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(I'm talking with a group of touts I know.)
tout: You've got to try Indian girls.
Danny: No, no, I'm in a relationship.
tout: You've got to try her and her and her and . . .
Danny: She doesn't even look good.
(The other touts walk away after some white people.)
tout: . . . and her and her. And hey, wanna try an Indian girl now?
Danny: No, no, no, my girlfriend is enough.
tout: Totally clean!
Danny: No, no - wait: Meaning prostitutes?
tout: What?
Danny: Er, buying sex?
tout: Only 500 rupees! (= ~$10)
Danny: :o
tout: Cheapest and best!*
Danny: :O
tout: Just come with me!
Danny: Listen, listen. First, if I want sex, I don't have to pay.** Second, I have a missus.
tout: I get a commission!
Danny: NO! I'M FINISHED! GET LOST!***
* "Cheapest and best" is something people like to say in English about street food.
** No, I just need to pick a girl and marry her. I know this because I spent my afternoon eating a very nice lady's food on the pretext of getting her to answer some questions about monkeys. But really, she wasn't interested in monkeys at all and just trying very hard to get an American or Canadian husband for her daughter.
*** How do you say, "get lost" in Hindi? "Naash do!" Literally, "give the destruction!"
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2 Girls, 1 Cup - you all saw that one, didn't you? Oh sure you did. "Grotesque" doesn't cover my reaction to it, and I definitely didn't finish viewing it. But I didn't and don't feel bad about having watched 2 Girls 1 Cup. I can't pass moral judgment on the Girls. I don't know much about the video, but presumably they weren't being forced to do it, and as far as I can tell they didn't hurt anyone, except possibly themselves, by making the video. Idling away my own free-time, watching 2 Girls 1 Cup, trying to get through it, and ultimately being proven too weak-stomached to manage . . . It's sick, but I can share with my friends my reactions and we can giggle and cringe about our mutual revulsion. They'll cackle about how they couldn't watch it either.
But the making of the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs snuff film involved a murder, a real murder. One of many murders, actually. I do not exactly want to watch this for my enjoyment, and true, I'm not going to enjoy it. But I'm going to watch it, at least a little.
93% loaded.
The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs are a trio, possibly a duo, of Ukranian teenagers, who killed 21 people and tried to kill 8 other people during the summer of 2007.
I feel wrong for my desire to see the record of Sergei Yatzenko's random death, and the actions of the monsters who made it happen. While they haven't been proven guilty yet, the court is reputedly of the opinion that the attacker shown in the video is Igor Suprunyuck, and that the man behind the camera is Viktor Sayenko. And there is no doubt who the man on the ground is, as he was found four days later by family members in the spot recorded on the video.
Suprunyuck and Sayenko hurt a lot of people, and enjoyed making films of the attacks with the cell phones. I do not want to participate in their crime. I do not want to share in the attack on Sergei Yatzenko.
100% it says.
I am going to watch the video. I fear that as the video continues to be viewed on the Internet, the evil therein might be continuing to reproduce. I'm sounding dramatic, but I'm trying to be serious. People have watched it for fun, for a thrill, to make light of it, to mock the heartfelt reactions of viewers who found that they weren't prepared to take it on. I want to be able to watch it and to learn something from it, so that Suprunyuck's and Sayenko's own intentions and desires - whatever it is that they hoped to gain by doing this to Sergei Yatzenko - are thwarted somehow. I want the echoes of this evil to be bent in some other moral direction.
I'm bothered that I'm going to watch it. I worry about what it means that I'm willing to spend my idle time doing this. No one's making me do, I'm not in the jury, I'm not required to do it, and I don't believe in the intrinsic value of bearing witness evil. If I can't watch it, I'll be satisfied.
(I'm much less bothered by the fact that I'm sharing my thoughts with ever how many people are still reading this blog.)
One last thing. Should I put the sound on? I think it may be easier to detach from it if the sound's off. But if I'm going to watch it shouldn't I just hear it too? Shouldn't I experience the complete artifact of the act? Definitely not, I think. I'm not going to (as the translation of the murderers' conversation into English has it) "feel his brain".
