Me and a second-career Jewish student who keeps kosher from my program had planned a couple weeks ago to meet today for lunch, but realized we had forgotten about the inauguration and decided to postpone till next week. We did this by e-mail, and I asked him where he'd be watching, and he sent me this back:
I'l probably be watching from home while reviewing Latin
flash cards! I have a quiz later in the afternoon.
E pluribus unum!
[his name]
That really struck me funny.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
My inauguration day breakfast.
So, since on weekday mornings I always walk by restuarants and there are always all these students in there and I wonder how they have the time to eat out and blow away a morning midweek, I asked my neighbor who I had volunteered for Obama with in Indiana if she wanted to go out for breakfast at the local cafeteria on inauguration day, and she did, so we arranged to meet at 7:30pm and walk over and get breakfast so we could be on campus by 9am by the time the ceremony was supposed to start, central time.
At like 7:28am, though, while I was taking a shit, she called me frantically to see if we could call it off or postpone, since she had been up since early working on a legal brief and needed it in today and it wasn't finished yet, but since I still had some Greek I wanted to get done -- I had gotten up at 6:30am and had some pre-breakfast breakfast and coffee over Greek -- we agreed that she'd call in like a half hour, and she did, and since she had finished up enough of the brief for the moment, she popped down and headed out to the cafeteria for breakfast, only like 45min. behind schedule.
When we got the cafeteria, there turned out to be two tv stations there, and there was a $5 breakfast special (ham omlette, or a veggie omlette, or a strip steak and eggs, or pancake and meat) and a free Obama mug for the first 500 people who showed up, so we got in line to wait -- the line was to the door, and the place was full of (mostly black) people in their Obama wear, much of it with sequins, and the cooks were frying and flipping multiple sets of five strip steaks at a time on the grill -- and all of a sudden from four people up there was this short white woman in black with a bright scarf and glasses and with shoulder-length gray hair...
It was her law school human rights prof, the one who had arranged the Black Panter panel I had gone to a few weeks earlier, and she was like, "Hey, where are you guys sitting, I'm waiting for my friend Bernardine to call, but we can all sit together!"
So, we got through line -- her prof kept talking rapid Spanish to the Mexican cashier lady, as she talked in rapid Spanish to the Mexican busboy who took our trays after we sat down and took our dishes off them to make more room; I cracked to the couple (black) people in line next to us that I hoped they kept the $5 strip steak breakfast special going for the next 8 years -- and we sat down with this white lady recently moved from Dallas who said we could sit with her, since there were no tables open.
"Yes," the law school prof was like, after getting off her cell phone again, "It's my friends Bernardine and her husband Bill, they were the terrorists with the Weather Underground, say hello to your neighbors!", and then she asked the lady from Dallas what she thought of the neighborhood.
Anyhow, like two seconds this older white guy with an earring walks up, and so does this older white woman in turquoise with dangly gold earrings, and the law school prof introduced them by their first names real quick, and they asked me in particular if they could leave their Starbucks cups on the table and I could watch them while they went to get food (the empty space on the table was right next to my dishes).
"Yeah," the law school prof was like, to them, "You can keep them, just as long as you hide it."
So, they went up, and meanwhile this guy who kind of looked like Obama arrived in a suit and was walking around taking pictures with everyone, and he was going by our table and two tv camera crews were following him.
"My lord!", this one older black lady at a nearby table was like, right after he shook her hand. "I guess I didn't need to go to Washington after all!"
So, anyhow, at that point BA and BD get back to the table with their breakfasts and he sat down next to me and she on the other side of him, and the law school prof started gushing about my friend and her studies, and kind of mentioned me, and then BA brought up how nice it was at the inaugural concert the previous night to hear Pete Seeger sing some verses of "This Land is Your Land" that aren't sung too often.
"Like what?", I was like.
"There's this one about a sign," he was like, "And how on one side it says 'No Trespassing - Private Property', and on the other side it's blank, and how the blank side was made for you and me. It's a great verse, and no one ever sings it! And there was Obama, singing and bopping along and knowing all the words, it was great."
At that point I asked about Aretha and Bettye Lavette and when they were singing, but that really didn't work into the conversation, I was very self-conscious during the whole thing anyhow, and then they started talking with the law school prof about how they had high hopes for the inaugural poetess, since she was their friend and some news agency this morning said it would be the most-watched live poem ever.
"I hope it's a good poem," I was like, and then the conversation died again, so I excused myself to the restroom since I needed to take a piss and call my mom at work to let her know who I was dining with.
