Sunday 9 March 2008

Shameless Self-Promotion

I have four things that I'm ridiculously proud of, as recounted on the phone this morning:

- The essay that I turned around in 60 hours was a huge success - my supervisor seemed to really like it, and it turns out that a passing knowledge of witchcraft beliefs makes for awesome cocktail party conversation. (It's the next best thing to reading something by Michael Pollan, who has an unfair advantage because he writes about food and people like Michael Taussig write about devil worship. If you go to the types of parties that I go to, it's easier to chat about eating lower on the food chain than it is to slip in a few lines about appeasing the Tio.)

- I bought my mom a pair of earrings in Morocco, and it crossed my mind that since I'm naive and bad at French, it's quite possible that they're not actually silver. So I took them to two jewelry stores, and at both places, they were like, "hey, looks like silver." And at the second one, the woman was like, "wow, these are beautiful." I almost jumped the counter to hug her.

- At dinner yesterday, this guy mentioned that he was thinking of watching every episode of the British Queer as Folk in one sitting (and let's be honest, one of my favorite things to do is tackle the entirety of a series while pausing only to eat and pee), so after polishing off my lemon rice, that's exactly what we did. It only took us like seven hours, and now I know everything there is to know about gay life in Britain. Everything. (I only say that because we also watched the bonus features, and they had a panel discussion where one of the panelists was this guy who complained that nothing about the show - the drugs, underage sex, promiscuity, clubbing - represented his life. And I was kind of like, "no, nor mine, but I'd also understand why nobody would want to watch my life, at least not for seven hours in a row.") I've decided to treat QAF like a documentary out of spite.

- I just finished the New York Times' Sunday crossword for the second week IN A ROW. And not the kind of finishing where you shift your eyes and go, "...of course rolp is a word" and pretend you believe that, but the kind of finishing where I actually knew the answers. Either I'm getting smarter or Will Shortz is getting dumber, but whichever it is, I'll take it.

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