The day�s pleasures:

1. My little brother Shawn has got himself email. He has written me twice today. I love it. He�s cracking me up. He�s full of plans for making money. He also wants to bleach his hair and dye it some punk color when he�s here. We did it in blue last summer, but we did a lousy job so it was actually sort of this green hue. And in the right light, it looked like a rainbow. We are discussing new, hopefully better hair-dying techniques. We are in talks concerning which movies we need to see and how many times we can go swimming and if/where/when we shall go out to dinner. We are negotiating sleeping arrangements (He REFUSES to ever sleep on the floor. He�s got a bad back he says. He�s 13, y�all).

2. I received the following email from a fellow co-worker today (the Pater of my little stoner helper):

Dear Coffee Club members,

As you know by the reappearance of the sign-up sheet in June, it is my sad duty as outgoing CFO of the club to send out bills from the aforesaid month. We have been working towards a lean club but after consulting with our accounting team, it has been determined that we may have cut too close to the bone and therefore MIGHT need to buy coffee on margin. We feel that this situation would not be acceptable to our shareholders and thus must raise coffee prices for June. Accounting indicates that the proper income/coffee ratio requires a rise in per cup rates to 6.8 cents, and bills were accordingly calculated at this rate. However, there is good news to counterbalance this chilling financial situation (our current reserves stand at $1.10). As CFO, I feel a sense of responsibility for the chaos that ensued when our coffee reserves hit negative territory last Friday. An examination of our inventory on Thurs. noon indicated an adequate supply, but unforeseen circumstances intervened, causing, I am told, our CEO to experience massive withdrawal symptoms and a creeping sense of overwhelming doom when our subsidiaries at EUC reported totally unexpected consumer demand of "Tickle me Elmo" magnitude, exhausting their supplies. Though documentation is inconclusive and, therefore, our legal department indicates that I, as acting CFO, could not be held responsible for the Friday debacle in any court of law, I would like to announce that a discount will be given to every coffee drinker, reducing the per cup rate from 6.8 cents to 5.7 cents per cup, the difference to be made up by this office. This discounted rate will be reflected in invoices currently being circulated.

A final point. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the most recent purchase of coffee (2 cans) from our usual supplier, Lu Lets, was made at the rate of $8.15 rather than the standard $8.14 (tax included). Though the higher price does not seem unreasonable (the 1 cent increase reduced our coffee money reserves by less than 1%), and we do not begrudge our supplier the added profit margin, recent events in financial circles indicates that immediate announcement of the rate increase will forestall possible SEC investigation at a future time.

Our incoming CFO, Claribel Cally, will announce at an appropriate time whether the per cup rate will need to be further adjusted.

Etc. etc.

This shit is hella funny. The author of this report is renowned for calling in sick, never coming in on time, and being generally, completely and totally irresponsible. He�s also the cataloging guru�the man can catalog anything faster than you can say boo. The head of our department (the aforementioned �CEO�) did, in fact, totally lose it last Friday when there was no coffee to be had. She came running out of her office, yelling �Damn it! God damn it!� and she was totally cute, I�m afraid. She�s really cute when she�s mad. She�s even cuter when she�s mad and undercaffeinated.

3. What else? Oh, this campus has been overrun by preadolescent little campers. I watched them flitting about this morning with butterfly nets. Lovely sight.

4. Another fellow at work, a real old-school geek godblesshim, overheard me talking about Star Wars the other day and has ever since been letting all the Star Wars thoughts that he�s ever had (and my friend, we�re talking near 30 years of obsession here) spill onto me. Today he brought, wrapped in plastic, a first edition of The Art of Star Wars for me to peruse. He wrote annotated notes on little post-it paper and stuck them throughout the book for my edification. I wish I could bring him over to Bathsheba�s. I don�t feel worthy of his fanaticism. I�m more a fan of fandom in these matters than a true fan.

5. And this too: I�m reading a short story that Frances copied for me well over a year ago and it�s wonderful. �The Hotel Capital� by Olga Tokarczuk. She copied it from the Winter 2000 issue of Granta in case anybody wants to know. Also in case anybody wants to know and because I feel the need to say so after Bathsheba�s translator�s manifesto (aka a theory of everything), the story was translated from the Polish by Teresa Halikowska-Smith.