Today.

The second flurry of exams is past now. (By chance, all my courses are on an irregular exam schedule, with either 3 or 4 tests, instead of the traditional midterm and final. For most students, the upcoming week is midterms.)

I got a 98 on my American Government exam. I missed a question about executive agreements. It was a multiple choice question, and there were only two possible answers given what I knew about executive agreements, which are agreements made by the president with governments of other countries, which are like treaties but don't have to be ratified by the Senate. I knew that. The distinction between the two answers was that one said executive agreements have to be within U.S. law and the other said they could be outside of U.S. law. I finished the rest of the test and then pondered that question for about 10 minutes. It was silly to fret about it, because I had no idea which was correct. That particular piece of information wasn't in my notes, it wasn't in the textbook. It must have been something the professor said in lecture and I hadn't written it down. I just took a guess, and I could have done that ten minutes earlier.

So, a 98 is pretty good, but I still wanted to know the answer, just to know. I approached the professor after class yesterday and asked her. She said, "Well, if you read the question carefully, there was only one possible answer," which struck me at first as an odd response. She must have thought I was questioning the fairness of the question. I can understand why she might be defensive, because students question everything, trying to get an extra point here or there. It's incredible how much bargaining with professors goes on. I don't remember that we did that when I was young. Maybe I was just too timid to bargain.

Anyway, I wanted to say, "I read the question carefully about 25 times. That's not the problem. The problem is that I still don't know the answer." I didn't say that. She told me that executive agreements have to be within U.S. law because the president is acting as a U.S. citizen when he makes these agreements, whereas a treaty is outside of U.S. because it is an agreement between or among governments. That's what I wanted to know. (My slogan -- "Academia: it's not just about learning.")

I got a 92 on my Biology exam last week. Adding my 10 points of extra credit, my score is 102! I also got an A on that English paper I blogged about recently. In Spanish I'm hovering somewhere between an A and B, I think, and I'm working as hard as I possibly can, so I just have to be happy with that.

I had a dream last night that I was being chased by a giant cat. It looked like a house cat but as big as a house. (Like in the Japanese horror films, where they'd film a fly or something and project it really huge so it looked like a monster.) After I escaped from the cat, I was on a ledge somewhere miles up in the sky, and there were tiny babies and kittens crawling around, some of them falling off the edge, while a veterinarian was explaining to me an elaborate medical procedure -- like an autopsy performed while they were still alive -- which was done on the babies and kittens after they fell. And somebody was eating French fries, which I could smell but not see.

Dear Mom & Dad: School is great. Please send money.

I was planning to get a part-time job once I got settled into my classes. I even applied for a cooking job at a neighborhood cafe in July and they told me they'd probably need someone in September. Then school started, and it was immediately overwhelming, so I put it off, and I put it off. Every once in a while the thought would pop into my head that my financial aid is going to run out some time around November, and I would think I need to get a job soon!, and then I'd have a Biology test or a panic attack about Spanish or a paper due, and suddenly I'm not thinking about money any more. Anything that gets me to stop thinking about money is fine by me, believe me, but now it's almost November and I don't have the rent. Every day I wonder, why am I incapable of managing all the parts of my life at the same time?

On that note, I thought I would mention to my readers, some of whom are friends but many of whom I don't know from Adam, that, if you have been curious about my work, now would be the time to buy a CD. (It's the soundtrack to the documentary called Life in a Box, which I made 2 years ago and which is very good but cost a lot of money we never made back, which is a big part of why I'm so broke now.) It played in lots of festivals in 2005; people liked it, and they liked the music.

I had 1000 CDs made because I was sure the film would be shown on TV and theaters and I'd sell enough CDs to pay the credit card debt I racked up finishing the editing. (Lack of pride and foolhardy optimism are the foundation of all art.)

I get $11 every time someone buys a CD. That means, if 30 people buy one each (or if 1 person buys 30), I can pay the rent next week. If I sell 60, I can pay the rent in December, too. Wow.

Fall.

