I was reading an article in the NY Times yesterday on a Ralph Ellison biopic on TV, and I was surprised to find my college alma mater, Grinnell College mentioned. Like nobody knows where the hell is Grinnell is, or Grinn City as it's sometimes called by people who went to college there, and nobody cares. And there it is, showing up in the February 19 NY Times.

Grinnell is a great small school, student population 1,200, stuck in the middle of the Iowa cornfields. Hardly anyone from Iowa went there. In fact, my friends and I figured out that 30% of the school's population came from NYC and maybe at least 50% came from suburbs on Chicago's North Shore.

I've been thinking about my first love Michael lately and it's a strange coincidence that Grinnell College, where we both met, is mentioned in this article about Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man is, at leaset it was when we were 18, Michael's favorite book. He begged me to read and I never did. I bought it to please him and told him I read it, but then we never talked about it again. I guess I should read this book after all these years, because it is a great book. The NY Times articles said he never finished another book, and spent the rest of his life trying to create his next masterpiece. Sounds depressing doesn't it?

I was trying to remember what my favorite book was when I was 18 and I so don't remember those days. I kept my journals from my college years and I guess I could read them to see if I recorded it. I doubt that I did though. I know I became obsessed for whatever reason with James Joyce's book of short stories, "The Dubliners" when I was 18, so maybe this book was my favorite. I was also really into Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter and wanted to have some kind of blazing letter like S for stupid or I for Idiot or U for ugly embroidered on my clothes, but that was a high school obsession and I don't think it counts.

I had the strangest dream this morning. I was dreaming I was with the band U2. This was was strange only because I haven't bought any U2 cds in a long time, even though I still like their music. Then in the dream, I kept waking up because my left knee was killing me and then going back to sleep and going back into my dream with U2. When I finally heard my alarm go off this morning, my knee wasn't hurting at all.

So I'm dreaming I'm with U2, but in the dream I know I'm dreaming and I wake up because my knee is killing me, then I go back to sleep and enter the dream again and then I finally wake up, I know I've been dreaming about dreaming and U2. What it all means I don't know.

I've liked U2 for a long time and in the shower this morning, I remembered buying their album October and Pretty in Pink by the Psychedelic Furs at the same time. October had two great songs that I remember, Gloria and I Fall Down. I wish I'd kept both albums but when my stereo broke, I sold all my albums thinking I'd replace them with CDs one day, but I still haven't gotten around to doing that.

I'm listening to Jim Rome's The Jungle. He's so funny. I even saw him at his tour stop in Oakland. He was great! I first discovered his show during the 2000 election because I got so bored listening to all the political brouhaha that all the talk radio show hosts kept going over and over again. I was surfing the AM dial and I heard Jim's voice. I recognized it from his TV show, The Last Word. I'm not into sports show but I noticed Jim Rome while channel surfing. He was this kind of cute guy sitting in a chair and always talking about sports. I only stopped to listen to him once because he had a take on The University of Hawaii, my state's big university and I had to listen to that. I found the sports talk on his radio show so refreshing after all the political correct BS that sometimes happens on talk radio shows.

From the first hour, I was hooked on the show. When Jim gets new affiliates, he says that it takes two weeks for people to like the show. I'm not into sports that much but I got into the show after one hour. I love the way he talks about sports and how brutal he is. I love his takes on life and sports, especially his rant about "softball players". I think the people that call the show, who are called "clones", are so funny. I feel like I'm a spy in a world I know nothing about, the world of men and sports. Sure there are women who call the show, but when I went to the tour stop in Oakland, there were very few women there. I brought a guy friend with me and we started talking to a couple from Arizona, who had come always to Oakland to see Jim Rome. The Arizona man automatically started talking to Charlie thinking he was the Jim Rome fan. When Charlie told him he didn't know anything about the show and that I was the one who invited him, the Arizona people were so shocked, they didn't know what to say. I wionder if they were embarrassed that they wrongly assumed I was just along for the ride. I guess in Arizona only men listen to the show, even though Jim says himself that he knows for sure a lot of women listen to the show but just never call in.

The last three days at work, the reception for picking up the radio station that carries The Jungle was so bad. Some bible banging christian show was interfering with the signal and I was starting to go through Jim Rome withdrawal. This was horrible especially right now, because I wanted to hear his takes on Jon Gruden going to Tampa Bay and Steve Mariucci and the 49ers. But today, the reception has magically cleared up and I can listen to The Jungle clearly again.