(She wasn't right there, so I hung up after they put me on hold.)
When I got back, the Obamas were on the rented flatscreen put up in the cafeteria, they were just going into the White House with the Bushes, and for some reason Michelle was up walking with then-president Bush and they touched hands, and one of the old black ladies at the next table was like, "Don't you be touching his hand girl, Barack, get yourself up there!", and her whole table laughed at that.
I sat down again, and since I was almost done with my coffee, I asked BA if I had to wait in line again or if there was a quicker way to get a refill.
"Here, have mine," he was like, and pushed his mug toward me, "It's black so you'll need cream, but I have my other coffee, I just wanted the mug."
I then told him that I actually drink my coffee black, but they had a coffee ready with cream in it when I was in line, so I took that anyways just to make things go quicker, but I do like my coffee black, and I poured his mug into mine.
"I'm happy about the mug too," I was like. "The other day I chipped my favorite mug, so it's nice to have a new one," and I explained to him how when I was in Alaska I stole this mug from my brother that had an Aleutiq in full native dress standing on an Alaskan bluff on one side and the tribe's corporate mission statement on the other, something like 'Maximize profit while preserving cultural pride", and he was like, "I hope you can still use it? Kitsch like that is great!", and then he told me about how when he was in China recently he got for a friend this poster from the Cultural Revolution, which had a bespectacled Chinese professor in a dunce cap in the corner over the characters "Repent, stinking intellectual!"
I then told him how I recently saw some celebrity news about how Gwyneth Paltrow or someone had bought this purse in China with characters on it and it turned out that months later some newsservice figured out that it said something like "Down with capitalism" on it, and her publicist put out a statement that she was no longer using the purse.
"Really?", he was like, "That's great."
At that point, I think, the law school prof said that she had asked the Mexican cashier about getting a second mug, and the lady just gave it to her for free, and wasn't that nice.
Like right at that moment, I started talking to the older black ladies at the table next to us, just as Bill was asking me what I was studying, and so I was caught between conversations and ended up talking to the ladies. When I told them about how Obama had wished me a Merry Christmas, they liked it, especially when I said the entire crowd was like a bunch of kindergartners all waving back and saying "Merry Christmas!" across the street to him, and just look now, you can't get within ten miles of him.
Right when BA and BD were leaving, though, he asked me again, and when I told him how Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible and how studying the Bible historically challenges that, he was like, "That's great, and you can tell you know what you're talking about since you can say it in one sentence so someone outside the area can understand, it takes a lot to do that, and a lot of my students haven't been able to do that yet."
With that, BA and BD said they were leaving, and the one law school prof got up to say goodbye, and so me and my neighbor finished up our breakfasts quick to go into school to watch tv in an auditorium where they were projecting the ceremonies onto a big screen, and we said goodbye to the white lady from Dallas who had let us sit at her table, though she was talking to another table of black ladies on the other side of her.
As soon as we got out of the restaurant, my neighbor was like, "I can't believe that just happened!", and when I was like, "I know, he's been on the news so much!", she was pleasantly like, "Actually, she's the more important one historically and was much more in charge, she was the one on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted List."
Then, I called my mom again at the library, and one of the other ladies answered, the kind of hippy one who has long white hair and wears big clunky wood jewelry.
"Guess who I just had breakfast with, Elaine!", I said when she answered, and when she was like "Who?" and I told her, she was like, "You are so lucky, you brat," and then she went to go get my mom.
At like 7:28am, though, while I was taking a shit, she called me frantically to see if we could call it off or postpone, since she had been up since early working on a legal brief and needed it in today and it wasn't finished yet, but since I still had some Greek I wanted to get done -- I had gotten up at 6:30am and had some pre-breakfast breakfast and coffee over Greek -- we agreed that she'd call in like a half hour, and she did, and since she had finished up enough of the brief for the moment, she popped down and headed out to the cafeteria for breakfast, only like 45min. behind schedule.
When we got the cafeteria, there turned out to be two tv stations there, and there was a $5 breakfast special (ham omlette, or a veggie omlette, or a strip steak and eggs, or pancake and meat) and a free Obama mug for the first 500 people who showed up, so we got in line to wait -- the line was to the door, and the place was full of (mostly black) people in their Obama wear, much of it with sequins, and the cooks were frying and flipping multiple sets of five strip steaks at a time on the grill -- and all of a sudden from four people up there was this short white woman in black with a bright scarf and glasses and with shoulder-length gray hair...
