You just can't do it.

Last week, in a moment of inspiration (and by "inspiration" I mean "Satan, most likely, was whispering directly into my ear canal") I sent Abbas bey, my Turkish teacher, a request to do something fun in class. For the past week we've been talking about how planting trees is/or is not a good gift to give to the parents of babies. (My contention: they need diapers, formula and Zoloft). Anyway, I asked Abbas bey if we could translate our favorite English language song into Turkish, and then we'd give the other two classmates the translation and we'd try to guess what the song was by our translations.

Well.

Of course I chose Bruce Hornsby's The Valley Road. About three lines into it, I knew I was gonna get effed up the goat's ass. How, then, would you translate such phrases into a Uralo-Altaic horseman tongue?

-this time I'll go where she wants me to go
In the end, that one came out looking like "this time I will go to where to go she wants."

- he took her "all the way" down the low valley road
The emphasis is mine; however, how do you politely say in Turkish that he knocked her
up?

- he showed her "what they do" down the long valley road
What "they do" is, apparently, pork each other. She gets knocked up, he's a poor local boy and daddy makes her "get rid" of it.

I should have done something ridiculous and easy, like "Imagine" by John Lennon. But nooooo!

With all my "alone time" this weekend I did quite a few pleasurable things. No, not those, you perverts. [counting on fingers the number of you who read into that too much] Like, I bought myself a new movie, among the other things (four picture frames, a tear-a-day calendar and a candle). It's The Village. When you see it, you'll know why I liked it so much.

('cuz it's effed up!)

I also went to see the Tibetan nun. Sadly, because Mother Nature took a healthy dump on the East Coast this weekend, the nun was stranded in Washington, DC. So, making the most out of the evening, they served the momos and some noodles and then we watched a movie called "Cry of the Snow Lion". It was awful. No, the work was good, but of course anything you watch that involves Tibet makes you want to reach for your hip-flask and go skin one of them yeller' Red Chinamen. So, feeling bad about earlier feelings about Tibet's freedom (ie, I oppose it sorta-kinda... well, total freedom, at least), I bought an "I (Heart) Tibet" tee-shirt. It's saffron, my favorite color, which makes me feel even fuzzier inside.

I know, I know, that was a boring post. I had a boring, nice weekend, so eff off.

Good night, Bloomington.

Dom