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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

I’m not talkin’ ’bout the linen

I got up at 6 this morning hoping to catch my sister in California to talk to but apparently people have better things to do on Friday night than park themselves on SKYPE. Last night was my Friday and I was also not wallflowering up the internet, so I understand. You know the horror movies -or like that one episode of Buffy, which we just started watching- when there's a demon in the computer? I sometimes think I AM that demon, because I am always on line. Not really. No, relax, come back. I only want to love you.

Last night we tried a different pub because our old favorite is under new ownership and the waiters are the precise combination of officious and cloying that I cannot stand. Uriah Heep with a tray of beer. So it is necessary to find a new place. The place we went to has an elaborate and noisy ventilation system, despite which they have to open the door to get the smoke out effectively, so we sat shivering in our coats while the people from one table shouted a conversation with the people at another table, over our heads, and thought: Well this is also not the place.

This weekend everybody goes back to where they came from and tidies up the graves of the people who have left that place even more permanently. I expect there will be pork and cabbage, traditional dishes, familial tensions. I don't have anybody dead here yet so we'll just stay home, watching more Buffy and possibly Starship Troopers, partly because it is sci-fi and partly because at this point we would both be happy to watch Neil Patrick Harris pick his nose.

What else? The book that I wrote with my own sweet hands (a textbook) is Zeno's-parodoxing itself towards completion. I'm meeting the publisher next week to hand it over so I sure hope it's done by then. Haha, that is a joke that I made; of course it will be done. What else? Oh, I got a giant book to edit on Energy Alternatives. It is more boring than you can possibly imagine, but I am going to learn so much about energy that it will be worth it. Also, this promises to keep me out of trouble until at least 2011. 

Sometimes I am so sad that I have to sit down with a box of tissues and let myself cry just until my brain is less soaked in tears and I can put together one or two thoughts. Sometimes it is more than I can bear. But then sometimes I laugh so hard I have to put my hand out for balance or I would flip onto my back like a cartoon character or I guess a bug. Hey maybe when you see a bug on its back with its legs twitching in the air, it isn't really trying to flip over; maybe it's convulsing with laughter, fully prepared to die laughing. That's not so bad a thought, is it? 

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