"There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe.. but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea."

--Lady Chatterlet's Lover

So my friend lent me the book that was the inspiration for that movie I saw (from the last entry). The book, so far, is MUCH better than the movie. British writing>french film. Usually I would have to say resoundingly yes. But we'll see.

"Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. "

And with that I'll be going to the beach. I may or may not be around until August 4th. And you also know that on Saturday I shall not be disturbed because I will definitely be with Harry.

ciao bellos.

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Ok, that's not fair. I've never actually watched any porn. But I did see Lady Chatterley's Lover tonight (the new, french adaptation), and that was probably close enough.

Is it the French? Is that it--- that's just the way they make movies? I remember watching (being subjected to?) this french movie one time- "Hiroshima, mon amour" it was called, perhaps you have heard of it. The frame story was just that this married French woman (why do they always have to be married?) is having sex with this Japanese guy.
Yeah, they spend a large part of the movie on that.

It's just after the war and she's come to Hiroshima to make a film about peace.
While this is taking place, she starts remembering her first love, a German soldier she fell in the sack love with during the occupation. Needless to say, this wasn't really good for her "La Resistance" street cred. There are a lot of wheat fields and some snow and quite a lot of bad editing. Yet another thing that that film had in common with this one, as it happens.

But the whole time we're looking at snow on poor quality film and wondering why we should sympathize with some woman sleeping with The Enemy (I bet she can't even speak German!), these two are having teh sex, very SLOOOOWLY, and man is it BORING. For the life of me I have no memory of how it ends. The movie, I mean.


During the fine film I just finished watching, they don't even have an intervening German. It's just "look at all the plants" and then SEX! and then "regard, the leaves on the trees" and then SEX!!! and then "behold, she walks through a field of flowers", etc, etc. If the plants were supposed to be some sort of innuendo or euphemism, I think they forgot they were supposed to *substitute* them rather than juxtapose them. Ok, so it got a little more interesting around the end when they finally fell in love. (Isn't that supposed to go the other way around?)

Anyway, my two friends and I spent the whole movie snickering.

Mostly because of the extremely awkward editing. I swear.

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Today I am only thinking about science. All day long. Like right now, I'm reading a book about Aeolian processes. It's talking about saltation. Saltation is when particles are only somewhat picked up by the fluid medium (usually air or water), so they tend to bounce along the ground as they go.

Saltation.

There used to be these little nuts that would fall on the roof of our dorm from the nearby trees. They would always fall all over the place in one of the little random vestibules between the higher roofs. We always talked about having a rooftop salsa party in one of those vestibules. There were even speakers in the walls, as if this place was made for that purpose. Wasps lived in the speakers now, we had discovered. Auggie and other members of zeta chi sigma used to go up there now and then and throw the nuts at the walls of the room. Their strange, knobby, hollow, wooden sound would echo off the walls as they saltated briefly --cloc-cloc-cloc-- before falling silent again. Or was it more of a cascading "pong-pong-pong"? Anyway, that is the sound I always think of when I think of the word "saltated".

This time it was night. I don't remember much about what kind of night it was. It was a little chilly, perhaps- but in Southern California in early May the weather can never be a cause for concern.
I think talk of these nuts had been a part of the conversation that had gotten us up there that night. I know for sure that my insistence that a nearby tree provided as good a route to the roof as any staircase had something to do with it. Some measure of sparkling mischief in his eyes played an important part, perhaps.

We had been wandering around for some time up there and now we were both still- looking out over the campus, which was glowing with festivities in the darkness.

He came up from behind and wrapped his arms around me. His arms... around me!

Me!

I slowly turned around to look up at him then.

Whenever I remember this part of the story, I feel an odd vibrato that speeds through my heart in trembling crescendo. Strange, I think, that something intangible like a memory could provoke such a strong physical reaction years later. I wonder if they hooked up a bunch of sensors to my body and brain... perhaps inserted electrodes, put me in an MRI, placed chemical tracers in my blood... if they could tell me exactly what pathway that memory takes from my mind to my heart. Why not my stomach, like the feeling I get falling from the Tower of Doom? Why my heart?

"How is that an evolutionary advantage?" I wonder.

After all, I'm thinking about science today. Only science, all day today.

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Yeah so... I used to do this ALL the time. I just never thought that anyone else did!

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This is a map of the United States where each state is renamed as the country in the world which has a comparable GDP to that state. Keep in mind that this doesn't take population into account, so while the GDPs of Iowa and Pakistan are comparable, Iowa has about 2.7 million people while Pakistan has about 170 million.



This map is from here.

