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