't do a damn thing after 9 p.m. in this tiny town, and I miss our city and our shitbox and our lives. And so I walk around with a dog that misses you terribly, and look for answers in the sky, and then misinterpret them and miswrite them and upset you. Oh, what am I saying? We've gotten out of practice. Actually, it may just be me. No one could be expected to put up with this, and I understand you want to leave. Go, sally forth, but come back soon. Just about three months will do it, right? I couldn't stand more. We can do it in less. Or, I think we should just talk until we figure something out. A lot of talking may be required. In New York. Night time, or any other time you prefer. I'll be there in a week.

entries from my notes, con law day 1

I cannot maintain for long this voice of simple, literal, dolorous sentences about slight movements that weave into extended metaphors using the past and present, storytelling and contemplation, sensation and feeling. The metaphors never say what I want them too, I offend when I mean to encourage, and then I scramble to clean up the fallout. We all know how long half-lives are for radioactive material; the damage stays on.

So I think I would do better to stop searching for symbolism in my life and then writing uncontrollably about it. It is in my nature to write bright, extremely clever, lighthearted crap. So I now return you to the morning’s notes, taken during Professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s review of the federal judicial power:

Gina works the diner all day. One of her customers, Customer, grabs her hand as she approaches his booth and forcefully demands a date with her for the following evening. Gina politely declines, and wrenches her hand away, perhaps more forcefully than she needs to. She feels a twinge in her ulna. Customer leaves by paying the check mostly in dimes and nickels, and leaving $.04 as her tip, causing Gina to experience nausea and premature menstrual spotting. Gina leaves the diner at the end of the day and drives her old Cutlass Sierra to meet her boyfriend, Tommy, where he is on strike at the docks.

When she pulls out of the parking lot, her front right tire, manufactured by Kumho Tires, sold by Searcy’s Distributor to Slocum Auto and then to the used Cutlass distributor from whom Gina leased her car, blows. Although Gina has had training as a NASCAR driver, not even a NASCAR champion, and certainly not Gina in this case, could control a Cutlass with a blown tire, and she careens into a nearby building. The building is an inn hosting a convention of common carriers. No one inside the building is hurt by the accident, but there is extensive damage to the building. Innkeeper angrily runs outside toward Gina, waving a copy of his accident insurance policy, demanding settlement. Gina stumbles of her car with a dazed look, and Intervener, a Good Samaritan who is on her way to check whether Gina is hurt, accidentally kicks Innkeeper in the shin as he stalks by. As a result, Innkeeper declares, “Intervener, everyone knows you’re a leperous crone!”

Graham Greene, an upstart journalist sipping a venti half-caf latte at a café nearby, overhears Innkeeper’s shout and mistakes Intervener for a famous movie star who has recently purchased Brownacre, a toxic waste dump that leaches chemicals into the groundwater at the edge of town. The next day, the Town Inquirer publishes a news story on the movie star’s putative leprosy, and an accompanying editorial lambasting her as a leprous carpetbagger for her recent property purchase.

If, decades later, Graham Greene, spurred on by his successful reportage on the leprosy crisis of the late 2000s, wins a Pulitzer and publishes a well-renowned treatise on investigative journalism, who will prevail in a negligence suit brought by Intervener against NASCAR?

1. NASCAR, because Intervener had a duty to mitigate.
2. Intervener, unless NASCAR committed a battery on Gina.
3. Neither. Because of the political question doctrine, the courts may not intervene.
4. Hearsay.

repetition

I don't know why I keep writing about looking at things outdoors. I think there must be something in California's allergens that turn ordinary people into metaphor-hungry, spirituality-starved hippie melancholics. I am taking antihistimines both to combat the insomnia and the spirit of the Sixties. They work against neither!

You know what I realized? I love people who love people who love language. My current campaign to win my partner back focuses on snowing her under with verbiage, via talks, texts, emails, chats, and if all goes well, logorrhea to an uninterested clinician, by the doctrine of transferred intent, said the hero in this story. Fish fish fish fish fish. It's a dogs dogs dog eat dogs dogs dog world.

the little dipper

I only recently realized that you see much more in the dark with your flashlight turned off than with it on. On, all you get is a spot of illumination that stretches, at its dimmest point, at most fifteen feet in front of you, and everything beyond that point is terrifyingly black. You mostly illuminate yourself and permit others to see you. Off, you’re blind at first, but your eyes adjust and you start to spy movements, then shapes, then details, in the dark.

I left the house tonight just before midnight for a walk. I felt brave, because being alone and outside in Palo Alto after 10 p.m. scares me. Everyone in this town is asleep or dead. It’s dark all around, and there are wide streets you can walk on for half an hour without seeing a single car go by. There are occasional streetlights, but their bulbs are filled with sodium vapor and the light they cast just passes through the bursting skins of the many sycamores on my street and creates frightening orange shadows everywhere. Even the sound of liquid amber gumballs scraping around on the ground scares me, afterhours.

Before I left, Dad equipped me with two headlights, one for my head, one for Boo’s head. I left them on until we were out of his worried sight, and then walked in the semi-dark the three long blocks to the giant field next to my middle school. Three or more football fields could fit on it. It’s latched shut in the day time when unhappy twelve year-olds are forced by their lesbian P.E. teachers to crab-walk on it – an image that brings me delight every time I recall it – but after school hours it’s free for dog frolicking. It’s next to a private elementary school. Both schools empty completely by seven and leave a long, quiet stretch of N. California Avenue more or less free of traffic until seven the next morning.

At day’s end, the California dry bake becomes a dry chill. I used to walk in the foothills at night with my bottom-weighted Pisces not talking, just shivering. I had a t-shirt on so I pulled my arms into the barrel of the shirt and clutched Boo’s leash through it. Boo was ecstatic about his unexpected walk and pranced ahead of me sniffing and peeing on bushes. We got to the field and I unleashed him and chased him so he would run around. He took off for the sprinklers on the far side of the field, hundreds of feet away.

I had come to relax my eyes. My go-to explanation for my insomnia is that light pollution in the western hemisphere has permanently damaged my circadian rhythms and made me unable to discern night from day, so I can’t sleep, and my foggy brain will never be brighter than the constant twilight it perceives. The trick, I think, is to reintroduce it to darkness. The middle of the field is the darkest place I can get to on a walk from my house, so I stood there a moment and looked up at the sky. I did what I always try to do: locate the Big Dipper and the pointer stars, measure five cup-heights, and follow my friends Dubhe and Merak to shy, elusive Polaris at the door of her inscrutable hat-shaped house.

