Posts Tagged ‘Spain’
Penises and Mustaches
Okay, boys, as promised, I’m writing a blog just for you. About your favorite subjects: penises and mustaches.
Those are your favorite topics, right? Penises and Mustaches?
Hey, mustaches are cool… in theory. I can’t actually tell you if they are cool in reality, because no one I know under the age of 60 has a mustache (and everyone knows that no one older than 60 is eligible to be called “cool” – they can, however, be called ‘spiffy’ or ‘nifty’ or even ‘sexy,’ especially if you are Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood or Mick Jagger).
So, guys, why don’t you all start growing mustaches? Seriously. It’s like the iPhone or the iPad – we need some “early adapters” here. Once the first few hundred of you start to grow them, the rest will jump on the bandwagon, and we’ll have brought the look back from the dead (where Burt Reynolds left it back in the 80’s) for all to enjoy!
And to be clear, I’m not talking about beards or goatees. Been there, done that. I’m talking a mustache. Not an overgrown, fu-manchu, or “look how retro hippie cool I am with little beads threaded into my mustache locks” mustache. Boy, please. Just a mustache, a simple, plain, trimmed mustache.
Picture it – Leonardo Di Caprio… with a mustache. Or even better, Ryan Gosling. With a Mustache.
Hot.
Okay, now that we’ve covered that topic, let’s move on to penises. Now, arguably, I’ve already covered this subject – when I wrote about how men in Spain took secret pictures of their penises on mine and my friend’s cameras, something we discovered only when we got back to the states & developed our pictures.
But there is more to penises than the fact that they are dazzlingly photogenic! (According to their owners.) One not-so-well-known fact about penises is that in the olden days, penises were opposable -until God realized that men didn’t need them to draw sketches on cave walls, and via evolution, He took away that functionality over decades of generations.
Wait. I may be mixing penises up with pinky toes. And God with Natural Selection.
In any case, I hope this manly blog has inspired all of you manly readers to please grow a penis and to quit secretly photographing your mustache while the girls are out of the room.
You know what I mean.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Tell me I'm wrong.
It’s a Gas (The Fart Blog)
Enough about Wedding Dresses, Bullies and Christmas.
Let’s talk about farts.
Oh yes, my friends, I’m going there. Because the other day – when one my five year old daughter let one fly – and then burst out laughing – it occurred to me, farts aren’t just funny to teenage boys.
They’re funny to everyone.
Except, arguably, to the people trapped in the same room with someone else’s fart.
If only I had such a good sense of humor as a young girl. Specifically, at age twelve. Because, it was at age twelve that- as I lay in the same bed as my best friend and her boyfriend (NO we were not NAKED – we were watching Strange Brew, and she didn’t have a couch) – when I let fly one of the loudest, most embarrassing farts of my life.
Embarrassing because, (well, duh, I was a twelve year old girl, but also), I was lying there in that bed, next to a girl I deeply admired and her boyfriend who I had a crush on (and who, I might add, I wound up losing my virginity to, years later, but that’s a different story), and… I farted.
Correction – I BLASTED.
Yes, gentle readers. It was bad.
But remember how, three paragraphs ago, I wrote it was “one” of the loudest farts I ever did? Implying, there was another…
Cut to: years later, in Madrid, Spain. I’m in a club with my friend Tatiana, high on horribly potent European hash and drunk on whiskey cokas. I’m sitting behind the DJ booth glass, because Tatiana and I are “in” with the DJ, whose name escapes me, but whose penis may have ended up on one of our rolls of film.
What do you think happened?
I farted. But not a regular fart, the kind that happened most days, because at that point in my young life I was suffering from a terrible bout of lactose intolerance.
Poor Tatiana (my roommate at the time).
No, this fart was not just a lactose intolerant fart. Nor was it a mere ‘club kid-high-on-hashish’ fart.
It was a magical fart.
Because, just moments prior, I was falling down the rabbit hole of being too high and too drunk; I was spinning, I was unable to talk or communicate, and I was very close to passing out/throwing up/needing to check into a hospital for alcohol and possible hashish blood poisoning.
Through my pounding head and with my blurred vision, I could see Tatiana’s face, worried, concerned; she tried to ask if I was okay but I could not respond….
Until…
I farted.
And then – everything was okay in the world. Seriously. The spinning was gone, the wooziness disappeared, my drunken high throwupiness vanished, and my teetering on the abyss of a blackout had evaporated. I was back in the game!
Tatiana was there – and she will attest to the fact that not only was this fart magical, but it also could have won the Guinness Book of World Records in fart volume – we heard it loud and clear, trumpeting above and beyond the distant chimes of the otherwise floor-shakingly loud discotheque music and thumping bass line.
So you see, dear readers, farts come in all shapes, sizes, and volumes.
And they’re magic.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Take off! No, you take off!! Dude. Who farted?
Viva Espanya, Part Dos
Oh lord, fine, more about Spain… if I MUST… Sigh…
Lived with Tatiana who back then was just Tania. I was still Shana. We went to the Jesuit Saint Louis University in Madrid, and our best friend was Lamar, a black queen who regaled us with stories about his time spent in the non-Madrid version of St. Louis University, (the one in Missouri), where, in Lamar’s words, “there ain’t nobody gay except me and the priests.”
Tatiana and I learned to cook one and only one Spanish meal: boil spaghetti, dump out the water once it’s done, add tomato sauce from a can and a can of chickpeas.
