ALL NONSENSE

Yesterday while biking to a friends house, some stranger in a car emptied the contents of her water bottle on me. I wish I could explain this, but I'm afraid I don't completely understand it myself. When we both came to a red light, I rolled up to the passenger side window and asked her what the fuck that was all about. Some lady with gold teeth (the human sprinkler) started shouting with the animation and intensity of a Jerry Springer audience member. She was all, "You can't do that! We have kids in this car! You almost killed us! Yap, yap, yap!" Anyways, it was all nonsense. I tried to ask her what my supposed offense was, but all she could do was spit and fuss and garble more nonsense. I smiled and told her she was a crazy bitch. And then left.

MY MORNING MADNESS

Usually I will wake up with some repetitive bits of Erasure or New Order wedged into the crannies of my corpus callosum. But not this morning. No, this morning I woke up with my brain snagged on the lyrics of Shel Silverstein's Peanut Butter Sandwich.

IMAGINE

Imagine all the petroleum jelly in the world (name brand and generic) gathered together in a huge pile. Wow!

THE HEAT

Transformed her white cotton shirt into a straightjacket.

FIVE STRING SERENADE

I went to my garden last night to weed and thin my carrots. I found tiny tomatoes and zucchini and five string beans.

ABOUT CHIGGERS

Um so. I was doing a little reading online about chiggers and I found out that they do not burrow into skin or suck blood. Instead they inject the host with saliva that contains digestive enzymes that break down skin cells. So the tissue essentially becomes liquefied and the little shits drink it up. I know everyone's got to eat, but that is so vile.

BACK NORTH

I brought back three things:

1. A camera full of photographs
2. A belly full of smoked pork ribs
3. A constellation of chigger bites

GRANDPA'S CAR: PART TWO

So my two cousins, Pit Pat and I went down to the local Country Mart in downtown Forsyth, MO (where a black man was spotted once in 1997!!) and bought this little bathing beauty and stuck it right on the dashboard of grandpa's car. Gosh, I sure hope he likes it.

GRANDPA'S CAR: PART ONE

My grandparents are political and religious conservatives. They've been known to do silly things like 1) move south, 2) vote for Bush, and 3) put stuff like this on their car. But we still love them.

FLY SOUTH

I'm flying to Forsyth this evening. That's a little town in Taney County Missouri, about twenty mintues from Branson.

Ah Branson! It's like that poor dim witted relative of yours that sounds like he's being made fun of just when you speak his name. Braaaaaa-nson!

I WISH WE HAD TAILS

Just think of all the cool flips we could do if we still had tails.

LAST NIGHT I SAID:

"You fuck like a National Geographic special."

I'm still trying to figure out what I meant by that.

GIANT SALAMANDERS

I couldn't sleep last night. Do you know why? Because of the giant salamanders of Japan! They can live up to eighty years and grow two meters long!

One of my environmental science students lent me a DVD box set put out by the BBC called, Planet Earth. It's more than twelve hours of incredible earth/life science footage.

GAME NIGHT #2

Here's another picture from the same night. I don't know what this person was trying to draw.

GAME NIGHT #1

Here, some Ultimate Friends and I were playing the game Cranium while sipping Schlitz beer. I guessed this one before my teammate Trixie got a chance to draw in the notes. Do you know what it is?

CONVERSIONS

When I cover metric and English conversions in math class I always use my one experience with a metric scale in China as an example. I tell my students that I got on the scale and it read 68 kg. Together we convert the weight and come up with something like 149.6 lbs. Inevitably, there's one student who will say something like, "you don't weigh no hundred n' fifty pounds."

Why does this information always surprise the dudes?
Do men really think women are made of cotton candy and bubbles?

MY HEART IS BREAKING

I can't help it.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH

Why do I fall in love with people that sort of kind of love me back?
Why do I work for institutions that sort of kind of appreciate me?

When did I decide this kind of living was good enough?

GUINEA WORM BLUES

I'm going to Ecuador in August, but I have no health insurance. So I'm going to have to either buy my own malaria shots or else drink a huge wavy sea of gin and tonic.

THE CHICAGO DIET

The Steady and I went to the Windy City this weekend. We drove down Thursday night and got back late Sunday. I just returned the rental car this morning and I feel about 2,000 pounds lighter.

CHITOWN: DIZZYGOOD

CHITOWN: HOODLUMS

CHITOWN: DEARBORN

CHITOWN: EATS

This is a chickenmozzarellasweetpepperpestosausage thingy from Hot Doug’s on California Ave in Logan Square. Oh my gawd, I nearly wept in the duck fat fries!

SULKING

Well shit. I just spent $525 on a plane ticket so I can spend two days in Forsyth, MO at the end of the month. It is a family reunion thing. Which means I don't have a choice.

*sulk*

ASIAN

I joined the Tuesday night Ultimate Frisbee summer league. It's really pretty laid back and I like the people on my team. They are all different ages and come from different places and levels of experience. Usually after a game we go to a local bar, but this evening we went out to a Korean restaurant. I was talking to one of my teammates between points, asking her if she was going to join us for dinner. No, she said. She can't stand Asian food. She can't even stand the smell of it.

This statement seemed a little odd to me since the word Asian is such a broad term. I mean, it would include Chinese food, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, and many more. And having had many of those kinds of foods, I'd say they're rather distinct. To me, it's like someone saying they don't care for European food. But when she said this, I just nodded and smiled.

Then there was a long pause.

And then she said, "what's your nationality?"

Still nodding and smiling I simply replied, "Asian."

YOU SILLY DUMB ASS

Yessir. We are officially at the end of finals week. Summer break is so close I can smell it.

And it smells like cocaine.

My evening math students are taking a test this very moment. I like the class overall but there is one skinny little runt of a man that I'd like to grind my boot heel into. He's either a) telling his classmates how stupid they are, or b) sleeping upright, with both arms propped behind his head. Whenever I look at him and I think, how sad. And then I sit and wonder if they even have surgeries for people with underdeveloped genitals...

Hmph.

And so. Right before I hand out the final exam I tell them that it should not take them more than an hour to complete. Runty, looking out the window with his hands behind his head says, "It daaaaamn well better not."

DESTINATION: AUTHENTIC LOVE

The Steady and I have been seeing each other for about six months. One half a year. One half a year is where reality and fantasy meet like an airplane meets the horizon. And I am trying to be cool about it, but when I look back in the week I realize that I have been hitting the in flight mini-bar an awful lot.

AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

What is this 'happy' stuff anyway? People say you can't buy it. But is that really true? Maybe they just say that because they don't want to share any of theirs. I don't know if this is even legal, but if you have some, or if you know people, or if your people know people, please let them know that I'm interested...in just like a dime bag or something.

OH MY GOD, I WORK WITH HAPLOIDS

So there's this guy I work with. He's an older white guy with a ponytail. Pleasant enough fellow, but like my friend John says, don't ever make direct eye contact with him or he will come over and talk until your ears shrivel up and sink back into your skull.

Let's call him Huck.

Huck's probably a pretty smart man. At least that's what computers will tell you. He's the one who was bragging to me about his very, very high GRE scores and his flirtations with MENSA. *Yawn!* I personally don't think he's that smart because he'll say wacky things. For example, he's pretty sure he's part Mongolian. Why? Because his head is shaped like a Mongolian's. WTF? And he insists on using words like “oriental” in order to describe "my people."

So he tells me last week how one of his students did a presentation. And in this presentation there was a picture of a little girl that he insists looks exactly like me. So he emailed me a copy of this picture, my supposed doppelganger, and she's Asian. You know, and I’m half Chinese. Which automatically makes us twinsies.