Today I Learned

that Hillary is terrified not to smile and seem easy-going. She thinks she can't have a scowly moment, she's trying so hard to seem likable. It's painful to watch, but she's a fighter. It's just grueling that you have to fight with every muscle of your facial features.

Obama, as many men are, is more comfortable simply being himself.

Today I Learned

Today I learned one way to lower the earth's temperature is to provide some shade from the sun.

Suck on that, David Hasselhoff!

Today I Learned

Today I learned there are limits to my patience with The Awkward Age. So I turned to E! 10 Most Sensational Hollywood Meltdowns.

I knew about all of them already. Except David Hasselhoff. I guess he'd told his daughter to videotape him if he ever got out-of-control drunk so he could know about it. She obeyed him and it ended up all over the Internet.

Oh and I learned that Paul Mooney, a funny guy from Chappelle's Show, thinks Michael Richards was just having a fit -- that his racist outburst wasn't his real feelings. Oh and, Michael Richards is on a spiritual retreat in Cambodia.

Today I Learned

Today I learned you can read just about anything rather than face reality. Even The Awkward Age by Henry James.

Today I Learned

Today I learned Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is a miracle.

Yesterday I learned The Awkward Age by Henry James is super-hard to get into.

The day before that, I learned that stuff about soy milk.

I think that was that day.

Yesterday I Learned

that the new anxiety about food (other than whether or not you have any) will be how far it was grown from where you are eating it, rather than the pesticide thing.

Today I learned soy milk is unpleasant in coffee, separating into little tiny pieces that look like curd-beginnings. The nice coffeeshop guy showed me that it's normal for soy milk to do that, but I still felt queasy after I drank my coffee.

Today I Also Learned

that the family who walk on all fours, in southern Turkey, that the ones on all fours are quite happy-seeming. Also it seems like their behavior may be a result of a very isolated, impoverished upbringing where no one had time to help them get from the crawling-on-all-fours stage to walking upright. Though they all appear to have some degree of brain impairment that contributes to their physical problems. But the scientists who were there to study them gave them some parallel bars to try walking upright with and they did so, seeming very joyful at the opportunity.

It was fascinating to hear the talking heads disputing whether this was a genetic condition or an example of devolution or a socially induced problem. I kept imagining one of the scientists' voices fading away while a voiceover narrated: "Men like this tend to speak with great authority while hiding feelings which eventually become inaccessible and the source of chronic problems ... "

Quite frankly, the quadripeds living in a hut in Southern Turkey with loving parents and a nice dog seemed as viable humans as the parade of experts discussing them.

I've been drinking.

Today I Learned

that you can't win. You can't fucking win.

I only have one day of work this week -- only had two last week. So after calling temp agencies till 1:30 I went out to get groceries and missed a call offering me work tonight.

I know: You shouldn't have gone to get groceries! Sit by the phone, don't ever move!

Actually, the real problem is I don't have a cell phone anymore. Gave it up. Too pissed at Verizon. It's stupid though. You can't operate without one. Try calling friends from a payphone in a high wind in midtown when their area code is some frickin thing from Florida.

Actually the truth is I just couldn't pay the phone bill for the cell phone.

The real problem is I don't face reality when it comes to my finances, according to my therapist.

Maybe a more basic problem is continuing to go to therapy even when you're barely getting by. Yet when you point this out to your therapist, they never want you to quit. They just want you to face what a mess you made.

But the bedrock problem is no one ever comes to my rescue!

Nee-ah, nee-ah. (siren noise)

Today I Learned

that we have tiny bones in our ears that are remnants of the fish that we all came from.

Today I Annoyedly Learned

that early-music composers didn't write in regular time signatures so when we put their music into regular notation the rhythm is all over the place and you can't get it! No matter what you do!

This is driving me crazy.

Today I Learned

that Borges's mother lived till she was 99. The guy just couldn't catch a break. He didn't rebel against her until after she was dead -- when he was in his 60s. He'd suffered many rejections in love and even made an unhappy marriage just because his mother thought he needed someone to look after him, after she died. Incredibly, Borges did find love in his 60s. But overall he had a miserable life.

The descriptions of his stories still make me burst out laughing. In one, a man with a scar on his face relates the story of being pursued and stabbed until it slowly becomes apparent that in fact he was the one who did the stabbing, and he's posing as his own victim.

It makes sense that Borges wrote stories that lead into snarls, doubling and repetitions rather than outward to otherness. It's what his inner life seemed to have been like. But should that be known? Reading biographies is a bit dicey since you don't really want to know a writer you revere is a weirdo, coward, drunkard or wife abuser (those last two apply to Faulkner, whose biography was a terrible experience for me).

In Sympathy

Today I Learned

Today -- well, really over the last few weeks -- I learned Borges was kind of a mama's boy.

Today I Learned

I skipped yesterday. Today I learned the movie Clueless is still a fun way to spend 137 minutes.

Today I Learned

Today I learned that mazes were originally based on human intestines.

Today I Learned

that Oswald could have acted alone.

But what about those other assassinations? You telling me suddenly three psychopaths happened to crop up within 8 years and just happen to kill the hopes of the American left?

And where does Jack Ruby figure into all this?

Today I Learned

The word "multivariate" and

That "firsthand" is one word, no hyphen.

Yes, I worked today.

Today I Learned

Today I learned that I've been screaming for my whole life and nobody has heard me including myself.

Today I Learned

Today I learned that Crete is near Greece!

Today I Learned

The blog is languishing. So every day I'm just going to write one thing I've learned.

Today I learned Pennsylvania is between New York and D.C.

Yah, hard to believe, but I thought it was off to the side. (I thought New Jersey connected directly with Delaware or something. What do I know? I grew up in Canada.)

I learned today's fact from a funny episode of 30 Rock.

That's a good show, and Tina Fey is really funny. Her self-deprecating humor is very appealing. At first I thought the show was too fast and insubstantial, but I think they've found a good rhythm and it's got a nice, light wackiness, never stupid, just bouncing along with fast sly little jokes.

Rock on, Tina Fey.