Another birthday present received from a generous benefactor, after several months of my yapping about it, and it has already had a profound effect on my perspective. The present sat on my desk for a couple days after I received it, and then I came in from the snow late on Saturday night, saw it, felt the adequate heat from the radiators, and decided, shit, I need to establish a scholarly context in which that present can be considered. I need a study in my apartment. I had been planning to move when my lease was up in May, out of boredom mostly, but my current apartment has a spare room that I never use, and I have decided to stay in my current apartment and begin to base my operations out of the study, which I will set up in the spare room, and when my new lease expires in 2003, I should have some real answers about the shattering questions posed by the birthday present.

There has been a lot of work to do lately. I have been trying to convey to the rabbi in clear and constructive ways that my attitude becomes bad when I have to do more than a certain amount of work, which can be measured as 'some' or 'any', depending on conditions at equilibrium. But these men of religion do not seem to understand my science.

Falling asleep with my contacts in always fucks up my dreams. Last night, I dreamed that I was walking through a grove with strange, fantastic architecture, like melted conical Louis Sullivan buildings. They were inhabited by a small group of dwarves, who interrupted their picnic to have their savage dog try to steal my nose. Upon escaping, I was roped into performing an improv show for a bunch of pirates in Alaska who got angry if you called them pirates. Later, I dreamed that I read a nasty review of one of my old plays ("Monks in Trouble") by a post-modernist fireman who wrote in the style of the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, a shithead of some renown. The fireman was angry that there weren't any firemen in the play and thought that I was implying something about firemen by leaving them out. I went to his office to talk with him about it, and he made fun of me. I was happy to wake up when I finally did.

This is the one-year anniversary of my having had a nasty case of chapped lips, having spent two full days doing nothing but wandering around London by myself in the cold, and, oddly enough, my lips are fiercely chapped again from having walked to the hockey game, though not silently this time, as we were yelling for the hell of it. Free tickets were given in fairly random fashion at a party. Crazy. Aw, let's make out anyway.