pleonasm

kara and i are a bit under the weather these days, no doubt as punishment from god on high for purchasing a new automobile. kara exploded in a coughing fit last night and my nose is leaking something fierce. we'll be spending this morning, then, in the emergency room.

i'm joking of course. we have over the counter generic medicines that we take q4h (every four hours). it's just palliative care, though; these viri (viruses?) have to run their course(s).

it's been nice out the past couple days, but i think the rain will return today. last week, when it was raining, one morning there were four snails on the sidewalk in front of our house!

good word of the day today: pleonasm. the use of more words than are necessary to to express an idea. "the patient is noted to have a known history of diabetes in the past."

what did we do?!

kara's like me when it comes to making decisions, for better or for worse. the big decisions, like buying a car or choosing a college, we make quickly. (i'm not saying we're equals to "the decider" in the other washington, but we do okay.) it's the small decisions, like what to have for dinner or what shirt to wear with these pants, over which we agonize.

we looked at the kia spectra too but then we went with the mazda 3 t. we don't have it yet; it'll be a couple weeks. it's on a boat from japan at the moment.

smart as her namesake

apparently sagan is quite a good dog. kara says we won't find another dog so willing to go to bed. we crate her at night and when we're out of the house. this started when we first got her and she was rambunctious and not well housetrained. (she was cratetrained before she was housetrained; i guess that's usual.) plus she'd had some altercations with max and we didn't want to take chances. and she's been in our lives now for, what, 3 years now? is it possible it has been that long? and still we crate her.

it's weird how willing she is. when we're getting to go out, all we have to do is start putting on our shoes and sagan runs right into her crate. runs right in. sometimes if we're just changing clothes, with no intention of leaving the house, she takes that hint too and goes into her crate.

and at night, these days pretty much right at 8:30pm, she'll jump up on the bed (where we're invariably watching tv [these days either csi or the daily show]) and stare at kara and whimper. she knows it's bedtime and she's ready to go.

basically the only time she's irritating is when she's immediately out of her crate (when i get up at 4:30am-ish and when i get home from work in the afternoon i set her free) and when kara comes home from work - at those times she's a bit excitable and jumps up on us. actually in the early morning she doesn't jump up; she just stretches. and she pretty much knows i don't like her jumping on me, so in the afternoons she doesn't. so i suppose the only really bad time is when kara gets home in the evenings.

i don't know why she knows i don't like her jumping on me, but she doesn't know kara doesn't like her jumping up on her.

she hasn't attacked max in quite a while. a few months. that's good.

i can't quite bring myself to say i like the dog, though. dogs, by their nature, are annoying. she's bulky and stinky. drooly. i'll say this: i like her when she's asleep, and snoring. i like her snores. there's a buzzsaw inside her. i'm entertained by that. but that's all i'll cop to right now. sagan clearly has quite a high regard for me, which i think is just silly.and, yeah, that's a vhs tape of "the devil in miss jones" under the bookshelf. good eye.

one more

yesterday i forgot a weird thing a doctor said. a not-infrequent occurrence in the emergency room is this: panicky parents bring their child in because he or she was sick yesterday. today, the day of the visit, the child is fine.

and a physician says, "The patient is asymptomatic here, so I choose to treat him symptomatically."

now - what does that mean? is that a goof on the part of the dictator? or is it a strange-sounding but actually-normal way of saying that she's just not going to do anything?

i'm not sure about that one.

anyway. kara says i'm a freak for even being awake at this hour on a day off.

four beady little eyes

sagan on the left, eliot on the right

what we throw away

these pictures are for christa.
just so.

collection day

i read about this book in (where else) harper's magazine and i confess i am intrigued. a novel of vowels. a weird exercise. i might just have to go there.

today was something of a banner day for dictator goofs. i wanted to post a couple. will anyone else be as entertained as i?

just dumb stuff, making it clear the dictators don't listen to themselves when they talk. example: a patient was in the emergency room because she had abscesses on her buttocks from muscling heroin. (yum!) so the dictator says, under the "social history" heading, "She is employed. She is a smoker. She injects heroin; she muscles two to three times a day. She denies any alcohol or illicit drug use." i suppose heroin doesn't count as an illicit drug?

in my typing, i corrected this. someone owes me a thank-you.

