The corn: downtown Bloomington, Indiana, at dusk. Yes, yes, I know you can't see any corn in the picture, but rest assured, it's out there.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Where do we go... from here?
Ah, an "Evita" moment. [pointy finger of reckoning!]
As of 7:48 PM Indiana Time (no, not Central or Eastern Standard... don't get me started) Tuesday night, I am no longer a student of The Language We Do Not Speak Of.
[sounds of lowing as a randomly selected cloven-hooved ruminant is sacrificed to gore-soaked pre-Christian deities in thanks]
I wish I could say that this class prepared me for something, that it meant something, that it was worth my time more than, say, watching reruns of "The Love Boat" in Kiswahili. I've endured classes that weren't amusing if I felt that, one day, I'd be able to utilize the skills/knowledge I'd procured in the class in my life. I've justified taking classes during my undergraduate such as:
Introduction to Aquaculture
The Literature of the Sea
Elementary Greek (ancient; Attic)
World Food Supply, Population and the Environment
The Religions and Philosophies of the East: Hinduism
Introduction to Forest Biology
Classical Art and Architecture
Dinosaurs
Introduction to Human Geography
The Holocaust
Chinese Art
This is because I believed, and still believe, that all of those courses brought something to my life that I will be able to use, even if it is just for my own amusement. After all, like any of you give a rabid rat's malarial undercarriage about sustainable salmon fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, the symbolism of the albatross, the REAL way to spell Athens, the effects of desertification in SubSaharan Africa on tuber foodstuffs, allusions to same-sex unions in the Bhagavad Gita, the blight of gypsy moths in temperate North American forests, the sordid history of the Propylea on the Athenian Acropolis, the probable usage of the post-cranial crest of the parasaurolophus, settlement patterns in tropical Southeast Asia, how many metric tons of ash were recovered from Auschwitz or the uniqueness of Tang dynasty glazed "camel" figurines. But, seeing as how I am insufferable, these things fill me with delight. OK, so maybe not "delight" for the whole human ash thing; that's effed up.
Yet, there is an indescribable hole in my corn-encrusted world. Whither, then, my rage? I can't possibly endure a life without something to bitch about to a captive audience. (OK, well, you're not really captive... one click on that "x" in the corner and my ravings will be no more). French provided a convenient scapegoat for the vengeance, for the lunacy, for the dead nuns in my attic. A year's worth of Satan, and now what?
{muffled weeping; weeping, then sinister cackling}
Today, I came to a startling realization. I have a problem, and since I am admitting it, I guess that's the first step in my healing process. I've discovered that I cannot make it through a schoolday without the aid of chocolate no-bake cookies. If you were raised on a coral atoll in the Pacific where you ate raw conch all day, every day, you might not know what these wee delights are. Essentially, you take choocolate, peanut butter and oatmeal and mix them together with what I assume to hairs from the head of the Christ-child Himself. The resulting tastiness has me so utterly spellbound that the thought of not having one every day makes me need to kill again, and this time I might not be so careful about the disposal of the remains. There can be no good that comes from this. I can see the headline now: Man Sought In Tot Slaying: Baked-Goods Deal Gone Wrong?
This past Tuesday, as I was thwarting international students' efforts to successfully reach the beleaguered advisor staff with my *ahem* legendary patience, I nearly went around the bend when a young South Asian woman came to me at the desk. She was my last victim of the day, and the door was already closed. I'd seen, at that point in the day, more than 40 students and scholars. She comes to the desk when I call her by her 458 syllable name and she sighs pregnantly.
"Finally," she mutters under her curry-eating breath.
I was too shocked to speak. I'm not sure if she realized how hard my job is sometimes, or how many people I'd helped that day (none of whom had, it seemed, "normal" issues), or that I was, at the time, possessed of a disaster-full bladder of white hot man-piss and a crap "in camera" that threatened menacingly to ruin my life and the lives of all around me; these reasons, and these alone, prevented me from actions further than those I took. I politely explained to her that we're very busy and that, indeed, it's the quality of our services that we strive for. To drive the idea home, I emphasized that she was one of about 3,500 internationals here at IU, and that it WAS the end of the mothereffing semester; shouldn't she have thought about this before? She thought about it for a moment and steered her questions in a more delicate and tactful direction.
Maybe it was because I was weaving an effigy of her out of real human hair at the time, but I dunno, she seemed to get what I was saying. Insulting my turnover rate! Man, I'll cut'choo, cut'choo real bad, a'ight?
I had my oral exam in Turkish today; it was mass-graves-in-the-Balkans bad. The premise of the exam was for us to describe two pictures that Abbas bey was going to show us, and he'd given us the six contender pictures ahead of time out of mercy. He was to choose one and we were to choose one. Well, I picked the one with the couple who was getting married. I talked about how neo-Nazi Americans are protesting, at this very moment, about same-sex unions being "special rights" and how (1) Man + (1) Woman = Jesus. No, I actually talked about civil ceremonies versus church weddings, how we make these fantastically enormous and often tasteless cakes, and how at least one of the bridesmaids gets schtupped by a drunken groomsman in the reception hall coat-closet. He seemed pleased, but it's hard to tell with Abbas whether it's "pleased" or "I'm going to cut your throat out of your lard-ass neck and take a dump down the wheezing hole." Then, he picked his. Now, Dustin and I knew which one he'd pick because he was mothertouching obsessed with the chapter; it was about conservation and saving nature. The chapter's name was "Dünyamız Çöl Olmasın!" , which means "You Must Not Let Our World Become a Desert!" There really isn't a lot to say. People are gross and that won't change until we all die and roaches and Paris Hilton rule the planet. I wanted to fiddle with some of the slang I'd procured via internet and some of my less savory Turkish friends, but telling Abbas bey that I was going to plant a pine tree in his mother's woman parts and fornicate with his sister in the shade of said tree seemed inappropriate. So, what I did instead was mumble like I was developmentally challenged about how trees give us oxygen and how people shouldn't throw shit into the sea. It was tragic. {sound of a Guiness being slammed; slammed, then a satisfied belch of pleasure}
I received a lot of response to my 'blog series about my faithful minions. Other than the box of venomous Venezuelan spiders (all of whom seemed to be wearing the pelts of small mammals they'd snuffed on their quivering backs), people seemed to warm to the idea of it. Now, I know that there are more of you out there. There are a few of you whom I know exist, and I hope you know why I can't write a 'blog about you. Mesela, helvacı kabağım için. Thanks, my minions, for allowing me to publicly display my affiliation with you for the whole world to see. I've been getting hits from India, China, Taiwan, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Costa Rica and Switzerland, to name a few. Huh. I wonder what "corn" would be in Bengali.
I've decided that, this summer, I will read no fewer than 25 books for pleasure. In random order, their titles:
1) Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (my heroine!)
2) Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
3) The Lovely Bones
4) East of Eden
5) The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier
6) A Fine Balance
7) The Black Book (KaraKitap)
8) Zorba the Greek
9) A Bend in the River
10) The Ground Beneath Her Feet
11) In the Arms of Africa
12) Geisha, a Life
13) Catfish and Mandala
14) Dinner with Persephone
15) Vietnam, Now
16) From the Land of Green Ghosts
17) Black Dog of Fate
18) An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
19) The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim
20) Snow (Kar)
21) From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants in New York City
22) Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror
23) Chinatown
24) Traveler's Tales: Turkey.
But, most importantly of all:
25) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Yessssss, oh yes. Already pre-ordered. [mouth floods with saliva]
I remain, as ever,
Dom
As of 7:48 PM Indiana Time (no, not Central or Eastern Standard... don't get me started) Tuesday night, I am no longer a student of The Language We Do Not Speak Of.
[sounds of lowing as a randomly selected cloven-hooved ruminant is sacrificed to gore-soaked pre-Christian deities in thanks]
I wish I could say that this class prepared me for something, that it meant something, that it was worth my time more than, say, watching reruns of "The Love Boat" in Kiswahili. I've endured classes that weren't amusing if I felt that, one day, I'd be able to utilize the skills/knowledge I'd procured in the class in my life. I've justified taking classes during my undergraduate such as:
Introduction to Aquaculture
The Literature of the Sea
Elementary Greek (ancient; Attic)
World Food Supply, Population and the Environment
The Religions and Philosophies of the East: Hinduism
Introduction to Forest Biology
Classical Art and Architecture
Dinosaurs
Introduction to Human Geography
The Holocaust
Chinese Art
This is because I believed, and still believe, that all of those courses brought something to my life that I will be able to use, even if it is just for my own amusement. After all, like any of you give a rabid rat's malarial undercarriage about sustainable salmon fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, the symbolism of the albatross, the REAL way to spell Athens, the effects of desertification in SubSaharan Africa on tuber foodstuffs, allusions to same-sex unions in the Bhagavad Gita, the blight of gypsy moths in temperate North American forests, the sordid history of the Propylea on the Athenian Acropolis, the probable usage of the post-cranial crest of the parasaurolophus, settlement patterns in tropical Southeast Asia, how many metric tons of ash were recovered from Auschwitz or the uniqueness of Tang dynasty glazed "camel" figurines. But, seeing as how I am insufferable, these things fill me with delight. OK, so maybe not "delight" for the whole human ash thing; that's effed up.
Yet, there is an indescribable hole in my corn-encrusted world. Whither, then, my rage? I can't possibly endure a life without something to bitch about to a captive audience. (OK, well, you're not really captive... one click on that "x" in the corner and my ravings will be no more). French provided a convenient scapegoat for the vengeance, for the lunacy, for the dead nuns in my attic. A year's worth of Satan, and now what?
{muffled weeping; weeping, then sinister cackling}
Today, I came to a startling realization. I have a problem, and since I am admitting it, I guess that's the first step in my healing process. I've discovered that I cannot make it through a schoolday without the aid of chocolate no-bake cookies. If you were raised on a coral atoll in the Pacific where you ate raw conch all day, every day, you might not know what these wee delights are. Essentially, you take choocolate, peanut butter and oatmeal and mix them together with what I assume to hairs from the head of the Christ-child Himself. The resulting tastiness has me so utterly spellbound that the thought of not having one every day makes me need to kill again, and this time I might not be so careful about the disposal of the remains. There can be no good that comes from this. I can see the headline now: Man Sought In Tot Slaying: Baked-Goods Deal Gone Wrong?
This past Tuesday, as I was thwarting international students' efforts to successfully reach the beleaguered advisor staff with my *ahem* legendary patience, I nearly went around the bend when a young South Asian woman came to me at the desk. She was my last victim of the day, and the door was already closed. I'd seen, at that point in the day, more than 40 students and scholars. She comes to the desk when I call her by her 458 syllable name and she sighs pregnantly.
"Finally," she mutters under her curry-eating breath.
I was too shocked to speak. I'm not sure if she realized how hard my job is sometimes, or how many people I'd helped that day (none of whom had, it seemed, "normal" issues), or that I was, at the time, possessed of a disaster-full bladder of white hot man-piss and a crap "in camera" that threatened menacingly to ruin my life and the lives of all around me; these reasons, and these alone, prevented me from actions further than those I took. I politely explained to her that we're very busy and that, indeed, it's the quality of our services that we strive for. To drive the idea home, I emphasized that she was one of about 3,500 internationals here at IU, and that it WAS the end of the mothereffing semester; shouldn't she have thought about this before? She thought about it for a moment and steered her questions in a more delicate and tactful direction.
Maybe it was because I was weaving an effigy of her out of real human hair at the time, but I dunno, she seemed to get what I was saying. Insulting my turnover rate! Man, I'll cut'choo, cut'choo real bad, a'ight?
I had my oral exam in Turkish today; it was mass-graves-in-the-Balkans bad. The premise of the exam was for us to describe two pictures that Abbas bey was going to show us, and he'd given us the six contender pictures ahead of time out of mercy. He was to choose one and we were to choose one. Well, I picked the one with the couple who was getting married. I talked about how neo-Nazi Americans are protesting, at this very moment, about same-sex unions being "special rights" and how (1) Man + (1) Woman = Jesus. No, I actually talked about civil ceremonies versus church weddings, how we make these fantastically enormous and often tasteless cakes, and how at least one of the bridesmaids gets schtupped by a drunken groomsman in the reception hall coat-closet. He seemed pleased, but it's hard to tell with Abbas whether it's "pleased" or "I'm going to cut your throat out of your lard-ass neck and take a dump down the wheezing hole." Then, he picked his. Now, Dustin and I knew which one he'd pick because he was mothertouching obsessed with the chapter; it was about conservation and saving nature. The chapter's name was "Dünyamız Çöl Olmasın!" , which means "You Must Not Let Our World Become a Desert!" There really isn't a lot to say. People are gross and that won't change until we all die and roaches and Paris Hilton rule the planet. I wanted to fiddle with some of the slang I'd procured via internet and some of my less savory Turkish friends, but telling Abbas bey that I was going to plant a pine tree in his mother's woman parts and fornicate with his sister in the shade of said tree seemed inappropriate. So, what I did instead was mumble like I was developmentally challenged about how trees give us oxygen and how people shouldn't throw shit into the sea. It was tragic. {sound of a Guiness being slammed; slammed, then a satisfied belch of pleasure}
I received a lot of response to my 'blog series about my faithful minions. Other than the box of venomous Venezuelan spiders (all of whom seemed to be wearing the pelts of small mammals they'd snuffed on their quivering backs), people seemed to warm to the idea of it. Now, I know that there are more of you out there. There are a few of you whom I know exist, and I hope you know why I can't write a 'blog about you. Mesela, helvacı kabağım için. Thanks, my minions, for allowing me to publicly display my affiliation with you for the whole world to see. I've been getting hits from India, China, Taiwan, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Costa Rica and Switzerland, to name a few. Huh. I wonder what "corn" would be in Bengali.
I've decided that, this summer, I will read no fewer than 25 books for pleasure. In random order, their titles:
1) Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (my heroine!)
2) Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
3) The Lovely Bones
4) East of Eden
5) The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier
6) A Fine Balance
7) The Black Book (KaraKitap)
8) Zorba the Greek
9) A Bend in the River
10) The Ground Beneath Her Feet
11) In the Arms of Africa
12) Geisha, a Life
13) Catfish and Mandala
14) Dinner with Persephone
15) Vietnam, Now
16) From the Land of Green Ghosts
17) Black Dog of Fate
18) An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
19) The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim
20) Snow (Kar)
21) From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants in New York City
22) Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror
23) Chinatown
24) Traveler's Tales: Turkey.
But, most importantly of all:
25) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Yessssss, oh yes. Already pre-ordered. [mouth floods with saliva]
I remain, as ever,
Dom
The fat reeking ugly skull of death.
If you're wondering, as I imagine you might be, "Where the eff is Domonic?" Yeah. Like you care. >:) But if you do, know this: it's finals week, and I am swimming in the rapidly decomposing offal of this semester's misdeeds. My mascot during this, and every finals week, is the Fat Reeking Ugly Skull of Death, a picture of whom I will be posting soon. But yea, verily, I live still, and once Friday of next week comes, I shall once again become the blogging mo'fo you all love to mock.
In the meantime, you all could perform a mitzvah for me: go to your local stockyard and purchase a randomly selected beast, which you will then cause to shuffle off this mortal coil. Take the rapidly cooling blood and, with your fingers, write an "A+" on the loins of a virgin.
Or, you could just keep me in your thoughts for a few days as I prepare for the inevitability of hearing my academic death-knell.
Soon, my children, soon.
[shrieking from the corn]
Dom
In the meantime, you all could perform a mitzvah for me: go to your local stockyard and purchase a randomly selected beast, which you will then cause to shuffle off this mortal coil. Take the rapidly cooling blood and, with your fingers, write an "A+" on the loins of a virgin.
Or, you could just keep me in your thoughts for a few days as I prepare for the inevitability of hearing my academic death-knell.
Soon, my children, soon.
[shrieking from the corn]
Dom
Saturday, April 23, 2005
İşlerim.
My jobs.
An Alert Life in the Corn reader responded to my last post in horror. "Did you really have to rub ointment onto the bedsores of an elderly woman?", she asked. My response is, uh, yeah. After all, everything I post in my 'blog is the unadulterated Truth!
OK, even *I* couldn't write that without laughing so hard that migrating geese began to commit suicide in Gary's flame-fest like thirty-pound feathery moths. But I swear to you: that's true, and Baby Jesus in his hay-scented manger, I wish it weren't. I've had a lot of... interesting... jobs in my short time on this ball of dust and tears. Feast.
1) Home Healthcare Aide for Ms. S******.
