god fucking dammit...ok i found a wired computer in the civic center. ridiculous. i had hope that there was an actual internet cafe here but no...seems that they just didn't take in finland...not unlike the us. out of business.

i'm dying for us news...i see protesting on tv...i tried looking on cnn but i couldn't bring it up on this terminal. people keep asking me if we are going to get rid of bush finally. god i hope so is all i can say.

tip: if you go to a small town on an excursion this time of the year...be warned...summer is over and winter isn't here yet so everything is closed...and hotel spa in the same small town called ilomentsi where they are the only game in town for a lunch is code for hospice and hospice dining hall. oy...which means 'company' in finnish. you see it after most business names. oy.

attention organizers of international conferences -- if you are going to make a printed proceedings, DO NOT GIVE IT TO US AT THE FUCKING CONFERENCE IF IT IS TWO INCHES THICK. fuck. now i'm going to have to mail it to myself cause i'm not dragging it with me for the next 9 days. i mean shit...it's almost as heavy as my damn suitcase. that's insane.

in joensuu now, small uni town. walking sticks and roller blading sticks are everywhere...that explains a lot. anyway, i'm presenting in less than an hour, internet access sucks in finland so you may not hear from me again for a few days...until i find a better, stronger, faster connection back in helsinki...not that access is easily found there either...since it is in finland and all.

this hotel's like a disco and it's raining outside and saunas are weird and helsinki is a very small city and my luggage didn't come with me from london but i have it now and i had a coffee at the oldest helsinki cafe only i didn't know it until a few minutes ago and there are tons of boycott american products signs and posters and stickers plastered all over the city and i'm like great, what now, and i'm leaving for joensuu in east central finland, which hopefully doesn't look like east central illinois (somehow i doubt that it does) and the olympics are almost over and i've had way too many toffee candies and i think i'm going to have a drink at the hotel lobby bar because my feet hurt from walking around all day and i got my train tickets to russia this morning and...

please kill me...i'm so fucking tired. i haven't slept in days and now i'm at heathrow where it's raining, well not inside the terminal, but i'm still waiting for them to announce which of 500 gates my flight will be leaving from and it's, oh say, 20 minutes until the flight leaves but they say oh don't worry it will be posted so ok here i am on the friggin' web and i really think i need my eyes examined when i get back because i can only see the flight board if i really squint my eyes but then again i just got off a 7 hour flight and i'm tired and not looking forward to getting on the next plane because who knows what trouble i'll cause there; i nearly clocked the same british woman 3 times on the way here with (1) my bag (2) my sweater (3) my sweater again. i mean there must be something wrong if the sleeping pill my doctor gave me for the flight didn't work on me at all. hey doc if that was a real pill versus a placebo...it didn't fucking work!!!!!!! and well, if it was a placebo then it didn't work either.

hey there's a new magazine called expatriate. coooool. us politics overseas report: a french mag has bush on the cover saying (in french) i regret nothing (although i'm sure he didn't say it in french originally). stay tuned to this channel for olympics and rnc coverage euro style.

ok...so the guy hauled away my dead washer/drier and, actually, it was really only the washer part but, you know, they were together as a stackable so both went out the door. so i'm going to the laundromat because, well, what else could i do? click. loading the laundry into the car. click. throw the keys into the front seat. click. shut the door...uh oh, front door won't unlock. oh. that was what that clicking noise was. the laundry hit the door lock button. well, ok, i guess i'll go inside...damn, keys inside car. well i'll call chris using my cell...that's inside my car. definitely the start of a beautiful week.

kafka is now in bal'more and sleepless is still in seattle and what can i say about anything and everything other than...i don't know. what can i say? change, maybe, i guess...too many nights lately, though, of tossing and turning and trying to...

whoa! a lomo tips blog...cooool.

phone message just left for diane: hey, i looked at my calendar and realized it was august, which means it's been, like, four months since you called so i thought i'd better call back.

that sums up the black hole void that has been at the core of my "communications strategy" for the last six months or so. feel the synergy. synergy. that's so 90s.

so starting next tuesday, 135 freshman girls (don't get any "fix up" ideas, weirdos) will be under my watch in the living/learning community at the u that i've suddenly found myself at the helm of and that's pretty friggin' hilarious if you think back to how i was when i was their age. wait...how i still am? am i any less random than i was back then?

anyway, i think that i'm going to get my hair cut this weekend. and, no, that has nothing to do with anything else i've said in this posting. not really. i think. ok, maybe the connection will come to me later. eat more fiber. or at least look at the box for the kashi cereal "good friends" that claims to have "tastier twigs!" twigs? finally granola food with a sense of humor. brill.

oh yeah...if you were also a teenaged girl in the 80s, watch 13 going on 30. i know it sounds insane but just trust me on this. it just came out on dvd this week. the thriller and love is a battlefield scenes are worth the watch alone.

first off, kinkos still does and always will suck. but more importantly, my passport came back today with the russian visa inside in that is half "very old school soviet official looking complete with my name in the cyrillic alphabet pasted onto one page" and half "some kid messing around with a copier that stapled another piece of paper in there with something that probably says 'kick me' in russian." so now all there is to do is, uh, go. i guess?

so let's see...every time i get my god damn inbox down to just under 60 messages, it goes back up to 346 messages, all of which must be dealt with now, now, now, now. well, except for the 60 i haven't yet replied to because i want to send an actual reply and not just a "hey, i'm lame, shoot me please" message. so something is clearly fucked up that i can't reply to the 60 because i'm spending too much time trying to keep the rest at bay. some day i will catch up and reply to you all unless the email kills me first.

movie rec: the village. you will love the village. you will love the village. if you do not love the village you aren't trying hard enough.

hfg. august. so what's up with yet another friendster social network thingee, this orkut crap..."orkusphere" as pomo freaks with faux british accents summering in some delusional place in their own narcissistic fantasies like to refer to their "network" of "friends" as. oh did that sound insane? so sorry.

anyway, i'm off the hook again 'til mid september with the whole up and back to northwestern memorial thing. so it gives me time to practice not having my blood pressure go up to 3 trillion over -- well, whatever you get the joke -- and jumping off of tables threatening to cut any one that tries to come near me with an iv needle, speculum fresh out of the freezer, or insurance form...and i wonder to myself, and now to you, how do they get those things so damn cold...but not so cold that your cervix sticks to the speculum like your tongue on a frozen piece of playground equipment. seriously. how do they find that perfect temp?