[begin Je(nn)ff blog persona] …so today my wife and i are going out to lunch for indian food — the subcontinent kind of “indian” food, mind you, not the native american kind, which from what i can gather is all stews and corn (though the natives call corn “maize”) and buffalo meat. oh, and pumpkins.

no, we’re going out for the lentils-and-potatoes kind of subcontinental indian food. not that i have anything against the native american kind. i love corn. and “maize” is one of my favorite crayola crayon colors.

speaking of crayons, here’s a little story…when i was growing up, a lot of the kids in my elementary school class had the big box of 64 crayons — the one with the built in sharpener! — but my parents were poor (my mom drove a beat up old plymouth duster with stuffing billowing out of gashes in the vinyl upholstery; and my dad, though born without thumbs, hitched to work) so i had to make due with the beginner’s box of 8, which I tried to blend together to make new colors (but alas, this technique almost universally yielded a murky mud-colored brown). i was so envious of those rich kids! i mean, the colors they had at their disposal: maize, burnt sienna, umber…perriwinkle! jennifer boliton even had two boxs of 64 crayolas, if you can believe that — so if, say, her azure blue ever got dull, she would just retrieve her spare azure blue rather than simply sharpening the one she’d been using (to color the sky with, of all things!!!! golly, why is it that the rich kids are always the least creative?

stupid capitalism).

on one such occasion, i asked her — motioning to the crayola nub in her fat little fist, “why don’t you just sharpen that one?”

— “well, because,” she told me, “that kind of manual labor is for the mexicans. or for other brown peoples. or for poor kids like you.” she then reached into her lunch box and pulled out a boxed fruit drink. “so how about it? want to sharpen my crayons for me? boy?”

…needless to say, i hated jennifer boliton. which is why i couldn’t feel sorry for her when it came out, years later, that she was an honest-to-goodness hermaphrodite — quite an oddity, you have to admit — and that some of the kids had taken to calling her (him? them?) “jennifer’s balls-o’-tin.” me, i just went up to her one day — and i only did this once, because i’m hardly the vindictive type — and asked, “would you like me to sharpen your thingy for you? boy?”

she had no idea what i was talking about, of course, but i didn’t care. my mom was driving a buick regal by then.

anyway, like i was saying, my wife and i are going out for indian food — lots of curried lamb and nan and saag and saffron-seasoned rice. after that, we’re going to best buy, where i hope to pick up a few new dvds! like, i’m thinking of picking up the evil dead (the original and the evil dead 2), and maybe the collector’s edition of the wicker man. i don’t know why, but i’m in the mood for some “horror” movies to add to my collection — and there are so few of them that are any good.

after that, we’re going to go food shopping (such consumers are we today, eh? paging dr. chomsky!) — so i can pick up some nice rosemary olive oil bread, and maybe some stuff to make curried prawns for dinner tonight. my wife came across some really big shrimp at the market the other day — she called me all excited from albertson’s, which is the name of the grocery store close to my house, to tell me that she’s found “enormous shrimp the size of canned hams!” — so i told her to get a pound and a half, and that i’d figure out what to do with them. so tonight i have to figure out what to do with them. i’ll probably saute mine in a curry paste; my wife’s i’ll season with salt and white pepper and serve over a bed of flash-fried cabbage. either way, delish. (my wife, she doesn’t like spicy food all that much, which is why she won’t be having hers cooked in the curry paste). anyway, ‘s hard to mess up good shrimp — as bubba from forrest gump was quick to remind us. poor bubba. died too young.

goddamned viet nam.

side dishes? probably corn on the cob. or, as the indians — er, native americans, i mean — call it, “maize on the cob.” and a nice salad of field greens and raw spinach. [/end je(nn)ff blog persona]