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Last night I saw a man and a woman making out in the parking lot of the tattoo parlor down the street from my house. The tattoo parlor used to be a Christian dance club. They kissed, then he stepped back and slapped her. Then she made a kissy face at him.

I had kind of a disastrous hair dye experience, but eventually I fixed it, and it's now Sonic Green and Electric Blue.

Excited that Julie and Julia is going to be a movie, and to go to the Wench tonight.

Just read this and think it's the most perfect 434 words ever.

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Okay, I think my answers to this perennial question need an update. Because really, I don't want to take my all-time-top-five-desert-island books *to* a desert island. If I could only read five books for the rest of my life, they wouldn't be the five best books I've ever read, or even my five favorite books. They'd be the ones that I knew I could reread countless times, and keep finding new meaning in. And they'd be REALLY LONG.

1. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
2. The King James Bible by James I. (Kidding about the author! Don't take my English major membership card away! Yeah, it looks like a Costco card, but it actually *costs* you money.)
3. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
4. The collected works of Dorothy Parker.
5. Ulysses by James Joyce.

So, lots of good stuff...
I have an interview with Buffalo Exchange on Thursday.
The new apartment is working out just fine. It's in walking distance of everything (Pippi and I have walked like seven miles in the last two days...we'll see if that kind of exercise happens once the weather stops being freakishly wonderful, though), and my neighbor has seriously had yet to be home in the past five days. So basically, even though it's a duplex, I have plenty of privacy, and Pippi's incessant yapping isn't bothering anyone but me.
There are a bunch of cool pictures of me and Summer and our South side fun the other day (did I blog about that? oh well, thrift store, condemned house, yadda yadda) up on Summer's photo stream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/26380715@N06/). I feel a little bit guilty linking to it, since she's deathly ill and I'm supposed to be bringing her British comedy box sets right now (I will, once I um, take a shower, and eat for the first time in 24 hours...), but oh well.
I did my first Sunday NY Times crossword all by myself yesterday! I think that not having the internet at home is kind of a great thing, because I wasn't able to cheat, no matter how tempted I was, plus I'm living by myself, so I couldn't beg for help every five minutes.
In other "no internet at home" news, I read "Foe" by J.M. Coetzee - holy shit! Amazing! I had to reread "Robinson Crusoe" recently for a class, so all the differences between the original and the reimagining (Friday's tongue? Cut out! Gah!) were apparent and fascinating. I also read "Girls of Riyadh" by some scandalous Saudi girl - I forget her name, Riyaa something? It was pretty fun. A good beach read, if any of my readers are lucky enough to go to the beach this summer. (Haha, I think "Foe" would be a tad disturbing of a beach read.)
Also: I wrote a pretty amazing poem yesterday that I was going to post, but I didn't bring my notebook with me. So I'm going to try recreating it from memory, and maybe if this ends up being really different, I'll post the "real" version later.

"Lucy"

i shot a man today
just to find out what his blood smelled like
nothing like mine after all
my corrupt, decaying core
spilling my seed on kotex

i shot a man today
actually my life is nothing like a johnny cash song
i was walking my dog too late
a man fell upon us and-
my flashlight-
her teeth-
it was too dark and messy
i don't know exactly what happened
and i can't explain this to anyone
because my life is nothing like a le tigre song
this is not about girl fucking power
more animism
or opium dream

i shot a man today
but he shot me first
our blood mingled on the pavement
bacteria networking cheerfully
then gasping gasping gone

i hope they put my real
name on the
tombstone

"Special Topics in Calamity Physics" is the best thing I've read this year. It's as if Nabokov and Jonathan Safran Foer wrote "The Secret History." Oh, and the, the crossreferencing!

Okay, granted I haven't finished it yet, but I haven't felt this hyperbolic about a new author since I discovered A. M. Homes.