Loose Cans

We decided afterwards that this was my punishment for the unmitigated success of yesternight's repast.

So I've just finished a 4:45pm lunch (half-price pizza at Mona Lisa's on College Street) and I'm on my bike, on my way to meet Sadie and Steven so we can see Elf with Will Ferrell. I weave through a couple of stopped cars, go through the crosswalk, and hang a right onto Westmoreland, when a police car comes right at me. The driver waves me over to the side of the road.

"So, do you have a license to run red lights?"

What the FUCK? On a BIKE?

There was no one crossing, I didn't come near any fucking cars, and this asshole has to pull me over.

I'm sorry, I say very penitently. Sorry's not good enough, he says, very predictably. I consider saying I won't do it again, but I don't because a) what good does that ever do and b) it's a lie, and so we sort of end up staring at each other for about two minutes until I break the silence by saying, stupidly, Look, what do you want me to say?

This does not go over well and the grilling begins. I sincerely consider lying, and indeed begin to do so, until I realize that I really don't have the knowledge of Dublin geography necessary to falsify addresses. I don't show him my garda ID, for sure, and instead show the NY ID. I say I'm staying with a friend, and that this is his bike. This I tripped over later, which was incredibly stupid. I'm on an extended stay, I said. Fuck it. I can't even remember what I said. All I really remember clearly is saying Look, this is my first offense, can't you just give me a warning?

"No. I don't like your attitude."

Again, what the FUCK? What fucking attitude? This is what drives me insane about some cops, Steve. That they treat everyone as though they were lower than dirt, not worth respect or even consideration. "Since I'm the figure of authority in this context," goes the reasoning, "and therefore have no obligation to justify my actions to anybody, I can treat you however I damn well please. You are not a person, you are a walking transgression. I take particular delight in sadistically foisting onto you the burden of proving your own guilt by saying things like, 'So do you have a license to run red lights?' or the ever-popular, 'Do you know how fast you were going?'" Look, buddy, this is not your job, to be sarcastic. You don't need to intimidate all the fucking time. A badge alone does not make you a better person, and it certainly doesn't make everyone else beneath you. I think the general populace would feel slightly less animosity toward you if you were in some way professional about these small things: "License and registration, please" will more than suffice. Tell me what I did, take my info, write me a summons, and go back to doing something worthwhile. Don't linger to toy with me. This cat-and-mouse shit is precisely why anyone who's ever had a run-in with you hates the ground you walk on.

The last time something like this happened, when I got nailed by a plainclothes for wearing rollerblades in the subway, the cop was very reasonable. When I asked him if he could just give me a warning, he said somewhat apologetically that he would, only his supervisor was standing right behind me, trying to look inconspicuous. That was a little unjust, I thought, but at least I respected and sympathized with him for being honest. He let me tell my side of the story (it was raining out, and skating in the rain is asking to die because you absolutely cannot stop), and was even somewhat courteous. But this guy yesterday was just vindictive.

The worst part, the most infuriating part, was that it wasn't just one cop. Oh no. It was THREE FUCKING COPS. I occupied three Gardai for 15 minutes while the guy a block away probably snatched an old lady's purse. And I'm willing to bet that he wouldn't have been such a fuckface had he not been trying to impress his partners. He threatened, as they always do, to take me down to the station. Had I not been on my way to a movie (for which they were making me late, which was irrititating me very much), I considered accepting. Because what can they do to a guy who ran a red light on a bike? Put him in a holding cell? You must be joking. But I wanted to get to my movie. He said Walk the bike. I said It's a long walk. He said Would you rather ride to the station. Right. Fine, whatever. I'm walking, see? Asshole.

By the way, what authority does he have to tell me not to ride my bike? Riding wasn't the offense, running a red light was (I didn't even run it, really. I more like walked it real slow. And it was just the crosswalk. I didn't go more than three feet into the street before I turned. I endangered no one, not even myself). And Jesus, since when is running a red on a bike a crime? No one ever told me this.

In any case, Sadie and Steven had been held up by waiting for Caitriona earlier, so they were on the same street as I was. They actually passed me while I was with the cops, I think. I caught up with them at the end of the street and we walked to the theatre. We got in just as the opening credits began to roll.

