Okay, a quick summary so I can get on to two more pressing points: Seth and I saw Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle in early August, which is the most convincing peer pressure I've ever seen to smoke pot. I have never smoked pot, and I can't imagine I would write about it online if I did - but Harold and Kumar is populated with nerdy, otherwise upstanding, externally successful potheads, and I have to admit the idea of drug use and people like my friends coexisting is compelling. I had actually gotten over this temptation (it was around August 5 that I saw the movie) until I watched The Breakfast Club, something I hadn't seen since childhood, at Seth's house the other day. In an expression of inter-caste unity, the prom queen, jock, geek, and two varieties of troubled teen smoke up together and laughingly or tearfully tell their secrets. I want the transcendent comradery that only illicit substances can bring.


Also, Seth was sick the other day, so I kept him company watching the Olympics. We commentated like during the DNC, and Seth transcribed ridiculous forced/mixed metaphors and awkward turns of phrase from the former-gymnast pundit. Unlike during the DNC, Seth was wearing a ratty bathrobe and made periodic moans or spasmodic contortions to indicate sickness. "I feel like death," he said.

"What are your other symptoms, besides feeling like death?" I said, trying to be helpful.

He felt better the following day, and I've continued to watch the Olympics, sometimes with him and sometimes alone. More than anything else, the gymnastics reminds me of an unfortunate period in my childhood when a neighbor family "watched" my sister and me before school and left us essentially unattended. Along with their two daughters, we decided to teach ourselves to do flips - which we accomplished by standing on their parents' bureau, across from the double bed, and launching ourselves in the air between the pieces of furniture, ideally landing on our feet or backs on the bed (versus the carpet, or the footboard, or whatever). I spent a long time teaching myself to do flips off the diving board at the public pool, with less consistent success (which is okay, because failure on the bed might have paralyzed me), but there's really nothing like the sensation of turning head-over-heels in open air. I did gymnastics for five or six years, and I miss that ease and motility. My sedentary body feels like such a burden now.


Anyway, Dave P. came back to town from Russian immersion at Middlebury, and a gathering was held in his honor on Wednesday. He had a basement full of Duplos and other exciting toys. I think if my social interaction never matures beyond this point (which it presumably will), I can be content - participating when I'm able to do so authoritatively, and otherwise finding sinister Duplos like the frowny face block and what looked like a guardtower and a microwave. I wasn't alone in my immaturity: GPaul composed a kinky limerick on Tara's behalf, she did his hair and attempted to draw various anatomical features on his leg (the boys are distressingly better at that than we are), and a contingent disappeared for a long time looking for popsicles. Yesterday, I experienced far more bombastic crassness when my family saw The Producers at the Kennedy Center. Some of the jokes I could have done without, but it was well worth it to see chorus girls and boys cheerfully dancing in a swastika formation (with gay-Hitler somewhere therein). [Broken into two posts for your scanning convenience.]