Hold on, wait a minute.

Tonight I went to the Main Library here at IU, which devoted Life in the Corn acolyte Brooke described aptly as looking like "the bastard child of a Borg ship and a Triscuit." It's been an entire semester and a summer since I have stepped foot in there, and for good reason: it's windowless, airless, soulless and smells like tears, desperation, anticipation and the latest designer imposter scents that all of the vapid wear. That, and the moment I go there, I am usually assaulted by international students eager for some immigration advice. It's moments like those that I wonder how much a burkha costs: if they can't see your eyes, they can't make eye contact with you. Plus, I hear them there burkhas come in dazzling arrays of drab colors, like Leprosy Gray, InfectedWound Gray-Green, Hole of Calcutta Black, and Hypothermia-while-hiding-in-the-Tora-Bora-Mountains Blue.

Sigh. Come tomorrow it will be one week-- VON VEEK!--and I get to go home to a state that has, oh, a frigid North Atlantic coastline, vast coniferous forests filled with the blood-drinking undead and tree-weasels, and lots of hard-bodied sea-spiders upon which one feasts with drawn butter and blueberry pie.

But until that time, I must make do with my decreasing level of holiday festiveness and the general malaise I feel at the completion of every semester. The other night I went to the Bed Bath and Beyond store here in the Republic, filled as it was with cheery Christmas music (if I hear Rudolph the Red-Nosed-Reindeer one more time, I am going to go into the woods with a semi-automatic weapon of Northern Irish make and not come out till I find that damn deer and make him pay) and the cloying stench of hundreds of Christmasy candles, wax tarts, and air fresheners. However, when Keith and I walked outside, there was a cart filled with dramatically clearanced items.

Hanukkah items.

Now, I don't imagine that there are too many persons of The Book here in the Republic, so it begged the question as to why they had ordered so much. There were fancy menorah candles. There were, and I am not kidding in the least here, Hanukkah finger puppets (dreidel, menorah, etc.) as well. And--and here my heart began to race--very inexpensive, fancy embroidered handtowels. With the discount, they'd have been only a dollar apiece.

I bought four.

Yes. For $4.20 I managed to raise my Festive-o-Meter by at least ten points; it was getting low enough that I was going to have to have gone to the mall for some good-old-fashioned small child shivving. Of course, I am not Jewish. Sometimes I say fun Yiddish things, the legacy of having grown up in multicultural New Jersey (Motto: We have culture! We have vegetables! Also fish-rendering factories that make you want to projectile-vomit through your eye-sockets!). But yeah, if I can feel like it's a nice time of year because of someone else's religious artifacts, then I say, bring that effing junque on, tout de suite.

Not too long ago I went to see Alexander with Keith, Tony and Tony's girl (space) friend. I had looked forward to seeing this movie for months and months and months. Finally! The story of one of history's greatest..uh...men...would be told on the Golden Screen! How he grew up in the shadow of his despotic father! How he became a man while on the back of a horse, conquering the known world! To say I was disappointed in the movie would be like saying that some people died during World War II. Three hours of bad bad BAD acting, horrible dialogues, and horrendous dye-jobs made for a near-wrist-slashing. I've never come so close to walking out of a movie in my life. That'll teach a history buff to go to "epic" movies ever again. The best part, though, happened not on the screen but right beside me, when Keith (a classically trained musician) saw that the Babylonian harp that one of the harem-hussies was playing was wrong.

"OH MY GOD! That's not Babylonian! That's a reproduction of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial Anglo-Saxon lyre!"

He said this very very loudly. It went downhill from there. It was all I could do to calm him. It was almost as bad as when I watched Gladiator for the first time and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) was killed in a gladiatorial battle. That's not artistic license. That's treason. Anyway, Keith recovered. It made my heart warm to know that someone out there is as... weird?... about things like that as I am.

When Keith told Brooke about how that woman was playing the Sutton Hoo lyre, she said:

That BITCH!

I guess you had to be there. I almost moistened my undergarments.

While working on this paper (due Thursday! AHHHHHH!) about militant Sikhism and the martyrdom complex that has come out of it, I was struck yet again by how it is that people can feel so strongly about something that they'd be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for it. I wondered: do I feel that strongly about anything? I mean, other than if Bruce Hornsby asked me to; I'd kill for that man like a mujadiheen. And, while I have never looked back when it comes to Turkish Studies, I remembered how much I cared for and was interested by those fun turbaned South Asians. For a moment, I thought: Sikh Studies! Yes! Then I thought: what, am I insane? Time will tell. Hey: maybe there are Sikhs in Turkey!

Anyway, I am off to dinner, then back to the soul-crushing paper. All of you students: keep your chin up. Just think of all that fun wastey-waste time you will have soon, at home, where things make sense, and it will all seem better.

Good luck, Bloomington.

Dom