cp is on a flying visit to the motherland: the gang went to julian’s for drinks and conversation was, as on these occasions, utterly uncircumspect, slightly cruel and wholly unrepeatable, the mildest of which was when an unphotogenic person’s profile photo was decried by c as being ‘a vendetta upon the world.’we meandered through constitutional protection for property and the difference between panhandles and peninsulas and the ridiculous name of the new junior college (y remarks that if it were named for where it is built it would have the added advantage of telling you where it was) and how some whiskys smell like chinese angelica root, and whether j would be offended if his third best whiskey was used to swill out some leftover ben & jerry’s. after a while we found ourselves in a discussion about the properties of angelica root and the treatment of women’s health problems in traditional chinese medicine, fortifying the body and replenishing the blood and so forth. sl then piped up with a story about favoured children and sibling dynamics, for, we heard, when she and her sister’s periods went out of sync, their cook stopped giving her angelica. in the wake of this story one of the men at the table was clearly uncomfortable (we later found he also disapproved of women breastfeeding in public, so you see) but we are too lazy to bristle and only remarked that at least he wasn’t insisting we go to a separate hut, and y, the only mother in the room, said mildly re: breastfeeding: i do it and it is at most unaesthetic, not immoral.
and then choonping wanted us to look up that passage in good old pliny the elder (he said pliny the younger at first, and when twitted for being wrong said loftily that he was only off by one generation), where it is asserted as a fact that the reflection of a menstruating woman would dim a mirror and dull the edge of steel (and also, as it turns out when I had looked it up, kill a swarm of bees.)
then the host pleaded work the next day and threw us all out.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird