Perfect Day

There is an Asian girl in my class and she is the first person I’ve ever seen with a purplish skin tone. I can’t decide if she is more lavender or like choking-person purple, but she is definitely within that palette. Which is weird, I always heard them referred to as yellow, and although yellow and purple are obviously good matches (I believe these are still the Viking’s colors), I don’t think most Asians are anywhere near yellow, and some are purple. So chew on that a bit…

I am greatly disturbed about the European eating habits as displayed by my flatmates. Gerald, the French who says Third Eye Blind is a punk band, is accustomed to eating most nights a pasta which he tops with shredded Emmenthal cheese and large amounts of catsup. Duncan, the English artist, I’ve never seen eat. I think he gets most of his nutrients/calories from beer and whiskey. In fact the only evidence I have that he has ever cooked anything is the story of when he put a frozen pizza in the oven and then fell asleep for a bit. Somebody else woke up when the smoke was pouring out of the veranda and now the charred remnants of the still circular food is nailed to the wall, and I always mistake it for a clock when I’m running late for school. The other English person is a young lass named Betty, she is a vegetarian, so I don’t pay attention to what she eats. Manuela, the Italian and only one who regularly speaks Portuguese with me, is a pretty good cook. She says "all good Italian food will have one or all of the three Ps: Pesto, Tomato, and Cream." I only count one P. The only thing that bugs me about her cooking is the fact that, instead of using fresh tomatoes, she always uses this gross bottled tomato sauce. So if she is cooking with the P-food that is tomato, I pppass. Mintu, the Finnish girl who likes to surf and roll her eyes at nearly everything, seems to have a pretty healthy diet of fruit, soup, salads, pancakes, or pizza—the pizza she makes from scratch (cooking the dough first in a frying pan—which made Manuela nearly pass out. Katia, who would have made a great femme fatale in a Bond movie, I haven’t seen in two weeks so I don’t really know. Josue, the Dutch with the Scarlett Johansson doppelganger girlfriend who visited for two weeks, just tried cooking a frozen foods filet of salmon wrapped in puff pastry by taking it directly out of the freezer and putting into a smoking skillet. This didn’t come off well.

Anyway, last night I did some research on the music scene of the night and ended up going to a band that was part Sonic Youth, part Nick Cave, and part Einturzen Neubauten (I’m sure that is spelled wrong) at the Braça de Prato. It was nearly impossible to find since its hidden away in some industrial wasteland and used to be where the dictator Salazar constructed and stored munitions and sometimes interrogated and tortured dissidents (so it had a real chilling feel to it when we finally found it). I went with Betty, the English vegetarian. Anyway we went to Bairro Alto after that and had a bunch of Mojitos and all the international dudes (does anyone remember international night at the Loring Park Café? Bairro Alto is like that every night past 11 p.m.--always packed with a bunch of sweaty, swarthy, obnoxious, drunk dudes--the ratio of men to woman is 99:1) were hitting on her while I sort of scratched at the ground with my foot for about an hour. Then some group of other internationals wanted to take a bunch of pictures with me. I guess they thought I was a celebrity...I couldn't understand what they were saying since they didn’t speak Portuguese and their English was intolerable. Of course I was in some wicked duds since I had a Keenan Duffy Bowie dress shirt, my CC Club tie (2 generations of Arnolds have been kicked out of this exclusive club on 26th and Lyndale--3 decades apart), and this new black and grey argyle sweater vest with skulls and crossbones sewn into the grey diamonds--so maybe they wanted to see some true American style.

Today I finished my homework early and was inspired by the song “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed, so Betty and Manuela and I are going to make some white sangria and tosta mista (this is fancy talk for a melted ham & cheese), and go to the Parque Florestal de Monsanto (this has nothing to do with the company Monsanto)-basically cause we are all without money and this seems like the cheapest solution for a lazy Lisbon Sunday.

The video included here has nothing to do with anything I wrote about in the text above. Its a little bit of Fado and some guitar work I need to fit into my repertoire.