Four years ago

Here's a half-hearted attempt to recapture what was lost when Microsoft ate my last attempt to write an unwriteable story. It's just a clatch of images, but sufficient time has elapsed so that I remember nothing other than a clatch of images.

So this is what I remember from November 27, 2001: Casa del Sol, the abandoned tenement turned almost-adverse-possession squat on Cypress in Mott Haven/Hunt's Point, Laura's former home, eventually taken over by young crusty punks after the RNC last year but shut down after the FDNY and NYPD set it on fire December 2004; crazy guy named Bueno, crazy guy named Bernard, an angel named Lisa, a saint named Harry; stumbling off the 6 train looking for the Cherry Tree Garden; chopping up logs in the South Bronx with a dull ax and moving all the mulch in a wheelbarrow; a single toilet bowl in the center of an otherwise empty room, water flowing in a stream from the ceiling, a bare bulb next to it; Culebra the cat and her kitten Unguento; a kitchen sink rendered useless when a crazy guy accidentally boiled a chicken in candle wax and poured the wax down the drain in an attempt to save the chicken; no electricity but an old European payphone and candelabras; a dried elephant's leg used as a wastebasket/umbrella holder/hat; six floors of abandoned belongings, suitcases full of porn, 26 tuxedos, Naked Color Spectacular; dozens of rooms with nothing but drafts, rooms shuttered in plywood, rooms with homemade stoves and vents; a four-seater bicycle car in the vestibule; a "gallery space" with no illumination; a day-long fast; an abstinence from water; Sam's silver fixed gear with brahma bars; a dusk to dawn Navajo tipi ceremony led by two Arizonans named Keith and Melvin; a tipi no bigger than a bedroom seating 52 with a blazing fire in the middle of it and a tiny hole at the apex for the smoke to escape; two concentric circles of 26 each; starting in the inner circle but hating the heat; moving into the outer circle and losing my shirt and freezing next to Laura; watching a heat blister the size of a baby corn bubbling up on Aresh’s bicep as he endured the fire; kneeling until kneeling was no longer possible but being bitched out by Keith for being unable to overcome physical pain and instead all of us sitting sidesaddle like weak women; 52 wingnuts in a tipi projecting their own misfired visions of Native American religiosity onto actual Native American religiosity; 52 fools taking turns saying what was on each of their minds while a troubled man beat a drum filled with water; pulverized peyote by the fistful, spooned out of Skippy jars with a tablespoon, the powder reaching under your teeth, into your throat, up your nose, gumming your mouth, difficult to swallow, impossible to disgorge, clouding your judgment, echoing the water drum, protracting that strung out woman across the fire’s rendition of “What the World Needs Now” between four and six in the morning; politely bypassing every opportunity to chant or say prayers; watching the Latin American guy heave and vomit next to the fire, which we learned then was a sacred symbol of “ancestors,” watching the same guy later reach dazedly for an ember only to be swatted away by the huge Jamaican man tending the fire and reprimanded by Melvin—in his own defense the Latin American man saying, “It ‘twas a FEE-ling”; Lawrence, dirty old white man with white beard and white hair, laughing at Keith’s militarism, hooting at Keith’s declarations of patriotism and his support for the war in Afghanistan in which his daughter was fighting; Keith screaming at Lawrence and implying the whole history of European-on-Native American violence; Keith screaming at us and implicating all of us in the same history; a break at 3 a.m. standing swaying in the garden with Aresh sprinting around the block for energy and yelling “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”; Melvin leaving the tipi during a lull to pray aloud outside, his voice pitching, breaking, howling some kind of high lonesome toward the Bruckner traffic, trafficking in redemption, begging forgiveness for the 52 idiots crying in the tipi and all the people they’d ruined; all of us sending prayers to unreal things, me included, overcoming skepticism to see the unstoppable momentum of faith, nothing but faith, faith naked and blinding, faith as a speech-act that invokes itself and makes itself true; Lawrence laughing in spite, Lawrence and Keith again fighting; Lawrence standing up in tree pose, saying nothing, holding the pose, then leaping out of the circle for a derisive dance around the sacred fire, and plunging through the oilskin hatch and guffawing in the garden and 52 suddenly depressed idiots feeling then that all the collective goodness we thought we thought we believed in were illusions masking unstoppable isolation; the night continuing into pre-dawn twilight, into dawn, into day; breaking the fast with venison and corn palmed out from pewter bowls; drinking water for the first time in twenty-four hours and consequently feeling as if flying; mouthing prayers, thinking prayers, trying so damn hard just for one moment in a lifetime of moments to live prayers; thinking the unthinkable thought of leaving the tipi; drawing out the ceremony until seven; then a processional around the fire and through the oilskin hatch; a giddy processional outside around the tipi; racing with Laura into the building, up past the sixth floor, onto the rooftop, past the skylight Amy ruined a pair of secondhand overalls attempting to caulk, leaning on elbows against the sloped tar of the roof berm and watching Aresh contort and flex and turn cartwheels and yelp with pleasure and watching the slow Thanksgiving boats pass under Hell’s Gate and the parade of shining cars on the Bruckner hurrying to feasts and families, seeing New York in slanting light from Yankee Stadium to the Gowanus to office canyonlands to wake waves lapping on the Jersey shore, shivering from the unexpected generosity of a late November sun, thinking this is it this is it this is it, this is the closest I’ll ever be to transcendence; the unmanageable urge to hold everything in my arms, in my mouth, streaked in the fibers of my muscles, laced into my eyelashes, balanced on the bunched up tips of my fingers; leaning over the edge of the roof and monitoring the bustle in the triangular wedge of urban agriculture below; returning to the garden, sampling a root roast, beaming, hugging, and finally taking a reluctant leave to the 6 train again, first stopping by Laura sleeping in a wheelbarrow to pat her feet goodbye, heading to the Lower East Side, to Rivington Street, to a 24-hour bagel store to search for Cynthia from D.C. but instead finding her outside on a bench facing an empty basketball court littered with potato chip bags, taking her back to the apartment; and finally, sleeping the deepest sleep ever slept in a filthy sleeping bag on a borrowed bed in a tiny room in a shared apartment in a noisy neighborhood in a wild city in overfilled with love.