It was her law school human rights prof, the one who had arranged the Black Panter panel I had gone to a few weeks earlier, and she was like, "Hey, where are you guys sitting, I'm waiting for my friend Bernardine to call, but we can all sit together!"
So, we got through line -- her prof kept talking rapid Spanish to the Mexican cashier lady, as she talked in rapid Spanish to the Mexican busboy who took our trays after we sat down and took our dishes off them to make more room; I cracked to the couple (black) people in line next to us that I hoped they kept the $5 strip steak breakfast special going for the next 8 years -- and we sat down with this white lady recently moved from Dallas who said we could sit with her, since there were no tables open.
"Yes," the law school prof was like, after getting off her cell phone again, "It's my friends Bernardine and her husband Bill, they were the terrorists with the Weather Underground, say hello to your neighbors!", and then she asked the lady from Dallas what she thought of the neighborhood.
Anyhow, like two seconds this older white guy with an earring walks up, and so does this older white woman in turquoise with dangly gold earrings, and the law school prof introduced them by their first names real quick, and they asked me in particular if they could leave their Starbucks cups on the table and I could watch them while they went to get food (the empty space on the table was right next to my dishes).
"Yeah," the law school prof was like, to them, "You can keep them, just as long as you hide it."
So, they went up, and meanwhile this guy who kind of looked like Obama arrived in a suit and was walking around taking pictures with everyone, and he was going by our table and two tv camera crews were following him.
"My lord!", this one older black lady at a nearby table was like, right after he shook her hand. "I guess I didn't need to go to Washington after all!"
So, anyhow, at that point BA and BD get back to the table with their breakfasts and he sat down next to me and she on the other side of him, and the law school prof started gushing about my friend and her studies, and kind of mentioned me, and then BA brought up how nice it was at the inaugural concert the previous night to hear Pete Seeger sing some verses of "This Land is Your Land" that aren't sung too often.
"Like what?", I was like.
"There's this one about a sign," he was like, "And how on one side it says 'No Trespassing - Private Property', and on the other side it's blank, and how the blank side was made for you and me. It's a great verse, and no one ever sings it! And there was Obama, singing and bopping along and knowing all the words, it was great."
At that point I asked about Aretha and Bettye Lavette and when they were singing, but that really didn't work into the conversation, I was very self-conscious during the whole thing anyhow, and then they started talking with the law school prof about how they had high hopes for the inaugural poetess, since she was their friend and some news agency this morning said it would be the most-watched live poem ever.
"I hope it's a good poem," I was like, and then the conversation died again, so I excused myself to the restroom since I needed to take a piss and call my mom at work to let her know who I was dining with.
(She wasn't right there, so I hung up after they put me on hold.)
When I got back, the Obamas were on the rented flatscreen put up in the cafeteria, they were just going into the White House with the Bushes, and for some reason Michelle was up walking with then-president Bush and they touched hands, and one of the old black ladies at the next table was like, "Don't you be touching his hand girl, Barack, get yourself up there!", and her whole table laughed at that.
I sat down again, and since I was almost done with my coffee, I asked BA if I had to wait in line again or if there was a quicker way to get a refill.
"Here, have mine," he was like, and pushed his mug toward me, "It's black so you'll need cream, but I have my other coffee, I just wanted the mug."
I then told him that I actually drink my coffee black, but they had a coffee ready with cream in it when I was in line, so I took that anyways just to make things go quicker, but I do like my coffee black, and I poured his mug into mine.
"I'm happy about the mug too," I was like. "The other day I chipped my favorite mug, so it's nice to have a new one," and I explained to him how when I was in Alaska I stole this mug from my brother that had an Aleutiq in full native dress standing on an Alaskan bluff on one side and the tribe's corporate mission statement on the other, something like 'Maximize profit while preserving cultural pride", and he was like, "I hope you can still use it? Kitsch like that is great!", and then he told me about how when he was in China recently he got for a friend this poster from the Cultural Revolution, which had a bespectacled Chinese professor in a dunce cap in the corner over the characters "Repent, stinking intellectual!"
I then told him how I recently saw some celebrity news about how Gwyneth Paltrow or someone had bought this purse in China with characters on it and it turned out that months later some newsservice figured out that it said something like "Down with capitalism" on it, and her publicist put out a statement that she was no longer using the purse.
"Really?", he was like, "That's great."
