Why I Haven't Written in a While

I've been having this strange dream for two weeks now: it lasts all day and well into the night.

In the dream, I went to a huge party. I was deliriously happy. Like only can happen in dreams, I kept seeing people I know or who looked familiar but with the contexts all mixed up: school friends were there with distant relatives, childhood neighbors with current students, people who I know full well live thousands of miles apart standing and chatting with each other. In a similarly dream-like way, the cultural contexts for the party were all mixed up: we'd be dancing to bhangra one minute, to ABBA the next, then to something in Spanish I could almost make out before circling to the strains of Hava Nagila. I was flying, or at least floating, at one point, then Kira was floating above me--there was cake, there were old men and women falling deeper in love with the universe. We walked outside and the stars had come down out of the sky to glow in people's hands--"we" meaning me and this beautiful woman dressed in white with touches of gold, jewelry on her face and around her neck, mehndi on her skin, and my heart wrapped up in her soul. Kira left us, then, to join the night stars and we walked off past the stars, out into the darkness, past what would have been the edges of the universe if the universe had that kind of shape.

Conspiracy!

Many programs, including facebook, sometimes ask you to type "random" words to confirm your identity as a human being. Are such words, however, really random? Or are they, in actuality, evidence of facebook's intelligence--and maliciousness?

Take a quick look at Exhibit A, a photo a friend posted from a performance in Utah County:




Now look at Exhibit B, the words Facebook made me type to confirm my recent comment:



Coincidence, or conspiracy?

The Commie Awards

It's time for the monthly Commie Awards (that is, the awards for the best comment of the month). In grand Commie (that is, communist) tradition, however, we'll gradually rewrite history to pretend this award has existed all along, granting it retroactively to June through August as well as September. So hold your breath, comrades (that is, readers), you could be one of the four champions to win the long-coveted Goldbergish.Blogspot.Com Commie Award!




September:

September's Award will be presented by Leon Trotsky, famous for his guest appearance on this blog, for helping dye the Communist flag red, and for completely dropping the ball and letting Stalin take the Soviet Union over and have him killed in Mexico with an ice pick.

The nominees are:

Groomellette Party

In contemporary Caucajewmexdian circles, it is customary to hold a "groomellette" party, or perhaps three such parties, prior to a wedding. While the complementary "bridellete" parties are typically reserved for women only, the Groomellette is open to men and women.

For the first of my groomellette parties, we're planning on screening a film--but it's been very difficult to choose just one. I'm down to a top three list and stuck.

The candidates at this point are:

A Jewish Conspiracy to Fuel This Blog

The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper with a commitment to truth that rivals this blog's, recently published an article suggesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's parents may have had a Jewish last name before moving to Tehran.

I tend to take any such explosive rumors with a coarse grain of salt. I wasn't ready to believe this one until I did some research on Mahmoud's facebook page.

I thought I'd start with the "We're Related" application. His parents and grandparents weren't there, of course (probably because facebook is godless and doesn't believe ancestors matter)--but something telling was.

Yes, Mahmoud's relatives included three descendants of Mayer Rothschild (a Jew famous for establishing the 18th century's most formidable carrier pigeon network), a great-grandson of spectacle fashionista Leon Trotsky, and an elderly nephew of cigar aficionado Bugsy Siegel.


Even in the most degrading anti-communist
propaganda posters, Trotsky's glasses themselves
manage to look cool. That's what I call style.

Does this mean Mahomud does, in fact, have Jewish roots as the Daily Telegraph's report suggests?

In a word: yes. In two words: of course.

Does that, in turn, mean that in addition to Capitalism, Communism, Comic Books, Christianity, Las Vegas, the Media (through Zach Efron), this blog, and numerous other international conspiracies, Jews are secretly responsible for contemporary Holocaust denial?

Update from the Grad Office

I am in the office I share with perhaps forty or fifty other graduate students who teach English 150.

Today, it smells strongly of waffles.

And it occurs to me, as a person who ate a granola bar for breakfast and who seldom eats lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays, that this is not, in fact, calculated torture. You see, scents are not simply waves like light and sound--smell is produced only by the presence of actual tiny particles from the source.

I am consuming, in a sense, extremely modest portions of wheat, butter, sugar, maple.

Today, a friendly colleague has unknowingly served me lunch.

If you have to move...

...which, if you're an average American, will happen 11.7 times during your life (a statistic that suggests that the twelfth move is usually fatal), I would like to suggest the following:

DON'T PACK YOUR OWN BOOKS

Books, you see, are sort of like ghosts, except that you are the dead person (even before you move for the twelfth time). This is because every book ends up preserving some past part of you based on the time of life when you obtained it, the person who gave it to you, and the slips of paper you may have tucked in which fall fluttering out from their safe place in before to the transition of this moment.

I don't normally mind books. We live side by side, but I only consult them when I'm already thinking of them, so their pull from the present toward their past isn't so extreme.

Today, though, I found myself face to face with a playwright and a missionary, and older brother and a friend, with an Ohio Utah Germany resident I used to be. I found myself face to face with old friends, old critics, old fears and old interests.

But the rush of packing meant there was no time to deal with each ghost, to greet it respectfully and lay it to rest. And so the ghosts rose into the air, lingered around me, as I packed my many selves into tight little cardboard boxes, taping them up and preparing them to be brought to lie in wait in a new home, storing their energy to haunt me again and again--until 70% of the way into my final move I give up trying to keep one step ahead and go live in the present of those many ghosts again.