A typical conversation with my dad

Dad, taking a break from random handiness around the house, stopping in doorway: Who cuts your hair?
Me, sitting at computer puzzling through Contracts Part II: Um, I do.
Dad: That's so sad.
Me: I don't mind.
Dad: You should get someone else to cut it. Thin it out. It looks like a hat. It's like Queen Elizabeth.
Me: You say the nicest things.
Dad: [returns to rooftop to rummage around with pipes and hammers]
Me: [immediately starts blogging, hanging hair/hat in shame]

Mother@#$%! Microsoft!

Goddamn, I just spent forty-five minutes finally writing down the Thanksgiving 2001 story I've been attempting to write for four years, only to have my grand plans thwarted by a crashed computer. So now all my pretty words are on some undiscoverable part of a silicone chip somewhere in this computer, and my adoring fans will never learn about the closest I came to adult spirituality, in a tipi in a garden in a squat in the South Bronx. Goddamn. Maybe if I try to write about the closest I came to child spirituality, with eight uninterrupted years of daily prayer and a missed Host that ruined it all, Microsoft will be more amenable.

Goddamn.

The Problem of Indefiniteness [Rest. 2d §33(2)]

I’m really goddamn tired and not confident in my own ability to write or think clearly. I got home about two hours ago from second Thanksgiving at Emma and Brian’s in Oakland. Their latest obsession is nurturing the little life forms in the aquarium that they bought with money accrued during six weeks of full-time work. Everything about the aquarium is otherworldly— the devotion of the owners maintaining it, its gigantic pedestal, its coral ecology, the shrimp (whom we named Angus) that snuggles against your hand like a well-loved border collie when you plunge your hand into the brine. A textbook accompanying the aquarium suggested that blue blennies were especially “droll” fish; I then spent a significant portion of the evening wondering how the hell, exactly, a fish could be considered “droll.” We sat around a table that trebled when its leaves were extended to accommodate all the food Emma and Brian had spent the weekend preparing. They had invited two other friends who had raced back from SoCal to make it—a sign printrix/graphic designer who (I could tell from the way she was dressed) was very good with her hands, and another woman with whom I exchanged less than ten direct words but who regaled us with amusing stories about the Cuban/Mormon side of the family forcing prayer from the atheistic side during a pre-Thanksgiving dinner saying of grace.

