Friday Night Fun

Well, we spent Skylar's "Kids' Night Out" at home, indulging in a purification ritual rather than repeating the ritual of impurification. But, as I told Laurie prior to Bean's departure, the idea of cleaning the house of a Friday night is not foreign to us. Some of our happiest times of the mid-1990s were spent straightening the house up to loud music and the accompaniment of Friday-night vices like good champagne, followed by a viewing of The X-Files and Homicide, and, on a good day, concluding self-reflexively with the breeze blowing in off the coastal fogbank. As Kim will readily attest, I'm a terrible person to clean around -- I ask endless questions about what's being discarded and why -- unless I'm sufficiently distracted by sonic pleasures. Sometimes that level of distraction is hard for me to achieve, since I'm easily distracted by minor impediments, being what Kim refers to with equal parts dread and bemusement as, "a Bertsch." Last night, however, I found a means of staying in the music zone while we tidied up and down. By the end of the labor, Kim felt a lot better, I'd had a chance to listen to my favorite album of last year at high volume -- Modest Mouse sounds good that way -- and we'd consumed some spicy polish sausages from AJ's that I mixed in with a still-spicier corn-onion-garlic concoction. Corn isn't very Polish, but I was so inured to my obsessive compulsive tendencies by then that I didn't give a flying frig. In other words, the title to this entry is not at all ironic, though anyone who heard the pared-down version of our evening would have presumed it to be.

Barely Bearable Bedfellows

Here I am, getting ready to shepherd the Bean bedward, while Kim has a much-needed night free of night-night duty and I'm watching the UCLA-Oregon game with a distressing degree of interest. You see, my Bears, the original ones from Berkeley, somehow managed not to lose another game in a row. This means that, should UCLA win, Cal will make it into next week's Pac-10 tournament as the eighth and final seed. The reward would be another evisceration by the U of A's Wildcats but that's all right: I'd be happy just to see my team play one more game. Of course, the game would be during my documentary class on Thursday, but that's a secondary problem. The first order of business is to send the Ducks home for the season. So I've put aside my lingering resentment at former UCLA Chancellor Chuck Young's wily manipulations of the systemwide budget and the sense, stoked by two colleagues here in Tucson, that UCLA graduate students had it a lot better than we did in Berkeley. Go Bruins!