I did find out today in my advising session that I will not, after all, be able to finish my B.A. by next spring, but nothing could come close to spoiling my great mood because it's finally, really fall. I went to sleep last night with my door and all my windows wide open, and I woke up at 4:30 to a huge racket outside, wind and rain in the trees, and the temperature had dropped about 30 degrees. I shut the windows and pulled up my blankets and went back to sleep for an hour. All morning, on my way to the bus and to and from classes, it poured and the wind tried to rip my umbrella right out of my hands, my feet got soaked because (this is the other thing I found out today) the soles of my shoes are cracked, and I was smiling bigger than I've smiled in months.

Now the rain has stopped, but it's still windy and the air is dry, and I want a t-shirt that says I survived.

Today.

I can't say that I enjoyed today much. I have a mountain of homework to get done this weekend, the bulk of it (besides Spanish, which takes up about 50% of my life) a couple chapters in my microbiology textbook. I dread that book because it's so slow and requires such intense focus -- I'm a fairly slow reader to being with, but this book is crazy slow; it probably takes me an hour to read 7 or 8 pages -- and after about an hour of it, I cannot stay awake to save my life. It's not that it isn't interesting; in fact, it's fascinating. It's just so dense and foreign.

After a couple hours of that, I borrowed J's truck to pick up our box of produce from the CSA. (J went with a friend this afternoon to Maker Faire, an event here in town that I'm still not entirely clear on.) When I had the cooler packed with our veggies and stowed in the back of the truck, I found I had locked the keys inside the truck. I had to walk home, which is not such a great hardship, it's only about a 25 minutes walk, but I was mad at myself and frustrated because I had so much studying to do and it was hottest part of the afternoon, and I was already resenting the time I had to devote to the vegetables, washing, prepping, etc. And because the CSA vegetables are one of my favorite things in life, I was resenting that I was resenting them and not enjoying them today. Yeesh.

I called J from home, but he didn't get the message for a couple hours. By that time, I had gotten over my little episode. He picked up the truck and the vegetables on his way home. I made dinner for us and J's friend: fried okra, yellow squash sauteed with garlic and basil and Parmesan cheese, and a salad of cut lettuce, arugula, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers with a lemon vinaigrette. Boy, it was good.

I forgot to mention the other factor in my response to the Tony Kushner event the other night (if you're curious, you can read J's blog account of it too -- his telling has a similar sort of tangled up ending; it gets to be such a rat's nest when you try to pull apart the various threads): I had discovered that afternoon that I may not be able to finish my degree by next spring. I'm having trouble figuring out the degree requirements, and I have an appointment with my adviser on Monday, but it looks like there are too many requirements for me to finish in 3 more semesters. That bummed me out. I had made peace with the fact that I was going to be like 52 when I finish my MFA (which is what all this nonsense is about). So another year on top of that...

There are days when I wish I was 65 because 1) I could collect social security, and 2) I wouldn't have so many years left to have to make sense of.

That's What They Call Baggage.

Last night, the Ransom Center sponsored a "chat" with Tony Kushner and Steven Dietz (a playwright I'm not familiar with, but he teaches here at U.T.). It was one of those things where a couple famous artists or writers or intellectuals sit in upholstered chairs on a stage with lots of potted ferns and pontificate about their work and art and culture and the audience hangs on every word, chuckles reverently at the high-brow jokes, etc. I love these things.

I lived in New York when Angels in America was on Broadway, but I didn't see it. I think my excuse was that I couldn't afford it, but I'm not sure if that excuse holds water because, if I'd really wanted to see it, I could have saved up. My negative attitude -- at the time -- about Broadway probably came into play, but I remember being aware that this play was different and important, and I was pretty involved in ACT UP at the time, so I'm not sure why I missed it, except that life then was narrow and harried and, working full-time and doing theater, I didn't have time or energy for much of anything else. I saw the Mike Nichols HBO adaptation just last year on DVD and I still can hardly find words to describe how it shook me.

(I really wanted to see Caroline, or Change, which was on Broadway when I was living in New York again in 2003 editing Life in a Box, but it was very popular, and it was impossible to get discounted tickets. By that time, Broadway tickets were over $100 -- they were probably half that in the late eighties -- so it was out of the question.)