I can never find the Little Dipper, but I like to make a sport of trying. Years ago I lay on a riverbed in New Hampshire with a nineteen year-old girl who loved mathematics and explained to me, as I searched the night sky for the Little Dipper, how a the four-dimensional equivalent of a sphere would manifest in the third dimension as a point that expands to a sphere that contracts back to a point and then disappears. The girl’s unfortunate name created the same phonemes as a phrase describing an action one might take on safari – her first name sounded like the name of an African prey animal, and her last name was pronounced “Shoots” – and this spring I saw her for the first time in five years, in a suit, interviewing at the NYU Law public interest fair – but what am I saying – oh, that I did not find the Little Dipper that night, but I found God in the combination of the night sky and the fourth dimension, and for the first time in my dumb little life I understood what “awe” meant, and I have been waiting to see it again ever since.

I told somebody once that she was my north star. In fact, I declared this, as a speech-act, in front of more than a hundred raptly attentive people at a bend in Horseshoe Creek. They cried with joy and applauded after I said this. It turned out I was lying, or exaggerating, or mistaken, because only three months later I had completely lost my bearings and gone in an entirely different direction looking for true north. I am starting to think that my hunt for the Little Dipper is a fool’s errand, because my compass will always be drawn off course by magnetic declination, or because my plastic-capped eyes have deteriorated beyond repair and can simply no longer see, or because the Little Dipper is an invisible fiction. Or I am just faithless, and an inconstant person cannot find a north star.

I didn’t find it tonight. I stood there for a few long minutes, and my eyes started seeing streaks and constellations where there were none. Stars emerged and then faded. Blinking lights traveled the long slow distance between takeoff and landing. The bottom fifth of the sky to the south was almost white from the lights in San Jose, and a car drove the lonely stretch in front of the field and flooded me out with its headlights anyway. Boo ran back toward me and I dropped to my knees and wrestled with him. He batted me with his front legs but then I accidentally stepped on his foot and he cried loudly and retreated from our game, so I apologized to him, leashed him, and led him off the field and back toward home.

entries from my notes, essay workshop 1

George Takei just said something about real property and trusts – I really thought he was speaking in a foreign language. Dutch. Amharic. Maybe Russian. OMG. OMGWTF.

Another thing I miss about New York: short blocks and difficult-to-maneuver bike routes. My bike ride to Stanford consists of three straight, fast, boring lines. I get up at 8 a.m., nuke a bowl of oatmeal, slice strawberries against my thumb, eat it while checking my email and reading the news, shoo Boo into the backyard, and climb on my bike and roll out. It is one block to the left turn onto N. California Avenue. Two and a half miles straight down N. California and Stanford Avenue. Right turn at Escondido Road, straight for a mile past the elementary school and a sea of dorms. Then I am at the large outdoor Alexander Calder sculpture (!) that tells me I have arrived at F.I.R. Hall, and I go to the law school café, sheepishly beg for a cup of hot water for the teabag I’ve brought from home, thank the friendly patient man in the café who gives it to me every day, and make my way to the third middle row, fourth seat of Room 290, try to say something witty to Pamela, text Oliver and Connie the run-time of today’s DVD, and wait for the lecture to start. The most exciting part of the ride is when I go under Alma and I can hear the Caltrain pulling out of the station over my head. But other than that, it’s just pump, pump, pump. I concentrate on the size and power of my quadriceps, which ache, because there are neither turns to strategize nor cars to negotiate nor traffic lights to give me rest. It takes seventeen minutes to get there and fifteen minutes to get home. No bridges, no Hasidim, no Manhattan drivers, no Domino factory, no view of life from over the East River. I don’t even sing to myself.

Sometimes, to make the ride go by faster, I envision getting creamed by the #35 bus, flying off my bike like a formless sack of flour, my bones already shattered, and landing with a thud on the asphalt and having a gold Prius driven by a distracted thirty-eight year old mother of three on her way to Walgreens for extra-large tampons and Valium – she’s on her cell phone arguing with Bank of America about a late fee she thinks was improperly levied - run over my head, crushing my helmet, closing my casket at the funeral, devastating my parents, reuniting my friends, kindling guilty relationships (how could you say on your wedding website that you met at your mutual friend’s funeral?), laying the groundwork for the memorial sewer cap that will be placed for me in a park in the middle of a traffic island on El Camino Road and will prevent generations of stupid schoolchildren from accidentally dropping into the sewage, and I am glad that my death could provide the public service that my foreshortened life could not. The photograph that will be enlarged and framed at my funeral will be the image of me, taken at the moment I heave a 4-kilogram shotput away from my chin, my face pruning with exertion, my sheer green and white jersey clinging to the outer bounds of my spare tire, that was published in the Palo Alto Weekly’s high school sports section in 1995. You will shake your heads and say, “What a waste!” and “Alas, we hardly knew ye!” and “She is as cheap in death as she was in life and I knew there weren’t going to be spanikopitas at the wake.” I will smile upwards wistfully upon this scene from the lava-surrounded igneous rock from which I will have my everlasting vantage point onto the world and occasionally leave to haunt Stephanie. I don’t think it would be so bad.

I miss New York.

a memory

I saw a view once. I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember very much about the ten or so backpacking trips I have taken in my life. Maybe it’s even less than ten. I could count them all, just as I could count the number of lovers I’ve had, but I will always forget the numbers and the details. I have been telling friends that I’ve been feeling religious lately, but that I only use “God” as shorthand for the inexplicable forces that control the things around me, and here is one example of this developmentally retarded religiosity: I tell myself that I am unable to remember the number of lovers I’ve had, or the number of camping trips I have taken, or the rules regarding impeachment with extrinsic evidence, because I am not meant to remember these things. God is like the parasympathetic nervous system that shuts your mind down if your mind is only going to hurt you. God helps me feel satisfied with known unknowns.

So I cannot remember where I saw this view, but I remember coming across it somewhere in the deciduous forests of the White Mountains – or the Sierra Nevadas – or western Massachusetts – a view somewhere at midday on a long hike. Might have been August 1998 or May 2000 or May 2002 or August 2002. We had hiked hard the whole summer day under tree cover. Our eyes that day had only seen sunlit patterns of bright calico on the trail duff and the long, snaking lines of elm, beech, and oak trees. No vistas, just trees and dead leaves - envision white noise, on a mountain.

Somewhere close to the summit, we came to a clearing that was a large, smooth granite slope, down which a stream of water flowed. The stream came down the cracks and pooled in the levels of the rock. One pool was exactly the right size for someone to lay on the rock above it and plunge her head into it, and the day was hot and muggy, so we dropped our packs by the side of the trail took turns dunking our heads into the cool water. Others splashed their arms and legs in the other pools. I remember a tall gangly boy in shorts whipping his head around and spraying the rest of us with oily water from his scalp. We were on the west side of the mountain and when I looked out I could see the sun halfway down the sky directly across from me. There were mountains, and mountains beyond those mountains, and more, and finally just indistinct shapes in the distance, and all of these mountains were blanketed with trees. The granite dropped off sharply just down the mountain from where we were and if you followed the slope with your eye you could see a steep valley hundreds of feet below us. The sky was cloudless and there were no structures in sight.

Even as I write this I know it is lacking. The literal description fails to capture what was, I guess, ineffable about that view. I should have taken a picture, but I suppose a picture would only have fixed in two dimensions what is now a flexible abstraction that permits me to perceive differently each time I recall the memory. I would usually resort to metaphor to describe it at this point, but I don’t have patience for it and it doesn’t matter, and I suspect this whole story is some sort of metaphor anyway.

the closest i will come to patriotism

Fair Harvard. This made me.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/multimedia/flash/080603_dudley.swf

entries from my notes, torts day 2

I keep writing “persimmon” when I am trying to write “permission.” This is particularly loathsome when the subject is torts and we are talking about duties owed by possessors of land to entrants upon land, because the word “persimmon,” strike that, “permission,” occurs at least once a sentence.

THIS ROW:

1. This boy loves the Mets and drinks Diet Dr. Pepper. He looks like Olivia’s ex-boyfriend, Ben, the one that composes music for video games. Maybe because he is hapa? He looks more bored than anyone else in this row.
2. This man just graduated from Santa Clara. His name is Shen and he has braces and a thick Chinese accent. When I sat down next to him, he said, “You like to draw?” And I said, “Did you notice my doodling? I have to doodle if I am doing nothing but listening.” And then I said, “Hi, I’m Mandy.” Then he chuckled, because he didn’t hear me. Then I said again, “Hi, I’m Mandy.” And then he said, “Oh! Shen.”
3. This malodorous monkey who wants a gin and tonic is me.
4. This woman has a Blackberry.
5. This woman went to Los Angeles over the weekend for a wedding. Her name is Pamela and she just graduated from Stanford Law School. Pamela chats with me in the mornings before the video starts. She says, "I am so far behind!" and I say, "Getouttahere! I haven't cracked the MPQ!" I offer her my cashews and she politely declines. She seems like a friendly and uneventful person, and already I have a crush on her.

Sometimes I’m so thrilled that I made it out of New York without getting killed on my bike or accidentally burning my house down.

bao

It's for you, stupid.

my heart

is leaping like a deer with its hooves caught in nests of bees!
is filled like a rooftop water tower on stilts!
is as engorged as Ithaca!
is leaking with love like the Holy Ghost!
is taking over my body!
is durable when fileted!
is grapeshot in the sky!
is tattooed on my heart!
is a four-minute mile!
is a palm frond! a tiny dancer! a bus!
is a hundred hot air balloons filled with hearts!
is a happy black and white dog slipping on grass!
hangs in my throat!
spins in my wheels!
walks on my feet!
toils!
howls!
is yours! is yours! is yours!
Take it!


I am at the moment alternating between manic states and have found a high one during which to blog. I feel like a waterfall of love. I feel like I should distribute ponchos for the mist. Maybe it's the smell of wet chaparral at the turn from Stanford Avenue onto Escondido Road, or the long days of light, or a feeling of terror plus disbelief, or a great unfulfilled promise, or Molly Malone in my ears. I don't know. I'm an optimist. There is so much love in the atmosphere - up, in the air! It's like a mimosa tree and we are giraffes and all we have to do is lift our ten-foot long necks up and eat the twigs and we'll have it! I know I sound like I'm on drugs but this is how I feel.

Also, no more blogging ever again about anything of substance. (Like that was ever a threat?) I want you all to know that this is who I would prefer to be, devoid of politics, ambition, and opinions, that I am primarily interested in stories and feelings, and that all of the Myers-Briggs type indicator tests I have taken have been wrong and I am, in the end, not a monster but an ENFP. Good night!

palindrome

Studying alone for standardized test in cold library, starting law school, fucking up, clinic, summer, clinic, fucking up, ending law school, studying alone for standardized test in cold library.

Three years. I've come a long way, baby.

young man hard man

goodbye

Goodbye, I'm leaving, goodbye forever. I'll be on hiatus until the grieving ends. Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!

graduation

I graduated. NYU managed to mispronounce a two-letter last name and call me [Bananarchist] Ho. We were corralled in a humid hallway for an hour by a woman with a bullhorn (and a bolt gun?) telling us that once we began "processing" we would not be permitted to use the bathroom. My friend Cynthia asked why our seats didn't come with air sickness bags for the portion of the festivities that included a bombastic, self-celebrating speech by Anne Milgram, J.D. 1996, AG of New Jersey. Reena bent over a gossip magazine with a pen in hand and read an article entitled "Does Mischa Barton have CELLULITE?" intently while ignoring the procession of five million "Allez!"-hollering L.L.M.s. Sonia began or completed five rounds of telephone pictionary. Four hours later, I returned my Cap'n Gown. Arggh, matey! And then we ate cheese on sticks and drank white wine spritzers and that was the end of my life as a law student. Now what's my identity??

russian ark

You can procrastinate by watching this thrilling music video:

I am learning to sing "Lili Marlene" in German instead of writing the last two memos that stand between me and a J.D. It is a Nazi song, or just a song appropriated by the Nazis? Leni Riefenstahl or the Baron Von Munchhausen? I am also learning some Irish folk songs.

Notes from Art Law, January 31, 2008

"The class takes turns making noises. Caw, caw! Gobble, gobble, gobble. Mewl, meow, mao. Rrruf, rrr, rrrruf! Moo. AA thinks Sally Mann’s photos could easily be prosecuted as CP under Dost since there is no serious LAPS value defense available in CP law."

I am awesome at law school.

cleats

OMFG I am taking my Art Law takehome exam right now and the children downstairs have chosen today as the day they will blast shitty house music all night long! They haven't blasted music since the last time I went pounding on their door, about a month ago - then they choose tonight! AAGGH!!! Please buy me rugby cleats so I can tap dance above their beds tomorrow night!!!!

P.S. The answers for the takehome are (1) A; (2) B; and (3) C. Shhh!

no news

Everyone is quirky in their Facebook profiles! I know because I looked at everybody's profiles. Besides that, no updates. All I did today was watch three episodes of the Simpsons, salivate over this, read about the misinterpretation of Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics, eat, eat again, and walk Boo twice. Now it is time to eat again.

cloves

I bought a 20-pack of clove cigarettes in 2004. I still have the pack. I smoke about 3 per finals period. I just smoked one. I was temporarily dizzy, but now I just feel ill. I think I might finish the pack during this finals period. I am already getting sentimental for this feeling of nausea.

a plea

Those of you with blogs, please blog more. I am trying not to study for Art Law.

Those of you without blogs, please start a blog. I am trying not to study blah blah blah.

Thank you.

poppies

You are NOT a fatso. You know who I'm talking about. Yes, you. You are not. So stop stressin'.

anthony's song

Now that I have nothing left to prematurely sell, I am prematurely packing. I started by packing up my journals. I have been so prolific! I filled an entire box with notepads covered in scratchings and sophomoric doodles. I also found some things I thought I had lost:

The 2002 Telephone Pictionary game that started it all. The last line is the work of the beautiful mind of T. Mok, whom I've known since she threw her SAT vocab cards (and later a box of tampons) at me in Yasuda Sensei's seventh grade Japanese class.