incidentally, i've never tried heroin. i'm sure many were curious regarding that issue. i'm not keen on needles. i had my annual tb test this week and even that weeny needle makes me wince.

an emergency room physician who is at the end of his shift says, of a teenage patient who came in quite intoxicated, "The patient will be signed out to Dr. (so-and-so), who will dictate the addendum when he sobers up." diagram that! see? this is why sentence structure is important.

and this isn't really a goof, but just kind of amusing. this is the first line of the report: "This is a ... lady with a history of ongoing psychosis who was initially seen by the crisis triage mental health professional today because her family could not cope with her any more."

i just like it when the dictators break down and tell it how it is. and i'm not saying definitively that the person sobering up is not dr so-and-so, rather than the patient.

that's it, for now. probably not as funny in the setting of a blog than while i was at work. sorry. i'm going to go change out the cat litter and bring the garbage and recycling to the curb. tomorrow is collection day. i love the day before collection day.

and it's my weekend, which is nice. tomorrow i'm just going to tidy the house up a bit, do a little writing and a little reading, and wait for the cable guy to show up.

ooh, it just stopped raining, so i better get going. bye.

plodding this morning

kind of plodding as far as my own writing goes. i'm on page 2. the top of page 2. i think i'm looking for a new rhythm. i'm trying the first person, you know, just to see. i have an idea of what i want the pages to look like, the shapes of the paragraphs, but it's not yet clicking.

it'll click. i'm not worried. it just takes doing.

weird dreams are back. sometimes scary ones but not truly terrifying, as they were a month or so ago.

someone's coming by on friday because our cable tv is being futzy. oh, get rid of it altogether, yes? soon. but this friday visit is going to cramp my style.

we saw "munich" recently and overall i liked it. spielberg can make a movie, i don't care what anyone says. i've been thinking a lot about the scene in which the woman is killed. it was disturbing. who's seen the movie?

on the show "the beat" on npr they talked recently about singer-songwriter neko case. they played a clip of a song and i kind of liked it. anyone have an opinion on neko case?

the book i'm reading, "ghostwritten," is kind of plodding at the moment as well. this particular interconnected chapter seems to be dragging. i guess such a style, each chapter a different character, is bound to have high and low points. i have something like 150 pages to go. then i can read the noel novel.

alanis moment

for the last week or two it's been hot here. by hot i mean temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s and sunny and not humid. it's tolerable but i prefer it cooler. i haven't been whining all that much. we cooked out last weekend, on the grill, yummy, and i've been thinking all week about cooking out again this weekend, very excited. of course now it's overcast and significantly cooler. low 60s, maybe? showers are in the forecast for the coming week. isn't it ironic?

disintegration and automatic

this album came out in 1989; i know this because i looked it up. i'd erroneously remembered it came out in 1992. oh well. this is neither here nor there. the point is that the album continues to make me melt. i actually haven't listened to it in a year or two but i've been thinking about it lately and will put in into my cd player this afternoon, if i don't forget. someone remind me!

like rem's "automatic for the people" (which did come out in the fall of 1992, at the beginning of my senior year, when i was just back from 11 months in ireland and a romantic disintegration), it's an important album for me. "disintegration" came out my first year of college and "automatic" in my last. significant?

i think both albums are going into my cd changer today. i have room for three more.

both these albums, in my opinion, are the last great albums by each of these bands. i was a huge cure fan throughout college, but haven't really appreciated anything they put out after "disintegration" (i listened to their backlist - is it called "backlist" in music or it that just for books?). rem's "new adventures in hi-fi" had some good songs on it but i didn't find it so cohesive. their music since then simply hasn't reached me. (their music up to and including "automatic for the people" continues to blow me away, though.) i totally have respect for michael stipe; kara and i would totally sleep with him.

ooh, if michael and jodie foster both came over for dinner and drinks! what an evening! what a night!

nothing, really, much, to do with milla

this, again, is milla. she's been talking to me (not in my dreams; only when i'm awake) in her stilted russian accent. she can't help it; it's how she talks. her new movie is supposed to be atrocious but i'm looking forward to seeing it.

anyway. enough of tasty milla. (check out her sternocleidomastoid!) she hasn't really been talking to me. i don't even particularly want her to. i just think she's purty.

should i write my novel in the first person? i confess i didn't start writing last friday as i was supposed to. bad boy blue. other things were happening. so: this friday! and i'm considering the first person. i've been writing in the third person for quite a while and perhaps the switch to first will shake things up. things need shook up.

