sunrise on lake michigan

Rose up from sleeplessness this morning at 4:30 a.m. Cousin Jen was asleep in my bed; I hugged her goodbye. She and Mike have been visiting for the weekend, to attend the Pitchfork music festival. Mike writes for Pitchfork. He didn't come back last night because he went to the afterparties and stayed at the Pitchfork office. Jen said that was fine, she'd rather him sleep with "all of his dudes" on the floor of the office than awaken her with his beery snoring. On the one afternoon I attended, the festival did seem to be full of dudes with Comic Book Guy social skills (one ginger I stood near declared loudly, "Anything a DJ does on stage is brilliant, especially DJ Rupture [the solitary, unmoving figure pressing buttons on a bank of electronic devices one at a time onstage as the ginger spoke]") who would disturb their girlfriends' sleep with snores, should God bless them with girlfriends at all. This, of course, does not apply to Mike.

Something kept me up again, and again I don't know what it was. I lay on the couch rehearsing phrases from the songs of the weekend - "Diana," "Donna," and Dvorak's Humoresque No. 7. Olympia played the last for me on Saturday after I came back from band practice. I lay on the couch and listened to her on the violin for ninety minutes, at the end of which I asked her whether she knew how remarkable it was that she could make music of such quality any time she wanted to. Olympia demurred. She found the timbre of her violin shrill relative to the warmth of her viola. I told her about the advice column I read recently in which a middle-aged woman described her love for music; she couldn't play but a few chords on the guitar but strummed them diligently nonetheless, content simply to release a few notes into the atmosphere.

I understood the imperative to hear music. I could listen to Olympia sitting on the arm of the couch playing portions of Partitas all day. We talked about the music; Olympia said that the middle section of the humoresque was satirical, because its minor chords were comically grave in contrast with the light skipping theme of the surrounding sections. She said that it was often transposed to an easier key for young players. She played it in D. I said it was originally G, but I was wrong: it's in Gb major. I heard the first twenty-five notes of it over and over between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. today.

I packed oatmeal into bags, heated up water for tea, and then left the house by bicycle at 4:55 a.m. The streets were all mine. Hardly a car passed me on Milwaukee. (There was only a lonesome cyclist, riding a humping mountain bike with the front wheel terribly out of true.) I waited for no lights, but paused to take pictures of the glass facade of a skyscraper that was exactly the color of the sky, and the emptiness of Jackson and Columbus Boulevards. There was a figure stumbling after a giddy bulldog puppy. Some men were at work spraying water on the sidewalks. Delivery trucks backed slowly into alleys. Otherwise, it was still too dark and quiet for the day's work to begin with any conviction.

(A building the color of the sky in my quiet city at 4:55 a.m.)

I biked past the courthouse and continued on Jackson to the lakefront next to Grant Park, where Harry and I sat for our 2.5 hour Mittagessen mit Bier on the warmest day in early April. A woman in a blue windbreaker was standing on the quay pointing her footlong telephoto lens east, toward the boats bobbing in the marina and the sky lightening far in the distance. I dropped my bike and sat down to watch. The air was not warm but I had hot milk tea from my thermos. Anyway, my heart was racing from the insomnia and the exertion, so I didn't feel the chill.

I took a snapshot every five minutes or so, but my camera was of too poor quality to capture the way the light changed. Everything came out the same shades of magenta and pink. I realized suddenly that I might finally be patient enough now to appreciate Impressionist art. In front of me were small sailboats with their sails drawn down. Dozens of rigs chimed against dozens of metal spars. Gulls squalled overhead. I noted the boats, their reflections on the water, the ripples that a goose couple left behind them, the sky, the sparse clouds, the circling gulls, the busy photographer, the dark buildings to the north, the aquarium and planetarium to the south, and then a swarm of gnats captured my attention and I watched them dancing in a cloud near my head for a while. The horizon was crowded out by boats.

After twenty minutes, a glowing pink line appeared behind a row of boats, and quickly grew into an arc, a crescent, a hemisphere, a boule, and finally, a perfect red circle rising up over Lake Michigan. It was ten times the size of the weak moon I watched rise over the lake from Zion, Illinois, last week. Words appeared on the boats, and I saw that the boat that had been forty feet away from me for half an hour had "Miss Be-Having" painted on it. An increasing population of postdawn speedwalkers, one wearing a gold-accented salwar kameez, passed on the lakefront path behind me. The sun soon became too bright to look at, and I gathered my belongings and left.

I have no occasion to go through my city so early in the morning. I have no business with dawn. My most memorable encounters with city scenes like this have come when I have been traveling abroad and arriving on transportation at odd hours to see ice haulers in Mexico City, fruit vendors in Kaoshiung, etc. The way mornings go in other countries seemed so foreign to my American experience until I learned, today, that it is mornings, not other countries, that feel so alien to me. Today I cruised down the hill at Blommer's Chocolate factory, the one whose operations fill the northwest corner of the Loop with the smell of chocolate chip cookies every day, just before dawn, with an idiotic grin on my face. I was very, very happy to be awake.

moral laxity

After my improv class last week, a person who had been making lusty eyes at me asked me for my number and suggested that we go on a date. Let us call him Tattoos, because he has several visible tattoos, one of Africa on his left bicep, one of a dark undefined shape on his wrist, and the Arabesque names of his twin 8 year-old daughters on his neck. The last one is a warning sign that reads: carrier of hepatitis. I judge like this, I do.

I gave him my number, and avoided his "c u later" and ":-)" heavy text messages while Olympia and I were cycling slowly north over the weekend. He also texted during the week, and called me "sweetheart," and I avoided these also.

Last night he was at improv, and he continued to give me lusty eyes. (Also, the 24 year-old boy who wears shirts covered in Chinese characters and who brought Japanese chocolate snacks from an Asian mart to share with the class this week is giving my slanty eyes his googly eyes. My class, fifteen men and five women, is a heterosexual meat market. This is fascinating, flattering, gross, and totally hilarious! I'll write more about this at some later time.) After class, Tattoos walked me to my vehicle and stood off to the side as I strapped on my helmet, blinky lights, reflective pants-clinching slap anklet, and Kryponite chain.

We sat down for a few minutes on a sidewalk planter, and then he spoke at me for about ten minutes, saying things like, "I would make a really good boyfriend. I'm really sweet, but not clingy. I can be loving." I thought it was interesting how literal he was being. Why do people feel compelled to advertise themselves in this way?

Soon his literal descriptions turned physical, and he described how he was attracted to the way I looked, and then the physical actions he wanted his body to do to mine, etc. I found this all very distasteful, the lack of metaphor, of filter, of finesse, of understanding, and the obvious desire for sex. I think I am more conservative than I admit to being; maybe this explains why I am so uncomfortable when the limber Russian 20 year-old girl in my improv class announces to the to the fifteen salivating men watching her, "I love porn!", or how when the petite 21 year-old Northwestern junior tries to fill our improv vocalization scene with sexy "Ooohs," I respond with rooster and goat noises.

Tattoo kissed me, and then I stopped his roving hands from their exploration of the Great Plains. Something was happening to his face where his eyes got half-lidded and his jaw slackened. Seeing somebody else's lust when you don't feel the same way is somewhat repulsive, I have learned. Is it old-fashioned to want symmetry of desire? How'd I get to be so old and so unable to distinguish between experiences that are interesting to have and experiences that are good to have? Now I must find avoid his texts and looks for the last two weeks of my improv class.

Well, this is all TMI. The moral of this story is that I should spend more time reading.

july 4, 2009

Eleven days ago Raj and I celebrated the 233rd anniversary of the speech act that carved a new country out of an old one. He flew in on a Thursday while I was in my improv class. When I got home, we ate gummy bear vitamins and watched the video of Michael Jackson's other duet with Paul McCartney.



Olympia and I played Raj our Mark Sanford tango for guitar and mandolin. We sang "You Are My Sunshine." I took the higher harmony. Raj and I retired to bed. After contemplating the world map tacked up over my bed, Raj noted with some alarm that Canada had many more islands than one would have thought. I slept intermittently and saw Olympia, who was staying up all night to catch an early-morning flight, peering into her laptop around 4 a.m. In the morning Raj and I dawdled until it was time to slowly pack up a pannier and take two bikes for a spin. The Cannondale touring bike got a flat on the rear tire as soon as we stepped out of the Jefferson Park el. I fixed it in front of a tacos al carbon shop. A friendly cabbage with a highly developed torso paused to offer suspiciously generous help. "There's a bike shop just two miles down the road. I can drive you there!" he said. We beamed back at him. He handed Raj a slip of paper that said "Jason, 312-[555-1212]," which Raj reported was the respectful thing to do, to hand the man in a male-female pair a telephone number to signal only neighborly helpfulness, not sexual availability. We biked sixteen miles to the botanic gardens, and ate sandwiches sitting by an artificial river. Raj could not contain his excitement for the vegetarian mixture of fixings: wheat toast, avocado, hummus, local cheddar, greens, tomatoes, mayonaise, mustard, honey, Sri Racha, pepper. I placed my two liter water bladder under my shirt and instructed Raj to pet it as if it were a roll of fat. We ranked nuts: Raj favored cashews; I chose macadamia; we agreed that almonds were top tier. After lunch, we toured "Fruit Island" and found robins' eggs nested in the branch of a trained fruit tree.


