This much I know is true.

It's a lazy weekend afternoon, and it finds your pallid leviathan carcass moistly reclining on your living room couch while you absently behold twelve straight hours of Friends on DVD. From somewhere in the house, an almost imperceptibly low, steady purring punctuated by the sound of a plastic eye rapping rhythmically on the hardwood floors; the smaller of the two house-beasts is bringing himself to savage, felid "climax" atop an increasinging fecked-to-death cephalapod toy. The larger of the two house-beasts taps to a corner of the kitchen where it briefly contemplates extruding a few clunkers on the dingy linoleum and, in an astonishing display of restraint, decides instead to return to his dog-cage wherein he commences to lathe his tongue over his entire body at decibel levels generally associated with roadwork. Outside, a songbird troubles itself to break into a twittering symphony before it is rewarded for the effort by bursting into greasy flames in the oppressive Indiana summer heat and, as its immolated avian corpse catches a portion of our brown, dead lawn on fire, it becomes intensely interesting to the smaller house-beast, who pauses in his unlikely, unholy union long enough to "chatter" at it through our dog-nose smeared front window. Ordinarily, you'd get up to stop any one of these blessed events, but it is at this moment - lawn ablaze, cat humping a squid, dog autofellating, Chandler saying something witty on the telly - that you come to the realization that you have

ceased being able to care about much of anything.

Instead, you open a bag of nacho cheese Doritos and begin to sully your fingers with unnatural, day-glo cheez-product and settle in for the show. Later, as your insides begin to buckle from the aforementioned Doritos and the accompanying orange-tropical fruit Gatorade you've washed them down with, you begin to ask yourself the question that dare not be asked:

How did it come to this?

The answer, my few and potentially devoted, can be summed up with one word -

AUGUST.

For me, if the month of August - and the late July weeks leading up to it - were to be characterized by a smell, the bouquet would be rather like what I imagine might issue forth from an toddler's underside after it had taken special pains to covertly consume vast quantities of slightly spoiled Indian food.

I won't lie, folks. I look forward to August and the accompanying shetstorm in my place of employment as one might look forward to a lengthy stint on one of Texas' death rows. Yet, each year August comes and goes without the additional bonuses of worm-ridden, shetty prison food, frequent and brutal anal rapes in the showers, the opportunity to attempt to fashion stabbing devices from sundry contraband objects and, finally, the bittwersweet release that comes with riding the Intravenous Poison Chariot and the accompanying, all-expenses-paid trip to Big Dirtnaptown.

Don't get me wrong: I love my students, and I am glad that more and more of them choose Indiana as a place to live, work and study. Each one of them is talented, unique, and each of them makes my life - and the life of the community at large - better, brighter, and richer. It's just really sisterfecking hard to keep that perspective sometimes when you have a student weeping moistly into what can only be described as a hand-knitted potholder in your office while your phone is ringing, as sixty frantic, desperation-laden emails are flapping their vile cyber-wings into your inbox faster than there is any human way to deal with, and as other staff members - desiring desperately to know if you are working on some other complete diarrhea-tornado of a mess from THEIR emails, appointments or phone calls - lurk in your doorway, entreating your assistance, all at the same time. As you longingly gaze at an unnaturally sharp letter opener in the shape of a Persian phoenix and wonder how long it would take for someone to notice how long you'd been in the men's room, you snap out of it - oh, happy dagger! my ass - and press forward with your day, as it's the only thing you really can do. Well, I mean, other than screaming into a pillow at noon and four each day until your vocal cords shred up like gory Circassian chicken and developing a cleverly-disguised substance abuse issue.

I'm not entirely sure why August comes as a surprise to me every year. The Dyad of Incessant, Unrelenting Ghastliness is, and will always be, a fixture for any international student advisor's life in August. The Dyad, for those outside the blessed field, is:

1) New Students.

Most new students are doe-eyed, fresh and happy - a little nervous, understandably, but nonetheless ready for a new term, a new town, and a new life. However, vis-a-vis my twenty-person office, almost twelve hundred of them. This means that, if each of them had but one and only one question or issue, there would be twelve hundred problems. With each moment that an issue goes unresolved, the desperation factor, coupling nicely with intrinsic cultural baggage and good old-fashioned frustration, multiplies exponentially. What this means for us is that often the staff members in my office have but to breathe deeply, momentarily go to our happy places, and briefly touch the tasers taped under our desks for a hit of heady reassurance as a few of our (understandably scared, frustrated, angry) students shriek, cry, speak in tongues and cast you nicely into the role of Person Who Is, Singularly, Making My Life Unbearable. It is a role that I, as someone who is apparently dead inside, play with unfettered abandon and unusual panache.

2) Returning Students.

On top of the nearly 1,200 new students, about 2,500 former students return for classes right around the time the newbies get here. While the vast majority of students take the time to find out what they need to do to travel outside the US and return safely, it remains a given that no matter how many emails we send as reminders that there are going to be a handful of troublemakers. And by "troublemakers" I mean "people who call hysterically twenty minutes before leaving for the airport with no idea of where their documentation is." Now, things happen sometimes. But I'm not entirely certain that if I was going on an international flight that I would wait until a half hour before I left to see if I had, oh, a valid visa to broach the country I was to be entering. Maybe that's just me, projecting my own beliefs and cultural background onto other people. Or, uh, perhaps

it's just hot-breathed insanity issuing straight from the lips of Satan to not think of these things before trying to enter Fortress America as a foreigner in a post-September 11th world.

But hey, who am I, right?