Ms. S was a ninety-two year old woman who, by stubborn request, lived alone in a tiny shack with her incontinent bitch of a dog, Sandy, and a seventy-five year old cat whom I never saw. Once a day, a Meals on Wheels delivery was made to her for lunch, and every other weekend, her son drove down from near New York City in his cigar-reeking Midlife-Crisis-mobile, which I think was a Jag. In the interim, there was me: a highschool freshman, riding more than a mile and a half on my shag-me-now Huffy bike, preparing her dinner and feeding her vile beasts. Ms. S's body was shot: she'd broken her hip and was entirely bedridden save when she had to relieve herself, but her mind was uncannily sharp. When it came time for her to do something in her chamber pot, I would go and hide in her bathroom and try not to listen to the grunts from the other room, dreaming of going to Greece. Ms. S was sharp, but good Lord, she was weird, and for ME to say that, she was certifiable. One day, she told me that there was a fish in her refrigerator and that she wanted that for dinner. When I opened the fridge, the "fish" that confronted me was not only a smoked fish, but was not a species of fish I had ever seen, and believe me when I tell you that I've seen a LOT of fish. The creature's clouded eye gazed at me accusingly. I brought the fish to her and she regarded it for a moment before motioning to the middle part of the beast with her gnarled claw. "I want to eat that middle part. Can you flake up the meat and make me some fish salad?" I've never suppressed my gag reflex so deftly before or since. As I sawed through the beast's spine with a butter knife and got out the jar of Evil Satan-Goo (mayo), I went to a happy place where there were unicorns to ride and Snicker Bars grew on bushes. Ms. S was full-blooded German and made no effort to hide the fact that she resented the villification of her people by History Channel documentaries. "If we knew the Jews would whine this much about the Holocaust and make us look this bad, we would have made sure to finish the job." That night, her "fish" salad had a very carefully expectorated phlem globber mixed into it; she had no tastebuds left and no sense of smell, and ate it with gusto. [Kidding! Maybe!] But the worst was her dog, Sandy. Sandy was the longhaired product of some bastardized mix, and since she pissed on herself with clockwork regularity and never got groomed, she smelled like a hobo's undercarriage. Sandy and I loathed each other intensely, so much so that objects placed between us would burst into smoky flame. The best was when I'd let her out and she'd pretend to poop, and then would lay cable on the kitchen floor while I was watching her do it, just beyond Ms. S's view. But I would have cleaned up Sandy's messes for a eon's worth of time to not have to rub foul ointment into Ms. S's bone-revealing bedsores and hose down the fungal growth she'd acquired from being too stubborn to lay on a bed; no, she sat and slept all damn day in a leather Barcalounger. Fortunately, her son confiscated it and got her a Craftmatic bed so that she could roll over, but not before I wanted to take my own life. She cried a little when I left to move to Maine, and as I left her home for the last time, I made double sure to give Sandy the finger.
2) House-Slave: Holiday Inn, Odlin Road, Bangor, Maine.
Nothing is quite as soul-crushing as spending your weekends and summers tediously cleaning up humanity's nast in un-airconditioned hallways and dank linen closets. My job consisted of me picking up the skin-flake laden filthy linens from the carts of the cleaning staff and transporting and sorting it in the laundry room; filling the closets with the "fresh" linens once laundered, and maintaining the outer appearance of the hallways and windows. Some of my "fondest" memories are of accidentally hearing some flight attendant screaming like she was being torn apart by wolverines as she was being pleasured by a fine Banguh townie; finding a toilet that'd been clogged by no less than seven condoms in a "bridal suite"; killing a spider that was as large as a teacup saucer with a tiny "complimentary" canister of hairspray in a closet while I screamed like a girl, and watching dumb British flight attendants rushing outside during a horrible thunderstorm to see the hail, only to return bruised, wet and cursing. Duh.
3) Galley-Bitch, The Bear's Den, Memorial Union, UMaine
At UMaine, my first job was working the sub-sandwich line and the grill; eventually, I was able to graduate (I still get chills at the honor!) to Pizza Hut. As Marleina can attest, when I came home, I reeked of onions and death and wanted to mix myself a Drano cocktail. The nastiest part came when they put me on sub-line and some gigantic football player would come to ask for a sandwich. This is an actual transaction I had with a football player, who, for anonymity's sake, I will call "Neckisaswideashistorso", or Mr. "N" for short.
Me: What can I get for you today?
Mr.N: [picking nits out of his ha'r]
Me: Sir? What {makes "question" handmotion} can {hand motion} I {motions to self} get {mimes making sandwich} you {motions to him}?
Mr. N: Me wanna triple meat ham "Italian" sammich.
[As an aside, in Maine, sub sandwiches are called "Italians", but you don't pronounce it the regular way; no, it's "Eye-tal-ee-yan." I got nothin'. ]
Me: Would you like a spread?
Mr. N: [distracted by a vagina walking by]
Me: [talking like Helen Keller] Mayo, mustard or hummus?
Mr. N: Mayo. Me like mayo.
I begin to make the sandwich, and he's watching intently like I am going to gingerly rub my male member on it when he's not looking. He begins to grunt something.
Mr.N: No, more mayo! When I bite it I want it to come out the sides of the sammich!
Me: {projectile vomiting}
That's when they decided to put me on grill duty; there, I could hand my customers packets of the vile ooze and they'd apply it themselves, with any luck on another continent. I firmly believe that every person on this earth should have to work in the food service industry at least once; then, on those days when you think that you've had it with your nice desk job, you can recall with relief that you aren't spreading hummus and tuna salad and slapping a slice of provalone on a raisin bagel for an international student who didn't know what any of those things were. Your job might be stressful, but at least it doesn't make you take your 15 minute break to chunk every day. Bulemia is SO '87.
4) Campus Walking Companion, UMaine
This was the easiest job that I have ever had, or will ever have again. Essentially, when people called our "command station" in the basement of the Cutler Death Center and wanted to walk somewhere at night, two uniformed workers would take giant flashlights and take them from point A to B. I worked there for three years and I think I walked ten people. Nobody called. This is because, uh, IT'S EFFING MAINE. We don't have crime. So, I got paid $8 an hour to watch cable TV and do my homework. Kickass.
5) Departmental Assistant to UMaine Anthropology Staff
For two years, I worked as a Work Merit lackey for two professors, Cynthia Mahmood and Paul "Jim" Roscoe. For Cindy, I swore my way though scanning, formatting and binding a book for her, for which I was rewarded with my name being printed in her book (A Sea of Orange: Writings on the Sikhs and India) ; with Jim, I was rewarded with having him send me an email that had, as the subject line, "Christ on a cracker, Dom! What have you done?"
6) Peer Study Abroad Advisor, UMaine
Essentially, I (as a recent study abroad returnee then) was supposed to advise students as to what they could do, and where, and when. In many ways, it really opened my eyes to American culture. 99% of the people who came to my office said that they wanted to go to a country that was "warm and English-speaking." When one woman came to my office and said that she was going to Morocco no matter how I tried to dissuade her, I burst into ragged tears and thanked her for validating my will to go on. Mostly, though, the students I met wanted as few challenges as they could possibly have. When I told them that I once rode in the flatbed of a truck next to a horny he-goat over roads on the edge of an Aegean cliff with a man with one lazy eye and one cataracted one, they went ashy and looked at the brochures for Australia. Fools. That goat and I still write.
7) GE Mortgage Insurance, Raleigh, NC
I had great coworkers whom I love dearly, but I can sum up this job with ten words.
People. Screamed. On. The. Phone. At. Me. All. Damn. Day.
One gentleman once called me a "sadistic Nazi motherf*cker." Fa la la la la! Thank God for that hip flask. And the houdoun doll. And rock cocaine.
***********************
And then, my current avatar as graduate assistant at the Office of International Services. I have a squirt bottle for unruly internationals. I have a taser. I have an altar to the unseen Clown God. Either my coworkers find them amusing or else they hide their fear well. It's been almost two years working in that office, and while many things have changed, it's there that I feel most alive and myself while on this campus. And, thankfully, I haven't had to hose down anyone yet.
With the bottle.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
An Alert Life in the Corn reader responded to my last post in horror. "Did you really have to rub ointment onto the bedsores of an elderly woman?", she asked. My response is, uh, yeah. After all, everything I post in my 'blog is the unadulterated Truth!
OK, even *I* couldn't write that without laughing so hard that migrating geese began to commit suicide in Gary's flame-fest like thirty-pound feathery moths. But I swear to you: that's true, and Baby Jesus in his hay-scented manger, I wish it weren't. I've had a lot of... interesting... jobs in my short time on this ball of dust and tears. Feast.
1) Home Healthcare Aide for Ms. S******.
Ms. S was a ninety-two year old woman who, by stubborn request, lived alone in a tiny shack with her incontinent bitch of a dog, Sandy, and a seventy-five year old cat whom I never saw. Once a day, a Meals on Wheels delivery was made to her for lunch, and every other weekend, her son drove down from near New York City in his cigar-reeking Midlife-Crisis-mobile, which I think was a Jag. In the interim, there was me: a highschool freshman, riding more than a mile and a half on my shag-me-now Huffy bike, preparing her dinner and feeding her vile beasts. Ms. S's body was shot: she'd broken her hip and was entirely bedridden save when she had to relieve herself, but her mind was uncannily sharp. When it came time for her to do something in her chamber pot, I would go and hide in her bathroom and try not to listen to the grunts from the other room, dreaming of going to Greece. Ms. S was sharp, but good Lord, she was weird, and for ME to say that, she was certifiable. One day, she told me that there was a fish in her refrigerator and that she wanted that for dinner. When I opened the fridge, the "fish" that confronted me was not only a smoked fish, but was not a species of fish I had ever seen, and believe me when I tell you that I've seen a LOT of fish. The creature's clouded eye gazed at me accusingly. I brought the fish to her and she regarded it for a moment before motioning to the middle part of the beast with her gnarled claw. "I want to eat that middle part. Can you flake up the meat and make me some fish salad?" I've never suppressed my gag reflex so deftly before or since. As I sawed through the beast's spine with a butter knife and got out the jar of Evil Satan-Goo (mayo), I went to a happy place where there were unicorns to ride and Snicker Bars grew on bushes. Ms. S was full-blooded German and made no effort to hide the fact that she resented the villification of her people by History Channel documentaries. "If we knew the Jews would whine this much about the Holocaust and make us look this bad, we would have made sure to finish the job." That night, her "fish" salad had a very carefully expectorated phlem globber mixed into it; she had no tastebuds left and no sense of smell, and ate it with gusto. [Kidding! Maybe!] But the worst was her dog, Sandy. Sandy was the longhaired product of some bastardized mix, and since she pissed on herself with clockwork regularity and never got groomed, she smelled like a hobo's undercarriage. Sandy and I loathed each other intensely, so much so that objects placed between us would burst into smoky flame. The best was when I'd let her out and she'd pretend to poop, and then would lay cable on the kitchen floor while I was watching her do it, just beyond Ms. S's view. But I would have cleaned up Sandy's messes for a eon's worth of time to not have to rub foul ointment into Ms. S's bone-revealing bedsores and hose down the fungal growth she'd acquired from being too stubborn to lay on a bed; no, she sat and slept all damn day in a leather Barcalounger. Fortunately, her son confiscated it and got her a Craftmatic bed so that she could roll over, but not before I wanted to take my own life. She cried a little when I left to move to Maine, and as I left her home for the last time, I made double sure to give Sandy the finger.
2) House-Slave: Holiday Inn, Odlin Road, Bangor, Maine.
Nothing is quite as soul-crushing as spending your weekends and summers tediously cleaning up humanity's nast in un-airconditioned hallways and dank linen closets. My job consisted of me picking up the skin-flake laden filthy linens from the carts of the cleaning staff and transporting and sorting it in the laundry room; filling the closets with the "fresh" linens once laundered, and maintaining the outer appearance of the hallways and windows. Some of my "fondest" memories are of accidentally hearing some flight attendant screaming like she was being torn apart by wolverines as she was being pleasured by a fine Banguh townie; finding a toilet that'd been clogged by no less than seven condoms in a "bridal suite"; killing a spider that was as large as a teacup saucer with a tiny "complimentary" canister of hairspray in a closet while I screamed like a girl, and watching dumb British flight attendants rushing outside during a horrible thunderstorm to see the hail, only to return bruised, wet and cursing. Duh.
3) Galley-Bitch, The Bear's Den, Memorial Union, UMaine
At UMaine, my first job was working the sub-sandwich line and the grill; eventually, I was able to graduate (I still get chills at the honor!) to Pizza Hut. As Marleina can attest, when I came home, I reeked of onions and death and wanted to mix myself a Drano cocktail. The nastiest part came when they put me on sub-line and some gigantic football player would come to ask for a sandwich. This is an actual transaction I had with a football player, who, for anonymity's sake, I will call "Neckisaswideashistorso", or Mr. "N" for short.
Me: What can I get for you today?
Mr.N: [picking nits out of his ha'r]
Me: Sir? What {makes "question" handmotion} can {hand motion} I {motions to self} get {mimes making sandwich} you {motions to him}?
Mr. N: Me wanna triple meat ham "Italian" sammich.
[As an aside, in Maine, sub sandwiches are called "Italians", but you don't pronounce it the regular way; no, it's "Eye-tal-ee-yan." I got nothin'. ]
Me: Would you like a spread?
Mr. N: [distracted by a vagina walking by]
Me: [talking like Helen Keller] Mayo, mustard or hummus?
Mr. N: Mayo. Me like mayo.
I begin to make the sandwich, and he's watching intently like I am going to gingerly rub my male member on it when he's not looking. He begins to grunt something.
Mr.N: No, more mayo! When I bite it I want it to come out the sides of the sammich!
Me: {projectile vomiting}
That's when they decided to put me on grill duty; there, I could hand my customers packets of the vile ooze and they'd apply it themselves, with any luck on another continent. I firmly believe that every person on this earth should have to work in the food service industry at least once; then, on those days when you think that you've had it with your nice desk job, you can recall with relief that you aren't spreading hummus and tuna salad and slapping a slice of provalone on a raisin bagel for an international student who didn't know what any of those things were. Your job might be stressful, but at least it doesn't make you take your 15 minute break to chunk every day. Bulemia is SO '87.
4) Campus Walking Companion, UMaine
This was the easiest job that I have ever had, or will ever have again. Essentially, when people called our "command station" in the basement of the Cutler Death Center and wanted to walk somewhere at night, two uniformed workers would take giant flashlights and take them from point A to B. I worked there for three years and I think I walked ten people. Nobody called. This is because, uh, IT'S EFFING MAINE. We don't have crime. So, I got paid $8 an hour to watch cable TV and do my homework. Kickass.
5) Departmental Assistant to UMaine Anthropology Staff
For two years, I worked as a Work Merit lackey for two professors, Cynthia Mahmood and Paul "Jim" Roscoe. For Cindy, I swore my way though scanning, formatting and binding a book for her, for which I was rewarded with my name being printed in her book (A Sea of Orange: Writings on the Sikhs and India) ; with Jim, I was rewarded with having him send me an email that had, as the subject line, "Christ on a cracker, Dom! What have you done?"
6) Peer Study Abroad Advisor, UMaine
Essentially, I (as a recent study abroad returnee then) was supposed to advise students as to what they could do, and where, and when. In many ways, it really opened my eyes to American culture. 99% of the people who came to my office said that they wanted to go to a country that was "warm and English-speaking." When one woman came to my office and said that she was going to Morocco no matter how I tried to dissuade her, I burst into ragged tears and thanked her for validating my will to go on. Mostly, though, the students I met wanted as few challenges as they could possibly have. When I told them that I once rode in the flatbed of a truck next to a horny he-goat over roads on the edge of an Aegean cliff with a man with one lazy eye and one cataracted one, they went ashy and looked at the brochures for Australia. Fools. That goat and I still write.
7) GE Mortgage Insurance, Raleigh, NC
I had great coworkers whom I love dearly, but I can sum up this job with ten words.
People. Screamed. On. The. Phone. At. Me. All. Damn. Day.
One gentleman once called me a "sadistic Nazi motherf*cker." Fa la la la la! Thank God for that hip flask. And the houdoun doll. And rock cocaine.
***********************
And then, my current avatar as graduate assistant at the Office of International Services. I have a squirt bottle for unruly internationals. I have a taser. I have an altar to the unseen Clown God. Either my coworkers find them amusing or else they hide their fear well. It's been almost two years working in that office, and while many things have changed, it's there that I feel most alive and myself while on this campus. And, thankfully, I haven't had to hose down anyone yet.
With the bottle.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Life in the Corn Minion Number Seven: Magistra Poolensis.
Name: Magistra Poolensis; also, Ary-janemay Oolepay.
Location: Florence, Italy (p'raps the environs, but close). Nauseating, no?
Occupation: Formerly my Banguh High School Latin teacher; now Magistra works in Italy doing translation work from Italian and Latin into English, and vice-versa.
Object Magistra Possessed That All In Her Classes Coveted: A rubber stamp with a cow on it; the cow's marking was of the globe. With ten "cow" stamps for correct answers on "quizzies", you got to either not turn in a homework assignment or get a 100 on a quiz. (Right, Magistra?)
