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2005-09-09 4:29 p.m.

crossroads

There�s a spider in my bathroom. When I pee, the web is right at head level, so I�ve had the opportunity to track this spider over the summer. I don�t usually see much in her web, but somehow she�s gotten bigger anyway. But then yesterday I saw her nab somebody! A big old wasp! It was sitting on the windowsill, and I think it must have been startled by my entry into the room, because it immediately stumbled into the web. And that spider was THERE, man. It was almost like she lassoed the wasp, or something, I don�t know. All I know is suddenly the wasp was suspended in the air and somehow was transported right to the middle of the web, where the spider quickly completed the immobilization. And then came the kiss of death. For the next twenty four hours she was glued to that wasp, drinking its sweet, sweet nectar. It was cool. And then suddenly the wasp was gone.

The spider�s legs look like glass.

Another use of pop music in the classroom: �Friday I�m in Love� by the Cure, to teach the days of the week. I divided the class into seven groups, each assigned a day of the week. When they heard their day they had to stand up. It was a hoot.

I went to the bank today, and the bank manager was outside trimming the bushes. He asked me about my guitar, and when he found out I like the blues he immediately ran home, came back, and lent me two Robert Johnson CDs, which is awesome because I�d just recently gotten interested in checking him out. Now that�s customer service.

Turns out there�s at least three Robert Johnson covers in my music collection, already. The dude made two sets of recordings, one in 1936 and one in 1937. He died in 1938 because someone (a jealous lover, or perhaps a jealous husband) poisoned him. What a fascinating figure. Mythical, you might say.

I�m listening to the CDs right now. Supposedly most people don�t get it when they first listen to it, but� I like it. What does that mean? Is it because I�m a guitar player and I can appreciate what he�s got going on there, or because I�m already familiar with the blues, or what? Anyway, this is not a taste I�ll have to work hard to acquire. Oh, the Mississippi Delta, how I mourn for thee...

I need to learn to play slide guitar, man. Slide guitar is cool.

Anyway, here�s a good article on how modern society is setting itself up for disasters like Katrina with the short-sighted way it chooses to expand.

All these new hurricanes and typhoons (Japan got more typhoons last year than any year on record) and other ocean weirdnesses seem to be signs of global warming, don�t they? You can argue that dead birds and nasty hurricanes are just the result of natural cycles and so it doesn�t necessarily mean anything, but places like Antarctica, Greenland, Siberia, and Alaska are warming very quickly, and the rate of warming has been accelerating rapidly for the past few decades. Natural climate change doesn�t move that way, that quickly. And this is only the tip of the melting iceberg. Ah, but the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has assured us that the Kyoto Accords are �inconsistent with freedom, prosperity and environmental policy progress� and that �global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world.� So, nothing to worry about, right? I�m sure once Bush finally stamps out all the terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and Greenpeace, who are out there warming things up in order to fool everyone into thinking that global warming is occurring, everything will go back to normal.

Oh, and did you know that Mexico is bailing us out? Mexico!

WTF said my last cell phone email to her made her cry. From happiness, I�m assuming. Finally she�s understanding how much I like her. I kind of had to grab her and shake her, emotionally speaking, in order to get her to realize that, but things have gone so much better since then. We�re meeting up in Fukuoka again tomorrow. That wasn�t on the schedule originally, but as it turns out we kind of like spending time with each other. I�m going out to Beppu again next weekend.

And, well� Okay, I�ll do it.

one. seven things i plan to do before i die:

1. get married
2. have a kid or two
3. get some (or perhaps a lot) of my fiction published
4. get a phd
5. get my black belt in Shotokai
6. pass JLPT level 1 (I�m hoping to get this ticked off in December, actually)
7. take over the world with my army of genetic mutants (now accepting applications for positions on my staff)

two. seven things i can do:

1. speak Japanese and French
2. play clarinet and guitar
3. name all 20 standard amino acids and draw their structure (the exact structures of the nucleotide bases have been resident in my memory in the past, but they are currently on sabbatical)
4. swim 2000 meters without stopping (at age 10 I coulda done 5, 6 thousand or more. sigh.)
5. recite The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory
6. scuba dive
7. see the ocean whenever i want!

three. seven things i can't do:

1. fix a car
2. hack a computer
3. use a programming language
4. play piano or violin
5. ever get enough sleep
6. get no satisfaction
7. stop buying music, books, and DVDs

four. seven things that attract me to people of the opposite sex:

1. intelligence
2. independence
3. not afraid to be eccentric
4. kindness
5. good taste
6. curiosity
7. breasts

five. seven things i say the most:

1. lovely
2. osaki ni shitsurei shimasu
3. i yam what i yam
4. billy likes to drink soda. miss lippy�s car� is green
5. il ne faut pas que je perde mon fran�ais
6. this music is the glue of the world. it holds it all together. without this, life would be meaningless
7. you don�t know where i been, lou!

six. seven celebrity crushes:

1. julia stiles
2. natalie portman
3. rachel leigh cook
4. scarlett johansson
5. alison lohman
6. kumi sato (oddly enough, Japanese wikipedia doesn�t have an entry for her, but Chinese wikipedia does)
7. sarah vowell

seven. seven people i want to take this quiz:

1. george w. bush
2. osama bin laden
3. hillary clinton
4. gordon b. hinckley
5. jon stewart
6. james watson
7. you

i believe i�m sinking down,

greyarea

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