subplatysmal
dyspareunia
cephalad
inferolateral
fistula
cuneiform
retropulsion
endovascular revascularization
violaceous

because it was my birthday recently (oh yeah! happy birthday to me!) it was a "free day" for me at work today. this just means i got to choose which physicians' reports i typed. all day! so it was rather fun day of work. i had almost all surgical reports, and i like that. my favorites for the day were from a podiatrist and a vascular surgeon. i came across those words up there in the course of my reports, and i like the sound of them.

in poetry-writing classes in college as an exercise we could pick several words out of a hat and then write a poem incorporating those words (and others of our own choosing). how would a poem that incorporated those worse look? what a challenge that would be! i wonder if i should take myself up on that. for laughs.

so the david mitchell book so far is good. i'm on chapter three or four. three, i think. each chapter is different character (in first person), a sort of short story, and the styles in each are so far quite different. the second chapter was quite murakami-y and i enjoyed it. i might be looking into other books of his.

mom sent me the novel by katharine noel, who was a friend (more or less) of my sister when they were children. teenagers, maybe. and my friend mailman knows noel's husband, so that's totally weird. but anyway, mom (who read it and liked it) will want the book back, so i'll read it when i finish the mitchell.

(i've never been to the tattered cover but i wouldn't mind checking it out one day.)

and lately i've been listening to this cd by abigail washburn, though i know her as abby. i can't say i actually know her, but her mother chrissy was the one of the leaders of the high school youth group at our (uu) church when i was in high school. abby is several years younger than i (seven or eight or ten, i don't know), and i think of her as little abby, but she seems to have grown up. her cd is terrific. i like her sound a whole lot.

enough blathering, i think.

ends, begins

finished "specimen days" the other day. maybe it was yesterday. as i said, it had three sections, and the first section was great. wow, great. the second section was less great than the first, quite good until the end, and the third was markedly less great than the second. so overall the book was all right. maybe if the first section had been the last part i read i would have a higher opinion of the book now.

kara's still in the midst of "saturday" so i picked from our shelves david mitchell's "ghostwritten," and so far i'm liking it. a blurb on the back likens mitchell's style to that of don delillo and haruki murakami, so that's positive in my eyes.

so "the west wing" is over. the final episode was last night. i can't help feeling a little sad. i confess - the show reached me. i could get along watching the santos administration. of course i would also want to see what cj and tobey and will and the character mary mccormack plays are up to. i like the characters! it was a rare tv show.

real people

i took these pictures through the hotel window in seattle on the mornings of 5/6/2006 and 5/7/2006, while kara slept. they're real people, as far as i know. i do not claim to know who they are.

trim

hey moe!

addendum

on the gastroscisis link from yesterday there are lots more interesting pictures of congenital malformations. don't hesitate to check them out!

specimens

i guess i didn't really care for edward carey's "observatory mansions." it didn't grab me, and i needed grabbed. so here i am reading the latest by michael cunningham.

i've read "the hours." i liked it quite a lot but was a tad surprised when it won the pulitzer. the movie was good too, but with a cast like that you could hardly go wrong.

i've read "a home at the end of the world" and i thought it went on a bit long. it was interesting and i liked the characters but it wandered and didn't seem to go anywhere. i actually didn't finish it. we saw the film several months ago and it was kind of like the book. i did watch the whole film though, and at the end it just sort of stopped without coming to any kind of conclusion i could discern.

so now i read "specimen days" and let me say that i am enraptured. like "the hours" it is set in three different time periods. today i finished reading the first section, set in the thick of the industrial revolution. that section was fantastic. i admit i have high hopes now for the second and third sections. i do hope i am not let down.

the city of new york is a character in all three sections (so i read on the back cover), as is walt whitman. he makes a brief appearance in the first section and it is rather magical.

can you believe i've never read "leaves of grass"? i totally should read it, shouldn't i? has anyone read it?

i haven't read "howl" either, though i should. i feel like i should. why do i associate allen ginsberg with whitman?

anyway. "specimen days." so far, so great.

and kara's reading ian mcewan's "saturday" and liking it a lot. from what she says i think i would like it too. (don't get me started on "enduring love"!) though she liked "observatory mansions" and i couldn't get through the first 75 pages. but the main character in "saturday" is a neurosurgeon!

