George Barrows

            On Thursday morning I worked out the chords to part of the instrumental beginning of “Mangos” by Serge Gainsbourg. For me they don't quite correspond with the chords I found online. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I ate five clementines before riding to tutorial. 

            Tutorial. 

            Next week is technically the last tutorial. There will be an optional session on December 9 with exam tips. Sarah asked for suggestions and I said we could go to a bar. 

            The attendance question was “What is your sad cafe?” I said the Art Bar at the Gladstone Hotel.              We had a lecture review. Biographies of Carson McCullers and Langston Hughes. Her wiki page is wild. They were both from the south and New York transplants. Queer coded. The genre of the ballad. McCullers was a musician. 

            Marriage as kinship, contracts, gifts. Bonds between individuals are not easily defined. Last week she talked about mourning, this week she'll talk about love. The love plot. Harriet Jacobs Quote “My story ends with freedom not marriage.” Everything we consume has a love plot. She thinks the love plot of As I Lay Dying is Anse and his new wife. Queering the love plot. Jacobs queers it. Empowering.

            I said according to McCullers's definition love is one sided and only existing in the lover's mind.

            I almost forgot my flash drive in the room. Someone came after me down the hall to give it to me. 

            It was raining when I left so I didn't ride to Yonge and Bloor. I rode along College to Ossington and then south to Queen. Queen east of Ossington is now closed off for the streetcar track renewal. I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of grapes, two half pints of blueberries, a bag of kettle chips, two cans of peaches, skyr, extra old cheddar, tomato and hot pepper pasta sauce, limeade, orange juice, and a lint roller. I looked for oven mitts but they don't seem to have them these days. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. 

            I got caught up on my journal at a little after 17:00. 

            I finished re-reading and making notes on Sherman Alexie's “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.”

            I did a word count of all my notes for the essay and it was 3625. That's 1925 words over the limit. Now I had to pare it down and try to turn it into an essay. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I worked on my essay until dinnertime, moving all my ideas about cousins to the beginning and adding more as I went. There's about a page of that stuff: 

            “Cousin” is the most generic of kinship terms and that allows the tag to perform multiple functions. To say that someone is a cousin establishes a link that is different from that which one shares with one's siblings because it is ambiguous. One cannot be less than a half sibling but cousins can be removed into infinity and yet still be cousins. Cousins are connected and yet they can be removed, connecting us to infinity by way of division. Cousins are the least kin one can have and they can become less and less with each removal. They can be subtracted from one's life but one is still connected to their absence. This kinship links one to history in a way that friendship cannot and yet one can hold cousins at a comfortable distance. Cousins can be distant enough to ignore or to mate with or close enough to adopt as one's child. It can be a term of relatedness between ethnic groups that are more related to each than they are to the dominant population. It can be used figuratively to establish what people have in common such as a physical affliction. It can be a term of pretend belonging. One can disconnect from family and connect with cousins. 

            My brain got too tired to work while eating dinner and so I needed to rest it by watching a brainless TV show. I had a potato with gravy and a pork chop while watching an episode of The Addams Family. 

            In this story Gomez takes Pugsley to the circus because an old friend of his, Oscar Webber owns it. He once went on a double date with Gomez and Morticia and he was with a tattooed lady whose chest was done by Picasso. Before they leave Pugsley gets some money from his piggy bank which is a real pig. At the circus Oscar tells Gomez that his circus is failing. His fat lady lost 100 kilos and his midget took vitamins and grew to normal height. He tried billing them as the world's thinnest fat lady and the world's tallest midget but it didn't work. He had to let them go. The only attraction he has left is Gorgo the gorilla. Pugsley makes friends with Gorgo and when they leave Gorgo breaks free and follows Pugsley home. While they are waiting for Oscar to come for Gorgo he becomes one of the family. There springs a rivalry between Lurch the butler and Gorgo because Gorgo is better at ironing than Lurch. When some women from the ladies club that Morticia wants to join come for tea, Gorgo locks Lurch in a room and tries to take over serving, but his clumsiness scares the ladies away. When Oscar gets Gorgo back he has great success at the circus showing off his ironing skills. 

            Mrs Page was played by Pearl Shear and the other lady was played by Dorothy Neumann. 

            Gorgo was played by George Barrows who built his own gorilla suit and mostly played gorillas. He was also featured in Robot Monster wearing a suit he made which depicted a gorilla type robot.

            I worked a bit more on the essay but my brain was still too fatigued to get very far. I'll try to meet the deadline tomorrow and get the bonus marks but realistically I might have to settle for the two days of grace that moves the deadline to Sunday and offers a normal mark. I went to bed at midnight.