Made Me Memorize: The first ten lines of Vergil's The Aeneid, which I now can recall with clarion vividness when I am trying to remember things I need at the grocery store, or how to spell my own name.
I honestly don't know how it is that Magistra didn't see fit to taser me when I first was coming to know her. I was that nasty little chode who stayed all the time after class to talk about classical Roman/Greek things. I had ugly clothes and big hair, and if you've never met me, my teeth (to this day) rendered me the ability to eat an apple through a chain-link fence. But I was so lonely and desperate for attention, having just moved to Maine the summer before, and nobody in my classes gave me the time of day other than to make slashing motions over their throats at me when I did well on an exam or to extinguish Marlboros under my armpits. But Magistra... well, Magistra listened. If she was bored or weirded out by the kid whose only earthly obsession was the classical world, she made no indication of it. And, as time went on and I matured into my current incarnation, Magistra was there to talk to me and make me feel like I wasn't the Freak of the Week for loving Latin and the classical world. The taser always remained in her pocket, comforting her with its cool, steely presence, but she never used it, not even once.
When I was a freshman, attending the grand institution of Hackettstown High School (Motto: So Maybe You Won't Get Jumped in the Parking Lot), in my freshman Latin class, I became mildly obsessed with the idea of going to Greece. Ms. Fahey had a poster of the Athenian Acropolis on the wall above her desk, and when my mind wandered as we conjugated "puella" and "nauta" and "pirata", my gaze would inevitably be drawn to the magic on the wall. When Ms. Fahey announced that she was going to be taking a student trip to Greece, I laid cable in my pants. At the time, my $5 an hour, seven days a week, three hours a day job of massaging cream that smelled mildly like blowtorched human effluent into the bone-revealing bedsores of an anti-Semitic ninety-two year old woman and feeding her incontinent bitch of a dog seemed like the golden ticket to my Hellenic fantasies. Then, my mom dropped the bomb.
"Pack up your shit," she said. "I'm moving to Maine with or without you bitches." She was drunk, as usual, so I didn't take it at face value till the UHaul came. No trip for me. "Stop crying, or I will give you something to cry about, and we can't afford stitches", my mom said.
When I got to Maine, I marveled at the fact that Banguh High had a Latin program; furthermore, I found out that Magistra was going to be taking the same kind of trip. Now, Magistra, Italophile par excellence, was originally planning to go to Italy for the "grand tour", from Venice to Sicily. Insidiously, I planted an idea in her head: what if, uh, one was to go to Greece as well? Most likely fearing for her life, Magistra decided to do just that. The stage was set: now, the mechanical monkey had to make some money. To do so, I sold my soul to the Hooved One ($45), but that left me about $1,900 short. So I worked a miserable job for ten thousand years at the Holiday Inn on Odlin Road, Banguh, wherein I cleaned up human detritus, bleached unidentifiable stains from diseased carpets, and appeased dozens of (sometimes surly) room attendants with fresh linens and sundry items in un-airconditioned, three hundred degree hallways that were stale with exhaled smoke and the stench of human tears.
As spring approached, Magistra's eyes began to gleam unnaturally. She was going to get to go back to Italy. Mine gleamed, too, because I was high on glue. No, it was because my mild obsession with Athens had grown into a full-blown, paralyzing addiction. I had an entire wall of my bedroom wallpapered with pictures of Greece I'd photocopied or stolen wholesale from magazines. About a week before we left, our bodies were humming like tuning forks. It was then that I realized: hey, it's OK to love a place this much; if Magistra, who always had it together, was like that then I didn't have to be ashamed.
Italy was magnificent. The Colosseum lit up from the inside at night, the very thunder of the Roman traffic sounding like the roar of thousands of spectators and the howl of wild animals sequestered below... Pompeii, beyond the thousands of tourists, filled with unfurling spring poppies that stained the volcanic fields crimson... the view out over the Mediterranean from the summit of Anacapri... throwing some lira into Trevi Fountian over my shoulder like something out of La Dolce Vita... the cool crypts and soaring splendor of the Vatican...
But I had my eye on the prize, and Magistra knew it.
On the ferry from Brindisi, Magistra sat down next to me at the dinner table and ate with me. She was oddly quiet. About halfway through dinner, she said: "So, uh, we're going to be in Athens on Greek Easter." I knew this, but I hadn't given much thought to the ramifications of this news. Then it dawned on me: our tour of the Acropolis was to be on Sunday. Easter Sunday. Greek effing Easter Sunday, when all of the pagan sites in Greece are closed. I remember nearly choking and standing up and stammering. Magistra did her best to calm me and bade me sit. It was to be a long night, that one, and it would have been better for me if I didn't get worked up. I knew she was right, but to get that close and not realize my dream seemed to be the cruelest thing I'd ever been dealt.
That night, on a ferry filled with dozens of horny Greek sailors who'd been in the Greek navy for years, I sat on the deck of the ship and watched as we cut our way through Homer's wine-dark sea and cursed my fate. That, and I ate a bag of pretzels. One of the people from my group was talking to her friend nearby, and I heard her say that she'd done what she came to do when she bought a real cameo pin in Rome, and my white-hot loathing for her blinded me. On the tail of that, I began to scheme. I'd brought a tiny book about Athens with me on the trip, and when I looked up the hours of the Acropolis site, I saw that it opened at 8. Further investigation: we left for Boston at 2 PM Monday morning, and there was nothing planned for the day. Further still: our hotel was only a quarter mile from the Acropolis itself.
After I warded off the Greek sailor, I made up my mind then and there: All the boys DID think he was a spy; he DID have Bette Davis eyes. No, what I actually thought was, uh, that nothing but being disemboweled by rabid wombats would keep me away from the site come 7:45 AM Monday.
Needless to say, it happened. In the shade of the Parthenon, on the ovoid outcropping of my dreams looking down over a holiday-deserted Athens, I realized that I'd done what anyone who was as completely Athens-addled as I was would have done. No, don't clap for me. But the thing that made the entire experience the most memorable of my young life was how Magistra just smiled all day, warm inside from how blissed out *I* was. That's the kind of person she is. She was there to absorb the flow of tears from what could have been my young life's biggest disappointments, and she was there and happy for me when it all came through. It's hard being happy for someone, genuinely so, but she made it look easy.
Of all the people I've met in my short twenty-five years, Magistra's life is the one I look to when I think of how I want my own to be. No matter where she goes in the world, she's surrounded by friends. And, despite the costs, she's followed her dreams as far as they would go, doing what she knew would make her happiest. It's refreshing, really. Her life has static, like everyone else's. But in the end, all it takes is me imagining her walking down some medieval street in Italy, perhaps with a small bag of groceries under her arm, smiling, to make me feel warm, fuzzy, and hopeful.
Here's my shout out to Magistra: woman of conviction, of grace, of candor, and of strength we all would be lucky to possess. Semper ubi sub ubi. ;)
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: Florence, Italy (p'raps the environs, but close). Nauseating, no?
Occupation: Formerly my Banguh High School Latin teacher; now Magistra works in Italy doing translation work from Italian and Latin into English, and vice-versa.
Object Magistra Possessed That All In Her Classes Coveted: A rubber stamp with a cow on it; the cow's marking was of the globe. With ten "cow" stamps for correct answers on "quizzies", you got to either not turn in a homework assignment or get a 100 on a quiz. (Right, Magistra?)
Made Me Memorize: The first ten lines of Vergil's The Aeneid, which I now can recall with clarion vividness when I am trying to remember things I need at the grocery store, or how to spell my own name.
I honestly don't know how it is that Magistra didn't see fit to taser me when I first was coming to know her. I was that nasty little chode who stayed all the time after class to talk about classical Roman/Greek things. I had ugly clothes and big hair, and if you've never met me, my teeth (to this day) rendered me the ability to eat an apple through a chain-link fence. But I was so lonely and desperate for attention, having just moved to Maine the summer before, and nobody in my classes gave me the time of day other than to make slashing motions over their throats at me when I did well on an exam or to extinguish Marlboros under my armpits. But Magistra... well, Magistra listened. If she was bored or weirded out by the kid whose only earthly obsession was the classical world, she made no indication of it. And, as time went on and I matured into my current incarnation, Magistra was there to talk to me and make me feel like I wasn't the Freak of the Week for loving Latin and the classical world. The taser always remained in her pocket, comforting her with its cool, steely presence, but she never used it, not even once.
When I was a freshman, attending the grand institution of Hackettstown High School (Motto: So Maybe You Won't Get Jumped in the Parking Lot), in my freshman Latin class, I became mildly obsessed with the idea of going to Greece. Ms. Fahey had a poster of the Athenian Acropolis on the wall above her desk, and when my mind wandered as we conjugated "puella" and "nauta" and "pirata", my gaze would inevitably be drawn to the magic on the wall. When Ms. Fahey announced that she was going to be taking a student trip to Greece, I laid cable in my pants. At the time, my $5 an hour, seven days a week, three hours a day job of massaging cream that smelled mildly like blowtorched human effluent into the bone-revealing bedsores of an anti-Semitic ninety-two year old woman and feeding her incontinent bitch of a dog seemed like the golden ticket to my Hellenic fantasies. Then, my mom dropped the bomb.
"Pack up your shit," she said. "I'm moving to Maine with or without you bitches." She was drunk, as usual, so I didn't take it at face value till the UHaul came. No trip for me. "Stop crying, or I will give you something to cry about, and we can't afford stitches", my mom said.
When I got to Maine, I marveled at the fact that Banguh High had a Latin program; furthermore, I found out that Magistra was going to be taking the same kind of trip. Now, Magistra, Italophile par excellence, was originally planning to go to Italy for the "grand tour", from Venice to Sicily. Insidiously, I planted an idea in her head: what if, uh, one was to go to Greece as well? Most likely fearing for her life, Magistra decided to do just that. The stage was set: now, the mechanical monkey had to make some money. To do so, I sold my soul to the Hooved One ($45), but that left me about $1,900 short. So I worked a miserable job for ten thousand years at the Holiday Inn on Odlin Road, Banguh, wherein I cleaned up human detritus, bleached unidentifiable stains from diseased carpets, and appeased dozens of (sometimes surly) room attendants with fresh linens and sundry items in un-airconditioned, three hundred degree hallways that were stale with exhaled smoke and the stench of human tears.
As spring approached, Magistra's eyes began to gleam unnaturally. She was going to get to go back to Italy. Mine gleamed, too, because I was high on glue. No, it was because my mild obsession with Athens had grown into a full-blown, paralyzing addiction. I had an entire wall of my bedroom wallpapered with pictures of Greece I'd photocopied or stolen wholesale from magazines. About a week before we left, our bodies were humming like tuning forks. It was then that I realized: hey, it's OK to love a place this much; if Magistra, who always had it together, was like that then I didn't have to be ashamed.
Italy was magnificent. The Colosseum lit up from the inside at night, the very thunder of the Roman traffic sounding like the roar of thousands of spectators and the howl of wild animals sequestered below... Pompeii, beyond the thousands of tourists, filled with unfurling spring poppies that stained the volcanic fields crimson... the view out over the Mediterranean from the summit of Anacapri... throwing some lira into Trevi Fountian over my shoulder like something out of La Dolce Vita... the cool crypts and soaring splendor of the Vatican...
But I had my eye on the prize, and Magistra knew it.
On the ferry from Brindisi, Magistra sat down next to me at the dinner table and ate with me. She was oddly quiet. About halfway through dinner, she said: "So, uh, we're going to be in Athens on Greek Easter." I knew this, but I hadn't given much thought to the ramifications of this news. Then it dawned on me: our tour of the Acropolis was to be on Sunday. Easter Sunday. Greek effing Easter Sunday, when all of the pagan sites in Greece are closed. I remember nearly choking and standing up and stammering. Magistra did her best to calm me and bade me sit. It was to be a long night, that one, and it would have been better for me if I didn't get worked up. I knew she was right, but to get that close and not realize my dream seemed to be the cruelest thing I'd ever been dealt.
That night, on a ferry filled with dozens of horny Greek sailors who'd been in the Greek navy for years, I sat on the deck of the ship and watched as we cut our way through Homer's wine-dark sea and cursed my fate. That, and I ate a bag of pretzels. One of the people from my group was talking to her friend nearby, and I heard her say that she'd done what she came to do when she bought a real cameo pin in Rome, and my white-hot loathing for her blinded me. On the tail of that, I began to scheme. I'd brought a tiny book about Athens with me on the trip, and when I looked up the hours of the Acropolis site, I saw that it opened at 8. Further investigation: we left for Boston at 2 PM Monday morning, and there was nothing planned for the day. Further still: our hotel was only a quarter mile from the Acropolis itself.
After I warded off the Greek sailor, I made up my mind then and there: All the boys DID think he was a spy; he DID have Bette Davis eyes. No, what I actually thought was, uh, that nothing but being disemboweled by rabid wombats would keep me away from the site come 7:45 AM Monday.
Needless to say, it happened. In the shade of the Parthenon, on the ovoid outcropping of my dreams looking down over a holiday-deserted Athens, I realized that I'd done what anyone who was as completely Athens-addled as I was would have done. No, don't clap for me. But the thing that made the entire experience the most memorable of my young life was how Magistra just smiled all day, warm inside from how blissed out *I* was. That's the kind of person she is. She was there to absorb the flow of tears from what could have been my young life's biggest disappointments, and she was there and happy for me when it all came through. It's hard being happy for someone, genuinely so, but she made it look easy.
Of all the people I've met in my short twenty-five years, Magistra's life is the one I look to when I think of how I want my own to be. No matter where she goes in the world, she's surrounded by friends. And, despite the costs, she's followed her dreams as far as they would go, doing what she knew would make her happiest. It's refreshing, really. Her life has static, like everyone else's. But in the end, all it takes is me imagining her walking down some medieval street in Italy, perhaps with a small bag of groceries under her arm, smiling, to make me feel warm, fuzzy, and hopeful.
Here's my shout out to Magistra: woman of conviction, of grace, of candor, and of strength we all would be lucky to possess. Semper ubi sub ubi. ;)
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Life in the Corn Minion Number Six: Ungfishlay.
Name: Lizabetheay Iapay-Illermay.
Location: Ithaca, New York.
Occupation: When not holding down a 40 hour work-week position at a Latin American bookstore, she "finds the time" to be a mother to two foster children.
Strangest Thing Ever Said To Me By Any Human, Ever: "Or, she could just turn into a lungfish and hobble away."
Irrationally Fears: Being savaged by a skunk.
Doesn't Remember: Our sophomore year of high school. Like, at all.
I met Ungflishlay at a very vulnerable time for me. I'd just moved to the woods, and nobody wanted to be friends with that weird Mid-Atlantic State kid; well, save a few socially inept, Magic-playing-in-the-"caf" mutants. I had big hair. I talked funny. And, to say I couldn't dress myself properly would be a gross understatement, like as if I were to say that Charro was sent to Earth from the bowels of Hell itself. To make matters worse, I was in an Honors English class that I should not have been in, filled as it was with Bangor's power-elite's spawn, each secure in the knowledge that they'd be getting trust funds and villas on the Maine coast upon graduation. The teacher, Mrs. Kornfield (hahahahaha! irony!) pitied me as one might pity those children you seen on Sally Struthers TV ads for relief work in Calcutta; you feel bad because you know that when the director says "cut", that kid's gonna end up bathed in acid in her belly. Well, good ol' BHS was my Sally Struthers, and I wasn't about to let that bitch chew me up without a fight. One day, Mrs. Kornfield was talking to a young woman when I walked into class, and, upon seeing me, Mrs. Kornfield's eyes twinkled unnaturally.
"Domonic! So good to seeeeeeee you!", she positively hissed. "Have you ever met Lizabetheay? She's in my mod 13-14 Honors English. She's going to be putting on a skit as her project!"
Incidentally, I HAD met her. We were in the same Corporeal and Psychological Torture Class, aka Phys. Ed. We'd never talked, but I remembered her well: the first time I laid eyes on her, she was wearing a shirt that said "I don't mind straight people as long as they act gay."
We greeted each other, and then Elizabeth went her merry way, she of the Converse sneakers. A few nights later, I got a call. I don't remember if I actually gave her my number (prolly) or if she looked me up in the book, but there she was, on the phone. "I have a book report due tomorrow," she said. "Have you read 'The Color Purple'?"
I had, and we began to talk. No, not about the damn book. About olives. About our weird-as-a-bag-of-hair families. We talked for three hours. Three hours! My God man, three hours!
