As posted to uiuc.test earlier today. There may be a moral in here somewhere ...
If there are two things that my fellow countrymen here are very skilled at doing, it would be the following:
- Drinking heavily
- Complaining about the blacks
- Complaining about the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc.
Now, number 1 aside (since it has no bearing to this post), my fellow descendents from the Motherland are superb at #2 and #3... as well as #1, but that is out of the scope of this post.
So every time there is some ethnic holiday and people start cruising down the streets with flags taped onto and hanging off of their cars...with yelling and screaming people hanging out of said moving autos, my fellow Polonians are the first to respond with all sorts of constipated and expletive-laden invective. Whenever a group of boisterous black youths board an el train at 1am (when all the Polish proletariat are heading home from their janitorial jobs downtown), my fellow patriates sink into their seats and pray to the dear Lord that he deliver them unto their stop unharmed.
If I had a pair of eyes in the back of my head for each time some upstanding Polish person complained about the blacks and the Mexicans, well...I'd have a lot of eyes in the back of my head, wouldn't I?
So as this past weekend approached - more specifically May 3, Polish Constitution Day - what did I see all over the place? Cars streaming down the street with Polish flags draped across hoods, taped onto antennas, poking out of car windows. People yelling, honking, screaming. When I went to my smarmy 7-Eleven to pick up a Sunday paper, I saw rebellious little 10-year old hooligans standing on the curb, waving flags, and yelling at the passing adorned vehicles. You coulda renamed Belmont Ave to Kosciuszko[1] Way or something.
If the Mexicans can do it, I suppose the Polaks can too. To quote a wise and eloquent man, "What a country". Just when you thought you've seen it all, sweet Beelzebub throws something new at ya.
/lw
[1] It's pronounced "Kah-zee-ES-ko"...but only if you live in Miss'ippi.
I never really realized how enlightening and epiphanistic crime can be sometimes. Somebody stole a mouse from one of our labs over the weekend. Seeing as how I was charged with installing theft countermeasures several months ago, I though that today I would go down to MPC - the campus computer vendor types - and check out their wares, so to speak.
I walk on over to Norris...it's kinda just exactly like the Union. It's full name is Norris University Center; however, until about a year ago when they re-installed the letters that had fallen off, it was always known to me as N'o's'n'e's'n...a peculiar name, no? But that's really not important. After I checked out the latest low-tech security devices, I decided that I should grab some lunch.
The pizza joint always has some kind of calzones; each day showcases a different filling. Today's special was cheese. "Great," I thought, "I've never had a cheese calzone here and it would so placate the Vegetarian High Council." I had made numerous appearances before the council.
For, up until today I've only had the pepperoni ones because
a) pizza products containing sausage tend to go through me like a freight train for some reason (this is important; y'all need to know this),
b) I refuse to touch the vegetable kind because, like most places offering vegetable pizza will not realize that broccoli has no place near any pizza-affiliated product, and
c) similar to bratwurst, which is a rhizome, pepperoni is completely different in that it is a bulb.
Despite my repeated, logical and rational arguments stating that I was completely vegetarian except for the times I ate of the Kowdeath, the Council was not swayed. They had almost recommended that I be expelled from the continuum...to have the rank marks and buttons ripped from my formal uniform jacket and to be branded as solely responsible for the events at Bitter Creek.
So I take my cheese calzone and Mug Root Beer and sit down to eat. Now, before I go on, I would like to state that I looked at the Coke machine and stepped away in order to show my solidarity. Granted, Mug is a Pepsi product, making it equally heinous, but I decided today was not the day for flawless idealism, for there was computer security at stake.
I had been sitting for about a minute, acquiring the appropriate mental state conducive to good eatin'. I looked up and saw a girl walking across the dining area. She was wearing a skirt; the hem dropped almost to her ankles; it was slit up one side to about the knee. As she walked, the slit revealed that she was wearing those cool, black-and- white, (horizontal) stripey tights. Lest you think I stray from fact and into the doom-pit of conjecture, I offer my ownership of similar tights as proof that they are, indeed, cool.
What bothered me, though, was her footwear. She was wearing those vile Adidas bath flip-flops that all the kids are wearing these days. Now, a skirt of that length with tights of that pattern one wears with shit-kicking boots, pointy-toed boots, Mary-Janes, or similar deviant footwear. One absolutely does not finish off such an ensemble with flip-flops! Friends, I was shocked. And I assure you that, had I the time to attend to the matter with the gravity that it deserved, that young woman would have endured the spanking the good gods meant for her!
But, unfortunately for her karmic balance, I was being called to higher duties. I began sampling the calzone in front of me. It was an odd shape, 'ancalzonous' if you asked me. It was filled with, obviously, cheese and mushrooms and spinach. Those of you who have constructed any sort of stuffed pizza item may understand my bias when I say that, when one uses spinach as an ingredient, the spinach must be thoroughly chopped. This calzone had no such degree of that quality. Worse, the spinach was horribly moist, limp, and underdone...and it could not be remedied. I ask rhetorically and with fantastic melodrama, "is there anything worse than an object which is _irreparably_ moist and limp?"
Well, I could no longer continue eating such a monstrosity. I packed up and departed. What followed was perhaps the only glimmer of positivity of the entire torturous ordeal. As I walked toward the restrooms, I saw another girl. She was unshackling the rollerblades from her person. From my angle, it looked as though she were wearing a dress. "How neat," I thought. The idea of rollerblading in articles of clothing other than pants - the _de rigeur_ standard of most, if not all, rollerbladers - intrigued me.
For the first time in my life, I was struck with the urge to 'blade. And at that moment, I also resolved that, should I ever do it on a regular basis, I would do it whilst wearing my favorite skirt: the one that stops just 2-3 inches above my knees, is slightly poofy due to the almost-kiltlike abundance of material (unlike most flimsy contemporary short skirts which are liable to give any girl wearing one chapped lips) and consists of small squares of variously printed maroon, cream, and navy blue fabric. It is coming apart at some of the seems thanks to repeated wear and washing - rayon is not the sturdiest of materials. Perhaps I would round out the ensemble with some deviant legwear...though not the black-white stripey tights because one really shouldn't mix prints and stripes together.
I would form a group, perhaps extend it into a sport of some sort, and refer to it as "Bitchblading".
As I walked outside and toward my building, the cool sea-air of Lake Michigan - not 100 meters off my port beam - refreshed me. "Yeah," I thought, "that would be cool."
Cheers,
/lw
-- Rev. Thomas Mary Lunarwolf Dobrowolsky, U.L.C. kb9iqx http://jaka.ece.uiuc.edu/~lwolf lwolf@jaka.ece.uiuc.edu -ky-ky-ky- Colleen B. Noonan for President! -ky-ky-ky-
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