Pimple/Puerto Ricans/Bugs.

Last night when I was standing in front of the mirror after my shower I noticed a reddish bump on my shoulder, right at the end of the tip of my collarbone. It looked like a deep pimple, so I squeezed it gently and right away like three-pinhead's worth of drab gray stuff gushed up all at once and just sat there on shoulder till I wiped it away with my finger and washed my hands. I think the pore got blocked deep down, and so it didn't form a head like usually happens with a pimple.

One of the touching things in the Puerto Rican neighborhood I went to last weekend was all the lavandarias I was seeing everywhere. I'm used to seeing fruiterias and carnicerias, and you expect those, since even the poor have to shop somewhere, but I found it touching to think that even in the middle of the ghetto you have people who love flowers. Too often we think the poor should just get by and have no joy in their lives, but when you think about it, they're people like us too, and why shouldn't they deserve flowers on their kitchen table?

Last night when I finally got home and was taking my massive shit -- bits of corn in it from the cob I had had earlier in the day -- I was sitting on the toilet when I saw this dark thing moving alongside the outside edge of the bathtub. It was a silverfish, about 2.5 inches long, so I leaped off the toilet (luckily no shit dangling; had just finished a movement) and killed it with the toe of my sandal I had on. I'm lucky that the big ones move slow; they're the most disgusting ones, but fortunately they're also the easiest to kill.

TRAPPED!

I planned my day to spend a minimal amount of time at school so I could go home and take a nap and do work from home this evening so I can rest up and get over this (mild) cold, but not only did torrential rains just start, keeping me in the library, but I also need to take a massive shit, the kind where you need to wash your ass out afterwards, and there's no hope of my getting to my home bathroom anytime soon. I'm flummoxed, and don't know what to do.

Shakespeare and the Bible.

I've been thinking about one of the things that you always hear about teaching the Bible in public schools is that it's a cultural touchstone for the authors of the great works of English literature, and so kids can't understand Shakespeare or whoever if they don't know the Bible. While that's true, an educational system that taught the Greek and Roman classics was also a given for many authors of English lit and they reference those texts and conceptual framework just as much as the Bible -- Milton's "Paradise Lost" is just as much Homer and Virgil as it is Adam and Eve -- but you never hear people lamenting the decline of people knowing the classics as a culutural touchstone and trying to get together textbooks on that for public schools, so to some extent, having to know the Bible to read Shakespeare isn't so much about the Shakespeare as it is about the Bible, and to that extent the issue-framing in the debate strikes me as at best naive or at worst disingenuous.

Bars: downtown, my neighborhood.

Last night I met a friend for chili at my favorite bar downtown. Patrice was talking to some guys at the table behind us who were saying they were from a foreign country but not really, and though they meant and did eventually say they were from Canada, Patrice was like, "Oh, and I thought you guys were from Texas!"

Patrice also convinced me to have a brandy-and-water with lemon for my cold. She filled a coffee cup a third with water, and then she took a wide-mouthed brandy bottle and just held it over the coffee cup till it filled it up to the top with brandy, at least six or seven shots. The brandy was just flowing out into the mug, and then she threw just this little itty-bitty lemon in. I've never seen anyone pour like that in my life. I was feeling pretty good afterwards. In fact, the black girl sitting next to me on the bus on the way home, who it turns out loves the original and musical movies of Hairspray, though she doesn't like how they took out the sexiness from the dancing in the musical, told me that I better not throw up on her pants from all that brandy.

Also, I found out that the bartender at the black neighborhood bar near my house keeps a baseball bat under the counter.

You know if someone's a liberal boor...

...if they keep saying the words "the Bush administration" really fervently. It's a tell-tale sign.

Pimples, Puerto Ricans, and the Lives of Dance Instructors.

Last night when I was doing a testicular self-examination -- once a month is recommended; this guy I know who's not that much older than me actually got testicular cancer and they had to go in and remove one of his testicles, they actually don't cut the scrotum because it doesn't heal fast and often gets infected because of the bunched-up skin, instead they make an incision somewhere above and go down in and scoop the testicle out -- I noticed a big, ugly-looking pimple above my left nut. I was disturbed, but they I realized it was above a follicle base, and that it was probably an in-grown hair. I pinched around the pimple and then with my nails was able to draw out a hair almost a 1/8"-long that had grown into my nutsack.