At that point, I think, the law school prof said that she had asked the Mexican cashier about getting a second mug, and the lady just gave it to her for free, and wasn't that nice.
Like right at that moment, I started talking to the older black ladies at the table next to us, just as Bill was asking me what I was studying, and so I was caught between conversations and ended up talking to the ladies. When I told them about how Obama had wished me a Merry Christmas, they liked it, especially when I said the entire crowd was like a bunch of kindergartners all waving back and saying "Merry Christmas!" across the street to him, and just look now, you can't get within ten miles of him.
Right when BA and BD were leaving, though, he asked me again, and when I told him how Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible and how studying the Bible historically challenges that, he was like, "That's great, and you can tell you know what you're talking about since you can say it in one sentence so someone outside the area can understand, it takes a lot to do that, and a lot of my students haven't been able to do that yet."
With that, BA and BD said they were leaving, and the one law school prof got up to say goodbye, and so me and my neighbor finished up our breakfasts quick to go into school to watch tv in an auditorium where they were projecting the ceremonies onto a big screen, and we said goodbye to the white lady from Dallas who had let us sit at her table, though she was talking to another table of black ladies on the other side of her.
As soon as we got out of the restaurant, my neighbor was like, "I can't believe that just happened!", and when I was like, "I know, he's been on the news so much!", she was pleasantly like, "Actually, she's the more important one historically and was much more in charge, she was the one on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted List."
Then, I called my mom again at the library, and one of the other ladies answered, the kind of hippy one who has long white hair and wears big clunky wood jewelry.
"Guess who I just had breakfast with, Elaine!", I said when she answered, and when she was like "Who?" and I told her, she was like, "You are so lucky, you brat," and then she went to go get my mom.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Found a new song with a French middle part.
This morning when I was listening to the radio I found another song with a middle part in French:
The Talking Head's "Psycho Killer".
Somehow, I never noticed that the lyrics go "psycho killer/ qu'est que c'est" and then there's this whole part at the bridge where the guys are like
ce que j'ai fais, ce soir la
ce qu'elle a dit, ce soir la
realisant mon espoir
je me lance, vers la gloire
okay
How odd, that all these songs from the 70s and early 80s do this. I need to find them all. It was a pattern!
The Talking Head's "Psycho Killer".
Somehow, I never noticed that the lyrics go "psycho killer/ qu'est que c'est" and then there's this whole part at the bridge where the guys are like
ce que j'ai fais, ce soir la
ce qu'elle a dit, ce soir la
realisant mon espoir
je me lance, vers la gloire
okay
How odd, that all these songs from the 70s and early 80s do this. I need to find them all. It was a pattern!
Saw my one black friend.
I saw my one friend who works at the library yesterday. She had a fire in her house because the basement ceiling caught on fire from this torch used by a guy she and her parents hired to unthaw the pipes in her house.
"I cannot believe that our smoke detectors did not go off right away," she was like. "Usually, my father can't fart without that thing going off!"
Later, we were talking about soup and she asked if I liked it, and then if I liked it hot, because she was going to start talking about how she always adds a lot of cayenne pepper to her soups, but I interrupted and was like, "Wait, you have to see this":
As soon as I had put in the search terms "Jamaican cock soup" into Google image search, though, and came up with an image and went to click on it to enlarge it, she saw what I had written, and then she saw the Google image search .jpeg instructions, and then she was like, "Full size?".
"I cannot believe that our smoke detectors did not go off right away," she was like. "Usually, my father can't fart without that thing going off!"
Later, we were talking about soup and she asked if I liked it, and then if I liked it hot, because she was going to start talking about how she always adds a lot of cayenne pepper to her soups, but I interrupted and was like, "Wait, you have to see this":
As soon as I had put in the search terms "Jamaican cock soup" into Google image search, though, and came up with an image and went to click on it to enlarge it, she saw what I had written, and then she saw the Google image search .jpeg instructions, and then she was like, "Full size?".
Went drinking with my one Dutch friend.
I ran into my one Dutch friend at the library on Friday and he ended up coming over to my place for dinner. He had just checked out some Chilean novel to read for fun, and we started talking about reading fiction for fun, which I don't do, since years ago I realized that that shit just isn't real, and there's just as absorbing if not more absorbing things I can read that are actually real, like "Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed", the book that the Amazon software sent me an e-mail about the other day to recommend to me (it really knows my tastes!).
Anyhow, at one point he mentioned that he hated Jane Austen, and I was like, "A lot of people like her, especially women."
"That's because women are narcissistic," he was like.
