And hilarity continued to ensue...
Here I am! Dead tired, though not (as some have suspected, owing to my long absence from the autojournalistic realm) dead in the strict sense, as an elephant might be dead were one to drop it from a helicopter hundreds of feet above the forest. It is, however, only the most excellent sort of tired, born of the most excellent sort of night. Against her better judgment, Maddy came in last night, with the full knowledge that she'd have to take an 8:00 bus out this morning. Revelry ensued, thus!
1. We bought lemons, and made some lemonade. Then added a bunch of vodka to it. It was really rather good. Then we were friendlier than necessary to the security guard, and very supportive. The poor fellow's pen had broken. Awwww.
2. We stumbled uptown in the general direction of Caroline's Comedy Club at Times Square. I gave an old woman a dollar on the subway. Don't thank me - thank lemonade. ...Po Russki!! Once we arrived, we saw some comedy. It was pretty good comedy, as comedy is concerned. I mean, there was laughing, sure, a good bit of it even. But that was only during the three opening acts. I'm not even talking about when Mitch Hedberg came on, because that was not comedy in the strict sense. It was a near-apocalyptic experience, a corpus of humour so concentrated as to threaten our lives, our very conceptions of reality on a fundamental level. The man is funny enough to place a person face to face with oblivion; it is like standing in audience before the Sun in the insolent hope that you can withstand its heat, even as you are torn apart by that immeasurable, ungovernable energy.
Okay, perhaps I embroider the gravity of the situation - but trust me, he was pretty goddamn funny. I will fight any man who says otherwise.
3. We returned, and - for a reason which I'm sure we could have explicated at the time - it was clearly necessary to make brownies in unconventional vessels. Note the shot glass filled with brownie batter, in the back. Truly, there should be a show featuring Ironic Chefs. They came out quite well, albeit overcooked (the way I tend both to make them and, conveniently, like them).
Today, as noted, we were up in time to get to an 8:00 bus, which seemed like a cool idea around 10:00 last night, but progressed through various stages of inadvisibility as it drew nearer our actual 3:00ish bedtime. It wasn't actually so bad, since Maddy awoke at six anyway to go into cardiac arrest (well, she got better) while I made eggs. This was a notable task in itself, as I do not ordinarily ovulate - but for her, I am willing to stray somewhat from traditional gender roles, if it means a good breakfast. So that was that.
Through some stretch of the imagination, it seemed like a good idea not to go back to bed afterward, so I've been about. I went to the library and watched Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night, both because I'm reading Lumet's book (Making Movies) and he's awesome, and because I had to for another class. Hooray, multibird stoning. It was excellent, albeit horribly depressing, so that I determined to walk the hour home in suddenly magnificent weather. This was interesting on the basis of the formerly established sleep deprivation - indeed, I had fallen asleep on the bus to campus, and some chick had to wake me up as the bus driver cackled at me. But walk I did, down the west side, staying to grimy streets which I had never seen before. I shuffled through the hive of bodies that is this city, all brushing together yet sealed off, each blind to the eight million others. The city was eight million cities.
I got some sort of falafel dinner for two dollars - one of the best two dollars I've ever spent, frankly - and finally admitted it was time for coffee. I also took this picture, of some sort of building. I don't know, I think at the time I believed it looked like a robot building. Where robots are born, and perhaps do battle.
As for the past bunch o' days, I've spent many of them working to reserve hotels for myself and Maddy in the summer. It's taken numerous hours and a lot of e-mailing, but somehow I've secured a place in the middle of the old town, with (or in) the historical buildings in Prague. And Budapest. And Krakow. For cheap! Time to open a travel agency, I suppose.
Moreover, I've been working on my research grant application. That's right, somebody may want to give me money to read books during the summer. You probably don't recall my final linguistics paper from last semester, in which I developed a coherent unified theory of language evolution. The point is, you don't have to - but the professor, Crazy Ray Dougherty, Destroyer of Bats, did. And convinced me to apply for a grant to continue working on it, which I'm entirely happy to do. If there's one thing, or several things, which I enjoy more than evolutionary psycholinguistics, one of them is bound to be cold hard cash.
Now, if you'll excuse me, the coffee begins to lose its edge - I must seek an alternate source of consciousness. Remember: don't do rugs. They're expensive, especially the Persian ones, and unlike some of their close phonetic relatives, they don't tend to yield much of a buzz.
