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.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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".
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".
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