Running on empty

I have never felt like more of a sheltered, middle-class white girl from Podunk Massachusetts than I did last night. Kim and I went to see the show Afrika Afrika. To be trite, you could say it’s an African version of Cirque de Soleil. While I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t just a bunch of physically fit men and women doing circus tricks, I am really glad K was there to fill me in on some of the details. (K is not Asian as you might have suspected; he’s from Nigeria.) For each performance he told me what part of Africa it was representing based on the music, dance, act, and/or costume. Not all the acts are native to Africa (break-dancing and fancy basketball to name two), but they are still all part of the culture, many being performed by street entertainers. Among the acts were an insane juggler who impressed me when he used only 3 balls let alone the 8 that he was up to by the end, pole climbers who made the little Chinese dude in Ocean’s 11 seem like an amateur, contortionists who made me cringe and shield my eyes from the horror, men on unicycles doing double dutch, girls lying on their backs and spinning huge clay pots and tables on their feet, and of course, men who climbed on each other building man-towers 5 people high. I really enjoyed the show; I know there was a lot that went over my head since I’m vastly uninformed when it comes to knowing about African culture. But I understood that there was meaning behind it all and I could certainly tell that it was more than just a show to the 4000 people or so who were in the audience. All in all, I’m glad I bailed on another relationship-filled-with-drama play to see it.

I have become friends with two people from Africa in the past month. That is two more than I’ve befriended in my entire life.

Last night I found myself asking K, “Do you want to walk to London Bridge?” I realize this isn’t that far-fetched a question to be asking, but it still seems funny to me.

I hurt my finger peeling a banana. (Oh and thank you everyone for your concerns about my general hygiene with respect to wiping my fingers on my chair. What would I be without your judging? Other than a decent human being who doesn’t soil office furniture…)

The afternoon paper has a one-liner joke every day. So far, I’ve surprisingly laughed out loud at every one of them. Yesterday’s joke was “What do you call a heavy Italian fog? A bigamist.”

This was a headline in the same paper: “Official: Tube signs really do tell porkies.” Even after reading the article, I still don’t know what that means.