The cold delights of space

It is a bright, sunny, mid-sixties day outside, but inside the library, a friendly polar bear has set the temperature to 'brisk' and taken up residence in the place, batting the books and sleeping graduate students back and forth to wile away the time. I study on the sixth floor in a room with enormous windows overlooking the sun-drenched campus area and happened to glance up a moment ago to see each bay of the windows occupied by a long-sleeved graduate student staring blankly into the tableau of fun-and-sun stretching before him into endless horizons of enjoyments not had. Thirty seconds later they were all back at their computers, trying to convince themselves that what they saw wasn't real.


But it's okay. The polar bear will probably eat them soon enough.

Zane's Beard Update

Status: Coney Island-homeless-man shaggy

Put-in-mouth-ability: Fair to stormy

Flavor: Strong overtones of cotton candy. Reasons unknown.






Inquiring minds have a right to know.

Incredible works of time-wastery

My friend Joelle held a short IM monologue in which every sentence accidentally began with an I. This got me thinking that she had tried to start writing an acrostic, but had been seized by the stutters as soon as she began.

I guess that's about as far as I can go to explain where the last twenty minutes went.

I-crostic

I started to write an acrostic,

Intending it to be fant-ostic.

Intricate secrets I would hide there,

Initials leading to wisdom’s lair.

Indeed, the very idea thrilled -

In such clever guise, my thoughts cradled.

Injurious to public morals?

Into the deep I cast such quarrels!

Interring my fear six feet below,

Impetuously I began – O!

Instead of wit so scintillating,

Ire alone I found a-waiting.

Impish beast, Fate! Why mention butter?

If only I could lose this stutter!

What does it mean to exist in this world of pain and emptiness?

What follows is an intensely serious and enlightened discussion of man's state vis-a-vis the essential unknowability of goodness and the immanent presence of evil.


Did you know that leaving your window open all day when the weather is in the mid-fifties with a coquettishly chilly breeze can leave your body as cold as a lump of Antarctica swaddled lovingly in dry ice, boxed up with pure hate, and shot into a black hole? Well, in point of fact, this turn of events is highly possible. But how could I know such a thing, the impudent but attentive reader may ask. Though I may frown at the off-handed manner in which this hypothetical reader reveals his inability to take my word on trust, I will nonetheless confess that I have arrived at the above-stated piece of priceless knowledge not by extensive research, but through that most noble teacher of the Enlightenment, Experience.

The weather finally, and I hope permanently, broke yesterday after stubbornly persisting in maintaining temperatures well into the mid-eighties during the first week of October, and I am so enjoying the sounds of the crisp fall afternoon and the feel of the breeze that I refuse to even consider closing the large, wide-open window approximately two feet from where I sit. It seems somehow unjust that I should be doing what makes me feel good, but still be uncomfortably cold at the same time. WHEN WILL SOMEONE STOP THE BUSH REGIME'S REIGN OF TERROR AND LET JUSTICE RETURN TO AMERICA? How myriad are his injustices!


Seriously, though, my hands are, like, way cold. And so are my knees, for reasons unknown. THAT IS JUST WHERE THE COLDNESS GOES.


If someone told me anytime during the first two years of grad school that there would come a period in my course of study in which I could waste the tail end of a Friday afternoon typing a blog post about being too damn obstinate to close a window, I would have punched that person directly on the kisser and then gotten angry about how punching him had made me waste valuable time.


And now we are all better informed about the problem of evil and the ways in which it intrudes itself upon our consciousnesses.

An Unbearable Fact of Being

Sometimes I step into timeless zone
And I lose my way
I don't know where I am
Sometimes I feel like I'm in the Milky Way
And I lose myself
I don't know who I am
I discover whiskers of a cat in a timeless zone
And I put them on my face
In a moment I become a sweet little cat
And I dance on a flying saucer

I Am A Cat

I discover ears of a cat in the Milky Way
And I put them on my head
In a moment I become a sweet little cat
And I dance on a flying saucer

I Am A Cat






Thanks, Shonen Knife. You make life just that much smoother.