At the artificial pond, a toddler fed muffin crumbs to giant black koi whose pallid mouths broke the surface of the dark green water. Raj speculated that the mist from the fountain in the artificial pond was aerosolizing bacteria and feces for easy entry through our mucus membranes.


(This image comes up when you search for "aerosolized feces.")

We walked away from the water. We were unable to take the commuter rail home because ridership from the large street fair in Chicago had crowded out the bikes, so we gamely rode the sixteen miles back to Jefferson Park through clouds of gnats. An insect struck my right eyeball. We passed the miles by imagining ourselves biking in New York. Raj said mile six was going to Williamsburg and back. Mile five was "Hey, let's go to the Park Slope food co-op." Mile two was biking from the Village to the Empire State Building. We got seats on the #56 bus and were home by eight. For dinner we made the same sandwiches we had eaten for lunch, but Raj declared that the sandwiches that had spent an afternoon in the heat and compression of the pannier had been tastier. Raj forced me to eat radishes and pickles and a honey beer and then sprint two nauseating blocks to catch a bus along Chicago Avenue, which we just barely missed, so we watched the 11:45 pm showing of Up instead of the 11 pm showing of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Perhaps it was just my exhaustion clogging up the warm-feelings valves in my body, but I forgot everything but the first fifteen minutes of the movie instantly. A cab driven by a lunatic—the second such ride Raj and I have endured in two weeks—bore us home along the legs of the triangle, rather than the hypotenuse, causing us to pay $(fare * √2).


In the morning, Raj called up his friend Anne from urban planning school and conveyed to her our intention to rent a car and drive it to Gary, Indiana, to the childhood home of Michael Jackson. Anne wanted to go, and offered to drive. Raj and I took the bus to her apartment and met her husband Gordon, a new professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. I knew instantly that I would like Anne because she had arranged a sofa so that a person seated on it would look out the window at the people in the high rises across the street. She also had a Trek 520 and later explained that she had biked across the country as a teenager. Gordon insisted that we eat extremely fresh strawberries before leaving. We bought white roses, peach-colored rose petals, and miniature cupcakes with red, white, and blue sprinkles at a nearby supermarket for the trip to Gary. Raj and Anne made precise and thoughtful observations about the built environment around us as we drove past it. There was a forty-foot tall alien inflatable attached to a building by the highway right at the Illinois-Indiana border; Anne suggested that this was the "Welcome to Indiana" alien. To me the road looked just like Taiwan. Maybe it was just because it was humid and overcast, and the roadside was overgrown with weeds.


We entered Gary at Broadway Street. Ninety percent of the storefronts we passed were empty. All were falling apart. One marquee above a closed theater read “JACKSON IVE TONIGHT.” It was unclear whether the letters had been up for thirty years, whether they were a recent memorial for Michael, or a prank. Anne slowed to a stop on the main thoroughfare to admire an old neon sign. Raj, who is from Detroit, said that the decay were seeing in Gary was worse than what he had seen in Detroit. Almost every other house on 23rd Street was abandoned (Anne said, “It’s beyond repair now, but what beautiful housing stock it must have been,” and sighed) but the ones that were not were tidy. The Jackson house was at the end of a road a stretch of which was a sidewalk on one side and only a weedy field on the other. It was apparently abandoned. The house was not more than thirty feet square.


It was hard to imagine Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Michael, Randy, Janet, Joe, and Katherine all squeezed into the space. There were a dozen fellow mourners. I had brought the American flag that I’d bought on election night in Grant Park. Only later, when Raj and I concluded that Barack Obama was the only person whose worldwide celebrity could grow as large as Michael’s, did I realize how pleasingly symmetrical was the journey of my star-spangled banner. We snapped photos of ourselves exhibiting a variety of moods inappropriate for the occasion.

Raj called this picture a “weird, fascinating conflation of patriotism, grief, and documentation.” Raj lay the flowers down. I spread the flower petals. I wrote a note to Michael on the only piece of paper in my backpack—a New Yorker reply form—and left it under a stuffed animal. I will say nothing about the contents of the note except that it was, upon later reflection, troublingly similar to what Barack Obama had written in the note he left on the Wailing Wall.


Others had left notes also, some heartfelt, some in different languages, some simply advertising unrelated services (“Nuñez Towing”). Mounds of stuffed animals and flowers were heaped up in front of the house. Somebody appeared not to have thought of the implications of putting a single glove on a stuffed monkey.


Across the street, a few people had set up a vendor tent to sell unattractive memorial t-shirts and DVDs. We pondered these. Raj said that the t-shirts only invited regret; he would regret spending the $20 to buy one, and he would also regret not buying one. I offered to buy him one. He declined. We left. Anne drove us along weedy single-lane roads to the Indiana Dunes, the south shore of Lake Michigan. She said that when the driveways became dominated by pick-up trucks, she knew that we were in the white part of Gary. We found an aquatorium structure and a statue of Octave Chanute that had been erected by The Society for the Restoration of the Gary Bathing Beach Aquatorium and Octave Chanute’s Place in History, Inc. All things around us were colorless under the overcast sky. Anne found a plastic doll with one arm and no head, and said, “This is the kind of thing you always find on beaches like this.” On the drive home, we stopped to buy a Fanta and a loser lottery ticket. We could find no place to buy food. It started pouring. Anne drove us home.


(Indiana Dunes, Lake Michigan.)

Raj and I watched episodes of 30 Rock until dinnertime and then, so moved by the ads we had seen, we went to Jewel/Osco to buy Jello chocolate pudding cups and pizza. My young gay Asian couple friends came over in the evening with board games. We closed all the windows to keep out the noise and then played Settlers of Catan and Modern Art as M-80s exploded loudly in the street. It was the Fourth of July. Derwin took ten minutes at the end of the evening to explain, in great detail, how a player could win Die Macher. They left. Raj and I stayed up until 3 a.m. taking turns showing each other our favorite Michael Jackson-related YouTube clips, including the videos for “Scream,” “Rhythm Nation,” “Rock With U” (Janet’s, not Michael’s).


On Sunday morning, Raj read aloud a passage from a book that described how the human population of Easter Island exhausted the island’s resources after several hundred years of habitation and then developed a culture of cannibalism. We went to the new modern wing of the Art Institute, where Raj’s art school friend worked the coat check. He got us in for free. Now I remember nothing about the art except for one very large photograph of an African-American woman in a floral print dress reclining on a floral print couch. Remembering one piece of art is my goal each time I go to a museum or gallery. The natural lighting of the new building was very pleasurable to walk through. Raj recalled a critic’s admiration for the “gradients of light.” From the museum, we took a bus to North Avenue and found a spot on the beach. I waded in the lake. I think my nipples broke off. Raj read Resilience Thinking and I read a magazine. We observed the sky and enjoyed the 5-15 minutes of sunshine that the breaks in the clouds afforded. Raj did not need to use the tinted ski goggles I had insisted he bring for reading in the glare. Attractively muscled boys in drooping shorts tossed balls all around us. I waited patiently for their shorts to fall off. Raj left to attend a pizza barbecue. When he came back to the apartment, we watched Dave Chappelle’s Rick James video. I showed him how Electronic Case Filing worked and told him about Monday’s notices of motion. Raj laughed and said that “motion” meant “bowel movement” for Indians. This gives me as much delight as the doodie element of negligence. He put a hand on his stomach, wagged his head and said something like “Notice of motion: I am having a loose motions” in his Indian accent. Raj left early Monday morning and I was not awake enough to remember his departure.