And what a movie! Just what I needed after. Everybody MUST--this is an order--go see Elf. Greatest Christmas movie ever. Period. No argument. Greatest ever. Laugh-so-hard-your-jaw-aches funny. It was so brilliant we actually paid to go see it again at 11:30 after going for dinner and a pint or three, this time with Caitriona (by the way, when you see it, just know that Jovie (Zooey Deschanel looking stunning) IS Caitriona Gunning. I mean, in every way except the blonde hair). It was absolutely fantastic.

On the way home, as a cap to a rather up-and-down day, we happened upon a little shopping cart on the sidewalk, which we brought home. We gave each other rides, eliciting many increasingly unoriginal jokes from everyone standing outside every club we passed from Aungier st. to Rathmines. When we reached the Halls gate, the night guard asked if that was our shopping cart.

"No. We stole it from a homeless guy. Don't tell anyone."

Of course it was ours. By this time it was 2am, so we went to bed. I, for one, had been up since 8. Now it's 4:20 and almost dusk, so I should go do some grocery shopping and see if I can get a start on one of those essays tonight. I have two due on friday. Hope everyone's vacation went well.

First there is despair. Then comes some reassurance. But then disquiet. Then there is worry, at which point reassurrance has evaporated. Then there is an interlude when there is aggravation followed by profound aggravation, and then we come back to worry, which soon enough metamorphoses itself into stress, which grows geometrically. At a certain point, stress has become so engorged that it may now be referred to as mania or frenzy. And it is in that state that I ran into the Dunnes' Store on Greater St. George's st. at 10:30 am yesterday morning.

Butcher shops and supermarkets I had been to since 9am: Lawlor's. Donovan's. Londis. Tesco. Dunne's Stores Rathmines. Random butcher shop on Rathmines road. Random butcher shop on Aungier st. And finally Dunne's St. Georges st.

Number of turkeys I had found: Zero.

Hairs I had lost: 12,536

Despondent text messages I had sent warning that thanksgiving might have to be kicked back a day: 3.

But then there it was. A huge frozen turkey just sitting there in the freezer section. And there wasn't just one, oh no. There were a million! (more or less. okay there were like maybe seven. But there were fucking turkeys!) Six kilos, thirteen point twenty-two pounds of bowling-ball hard bird. €18. I had a turkey!

I put it in the weekend bag I had been carrying around all morning (I had left all notebooks, books, pens, paper, iPod, etc. back at the ranch), slung it over my shoulder, and got on the bike. This proved much more difficult than expected: you try biking with a bowling ball on your back. It was a quick hop over to college, where a lot of people were very happy to see me. But our collective relief was quite swiftly extinguished when I looked at the back of the turkey wrapping.

Suggested defrost time in cold water bath (a conventional method): 30 hours.

Fuck. I don't have 30 hours.

A few hours later (after attending one class--poetry tutorial--at the beginning of which I dropped the bag on the table and it made a terrific SLAM!, and then getting a bus home because there was no earthly way I was biking with that thing on my back--though queerly I'm perfectly used to carrying much heavier weights on the bike after grocery shopping. I think it had something to do with weight distribution. A turkey, after all, does "sag like a heavy load...Or does it EXPLODE?"), the father, the super father, der ubervater, came, as he always does, to the rescue. He assured me that it was perfectly legal to defrost it in a hot water bath (because you can't believe how frozen it was. You could easily kill someone with it. Seriously, I've felt rocks that were softer), so long as I still, as with the cold water method, changed the water every half-hour.

So for the next three or four hours, I kept a vigil beside my reanimating turkey as it thawed from its cryogenic freezing.

When I finally took it out, it seemed the insides were still a little frozen solid. So there I stood for twenty minutes, occasionally pouring boiling water up its backside, draining it, and then shoving my hand in the out hole, rooting around for defrosting giblets. These I eventually found had been helpfully extracted for me by cheerful workers on the line at the turkey plant prior to freezing. Stupid me, I figured that when the wrapping said "with giblets," it meant they were still inside. Turns out they were in the little bag I took out at the beginning. Oh well. It's not a Thanksgiving if you don't violate the turkey.