Okay, I'm going to watch it. We'll see.
Long pause from my stressfully slow computer. Okay - I have no idea why I was compelled to try this, but apparently my PC won't play it in full screen mode. Fine.
Ok.
I talk about the video below, so don't read it if you don't want to know what it's like.
I saw it. There was no sound. It was not as hard to watch as I thought it would be. This was a stupid post. I'm infected like everybody else; I watched Sergei Yatzenko's face shatter, loosen, slip from his skull, and it just seemed surreal. I saw them hit him many many times in the head with a hammer. He gasped and choked as the killers used a screwdriver to stir his intestines. They gouged his eyes out with it, too. The man behind the camera, in all likelihood Viktor Sayenko, jammed the screwdriver all the way into his eye socket. As he literally stirred Sergei's brains, I saw the poor man's face twitch. It took him a few seconds, but even then he raised his arm to protect himself.
I'm unhappy with it. I feel like it's impossible to have sympathy for Sergei Yatzenko, possibly because he is on the video, possibly because I only know him as the victim and unwilling star of the video I just watched. I've been searching in other tabs for evidence that the video is a hoax. One commenter thinks that Sergei Yatzenko's face looks too rubbery to be real, and another answers him by asking what does he think his own face would look like after being slammed by a hammer time and time and time again. There do not appear to be any refere
I just realized that I had the computer on mute the whole time. So my headphones are producing their own static now, are they? Obviously, the question is now, should I watch it again? I'm going to finish what I was saying about the hoax angle.
So CNN, FOX, MSNBC, BBC, etc. have not covered the story at all, but there are a lot of Russian language and Russian origin news pieces on the murders. They, the murders, seem to have really happened. There is one Russian language site (http://www.blik.ua/content/view/15141/42/) that may be reporting on the leak of the video to the public - but, you know, I don't read Russian. A commenter elsewhere has speculated that the only way the video could have been leaked is if one of the killers uploaded it before the trial. On the other hand, Sayenko's father cum lawyer has argued that the faces in the video - yes, they definitely made videos of their murders - are unrecognizable; it makes sense that someone from the defense or even the police department might have leaked the video to sway public opinion otherwise.
One possible route to figuring out if I think it could have been staged - and I'm noticing that I really want it to be - is to watch it again, but without the mistake of having the sound off.
Oh gosh, that was really loud. I don't think I want it to be that loud. If I have to turn it off - well, my computer's slow and I don't want to have to listen to more than I'm ready to. Also, I'm using headphones so as not to disturb the nice people downstairs. Again, with sound down.
That was horrible. Why the fuck did I do that? Why did I watch that ever? I understand that his face was rubbery now. I took a break, went back, had to stop again. Every breath he took was as though he was sucking his air through a - what am I saying, "as though"? He was drawing his breathe through his shatte
I want to talk about how I was sitting there, above this line, trying to decide what to type. If I were a character, if I weren't a a person sitting in a flesh and blood body like the one I've just seen and heard destroyed, then my author would have been right to put ellipses after "drawing his breath," "through," and "shatte . . ." I don't know what adjectives to use because they all seem hackneyed when applied to the murder of a real man.
He gurgled as he breathed. I took a break. Went back. He was trying to scream, but it was choke - not really - lost, muffled, drowned. He couldn't cry out. As they jambed the screwdriver in his eye, into his brain, repeatedly and - fuck, brutally, I can say "brutally" but the word's been turned to useless shit.
No. I'm sure that something very bad was happening. My disbelief is faded enough. They were playing with him. They were 19 years old when they did this. They played with his nose, with his eyes, flicked at him with their screwdriver like he was roadkill. As they pumped the screwdriver into his abdomen and shook his belly, they were playing with his body, trying to see what they could do with their tools, showing off the outline of the screwdriver as they pressed its blade against his body cavity from the inside. The cameraman is panting, strong breaths, clearly excited, and I hate how alive he sounds and how strong his breaths sound against the just fucking simply agonizing noises of Sergei Yatzenko's death rattles.