Without Ungflishlay, I don't think I would have made it through high school. I have too many stories about her, most of which she would come to the corn to slay me for revealing. Mostly, though, I think about how we'd go to the Shop 'n' Save on those cherished in-service days and procure a container of Kalamata olives, hummus, feta cheese, a loaf of French bread, and some German potato salad, which we'd eat al fresco in the park. Or of the night we went to Bar Harbor instead of going to our senior prom, and we laid on a blanket on Sand Beach and watched a meteor shower. Or of how she told me, upon going to her house for the first time, how the reddish stain on her house's kitchen linoleum was "where someone got murdered." Or of how, after all the Greek I taught her, the only thing she could remember was how to ask someone if they had octopus. Or the "whale testicle soup" at China Wall restaurant and the bleating noises at that first pep rally. Or of innumerable visits to Taste of India restaurant, possessed as it was of only one cassette of Indian music. And those endless conversations, long into the night, each knowing more and more about each other as the moments passed. Once, she became enraged because she found out I once took scuba lessons, and we'd known each other for about five years by then.
This one goes out to my kindred, to the woman who knows me better than I do myself, my minion, my best friend, my lungfish.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: Ithaca, New York.
Occupation: When not holding down a 40 hour work-week position at a Latin American bookstore, she "finds the time" to be a mother to two foster children.
Strangest Thing Ever Said To Me By Any Human, Ever: "Or, she could just turn into a lungfish and hobble away."
Irrationally Fears: Being savaged by a skunk.
Doesn't Remember: Our sophomore year of high school. Like, at all.
I met Ungflishlay at a very vulnerable time for me. I'd just moved to the woods, and nobody wanted to be friends with that weird Mid-Atlantic State kid; well, save a few socially inept, Magic-playing-in-the-"caf" mutants. I had big hair. I talked funny. And, to say I couldn't dress myself properly would be a gross understatement, like as if I were to say that Charro was sent to Earth from the bowels of Hell itself. To make matters worse, I was in an Honors English class that I should not have been in, filled as it was with Bangor's power-elite's spawn, each secure in the knowledge that they'd be getting trust funds and villas on the Maine coast upon graduation. The teacher, Mrs. Kornfield (hahahahaha! irony!) pitied me as one might pity those children you seen on Sally Struthers TV ads for relief work in Calcutta; you feel bad because you know that when the director says "cut", that kid's gonna end up bathed in acid in her belly. Well, good ol' BHS was my Sally Struthers, and I wasn't about to let that bitch chew me up without a fight. One day, Mrs. Kornfield was talking to a young woman when I walked into class, and, upon seeing me, Mrs. Kornfield's eyes twinkled unnaturally.
"Domonic! So good to seeeeeeee you!", she positively hissed. "Have you ever met Lizabetheay? She's in my mod 13-14 Honors English. She's going to be putting on a skit as her project!"
Incidentally, I HAD met her. We were in the same Corporeal and Psychological Torture Class, aka Phys. Ed. We'd never talked, but I remembered her well: the first time I laid eyes on her, she was wearing a shirt that said "I don't mind straight people as long as they act gay."
We greeted each other, and then Elizabeth went her merry way, she of the Converse sneakers. A few nights later, I got a call. I don't remember if I actually gave her my number (prolly) or if she looked me up in the book, but there she was, on the phone. "I have a book report due tomorrow," she said. "Have you read 'The Color Purple'?"
I had, and we began to talk. No, not about the damn book. About olives. About our weird-as-a-bag-of-hair families. We talked for three hours. Three hours! My God man, three hours!
Without Ungflishlay, I don't think I would have made it through high school. I have too many stories about her, most of which she would come to the corn to slay me for revealing. Mostly, though, I think about how we'd go to the Shop 'n' Save on those cherished in-service days and procure a container of Kalamata olives, hummus, feta cheese, a loaf of French bread, and some German potato salad, which we'd eat al fresco in the park. Or of the night we went to Bar Harbor instead of going to our senior prom, and we laid on a blanket on Sand Beach and watched a meteor shower. Or of how she told me, upon going to her house for the first time, how the reddish stain on her house's kitchen linoleum was "where someone got murdered." Or of how, after all the Greek I taught her, the only thing she could remember was how to ask someone if they had octopus. Or the "whale testicle soup" at China Wall restaurant and the bleating noises at that first pep rally. Or of innumerable visits to Taste of India restaurant, possessed as it was of only one cassette of Indian music. And those endless conversations, long into the night, each knowing more and more about each other as the moments passed. Once, she became enraged because she found out I once took scuba lessons, and we'd known each other for about five years by then.
This one goes out to my kindred, to the woman who knows me better than I do myself, my minion, my best friend, my lungfish.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Friday, April 15, 2005
Life in the Corn Minion Number Five: Ookebray.
Name: Ookebray Okdykstay.
Location: The corn.
Occupation: Front Desk gangsta; also, Life in the Corn Ninja Number One.
Irrational Claim to Fame: Claims to have invented the word "sorostitute."
Setting: The Office of International Services, perched like a carrion-eating raptor-bird on the third floor of Franklin Hall. It's five minutes until close of business, and it's been a very, very special day in the neighborhood. Domonic and Ookebray are looking forward to the relative respite of an hour's worth of uninterrupted work. Just then, an international walks through the door, grinning like a recently-escaped lunatic. Ookebray heaves a sigh and goes to talk to him while I close the door behind him.
Ookebray: Hey! What can I do for you today?
Bamboo-Peace Water: I want to work.
Ookebray: OK. What's your status?
BPW: {statusstatusstatus}
Ookebray: Well, what you could do is apply for Curricular Practical Training, which would allow you to work off-campus like you seem to want to do.
BPW: How do I do that?
Ookebray, with her legendary poise, grace, and excellent grasp of international student-type regulations, explains the process of applying for, and successfully receiving, the work authorization.
BPW: OK.
Ookebray: Do you understand what you need to do now?
BPW: I don't wanna do that.
Ookebray: Guh?
BPW: That sounds complicated, I don't want to do that.
Ookebray: Look: that's your only option for the kind of employment you want to do.
BPW: But I don't want to do that. Is there some easier way?
At this point, Ookebray senses, ninja-like, that this is not only a battle she must win for herself and the office but one that will mean the difference between whether this bucko lived to see another day. Did I mention that all of this took place after hours? Indeedy.
BPW: What if I don't do that?
Ookebray: For an international student to accept work off-campus without proper authorization is for him or her to immediately jeopardize his or her non-immigrant status.
BPW: {mumbles under breath}
Ookebray: {reaches for letter-opener}
BPW: So, what if I don't apply for this?
Ookebray: I've already told you. It's badbadbad.
This goes on for nearly a half hour. Bamboo-Peace just doesn't seem to get that, without the thing he needed to apply for, he could (potentially) fall out of status and have to take that long flight home to Happy Bay. In the meantime, Ookebray has gone completely scarlet with {righteous!} fury.
BPW: I just don't know.
Ookebray: I kill you now.
In the end, Ookebray sent Bamboo-Peace packin', and wrote up a long letter of explanation in his folder. By that time, she'd had to take off the over-sweater she was wearing because she was that pissed off. This is my favorite story about Ookebray because, the whole time this was transpiring, I was giggling like a schoolgirl at the image that was floating in my head. In it, Ookebray and Bamboo-Peace were swordfighting a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but instead of swords, they were fighting with broken beer bottles (Ookebray) and his ridiculous pencil-bag (Bamboo-Peace). OK, so maybe that's not amusing to you, but I guess you'd have to have been... me.
Ookebray is, without a doubt, the most faithful of my Life in the Corn minions. I reward her with buckets of fish and cookies. No, actually, she's one of my dearest, closest friends, and when she takes whatever fantastic job she'll inevitably be given at the end of this semester, I and Bloomington will be utterly bereft of one of my most favoritest people.
Well, when she's not punching me in the shoulder, giving me bruises the size of dinnerplates. That wench has a whallup in her swing, letmetellyou. And no, I don't mind telling the world that my female coworker wails on me, so shet the feck up.
Here's a shout out to my professional-actin', green-tea-from-hell drinkin', save-me-from-myself angel sent from heaven. Phi Digs fo-evah.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: The corn.
Occupation: Front Desk gangsta; also, Life in the Corn Ninja Number One.
Irrational Claim to Fame: Claims to have invented the word "sorostitute."
Setting: The Office of International Services, perched like a carrion-eating raptor-bird on the third floor of Franklin Hall. It's five minutes until close of business, and it's been a very, very special day in the neighborhood. Domonic and Ookebray are looking forward to the relative respite of an hour's worth of uninterrupted work. Just then, an international walks through the door, grinning like a recently-escaped lunatic. Ookebray heaves a sigh and goes to talk to him while I close the door behind him.
Ookebray: Hey! What can I do for you today?
Bamboo-Peace Water: I want to work.
Ookebray: OK. What's your status?
BPW: {statusstatusstatus}
Ookebray: Well, what you could do is apply for Curricular Practical Training, which would allow you to work off-campus like you seem to want to do.
BPW: How do I do that?
Ookebray, with her legendary poise, grace, and excellent grasp of international student-type regulations, explains the process of applying for, and successfully receiving, the work authorization.
BPW: OK.
Ookebray: Do you understand what you need to do now?
BPW: I don't wanna do that.
Ookebray: Guh?
BPW: That sounds complicated, I don't want to do that.
Ookebray: Look: that's your only option for the kind of employment you want to do.
BPW: But I don't want to do that. Is there some easier way?
At this point, Ookebray senses, ninja-like, that this is not only a battle she must win for herself and the office but one that will mean the difference between whether this bucko lived to see another day. Did I mention that all of this took place after hours? Indeedy.
BPW: What if I don't do that?
Ookebray: For an international student to accept work off-campus without proper authorization is for him or her to immediately jeopardize his or her non-immigrant status.
BPW: {mumbles under breath}
Ookebray: {reaches for letter-opener}
BPW: So, what if I don't apply for this?
Ookebray: I've already told you. It's badbadbad.
This goes on for nearly a half hour. Bamboo-Peace just doesn't seem to get that, without the thing he needed to apply for, he could (potentially) fall out of status and have to take that long flight home to Happy Bay. In the meantime, Ookebray has gone completely scarlet with {righteous!} fury.
BPW: I just don't know.
Ookebray: I kill you now.
In the end, Ookebray sent Bamboo-Peace packin', and wrote up a long letter of explanation in his folder. By that time, she'd had to take off the over-sweater she was wearing because she was that pissed off. This is my favorite story about Ookebray because, the whole time this was transpiring, I was giggling like a schoolgirl at the image that was floating in my head. In it, Ookebray and Bamboo-Peace were swordfighting a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but instead of swords, they were fighting with broken beer bottles (Ookebray) and his ridiculous pencil-bag (Bamboo-Peace). OK, so maybe that's not amusing to you, but I guess you'd have to have been... me.
Ookebray is, without a doubt, the most faithful of my Life in the Corn minions. I reward her with buckets of fish and cookies. No, actually, she's one of my dearest, closest friends, and when she takes whatever fantastic job she'll inevitably be given at the end of this semester, I and Bloomington will be utterly bereft of one of my most favoritest people.
Well, when she's not punching me in the shoulder, giving me bruises the size of dinnerplates. That wench has a whallup in her swing, letmetellyou. And no, I don't mind telling the world that my female coworker wails on me, so shet the feck up.
Here's a shout out to my professional-actin', green-tea-from-hell drinkin', save-me-from-myself angel sent from heaven. Phi Digs fo-evah.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Life in the Corn Minion Number Four: Uliejay.
Name: Uliejay Otortipay.
Location: Banguh, Maine. (Ayuh, again.)
Occupation: Prostitute. Oh, uh, I meant, my sister.
Little Known Fact about Uliejay: She sucked her thumb until she was sixteen. And peed the bed. And cried during thunderstorms.
It was bitter cold (hell, do I even have to preface any description of Maine like that?) when my sister and I went to Mount Desert Island and her Whore of Satan capital, Bar Harbor, for some shopping and frigid beach combin'. I was on Wintah Break, and getting out to the coast was just what I needed after semester's worth of corn-living. It was a blindingly sunny day, the roads were clear of the twenty-five feet of snow, and the tide was blissfully out, all the better for scavenging. Found me two sand dollars, even. All would have gone to plan except for one thing:
We'd eaten shrimp fettucini alfredo for lunch.
We finished our misdeeds in Bah Habah and headed back towards the mainland. As we neared the landward side of the island, Uliejay became ashen. I asked her what her damage was, and she hissed at me; I took this to mean that she was fine. Just as we neared the bridges that cross the sound onto the continental US, Julie began to drive erratically.
"We need to find a bathroom", she hissed under her breath.
My blood went cold. Had it been summer, this would not have been a problem; in the winter, in that part of Maine, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is open. Gas stations close. Boarded-up restaurants bear merry little placards saying "See you in May!"
Can you hold it?, I asked. You know, till we get to Brewer and the "all year 'round" Maine?
She looked at me like I'd asked her to blow-torch a puppy. Magically, we both thought at the same time: hey! Maybe the Acadia National Park pit-stop will be open! The Trenton Bridge one!
As we pulled into the parking lot, my sister's situation had gone from "grim" to "Three Mile Island." She ran up to the door of the wee little crappers.
Locked.
Without hesitation, she lunged into the nearby woods, pushing phenomenal drifts of snow before her. I called to her, but in her madness she heard me not. There was crashing around in the brush, and then she disappeared. Then, silence. The seagulls stopped shrieking. The waves stopped crashing. The wind moved not through the pines.
Five minutes later, a tinny voice.
"Paper towwwwwwwels."
Apparently, Uliejay, who'd been a Girl Scout, was prepared at all times for the worst and had a roll of paper towels in her trunk. The trick, then, was thus: how could I get it to her and not see her cho-chah?
Well, long story short, it ended... well, it ended. I made her bury her mess "like the animals do" and I drove her home, ashy and mortified. Hell, she'd probably gone a long way to forgetting it'd ever happened. Now, dozens of people will read this and know that, two years ago, on a frosty winter's afternoon in Eastern Maine, my sister took a steaming dump on National Park property like a wild animal.
As the years have gone by and every sentence between us hasn't ended in "douchebag" or worse, I've realized that my sister is also my friend. We laugh like there's no tomorrow. And, when she doesn't resent me being home, we have a good time. As she prepares to become a teacher, I think with a smile:
God help those poor bass'ad children.
Kisses, Uliejay!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: Banguh, Maine. (Ayuh, again.)
Occupation: Prostitute. Oh, uh, I meant, my sister.
Little Known Fact about Uliejay: She sucked her thumb until she was sixteen. And peed the bed. And cried during thunderstorms.
It was bitter cold (hell, do I even have to preface any description of Maine like that?) when my sister and I went to Mount Desert Island and her Whore of Satan capital, Bar Harbor, for some shopping and frigid beach combin'. I was on Wintah Break, and getting out to the coast was just what I needed after semester's worth of corn-living. It was a blindingly sunny day, the roads were clear of the twenty-five feet of snow, and the tide was blissfully out, all the better for scavenging. Found me two sand dollars, even. All would have gone to plan except for one thing:
We'd eaten shrimp fettucini alfredo for lunch.
We finished our misdeeds in Bah Habah and headed back towards the mainland. As we neared the landward side of the island, Uliejay became ashen. I asked her what her damage was, and she hissed at me; I took this to mean that she was fine. Just as we neared the bridges that cross the sound onto the continental US, Julie began to drive erratically.
"We need to find a bathroom", she hissed under her breath.
My blood went cold. Had it been summer, this would not have been a problem; in the winter, in that part of Maine, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is open. Gas stations close. Boarded-up restaurants bear merry little placards saying "See you in May!"
Can you hold it?, I asked. You know, till we get to Brewer and the "all year 'round" Maine?
She looked at me like I'd asked her to blow-torch a puppy. Magically, we both thought at the same time: hey! Maybe the Acadia National Park pit-stop will be open! The Trenton Bridge one!
As we pulled into the parking lot, my sister's situation had gone from "grim" to "Three Mile Island." She ran up to the door of the wee little crappers.
Locked.
Without hesitation, she lunged into the nearby woods, pushing phenomenal drifts of snow before her. I called to her, but in her madness she heard me not. There was crashing around in the brush, and then she disappeared. Then, silence. The seagulls stopped shrieking. The waves stopped crashing. The wind moved not through the pines.
Five minutes later, a tinny voice.
"Paper towwwwwwwels."
Apparently, Uliejay, who'd been a Girl Scout, was prepared at all times for the worst and had a roll of paper towels in her trunk. The trick, then, was thus: how could I get it to her and not see her cho-chah?
Well, long story short, it ended... well, it ended. I made her bury her mess "like the animals do" and I drove her home, ashy and mortified. Hell, she'd probably gone a long way to forgetting it'd ever happened. Now, dozens of people will read this and know that, two years ago, on a frosty winter's afternoon in Eastern Maine, my sister took a steaming dump on National Park property like a wild animal.
As the years have gone by and every sentence between us hasn't ended in "douchebag" or worse, I've realized that my sister is also my friend. We laugh like there's no tomorrow. And, when she doesn't resent me being home, we have a good time. As she prepares to become a teacher, I think with a smile:
God help those poor bass'ad children.
