a good man is hard to fine

hey everyone! long time no see.

school is winding up quickly. i essentially have to write 5 10-15 page papers in the next two weeks10 days (holy crap).

meanwhile it's time to move again soon. moving again. sigh. once in 1996. three times in 1997. twice in 1998. twice in 1999. twice in 2000. twice in 2001. twice in 2002. once in 2003. twice in 2005. once in 2006. hopefully i can stay in one place for a long while this time ... maybe even more than 18 months!

along with trying to finish up classes with sufficient credits to graduate, i have to make sure that all of my things are in order with school. my bursar bill is paid off ... but as of today i owed overdue fines at the law library. i kept a few books a couple days late earlier in the semester and when i returned them the librarian told me the fine was $375. three hundred seventy five dollars. US dollars. i was like "are you serious? okay i can't pay that right now." it must have been like $50 per book per day, or maybe they were charging by the hour because one of the books was especially rare or something? ugh. sadly, this school has taken so much money from me already, i figured that fine was probably standard.

so i saved up some money to pay the overdue fine. and then i procrastinated a bit on paying it, til the school e-mailed saying that all monies owed to the school had to be paid by may 1 in order to get state bar association applications approved. finally, today ... in the pouring rain, mflsitwww and i went out to run errands and stopped by the law library to pay my fines. the librarian swiped my school id and reminded me "three seventy five" so i handed him my credit card.

"oh no. checks or cash only."

what the heck? argh. fortunately, i happened to be rolling a few benjamins deep (don't ask) that mflsitwww was holding for me (besides being my bodyguard, she's also my accountant) and i handed the guy four hundred dollar bills.

"what? no."

he looked at me dismayed. or maybe it was confused. whatever it was -- let's call it the "skunk eye" -- but it all came to light as he explained ...

"it's three dollars and seventy five cents."

Merry Christmas!!!

it's deep into the night and i'm about to go to bed here in the basement of my brother's house outside of portland, oregon. my whole family is here and in a few hours i'll be woken up by three excited nephews and one excited niece and we'll all run upstairs and exchange gifts and cards and celebrate a wonderful day.

so before i head off to sleep, i want to send out merry Christmas greetings to all of you out there who might be reading this message. may yours be a day full of warmth and merriment. may you bring joy to the lives of others, just as they would bring joy to yours. and may the spirit of the holiday fill your heart, upwards and outwards, with thankfulness for the great blessing that we celebrate today.

who cooked what in the where now?

i've been living here for four, four and a half years, and i still don't understand why ...

why is mexican food cooked by chinese people,
and chinese food cooked by mexican people in manhattan?

hrm.

it's the same thing every year, i know ...

but really, it should be the same thing every day. the last few years i've always put up a post about "a charlie brown christmas". you would be bored with it by now i'm sure (if you didn't love it so much! ) so as i was about to post this, i was thinking ... really we should spend all year in the Christmas spirit, don't you think? thinking of giving before receiving, spending time with loved ones like family and friends, and most of all being thankful for every blessing you have and for the chance to live life through good fortune and bad ... if that's not Christmas to you, then you can skip this post i suppose. of course, if you want something more titillating ... you're on the internet. it's not hard to find!

well i know my posts in the last year have become much less verbose and interesting to read. the poems have fallen off ... they tend to form in short verses in my head in those moments before sleep sets in. the wild parties at gun dealers' lofts and bowling in robes at the port authority happens much less frequently in my life nowadays. but i do still bump around with my headphones here and there, and i suppose i could report more often about the celebrities i skate past or dine with. i'm a bit surprised myself that i didn't comment on the democratic sweep in the mid-term election (ho-hum ... we'll see if they can actually do something with this opportunity) or neil cavuto on fox news declaring that teaching kids about environmental responsibility is an insidious part of the liberal agenda.

no, i'd much rather go back to what tickles me today. no, not this (if neil cavuto thinks happy feet is bad ... what's he think about that??) ... but

(full length no-less ... woo-hoo!)