All the descriptions share two things in common.

Today has had mixed productivity (this is, I’ll remind you, coming at the end of my day, even if it’s going live at a different point in time). I’ve been working on an essay on aesthetics, and I want to give it to Briullov so I can get critiques and then revise (because this is how the writing process works) but I apparently cannot come up with a conclusion that’s not pathetically feel-good and humanistic. We’ve gotta break free of the chains we wrap around ourselves!

Gah. I’m such a proletariat-humping hippie.

I have, however, gone to a bookstore! Exciting on multiple levels. The primary reason I went was because I made the mistake of doing a search on its online catalogue the last time I had interwebs, during which I found out that they had The Bible of Socialist Realism™ in their collection. I couldn’t concentrate in the library today. I thought, “I could have this book. I should have this book. I must have this book.”

Never mind that the third-largest library of Slavic materials in the United States, which will be hosting me for the next umpteenth years of my life, has it in its stacks. I am a capitalist-humping hippie. I must have my own copy!

So I have, as I mentioned two paragraphs ago, gone to a bookstore. The book was still there! (This was the used and antiquariat section, so this truly is cause for excitement.) I also bought a fresh stick of glue. I ran out of the last stick a few pages into my Collection of Supporting Documents, a project I’ve obscurely mentioned before. I’ve gone through all the newspaper clippings, pictures, and notes I’ve taken and stored in a ridiculous number of places. I’m hoping in the end I’ll be able to finish a work without resorting to my feel-good message technique. (See above.) So I’m putting all of those clippings and fragments into one massive mother of all collages. Spread out over multiple pages. But it’s not a scrapbook.

Alright, fine, call it a scrapbook if you want, but know this – it is the kind of scrapbook that makes children fear the Things that Go Bump in the Night, that causes them to set up camp during those first and formative vigils against the Oppressing Darkness, that inspires me to speak in properre Aenglishe, which has retained Germanic noun capitalization.

Ugh – in other news, I’ve forgotten how much glue stick glue gets over the users hands. I am writing this while having a snack of unsweetened tvorog (cheesy, crumbly curds) with yogurt, and got some on my finger, and when I licked the offending microbes and bacteria off, tasted yummy Spanish glue. I’m apparently a crafts-supplies-humping hippie.