Kisses, Uliejay!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Life in the Corn Minion Number Three: Ikemay.
Name: Ikemay Otortipay.
Location: The Wheat (Wichita, Kan-effing-sas).
Occupation: My sire.
Little Known Fact about Ikemay: He collects/is very fond of windchimes(!!!).
The first time I met Ikemay was when his seed of life caused my mother to be in a "family way." Nine months later, when I came forth from my mother's fluid-filled containment unit, I met him and shook his hand. "Good work", I gurgled contentedly. Then I did his taxes.
Thirteen years pass.
As many of you may be unaware, I actually did not grow up in the pines; nay, I grew up in quasi-rural Northwestern New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border and the Poconos. Many of you are currently thinking "Which exit?", thinking you're all cute and clever, sitting there chortling at your own lame joke. I shit to your mouths. The New Jersey I grew up in was a place of bucolic natural beauty, ringed by mountains and traversed by broad rivers. The whole time I lived in Hackettstown, I can only remember there being two murders, and they happened at the same time: some freaky biker brawl, if I recall correctly. And and AND, they weren't Hackettstownians, so whatever. Hackettstown's claim to fame is the fact that it's the only place in the Northern Hemisphere where M&Ms and M&M Mars products are made; when you woke up in the morning, the whole town smelled like baking brownies, and Halloween... well, it's a miracle I still have all of my teeth. Anyway, this isn't about me, it's about the old man. And me.
So, Hackettstown, whilst fairly isolated (then...) from the worries of the outside world, was merely forty-five minutes from New York City. Needless to say, by the time I left NJ at fourteen I'd been to NYC approximately 4.2 billion times. One of those times, my father decided to bring some culture into my, and my sister's, tiny ignorant lives. So, he brought us to see "Cats."
Yes, Cats.
When you live so close to NYC, all of the television channels are geared towards the NYC viewer audience, so of course I grew up watching commercials for shows and musicals. My sister was hell-bent on seeing Cats. Myself? Well, any chance to go to NYC was a chance for me to count prostitutes and try to buy ninja-stars, so I was game. So, for three hours we watched people in spandex cat suits writhe about to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The plot, so far as I could tell, was nonexistent. There was this girl cat. Then she died. Then the big hairy cat dude brought her to cat heaven. I dunno. At any rate, we watched it, and as we were leaving, I asked my dad to get me something as a souvenir, like a $3 program or something. The old man's eyes gleamed.
"Wait outside and I'll get you a souvenir."
I'll pause now and allow you all to imagine what surely awaited me.
{dum dee dum deeeeee dum dee dum}
So, my father came out with his hand closed around something small. "It's your souvenir", he breathed. He opened his hand, and inside was a tiny lightbulb.
A lightbulb he stole from the men's bathroom.
I can laugh now, but at the time I was livid. Instead of cherishing the tiny lightbulb as I would now, I stared at it in mute horror. Oh, was I pissed.
Later that night, my dad got pinched by none other than the NYPD for driving 80 in a 65 around the city's beltline. For the first time in my life, I thought about divine retribution. Of course, my father, He of the Gilded Tongue, talked his way out of the ticket with a warning.
Now you see where I get it from?
Many years have passed since, and when I think about that goofy look on my dad's face when he showed me his "treasure", it makes me smile. He's moved around a lot since then: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh. Now, he's just as lost as I am out here in the heartland.
When I went to see him last Thanksgiving, we went pub crawling. Pub crawling! With my old man! Bet your dad's not so cool.
Here's my shout out to the wheat, and the old man, and his new hip.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: The Wheat (Wichita, Kan-effing-sas).
Occupation: My sire.
Little Known Fact about Ikemay: He collects/is very fond of windchimes(!!!).
The first time I met Ikemay was when his seed of life caused my mother to be in a "family way." Nine months later, when I came forth from my mother's fluid-filled containment unit, I met him and shook his hand. "Good work", I gurgled contentedly. Then I did his taxes.
Thirteen years pass.
As many of you may be unaware, I actually did not grow up in the pines; nay, I grew up in quasi-rural Northwestern New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border and the Poconos. Many of you are currently thinking "Which exit?", thinking you're all cute and clever, sitting there chortling at your own lame joke. I shit to your mouths. The New Jersey I grew up in was a place of bucolic natural beauty, ringed by mountains and traversed by broad rivers. The whole time I lived in Hackettstown, I can only remember there being two murders, and they happened at the same time: some freaky biker brawl, if I recall correctly. And and AND, they weren't Hackettstownians, so whatever. Hackettstown's claim to fame is the fact that it's the only place in the Northern Hemisphere where M&Ms and M&M Mars products are made; when you woke up in the morning, the whole town smelled like baking brownies, and Halloween... well, it's a miracle I still have all of my teeth. Anyway, this isn't about me, it's about the old man. And me.
So, Hackettstown, whilst fairly isolated (then...) from the worries of the outside world, was merely forty-five minutes from New York City. Needless to say, by the time I left NJ at fourteen I'd been to NYC approximately 4.2 billion times. One of those times, my father decided to bring some culture into my, and my sister's, tiny ignorant lives. So, he brought us to see "Cats."
Yes, Cats.
When you live so close to NYC, all of the television channels are geared towards the NYC viewer audience, so of course I grew up watching commercials for shows and musicals. My sister was hell-bent on seeing Cats. Myself? Well, any chance to go to NYC was a chance for me to count prostitutes and try to buy ninja-stars, so I was game. So, for three hours we watched people in spandex cat suits writhe about to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The plot, so far as I could tell, was nonexistent. There was this girl cat. Then she died. Then the big hairy cat dude brought her to cat heaven. I dunno. At any rate, we watched it, and as we were leaving, I asked my dad to get me something as a souvenir, like a $3 program or something. The old man's eyes gleamed.
"Wait outside and I'll get you a souvenir."
I'll pause now and allow you all to imagine what surely awaited me.
{dum dee dum deeeeee dum dee dum}
So, my father came out with his hand closed around something small. "It's your souvenir", he breathed. He opened his hand, and inside was a tiny lightbulb.
A lightbulb he stole from the men's bathroom.
I can laugh now, but at the time I was livid. Instead of cherishing the tiny lightbulb as I would now, I stared at it in mute horror. Oh, was I pissed.
Later that night, my dad got pinched by none other than the NYPD for driving 80 in a 65 around the city's beltline. For the first time in my life, I thought about divine retribution. Of course, my father, He of the Gilded Tongue, talked his way out of the ticket with a warning.
Now you see where I get it from?
Many years have passed since, and when I think about that goofy look on my dad's face when he showed me his "treasure", it makes me smile. He's moved around a lot since then: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh. Now, he's just as lost as I am out here in the heartland.
When I went to see him last Thanksgiving, we went pub crawling. Pub crawling! With my old man! Bet your dad's not so cool.
Here's my shout out to the wheat, and the old man, and his new hip.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Life in the Corn Minion Number Two: Errytay.
Name: Eresatay Otortipay (that's "Errytay" to you, thankee kindly.)
Location: Banguh, Maine. (Ayuh.)
Occupation: Uh, she squeezed me out of her loins, so "mother."
Little Known Fact about Errytay: She can pound down a Captain Nick's Seafood Platter like it's nobody's business. (It's about seven lbs. of food).
The first time I met Errytay was when one of my old man's "wee swimmers" created the magic of life with one of her eggs. As I frolicked about in the warmth of her uterus, I demanded sacrifice: McDonald's french fries. Sadly for her, Salt Lake City/Clearfield/Ogden, the site of my nativity, did not have a McDonalds in late 1979, so apparently (so she says; she is the Mistress of Lies) she made my old man take her somewhere that did. Like Colorado.
So, I was born [merriment!]. Like the Baby Jesus Himself, I was birthed painlessly and in the span of about five minutes. When I came out, I cut my own umbilical cord and began to read an ethnography about Egyptian Bedouins.
Twenty-one years pass.
[Now, Errytay mothereffing hates this story I'm about to tell. But it's my favorite story about her, so I will press on. Don't worry, Errytay; it's not the one about how you got really hooched up and beat me within an inch of my life with a crowbar for playing my Peter Cetera cassette too loudly while you were on that seven month bender. ]
Twenty-one years later, I'm on the phone in the hallway of Bilkent University's Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz, "0" kat (Dorm 78, Ground floor) calling her to ask her if all was going to plan for preparations for picking me up the next day at Logan "Seventh Circle of Hell" Airport in Boston. I'd spent about six months in Turkey, and during that time I could only call Errytay seven or eight times because, uh, I was using $10 phonecards that would only let me talk for three and a half minutes. This was one of those times.
Now: It's a source of family contention, and will remain so until the end of all things, whether I actually said that I'd be entering American airspace the next day. I feel I did. Just so you know.
At the ass-crack of dawn the next morning, there I was at Esenboğa (Ankara) Airport, saying goodbye to my Turkish brother Dinçer. One of the last things he said to me before I got on the plane was "Hey, did you call your ma last night?" I said that I had indeed called her to confirm that my Uncle Utchbay and Aunt Ondaray would be picking me up (they live in Manchester, NH, a forty minute drive away) and then taking me back to the mothership the next day.
I got on the plane in Ankara and ended up with a layover in Zurich, Switzerland. In my weepiness about leaving Turkey, I ate about thirteen pounds of Swiss chocolate and then got on my transatlantic flight.
I hit Boston in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm, and my flight was the last transatlantic flight to touch down that night. Turns out all the rest were being magically diverted to Bangor, Maine. {Satan!} I cleared customs and took my metric tonne of luggage to a little Slap'n'Crap kiosk and tried to used Turkish lira to pay for a dry little turkey sandwich (turkey! I almost wept) and then called Errytay.
Ringing, ringing.
Errytay: Hello?
Me: Hi, Mom! I'm at Logan! Where are Utchbay and Ondaray?
Errytay: Hahahahahahahaha! No you're not!
Me: Uh, yeah I am. [holds reciever up in the air, wherein she could hear the announcements overhead; the word "Logan" was used twice]
Errytay: {defensive} YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TOMORROW NIGHT!
Me: But, uh, I'm here now.
Errytay: [frantic] I'll call them and have them come now.
Me: Don't worry about it. I'll be OK.
Errytay: No you won't!
[She hangs up to call them. They're magically not home, as they are attending their Harley Davidson Club meeting. The franticness continues in earnest.]
In the end, they came home, heard my mother's twenty-eight plaintive voicemails, called her, and they came and got me. I guess what happened was that Errytay hadn't reckoned that I'd be flying against time, and that my Boston arrival would actually be the same day I left.
The reason that this is my favorite story about my [now mortified all over again] mother is that, of all people on the earth, she's the last for whom this sort of thing would happen. She's early to everything by at least a half hour. She pays her bills the nanosecond she opens them. And, she managed to raise two bizarre larvae nearly single-handedly in a new city and a new state. Of all of the things I hope that I get from her one day, it's that strength, that togetherness, that I think we all should aspire to.
Unless she's driving to Boston, because then she's a raving lunatic.
Kisses, mom!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: Banguh, Maine. (Ayuh.)
Occupation: Uh, she squeezed me out of her loins, so "mother."
Little Known Fact about Errytay: She can pound down a Captain Nick's Seafood Platter like it's nobody's business. (It's about seven lbs. of food).
The first time I met Errytay was when one of my old man's "wee swimmers" created the magic of life with one of her eggs. As I frolicked about in the warmth of her uterus, I demanded sacrifice: McDonald's french fries. Sadly for her, Salt Lake City/Clearfield/Ogden, the site of my nativity, did not have a McDonalds in late 1979, so apparently (so she says; she is the Mistress of Lies) she made my old man take her somewhere that did. Like Colorado.
So, I was born [merriment!]. Like the Baby Jesus Himself, I was birthed painlessly and in the span of about five minutes. When I came out, I cut my own umbilical cord and began to read an ethnography about Egyptian Bedouins.
Twenty-one years pass.
[Now, Errytay mothereffing hates this story I'm about to tell. But it's my favorite story about her, so I will press on. Don't worry, Errytay; it's not the one about how you got really hooched up and beat me within an inch of my life with a crowbar for playing my Peter Cetera cassette too loudly while you were on that seven month bender. ]
Twenty-one years later, I'm on the phone in the hallway of Bilkent University's Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz, "0" kat (Dorm 78, Ground floor) calling her to ask her if all was going to plan for preparations for picking me up the next day at Logan "Seventh Circle of Hell" Airport in Boston. I'd spent about six months in Turkey, and during that time I could only call Errytay seven or eight times because, uh, I was using $10 phonecards that would only let me talk for three and a half minutes. This was one of those times.
Now: It's a source of family contention, and will remain so until the end of all things, whether I actually said that I'd be entering American airspace the next day. I feel I did. Just so you know.
At the ass-crack of dawn the next morning, there I was at Esenboğa (Ankara) Airport, saying goodbye to my Turkish brother Dinçer. One of the last things he said to me before I got on the plane was "Hey, did you call your ma last night?" I said that I had indeed called her to confirm that my Uncle Utchbay and Aunt Ondaray would be picking me up (they live in Manchester, NH, a forty minute drive away) and then taking me back to the mothership the next day.
I got on the plane in Ankara and ended up with a layover in Zurich, Switzerland. In my weepiness about leaving Turkey, I ate about thirteen pounds of Swiss chocolate and then got on my transatlantic flight.
I hit Boston in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm, and my flight was the last transatlantic flight to touch down that night. Turns out all the rest were being magically diverted to Bangor, Maine. {Satan!} I cleared customs and took my metric tonne of luggage to a little Slap'n'Crap kiosk and tried to used Turkish lira to pay for a dry little turkey sandwich (turkey! I almost wept) and then called Errytay.
Ringing, ringing.
Errytay: Hello?
Me: Hi, Mom! I'm at Logan! Where are Utchbay and Ondaray?
Errytay: Hahahahahahahaha! No you're not!
Me: Uh, yeah I am. [holds reciever up in the air, wherein she could hear the announcements overhead; the word "Logan" was used twice]
Errytay: {defensive} YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TOMORROW NIGHT!
Me: But, uh, I'm here now.
Errytay: [frantic] I'll call them and have them come now.
Me: Don't worry about it. I'll be OK.
Errytay: No you won't!
[She hangs up to call them. They're magically not home, as they are attending their Harley Davidson Club meeting. The franticness continues in earnest.]
In the end, they came home, heard my mother's twenty-eight plaintive voicemails, called her, and they came and got me. I guess what happened was that Errytay hadn't reckoned that I'd be flying against time, and that my Boston arrival would actually be the same day I left.
The reason that this is my favorite story about my [now mortified all over again] mother is that, of all people on the earth, she's the last for whom this sort of thing would happen. She's early to everything by at least a half hour. She pays her bills the nanosecond she opens them. And, she managed to raise two bizarre larvae nearly single-handedly in a new city and a new state. Of all of the things I hope that I get from her one day, it's that strength, that togetherness, that I think we all should aspire to.
Unless she's driving to Boston, because then she's a raving lunatic.
Kisses, mom!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Sikh and ye shall find.
Yesterday morning, I got all fancied up (ie, no flannel, no workboots) and got ready to go to the Indiana state NAFSA conference, which was to be held at IUPUI. IUPUI, pronouced "oo-wee-poo-wee", is Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis. NAFSA, pronounced "Jan-et-Jack-son's-bos-oms", is the National Association for Foreign Student Advisors. My office graciously offered to send me so that I could get the inside scoop on my new, beloved profession, network with colleagues/potential Indiana employers, and best of all, skip my goddamn Friday classes.
[As we speak, I am euthanizing my "fun" mylar clown balloon from my birthday. He's been flying really low for the past two days, and this morning I awoke to find him gasping for breath, supine, on floor. Out of compassion for my new friend, I cut a tiny hole in his hat, allowing him to die with dignity. It's a very Amsterdam moment for me.]
We got to Oo-wee-poo-wee and checked in. Brooke, dressed to kill in a lovely mint-green powersuit (97% cotton, 2% poly blend, and 1% "other"--Tibetan nun's hair, methinks), began to immediately network with people she knew from past meetings and interviews she'd had. One of the men she was talking to, a representative DSO from Valparaiso, wore a turban and looked to be South Asian.
A Sikh.
Of course, my pupils dialated and gurbani music filled my head. For some reason, though, I was too shy to introduce myself. Well, I know why. It always seems so Orientalist when I introduce myself to Sikhs, because I immediately have to explain away the shiny-eyed zeal that positively lights me up from the inside. I'm not sure how *I'd* react if someone shook my hand and then launched into a diatribe about how much that person was fascinated by my culture and how they'd done extensive fieldwork/class work with my people. Well, I'll tell you how I'd react: [stab!]. Brooke, as always, had my back, and she explained to her old friend how I was an absolute mutant for Sikh studies. After the opening remarks and continental breakfast (coffee and dry little danishes), I felt someone grasp my arm from behind. I turned around to find the Sikh standing there, grinning. "Brooke tells me that you did Sikh fieldwork. Sat sri akal."