On Sunday, as we walked away from the beach, Raj asked whether I was happy about my decision to have lived in Chicago for a year. I said that the only possible answer I could give was yes, since it was unproductive and meaningless to validate regret. He wanted to know whether I had friends in the Bay Area; when I responded yes, he wanted to know the specific people I had in mind. I listed them. The way that he asked these questions and listened attentively and actively to my answers filled me with love and wonder. Love, for obvious reasons, and wonder because in my time of lonesomeness in the frigid Midwest I have sometimes forgotten what it feels like when someone pays attention. If I have any regret about living in Chicago, it is my choice to be far away from this. It is not so bad here now, of course, with the people and the weather. Still, thank you, friend, for the excellent weekend.

marshall islands

The Marshall Islands came up several times last weekend, first on Thursday night when R and I were looking at the hazy world map over my bed without our glasses on. He discovered Canada's Queen Elizabeth Islands, and I then told him of my recent interest in the ports of the Caspian Sea and the concrete dome on Runit Island.

(This 350' diameter concrete dome covers radioactive debris leftover from the U.S. military's nuclear tests. For scale, those dots on the dome are people. This dirty finger is just one link in a necklace of coral islands comprising Enewetak atoll. I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on atolls if you would like to restore your awe at the grandeur of the universe. Also, coral reef, lagoons, shoals, and century plants.)

The Marshall Islands came up again on Saturday afternoon when Anne told a story about how she was two weeks from flying out for a yearlong teaching job there when she learned that her mother was very ill. She canceled her plans to tend to her.

It is total cliche for one to imagine places like the Marshall Islands when blogs, bikes, online underwear shopping, and viola jokes fail to distract one from the drudgery of daily office work. This aside, the Sargasso Sea, trebuchets, the franking privilege, and ETAOIN SHRDLU are also items of interest.

july 2, 2007

Procrastinating from writing up what I've been doing in July 2009 by reposting journal entries from July 2007. First day on the job at the Palo Alto office:

I'm tired and groggy, because in addition to staying up until 3 a.m. EST to webcam puppet shows with Stephanie - the mini vulva I drew between my fingers in order to pantomime female masturbation remained on my fingers this morning, and I frantically licked it off in the lobby of the Palo Alto office after accidentally proferring my mimetic vulva to another summer associate's hand - mom woke me up at 7 a.m. to pet Boo, who was under the bed twitching and sleeping. I got back to sleep but dreamt that I was late to my first day on the job, and that I had a fight with mom and dad, who forced me to ride the car instead of my bike to work today. It turns out that I was not late to work, but I did indeed get in a tiff with dad about riding my bike. He called my hair "a hat" last night, so I think that's enough criticism for two days.

grotesque

Strange news from Chicago. Four cemetery workers are accused of digging up 200-300 old graves and reselling the plots. They used a backhoe, and dumped the remains a weedy pile.

See:

Exposed bones, chunks of concrete and broken coffins litter the hilly, overgrown area about four blocks long, authorities said.

"Literally, they were pounded [down]," he said. "They pounded the other [body] down and put someone on top."

And see:

There were broken caskets and concrete grave liners in the mounds, too, and detectives said that when the grave robbers got tired or sloppy they just dumped the bodies on the ground.

So there were human teeth and leg bones, hips and finger bones scattered out there in the weeds.

See also:

"EMPLOYEE B said that sometimes during transportation a bone will fall off the back of the truck and land on the ground or along the roadway."

This is apropos of nothing. Read the readers' comments for the expressions of shock and disgust. It is objectively disgusting to imagine bones, gristle, flesh, and hair being moved en masse to an open weedy pile: it offends biology and anthropology. Olympia and I debated last night whether these acts qualify as "violence" when the subjects dismembered are already dead. The victims are the family members who have invested emotion in the ritual of commemoration. Even if it's not violence per se, it is offensive and gross, and really, really weird.

I recalled a scene from J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace which describes the main character's work in an animal shelter. His job, which he does poorly, is to cremate dead dogs. The other workers casually snap the dogs' death-stiffened legs in order to fit them better into the furnace, but the protagonist cannot bring himself to do this. Olympia let me know, in so many words, that she thought this analogy was inappropriate.

dear god please leave me alone

V____ from three posts back is back at it. I waited 18 hours after his last email invitation to say, "Sorry, I'm busy. But I'll see you in class!" Collegial, short, evasive. A good reader would understand that I have expressed a lack of interest in friendship. But V____ is not a good reader.

Just now I got this email:

What up [Bananarchist],

Hi, how are you? I hope all is well. I'm going to be in the city Sunday working with my first client and was wondering if you wanted to grab brunch at 11:00AM at
LePeep.
1010 W. Washington Blvd.
Chicago, IL 60607
312-563-9990
Let me know by Saturday at noon.

Best,
V_____

He wrote it just like this, with the "What up" and the Let me know by Saturday at noon in italics and bold.

What in good God? I honestly don't think he's trying to ask me on a date; he wants to make friends. But who makes demands for friendship like this?! With italicized deadlines, in bold?

rancid lying demon

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:09 PM, [B] wrote:

it's really funny when wonkette describes bill kristol as a "rancid lying demon." just saying!

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:09 PM, S____ wrote:

i love wonkette! their post about italy hosting the G-8 summit is amazing! on the front page paragraph alone, italy the country is referred to as

a wacky do-nothing ice-cream colony
an ancient land-phallus
AND
this embarrassing pizza-bagel of a country

amazing!!!

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:46 PM, [B] wrote:

heehee!!! is that berlusconi?!! does he shave his abbondanza?

can i tell you about something cringe-inducing? my improv class has an email list which we use to set up nights to go out together to watch shows. one of the guys from my improv class, a friendly but socially inept 28 year-old attorney (i'm not describing myself here) has sent some regrettable emails over this listserv. the first came last week: "I noticed there are some cliques forming in our group. I challenge everybody to take some time to talk to somebody they don't know at the next class!" note that no cliques had actually formed, but poor v___ just felt lonely. the email expressed a weird mix of hope and dismay that seemed totally inappropriate for our light-hearted, very friendly, very social group. during the next class he took a position at the far end of the room and spoke to nobody, although a few times people went over and tried to be friendly.

i just got another email from him:

Dear [Bananarchist],

Hi, how are you? I hope all is well. I haven't had a chance to talk to you and would like to make a new friend. So how about we meet at the corner of North and Wells and grab a bite at a restaurant near Second City at 5:30pm before class?

Cheers,
V____

nothing too wrong with this friendly gesture, except he sent reply-all to EVERYBODY IN THE CLASS.

i felt pretty awful until he did this, two minutes later, again replying-all, to another person in the class!

i haven't responded bc my life is too short to go on friend dates with people i am certain i don't want to spend alone time with. do you think he's a shooter?

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:55 PM, S____ wrote:

oh no! oh no!!! totally cringe-inducing, eye-averting! poor v____. BUT also annoying and irritating v____ who is killing everyone else's buzz. you can't demand friendship (the way he is demanding friendship). as i say all the time, friendship is beautiful because its parameters are flexible and ambiguous and organic, therefore it is very sturdy, unlike a rship. it's hard to ruin a friendship, unlike a rship. similarly, it can be hard to force a friendship. you can't just be like, i don't know you very well, let's meet at this place at this time on this date so we can get to know each other better. that's just bossy.

advice: ignore. life is too short to pretend-make friends with someone just because you worry that there is a chance that he is the mass murderer in your midst.

the missing witness

My stupid fucking brain cannot explain in plain language why Seventh Circuit Pattern Criminal Jury Instruction 3.24 ("The Missing Witness") should or should not have been threatened to have been not given. Passive voice. Present perfect progressive tense. Double negatives. Uncertainty. Grammar fails. My job is killing English; killing English kills me. I hardly ever write or talk about my job because for long spells it is difficult, maddening, and uninteresting in precisely this way.

Doctrinal law courses, at their best, are storytelling sessions. There is a brief story. "The farmer agrees to buy a filly to breed with his stallion. Nobody knows it, but filly is barren." Questions of justice follow from the story. "Must the farmer buy the filly if the truth is discovered?" The law chooses a just outcome: mutual mistake, no contract. One is satisfied, one stretches one's legs, one walks out of the classroom to purchase a lemon-infused fizzy water. One graduates expecting to be stimulated by clean stories of injustice forever.

My experience with justice has been less clean. In metaphor: in the deli sections of Chinese supermarkets, there are live fish swimming in tanks alongside the iceboxes where carcasses of cleaned fish are displayed. (There may also be some western supermarkets with live fish, but I haven't paid attention.) One wants a catfish but thinks, I would like a fresh one, not one that has been dead for seven hours, and one points at a medium-sized manx in the tank. The butcher scoops it out with a net. Then he slams the net on the ground. He takes the fish by its tail, and hammers its head against the tile. He uses a short, sharp knife to make a quick incision the length of the fish, and in one practiced motion, he sweeps the new cavity of salty, wet, dun parts. Only then do the gills stop heaving. The innards go on top of thirty gallons of fish parts in a heavy duty trash bin. Flies move from the old parts and descend upon the new. The butcher then uses the dull side of his cleaver to scrape the sequins off the fish's black dress, and the sharp side to hack off its head. The fish offers a final convulsion, and then uncurls on a piece of white paper for one's delectation. It then costs $1.99/pound. It looks just like the clean fish on ice, but through the process of the slaughter one loses one's appetite.

