As summer comes on, I think the mountains turn into transvestites. This week, Mount Wilson has been experimenting with a hazy smear of foundation, enough to conceal his jagged wrinkles but not quite enough to hide the sharp outlines at his peak. Soon enough, he'll blanket himself in flesh-toned smog, presenting us lowly residents of the foothills with a soft and feminine skyline.

There are more pictures in the photoblog, and there's a new loop on gabbro radio, all about fruit and right wing politicians.

I have this bang on my knee, and two days ago it was a bruise. A nice bruisey bruise, with angry pink on the edges that gradually faded towards sallow yellow with tinges of purple in the center. I can't remember where it came from, but since I noticed it I've been watching with pleasant anticipation for the moment of crowning, splotchy blue glory all significant bruises enjoy. But instead, when I woke up this morning, it had migrated to the top of my skin and become an ugly, parasitic, scabby scrape. Boo, hiss.

Unrelatedly, I've been thinking about serendipity today, and how I tend to rely on it for decisions of all sizes and impacts. I am, for the most part, very adept at wanting what I can find instead of what I can't have. To put it another way, I have cheap tastes. My therapist thinks this is because I grew up without much excess money and got used to buying toys from garage sales, the implication being that I never learned to properly define what I want.

Economists have studied how shoppers behave when they're faced with a paralyzing array of strawberry jellies at the supermarket. Such dizzying choices are a peculiarly modern phenomenon - jam or jelly? strawberry or strawberry-kiwi? economy size or novelty jar? do I really give a fuck? - and they make people inefficient.

The guy across the hall is on the phone with his girlfriend. He just called her "honey" in this strangely oozing tone; threw me totally off track. I've never dated anyone who called me "honey" with any seriousness - not in conversation anyway; written forms do accomodate a certain amount of extravagance - and it's probably just as well, because most endearments completely wig me out.

Ahem. I believe I was muttering something about combinatorics and explosions and technology. Yes. I've also been sidetracked by an aesthetic issue, the glorification of killer robots and things you can do with jagged-edged scrap metal - a celebration of the post-apocalyptic, as it were. I haven't documented any of this, of course - facts are meant to be free, not enslaved by silly theories - but intuitively it seems that attitudes towards urban decay and nuclear winter have been moving from honest fear to campy appreciation to genuine appreciation of an idealized post-modern savage. Why? Because we're all sick and tired of choosing between 87 kinds of strawberry jelly, and we'd rather define ourselves in relation to some set of obvious, external, unalterable limits than deal with near-infinite possibilities and associated existential angst. Or at least, that's how my world works.

My dorm has coed multi-stall bathrooms, and over the course of the year, everyone gets pretty well used to barging around with only a minimal regard for privacy. So I'll be sitting there trying to poop, or drawing graffiti, or whatever, when some guy comes in a couple stalls down to pee. This is not a big deal.

But no matter how cavalierly the guy walked in, if I get up and flush before he leaves, he always always always waits for me to wash my hands and leave the bathroom before cracking open his stall door. Because God forbid you actually see who you were peeing with, even if you already know who they are.

It's always the guys who do this, too; maybe it's an extension of that gender-skewed public restroom code that they like to make cheap jokes with on sitcoms.

My campus is peach, always. The buildings are adobe peach, the lights at night cluster around a sodium vapor peach that's seedy and depressing without being dehumanizing or sexy. Even the sky is filthy smog peach if it hasn't rained in a while. So when they install a bright blue emergency beacon at the beginning of my walks, I can't help but stare at it, peripheral vision slowly fading, squinty blue lines springing outward bringing the dust on my glasses to the dust in the air, the treetops, the frisbee players, campus security.

It's a cosmic connection that can only be destroyed by gummi worms.

Yami, I ask, what is the world coming to when a mall can be considered, ahem, venerable?

I wrote half a response to this in the comment form, and then deleted it because I was thinking too much and wanted a full entry. The gist of it is this: I think giant chain stores, and the malls they occupy, are inevitable in a culture that encourages lots of gallivanting around and resettling halfway across the country. I'm not prepared to condemn this kind of mobility, so I've been cultivating a sort of curmudgeonly affection for malls.