The one guy steps on Sergei's belly after a while and the heaving sounds
They're like the hollow, gaseous, sometimes gratifying almost-belches that tickle you, that lift your vomit when you're trying to throw up a big mess of vile things in your belly, and you know you're going to feel better after it comes up. But Sergei's death rattles are so much louder, and they're outside his body. And you know that if he's vomiting, he's - I don't know how he's even making those noises, his body has been destroyed
The killers are laughing. It's fun for them. They're cracking up. A train goes by, they take a break. They try to finish him off with the hammer again, and then they run to the road - which is right there, just nearby. Their car is parked there. People probably drove by while they were doing it.
I'm not a better person now. I don't know. It could be real. I'm done with this.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article5483397.ece
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But oh no it looks like proposition 8 is going to pass.
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| 2008-11-04 20:54 |
| Hooray! |
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Hooray!
Dear world, America will be better to you now. You can start trusting us again.
(Well okay, we'll see about that. BUT things are looking up.)
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Never before have I had such a desire to destroy other living things as when I discovered termites eating my goddamn research notes this afternoon.
In my desire to totally punish the colony for turning my fantasy of a livelihood into a snack, I considered going bonobo on their little white asses and eating them. This probably had something to do with my lack of proper nutrition lately. Whatever the source of my impulse, the notion of dipping a twig into my books and pulling the termites off apishly with my lips was just so appealing.
I did not eat them, the main reason being their choice in main courses. So, yes, they trimmed back the bottom millimeter or two from some research notes, but they especially got into my notes for Ghost & Time, as well as leaving their nasty little wood droppings all through my Cthulhu books, which they had colonized like some cyclopean city of leaning, soft-bound leaves. Fearing the eldritch horrors they may have themselves devoured, I decided turnabout was not the wise move in this case. Instead I gave my gaming books a good stomping.
I will pick out the carcasses later. This is certainly the last straw with this house, which has been a dark comedy ever since I moved in. The real estate wala has found a new home for me, one which I saw before but deemed too expensive. Well, I can afford it now. This one's an actual flat, not a terrace apartment. Indian toilet AND Western toilet. (I made sure it flushes.) He was offering it for Rs10K/month before. Now it's just Rs8K, which is like $160/month, at least the way the rupee is doing nowadays. It'll probably be $180/month by the time I'm done with it. But since real estate guy's lending it to a wedding party for a few days first, I can't move in until the 25th of November, right before ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rainydayfriend gets here. I hope I can get the geyser installed by then.
Now he's giving me a bargain? I think he's worried about his reputation - I do tell everyone I can about how may entire house is broken - but then again, maybe it wasn't selling for some reason. I can't be sure. It's a nice neighborhood. Private front entrance with a gate. Three rooms, a kitchen, a shower, and a toilet. Electricity. New paint. I don't know what the catch could be, so I think real estate guy's just cutting me a deal. (Which is to say that he may be giving me something closer to the locals' price now. Just two thousand more than this dump? What would an Indian pay for where I'm living now?)
In the meantime - after I find a laundry guy who comes when you ask him to - I've determined to get to work on my stuff in Shimla. It's a hill station in the lower Himalayas and the former summer capital of the British Raj. I can never get over that - the freaking Himalayas. It'll be cold there, so the hotels will be cheap and the monkeys easy. Totally looking forward to it, and then to returning in December with rainydayfriend.
What appeals to me just now, though, is using the bathroom and buying more underwear. Not necessarily related needs. So off to the mall!
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I don't have much cause to post in LJ these days.
But I think winning a Wenner-Gren is reason enough.
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The website for the CoC game I mentioned in the last post.
Also, an article about why Exploitative multiplayer worlds don't deserve to be called art. Take note World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc.
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"Ghosts & Time" (tentative title) will be a play-by-text campaign of The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game.