The issues, boiled down to the stories, are simple: was he fired because he was black*, or because he failed a drug test? Can he seek medical leave if he has only been on the job for 340 days and the FMLA coverage begins after 365 days? Should the defense attorney have been permitted to argue that the government's failure to call a witness suggests that the witness's testimony would have been favorable to the defense? Is "this offer expires after 30 days" misleading, if other offers are available after 30 days? In abstract form, these issues are delectable. When I must tell stories about my job, these are the stories I tell.

* I note that I am not actually so stupid as to use any REAL examples from my work. These are hypotheticals, people!

But the actual process of reading, researching, and applying the law is a dull, gory slaughter. In a Fed. R. Crim. P. 33(a) motion, the issue and its outcome are pretty clear. The interests of justice do not require a new trial because of one confusing thing the defense counsel said in closing statements. But one can spend nine hours here - typing fifty words, then checking email and blogs for half an hour, then reading a Tobias Wolff short story, then eating bi bim bap, and then typing another fifty words, then Googling "how do disc brakes work," then watching Michael Jackson's daughter cry, then typing some more - because one's stupid fucking brain cannot parse a relatively simple issue of procedure in plain English.

I could do this in the style of unclear extended metaphors with muddy referents. I could do a zen koan. (Here, e.g., "A rancid grape can be clipped from the bunch.") I could draw this in pictures. I could do it Illinois state court style, with the parties filing sample orders and the court official just circling words he agrees with and crossing out words he doesn't. But Memorandum Opinion and Order style? Word Perfect is the cruelest irony of them all.

change

Just fiddling around with the blog template. The orange was a little stressful. I'll put up some words about my and R's July 4th trip to Michael Jackson's childhood home soon.

animal rights

I went on a date on Monday with an animal rights activist I met on my online dating site. Since I respect him, I wouldn't ordinarily reduce him metonymically to his convictions about animals - in the same way that I would describe Tapered Jeans by his only memorable feature - but it defines so much of him that I don't think it's an unfair description.

We went to a vegetarian fast food restaurant in my neighborhood, at his suggestion. I made sure to wear my second most animal-printed shirt. The first, a red sweatshirt with dozens of antelope silhouettes in pink, is for winter wear. I also flossed the turkey leg tendons from my teeth. N and I had gone to Taste of Chicago the night before, and had shared many pounds of barbecued poultry sitting on a curb near the Buckingham fountain. I was vegetarian for ten years and vegan for six months, but this was for environmental reasons and to woo a hot vegan, not because I cared about the animal suffering behind my diet. In fact, I believed that concern for animal suffering was only an ancillary and not very compelling reason to go veg, and a bad way to pitch the plan to potential vegetarians.

This guy I met on Monday has almost changed my mind. He didn't make arguments that were new to me - in fact, he didn't make arguments at all. He wasn't proselytizing, although as always with a conviction that the speaker feels so strongly, any conversation with an outsider about it will feel to her like evangelism. I was honest with him about the limits of my sympathy for his cause. But I liked what he had to say a great deal. First, I just like people who can speak enthusiastically about the things that matter to them, no matter what those things are. It's the sort of nauseating relief you feel when Mark Sanford describes his Argentinian consort as his "soulmate"; nausea because OMG TMI, but relief because his honesty about his lovesickness is easier to understand than the soulless and politic contrition we have come to expect from our horny politicians. I felt the same way recently when IB explained that he stockpiled Kashi Autumn Wheat cereal in order to achieve a "honeycomb" effect in his bowel movements: more fascinated than repelled, more accepting than judgmental.

Second, he was very smart, in a limber and associative way that reminded me of the people I admired most in college and law school. Schopenhauer is a dick, but a person who can talk about Schopenhauer on social movements and animal rights is a person I want to listen to. Move from Schopenhauer to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, and I might even break my prohibition on second dates to see you again! We talked about the latter when he described to me the sentences meted out to his activist friends for trespassing, videotaping conditions in the meat industry, protesting, etc.

Third, he was sincere, kind, and sympathetic. I asked him his animal rights activist story. The story started with him being "one of ten Chinese people in Indianapolis, all of whom were evangelical Christians," being shunned, bullied, and beaten in his all-American high school, and finding companionship and solace in Vivian, his dog and his best friend. People who haven't had a connection with an animal think dog owners/animal lovers are nutjobs when they talk about their animal friends, but as someone who has crawled underneath a bed and whispered "Nobody understands us, my friend" for half an hour, to Boo, during a raging house party, I get it. So he and Vivian went off exploring together, and grew up together, and he still regrets that he chose to stick to his GRE study schedule rather than drive back to see Vivian in her last hours. He said he quit his economics Ph.D. at MIT in part because he had stepped on a mouse that had made a home inside an old shoe.

It's easy to dismiss this as kooky, and animal rights activists generally as kooky, but I didn't think he was kooky. Who am I, anyway, to tell someone that the pain he feels upon seeing animals hurt is unreal pain?

Incidentally, I ate a fried tofu burger with a cream soda, which made me sick for two days, and he ate a wrap with a vegan chocolate chip cookie dough milkshake. He declared fruits and vegetables to be his "mortal enemies," which I have never heard a vegan do.

Anyway, I didn't change my mind. I started out from a sympathetic place. Like the other yuppie liberals you know, I believe that unnecessary animal suffering should be minimized and that consumer and dietary habits should change to reflect the true cost of eating meat, so that you pay a couple more bucks to eat a decently-raised chicken once in a while rather than having cheap and plentiful meat from toxic, tortured birds for all meals. I don't like how wastefulness drives up demand for products that suck up animal and natural resources. But I am also a bit more brutal and profligate than my new friend, and I accept that sometimes animals must die for human use.

Well, who cares about my thoughts about animals. I liked this person a lot. I liked that he likes Ratatouille, I guess because it depicts parasitic animals and humans living in harmony. (I didn't tell him about my desire to chop into a thousand pieces the rat that has been hiding in my kitchen for two months.) I liked also that afterward he texted me to say "New mission. Find gem of cyttorrak for [Veggie Bite] owner," and clarified that said gem "gives wielder unstoppable powers." Still later, he declared by text, "Hell yea! Im a lvl 7 conjurer w a pet iguana and a powerful, uh, staff...Cloud strife has nuttin on me!" I have never developed my fantasy/comic nerd potential but I am attracted to those who have.

But, wholly unrelated to this person, I am still feeling so squeamish about dating and intimacy that I'd might rather just be friends so I can continue to distract myself with half hour sessions of conversation with and blind trust in total strangers. It remains to be seen what the heart (and the nether heart) will allow.

iran

One thing I find very distressing about American reporting on the Iran demonstrations is that the writers seem to be surprised that Iranians act like normal human beings. Iranian women play rugby and softball, even while wearing scarves! Iranian young people go the gym, and ride motorcycles, and get pissed, and believe in justice! Wha!? This is news only if you didn't believe that Iranians were cognizable as human in the first place. I guess you have to believe that if you think the best way to help Iranian democracy is to blow the demos to smithereens.

old stories

Sorry not to have posted anything recently. My brain is in a sleepless backlog right now. But I rescued some journal entries recently and found some stories that might distract you momentarily from studying for the bar/avoiding work/passing the weekday in an unproductive stupor.

Wednesday, 1/30/08 11:42am

I've heard a couple of good stories lately so I thought I should write them down.

1. Richard from the dog run. Richard was talking to some other stranger when I got into the dog run. I'd seen him talking to people in the run before, but I had assumed that they just knew him. Turns out people were just being friendly to a lonely, garrulous old man who attached himself to them and talked about himself. I had jogged to the run and was stretching out my hamstrings on the bench while Boo trotted alongside a Jack Russell who had a worn tennis ball. Richard said, "Keep going, you need to touch your toes!" I was irritated, and said only, "I'm doing the best I can!" Richard said, "When I was in the Marines, I could go six inches past my toes!"