KISSES

This is apparently what happens when you, and by you I mean me, go hiking on the Polish borderlands with Michal: kisses from fat, topless drunk guys holding fish.

I guess I should have seen that coming.

We were in a minute speck of a village consisting primarily of train tracks (featuring exactly one train to and from Warsaw a day) and a hole-in-the-wall bar that dispensed serious booze for men who want to get drunk as cheaply as possible and stay that way for as much of the day as possible. I first visited this pleasant little establishment at the outset of my journey around 9:40 in the morning, by which time at least ten of the village's finest had gathered at the joint in order to drink vodka out of fist-sized glasses and exchange vague grumbles about, presumably, existential ennui. This visit ended fairly innocuously: I came, ate chicken-bowel soup and pizza slathered in ketchup (a Polish speciality), and went on my way without so much as a handshake from a fish-bearing fat topless man. I was not to be so fortunate during round two.

After the hiking trip came to a satisfactory close involving many hours of forcing our way through sparse forest and undergrowth along a beautiful river and occasionally being savaged by stinging nettles, Michal and I decided to kill the hour we had until the train arrived by joining the crowds of sweetness and light bustling in and out of the same dingy bar. Michal cunningly ordered a shot of "the worst stuff you've got," which as it turns out is pretty much the worst stuff that exists this side of lighter fluid mixed with actual death - I should perhaps mention that the shot cost about sixty cents and was steep at the price. We drank it with relish and not even remotely disguised coughing and retching, because we are two tough dudes. Having proven our credentials by navigating the rough seas of heinous vodka with manly aplomb, we were ready to join the bar flies in smoother seas and sat down at a table outside with rather more palatable alcohol and a heady sense of a job well done.

Michal first noticed our friend stumbling around on the street in front of the bar, and the sociologist in him discerned in the man's great drunken girth, ambling gait, and beached-whale exposure ample material for a work of photo-journalism on the faces of the Polish countryside. The man, for his part, spied Michal's half-empty shot glass from afar and discerned in it a chance to get ever so slightly drunker for free, with the result that in a few short moments he had joined us, flopping a fish (photographed above) down onto the table and exhorting us to partake of its bounty with him. As we did so, it came out that I was American, which led him to start a long monologue involving anecdotes about his time as a jet pilot in Iraq and his disdain for Ronald Reagan, who he thought was still president.

This was all well and good, but Michal decided it would be a shame to let our little piece of inter-cultural exchange escape undocumented, a sentiment heartily supported by our topless friend, so out came the camera, the photographs, and the kisses. The man had already planted a big Slavic present on the side of my head earlier in our conversation when some unknown theme in the conversation filled him with an intense love for humanity that simply could not be restrained any longer, but the fine specimen you see in the above photograph was the work of Michal, who suggested in Polish to the man that a mere smile would not be enough of a sign of international friendship, and after all what is a better sign of affection than a kiss? I do not have an answer to that question, and apparently neither did the man.

I guess the moral of the story is this: if you're ever traveling in the east of Poland along the border with Belarus and feel like what your life is missing is a big vodka-flavored kiss that subsumes most of the left side of your head, a trip to the local watering hole would not go amiss. Fish optional.

Warsaw, again

So I'm in Warsaw now at the apartment of my wonderful friends Michal and Paulina. After almost fourteen hours on the train, I'm more or less glad to be stationary, but the train journey felt surprisingly short for all that. I brought a bunch of cheese, bread, and candy with me to while away the hours, which I confess bears all the earmarks of total genius. The only problem is that I chose three cheeses more or less at random and one of the happened to be so pungent that I could not even open it on the train for fear of unleashing lederhosen-clad rage the likes of which the world has never seen, so it just sat in my backpack the whole time, quietly exuding cheese funk into all of my books and clothes. I spent most of the trip alternating between happily champing down gummy candies like a five-year-old and sleeping as if in the grip of a violent beast of oblivion. That is actually a pretty enjoyable set of options to vacillate between.

