Friday, April 21, 2006
Full Frontal Friday
I fell in the shower this morning. Yeah, I thought that was an activity reserved for the Depends demographic as well. Turns out, not so much. I somehow lost my balance while performing what I like to call "the sudsy pirouette." Shower ballet, you know? I'm kidding, obviously. (I hope it's obvious, anyway; though after yesterday's post, all bets are maybe off.) I don't know how I fell; I just did. I tried to grab the wall in those few seconds of Wile E. Coyote arm-waving don't-look-down-don't-look-down off-balance fun, but it turns out that flat, wet, ceramic surfaces provide little resistance against the force of gravity and my inability to stand upright. When Erin came in to see what the ruckus was about, she found me with the shower curtain draped around my neck like a cape and the rod across my shoulders like some avant crucifix. I did something to my knee on the way down--I'm thinking it involved being smacked against porcelain--and my left shoulder is unhappy as well. It is now official: I'll do anything for a laugh.
The shower tumble happened not long after I woke up in some bizarrely contorted position in which I was somehow sleeping simultaneously diagonal across the bed and straight up and down and was wearing one blanket as a toga and another as a kilt. Erin and Janika were having a Kyrgyz language lesson in the kitchen with Jarken, so there was a faint hum of the percussive/liquid flow that is a Turkic language pouring into the room. And it was raining outside quite heavily. There was some shadow of a dream still playing with me and I think one of the blankets may have been tugging a little tight or something, because the first thing out of my mouth was, "Saigon...shit."
So that was my morning. E and I got out of the house around 1:00 and headed over to the university for lunch (delicious, thank you very much), after which she went off to a meeting and I went off to Tsum for a few new DVDs. I walked through the park, startled a couple of teenagers making out on a bench under a tree and affectively embarrassing all three of us, went through the underground bazaar at Chui and Sovietskaya, and on to Tsum, which is essentially a mall or department store or four-story indoor bazaar, depending on how you choose to look at it. So I buy a bunch of new DVDs from the woman we usually buy DVDs from and started out again. As I headed back over to the escalator, a woman in the booth sort of diagonally across from the one where I'd just bought movies from called out to me. "I have good movies," she said, "in English!" "I'm sure you do," I said. "But I just bought some. Next time I'll come to you." "I have special movies," she countered. "Ones you don't see. You'll like." Well, I was intrigued. I walked over to her counter and asked, "How special?" She smiled and bent down to pull a box out from under the counter. "You will like them," she said. "Men like them." Yup, you guessed right: she started dropping porn all over the place. "European girls, Asian girls, Japanese girls, all girls, this one I don't know, African girls...four hundred som each." I don't have a special porn wing in my house and I don't think Bishkek is really the place to start the addition. "Listen," I said, "I don't want any of these." "I have boys, too," she said, "if that's what you want." You don't want all-girl porn? You must be gay. Right, where was the escalator again?
Back outside, laughing and literally shaking off the conversation, I headed back toward the university. On the way, I passed a woman singing karaoke, on the sidewalk, all by herself. She was kicking out a pretty fair version of Madonna's "La Isla Bonita." It was enough to stand in front of her for a few minutes smiling to forget about the unexpected porn dealer in Tsum. And I think that's what it was, too, the totally unexpected nature of it. I moved from buying bootlegs of very recent blockbusters (sorry, copyright police...but I like a little mindless entertainment every now and again) to being shown boxes with photos on them of naked people doing things I couldn't even figure out. It's one thing to knowingly go into an adult bookshop (our house in Bloomington was no more than a hundred yards from College Adult Books, a cleverly named emporium of the biggest little secret in America...it was only a matter of time before I gave it a look-see is what I'm saying). You can mentally prepare yourself for the onslaught of images you're going to be faced with and plan out evasive maneuvers against whatever variety of sketchy old dude you may come into contact with. But just going about your Friday, thinking happy thoughts about finally getting to see King Kong so you too can trash it, and then wham!, you're getting the hard sell on a movie called Hong Kong Suck Fu. It's like one minute you're washing your hair and the next you're wearing the shower curtain like a yoke and limping around the bathroom naked with soap in your eyes screaming obscenities. Peter Jackson, take me away...
The shower tumble happened not long after I woke up in some bizarrely contorted position in which I was somehow sleeping simultaneously diagonal across the bed and straight up and down and was wearing one blanket as a toga and another as a kilt. Erin and Janika were having a Kyrgyz language lesson in the kitchen with Jarken, so there was a faint hum of the percussive/liquid flow that is a Turkic language pouring into the room. And it was raining outside quite heavily. There was some shadow of a dream still playing with me and I think one of the blankets may have been tugging a little tight or something, because the first thing out of my mouth was, "Saigon...shit."
So that was my morning. E and I got out of the house around 1:00 and headed over to the university for lunch (delicious, thank you very much), after which she went off to a meeting and I went off to Tsum for a few new DVDs. I walked through the park, startled a couple of teenagers making out on a bench under a tree and affectively embarrassing all three of us, went through the underground bazaar at Chui and Sovietskaya, and on to Tsum, which is essentially a mall or department store or four-story indoor bazaar, depending on how you choose to look at it. So I buy a bunch of new DVDs from the woman we usually buy DVDs from and started out again. As I headed back over to the escalator, a woman in the booth sort of diagonally across from the one where I'd just bought movies from called out to me. "I have good movies," she said, "in English!" "I'm sure you do," I said. "But I just bought some. Next time I'll come to you." "I have special movies," she countered. "Ones you don't see. You'll like." Well, I was intrigued. I walked over to her counter and asked, "How special?" She smiled and bent down to pull a box out from under the counter. "You will like them," she said. "Men like them." Yup, you guessed right: she started dropping porn all over the place. "European girls, Asian girls, Japanese girls, all girls, this one I don't know, African girls...four hundred som each." I don't have a special porn wing in my house and I don't think Bishkek is really the place to start the addition. "Listen," I said, "I don't want any of these." "I have boys, too," she said, "if that's what you want." You don't want all-girl porn? You must be gay. Right, where was the escalator again?
Back outside, laughing and literally shaking off the conversation, I headed back toward the university. On the way, I passed a woman singing karaoke, on the sidewalk, all by herself. She was kicking out a pretty fair version of Madonna's "La Isla Bonita." It was enough to stand in front of her for a few minutes smiling to forget about the unexpected porn dealer in Tsum. And I think that's what it was, too, the totally unexpected nature of it. I moved from buying bootlegs of very recent blockbusters (sorry, copyright police...but I like a little mindless entertainment every now and again) to being shown boxes with photos on them of naked people doing things I couldn't even figure out. It's one thing to knowingly go into an adult bookshop (our house in Bloomington was no more than a hundred yards from College Adult Books, a cleverly named emporium of the biggest little secret in America...it was only a matter of time before I gave it a look-see is what I'm saying). You can mentally prepare yourself for the onslaught of images you're going to be faced with and plan out evasive maneuvers against whatever variety of sketchy old dude you may come into contact with. But just going about your Friday, thinking happy thoughts about finally getting to see King Kong so you too can trash it, and then wham!, you're getting the hard sell on a movie called Hong Kong Suck Fu. It's like one minute you're washing your hair and the next you're wearing the shower curtain like a yoke and limping around the bathroom naked with soap in your eyes screaming obscenities. Peter Jackson, take me away...
