apparently it is also called horripilation

I like it when I get goose bumps

I hate it when people call it goose flesh.

like a deranged Groucho Marx

Wow, I have such great elevator etiquette. I always face the doors and I don’t lean on the wall all cocky-like. When someone gets in I ask, “What floor?” with my hand hovering over the buttons; I never say, “Can I push your button for you?” while raising and lowering my eyebrows at a fantastic rate.

No, I am downright cordial in elevators.

Borealis?

I thought I saw the aurora borealis tonight. All these gorgeous red, orange and white lines shooting upwards in the sky. Turn out they were only lights from buildings, reflecting off of icy air particles. This was almost as good as seeing the northern lights, I think. I am not so picky about my beautiful events that occur rarely in the sky and relate some way to atmospheric conditions. It was fun thinking I saw them for a little while, though.

It reminds me of a comment made in class about Frederick Douglass: “sometimes it is better to be ignorant and be a slave than to know all about slavery and have knowledge and things that make life harder”. Yes, she really said that, and yes, sometimes it is better to think you are seeing the northern lights than to realize the physical air is so cold that it has crystalized to the point of being reflective. in April.

Hungry like the werewolf

I was recently making a to do list, mostly about lycanthropy. It is a little known fact that werewolves are an overrepresented minority in the were-family. Yup, you also have weretigers, wereboars, werekangaroos, etc.

A fun activity that doesn’t really count as an activity because it takes two seconds is deciding what class of shapeshifter you would be. I quickly said, ‘Weredragon. No! Werenuclearmissile!’ but in all honesty I would probably be a wererat. What kind are you?

The whale is allegorical

So today I was officially accepted by faculty and SAC both into an exchange into the heart of the Orient. Now that I am going, and am booking tickets and all that, I feel all of this has been done rather whimsically on my part.

Let me relate it to you, literary styles. I have been reading Moby Dick lately, and it is one of those books that is so good you get depressed just thinking about how it will eventually be over. Anywhat I am at the part where the crew of the Pequod has just harpooned, or ‘pooned’ as I like to say, their first whale, and Melville’s description of their being recklessly dragged by the whale out to sea made me think of LIFE.

The point is, I feel like I have pooned myself to this whale, and now it is time to be dragged away from friends and family to wherever it takes me. I am not sure where, but I think about it a lot, and I imagine myself standing on the prow of my ship,(for this fantasy, my ship purple, and crewed by G.I. Joes) looking backwards as my comfortable home grows smaller and smaller on the horizon. It was probably pretty stupid ot tether myself to a leviathan I had barely seen, but that is how I like to do business – stupidly and without foresight.

(it is a metaphor for our lives)

You are standing on a platform at a train or subway station. As the train approaches you are thinking:
A) Someone could easily push me off the platform into the path of the train. What if someone pushes me?
B) I could push this guy/lady right now. They wouldn’t even see it coming.
C) I could just jump right now off the platform into that train. Just like that and it would be over.
D) There is my train. I will get on when it stops and go where I am going.

My experience is that most people are pretty consistent about their platform thoughts and rarely waver. I imagine that most people consider choice B many times while waiting for trains. I find it pretty tough to convert from choice C to choice A. Of course, D is never an option of train-thoughts.

Also I glare at babies

My job is being a fancy hall monitor. By fancy I mean that I don’t move or say anything to anyone in the hallway, and just silently read novels and eat sandwiches. Today I read a crime novel and ate a roast beef sandwich. My story begins thusly:

As I wiped the crumbs from my mighty facial hair, a dance-mother and her three dancing children alighted upon my humblest of plastic folding tables. The children cooed incessantly for money to buy sodas and jellybeans. Their mother, obviously tired and sapped of money from the previous night spent at the bingo parlour, where her hands accumulated that most thick layer of nicotine and scabs, suggested that the children ask me for money. As she looked in my direction, expecting my smiling countenance to play it off as an elaborate joke, I just said ‘no’ in my angry-voice (regular voice) and glared at her and her children. They left rapidly, shamed by my stingy display. So is my story.

ps Being a fancy hall monitor does not pay well.

pps. In strange coincidence, almost the exact same story happened to Jasmine

Also milk flies from your nose

Have you guys ever been tickled? I mean REALLY tickled? Tickled so hard that you belch the name Andy, and have to be fed grapes for half an hour before you can stand up under your own power again? Lord knows I have.

At shaving, I suck

This is true. It is why I never do it. Until last year I sucked at lathering too, which is unfortunate because I love that word.

‘Lathering’.

‘Hey, what are you up to?’
‘Not much, just doing lathering.’

Great word.

What were we talking about? Ah yes. My terminal suck in the presence of a razor. I was just in the bathroom lathering and I noticed how much hair my face had accumulated in the past number of weeks. Sometimes I feel like my beard looks like the nest of an angry and retarded bird. I think I will shave sometime this weekend, with a delicate ritual preceding. I imagine that when I have shaved, I will feel a sense of accomplishment that business men and architects feel on a daily basis.

Or maybe a friend’s closet.

I kind of pride myself on being able to verbalize yearnings. Usually this is with food stuffs. Like the other day I was really in the mood to eat lamb and I did so. Yet another day I realized I wanted to eat some heavily salted corn on a sandy beach.

Today I am really in the mood to pee in a coffin. Like actually be closed inside a coffin, maybe propped up against the wall, and let fly yellow on the velvet lining. I realize this is probably outside the realm of possibility, so I will have to do the next best thing and find a port-o-potty. Or a small change room at the mall.