J and I talked through dinner and our walk home about our similar reactions to the "chat." Tony Kushner is charming and extremely smart, and he shines in this format. He speaks in paragraphs (long paragraphs), and though he is erudite, he's not pompous. He's funny and humble and clear. So, I enjoyed it. But I (like J) felt on and off through the talk a kind of deep, painful sadness, a feeling of regret, a feeling that my artistic life has slipped by, that I missed the boat, that in my twenties I had a destination but I got lost. I'm combining my description of the feeling with J's. We both admitted to having had this feeling before.

About a quarter of the audience I'm guessing was students, some of whom -- judging by the self-conscious quality of some of the laughter and sighs when Mr. Kushner's comments were particularly witty or profound -- worship Tony Kushner, and it brought me back to similar events when I was in college (the first time). Meredith Monk came to Miami University when I was a freshman. She performed in a small recital hall and then talked with a group of students and faculty, answered questions, and I simultaneously fell in love with her and art and my own potential to be a great artist just like her.

That desire is mixed up with but not exactly the same thing as the desire to be famous. And both J and I were afflicted with both desires. (I didn't experience it so much as a desire to be famous but as a certainty that I was a famous person who just wasn't famous yet.) Maybe the two are the same after all, just different degrees of the same thing. I wanted not just to be known, but to be known after I died, to have made an indelible mark. And that's my antidote to that uncomfortable feeling of having failed which J and I both experienced last night: I believe -- and I've blogged about this before, I think -- that the work J and I did as Y'all had some quantifiable influence on creative activity that followed it, art, music, performance, something. I haven't done the research; I can't defend my thesis yet, but I'm pretty confident that there is support for that argument. The trouble -- as J pointed out -- is that much of the best work we did was, because it was performance, ephemeral. But -- as I pointed out -- a great deal of it was recorded. We have hours and hours of video; we (mostly J) wrote a book; we made records. There's a substantial archive -- I know, because I've been dragging it around the 48 states for the last 5 years.

Y'all, as far as how it played out in our lives, in our relationship, and in our careers, is hard to parse. We knew it was a beast when we were in the belly of it. Y'all started out as something fun to do. We were both pretty busy with other stuff when we met. I was working a lot with Tiny Mythic Theatre Company, and I had a folk-rock band. J was writing plays which were being produced at various little downtown theaters. We met, we couldn't get enough of each other, and you can only have sex so many times in a day, so eventually we got out the ukulele and started making up funny songs. That's really how it happened. And then, the short version of the story is that we played our songs for our little circle of theater people, they said nice things, we got a couple gigs, people laughed, so we went with it. It was what I'd been trying to do all along with all my work, create something that people responded to. We wanted to make good art, but we both wanted fiercely to be famous and this truly seemed like our shot.

But then, at some point early in the career of Y'all, we made a choice to pursue a middle-America audience. We knew we were working in a traditional medium, a populist medium, and -- though we were aware that being so queer and so old-fashioned at the same time made Y'all subversive, we could see that the people who responded deeply to our act were those who had some reverence for those traditions (old-time and country music, the Grand Ole Opry, etc.). We knew that Y'all was post-modern but we didn't want to let our audience know that we knew. The people who were sneering at or laughing at the traditional element of it, eventually lost interest in us, I think. The people who liked us were little old ladies and little kids, art snobs, rednecks, and housewives. Everyone, it seemed. It was intoxicating. That bit about wanting to host our own TV show, we really believed we could make that happen. That wasn't just part of the act.

When I was in art school, and when I was studying theater, and even when I was doing all that experimental work in New York, I always had a slight uneasiness about the eliteness of it, the arcaneness, the artists-making-art-that-only-other-artists-will-understandness-of-it. I loved that Y'all was art for the people. We followed Y'all out to the hinterlands, farther and farther away from our avant garde community and eventually out of New York. That's where our audience was, but we were left pretty isolated out there.

Then there's our relationship, and how it affected and was affected by all this art and fame stuff, but that's just too complicated to get into right now. I made a movie about it, which I think tells pretty accurately at least a small part of that story, but of course there's always more to say, more to ponder.

So, I don't know. I have no c0nclusions here. Both J and I at times have a pretty troubled relationship with our past, our futures, our careers, and even sometimes with each other. But I'm hugely grateful that I have him here, in the next room, and that we can talk about this stuff from time to time, even if it's unpleasant.

