So, it's my birthday. whoop-dee-fucking-doo-doo. 28 years old. i never do much of anything for my birthday. worked from 9am-10pm, just about continuously, not stopping once except to go get lunch (which was paid for by my friend Dwayne, who was also nice enough to buy me a box set of Horowitz CDs (which I already have, but that's ok, i can return it for SOMETHING NICE).

Had lunch in one of the restaurants that looks out onto the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and talked about Citizen Kane, Quentin Tarentino, other things.

The Horowitz CDs were wrapped with pages of the Manhattan White Pages. Before unwrapping the gift, I perused the phonebook listings, wondering if there was something he was trying to tell me with his choice of phonebook page, which was from the 'V' section, and included listings for several Vein Doctors. I happen to have very bulbous veins in my arms, and when I pointed out that he had wrapped this thing with the page that had the complete listing of vein surgeons in Manhattan, I proceeded to demonstrate that I can do something really gross with the veins in my arms (I almost said "farms in my vein"). Here is a Windows .avi video file {662k}) of what I can do with my veins; the gurlz just love it.

On further reflection, I don't think there was any hidden meaning, and he thought I was being strange, but fortunately he's one of the people out here who tolerate this sort of thing. There are plenty of people who do not.

So it's been a busy week, these past several days. So much to do, places to go, people to see, hearts to break.

I've been spending quite a bit of time looking at text, you know just looking at it and trying to understand how it communicates. Words start to look like wire to me after a while, all of them bent and twisted into shape like the plumbing of some demented mansion. But text is, if touched just so, all we really have to communicate, and after all the spinning cubes have spun their last spin, text is all there is.

Most text is lackluster, and this particular stretch of type is certainly no acception, but I'm hoping to develop my understanding of this stuff. Maybe I'll take a course in typography. That way I could learn about something that interests me, and meet a lot of elderly people.

There's a rare books store over on Madison Avenue that has a course in bookbinding. I've been thinking about doing that for quite a while now.