littlelotte

New icon! I <3 Hendricks. Obviously. And now there's somewhere in Kalamazoo that serves it...for only $5! And it's the sushi restaurant! I can't even express my delight right now.

I had Indian food for lunch in Kentucky yesterday with the Partner of the Cincy CiP. It was good, but I compare everything to Saffron, it seems. They used sweeter spices at this place, and Saffron's staples are more earthy--I prefer the earthier flavors. The buffet was awesome, though--it had a great selection. Also, my boss used to work in fine dining and has a real passion for the industry--I love that, and he always has interesting stories. After lunch I finally went to the Creation Museum. It was really rather "eh" to me, as I'm really not terribly familiar with the Bible. It's also actually pretty sparse, aside from the gorgeous botanical gardens outside. I think I would have had far more fun if I would have had somebody to boggle at it with who is either far meaner than I, or who knows the Bible a lot better than I do. The place really stumped, amused, and terrified me. The reasonings are obviously warped, but there's practically no real explanations for things--just questions intended to place doubt about the sciences' findings and reasonings. My camera is full of pictures from it, but I need to resize and upload them. I won't post the actual images on my journal, as there are too many, and because I need them to stay a reasonably large size for people to be able to read the signs I took photos of. There are way too many dinosaurs, too. I did learn some things, though, if you take the God-spin off of them. The planetarium show, minus sayings like "Nebulae are God's artwork," was actually pretty interesting and informative. It was really terrifying, though, to see families there really getting into it and discussing things. In the "Valley of Corruption" area (LOL!) there was a speaker stating a handful of random statistics like "The average parent only spends 30 minutes a day with their children" and "One in three pregnancies end in abortion," and there was a family holding a discussion about these things. Granted, I find the parent/children statistic as sad and disturbing as your average evangelical, but the tidbits I overheard from these families really drove in the reality that many of these children are home-schooled and are being brought up with these things as solid fact. These children are practically brainwashed and not given the opportunity to question any of it. I have absolutely no grudge against a believer of any religion (as I'm religious myself, even though it's not of the Christian variety), but it saddens and disturbs me when people aren't given the opportunity to question and decide things for themselves.

Anyway...enough of that. After the CM I went to Ohio State in Columbus to see MZD read and speak. The professor who introduced him obviously didn't know much about him (couldn't say his name, which you can find a pronunciation of anywhere online, only mentioned him writing "two books"--what about T50YS?!, etc...). MZD started by saying he's been into revisiting things a lot lately, and how he recently reread HoL again and one part suddenly struck him as talking about OR. He read one of Johnny's footnotes (from May 1998, I believe--I'll have to look up the date...I wrote it down), and then three parts from OR--Sam (when Hailey suggests leaving St. Louis), Hailey (the section or two right after the Sam one he read), and Sam's final section ("Ever Sixteen"). I wanted to die right there when he started saying "And now I'm going to commit a terrible treason and read from the end of the book" because I knew I was going to start crying in the middle of it...which, of course, I did. I had him sign the opposite side of my hardcover (he signed the Hailey side in Chicago last year), and bought the paperback to have him sign for Dan. Side note: he remembered us from Chicago, Julie! I added my own inscription to Dan on the dedication page of the other side and gave it to him today. Oh! Also, the person in front of me bought the paperback as a wedding gift for some friends of his that are getting married on Saturday. MZD asked him how he wanted him to sign it, and after he found out it was for a wedding gift he signed really sweet personalized messages--one for the bride on Hailey's side and one for the groom on Sam's side. It was really awesome. After the reading/signing I drove back to Kalamazoo and am now wasting time at the coffeeshop until Dan is finished with work.

I'm sure I've rambled on for quite long enough, so I'll leave you with a couple of pictures--my new autograph, and the one I wrote for Dan. I'd post the one I had taken with me and MZD, but I look stoned, even though I'm obviously not, so I won't :-P I outlined the o's and "Gold" in my inscription for Dan in yellow after I took this picture. The quote in my second one--the "Faster baby. Let'S never stop." was from one of the readings he did. As soon as he said it, I knew I wanted to do this for Dan because it was so perfect and so us.



...because, as silly and romanticized as it is, he really is my own Leftwrist Twist of Gold.

Oooh...

So it seems from speculation that Hailey is one of the parade of women Johnny Truant slept with in HoL! She apparently appears on page 151 in HoL. I haven't had a chance to look it up yet, though, so I don't really have anything of my own to jump in with.

Edit: Finally got the scan on the feed to work. It's when the "editor" is talking about HoL being put online, and then some of the email responses to/about Johnny. A girl named Hailey was one of those who responded...

I think Johnny was a little off here. I wanted to write and tell you about it. We actually had a pretty rad time (though his screams were really weird and definately scarred me.) He was very sweet and really gentle and kinda crude too but we still had a lot of fun. It did hurt my feelings the part about my breath. Tell him Ive been brushing my teeth more and trying to quit smoking. But one part he didn't mention. He said the nicest things about my wrists. I was sorry to hear he disappeared. Do you know what happened to him?
--Hailey. February 13, 1999.

I imagine she appears elsewhere in the book, too, if this was her "response" to the book, but I really don't know where. The wrist comment is right in line with OR Hailey, so it's very possible that the person that came up with this theory isn't too far off a truth.