An Eventful Evening (I of II): Catching Up.

The other night I visited my one (black) friend who works at the main library on Sunday nights, though at the science library, since I’m never on campus on Sundays anymore.

I told her about the Dutch tradition of having a guy in blackface accompany their version of Santa Claus, and she just shook her head and was like, “What message does that send to the children?”, and she repeated those same words again after I told her that my one Dutch friend had said that he remembers the guy who was in blackface pretending to be stupid and talking Dutch all wrong.

Also, when I google-image searched “zwarte piet” and we scrolled through page after page of happy Dutch people of all ages dressed in blackface, she just pursed her lips all seriously and kept going “mmmm-mmmmm-mmmm”.

After that, we caught up some, and she told me about one time her friend dreamt of rats and called her to ask what it meant, and she was like, “It means you play 929 in the lotto tonight” (her friend’s birthday was September 29^th). Her friend didn’t, but she did, and she won $300.

“I told you you should have played those numbers,” she told her friend afterwards.

I then brought up the dream book of Artemidorus from the 2^nd c. and how he had this whole book of how you interpret dreams, and she seemed interested, so I googled him and searched the hits till I found excerpts of his writings in English.

“This is all very interesting,” she was like, glancing over the excerpts, “but I don’t see any numbers!”

...later she also was saying the bathroom had stuff on the toilet seat that she had to wipe off with some toilet paper, and when I asked her if she meant piss or shit, she was like, "The latter," and proceeded to ask me if the men's room in the library was usually dirty like that... I told her it wasn't, and then regaled her about this shit I took a couple weeks ago where it was really really voluminous and watery, and sprayed down so hard that it splashed back up all over my ass, and when I got up shit-smelling brown water was running down onto my lower buttocks and legs... "[my name], you crazy," she was like, laughing...