Garage band, Caguamas, y hotdogs

Note: The day I post is not necessarily the day I wrote. Capeesh?

So there’s this student who, for some strange reason, is infatuated with early 90’s grunge “music.” He always carries around his Nirvana bag and can usually be found wearing a shirt with Kirk Cobain. Apparently he sings in a band and he invited us to watch him practice yesterday. We met him down the street and piled into his friend’s car; three of us into a two door Ford Festiva wanna-be – there were already 4 people in it. We fit all the clowns in the car thus: Carolyn sat on the passenger’s lap, and in the back the drummer sat on one of the guitarist’s laps, I sat bitch and Antonio was smashed into the remaining seat. Without seatbelts we barreled down cobblestone streets into a rather bad part of town. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all the entire way there. Solamente en Mexico, guey.

We arrived at a storage yard and small garage for one taxi company or another, got a case of “Caguamas” (ka-wa-mas: 940ml bottle of beer – sort of like a 40, but smaller) and had a listen. They played some of their own songs, some Nirvana and some Smashing Pumpkins. They believed that I am somehow supposed to know all the lyrics to every English song ever. After 4 or 5 caguamas of Leon they convinced me to sing. I did that one Nirvana song off of that album with the baby in the pool swimmin’ for a dollar bill…? It goes “heeeeeee’s the one who likes all our pretty soooooongs but he don’t know what it means…” I don’t remember the title. The nice thing about their little understanding of English is the ability to make up the words without them realizing that I’m really just saying gibberish – screaming, actually (grunge, remember?).

One thing leads to another and I’m puking in the bushes. Then a taxi comes and we shuffle in. Bada-bing, bada-boom, and we’re at my house. It was suggested to me that I go to the hotdog stand down the way. So I take some orders and somehow remember what everybody wanted. Once I received the dogs and paid for them, I started to walk away when it struck me that I had a hell of a lot of hot dogs. And I paid a pretty peso for them too. I turned to the guy and said something like, ‘hey, I didn’t order this many hotdogs.’ We then exchanged contradictions for a moment; ‘yes you did.’ ‘no I didn’t.’ ‘yes you did.’ Etc. Finally I decided that I’d just deal with it and sell them to all these people that have somehow ended up at my place. I managed to sell one to some kid on the street for 15 pesos on the way back home. When I arrived home everybody was like, ‘hey, give me my hotdog.’ I told them no, because they hadn’t paid me. Emphatically they told me that, yes, they had in fact given me some money. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and sure enough there were wads of pesos. It’s a good thing I didn’t sell the rest of them to other strangers on the way back. Nobody said anything about the missing dog.

On Sunday I ended the day watching SD lose against the Pats, but it was a good game. I was supposed to be on the radio today, but I sort of blew that off.

One of my students is a stripper – I think. My Saturday class is 4 hours long, so we take lunch half way through. I joined half the class at a joint down the street. The told me that the rules were that I had to speak Spanish the whole time because I make them speak English the entire time in class. Fair enough. To make a long story short, one guy said that we should go to this place, Golden Globe, to watch this other student dance. “Dance?” I asked. Yeah, dance – and “sin ropas.” I was calling them liars, but the rest of the people there – they all know each other – kept saying that it is true, that she really is a stripper. I asked her what a dancer needs to learn English for. She said that she wants to speak English so that she may some day live in the U.S. I presume that she doesn’t want to strip in the U.S., because English speaking ability really makes to difference in that arena.

This same class mentioned to me that I am the most prepared teacher they’ve had. Awww..

I’ve covered everything leading up the midterm with 3 days to spare, including review. Let’s see… we have Taboo, scrabble, word up, … Oh damn, that reminds me: I signed up for the TV and DVD tomorrow and I don’t have anything lined up. Damn. “Prepared,” my left foot.

… I ended up showing the first half hour of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. They hated it. Fuck ‘em – it’s a good movie.