The Benjamins

In February of next year, the Treasury is rolling out new $100 bills that have all kinds of technology and colors and it's basically a transformer and I'm extremely excited because I have been jealous of other countries' currency for ever so long.* Ciro rightly points out the appropriateness that the bill thus updated is Benjamin Franklin's -- Franklin, the printer, who created such wonderfully intricate designs for the 1756 shilling notes, using leaf patterns to make them counterfeit resistant, and whose printed money was used right through the revolution.

I continue to work on the script and to make obsessive lists of things I'm going to do to the apartment if and when it is ever appropriate to do these things to the apartment. In the meantime, I'm trying to donate a lot of my long-unused art supplies to the elementary school around the corner. If not, perhaps I'll chop them up and glue them to things.

*I have collected coins since I was a small child, and whenever I have said I was visiting the British Museum I meant I was visiting the currency room in the British Museum.

almost there

A very slow few days of work; I'm here ten hours and occupied for maybe four and a half of them. I should feel great about this and get lots of my own projects done, but it feels quite a bit like solitary confinement, and by the time I get home I'm too shattered to write my script. Even after several cups of tea.*

I continue to feel very good about the small steps of getting rid of stuff I don't use -- small and out of the way things like colored pencils, old letters from people I don't like, and old issues of Wired. (I dislike the current editorial direction so fervently it has contaminated my regard for the back issues.)

On Sunday, I'll be at the museum again, for a sort of relaxed talk/demonstration about horizon lines in photography. I feel like my life would be fairly ideal if I could catch up on sleep; as it is, I feel as though I'm in a constant state of crisis. On the excellent news front, Rex has cleaned out his garage and donated a lot of old furniture to the Buddhist center; it is obviously a huge weight off of him, and he's getting excited about the impending (but as yet unscheduled) move to New York -- feeling like it's something he can pull off. As for Ciro, he's through a hell week of papers and performing Lucky's monologue from Waiting for Godot, for pay, at a prestigious lecture tomorrow (about translation and added/lost meaning).

*Tea was on sale at the grocery, and I bought so much of it the only way to fit it into a cabinet was to consolidate the bags in a large glass pitcher. So when I say I have a pitcher of tea ready, I mean something different than other people in the area.