An Old Dog.

I just took my second biology exam. It was less harrowing than the first one. The material was not as difficult for me. The first test was all chemistry and genetics, which are abstract and complex compared to viruses and drugs (the topics covered on this test) which are complex but they're somehow more real to me. I also knew better how to study this time. I was thrown last time more by the types of questions than by the subject matter. Anyway, I think I did well.

I also had a quiz in Spanish this morning.

So last weekend was intense, with studying for the exam and re-writing an English paper. I say re-writing, but for all intents and purposes I was starting over. In the first draft of the paper, I had taken issue with a point in a scolding little essay by Nabokov, called "Good Readers and Good Writers." The essay is one of two texts that the professor has based the course on (the other is "Education by Poetry," by Robert Frost), so I knew I was walking into a minefield by disagreeing with something in it, but my argument was specific and well-argued, I thought. I got it back with no marks on it, and a note on the front that said, "While your paper is well-written, what you have written is not the kind of argument that the assignment requested... You need to go back and choose a topic that you can support with clear, undisputed proof," etc.

We have lecture twice a week, and we meet with a grad student teaching assistant in small "discussion sections" once a week. Our papers are graded by the T.A. In lecture the day after we got our papers back, the professor said "the worst thing that can happen is that you get your paper back with no marks on it, but that only happened to a few people who are still trying to argue that Nabokov is wrong. If you're still doing that, just stop it, it's childish."

I stewed for a while, remembering what it was that drove me to drop out of school 3 times previously: the attitude in academia that the person who has read the most books is the smartest. But then I started thinking, you know I've read a shitload of books, and not only that, I've had a pretty wide range of experiences, not to mention the fact that I've been an artist and writer for over 25 years. My mind might not be exactly on a par with Nabokov, but I at least have enough authority to have a dialog with some of his ideas. And, I certainly have more authority than a 23-year-old grad student. Harumph.

So I went to see the professor in his office, and I said, "I need some guidance here. I need more than just 'wrong, try again.'" (Have I said that I love this guy? I've never seen a more energetic, committed teacher. I love his class.) We had a great conversation. He understood how I feel awkward sometimes, being an older student when the style of his class is geared toward people just starting out with these ideas. He looked at my paper and the T.A.'s comments and said, "I remember this one -- this isn't what I told her to say to you." He helped me see the Nabokov essay more clearly, pointed out things that I hadn't noticed, and I left with a deeper understanding of it. I went home and re-wrote the paper.

The moral of the story is, make use of your professor's office hours.

When I was younger, school consisted of figuring out what the teacher wants, giving it to him or her, getting an A. I don't want to do it that way this time, I know that. What I want to do is figure out what the teacher wants because if I do the thing in the very specific way that the teacher asks, I will learn something valuable. And get an A.

Discrimination.

It's like a hobby, my interest in love relationships. The topic, I mean. I ponder and pontificate about it more than most people, I would guess, and -- after the experience of making Life in a Box, spending 3 years examining, making some sense of, and figuring out how to present narratively my own most significant love relationship -- I think I may have some small wisdom to share on the subject. (But, of course, it's a case of the more you know, the more you find you don't know.)

Last night, I was at the bar I go to, having a conversation with a guy I talk to. He was telling me something about something, and he said, "my buddy, my other half," referring to the man he's been involved with and lived with for many years. I was struck by the word "buddy," and how probably 10 years ago I would have regarded his use of it as a bit pathetic, a vestige of the closet. Or, I would have thought, maybe it's how he refers to his partner when he's in straight male settings where he doesn't feel safe being out. (We say we've come out of the closet, but honestly we're in and out of it all day long.) It would have struck me as a sad word, in the same category as calling a boyfriend "my friend" or the substitution of gender-neutral pronouns -- "they" instead of "he" -- when talking to a co-worker about a date.

But last night it sounded, simply, like the right word. This guy is his buddy, not his lover, not his husband. Guys use the word buddy for a friend they have a deep bond with, a history, maybe someone with whom they're emotionally more open than usual. A guy who knows them better than their other friends. Drinking buddy. Fishing buddy.

