Weirdness

03 May, 2003 || 15:33

Interesting things happening. Last night, I volunteered at Paredes Middle School here in Austin with Lady More to teach children how to say and write things in Japanese. It was a lot of fun. Things I observed that night:

1: No child of mine will, in the sixth grade, have pants that say "bootylicious" on the back of them. EVER.

2: The school was much better integrated than many that I've seen. Not only were there lots of black kids, white kids, and hispanic kids, but the groups of friends were all mixed too. That doesn't happen often, and it's a very good thing. However, I saw *one* Asian person last night. One. And she wasn't a student, she was a coordinator. Later on, I thought to myself, "Ai ya, have these people never seen Asians in their lives?" I mean good grief, I had at least two, and maybe three or four people ask me and Lady More if we were Japanese. We're both white. Very white. And these people were being serious.

3: Oh, the Drag. Last week it was naked people. This week, I was walking down it with Neko, and saw a man demonstrating HOW TO MASTURBATE (this time fully clothed thankfully, he was only making the motions -- and SOUND EFFECTS. EEEEW!).

4: Good grief, Neko is a deep sleeper. I had seen her earlier in the afternoon, and she was in a very good mood. She said to me "Sfida, you know what we need to do? We need to go and drink heavily." So I called her later that night, and watched most of The Sound of Music with her friend Elena. Neko was there too, passed out on the couch. I tried torturing her with ice, rubbing it on her forehead. Didn't react at all. For part of the time she was sleeping so deeply we were afraid something happened to her. We thought she wasn't breathing. But she was, just not much. Kinda scary really.

5: There were these people there who only spoke in French to each other that were very anxious for our movie to be over. They came in and dropped this huge pile of blankets etc. on one of the chairs we weren't using. I'm never going in that room without a can of Lysol again.

6: What I told Elena during the movie: "This is so unrealistic. You wanna know what life was like in my mom's family of seven kids? She and her one-year-older brother used to fight with the express intent of putting each other in the hospital. Once or twice, they succeded."

7: What happens when you put three barely-awake, overworked, overwrought ex-teenagers together who each suffer from varying degrees of angst? Things like this: "Drink heavily and carry a big stick."