This was his opening. From this exchange, he went on to tell me how he could do 120 push-ups in three minutes, and 100 sit-ups in two minutes, and most importantly, how he could do 48 pull-ups in a row in his heyday in the Marines. "But I didn't do it for my ego. You know how some guys just want to be big. I was the biggest and strongest guy in the Marines. But I did it for a woman." The winner of a company-wide pull-up contest would get five days leave in England. A few months before he had spent a weekend with a British girl named Audrey Hooper. "But it wasn't sexual at all. We had a thing - it was intellectual. Well, as intellectual as 18, 19 year olds can get. But it was just comfortable, you know? There wasn't any sex." He trained for the contest and won it, and as a reward he was the only enlisted man who was permitted to wear civilian clothes on their warship. He also got his leave, which began with him stepping off his ship, walking down the street and seeing a Rolls Royce, which stopped for him and his friends. A man inside said, "Come on in, Yanks!" and drove them into town.

Richard did not find Audrey that week and never saw her again. He said he written to her in the intervening years to tell her that she had given him the best weekend of his life. Richard proclaimed even in the dog run that that weekend was the best of his life. It was in 1964 or 1965, and he was young. "I sent her a watch - Bulova. I wrote to her." He didn't say if she ever wrote back.

I said, "That's a great story, you really should write it down" and went over to put Boo back on the leash and take him home. He was still eagerly chasing around a softball, so it took me a few minutes to pin him down. Richard took this as a slight and went up to the next stranger and said, "Okay! Who is my next victim! She doesn't want to talk with me anymore!" I felt bad and wanted to say that I really was preparing to leave, but I mumble too much and throughout our conversation he didn't appear to hear any of the things I said - things admittedly limited to extraneous interjections like, "Hm!" and "That's how it happens, isn't it?" - so I wasn't too confident that he would hear my excuse. He tried speaking to a woman he called "Jessica," but Jessica said, "Nuh-uh, you're speaking to him, not me, Richard!" in a jovial but firm way. I guess she'd fallen prey to him before. Richard then said, to no one in particular, "I'm lonely, you know? I'm just a lonely old guy who has no one to talk with so I have to talk with people here." I left.

2. SV's latest threesome. SV, a woman in her last year of her doctoral program in history at NYU and one of S and R's friends, told me and S this story two nights ago when we were at an afterparty for the NYU grad students who had seen the Jerry Springer opera at Skirball. I missed the opera because I didn't think to get tickets but I'm not sad to have missed British people mocking what they believe Americans to be like, because it only arouses feelings of jingoism which are usually so foreign in me, and I would only have gotten into a fight with some Europhilic self-aggrandizing liberal grad student about why England isn't exactly a classy lassie herself. Instead I spent an evening in the clinic offices typing up a memo for TLDEF about the possible claims a transgender student could make against his school district for being forced to home-school because the district could not regulate the bullies who tormented him, and afterward made my way to Nowhere Bar on 14th and Second Avenue, with Freddie Mercury's spinto tenor singing to my ears on the walk over.

The party was a combination of NYU grad students who had just come from the opera, and R's ex-boyfriend's M's friends - it was their first of (they hoped) many Monday night parties at Nowhere, with M's lesbian friend Carly "spinning" music on iTunes whilst bedecked in Shane regalia, which included eyes beleaguered by liner and shallow, short-brimmed hat, and a self-consciously sly approach to approaching women. I avoided her. I bought a $2 Pabst and sipped it with S while SV told us her tale.

SV is a recently-divorced thirty-something who is experiencing a second sexual adolescence in the sausage-heavy region delineated by the L stop at Lorimer, the NYU-side of the Village, and the Williamsburg bridge, with jetties reaching to basement speakeasies in the Financial District and strangers' apartments further south in Brooklyn. She lives with R and another divorcee named S_ in a newly-renovated apartment unit just a block away from one of Williamsburg's largest bars. S describes pictures of SV from the mid-1990s, when she was married, as images of an unhappy East German hausfrau. I guess marriage will do that to you, and getting out of a marriage will do exactly the opposite. SV now has a cute hipster haircut and wears tall boots with tight jeans that draw attention, as the jodphur-style of hipster fashion is meant to do, right to her ass. She also has this way of leaning toward you when you speak to her, which I found a little discomfitting at first (so I rocked back on my heels more than a few times).

SV told us that she had been at a bar with her friend D, whom she had slept with before. They were squeezed into a picture booth when D told SV that his new roommate Richard was interested in her. Richard had apparently just gotten out of a long relationship that was mostly devoid of sex ("The reason was supposedly that he was too big, so she would give him handjobs once a week," SV said), so D wanted to cheer his friend up by facilitating sex for him. SV turned around and said, "Well, that's great but you're the one I want to sleep with," and strutted away before D could think of anything to say. She found him lamely hitting on some other girl at the bar later. D, SV, and Richard left the bar together for SV's house, where she got into her pajamas and directed D to sleep in the middle of the bed, between SV and Richard. SV somehow managed to get between them anyway, and had concluded that nothing was going to happen except for sleep, at dawn. D got the hiccups and began describing what he thought was going to happen ("Does this mean that in *hic* five minutes *hic* Richard and I will be sucking each others' dicks?"). Richard, meanwhile, began groping SV from behind. She batted his hands away but he was persistent. The details get hazy at this point, but SV said, in confidence, again leaning toward me, "I sucked Richard's dick while D fucked me from behind." I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. She could not remember who had the bigger penis ("because D is pretty big too") and the next morning closed her eyes and grasped bottles with each hand and called upon her motor memory to compare their two cocks.

Alan, another friend, was out in the living room on the couch. He had to catch a flight back to his apartment in Mexico City that morning, and his belongings were in SV's room, so at ten a.m. she got into her bathrobe and pulled all of Alan's stuff in to the kitchen. Then she got back into bed and ignored D and Richard and Alan as they milled around the kitchen trying to make sense of the night before. She told D if he was hungry there were English muffins in the fridge.

This was all very scandalizing, and I did not stay to have a second beer.

night words

I couldn't sleep last night and the word bird flew back to me. Don't remember anything except: "You were a paradise. A reliving."

C too experiences the word vision at night. She says: "It sounds like it might have meaning, but it didn't mean what it sounds like it might mean in my dream, if that makes sense: 'You can’t know, you’ll never know, because you’re worried about flavors like unique.'"

eight baby pandas wrestling

What needs to be said, really?

where i am really from

Five brief conversations from the last three weeks:

1. Black men in freight elevator watching a kung fu DVD. One says to me, I bet you could do that, can't you? I put up my dukes, everybody laughs. I leave, bike away.
2. White man at street festival says, Konbanwa! Where are you from? I say, Are you kidding? I'm American. He says, But really, where are you from? I say, Give me a break. He says, Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to offend. Japanese women are just so beautiful. I tell him to leave me alone, I'm not even Japanese. He says, Korean? Chinese? Eventually he leaves me alone.
3. White man, IT tech from my office building, comes into chambers to fix co-worker's computer, and on his way out the door says to me, Hello. I say hello. He says, So...China? Where are you from? I say, Please, I don't like to talk about these things. He says, No, I just want to know where you're really from. I say, Please, it's just something I don't want to talk about. He says, Come on now. I close the door on him, saying, Please, have a nice day, thank you for coming.
4. White man standing in front of Bank of America. I bike by. He stops me, and says, Hey, do you know where there is an ATM? I say, Are you kidding me? You are standing in front of a Bank of America. He says, Oh. Are you Chinese? Where are you from? I say, You're joking, right? No. Then I ride ten feet away from him to lock up my bike. He lingers in front of the bank, and says, Can I ask your name? I say, flatly, No.
5. Two white men standing behind me at McDonald's in O'Hare. All flights are canceled due to a downpour. I am eating the soft serve I just bought. They say, Excuse me. I say, Oh sorry, and move to the left, thinking they are trying to get past me to the cashier. They say, No, no, excuse me, where did you get that ice cream? It is a McDonald's soft serve with a McDonald's wrapper wrapped around it, and I am standing directly in front of McDonald's. Oh, I say. From McDonald's! It's the best thing that's happened to me all day! They say, Ha ha ha! and so do I. A few seconds later, one turns to me and says, How do you say "hello" in your native language? "Anyeong haseyo"? I say, You say "hello." I speak English. I am American. They say, Oh, you're American! I walk away, the pleasure of the soft serve extinguished by the conversation, muttering, My English is better than yours, assholes.
   

I am posting this primarily to remind myself why I need to live in California for a while.

These are trivial, hackneyed, universal and well-documented irritations, and not very interesting to read about. Perhaps they are not even justified; the people saying these things seem to mean well; they are only curious; I would rather they be curious than hard; we must all be curious about each other. It's not like anyone is arresting me, strip-searching me, or erasing off my camera my vacation photos of New York landmarks because of my appearance.