One of the things that surprised me about the Puerto Rican neighborhood was how many stores were advertising "Cerveza fria". Honestly, leave it to Puerto Ricans to figure out how to fry beer. It seems like all they do is sit around and collect welfare all day, but tell them to think up a new way to fry something, and they're all over that like stink on shit. Misplaced initiative much?

Dance lessons last night were interesting. I got to thinking that I'd love to be invisible and track the life of a dance instructor for a week. It's crazy, that what they do is just show up, teach people to samba for an hour or two, and then go home. My one tense-looking female instructor doesn't even do much public instructing, though she occasionally does go around and help people when she's not standing around and looking tense, because her job when her and the male instructor are demonstrating is just to stand there and follow his lead. So, she just shows up, follows for an hour or two, and then goes home, likely to stand around in the kitchen and smoke and have a drink or two and stare out the window and think about life, like she probably does before she comes in to give the lessons, often. I think it would be easy to become an alcoholic if you were a dance instructor -- you would slide into it so easily, since all you would do is teach people to dance and then you'd have all this time to fill with tv and booze and your thoughts. Honestly, what are their days like? I really want to know.

Went to the Puerto Rican neighborhood on Saturday.

I knew I was getting close when this chunky, slightly dark woman jogged by in tight pants, a camouflage baseball hat, and some political protest t-shirt with a Puerto Rican flag on it and slogans in Spanish.

Highlights included a Pentecostal coffee house with a mural made of different-colored beans that depicted this gigantic tree in the middle of the Atlantic with its lefthand roots in Puerto Rico (nothing else in that hemisphere depicted) and its righthand roots in Spain and Africa (no other European countries represented), and a restaurant called "La Casa de Jibaro" that featured a big sketch of a jibarito drawn on the sign.

On the way out too I saw the famous 80s barber shop "The Surgeon of Fades", only it seems like it's under new ownership, since it had this board hung up at the beginning of the sign that said "Santiago's", so the new sign would read, "Santiago's The Surgeon of Fades".

Divine self-revelation; Greetings.

Today in my Hebrew Bible class we were discussing how God self-identifies to Moses as "I shall be who I shall be", often translated in Christian tradition as "I am who am". I flashed back to my high school religion class, when the nun was discussing that very thing and the kid behind me said that that's who we know God isn't black, because otherwise he'd be "I be who be".

My new greetings for women I know is "Howdy, sugar."

Oddly, I've given up for some reason on greeting groups of people I know by saying "Hola, fatties" (always a favorite of mine).

Shit/ass/bugs.

I lost my reusable metallic-and-plastic coffee sippy cup, so I'm now using a mini-thermos I picked up in Chinatown last spring. I had made up some turkish coffee and brought it into school yesterday and was drinking out of the thermos top, which doubles as a small cup, only it didn't fasten on right and so the leftover grounds dripped all over the thermos and everywhere and looked like shit had been smeared all over the thermos.

At the gym last week this big black kid who you'd describe as "pasty" if he was white was in there, and he smelled like the worst smell I've ever smelled -- something of an overpowering sickly-sweet Dunkin' Donuts smell, only with an undercurrent of ass. I've never smelled anything in my life like it.

The silverfish had gone into hiding, which I figured was do to change of weathers -- I was thinking that the walls had gone cold and driven them out, since they love the cracks by the outside walls of my apartment -- but on Sunday when I got up and was having breakfast in my dining room I looked over to the left languidly and saw a 2-inch silverfish perched above waiscotting on the west wall of the dining room, just sitting there in the dim light. I smashed it with my sandal. Maybe the cold doesn't drive out the silverfish, but instead makes them lethargic?

I was just thinking...

How can you not love a hard-driving song like "Waterloo"?

Interesting research (II of II): Statutory rape.

This past Friday I went to a talk by a visiting law school prof on statutory rape. These are her observations on statutory rape laws:

1) They were originally to protect the virginity of upper class women, more as a social thing for their families and marriagability than to actually punish the crime of rape.

