In which the following things are mentioned: incest, cannibalism, bastards, hell, technicolor pig slippers

So November is shaping up to be de los muertos, and I'm not talking about All Souls' Day. I spent this weekend writing another theory paper and generally trying to map out a strategy for the rest of the semester, which i going to be...challenging, to put it euphemistically.

In other news...Lyra ate a Post-It tab yesterday, which was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. I stuck it on her shoulder; she pulled it off and swallowed it. Clearly my fault entirely, but I've never known her to eat anything else plastic. Evidently the adhesive makes it go down easier.

I gave blood today, at a blood drive run by undergraduate pre-meds. You can just imagine what that was like—three 18-year-olds telling me I had to sit down for fifteen minutes and drink some red Kool-Aid. (Which, by the way? Red Kool-aid at a blood drive is perhaps not the best choice ever for avoiding overtones of vampirism.) I bled in seven minutes, sat down for ten, and then ran away from the super-intense chicks talking about their potential shadowing assignments. Seriously, kids, lighten up. You're not going to get into med school, anyway, because I know your rhetoric teacher and she doesn't like you. Bonus: two girls fainted while I was there, and another's vein collapsed. Awesome.

October's rallying cry was "No Heat 'til November!" Now that November's arrived, I'm being rewarded for my holdout: it's been 70 here during the day, and at night I can get by adding a sweatshirt and the technicolor pig slippers. I'm tempted to extend "No Heat 'til November!" 'til December, but then I wake up with a face-full of heat-sucking cat in the morning and I reconsider. I'm getting way more than my RDA of fur that way.

Random things in which my interest has been rekindled since starting school (and hanging out with weirdos like me on a full-time basis): science fiction, the Plague, zombies, boys with earrings, cannibalism, hell, and the domestic arts. Having lunch in the graduate student lounge is a grab-bag of randomness, let me tell you. Today's topics of discussion were: weddings, how to make the sign of the cross, classes for next semester, overseas phone calls, the Indian caste system, and incest. The English department needs Conversational Ritilin.

All right, I'm going to tell you now: don't expect an update until Thanksgiving week. I've got the whole week off, and I'll be sure to regale you with tales of my Chaucer paper (on demons, sin, and the body in the Friar's Tale) and my South Asian Lit paper (on grandmothers, grandsons, and the developing political atmosphere of mid-century India). Until then...don't let the bastards get you down. Or something.