But it is boring and irritating to receive comments like those above. Though I generally love talking with strangers, I dislike conversations that begin with the most obvious thing about me. Somebody might want to talk to you because you have voluminous buttocks, but if they want to make conversation with you, they should not begin with "Hello, how much water could your buttocks displace?" Instead, dating coaches suggest that one wear an interesting article of clothing - a Danzig t-shirt, dreamcatcher earrings, a loud belt - when going to bars so that strangers have an entry point for making conversation besides your voluminous buttocks, even if ultimately that is what they find most compelling about you. Race is not an interesting article of clothing; race is buttocks! This analogy is imperfect.

When a stranger opens conversation with my race, this tells me a few things about him. First, he comes from a place where Asian people are uncommon. Second, he doesn't have many Asian friends. Third, no Asian person has successfully communicated to him their uncomfortable feelings of otherness resulting from having had their race and nationality probed. Fourth, he is curious and forward. None of these traits are deserving of my contempt. But often they come packaged with contemptible problems: he hasn't thought about how Asian-Americans might feel just as affiliated with America as he does; he has a narrow idea of what Americans look like. A better person would sit through the painful opening salvos of the "Where are you really from?" conversation to get to the more interesting bits of human interaction - stories about divorces, pig races, and absurd business ideas - and maybe educate a heretofore clueless American about race in the process. But I find it so difficult to be that better person.

I live in Illinois, where only 3.4% of the population is Asian, but my expectations for others developed in California, which is 12.9% Asian, near San Francisco, which is 33% Asian. So I cannot begrudge these kindly cabbages their curiosity about my background, but it is so tiresome. These complaints are inspecific, so let me offer some precise tips for the person dying to know about another's ethnicity:

1. Gather at least twenty facts about a person, or converse for at least fifteen minutes, before inquiring about their race. Race-neutral conversation starters include: It's raining walnuts!; How do I get from Cleveland to Louisville?; Would you rather have a vomiting problem or a diarrhea problem?; I do improv comedy; You look like a zombie.
2. Don't say "Where are you from?" when you mean, "In what part of the world do people have slanty eyes like yours?" The former implies that slanty-eyed people cannot be from America, which is a faulty premise, upon which conversation cannot be built. The latter is direct.
3. Don't say "In what part of the world do people have slanty eyes like yours?" because it is too direct. Even if a person indeed has the epicanthic fold, it is still distressing to reduce her to the metonym. Say instead, "What is your ethnic, racial, or national background?" You may sound like a Census analyst, but better a social scientist than a bumpkin.
4. If your primary interest in another person's ethnicity is to satisfy a creepy fetish you have regarding that person's ethnicity, it's best that you restrict yourself to communications via the Internet, in chat rooms which you must pay to join, with receptive strangers, late at night, in Canada.

Please! Ask me about my ass!

don el don

"Don El Don" is the name I have given to the strange nighttime phenomenon that I have been experiencing lately during my spells of sleeplessness. On my nighttime mind are the standard stimulants: anxiety about my halted progress toward unclear life goals, regrets for mistakes long made, and the overall unpleasant feeling that my life can best be described in metaphor as a sack of unshelled walnuts spilled out on the ground. I'm coming to the end of my year in suspension, preparing for some transitions, etc. Only more alarming than being glum like this is the regularity with which I write about being glum like this. That's a different post, however.

Anyway, I haven't been sleeping very well since May 2008. The insomnia comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad. Now, when I can't sleep, I lie in bed, breathing shallow, with my heartbeat vibrating at high speed in my ears. In the daytime, I avoid light. I feel drunk and I cause accidents. Yesterday I accidentally upended a pint of blueberries on my desk, and they went bumping off in every direction; today, the same with a baggie of pecans. The physiological effects of sleeplessness are terrifying. I feel like I might die now, or die young.

Late, late at night, Don El Don starts up. I must be lying in the dark with my eyes closed, and my fatigue has to have gone from standard sleepiness to unhappy weariness to hyperactive panic exhaustion. Some set of letters, often "Don El Don," will appear in my vision, and then I see an unending succession of words. They aren't nonsense letters, like "xoqtudff," but are English words, usually arranged in grammatical sentences, but the combination of the words does not parse (e.g. "billiard bottom conjure"). Actually, the phrases are a lot like the nonsense phrases in my spam emails, which I posted about below.

The words don't just scroll across my vision like a ticker. Instead, I am in a big, undefined space with many different plaques and signs of different shapes, fonts, and orientations affixed to faraway walls. It is as if I am behind a camera with an intense telephoto lens and a mind of its own, and I just watch passively as it zooms from spot to spot. The zoom looks like how eagle vision is depicted on-screen: sudden extreme focus on a tiny patch of space. If I'm not tired enough, the words are too fuzzy to read. It is only when I am really, really tired that the words come into focus. As soon as I read the words on one plaque, my vision focuses on another, and then another, and then another.

When I try to do Don El Don when I am fully awake - right now, for example - my mind works differently. First I think of a word, and then I see it (and its neighbors) in my vision; it feels like the conscious retrieval of information I already know. But when Don El Don comes in the night, it feels like some outside source is supplying the words to me. All I do is passively absorb new information. It comes in a liminal stage of half-sleep where I am aware that the words are creating weird juxtapositions, but if I were to read aloud or try to document them, the words would disappear as I became fully awake. I wish I could remember even one-thousandth of the words I see at night, but, like most of my dreams, they fly through my mind without ever setting a faint footprint into my memory.

It's not really something that concerns me or feels unpleasant. Sometimes Don El Don leads to the kind of distraction required for sleep, like what people try to feel when they count sheep or count down from a hundred. Those times are nice. Sometimes it goes on for hours. Those times are less nice, but at least I feel creative, or possessed, or just blessed by weirdness. If it's a neurological problem, oh, who cares? I have a nighttime companion in Don El Don.

sinister

Things that can be typed using only your left hand:

• awes
• great
• tear gas
• faster
• dessert
• defects
• treaded feces

A Boston wedding this weekend, and lots of things to think about. I'll write about them slowly over the week. Some stuff up at God si love already. Feces were defects!

spam poetry

Sometimes I check my spam folder because I find the nonsense words in the erectile dysfunction emails poetic. One from today.

fully tandem ape flood.
fiber lives bay.
gooey valuer gasper fiber.
flood palmy peso lipped.
sin penes nimbus.
module gooey warble tandem.
gas alb mix.
farad public.
peso aerate pupa pant?
aerate coatee shrink.
how cue give chump!
tare moving bay hubby.
baboo shrink tempi thyme!
bounty emir pupa mix!
fetid pink.
reflux estop lumper public!
novel voter bled nibble.
thyme mix tandem ape!
tops reflux bled seer!
arise flake sleety voter?
lipped fetid tare.
aerate outre.
slam sell blase valuer!
cue thyme pray large?

WTH. This was followed by a link to penis pills.

carrots PSA

Monday night I stayed at work until 10pm to finish up a particularly onerous motion for summary judgment. It is the second of five consecutive employment discrimination and retaliation summary judgments I need to finish in the next month; these cases are particularly gnarly because it always comes down to the facts, and often both sides disagree about every material fact, and cite dishonestly to the voluminous record, which does not actually reflect the proposition for which it is cited, and so some sad clerk gets to spend a rainy June looking through deposition transcripts in files inconveniently held together by fingertip-abraiding metal clips that prevent the document from staying open at the page one would like to stay open at, requiring Bluebooks and thermoses and rubber band balls to be repurposed as paperweights, in order to determine where a reasonable jury would say the truth lies.

Anyway, so I stayed late and got this little fucker done. But I am lazy and cheap, and I did not want to leave the office to eat. So for dinner I ate what I had on hand: a snack-size bag of Baked Doritos, and a one-pound bag of baby carrots.

(So sinister.)

This, readers, was a big mistake. I feel compelled to tell the world what a huge mistake it was so that it will not be repeated by lazy diners in the future. Please, please, never eat an entire bag of baby carrots.

You may think a one-pound bag of baby carrots is a healthy meal because it is raw and brightly colored, but it will make your insides feel as if invaded by a convention of ex-girlfriends dueling in spurs with hot, barbed pokers. I was okay for my bike ride home. I even downed the two homemade pizza slices that Olympia and her gf so generously offered. There were rumblings down below, and some stabbing pains, but I sipped ginger tea, watched an episode of 30 Rock, and tucked myself into bed at a totally reasonable hour expecting a full night of self-satisfied rest.