I ate myself to nausea with assorted vegetarian namkeens then still managed to impel another slab of peach cobbler into my distended belly. Ex ante and ex post weigh-ins on the bathroom scale suggested that I successfully gained five pounds over the course of the evening (see “Goals for Today,” below). But I was 138 lbs with my jacket and boots before the meal and 143 lbs without my jacket after the meal; where are my structural engineers to tell me what that means? After the binge we warshed the dishes, warshed the tables, covered the remaining cranberry sauce, stroked the cats, examined the coral for signs of the emerald crab, and returned misplaced things to their proper homes, including me and Laura via a long midnight drive from Oakland to Palo Alto down I-880 to the Dumbarton Bridge across the saltwater flats of the mid-Peninsula. The drive felt more familiar and poignant than it ought to have, though all my heart throbbing was broken up by loud, imperfectly pitched twin renditions of “When Doves Cry” and Erasure’s “A Little Respect” (that you give me no that you give me no). We came home, cradled our respective newborns (hers an iPod, mine a little less sleek but more bang-for-buck) and lay side by side in bed listening to Edith Piaf and the Pixies until Laura fell asleep. I transitioned into Modest Mouse, which prompted me to climb out of bed and post the latest entry in this public/private conflation I like to call Bananarchist.

The lessons drawn from the day (or, as my Contracts outline would put it, the takeaways) include: 1) I don’t need conservative queers in my life [re: a brunch conversation about “growing [one’s] money”]; 2) the promise of a digital music library in one deck-a-cards-sized contraption unleashes rabid consumerist urges in me; 3) honest and kind people continue to defy all odds and exist in this fucked up city/state/country/etc., and I am blessed by something, possibly the Cuban-Mormon God, with being friends with them; and, finally,

4) I have all but given up writing in my journal for writing on my blog, which is all well and good until it comes time to document things that I don’t want broadcast over the Internet. The easier option would be to just write in my journal instead of or in addition to blogging, but de facto what happens is that I blog faithful literal descriptions of my sensations—the weather today was chilly, the sequence of events I experienced today was X then Y then Z, I saw shoulders with tightly-corded muscles and lapsed into a pleasant train of thought—and then struggle for ways to encode the actual aggregated meaning of these sensations within my blog. Instead of keeping the public public and the private private, I make the private public but write in mirror script. (I thought about writing in C++ or LISP but both are widely understood languages and besides, I’ve forgotten all about programming anyway.) What this means is I leave markers that I think only I will understand in the hopes that they will trigger those neurological sequences that lead me to my desired memory, and here I will cop and misuse a word I did not understand until a week ago and call this autointertextuality, happening somewhere in the liminal space between my head and my blog. What’s bad about this approach is that it is a house of cards because I’m embedding memories into trigger words but without documenting what those trigger words mean, recognizing the strong likelihood that I’ll forget all these inside jokes for myself. So here we go again with the physiology of scars and memories that erase everything worth remembering, and here I am again complicit in the shittyness of my documentary.

Now with this uncalled-for exegesis on proper methods of remembrance, I’ve forgotten everything that I wanted to write about/encode on this post.

Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you.

I'm just a simple lass with modest goals

Today's goals:

1) Gain five pounds at Alternative Thanksgiving in Oakland.
2) Open Contracts book and appear productive.
3) Fill new MP3 player with poppy hits.
4) Avoid ramming dad's car into any more curbs.
5) Avoid drinking, driving.
6) Avoid putting off writing today's goals until 4:52pm.

Oops!

Insect Scares on Elsinore Street

I’m amazed I’m not more of a panicked horse than I am, considering my upbringing. My parents have been running around all night releasing room-filling pesticide bombs and stuffing their clothes into black plastic bags because my mother discovered a couple mysterious bites on her leg. (“Lice!” they initially screamed, until I pointed out to them that lice do not attack hairless ankles and do not leave mosquito-bite-sized welts.) Just now they were scuffling outside my door because my mother had squashed a frightening new bug. I opened the door to my mother’s disgusted wails and my dad’s frantic exclamation: “Snake!” I kid you not, it was a little black inchworm, a less-than-an-inchworm curled and dried up like a denigrated shrimp. Now my dad is interrogating my mother on whether she has washed her hair today. “The smell of oil is very strong,” he says.

