Forty days and forty nights.

Yesterday, as Kemal bey began cramming Arabic and Persian grammar into my [voices-filled] head, we came across a word I'd heard in Turkey whilst frolicking on the Aegean. More rightly, I saw it a lot, written on signs and billboards, especially around Denizli and Edremit. {Look them up on a map; I ain't gonna coddle you.}

Mermer.

Marble. {Mair-mair}. So, with a wipeboard eraser clutched in my Turkish-language-butchering hand, Kemal and I talked about the etymology of this word. Where did that word come from? Why was the "mer" sound repeated? Armed with this knowledge, I'd know how to properly write it and not make a further ass of myself, which as you all know is a big chore for me. I guessed it was Persian, but a quick look into an Ottoman dictionary about as wide as my torso quickly confirmed that, of all things, it was a Greek loan word:

μάρμαρο - marmaro.

Kemal waxed for a moment.

"That makes sense, Domonic'ciyim. After all, do you think the early Turks would have had a word like 'mermer' in their lexicon? What would they say? 'Come here and look at my beautiful marble tent?' "

Naturally, I howled like a gibbon for about two minutes before coming back up for a breath. It absolutely slayed me. Now, the rest of you are thinking: uhh, yeah. It's not even one of those situations where I could say "you had to have been there." More like it, you had to have been me. And that's fine. I know you all think I'm as weird as a bag of hair. {Nods to Keith, Anna, and Julie.} I've come to accept - nay, embrace - the fact that this blog has caused many of you to reconsider allowing me to be in the presence of children, the elderly, and beloved barnyard animals.

Today, though, was Les Miserables day. Yes, Les Miserables came to IU, and of course nothing but rabid lemurs with rusty machetes could have kept me from it. Whilst trying desperately to not belt out the words to all the songs during the performance, I became aware of several things:

1) Apparently, I have a penchant for French-inspired dramas wherein people are slain in large numbers.

2) I still hate the French language so hard that when I think about it hard enough birds on the wing in my vicinity plummet to the earth stone-dead.

3) I think I secretly want to go to France.

Are you effing kidding? you all say. That country's full of people who read, write, speak and think in a language that you loathe with the white-hot fire of 10,000 suns! Further, you think the food is ass-nasty! You don't study French art, architecture, or culture! And the underarm hair... oooh, la la!

Of course, you'd be right [stabs self for revealing weakness]. But, much like my burning desire to go the UK following reading my first Harry Potter book, or my nearly crippling yearning to teach English in Vietnam during a class I took about the Vietnam War, I think that I am just utterly susceptible to the notion, or illusion, of the exotic. You'd think I'd be over it by now. As an anthropology major in one of my previous avatars, all I did, day and sleepless night, was read about and write/comment on societies that are hopelessly exotic. Take, for instance:

The Sambia. The Sambia are an ethnic polity who live(d?) in the Highlands of New Guinea. Sure, you say, what's the big deal? Tons a' them bone-through-the-nose spear-hurlers live in New Guinea; swing a dead cat around and you'll hit one.

Well, the Sambia believe that semen can't be produced by the human body AND that women are the most fithy, polluting and loathsome beasts to walk the earth. So, what happens is this: they enculturate their young males (7-10) to pair up with an older male, whom the wee ones fellate constantly. This is seen as not only the ultimate bonding experience for the young ones, but also as a way for them to get "seed", since it is in limited supply. Then, once they are 16-18, they are expected to stop having relations with men and must marry; those who desire to be "gay" further live out beyond the settlements and often perish young from starvation and cassawary attack.

The Nuer. The Nuer were a Nilotic people who lived in what is now Sudan. They bathed in cow urine, often waiting quite some time for a cow to be ready to "give a bath", and they brushed their teeth with ash from burned cow dung.

The Creole Brazilians: As lived/written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, more people die violently in the shantytowns of Brazil's cities than anywhere on earth save Medellin, Columbia. In fact, so many infants die in these shantytowns that the mothers seem to not even love the babies as a defense mechanism against profound loss, causing one to question the very idea of motherhood. Those not carried away in infancy by malnutrition or schistosomes usually joing local gangs and are murdered before the age of 20.

Man, I'd cut off all of my toes with pinking shears to go to Papua New Guinea, the Sudan and Brazil! What's wrong with me?

I made a Ten-Places-I-Must-Go-Before-I-Die list when I was in high school. Surprisingly, it has changed little in more than six years. Feast:

1) Thailand.
2) India.
3) China.
4) Japan.
5) Indonesia.
6) Kenya/Tanzania.
7) Egypt.
8) Morocco.
9) Vietnam.

And number Ten, the one I keep on in vain hopes,

10) The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Of course, that's because my favorite book on the earth is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Wow, I need help.

I spent most of today doing laundry, which was about as fun as having your optic nerve massaged by liver flukes. As I moved my foldy-outy chair from my wall, I completely turned over my goddamned humidifier, and it had at least a gallon of water in it. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes committed suicide by the trillion following the sub-and-supersonic blast of profanity that emitted from my tender Italian lips. Pilot whales off the coast of Cape Cod are stranding themselves in the hundreds. And somewhere in the Tibetan Himalyas, the heavens opened up and released a metric ton of ashy snow out of a cloudless sky.

What a mess. Six towels and it still is squishy. Fortunately, the water managed to wash away another stain from that nurse I lured here with candy and snuffed as sacrifice for Cuddles the Under-the-Bed clown.

This Tuesday and Wednesday, Chicago. So far we've planned on going to the Field Museum and Greektown... and, muahahahahahahaha, Chinatown. Little does Keith know what he's getting into. >:)

Until tomorrow, I remain as ever,

Dom