Follow the route if you desire.
Yes, it's a little boring. I meant to run down to the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn, but if you notice that little down-and-back beyond the Queensborough Bridge, I suddenly realized that "FDR Drive" is a highway. There is simply no way to run down the east side of Manhattan! Hopefully next week will be a little more interesting.
The context is this: the author--Elizabeth--is at a soccer game in Italy. She is sitting in the stands, surrounded by cheering, stomping, cursing fans, one of whom was ranting and raving with particular gusto, directly behind her. This is her rendering of what she heard.
Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai . . . va bene, va bene, ragazzo, mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo . . . Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nella porta! Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio, eccola, eccola, ecco—AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIO DI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRADITORE! Madonna . . . Ah, Dio mio, perche, perche, perche, questo e stupido, e una vergogna, la vergogna . . . Che casino, che bordello . . . NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA Guarda, non e successo niente . . . Dai, dai, ah . . . Molto migliore, Albertini, molto migliore, si si si, eccola, bello, bravo, anima mia, ah, ottimo, eccola adesso . . . nella porta, nella porta, nell—VAFFANCULO!!!!!!!!!
Roughly translated to:
Come on, come on, come on, Albertini, come on . . . OK, OK, my boy, perfect, brilliant, brilliant . . . Come on! Come on! Go! Go! In the goal! There it is, there it is, there it is, my brilliant boy, my dear, there it is there it is, there—AHHHHH! GO FUCK YOURSELF! YOU SON OF A BITCH! SHIT-HEAD! ASSHOLD! TRAITOR! . . . Mother of God . . . Oh my God, why, why, why, this is stupid, this is shameful, the shame of it . . What a mess . . . [Author’s note: Unfortunately there’s no good way to translate into English the fabulous Italian expression che casino and che bordello, which literally means “what a casino,” and “what a whorehouse,” but essentially mean “what a friggin’ mess.”] . . . YOU DON’T HAVE A HEART, ALBERTINI!!!! YOU’RE A FAKER! Look, nothing happened . . . Come on, come on, hey, yes . . . Much better, Albertini, much better, yes yes yes, there it is, beautiful, brilliant, oh, excellent, there it is now . . . in the goal, in the goal, in the—FUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUU!!
I initially met Tom2 my freshman year of college. We lived on adjacent halls on the fourth floor of our dorm, and he was one of the guys I ended up befriending, simply because they all seemed less judgmental and more easygoing than the girls on my hall. This didn’t mean we had common interests—I had zero interest in playing Mario Kart/Halo/Soul Caliber or throwing a ping pong ball at a plastic cup while inebriated—but the general level of acceptance was high enough that I could take my notes into their rooms and feel “social” while studying, even if I was the only one doing it. It felt better than trying to pretend to be interested in “Desperate Wives Club” and painting my fingernails with my own hall mates.
In any case, we remained casual friends through the course of college and, in our senior year, ended up living together in a suite—ironically enough—with three other members of our original freshman crew. Gradually, over the course of our first semester, we grew to become better friends. Not only did we live in much closer quarters than we ever had before, but we also shared a love of sports—both watching and playing them—not to mention the fact that we were the only two individuals in our suite whom I would venture to dub “athletes. ” Our social preferences were more similar to each other’s than to anyone else’s in the suite, thus leading us to spend increasing amounts of time attending functions at bars and bowling alleys. And finally, we developed a mutual interest in watching movies late at night. (Albeit, this was probably his interest; it was more my attempt at cinematic self-education and way to avoid working myself to death.)
With a wince and a grimace, I’ll admit it: by the second semester, I began wondering if there was any potential for romantic interest in our relationship. This is not to say that I wanted to ruin our friendship, by any means, but come on—the guy was spending at least three nights a week with me sitting on his bed with him, in the dark, at ten o’clock at night, watching movies. And on Tuesday nights, our regular bowling nights, he and I would still put on our shoes, get in his car, and drive out to the lanes, even if everyone else who ordinarily came to bowl had backed out. So maybe I was wishing too hard for a reasonable, respectable, good-looking guy to finally fall for me and projected this wishful fantasy onto him. Either way, it made what happened that much worse.
