my dog threw up on my sweatshirt this afternoon (i guess i deserved it for throwing the sweatshirt on her head, if not for constantly calling her Dip.) i can hear the washing machine quietly digesting the stain in the next room.
today was packed and fun. lana came over friday post-shabbes. i fell asleep not long after. it was my first platonic nite in over a week; i was exhausted. this morning, i woke her up w/ eddie from ohio, who remind me eternally of summertime. breakfasted w/ the newspaper, grandpa’s challah and mom’s baked apples, and then off we scooted w/ judah to his very first publik skool football game. on the way, lana pointed out that i seemed to be expecting a scene from rural ohio, not d.c. she was right: all the players, all the cheerleaders but one, all the members of the marching band except one drummer and the fat bereted tuba player, and virtually all the folks in the stands were black. judah is small and pale; and if that wasn’t conspicuous enuf, he was wearing a shirt w/ large hebrew letters on the back. still he seemed unfazed.
lana and i were more interested in watching the cheerleaders than the game itself, in which very little happened, football being the most boring american sport. there were three varieties of girls: the official cheerleaders, who wore the team colors and pranced around; what we called the RoboCop girls who were decked out in shiny silver body stockings and boots and pranced around w/ flags; and inexplicable girls in white skin-tight tanktops and booty-shorts who pranced around miming having sex with the air in front of them. lana and i discussed (a) objectification, (b) that we felt bad for the girls who bulged out between the skimpy sections, (c) that maybe we should feel worse b/c these girls didn’t seem to have issues; *we* did, (d) feminism, and (e) how different all this was from jds.
everyone was eating the hamburgers and slices of pepperoni pizza sold near the bleachers except for the white couple directly in front of us who unwrapped yuppie sandwiches from corner bakery.
we wandered off before the game ended, altho we later surmised that “we” won. judah showed us more of the skool. funny that he’s the only one of the three of us who ends up getting a normal experience. he seems to be taking the good (computer classes, a cool curriculum) w/ the bad (metal detectors, cops).
went home and watched Truth About Cats and Dogs, which, along w/ WHMS, has the male protagonist i’m most in love w/. he’s funny, artsy and cute, and he goes for jeneane garofolo. what more could one ask? jamie joined us & we ended up in adams morgan for ethiopian dinner followed by chilling at Tryst. back at lana’s, we gushed over her finally found-and-developed pictures and grabbed doubles. much discussion: how are skool folk different from home folk; how have we changed; bunnies. typical fuelo talk. they asked me who i vent to at skool. i realized i don’t really vent to anyone — then i found myself venting to them.
as always, it was refreshing and lovely. tomorrow i head back, to write grants and be apprehensive about getting papers back and start rehearsals on the show. so much traveling between worlds. so surreal.