April 18 1998, Saturday

I was hungover again today. Two days of hangover in a row are rough, but today I managed to rally my energy a bit better than yesterday. I finished two musings entries, for example, along with several web pages related to my expanding online art gallery.

I

expressed skepticism at two different pseudoscientific things today, and evidently this gave Jessika reason to be angry with me.

The first of my skeptical utterances concerned ear candles, a kind cone-shaped wax-paper device whose little end is put in the ear and whose big end is burned, creating a "suction." Deya, who claims to have problems with excessive ear wax production, used an ear candle today. I guess she got it free from Rebecca's Natural Foods, where such untested hippie crap is peddled right along with the organic artichokes, herbal tea and rice cakes. She showed us the results, which certainly were impressive: several cubic centimeters of brownish waxy stuff. But I said that I wouldn't be convinced that the crap actually was earwax until someone tasted it and proclaimed it bitter (as we all know earwax to be). Jessika was willing to accept on faith that the substance was earwax and, like Aristotle many years before, considered experimentation unnecessary. She doesn't have a skeptical mind and finds mine to be a constant source of irritation.

Later, I saw Jessika drinking some kind of homeopathic "liver cleanser." For my part, I don't believe in homeopathy at all. I know a lot of biochemistry and it makes absolutely no sense. How can an extremely dilute version of a poison be a cure for that poison? I told Jessika that I thought homeopathy worked, if it worked at all, only by virtue of the placebo effect. Disgusted, she cited (as evidence of homeopathy's power) the positive healing effects it has on sick babies (Ana and Peggy are both big fans of homeopathy). I responded that babies are always getting sick only to inevitably get well again and would continue do so with or without homeopathic quackery. Jessika didn't talk to me for the rest of the day.

I

n the late evening, there was a party at Blond House, but we felt kind of funny about it, so we didn't actually end up going. Elizabeth had invited us, but she did so in a strangely patronizing way. She hadn't said anything to me, but had instead told my housemates, with instructions that they not tell me until 8pm for fear that I would mention it in the musings. She also apparently expressed fear that we'd bring over unsavoury types. I guess she (and her housemates) view me as having a dangerous aura because of all the fucked up things that happen when I go to parties. But it's not me and it's not my friends. For example, in the case of the disastrous "Fridge Full of Forties Party," the problems were all caused by idiot friends-of-Chaz who had been nonchalantly invited in the spirit of hippie acceptance by Dave Mack.