Homosexual relationships aren't the same as heterosexual relationships. The reason they aren't the same -- and this is so obvious that I think it gets overlooked -- is that we are of the same sex. And sure there are ways in which we can mimic heterosexual relationships, for altruistic reasons (for instance, to adopt children) or for selfish reasons (to gain acceptance), but by pretending that they are, in fact, the same denigrates homosexual and heterosexual relationships. The people who are fighting for "marriage equity" are saying that there is no difference between them and that the marriage laws are discriminatory. I see good reason to discriminate. I think it's untruthful not to.

I've never felt like the particulars of my life were covered by or included among the outlines we get. I never wanted a job, I never wanted to own a home, never wanted to get married. (That's not strictly true; I have momentarily wanted each of these things, only because I thought they might bring some comfort or security, not because I thought I would flourish in them.) Even if I were heterosexual I would rail against the institutions I rail against now: marriage, the military, academia, private property, the market economy, etc. I used to think homosexual orientation was the cause of being so at odds with the world, but apparently that's not the case since there are so many homos now fighting to be included in that foundational institution of institutions.

I Hate That In the End It Always Comes Down to How Much I Have Invested in People Liking Me.

I read 4 or 5 blogs every day, and another batch of them I read weekly. A few of them are newsy, but most of them are more like mine, just people writing about the little stuff that goes on in their lives.

Last week, one of my bloggers posted a youtube clip from the Dr. Phil show of Sandy Patti singing Ain't No Mountain High Enough while a girl with Down's Syndrome did ASL interpretation. I didn't notice that the girl was retarded until halfway through the clip (the camera mostly avoided her), but I was having a good laugh at Sandy Patti, the big white lady pouring her heart and soul into the Motown tune. Sandy Patti is like a blonder, less famous Kathie Lee Gifford, and just as ludicrous.

When I finally did notice the girl, it became suddenly exponentially more bizarre and hilarious. I cracked up at the insanity of this woman who had decided that the best way to convey her message would be to sing this song and have a retarded girl do ASL with her, and that it was working because this room full of people was obviously deeply affected by it. What a world.

I sent the clip to J and another friend who I was sure would find it as absurd and funny as I did. Both of them replied saying, basically, "I don't think this is funny." In an instant I changed from the sophisticated artist with a dark sense of humor to the cruel oaf laughing at the retarded girl, and I was mortified. (Neither of my friends reprimanded me. This anxiety was of my own creation.) I know I wasn't laughing at the retarded girl, but, for some very frustrating reason, it was more important to me to know that my friends know that. And of course there's no explaining it. ("I wasn't laughing at her, I was laughing with her." How ridiculous.) And really, even though I wasn't laughing at the retarded girl, I was laughing at the fat white lady, who, after all, was just doing her best to bring joy into the world.

There may be a lesson bigger than the size of my head in this, something like, "A dark sense of humor is fine until you hurt somebody." But mainly what I've learned (for the ten billionth time) is that despite the fact that I try to chip away at it every day, my ego is still as big as Mt. Everest.

Last night over dinner, J told me something that might serve as exculpatory evidence: On the youtube site -- when I forwarded the URL to my friends, it took them to youtube, not to the blog where I found the clip -- it's titled "Sandy Patti Butchers the Hits with a Retard." On the blog where I watched it, there was no title. I never would have laughed if I'd seen that title. You know that, don't you?

Brouhaha de Español.

My Spanish teacher sat the class down for a heart-to-heart this morning.

Apparently there's a big flap in the Spanish department because the average test scores in all 20 classes of first-year Spanish were very low. Also, the range from highest to lowest score was very wide, some 45 points (which for some reason is also a bad sign, though I'm not sure why).

This is the first year they've used this textbook and curriculum, and they're thinking maybe it's not going so well. They've decided that they can't -- again I don't know why -- help a brother out and adjust the test scores on a curve, but what they can do is lower the test's percentage value toward our final grade. Also, our teacher passed out a survey for us to evaluate the course so far and offer suggestions. For some reason I'm not feeling very secure in this little expedition. It's slightly encouraging to find out that it's not just me at sea. But, still, I'm at sea. And I think the boat is leaking.

