A Little Something Unexpected

I hate Mondays.
I hate Mondays, but I feel sorry for them. Monday's have to endure the combined hatred of millions and millions of workers and students, in pure, concentrated form, every week, every year, ad infinitum until the ending of the world. You might say that, of the weekdays, Monday got the shit end of the stick. Except for Tuesday. Tuesday sucks too.

I've been having some light bulb moments recently. I was listening to "We Didn't Start the Fire" a few days ago, and I realized that everything would be much easier to learn if it was a Billy Joel song. Honestly, I think Algebra II would have gone a lot easier for me if I could've popped in a CD and listenend to "Quadratic Man" in order to finish a worksheet.

Some words are obviously a product of their environment. Take, for example, molasses. Molasses is one of the few words that actually sounds like the thing it describes. Say it slowly, and it drips off your tongue, bits of the vowels sticking to your gums and sliding back down your throat. Say it fast enough, and you might have a little lingering sweetness in your mouth; say it too often, and hell, who knows, your teeth may start to rot. Or the word insipid, a word I believe was solely coined by movie critics for the sole purpose of inclusion in their reviews. The next time you come across the word being used to describe something other than Orlando Bloom's acting in Pirates of the Carribean, please, let me know.

I have a new image of sadism burned in my brain. Sadism to me is a 300 pound mulatto gym trainer grinning like a clown and chanting the lyrics to "Beat It" while I do sets of 30 pound shoulder lifts. Personal trainers are supposed to do that, I guess; sit high atop their ivory towers and hurl thunderbolts down upon the poor weightlifting peons, urging us to push it, and two, and three, come on man, its all you baby, its all you, I ain't even liftin' the bar! And in a way, they're like Mondays. We can love a personal trainer to death outside the gym, but when we're doing squat lifts and he's chatting up the manager, we tend to become filled with a certain incandescent rage. "Hulking out", I believe, is the scientific term. But we need personal trainers; they serve the role in gyms that annoyingly articulate critics do in the arts. They're our consciences, if our consciences had biceps the size of melons.

A little personal fact about myself that not many people know is that, when I was in my late 4's, my family had a succession of au pairs, crosses between exchange students and babysitters. For a few months, a foreign student essentially became a part of our family, eating with us, sleeping in a spare room, and (most importantly) taking care of my sister and I. This was a long time ago, and I'd pushed it into the file in my mind labeled "Miscellaneous Baby Thoughts". So imagine my surprise when, a few days ago, my family gets a letter from one of the au pairs.
Her name was Nerina, she was Indian, and for the past decade or so she'd been living in South Africa. The letter itself wasn't anything spectacular; an update on her life, some inquiries, a quiet "God Bless" at the end. What struck me was a line in it. "I often think about you all with the fondest memories", she wrote, and I realized I had forgotten almost everything about her. Only her name hung in my memory, suspended with a hundred thousand faceless others. Here was a woman who had last seen me entering kindergarten and had then disappeared, with only an image of a small, brown and blond haired boy with a penchant for reading and solemnity. This was her picture of me; this was all the Andrew she knew. Simple, sweet, and quiet, without the wear and tear of emotional baggage, of too many late nights, of pent-up rage and soured love, without the cursing and the ego and the insecurity. Just a little, thoughtful kid in a lollipop shirt.

Would she be thinking of me fondly, I thought, if she saw who I was today?

They said that Queens could stay, they blew the Bronx away, and sank Manhattan out at sea.