Bryan Bell just released a new Radio theme, Swim Fan.
8:52:37 PM  #  comment []

Armi’s friends wanted to eat at Go on St Marks St, so I met them there last night. Without an umbrella. Mostly incomprehensible shop talk, and most of it in Tagalog. One of them, Ramon, apparently knew an entire Latin hymnal mass by heart, and was very excited to learn I had a little Latin. Amazingly, my Latin was up to his requests for translation. He would sing me lines, and I think I got most of them right, but I was surprised that he didn’t know their meanings from the order of the Mass. He was asking me things I thought that a doctor and a Catholic would have learned by osmosis and context, so I was suspicious until he insisted that the “Kyrie eleison” used in his Mass was Latin. Armi told me today he was a Protestant, which probably means he would be more familiar with some bastardized liturgy.

Two of her friends were of the Iglesia ni Christi. Luckily she did not tell me earlier, or I would have grilled them on the InC’s take on theology and the divine economy. Mayumi, on hearing that I had a little Spanish, asked if I knew a particular word. From the gasp of Armi’s, I suspected it was one my Spanish teacher (a Frenchwoman who was scandalized to learn that I had given up two years of French to take Latin, then Spanish) had never taught me. I begged off, claiming ill-use.

So: they go to Les Miserables without me then insist that I come eat with them and walk aimlessly around the east Village. And me with flat feet. Oy. I begged off when it seemed to me they started going in circles.
12:01:58 AM  #  comment []