How I Ended Up in a 7-11 at 2:30 in the Morning in my snowflake pajama pants and eeyore nightshirt, holding a brownie in one hand and cheetos in the o

ther. (Title space has a limit?) Otherwise titled: Nighttime Wanderings.

I woke up from a nap at around 2 in the morning (so far, nothing out of the ordinary). I picked up the book that I was currently reading, "In the Shadow of the Law" (nothing strange there). I found my place and started losing myself in the story again (great book, by the way). Then, somewhere down the line (line 9, page 347), my mind started wandering.

After some random pit-stops, it wandered to "Meet Joe Black"- possibly the weirdest movie ever made in the history of movie-making. And damn, way to kill the effectiveness of the "dramatic pause" through overuse. Also, I don't think the director realized that if you pause for too long, intensity and level of anticipation and interest actually decrease exponentially, members of the audience actually start to forget why we are pausing in the first place, the link between the pre- and post-pause line lost in the silence. And so, we are left scratching our heads and wondering why the word "Death" has just flown out of the Brad Pitt's lips.

Anyway,...after ambling into Meet Joe Black, my mind then wandered effortlessly to Brad Pitt, who plays Death, and made a smooth connection to peanut butter (in the movie, Death develops a rather obsessive taste for peanut butter). *Gurgle gurgle*. My stomach approved. So, slave that I am to the desires of my tummy, I pulled out the pb and started eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon, just like Brad Pitt does in the movie.

Then, instead of wandering further into the murky depths of undiscovered associations, my mind remained a passenger on the food train, and I began to think how wonderful it would be to have a nice big decadent slice of 7-11 (we say "magic") brownie on a plate in front of me. But it's 2:30 in the morning! protested my voice of reason. He was quickly silenced. Throwing a coat over my pj's, I was out the door in a minute, down the escalator,...and that's how I ended up at 7-11 at 2:30 in the morning in the said get-up, with said comestibles in hand.

But what about the cheetos? That was to balance out the sweet with a little salty. Apparently, my voice of reason was not completely and properly silenced upstairs. That shall be remedied in good time.

Otherwise entitled: Why it takes me so long to read even a good book like "In the Shadow of the Law".

Do the dew, not the doo

Oh man. I dunno whether to laugh or be embarrassed, so I am currently doing both. I was sitting in front of the computer annotating WSJ sentences (OK OK I was surfing the net, reading the Times), when the bottle of mountain dew I had this morning called for a trip to the freezing cold bathroom down the hall. I opened the door, walked in, and exclaimed aloud to no one in particular: "pee-EWWWW!" because man it smelled like the worst case of doodoo in there, and because I thought I was alone. Only I wasn't because the next moment, I saw a pair of feet peeking out from under a stall from the reflection in the mirror. I had the horribly impolite but involuntary urge to giggle, and then thinking how embarrassing it would be to come face to face with the doodoo-doer, I quickly shuffled out of the bathroom. And now, I'm sitting in front of the computer once more, desperately needing to go pee.

Welcome Home

Gee, Philly is supposed to be the hub of violence, but so far, I've witnessed nothing in the city of brotherly love (KNOCK ON WOOD!). Then I come home to Tacoma for a 3 week vacation, and in one day, a fight breaks out at our local mall, right in front of my eyes, where a woman actually gets tasered, then later that night, I come out of a club in Seattle, and there's a guy knocked unconscious on the ground, his body twitching, and blood dripping out of his skull, forming a dark pool around his head. Then a couple weeks later (today), I learn that there was a fatal shooting at my old high school.

What's with that?

Yet, I still had a marvelous time yesterday in the beautiful city of Seattle, where I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls(!!!) which were on tour at the Pacific Science Center, and then had an interesting sushi dinner at U Village, which is all lit up with fairy lights at this time of year. It was interesting because it involved swiping our entrees directly from a giant conveyer belt. As for the scrolls, I've got a keen interest in ancient scripts/paleography, so no doubt it was fascinating and linger-worthy, seeing those arcane scrawlings on scraps of goathide which when deciphered, revealed stories about the genesis of the world and frightening tales of the fiery end of the world. And I even got to carry out a black-ops mission on the side, which involved faking a major coughing fit in order to get past security. OK, the coughing fit was real. The mission? Not so much. But y'all already figured that out...

Cobalt out.