Subway Story (I of II): Drunk.

The other night after an academic reception and then another drink, I was heading home, and like two stops after I got on the subway, this older (black) man in really dirty clothes opens the door between cars and starts staggering around asking people for me.

"THIS IS TWENTY-THOUSAND AND ELEVEN," he would say incredibly loudly at people, "DON'T YOU HAVE ANY MONEY FOR ME? I DON'T HAVE A HOME OR NOTHIN'."

He did this a lot, and would lean in and make (younger white) women nervous - some of them actually hurried off at one stop and ran to a car a few cars down from where he was - and then he went back to the car he came from for a bit, and then he staggered back.

By that time, I was reading a free newspaper, and I was on the "food and drink" section, and I was eating an orange I had peeled while I did so.

"LOOK AT THAT," he said, staggering up to me, holding his hand to the paper, "'FOOD AND DRINK', WHAT'S UP WITH THE FOOD, ALL I NEED IS THE DRINK!", and then he said something about me laying my orange peels on top of my bag (I did that because I didn't have anywhere to put them and I didn't want to litter), but I could do that because it was my bag.

After he yelled at me for like 3-4 minutes, he staggered over and sat down, and some (younger white) woman who had gotten on a few stops earlier was laughing out of nervousness, and this fat late 40s (white) gay guy was looking at him out of the corner of his eye...

At some point the guy got up again, and a bottle of whiskey in a black bag fell out of his coat, and he started yelling and moaning and being like, "OH NO OH NO, THAT GONNA GIVE ME A STROKE!", and as he picked up the bottle, he pointed to all the whiskey that had seeped out onto the floor, while the gay (white) guy shook his head and grimaced.

Then, the homeless guy sat down, and he tipped back the bottle and drank up the 10-12 shots of liquor that were left in it.

Like 5 minutes later he staggered toward the door to another car, and he started saying something about smoking and how he didn't mean to bother anyone, and he let himself out in the space between cars, and at first it seemed like he was going to go onto the next car, but then he just kind of stayed there, and the subway car started going around a curve -

And at that the late 40s white (gay) guy jumped up and was like, "He's drunk, he could fall off the car!", and he ran and opened the door and got the guy out and helped him to his seat, and I felt ashamed I hadn't realized what was happening as quickly and didn't move to do the same. Within a minute the homeless guy was blacked out on the seat.

Another reaction to Zwarte Piet: A colleague from school.

The other day I was at an academic reception and I was telling a(n American) philosophy ph.d. grad student who I know all my various recent tampon stories I heard, and then I started telling him about Zwarte Piet.

When I was done, he was like, "You know, that makes me so glad, because Europeans always act like Americans don't know anything, which always pisses me off. But hey, at least when it comes to race, we know we have a problem."

Meat and Coats.

1) Yesterday I was cutting up stew beef to make beef barley soup, and I got really nauseated and had to go lay down and put my legs up to keep from fainting... I hadn't had lunch, had already had habanero peppers sauteeing near me, and the room was really hot, so I think that contributed to it. I started cutting again after everything seemed fine, but then I felt faint again, so I just fired in the last three (big) pieces of meat.

2) Whenever I wear my overcoat, a ton of people (both men and women) catch my eyes and smile at me. I wonder if it's because people think I'm rich? I have another gray coat that's very nice and upscale, but people never flirt with me when I'm in that.

the shit kids write.

the other day i had to correct like 50+ quizzes on historical personages and facts. i couldn't believe the crap kids write, or how many people obviously just didn't study. i knew it was bad, but i didn't know it'd be that bad!

Me and John Waters.

John Waters reminds me of me because:

- he likes really trashy things (e.g. a book "I was a Negro Playboy Bunny").

- he has a very strong sense of what's just and right, though he has regrets about how he was a bit of a smart-ass when he was younger.

- he has a strange identification with Catholicism, though he does not practice.

- he is interested in weird fetishes / late 50s and early 60s pop culture / cults.

- he has an odd mix of highbrow and lowbrow tastes.

There's probably other similarities, too.

Bosnian coffee shop.

St. Louis has one of the biggest Bosnian commmunities in the U.S., so one of our tourist goals for my visit was to go to a bosnian restaurant and perhaps coffee shop.

The restaurant we went to was okay, but not stellar. I had kebabs in a big bake flatbread (which is a typical Balkan dish), but the kebabs weren't that good and the flatbread was greasy, and though they gave raw onions to put on, they didn't give sour cream! They were also out of cabbage salad, so I had to get a regular one.

My one Dutch friend got stuffed cabbage in a tomato cream sauce, which was much too rich.

The waitress/cashier was nice, though, and when I asked to put a tip on the credit card, she was like, "I don't get it."

"Get what?", I was like.

"The tip," she said, "The managers don't give it to us if you do it that way. Only cash."

After that, we walked to the coffee shop that we had passed by on the way to the restauarant, this ultra-modern cafe with weird chairs and tables and dark lighting, amidst which you could discern here and there eastern european guys in tracksuits drinking coffee.

By the time we got there, it was just some younger people up at the counter, and one guy in a tracksuit with a crewcut and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth was sitting by one of those video machines like they have at bars where you put in a dollar to play some sort of electronic game, and it was a "find 5 differences between these 2 pictures" game, only the pictures were of huge-breasted naked women leering out at the player.

The waitress had the tightest jeans on I've ever seen, and this t-shirt that was even tighter, and left about 2 inches of her belly showing, which made my one Dutch friend miss his wife.

"[my one Dutch friend's wife's name] has a stomach like that," he was like.

...my one dutch friend missed his family...

He would talk to his wife over skype or the phone like twice a day, and play with the 15-month baby a lot over skype.

"It's tough," he was like, "Especially since he's so much fun now. For the 1st year he just ate and slept and you couldn't interact with him, he was a larva. Only, he was worse than a larva - he was a larva that deprives you of sleep."