I don't mind being a guinea pig -- I spent most of last year doing it for a living. But if they want me to test out their new curriculum, they should be paying me, not the other way around.

Boo, Spanish.

I had my first Spanish exam yesterday, and our instructor already had our tests graded to give back to us this morning. I got an 81.5. I wasn't surprised. Most of the exam was based on an audio recording of two people speaking at a normal conversational speed in two different accents (one Mexican, the other Colombian). We heard it twice. I could understand about 15% of it.

I have a hard time listening to poor-quality audio amplified in large rooms, because I have a slight hearing impairment. It's never been diagnosed, but what happens is some frequencies just turn into noise, like analog distortion. I can hear things, but I can't always understand the words. The impairment is subtle enough that it hasn't affected my life much -- though it does affect the lives of my friends, who have to put up with me constantly saying, "What?"

But I can't completely blame it on my hearing. The speakers were talking fast, and they sounded very different from anyone I've ever heard speaking Spanish. The woman totally swallowed her S's. S is kind of an important letter to leave out, I think.

The second part of the exam consisted of a synopsis of a movie in Spanish, mostly in words and syntax we haven't studied yet, and then questions about it. The idea -- this is a technique that's used a lot in our textbook -- is to skim the text for cognates (words that are similar in English) and then try to guess the general sense of the paragraph. This part was a little easier, though most of the class objected to a few of the questions, which were tricky considering we've only been studying this language for 5 weeks.

I'm frustrated. It's not like Biology where the material is just difficult and complex, but I know if I study like a maniac I can get it. A foreign language is difficult and complex, too, but I'm doing well with the written stuff. I know the grammar. But listening comprehension is an intangible skill. I don't know how to study it. We don't do much listening in class. Not even in lab, which I think is supposed to be for that. Lab is a waste of time. We'd be much better going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering in Spanish, or watching a Spanish TV show, or anything where we could be listening to people actually speaking the language.

I'm going to get some tutoring.

My Cousin From Red Bank, New Jersey.

It's my time of the month. Sometimes it's worse than others, but typically I get alternately panicky and depressed for a few days. Little things, like running out of printer ink can put me in a black mood for an hour or two. Tears come easily, sometimes out of nowhere, when I'm waiting for a bus, or, recently, when I'm working out.

The rent and bills are due.

I'm grateful that I've had a break of a couple months from this monthly punch in the gut, but now my financial aid money is running out. I have to come up with some cash to get me through November and December. I applied for a job cooking at a cafe in the neighborhood, and I was hopeful that they'd hire me in September, but I haven't heard from them, and I've been so overwhelmed with school that I haven't followed up on it. I really only need to work a couple days a week to make enough to cover the financial aid shortfall, but even so it's hard for me to imagine
fitting that in with all the studying.

I was also holding some hope of a little windfall for the Lizzie Borden option. We're still waiting to get a proposed agreement from the producers. When that is finalized and signed, I'll get some money. It could be next month. It could be next year. It could be never.

I've been working out at the gym every day for two weeks. My body is different. Especially my arms. I don't think you'd be able to tell by looking. Even I can't really notice a difference when I look in the mirror, but my arms feel bigger. It's a weird sensation when I touch my arms and shoulders, almost like touching someone else. And I've lost about 5 pounds. I didn't need or plan to lose weight, and I'll probably gain it back in muscle. But all that time on the elliptical machine and the fact that I'm eating a lot less now that I'm busy all the time have had an effect.

My American Government test was easy, but not as easy as I expected. One question really stumped me, and I second guessed my second guess and gave the wrong answer. I haven't gotten my grade yet, but I think that was the only wrong answer. (If you're interested, the question was about women's suffrage and government efforts to clean up air and water pollution, whether they started at the state or federal level. I didn't know. I had a hunch, since the question said "started" that something happened with those issues at the state level before the national government dealt with them, but I wasn't sure. I decided that, since both were ultimately national issues, the answer was federal. Even though I'm sure I got a good grade on the test, I hate that I didn't know that. I should know things like that. We should all know things like that.)

I Like My Yeast to Stay in My Bread.