Not sleeping

One more thing. I wish I had the balls to say things like, "You sure had your tits in a twist over him!" Maybe it's not balls but the feeling of illegitimacy when trading in American vernacular that prevents me from saying things like that. (Cf. my inability to greet the Bronx Leadership Academy custodian with the greeting that my more socially fluent friend Karin used, "Mikey-Mike, hot pants!" and instead stiffly extending a "Hello, Mike.") Whatever it is, goddammit I don't have it.

The immigrants' child once again casts herself as victim, hangs her head begging sympathy, and keeps an eye peeled to make sure she's getting it.

And a bingo, too

And not to let myself slip in the blog-as-bingo-recollection-forum: OBSCURE, 73 pts.

Hu-stravaganza

Finally made it to a Hu family Thanksgiving, after two years of conspicuous absence. I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d seen my family until they started asking me things like “So, I heard you were teaching!” (I haven’t been in the classroom for a year and a half), started saying things like “You’ve lost weight!” (weight hasn’t changed since Fall 2002, when I was roly poly from a year of living in exerciseless Kathmandu, Delhi, South Bronx) and I vigorously avoiding introducing my platoon of non-Chinese friends because I couldn’t remember the names of my cousins (there’s either two Stephens or two Andrews—which one is it? I think this was an LSAT puzzle). Eventually I remembered everyone’s name and had a bunch of awkward conversations with the cousins with whom I’ve spent almost every Thanksgiving in memory: “You’re in...college?” and “You study...public health?”

To catalogue:

• Grandma, 83, the matriarch from Ningpo in whose house we feasted and watched Chinese historical fantastical soap operas, who taught me the literal and metaphorical Chinese translation of “Thanksgiving” tonight [cue poignant music] as I sat next to her in the corner spooning her rice porridge into my mouth, and her five sons:
• Dà bó [check out my awesome attempt at pinyin, a totally foreign language to someone raised on bopomofo], the oldest uncle, of whom my earliest memory is my mom saying “They have a whole acre of land in Los Altos Hills!” and me subsequently scratching my seven year-old head in consternation at the foreign measurement terminology
• His wife, dà bó mu, a woman who paints neo-Surrealist landscapes that hang up in the living room of her Los Altos Hills home
• Their sons:
• Peter, the oldest cousin, who kept the family gatherings lively for me, Richard, and the others of my generation first in the 1980s by making up Dungeons and Dragons-esque labyrinths on graph paper for us to move characters through, and then in the 1990s by giving us math puzzles (e.g., white hats and suicides on Hatland island) to think about between dinner gorgings. Peter is currently winning the coolest job competition with a plumb FPS video game programming job in Palo Alto.
• Dip, his South Asian-via-West Virginian doctor girlfriend
• Stephen, who is one day younger but got 40 points higher on the SATs than me, who is second place in the coolest job competition with a plumb spot at Google, where apparently the staff is treated to, among other perks, a volleyball court. Stephen has grown his hair out and is also growing a short goatee. The exact words his mother used to describe this weird phenomenon were “yang fa,” which means not to grow hair but to nurture it into existence, like an herb garden; then his mother said that Stephen’s next move in the growing-things-on-his-face plan was to “yang bí tì,” or nurture snot until it hung in tendrils down his face. My fourth uncle asked him how long the “Jesus Christ Superstar” act was going to last.
• Alan, a senior at Berkeley who tells me, fingers crossed, that he doesn’t know how to read but wants to be a lawyer
• èr bó, my dad’s second older brother, a really funny skinny dude, of whom my earliest memory is him doing twenty-five pull-ups without stopping on the chin-up bar in the hallway to the kitchen (which I eventually broke with an acrobatic flourish in 1996)
• His wife, èr bó mu, whose name is “Sue Hu”
• Their son, Anthony, the youngest cousin who I barely know whose birth was preceded by much hand-wringing re: his parents’ fecundity. I was to “tutor” him in “English,” not the language but the art, while I was in high school and he was in middle school, but that never panned out and now I don’t know him at all.
• My dad, the spry middle guy in the Hu family tree, who told me on my wedding night how his father was an abusive gambler who sent him (and only him, among the five sons) away to live with strange relatives in Kaohsiung when he was eight because he was so disliked by his father, who begins stories by saying things like “there was a Chinese guy with a Ph.D. who drove his car off a cliff in Yosemite and they didn’t find him for three days,” who taught me the meaning of improper sleep patterns and who comes to my room when I’m working bearing cubed Korean pear bits so that I won’t starve in front of the computer screen
• His wife, my mom, who I so stupidly and misogynistically dismissed for so many years as a hysterical worrier but who has stunned me a thousand times over with her perspicacity and sensitivity, who is also a really great cook and a person whose happiness I want to preserve at all costs
• Her sister, my aunt, a yí, who looks exactly like my mom except about fifteen pounds skinnier, a retired high school teacher/administrator who just this year moved to the Peninsula while her husband and two kids remain in Taiwan (they’re not separated, she’s just the first to cast her line to America)
• NOT Richard, my older brother, who is finishing his second year of dental school at U. of Sydney in Australia with his Taiwanese-Australian girlfriend Aimee in tow, who is also 5’3” and really into FPS video games
• A fumbly, malodorous, perpetually disaffected homunculus named Mandy who can’t ever seem to find a comfortable place to put her hands or the right anecdote for the occasion
• My life pardner Laura, possibly the most virtuous human being who hasn’t been sainted, radio producer extraordinaire, triathlete, well-coifed androgyne, Scrabble champ (at least one of every three times), all around nice guy who instructed all the interested cousins tonight on the function of “royal jelly” in beehive maintenance
• My college pal Deepa, a new Californian, an intrepid and prize-winning education reporter for the renowned Sacramento Bee, a siren with a siren song, a fluent Tamil speaker with whom I once rode un-A/C’d night trains in Kerala looking for the lentil cutlet monger or the statues of Kannyakumari, whatever comes first, who tonight added “Grotesticles” to the line of erotic cereals we’re scheming, which includes “Fellati-Os,” “Cunniling-clusters,” and “Penis Flakes”
• My college pal Bernadine, the former “hooker” and captain of the Radcliffe Rugby squad, a fireplug whose laugh coaxes even grumps to laugh, who came from Oakland bearing a huge box of “Korean” pears that later elicited a lengthy discussion comparing “Asian” to “Korean” to non-Asian/Korean pears (presumably the former two are better at math?), who played four hands piano with me today using pieces Mozart wrote at age six for two baby hands, who also looked at a picture me sweatshirt-clad on the piano from 1995 and declared that I looked like “Jabba the Hutt”
  

