The Use of the Guttural G in Moby Dick

Yet again this morning, I was struggling with the eternal question: what the fuck should I call one of my catch-all posts? And then I remembered that when I was in college, I took a course in American novels that my advisor was teaching. I was a senior, so by then the actual writing of the papers was easy, or at least I knew that a decent idea and a few hours of effort would generate a good paper. But I had written my first paper (about, if memory serves, "Rappaccini's Daughter," which was not -- and still is not, I presume -- a novel), and I thought of my poor advisor reading twenty-five papers, most of which would likely not be very good, and I thought that I should at least try to make him smile with a decent title, so I used the one that I've used here. Titular relevance is way overrated, no? Anyway, my advisor retaliated by putting a large, red, circled D- on my paper, along with the comment, "Just my impish sense of humor. The actual grade is A." After that, the titles got weirder. The grades were always the same, however.


It is not as easy as one would hope to find pictures of attractive naked men wearing glasses. Perhaps this makes sense: usually when I'm getting naked, my glasses come off before anything else. My eyesight isn't all that horrible, though. Every once in a while I'll play with a guy whose vision is so bad that he resists removing his glasses. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the sort of person who can have sex in such a way that keeping my glasses on would be appropriate or at least workable. Of course, sometimes I also wonder what it would be like to win a really big lottery payoff, which is about as likely as my having sex with my glasses on. Mostly because I never buy lottery tickets. I've never had anyone lose a contact lens during sex, but I suppose it must happen to some people. I've never worn contact lenses, and I doubt I ever will. They're too high maintenance, and I like my glasses.


People who provide limited information and then complain that you've judged them based on that information should either provide more information or not complain. Speculation is always fun, of course, but if I have to choose between formulating an opinion based on the data at hand and formulating an opinion based on data that I have to imagine, I'm usually going to go with the data at hand. This concept applies especially to reality TV contestants, but it applies in many other contexts, too.


My daughter has decided that her Halloween costume will be the evening sky. This involves one of her old ballet costumes -- a deep blue leotard with a gauzy skirt -- and some silver bling. Because her mother thinks the costume is too sheer, YFU handed me a piece of plain dark blue fabric and asked me to make her a skirt out of it. Um, what? And more to the point, how? Anyway, I did (hooray for applied geometry), but I found the result horrific (which might be appropriate for some Halloween costumes, I admit, but not so much for the evening sky) even though YFU quite sensibly said, "It's going under the costume. Nobody will see it, Dad." She left the "duh" off, but I could feel it. Still, I made and played around with some miniature paper cutouts, went to the fabric store, found a dark blue remnant in what I hoped was a more skirt-friendly fabric, and made a second skirt. YFU shrugged, but she admitted it was a much better effort. Which, still, no one would see. This was all so much more difficult than it looks on Project Runway.


Yesterday morning, I was half an hour late to work because I spent a similar amount of time trying to find my wallet. I eventually found it in the pants I'd been wearing the day before. The pants, alas, were in the dryer. I guess that explains why the dryer was making that thumping noise the night before. It's amazing how little of what I have in my wallet was significantly damaged by a trip through the washer and dryer. I know from past experience that cellphones are not similarly resilient. The wallet is still a bit moist, as is the paper money, but the snack machine at the office accepts damp currency, so I'm good.


I was ordering some pre-release discounted DVDs a week or so ago, and I ordered something called Frat Sex 2 without realizing that it was actually a written porn anthology. Well, you can never have too many of those, either, right? Some of the stories are so badly written that you can't help laughing at them, but for the most part they get the job done. I was jerking off to a few of them last night, and it never ceases to amuse me to see how the quality of the writing seems to increase as I stroke. I generally shoot my load in the middle of the third or fourth story, then, after I wipe up, I return to it to see how it ends, and suddenly it is, once again, poorly written and entirely uncompelling. It was pretty late when I started last night, so there was considerable tension between wanting to play with myself for as long as possible and wanting to get to sleep, and I lasted less than half an hour. The night before, I didn't cum the second time I fucked Judd, and then after he left, I jerked off (again to Frat Sex 2) and came so hard that I made a big mess on the pillows and wall behind my bed, so last night I eased up a bit and came into the towel instead. I don't know whether choosing ease of housekeeping over the spectacular fountain-of-semen approach says that I'm mature or just boring. I should probably conduct additional research to find out.