My birthday happens in January, and the next major holiday after that is one of the most dreaded: Valentine’s Day. Personally, I’ve never dreaded it, because I’ve never had a particularly good or bad Valentine’s Day. Typically, my dad has bought me chocolate or jellybeans, my parents send me a cute “we love you because you’re our daughter card,” and the day passes in a whirlwind of red glittery signs and broken flower stems. However, what I do dread is the entire holiday shopping season leading up to this particular calendar day. It seems that the entire season is built to enhance one’s feeling of loneliness, as everyone else frets and dithers over what they should buy their sweetheart and where they should get reservations, or if they should eat at home, etc. The older I get, the worse it gets. When you’re little, everyone gets a little paper Valentine in his or her decorated shoe box, and maybe even a lollipop attached, if you’re lucky. When you’re older and single, you have to buy your own lollipop. And that’s not what heart-shaped lollipops are for.
Needless to say, I must have mentioned somewhere along the line that I had never received a “true” Valentine before.
“What do you mean a ‘true’ Valentine?” I was asked.
“You know,” I would say, “like one from a boy.”
Now, I certainly wasn’t telling people this in the hopes that I would receive a Valentine; this was just a fact that reflected how I felt at that time, and so I said it to whomever I was with. I paid no attention to my company when I said these sorts of things. What came next taught me to start noting my company before I blab away.
Valentine’s Day that year fell on a Tuesday—our weekly bowling night. That morning, as I sat in the common room of the suite to lace up my winter boots before I trudged out into the snow and headed off to class, Tom asked me if I was doing anything that night. Simultaneously, my heart both leapt for joy and sank to my feet. Was he about to ask me out for Valentine’s Day? “When?” “Like, at eight,” he told me. “I’m doing an editing session in the library at six,” I answered miserably. “It’s scheduled for two hours.” “Oh.” He looked a little worried. “Well, we wanted to go bowling earlier, so we were going to try to leave at eight.” Now I was confused. We always left for bowling at nine because Ryan—our other most constant bowling companion—always had to talk to his long-distance girlfriend for an hour (8-9 p.m.) before we could leave. Tom never could have convinced him to skip his precious phone call on Valentine’s Day of all days . . . could he?
I expressed my skepticism, but Tom made it seem pretty urgent that he had to go bowling at eight and assured me that Ryan had agreed. Therefore, I told Tom that I’d try to make it back by eight but that if I couldn’t get back in time, to just go without me. I was supremely disappointed at the idea of missing our bowling night, particularly tonight, when the couple in our suite was sure to be doing something special for the holiday (and they liked to stay in, which meant that there would be no escape for me), but what could I do?
As luck would have it, however, my editing session ended early. I was finished by 7:40 p.m., and I hustled back through our suite through the cold, hoping that they hadn’t left without me. As soon as I opened the door, I breathed a sigh of relief; Tom, Ben and Eric (my three male suitemates) were all sitting together in the common room.
”Awesome!” I exclaimed, breezing in and heading to my room. “I’m going to put my stuff away, and I’ll be ready soon.” Of course, I got wrapped up in checking my email, particularly because I had a few minutes, and the next thing I knew, Ben was in my room, tugging at my arm.
”Come be social,” he whined. “We’re all out in the common room.”
”Give me a minute,” I told him. “It’s not even eight o’clock yet.”
”You never spend time with us,” he insisted. “You’re always being antisocial.” Now Tom was standing in my doorway, too.
”Fine!” I shut the lid of my laptop. “I’m coming!” I grabbed my coat and purse and headed down the hallway after them. Plopping down on the couch in the common room, I looked around expectantly. “So, what do you want to talk about?”
That’s when there was a knock on the door.
Ben opened, and in barged After Hours, the UR’s coed a cappella group. Scanning the room, the leader—a pale girl I recognized as part of the UR Protestant Chapel Community, with a mane of springy bright blond curls and big peach-pink lips—spied me and proceeded to zero in. Her entourage followed, and once they had all formed a semicircle around me, the singing commenced. From this moment on, I proceeded to be serenaded by our college a cappella group, on Valentine’s Day, in front of my suitemates, to the tune of “[When I Think About You] I Touch Myself.” I have never seen Tom look so pleased with himself.
And what do you think happened at the end of the song? The lead singer—who had been crooning straight into my face for all the breathy parts (“I'd get down on my knees; I'd do anything for you….”)—pulled from behind her back a single red carnation. I’m sure by that point my face was fit to match.
