Apostolic appetites abundantly appeased.

As I met Keith for lunch yesterday before girding my extremities with the shackles of work in the OIS, I happened to notice a small sign on the register/ordering counter. This sign, in smallish letters and with demonstrative pictures, showed the Penn Station's

LENTEN SPECIALS.

Yes. Lent: a season of deep, moving spirtuality for the devout Catholic/Christian. Lent: a season of self-denial, proving through action that one can be close to the Lord through penance. Lent: obviously not a time when people can eat anything even remotely tasty. As I looked over their Lenten Specials (as the hordes of ravenous coeds permitted), I noticed that they were, essentially, punishment on bread. Oh! Gave up cheese and meat for Lent? Then tell me something: why the blue eff would you go to Penn Station for lunch? [Penn Station: an "East Coast" style sub place, famous because they, like Quiznos, toast the bread, for those of you who aren't corn livin'].

Today: more OIS fun. And by "fun" I mean "something akin to watching pale white worm-like parasites burrow out of your skin." Let me set the stage:

The Office of International Services, perched high in Franklin Hall. At the Front Desk, Domonic Potorti toils alone, utterly bereft of aid while his trainee unexpectedly takes an obnoxiously loud call from his 'rents in Pakistan in the hallway; it's in Urdu.

It's about 1:30, and a stately African visiting scholar glides into the office and signs in. The white hair at his temples gleams in the maddening flourescent light that makes me want to kill again. Let me rephrase: makes me NEED to kill again. Anyway, he sits quietly and when called glides back to the desk with a tiny piece of scrap paper in his hand.

Me: Hello! What can I do to help you today?
Stately African Visiting Scholar: Hello. I am a Fulbright scholar.
Me: I see.
SAVS: I was told that someone from my country will be coming on another Fulbright.
Me: Yay!
SAVS: Who is he?
Me: {forehead wrinkles slightly} Say again?
SAVS: Well, I don't know who he is, but I thought you might.
Me: Well sir, that's a violation of privacy rights for me to tell you his name without his permission.
SAVS: But the IIE (the Fulbright Award people) told me he was coming!
Me: Well, uh, maybe you could contact them and they could tell you.
SAVS: Can you call them for me?

At this point, five more people have come in to sign in and wait, patiently, for their turns with me. When they heard him ask if I could call IIE for him, which, uh, there's really no way I was gonna anyway, they all braced themselves for the unimaginable. One young lady, who surely was there merely to pick up a document, produced from her Hello Kitty pencil-bag a tiny engraved flask that she began to suckle upon with vigor. A young gentleman took out his Bic lighter and played that game wherein you make a wee cup with your hand and fill it with fumes from the lighter by depressing the switch without sweeping the wheel; once "filled" with the fumes, you then make a flame and when you open your hand a tiny fireball erupts forth.

[Domonic lost nearly all of his... knuckle, yes, knuckle... hair playing this game once]

The horror continued.

SAVS: I don't know why you won't tell me who he is or where he is. I want to help him.
Me: Sir, maybe you don't understand. If I give you information about him, I am breaking the law.
SAVS: OK then. Can you tell me where he is going to live?
Me: No.

{agitation!}

SAVS: Can you tell me his department? [scowls at the scrap of paper]
Me: No.
SAVS: Where is the Education Building?
Me: {grabs campus map} Is he going to be in Education?
SAVS: I am not going to tell you that.

{!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!}

Me: Fine. {uses highlighter to point to Education Building} You need to go here.
SAVS: Which bus do I take?

At this point, the young East Asian woman who'd been pickling her liver reached for a smaller vial, one with a greyish liquid and a tiny Hello Kitty skull and crossbones emblazoned upon it.

SAVS: Also: does your office coordinate to pick him up from Indianapolis Airport? Can you go get him when he comes?

This goes on for nearly twenty minutes. Mere nanoseconds before the patient, albeit drunken, East Asian took her own life, the Stately African Visiting Scholar determined that he'd get nowhere. That, and I was warming up my taser under the desk; a quick whiff of ozone was all he needed to get the hint. He left in swirl of robes and cologne, and I helped our young female Asian with her [blessedly] ordinary problem and sent her staggering home. That left one bright-eyed Asian man for me to help. He looked familiar. Sooooo familiar.

[tiny hairs on back of neck hackle]

Hello, he said. My grandfather passed away and I need to go home to Korea.

Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss. Let's get you ready to go. Can I see your documents?

{shuffle shuffle shuffle}

Well, it looks like we need to get you a new travel document. Can you wait a few minutes while one of our advisors fixes it up for you?

He leaves to go move his car. In the meantime, I take the form he's filled out and I take it to an advisor, flipping through the copies of the passport information as I do so. I stop dead in my tracks.

His...wife...is... [FLASHBACK!]

His wife was the woman who had, this summer, basically accused me, personally, of doing everything short of knife-raping Congolese orphans. In between near hysterical weeping, flailing like a newborn giraffe coming off opium and pursing her lips so hard that they nearly caused sparks, she explained to me that I was inept, incompetent, and that I, singularly, had made it so that she couldn't get what she needed done accomplished. When I summoned the Senior Associate Director, she called him a liar. Finally I called upon the Dean himself to deal with her; with tact and grace befitting his position, he talked to her for a good half hour before she loped out of the office, broken and chastised, casting one last dagger-filled glance over her shoulder at me as she did so. Even in photocopy, her visage made my bowels roil ominously.

Now I know why she didn't come: she knew I'd cut her, and cut her real bad.

Today, in the musty depths of a Vatican storeroom filled with fingerbones, skulls and vials of congealed blood from hundreds of little-known saints, the Catholic Church pulled the file of Saint Jude, scribbled a few notes on the inside of the manila envelope, and refiled it.

Yet another miracle attibuted to his penchant for lost causes.

I got a 92 on my French exam.

Sigh.

I remain, as ever,

Dom

This is Jimmy, my shower-monkey. Note his beady eyes! I really do hate monkeys, but Jimmy... well, he had a special place in my husk.

The question.

An anonymous, yet alert Life in the Corn reader asked of me:

There is a blue monkey that hangs across from my toilet on a towel rack with beady eyes... my mother put it there because it matched the tile floor colors and bathtub. What is the history of your monkey???

Well, Alert Anonymous Reader, feast!

While I was whitewater rafting down the Zambezi River last summer, swollen as it was by unexpectedly torrential equatorial rains, I noticed a small, damp creature clinging to life on a rock near a particularly treacherous whirlpool. Using all of the hundreds of hours of whitewater rafting training that I have, I deftly maneuvered to the creature, which, out of gratitude, chose to not savage me with its lengthy incisors. As it gasped pitifully on the floor of my raft, I noticed that it was a black-and-white colobus monkey and I gave it some of my home-dried mango hunks. Throughout the rest of the trip "Jimmy" and I became fast friends; his beady eyes enchanted me, and he flung his feces at potential danger. I let him fling his feces, because damn: that shit's funny. However, when I tried to take him home with me, the brutal military junta that was controlling that part of Africa wouldn't let me take Jimmy home with me, so I smuggled him aboard with my luggage. Once in Maine, Jimmy promptly perished from exposure. As I dug his shallow grave lined with lime (we can't be having a hantavirus in Maine, y'hear?) I thought about how selfish I'd been to have taken him from his beloved home. For penance I swore to never be so selfish ever again, and sealing that pact were all twenty of my finger-and-toenails, torn off with a pair of needlenose pliers. Rest in peace, my lice-ridden buddy, rest in peace.

This summer while I was home in Maine, my sister went out for the day, and since I couldn't go I begged her like a four-year-old to buy me a present while she was out. She did. It's a rubbery, Chinese-made monkey with four suction-cups on his four limbs. The moment I saw it I knew that the spirit of my deceased monkey lay within it, and thus I quickly found a proper place for him to dwell: in my shower. So now, every morning as I bathe my rancid carcass, Jimmy and I reminisce about Africa, about feces, and about him freezing to death. It is he who guards my bathroom; woe betide those who tread therein without my consent!

That's the history of my monkey. Had monkey in Africa. Monkey died. Sister got suction-cup rubbery monkey with sinister beady eyes that contains the soul of my dead pet. Now he lives in my shower.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic

Tasty tincture of tepid tumescence.

Last night I came home to find that my roommate had invited several of his close friends over to watch something police-related and eat pizza and get [sorta] smashed. They looked fairly underwhelmed by the entire experience; perhaps it was because of the cheap beer coursing through their veins, but it's probably because we don't have the world's most exciting apartment.

