I am watching my Spinal Tap DVD in honor of Christopher Guest, and the fact that his new movie (Best in Show) is opening tomorrow. What a great week: first the Buffy and Angel season premieres, and now this. I've been waiting for this Christopher Guest movie forever. And I hear it's great. Of course it's great. It's Christopher Guest, people.

Man, I forgot how funny this is. I just looked up, and "Nigel Tufnel" was playing the guitar with a violin. I forgot about that. Hee.

I finally got my first forwarded mail today. What a relief. I was a little concerned that I wasn't getting my mail. Of course, once the bills start trickling in, I'll probably wish they had stayed in USPS limbo for eternity. Because although not having a job is pretty fun, it also means I don't have any money, either.

Except the money I'm able to siphon from innocent two year old children... but I'll get to that later.

Let me give you a quick rundown of my class schedule, for your future reference.

On Mondays, I have two classes. The classes are in Berkeley, and are literally two miles from my house. I could walk there, if I wasn't totally lazy. It's just a coincidence, actually, that these two professors have class at their houses, and both houses are within five minutes of each other. From 12:00 to 2:00, I have Publishing Prosodia. From 3:00 to 6:00 I have Keats: This Living Hand.

The first class, Publishing Prosodia, is one that I transferred into. I dropped a Friday morning class, which means I now have a four day weekend. Plus, the Friday class totally sucked. It wasn't worth getting up early on Friday, traveling into the city and ruining my weekends in the process for a shitty class when this other class melded so perfectly into my life. You can imagine that the schedule and location were the big draw, but I'm also excited about the class, now that I'm in it.

This is a two semester practicum, in which we'll be publishing the school's literary magazine. We're soliciting contributions from anyone and everyone (Aimee and Joanne, I'm looking at you) and contributions can be anything from poetry (the primary focus) to art, photography and prose. The theme of the issue is "Nemesis" and the submission deadline is October 24.

The great thing about this class... well, there's many great things about it. It's easily my favorite class. There's five people in it, and I am the only girl. (None of the guys are single though, so forget it.) (Plus I'm a Jewish lesbian now, remember?) They respect me. They respect both my opinions and my experience editing a literary magazine. We laugh a lot.

Plus, the professor serves us wine, bagels and yummy gourmet cream cheeses at every class. One of the members of last semester's staff asked us last week, "Have you started drinking yet?" That got a big laugh. Of course, we have. And it makes class way fun.

The second class, the one on Keats, is pretty tedious. It's hard to sit in a class for three hours without a break, and the professor doesn't give us a break. Plus, he fills up huge sheets of butcher paper with tiny, illegible notes, and it's impossible to write it all down. So I just try to stay awake, pay attention, and write down whatever I retain.

What he has to say is fairly interesting, given that I am not a Keats fan. (We talked about what Byron had to say about Keats-- Byron hated Keats-- and it made me want to study Byron instead. "John Keats is always frigging his imagination" is one Byron quote that comes to mind.)

On Tuesday from 3-6, I have Experiments in Poetic Form, which is otherwise known as ExPoFo. We do poetry experiments every week, which is right up my alley. Deb, Joey, Laurie and I are also starting a workshop of our own next week, right before ExPoFo, since we have enjoyed the discussion so much about our little experiments.

Here's my rhymed quatrain, for your amusement.

Mission District Despair

I was watching TV for a bit
And eating leftover pizza
The baby was sleeping
And I heard him say shit

I've just been adding up our debt
He crunched the page in his hand
We're fucked.
Get me a cigarette.

It was rare
That I saw him looking like this
Shame.
Despair

I handed him a beer
And a lit filtered Camel
And said
Somehow we'll get clear,

It's just a little snag.
But he threw his beer against the wall
And said fuck
We might have to sell the Jag.

On Wednesdays, I have Revolting Romantics. We're studying the Romantic age. Keats was a Romantic poet, which is of course no accident. My school calls them context and author courses. We study an era, and simultaneously, the work of a poet from that area.

The Romantic age and philosophy are fascinating. We're talking now about the invention of everything from department stores to the concept of privacy, to mass pornography and on and on. When you can spend 45 minutes debating the influence of the Marquis de Sade on modern society, you know a class is interesting. I can't really distill any of the concepts yet, although I'm fascinated for the three hours I am in class. Hopefully it will gel later, and I can convey the more interesting tidbits to you.

I can see you're waiting with bated breath to learn about the Romantic era. Look at you. You want it bad. I can tell.

(Either that, or I need sex.)

In other news, Cassie has acclimated.

Our favorite little freak with a beak spent a few days getting used to her surroundings, which include a curious two-year old and an even more curious cat. (The other day, the cat was lurking at the door, listening lustfully to the chirping within, and I sprayed her with water from Cassie's squirt bottle. She hasn't been back since.)

Leah and Jane's son is absolutely adorable. He's two. He'll come in and stare up at the cage and say, "What's going on, Cassie?" Except it's in that adorable barely comprehensible little-kid lisp... you know the lisp. He's in here all the damn time, but so far it's endearing. He's remarkably sweet. We were sitting in "his" beanbag chair (formerly known as MY beanbag chair) and he kicked me in the foot by accident. He actually kissed my toe when he realized what he did. I mean, how cute is that? Plus, he emptied out the contents of his piggy bank and put it all into my piggy bank. You gotta love a kid like that.

(Don't worry, don't worry. I'll make sure he gets the money back. Besides, he stole most of that money from my room in the first place.)

But I was talking about the bird. Cassie's used to it all now. And she's thrilled to little feathered bits that I have been spending so much time hanging out with her. She's got a number of new ways to express her enjoyment.

If I'm eating something (especially if she hears something crunchy) she flies over and sits on my hand, and starts eating my food. It doesn't matter if I go break off a piece of cracker, or whatever it is, and put it in her food dish. She just looks at it with disdain. She wants exactly what I am eating, and if she has to land on the food to keep it from fitting in my mouth, she'll do it. (So far, I've managed to avoid eating my bird. Yay me.)

If I'm not eating anything, she flies over and nibbles on my arm hair.

On the (infrequent) occasions that I am doing homework, she likes to sit on top of my book, notebook or what have you, and nibble holes in it. She has an oral fixation, I think. And now all my books have chunks taken out of them, and my carpet is strewn with little bits of nibbled off paper.

If I'm laying on my stomach, she marches around on my butt. If I am sitting up, she lands on my head. If I move her to my shoulder, she hops to one boob, then the next boob, then to my other shoulder. Then she starts eating my hair.

She's constantly chirping and twittering. Particularly at 7:00 in the morning, which I find completely charming. She's really spectacular at 7:00 in the morning. You should hear her. No, really. Let me put her in your room at 7:00 some morning, and allow her to wake you up with her extremely fucking loud parakeet noises. It's fun!

I got revenge on her the other day, though. She was sitting on my keyboard, and I reached my hand up to do something, and I startled her. She didn't fly away, she just hopped up in the air about six inches, and landed right back on the keyboard again, typing a single "n" in the process.

For some reason, that little "n" was very funny.

She eats my necklaces. She pecks at my toes. Occasionally she nibbles on my ear, and it tickles, until she attacks my neck with a bloodthirsty eagerness. She looks fluffy and innocent, but somewhere, deep down, she's an evil Alfred Hitchock bird of death. I just know it.

Everyone has high expectations for me and god knows I have high expectations for myself, but around every corner seems to be a closed door, a dead end.