Street in Varanassi

I noted something about westerners who chose to vacation in India:  they all stand out.  Not only because they are white, but because they wear fanny packs, carry their sunglasses on brightly colored foam cords around their neck, and cover their heads with safari hats.  In the middle of a very big city, Europeans and Americans are walking around dressed for encampment. Worse than that, though, are the Japanese, who have put all pride and hopes of blending in behind them and walk around all day with surgical gloves and face masks favored by the more cautious of today’s mail carriers.  I counted no less than twenty of these people in all four cities I visited, and it made me want to beat them to death.  Not as a hate crime, but because I want to spare them the innevitable humiliation of getting home and showing their friends and family pictures of them at the Taj Mahal or Amber Fort dressed as if they have come to do very delicate reconstruction.

Now lets see what my five senses had to say about India. Everything is made of layers, and exists at one severe end of the spectrum or the other. Walls of stone will be painted with a layer of yellow or turquoise, and then slathered with animal blood.  The lower something is the more paint it has on it, but that goes right up to the top. The road is rather nice and cobblestoney, but hidden beneath a half inch of dirt, then anywhere from one to three feet of trash, some of which has been set on fire for your convenience and comfort, some of that is being eaten by bulls. India is home to a number of unique smells, many of them pleasant, but most of them unforgetable.  I’ll smell the air here sometimes and say “It smells like India.”  Veranasi itself smells like burning chocolate, for example. I thought it was incense or cooking, but my mom told me that it was just the corpses being burnt on the Ganges. The food is very spicy and very colorful.  Since all the menus were in Hindi my policy was to order the dish with the longest name and eat whatever they brought me.  One morning in Jaipur I woke up to what sounded like all the adults from a Charlie Brown movie yelling into a loudspeaker! WAAAAA! waaa WAAAA!  Someone, somewhere, for some reason had decided to blow horns very loudly at different volumes and times, making for a constant stream of WAA WAA WAA’s that morning. It went on for over an hour.  The night before someone had gotten his hands on that same giant microphone system, and was using it to sing mindless songs, relay anecdotes, or generally palather to the city at large.  I thing a single man spoke to the entire city for over three hours and not one word of it sounded important.  I think he was just killing time.

Veranasi is the world’s oldest city, having records of its existence more than 8,000 years ago. The city is most famous for its burrial rituals, which are very moving, actually. There is an ETERNAL FLAME! that has been burning for 5000 years that you use to burn the corpse of your dead loved one, wrapped in silk of different colors according to their class. The husband or male heir circles their bed of wood five times and then lights it, allowing the spirit to flow out. After 1 and a half hours they smash the skull so the spirit can escape to nirvana, and the whole thing burns for 34 hours. After which the ashes are beaten with a shovel to make room for the next procession. I watched as someone was lit on fire , and also watched them smash the skull with a big stick.  It still had a face and everything. I can now use the word “funeral pyre” with firsthand experience. Read on…

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Our victim

Ever since he was outed in 1957 The Grinch has taken the rap for just about every miserly, dastardly, underhanded or uncheerful deed perpetrated by man or beast (an unflattering comparison).  Perhaps The Grinch’s only rival, or sense of relief is you choose to see it like that, would be Ebenezer Scrooge, who at the age of 63 learned a very similar lesson the hard way.  But why should The Grinch be subjected to such malignance, especially by people just as materialistic and judgemental as they believe him to be?  If one truly searches the soul of The Grinch, takes the time to get to know him personally, could they discover that there is a whole other side to the slander Ted Geissel’s editorial expose released?  I think so.

First of all, if we look at it objectively, we see that The Grinch is obviously the victim of some major racism from The Whos.  Just because he doesn’t have a button nose or any ears to speak of, and just because he happens to be of normal height (rather than the alarming 0′8″ that some Whos have starved themselves down to) The Grinch is shunned from the community!  It takes a lot of hatred to drive a man 10,000 feet up the side of a mountain, however curly it may be!  Who are these Whos anyway, and what exactly is their problem?  A recluse group of relentlessly cheery non-humans living together in a remote polar village?  Anyone can tell from the songs they sing that these people are materialistic to a fault.  Just like us they spend weeks and weeks and thousands of dollars decorating their drooping shacks with jingle balls and who-who fluff.  The word obsessed comes to mind.  Why they’re even trimming their aunts with yards of who-flock-flant!  Where are they getting the capital for these materials with no infrastructure system to be observed?  Where are they getting the energy?  I believe they have something other than cheer financing their operations.  Something else is cooking, if you know what I mean.

These Whos are also idol worshipers, bowing down before the Great Christmas Tree, presenting their gifts of fizzlefinks and wunts with songs of whobilation enought to make a grown man sick.  Perhaps I ought to recant my earlier conjecture about racism and say that The Grinch actually did the sensible thing leaving those who-hash eating sons of bitches in Whoville when he had the chance.  Who the hell wants to be merry all the time?  And sing?  There’s a lot more dangerous who-treatment than people care to see.  Forget Santa!  Cindy Lou’s parents out to get a visit from DEFAX if she’s two-years-old and barely larger than a Christmas tree ornament.  Add child abuse to their list of grievances and The Grinch is looking more like a hero every second.  Why do these Whos deserve such a nice Christmas when they’re all on the naughty list?  He seems more like The Punisher than The Grinch, dolling out justice where justice is due.  Or “who”, if you will. Read on…

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Me at age 13

I found a box of mementos hidden beneath a table at my house. Four boxes, actually, three for my sisters and me, and one marked “misc.” containing photos and documents from my mom’s childhood. My box had about 200 pictures of me from age seven to fourteen and the most flattering pictures in the world they were not. I had, in fact, been trying to explain to my friends about this period in my life, and so despite the embarrassment the pictures intoned I was glad to have them as photographic evidence that I was not- in fact- making things up.

