Hooray! The air conditioning is off, being fixed o…
Hooray! The air conditioning is off, being fixed or something, and it is actually pleasant in the office today! Wait a minute…damn, they turned it on again. Oh, well.
I was buying some stuff at a nearby underground grocery and overheard the cashiers talking to each other about a little boy one of them knew.
“He’s just like his dad. His father’s a gangster, you know. One time his dad came home late and the kid said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?'”
“Oh, really? How old is he?”
“Four years old.”
“Oh, my.”
“That’s nothing. When he was three he was chasing people around a market with a cleaver.”
I don’t know if I want to guess what kind of man this kid is going to grow up to be. Probably a legislator, I’ll wager.
One of the good things about being seen as a foreigner here is perfect strangers feel free to say whatever they want right in front of me. They just assume that I have no idea what they’re saying. This is all very interesting until I have to actually talk to someone, say order food at a restaurant or whatever, but otherwise I hear some pretty bizarre stuff from people who think that their conversation is private.
I caught my brother online the other day. He lives in Houston and therefore had a day off due to the recent flooding. I remember when we lived there and one day I got up and went downstairs to find my dad sitting on the sofa in the family room. This was unusual because he usually went to work pretty early. He was working at Lockheed back then as an aerospace engineer.
I discovered that the reason he was still at home was because our house was surrounded by floodwater and no one could leave. Dad had tried driving our 1973 Pinto station wagon(with faux wood panelling, no less!) through a floodwaters once, even though the truck with the “You really might want to consider evacuating, you know” sign couldn’t get as far as our house in Seabrook, which was practically on the coast of the bay. The Pinto rusted out, which was a good thing as otherwise it very well could have ended up as my first car, instead of the wonderful 1977 Datsun 810 that contributed so much fun to my high school years in Winter Park, Florida. Looking like an ordinary four-door tan sedan, the 810 had a secret weapon in the form of the engine of the 240Z beneath its mild-mannered hood. We bought it from a little old lady, so my parents thought it was a great deal tamer than it actually was. I only had one mishap in that car, when a 60’s era Lincoln ran me off a slippery road and I bent one of the wheels under the car. Bastard.
Tangents are so much fun, aren’t they?