It was at about this point that I realized just what it was I had volunteered to do. I was solely responsible for turkey and gravy. I did not have a sous-chef (except possibly for flatmate Vinnie, who is a wonderfully sweet fella and who helped tie the legs together with sewing string while I held them. Didn't get poultry lacers or even regular string. I stitched the neckflap to the breast with a sewing needle and fine blue thread. That came apart eventually; the leg binding held fast. He also came up with its name when I couldn't think of anything beside Harold, and I name everything Harold. Immediately before being thrust into a 450º oven--220º C--it was christened Tasty. Thanks, Vin). And this is a huge fucking bird, this turkey. Most recklessly ambitious thing I've ever done. Hardest, too. Cranberry Brisket, Tortilla Stack, Crepes from scratch, no problem. But I've never watched anyone do this before. I never figured I'd have to do it so soon. And so find myself face-to-gaping-nether-maw with something I have never even considered doing before. It's that moment of awe when the enormity of the undertaking just cracks you over the head. Which tends to raise a lump, like in the cartoons.

The thing was, I was seriously under the gun, having finished defrosting at about 5:15pm. I was going to have to use the express method of tenting it with foil. We had made the stuffing last night anyway--more on it later--and clearly stuffing the bird before cooking was out of the question, since it adds upwards of 20 minutes to cooking time. But you have to put something in there. So I chopped me onions and carrots and celery and burrowed them up its arse along with two bay leaves for good measure, rubbed it with butter, chicken seasoning (figured it was the same as poultry seasoning. It was), coarse salt and ground pepper, and laid it on a long sheet of tinfoil, which I folded over to form a tent above the bird.

But I was worried, you see. Because when you do a bird in foil, you're not actually roasting it. You're baking it. Because roasting, apparently, involves ventilation, which tinfoil prevents. As a matter of fact, The Joy of Cooking has some shockingly nasty things to say about people who use foil. It would be very funny if they weren't talking about me. Look, Bombauer, you snotty bastard (woman though you purport to be), if I'd had the time, I would have done it normally, but I'm sorry, some of us have other things to do, so now run along and go fuck yourself. Furthermore, I didn't have a rack to put on top of the turkey tin (which I'd picked up the day before), and the foil method, happily, dispenses with the dripping rack altogether. I wasn't cut terribly deep by their barbs (and they really are rather mean, to say nothing of gratuitous. Go read it, it's just totally unnecessary), but I was worried by their threat that foil-baking dries the turkey out.

With the foil tent, you're supposed to have about a full foot of clearance between the breast and the apex of the tent. But my oven isn't that big. So I could only give it about 3". But in it went. I'm kicking myself for never having taken any Before pictures. I have a lot of pictures of the dinner that night, but none of the turkey before it was carved. Damn. I'll just have to do it again.

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While we wait for Tasty to cook and crisp, I want to interject here that I am in a very good mood today. I don't know what it is. This morning, I couldn't bike up to college because I left the horse there yesterday, so I decided to walk. I stood at the bus station ouside Halls for a minute, though, talking to some friends amid the multitude waiting for the 14A, and in a minute, the bus had come. I nearly took it, but then decided I'd rather walk. It's a lovely gray day, not freezing but not warm, smooth and gentle, if anything, and I had Francoise Hardy playing, and there was just no way I was going to stand on that cramped, stuffy bus, and deal with the asshole driver. Because there is an immutable rule of Dublin transport (consider this my first act of concerted travel writing): the taxi drivers, though they gouge you in absurd fashion (50¢ per passenger beyond the first, 50¢ per bag in the "boot"), are invariably genial and garrulous, with some maintaining a running conversation all the way to the damn airport. They are very personable, and in every way the opposite of NYC cabbies. The bus drivers, on the other hand, are for some unknown reason the most notorious assholes in the city. Everyone acknowledges this: Dublin bus drivers, as a species, are horrible people. They are nasty, brusque, and not at all happy to see you. All they want is for you to get the fuck off their bus so they can go home and beat their wives. And you can forget about calling "Back door!"

Where was I? Oh yeah. I was describing my good mood, because we must of course give the turkey time to cook. Don't rush the repast.