words i came across today in the course of things

indwelling
sequelae
psoas
gastroschisis
myoclonus
vasovagal

are you uu? am i?

i was brought up unitarian. unitarian universalist. i have no issue with unitarians and i suppose i still consider myself one.

my mom more than once has advised that i might join a unitarian church here in tacoma and thus meet intelligent and thoughtful people, filling a void i have previously described.

my parents are involved in their local church; my sister is involved in her local church (i don't know if my brother-in-law rick is involved in the church).

i work on sundays; my workweek is sunday through thursday. but aside from that, why do i balk? for i do balk.

it's not a bad idea. it's reasonable. a unitarian church is indeed among the most likely places to find people an individual as persnickety as myself would deem worthwhile.

i don't know. as i say, i work sundays at the moment. if my schedule changes, maybe i'll check a church out. or, even now, i could see what sorts of nonsunday events a unitarian church offers. i don't know where there is one in tacoma, but i could find out without difficulty.

here's something. i work full-time, and i'm married. i'm supposed to be writing (the restart date looms!) and exercising and there's plenty of garbage that needs done around this ramshackle house. plus i like to read. plus i'm generally not usually interested in doing so many things outside the home. (translation: i'm lazy).

or it's the misanthrope in me. people i meet i do not expect to like. (is this the result of years of customer service jobs?) it does seem the more i get to know most people, the less interested i am in spending time with them. plus of course i'm shy and withdrawn. mostly i like spending time with kara or on my own. i like the idea of having friends but it seems rather like a pipe dream.

i don't know. maybe i'm just out of practice as far as meeting people? kara has a friend at work who she says is quite cool. and this friend has friends who are said to be cool. and kara and i have been invited a number of times to meet this group of people at a coffee shop. i go to the same coffee shop in the mornings of days off sometimes. it's a good coffee shop; i've mentioned it before, the mandolin. but this group goes there after 10pm and that's just plain late at night.

so i don't know. as far as other people go, i suppose i don't know what i want.

i guess it's the vibe of capital hill, seattle, that appeals. interesting-looking people out on the streets, creating a lively and colorful atmosphere. you can feel the individuality, the personality - it's palpable! most people on the streets of tacoma appear demented or thuggish or both.

anyway. mom's advice is good. i probably ought to follow it. i don't know if i will, though. stay tuned.

status post seattle

i love seattle. we had a great time up there. i don't even know if i can write about it now. we went up to capital hill friday afternoon. the vibe there is just so appealing. we had a beer in an irish-ish pub i hadn't been to before, a great old crazy building. we ate ethiopian food (not in the irish pub), and it was amazing, but who knew the portions would be so enormous? fantastic food, though.

saturday we did a little shopping and then went to the movies. we saw "inside man," with clive, denzel, and jodie. now, i've said it before and i'll say it again, but jodie foster can come and hang out with us in our home any old dang time. are you reading this, jodie? an open invitation. all the same, i didn't buy her character in the movie. she doesn't do cruel and manipulative so well. she's too good!

and kara and i can watch clive and denzel all day long.

we napped in the room for a bit and then we went to see ira and julia. julia sweeney did an excerpt from her monologue called "letting go of god," about her transformation from a devout girl aspiring to be a nun into an adult agnostic. it was great to hear a coherent and rational argument against blind faith.

kara works with some mormons and i work with some seriously christian folks, and though we rarely see eye to eye with these individuals i would have liked to have them along that evening. how would they respond to julia's point of view? i do wonder.

after the monologue ira joined julia on stage and they just sort of chatted. about religion and science, mostly. agnosticism. very friendly. ira glass is a fantastic dork, such a goober, but he's smart and funny. julia, too, is smart and funny. so it of course was a great time. the crowd, too, was hugely receptive, and there was a great vibe in the paramount that night.

and the next day we came home. it surprised me, as it almost always does, how little time it takes to travel between tacoma and seattle. they're close!

and here we are. i went to work today. kara is still at work. the dogs survived their kenneling. the cats survived being alone. leopold (nee yellow) evidently missed me a tremendous amount and was all over me when i got home. rumble (thinking of renaming her loeb) was just kind of pissed off at me. i think she'll get over it.

it was a great weekend. kara and i had a great time. seattle is great. i wish we lived there. someday we might be able to afford it, but not soon.

