back from a week in a warmer climate. it was nice. but i feel all dissociated from reality. i would have observations, but....no.

oh, and tim: Economic Left/Right: -4.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.90

bizarre: just today, i started getting spam from people using kenyon usernames. usernames of some of my friends as well as those of people i never once talked to. i wonder how that happened, exactly. of course i didn't open any of it, but seeing those familar groupings of letters certainly made me hesitate.

interesting books that i've seen pass through my refund counter: combustion engineering, health care and the rise of christianity, and lactation. i want to read all the books i see, but i have no time even to sit, let alone read. next week is my last week. you know how temp jobs are. temporary. ah well. today i scanned a book on managing country clubs, checked out some aristophanes just for old time's sake, and decided i should find out more about neil labute.

dear rooty-patootie, did you know that "good on you" is a quintessentially australian expression?

K and i watched this awesome film about a rather strange and little-publicized byproduct of the second world war. the UK, fearing that the nazis would somehow destroy or manipulate their scientists of jewish or other "minority" descent, sent said endangered scientists to camps in canada and australia to protect them until the war was over. so this film we watched was about a bunch of jews who somehow ended up in australia. it was actually quite lovely. when the people decided they needed all the trappings of a community, like a newspaper and a library and an orchestra, they were having trouble naming their new currency. after hearing more than one australian officer say "good on ya, mate," these eastern european types decided to name their currency the "gudonya."

heh. maybe you have to see it. but it made us laugh. most of the jokes in the film are at the expense of the australians. as it should be.

please, no one throw kangaroo dung at me.


so working at the book store is going fairly well. i only have one truly annoying co-worker. and i get to see cute college-age boys all day. and the best benefit is seeing people i haven't seen in years. in the last two days i've seen one old friend from high school and three friends from nerd camp. supercool, as the swiss would say with their guttural flair.

that chinese cookbook i checked out from the library is actually an encyclopedia of chinese cooking. i chose it because i admired another cookbook i'd read by the same author. but this one is really doing my head in. after three nights i am finally finished reading descriptions of the 40 primary methods of cooking. i think we in the "west" have about ten.

absorbing like crazy right now.

stuffing myself silly with TV: good eats, ER, CSI, jeopardy!, british murder mysteries like jonathan creek and wire in the blood.

gorging on books: borrowed from the public library are the new patricia cornwell, some john le carres and a book on how to use my new christmas wok. scanned voraciously at the university library were sleep and brain plasticity, some journal articles on the nutritional requirements of vegetarian women, a colorful volume on the making of "willy wonka," cookbooks by alton brown and christopher kimball, and an oddity titled the island of hydra and leonard cohen's bananas.

the reason i'm getting this much stimulation is because i'm temping at the university book store. ooh, i love being on campus.

i'm in one of those productive moods again. i actually decided to dust my mother's entire collection of salt and pepper shakers--over a hundred at least--and polish the shelves they sit on. it took two afternoons. but i can do it while i watch jeopardy!...

anyway, i've submitted one grad school application and i'm not overly anxious about the others. that's good progress.

make it all happen NOW!

blah. life is like at a stuck-still pace here and yet i'm still not accomplishing anything but cleaning cleaning cleaning.

i've been sick for all of the holidays. the threat of world terrorism has really fucked up my personal life. and the US mail just isn't bringing me what i want to see.

anyway, happy 2004 to all of you.

probably nothing could be worse than this last year.

but i think i've said that to myself before...