This game will be very much like a traditional tabletop game of CoC. The main difference is that instead of speaking to one another, most interaction between the players (including the Keeper) will be accomplished through textual and visual media posted to individuals’ blogs. All the usual aspects of the tabletop environment - dice, rulebooks, character sheets, cheetos, and Mountain Dew - will continue to haunt our game, but they will not be its focus.
The focus will be the collaborative story. Players should be interested in visual media and writing more than rolling dice.
Characters may be from any setting in history up until 22 April, 1924. Players do not need to own or even know the rules.
For more information, or to play, contact Danny at gordianphock@gmail.com or comment on this lj with an e-mail address I can use.
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| 2008-03-08 13:30 |
| Meryl |
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Yesterday, a little bit after 1:00, my little lizard died.
Meryl was originally the pet of an airman or civilian employee of the Air Force. Later, she and another gecko, Ms. Donald (both named by their original owner), were given to another civilian employee, who later gave her to me during my stint at Bolling AFB’s Air Force chapel in 2001. Ms. Donald remained in Virginia for the rest of her life, but, besides the year I spent in Chicago and a few months of being cared for by trusted others while I was in India, Meryl remained with me. She went across the country in the passenger seat of my car twice, going through more states than both of my parents, together, have ever been through. She never bit me, she put up with being harassed by at least three cats and three dogs, and she used to chirp like a parakeet when I offered her a little bit of banana baby food on the tip of my finger. I’m guessing that Meryl was ten years old when she died, which is about right for her species. She could have lived longer, but she also could have been older.
With Meryl gone and her terrarium packed up, I’m free to go away to India for a year or two, and I won’t need to feel guilty about leaving her with someone else. I’m also freed of the daily waterings and feedings, not that it was that much work, and not that I ever completely kept up with what was required.
I miss her a lot. Meryl was not cuddly or talkative or cute in the way of warm-blooded animals, but for about seven years, she was a nearly constant and almost completely silent witness to my life. Besides a few possessions like books, clothes, and my car, Meryl is the very last bit of Virginia to follow me to California. The people and animals I see around me everyday are no way the people that were around me every day seven, or even five years ago. This apartment in San Jose was Meryl’s very last place of residence. Looking around it now is like looking over my own body and being aware that it is entirely composed of elements that are no older than seven years. My entire skeleton has been remade in the time I was Meryl’s owner. I feel like Meryl is the last part of my old body to go.
She was lying clumsily on her face a little bit before 1:00 yesterday, so I picked her up and put her on her log to sit in some sunlight and warm up. She never made much use of that log until she stopped sticking to the glass. After that, the log was the second best place. You shouldn’t handle geckos if you don’t have to because it’s stressful, but she just looked so uncomfortable sitting as she was, that I had to straighten her out. A few minutes later I saw her lift her head up in the sun, and I said something to her. “See, the sun will make you feel a little better,” or something like that. I didn’t realize that she wasn’t lifting her head, just stiffening in death. It was maybe 1:30 when I came to check on her again and saw that she wasn’t breathing. I waited a few minutes to be sure that she was gone, then wrapped her up in a little paper towel, put that in a plastic bag, and put her in the freezer. Meryl was already dead by then, and the AVMA does not recommend freezing as a method of euthanasia for reptiles, but I wanted to make sure.
I couldn’t stand to look at the empty terrarium, so I cleaned everything up as quickly as I could and rearranged some things around the house to fill the empty space.
San Jose is a flat waste compared to Virginia. I’ll bury Meryl in the woods high up on upper campus. That’s not the environment she was meant for, but I’m not done with UCSC yet, and I’ll be back there at some point in my life, so I won’t feel like I’m abandoning her to one of my temporary homes. Meryl wouldn’t care where she was buried.
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Again and again, writing to the National Science Foundation for money, eliciting opinions, rewriting, eliciting opinions, rewriting. It's like . . .
That scene in Alien 3 with the scissors. Alien 3 is the one where Ripley lands on a prison moon and the lucky prisoners have Roc1 as their prison cleric. If you saw the movie, you remember that part of Roc's pastoral duties was bare-handedly wrestling the alien while getting trash compacted.