• Her college pal Sam, a Deep Springs guy (the designation sticks for life, I think) who wore double-kneed Carhartts and a backpack with hiking boots dangling from the bottom (for the Yosemite hike tomorrow) and a pair of orange boxers of an indeterminate pattern (Deepa: “Pumpkins? Shark bites?”)
• sì shū shu, the fourth brother, the only person whose family lives in Los Angeles, the last brother to stop smoking, the guy who accused Stephen #1 of looking like Jesus Christ Superstar
• His wife, sì shěn shen, someone with whom I studiously avoided conversing because I am not confident enough in my Chinese to communicate nuance and I was afraid I would have to
• Their daughter, Jen, a Stanford grad with a masters in English who commutes to the Peninsula from San Francisco to teach English to spoiled brats at a private school in Palo Alto, whose politics are more closely aligned with mine than anyone else in the family. She said tonight, “It’s just us cousins here, plus significant others and boyfriends, they come and go, etc.”
• Her younger brother Stephen #2, a junior studying who knows what at Berkeley, who seemed really interested in bees tonight, who when asked why there were two “Stephens” in this generation of the Hu family said, “Dunno, I think my mom was playing mahjong when I was born and she just said, ‘Oh! Um—“Stephen”—whatever!’”
• xiao shū shu, the youngest brother with the second largest head (after my dad), of whom my earliest memory is petting his twin terriers in his Fremont home
• xiao shěn shen, his wife, who is extremely young-looking and beautiful despite being nearly fifty, about whom my grandmother told me, “She looks young because she exercises a lot. She does group dancing—and they travel overseas together. They took a cruise to three Mexican islands last year!”
• Their daughter Alice, a junior at Berkeley, who is taking her MCATs in April in order to do a M.D. with a public health focus in order to work in a clinic or for Doctors Without Borders, or something, she says, to whom I mailed Beloved and Dharma Bums right before I left for college in an effort to expose her to the right half of the human brain for fear that she was turning into a left-half kind of Hu, who sat on the floor of the living room tonight and made funny remarks about the historical fantastical Chinese soap opera that was running on the widescreen TV all night
• Her brother Andrew, who must be in high school now, maybe in his first year of college, who the hell knows?

