Happy Halloween 2024

Every day for the last fortnight my FitBit has given me a score of Readiness on a scale of 0-100, and usually I'm in the 60's, but I'd been as high as the 70's and as low as the 20's. This is all based on my sleep quality the night before and my resting heart rate. To my surprise, yesterday I had a perfect score, so I was expecting to feel twenty years younger, but in fact I just felt good... for my age. Today - another perfect score! Let's see if I can make it three in a row tomorrow... Yesterday evening as I waited for the shuttle, I glanced at my FitBit to see the time, and it said it was 5:11 and I'd gone 5.11 miles. I have no idea how to do a screenshot of it, so I pulled out my phone to take a photo... and then it was 5:12, so the moment was ruined.

Today was very strange. There were cops just hanging out all along the shuttle's route to campus, but that was probably because a presidential candidate had come to town and was heading for the airport soon. Then on the chalkboard speech bubbles on my floor, someone had written a joke in German, which my coworker and I figured out said, "What does a clown do in the office? Faxes!" Ha ha? I said maybe it's a terrible pun in German, so I asked a grad student (whose first language is English), and he said, "That's just the German sense of humor - the anti-joke. Like, 'How do you make a clown cry? You shoot him.'" I said, "But that's funny! Of course, I have a very dark sense of humor..." and he said, "They would say, 'What does a vampire do in the office? Make copies!'" I was not convinced, so I asked another grad student who is a native speaker, and she said it's a pun because "faxen" can mean sending a fax or clowning around. Now I can't decide which interpretation is worse, because they're both so bad.

Meanwhile, Travalon was going through the stuff that has been in the storage shed for the last decade, and he found some paintings I had done many years ago. Here is "Cat with a Saxophone," featuring Dr. Thelonius Mingus:

I did that one when I was nineteen. Here is one I did when I was twenty, based on a poem that I had pretentiously titled "Untitled" and had written in high school:

Aimless I wander through fields of silk,

The honey-touched zephyrs are flowing with milk

As midnight-black mountains shed petal-soft tears,

The sweet scent of ivory rings in my ears.

Golden the evening and silver the night

As I gaze at the world with song-colored sight;

Velvet and gauze are her jewel-strewn skies,

Their unknown eternities burn in my eyes.

Up a steep valley a waterfall climbs

To a temple all lit with the laughter of chimes,

Where fountains of flowers dance through the days,

And waves of bright Aprils blossom to Mays.

I stand here this moment in wonder and bliss,

My memory lingers with thoughts of your kiss,

And of God and His angels I ask only this:

That I spend forever with you.

I told Travalon that he must be the dragon in that painting, because I wrote the poem for a short-lived high school romance, but at the time I painted the painting, I had no idea who the man would be, so I just painted a dragon. He seemed pleased with that. 

Okay, so not much about this post has to do with Halloween. I guess you can imagine Travalon in a dragon costume or something. My outfit in the painting is, in fact, based on a Halloween costume of a sexy devil that I had back in the day. So there you go - a Halloween connection.

Famous Hat