The morning will see me off on the train again, this time to some random villages in the east of Poland that Michal knows. Or maybe he doesn't know them? It's hard to tell sometimes. In any case, we will head to the middle of (or the eastern edge of) Nowhere, Poland, and tramp around there for a few days. I'll be back on Monday or Tuesday to Warsaw, but I highly doubt I will be able to post anything before then - something tells me these random little villages are not exactly crawling with cheap internet cafes.

I guess that's about it. I chatted a little with two girls who were sharing my hostel dorm room last night, and spent most of the time trying to convince them that their second cousin's German fiancee was a Soviet spy bent on spreading Communist propaganda through manipulation of the matrimonial bond. I think they were pretty convinced, which is understandable because the case was pretty iron-clad. I just finished reading The Bourne Identity two days ago, and now my head is all full of spies and kung-fu kicks, one of which I have learned is usually aimed at the other (the latter at the former, although sometimes the other way around). Robert Ludlum is a pretty trashy writer, but the book is still a lot of fun. His love scenes, which probably total up to no more than ten pages out of the book's 500-some pages, reek so horribly that they almost kill the whole work. The tend to work like this:

BOURNE: I have to leave you, because I don't remember who I am, and I don't want to get you killed.

BOURNE'S FINE LADY: But I love you.

BOURNE: But... I love you, too.

BFN: Then you have to stay. Because we love each other.

BOURNE: Touche (proceeds to kill a bus full of spies with his bare hands because he is so cool).

The worst part is that I'm not kidding about or exaggerating the italics. Ludlum should be legally prevented from writing with italics until the end of time. In fact, so should everybody.

The Cold Embrace of Cowardice

Yes, gentle readers, you are reading the words of a coward. These meager sentences are the fruit of a delicate mind that, when faced with the opportunity to feast on such traditional Munich/Bavarian fare as ox diaphragm, could barely suppress the desire to run and hide. Calf diaphragm? No, thanks again, though. Pork diaphragm? Still not doing it. When I noticed that one single dish promised a range of beef delicacies including heart, liver, kidneys, tongue, and I think stomach, I merely smiled weakly and turned to the sausages with the same sort of heavy heart that I can imagine weighted down Napoleon on Waterloo. The message was all too clear: You are not man enough for Bavaria. And it is true. Even the whimsical section titles of the English menu I received at the restaurant made me blanch and titter like a schoolgirl at a wrestling match: "The Best Part is the Offal," for instance, advertised about ten different dishes involving calf's head and the same number for calf hoof-based cuisine. I say "different" dishes, but really they all seemed to be calf head/hoof boiled in vinegar and onion "soup" and served with potatoes. I'm not quite sure that the addition or subtraction of something like parsely should really make it a new dish, but obviously the Weisses Brauhaus in Munich has other ideas.

Normally such food exotica would have exercised a powerful attraction, but frankly the two-fold fact of it being my last night in Munich and the fact that I was eating with an audience of one (being the Naipaul book I was reading, and therefore not very responsive) left me with the singular experience of being unwilling to put something that any random joker called food and charged money for into my mouth. I can't say I think this is a positive development.

At the same time, seeing what was actually on the menu made me feel a little better about my ability to decipher German. At every other restaurant, it had been easy enough to fumble my way through a variety of wursts, potato dishes, and the like, but after about ten minutes' hard staring at the menu last night, I was no more the wiser to its contents. When the waitress brought an English version and I saw that every item on the menu involved some complex interaction with bits of the alimentary canal and various internal organs of animals like the trusty ox, I felt somehow vindicated. This way I could be outraged - how on earth did my foolish professors think to omit crucial words from German 101/102 like "ox diaphragm"? Obviously it is an everyday word that even the simplest fool should be expected to know. I blame the Communists.