(undergarment soilage)
Holly (yes, his name is Holly) Singh ji and I were inseparable for the rest of the day. It was just like old times, when I'd hang around with my beloved Sikhs at the Milford gurdwara in Boston, Massachusetts, talking about martyrdom, Khalistan and Operation Blue Star. Of course, Holly and I didn't talk about those (heavy) things, as we were at a conference for foreign student advisors, but I did ask him if there was a gurdwara sahib in Indiana. "Oh yes, Domonic. There's one here in Indianapolis." I began to writhe in my seat like a hyperactive Jack Russell pup.
The icing on the Sikh cake was, unbeknowst to me, that the keynote speaker who presented at lunch was to be none other than Sagamore of the Wabash laureate K.P. Singh, beloved citizen of Indiana and pink-turban-wearin' Sikh. I couldn't deal with it. I'd been in the corn for almost two years and had only glimpsed three Sikhs from across the Front Desk, and now I was sitting with a new Sikh friend AND listening to a speech from one of the US's most influential Sikhs. Just when I thought my little, effed-up world would implode from the weight of my happiness, Holly asked me if I wanted to MEET K.P. in person. I wasn't able to put on a poker face before getting up so fast that I created a sonic boom, saying "Boy, would I!"
So, Brooke and I met K.P. Singh, who gave us his business card and shook our hands. I knew for a fact that K.P. was an influential member of the Indianapolis gurdwara, so I took the opportunity to "warn" him that I'd be coming. He was very welcoming, as Sikhs always are, and cordially invited me and whomever I wanted to bring to come to service. "It's in Punjabi, you know", he said, winking, "but we'll feed you afterward." Ah, the langar hall. Indian food like you'd never believe, served while you're seated on the floor... it's fan-effin'-tastic. I also took the opportunity to drop Cynthia Mahmood's name, as she was my mentor and advisor for my undergraduate career, and K.P., as well as most North American Sikhs, had only good to say about her. I didn't mention, however, that I was in one of her books; I'll leave that for another day.
The conference itself was useful and eye-opening for me. I found out that I know way more about immigration and foreign student advising than I'd ever dreamed. I found out that I could, at a smaller school, pretty much jump right into being an FSA with some SEVIS training and other related cross-training (acronyms! muahahaha!). I also realized that the training I've been getting at IU, directly (from the advisor staff and peers) and indirectly (from hundreds of thousands of student questions), has made me pretty well-rounded. I know stuff about most visa types and how things should work for them. I also found out that cheese danishes plug up my works, if you know what I mean.
It's 80 degrees and sunny out; the birds are enticing their mates like the little feathery whores that they are, and flies are beginning to hatch. Far be it from me to spend all day in here entertaining myself; haydi, gidelim. (C'mon, let's go.)
I remain, as ever,
Dom
[As we speak, I am euthanizing my "fun" mylar clown balloon from my birthday. He's been flying really low for the past two days, and this morning I awoke to find him gasping for breath, supine, on floor. Out of compassion for my new friend, I cut a tiny hole in his hat, allowing him to die with dignity. It's a very Amsterdam moment for me.]
We got to Oo-wee-poo-wee and checked in. Brooke, dressed to kill in a lovely mint-green powersuit (97% cotton, 2% poly blend, and 1% "other"--Tibetan nun's hair, methinks), began to immediately network with people she knew from past meetings and interviews she'd had. One of the men she was talking to, a representative DSO from Valparaiso, wore a turban and looked to be South Asian.
A Sikh.
Of course, my pupils dialated and gurbani music filled my head. For some reason, though, I was too shy to introduce myself. Well, I know why. It always seems so Orientalist when I introduce myself to Sikhs, because I immediately have to explain away the shiny-eyed zeal that positively lights me up from the inside. I'm not sure how *I'd* react if someone shook my hand and then launched into a diatribe about how much that person was fascinated by my culture and how they'd done extensive fieldwork/class work with my people. Well, I'll tell you how I'd react: [stab!]. Brooke, as always, had my back, and she explained to her old friend how I was an absolute mutant for Sikh studies. After the opening remarks and continental breakfast (coffee and dry little danishes), I felt someone grasp my arm from behind. I turned around to find the Sikh standing there, grinning. "Brooke tells me that you did Sikh fieldwork. Sat sri akal."
(undergarment soilage)
Holly (yes, his name is Holly) Singh ji and I were inseparable for the rest of the day. It was just like old times, when I'd hang around with my beloved Sikhs at the Milford gurdwara in Boston, Massachusetts, talking about martyrdom, Khalistan and Operation Blue Star. Of course, Holly and I didn't talk about those (heavy) things, as we were at a conference for foreign student advisors, but I did ask him if there was a gurdwara sahib in Indiana. "Oh yes, Domonic. There's one here in Indianapolis." I began to writhe in my seat like a hyperactive Jack Russell pup.
The icing on the Sikh cake was, unbeknowst to me, that the keynote speaker who presented at lunch was to be none other than Sagamore of the Wabash laureate K.P. Singh, beloved citizen of Indiana and pink-turban-wearin' Sikh. I couldn't deal with it. I'd been in the corn for almost two years and had only glimpsed three Sikhs from across the Front Desk, and now I was sitting with a new Sikh friend AND listening to a speech from one of the US's most influential Sikhs. Just when I thought my little, effed-up world would implode from the weight of my happiness, Holly asked me if I wanted to MEET K.P. in person. I wasn't able to put on a poker face before getting up so fast that I created a sonic boom, saying "Boy, would I!"
So, Brooke and I met K.P. Singh, who gave us his business card and shook our hands. I knew for a fact that K.P. was an influential member of the Indianapolis gurdwara, so I took the opportunity to "warn" him that I'd be coming. He was very welcoming, as Sikhs always are, and cordially invited me and whomever I wanted to bring to come to service. "It's in Punjabi, you know", he said, winking, "but we'll feed you afterward." Ah, the langar hall. Indian food like you'd never believe, served while you're seated on the floor... it's fan-effin'-tastic. I also took the opportunity to drop Cynthia Mahmood's name, as she was my mentor and advisor for my undergraduate career, and K.P., as well as most North American Sikhs, had only good to say about her. I didn't mention, however, that I was in one of her books; I'll leave that for another day.
The conference itself was useful and eye-opening for me. I found out that I know way more about immigration and foreign student advising than I'd ever dreamed. I found out that I could, at a smaller school, pretty much jump right into being an FSA with some SEVIS training and other related cross-training (acronyms! muahahaha!). I also realized that the training I've been getting at IU, directly (from the advisor staff and peers) and indirectly (from hundreds of thousands of student questions), has made me pretty well-rounded. I know stuff about most visa types and how things should work for them. I also found out that cheese danishes plug up my works, if you know what I mean.
It's 80 degrees and sunny out; the birds are enticing their mates like the little feathery whores that they are, and flies are beginning to hatch. Far be it from me to spend all day in here entertaining myself; haydi, gidelim. (C'mon, let's go.)
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Friday, April 08, 2005
Ah, anonymous posty-person.
Upon asking for a "clue about who you are" when replying to the "Ensure your immortality" post, a Life in the Corn reader responded:
Hey,
You know who I am
Love you always
I'm not so sure I know what to do with that. I mean, it's true: everyone loves me. ( >:) )
Is that supposed to be tender? Or is it like Sting's "Every Breath You Take", which only the moronic think is romantic? [Stalker song!]
So, anonymous posty-person, send me an email and identify thyself. If you don't, I'll have to go all Ouija your ass.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Hey,
You know who I am
Love you always
I'm not so sure I know what to do with that. I mean, it's true: everyone loves me. ( >:) )
Is that supposed to be tender? Or is it like Sting's "Every Breath You Take", which only the moronic think is romantic? [Stalker song!]
So, anonymous posty-person, send me an email and identify thyself. If you don't, I'll have to go all Ouija your ass.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Life in the Corn Minion Number One: Arleinamay.
Name: Arleinamay Ordfay.
Location: Ellsw’th, Maine.
Current Occupation: Music instructress for larvae.
Favorite Drink: Moxie. ["Unique" Maine soda: tastes like flat cola that has had cigars extinguished in it.]
Arleinamay approached me one stifling (hahahahaha! stifling! in Maine!) summer day and asked me for a favor. She’d snagged an interview for a music teaching position and needed a companion to ride with her through the nosferatu-infested forests to the school. It was my day off, and it was summer, and at that time I’d not traveled around much in my piney home state, so I was like, hey, what the eff. That, and I was certain to find some random ethnographic artifact. Plus, you could definitely do worse to have Arleinamay as a traveling companion; my vocal cords ache when I think about the hours of pleasant conversation. And by “pleasant” I mean “oftentimes inappropriate, vulgar and hysterical.”
We got into her boat-car and headed due East. Her interview was supposed to be in a town called Woodland, which we found on a map to be near Calais on the Canadian border. We prayed to any deity that came to mind for our safe passage on “The Airline”, aka Route 1, which is used primarily by logging trucks and skiddahs, which of course take up the entire road and force smaller, weaker vehicles into the ditch. We made good time to the remote Eastern portion of the Pine Tree State, and since we got there hella-early, we decided to go to a Canadian Wal*Mart, which was delightful to the extreme. (Canadian rednecks speaking French; divine.) When it came time to get a move on, we crossed back into the States and made haste to the school. Arleinamay walked into the reception office and announced that she was there to interview for the music position.
One of the two women in the office crumpled her face ever-so-slightly. “I’m the music teacher, and as far as I know {shoots glance to receptionist, who shrugs and shakes her head, eyebrows raised} I’m not going anywhere.” Arleinamay said that she’d been contacted by the school and that there was, indeed, supposed to be a music position available. We stared at each other for a few minutes, periodically shrugging our shoulders and crinkling our brows. The receptionist then looked up at Arleinamay and said, and I quote:
“Well, did you know that theyah ah two Woodlands in Maine?”
My first instinct was to wonder what the hell kind of state would allow there to be two towns to have the same name. Then I remembered: only a million and a half people live here. Who the eff cares of there are two towns with the same name? On the tail of that, of course, was my curiosity about where the other Woodland might be. Upon asking, we found out that the “Woodland” we were in currently was phasing out of being named as such, and was transitioning to “Baileyville.” “The othah Woodland”, the receptionist said, “is up Fo’t Fayahfield way.”
Effing Fort Fairfield. Arleinamay went ashy, like when you get hit with that first stomach spasm after eating Indian food. Fort Fairfield is two and a half hours due North from Calais and the faux Woodland. To say that we’d never make it on time would be like saying that Martha Stewart is really an overweight Hispanic man with good makeup; both are true. The receptionist’s curiosity turned to pity, and she handed Arleinamay a phone with which she could call the non-faux Woodland school to tell them that we were missing chromosomes. Arleinamay apologized profusely for wasting their time and thanked them for their consideration.
But apparently, they were interested enough in her that they said, hey, we'll wait the two and a half hours for you to come interview. Christ on a cracker. Back in the car; two and a half hours later we were in Aroostook County ("The County" in Mainese; it's the largest county in Maine and the largest county East of the Mississippi).
It all ended well. They offered Arleinamay a job on the spot and she later took it. For more than a year, she and her then-fiancee Ndreway lived in Fort Fairfield, Maine, population 7, within visual distance of the Canadian border crossing. Once a day, an antique air-raid siren went off at noon, and that was the excitement in Fort Fairfield.
That's my favorite story about Arleinamay, and I didn't make up a single bit of it, as she could confirm. Well, I neglected to tell you how they, as poor teachers, made supplementary income from selling children into white slavery, but that's for another time.
I met Arleinamay my first week at UMaine, in my crappy little dorm room in Somerset Hall. Her boyfriend, Ndreway, was to be my roommate, and as he unpacked (silently) we talked each other's ears off. The day three years later when I was the best man at their wedding was one of the proudest of my life; it was the least I could do for years of sister-like friendship.
I miss her, and Ndreway, all the way out here in the corn. But she knows, I hope, that wherever I go, she's there too.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Location: Ellsw’th, Maine.
Current Occupation: Music instructress for larvae.
Favorite Drink: Moxie. ["Unique" Maine soda: tastes like flat cola that has had cigars extinguished in it.]
Arleinamay approached me one stifling (hahahahaha! stifling! in Maine!) summer day and asked me for a favor. She’d snagged an interview for a music teaching position and needed a companion to ride with her through the nosferatu-infested forests to the school. It was my day off, and it was summer, and at that time I’d not traveled around much in my piney home state, so I was like, hey, what the eff. That, and I was certain to find some random ethnographic artifact. Plus, you could definitely do worse to have Arleinamay as a traveling companion; my vocal cords ache when I think about the hours of pleasant conversation. And by “pleasant” I mean “oftentimes inappropriate, vulgar and hysterical.”
We got into her boat-car and headed due East. Her interview was supposed to be in a town called Woodland, which we found on a map to be near Calais on the Canadian border. We prayed to any deity that came to mind for our safe passage on “The Airline”, aka Route 1, which is used primarily by logging trucks and skiddahs, which of course take up the entire road and force smaller, weaker vehicles into the ditch. We made good time to the remote Eastern portion of the Pine Tree State, and since we got there hella-early, we decided to go to a Canadian Wal*Mart, which was delightful to the extreme. (Canadian rednecks speaking French; divine.) When it came time to get a move on, we crossed back into the States and made haste to the school. Arleinamay walked into the reception office and announced that she was there to interview for the music position.
One of the two women in the office crumpled her face ever-so-slightly. “I’m the music teacher, and as far as I know {shoots glance to receptionist, who shrugs and shakes her head, eyebrows raised} I’m not going anywhere.” Arleinamay said that she’d been contacted by the school and that there was, indeed, supposed to be a music position available. We stared at each other for a few minutes, periodically shrugging our shoulders and crinkling our brows. The receptionist then looked up at Arleinamay and said, and I quote:
“Well, did you know that theyah ah two Woodlands in Maine?”
My first instinct was to wonder what the hell kind of state would allow there to be two towns to have the same name. Then I remembered: only a million and a half people live here. Who the eff cares of there are two towns with the same name? On the tail of that, of course, was my curiosity about where the other Woodland might be. Upon asking, we found out that the “Woodland” we were in currently was phasing out of being named as such, and was transitioning to “Baileyville.” “The othah Woodland”, the receptionist said, “is up Fo’t Fayahfield way.”
Effing Fort Fairfield. Arleinamay went ashy, like when you get hit with that first stomach spasm after eating Indian food. Fort Fairfield is two and a half hours due North from Calais and the faux Woodland. To say that we’d never make it on time would be like saying that Martha Stewart is really an overweight Hispanic man with good makeup; both are true. The receptionist’s curiosity turned to pity, and she handed Arleinamay a phone with which she could call the non-faux Woodland school to tell them that we were missing chromosomes. Arleinamay apologized profusely for wasting their time and thanked them for their consideration.
But apparently, they were interested enough in her that they said, hey, we'll wait the two and a half hours for you to come interview. Christ on a cracker. Back in the car; two and a half hours later we were in Aroostook County ("The County" in Mainese; it's the largest county in Maine and the largest county East of the Mississippi).
It all ended well. They offered Arleinamay a job on the spot and she later took it. For more than a year, she and her then-fiancee Ndreway lived in Fort Fairfield, Maine, population 7, within visual distance of the Canadian border crossing. Once a day, an antique air-raid siren went off at noon, and that was the excitement in Fort Fairfield.
That's my favorite story about Arleinamay, and I didn't make up a single bit of it, as she could confirm. Well, I neglected to tell you how they, as poor teachers, made supplementary income from selling children into white slavery, but that's for another time.
I met Arleinamay my first week at UMaine, in my crappy little dorm room in Somerset Hall. Her boyfriend, Ndreway, was to be my roommate, and as he unpacked (silently) we talked each other's ears off. The day three years later when I was the best man at their wedding was one of the proudest of my life; it was the least I could do for years of sister-like friendship.
I miss her, and Ndreway, all the way out here in the corn. But she knows, I hope, that wherever I go, she's there too.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Ensure your immortality.
Having the wee Sitemeter thingiemabobber at the bottom of my 'blog has me intrigued. I've had 367 hits (at 1:58 PM Thursday, the 7th of April) since March 9th. Someone's out there, but at this point, with a couple of exceptions, I have no idea who's reading this. So, here's my fun idea.
Post a comment to this and tell me the name of your internet provider (verizon.com, insightbb.com, aol.com, etc.) and give me a hint about who the hell you are, and I will write an individualized 'blog telling the world my favorite story about you. And and AND, I will make up a fun nickname for you, in case you want to remain anonymous.
