the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

It's abundantly clear to me that I could never be a regular columnist. I'm just too fickle. Also, this post is a study in contradiction. This probably says something about me, but I'm not sure what.

This year, my resolutions are:

1. To not fall down my stairs and twist/break my ankle, or any other part of my anatomy. I have a plan in place to make this a reality, and I began to enact it at midnight last night: I will use proper lighting while traversing the steps and will make use of the walls and monkey bars (there's no handrail) as necessary.

That might be my only resolution. I figure with only one, I can focus on making it a reality.

Oh wait.

2. To not start anything I won't finish, except for books. This should keep me from wasting money on random fly-by-night interests, since I never finish anything, anyway. Books are exempt from this rule because I've usually gotten all there is to get out of them by the half-way point, anyway.

Speaking of which, I'm finally finishing the biography of Dorothy Parker (What Fresh Hell is This?), begun last May. It provides a somewhat lighthearted break, believe it or not, from Frazer's The Golden Bough, a classic work based on anthropological data about the evolution of magical thinking into religious belief. Frazer's work is a must, I think, for any self-respecting English major (and I can see why). It's fascinating, but long and dense (and I'm reading the "short" version in one volume, a mere 800 pages).

Random information: Over Christmas weekend, John and Cela came down from Ramstein to hang out with me. We went shopping in the old bazaar on Saturday, where they munched good Turkish food and bought a couple of leather jackets. On Sunday, we went adventuring to find some camel wrestling.

Right.

Camel wrestling is a real sport. It involves camels wrestling one another--not people wrestling camels, which you might think based on your all-too-intimate knowledge of alligator wrestling, which doesn't even involve camels.

For camel wrestling, people will invest in large bulls which they will feed well so they can match them against other bulls in the ring. I don't think the camels are trained or anything. They are outfitted with colorful saddle-like things, the purpose of which appears to be a display of team colors (?) and padding for the ring.

The ring, by the way, reminded me of the sort of muddy lot you go to for local 4-H competitions. People were lining the fences and milling around inside the corral itself, which served as the "ring." They wore skarves denoting their "team." They also had what appeared to be a primitive version of tailgate parties: they'd dragged up several giant trailers with farm tractors outside the ring, where they had chairs and goodies for spectators.

There were usually a few bulls on ropes toward the perimeter of the ring, and two being paired off in the middle at any given time. It works like this: the bulls are kept on ropes by their handlers. A cow is brought out and paraded around until the bulls get excited, which you can tell because they foam white out of the mouth and nostrils.

I know. Sexeh.

At this point, the female is led away and the males...wrestle. This is apparently something they do in the wild. They lean against each other for a while. If one is markedly heavier, the small one will run away, pursued by the large one. I'd read that they sometimes charge toward the crowd. I was hoping to see this shameful exhibition, but the handlers kept them from causing any such excitement.

Sometimes, the camels actually get a leg throw in, though.

Apparently, large sums of money are bet on these matches, and it's sometimes hard to tell who won. I certainly couldn't tell. But...that wasn't the point for me. I just wanted to see some camel wrestling.

John got some genuine camel slobber on his new jacket, and I have given them a Christmas they will remember. Also, they get to try to one-up me when I visit them in Germany.

Random, I know. So what.

d