So I just had a marvelous amble. At the Grand Canal, a smiling man on a bike tapped me on the shoulder and pointed, saying, "Good morning, traffic light!" I turned to follow his finger and saw Good Lord! that the entire steel post with the lights affixed to it had been, it seemed, hit by a car. It had been wrenched downward and now stood at a 60º angle; another six inches and it would have put a hole in the side of the Deli-sh eatery (worst name ever). "That?" I said. "Oh, that was me." I leaned against it like I'd pushed it over. We laughed. Then his light changed (one that was standing straight up) and he took off.

It was just one of those pleasant moments that you can't really transmit, because they're made entirely by the general mood. I thought about writing the whole time. Thought about blogging, more specifically, and realized just how much I love doing this. Because we all have this great fear that no one will listen to us. We fear it because if no one listens, we naturally take it to mean we're not worth listening to. Because, as ever, it's about security. And so to know that I'm being read, that people want to know, that you are listening out there so far away...it gets me right in the jumblies, it does.

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Forty minutes before you take it out, you have to get the foil off the turkey and start basting like hell. I had bought a baster that day, and by nightfall, I was unanimously hailed as the Master Baster. Ha, ha, ha. And no, there's not an original joke you can make; we ran the category in minutes.

Oh, by the way. Discovered something terribly interesting: it turns out--I really didn't know this. Should I have?--that aluminum foil, no matter how hot the oven, never gets above room temperature. You can stick your hand right in and futz with it. Heh. Learn something every day.

It's the basting that makes the turkey at that stage. All the seasoning was ancillary to the make-or-break basting process. Because if you didn't do it enough, it would dry up like a shot. So I basically spent the next 40 minutes with my head in the oven, basting away. And then, at about 8:45, it's ready. I change verb tense and go to run downstairs to get Duncan, bless him (he's reading this, by the way, he's one of the few here, the happy few, who get to. But if he doesn't stop slagging it, he's going to get popped in the face. Hear that, Classicist? Crritic!), because I need him to open doors, when the doorbell rings. It's Duncan. I change to the second person. You're just in time. Here, take this measuring cup, these three knives, this big two-pronged fork, what do you call it?, this Martha Stewart book (God bless you Martha Stewart. Will you marry me?), this baster, and a few other random utensils. Can you carry anything else? No? Oh well. Okay, I have the turkey. Christ, this thing weighs a ton! Right. Now, with your available finger, pull that fire door open (all doors are fire doors at Halls, which is to say, absurdly heavy). That one too. Kick that one. Pull that. Now take out the key Sadie lent you, slide it in, and shove open that one. Kick in the door to their kitchen and

WOO HOO! TURKEY! (<--general clamor)

Hey Sadie, trivet! Yeah, right there, perfect. Okay, down we go, gently, gent...ah. Perfect.

Switching back to personal narrative. Now I have to make the gravy as Tasty cools off. Martha Stewart saves the day once again, because God knows I've never done this before. We also have a bottle we picked up at Sparks & Mencer the day before, which we intend to use to cut my stuff, because you can simply never have enough gravy. You have to imagine the scene, though. you have people buzzing about, must have had eleven of us, desserts and potatoes being propelled out of the oven and across the room, shattering against the far wall and dripping over the radiator, which is steaming, all four hot plates on the hob are going on full, and I'm using two for the gravy, food is everywhere, Duncan has valiantly undertaken to carve the turkey because I'm bent over my gravy, and this seems to be a source of much laughter and swearing, and Sadie and I are diving over each other to sneak looks at our respective pages in the Martha Stewart magazine and we're getting all crossed up over the hob trying to tend to our dishes, it's like playing four-hand piano, and then suddenly, it's done.

We have three coffee tables set up at the back, with chairs all round, and we're using the kitchen table as a buffet. We have turkey. We have the loveliest buttermilk mashed potatoes by Caitriona. Duncan and Stephen have brought forth the apple stuffing we engineered at midnight that morning. I have produced massive amounts of gravy. Of course cranberry sauce. There is salad, much salad. And vegetables. Oh, and these sweet potato biscuits Sadie made. Ben picked up a pair of baguettes. And of course there is vinum and bier. These are afterthoughts, though, no matter how tanked Caitriona was by the end of the night.