A 2002 letter from my dad, which he left on top of my desk one day. If you can't read it, it says: "Mandy: Forgive again: I have to remind you that don't never try to take a picture with Xerox machine. It has UV - (ultraviolet) light built in. If you watch close by you will temporary loose your vision. But if you stare it while it whipes through, as close as in inches, you will loose your vision permanently. love DAD." This letter is even awesomer because nothing I was doing that day, or in previous days, suggested I had even contemplated staring at a Xerox while it wiped.

Still haven't read any Art Law!

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?

ganymede

"Ganymede," if mispronounced, is a Chinese epithet. Sort of. I just watched "Lust, Caution" and loved it. It's better than No Country and There Will Be Blood; watch it. No, no, take it back...if you're Chinese, watch it. Otherwise, the movie will confound you like it did so many American reviewers. After I watched the movie, I read some reviews of it and came away with the impression that critics are carbuncled barrow boys too arrogant to admit that the people making the movie are more intelligent than the people reviewing it. For example, in his review, Ed Gonzalez, who usually has some decent things to say, doesn't recognize that the point of the newsreel interruption in the scene that he mentions is not the cheap irony of the Western media influence but the bitterness of triumphalist message about the end of Western imperialism being forced upon a Chinese audience by Japanese colonizers. Ed Gonzalez doesn't understand this because he doesn't understand Chinese history and he has unfortunately learned nothing of it from the movie because he has been too busy chasing the red herrings of his interpretive imagination to pay attention to the lesson. He probably doesn't understand that there are at least five languages at play in the movie (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Japanese, and English), because the subtitles don't indicate when the languages transition, and these shifts add meaning to the movie. This is not to disparage Ed Gonzalez, but just to point out that there is no audience for "Lust, Caution" in America. And by filling the movie with sex, Ang Lee has also sabotaged its reception in China.

Which is to say, it is the ultimate Taiwanese-Chinese-American lamentation of unbelonging! Thank you, Ang!! Go Blue!

la menu

Ever since apparently eating feces on Saturday night, I've eaten:

8 Saltine crackers*
3 cups rice porridge
4 pints Gatorade **
12-15 pieces of penne pasta
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup chicken soup***

*Six came up immediately.
**One came up immediately.
***This came up and went through immediately.

fallingwater

Hello! Back from a week in Lawrenceville, Georgia and surrounding environs, with a new big bug in my stomach! I have spent the day alternating between sipping Gatorade and emptying it quickly thereafter from my bowels! It's really amazing how quickly things can move through your body. I shat myself on a plane yesterday* - after assuming pavana-mukta-asana ("The Wind-Releasing Pose") to relieve a little high-altitude tension, then said, "Whoops!" and ran toward the bathroom like Dominic Monaghan on the first episode of Lost (which I incidentally watched on my spring break!) and barely made it without passing out (instant cold sweats, and my hearing was as if my ears were clogged with cotton balls!) but managed to fumble off my belt and the sweatshirt I had tied around my waist to disguise any unslightly spotting. I seriously felt like I was dying and thought it would be much easier just to collapse on the floor shitting myself and vomitting - someone on the plane would've been in charge of taking care of me, right? I didn't even bother to close or lock the bathroom door. Someone walked in on me as the waterworks started and said, "Oops, sorry!" but I didn't care because I was leaning against the wall of the bathroom very precariously and trying very hard not to slide off the toilet. It was like a gallon of spicy water that came out of me! And get this: at the exact same time, I threw up three times into the bathroom sink (the one that is conveniently at head level when you sit on the airplane toilet) the half pound of Hot Tamales and Popeye's fried chicken I had ingested the night before when watching the aforementioned first episode of Lost! I remember thinking "Very pink!" before hanging my head between my legs for the remainder of the time it took to get the leftover fluids out of both ends of my body.

I did have cantaloupe two days ago at a Sweet Tomatoes in Duluth, Georgia (which is in Gwinnett County, where many others have been sickened by cantaloupes!). The thing I suspect to be in my bowels is pictured above. Now, who should I sue?

* Lucky for me, my maxipad caught this drainage! Just how gross can one person be???

good grief

I found some blurry old pictures! I was 20 and a dirty hippie when this picture was taken. Constance, I hope this shows you how mere months later I was living with a woman who saved all of her handmade menstruation rags until the end of the month to soak in hot water and water the houseplants with. This was years before I got two types of parasitic butt worms!

Now look at the effects of sun exposure on my face.

tetris

I wrote this on my hand during my morning commute, in large clear letters: "This man's style of playing Tetris reveals his problem with futurity." Then I put my hand on my lap and waited for the man stacking up Tetris rows like so many misaligned layers of Fallingwater to look over at me and notice my message to him. He didn't look over, of course, and instead played the game furiously until very quickly his pile reached the top of his screen, and he exclaimed something like, "Rrrgh!" Sir, when you ignore the cardinal rule of Tetris (don't cover the holes!) you lose very quickly. I wanted him to know how ashamed I was of him, because he looked exactly like my ex-roommate (you know, the one whose girlfriend kept exclaiming, "Joshua! Joshua! Joshua! Joshua! Joshua!" from atop his soiled sheets) who owes me somewhere between $90 and $300.

Also, ELIOT FUCKING SPITZER WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The details are so sordid. Must you pay for your poke? Can you just penetrate an unpaid intern with a cigar?

I'm going to Georgia for spring break; oh let the bun beat down upon my face.

relief

I did my presentation today. Thank God! I feel like the clown over my bed has been blown away. Now time to learn Led Zeppelin songs on the guitar. "Ah, ah. Ah, ah. Ahhh, ah. Ahhhhhhhhh?" is why Robert Plant is such a great lyricist!

daylight savings

I've been stuck indoors for the better part of three weeks trying to get my Crim Lit brief, my A Paper, and my Hays memo done. One down, two more to go. It's not pretty - one is overdue by 18 months, and the other is due in three days and I got nothing down on the page yet.

I went out last night to watch my third and last MOKA performance at NYU. It is a fine event that draws extraordinary souls out from the sepulchral lawyerly forms in which they are ordinarily confined, and reminds us that we are still young, creative, performative, and fun, unlike the professional tradition we have indentured ourselves, via Debt Ellis, into. Sonia's reading of Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel late in the evening's performances nearly brought me to dumbstruck tears. Before she went on stage, I snatched her crumpled notes away from her and read through her handwritten diacritics, the lines that told her to emphasize now and now speak slowly; when she read it, I heard an elegy. The poems final two lines ask, "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" And of course not: there is no choice between staying at home and going out to watch strangers in a play, because there remains no home left for us to go back to. Here we are, finally, in the artificial solstice of a foreshortened spring Sunday in the last semester of a strange decision we made, unbeknownst to each other, to travel together until May.