Yesterday I had an appointment at a clinic that I think is part of the U.T. nursing school. I don't have insurance, or income to speak of, so I rely on the kindness of strangers (i.e., free or sliding-scale clinics) for my health care. Thankfully, I don't have any serious health issues. But I have had a persistent case of Tinea cruris (look it up), and I was concerned not only about the fact that it wouldn't go away but also about the possible side effects of using over-the-counter anti-fungal drugs on my skin over such a long period of time.

We've been studying prokaryotic cells in my Biology of AIDS class, and something about the huge projected slides of yeast cells budding in colonies made me get off my ass and make an appointment to see a doctor.

It turns out there's not really a whole lot I can do about it that I'm not already doing. Some people are just more prone to these things. Especially people, like me, who sweat more than average. I'm an above-average sweater. Speaking of sweaters, lately I regularly see people, mostly women, walking around campus wearing sweaters. Oh my god, it's 93 degrees out! I can barely stand to be wearing pants.

The doctor who saw me was Lisa Doggett, daughter of my favorite Congressman. That made my day!

I'd Like to Thank God, Because Now I Know He Exists Because He Gave Me An A on My Biology Exam.

Just kidding. About god, not about the A. I got a 90! Actually, I got an 84, but there was a 6-point curve. If there are questions on her exams that less than 25% of the class gets right, the professor considers those questions to have been ambiguous or too confusing or just too difficult, and she takes the number of points those questions are worth and adds that many points to everyone's scores. In this case, there were three such questions. (I'm sure I could have said that in fewer words.) Even with the curve, the median score was 68 -- and I found that out before I knew my grade. Anyway, glory hallelujah.

I have a test in American Government tomorrow. My easy class. But I don't want to get all cocky and blow it, so I'll spend the evening studying the Constitution and Federalism and such. I have a quiz tomorrow and a test next Tuesday in Spanish and a 2-page paper due in English next week, too. Must be the season.

Tell Me Why, I Don't Like Mondays.

My biology test today was hard. HARD. And I really knew the material. I could have a conversation with you about it. (Let me know if you ever just want to chat about nucleotides or eukaryotic cells.) It was a multiple choice test -- those always throw me a little anyway -- and this professor is very clever and she posed a lot of questions in ways that force you to think on more than one level, so it didn't feel so much like an evaluation of my familiarity with the material and concepts as a test of my logic skills. (For instance, she often included answers like "1 and 2 are both correct," or "two of the above are correct.") I rushed through the last several questions because time was running out, and on half the questions I didn't feel at all sure of my answers. Shit.

Biology and Spanish are really testing me. I study both subjects for at least a couple hours a day, often more, and several hours on the weekends, and still my grip is tenuous. Both classes require so much memorization, and it's relentless. This is the fourth week of classes, and I already have a stack of 250 words in Spanish that I need to know, besides the grammar. There are slightly fewer words to memorize in Biology, but they don't for the most part match a word in English that means the same thing. Rather, each word corresponds to at least a paragraph of plain English. And they're long fucking words!

I'm going to bed.

Fall.

I survived my first week at the gym. I'm still sore, but much less so. Now it's only a general soreness all over. In just a week, my shoulders are noticeably (to me) different, bigger, and that's enough encouragement to keep at it.

My first Biology exam is on Monday, so I'll be studying all weekend. I think I'm in fairly good shape because I've studied all along, but there's a shitload of vocabulary to keep in my brain.

The weather seems to be hinting the last few days that maybe, just maybe, summer will be over soon. If I have ever done anything remotely resembling praying, I am doing it now for that.

The Unknown Life of a Great Movie.

Did anyone see The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys? It was made in 2002, but I don't remember it coming out in theaters. I read an article about Jodie Foster in the New York Times by Manohla Dargis last week in which she mentioned this movie that I had not heard of. (I'm so happy the Times finally got rid of their stupid TimesSelect thing where they hid the good articles behind a pay barrier.) All the article said about the movie was that Jodie Foster plays a one-legged nun, which was enough for me, so I greencine'd it and J and I watched it last night.

Jodie Foster produced it, and she's great as the nun, but the movie is about the boys. See it if you haven't. It's full of the best kind of surprises. Most people seem to already get the comic book thing, but I never did really, until I saw this movie.

