Portuguese lesson tonight with Manuela. One of my favorite restaurants in the city. (who thought of that spelling and ass-backwards pronunciation?! Totally retarded. Is it no wonder that everyone naturally spells that word ‘restaraunt?’ since that’s the way its pronounced. the word Wednesday is the same thing. just totally effing retarded. And in our schools here in retardville the teachers try to come up with some stupid excuse about the words derivation or etymology to explain why the whole country is pronouncing these words the wrong way. Give me a break. Either spell it the way it sounds or pronounce it the way it is spelled. Period. Enough with your bullshit. I remember the day the exact day our teacher tried telling us why Wednesday was spelled was spelled wrong and why we should just accept it. I thought it was bullshit then. and I think its bullshit now.
O.k. enough. But one day mark my words, I am going to hire a small staff to go into a lab for a few months and rewrite the entire English language so it makes sense. This is a promise.
I made this little poem about how retarded English is: “bluff, rough, scoff, cough, dough, tow, go, toe, plough, plow.”
There is a lot of irony in those ten words the way they are strung together. Just absolutely a retarded language when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. Look at those words! certainly linguists have already attempted to tackle English and turn it around… will research.)
O.k. so anyway I’m at this great Italian restaurant eating radicchio drenched in olive oil with Manuela. And she is drop dead. She doesn’t know it, which makes her even better, I mean just when girls are shy like that, there is nothing more repugnant than a hot girl who knows or thinks she’s hot, except a not so hot girl who thinks she’s hot. but Manuela is hot, and she’s totally shy still and humble and gracious and that’s refreshing. We are practicing English and Portuguese together. she is forced to speak to me only in English and I correct her and I am forced to speak only in Portuguese and she corrects me. it’s a brilliant set up. learned a lot. and because we both speak Spanish we can always fall back on that when we need to in order to grab at a word neither of us know in the other’s language. Its great.
Manuela is one of those good girls that you don’t meet anymore. Something out of the nineteen-forties. She’s been with one guy in her entire life, her ex-husband. amazing. great manners. perfect etiquette. She heard me say fuck once and she asked me in her very heavy broken English Brasilian accent “Fishy, do you say words like this?” almost shocked. In fact, she probably was shocked. And I said “no no. I was just kidding.” I don’t think she has any idea who I am. Who Fishy is. I think she just likes hanging out with me, doesn’t know much about me. I think that if she ever read these diaries that she would be truly shocked. Horrified probably. You just don’t meet girls like her anymore. A guy like me could destroy a girl like her because she just has no reference points to know how to deal with or relate to who I am or how I act or the things I say.
From this recent experience with the dove I was again reminded how important it is, this evening especially, to be a gentleman and really be careful in your speech and actions not to lead people on. if its not going romantic, you don’t play romantic. Period. You be a man. you grow up. you don’t play games with people. you are clear from the beginning and you act from that space. from a clean space. don’t blur the lines. Some people do it they say out of ignorance. They think they’re playing clean and they can’t figure out why people are misunderstanding their messages and getting hurt or mislead by them all the time. they swear they aren’t a player, but people keep telling them that they’re a player… other people do it just because they’re fucking vampires and they don’t care about the other. they are just sucking attention or affection for themselves selfishly, whether deliberately or not. Either way, its fucked up. I would say that in the last few years I have gotten really good at being careful about this and not giving the wrong signals if I’m not feeling it. I am proud of this.
I just think that in the end, no matter how many times we say it and think it, and feel it, it still all comes down to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ if we can master that in this lifetime, we are there. in a nutshell.
New Yorkers are super into sports. You realize that pretty early on. I don’t mean people who live in New York. those aren’t New Yorkers. I mean New Yorkers. People who grew up here. they like effing love the Yankees. Man its all they ever talk about. totally foreign to me. But its kind of fun too the way it seems to bond them together. all you have to do is mention in passing, ‘how was the game?’ you don’t even have to say what game. Everyone knows what game you are talking about. and its instantaneous bonding. That’s New York. just a small part of what makes it such a great place to live and breathe.
Last screening: I finally finished the history of the barbarian tribes documentaries. So now I’m watching all the old Gong Shows. Seriously. I bought the whole freaking collection on eBay. I’m a FREAK. I know. but its so absurd and stupid. you really can’t believe that it ever existed. Chuck Barris is a God-clown.
Current spin: keane, again. and Yupi by Hashimoto. Brilliant!!! Buy it.