Not so! Soon after I lay down to sleep, the occasional stabbing pains escalated into waves of intense, crippling stomach cramps. It felt as though a giant's hand was grabbing all of my internal organs at once and rhythmically squeezing them down into a diamond under my lungs. I had just watched a Spike TV reenactment of a guy who died when his girlfriend punched him in the stomach ulcers and ruptured everything inside him, and I was sure this was happening to me. Really, I had never felt anything like this before. I moaned, I groaned, I almost cried. I lay on my side whimpering.

Each half hour, for the next five hours, I vommed. The first few times I made the toilet; the last few I only got to the trash can, which is wire mesh, so my bathroom floor was flooded with stomach bilge, and pieces of basil clung to the mesh. This was very exciting to clean up. It was the kind of out of control throwing up where you make those involuntary chirping/gurgling noises in your throat that make other people, should they have the misfortune being in earshot, want to throw up too. By 3 a.m. there was nothing coming up except orange-colored water, but my stomach was still trying to kill me, so something remained amiss. Finally, at 4 a.m., I took one last trip to the vomitorium and disgorged a fist of shredded carrot from my stomach. After this, I slept.

The moral of this story is that our bodies are not meant to digest so much carrot in so little time. Lucky for me, my body was able to eject the source of poison, so that nobody had to tell my parents that their idiot daughter had died from carrots. So much of my blog is devoted to stories such as these, e.g. when a combination of Popeye's chicken and Hot Tamales caused me to shit my pants on a plane, you would think I would learn to treat my body better. Lucky for you, dear reader, I haven't!

The epilogue to this story is that nothing has come out of my ass in two days except for some mysterious hissing sounds.

stoned cats

Cats on cat drugs. Another amusing thing to watch silently from work.

people falling down

Why is it so funny to watch people falling down?

These can all be watched without sound, from work.

james and killer

Time for some bike nerdery. Introducing my preciousessssss...

James is the 2006 16" Jamis Coda Sport that I bought for $375 on the second day that I was in Chicago. The Lincoln Park lady from whom I bought this bike had gotten it for a triathlon and then stowed it away, unridden, in her high rise on the lake, for two years. It is now a commuting powerhouse: it has fenders, so I ride it on rainy days, and a rack, so I ride it on Mondays when I bring an Ortlieb pannier weighed down with five yogurts, five bags of oatmeal, a pound of mixed nuts, two lunches, and a sack of raw vegetables to work. I hate the bar ends and never use them but I won't remove them because then I'll have to replace the grips. I could probably tour with this without adding anything else, although if Olympia's and my plan to grow avocado pit$ into blooming tree$ and $ell them for profit pans out, then I would buy a front rack and front panniers, replace the butt bench for a Brooks B17 saddle, replace my weak little wheels for 40 or 48 spoke ones, replace my balding no-name tires with 700x35mm Schwalbe Marathons with reflective sidewalls, and replace the third chainring for a 24 or 28 tooth one for optimal granny gearing. (Not that I've ever had to use anything but four of my 27 gears - there are no hills in Chicagoland.) I would even consider switching out the flat bar for drop bars with cyclocross-style in-line brakes. These are just the daydreams of a bike nerd at an office job, though.

Killer is the mid-1980s 49cm Fuji Espree that has been converted by a quack into a singlespeed (freewheel) bike. Killer is so named because it will one day kill me. When I first bought it, three weeks ago, there was only one brake, which was practically unscrewed from the frame. The headset was also so loose that I could unscrew it by hand; it rocked back and forth like a pony on springs. And the rear wheel fell off the fourth time I got on the bike (but thankfully stayed slotted in the dropouts - the ride could have ended very differently). The 27" tires are too large for the small frame, so my feet get jammed up when I turn sharply. Very, very dangerous. I went to "Women's Bike Night" at a bike collective last week and learned some new bike skills (adjusting headsets, installing brakes, cables, and housing) and improved this ugly beast, so hopefully I will not meet my death pitching headfirst into a bus. Though it will kill me, it is a fine ride. It weighs almost nothing and there are no gears to fiddle with and I can just glide, glide, glide. The simplicity of the bike is so appealing to me; with the right tools, I could probably take every piece off the frame and put it all back together in an hour. The modifications I would like to make, pending avocado profits, are mostly vanity-related: snazzy colorful grips, snazzy colorful chain, 26" wheels. This is my default bike except when it's raining and when I need to haul crap in my panniers.

Olympia says that a person needs at least five bikes: a beater bike for around town, a road bike for longer trips, a touring bike for hauling crap, a "fun" bike that is exciting to ride, and I forget the fifth. Maybe the fifth is an Xtracycle. Maybe it is a folding bike. Maybe it was only four. N's boyfriend A, who stayed with me last week, has seven bikes. The drooling cannot be contained.

Don't you wish you had those thirty seconds of your life back? Why do you read some self-indulgent lezzie's blog, anyway?

small pleasures

There are some things that make any day brighter. These include:

This video of a bird in San Francisco attacking people's heads (no sound needed for the hilarity).

This sound file of tennis player Michelle Larcher de Brito's on-court death rattles. (The link is in the leftmost column.) I edited her Wiki page to include a section on "Shrieks," which read, "de Brito's shrieks have brought thousands of new fans to the sport." This was deleted immediately.

Filling in the sections of this Venn diagram:


This Prince song (ignore the weird YouTube video). Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine, a side order of ham. L taught me that life is better when you start each day listening to this song, and most days I still do!

e.m. forster

I have been reading some stuff by E.M. Forster recently and he really must have been so nice to be around. Maybe you find secular humanism cheesy, but nonetheless I like this:

Tolerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.
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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract - that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most men possess this warmth, though they often have bad luck and get chilled. Most of them, even when they are politicians, want to keep faith. And one can, at all events, show one's own little light here, one's own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend. Personal relations are despised today.
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The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research, or they may be what is called "ordinary people," who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbours.
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I realize that all society rests upon force. But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front. These intervals are what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them "civilization." Some people idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it, instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible. I think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the mystics, err even more when they declare that force does not exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its box. It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made. But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid. Consider their conduct for a moment in The Nibelung's Ring. The giants there have the guns, or in other words the gold; but they do nothing with it, they do not realize that they are all-powerful, with the result that the catastrophe is delayed and the castle of Valhalla, insecure but glorious, fronts the storms. Fafnir, coiled round his hoard, grumbles and grunts; we can hear him under Europe today; the leaves of the wood already tremble, and the Bird calls its warnings uselessly. Fafnir will destroy us, but by a blessed dispensation he is stupid and slow, and creation goes on just outside the poisonous blast of his breath.

your tax dollars

My co-workers are cleaning out their keyboards now with pressurized air canisters. "The hair just doesn't seem to get out," one just said. "You can hear the crap rattling around," said the other. Now the first one has upturned her keyboard against a garbage can and is banging it steadily. I tried the air canister for one second. Lots of particles flew out of my keyboard and into my face. Last night I fell asleep around 2 a.m. and woke up with a wet spot on my bed from the half-eaten sack of baby carrots that I had gnawed through during a three hour 30 Rock watching marathon and forgotten to return to the refrigerator. I try to comport myself with grace and dignity at all times. Please tell the Los Angeles County Bar Association to stop spamming me because I simply do not care about their diverse course offerings.

another note about the yoga ball

Look here so when it comes time to politely disgorge gas from your nether eye at work you can usually do so into your padded leather stench throne discreetly and inaudibly and no one knows any better, even if you do sit in the receptionist fish bowl, but when you sit on a yoga ball even the most mind-body controlled gentle byproduct of digestion will be amplified and echoed inside the ball as one reverb-heavy brass note slowly decaying into the otherwise solemn atmosphere of the federal judiciary. Product liability ladies I wish someone had warned of this on the packaging.

play nice

Contra the last post, I was a total bitch to a stranger yesterday because he made assumptions about me based on my race. I went to see Justin Townes Earle again yesterday...more about how much I want to butter this man's biscuit later.

Anyway, at the show, a man standing next to me looked over and said, "Konbanwa! Are you Japanese?"

Now listen ladies I had a rough weekend. Four separate friends bailed on tentative plans they had made with me, I lost hearing in my left ear for two days and Saturday stayed in bed, nauseated by noises, and then I broke two hearts, one Bavarian, on Sunday morning. For most of the weekend it was 45 degrees and raining in Chicago. (June.) I was feeling grim, impatient, and ungenerous. I was certainly in no mood for exchanging essentializing pleasantries with friendly but clueless cabbages.

