Friends,
This alone deserves much attention: I received a letter yesterday cordially inviting Alli and me to the 14th annual Students of Color Dinner Series. Apparently, I am colored. And the Afro American Music Institute will be there to play jazz. Apparently, as a colored person, I like jazz. Our theme this year will be "The Graduate School Journey: Intersections and Boundaries." We will talk about our coloredness and how it feels to be colored. According to the year's calendar, in February I will find out who is "the real me": leader, scholar, or community member. Truly, this was a shock. I never thought of myself as colored, or not colored. And 'colored,' that's such a weird word, isn't it? Colored. I feel like I'm in a Mark Twain short story, or Buckwheat's little brother. Colored. Isn't that, like, an old word that doesn't get used anymore, one you'd have to explain to Gramma--after she makes a loud remark about "that colored boy down the block,"--that she's being way inappropriate? I mean, that word. That word, I hate that word. It makes me feel weird. I hate that word. And I don't want to go to the dinner, but maybe I do. I'd go because I was invited, and would like to see what this is about, and making judgements is not nice, but I wouldn't go because I hate that our culture even does this sort of thing, plus I grew up white, mostly. I'm as white as they come. I surf. I say 'totally.' My students in Lynwood called me 'Gringo.' They couldn't believe that my best friend's name was Chad. "Chad?" they said, laughing every time I said his name. They had never even met a 'Chad' before. "He WHITE, Mr. Delgado! YOU WHITE, Mr. Delgado!" Plus, my wife is of English descent. She's got green eyes and white skin. Would I be considered, I'd wonder, walking around the party, like, a some kind of Ecuadorean Tio Tom? Have I betrayed my heritage? My head sweats when I think about it--all of a sudden I feel the race question building up inside of me, something I don't think about ever, and am I treating it so poorly? Are these things things to think about for real? But, then again, this is a graduate school event, and somehow I'm not too sold on what's going on. Here is my issue: we are all in graduate school (I say "we" right now, assuming I am a part of this group). How can we go about reciting Langston Hughes, talking about what happens to a dream deferred, not inviting whitey to our dinner because he isn't colored like we are? We're in effing grad school! Two more years and we'll be in tweed coats smoking pipes and crossing our legs in front of the fire place discussing some big shot smart guy stuff with a group of students hanging on our every word. We'll have brick houses in a suburb. Dream deferred my black ass!
(If I just lost friends with that last paragraph, please forgive me. I am only joking around, even though the invitation is real, and my questions surrounding it are real...my jokes are jokes, only that.)
Alli drove Ray and me to Starbucks this morning. He loves the car, finally. He leans his head out the window and feels the cold air blow on his ears and face. His paws stick out the window. He is very cute to watch. He likes to sit in the driver's seat, I don't understand why. It was a pleasure this morning, watching Ray sit in Alli's lap while she drove, it's my family, these two are my family, Ray with his face out the window and Alli singing along to Wilson Phillips on the radio. Wait--what? Did I say? Yes. I did. I said Wilson Phillips. Plus, she knew the words. She was going crazy. She closed her eyes on the high notes. I don't know this woman anymore, I thought to myself. Who is she. Who is this woman.
My first couple of weeks of classes are over, as you might expect. I am in a kind of heaven out here, taking these classes. We read stuff and we talk about it, and somehow I am earning a degree for my time. I have three classes, two of which are really great. One, however--and I can't get around this in my head--is very scary. The professor speaks seven or nine languages fluently. One of them is Arabic. One is French. One is Spanish. He mouths off in Portuguese and berates us in German. We are studying power and power structures, ideology, or something, I have a hard time keeping up, because he reads to us a thirty-page lecture every week, properly pronouncing words from different languages, like Al-Quaida (is that how we spell it?). When he says it there is a pop in his tongue or in the bottom of his throat or maybe saying that word properly includes cracking your knuckles. I don't know. I don't understand him sixty to ninety percent of the time. The rest of the time (like during roll call and the fifteen-minute breaks), though, I'm having a good time.
Alli, Ray and I are making friends, here and there, which means soon we won't even feel like updating you on anything. We'll be too busy with our Pittsburgh friends doing Pittsburgh stuff, stuff you wouldn't get because we're in the 'Burgh. We hung out with a family on Labor Day, the Morrises, Greg & Laura and their kids Jillian & Hillary and the dog Sidney. We had very good corn, some of the best corn I've ever eaten. We had Turkey burgers. I talked to Jillian about her new dictionary and Alli took a lot of pictures of Hillary, who is only fourteen months old and very beautiful. And, Ray spent the better part of the six hours we were there trying to hump Sidney. It was an awkward afternoon, trying to talk around the birds & the bees question in front of a six-year-old, but she kept saying, "Eww, what's that red thing? Why is Ray smelling Sidney there? Is Ray trying to get a piggy back ride?" Alli and I had fun, and I KNOW Ray did, but I think we left Greg and Laura behind with a six-year-old with a ton of questions, so it was really good to get out of there when we did.