Or so I thought.

Now, I'm not an intellectual sadist. I'd like to think that I am not elitist. Hell, there are very few words that end in -ist that I think describe me. [rapist! communist! purist! tourist!] With that having been said, the moment I saw my roommate and his friends moments away from picking nits out of each other's hair with yet another inane police drama blaring on the Stonehenge-sized television my roommate propped up in the living room a la a Hindu altar, thankfully bereft of the flowers and the gallons of ghee, I hastened to my room with only a cursory look back. [pillar of salt!]

Of course, since our living room is the size of a Good N' Plenty box, that meant that I had to dodge the TV trays, the empty pizza boxes filled with rapidly cementing cheese and the very limbs of the attendees. I greeted all of them by name and fled to the Boy Cave, where, once I was safely ensconsed, I put something that would make me not want to kill (again) into my computer's CD player. Shortly after I flung my weary carcass onto my bed for a moment of rest, there came a knock.

Taptaptaptaptap.

I sat up a little too quickly; as the blood sang through my ears, I realized that the knock wasn't on my door. It was on my bathroom door.

Now:

As you are all [now] aware, I have issues with bathrooms. My bathroom is my refuge, the place where I can be as animal as I need to be, and the thing that makes it delightful is that it is my own-- y'hear? my own! -- for Tony has his own as well. When I am in there, I do what I wan'. Needless to say, unless you are my friend, family, or someone I am lovin' on, you don't belong in my bathroom.

The issue at hand:

Tony's bathroom contains the mouldering skeletons of those who've attempted to use it. On one hand, there's a "good" reason for it; nay, two reasons: come to think of it, three.

1) Tony has no colon. No, I am not joking. He had colon cancer and had to have it and much of his large intestine removed.

2) Tony is a boy.

3) Tony is a boy who was raised by a very fundamentalist Christian mother as an only child.

So you can imagine what his toilet looks like. Come to think of it, don't. You might want to eat again someday.

Now:

Since Tony's friends have a b-b of intelligence rolling around in the tuna-cans they have embedded in their heads, they avoid his bathroom as one might avoid consuming a putrid flea-ridden marmot whilst frolicking in Mongolia [Black Death!] Naturally, when Nature (bitch!) calls upon them, they answer her call in my bathroom. When I feel that Tony might have guests, I always close my bathroom door as a passive-aggressive sign from me that hey, you should clean your mothertouching bathroom so that YOUR guests can use YOUR effing bathroom; I'll lend you my flamethrower and machete, if need be.

Thus, the knock. The male guest thought that someone was in there, and he was right: my shower-monkey was watching him the whole time with beady, black painted eyes. But no, there were no humans to speak of in there.

The door closes.

*Sounds emanate*

Well, I have to give him this: he washed his hands. Anyway, he comes out and he says to Tony:

"Wow, your roommate's weird."

{!!!!!!}

Uh... what? What...the...eff...? He continued; apparently the look on Tony's face begged further explanation.

"He has an upside-down pink Virgin Mary nightlight and Hanukkah towels. Is he religious?"

I think Tony and I both stifled giggles at the same time. Tony, because he, too, thinks I am weird; I, because I was imagining what his friend might say if he were to come into my room.

" Does your roommate worship Kali, Ganesh, Durga, Shiva, Lakhsmi, the Buddha, Waheguru, Confucius, Allah, Poseidon, Athena, the Great Spirit, Quetzalcoatl and his ancestors?"

I just happen to have a mildly Judeo-Christian bathroom, that's all.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: the Virgin Mary nightlight? She's upside-down because the sockets in my bathroom are upside-down, and that's the only way that the prongs will fit in. Not a statement. [But oooh, what a statement, if I were!]

*sulfur*

I remain, as always,

Dom

Alert Life in the Corn reader Mary-Kate was in San Francisco and found the street of my dreams.

Limply luxuriating in the lavatory of listlessness.

Disclaimer: This blog is foul.

As each on of my [painful!] school days unfurls, I am incessantly presented with a problem whose ultimate solution has the power to make or break my spirit:

Can I make it to one of the two Safe Bathrooms in time?