And so the turkey? Well. Okay. You win some, you lose some, you know? And this time, I don't know...I mean, what did you expect? I've never done this before. I just feel like the only way to explain what happened is to say

HE SHOOTS HE SCORES!

And the crowd goes wild!

Tasty, you tough old bastard, you lived up to your pedigree. It was dead on. Juicy, flavorful, mmm. So good. Everything was good. Shocking. Nothing was too dry or lumpy. Nothing fell apart. Everything--and I do mean everything--was a success. And there was so much we could have fucked up! I mean, even at home, we usually mark each big meal by leaving some dish out: "Oh shit, the sweet potatoes are still in the oven!" (alternately, "Holy God, how long has this broccoli been in the microwave? What do you mean, a WEEK?") And yes, we gorged ourselves. We ate everything. We blew through the mashed potatoes. Tasty, we hardly knew you. Every spot of meat on that bird was consumed. It was probably my greatest thanksgiving. And yes, I am immensely proud. I get to say that once. I don't know if any of us at that table have ever witnessed such an unmitigated success. I mean, not one single error. Not one. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Thanks to: Warren the Impossibly Great, Lizzie Kander and The Settlement Cookbook, and Martha Stewart and her empire. And Duncan because he's reading this. Say something funny, Duncan. America's listening.

Grudging thanks to: that Bombauer woman.

p.s. Duncan doesn't really slag it. He's just very tactless and, like I said, a classicist. So he objects to the deliberate syntactical holocaust I generally employ in my prose. That is to say, NOT the big words, few and far between though they tend to be. It's more things like sentences that seem to say nothing, and that they tend to begin with conjunctions or the words This and That. Someone's never read DeLillo. But then again, who has?

So all you HM stateside bastardi are reuniting today. Aww. Isn't that sweet. Kissy kissy, hello baby, how you doin', oh ma God, yo hair is long, and when was the last time you shaved? Uh huh. Well, just to make conversation, I shaved yesterday, and I got a haircut a few weeks ago but it looks like hell, getting it cut as soon as I get back to the city. Anyway. I hope the reunion is shits and giggles, and let me know how it goes, damn it. Right now I'm on Epicurious.com, bless it, finding out how to make thanksgiving for 13 when you have none of the essential tools.

Ich habe ein weird requestion: if any of you have old Nintendo 64 games you're just dying to rid yourselves of (excepting mario kart, goldeneye, or starfox), my flatmates and I will be more than happy to take them off your hands. We're going to get terrifically bored of Mario Kart soon. I don't even play it that often, and I'm sick of it already.

It's official. Stamp it, seal it, send it off first class. Shout it from the rooftops. Toll the bells, lads: I have become obsessed with getting out of Rathmines.

Everyone I know who has a flat, I ask them their rent, right off the bat. First question. Very inappropriate and forward. I check posted rent prices constantly. I've talked to people about rooming together next year. I want a nice little two- or three-person flat near City Centre, either Northside Dublin 1 or Christchurch Dublin 8. Or 9? Is it 9? Whatever, as long as I'm not in 6 anymore.

You know I keep thinking of Agent Smith in the first Matrix, when he sends the other agents out of the room and he clutches the gurgling Morpheus' face and growls though clenched teeth: "I have to get out of this place." It's the smell, he says. The stink.

There's an all-permeating stench in Rathmines, too. But it's not quite the same. It's not people, but it's also not no-people. The stench is really the name we give to the lack of stench. The lack of things. The lack of the vivid, the lack of fucking anything, for that matter. It's just such an utterly identityless place. Too far away to be relevant and urban, too close to be complacent and pleasant and bovine and suburban, it just has no point to it. The sidewalks are narrow, hardly wide enough for two. It doesn't destroy the spirit. It doesn't even numb it. It just sort of bores it. Bores a hole in it, too. Swiss cheese fucking spirit in Rathmines. Actually, I'm not even in Rathmines. I'm between Rathmines and Rathgar. It's just that Rathmines has this one long road, Rathmines road, that goes right through it, and we're just off the very tail of it. Rathgar is tiny, much more of a one-traffic-light hamlet, but then again, it's only a block away from Rathmines. Because these aren't suburbs, see, they're half-suburb, half-neighborhood. They flow fairly seamlessly into one another, such that it becomes awfully diffficult to tell where Rathmines ends and Ranelagh begins, or where Terenure of Rathgar end and Milltown begins, or Ballsbridge or Donnybrook, it's pointless to try. I don't see why any of these places have names. Because a name demarcates something, portions it off from the rest. A name delimits and assigns boundaries. It is this thing, it is not that thing, and it is not that thing either. I like Manhattan. Because Manhattan ends where the rivers begin. We have identity. In Rathmines we have none.

