INDEX

Back to the Motherland.

I visited Sri lanka this past Christmas. (1997)

First off, if anybody dares you to fly Balkan (Bulgarian Airlines) you must kill him without hesitation! He is your malefactor and wants not but harm to befall you. This experience I would not wish on my most bitter enemy (... well maybe Igor) It captures the exhilaration of being trapped in a Mexican septic tank with Don Rickles in drag serving you spit from a camel with scurvy in a cup made out of Saranwrap and airplane glue, without coming away with quite as much satisfaction. New York to Sofia was a 10-hour flight crammed with rude pushy over-made-up Bulgarians who would bring entire suitcases as carry-on luggage; and then trample you as they attempt to cram it into an overhead compartment already containing the entire luggage compliment of 3 other people... and my regulation sized carry-on. This delightful experience was chased with a cozy 12-hour layover it the shit-stinking IATA-lawsuit-waiting-to-happen Sofia airport. Now... Bulgarians smoke. I suspect it's their national pastime just as hitting on American tourists is to the Italians and publicly humiliating one's children is to Shri Lankans. But they don't smoke cigarettes... or pot, or cigars, or pipes, or anything pleasant like that. They smoke rolls of decaying animal flesh! Unfiltered! And their airport is apparently where chainsmokers go to get away from the persecution of regular smokers. Never again.

Sri Lanka was quite the different story. As I've said repeatedly to the legions of smalltalkers: I never knew I had so many 2nd cousins! We (mother and I) happened to hit the homeland in peak season. Not only were there parties aplenty, but several hundred thousand long lost relatives to populate them. I quickly became quite proficient at the Trace the Common Gene game. I was also quite brutally reminded that as high above the Americans' my chili threshold may be, I am a reedy lightweight! That is to say that Native Sri Lanka dishes contain generous portions of chili... and are often garnished with things like meat and vegetables. In addition to hanging out with strangers with whom I am behooved to associate because we might share up to a whole 1/32 of a genome, and having my oral cavity cauterized three times a day I did manage to slip in some truly vacation-style activities: I went water skiing—bags of fun for people who can see past the downside of being clobbered in the head by water. I went shopping—quite an orgasmic experience for the foreigner who translates everything into dollars. As an example not quite covered by the domain of shopping, a salon-style haircut: $1.16... including tip! High quality cotton tees—y'know the kind you find in the gap for $12...: $4.60!

I also went to a Sri Lankan night club; that being a Western-style upscale club catering to foreigners and westernized Sri Lankans featuring things Sri Lankans consider cool. Hanson! They love Hanson. Spice Girls! Whitney! Ace of Base!... Had enough?
Upscale you ask? I was denied admittance because I was wearing a t-shirt! It was a nice t-shirt... a dress t-shirt even (if there can be such a thing). But their dress code made no allowances for nice tee-shirts. I had to go back and borrow a shirt from my 4th cousin thrice removed or something—a hideous article that if not far my homeboy pants would've made me look like such a Sri Lankan!
 

"The Fall".

At the time of this writing I had just gotten back from Fall Break (1998)... well, when I say "got back" it's not that I went anywhere as I was supposed to—I had planned to go to NYC Saturday evening after my rugby game at RPI—but I did have to make an arduous return from the kind of hazy limbo-life of the past four days. Y'see I was supposed to leave Saturday morning for an away game at RPI, after which I was going to go to NYC for a few days: see the fam, buy stuff, and attend to numerous sundry errands and such. But I as it happened I just couldn't get my fat ass in gear.

The short version: We mostly drank, stayed up all night and watched premium and pay-per-view TV.

The long: ... Friday evening I made the mistake of stopping by a friend's place—we'll call him "Igman Porful III". Now with his apartmentmates gone and his new descrambler box feeding us with an incessant stream of HBO, HBO2, Cinemax,  Showtime, Starz and 3 channels of Pay-per-view, you'd better believe we watched TV for much of the night—a sad premonition of things to come. Around 12:45 we finally managed to peel ourselves from our respective couches and make it down to a local bar just in time... to be denied! So we drifted south towards Collegetown's only crummy little nightclub—and one of only two establishments open past 1 am—for their one night-a-week of latin music. We met Brazillian teenage models, danced a bit, but unavoidably ended up back at Marek's with a 6-pack of cider a mountainous pile of Legos and the afore-mentioned 6 channels of movies and *ahem* tasteful smut. Needless to say I never made it to the game, and instead stayed up till 8:30 am catching up on several months of movies missed for lack of someone to drag my ass out to see them.

Eventually I went home, slept a bit, and then began the two herculean tasks of filing my notes from LAST YEAR! and doing 3-weeks' of laundry, and generally reorganizing my room. This lasted until "Igman" called sometime in the early evening with the suggestion of food. Chinese takeout and another 4 hours of premium television later I go home to bathe. At this point the appartment is in such disarray as to be almost poetic.