I have a problem with most of the restroom facilities at IU. For example, Ballantine Hall's 4,000 year old facilities not only smell like bus station urinal cakes but also frequently have had the doors to the stalls removed. This is because (rumour? urban legend? probably not!) intensely large amounts of unsavory activity goes on in them, from crack deals to lube-less sodomy. And and AND, when one adds the pleasantness of unflushed thrones and graffiti that makes your eyes go milky with bewilderment, it's enough to make you want to just hold it until you pass out from the pain/internal bleeding/poisoning from internal wastes.

{ At this point, all of my women readers are shaking their heads and sharpening their machetes. "Bitch," you all are saying, "at least you can take a leak without having to 'float' over toilet seats that haven't been cleaned since the fall of Saigon." You know, you're right. But, I think in general that women probably don't lay cable on toilet seats, spit lungers on the flush levers or perform farmer blows on the walls of the stall. Correct me if I am wrong, please! Being possessed of a Y chromosome, I am not privy to your secret world! }

As far as I can tell, there are but two men's restrooms at IU that do not require immunizations or a Gideon Bible to use. One is in Goodbody Hall, home of Indiana University's Central Eurasian Studies Department. Down a tiny corridor past offices bedecked in posters extolling the virtues of, of all things, Estonia, you find a quiet, seldom-used men's room with a gigantic antique urinal that I'd initially thought was a bidet. Boy, was that a disappointment: there I was, waiting for that chilly stream of cleansing water, and all I got was a flush. Anyway, the other is on the magical, semi-secret second floor of the Memorial Union. Every time I go there, the cleaning-person is just leaving: gleaming in lemony, bacteria-free splendor, it's all I can do to not wet myself with delight right there at the threshold.

{Aside: I'm writing this from the dim little Union Cluster; it's the one that always makes me feel like I should be seeing rusting fetters bolted to the wall and hearing the wails of those whose misdeeds have earned them torment or insanity. Anyway, some asshole clearly has ignored the "Please turn off cellphones" sign posted on the door in five languages and is currently screening a call that is coming in. His ringtone sounds like something you'd hear in a bad vampire movie (some sort of pipe organ?) and it just keeps going and going and going. He's staring at the phone like the secret for turning fingernail clippings into uranium is on that tiny screen. The gentleman sitting next to me leaned over and whispered "Why doesn't he just hit the effing "Ignore" button? For eff's sake! I mean, dude!" Neighbor-dude is currently surfing the Abercrombie site for summer fashion, and yet I know that deep inside he'd help me load the bazooka when it came time to vaporize our special blood-drinking friend. }

Anyway, I was walking from Turkish class to the Union when I felt the need to visit my second-floor lair. And when I say "felt the need" I mean "I became sure that I'd befoul my undergarments and have to ride the bus all the way home like a methadone junkie." When I walked in, I stood in the doorway completely stunned: not one but BOTH stalls were occupied. My internal situation had gone from "dire" to "Chernobyl"; with all of my fortitude I hastened to the first floor bathroom and made it just in time. Now: the first floor men's bathroom has ten stalls, and two of them were occupied, numbers 1 and 2. I hit up number 10 (just in case) and was doing my 'thang when become aware that there is a conversation happening nearby. Oh oh oh, it was number 1 and number 2 stall-dudes having a conversation while they moved their bowels. Yes. It went something like this:

1: Shit man, did you go to the Deke party last Friday night?
2: Naw, my bitch wanted to do some early Valentine's Day crap because she had an exam Monday night. Man! Don't tell me it was a good one!
1: Some dude brought a dime-bag and I smoked until I thought I was gonna hurl.
2: Sheee-it.
1: I was still baked when I went to class Monday morning.
2: Mutha-effah!
1: [grunts]

And no, I am not making that up. Not a single word of it. The conversation alone wasn't what worried me; I'd heard conversations like it 4.2 billion times on busses, in hallways, in classrooms.... in HIGH SCHOOL. But anyway, when did it become OK to talk to someone in the neighboring stall while you rid yourself of that which is undesireable? Even if it is your buddy/girlfriend? Isn't that, like, special private time you spend with yourself? Or is it just us gross boys who do this?

As the light of broad day shone into my room, I poked a stick under my bed to see if Honkers (the clown) was awaiting. Seeing that he was out finding toddlers upon which he feeds (that's what his AOL Away Message said: " BigRedNose'n'Fangs01: out eating toddlers ") I hastily grabbed my Ouija board and the little movey-aroundy-thing and lit some incense while tearing the head off a fruit-bat. As my room filled with the stench of mothballs and curry, I summoned "Sean", a married father of three who drank a pint of embalming fluid on a dare.