A few days ago Alli took Ray out for his morning poop. When she came back she said, "Guess what I found?" and I said, "What?" and she said that she thought she found a sandwich bag of marijuana in the parking lot, all tied up in twistie ties. Of course she and I could only guess as to what it was, only having heard about this maryjewanna in the past. We guessed because, after all, we do live in the ghetto, a place where these sorts of things get passed around and sold and ditched when the cops are on the move-in. Of course, we hadn't any real experience with the stuff before, so she brought it up to the apartment. We decided it probably wasn't weed, though, because no one would lose that much weed, would they? We thought not. We probably weren't holding weed. It was probably not weed. I mean, surely it wasn't. We looked at each other. We held it in our hands, and there was no way we were going to know by holding it. So we decided to smoke it, just to make sure. Just to make sure it wasn't weed. We wanted to be absolutely positive.
The above paragraph is a lie. Mostly. Alli did find the weed in a bag while walking Ray for his morning poop. That part is true. She did come up and tell me she found it. But come on, we're two responsible people We aren't going to go smoke weed--no. We're not kids anymore. We're grownups. We cooked it in brownies instead.
That was a lie too. It's just fun to talk about marijuana, isn't it? And that's all we did--talk about the marijuana. We figured it belonged to the stoners on the first floor whose windows are always given to what Jimi called purple haze. We didn't put it into our bodies. We wouldn't do that. So we put it in Ray's, and watched him laugh for three hours. It was awesome.
By the way, things look shaky with the house purchase at this point. We are hung up on the furnace issue. I have never before been a part of a furnace issue, but here I am, partaking in a furnace issue. I guess the furnace is broken--something our home inspector found--and they won't replace it because they don't have the money to, which I think is a crock of sh, so they had a 'furnace repairman' say that, yes, indeed, the furnace is cracked, but will be good for another couple of years. Of course, something I just learned this morning is that cracked furnaces leak carbon monoxide, something I don't want to live next to, because I would die. I'd rather not send a canary or parakeet or whatever ahead of me into my garage everytime I want to go out there.
By the way, if you're interested in a really great author to read, look up Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love. Effing amazing, my friends. It's a great book. He's got other books too, but that's the only one I've read of his that I can vouch for.
I hope you're all well. We still miss you very much.
Carlos
This alone deserves much attention: I received a letter yesterday cordially inviting Alli and me to the 14th annual Students of Color Dinner Series. Apparently, I am colored. And the Afro American Music Institute will be there to play jazz. Apparently, as a colored person, I like jazz. Our theme this year will be "The Graduate School Journey: Intersections and Boundaries." We will talk about our coloredness and how it feels to be colored. According to the year's calendar, in February I will find out who is "the real me": leader, scholar, or community member. Truly, this was a shock. I never thought of myself as colored, or not colored. And 'colored,' that's such a weird word, isn't it? Colored. I feel like I'm in a Mark Twain short story, or Buckwheat's little brother. Colored. Isn't that, like, an old word that doesn't get used anymore, one you'd have to explain to Gramma--after she makes a loud remark about "that colored boy down the block,"--that she's being way inappropriate? I mean, that word. That word, I hate that word. It makes me feel weird. I hate that word. And I don't want to go to the dinner, but maybe I do. I'd go because I was invited, and would like to see what this is about, and making judgements is not nice, but I wouldn't go because I hate that our culture even does this sort of thing, plus I grew up white, mostly. I'm as white as they come. I surf. I say 'totally.' My students in Lynwood called me 'Gringo.' They couldn't believe that my best friend's name was Chad. "Chad?" they said, laughing every time I said his name. They had never even met a 'Chad' before. "He WHITE, Mr. Delgado! YOU WHITE, Mr. Delgado!" Plus, my wife is of English descent. She's got green eyes and white skin. Would I be considered, I'd wonder, walking around the party, like, a some kind of Ecuadorean Tio Tom? Have I betrayed my heritage? My head sweats when I think about it--all of a sudden I feel the race question building up inside of me, something I don't think about ever, and am I treating it so poorly? Are these things things to think about for real? But, then again, this is a graduate school event, and somehow I'm not too sold on what's going on. Here is my issue: we are all in graduate school (I say "we" right now, assuming I am a part of this group). How can we go about reciting Langston Hughes, talking about what happens to a dream deferred, not inviting whitey to our dinner because he isn't colored like we are? We're in effing grad school! Two more years and we'll be in tweed coats smoking pipes and crossing our legs in front of the fire place discussing some big shot smart guy stuff with a group of students hanging on our every word. We'll have brick houses in a suburb. Dream deferred my black ass!
(If I just lost friends with that last paragraph, please forgive me. I am only joking around, even though the invitation is real, and my questions surrounding it are real...my jokes are jokes, only that.)