So after the show, we traveled upstairs to the lounge that is the student coffee kiosk in the daytime and the afterparty by night, and took hesitant sips of our vodka tonics (or at least I did) and urged our poor old bodies to move in time to skipping Latin tracks being played off somebody's laptop. So many of these beautiful people looked so happy. Alejandro led me in a dance so aggressively that his body odor was imprinted into the left shoulder of my t-shirt; Sophia was a gentler lead during a cha-cha. The clocks had already been set an hour ahead so we all felt more noctural and more dangerous than we really were (or at least I did). Somebody kept trying to turn the lights off, and somebody else kept trying to turn the lights on, so the room went between states of illumination. One person expressed his surprise at the concept, generally, of weaves, and leaned pleasantly into everybody else.

I walked with Oliver to First Avenue and 14th Street. Along the way we resolved to form a secret society, known by the initials S.T.M. (only members can know it, but membership is open), dedicated to the appreciation of our last two months in this city, this mischievous monument which not to look upon would be like death. The last line is pretty, but it is not mine; E.B. White wrote it.

What is it? I'm feeling old, folks. I felt old when I was nineteen, but now at twenty-seven I feel like a ripe fossil. When I was younger and more anxious I thought aging through one's twenties was like walking through a graveyard of all the things you thought you could be, and all the headstones would say pat things, like "Astronaut," or "Hannah Arendt." I certainly did not expect to exit this graveyard with only a business card imprinted "Esq." What am I doing? Whatever happened to unpredictability? Is it too late to leave this place to become an artist?

Elizabeth Bishop says yes. My body also says yes - I have wrinkles, gentle readers! I broke up a marriage, gentle readers! Daylight savings upends me, gentle readers! I want to go home, but I love you all too much!

[Sorry. Like I have said before, caveat emptor, cave canem and res ipsa loquitor. I get my melancholy blues once a season when I can't sleep. Welcome to the here and now! I saw my old friend Fist Fuck on the First Avenue L train platform, but his friend Bat Face was not with him, just a brindle dog who kept looking at me because I kept looking at it.]

soldier of love

I want to be bombarded with kissiles.

scenes i see in art law

It's dark, and we're watching a movie about Albie Sachs. I can't see anyone's face. I only catch glances at a very long email open on a computer one row in front of me:

"I kind of wish you hadn't sent that . . . Hooray, you're not a complete waste. It's not a work ethic you need, it's focus and discipline . . . [At the end of the email:] I love you."

The blond woman reading the email hits "Reply" and writes only "I love you." before moving the cursor to the "Send" button and, after a pause, clicking it.

help me name my guitar

My new favorite way to waste time involves tracing the edges of the pentatonic box on the fretboard of my guitar. It is a blue agave 2005 Fender Standard Stratocaster with two single-coil pickups and a humbucker at the bridge - this is not necessary to know but admiration of the instrument's unfathomable electronics and smoove patina is part of my daily guitar worship, so why not write it down? It has a little sticker of a strawberry on the pickguard by the first string. I've sort of fiddled with it for a few years but haven't really sat down to learn anything fancy until recently. I'm still terrible at it.

It doesn't have a name yet, which is strange because I have named almost every other significant possession I own. I would like to name this guitar Brian, after my favorite guitarist Brian May, but my brain is named Brian and it would be too confusing to call my brain and my guitar the same thing. I thought a good alternative name would be Barry (for the sticker), but my crocheted strawberry is already named Barry, and that too would be very confusing. Other names that are already taken up by other possessions are Freddie, Jondolar, Jondolar 2, Rrose Selavy, Lefty, and Bobby Lee.

So folks, please help me name my guitar. Also, please someone write my A paper for me.

jessica simpson's legs

I dreamt that Jessica Simpson had been struck by a car some time during the peak of her fame (during that short-lived TV show she had with her short-lived husband) and injured so badly that she had to have her left leg amputated below the ankle. Like FDR, she had hid her disability from the public so that she might not be shackled by its bigotry, but it was time to come clean, via 20/20.

Jessica Simpson was bravely baring herself to John Stossel with her voice vibrating but never failing. She addressed the camera and confessed her fear of public rejection, and then the camera zoomed in on a pantyhose advertisement she had modeled for. In the advertisement she lay against a projection of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and showed off her smooth, slender legs, which were in fact not encumbered by pantyhose, and which were evocative of the gentle bends of summer streams, the floating curves of airborne ribbons, and the blue silhouette of a monumental range on the far-distant horizon. The camera lingered at her ankles.

"I was hit by a car," Jessica Simpson said in voice-over for a reenactment of the tragic night. "I just didn't see it coming." As she spoke, a blonde stepped in slow-motion into the path of a black GMC pickup and was spun like a sparkling spinner against the black night. She came crashing down at full speed and again the camera lingered, this time on a thin seepage of blood coming from underneath a blond mass of hair.

"I knew I was hurt really badly, but I just didn't know how bad it could be," Jessica Simpson said to John Stossel. "Can we see it, Jessica Simpson? said John. "Can the people of America see what's happened to our princess?"

Jessica Simpson hesistated, then slowly removed her left boot and raised the hem of her bootcut jeans. John Stossel gasped, for there was simply nothing - nothing at all to mark her tragedy except the clean absence of her foot. Her left calf ended in a straight, stiff cut, as if run under a circular saw, as if her foot

had been detached by its sculptor and purposely left in the grill of a GMC pickup speeding westward on Wilshire Boulevard.

Jessica Simpson tearily resolved to leg model again. John Stossel spread the brush of his moustache with a grim but hopeful smile and said, "All of America is behind you, Jessica Simpson." The scene faded slowly to black, as if to suggest the passage of time.

Then Jessica Simpson was preening and posing against a projection of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." "How do you feel about this opportunity, Jessica Simpson?" exclaimed John Stossel. "I want to thank all of America!" Jessica Simpson returned. ABC News had paid for Jessica Simpson to reshoot her famous "Starry Night" pantyhose advertisement; it would be blown up to gargantuan proportions and plastered against fourteen stories of an apartment building on the corner of Houston and Broadway in Manhattan and would bear the discreet logo of a non-profit dedicated to the restoration of severed limbs. The photographer's index finger fluttered over his shutter release, and the flash reflected unflatteringly on the veiny skein of a recent, overzealous collagen infusion. But luckily for Jessica Simpson, the photographer focused on her legs, and snapped photograph after photograph of the cylindrical ending of her abbreviated left leg.

The television camera froze on one close-up, and then unfroze and zoomed out to reveal the foot traffic on Houston Street beneath a blown-up version of the snapshot. Jessica Simpson stood on the sidewalk, smiling up at her advertisement as pedestrians coursed around her. "It was like she knew she was right where she belonged," said the voiceover of John Stossel, "Right at her feet."

