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