I discovered two new online addictions today: First, we have The Jon-Jon Diaries, a journal by a guy from Milwaukee. It first caught my eye because he refers to a lot of my old stomping grounds on the East Side, but his work has much more than hometown appeal. As Dana put it, "He's fucking hilarious." Strange side note: I found Jon-Jon's site at work today (and killed a lot of time by reading his archives), then came home to find Dana's reference to him in her entry for today. Coincidence? You decide.
Second of my discoveries was the Powells Bookstore site. It is sheer perfection. See, I love to shop online. I can't explain it, really, there's just something so satisfying about quietly selecting stuff in my pajamas at 3am, and then having it magically appear in my mailbox in a matter of days. To recieve books and CDs in the mail is quite possibly my idea of heaven. Sadly, I have moral issues with Amazon.com (no link for them!), so until now I haven't been able to partake in online book shopping. Powell's, though, is an independent bookseller with a real live (and reportedly amazing) store in Oregon. I have no qualms about ordering from them- in fact, I am barely holding myself back even now. I have to wait till the end of the semester to buy myself a gift. As an extra perk, they carry a lot of used books, making a Powell's addiction all the more justifiable.
Lest this entire entry turn into a commercial, I'll relate a bizarre event from my weekend. My friend Jason and his new roommate Heather threw a party Friday night, a kind of Heather-housewarming. As it turned out, I arrived just after almost all the people I knew had left, leaving me with Jason, Mike, and a gaggle of lesbians I didn't know. More lesbians, in fact, than I have seen in one place since the women's bars last semester in Amsterdam. The two guys and I sat in a row on the futon, telling bad jokes ("What's brown and sticky?" "I don't know." "A stick!"). The lesbians were on the other side of the vast living room, ensconced in total lesbiana. Imagine: There is an Indigo Girls CD playing. Each of the lesbians is holding a bottle of beer. Each has a bad lesbian hairstyle. And they are all wearing khaki shorts, a bright colored t-shirt, and Doc Marten's sandals. Is there some sort of lesbian borg collective that I'm unaware of? "You will be assimilated... First, a haircut; then you'll be issued the Standard Khaki Shorts (SKS)." It's times like these that I'm terribly relieved to be too post-modern to call myself a lesbian.