November is the longest month.

This last week has been all about body-pain (cramps, headaches, bizarre intestinal discomfort, etc).
However, tonight is all about nostalgia, and a little bit of the blues. My cupboard holds a new one-lb bag of untoasted yerba mate, and the smell reminds me of summer '06 and the year that followed it. I bought a hefty bag of sucanat to go with it, and I've cleaned out a pot for the roasting, but I haven't quite managed to make anything happen yet. Today I also haven't ever managed to get dressed, going so far as to shower and then put my pyjamas back on. My feet are cold, and on my coffee table there sits a tiny display of gourds and one ear of blue corn. It is November.

Even Los Angeles feels like autumn now. It's time to learn things, time to avoid going outside for fear of the cold, time to dress in multitudinous scarves, time to listen to the saddest of the sad singer-songwriters. Phil Och's religious revolutionary music is good for this now. Okkeril River seems conceived of only to make me weepy. I wish, again, I lived somewhere with deciduous trees, but there are still dead leaves falling off of plants here if you know where to find them.

I haven't been writing anything for quite awhile, and I'm not sure why. The last two or three months have felt long, hot and sweaty and difficult. First there was my weird heart-crushing experience in August, then the trip home to Florida and to Brooklyn. Then I became a teacher, which has been both tedious and strange. I rarely wake up in time to sit in on my students' lecture. I put off grading until the last minute. On Friday, I wrote my first recommendation letter, with copious help from a friend. Then we went to the post office to mail it, and I drove for the first time in about two years. I entered the wrong side of the post office's parking lot, parked terribly, and my friend and I were both called "cuntbags" by an angry old man who saw my parking job. White spittle flew out of his mouth when he harassed us, the first time I have ever seem such a thing happen. I yelled at him that he'd probably be dead in two years anyway, probably the worst comeback of all time.

Cibo Matto's "White Pepper Ice Cream" is on now, and my Japanese accent decoding skills have grown so poor, I heard 'white paper ice cream' instead. I am still studying Korean, and now I can't tell the two languages apart in my mind -- fragments of phrases just float around each other. "Deh-mun-eh" sounds too much like "demo ne". My little paperbacks of Ogawa Yoko need to be read and theorized-upon. An open pdf of Horkheimer's "The Authoritarian State" sits between iTunes and SoulSeek. I need that tea, to make the synapses fire a little faster in my mind. Horkheimer, then Korean vocabulary, then essays on Horyu-ji. I can do these things.

And of course, Tuesday is looming high and heavy over me. Super Tuesday! I will ride my bike a few blocks to someone's house near Griffith Park, hopefully just in time for the polls to open at 7am. I will vote in this big crazy history-making election for a super-cool smart man from Hawaii and Kansas and Chicago to be our next president. I will vote against 'saving marriage', and for public transportation, and for who knows what else -- there are so many initiatives in California to take part in. And then I will ride my bike down to Sunset, hopefully not getting hit by any cars, and get on a bus and go to campus and sit back while I make my undergrads present on early modern Japanese literature. I will drink large cups of coffee. I will come home tired, hopefully before 7, and watch election results come in via the tin-foiled antenna on the TV. I will probably drink bourbon, hopefully in celebration. If no one is sitting with me, I will type furiously in chat windows and email windows. But hopefully, I won't be sitting alone.

And that's all I have to say about that?