Gigantic Saturday

We went to the Kremlin-on-Quebrada-Seca last night for the second-best nacatamles we have ever eaten. Not to impeach Doña Micaela's fantastic cooking, but even a one-time visitor to the Teran household must admit that their Nicaraguan nacatamal is the world standard.

On the subject of beating animal flesh into a mealy pulp, the popular televisions show 'Gigantic Saturday' treated us to that once-popular centerpiece of America's fantasy world, "professional wrestling". Before these steroid-enhanced spandex-wearing troglodytes with dyed hair assumed the role of cultural ambassadors, the Miami-based show featured an undocumented widow living in the United States speaking with a lawyer about how to avoid deportation. Unless something was lost in translation, she was concerned that a homoerotic bodybuilder was going to come to her home and suplex her.

Thanks, America. You can just feel the Director laughing at us, demanding an explanation, a silent re-enactment of the Moscow show trials of 1936. Yes, Comrade Stalin. This is our brand of toughness. Artificially-enhanced, staged, and, yeah, just sort of gay overall. You win.

That sounds much like my chessplay against Tian yesterday, who ripped apart a fancy hypermodern opening I tried to play but did not know well. We have found a time-consuming diversion, Tian and I, which is better than rereading my short stack of books for a third time.

An addendum to the new language/new soul idea. I can understand why Tian is so logical, and would like to put in for a Chinese soul. Apparently meiguo, the Mandarin word for America (the United States of... you need to clarify down here), means "beautiful nation". Given the beauty and simple logic of that language, no wonder it crafts a soul so adept at chess.

As far as the high-stakes game, Saturday was not the first time the Director outmatched us. You will have to pardon the Russian Revolution references ad nauseam, but with six weeks of growth on my face (and given our new friend Taylor's criticisms of SHH these days), I feel okay turning this blog into Animal Farm. So Dan was Trotsky on Friday. His urgent desire to open the school up for public internet classes brought the Director's proverbial icepick down on his head. Cano positioned him in a corner and told the rest of us why this was a dangerous idea, how he hadn't been able to get this through the skipper's head, and that if we didn't stop El Boludo, he would kick us out of his school and keep the computers.

I've agreed broadly with the Director the whole time, to slow down and not overestimate the importance of complicated and novel schemes for 'sustainability' and a 'social business model'. I take my fashionable Muhammad Yunus books with a dose of Benedict XVI. I took a little solace in the encylical he wrote midway through our project, doubtlessly with us in mind. "All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias". Better to trust an oldschool caudillo like Cano, the proven method in these parts.

For that, Rodrigo and I played Zinoviev and Kamenev, living to be humiliated another day. Hopefully we fly out before that day comes, because Gigantic Saturday (featuring All-American Jack Swagger, in a blue spandex unitard, thighs bulging out of something even UVA waterpolo would be scandalized to wear) was embarrassing enough.