So it’s still sweltering sweaty sweat: it’s interesting, this daygig, as the kids are so like, “What’s a hexagon?”–future math teachers of America!

Alric has big news.

I like having the free time to wander around in Target and buy nothing, just wondering at the cheapness, except the books section, which is a slice of what real people read, if they read at all, which is also fine, although it would seem that more women than men read judging by the titles, and I don’t know if that’s true overall, as my set is not exactly representative.

One more day commuting and then I really should settle into writing this long-overdue paper. Well, it’s still under a month late, I guess.

So three pilsners (urquell if lukewarm) with Rob are just about enough to cure what it was that was ailing me. Which is not to say that I wasn’t a little moonish earlier, but after a late-night session discussing crossword puzzles for mathematics learning with graduate students, a little levity is quite overdue.

Pendant lamps, meanwhile, are quite overdue to alleviate Mark’s persistent complaints re: the want of a overhead lighting in my apartment’s living room. That and a recentering of the new TV. Meanwhile, the flypapers have yet to fully exterminate the gnats.

I should really do better to reread Monkey or rather Journey to the West, Waley notwithstanding.

It remains to be seen if I can meet Rob for a paella lunch tomorrow.

So of course there is little to say–I am now revisiting Lone Wolf & Cub, which makes me all emotional, like, with its simplicity and its rawness and its fluid violence, its authenticity–I was also getting pissed off at the new Nation as I was on the subway (mostly for what was going on within it). And on the way home, there was this cute little black boy, who couldn’t have been more than 2, but was already talking and gesturing and everything. Sigh. I must be PMSin’, the tears really do well up sometimes. Ugh. Not enough time to change the world. Maybe it’s arrogant to think people want saving, but I dunno… I guess it’s just making their lives as easy as mine were, back in the day.

Ah, well. Alric does not have good news on the dating front. But I am working on that. I feel as if he and Juliana could get along rather well, actually. I was woken this morning by a call from D, who’s a sweetie, who sends me these postcards with naked women, which I place on the fridge next to the postcards of naked men that my older friends who know me send me, who is still trying to help me out with girls. But yeah. Juliana and Alric? Stranger things have happened. But apparently chicks dig my politics.

I really need to skip more math classes. Induction is a great thing, like the first three times you learn it. You really don’t need to see it more often than that. I’m just a snob. But it is an amusing proof that all collections of n horses are the same color. Hrmm… And there is a philosophical thrust to it all, which is that in the case that any group of 2 horses are the same color, then… But I dunno.

In the modal logic, I am happy to report that I am reaching philosophically meaty stuff as far as existence goes. My sort of kneejerk admiration for Quine’s sort of deflationism is being deflated. This is actually meaningful philosophical substance with actual logic to go along with it. There might be a paper in here someplace.

Making plans with Joephet for tomorrow and the weekend somehow makes me very happy. Like I have something to actually look forward to. And yes: I am evidently going shopping with him this weekend, which I suppose we will hafta try and document in some way, as those who know me will find this rather difficult to believe. I am a very cheap dresser. Cheaper than any you could find at IKEA.

So my throat still hurts, but less so, after some chicken from the Chinese place, which was embarassing, as the entire family was sitting down chatting about their next meal of dog in the dining area when I walked in, and so they hurriedly rose to serve me, which was a bit strange, to say the least, and these excellent vitamin C drops that Halls makes which have made it possible for me to swallow without my entire torso performing the peristalsis, though the pain is still a little nagging.

I really do need to get into college early if I ever hope to make any headway on this math–there are some things I need to look up and some novels I need to check out, and the new Nation should hold me over just fine until I get to the library and new material: but so far it is a blank sort of day, having lost the push to produce comics, my letters stand there, languid, accomplishing nothing. And my summer dribbles away.

I really should try and write a comprehensive manifesto as regards math education as directed toward the aim of democracy. Yes. That would be nice. But maybe I should read a bit more before going off.

So I am still at somewhat of a loss, just hanging out in the computer lab, having been successful at finding satisfactory Caribbean food in the way of slightly overcooked jerk chicken. But something about that steamed cabbage:

Meanwhile, amazing how fast I was able to read through From Hell–done within twenty-four hours, the sort of leisure that will be well-beyond me come fall. And after that food I feel healthy again, even capable. It’s just a matter of needing to produce, to feel somehow indispensible and unique again, which is a frightening responsibility, the sort of thing that makes you drag yourself into work to see your ungrateful kids even though you have sick days stored up and are sick as a dog–when people ask me why don’t I find another job, you seem so unhappy and overworked, I guess this job is the thing for me to now do. As much as it may be questioned at times, I think I am on the right track–it little profits to look at other plates.

I have been strangely emotional. Maybe it’s the force of the Alan Moore. Or maybe I been seeing too many little kids on the subway. My biological clock is ticking.

