Pretend this was written on Wednesday

So Gili guilted me into starting to write to this again.

Chicago Vacation: The litany of what what went wrong that trip has become a comic routine:

1. I got my flight delayed for a day and half
   
2. I accidentally insulted a deaf lesbian's shoes and spent the next hour apologizing
3. I got a hang over.
4. I got a cold, and had to go through endless humiliation and bureaucratese to get at the good stuff so I could lay in bed for the day (the pharmacy had to take my name and adress, but only half the keys on the keyboard worked, so if they want to track down my meth lab, they're stuck trying to write a warrant for Ivi Ohchi (which I think will be my samurai name.)
5. I threw up in a taxi cab.
   
6. Some guy threatened to kill me at the wolf house in the Chicago Zoo.
   
7. The apostrophe key broke on my keyboard, and even Carlos couldn't fix it.
   
8. Ellen was unironically obsessed with Dippin' Dots, the ice cream of the future.
   

And yet, it ended up with a great trick, and I feel like a shadows lifted after.

Reading: Ulysses, of all things. Gili said to me last night that it's a guy thing to be obsessed with it, and for me it was a teenage boy thing, just like waiting for facial hair to grow. It's the big monument of 20th Century, the book so difficult that its guide is longer than the text itself, a back breaker that sums up every bit of Western Civilization. And it's dirty. It's banned. Somehow I had missed the fact that it was banned in the past, not now, and made a determined , Pierre Menardian attempt to get it instated at my high school library. Also I tried to read it, with that guide longer than the book, looking up every reference in advance of reading it so I would obtain some sort of perfect knowledge. I got somewhere through Chapter 3 and then would start over a few months later.

Anyway, I'm reading it now, and I'm realizing back then I should have been reading the same way I could laugh at Annie Hall and without knowing what a Mah Jongg tile was, or on Mystery Science theater, where I found the juxtaposition of Spalding Gray and Gamera hilarious without having heard of the former. And if anything gets real tough, I can google it- every word in Ulysses seems to be explained on Google somewhere- but I don't even think I'm supposed to know a third of what Dedalus is muttering to himself on Sandymount Beach. The struggle with it is part of the fun.

Gili and I finally met up and saw the amazing and peculiar St. Vincent, but the real thrill of the night was looking at couples across the bar and trying to guess their relationships or what they were fighting about through body language. I think I bored her too much asking "And what about this author? Do you like him? How about her?" And I launched into my dreaded Singing Detective monologue.

Listening to today: I'm took advantage of having an office to myself and played all of the Drive By Trucker's "Southern Rock Opera" while coding. Now it's Lucinda Williams on shuffle. I want something mournful about the past, with a little anger (or really anything that distracts me from work problems and my drenching clothes.)

Over the past few weeks, I saw Ratatouille and Once. I don't really want to talk about either in detail, I got an eye on the clock right now for dinner with Lendri, and need to copy edit this later, but they both are incredible and unexpected explorations of artistic creation and the role of the artist in society.