Today I tried the Neti Pot my friend Alex gave me. What is a Neti Pot, you ask? Well, it looks like a gravy boat, except instead of gravy you use salt water and instead of a turkey you use your nostril.

You see, a Neti Pot is some sort of ancient (?) Hindu holistic medical device that is meant to cleanse your sinuses. I have terrifically poor sinuses, so I’m the perfect candidate for said pot.

You fill the pot with very hot water and 1⁄4 teaspoon of salt. You then tip your head to one side, shove the spout up a nostril and pour the contents of the Neti Pot directly into your nose. The salt water travels through your nasal passage and sinuses and back out the other nostril. The whole process is utterly bizarre.

Here is a picture of me and the Neti Pot:

The sensation of hot water passing through your head is a strange one but it’s one I’d recommend. I mean, I imagined it would sort of feel like drowning but I found it weirdly comforting—just me and the Neti Pot, alone at my bathroom sink on a Sunday afternoon.

Alex expects the pot back, so I’ll be cleaning it vigorously.

EDIT: category changed to “Products I Find Myself Using”

So I’m sure by now you’re all aware of this game that’s going around—this game where you’re “tagged” to reveal 5 things about yourself that no one knows.

Thank you, Rob Lathan.

Here are my 5:

1. I once walked into a stranger’s hotel room in Moscow and fell asleep in their bed.

2. Ten years ago, I wrote and recorded an earnest homosexual rock ballad. I am straight.

3. After moving to New York—and in a period of personal crisis—I burst out crying at a rooftop barbeque after being scolded by a friend for cutting the hamburger line. Heaving sobs, I fell off a roof-ladder, slashed my chin open and landed in the emergency room.

4. In 1991 I bought 3 pairs of unusually-colored jeans (red, brown, mint-green). I put them in a dresser drawer. They remained there for 2 years until I finally threw them out.

5. I spent several nights in Rome hurling enormous 2-liter wine bottles out the widow of a friend’s apartment, attempting to clear the busy street below and land the bottles in the Tiber River.

Now, I thinking about tagging the marvelous Trevor de Clerq and Gabriella.

I need to shave about 20 seconds off of my Channel 102 show to bring it under 5 minutes. Where will these 20 seconds come from?

Kaveri has been visiting for the past couple of weeks. For those of you who have not been keeping track of my girlfriend of seven years, she’s in her last year of graduate school at RISD.

We were invited yesterday to the studio of one of her teachers, a very terrific guy.

He used the word desemiotize. I had never heard the word but I now plan to use it regularly. It may be borrowed from the French by way of Deleuze. I love desemiotize. I’m not sure exactly what it means. My guess is that it means the act of “de-signing”—removing the signifying function from an image or object. So, for instance, Jasper John’s Cézanne-esque brushwork was an attempt to “desemiotize” the American Flag. Something like that.

This teacher had been “desemiotizing” stuffed animals by covering them with a sculpting compound.