So I am off early to classes today, and perhaps to enjoy some Caribbean food in Flatbush, though I am still feeling a little sick, though not under the weather, which is so bright and clear and sharp. Things with Joephet are at an odd pass, perhaps. I am generally bored, or rather sick, and I have been reliving the glories of Alan Moore’s From Hell. I really need to get my comics collection organized: my productivity has ground to a slow and sickly halt, and I miss how Bessie is not around to read my blog and email me her comments, as I’m too HTML-dumb to include them myself.

So there are some things one can only realize when one is standing guard as a break from the wind and the view for someone who has the functional role of a Joephet in your life, being lightly sprayed by the unending stream of much-complained about piss even as you are not looking, cuz you’ve seen that particular unit before, as the piss splatters on a Prizm you hope the guy walking across the street does not own. It is not clear what realization this is, but it is pretty clear that one should be pissing on a more expensive car.

And it started out relatively well, a bag of Cape Cod chips, and plannings with Alric to recoup the loss of last night, though not the $400 worth of drilling (teehee) that Alric did manage to somehow purchase. But waiting around so long for Joephet to show up was a little lame, and hot, but so it goes: falling in and out of sleep while reading Waugh is frightening: it makes one quiver like an English schoolboy about to be caned.

And after a dinner at Golden China with Joephet, which was a bit tense given what was discussed so drunkenly last night, it was off, late to Alric’s, where we managed to polish off a bottle of wine (we could have done more) and the first disc of Manhattan-based namedropping which now at last makes sense to us both. And yes, it is difficult watching this show as a Marxist. It is more difficult watching the show with a Marxist. And to Alric I grow closer, if only intrigued by how his attempt to make straight male friends in the city is stymied by the fact that his lunchdate casually mentions “this guy I’ve been dating for a few years” in the elevator ride back to the office. A lot of learning yet left for the both of us.

Out of loyalty I drag myself, sweating, swearing, my pencil broken, down to 46 Grand, for Joephet’s cousin’s birthday party, or somesuch. In any case, this is a drunken mess, in which Joephet loses his hat, and I am swallowing half of the bitterness that I could so easily spew (but it would be too easy…): and so I have little more to report, beyond perhaps the following attempt (for I have not much of an ear for dialogue, which makes my fiction suffer) at transcribing some Flip plans for what is to happen next in the evening:

“Yo, let’s just go to White Castle.”

“White Castle, their burgers are so small, yo”

“But they’re cheap, like fifty cents for a [gestures with hand, in a small square]“

“You need like six to get full”

“That’s like 3 bucks, though, so let’s go”

“Naw, 70 cents each, that’s 420. We should go to Chinatown.”

“For dimsum?”

“No, for 4 bucks you can get some fucking wonton noodle soup. That shit will fill you up.”

“I just want White Castle, I wanna go home, I’m tired.”

“No, you can get curry beef rice for 4 bucks, rice, man, they’re still open, and it’s like not far.”

Lather, rinse, repeat. Better Luck Tomorrow here we go again.

So the past few entries have been just a tad out of synch for whatever reason–I have not been posting very promptly after writing. And I was away from internet access last night, so I wasn’t able to say anything, though I guess I did find the right sort of distraction from that work. I think I’m reaching a blah blah phase right now–it’s almost three on a wednesday afternoon and I’ve yet to check out the new comics for the week or the Onion. Still, the evening spent pleasantly with Joephet and going through old photos (new to me) with Betsy, marvelling, perhaps, at how little some things change, or sot hey apear: it’s strange, as there are so few photos of me from the college years, as I don’t think I had very shutterbug friends, and I certainly have never had a camera, trusting instead to memory. And of course I have such discontinuities: how many friends have lasted? Schisms sadly the usual mode. Ah, well: I should start turning on the matchmaking juices, it’s just difficult cuz Alric isn’t a Jew…

Also managed to dig up some lost gems via Joephet’s lit anthologies, which do not coincide with mine, which are buried deep in boxes against my wall anyway: I do miss freshman year and my writing class then. In particular, Walker Percy’s The Loss of the Creature (a title which I have forgotten for well-on 4 years) is I think the beginnings of my term “touristical” to describe a certain approach to experience. I really need to focus more, and might leave for school early, just to hit the library a little earlier than before. Ah, for bookshelves! I live in such squalor…

So upon reading Harper’s for the first time in some time, I confess I find it horribly horribly pretentious. It has the post-visceral taint of well-fed white liberalism, if that makes sense. The extended essay on dissent is more rambling than a drunken me. Maybe I am allergic to higher-quality paper, or the pooh-poohness of it all: this is simply not muscular prose, it is too upholstered in a florid print. I guess it’s also already long-obvious the things pointed out: the similarities between the present American imperialism and that of a century ago. So maybe I’m jaded: I guess I’m curious as to what the demographic for this magazine is, as well as what the further-left reception is (not great, I’d imagine). To think that I’d once wanted to work for these guys…

Ah, yes: the Post, which I read as my daily dose of right-wing nonsense, and also for signs of cracks in the Bush edifice, which is actually happening blessedly more and more often, today has a second headline of “Gay High,” which is apparently just good ol’ Harvey Milk given a head. Hrmm… I guess it would be nice to be able to bring Joephet to school, but at the same time, I feel as if I am ill-equipped to deal with quite so much high school bujiiness. Still, one must give some thought to the Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long’s query, “Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math?”