Et voila.
It’s all we ever cooked, even when we entertained guests. (Yup, you guessed it, also for our secret penis-photo snapping guests too. Hmmm… maybe the photos were revenge for the meal they were forced to consume?)
In any case, the disgusting Spanish red wine was always poured nonstop (as an alternative to the vile whiskey cokas we always drank at the bars and clubs), and the cigarette smoke filled our cement apartment like a Spanish cloud.
Tania and I watch Spanish TV constantly, with the sound reasoning that it would help us learn Spanish more quickly. Our favorite was Chicas De Hoy En Dia, and I can sing you the theme song right now if you want me to. The Venezuelan import Abigail, a tele-novela, ran a close second.
We were also on TV – Spanish TV – in a couple of different capacities. One was a music video shot in a warehouse, where we had to dance for like ten hours straight, with lights flashing as they filmed all of us. The producers gave us all ecstasy and whiskey cokas to help pass the time, but it still felt like it took forever.
I also remember that one of us – Tania or I – auditioned and got a role on this one major dating game show, but we chickened out before it came time to actually shoot the episode. We did, however, get stopped on the street once & asked to take part in a televised public service announcement having to do with imploring the slutty Spanish youth to at least cover up if they were going to sleep with everyone they met.
We happily complied, and a few weeks later, we caught ourselves on Spanish TV – holding up colorful condom wrappers and saying “Pon te lo!” “Usa lo!”
Towards the end of our stay, I got so sick to my stomach that I actually took a bus to see an acupuncturist who was recommended by a soft-core porn actor we were friends with. Turned out the acupuncturist doctor was 100% blind and spoke perfect English. Of course it was the blindness I was concerned about, given that he was sticking needles all over my body, but we made it through our session without him puncturing any of my major organs.
His advice to me was not to eat any cold foods, stay away from the whiskey cokas for a week, (One week! Dios mio!) and to switch from Marlboro Reds and Winstons (my cigarettes of choice) to “blue tobacco cigarettes” which are these indescribably vile types of cigarettes (some of you bratty world travelers probably know them best as Gauloises).
I must have followed at least most of his advice because I did recover. (Notwithstanding the fact that now, according to my current holistic doctor, Dr. Ed, I now need to do major detoxing from all my prior alcohol, cigarette and drug use…)
Gentle readers, to wrap it up, here is a Grownup Girl tip: If you want to quit smoking and you love throwing up, force yourself to smoke Gauloises.
You’re welcome.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Delicious. If you're a shark and there's a person attached to one of them.
Viva Espanya!!!
Remember my Hebrenglish blog, about how my English has degenerated been simplified, thanks to the daily influence of my Israeli husband?
Turns out, I was also greatly influenced by my five months as a University student in Madrid. And no, I am not talking about how I may or may not have taken ecstasy at our Spanish Halloween party and went around telling everyone that I was a black drag queen in my past life.
Er… and no, I’m not talking about how I may or may not have drank disgusting ‘Whiskey Cokas’ every single night for those five months and smoked the most disgusting hash nastiness and also tried cocaine a few times. I mean, if I even did that at all.
Nor am I speaking of the clubs my friend Tatiana and I “promoted” (AKA got free entrance into, in return for showing up and taking a stack of club flyers, all of which we promptly took home and chucked into the trash), nor the countless disgusting men who would hit on us and buy us drinks but never made it even to first base with us.
Unless you count penis photos as “first base.”
(This being in the pre-digital photography age, those penis shots gave me and Tatiana quite a surprise once our Spain pictures came back from the local drugstore after getting developed. Especially the fact that there were at least two distinctively different penises, photographed on two completely different rolls of film.)
Is this something that all dumb guys do when the girls leave the room during a dinner party? Take secret pictures of their penises? Or is it just Spanish guys?
No, I’m not talking about any of that.
What I am talking about, of course, is language. My trip influenced my language in a way that did not have me speaking in a fake Spanish accent like one wacky high school friend of ours who we met at a big American rendez-vous and couldn’t seem to shake his Spanish accent. My speech would not be impaired until years later, when I married my Israeli husband.
What the Spanish trip did is cause me to lose my ability to spell.
I first noticed it as I took notes in one of my dreaded pre-1800 English Lit courses – 4 of which were required for my Yale English major. My handwritten notes… were phonetic. PHONETIC!
Phonetic, like the Spanish language. I would write words completely wrong and it would take me a good couple of minutes to figure out what I was supposed to have written. (AKA I wood rite werds completly rong and it wood take me a cupla minuts to figur out wat I was suposed to hav rittin.)
I was an English major. I am a writer, and an editor, and a total stickler for grammar and spelling (I think I may have been among the elite few who laughed at Carrie Bradshaw’s shining moment of triumph over Natasha, the woman who married Big, when Carrie reads Natasha’s mistaken use of ‘their’ instead of ‘there’ in a thank you note.)
My Spanish problem persists to this day… in this very blog, no less, I wrote “roles” instead of “rolls” earlier (lucky me my Word program is savvier than I – either that or it never spent much time in Madrid), and also “you no” instead of “you know.”
So… thanks a lot, Spain.
For the memories, the alcohol poisoning, the penis photos, and most of all, my inability to spell the English language.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Senator Wiener, were you in Madrid lately? Because this picture looks mighty familiar...