Today I love the world. Everyone is attractive and smart and sexy and worth talking to. The weather can do no wrong. Everything falls neatly into place. I woke up early (an hour before alarm) and wrote about "my love affair with house music" as an intro for a Jaxx comp review. These reviews are getting too long - I'm only going to squeeze in two this week, sez Carla, and if they're running alternatingly, one a week is too slow a rate for how they'll hopefully be coming in again. A lovely stroll to French and back, and then time for a reuben, more writing, and chatting with Nori before Culture Concept. Everyone who was there when I arrived had sat along the edges of the room, but I staked out a spot at a table in the middle. When nobody ventured to join me and I was all alone in the center "ahm, like you're on exhibit," Bruce suggested I move to a corner. The class ran pleasantly and smoothly, even though the first two hours of discussion were led almost completely by two student facilitators. Bruce stepped in with some helpful definitions ("nomonology", "axiologic") and occasionally to provide examples or summaries. The most troublesome part was of course dealing with the Fabian reading, from a book titled "Time and the Other," the first chapter of which took me nearly three hours and a page and a half of notes yesterday afternoon as the sun set gorgeously outside the second floor of McCabe, and which is far, far more wordy than necessary, including much more than a fair share of purely invented jargon (including spatialized, naturalized, physical, mundane, typological, and intersubjective Time). After that, a nice first chat with Renee on the porch, tea-time with Nori and Alyssa, and filling-out WSRN app with the latter. Show title: "reality is lubricated." What do you think? Rae said it was "raunchy."

And then there was African. Man! Three hours (half drumming, half dancing) goes by like nothing. I mean, not even the most enjoyable seminar imaginable could pass anywhere near so quickly. I feel like my drumming has improved even since last week. My thigh-drum grip is more comfortable, and my technique and even stamina seem quite a lot better. I improvised some fun gradual embellishments on a rhythm that we played for quite a while, held down the tricky slap/tone upbeats (+a +a +a +a) on a Rumba, and basically prevented the patakato from falling apart when Charles went over to help one of the others. If I had ever imagined that drumming might occasionally get boring, I don't think so anymore. Even if it did, the dancers (and there are a lot of them) are infinitely pleasurable to watch. And then it was my turn. Class was if anything more intense than on Thursday, with great hungawe turning extension, kenanga alternating off-the-ground full-turn contractions, pelvic goodness across the floor. And plus the mirror was visible, which I rather liked because I was very much enjoying how I looked in my green shins tee, dark blue scrubs. Durn I'm skinny. I was so sweaty afterwards that I endured a thorough and chilly shower before heading off to SAC meeting. The meeting was thankfully efficient, and we kept nicely under budget for the week (doling out only $730 of nearly $1600 requested.) Back here I made myself a late supper of scrambled egg-lettuce-gado gado-cinnamon heart-cheese sandwich (it was good I tell you! tasted like Chinese food) and started to watch "The Blue Angel" with Nori. It took us a while to figure out whether there were subtitles, because the first scene takes place in an English classroom. The rest of the dialogue switches between English and German, but the recording is so poor that none of it is very comprehensible. Marlene Dietrich's sexuality is even sillier than Marilyn's. Alyssa is sleeping next to me now; I'll have to wake her up before I go to sleep, and rotate her 90°. Now I'm going to read the Meno with Nori, who's being awfly obliging.

cover me with spots
black and red dots
until i'm filling up your visual field