In Halls we do, though, and we don't much like it (this raises the question: would you rather not have identity, or have one and hate it?). It's a huge pain in the ass to get up to college, even when you have a bike, they don't allow us nearly the freedom the law has given us, it's hardly cheap (€500 a month for a six-person flat with one small fridge and one smaller sink? You must be joking), and they check on us constantly: we just had inspection. They come when you're out of your apartment, of course, checking both your bedrooms and the kitchen. My bedroom passed, but we failed the first time because they didn't come on the day they said they would, after we had cleaned up exhaustively, and then came a few days later. Of course we fucking failed; our kitchen goes from clean as the Pope's nose to filthy as his backside, especially after he's shit in the woods. Then they came again to give us a second chance. The place looked fine. They failed us again, inexplicably. The penalty for that was having a cleaning crew come in at a rate of €15/hour. Then they came back and--though we hadn't made the slightest effort to clean up a mess we couldn't perceive--passed us. It's very irritating.

Furthermore, here's another very sticky point: a party is defined as more than 12 people in a flat (which is to say, 6 guests on top of the 6 residents). If you want to have a party, you have to ask permission. If you ask permission and receive it, it comes with the caveat that at midnight, two assistant wardens will show up to break it up, because parties can't go beyond midnight. Which is such a fucking joke I can't believe it.

The cable we paid for a month and a half ago still isn't up and running, the internet, which is of course fucking essential to our quotidian and academic lives (a lot of people are required to get their course material online), seems like it will never come, though apparently if and when it does, we'll have to cough up for that, too. The accommodation lady today told me that in Limerick the fee is €130 for nine months. Christ! And I'm absolutely dying without the internet. We all are. I mean, for things so basic as word definitions or recipes or timetables or train fare or weather updates, we're completely fucked. And I'm not even going to go into how much I miss instant messaging. Everyone at home knows how I'm doing; I, of course, am totally in the dark about how everyone at home. I can't really get any news of America, much less New York, because who's ever heard of the New York Times, and even the Herald Tribune is wholly introuvable, and wouldn't help anyway, and all the UK papers ever print is how many Americans got killed yesterday in Iraq--which, by the way, is REALLY starting to get to me. Of course here are computers at halls: depending on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, time of the month, barometric pressure, the price of tea in China, and whether Mercury is in retrograde, we have a grand total of four to six (functional ones). Granted, most are neanderthals, the connection crawls, and two of them only run Linux, which most people can't deal with, but it's mostly that there are only FOUR TO SIX of them for SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY RESIDENTS. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ on a spit.

Also no laundry facilites, but I've bitched about that before. I finally broke down and did it yesterday. I had gone a solid month without using the laundromat, because it's a really long-ass schlep away and costs a fortune. At least now we can drop it off three evenings a week in the admin building (Greenane) at halls and pick it up the next day, but it's still crazy expensive, plus they tend to wreck your clothes. So for the month of November, I've kept myself in shirts and underpants and socks by buying a bottle of Woolite and washing it in my sink. Which is mucho pequeno. But the sheet situation was getting critical. And plus there are only so many times you can do that with underwear. So Jacob gave me money (God bless you, lad) and last night, I lugged a massive duffel full of clothes over to Greenane and plunked down €11.10. Oy.

OY!

It occurs to me that I have just wasted much time and energy: this whole thing could just be reduced to one resounding OY.