There's a guy on right now from Nocal (that's Jungle speak for Northern California) who's talking about Al Davis and the way he dresses. Something about a cross between Starsky & Hutch, members only jackets and his elvis glasses. The people who call the show are so funny. Leigh Steinberg, the sports agent that the movie Jerry Maguire is based on, even sometimes hosts the show when Jim goes on vacation.

I have a story about a baseball player that I'm dying to write. He'll be a smack talking middle aged baseball player who doesn't have a good relationship with his dad. From listening to The Jungle and listening to sports interviews where men in sports talk about their fathers, all men in sports mention how influential their dads are if they had one growing up. I thought it would be interesting to write a story about sports guy who has a troubled relationship with his dad and what that would be like. I had a trouble relationship with my male parental figure and the baseball story would be a good way to explore my own feelings but as a different character and a male one at that. I sometimes wonder that if I had been born a boy, I would have had a better relationship with my father like my brothers, but I'm not sure. My brothers said their relationship with dad wasn't that great either.

If there is sports guy who's a bad relationship with his dad, I haven't heard him in an interview yet. I'm sure bad relationships with dads exists but I guess it's something that doesn't make for good sports interviews or athletes just don't talk about it. Even Randy Johnson of the Arizona Cardinals in his interview after their World Series win, talked about how he wished his dad was alive to see him win a world series.

Below are the results of KDFC’s most romantic classical music poll.

1. Moonlight Sonata - Beethoven
2. La Boheme - Puccini
3. Bolero - Ravel - famous for being in that old movie '10'
4. Piano Concerto #2 - Rachmaninoff - first love played this for me one night, but then he was the ultimate romantic!
5. Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky
6. O Mio Babbino Caro - Puccini - the opening song from 'A Room With a View'
7. Piano Concerto #21 - Mozart
8. Canon in D - Pachelbel
9. Scheherezade - Rimsky-Korsakov
10. Lakme: Flower Duet - Delibes
11. Paganini Rhapsody - Rachmaninoff
12. Spartacus: Adagio - Khachaturian
13. Adagio for Strings - Barber
14. Romeo and Juliet - Tchaikovsky
15. Thais: Meditation - Massenet
16. Romeo & Juliet - Berlioz
17. Tristan & Isolde - Wagner
18. Piano Concerto #1 - Chopin
19. Nocturne #2 - Chopin
20. Liebestraum - Liszt
21. Adagietto - 5th Symphony - Mahler
22. Etude in E - Chopin
23. Gymnopedie #1 - Satie
24. New World Symphony - Dvorak
25. Fantasie-Impromptu Op.66 - Chopin

I didn't think I was that into romantic music but I own a lot of the works listed, if only because I own alot of Chopin not to mention Barber, Satie, Liszt, Rachmaninoff (who doesn't own Rachmaninoff), Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mozart. I really am surprised by how much of this list I own because I don't consider myself a romantic at all, but this is also a list of very popular classical pieces that are played alot on the radio and used for many movie soundtracks. So maybe I'm not that romantic after all, I'm just a collector of popular classical music.

I'm deciding on whether to continue attending a class on the Book of Revelation that my church is offering on Wednesdays. I have to confess it now, I LOVE CONSPIRACY THEORY! I listen to Art Bell every night and I just totally love listening to all his guests, especially the ones who talk about how the world is coming to an end, the ones who talk about the black ops agencies in the government and how everything is one big conspirary. I totally love it. It's so interesting and so entertaining.

So the first class on Revelation wasn't good, at least for me, because they made fun of all the doom theorists. Then there's my experiences with my spiritual healer/medical intuitive. She's cleared me of all kinds of beings, being who are mentioned in Revelation. Is is true? Honestly, I don't know but alot of those little aches and pains I've had since forever are gone now and hey, you can't fault someone for getting rid of your physical pains.

I don't know. I think I want to be ignorant of what the Book of Revelation is really about. I mean, who really knows anyway? It's all speculation at this point and for me, the doom speculation is far more entertaining than anything out there right now. I would never dismiss the book as a fantasy. There are too many unexplained things in this world that I've seen to do that. Perhaps it's just better for me to be entertained nightly by Art Bell and his guests and for me to feel so privileged that I get to listed to all the wonderful theories that are out there about our world.