So, when they discover that an alien is in the prison with them, Ripley tries to organize the prisoners. The best scene!: a prisoner is guarding a hallway, armed with a pair of sturdy scissors. Another prisoner walks by and comments on the way the first prisoner is holding the scissors - pointing downward. "Mate, you'll never be able to hurt anyone like that!" He takes the scissors from his comrade, returning them to his fist pointing up, away from his thumb, and scoots off.
Another guy walks by, notices how the prisoner guarding the hall is holding the scissors, and stop short. "Mate!" - or whatever, I don't remember exactly - "You're gonna hurt someone! Point those things the other way!" The passerby corrects his grip on the scissors, pointing them back at the floor.
Moral. And he still gets fucking intestinally-raped by the alien! That is what is essentially demanded from grant writing. If you're lucky, you have a lot of people to tell you how to do this and that, how to fit what you have into the program of the proposal. By the by, there is no actual act of impregnation followed by being eaten from the inside out by a foul alien life. The comparison between the National Science Foundation and fighting aliens on a prison moon pretty much ends with the scissors. And the scissors scene is funny, so it should be a great metaphor for something.
It's eleven o'clock Friday morning. I am going to watch the hell out of the morning show for Cloverfield.
1 - Not an elephant-eating bird, but Charles "Roc" Dutton. You know, from "Roc". Or did you not watch funny television back then?
***Saw Cloverfield. Okay, so the reviews that are already out are mixed. Most of them are like, "Wow! I love smashing monsters, fuckin' A, gonna see it a jillion times," or, "Wahh, I didn't realize it was gonna be all shot on a home camera, and it made my head spin. And I didn't even get a good look at the monster! Wahh." First of all, we see way too much of the monster, but not enough that I feel like I can describe it to you. Though the San Jose Mercury News is not the most reliable source for good film critique, I'm saying that they're kind of right on this one. They remark that the knowledge that it's a flesh-and-blood creature that could be killed is comforting, which doesn't go well with the whole idea of a horror flick. True, Cloverfield would have been better if we saw less of the monster, but, false, there is not knowledge that it is a flesh-and-blood creature. It does not seem at all killable. Insofar as it's a monster for the Oughts, well . . . Oh wait, that wasn't the SJ Mercury News, but some internet critique from Fandango.com. As it turns out, SJ Mercury News was more right - it commented that the movie was a document of NYC's destruction by monster for the You Tube generation. The containment of the footage - it is represented as a tape recovered from "US-477," "formerly known as Central Park" - does seem apropos to the ala carte style of news, film, art, whatever, that the Internet propagates. The monster has no name except for a hint in the very beginning of the movie that, sometime in the span of time between the attack and the moment when the viewer witnesses the contents of the mysterious tape, it has been designated "Cloverfield". Few of the characters even acknowledge that it's a monster, but this may be because the fact is obvious to them. The closest they get are two remarks by Hud, the main character's best friend who acts as cameraman for most of the movie, who declares in the first minutes of the attack, "I saw it! It's alive!" and, later, answering another character's question about what the creature is, "Something terrible." What makes this monster appropriate for the Oughts is its origin. There is no serious discussion in the movie about where the creature comes from. No body knows anything. It just happened. At one point Hud blathers about how the government may have created it or it may have crawled out of a crevasse in the ocean, but that's the end of it. 2 Cops, soldiers, newscasters, and all those caught in the destruction all admit nothing but ignorance. Discussion of the monster begins with, "It's alive!" and ends with, "What is that?" "Something terrible." Unlike Godzilla, or King Kong - or any giant monster of destruction that was ever pitched as anything other than comedy - Cloverfield has no origin. It just happened one night. It was not, as far as we know, a perversion of something that humanity had messed up in its innocence or arrogance, nor was it Nature or God striking back. The hype that, Godzilla : post-WWII Japan :: Cloverfield : post-9/11 U.S.is partly correct, but only insofar as, Godzilla : mutant nature taking revenge on an arrogant humanity ::
Cloverfield : sudden chaos and destruction from nowhere Hate out of nowhere