[This is not the first time I have had a vivid dream about a leg being cleanly severed from something. See, e.g., this.]

furry erotica

I know I've posted about this before, but that was two years ago. For my newer readers, here's the most awesome erotica in the world: typo-ridden furry porn. It's all text - enjoy at work! Purroar!

Dr. Altaica says, "Good, your still a virgin." Sara says, "Hay! I am not livestok!" then she throws him across the room. The two lions pounces Sara.

http://www.furnation.com/draltaica/stories/00H.txt

stuff white people like #72

Honestly, do you know what stuff white people really like? White people like writing blogs about themselves in third person, pretending that they're not white themselves, and duping thousands of people of color into thinking they've found some hysterical and incisive website when really what it is is another opportunity for white people to congratulate themselves. (Stuff White People Like #73 is that white people like immodesty.) Because all the "stuff" on that stupid website is yuppie shit, and even though that blog pretends like it's critical of yuppies, they have reserved social consciousness for the domain of white people and so they are secretly very proud of the things yuppies do and have. It's not really an insult to say that white people like "recycling," "caring about the environment," and thinking about their relationship with less fortunate people (regardless of how stupid their thinking about this actually is). It's not an insult at all; it's a self-celebration veiled as commentary. Nuh-uh, white people, you did not fool me with this blog.

If this blog were to be honest about what white people liked, they would put things up like #74: NASCAR, which is pure idiocy; #75: calling the police, which is something that white people LOVE to do; #76: having the police on their side, apropos of #75; #77: masturbating at home to 30 second clips of Internet porn, which is something that people of all races, including white people, love to do.

how i am exactly like my dad

I called my parents last night at 1:30a while I took Boo for a trot around Sternberg Park. They were shocked that I was out walking so late but I told them that I could see entire families with little kids clutching balloons strolling around the park, which was true, because New York is the city that never sleeps. My dad said, "Watch out for the sex offenders!" and I said, "DAD! Amazing! Just ten minutes before I walked out the door I looked up my zip code on the sex offender registry to familiarize myself with the faces of rapists in the neighborhood!"

Then when I got back home, my dad put me on speakerphone and played on the piano the eight measures of the Richard Clayderman song that he has learned ("With both hands!"). He kept messing up and saying, "Oh! No, wait, that's not right!" He confessed he had spent the day practicing piano. Then I confessed I had spent the day practicing guitar and then put him on speakerphone and played the solo from "Killer Queen" for him and kept messing up and saying, "Wait! Wrong note!" My dad said, "I am very close to your mom but sometimes we need to have separate things - piano is my separate thing." And I wanted to scream, "YES! Guitar is my separate thing from Stephanie!!!" which is true, because this week she has been dissertating like crazy and all I can do is retreat to my jolly corner and very slowly play the solo from "Sweet Child o' Mine" over and over again.

Then we were both on speakerphone and I tried to play the melody of "Ave Maria" on guitar over the Richard Clayderman chords that my dad was playing in California, which didn't work. But then my mom sung the words to Teresa Teng's "The Moon Represents My Heart" while I played the chords on guitar, which did work and was pretty cool.

I think I tore my ACL. Can someone diagnose this throbbing pain on the backside of my left knee?

the party downstairs

One should not take baths while having one's period, not only because of the obvious reason but also because it completely fails to do what it is intended to do, which is to provide the submersive erasure of the incessant thumping of the house music coming up through the floor from the party downstairs. But low frequencies travel through walls and become amplified by the shuddering steel sides of the bathtub, so instead of peace I get pounding, and I lay in the tub with only my face out of the water and sing loud arpeggios in my Kermit voice and dream of having this happen to those brats downstairs:

THE PARTY DOWNSTAIRS
by Angry Neighbor

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN, 2008. We see a FAT CHINESE MAN in pink flannel pajamas decorated with silhouettes of Christmas decorations, worn through on the right buttock, pounding on a door labeled "2B." His face is twisted into a knot of agony. We hear the thrum of foul music in surround sound, and know instinctively* that behind the door are young white boys with asymmetrical haircuts, collapsed girls with handmade clothes, utensils for crushing marijuana buds, a 5'3" sausage in a purple hat mismatching beats at a turntable, and minifridge-sized cabinet speakers paid for by parents' bankrolls. [*This is, of course, artistic license, because it is not by instinct but by observation that I know this to be true; during the last The Party Downstairs, at 6 a.m., I went a-pounding on the downstairs door and witnessed the aforementioned scene.] The door opens and a plume of marijuana smoke dissipates to reveal a TWENTY-SOMETHING man in a straw hat clutching a lime rickey.

FAT CHINESE MAN

(a beat) How old are you?

TWENTY-SOMETHING

I am 19.

FAT CHINESE MAN

I have 911 on speed dial.

CUT TO door of apartment building. The number "160" is illuminated on the door with each sweep of the police car's strobe. Unattractive youths with white powder limning their nostrils are led by cops into a paddy wagon, where the PURPLE-HATTED SAUSAGE sobs, "But I'm a Vanderbilt!" and a woman named CHARLEY (which we know because her shirt says "CHARLEY C'EST MOI") attempts to maneuver her cell phone with cuffed hands. A COP is talking to the FAT CHINESE MAN, who is now wearing a pink bathrobe from Victoria's Secret.

COP

Thanks for calling, sir. We always strive to ensure that the drug laws of this state are enforced uniformly. No NYU cokejobs go free on our shift!

FAT CHINESE MAN

I'm a woman.

COP

Oh, sorry. Ma'am. Heh, heh.

TWENTY YEARS LATER. A MIDDLE-AGED MAN (portrayed by somebody like Philip Seymour Hoffman) emerges from a bus labeled "The Bus That Takes People Off Riker's Island" and blinks at the sunlight.

MIDDLE-AGED MAN

(to nobody) I got exactly what I deserved.

In his hands, we see a faded purple hat. The camera lingers on the wretched condition of his ingrown fingernails.

END

Sweet, sweet justice, will I never know your savor? Because the music plays on, even as I type this pathetic revenge fantasy. My voice could not appregiate for long, so I lay supine in the tub as the water drained around me and through its suction learned what it feels like not to rage against the dying of the light - seriously folks, you really should stay in the tub while the bathwater drains, because it is sheer desolation - and then rose to rinse the raspberry jam and soap suds off my legs. When I am king I will not be just but I will be swift and the party downstairs will moulder forever in my seamy dungeons, BEATCH.

I think about Freddie Mercury 20-80 times a day.

a personality quiz

1. When was the last time you thought about the Mariana Trench?
2. Would you rather have a friend who would kill for you or die for you?
3. What happened to lesbian feminism?
4. Do you sometimes privilege your left side - e.g., by putting a sock on your left foot first - specifically to counterbalance the dominance of your right side? (Reverse left and right if you are left-handed.)
5. Rank in order of smell preference: a girl falling off her bicycle, felt, a loud report, bellybutton leavings.
6. Do you prefer sibilant to plosive sounds?
7. Have you pickled?
8. If you love it so much, why don't you just marry it? Because I am _________. (Fill in the blank.)
9. Who said, "I, Claudius"?