"Sean": I...t...t...a...s...t...e...d...l...i...k...e...b...u...r...n...i...n...g.

Me: Good times. Well, it made the funeral home's job a bit easier. And it knocked $100 bucks off your bill; bet the merry widow was so proud of you!

"Sean": M...e...w...a...n...t...c...u...t...y...o...u.

Me: Ah, but you're dead. And, might I add, amazingly lifelike. So "Sean", why is it that people feel like they can hold conversations while they are dropping their kids off at the pool, if you know what I mean?

"Sean": Y...o...u...l...i...v...e...i...n...a...c...e...l...l...p...h...o...n...e....c...u...l...t...u...r....e.

Me: Oh, you mean that it's in our nasty American culture to feel the need to always be accessible to others for conversation, even when doing the unspeakable? Wow, that's an asstastic answer.

"Sean": [ g...r...u...n...t...i...n...g ]

So, I don't know. Maybe I'm a prude. Maybe I was just brought up differently; being raised in a convent does that to you. Pray, eat, pray, learn sump'n about Jesus, eat, learn sump'n more about Jesus, eat, pray, watch Murder, She Wrote and hit the hay after praying again. Nowhere in there was "talk to someone you know while pinching a loaf." The only "loaves" we had came with a side of "fish", umm-hmm .

For all of you who read that 'blog: I'm sorry.

I remain, as ever,

Dom

Random remains in rancid repose.

[2/15/05]

Today's 'blog is brought to you by the letter "R!"

[gaily colored poppets - yes, pOppets - writhe about like rainbow trout that have ingested "herbs" procured in a dimly-lit apothecary in Chinatown]

Wait. Poppets don't eat. Let me rephrase. Poppets don't eat herbs. They eat children who make their daddies and mommies drink when they cry. They eat them with a glass of corner-store merlot and shallots and a whisper of cayenne for kick. As they eat them, they laugh in that chilling way that you imagine Stalin laughed when he enslaved almost all of Eastern Europe.

Muahahahahahaha! It vill be borscht and votka for your entire miserable, tundra-living lives!

It's been a strange day. Let me rephrase; today made me wonder things like this:

* What does a mummy taste like?
* How many angels could fit on the top of my clenched fist?
* What is the sound of one hand bitch-slapping the ever-loving shit out of someone?
* Exactly how much lubrication would it take to thrust an oldey-timey [cold!] glass Coke bottle up the goat-hole of one of those rednecks with the little white decals on their cars of "Calvin" urinating on the word "Faggot"? Also, is that too kindly an act?

[medicates self]

[hastens to snuggly]

[2/16/05]

Yesterday at work a young woman came into the office. I recognized her, but I didn't really remember why. Had she shrieked and leveled her pointy East Asian finger of reckoning at me? Had she, as once I beheld, began eating her lunch in the waiting-room antechamber - a lunch that still seemed to be struggling to hold on to life? (Those shrimp were still moving, I say, MOVING!) Then I remembered: she'd been a cryer. Granted, she'd had something to cry about: she'd been a bad, bad international and she was awaiting a meeting with an advisor who was going to plainly tell her she'd been wicked, and she knew it. I get the impression that most international students here feel that their immigration status is, at any given moment, about to fly into ten thousand crystalline shards of remorse, regret and later, resignation. They would live to rue things. (Letter "R"!) But she was OK. She'd only been kinda bad and the advisor who met with her joked with her and made her feel better. As she craned her neck at the Front Desk to see if that advisor was in, I asked if I could help her. She said that she wanted to say goodbye and to see the people who'd helped her out of her situation. Turns out she'd bought 10 $5 giftcards for Starbucks for the people in the office who had, instead of making her cry more, wiped her tears and made things OK again (with a stern warning, of course).

[takes swill from free coffee]

I have to say I'm a little torn at the moment. I mean, I bought this green sweater the other day but CLEARLY I'm an autumn: how will that affect my skintone? No, really, today I have the Dread Romance Language at seven tonight. At the same time, a professor and noted historian from the school I attended in Turkey (Bilkent University) will be giving a lecture entitled {ahem!}

Byzantium: Constantinopolis: Istanbul.

[cue crazy music: Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantiople...]