Not that I find them pleasant - too many people, horrid acoustics, lousy music piped through lousier speakers. But they're usually the quickest way for me to buy the things I need to buy, and since I hate shopping regardless, well, hey. Conveniently, it all ties back into local community again - traditional community centers (churches, schools) have become less central for whatever reason, leaving a lucrative void for clever merchants. Malls are also warm, sheltered places with enough open space for sundry community performances, bringing the art-fans in to shop and the shoppers in to the art world. It's all very warm and fuzzy and symbiotic; when in the hell did I become such a capitalist?

I think I just like the irony.

Jane was a diplomat's daughter; she's moved a whole bunch. Here she is now.

• Spread all your things all over the floor so you can't move. Stare at them, and realize how completely fucking hopeless your task is.
• Alternate compressible things with incompressible things. Make your books look as much like clothes as possible (I'm not entirely sure what this means, but then, most of my 6 hours of sleep last night was spent dreaming about Joan Rivers getting a new facelift that explodes into horrible horrible purple oysters and bronchial tubes when she sneezes during an appearance on my talk show).
• Do the small stuff last.
• Rinse, lather, repeat.

Oh, yes, she refuses to take the blame for my many alterations of her original advice. But I still blame her for the bit about Joan Rivers; her and her wacky chickpea substance. Zoinks.

I went to the term's last cosmology lecture out of a lingering sense of duty, and the thought that maybe I'd learn something useful about tomorrow's final. Instead, I was treated to some meaningless ramble (well, there was no math, anyway) about baby universes and vacuum fluctuations. In the middle, the prof stopped to mention that he probably shouldn't be using the word "somewhere" to describe events outside of established spacetime. I heartily disagree. Physically of course he's correct, our naive concept of "space" is completely meaningless when you're talking about jizz from a physicist's circle jerk. But more generally speaking, we use metaphors of space for all kinds of not-so-spatial things: relationships, family networks, this here Internet (how many of you care where my server is located?), the set of all polynomial functions, etc. There's probably a good neurological reason for this, and one could use the ideas of evolutionary psychology to explain why. Of course, one can use the ideas of evolutionary psychology to explain anything.

Regardless, I think it'd be an interesting experiment to run around for a day trying not to use any spatial metaphor, at all. I'm not sure I could do it.

I've done it; I've filled the bottom layer of one suitcase with clothes and crap I know I won't need until California. The tangibility of it all is frightening; I don't want to leave, and I especially don't want to pay exorbitant shipping fees for the extra crap I've accumulated. Other things that I don't want include the following:

• a giant chandelier covered in wet turquoise paint to suddenly descend from the ceiling above me
• a debt consolidation plan
• the eternal darkness of inter-galactic space
• to be hassled by Customs officials about the small quantities of alcohol I'll be underagedly carrying in my luggage
• to be attacked by miniature bunnies

Even though most of you will never see what I'm talking about, for the record, I would like to state the following: the picture on my bus pass is not simply a funny-looking picture of me. It is art. Through the use of bland fluorescent lighting and cheapass processing, it depicts the dehumanizing effects of our postmodern industrialized worker bee culture. It is probably a poststructuralist reading of apophatic discursive strategies as well.

I know you probably weren't expecting this to turn into isomorphisms, but here's a fun and exciting set of statistics problems for you to solve. Start off with the following assumptions:

• The city of Copenhagen can be divided into three bar-hopping zones: Amager, the city center, and everywhere else.
• In the city center, one-tenth of the bars are gay bars. Outside the city center, only one bar in twenty is a gay bar.
• Amager has no bars to speak of, because Amager blows.
• Bars outside the city center have decently cheap beer 2/3 of the time; bars in the city center have cheap beer only 1/3 of the time.
• Bars outside the city center have decent music 10% of the time; bars in the city center have decent music 20% of the time.

When I go out at night, I randomly choose a starting location, either in the city center, or outside of it. 80% of the time, the starting location is in the city center. I tried starting out on Amager once, but vowed never to do it again. Then I wander aimlessly, going into every bar I see until I find one that has both cheap beer and tolerable music. If I start out in the city center, I never leave, but if I start anywhere else I will walk to the city center with probability 0.1n, where n is the number of bars I've already tried that night.

1. On average, how many bars will I visit each night I go out?
2. So far I've found four bars I like. Two of them are gay bars, two of them aren't, and all four of them are located within the city center. Given that in any non-gay bar there is a 25% chance of dodgy old (or young, but usually old) men making me ick out, and that gay bars definitely do not offer cheaper beer, what can be said about the quality of music in the average downtown gay bar?