Well, for some of you it's gonna be painfully obvious who you are. Oh, and I'll probably make shit up about you, too. It'll be fancy, just you wait and see.
I remain, as ever,
Bated-breath Dom
Post a comment to this and tell me the name of your internet provider (verizon.com, insightbb.com, aol.com, etc.) and give me a hint about who the hell you are, and I will write an individualized 'blog telling the world my favorite story about you. And and AND, I will make up a fun nickname for you, in case you want to remain anonymous.
Well, for some of you it's gonna be painfully obvious who you are. Oh, and I'll probably make shit up about you, too. It'll be fancy, just you wait and see.
I remain, as ever,
Bated-breath Dom
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
"To transient killer whales, sea lions are like sausages with whiskers."
This is a quote taken directly from this month's National Geographic (The Crapper Reader par excellence). Are the directors of this esteemed periodical trying to give seven-year-olds violent dreams wherein Willy the Friendly Boy-loving Whale snorks down precious sea mammals like Seal McNuggets? When I was a larva, my mother purchased several of David Attenborough's Trials of Life videos for me from TimeLife Video. I'm not sure she knew what was going to be on them, but I did, having seen several of the episodes on the sly. Let's just say that Sir David doesn't make the animals kingdom seem... well, approachable. Watch, wee ones, as killer whales off the coast of Patagonia fling themselves onto beaches to snack upon terrified sea lion pups! Or, perhaps, as Nile crocodiles savage unsuspecting wildebeest calves as they drink? Or maybe, most terrifying of all, how packs of chimps in equatorial Africa band together and team-hunt lesser primates, whom they consume (alive!) with gusto?
Man, I never had a chance.
An anonymous Life in the Corn reader sent me a personal email. The subject line was "Is it true?" When one recieves an email with that as the opener, you brace yourself for the unimaginable. Essentially, the reader wanted to know if my blogs (the events contained therein) were true. After I swallowed a portion of my tongue laughing, I thought: hmm. Well, I guess if you didn't know me well enough, you'd think that I was joking. Sadly, this really is my life. [takes bite of orphan sandwich with extra pickle]
Today at work, whilst wading through dozens of emails with subject lines like "I need the help urgent!", I found one that intrigued me. And by "intrigued me" I mean "made me temporarily unable to properly hold liquid waste within the confines of my body because I was laughing so hard that Franklin Hall's rodent population committed seppuku en masse." An international student had altered how his name appeared when he sent email. So, instead of the usual first name, last name, this student had made it so that his account appeared as his last name and then the words "Bobo Captain Kiss It." Bobo Captain Kiss It! I repeat, just in case you were having an aneurysm, Bobo Captain Kiss It. Clearly, this was intentional, but it made me think fondly of the amusing names we run across in my office. To name a few:
Ufuk (Turkish).
So Young (Korean).
Bum Suk (Korean).
-and, on the tail of that one:
Suk Bum (Korean).
Kittiporn (Thai).
Bimbo (Hungarian).
Rikshit (Indian).
Deng (Chinese)-pronounced "dung."
The list goes on and on. I am, above all, a professional, so I wait till I am in the "break room" copying their documents to titter like a ten-year-old girl. I'm sure all of those names are noble and beautiful in their native languages, but to our nasty Anglophone ears, uh, wow. If one of you internationals happens on this blog one day and you see your name above, rest assured, I'm not making fun of you. It's coincidence that your name makes me giggle. If it's any consolation, my stage name is Tonsa Rollsafat.
Today was Monroe County's first tornado watch, which of course makes me feel really effing safe living in my plywood palace. Fancy. One more "perk" of living in the corn; you get to die being sucked into a whirling vortex of wind, hail and the fragments of other people's lives.
I was thinking today how fun, and, uh, un-PC it would be for me to do a study I've been desperately desiring to do since I moved to Maine. In this study, I'd interview hundreds of young men in their late teens and early twenties about why it is that they, white-as-cotton suburbanite/farmboy bourgeoise, feel the need to ghetto-ify. What's the draw? How is living in Harlem cooler than living in Des Moines? Why do you wear necklaces with pendants that weigh more than Roseanne Barr? What's with the sideways ballcap? How about the kop-killah rap? I'm just mildly curious, that's all. Aw hell, I'm fascinated. I guess the pot's calling the kettle black on that one, what with how I'm addressed half the time as "Demir." Touche, bitches, touche.
The other day, I had a long conversation about who our heros are. Of course, far be it from me to choose someone rational, like September 11th firemen, a president, a world leader, a strong family member. No, I chose the Wicked Witch of the West. She was misunderstood in her own time. She was unable to properly mourn the death of her beloved sister. And then, the brat who snuffed said sister steals the magic shoes that would have allowed her to realize her dreams. Plus, she had minions. True, they didn't adore her, but they respected her. Then, the little beast assasinates her. What a visionary! We should all be a little more like her.
The other day I was discussing Turkish movies with Abbas hocam before class. I do so dearly love them despite the fact that eight out of ten of them make you want to drink a Drano frappucino. For example, let's take the film "Baba", or "Father."
1) A man (husband and father of three) tries to get a work visa to stay as a "guest worker" in Germany, but is denied because his teeth are bad. (?)
2) In another part of the forest, a rich old man's son gets into a bar brawl and murders another man.
3) Our protagonist is ferrying the rich old man across the Bosphorus when he tells him that his family is in desperate need of money.
4) Old man hatches plan: Hey! Take the fall for my son on the murder charges and, while you convalesce in style in a TURKISH PRISON for ten years, I will financially support your family! After all, isn't prison the same thing as Germany?
5) Protagonist accepts and goes to jail in rich old man's son's stead.
6) Protagonist's wife is raped by the old man's son while he is in prison.
7) She leaves the baby (protagonist's baby) on the steps of a mosque and disappears.
8) Protagonist is told that his prison sentence, which he thought was going to be 10 years, is now more like twenty.
9) When he does get out, he discovers that his wife was on the lam, his baby was gone, his old mother had died and that his two remaining children, a boy and a girl, had been given away to unknown parties.
10) A "friend" tries to cheer him up with a whore. Upon undressing, he notices a strange birthmark. Oh oh oh, his own daughter is about to do him. But because she starts talking about how much she hates her father and how he abandoned his own family, he doesn't reveal his identity. Incidentally, he doesn't do her, either. [Praise the sweet weeping Jesus in his hay-scented manger].
11) He finds out that his son is a petty gangster.
12) He decides, hey, I'm gonna snuff the bass'ad who did this to me, and since the old man was already dead, he decides to blow away the son. As he is pumping him full of lead, more shots ring out from the corner. Turns out his petty gangster son was unknowingly the bodyguard of the rich old man's son. As his father is lying, perishing in a pool of his own red blood, he suddenly recognizes him and, tears in his eyes, says "Baba? Baba?"
So yeah. Most Turkish movies are like this. So I was talking to Abbas hocam about trying to find Turkish movies that weren't complete wrist-slashers when he suggested "Gemide", or "On the Ship." Abbas asked, "Do you want to know how to swear really badly in Turkish?" Man, did he even have to ask? Do I ever! However, a quick glance at the back of the VCD case confirmed my sneaking suspicions: there was gonna be a lot of brutal sex. Apparently, some sailors either buy or otherwise procure a woman and then they pass her around like a 40 oz. of malt liquer. Hmmm. Turkish softcore. Saucy. I'm saving it for a rainy day, but I'll keep you posted, you porn-hounds.
Finally, a word about pollen. Pollen, while allowing many species of plants to propagate, makes me want to take a Soviet flame-thrower to every field within a twenty mile radius. It feels like a hamster is living in each one of my sinuses, all 40 of them. It's only a matter of time before it drives me to the brink and I kill a nun.
Again.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Man, I never had a chance.
An anonymous Life in the Corn reader sent me a personal email. The subject line was "Is it true?" When one recieves an email with that as the opener, you brace yourself for the unimaginable. Essentially, the reader wanted to know if my blogs (the events contained therein) were true. After I swallowed a portion of my tongue laughing, I thought: hmm. Well, I guess if you didn't know me well enough, you'd think that I was joking. Sadly, this really is my life. [takes bite of orphan sandwich with extra pickle]
Today at work, whilst wading through dozens of emails with subject lines like "I need the help urgent!", I found one that intrigued me. And by "intrigued me" I mean "made me temporarily unable to properly hold liquid waste within the confines of my body because I was laughing so hard that Franklin Hall's rodent population committed seppuku en masse." An international student had altered how his name appeared when he sent email. So, instead of the usual first name, last name, this student had made it so that his account appeared as his last name and then the words "Bobo Captain Kiss It." Bobo Captain Kiss It! I repeat, just in case you were having an aneurysm, Bobo Captain Kiss It. Clearly, this was intentional, but it made me think fondly of the amusing names we run across in my office. To name a few:
Ufuk (Turkish).
So Young (Korean).
Bum Suk (Korean).
-and, on the tail of that one:
Suk Bum (Korean).
Kittiporn (Thai).
Bimbo (Hungarian).
Rikshit (Indian).
Deng (Chinese)-pronounced "dung."
The list goes on and on. I am, above all, a professional, so I wait till I am in the "break room" copying their documents to titter like a ten-year-old girl. I'm sure all of those names are noble and beautiful in their native languages, but to our nasty Anglophone ears, uh, wow. If one of you internationals happens on this blog one day and you see your name above, rest assured, I'm not making fun of you. It's coincidence that your name makes me giggle. If it's any consolation, my stage name is Tonsa Rollsafat.
Today was Monroe County's first tornado watch, which of course makes me feel really effing safe living in my plywood palace. Fancy. One more "perk" of living in the corn; you get to die being sucked into a whirling vortex of wind, hail and the fragments of other people's lives.
I was thinking today how fun, and, uh, un-PC it would be for me to do a study I've been desperately desiring to do since I moved to Maine. In this study, I'd interview hundreds of young men in their late teens and early twenties about why it is that they, white-as-cotton suburbanite/farmboy bourgeoise, feel the need to ghetto-ify. What's the draw? How is living in Harlem cooler than living in Des Moines? Why do you wear necklaces with pendants that weigh more than Roseanne Barr? What's with the sideways ballcap? How about the kop-killah rap? I'm just mildly curious, that's all. Aw hell, I'm fascinated. I guess the pot's calling the kettle black on that one, what with how I'm addressed half the time as "Demir." Touche, bitches, touche.
The other day, I had a long conversation about who our heros are. Of course, far be it from me to choose someone rational, like September 11th firemen, a president, a world leader, a strong family member. No, I chose the Wicked Witch of the West. She was misunderstood in her own time. She was unable to properly mourn the death of her beloved sister. And then, the brat who snuffed said sister steals the magic shoes that would have allowed her to realize her dreams. Plus, she had minions. True, they didn't adore her, but they respected her. Then, the little beast assasinates her. What a visionary! We should all be a little more like her.
The other day I was discussing Turkish movies with Abbas hocam before class. I do so dearly love them despite the fact that eight out of ten of them make you want to drink a Drano frappucino. For example, let's take the film "Baba", or "Father."
1) A man (husband and father of three) tries to get a work visa to stay as a "guest worker" in Germany, but is denied because his teeth are bad. (?)
2) In another part of the forest, a rich old man's son gets into a bar brawl and murders another man.
3) Our protagonist is ferrying the rich old man across the Bosphorus when he tells him that his family is in desperate need of money.
4) Old man hatches plan: Hey! Take the fall for my son on the murder charges and, while you convalesce in style in a TURKISH PRISON for ten years, I will financially support your family! After all, isn't prison the same thing as Germany?
5) Protagonist accepts and goes to jail in rich old man's son's stead.
6) Protagonist's wife is raped by the old man's son while he is in prison.
7) She leaves the baby (protagonist's baby) on the steps of a mosque and disappears.
8) Protagonist is told that his prison sentence, which he thought was going to be 10 years, is now more like twenty.
9) When he does get out, he discovers that his wife was on the lam, his baby was gone, his old mother had died and that his two remaining children, a boy and a girl, had been given away to unknown parties.
10) A "friend" tries to cheer him up with a whore. Upon undressing, he notices a strange birthmark. Oh oh oh, his own daughter is about to do him. But because she starts talking about how much she hates her father and how he abandoned his own family, he doesn't reveal his identity. Incidentally, he doesn't do her, either. [Praise the sweet weeping Jesus in his hay-scented manger].
11) He finds out that his son is a petty gangster.
12) He decides, hey, I'm gonna snuff the bass'ad who did this to me, and since the old man was already dead, he decides to blow away the son. As he is pumping him full of lead, more shots ring out from the corner. Turns out his petty gangster son was unknowingly the bodyguard of the rich old man's son. As his father is lying, perishing in a pool of his own red blood, he suddenly recognizes him and, tears in his eyes, says "Baba? Baba?"
So yeah. Most Turkish movies are like this. So I was talking to Abbas hocam about trying to find Turkish movies that weren't complete wrist-slashers when he suggested "Gemide", or "On the Ship." Abbas asked, "Do you want to know how to swear really badly in Turkish?" Man, did he even have to ask? Do I ever! However, a quick glance at the back of the VCD case confirmed my sneaking suspicions: there was gonna be a lot of brutal sex. Apparently, some sailors either buy or otherwise procure a woman and then they pass her around like a 40 oz. of malt liquer. Hmmm. Turkish softcore. Saucy. I'm saving it for a rainy day, but I'll keep you posted, you porn-hounds.
Finally, a word about pollen. Pollen, while allowing many species of plants to propagate, makes me want to take a Soviet flame-thrower to every field within a twenty mile radius. It feels like a hamster is living in each one of my sinuses, all 40 of them. It's only a matter of time before it drives me to the brink and I kill a nun.
Again.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Monday, April 04, 2005
Yeni söz.
The new word.
I woke this morning (to NPR... something inane, uninspired and insipid, I assure you) in a cold sweat. I'd been assured that since I am utterly bereft of a soul and since my heart is a dried corn-husk rattling in my chest that I'd not be able to dream. Well, eff you, amusement-park Gypsy woman. Sorry. Eff you, woman of Romany descent.
Anyway, in my dream, I was in a dimly-lit Mediterranean restaurant, my back to the wall. In front of me, the most supremely satisfying meal ever crofted by humans: spaghetti a la puttanesca. Yes, that's "whore spaghetti". As I fell upon the olivey treat, faces of other swarthy individuals swam in and out of the darkness. They were kissing my hand, upon which there was a ring that weighed as much as an infant. Whispers in my ear. Kisses on my hand. Neverending nutrition. I don't remember what any of the men were saying, right up until one of the men came up to me and asked for mercy. Another hairy man pushed him to the ground and held his head down so that he couldn't make eye-contact with me. Oh, and did I mention that we were speaking (what I believe to be) Thai? Oh yes. Anyway, he's begging and pleading for his life, and telling me that he has kids and a wife. I remember the warmth of the bread as I tore it and mopped up some of the whorey delight. I waved my ring-bedecked hand dismissively and he began thanking me and kissing my foot, which--of course!-- was bare. Then I whispered into an attendant's ear that if he effed up again, to "take care of him." We laugh heartily, a la Pol Pot whilst enslaving Cambodia, and I returned to my food.
I dunno. Maybe I've been watching too many mob movies lately. Maybe it's a portent of things to come. Maybe I shouldn't eat scrambled eggs with curry and jerk seasoning at 2 AM anymore.
I bathed my carcass and hopped into clothes (too many clothes, as it turns out: it was effing 80 degrees today) and got into my hella-sexy 2000 Rainforest Green Ford Focus. Oh yes. There were puppies to be tended to, and woe betide me if they shat all over their houses. One, Life in the Corn Devotee Brooke's lovely daughter Nikki; the other, Life in the Corn Acolyte Keith's beloved son Zeke.
Now:
I had to be at class at 11. I left the house at 9:30, thinking: hey. How long could this possibly take? Apparently, I'd eaten a brain tumor with a side of paralyzing frontal lobe stroke for breakfast. Dogs can sense when you need to be somewhere and, naturally, take their dear sweet effing time to do anything. Begging does no good, and it makes you look weak. "C'monc'monc'monc'monc'monc'monc'mon! Make a biscuit!" They laugh to themselves and continue eating cat feces and grass, snuffling around, regardless of your need for haste. Nikki was first, and she immediately made water. OK, one bodily function down, I thought to myself. A half hour later, a biscuit was not forthcoming from her loins; she finished snuffling around the yard and headed for the house. "Girl", I said, "don'choo be needin' to pinch sump'in?" She looked at me and panted. It was very Greta Garbo, stand-off sigh. OK, then. I gave her treats and lured her into her room. I'm sorry, Brooke. I did what I could. If there are rank Tootsie Rolls on your bed, I owe you a sawed-off finger. It won't be mine, but it'll be a sacrifice of a different kind to get it, as my van is up on cinder blocks and it's hard to lure transient homeless men into a Ford Focus.
