4:01 PM:

Okay, let's sum up:

Monday: The plumber showed up just before 3:00 PM. He looked at the toilet, puttered around for a few minutes, then declared that this wasn't a job he was equipped to handle, and left. Shortly after that, I left for school. I was told by my landlord on the way out that a second plumber was supposed to come around 5:00, so I unlocked my apartment to allow him entry.

I devoutly hoped at this point that he'd take care of the problem, because despite having a window open and a vanilla-scented candle burning, and despite having a less-than-sensitive sense of smell... well, the plumbing was backing up into the drain of my shower, and the effects of that were evident.

Anyway, I went to school, did some more studying, and took my linguistics test, emerging with the belief that while I certainly hadn't done as well on this one, I did at least pass. My guess was something in the "B" range. Good enough, under the circumstances.

My political science class was at 6:30, upon which I turned in my redundant-but-adequate makeup essay, indended to partly make up for the midterm.

After class, it was on to the poetry reading, last-minute supplementary signs for which I'd been putting up between the linguistics and political science classes. To my pleasant surprise, this one was very well attended: standing-room-only, at least at the start.

I then proceeded to give one of the worst readings of my life, but let's not dwell on that, shall we?

Eventually (circa 1:00 AM), I got home, and the plumbing had been fixed. Hooray.

Tuesday: Library day!

I haven't been able to use the Queens Borough Public Library since this past September, due to an outrageously large bill for overdue fines. On Tuesday, I finally took of it, returning two last books and paying the $73.60 I owed. I can use the QBPL again! Woo-hoo! I celebrated by taking out a few comic strip collections.

From there to York College, a few blocks away, where I went to their library and took out Phallic Worship, by George Ryley Scott. This is cited in The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara Walker, as the source for the connection between the Hindu goddess Cunti and the term "cunt." Walker, in turn, is cited by everybody else who asserts this etymology.

It turns out that the sum total of what Scott says on the matter is that after mentioning that the "the female principle in creation... was also personified in the goddess Cunti," he includes a footnote reading "The similarity between this word and the vulgar English synonym for the female pudendum is apparent." That's it. He doesn't even attempt to make a case for an actual connection.

Walker is toast.

Umm, so to speak.

Otherwise... oh, yeah. Between the libraries, I passed by a Modell's. Being heartily sick of wearing my dress shoes with my jeans every day and looking like a complete dork, I decided to see if they had any suitable sneakers. And I was willing to define "suitable sneakers" down to "anything that looks okay and doesn't hurt really badly when I put them on." So I picked up a pair of Wilson tennis shoes.

The plus side: They look better than my shoes (well, in the context of my daily wear), and they were substantially cheaper than what I'd expected to spend.

The minus side: They turned out to fit my right foot just fine, but my left foot less so. The question is, will they -- or my foot -- break in over the next few days, and turn out to be fine, or will I have to give up on them as being too painful to keep wearing?

The jury's still out on this one.

Oh, and for the first time in years, my father didn't send me an e-mail for my birthday. (He goes with the Jewish calendar, on which this was the day.) This succeeded in depressing me a bit. My sister called, though, and my sister-in-law sent an e-mail, so... anyway, it doesn't matter. Never mind.

Wednesday: Got my linguistics test back, and I did, indeed, pass. With a 65. Still ahead of the class average of 57, and he's gonna be putting the grades on a curve, and this is supposed to have been the hardest of the three tests, so I figure that I'll still be fine if I do better on the final... but still. Ouch.

Public speaking was okay, and kinda fun, perhaps because I didn't have to do any speaking this time around.

Thursday: Actually, this starts with Wednesday night. Late Wednesday night. Like, 1 AM, when I wanted to sleep, but couldn't, because I still had my column to write for the school paper.

I finally finished the thing around 5:30 AM, at which point I wanted to go to sleep... and that's when I saw the bug.

The bug was big. Like, a couple of inches long. Scary.

I shall spare you the details of the following couple of hours, except to say that by the time they elapsed, the air was thick with bug spray (and the floor was pretty slippery, being drenched in the stuff), and the bug had scurried to parts unknown, hopefully to curl up and die.

But possibly to return with reinforcements, which it why -- combined with the fear that I'd successfully poisoned myself -- I managed to sleep only fitfully for a couple of hours.

There's not much worth reporting from the rest of Thursday, except that I need to find a new online message forum in which to sink all of my free time. Or, more likely, I'll just learn to get by without one.

Friday: Well, here we are, just six days from my birthday. You're all making plans, I hope.

And to think, this was supposed to be the brief version of the past week. Imagine what might have happened if I were trying to be verbose.

11:42 AM:

Oh, dear.

So I was just awoken by the sound of a loud gurgling coming from the vicinity of my shower. I went directly to it, and confirmed that, yes, water and stuff was coming out of it again. As I haven't been using the plumbing here, this is obviously in reaction to something being done by the landlords... which means that the problem is further back than I'd thought. Wonderful.

Y'know, I just want to pack up and go to school, where they have functional bathrooms I can use, and places I can study for my linguistics test. But I need to hang around so I'll be here when the plumber arrives. And the smell wafting from the bathroom is pretty distracting, just to compound the problem.

Sigh.

Okay, I don't know how Friday's double-post happened, but it should be fixed now.

The weekend's had two events of importance.

The first was that I had the first of a projected two birthday parties, this one featuring three guests from the Old Country (okay, two high-school classmates plus one spouse), two pizzas, and one Scrabble board. This was ostensibly to mark my birthday on the Jewish calendar, which, as you may recall, starts on Monday night and lasts until Tuesday evening. That it was also the birthday of one of said classmates on the Gregorian calendar was icing on the cake. (So to speak. We didn't actually have any cake, although the classmate whose birthday it wasn't did bring some doughnuts.)

Anyway, this was my first birthday party since my Bar Mitzvah, and that had been my first one since second grade or so, and it went pretty well. Or at least that's what they claimed.

One more to go, that one a potentially larger gathering on May 10th. Gotta make up for lost time...

The other event of importance, which occupied pretty much all of today's activities, was that my plumbing is stuffed up, apparently just past the juncture of the toilet and shower. I discovered that this morning on entering the bathroom and... actually, you don't want the details of what was in the shower.

Repair attempts were made with plungers, a snake, and buckets of hot water, but to no avail. So a plumber is supposed to come by tomorrow afternoon to fix the thing.

In the meantime, I don't have a bathroom. I employed the public restroom at a local pizza shop earlier tonight, but this had better be taken care of tomorrow...

In the meantime, I've got a linguistics test tomorrow, and I haven't been studying. Meep.