2) During the 70/8os/early 90s statutory rape morphed into more of a thing where you men for impregnating young women who with their children would end up on welfare.

3) The laws are now differentially enforced, so the people who really end up getting punished besides the rapists everyone wants to see punished are black guys (either under 18 or who had just turned 18) who get caught with white girls or girls who have rich parents and are disturbed by their kids having sex. ...One of the many situations she discussed to show widespread differential application of the law is was how in the south this summer there were four separate incidents of white teachers from their 30s to early 50s raping their black male students, only no one prosecuted the predatory women...

Her argument was that statutory rape laws should be done away with, and what should happen instead is that you just have regular rape laws, only you have "enhancement" like you do with hate crimes, so there's a much bigger penalty for minors (though the underlying crime is that of rape, as the underlying crime is assault or whatever it would be with hate crimes).

Interesting research (I of II): Evangelical charities.

So, this past Wednesday I went up to the north side of the city to have dinner with a friend of mine who had done a one-year social science masters last year and is getting ready to apply for ph.d. programs in sociology. She's one of the people I depend on for social drinking -- when I ran into her on the Amtrak train I took to get home this summer, she was all ready to start buying rounds, though I declined since I was sick from all the coffee I had been drinking that day -- and though we ended up just doing dinner and then going to a nearby Swedish bar -- the glass square-window things in the entryway were dyed yellow and blue and arranged like the Swedish flag -- we ended up having a good time anyways, since though we had talked about her research interests before, we had never really sat down and talked about them in-depth.

In short, she grew up in a mildly evangelical household, and got out of it in high school and college, and was in the Peace Corps for a while, and now she's just fascinated in contemporary evangelical culture. Her research, in short, deals with the fact that recent surveys of American congregations show that more money and time are spent on arts than on politics or social services, even among evangelical congregations, which runs counter to popular perceptions, BUT -- and this is her contention -- no one has done qualitative work to go in to see about what happens in churches forms people's values and how they relate to politics and social services, in order to fill out the picture.

For her masters thesis, she went into Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, arguably the most famous megachurch in America (Rick Warren wrote the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life"). This is because Rick Warren is the face of evangelical relief-efforts in Africa (she says he's on Larry King about this at least 3 times a year), and the church has a big ministry that sends a ton of people over to Africa to do relief work and through that sinks a shitload of money into the dark continent.

These were her prelim observations:

1) Though using development buzzwords, the church really doesn't know development and has really wasteful, inefficient programs (she knows development decently from being in the Peace Corps and said their programs would look good to people not in the field). Though nominally encouraging full-time missionaries (which ups efficiency a lot), they more often send people for a week or two stints to volunteer and build shit.

2) Though Rick Warren has appeared on Larry King with the president of Rwanda and the church is sinking a shitload of money in the region, no one sees their activities as political, and, furthermore, it has not changed voting behavior, or even political behavior (no one writes letters to congressman about foreign aid or whatnot).

These were her explanations:

1) One of the reason for inefficiency is that poverty was described as a "spiritual problem" and the idea was that only a church could combat it, hence their not consulting more experienced NGOs for ideas and whatnot.

2) Another of the reasons for the inefficiency is that the go-to-Africa-for-a-week-or-two voluteers expressed in language reminiscent of old missionary langauge that they felt "called" to the work, and this calling not only put the work above politics -- she said they often used the word "above politics" over and over -- but also above any sort of real scrutiny.

More on Karen Carpenter: Leave it to my father...

When I was out drinking with people on Friday night, I kept asking them what Karen Carpenter's favorite food was, and no one even came close to guessing "iced tea". When I called up my parents this morning -- my mom was the one who got the Carpenters unauthorized bio off a free book pile and set it aside for me! -- I asked them, and though my mom didn't guess right, when I said "iced tea", she said she wasn't surprised, and then when I asked my dad once my mom put him on the phone, he just gave this sound of disgust because he hates any sorts of games, especially guessing games, and he said, crossly, "I don't know, air?", and then when I told him "iced tea", he was like, shortly, "Sounds about right."