Wednesday, July 06, 2005

At last, gentle readers, I return from the land of vacation. Behold my glory!

I said BEHOLD, goddamn you!

Anyhow, let me tell you a story about a man named Rado. He used to come into the Arc (the Wash U computer lab at which I am employed) every single day and ask me to log him into one of the back computers. The one with the high-speed scanner. I had the last shift this past Friday night. Usually I have everyone kicked out by ten minutes to close, but Rado wouldn't go. He was trying frantically to save his precious Chinese Literature dissertation, but had run out of disc space. Egad. To speed things up, I lent him a memory stick I'd recovered from the Arc lost and found. After watching the progress bar creep towards 100% for a few minutes, we began to chat.

I asked him where he was from. Slovakia, he told me. He'd been in the U.S. for some time on foreign exchange. "But the one part of American student life I never found," he said, "are these parties I always hear about." I gave him my number.

That night, I trotted over to my friend A ---'s penthouse dorm for an evening of civilized skylarking. We took to the balcony with a bottle of riesling. Some hours later, as I was meditating on the blue plumes of smoke seething from A ---'s cloved cigarette, Rado called.

It didn't matter that he was frightfully late. His conversation, though treacherously snarled with accent, kept us entertained. He told us a bit about his homeland. (Apparently they have mandatory physical education at his native university. America could use some of that!) We made him speak Slovakian. We listened to music and joked and played until god-knows-what-hour, and then snuck into Dauten (another dorm) so that A --- could exhibit his piano playing. Rado and I listened to the piano for some time. We danced an awkward waltz and discussed philosophy.

Before Rado left, he gave me a picture of a gecko in a wooden frame. "This is the animal I most identify myself with," he said. I showed him my totem tattoos - a pair of petroglyphic geckos under my breasts. Synchronicity never fails to amuse me.

He sent me a text message today, saying that he got home safe and sound. And now I have a new pen pal.

shiny objects