A 125 mph drive later and I was at Keith's house, where Zeke greeted my like he always does: he flips the eff out, running around the house with his toy and leaping, velociraptor-like, onto any stationary object. I let him out the back door and he sped to the back of the yard, where a small woodland mammal nearly met its maker at his snout; it crawled under the fence nanoseconds before Zeke could snuff it. [I think it was a groundhog, but I was too horror-stricken to note much about it]. After staring at the beast as it beat a hasty retreat for ten minutes, he commenced to eat grass. And then more. And, when he was done with that, he ate more still. "Zeke", I begged, "do yo' bidness!" He looked up from his grazing only long enough to make eye contact with me before he resumed it. As a whippet, seeing him eating grass seems fitting, as he is already rather gazelle-like. Anyway, what I think happened is this: Nikki, after our romp, called Zeke on her cellphone. "Hey, the hairy one is coming and he looks like he's in a hurry. Hold it in, hold it in!" Then they laughed merrily. Anyway, Zeke waited about twenty minutes to relieve himself, and once suitably lighter, he bounded into the house and curled up on his chair and dropped off to sleep. Mission accomplished, my canine friends. Well, almost. I made it to class with a fatty five minutes to spare. You could be peeved, but Nikki and Zeke are two of maybe five dogs I love, so since it was a nice, EIGHTY DEGREE day anyway, I guess all wasn't lost.
I learned a new word today from the other guy in my Turkish class. Yes, there's only two of us. Anyway, we were talking about the three-inch-wide "booty shorts" that many of the women on campus are now donning, what with it being hot and all. Emblazoned on the back of them are nice words, like "Hoosiers" or "Indiana" or "Brazen Slut-puppy Hussy." Dustin waved them off dismissively. "Sorostitutes", he said almost inaudibly.
I soiled several of my undergarments and had to clumsily change in the reek of the men's room.
Sorostitute. It comes from two very ancient words. The first, "soror, sororis", which is fifth declension feminine of the word for "sister" in Latin, if memory serves. The second part comes from the verb "statuere", which means "to stand" in Latin. The standing sister. Yeah. The sister who stands on the corner of Kirkwood and Indiana, half her junk hangin' out for all the earth to see, high on crystal and drunk on malt liquer; you can contract a venereal disease just by being downwind from one.
My old chum from last year, Joe, has come back from the UK (his native land) for a week and a conference, so I've been saying words like "chuffed" and "shag" and "pissed" a lot. It's sure good to see him again, as he was my best friend my first year in the corn. I sure did miss him.
Hahahahahaha, bitches! Someone came to see me from one of my previous lives! Take THAT!
< takes medication>
Helvacı kabağım için: seni görmeyi yine beklemiyorum.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
I woke this morning (to NPR... something inane, uninspired and insipid, I assure you) in a cold sweat. I'd been assured that since I am utterly bereft of a soul and since my heart is a dried corn-husk rattling in my chest that I'd not be able to dream. Well, eff you, amusement-park Gypsy woman. Sorry. Eff you, woman of Romany descent.
Anyway, in my dream, I was in a dimly-lit Mediterranean restaurant, my back to the wall. In front of me, the most supremely satisfying meal ever crofted by humans: spaghetti a la puttanesca. Yes, that's "whore spaghetti". As I fell upon the olivey treat, faces of other swarthy individuals swam in and out of the darkness. They were kissing my hand, upon which there was a ring that weighed as much as an infant. Whispers in my ear. Kisses on my hand. Neverending nutrition. I don't remember what any of the men were saying, right up until one of the men came up to me and asked for mercy. Another hairy man pushed him to the ground and held his head down so that he couldn't make eye-contact with me. Oh, and did I mention that we were speaking (what I believe to be) Thai? Oh yes. Anyway, he's begging and pleading for his life, and telling me that he has kids and a wife. I remember the warmth of the bread as I tore it and mopped up some of the whorey delight. I waved my ring-bedecked hand dismissively and he began thanking me and kissing my foot, which--of course!-- was bare. Then I whispered into an attendant's ear that if he effed up again, to "take care of him." We laugh heartily, a la Pol Pot whilst enslaving Cambodia, and I returned to my food.
I dunno. Maybe I've been watching too many mob movies lately. Maybe it's a portent of things to come. Maybe I shouldn't eat scrambled eggs with curry and jerk seasoning at 2 AM anymore.
I bathed my carcass and hopped into clothes (too many clothes, as it turns out: it was effing 80 degrees today) and got into my hella-sexy 2000 Rainforest Green Ford Focus. Oh yes. There were puppies to be tended to, and woe betide me if they shat all over their houses. One, Life in the Corn Devotee Brooke's lovely daughter Nikki; the other, Life in the Corn Acolyte Keith's beloved son Zeke.
Now:
I had to be at class at 11. I left the house at 9:30, thinking: hey. How long could this possibly take? Apparently, I'd eaten a brain tumor with a side of paralyzing frontal lobe stroke for breakfast. Dogs can sense when you need to be somewhere and, naturally, take their dear sweet effing time to do anything. Begging does no good, and it makes you look weak. "C'monc'monc'monc'monc'monc'monc'mon! Make a biscuit!" They laugh to themselves and continue eating cat feces and grass, snuffling around, regardless of your need for haste. Nikki was first, and she immediately made water. OK, one bodily function down, I thought to myself. A half hour later, a biscuit was not forthcoming from her loins; she finished snuffling around the yard and headed for the house. "Girl", I said, "don'choo be needin' to pinch sump'in?" She looked at me and panted. It was very Greta Garbo, stand-off sigh. OK, then. I gave her treats and lured her into her room. I'm sorry, Brooke. I did what I could. If there are rank Tootsie Rolls on your bed, I owe you a sawed-off finger. It won't be mine, but it'll be a sacrifice of a different kind to get it, as my van is up on cinder blocks and it's hard to lure transient homeless men into a Ford Focus.
A 125 mph drive later and I was at Keith's house, where Zeke greeted my like he always does: he flips the eff out, running around the house with his toy and leaping, velociraptor-like, onto any stationary object. I let him out the back door and he sped to the back of the yard, where a small woodland mammal nearly met its maker at his snout; it crawled under the fence nanoseconds before Zeke could snuff it. [I think it was a groundhog, but I was too horror-stricken to note much about it]. After staring at the beast as it beat a hasty retreat for ten minutes, he commenced to eat grass. And then more. And, when he was done with that, he ate more still. "Zeke", I begged, "do yo' bidness!" He looked up from his grazing only long enough to make eye contact with me before he resumed it. As a whippet, seeing him eating grass seems fitting, as he is already rather gazelle-like. Anyway, what I think happened is this: Nikki, after our romp, called Zeke on her cellphone. "Hey, the hairy one is coming and he looks like he's in a hurry. Hold it in, hold it in!" Then they laughed merrily. Anyway, Zeke waited about twenty minutes to relieve himself, and once suitably lighter, he bounded into the house and curled up on his chair and dropped off to sleep. Mission accomplished, my canine friends. Well, almost. I made it to class with a fatty five minutes to spare. You could be peeved, but Nikki and Zeke are two of maybe five dogs I love, so since it was a nice, EIGHTY DEGREE day anyway, I guess all wasn't lost.
I learned a new word today from the other guy in my Turkish class. Yes, there's only two of us. Anyway, we were talking about the three-inch-wide "booty shorts" that many of the women on campus are now donning, what with it being hot and all. Emblazoned on the back of them are nice words, like "Hoosiers" or "Indiana" or "Brazen Slut-puppy Hussy." Dustin waved them off dismissively. "Sorostitutes", he said almost inaudibly.
I soiled several of my undergarments and had to clumsily change in the reek of the men's room.
Sorostitute. It comes from two very ancient words. The first, "soror, sororis", which is fifth declension feminine of the word for "sister" in Latin, if memory serves. The second part comes from the verb "statuere", which means "to stand" in Latin. The standing sister. Yeah. The sister who stands on the corner of Kirkwood and Indiana, half her junk hangin' out for all the earth to see, high on crystal and drunk on malt liquer; you can contract a venereal disease just by being downwind from one.
My old chum from last year, Joe, has come back from the UK (his native land) for a week and a conference, so I've been saying words like "chuffed" and "shag" and "pissed" a lot. It's sure good to see him again, as he was my best friend my first year in the corn. I sure did miss him.
Hahahahahaha, bitches! Someone came to see me from one of my previous lives! Take THAT!
< takes medication>
Helvacı kabağım için: seni görmeyi yine beklemiyorum.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Friday, April 01, 2005
Ottoman boot camp.
Friday dawned over The Republic with a pall of early spring thunderheads, which of course endeavored to suck all potential happiness and merriment, lamprey-like, from the day. It was to be no matter, anyway: Friday, the first day of April, 2005, was to be spent "engaged" in, of all things - clap of thunder! -
Five. Fekkin'. Hours. Of. Ottoman.
Of course, I deserved it. Kemal bey knew as well as I did that I'd been consuming tots on the sly again, and not the "tater" kind. Also, I'd been shooting the heads off religious lawn statuary after getting tanked on Boone's Farm sangria; nothin' is quite as fun as a $1.99-a-cask wine bender. He knew of my crimes. Penance, a concept I am not entirely unfamiliar with (childhood spent in dank confessionals!), was to begin at one on the dot in his four hundred-fifty degree office on the second floor of Goodbody. Kemal swept into his office with me, whimpering like a sodomized puppy, in tow. One hour passed. Then two. Then three.
Wha'? That random jigglymabobber makes that work "deniz", not "dekiz"?
That's the nasal "n"?
How would three random letters, "s", "r" and "b", when put into the mef'ul vizin, cause those three letters to make a word that means "that which is drunken?" [If you're dying to know, it makes the word 'mesrub', or "drink". ]
I prayed for liberation more than I have ever prayed for anything in my whole life. As I covertly marked the passage of the hours by carving delicate slashes into my forearm with my pen, I noticed Kemal was getting edgy. "Domonic'ciyim, what do you say we go to the Memorial Union for something to eat?" I moved to the door so fast that I rent the fabric of time ever-so-slightly and the resulting sulphurous stench was quickly blamed on poorly crofted Mexican.
I'd never been in a public place with Kemal. Well, you know, outside the lecture hall/office environment. We went and got me some shimmery black coffee and a no-bake cookie and then went to go get Kemal some Booger Fling. The imp behind the counter beckoned Kemal forward.
Paper-hat-wearing imp: Wha' k'n Ah git f'r ya?
Kemal bey: I'm sorry, can you say that again?
PHWI: WHA'....K'N...AH...GIT...F'R....YA? {rolls eyes impatiently}
Kemal orders a Globber Extra Value Meal out of sheer desperation.
PHWI: That be {moneymoneymoney}. Wha' t'drank?
KB: {bewildered}
Now, at this point, I was waiting to see if our wee "friend" behind the counter was going to do what he did before, which is yell really loud and talk really retardo-slow. If he was going to talk to Kemal like that, I was going to fryolate his scrotum. Now, this was clearly not Kemal's fault. I could see how, if Kemal was, oh, I dunno, a Korean visiting scholar in the Law School, this could have been a problem. However, Kemal bey and I talk for hours about extremely complex topics, and he's married to an American woman. His English is nearly flawless. It's just the accent that remains, stubbornly, after twenty years of living in the US. So clearly it was the townie imp's dilly-o; his butchery of the English language would have made him incomprehensible by nearly any Anglophone account. But Kemal, being a genius, figured it out and got his ubiquitous Diet Coke, and we went to go sit down.
"Domonic'ciyim", he began, "I want you to take advantage of an excellent opportunity that I know of. On a small island off the coast of Turkey, there's an Ottoman language workshop school. I hear it's excellent." He began to talk in earnest about this "excellent opportunity" whilst falling upon his beefy treat. In the end, the impression I got about this Ottoman language workshop was this:
Donning sackcloth woven in the early 1800s, the pupils at the Ottoman Boot Camp would kneel on broken glass and uncooked rice with a calligraphy pen clutched in their claw-like appendages. When they passed out from the pain and the sheer weight of trying to learn a language that, many agree, is one of the most insanely difficult in the entire world, they'd be awakened by other pupils who would spray the victim's knees with bleach, detergent and lemon juice. At night, they'd sleep on concrete floors in an unheated abandoned dormitory, pressed to each other for warmth and protection from the kitten-sized vermin. When not "studying", the pupils would draw water in casks the size of Dom DeLouise from a well on the other side of the island, and barefoot and dehydrated, they'd have to make their way back without spilling a drop. Spills meant that they'd be sodomized by a rabid donkey, kept chained to the schoolhouse for just such an occasion. Upon graduation (six weeks later), they'd be stunned in the head and, while unconscious, one of their kidneys would be taken for sale on the Afghani black market.
"Sounds like a good time, hocam. Where do I sign up?", I breathed in wonder.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Five. Fekkin'. Hours. Of. Ottoman.
Of course, I deserved it. Kemal bey knew as well as I did that I'd been consuming tots on the sly again, and not the "tater" kind. Also, I'd been shooting the heads off religious lawn statuary after getting tanked on Boone's Farm sangria; nothin' is quite as fun as a $1.99-a-cask wine bender. He knew of my crimes. Penance, a concept I am not entirely unfamiliar with (childhood spent in dank confessionals!), was to begin at one on the dot in his four hundred-fifty degree office on the second floor of Goodbody. Kemal swept into his office with me, whimpering like a sodomized puppy, in tow. One hour passed. Then two. Then three.
Wha'? That random jigglymabobber makes that work "deniz", not "dekiz"?
That's the nasal "n"?
How would three random letters, "s", "r" and "b", when put into the mef'ul vizin, cause those three letters to make a word that means "that which is drunken?" [If you're dying to know, it makes the word 'mesrub', or "drink". ]
I prayed for liberation more than I have ever prayed for anything in my whole life. As I covertly marked the passage of the hours by carving delicate slashes into my forearm with my pen, I noticed Kemal was getting edgy. "Domonic'ciyim, what do you say we go to the Memorial Union for something to eat?" I moved to the door so fast that I rent the fabric of time ever-so-slightly and the resulting sulphurous stench was quickly blamed on poorly crofted Mexican.
I'd never been in a public place with Kemal. Well, you know, outside the lecture hall/office environment. We went and got me some shimmery black coffee and a no-bake cookie and then went to go get Kemal some Booger Fling. The imp behind the counter beckoned Kemal forward.
Paper-hat-wearing imp: Wha' k'n Ah git f'r ya?
Kemal bey: I'm sorry, can you say that again?
PHWI: WHA'....K'N...AH...GIT...F'R....YA? {rolls eyes impatiently}
Kemal orders a Globber Extra Value Meal out of sheer desperation.
PHWI: That be {moneymoneymoney}. Wha' t'drank?
KB: {bewildered}
Now, at this point, I was waiting to see if our wee "friend" behind the counter was going to do what he did before, which is yell really loud and talk really retardo-slow. If he was going to talk to Kemal like that, I was going to fryolate his scrotum. Now, this was clearly not Kemal's fault. I could see how, if Kemal was, oh, I dunno, a Korean visiting scholar in the Law School, this could have been a problem. However, Kemal bey and I talk for hours about extremely complex topics, and he's married to an American woman. His English is nearly flawless. It's just the accent that remains, stubbornly, after twenty years of living in the US. So clearly it was the townie imp's dilly-o; his butchery of the English language would have made him incomprehensible by nearly any Anglophone account. But Kemal, being a genius, figured it out and got his ubiquitous Diet Coke, and we went to go sit down.
"Domonic'ciyim", he began, "I want you to take advantage of an excellent opportunity that I know of. On a small island off the coast of Turkey, there's an Ottoman language workshop school. I hear it's excellent." He began to talk in earnest about this "excellent opportunity" whilst falling upon his beefy treat. In the end, the impression I got about this Ottoman language workshop was this:
Donning sackcloth woven in the early 1800s, the pupils at the Ottoman Boot Camp would kneel on broken glass and uncooked rice with a calligraphy pen clutched in their claw-like appendages. When they passed out from the pain and the sheer weight of trying to learn a language that, many agree, is one of the most insanely difficult in the entire world, they'd be awakened by other pupils who would spray the victim's knees with bleach, detergent and lemon juice. At night, they'd sleep on concrete floors in an unheated abandoned dormitory, pressed to each other for warmth and protection from the kitten-sized vermin. When not "studying", the pupils would draw water in casks the size of Dom DeLouise from a well on the other side of the island, and barefoot and dehydrated, they'd have to make their way back without spilling a drop. Spills meant that they'd be sodomized by a rabid donkey, kept chained to the schoolhouse for just such an occasion. Upon graduation (six weeks later), they'd be stunned in the head and, while unconscious, one of their kidneys would be taken for sale on the Afghani black market.
"Sounds like a good time, hocam. Where do I sign up?", I breathed in wonder.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
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