Okay. One paper down (the easy one, two pages on Pynchon and I wasn't even halfway started when it ended) and one to go (the other easy one, I'm sure, since I've been talking about it throughout the day, with Ester and then with Blair. The latter sent a flustered e-mail and then came over with uncertainty, and proceeded to be much more flaky than I've ever seen her, talking in silly whines and grimaces and claiming not to know what to write about even though she had plenty to say on the topic. I think she was just frightened since she gave The Boss a draft of her first paper and he ate her alive. Well, don't worry about what the professor thinks, I say. It's your own paper.)

Today's addition to my CD collection came via Ms. Ennen, who has taking to calling me Mr. Hoffman an awful lot, via Air Canada, via FNAC: Björk's Gling-Glo, which I'm excited about. I didn't realize Rogers and Hammerstein wrote anything in Icelandic.

I walked around the ville in French this morning, as we went back and forth between la poste and le restaurant chinoise and les salons de coiffure, making sure to always use les passages. Then we had a review of X-bar and so in in syntax, ended up abolishing the sentence in favor of something called IP, which looks really ugly at the top of a tree. Elena came over for lunch, talking mostly with Ester; actually I was talking too, but I was somehow distracted so I was really listening to what I was saying. Something about chalk and movies and this website. Two seconds after walking into my room, she said "I've never been so jealous of a space and a corduroy comforter and a CD collection and a fireplace and a futon mattress in my life." Nori sent an ominous e-mail about coming back next semester.

CDNow of all places has a pretty respectable list of the great songwriters of the century or something. Half, from which I just impulsively ordered two Randy Newman albums and a Lounge Lizards album, has a lot of Chemical Brothers singles for not much money; check it out Ben. Nobody on the web seems to have a copy of the huge early 90's dance hit "(It's Time for the) Percolator," which we found out is by Cajmere, alias Green Velvet, who I actually saw, at Titan; someone's selling a maxi-single at eBay, but we've been outbid to $15.50, and that's too much for us.

Here's some questions for general discussion: What should I be for Halloween? Should we have a christmas tree at the barn? Why do actors named John always play characters named John? Where does Marcantonio Barone get his cool from?

you'll be happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.
climb aboard, little wog, sail away with me