11.20.03 - 1:28 p.m.

Watchu thinkin bout? Here are some things I've thought about recently.

Breaking up with friends-- was this a Seinfeld episode? You can break up with someone you're dating, so why can't you break up with someone you're friends with? People drift apart; or else you realize that you don't like someone and your friendship is more an accident of circumstance than anything else. Etiquette dictates that you can't respond to someone's request to hang out by saying "Sorry, I don't want to because I wouldn't enjoy it." So what to do, except hide? If you're reading this, you are not the person I want to break up with.

Can you put deodorant on other parts of your body besides your armpits?

The gym I go to (24 hr fitness) is what I imagine hell to be like. TVs always on, always tuned to Fox News. I turn them off but I marvel at how many people seem to enjoy staring at the screen as they work out, listening to commercials and jingoistic reporting at deafening volume. Today I tried to turn one off and the power switch didn't work. I asked one of the gym guys and he said it was broken. THAT'S HELL RIGHT THERE!! Trapped in a room of tvs I can't turn off, all tuned to Fox. Not to mention the treadmills and stairmasters, which have you endlessly walking but getting nowhere, descending without ever reaching a destination.

V.S. Naipaul - I just finished "Among the Believers." I became temporarily obsessed with him one night-- I went online and found his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The speech was a 2 minute throw-away, but I just wanted to see his face and hear his voice. I found other people's accounts of meeting him. I read about Paul Theroux's falling out with him. I thought about Naipaul's classically modern view of the Islamic civilizations he visits in Among the Believers-- Malaysia, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan-- and the notion that these countries are hopelessly wedded to an angry, anti-intellectual conception of Islam that rejects modernity while still hypocritically (and ultimately self-deceptively) accepting the goods and technologies produced by modern countries. And how that ties in to Christopher Hitchens's polemics about "Islamo-fascism" and the clash between Western civ and Islamic fundamentalism. And where the war in Iraq will get us.

Veggies -- we belong to the Full Belly Farms biweekly vegetable delivery service. They drop off a box of goodies at Az's work. We've been getting a lot of squash, daikon and bok choy. I like eating seasonal vegetables, and we're getting stuff we would never buy on our own. I look up nutritional values sometimes. In case you didn't know-- cucumber is not very nutritious. It's a shame because I love cucumber and cheddar sandwiches and I'd hoped that this would be a healthy meal.

Sex & work -- but those are off-limits except in the most general terms. The former because it would violate Az's privacy and the latter because people from work read this. It's too bad, because while work is boring to talk about, sex is very interesting. If you're reading this and you have an online diary, I suggest writing more about sex. Possible topics include but are not limited to: the role of scent, strange positions, recurring fantasies, "if it ain't new it's through," and the new good vibrations store opening up a block from my apartment.