Thursday

Witches Everywhere I've now been coming here long enough that I feel like I have a tiny circle of cool folks I can count on to show up and refresh me. I've spent a delightful amount of time talking about magic. One person's researching the ways women used magic as a recourse against powerful people when they had no other. Another told me how she keeps her boss's name--written on a piece of brown paper bag--frozen in her freezer, to thwart his power over her*. Last night Miss J. took me to dinner with a women who shares my same name and who reads old Norse. How jealous am I! But we sat in a Japanese restaurant wrestling with our chopsticks and talking about giants. We talked about the "What the Fuck?" factor in the Poetic Edda, that pretty much forces you to the original language and your own dictionary--Loki ties his testicles to a goat's? What the fuck? Is that right? Oh, yes, yes, it is. She's reading Egil's Saga in the original. I am envious. I also talked to someone who is memorizing Eugene Onegin. I think it's a known fact that if one is gong to memorize anything in Russian, you cannot go wrong with Sasha Pushkin. He's like Byron, but with talent. I've found that my trip to the strip club, with an armed libertarian, makes for a popular topic of discussion, though, oddly enough, people are more fascinated by the fact that I spent an evening with a conservative man carrying a gun than they were about the fact that we spent it in a strip club. Which I think brings me nicely back to my breakfast discussion on Tuesday--that this is a large group of people with life experiences limited to and by their life choices (which, of course, is true of us all and I know I'm being a patronizing jackass but I'm a self-aware patronizing jackass so... well, so nothing... anyway) and they're fascinated by folks whose life experiences are vastly different. Hmm. Maybe I could make some money on the side by taking liberals on a bus tour past the Wayward Boyscout. He could stand outside, looking sufficiently libertarian, and they could point and stare, and then he could have dinner with them and I would take them back to their hotels and we could split the profits. And, if he's not game for such two-way exploitation, I'll just dip his name in sugar until he feels compelled to change his mind. Or until I acquire an ant problem... whichever comes first. *She also told me that if you want someone to improve his behavior towards you, you should encase his name in honey and he will have to become sweeter to you.