Some countries aren't on here, like Germany, China, Japan and the UK. They are the next four richest countries behind the US. If you add their GDPs together, you get around what the US's is. Here's someone who took the map and did more comparing.

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Today Toku and I went to Block Island, which is a little island shaped like a porkchop off the southern coast of Rhode Island. I heard this guy on the phone being like, "I can't get straight from Block Island to Long Island. I have to go from Block Island to mainland Rhode Island and then drive to Long Island. Does that make sense to you?"

Too many islands.

I brought lunch:


MMmmmmmMMmm!

Let's have another look:


You'd think that by now I would have learned my lesson about packing peanut butter and jelly. I didn't.

But actually it didn't taste too bad. Though I didn't end up eating this part:

I don't know (anatomically speaking) which part of the sandwich that was.

We had a lovely time. We rented bicycles and rode all over the island, taking pictures, taking walking sidetrips to lighthouses, going body-surfing in the ocean, etc. I bought this frozen lemonade, (which wasn't cheap!) but it had all these freaking pieces of lemon peel in it, which seems like a good idea, but ISN'T. I finally ingeniously bit the end of my straw until the opening was such an irregular oval that the peel-pieces didn't fit. Still tasted weird and gave me a toothache.

After we got home he wanted to take me out for Japanese food, because I hadn't allowed him to buy me anything all day, and he "never got me a birthday present", so we went. He also always walks on road-side of me when we're walking on the sidewalk. I'm not used to that, so I tend to make it extremely difficult for him because I don't pay attention to where I walk and he has to madly dash to the other side of me to... do whatever it is that men do when they stand on the road-side of women on the sidewalk. Usually this consists of putting his arm out authoritatively to stop me from jaywalking in front of oncoming traffic. Then I walk right through it, because hello, I'm sure they'll totally stop. They do in Cali, lah. [omg, btw, my friend had this album and she called it "Road-trip to So-Cali" There is no such thing as "So-Cali" There is a Cali, and there is a "So-Cal" There is no So-Cali. Get hip to it. jki<3ubff!]

I don't actually like Japanese food- namely... sushi, or most kinds of fish, but I ate a very good noodle dish with beef. He says they don't really eat sushi that much in Japan, only at parties and things because it gets rather expensive. Perhaps he would have liked the all-you-can-eat sushi at the Sushi Boat. I think he wanted to play the "I'll show you something new and gross and you can react in a squeamish girly fashion" game. But I've already had raw eel, thank you very much, and I don't react to anything in a squeamish girly fashion. Except... no, I can't think of anything right now. Squeamish-girliness is an unnecessary and sometimes extremely annoying affectation. Girls only really do it so that boys will pay attention to them longer, because boys love imagining that they're grosser than girls are. Observe this sometime: "Omg, there is a bug in my kitchen, ew! Ahhh! I'm so helpless and squeamish that I have to go hide in my room while my big strong boyfriend takes care of it for me! Don't kill it! You can't KILL a living creature! I can't stand either the bug or the idea that you'll squish it!"
Whereas, if she didn't have a big strong boyfriend, the conversation would go like this: "Give me that shoe." I remember one time this girl was whining about how her car's battery was dead and she needed someone to jump it. She was whining to this guy, of course, that she didn't know how to do it and that it was so confusing etc. etc. Not even thinking, I broke in and explained that I overhead their conversation and that I had jumper cables in my car which was right outside and I could easily jump her car for her. The guy looked a little relieved because he was obviously busy, and she looked like a huge raincloud had just settled over her face and she followed me out there with every bit of rage and no gratitude because I was not jumping her car, I was cheating her out of her golden opportunity to hang out with whoever that guy was. She wasn't that clueless about jumping cars, by the way.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with my day, or with Toku, because he comes from a culture that in chivalry-level resembles what ours used to be like not so very long ago and you can't blame someone for that.

Anyway, after buying me dinner he said that he'd like to buy me something else before he leaves... a dress. What kind of dress? One of my choosing, he says. I don't think he's ever seen me wear a dress. Not very many people here in Providence have seen such a shocking and totally unnecessarily frightful sight. Maybe that's why he thinks I need one. I don't know about you guys, but most of the time men buy women dresses in the movies it seems like they have the design that they might see the girl actually wear this dress. Oh, and in the movies the guy is usually the bad guy and she is his captive for the time being while her knight in shining armor/Indiana Jones/Luke Skywalker/Gaston is on his way to save her. Well, it's probably not like that since he would be willing to let me choose it, but still.

Well anyway, for now I'll go ahead and continue buying my own clothing. And you can bet it will be unflattering. And have some kind of geology joke on it. And there isn't a damn thing anyone can do to stop me!

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