I wanted to take a picture, but there was no camera at hand and if I can't motivate myself to pack and get on a bus to go and see my family, I sure as hell couldn't be motivated to bring a camera from my place. "Igmans's" friend "Hyman" was here over break and his girlfriend, another friend and his girlfriend were up to visit so we hung with them into the wee hours getting drunk, reliving the eighties, and playing "I never...". "Igman" and I left on *ahem* cue and went home and got a good night's sleep... ah-huh ha ha! Don't be silly! Of course we didn't! we went to his place and watched TV for another... entire night.

Monday I awoke early (relatively) and resolved to get my figurative shit together and catch the 9:30 bus to NYC. But my rare spurt of focus was twarted by the discovery that I had left my wallet somewhere not in my room. No wallet: no bus ticket! But perhaps more troubling, no wallet: no money! no money: no food! Well I found the wallet—it had been consumed by the disorder and disarray left by TV, the mother's milk of sloth, decay, and the absence of regimen and structure—but not before I had abandonned my aspirations of New York. I spent the rest of the time drifting casually as suited my fancy, with no appointments, no schedule and above all no homework.

All in all it was a most wonderous time; perfectly timed, adequately long and thouroughly enjoyed.
 

Clothes, Clothes Everywhere...

Daniel and I went to the Carousel Mall in Syracuse one day. I boggles the mind how a massive retail complex of 4 levels can have such a dismal variety of offerings. Or perhaps it is just that my tastes are too vanguard for an upstate industrial town.
 

Misuse of Words

Y'know all this time I've apparently been rampantly misusing the word "candor". I was perusing the dictionary and discovered to my horror that "candor" means openness, and frankness. I thought it meant discretion or tact and though I wasn't concretely sure what it meant, for some reason I thought the word was just so appropriate to that meaning (phonetically  it semmed to fit, at least). Boy is my face red or what over here—to the extent that a face of my hue can be red. I also found out that the word "belie" means the misrepresent or falsely portray. Here I was almost convinced it meant to be underlain at a hidden or deceptive level by something else. I haven't been using it so much or anything, although it was in the rewrite of a short story of mine—I really wanted to use it—but after I found out what it really meant I had to strike it. I don't suppose you know a word that means "to be underlain at a hidden or deceptive level by something else", do you? I really don't want to have to change the construction to accomodate my limited ...um... y'know... that thing... that means the words you know?
 

The Party Report

The First night of Senior Week '99 my house threw what I can only describe as (and you'll have to imagine the ghetto intonation) "da fatty-fattiest pah-dee" in living memory.

We had a hot tub!... which unfortunately turned into a grimy splash bucket for drunk hedonistic youths testing the final limits of this rapidly expiring consequence-free environment. Never was it the idyllic utopian scene we had envisioned of shapely uninhibited women in scant bathing suits standing casually around or squeezing into the tub; having to sit on laps for lack of room. No. For the first half of the party the tub was monoploized by 1) a pretentious unknown, posing with cell phone in one hand and drink and cigarette in the other—right there 3 violations of the dealer's Official Hot-tub Rules Governing Usage, and one egregious violation of our House Rule of No Pretentious Unknowns Posing With Cell Phone, Drink and Cigarette!—and 2) a ... shall we say... rather large unsightly individual who just wouldn't budge, and eventually was asked point blank to get out. I must've been approached by at least a dozen women with bathing suits a-ready who wanted so much to get in the tub "... if only that fat guy would get out." Towards the end of the evening people were being thrown in, clothes and muddy shoes and all; some asshole jerk was spraying everyone with his long sponge-like hair—I think the same guy who earlier was humping the side of the tub; what appeared to me to be a mating call of some sort, to what avail I shudder to think! If I may quote Jon Stewart "Never have I been so horny that I thought that might work." At this point the few women who had ventured to get in had been frightened away by just this sort of behavior.

The Punk Posse made an appearance—as is their custom: Y'see in Ithaca there is this collection of Punks—that is to say people wearing more leather than a herd of cattle; hair styled after gardening tools, weapons of hand-to-hand combat, and the stuff the plumber pulls out of your drain; with more metal attached and inserted into various fleshy appendages than the entire Borg Collective—who show up to parties (usually uninvited), interact with certain key people only enough to avoid being reported to the police, then retire to a secluded exclusive spot in the bushes and... well I don't know what they do, but I'm sure narcotics are involved and I was rather curious to know from where came the discarded condom wrappers we found during cleanup the next day.

What made it, thought, was the record-setting turnout. Unbelievably it seemed there wasn't a block party that night (one of the major boasts of Senior Week is that there is a block party every night!), so when the bars let out they all came here. It didn't help either that I invited 99 people, and the other dozen members of the house invited their own motley crews, and invariably they spread the word.