paul, te vas a emocionar!
Today I realized that if I didn't update this site, I would have no idea what day it was most of the time. And right now things are even stranger if you're a female devout European Muslim standup comic.
...three Muslim men jumped her, one actually wringing her neck, after she told a sly joke in a comedy club here about a pilgrimage she took to Mecca.
She was milling in a mixed crowd of men and women when, her joke went, "I felt a hand on my bottom. I ignored it. I thought: 'I'm in Mecca. It must be the hand of God.'"
Burning Circus is back to offend everyone, or so it claims. And Will Safire is trying out the first person with Vladimir Putin. And the Observer reports that we're checking out Somalia, Bosnia, Paraguay and Uruguay, of all places. Busy, busy planet. A few years ago, when I saw Jacques Derrida give a two-hour speech that no one understood (it even put my English professor to sleep), he kept referring to "worldization" because the term "globalization" was all wrong somehow. He also kept saying "travail" because the English "work" was inadequate. What a dick.
I was thinking that I would do much better on a planet with a 26-hour day. I average about 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours awake, but it takes an extra hour to fall asleep and another extra hour to wake up. The falling-asleep hour is usually worse because that's when the anxieties come out and sometimes I become convinced that my apartment is not my apartment; but the waking-up hour is just confusing because the REM mechanism is going full blast and half the time I don't know whether I'm actually awake. Like this morning I spent the hour rewriting "Ascending and Descending" (the story that Frank trashed a couple months ago), only it turned out that I was asleep for the rewrite, so that the new plot centered around a whale attack. Then I moved to a slightly higher level of consciousness and realized that there are no whales in Arizona, so my brain said "I guess we can change it to an enraged walrus. Note to self: research the walrus population of Navajo County." Then I awoke fully and felt useless.