The following has nothing to do with vodka, and everything to do with Dionysos. I miss English with DePeter.
One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will." -Baudelaire
1. We bought lemons, and made some lemonade. Then added a bunch of vodka to it. It was really rather good. Then we were friendlier than necessary to the security guard, and very supportive. The poor fellow's pen had broken. Awwww.
2. We stumbled uptown in the general direction of Caroline's Comedy Club at Times Square. I gave an old woman a dollar on the subway. Don't thank me - thank lemonade. ...Po Russki!! Once we arrived, we saw some comedy. It was pretty good comedy, as comedy is concerned. I mean, there was laughing, sure, a good bit of it even. But that was only during the three opening acts. I'm not even talking about when Mitch Hedberg came on, because that was not comedy in the strict sense. It was a near-apocalyptic experience, a corpus of humour so concentrated as to threaten our lives, our very conceptions of reality on a fundamental level. The man is funny enough to place a person face to face with oblivion; it is like standing in audience before the Sun in the insolent hope that you can withstand its heat, even as you are torn apart by that immeasurable, ungovernable energy.
Okay, perhaps I embroider the gravity of the situation - but trust me, he was pretty goddamn funny. I will fight any man who says otherwise.
3. We returned, and - for a reason which I'm sure we could have explicated at the time - it was clearly necessary to make brownies in unconventional vessels. Note the shot glass filled with brownie batter, in the back. Truly, there should be a show featuring Ironic Chefs. They came out quite well, albeit overcooked (the way I tend both to make them and, conveniently, like them).
Today, as noted, we were up in time to get to an 8:00 bus, which seemed like a cool idea around 10:00 last night, but progressed through various stages of inadvisibility as it drew nearer our actual 3:00ish bedtime. It wasn't actually so bad, since Maddy awoke at six anyway to go into cardiac arrest (well, she got better) while I made eggs. This was a notable task in itself, as I do not ordinarily ovulate - but for her, I am willing to stray somewhat from traditional gender roles, if it means a good breakfast. So that was that.
Through some stretch of the imagination, it seemed like a good idea not to go back to bed afterward, so I've been about. I went to the library and watched Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night, both because I'm reading Lumet's book (Making Movies) and he's awesome, and because I had to for another class. Hooray, multibird stoning. It was excellent, albeit horribly depressing, so that I determined to walk the hour home in suddenly magnificent weather. This was interesting on the basis of the formerly established sleep deprivation - indeed, I had fallen asleep on the bus to campus, and some chick had to wake me up as the bus driver cackled at me. But walk I did, down the west side, staying to grimy streets which I had never seen before. I shuffled through the hive of bodies that is this city, all brushing together yet sealed off, each blind to the eight million others. The city was eight million cities.
I got some sort of falafel dinner for two dollars - one of the best two dollars I've ever spent, frankly - and finally admitted it was time for coffee. I also took this picture, of some sort of building. I don't know, I think at the time I believed it looked like a robot building. Where robots are born, and perhaps do battle.
As for the past bunch o' days, I've spent many of them working to reserve hotels for myself and Maddy in the summer. It's taken numerous hours and a lot of e-mailing, but somehow I've secured a place in the middle of the old town, with (or in) the historical buildings in Prague. And Budapest. And Krakow. For cheap! Time to open a travel agency, I suppose.
Moreover, I've been working on my research grant application. That's right, somebody may want to give me money to read books during the summer. You probably don't recall my final linguistics paper from last semester, in which I developed a coherent unified theory of language evolution. The point is, you don't have to - but the professor, Crazy Ray Dougherty, Destroyer of Bats, did. And convinced me to apply for a grant to continue working on it, which I'm entirely happy to do. If there's one thing, or several things, which I enjoy more than evolutionary psycholinguistics, one of them is bound to be cold hard cash.
Now, if you'll excuse me, the coffee begins to lose its edge - I must seek an alternate source of consciousness. Remember: don't do rugs. They're expensive, especially the Persian ones, and unlike some of their close phonetic relatives, they don't tend to yield much of a buzz.
The following has nothing to do with vodka, and everything to do with Dionysos. I miss English with DePeter.
One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will." -Baudelaire