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touch her hair Yes, I am dropping details here once again and it's bothering me. Let me explain. Both Sunday and Monday were very productive days for me on a number of levels and some of that got lost in the writing. First of all, I managed to pull my head out of my ass after it got lodged there sometime late last week. In less crude terms, I was myself again and could see beyond tomorrow. For a while there work was depressing me more than I thought possible and I didn't want my life to become a countdown to the Europe vacation and then go back to being a living hell afterwards. Now it seems over wrought, but at the time it seemed very real to me. I hate those kinds of days where tomorrow seems so far away. ... On the drive to class, I finished listening to The Forgetting Room and for me it seemed to lose some of its strength at the end. I understood what the author was trying to do, but at the same time it felt rushed to me. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about going to Spain sometime in the future. ... There are times when it's very easy to distract me in class and that's what happened today. As the professor was talking there was a glimpse of movement in the corner of my eye. So I turned my head to see Amanda loosening her hair from her scrunchie. (I love that word scrunchie for some unexplainable reason. It sounds like something that Pepe Le Pew would say, but is probably a word that some advertising guy made up to sell what is essentially a cloth covered rubberband.) In one smooth motion she reached back and freed her hair. Even from two rows back I could tell that it was still slightly damp and I hoped that she was going to leave it down for the rest of the class. Sadly she didn't. Leaving her hair behind for a moment, she looked good in her green duster length sweater. ... As silly or as creepy (depending on a person's point of view) as my comments might be from time to time on what happens in class, years ago I met and then dated one of the most memorable women that I've known. Maybe on some level I am hoping to repeat that experience or even better have it end differently this time. That may or may not be the right thing to do, but that does play a factor in how I act. ... Class took an odd turn today when the professor asked if anyone knew the story of The Mutiny on the Bounty or had seen any of the films based on the story. When he asked the question only about four hands went up and one of them was mine. He then asked someone to explain the basics of what had happened and the person that volunteered to tell the tale turned out to be me. It had been years since I last saw the movie, but from what I could remember I knew that Fletcher Christian (I said Christiansen in class, but the professor corrected me) mutinied against Captain Bligh and set him and the rest of the officers that were loyal to him adrift in a boat. Then Fletcher and his crew ran back to Tahiti and from there eventually ended up on Pitcairn Island, which I believe was a far cry from a tropical paradise. As to why the professor used this event as an example was for the topic of pidgin and creole languages, which was not something that I got from the film but nonetheless is historically accurate. For me what I remember the most is that when the film was being made, Marlon Brando in his usual fashion went native in Tahiti and ended up having a wife there. Years later these children would end up in the tabloids for murder. Part of me thinks that it would be great to emulate someone like Brando to a small degree and no I am not talking about the later bloated mumbling version either. It would be great to have some of the energy and life of the Stanley Kowalski era Brando. Then again I also have a soft spot for him as the ever lovable Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now talking with a young Martin Sheen. Speaking of Tahiti, I caught part of a program about Gauguin and his painter buddy Vincent Van Gogh. Actually it was more about Van Gogh, but I needed a nice segue and Tahiti worked well enough. Over the years I've had mixed feelings about Vincent. I like his stuff and thoroughly enjoyed seeing his paintings when I was in the Netherlands, but I despise the over commercialization of it. Posters of his work are a common site in dorm rooms throughout America and that tends to dilute some of the impact of what he did. Of course the same could be said of any of the Impressionists. ... I think that the ideal job for me (besides working for National Geographic magazine in some capacity) would be where I'd travel the world with a cameraman and talk about what I saw. No, I am not talking about Rick Steves either. I'd want to do something more in the vein of what Michael Palin did for public television a few years. Even better was something that I saw on public television tonight called Global Trekker. There was this young vibrant woman making her way through the western provinces of China and I as watched and listened to her I became more and more entranced. Some of what she saw was mildly disturbing, but none of it seemed to put her off. Oh, she may have pulled back slightly in the open market with live animals ready for consumption, but most of the time she was very composed and witty. I was drawn to her in an instant. Justine Shapiro will you marry me or at the very least can we travel the world together? My backpack is packed and I'm ready to go. ... I picked up an audio version of Willa Cather's My Antonio in an attempt to get something that would contrast The Forgetting Room. I don't feel the need to stick with one genre or style of writing. Somehow it made sense to replace the romance and mystery of Spain with a tale in the American heartland. In addition to the Cather novel, I also got The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood.
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