In other words, a massive Hu gathering, with friends and more. I would enumerate our numerous dishes but I’ve exhausted my capacity for outlining, what with my above participant list and the three minutes of Contracts outlining I managed today. After the festivities, me, Sam, Laura, Bernie and Deepa walked the half block back to my parents’ house where we sat on the only sit-able piece of furniture in the whole damn freezing place (my bed, eliciting my dad’s “We should get a bigger bed!” comment) and told jokes about girls named Eileen and guys named Skip and told stories about teachers name-called “Princess Wrinkles” and guys who threatened to chop preachers with axes in Washington Square Park. All in all, not too shabby.

Mirrors

Not sure what subjective identity is formed by this particular desire:

You Remind Me of Something

You remind me of something
I just can't think of what it is

You remind me of my jeep, I wanna ride it
Something like my sound, I wanna pump it
Girl you look just like my cars, I wanna wax it
And something like my bank account
I wanna spend it, baby

It's something about your love that's got me going crazy
Baby, you know I want you real bad
And girl I really like your freaky style
How can I be down with you?
So get a little closer to my ride
I wanna get to know you lady
And hip me up on how to get inside you
Listen, pretty baby

Criminal Jurisprudence in the A.M., take 2

Since all of my adolescent and some of my adult identity floated/floats on a thrum of anomie, much of it based on sexual alienation, it only makes sense that for the second time in three days I'm waking up to stories about sexual seduction as a justiciable problem. That is, what's punishable about a guy who pretends to be a psychologist and tricks a college student into having sex with him as part of his "experiment"? A friend tells a story about a guy in Washington Square Park who ran up to her excitedly and asked her to watch him masturbate through his shorts in the southeast corner of the park next to a sycamore tree, claiming to be collecting research for a book about exhibitionism; though obviously a lie, his story was nonetheless interesting enough for her to sit under an adjacent tree ten feet away from him on a spring afternoon as he made a mess onto his shorts.

Whoa! In unrelated news, Circuit City is telling me that stores will be open at 5am tomorrow. I love that the only time that daylight savings time is applicable to the lives of workadays (and nocturnal students like me) is Black Friday. Now it is time for me to eat some steamed vegetable buns. Sorry for the incoherence of this post. I'll make more sense once my glucose levels return to something simulating normal.

Right now I am watching a television show

about which Laura says: "Chemistry porn--it's so chemical--chemically hot!" A blonde actress who is dressed so that the viewer can infer that she went to Vassar, possibly Williams, maybe Haverford, is in a frenzy of cross-cuts upending vials and filling test tubes and applying viscous lacquers to dirty poupees to find clues to find leads to find fictitious criminals to satisfy the viewer's appetite for justice breached, adjudicated, then served. CSI, I think? My parents have rearranged the sparse furniture in this little Eichler so that my former bunk bed, denuded of its titular top, is facing the television-cradling third of the entertainment center wall unit formerly found in the living room. So despite my best efforts not to watch television while reclining, I and L have thus far already succumbed to half an hour of comedies, dramas, dramedies, and chemistry porn in the guise of "forensic pathology."

It's early in California but late in New York. I've been falling asleep in all the wrong places today--waking up to a fortutiously preset alarm clock at 1:57pm, three minutes before Contracts, with the imprint of the corduroy of two crossed jacket sleeves herringboning my face and a thin film of drool spreading on the study room table underneath my head, imminently confused, looking for daylight to give my fucked up circadian rhythms a point of reference, finding context-free fluorescence and a laptop screen filled with haphazard notes on something called "impracticability" instead; sleeping through four consecutive hours of infant howling on Continental Flight 427 on a folded airplane pillow I kept thinking was a piece of cocobread in a dream of Jamaican patties eaten on an unseasonably warm autumn day in Washington Square Park with someone I loved to the point of agony on a patch of grass next to the public restrooms where the stalls have no doors and the rats have free reign. [I'm full up on prepositional phrases because I'm in a movement-filled phase of the insect life cycle. Now fill your head with images of chrysalises rent and new wings unfolded.]

Sleep, sleep, sleep. Delirium plus. I am too lazy/stupid to write acrostics now but believe me, I'd write them here if I could. Instead I'll leave off for now and leave the pornographic catalog of my predicted Thanksgiving foods for tomorrow afternoon. Here's the unpornographic, totally appropriate catalog of expected feasters--me, L, my folks, my dad's four brothers, their wives, their eight children, my grandma, hopefully my cousin's South Asian girlfriend, hopefully my favorite two people from college, hopefully Jesus Christ the only child. I'll also leave you with the words of wisdom my dad just imparted upon me: "Brush your teeth. If your teeth rot, that's really the end."