is an apt enough theme for how many Americans experience the world-beyond. But it remains a cop-out. Of course, this movie would not have been effective at all if there were long periods of reflection, if the monster's origin was revealed to everyone, or if the characters were able to accomplish anything other than dying or, perhaps, escaping. The movie works because the characters are stuck wading through a terrible, ruined metropolis. If Cloverfield is a monster movie for the post-9/11 United States, it is because the destruction of New York City is an attractive fantasy. The precise fantasy is to survive the apocalypse, and to live the disaster. The fantasy and this movie, then, are something like pornography. Despite the waves of emotion and the almost immediate polarization of political affections in the wake of 9/11, the real, immanent experience of attack was limited to a few thousand persons. Everyone else was positioned, or positioned themselves, by degrees to the destruction. The NYC destruction-pornography has emerged to meet the demand for the experience of terror, that is to allow people to position themselves that many degrees closer to the experience of terror. When the Fandango critic suggested that Cloverfield could be thought of as a prequel to I Am Legend, which I did not see after reading the novel, they were admittedly referring to the scenic destruction of New York that is featured in both films. They were not making the more apropos connection that the sudden, surprising arrival of a monster in this country has served to pave the way for a horde of terror-craving vampires. This is not the technological optimism of Godzilla, where mankind's ingenuity has the potential to rescue us provided we learn a lesson from the experience. Cloverfield is the disenchantment with rationality that we find in the novel (not the movie) I Am Legend. If the novel I Am Legend documents the collapse of faith in the modern, then, yes, Cloverfield - and the inability to be reflexive in the aftermath of a swift, sudden, and ongoing terror - may be a suitable heir to Godzilla. Cloverfield is the paralyzation of the post-modern psyche. 2 - Two websites - slusho.jp and tagruato.jp - were part of the viral marketing for the movie. Um, they might have clues?
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Only about fifty people have come up to me, "Did you hear about the mayor?" No seriously, it appears to be true. Monkeys have killed the second-highest ranking administrative officer in the world's seventh largest urban conglomeration.
"Yes . . ." Unfortunately, I've been at a loss for anything smart to say, and I've had to resort to jokes:
". . . isn't that great?"
or
". . . and to think they laughed at me! Who's laughing now?"
***In other news, I settled on the name "Friday" for my new putty. It's short for "My Girl Friday". You'll please believe me that the sexist under/over-tones only occurred to me after I had already decided that I liked its spooky ring. Like "Wednesday Addams" and "Friday the 13th". And when she's good, I can give her fish because it's, "Fish for Good Friday!"
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Today I adopted a cat!
I haven't taken any photos yet, but here is the link to her adoption page at the SHAS website, where she is known as Candy.
Which is exactly our problem. Is Candy a good name? Teresa thinks she should be named Bagheera, but that's a guy's name, and "Candy" is definitely my cat. So, I'll take a few days to name her, and in the meanwhile anybody coming across this post can suggest a name for a little black kitten.
Here's what I know about her so far: She's sweet, very purry, all black with faint stripes and a little bit of red in her undercoat and some white guard hairs. She's a little bigger now than she was in the picture. She's six months old and she's already been adopted and returned once for having an accident on someone's bed. I don't think her previous owner was doing the housebreaking right, so I doubt she'll do this to me. Oh, and she has a sharp kink in the end of her tail from where it must have been broken at some point. Saber, Teresa's cat, has a kink in his tail too, but it's not as pronounced. There you go, what do you think?
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This is to announce that I cleaned up all the weird news files on my computer and put them together into a single mysterious folder, thus inaugurating my very own X-File!
So, now, in addition to any monkey news that you might run across, I want all your weird news.
This is so that when I, in my inevitable future paranoia, need to cross-check some date with my news files, I will have all sorts of faux-chupacabras, snake handling churches, bat-demons, and faces of Mary to fuel my obsessive correlations.
