Unexpected Problem.

When I got in the shower a couple nights ago, as the water backed up in the tub as it usually does, I noticed a longish insect swimming and struggling in the water, only it wasn't a silverfish, but rather some type of roach, like one I had caught on the edge of my sink months ago when I went into the kitchen late at night and turned my lights on (can't remember if I had blogged about that).

Lump at the back of my throat.

I've had the worst post-nasal drip the past week. A couple mornings, I wake up and feel this huge snotty lump at the back of my throat at the very start of my nasal passage, so I have to snort deeply and a lot and hack that shit back into my throat before I can spit it out.

The other morning, the huge snotty lump turned out to be the size of a small grape, only gray with brown and green highlights, and it just sat there on the bottom of the sink. I picked it up between my fingers, and it turned out to be a bit gooey, but more solid towards the middle.

Addendum.

I forgot -

My friend I went with pointed out a poster entitled "Mind Slavery" that had a black head peeled and unravelling. I didn't notice it at the time, but she said when we left that there was a white hand tugging at the end to make it unravel even more.

Friday / Sunday: Sunday.

Sunday -

I went to this "African Festival of Life" in a big park on the other side of campus with a friend.

Waiting to go across the street to the festival grounds, this older fatter (black) woman who was standing under an umbrella and selling cookies out of a cooler on the corner asked us if we wanted to buy any cookies, so I grabbed my roll of fat under my shirt and was like, "No thanks, I'm trying to get rockhard abs for summer and that would set me back," and she laughed and was like, "Don't be shaking that at me! You should be glad you're not a woman, that will just melt right off you, not like me, nuh-uh," so I did end up buying two oatmeal raisin cookies.

The music hadn't started up at the festival, so me and my friend wandered around and got some food (a lot of jerk chicken and smoothie booths), and then wandered around the booths to check out the (black radical) merchandise.

One t-shirt said -

DESCENDENT OF A FIELD SLAVE

-while another was a picture of a smarmy Condoleeza Riced with underneath saying -

WHITEY trusts ME
enough to PUT ME
IN CHARGE
OF EVERYTHING.

There was also a lot of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

Friday / Sunday: Friday.

Friday -

At the busstop things were slow, so I asked this older (black) guy who had paint-spattered clothes and was unshaven if things were running slow. He didn't know, but he said he need to get home before the firing started.

"Fouth of July and New Year," he was like, "I'm home by eight," and he proceeded to tell me about one time how he was taking the subway home on New Year's Eve, and as it went above ground by some housing projects by the tracks that aren't there any more, they were demolished, you could hear pings of bullets ricocheting off the sides of the train.

"I wonder about coming home tonight myself," I was like, "That kind of shit makes me nervous."

"Nervous?", he was like. "Hell, boy, that shit fucks with my head."

He then told me that he was painting some women's closet in my neighborhood for cash under the table, and she had a department store in her closet and that he had it all laid out in her room, and he had to come back the next day just to put it all back in once the pain had dried.

Another recent trip reflection: Turkey and the EU.

When Europeans I know start complaining about Turkey possibly joining the EU and talking about this abstruse policy stuff against it, I just say that I think it would be a wonderful personal growth experience for them, and then when they say that Turkey is almost fascist and not a real democracy -- there's some recent controversy I hadn't heard of where Turkey asked Denmark to shut down the satellite-using Kurdish television station there, otherwise they'd veto the Danish candidate for some organization that they all belong to; the people I know are like, "Turkey isn't a real democracy," or, "They think about government and power in ways that are different from us" -- I'm like, "Well, it would be a personal growth experience on both sides".

A recent trip reflection: prostitution.

In the Hague and Antwerp red light districts, like ninety percent of working girls are white (and a Dutch friend said like a quarter are Dutch/Belgian, and three-quarters eastern european), but like well over half of the customers are people of color. Is this their only chance socially to fuck a white girl? I wouldn't doubt it.

In the Amsterdam red light districts, most of the people walking around are white tourists, though there too the people actually talking to the girls in the windows are notably people of color, a lot more than in the general population.

My one Dutch friend's friend, who is also Dutch, said that you never see many higher class white Dutch customers, since they go to more expensive, private clubs.