Shit

I've been thinking a lot about shit recently because I seem to be the only person who ever needs to shit at this shit-free law school; everyone else just seems to be taking a long, suspiciously quiet time to pee. I've long believed that one's identity is formed and then performed in public bathrooms. I'm one of those people who takes a long and suspiciously quiet time to pee. I'm also one of those people sufficiently in love with herself that she will dredge up files from years ago, when she worked at House and Garden magazine in the Conde Nast building (4 Times Square, folks! It's lean, mean, and avocado green!) and thought about shit all day long because the bathrooms were immaculate and huge and the women who used them were immaculate and tiny and were paid in the bajillions and yet they still seemed to parts of themselves on the toilet seat. Look at what I found in "My Documents/New York 2001-2002":

The upchucked bolus of half-eaten asparagus, the Diet Coke-cum-urea, the coppery tampons and post-party diarrhea, then, all come spilling into the bowl. Some are especially careful never to sit on the seat, some acrobats only flush with their feet, and some enter and exit bathrooms having touched nothing more than toilet paper and, through that thin piece of two-ply, their own asses. We wipe what’s left on our bodies with sterile paper. Everything is flushed through the pipes and disappeared. We emerge, surreptitiously avoid eye contact, wash with antibacterial creams, dab our pinkies at the corners of our lips where our makeup has smeared. The door closes loudly behind us with satisfying, ironclad peals of assurance. We are purged and perfected. We are.

That is, only if we have not accidentally left shit on the rim of the toilet.

Two more reasons I love my civ pro professor

1) She speaks in complete paragraphs.
2) She uses words like "prolix" so as not to be prolix herself.

But nonetheless I am blogging from class. Hm. Competing loves.

Criminal Jurisprudence in the A.M.

Woke early to fill my mind with horrible stories from my Crim textbook. I'm hungry. It's cold and dark and wet. The bodega across the street has been shuttered for a week. My dog continues to not recover from a mysterious, unknowable, potentially bankrupting spinal injury and cannot move and whines periodically when he tires of staring into the ether from his square of foam. My girlfriend is swaddled in sheets, baffled in goose down, exposed only at the top of her head. My body yearns for my bed. It's one of those languorous fall mornings that make you feel pulled out like a taffy. I'm in love with it all.

Woe! I mean, whoa!

Sentences:
Why does this pile of unread Contracts readings stretch on und on? Oh, goddammit. Ah, goddammit. I gotta get my ass in gear. Nevermind all the whining, folks. I'm just in low law period. But it's so pleasurable to whine! And I do it so well! One whines because one must! Believe in the power of the high-pitched whine! Acknowledge the value of the well-timed complaint! OH MY GOD I need to get to work now.

So weird! I found a magnetic poetry generator! (Gentle readers, read on gently):
Though hail is sluicing into streets, my yellow self perserveres. Every existentialist collects, harnesses, and collates time: let only vagabonds escape!

Puzzled? So am I. Now y'all know what Contractz is like.

Plodding through blogging

Sitting down and writing a little note to the Prominence Fund (money money money money) before finally, finally, finally starting my outline for Contractz. Reading’s getting a little academic. I’m just trying to make sense of things. All I have to say, thank God the law school is not the academy. What the fuck are all these words about? I’m reminded of what my favorite pillar of virtue Blanche Weisen Cook once said: “Every time I hear the word ‘epistemology,’ I reach for my gun.” I’d reach now but I surrendered my holster in a Lincoln-Douglas debate about the 2nd Amendment in 1995. Why can’t those goddamn overeducated Ph.D.’s just write monosyllables for stupid law-talking guys like me? Why do these motherfucking goddamn fucking motherfuckers have to use words like “diacritics” and “intertextuality”? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? I’m just a simpleton trying to grope my way to meaning.

AO, gimme some of your Ivy League Ph.D. insight here. Define: diacritics; intertextuality; ontology; discursive management; neo-Marxism. Wouldja? Do “deontological” while you’re at it, because that one’s a real doozie too. (Unrelated: DOOZERS, L's bingo for 94 points last night.)