So that is why, if any reader out there is ever trying to do something to woo/impress/please me, beware: flowers have had a dodgy history in my life!
Humiliation number two occurred my senior year when I was working at the Hillside café (more of a coffee shop than a café) at the University of Rochester. In this instance, a slightly older man brought me the flowers.
Ed was a thirty-five-ish, waif-like, Asian man whom I had met—ironically enough—through my friend and then-roommate, Tom2. (The irony will be revealed after reading Humiliation three.) We met one night when Tom2 took me to his friend Jason’s apartment to play darts. Ed and I were both beginners (i.e. had held a dart maybe once or twice before in our lives), so we took turns sitting out to let the others play more competitively and consequently took to chatting about how unskilled we were at the sport. Ed was very pleasant, asking me about my studies and telling me about his former life in Singapore. (I was very interested in this, having just made a Singaporean friend and planning to travel to the country to visit her after graduating in May.) When our evening had concluded, Tom2 had other plans, so Ed volunteered to walk me back to my apartment (in spite of the fact that is was located less than ten yards away from where Jason lived). I figured this was just his way of being gentlemanly and responsible—he was significantly older, after all, and had been raised in a different culture—so I allowed him to do this and then bade him goodnight.
What should have tipped me off, I suppose, was when I received the birthday card—at my house. In Pittsburgh. Through one email exchange (yes, I foolishly gave Ed my email address to “keep in touch,” although in my defense, I still thought he could help me in planning my trip to Singapore), Ed had asked me where I was from. (He said he liked to travel, and so it was good to have friends in various places.) Afterward, he apparently asked Tom2 for my home address. Meanwhile, I went merrily on my way home for winter break, and then, in early January, lo and behold a card appeared in our mailbox from Ed. I was shocked! Yet, receiving a birthday card—at my house no less—seemed like more than enough. I certainly did not expect him to give me anything else for my birthday…or to use my birthday as an excuse to give me anything else….
I was hauling a cart laden with boxes of cardboard coffee cups, bottles of Dasani, bags of espresso, plastic lids, and other supplies into the coffee shop one morning at 9 a.m. when I was approached by my coworker, Ashley.
“There’s a man here looking for you.”
As soon as she said “man,” every guess I could have given for the term “guy” flew out the window. I didn’t know any men! I stopped pulling the cart and followed her gaze. Someone was rising from a table on the other side of a giant concrete pillar in the center of the room. Extended in front of this person was a bouquet of yellow blossoms wrapped in what seemed to be a combination of plastic grocery bags and translucent plastic. The bouquet obscured his face, but I could see his petite stature and his overly academic clothing, and from these clues, along with the black hair peeking over the top of the bouquet, I knew.
“Oh hello, Ed.” I could feel my coworkers trying not to climb over the counter in their curiousness over this exchange.
“Happy birthday, Allison!” He lowered the bouquet enough to see me. “Or belated birthday, I guess.”
“Thank you.” I tried not to blush as I took the flowers and set them on the cart behind me—anything to get them more out of sight. “You really didn’t have to.”
“I’m sorry I missed your birthday. But I am in time to get a smoody, no?”
“A…oh, yeah. What kind do you want?” His pretext for saying he would come visit me at work was always to say that “he had heard I was the best smoothie maker at Hillside” and that he would have to come and test this for himself. Apparently he had chosen now as the time.
“ Whatever kind you think is good.” He looked at me expectantly.
I looked at my cart and then at the three sets of saucer eyes watching me over the counter. “Actually, I have to finish putting this stuff away. But Ashley,” I pointed to the short red-headed girl over the counter, “will make you one.” I gave him an apologetic expression. “Sorry. Maybe another time.”
He face fell. “Okay. Maybe another time.”
I rolled away with my cart, careful not to be rude, but also careful not to prolong the conversation. I noted that he left without ordering a smoothie.
My most immediate thought was to throw the flowers into the trash, but Michelle (another coworker) hurried over to see “what kind they were” and to find out “who that guy was,” so I had no time to get rid of the bouquet before she had confiscated it. She and Ashley made me put them in water on the coffee counter so they would survive until the end of my shift. Everyone who came into the shop asked so many questions about “whose flowers those were,” that I barely survived until the end of my shift.
One more episode awaits….