bradley whitford + meg ryan = me

well i just canceled a credit card. that felt good. it was surprisingly easy over the phone; i'd expected more of a fight. okay then ... one down.

we do head up to seattle today. the weather looks good so far. we're not in a big rush. probably after lunch we'll take the dogs to the kennel and then we'll drive north. the ethiopian restaurant is in the capital hill area so once we're checked into the hotel we'll head up there. do the capital hill thing. which is good because the last few times in seattle we stayed downdown and in pioneer square.

the hospitals are in first hill, near capital hill, and it is a dream for us to land jobs there, at swedish or harborview, and move back up there.

and be among people who read! and think!

kara says she's snobby too, the same way i am. one of my favorite characters on "the west wing," josh, was called an elitist (probably not an irregular occurrence) and his response was something like, "sure i'm an elitist, but i have respect for those who don't measure up." this was season 2 or 3 maybe. i liked that bit.

i was also thinking yesterday, as i have before, about how different i am with kara than with just about anyone else. most people know me as a very quiet person. i don't know what else they think of me. i don't talk much; i don't tend to initiate conversation. quiet people can come off as snobby or as mysterious and i don't know if i fall into one of those categories. i'm not social at work. i feel i don't have anything to say. my thoughts don't seem relevant to the vibe of the place.

i'd like to be more social, ideally, but the conversations i tangentially participate in around the break room table don't tend to spark anything in me. i do not feel prompted to respond. i feel like saying, as one of meg ryan's characters often said in "joe versus the volcano," "i have no response to that."

they don't know who david sedaris, jon stewart, john sayles, ira glass, terry gross, whit stilman, or nicola griffith are. (incidentally yesterday i started reading "observatory mansions" by edward carey and so far it's pretty good. kara read it a few years ago and has been recommending it.)

as i say, i'm different with kara. i feel different, relaxed, more like me. actually like me. i'm talkative, silly, stupid, spontaneous, goofy. i have more fun. i feel like i'm fun (sometimes). obviously it's a comfort level issue. it has always taken me a long time to get comfortable with new people, and i certainly have to like the person, feel a kinship. i don't have that kinship sense with the women at work, or with carl. i'm not comfortable or relaxed; i don't feel safe letting me out.

obviously i haven't tried chatting with every single one of my colleagues. there may well be some i would enjoy spending time with. but it's not an overly social job, which is actually part of its charm for me. i sit at a desk, in a cubicle, before a computer, with headphones on, surrounded by medical reference books. it's rather a sweet situation for someone of my mindset.

i felt the same sort of distance in high school. the general thought that everyone else was interested in things that weren't interesting to me. there was a bit less of that in college. living in chapel hill with my cousin ian, spending time with christa, i felt better. i was probably quiet around christa, but i was pretty comfortable. living in seattle with mark was very good. and of course being with kara now is excellent. it's just everyone else. everyone else, so far.

anyway. moving on. something totally else. a preposition thing. a doctor on a recent emergency report said as the patient's chief complaint, "the patient is a 2-year-old female here for a sexual assault." my initial response, of course, was "i didn't know they offered sexual assaults in the emergency room." (next thought, "how much are they?")

is this indicative of anything? that i think about things like prepositions? i imagine 90% of my colleagues wouldn't think anything was off in that sentence, because i see it in report after report. maybe this is the standard way medical folks say things, but could you not substitute "because of" (or even "status post" if you wanted to maintain a clinical vibe) for "for"? most doctors have said these same phrases over and over and they don't even listen to what they're saying any more. they don't give thought to the meaning of the words.

anyway. i don't have to think about work now. i don't have to go back there until monday. we're stashing the dogs and going to seattle today, seeing ira and julia tomorrow, and coming back sunday. a weekend in seattle.

bullet points

well i for one am elated moussaoui didn't get death. i was disturbed death was even on the table. dare i say this gives me hope for humanity? no, i think that would be premature.

who cares if the national anthem is sung in spanish? not me! (of course, i don't care if it's sung at all!)

i think i heard on the radio yesterday that the border issue is upsetting for some because all those incoming mexicans will undermine american values, the american way of life. i say go ahead! undermine! surely some aspects of mexican culture are infinitely preferrable to that of the united states. (not all, perhaps, but some.) this border stuff is largely beyond me.

anyway. hot topics.