I think I’m going to read about simple things, like homicide, now. (Then I'll make sense of intertextuality in a less embarassing, less public forum, she promises herself.)

"I immediately heard snickers. Immediately! I just was appalled and, and and hurt!"

A supermodel makes conjunctions a new form of art. Thanks to Meredith for pointing her slavering fans to the weird phenomenon of beautiful women donning fat suits then spouting bromides about superficiality.

Tyra Banks experiences obesity through a fat suit; Vanessa: A day in a "fat suit"!

The secondary source:Green Days

Scuffing

So, I bought a new coat yesterday. As diligent readers will recall, my old one had been ingloriously nabbed from the back of a pickup truck in Oakland, and since then I have spent at least ten minutes per day disinterestedly entering and exiting stores near NYU looking for something to keep out the chill, failing mostly and relying without much success on old holey fleeces and layered sweaters instead. I finally found one yesterday. This new coat is eeriely similar to the last--a light corduroy short jacket with a faux shearling collar--with the exception of minute changes (to my chagrin: no epaulettes, deeper pockets, fumbly buttons) that I loathe but that Laura thinks makes me look "more classic," which I read as "less grotesque."

I felt pinches of disappointed self-discovery when, after the first day of fruitless hunting, I realized that I was just pursuing my old jacket and was still imagining scenarios for its return to me--maybe under a dumpster here? Maybe the Oakland police? Maybe it'll be swept up in a Bay Area updraft and carried by a flock of migratory birds to the East Coast, where a hot gust of gulf stream will startle the birds, who will serendipitously drop my old coat into my arms as I hold them out in coat-desiring prayer? Stupid, vain, unimportant thoughts. Here the regular host of anti-consumerist messages crowds into my superego and stomps around: why buy new things when used things abound and new things are crafted by the supple fingers of enslaved Asian children who make $.001 for every $35 the manufacturer makes and shipped by ununionized workers and stocked by the unhappy urban poor and the UHO folks ringing the bell outside the store doesn't get my money but this cordoruy jacket gets a bunch; why join the pre-Thanksgiving throngs on 34th Street, why put myself among the ranks of those folks who, on the subway ride uptown, comb jewelry catalogues pointing to the fistfuls of stripmined monopoly diamonds they wanted to stud their teeth with, why give a damn about the way this jacket looks or feels or keeps or doesn't keep out the cold? And more metaphysically, why desire material things? And why hold onto lost things?

All those questions were quieted by the Big Broom of Capitalistic Fervor, which swept out every dirty kernel of these thoughts in favor of more pleasant thoughts, like the smoove holiday jazz playing in Old Navy, or the artificial watermelon scents emanating from the Body Shop, and I got my jacket anyway and laughed my way to the bank. But the hand of God also strikes with perfect comedic timing. A little later, while biking in a frenzy to the South Bronx to see friends and the cutest, smartest, friendliest punk rock 2.75 year-old ever, I rolled over a plastic bottle and went flying onto 114th Street. No, no, that's too magnificient. I was neither biking in a frenzy nor flying. What I was actually doing was slowing to a stop a 114th and Lenox when I ran over the bottle, watched in slo-mo my tire sweep sharply to the left, attempted in vain to put down my foot, fell anyway, thudded onto my elbow and rolled onto my shoulder on the asphalt. The dozen or so teenagers standing fifteen feet away from me offered assistance in the form of comforting exhortations, including "HA HA! HA HA HA HA!" and "AHHHH HA HA HA!" In classic nerdery, I bolted upright, said something blustery, patted my pocket protectors, checked my tail and headlights and biked away with my face burning in shame.

I didn't check my body until I got to Amy's. I was perfectly fine. My jacket and gloves absorbed most of the fall. Skin was neither broken nor bruised. The jacket was scuffed but that only added to my [butch] authenticity. My bike is making funny noises, but then again, it's always made funny noises. God bless winter spills.

Oops, my bad!

I did not explain! The post below contains the lyrics to my atonal Gerard Manley Hopkins tribute album, "Pitched Past Pitch of Pitch." (A double, triple, quadruple entendre, gentle readers!)

I think I'm being sennimennal because it's easier than attempting to "write" a “memo” to a “senior partner” at the “law firm” where I am “employed” presumably for “starting salary $125,000/year.” Them Lawyering exercises are so gay.

[goddamn gerard yr azn words talk so pretty]