Speaking of humiliation, my self-introspection was sparked today when one of my colleagues recounted his three Most Embarrassing Moments. This caused me to stop and wonder, “What would I consider my most embarrassing moments?” I suppose, with my compassionate and talkative nature, I was hoping to share some in return, but frankly, I could not think of a single one. Does this mean I never embarrass myself? Surely not. My first guess is that I might immediately erase all embarrassing mistakes from my working memory, so as to keep my ego intact. However, there is simply no way that every single thing I have ever done to humiliate myself has escaped the lock safe that is my mind. Therefore, I sat down and had myself a think. Or, rather, I went running.
Here is what I discovered: my Most Embarrassing Moments were not ones I brought upon myself (or at least not directly). They were not instances where I tripped and fell on my face or spilled some beautiful dessert down the front of my dress. In fact, none of them had anything to do with some action of mine. No, my top three instances of personal humiliation were caused by the actions of others. And they all involved flowers.
Time number one was at a swim meet. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, having just come out of seventh grade and all of the junior high insecurity that involves. Being the little genius I was—or at least that people believed me to be—I had taken the SAT’s for “practice” that year, as part of a Johns Hopkins program, “just to see how I’d do.” I scored a 1070 composite—this was waaaay back when the total possible score was still a meager 1600—and my verbal score was apparently high enough to warrant some sort of special reception, where each child received a paper award with our name on it, and a cookie afterwards. In any event, it was at this “hooray for the smart kids” ceremony that I met Tom1 (not to be confused with another Tom, Tom2, whom we will come to later). We ended up sitting next to one another during the ceremony, and both of us were so bored that we spent the entire time making jokes about the speakers and each kid that went up onstage (which of course made me wonder what someone in the audience was saying about me when I went up onstage…but that was another matter). Afterwards, when we were eating our cookies at the reception, Tom1 sought me out and enthusiastically suggested that we stay in touch. Ever the letter-writer, I cheered to the idea of having another pen pal and happily wrote my address on the back of his program. A week later, he called me. Even back then, the internet was stalker-friendly.
Flash forward to the day of the swim meet. By then, Tom1 and I had spoken on the phone several times. Most of these times consisted of him being bored and talking about his dog and me trying to think of plausible excuses for getting off of the phone. Meanwhile, though, I filled the excruciating gaps in conversation with things about myself, facts about my life. Somewhere along the line, I must have mentioned that I swam. And somewhere along the line, I must have mentioned this particular swim meet.
It’s a meet that happens once-a-summer, as the Championship meet for all of the local teams that compete against one another. In recent years, it had been held at my community’s pool. This particular summer, I was swimming two events. One of my events—the fourteen-and-under medley relay—had a chance to break the pool record, so my relay was really excited. We had gone out earlier that week and purchased matching swimming suits and caps, all in garish, florescent colors and a hideous fruit salad pattern. We were stoked.
I suppose this is why I had mentioned the meet to Tom1. After all, how could I help myself? I was supremely excited about it, and I was telling pretty much anyone who would listen about our potential to break a pool record. However, never in a million years did I think he was actually listening to me prattle on. We were thirteen (okay, he was fourteen, because he was one grade ahead of me, but still). Thirteen-year-olds don’t hear this sort of thing and think, “Okay, this means something to a person I barely know; I’m going to take action.” Even if they do have a crush on that person.
So there I was at the pool, dressed in my suit and cap, hunting in my swim bag for my goggles, preparing to go to the waiting area for my event, when my sister came charging out of nowhere and grabbed my arm.
“Alli!” she exclaimed. Her eyes looked like they were about to burst out of her head. “There’s someone here to see you!”
Honestly, I had no idea it was him. If I had known, I might not have gone to the entrance to meet him. But since I didn’t, I let her drag me up the steps, to the pool’s entrance gate. And there he was: round glasses shoved up against his slightly pudgy face, belt cinched over his tucked-in T-shirt, bouquet held out in front of him, with colors almost as bright as my bathing suit. My sister, meanwhile, in all of her nine-year-old-glory, was ogling the flowers, ogling me, and going back to ogling the flowers. Tom1 was sweating. He looked slightly out of breath.
I saw all this, and it was like we were on the phone again. If I could label the feeling, it would be a sense of apologetic dread. All I could immediately think was, “Oh no. How am I going to get rid of him?” And now I had these flowers that everyone was going to ask me about. . . .
Number two to come.
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