Well, I can say from personal experience that in gay math, combinatorics (how many outfits?) is much more important. And your word problems tend to be set at Sephora. But that is an inside joke. And I am a terribly dressed gay math teacher, hehe, so I was famous for the (illustrative) question, “Mr. Hu has five dress shirts and one pair of pants. How many outfits does he have?” It’s great to be able to deflect your students’ accusations of buggery with a simple, “Not with these shoes…”

So I been lazy on this day my day off, which as expected has become this deep sink where there is to be no real math to be done, though I am somehow reading yet more short fiction, with the hope that perhaps some of it will rub off and I will gain the sort of fluency I will need to make some of my own. Not so much a matter of imitative strokes, but more the direction of orienting myself, as it were, as this is not something I’ve given much thought to. It’s also difficult, because old Alric, for all his ambitions in fictional directions (heehee: I’m going to have to blog that little one-liner), confesses not to often read women authors. Which seems rather important if I am to write biting SAPI fiction (At Alric’s suggestion, “Straight Asian/Pacific Islander” is more clear-cut, with the requisite counterpart “GAPI”).

See, I’ve been trying to blog about class-assumptions in fiction for some time now, but in all my attempts come across as something of a prig. But it’s a big deal, still. Like at the year-end reception for the teachers at my school at the Brooklyn Marriott, where some teachers were unable to identify all the cheeses present–Cheddar, Havarti, Brie. I mean, brie, goddammit! This is not rocket science. So the point is that any work of fiction–any type of discourse, really–has class-assumptions about it which can be difficult to somehow overcome–and this is the hesitancy that I feel, though of course it’s deeper than this one trivial manifestation–I just don’t quite know how to verbalize it yet. But I feel this way about most art, which is, I realize, somehow foolish, but perhaps no more foolish than some soaring praise of the universality of art and beauty and all that. I guess I recognize the barriers but have yet to rest upon their ultimate significance. And it’s not as if I don’t love a good Waugh story.

Strange dreams that I can only vaguely remember: something about Josh Hartnett floating naked in an indoor swimming pool, and me without a remote control. The attic people who seek to get married, but when they go to the shore to contemplate the future together, find that with the receding tide there are park benches of tormented souls who are periodically jolted by a monkey from the Planet of the Apes in pretty multicolored bolts of monkey-electricity. I need to get a dental checkup, too.

I may be getting mired in ethnic literatures, meanwhile. Which again, would help, as I feel more and more the plight of the HAPI (heterosexual Asian/Pacific-Islander, which is a delightful acronym, as surely they are anything but). Something ought to be done about that, and I would be interested to see what the latest takes in fiction might be…

And now the rain is falling, which means that for the first time in memory it is actually not Beer Garden weather, which is tragic, but OK, as most of the neighborly crew are elsewhere. I think a Mandy Moore expedition with Lex is quite overdue, to learn How to Deal. Not feeling lackluster in general, but not been in a blogging mood. Maybe because my contentment of late is rather private…

So I shouldn’t still be up, but what can you do. Thoroughly in love–in love with this Clarence Cooper novel I’m reading, The Dark Messenger, about a Negro newspaper. I don’t know: it’s just so vibrant, raw, polemical but real. Exactly the sort of Trojan Horse fiction I could only dream of writing. My work is too unsubtle. But as Stanislavsky said to Danny Kaye, “You must suffer.”

It’s amusing thing to do archaeology-by-way-of-receipt. What then, is to be made of the following (“fer-reals”) order I placed today at AllDirect.com? As the old motto at math camp went, “This will not end well”:

1 Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC Family

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1 LSAT

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1 Sex And The City 3 – The Complete Third Season

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1 Orientalism

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1 Gunga Din Highway

But beyond this petty commerce, today has been thoroughly lazy, aside from the obligatory lifting. Classes begin tomorrow, and so I go back to a minor grind. Amazing how fast this summer has already moved, but I suppose I have let myself lose myself. But it’s not hopeless.

Oh, yes: I’ve realized that gay New York is basically like a generic-brand raisin-bran cereal: some tasty fruits (somewhat dessicated), but mostly just flakes. Not that this realization is new–the conceit, though, is.