Results will be processed to gauge the testtaker's general compatability. Thank you, and happy Valentine's Day.

redshirt

I knew it was a word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(college_sports)

at the dinner table,

Stephanie and I take turns saying this: "Mandy's plot is circular. Genesis's is isosceles-esque."

ESL

This is how my English-as-a-second-language girlfriend wrote her name when she was a kid:

an ostentation of ostriches

Storytime!

Story #1:

Nine barnyard animals - eight ungulates, and one lonely old dog - gathered for their monthly meeting yesterday around their dinner trough, a fancy Italian place on LaGuardia Place. Six of the barnyard animals were younger than the other three, but all enjoyed special stature in the barnyard because they received extra feed for doing nothing more than gathering once a month to dine and discuss themselves. One of the elders was an unusually long ewe of advanced age, who spoke in a high, confused tone about her curiosity about other animals species - particularly dogs, since she had seen so many different breeds, including shi-tzus, shiba inus, poi dogs, Tibetan mastiffs, and it didn't seem to her (from her experience with the uniformity of sheep) that all of these breeds could get along! Another elder was a fine, intelligent nanny goat who chewed her cud very delicately, concentrated on suppressing her displeasure at the unseemly curiosity of the long ewe, and was drawn to systems of orderly management - of the dinners, of the barnyards, of the practice of federal civil law and of the federal courts. The last elder was a prize bull who had retired from his tumultuous, passionate career into a subsidized dotage during which his pugilistic instincts hardened into a general boorishness and drew the admiration of the cowed, the fear of the rest of the barnyard, and the exasperation of the silly mutt, who didn't understand why the bull should be permitted to spout nonsense in his old age simply because he had done so well for himself in his youth.

It came time to choose the night's courses. A human in a tidy outfit poured water into the sweaty goblets that had been set aside for the evening's guests. The lugubrious mutt's vocal chords were only accustomed to barking and whining, coarse noises unable to accommodate the flamboyant coloraturas of the ungulates' language and the language on the menu, so she ordered only what she could pronounce: "Lasagne, please." Later, when the food arrived, all the ungulates turned to the mutt with bemused concern and one said, "Why, Mutt, you did not order an appetizer!" The mutt hung her snout in shame, for she had only just noticed that she was the only animal from the barnyard who did not have before her a bucatini all’Amatriciana or an agnello alla sarda, the latter of which had been sacrificed from the long ewe's brood just for the meal. The mutt dared not look up. She pulled her lips down so that her teeth, which had turned a navy hue from the tangy water pressed from cabernet grapes that all the animals quaffed, glass upon glass, might not show.

The ewe and the mutt had recently had an uncomfortable exchange, and the mutt sensed that the ewe was trying to be sensitive and inclusive during the dinnertime conversation. Yet the mutt bristled at the effort because, generous though she was in spirit, the ewe continued to offend the mutt by looking at her meaningfully only when the ewe said words like "Rainbow Coalition" and "transgender," as if the mutt's ears could only perk at sounds associated with freaks. Later, when discussing the recent elections that had captured the attention of the entire farm, the ewe asked the mutt, "Now, have you ever voted?" The mutt wanted to tell the ewe that even though her parents were not born on the farm they still belonged in it now - and everyone in the mutt's family had passports to prove it! But instead, she demurred, and focused on her lasagne (which, unimpressively, tasted just like her same old dog food).

The evening bore on. The mutt was seated far from the goat, whom she felt was a kindred spirit, or at least as kindred as their wealth and cultural differentials would allow. The mutt was relieved that the bull had thus far spared her from his attention. In her singsong soprano, the ewe commented on a iPhone that one of the younger lambs (a transfer from a different barnyard in the same town) had laid on the table. "Well, as long as you have one of those on the table, you'll always know what to call a group of ostriches," she said. "What do you call them?" an animal asked. "You call it an ostentation of ostriches!" cried the delight-stricken ewe. Around the trough, wineglasses were clutched with clumsy hooves and milk-based desserts were licked off of plates.

The bull spoke on and on, but the mutt had successfully trained her sensitive ears in a different direction for most of the meal. Finally, the bull spoke so that he could be heard by everybody, on the topic of a ram (the son of Othello and Desdemona, raised by the latter in a midfield flat on the farm) that was competing in the elections. The ram had already been president - not of the farm, but of the Harvard Law Review - which, to the bull's mind, was even more impressive. The bull said, "Well, when I heard that, I called a few friends of mine at Harvard." Why? asked a curious animal. "I wanted to know whether he had deserved the spot or if it was an affirmative action thing." The mutt gasped, and hid underneath the table. "And you know, everyone I spoke to said it was based on merit!" From under the table, the mutt groped for her wineglass and tipped all of its contents into her mouth. "And then I thought, 'That's really something!'" The bull finished his thought with a snort and firm stamp on the table.

Around the table, heads bobbed in solemn approval and nothing could be heard but the occasional squeak of hoof against ceramic. Although the mutt really wanted to shout "My lip gloss be poppin'! My lip gloss be poppin'! Whatchu know 'bout me? Whatchu whatchu know 'bout me?" and flip the table over in anger, she had neither the median glossoepiglottic fold nor the hands nor the heart to do anything at all. A half hour later, all the animals gathered their umbrellas for the trudge to their separate stables and the ewe laid down a piece of plastic to pay for their $534 dinner. The mutt waited by herself on the L train platform at Sixth Avenue, banishing intemperate thoughts from her head by filling it, through the ears, with Freddie Mercury's heroic tenor, and resolved to write a parable for a tiny audience of friends and the Internet at large, so that she could communicate her grievances without losing the hefty purse attached to her monthly dinners.

Story #2:

A dream. Stephanie and I are attending a demonstration with lots of other students. There are police there, and everyone, including the students, is wearing riot gear. The protestors are patiently standing in neat arrays as the police lob egg-sized rocks at us. The rocks bounce off our helmets and shields. One protestor foolishly tries to headbutt one and reels from the pain. We wonder, "How long can this continue?" knowing that soon someone's patience will lapse and violence will erupt. From our vantage at the back of the demonstration, we see a speckled piece of granite as big as a breadbox hurtle through the air and strike an unseen target. There is a shriek and then shouts of anger ripple through the gathering. We know instinctively that someone has been hurt badly and the protestors will retaliate against the cops, so we run. As we flee we see people getting stomped in the head - it's not clear whether they are cops or protestors. We run until we come to some unlit, shaded enclosure where we gather with others by cool still pools and try to piece together from what each of us have seen what actually happened.

superbowl

It's the Superbowl halftime. I have momentarily vacated my spot in front of the television, where there is half a rotisserie chicken exploded on a tabletop and a fat dog with chicken grease on his whiskers greedily sniffing at the air, to blog instead of watching Tom Petty,

whom I hate, because he looks like a ghoul.

