And, inspired by the power of the thing, he drew this lovely portrait:

From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel:

“Not long after I gave up any effort to concentrate on thinking, all kinds of fragmentary memories began to visit me. They arrived in silence, like water slowly filling an underground cavern. Places I had gone, people I had met, wounds I had received, conversations I had had, things I had bought, things I had lost: I was able to recall them all with great vividness and in amazing detail. I thought of houses and apartments in which I had lived. I thought of their windows and closets and furniture and lighting fixtures. I thought of teachers and professors I had had, all the way from elementary school to college. Few if any of these memories had any connection with each other. They were minute and meaningless and came in no chronological order. Now and then, my recollections would be interrupted by another painful wave of hunger. But each memory was incredibly vivid, jolting me physically with the force of a tornado.” (266-7)

“It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.” (460-1)

“Eight soldiers marched four Chinese men ahead of them at bayonet point–young men, perhaps twenty years old, wearing baseball uniforms and with their hands tied behind their backs. The black-and-blue marks on their faces made it obvious they had been severely beaten. The right eye of one man was swollen almost shut, and the bleeding lips of another had stained his baseball shirt bright red. The shirtfronts had nothing written on them, but there were small rectangles where the name patches had been torn off. The numbers on their backs were 1, 4, 7, and 9. The veterinarian could not begin to imagine why, at such a time of crisis, four young Chinese men would be wearing baseball uniforms, or why they had been so badly beaten and dragged here by Japanese troops. The scene looked like something not of this world–a painting by a mental patient.” (512)

Editing pictures for an infant study, drinking a lot of coffee, tapping my feet, and bobbing my head on the cheesiest of cheesy days. Sometimes everything seems really perverse and strange. I should be popping pink bubble gum bubbles. Wearing pigtails. Hula hooping. And maybe none of this makes sense.

I have had very bad luck with the mail system this week. A few things I mailed for Valentine’s didn’t yet arrive, and I just found out a shirt I made and mailed to my brother almost a month ago never got there. Also, a package I mailed myself from New Orleans lost its label and has been officially listed as missing. It had Christmas presents and things from when I was a kid in it. Luckily, I don’t really remember specifics, or I might be sad. I’m thinking it’s still not reliable to mail things to and from New Orleans.

Oh, pretty baby. This feeling I just can’t hide. You got me mysti-fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiii-iiiiiiiied!

Update: I’ve moved on to the best band in the history of five years ago, the Murder City Devils. So romantic! (That sentence didn’t make sense.) Yes it did.

I found this thing while searching for unnameable objects. My best guess is that it’s a napkin holder converted into a lamp converted into a robot lamp.

But it’s cute, yeah?

It won’t work for my purposes because it has a face and babies show a bias to look toward faces, but I didn’t want it to have been discovered in vein, so yes! Posting it now.

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Awesome.