rare loquacity - linkless, picless

i know, i know, it's been eons. not quite eons, but a dang long while. how long? fifteen days, i think. roughly. i just haven't been feeling chatty of late. i wonder if i've lost my entire fan base.

give a shout if you're still with me!

it's not as if i've been busy. just kinda poopy. i've been going to work, doing my typing. i've been reading a fair amout, which is a good thing. i watched a good number of movies with the wife, but that's nothing new.

i haven't been working on the novel. i haven't been working out. i haven't felt like blogging. i've been a bit of a dud. i'm the first to admit it. i had nightmares every night for two weeks. scary ones too.

yesterday though, for some reason, ideas poured into me as regards the novel and i feel energized about it again. i don't know how that happens, but it happened. i have a new start date for writing. actually, a restart date: may 12.

i work well with start dates. a start date a week or so off gives my thoughts and imagination a chance to gel. it might sound like a rationalization. one might say, why not start writing right this minute? and it may well be a rationalization. i'm not claiming to be above rationalizations. but it's a system, of sorts, and a system that works for me. so there it is. may 12 is next friday.

today is my aunt mollie's birthday. happy birthday mollie! yesterday was my sister's birthday. happy birthday jennifer! i hope the package i sent arrived safely; i was told it would arrive yesterday. my mom's birthday is saturday. my own birthday is a week from saturday, the day after my start date, as it happens.

i'm not going to talk about how old i'm going to be except to say that i know of people my age who are grandparents! ... and others who are published authors. i guess i'm somewhere in between.

so, yeah, working. i think the most interesting report i typed yesterday was about someone mowing her lawn. there was something in the path of the mower and she reached down to get it out of the way and felt a sharp pain in her hand. she looked at her hand and there was a nail clean through it, having been thrust up by the blades of the mower. ew.

today i typed one about a 2-year-old who took a tumble down some stairs and smacked his head pretty good. there was some ambiguity as to whether his mother's boyfriend had given him a bit of a shove.

sometimes i do want to follow up on these reports, but that just wouldn't be ethical.

i'm about 4 pages shy of finishing "ratner's star" by don delillo. i ought to finish it today. it's good but not his best. it's comic, about supposedly wildly intelligent mathmaticians and physicists and engineers in an isolated think tank trying to determine the content and precise origin of a message from outer space. they're really quite neurotic and silly and not very logical. hence the humor.

recently i also read "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon. that was a gift from jennifer and it was very good. that book is what inspired me to give "ratner's star" another shot, the talk about mathematics and such. and before that? "the valley of bones" by michael gruber, his second novel, a bit of a thriller. somewhere in there i also read several poems by elizabeth bishop, and came away slightly disappointed in myself for not yearning to read her entire "complete poems: 1927-1979" cover to cover. she's got some good ones, though.

and what's next in my reading world? "ghostwritten" by david mitchell? "woman on the edge of time" by marge piercy? i'll be scanning my shelves this evening and tomorrow, no doubt.

this struck me about some of my coworkers recently. one woman (they're all women, my coworkers, except for carl ... a topic for another occasion) came across the name lolita (a patient i presume) and commented that the name lolita carried with it a connotation of preadolescent promiscuity. though the words "connotation," "preadolescent," and "promiscuity" were not used per se.

in listening to these people talk about this, i realized they had no conception of the nabokov novel. (one may even have used the word "nymphet"!) the name is thick in popular culture and they've gleaned that, but they have no source knowledge.

my point? i don't know. maybe that they're not the most intellectual bunch in the world? do i fault them for this? i comprehend that it would be snobby to do so, yet i do so. do they listen to npr and vote against bush? i am afraid not.

perhaps the flaw is with me more than with them. i don't know. it's been an issue i've had with the majority of the people i've met here. i seem to be interested in vastly different things. my head is in another place. different sorts of thought processes. i have difficulty relating to most people i've met here.

ah well. i do have kara. kara and i are on the same page the vast majority of the time. this makes everything worthwhile.

we're going back to seattle this weekend, to see ira glass and julia sweeney and to eat ethiopian food. (another beef i have with tacoma - no ethiopian restaurants!) i'm looking forward to that. ira and julia will be at the same venue as david sedaris was the week before last, but our seats are going to be much better this time around.

david, by the way, was hilarious. a funny, funny man. a good kind of mean.