kiss the girls

i used to really enjoy going to see ashley judd movies. until miss bird and i went to see one that featured a lot of snow globes. it was bad.

i still love her though because she is a big KY b-ball fan. (i love her almost as much as rick majerus does). and despite how i typed that, this also is not a code for anything. she just loves herself some wildcat ball. and i respect that. and she stands in the student section and has a mess of rituals for pre- and post- game that even involve some of my favorites including an arnica rubdown.

donna, it's the rituals and striving for perfection and fear of germs that drove her to her recent hiatus in a treatment center. evidently, while the family was having an intervention with her sister, one of the counselors turned either to (or on) ashley and said that she was from the say family of origin and had similar root causes, but different symptoms. sort of a tinkerbell moment but no sandbox, right jbw?

anyway, donna: my mother was distressed because she couldn't talk about ashley judd with me while i was away in new york playing with puppets. my mother was indeed very worried about "the poor girl" because she saw some of her pathologies on display once on oprah and again once on martha's tv show. even, according to my mutha, even miss martha stewart marveled at ashley's mastery of a wide range of obscure skills.



i spent a lot of time resolving matters over the past few days. including transfering my tags, title, license, registering to donate organs and to vote here. it's official michigan is my permanent residence. this sort of kills me. i know i need to vote here this fall because we have a hateful anti-affirmative action measure on the ballot and for god's sake an amway scion is running as a repub for governor, but i am now officially this much more removed from my beloved district. i made a big deal at the secretary of state's office about how i used to be licensed in another jurisdiction, not a state ... and went into the whole how d.c. residents pay taxed without representation. and by the way, did anybody see stephen colbert and eleanor holmes norton last night on the report. she gave as good as she got. she actually went up in my estimation.

and speaking of going up in my estimation...jason you are just jealous of my boy's testosterone levels. of course, he has high levels in his system. it was trapped in him all those years he lived with his plain family in pennsylvania. duh. and i don't care. karen's ex dayne had it right about steroids in baseball -- who cares? it's still pretty amazing to me that he can pedal that hard in that tight lycra.

this morning, i met with a colleague to review my syllabus for my fall undergrad class on african american travel. there are just amazing resources here at umich.edu. he works in the campus' learning and teaching center and since i can't make the august meetings, he agreed to meet me individually today to review my class and to brainstorm. for an hour.

and then, i trotted over to say goodbye to one of my favorite librarians who is leaving for grad school in counseling. (he was so touched that i wrote a thank you note and bid him adieu. again i type: duh. of course, i would thank this guy. he would totally haul all manner of molding early 20th century architectural journals out of storage for me to scan at a moment's notice. and, i mean, at a moment's notice. he ruled. just like all the staff librarians on north campus (and most of them except the evangelical christians on central campus in the grad library). anyway, here's the point: i gave him the list of readings and his colleagues will begin to compile and scan each of them for my fall class. i didn't understand this service last year so i either did it on my own or had ben, my research assistant, do it. they will do it for me. and fetch the books and then reshelve them. this seems so insanely decadent to me. i am still holdng firm and i refuse to sign up for the office/mailbox delivery system -- by which i order a book or article from the library and a staff person brings it to my campus building and leaves it in my mailbox. and to think that i actually sat in a faculty meeting here in the spring where people complained about the budget cuts that meant that the items were no longer delivered directly to your office (unless you were grandfathered in).

this is almost as decadent as when j!s!s! had the people in the harvard B school photograph his bookshelves before a move so they could be relocated and reordered as was on their new perches in their new home.


it's pretty stunning to me.

anyway...night falls and the keyboard is acting up.

off to count my blessings and the lightning bugs with jasmine.