Later, we went to the black neighborhood bar. Two young black guys way down at the other end were having a loud argument about whether you could play basketball by yourself or not, and then started arguing with this old shaky alcoholic black man there when he butted in and said that baseball was America's game.
"Take me around the city right now and show me some kids playing baseball," the one young black guy was like, "You can't, but I can show you some kids playing basketball."
"He's got a point," the second young black guy was like, loudly, and to no-one in particular.
Right before we left, this built middle-aged black woman with striking blonde highlights and long nails and wearing a tight black sweater with slits in it that showed her flesh came in and had the bartender bring her a small bottle of white wine and a glass, and she was looking around the bar really really hungrily, you could tell from her eyes.
"Look, she's ready to drag you home," my one Dutch friend was like.
Anyhow, at one point he mentioned that he hated Jane Austen, and I was like, "A lot of people like her, especially women."
"That's because women are narcissistic," he was like.
Later, we went to the black neighborhood bar. Two young black guys way down at the other end were having a loud argument about whether you could play basketball by yourself or not, and then started arguing with this old shaky alcoholic black man there when he butted in and said that baseball was America's game.
"Take me around the city right now and show me some kids playing baseball," the one young black guy was like, "You can't, but I can show you some kids playing basketball."
"He's got a point," the second young black guy was like, loudly, and to no-one in particular.
Right before we left, this built middle-aged black woman with striking blonde highlights and long nails and wearing a tight black sweater with slits in it that showed her flesh came in and had the bartender bring her a small bottle of white wine and a glass, and she was looking around the bar really really hungrily, you could tell from her eyes.
"Look, she's ready to drag you home," my one Dutch friend was like.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Why Spanish is a trashy and ridiculous language.
This is one of many possible case studies --
A couple years ago, a Spanish friend of mine had a friend visiting from Spain for a couple weeks and they were going to be down in my neighborhood, so I went to show them around, and some of my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworkers decided to come along too, so there was me and a bunch of chaotic Spaniards careening around my (largely black) neighborhood, and invading multiple places -- the local bbq place, the market where you can get schismatic pastries (they loved them), etc.
Anyhow, whenever I show people around my neighborhood, the highpoint of the tour is the new gym on campus, since you walk immediately into this huge circular foyer that has a ceiling two stories up, and up on the second level there's all these treadmills and ellipticals and whatnot positioned around looking straight down on you (kind of like a Panopticon of fitness, as many English grad students point out, a little annoyingly) -- and, since this is its actual name, as soon as me and some visitors enter and they see the foyer, I turn to them and broadly sweep my arms out and am majestically like,
"Welcome to the Cardio Rotunda."
So, when I did this, my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworker, this tall skinny mulleted guy in a leather jacket ("Alejandro"), hadn't heard since he had been busily chatting to another one of my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworkers, so he turned to someone else and was like, "?Que?".
That Spaniard, then, very matter-of-factly was like, "La rotonda de cardio," and when Alejandro heard that from her, he kind of paused and was like, "Oh," and then he suddenly bust out laughing and was like, "Jajajajajajajajajajajajaja."
A couple years ago, a Spanish friend of mine had a friend visiting from Spain for a couple weeks and they were going to be down in my neighborhood, so I went to show them around, and some of my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworkers decided to come along too, so there was me and a bunch of chaotic Spaniards careening around my (largely black) neighborhood, and invading multiple places -- the local bbq place, the market where you can get schismatic pastries (they loved them), etc.
Anyhow, whenever I show people around my neighborhood, the highpoint of the tour is the new gym on campus, since you walk immediately into this huge circular foyer that has a ceiling two stories up, and up on the second level there's all these treadmills and ellipticals and whatnot positioned around looking straight down on you (kind of like a Panopticon of fitness, as many English grad students point out, a little annoyingly) -- and, since this is its actual name, as soon as me and some visitors enter and they see the foyer, I turn to them and broadly sweep my arms out and am majestically like,
"Welcome to the Cardio Rotunda."
So, when I did this, my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworker, this tall skinny mulleted guy in a leather jacket ("Alejandro"), hadn't heard since he had been busily chatting to another one of my one Spanish friend's Spanish coworkers, so he turned to someone else and was like, "?Que?".
That Spaniard, then, very matter-of-factly was like, "La rotonda de cardio," and when Alejandro heard that from her, he kind of paused and was like, "Oh," and then he suddenly bust out laughing and was like, "Jajajajajajajajajajajajaja."
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