So der Bruder is on his merry way to the aeroporto. A merry, if quiet, few days. Very pleasant. Not a great sweaty hamperful of things to report: took him out to the Guinness Brauhaus, where I have now been three times, and where you may drink what is undoubtedly the most perfect pint imaginable; we did Ultimate in Herbert Park on Sunday and he froze his fingers off (not enough playing, said I); saw Waiting for Godot at the Gate, which was a very fine production indeed, marred only by my recollection that we were going to be reading it Hilary (next) term, and considering it in the light of Everyman. This is to say that I was watching Godot (pronounced GOD-ot in these here parts. This is a major point of contention) as a reinvention of the genre of the Medieval allegory drama. Ugh. Like I said, I can take the fun out of anything.

I'm all sleepy. Wan' go back ta bed. But no. Because I have a class in about two hours. Maybe I could go take a nap, though. But not in the library, because there are no comfortable nappy places in the library. It does occur to me, from time to time, that there's a lot I'm missing out on by not going to American school. But then I remember I'm in Europe and I have to go buy meat tenderizer and make my own thankgiving.

Got an email on the dublinultimate (Pookas) group yesterday about the possibility of a tournament in Lithuania. Probably won't materialize, but we saw pictures of the indoor facility they have there (God bless the soviets), a huge astroturfsward under this roof that looks like the astrodome. It would be glorious--all the things one loves about outdoor (space, grass, space, and grass) with none of the things one hates (wind, sun, rain, wind, and wind). Not likely to happen, but hey, one can drool.

Have you ever bullshat so magnificently, so obscurely, so wholly irrelevantly that there was simply no reply?

That's what happened in CritCult an hour ago. It was funny. One girl (the San Franciscan, Meaghan) did Diving Into the Wreck, which just shouldn't be allowed for that kind of assignment, Kathy (Dubliner born and bred) did Clapton's Wonderful Tonight, which was legit, and Will (London?) did Van Morrison's Brown-Eyed Girl. And then there was me. Who decided not to go with the obvious, boring "objectification" route, and instead decided to center his whole argument around the thesis that indeed the essential line, the crux of Baby Got Back is the part at the beginning where he goes,

When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung.

This is because in the cultural discourse in which Mix-A-Lot operates, The Butt is the sine qua non of female sexual viability. We have synecdoche: butt as woman. It is no longer Goethe's Ewig-Weibliche, eternal feminine, but Mix-A-Lot's Eternal Booty. Women, in the literary canon, is always either monster or angel, never real. So, like Woolf says, we must "kill the angel in the house." Mix-A-Lot, in rejecting the text-based conventions the establishment has engineered ("So Cosmo says you're fat/Well, I ain't down with that/Cuz your waist is small and your curves are kickin'...") does indeed kill one angel: the waif-woman. But in so doing he gives another one its wings. He deifies the Booty instead. Thus, we have not a mitigation of gender values, but merely a displacement of them. A relocation, as it were. Because, in the end, we are still considering only the FUNCTION of woman, dictating for her a purpose. She is deprived of internal mobility and agency. Because a purposeless--that is to say, booty-less--woman, of course, is irrelevant. Like I said, it's the sine qua non. She doesn't exist, since the purpose which has been assigned to her is to affect something in the male: naturally, to get him sprung. That is the point. The achievement of the itty bitty waist, the strategic placement of that thing in your face, all to the end of getting you sprung.

I think I can take the fun out of anything.

But since the brother is here, I've hardly gotten any work done since thursday. Except for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Because Liz is absolutely right: Jeanette Winterson is brilliant. I haven't had this much fun with a book since Cosmopolis. I was reading Duchess of Malfi last night because I've got a tutorial on it today, and it was only 11, but I just couldn't do it. I was falling over. So I said Fuck it, got in bed, turned on the reading light, and picked up Oranges.

And proceeded to read 75 pages before forcing myself to go to sleep. I'm going to get her others just as soon as I have some breathing room.

I'm in my last week of tutorials this term; next week it's just lectures. And essay-writing. Lots and lots of essay-writing.

Have been having much fun mit der bruder (that's Nordic, actually, Bruder, but just because I can't remember what it is in Deutsch), but I really can't talk much right now because in the next two hours I have a mess o' reading to do, plus--and this is just one of those things I find myself doing altogether too often--I have to do a feminist analysis of "Baby Got Back."

No, this was not the text assigned. She said Pick your own text. So I did. Should be fun.