Try getting THAT out of your head now.

I've already missed a few classes of the Dread Romance Language; this is because I loathe it with the white-hot fire of 1,000 suns. It would seem, therefore, to be a non-issue except for the

CATHOLIC GUILT COMPLEX

Yes. On the one hand, we have the sage words of my mentor and good friend Ms. Mary-Jane Poole (Magistra Poolensis), who, despite being my Latin teacher for three years, told me that I should "never let classes get in the way of my education." On the other hand, I have a chubby-faced, rosy-cheeked altarboy - one of my many previous avatars - telling me that when I skip class that the Infant Jesus in His Sweet-Scented Manger weeps uncontrollably and becomes inconsolable. [Did the Baby Jesus ever have colic, I wonder? Is wondering that even worse, perdition-wise, than skipping class?]

Well, I think you all know how this is going to turn out. At this point, I think there is little to no hope for redemption anyway; I might as well go to the fun Turkish lecture and be awed by the splendors of The Big Meat on a Stick herself. But if I'm to go down, I'm taking someone with me. I think that my Turkish professor, Abbas bey, who is also in French, will skip with me. Turk Contingent! Rebels! Excelsiorrrrr!

I remain, as ever,

Dom

Altı ay!

Six months! I have been blogging for a half a year!

(sacrifices woodland creature in gratitude)

-d-

Climbed into a dead-horse belly.

(2/10/05)

As I hit my alarm this morning, I thought: man, I'd nuke an orphaned minority whale for Christ to sleep in this morning. My alarm is set to go off with the radio, and I've deliberately chosen the most obnoxious station I could find: NPR in the morning. This morning's serving of "effed up" was something that sounded like an ermine being brushed briskly on a dull cheese-grater with a lively jazz beat in the background. The entire experience was like taking a slow-sheet enema without the sticker I always make the nurses give me. (The last one was an octopus with a band-aid on his tentacle: it said "Be Nice To Me Today: I've Just Had An Enema.")

Once at my place of employment, I found that the entirety of Indiana University's internet capability had gone down like a tube-topped truck-stop "entertainer" on 'ludes. At 9:30, a young woman came into the office and said that she'd had an appointment scheduled for 9:30ish with one of our advisors. I had no choice but to believe her. She sat and stared at me for quite some time, which was unnerving, what with how I was weaving an effigy of her out of human hair to burn later. She finally decides to speak. I transcribe our conversation in its entirety below. No, I am not making this up.

Needy South Asian Female: So, how often do you work at the library?
Me: [looking up from hair-doll] Guh?
NSAF: I just saw you there last night.
Me: You mean the Main Library?
NSAF: Yes.
Me: I don't work there.
NSAF: Yes, you do.
Me: Oh, THAT must be why I am so weary that I am seeing traces! I've been working there while I am sleeping!
NSAF: Huh?
Me: Nothing. Well, like I said, I don't work there.
NSAF: Well, it's your brother then.
Me: If by "my brother" you mean "other things that I don't have, to the best of my knowledge", then, yes.
NSAF: But you look just like him!
Me: Fancy that. I also look like a Turkish man's brother-in-law, a Kuwaiti woman's uncle, and lunatic Iranian mullah.
NSAF: Are you SURE you don't work there? I just saw you last night.
Me: [hoses student down with clown squirt-bottle]

What I am going to have to do is this. Since I have [apparently!] a generic look, I am going to shave one half of my face and leave the other to grow. The hair that grows there I will plait into attractive braids, which will be adorned with shiny things like beads and bits of sea-glass. I will wear utterly unmatched clothing; for example, I would wear yellow wellies, sweatpants and a savar-kinees with a yarmulke on my crown along with my backpack made of rodent pelts and sewn together with hair donated from Tibetan nuns. I will allow my thumbnail and my pinkie nail on each hand to grow ridiculously long, and I will file them to razor points. I will also get a tattoo of a tear on my cheek. Then, and only then, will I stop looking like people everyone knows. Until that blessed day, though, I must content myself the only thing that will make this all seem irrelevant: Afghani opiates.