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I know I haven't posted lately, and I will post sooner than later for sure. But right now I want to alert you to the work of one of the professors at school. Not only is this guy one of the smartest people we have in our department, but he's only, like, six months older than me. Scientists, go figure.
Anyway, the title is good enough to share with you. It's, "Potato 'fuel of human evolution'". Again, go figure.
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chaoyote se hae:
 Mingle2 - Online Dating Apparently my journal earned this rating on account of the appearance of the following words in my most recent entries, nevermind the curse words, which assuredly appear more often than "punch": * zombie (9x) * shoot (7x) * gun (6x) * kill (5x) * death (4x) * hell (2x) * punch (1x)
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Indian food gives me the gasses if I eat too much at once. Often I find myself walking away from dinner round-bellied and really more waddling than walking like an upright human being. I believe I must have lost weight, but I don't think it's showing because of this very problem.
Towards my weight-loss ends - I mean, less "towards the goal," and more of just happening to be living with the side effects of ecology shock as well as the much-discussed culture shock - I finally got sick today. It was at the point where my own more-than-satisfying gas passing became less of a release, and more of a terror for me: how was I to be sure what was going to come out? My sickness is of the chaltewala paet kind, my "stomach is running." Which means that this morning first thing I did after a night of cramps and uncertain farts was to go to the bathroom and turn on the butt faucet. I'm not sure what caused it, but it was likely one of four sources.
A) Copious alcohol I consumed on Friday and Saturday, which more than likely weakened my immune system rather than simply making sick.
B) Peanuts I consumed in my alcoholic must on Friday night, which tasted like poop and were probably from a barrel and unwashed hands.
C) Mc-Fucking-Donald's. I have no good reason to be suspicious of McDonald's, what with their seriously high standards of both English and cleanliness, except that I've only eaten there once on this trip, and that was on Sunday. It was Sunday night that I got sick, and so the connection is there.
D) A half-bottle of Thumbs Up cola that I drank. Like the peanuts it tasted like horribleness and that must have been why there's still about ten ounces of this butt-enriched cola sitting on my dresser. Normally it tastes like RC to me, but maybe a little aniseedy? Aniseed I like when it comes in those little trays beside a heap of coarse grain sugar, but Thumbs Up I do not.
Earlier I had been complaining about the clicitude of my guesthouse; not in this forum, but in e-mails to American log, and also, tipsily, to any non-guesthouse student who'll listen to me at the local palace of nectar cum hole in the wall.* Well, all it took for people to start visiting me was for me to get sick. I have had so many pieces of pepto-bismal and tums, so many electrolyzers, teas, and such, delivered to me today. Besides the fact that being sick seems to have turned me into a sympathy magnet, Auntie-ji, the mistress of the guesthouse, came in my room this morning without knowing that I was there. She woke me up at 10:30, after I had decided not to go to school. I have a hard time talking to her, because her accent is kind of thickly Rajasthani and she tends to ask several questions at once, but I managed to explain the specificities of my illness, and she too became automatically sympathetic. Feeling my arm, she declared that I had a fever.
In a brash, swift response, even an act of decimation - defined by T. rex's friends here as the punishment of a regiment by the killing of 10 percent of their number, in my case a regiment of some unknown bacterial agent - I took my granny's and mother's advice and starved the flu. If they were going to take away my capacity to hold water, I was going to take away the spicy catalysts that allowed their foray into my intestinal regions in the first place. Having not eaten anything all day long, I have just finished a dinner of some rice, a little bit of pumpkin (not pumpkin as you know it but some Indian kind of squash), two pieces of toast, and a cup of tea, I feel okay, perhaps a little headachey now.