I was…large- huge, really. Morbidly obese is the clinical term, I believe, and no part about me made up for that fact. The perfectly round head I had in sixth and seventh grade bobbled only inches above the collar of my Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt which was bent and convoluted beyond repair due to the fact that I constantly, incessantly, was never not chewing on it. Yes I ate my shirts like a penguin might eat a particularly oversized fish, keeping it in my mouth for hours on end. At the end of a good day my shirt smelled like chewed fingernails mixed with closets upstairs, and the crinkled, discolored ring of absorbed saliva reached down to my chest- or man-boobs. This might not have been such a severe problem had I had more than five t-shirts to choose from, but with only a red one, a green one, an orange one, a slightly different red one, and a blue one in constant rotation, I wore them for strings of days as long as polypeptides before switching to the next. I never showered; believing that if I waited long enough my hair would clean itself (which it will if anyone can back me up on this one.) I had three pairs of pants, blue sheer cotton sweat pants bought at my local gym and worn year round, green ski pants five layers thick that swished when I walked, and bright blue camouflage pants that I would wear so high the waist band of the pants would touch the bottom of the spit ring on my shirt. Read on…

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Soon after arriving in Bangladesh I had my first exposure to cricket.  It’s that game that is kind of like baseball, but only with two “bases”, the bat is flat, and they only play it in ex-British colonies and Great Britain itself.  Because barely anyone in America has heard of cricket, I thought I’d give a few observations that I’ve made since being here.

1)    Cricket takes forever.  There are one days matches and 4-5 day matches.  And when I say day I mean 90 overs, which means that there are 540 pitches made to the batter.  So, people have to sit around in the hot sun for a long long time. If you are following cricket this might mean spending 4-5 days, 8 hours a day watching cricket.  That’s like a full work week!  I talked to some Australians about this a few weeks ago and they said they knew “mates” that would spend days watching cricket and drinking beer on the couch.  Honestly, watching cricket isn’t that great.  It can be an exciting sport to watch, but not for 8 hours, day after day.  The matches take so long that they need tea breaks and meal breaks during the game.

2)    I’m sure the majority of the people that are reading this article don’t have the slightest idea how to play cricket.  Upon coming here I spent a great amount of time asking people how the game is played, I finally figured out how it works.  The interesting thing is how little coverage it gets in America.  I can’t ever remember seeing cricket on the news in America.  Recently a there was a huge upset. Australia lost its first cricket match in three years.  This was a huge deal in the cricket world, but I doubt it made headlines in any sports section in America.  Read on…

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The Boston Municipal Courthouse in all it's glory

I recently had to venture out into the real world and go to court. No, don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere soon and yes, those other charges were dropped, but we can talk about that another time. I arrived at the Boston Municipal Court promptly at 2:00 pm (not for any particular reason, I just like arriving at places on the half hour). After going through the security check in, which in my opinion, seemed quite lax (but who’s to complain about that?), I then climbed two flights of stairs and found my way into courtroom eleven.

Pushing open the two heavy oak doors gave way to a barrage of awkward looks and stares. “What is he doing here?” is what most people probably thought. But perhaps someone was merely thinking of chocolate chip pancakes and just happened to be looking in my direction. Who knows. I quickly took a seat in the back row.

“All rise for the honorable Judge McCormick.” Read on…

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“Mr. Zac Efron can suck it for all I care,” were my only sentiments.  I didn’t really care about hurting her feelings because my ears still hurt from when she had screamed in them only minutes ago. “But he’s sooooo good!” was all she had to say. Stephanie had literally burst through the doors yelling at an almost canine pitch, jumped over two chairs, fallen, gotten back up, and rushed to the center stage before singing “THIS IS THE LAST CHANCE TO GET IT RIGHT!” There were, at the time, perhaps fifteen people in the room, and now they all stared at Steph as she panted lightly, arms spread in an expectant world-wide embrace. “Anyone?” she asked. Of course this was Stephanie’s normal behavior so no one was quite shocked, that is until Cassie piped up with an equally loud and obnoxious scream. They flew together like magnets and jumped up and down, up and down until I broke them up fearing structural damage. “What the hell are you two screaming about?” I asked. They both looked at me incredulously and answer immediately “High School Musical 3!” That’s when I said my line about Zac Efron sucking it.

Of course the virus had gotten into the room at that point, and Cody joined in, talking loudly about how he just got “2″ on DVD and don’t tell him what happens and his soundtrack was on its way from Amazon blah blah blah. “You guys are all ridiculous!” I told them. “High School Musical is the stupidest thing Disney ever put out! It’s just another manufactured teen glory film with no real talent to be found!” Stephanie approached me like a lion, and said “Have you ever even seen HSM?” It’s odd when people abbreviate things in their speech. “Of course not! I don’t need to see it to know that it’s dumb.” Cassie shouted “But if you’ve never seen it then you don’t know the magic!” She started singing the words “can I have this dance” and twirling. I looked at Cody for support and he said “You really should see it. Come with us Saturday to the 12:00 show. It’s only six bucks. Read on…

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