Three days ago a Turk comes in to the office. His name, amusingly, is "Horizon Hero-Stone." This is because [Dom launches into lecture-mode! hide the children!] Turks, up until the 1920s, had names in the Arabic style. In other words, where one might be "Muhammad bin-Hussein" in the Arab-speaking world, you'd be "Mehmet Huseyinoglu" in Turkish. When Ataturk became the first President of Turkey, he required, upon pain of death, for every male citizen of the Land of the Galloping Mare's Head to choose a surname for himself. Most of them, while amusing to the Anglophone ear, are just names of that man's profession or his father's profession. For example:

Helvacıoğlu: Son of a helva (almond dessert) maker
Değirmenci: Miller
Ekmekcioğlu: Son of a baker (bread maker)
Dinçer: Robust soldier
Kuşçu: Bird-seller

But some of the people got creative. For example:

Akarsu: Running Water
Yıldırım: Thunderbolt
Çolak: A war injury; it's to be crippled by having your arm cut off just below the elbow.
Akargün: Daybreak
Erdoğan: Rising Soldier
Öztürk: The True Turk (or "pure")

Ok, enough of that. So anyway, Horizon bey comes to the office with a wee bag. He greets me warmly, as always, and we exchange pleasantries in Turkish before I begin to ask if I can help him. From the bag he takes a baseball cap and a jersey. "These are for you, biraderim", he said.

{moistness in undergarments!}

After willing the mist that had formed instantly when he said that back into the recesses of my eyes, I saw that they were artifacts from Horizon bey's school in the motherland, Marmara Üniversitesi. Located on the European and Asian shores of the Big Meat on a Stick, İstanbul, Marmara University is one of the leading schools in the country. My first non-perishable present at the Front Desk! So I immediately start gibbering like a mentally-challenged seven-year-old who is trying to learn !Kung because I am overwhelmed with emotion at the gesture; this, and I was trying desperately to think if I had done something with Horizon bey that would warrant such a gift. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I realized I was doing something very American: trying to justify a good gesture. Maybe he just liked me. Maybe he got them and thought of the bearded Turk-wannabe in International Services. Anyway, the thought makes me swell up inside with happiness and pride in my work. Perhaps, though, the swelling is from the bizarre Tibetan food I'd eaten for dinner. Yak backs up on you something fierce.

(2/11/05)

Of course, today I got to Turkish class and asked if the ridiculously small amount of work that we had to do for homework was my imagination. It was. Apparently I'd not read the bottom of the assignment email that detailed how we were to have answered like twenty questions on something crappy and hopelessly complex that I totally hadn't read. This knowledge comes about ten minutes before class commences. So, like a good ninja, I bowed my head and awaited the blade. Instead of a good old-fashioned draft-horse raping, though, we listened to my favorite Turkish folk song ever and tweaked out on some Arabesk music from the willy-wags of Eastern Turkey. One more hurdle before this weekend officially begins: Osmanlıca, the dread dead language. And if you think for one moment that I am not going to be spending most of this weekend unconscious, you've been gargling with bong-water. Well, except for the times when I am doing the metric ton of laundry I have built up and cleaning our scurvy man-house.

And blogging. Oh yes, blogging. Two, three, maybe even four. I've been wicked and I must pay.

Oh, and helvacıkbağım için: zaten seni özledim.

Have a good one, Indiana.

Demir

The Lord Jesus as a stain on an obviously non-Teflon pan. Note the dramatic Crown of Thorns! No longer does one have to be dispatched by being torn asunder by arena-beasts, or rolled down a hill on a spiked wheel or flayed alive to be canonized; turn on your George Foreman and spray it with Pam and see what you get!

You remind me of my imam.

Last Thursday night as I steeled myself for the Dread Romance Language, long past the setting of the Midwestern sun, a fellow student settled himself into a desk nearby and began to fan his homework and translations out on his desk. While doing so, he kept one eye steadily on me, as one might keep an eye on a toddler who was dangerously close to an open bottle of bleach. While I was mildly unnerved, I also knew that this particular individual was not especially "on keel" and that he probably was just as freakish with other people. In other words, if one were to come to me with news that he'd been quietly slaughtering coeds with a baling hook and keeping their eyelashes in a wax-coated envelope marked "They Loved Me Not", I'd yawn and keep eating my chicken Caesar salad. Anyway, after about ten minutes, he made full eye contact with me and opened his mouth to say, and I quote:

"Hey, I just watched a movie about the Middle East conflict and you look just like an Iranian mullah I saw on there." [dry laugh]