For us, the creamy brown sewer-icing on the month of August is that it's hotter than a goddamn blast furnace in Indiana in the summer. Initially, I thought that I was just being stupid and that it was my own icy seawater blood that was preventing me from appreciating temperatures in the nineties with triple-digit humidity. Then one day I saw a nun tear off her habit and vestments right there in the street for a moment of blessed relief. It gives one pause: if the sweet infant Jesus is attempting to cool off a nun - his bride! - it's got to be as though the Hooved One's loins are pressed directly on skins of the rest of us. And let me tell you: he's not so fresh down there.

***

Speaking of "not so fresh", I went to the Indiana State Fair this year.

OK, so maybe that's not the world's fairest segue. Haha, "FAIRest." Anyway, I love big state fairs, which may come as a surprise to some of you in my readership. And by "some of you in my readership" I mean "those of you who have seen me shriek like a seven-year-old girl when animal poop gets anywhere near me." That having been said, the five or so summers I spent living with relatives in West Virginia toughened me quite a bit; it's not every day you are lowered into a newly-completed liquid pigwaste cistern to clear out cement debris or get to assist with the castration of young barnyard animals. Added to the West Virginia experiences were a few early morning trips with my Uncle Anthony, a large and small animal veterinarian in rural Pennsylvania, to behold bovine twisted stomach surgeries and to witness the miracle of seeing a calf splurp out of a cow's bunghole, among other things.

Mostly, though, the fair provides me with an entire day of high-grade improbable nostalgia. I've gotten to experience, on a very limited scale, the lives of my relatives who work the land and raise, care for and dispatch its creatures, but there is no way that I could even pretend for a moment that I shared in their experiences. I am aware that it's not glamorous work - hell, heaving a bucket of freshly-extracted pig testes into a nearby wooded ravine is a sobering chore - but as someone who has been touched by a farming way of life, I have to admit that I find a measure of allure in the idea of it. I say "the idea of it" because my soft, pallid body would be as worthy of a six-day-a-week regimen of manual labor as it would be to swimming the English Channel. However, when one of the houses I looked at renting two years ago proved to have a chicken coop in the backyard, I have to admit that I laid a calcite-covered spheroid in my drawers. Farming in small, recreational doses: apparently OK in my book. And pants.

The other attraction to the fair is, of course, the ethnographic experience provided for you nearly free of charge. Whilst consuming something deep-fried on a stick (this year, the "hot" innovation was a block of frozen Coke, deep-fried on a stick), you have a nearly endless eye-buffet of humanity's highs and lows parading forth right in front of you. Strangely, Indiana's state fair takes place right in the middle of Indianapolis, just north of downtown, but the folks who come to the fair are - let's be honest - not city folk. Lots of cowboy hats, lots of leather fringe, and lots of shetkicker boots. Even more often, adults dressed in Loony Toons-embossed clothing and sticky, red-faced children sullenly following their parents to find the shetter. Belly shirts girding people who could, perhaps, rethink said attire. I feel like an outsider most of the time, as though my (nearly) two degrees produce volutes of a nearly visible reek of pretentiousness in the face of hard-working, ag-Americans. But, just as I think that, I remember waking up at 5 AM to bottle-feed an orphaned calf (named Calvin, then renamed Calvina when its gender became apparent) one summer at my grandmother's house. So, there's a little bit of it in there - not much, as being near animal shet still makes me shriek - but it's enough so that I, like thousands of Indianans, can feel connected to our glorious state fair.

But honey-child, come on: ain't NO reason on this blue-green earth why you need to be wearin' that Tweety Bird tubetop. Oh, snap!

***

Dear filthy Bloomington hippies,

First off, let me start out by stating for the record that I have very few issues with those who live alternative lifestyles, as that would be hypocritical in a way that would cause my head vaporize on my squat neck in terms of karmic retribution. I can appreciate your commitment to political and social issues (Tibet, legalization of low-impact narcotics, electing leaders who are committed to a communist agenda), your alternative dietary needs (meatless, dairy-free, tofurkey-at-Thanksgiving veganism) and your commitment to gird yourself with outwardly non-conformist clothing woven from hair, bark and will-o-the-wisps. Hell, I applaud your decision to mat your hair into strange, bulky cylinders that hang lankly off your skull.

But let me tell you something:

When you smell so bad that I gag and begin to dry heave on the street when you pass, I feel as though I have been violated in a deeply internal way. It's one thing if, say, you're homeless and don't have access to a stick of Right Guard while rifling through a Dumpster for your dinner. It's another thing altogether when you are a white, suburban twentysomething with four fifty dollar bills in your hemp wallet and a Prius hybrid car. Hygiene is, if you've been noticing, important to American culture and I am here to tell you that yes, Brother Dreadlocks, you can be a nonconformist AND still not have to reek like a calving Asiatic elephant's nether-regions. I've seen natural hygiene products - organic, even! - that are cruelty free and fashioned from, oh, I dunno, mint and sage and tea-tree oil. Barring that, aren't there special sticks that one can use in the shower to take the stench off - eucalyptus branches, for example?

What I am saying is this: unless you are a hobo, there is no excuse for you to smell so badly - even in the brick-oven heat of Indiana's summers - that I find my partially digested and nearly disgorged lunch sloshing in my mouth like a hellish stew. Should you not heed my entreaties to properly de-stink, I will be forced to utilize the only power available to me. So when a three-hundred pound man named Albert "The Lip" Fontinelli comes to your home and asks you to take a walk in the woods with him, you can rest assures that your pitiful remains will make a sound meal for nature's non-vegan lifeforms.

Kisses,

Domonic

***

Now that all seems to be simmering down, I should be able to post again.

If you're still out there. [sniff]

Until then, I remain,

Domonic (OK,soIdidn'tpostfortwomonths-sueme,bitches) Potorti