Speaking of the side-effects of Indian food, I should mention that I have been watching The Biggest Loser Jetega. It's not the American show, but an India-specific installation, starring something like ten or twelve overweight Indians of various persuasions and ethnicities engaging in silly games to the hybrid end of entertaining folks and casting off the bodily effects of their wealth and prosperity (in a land where malnourished and bloated, rather than overfed, bellies are still not an uncommon sight). They mostly speak a lot of English on the show. It's completely hilarious. They do things like dance in front of celebrities, which isn't as bad as it sounds because for a country full of nominally caucasion people (as per the old five-race circus imagined by backasswards anthropologists as recently as the Seventies, er I mean, Nineties, er, Oughts), like, freaking everybody knows how to fucking dance. Oh, but do the "big losers" (and I mean this in all the good spirit of the show) jiggle. One guy, who used to be so unhealthy that he had to use crutches, incorporated them into his dance routine. In this routine, he posed as a beggar, who cast off his handicaps and his low status in order to be taken by the rhythm. Bilkul dilchasp.
I should go, there's something scary on television, and I so, so, badly want to know what scares Indians. I don't know what's going on, but girly-girl on tv say something and then got mauled by the first-person perspective of the camera. Please tell me that the eyes behind the POV belong to a monkey. Of course, as anyone who's ever seen Rape (not that I have) knows, the eyes are our own. Well, I assure you that I have not been mauling anyone. For what I can tell, the story is primarily about a girl who keeps finding herself in situations where she is suddenly alone and threatened by a less than defined presence. The family cat just got run over - the declaration by mother that "Billi mar gaya" (the cat died), followed by weird violins.
* - You tell me if that's an erotic pun or just overly flowerly English for the seedy bar down the street.
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Oh my God!
You know, it's not the developments in Palestine or the fires around Lake Tahoe that have made me realize how easily one can get out of touch with one's domestic reality so quickly.
No!
It's that Chris Benoit freaking strangled his wife and son, and then hung himself, a few days ago and I didn't know anything about it!
Plus, there's this weird twist to the story: a wikipedia user posted about Nancy Benoit's death fourteen hours before the police discovered the bodies! See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19468182/
Oh my gosh!
***In other news. I went to a wedding. I think I look pretty damned good in sequins and a scarf. Please, everyone invite me to your Indian weddings so that I may get more use out of this get up. Well, that's it. I mean, I do have lots of interesting things to say - like, I saw some wedding elephants the other day, and the cats here are obviously not too far descended from desert wildcats - but lately I've been feeling like every moment spent in English is a moment that I'm not learning Hindi. And my Hindi sucks. Not so bad that I can't go shopping, get a rickshaw, do all kinds of fun things around town without the use of English, but still pretty bad. Bad enough that I can't have discussions about my research yet, bad enough that I can't explain to the cook that, no, we don't all just go a-orgying all the time in America. Luckily, on that last point, I think it's better that he thinks America is the land of orgies. Considerably more accurate than streets of gold.
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I had a weird dream one afternoon a few days ago. I wrote it down as soon as I woke up. Because the dream was recorded on a piece of paper that also had my translation notes from a Hindi newspaper the layout ended up being unusual and I preserved it. Digges is a computer guy I know from Virginia, whom I hear has got plastic surgery for his weak chin. Ryan is a kid I knew in middle school; after noticing that the middle fingers on each of his hands were missing a joint, the best thing I ever said to him was, "Hey, I see you’ve got a short finger there."
In the waking dimension, I didn’t know what Orkut was, but the internets did. Unfortunately it is not the name of an evil deity or anything like that. It is Google's networking engine, named after its creator, Orkut Büyükkökten, who is not the same thing as bukaki. In India, Internet cafe owners are under pressure from the nationalist group Shiv Sena (Shiva's Army) to ban Orkut because some persons using the network have apparently decried Hinduism. I must have heard of Orkut from Google, or read about it in one of the Indian newspapers and just not remembered it.
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So I really have better things to be doing than playing with my American Internet toys, but I've had these pictures for a few days now, and they are super cute. Is there something wrong with me being a full grown man of good upbringing who enjoys this kind of thing? Anyway, before you look at the pics, you should know that she (and you'll figure out who I'm talking about) was actually suckled by a pig as a baby . . . and that explains everything.
( Enjoy the tiglets of Thailand: )
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irate
not as good
hungry
giddy
cat!
shocked