Iranian! Mullah! Me??!! What does one say when presented with "evidence" like this? Can I prove I don't speak Farsi and that I don't issue fatwahs against infidels and adulterers? Mullahs, for those of you who [mercifully!] don't live in a world where you hear said word every unspeakable day, are Islamic clergy who have studied the Qur'an and the Hadith and are considered experts on related religious matters. At least, that's what an online encyclopedia of Islam says. In the real world, mullahs often command such respect that they frequently are able to live beyond secular laws of any kind. In Afghanistan, they rule the country; Ayatollah Khomeini was a mullah before becoming figurehead of Iran. In other words, mullahs are the religious badasses of the Islamic world and nobody effs with them, lest they find themselves at the recieving end of a honed scimitar. I don't know how Salman Rushdie sleeps at night.

So yeah, a mullah. I made a mental note to trim my beard and told my classmate that it was "funny" that I looked like a mullah, though where does one go, conversation-wise, when one person tells another that they look like a lunatic Islamic clergyman they'd seen on a documentary about honor-killings in Jordan? I needed a beer and I needed one bad. I had half a mind to drink it in front of my new "friend" so that he'd know I wasn't the local muezzin, but considering that he'd seen me finish a ham sandwich the other day before class, he know very well that I wasn't.

Last week was, classwork-wise, like having a live carpet-shark sewn into my gullet. With smallish, prehistoric teeth it nibbled delicately at my vitals, and from hellish pores it poured forth a wretched and poisonous slime-coating; at night, whilst I tried to sleep, I could hear its vile gills opening and closing as it prepared to consume me wholly. But this weekend was worth it. Kicking it off was a Chinese New Year soiree with Julie, Anna, Nancy, Dan and Keith (Gong hee fat choi!); this year is [ahem] the Year of the Cock.

[titter!]

There was feasting. There was drinking; the wine glasses had pastel-colored "slippers" made of feathers, which made drinking out of them, as Dan said, "like drinking out of a Muppet." Then: Scattergories. The idea of this game, if you have lived in a squalid, malarial corner of Third World hell for the past twenty years, is that you get lists of ideas and someone rolls a die with most of the alphabet on it; when the timer starts, you have to write a response to the prompt starting with that letter. So, if someone rolled an "W" and the prompt was "World Capital", one could say "Windhöek", naturally. Well, with my random word association problem, this game was especially difficult for me. This is because I don't want my new friends to think that I am going to hack them to pieces and hastily bury them under rapidly cooling lo mein in a Chinese restaurant dumpster. You would not BELIEVE the restraint that I exercised; to say the effort was Herculean would be an understatement. I wasn't being inauthentic by any means; I just wanted to play nice, that's all. For example, if someone said to me to name the first thing I could that began with "S" that "People Collect", I'd say without any hesitation "Skin." But in Good-Boy World, I'd say "Stamps." You see? I like to keep my friends.

As I write this, I know that three of them will read this anyway. I have a feeling, though, that they know who I am inside anyway and have already made peace with it. I apologize in advance.

Sunday afternoon, Alert Life in the Corn Reader and Donator of Half of My DNA, my old man, called me to tell me something very interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "as soon as I heard it I wanted to eat a roasted whooping crane with baby-seal sauce." Apparently a man in Texas was preparing something for his ag-ed mother in a pan when [miraculously!] the face of Jesus appeared in it. Within nanoseconds, he'd had it on Ebay, naturally. What disturbs me more? The fact that this country is being mocked for oh-so-many other reasons and now we have the Virgin Mary and Her Precious Son appearing on various kitchen media? Or that I will have to drive all the way to Texas to snuff both the man AND his mother for daring to presume that the Lord Jesus would appear to them? Heresy! They will be reposing in shallow graves, gradually mummifying in the heat and dryness, within a week's time. Nobody sells my Lord and Savior on Ebay. Cut'choo, bitch. Cut'choo real ba'.

Tomorrow: exam in French. Of course, I'll be studying for it whilst basting the nice condor in my oven; with a twist of lime and some tarragon, ooooh! divine! I leave you with the text below the opening panel of an illustration series by Edward Gorey, who easily is the most amusing human who has ever walked the earth. The series is entitled "The Loathsome Couple."

Harold Snedleigh was found beating a sick small animal to death with a rock when he was five years old.

The question is: how can you NOT read on?

Have a good one, Bloomington.

Dom