yen told me she's now reading connie palmen's the laws. i admired that book tremendously, and then had dreamed myself in marie deniet's place, but palmen’s women are always very hard for me to take to. i ought to like them more, or relate to them more. they are always university students, in fanatical pursuit of knowledge and meaning. they love books, they secretly want to be writers. they need mentors and find them in older men. they come up with theories to explain their world and they represent this best in letters (two of her books ended with extremely lengthy self-reflexive letters.) they are clearly intps. i don't like them, however, because i think they don't like being women enough. they aren't asexual, no. they just strike me as really preferring to have been male, and uncomfortable with other women, occasionally loathing of their own bodies, and uninterested in what c.s. lewis calls "nylons and lipsticks and invitations."

[speaking of lewis, spufford writes: "a deeply carnal individual, lewis always imagined heaven in carnal, you might say hypercarnal, terms. it was not just the place where we will encounter immortal love, and see the true stars shine by comparison with which the stars of our own familiar sky are dim, sad glowworms. it was also the home of the immortal sausage, more brown, more popping, more savoury in its skin than the shadow sausages we know now; of immortal beer, and immortal tobacco, and all the other things lewis enjoyed. it was the place where feeling would reach its fruition, its consummation. there, when you did the keatsian thing, and burst joy's grape against your palate fine, a hand grenade of true grapishness would go off in your mouth, and send its total message of cool pale green flesh, sweet yet acidic, to overwhelm every nerve in your body."]

cheemun told me he was going to come down tonight and we vaguely discussed times and trains but it's saturday today and nearly noon and i haven't heard from him or got a last confirming email saying when he's arriving i wonder if he's coming down or not and when exactly so i can go meet his bus and also make plans for the rest of the day because i'm supposed to fit in two dinners with two other friends before break is out and i don't want to be in the middle of a meal when (if) cheemun arrives. i broke my cell phone antenna yesterday when i got out of bob's car because i hadn't realised it was on my lap and it doesn't receive very well anymore. still very happy about the chair and wish i had a photo of it to put up. yesterday was a good day, except for the temporary scare when i thought i had lost my keys, cards and money. (i'm not going to pay for a new id with 7 weeks of school left!) they turned out to have fallen from my bag on my way out so i found them at home, to great relief. also had lunch at saigon cafe, a place i like but have seldom gone to because it's out of the way. talked about the godfather movies (bob's favourites) which i'd just watched this past weekend. this really does remind me of ashraf and his al pacino obsession and how he liked to say he's "singapore mafia" hahah! of course, i also remember he said that to our bus driver in vienna, who promptly chased him around the bus, to great amusement and mild chagrin of all present.