Alli drove Ray and me to Starbucks this morning. He loves the car, finally. He leans his head out the window and feels the cold air blow on his ears and face. His paws stick out the window. He is very cute to watch. He likes to sit in the driver's seat, I don't understand why. It was a pleasure this morning, watching Ray sit in Alli's lap while she drove, it's my family, these two are my family, Ray with his face out the window and Alli singing along to Wilson Phillips on the radio. Wait--what? Did I say? Yes. I did. I said Wilson Phillips. Plus, she knew the words. She was going crazy. She closed her eyes on the high notes. I don't know this woman anymore, I thought to myself. Who is she. Who is this woman.
My first couple of weeks of classes are over, as you might expect. I am in a kind of heaven out here, taking these classes. We read stuff and we talk about it, and somehow I am earning a degree for my time. I have three classes, two of which are really great. One, however--and I can't get around this in my head--is very scary. The professor speaks seven or nine languages fluently. One of them is Arabic. One is French. One is Spanish. He mouths off in Portuguese and berates us in German. We are studying power and power structures, ideology, or something, I have a hard time keeping up, because he reads to us a thirty-page lecture every week, properly pronouncing words from different languages, like Al-Quaida (is that how we spell it?). When he says it there is a pop in his tongue or in the bottom of his throat or maybe saying that word properly includes cracking your knuckles. I don't know. I don't understand him sixty to ninety percent of the time. The rest of the time (like during roll call and the fifteen-minute breaks), though, I'm having a good time.
Alli, Ray and I are making friends, here and there, which means soon we won't even feel like updating you on anything. We'll be too busy with our Pittsburgh friends doing Pittsburgh stuff, stuff you wouldn't get because we're in the 'Burgh. We hung out with a family on Labor Day, the Morrises, Greg & Laura and their kids Jillian & Hillary and the dog Sidney. We had very good corn, some of the best corn I've ever eaten. We had Turkey burgers. I talked to Jillian about her new dictionary and Alli took a lot of pictures of Hillary, who is only fourteen months old and very beautiful. And, Ray spent the better part of the six hours we were there trying to hump Sidney. It was an awkward afternoon, trying to talk around the birds & the bees question in front of a six-year-old, but she kept saying, "Eww, what's that red thing? Why is Ray smelling Sidney there? Is Ray trying to get a piggy back ride?" Alli and I had fun, and I KNOW Ray did, but I think we left Greg and Laura behind with a six-year-old with a ton of questions, so it was really good to get out of there when we did.
A few days ago Alli took Ray out for his morning poop. When she came back she said, "Guess what I found?" and I said, "What?" and she said that she thought she found a sandwich bag of marijuana in the parking lot, all tied up in twistie ties. Of course she and I could only guess as to what it was, only having heard about this maryjewanna in the past. We guessed because, after all, we do live in the ghetto, a place where these sorts of things get passed around and sold and ditched when the cops are on the move-in. Of course, we hadn't any real experience with the stuff before, so she brought it up to the apartment. We decided it probably wasn't weed, though, because no one would lose that much weed, would they? We thought not. We probably weren't holding weed. It was probably not weed. I mean, surely it wasn't. We looked at each other. We held it in our hands, and there was no way we were going to know by holding it. So we decided to smoke it, just to make sure. Just to make sure it wasn't weed. We wanted to be absolutely positive.
The above paragraph is a lie. Mostly. Alli did find the weed in a bag while walking Ray for his morning poop. That part is true. She did come up and tell me she found it. But come on, we're two responsible people We aren't going to go smoke weed--no. We're not kids anymore. We're grownups. We cooked it in brownies instead.
That was a lie too. It's just fun to talk about marijuana, isn't it? And that's all we did--talk about the marijuana. We figured it belonged to the stoners on the first floor whose windows are always given to what Jimi called purple haze. We didn't put it into our bodies. We wouldn't do that. So we put it in Ray's, and watched him laugh for three hours. It was awesome.
By the way, things look shaky with the house purchase at this point. We are hung up on the furnace issue. I have never before been a part of a furnace issue, but here I am, partaking in a furnace issue. I guess the furnace is broken--something our home inspector found--and they won't replace it because they don't have the money to, which I think is a crock of sh, so they had a 'furnace repairman' say that, yes, indeed, the furnace is cracked, but will be good for another couple of years. Of course, something I just learned this morning is that cracked furnaces leak carbon monoxide, something I don't want to live next to, because I would die. I'd rather not send a canary or parakeet or whatever ahead of me into my garage everytime I want to go out there.
By the way, if you're interested in a really great author to read, look up Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love. Effing amazing, my friends. It's a great book. He's got other books too, but that's the only one I've read of his that I can vouch for.
I hope you're all well. We still miss you very much.
Carlos
posted by Carlos Antonio Delgado at 8:09 PM
1 Comments:
that was the funniest blog post I have every read in my entire life.
p.s. i still picture you in the shower on jason's video and I love it.
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