Ow.

Today I worked out on my own for the first time, and I came home feeling defeated because I could only do about half of what I had done with the trainer. I wondered if it might be because he was not there encouraging me, but a better guess is that it's because I'm so fucking sore I can hardly move. Yesterday I woke up feeling like I got hit by a truck. This morning it felt like the truck put it in reverse and backed over me. Most of the pain is in my arms and shoulders and chest.

I almost didn't go to the gym today. Since I could hardly lift my backpack, I wondered if it would really be productive to try to lift weights. Finally I told myself to just go and do whatever I could do. I didn't want to skip a day so early in the program. (Besides, my backpack weighs about 3 times as much as any of the weights I'm lifting.) Most of the exercises that my trainer had me doing for 10 reps I could only do 6 or 8.

I found out that the gym is much less crowded at 1:30 than it is at 5, so I may start going early on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday I have a couple big gaps between classes, but I can't imagine going to class after the gym. I can't imagine doing much of anything after the gym. Honestly, I could barely work the computer to check my email when I got home. (I'm trying hard not to exaggerate, because that would be complaining, which I don't do any more.)

After I regained the partial use of my hands, I wrote my first paper! It's only a one-page paper, but it was exciting for me because it's the first in my second college career. It's called "Is That a Pen in Your Pocket?" It's a reaction paper to the Sandra Gilbert essay, "The Queen's Looking Glass," which is a pretty important piece of writing if you're a feminist literary scholar. Check it out.

Good Lord, It's Early.

Last night at Hut's -- J and I go fairly regularly on Monday night 2-for-1 veggie burgers -- I could barely life my water glass to take a drink. The glasses at Hut's, like at so many places in Texas, hold about a half gallon of water, but I think I would have had trouble with a juice glass last night.

I had my first workout with my trainer yesterday. This morning, my arms are so sore I'm wincing every time I move them. I don't know if that's why I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't get back to sleep.

The workout must have jogged something loose in my brain, because on the way home my idea for the short paper I have to write this week started taking shape seemingly all by itself. Seriously, it was like turning on the radio and listening to someone talk. Or maybe I'm schizophrenic.

The workout experience is hard to put into words. As I got more and more fatigued, I started to feel pretty emotional. I think I may back off a little on my tendency to intellectualize every new experience I have and just let this one sink in. All I'll say is that walking home I felt very, very good.

Jesus Was a Sissy and Christians are Hot.

I read a blog called Joe.My.God. every day. I started reading it because I can't stand the mainstream gay media -- which is too obsessed with shopping and hairless torsos -- but I still want to keep up with so-called gay culture and issues. Joe.My.God. is like a friend with a great sense of humor keeping you up to date.

Joe has a lot of readers, and every so often a subject will start a long free-wheeling thread of comments. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not. There are a few blowhards who are hard to take -- some might include me in that category and I'm okay with that -- but there are also a lot of smart, thoughtful commenters.

Things Joe's readers like to argue about are "old gay vs. new queer," "transexuals: yea or nay," and, lately, whether We (this community of people who can't agree on what we are or who is included or what to call ourselves but is broadly defined by some kind or other of sexual deviance) like or dislike being represented in the mainstream media by effeminate men (e.g., Carson what's-his-name on Queer Eye for the Blah-blah or more recently Chris Crocker, the so-called crazed Britney Spears fan who is actually a performance artist but people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between art and reality anymore): the "Sissy Question."

Aaaanyway, coincidentally, someone recently handed J, or he picked up somewhere, a religious tract called The Sissy, published by Chick Publications (named after the guy who writes the tracts). It's pretty funny, so I thought I'd share it with you. The drawing style reminds me of illustrated paperback porn novels that I used to buy at a great bookstore in the West Village. I can't remember the name of the store; it hasn't been there for years, but it was a neighborhood institution, very dusty and nondescript. Mostly, it had long racks of vintage 70s and earlier gay porn magazines. (I used to frequent the place in the early 80s, so I guess the magazines weren't really vintage then, just used. Ew.) And then smaller racks of pulp novels. A lot of them were truck driver stories. I loved them.