So I turned to this man, with his awful Japanese accent, with his green bermuda shorts and his fleece vest and his low hiking boots, and I gave him the lookover you would give to a pamphlet on gum disease, and I sighed and rolled my eyes. "Oh come on," I said. "What?" he said. "No, I'm not Japanese, Jesus Christ," I said. I generally do not like to hurt other people's feelings, but I could not hide my disgust with this man.

The man persisted. "Wait, I'm sorry, I just wanted to know if you were Japanese." He was retreating and apologetic and sad. I could tell from his tone that he was an man afraid of vaginas, so I was probably devastating him by rejecting him so thoroughly. Regardless, I looked him square in the eyes and said, "Christ, why can't I just be American?"

"Oh no, sure you can just be American. I just wanted to know - I didn't mean to insult you or bring your day down" - just like that he said it, "Bring your day down," the poor stupid nice cabbage had been taught by someone nice to recognize other people's hurt feelings and apologize nicely, but I just detested it. So I said, "Please, just stop" and turned away from him.

It was pathetic and horrible but I was simply unable to muster the modicum of good will that would have saved the situation from being so unpleasant. He stood next to me holding his beer for two or three minutes, then slowly moved forward in the crowd without looking back.

do you have a good story?

I went to see an orthopedic surgeon today for the wrist problem described in the last post. Turns out I have inflamed a tendon or something, requiring a 3-hour doctor's visit, steroid injections, an x-ray, and a $200 splint - and I have to curtail my biking and guitar playing for 3-6 weeks - totally awesome.

But actually my trip to the doctor was enjoyable. First because I biked there and forgot my lock at home so I had to persuade the security guard to allow me to leave my bike in the freight office and then convince the man working in that office to watch my bike for me. I love meeting strangers and being self-effacing and pathetic and convincing (ask CH how I charmed three free tickets for the Wrigley Field-bound bus from a parking lot attendant last weekend!) and then getting my way. It's empowering. Also, all the guys who worked in the building were really nice to me, including the guy whose job it was to control the freight elevator while watching kung fu movies on a portable DVD player all day. (He showed me his box set of Jet Li movies.) These friendly helpful Midwestern cabbages!

Second, in the waiting room, I was able to polish off an issue each of Cat Fancy, Best Friends (a magazine for dog-lovers), Ceramics Monthly, and Reader's Digest, large print edition. I didn't get to "Highlights," but I have to go back to the doctor in three weeks and it is on my must-read list.

Third, there were posters and pastel paintings and sculptures of hands everywhere.

Fourth, I got a special splint made for me right there, and I was permitted to choose my own Velcro color. Naturally I opted for fluorescent pink, which makes my wrist visible from a hundred yards away and therefore doubles as bike safety gear. The atmosphere in the splint-making portion of the clinic was jovial. There were about half a dozen therapists making splints for half a dozen people with hand and wrist ailments, and you could tell that everybody enjoyed working there. They joked around with each other and with their patients. The man sitting at the table across from me told me about how he had broken his arm simply by falling over, and how three months of wearing a cast had mysteriously made thick patches of "Eddie Munster" hair grow on that arm. He also said that choosing any color other than black for his Velcro would ruin his reputation.

Fifth, there was a blank sheet of paper posted on a door in the splint-making room inviting people to write down how they had injured themselves. "Do you have a good story?" it asked. I quote the responses:

• Opened a bottle of syrup with a knife - yikes!
• Grandpa hit me with his car.
• Lost hand splint surfing in Costa Rica.
• I ran into my fiancee with my bicycle.
• I punched my dad in the arm.
• I crashed my bike too!
• I tussled with an alligator. Chomp!
• I jump [sic] high and came down on thumb
• I got old
• I got in a fight with my best friend over a girl at a bar. He left in a cab. I punched a wall.
• Fell rollerblading and I'm 71
• I got nailed saving my 25 lb dog from a 85 lb lab mix. Held on for dear life of my baby and I'm worse than she is. We are both lucky - due to my good reflexes. It's still a bit frightening. -JI
• I side-tackled someone playing soccer and they fell on me. Ouch!
• I crashed avoiding a deer while in Texas on my motorcycle (in full gear)
• I tripped running a marathon

Hahahaha! Then I was instructed to handwash the fingerless "arm sock" that one wears underneath the splint, and to use toothpaste to "deodorize" the splint itself, and then I left. There were half a dozen men in the freight elevator on the way down, all watching the kung fu DVD alongside the elevator man. The FedEx guy looked over at me and said, "I bet you could take all these guys down, couldn't you!" I put up my dukes and everyone in the elevator laughed. And then I said, "But really, I don't know the first thing about kung fu." And then everyone in the elevator laughed again! I felt really happy about getting along with my fellow Americans even though another version of me would have gotten pissy about being stereotyped as an Asian good at kung fu. Living in a less diverse and more politically moderate place has made me see the value of accepting other people's good humor and good temperaments even when they don't address you exactly the way you want to be addressed. God, I've really been such a bitch!

Anyway. At work now, balancing on yoga ball, typing with hot pink splint, blogging. Judge told me today that I should join the circus.

my birthday is coming up soon

Gift ideas.

butt ball

Due to the overwhelming response of one comment, I feel compelled to write some more about the blue ball I have sat on for so far 15 hours of the last 48.

Observations:

1. My ass hurts.
   
2. My back hurts.
3. My wrists hurts.

But these were true of when I was sitting in my previous all-leather sweat throne too. What prompted all this ergonomic experimentation in the first place is that my posture has always sucked and my left wrist has recently been all sorts of fucked up. It has a turning range of motion of less than 90 degrees now, which is problematic because the things I like doing (playing guitar, piano, typing, speaking with a fake Italian accent while emphatically shaking my hand over my head) all require my hand to be turned at a strange angle. Now the pain is an 8, and I am afraid that my stubborn refusal to see a doctor sooner means that the orthopedic surgeon I am scheduled to see tomorrow will tell me that my wrist must be immobilized for eight weeks.

Anyway, wah wah life is hard. And so is this stupid yoga ball. Some more detailed observations:

1. My ass hurts. A yoga ball is convex. It pushes your tush. My solution thus far has been to shift positions on the ball continuously. I guess this is good for your "core" but it seems pretty hard on your ass.

2. My back hurts. Lower back, shoulders. This might be a sign that I am actually sitting in the correct posture and my muscles are working harder so I feel sore. Or it could be a sign that I am permanently ruining my health. I think it's better for the shoulders though, because my previous chair had high armrests that made me sit with my shoulders hunched up and rolled forward. On the ball I think I sit more with my shoulders back and lower.

3. My wrist hurts. Still. Can't expect a quick-fix though.

4. I am slightly more entertained. Actually, I am infinitely more entertained by the ball, because entertainment by sweat throne was 0, and even .000000001 cubits of entertainment is ∞ more than 0. Some things that entertain me are these games: Try Not to Fall; Lift Your Feet Off the Ground and Try Not to Fall; You Can't Turn Around Without Standing Up First; Stop Squeaking When You Type; Slam Your Hand Down Onto Your Desk To Stop Yourself From Falling; Shrieking and Falling; Buddha. The last game is climbing off the ball and sitting on the floor to read a case.

5. I am extremely self-satisfied. You know, now that I work in an office all day long I have very limited opportunities for creative experimentation. This is why I obsess about the perfect morning gruel meal, the perfect bike for commuting, the perfect clothes for combination bike commuting/office work, the number of cups of water I drink at work. Introducing a ball to my office environment opens up avenues of office furniture experimentation. I love how awesome I am.
   

6. With the ball, my reputation in the office as a moron with a screw loose is rock solid. Did I tell you this? So a while back I told this joke to my co-clerks: "Did you hear about my camping trip? It was IN-TENTS!" They both laughed politely and returned to the topic of conversation. Then a few moments later, one said, "Wait, so you went camping?" Then I had to explain that I had said "IN-TENTS" and not "INTENSE" and there was no more laughter forthcoming from anyone!
   

finally

I am so looking forward to the next eight hours of being 28 and sitting on a ball.

yoga ball

The exercise ball came in the mail today. It came with a pump that was mysteriously covered in an oil that smelled like diesel fuel. Twenty minutes of pumping got the ball close to its advertised 65 cm diameter.
I was unable to insert the plug in all the way so I am certain it will rocket out of the ball as I am sitting on it and send me sprawling onto the floor. So far it smells like shit and is quite uncomfortable, but permits gentle bobbing, which breaks up the monotony of the workday.

I bent backward over it and read a Memorandum in Support of Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment (fittingly, a worker's comp case) with the blood rushing to my head. My co-workers are amused. My judge is out of town.

I almost fell over reaching for an almond that had fallen on the ground. More updates as they come.