The boys and girls upstairs are cheering for something so I assume the football game is back on. Also, Rihanna

looks like a beluga whale.

Am I the only person who thinks "Umbrella" is about Rihanna pulling her labia over somebody's head?

cold fingers

Hello! Hanging out with old (in body and in durability) friends Amy and Raj tonight has inspired me to write in this neglected blog. But first, here's half a blog entry from December that I had not finished writing:

"It's only taken two weeks of living in Palo Alto with my parents and brother to make me feel like I'm fifteen years old again, freaking out about how I'm spending my life in a place that cannot contain my ambition. Except this time I am 27 and I have no more ambition. So now it's three a.m., which is the time for me to revisit all the emails I saved when I lost my college email account, and to learn all about how the gods have blessed me with their mercy and allowed me to evolve away from my craptastic youthful predeliction for gigantism and turn into the mellow, ruminant ungulate that I am today.

I turn, naturally, to the emails from the first hot throbbing love of my life, a green-eyed, bottom-weighted Pisces from Loma Verde Drive who was apparently terrible at spelling but decent at stringing together a pretty turn of phrase, which was all my nineteen year-old heart needed to be wrung like a dishrag. At that point in my life, I wanted to put my heart in the Popemobile and drive it through a crowd screaming to be looked at because I was certain that no one in the history of humankind had anguished and ached as I did. Our imaginations of ourselves don't change, but we learn to be more discreet in selling them so that we don't look like fools."

Too bad you'll never learn what happened to this teenage heartthrob and how this tale of tragic romance ends with two people in grad school serendipitously meeting on a garbage barge tethered to the west side of Manhattan six years later, with no desire at all to have lesbian sex with one another. (A true story!)

On to the present: the ai of wo de life is having a sleepover in frigid Saratoga Springs, New York, which is currently encrusted in the remains of last night's ice storm, with three homos and a redheaded "straight" Orientalist who have slept with each other in three different sexual pairings. Tonight they watched the "Pursuit of Happyness" and retired at an early, chaste hour, which tells you just how old all of us are getting.

Meanwhile, I spent the day with the best, cleverest, most amusing people I can think of, and felt for the first time this year that I was making good on my New Year's resolution to exploit New York for the last three months I have with it. Raj suggested we take buses around Brooklyn until we got bored, which was a fine idea, but I got distracted by the Internet (did you know you can watch free porn online???) and showed up at his place just before dark, and riding buses for the sake of tourism in the dark is pointless, so we walked from Clinton Hill to DUMBO instead, which worked just as well as riding the bus as a low-impact activity requiring no manual movement, which was a criteria for the day's activities because Raj, who had been degloved-by-windowpane earlier this week, could not use his right hand. We walked down Lafayette to Flatbush and then past the Watchtower complex to the waterfront, where we were almost immediately ejected from the park under the Brooklyn Bridge by a ranger with a paste-on mustache, which forced us to wander around the strange residential wasteland north of DUMBO while eating sixteen ounces of freezing yogurt with our freezing degloved hands. We discovered the estate of a mid-century vinegar baron, overlooking a vast vinegar distillery and guarded by curved-over steel fences and two kinds of barbed wire, and got scared of the desolation so fled by foot over the Manhattan Bridge to find Amy, whom we met at a safe space (Dojo's) and united with over our shared loves for not spending money and gluten-free, indeterminately Asian cuisine. The first two sips of my third of our $18 carafe of box wine left me stupefied, so I was only able to participate in the dinnertime conversation by being silently dizzy or irritatingly contrarian. Raj and Amy, forgive it for it knows not what it does. It puts the lotion in the basket.

Raj has a new job and apartment and Amy is ABD with a dissertation topic. The future looks good! So we celebrated in a nearby diner with wheatless rice pudding and chocolate ice cream, became sedated by the central heating, and then boarded three trains on our merry way home. I am at home now. I started and discarded two novels before settling on a third (Ha Jin's Waiting), taking the last with me into the bath and then accidentally submerging it in soapy water. I am a fucking idiot. I am going to ice my rotting left pinky and go to bed.

juno sucked

Am I the only person who recognizes this? Juno blew goats. Why is it nominated for best picture?

god bless california, make way for the walmart!

I'm writing from the Palo Alto Main Library, where I've biked on a rainy Thursday evening to rip all the tracks off its meager blues CD collection. (Now ripping: "Muddy Waters: Folk Singer.") I fucking love this place. It's 8:25 p.m. and it's rockin'. It stays open until 9 p.m...it's practically a night club. All the librarians are exactly as you would expect them to be, with bowl haircuts and extremely pleasant voices. They've redone the layout since I was here last, some time in 1999 when I checked out some stupid econ book over Thanksgiving break to get school reading done and wrote all over the margins. Now there's a "teen" section, and the CDs are segregated between adult listening (categories including Orchestral, Popular, Folk, International, and Wedding Compliations) and something called "Teen," which includes:

1. A 1994 Eurhythmics album
2. Billboard's Top Ten Songs of 1992, 1994, and 1995
3. An album by the actress Minnie Driver, whose picture is dodged and burned such that her giant Owen Wilson lantern jaw is reduced to a one standard deviation size
4. Albums by (Leave) Lindsay (A-)Lohan, Fall Out Boy, and Bow Wow

I thought this was pretty funny. Palo Alto's efforts to woo it's teen clientele also include a "beading workshop," posters for which are discretely tented on the four infant-sized tables in the teen section, which was completely empty except for me, browsing through music from the 1990s and feeling the warm sensation that comes with being patronized to.

All I have been doing on the last few days of my winter vacation is driving from Costco to Fry's in Mountain View to the Costco and Fry's in Sunnyvale attempting to find gifts for Stephanie's 40-something lesbian aunts, since I have to deliver the goods on Saturday when I fly into Atlanta for the last leg of my extended winter vacation. (We're driving to Nashville and Memphis, for the Grand Ol' Opry and Graceland!!!! Hence I am in the Main Library finding music from the South so I can fit in with the hoi polloi.) I have also have been infected with naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating fungus that infects warm, stagnant freshwater bodies and sulphurous hot springs and kills its victims in two weeks, as a result of sitting in a hot spring in Big Sur for twenty minutes and accidentally rubbing my nostrils with my fingers last Saturday. I'm only reasonably sure I've been infected. So far symptoms include headaches, grogginess, stuffy nose, and an addiction to Afrin.

One of the librarians is a man who looks about 38 and is wearing a black mock turtleneck and a chartreuse v-neck sweater underneath it, and a lanyard around his neck with his ID card at the end of it. He is sitting eight feet to my right chatting with another librarian, but he is so good at what he does that his voice is barely audible. In fact, I think they might just be lip-reading. I am concerned that they will leap over the counter and stab me with golf pencils.