ben, wilson, justin, left to right, at the athens diner in charlotte, north carolina, may 23, summer '96.

me, i'm sick. which means i fight back against my hallmates, wilson and particular more rapidly than usual. they like to goad me, they call me chester and make fun of the way i smell because i insist that deoderant is a waste of time and i'd rather shower and use dr bronner's natural castille soap and uncle tom's toothpaste and i eat lots of garlic when i'm sick, which seems like 1/3 of my life, so they complain and ben makes fun of my pseudoscience and wilson's just a freak who jumps up and down physically or verbally, whichever would be most disturbing. anyways, i'm more grouchy and it's amazing to note how effective it is at preventing the sort of harping that usually accompanies our interactions. of course, i don't see much of ben these days, he's asleep when my door is open, and i'm computing, like 2am, like right now, of course if i insist on updating both my diary and my interface to my front page i will probably be awake when he gets up.

and since i'm sick, that sucks. i'm sick like sore and snotfilled and sore throat and tired all the time and unable to remember a lot. but this illness has been accompanied by an amazing elevation in the amount of career activity in my little deskmind area - someone wants me to come to a unesco tv panel on youth media in a week, and they want me to charge the 1800$ plane ticket on my groaning credit card. i find myself scrambling for money, calling my lawyers from san francisco city lawsuit and asking them when i'll get that money, and calling the bank to ask for more credit, other behaviours that reveal one as essentially and primally attached to the money technology undergirding the fantastic interactions that take place at the end of mobile jetways

and it maybe made me realize that this is why people chase money because they'd rather not chase people for money but just have their own. in miskito culture, anyone with anything is kinda a target, the more you got the more you are expected to share. fortunately that's changing, soon they'll have better home security systems. can you install guardian alarm systems on a thatched hut?

is this some of my best writing? what is this? i like being sick a little because it makes me feel more wretched and closer to the ground and a bit more forgetful of all the things i meant to say professionally and more about the akward positions i had to wriggle my butt into today to position it properly over the poker

speaking of poker, amy comes saturday and that will be fun. crazy, fun. i look forward to having her on the radio sunday. maybe we'll go to new york too because that is her cultural base that she feels committed to comrades and creation there, having lived there and left so many friends that any trip to the east coast demands a drop in. i'm glad to go to see my brother and maybe screen doug's film. it makes everything more crazy to travel within her travelling but we enjoy a hectic pace together, i mean we enjoy long afternoons of nothing but cooking and sneaking away when the kids aren't looking but somehow our time together increases in velocity into nothing but real life lead fast and fun and furious and even sickening at times so i should stop working on this web page and go to sleep so i have the energy to love!

sleep in college dorm beds, standard issue, in my experience, distinctly prohibit cohabitation because they drive the respected parties to absolute sleeplessness. i am surrounded by single men sleeping in futons but since they've all heard my gleeful recountings of fluid-fun with my girl-one they are disinclined to share their cloth bound sleeping apparatuses so i debate to drag a second bed into a space teeming with too much paper and cloth and string. all for sleep! sleep uber alles!

so all the people who might potentially love me for money after this college is paid is all very exciting, but distracting me somewhat, in combination with this illtimed (when is proper timing for an) imbalance of my humours, it's all distracting me from the divertissement at hand, my thesis, which i recently revised to more specifically concern

between olestra, vaccines, vitamins/diet pills, electronic babysitters, i'm studying how a range of more ordinary folks evaluate and implement technologies, and when those decisions are made for them.

as for divertissement, that is a word i heard today in my film class, about rules of the game, a film made by jean renoir, august renoir's son. well wraught portraiture of the idle and distracted rich and poor in pre-WWII france.

but moreover, today in old english we watched video on the norman (french) conquest of england in 1066, and how it may have been the best thing for our language, because we now have 10,000 french words in our vocabulary and ultimately modern english has twice the vocab of any of spanish french german. nice to learn in school: my language is cool! anyways, it doesn't seem to me that 10,000 words is enough to put us anywhere near doubling our vocabulty, but that's probaby because i haven't done that homework yet.

but the point is, in english we often have a choice of words
sophistication or savwafair
meeting or rezendezvous
cool or suave
i can't remember the others. but they're cool. they make you think - nice diverse broad language. is that why english is catching on worldwide? no, probably politics and money stuff. but maybe english makes for better media, textually, because of the extended choice of words? certainly not better opera. anyways,

it's all because one group of 1000 year old sweaty dudes successful beat on and vanquished another group of 1000 year old sweaty dudes.

whoa! dude!

so who should we beat on and vanquish today?

ourselves, oh lord, ourselves!

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