Black Jalapenos

            On Saturday morning I woke up at 4:59 and had a minute before the alarm would go off but then I woke up again at 5:08 and hadn’t heard it. I got up feeling my ears were extremely plugged. I started yoga eight minutes behind but breathed faster and counted the time for holding my poses more quickly and halfway through I was only five minutes behind. By the end, I was just on the late side of normal. 

            I finished editing “Arthur, où t'as mis le corps?” (Arthur, Where’d You Put the Corpse?) by Boris Vian on Christian’s Translations and now I only need to find a YouTube video to post with it. I should have it published on the blog on Sunday. 

            I did major flushing of my ears because my hearing was extremely impaired. I flushed each ear nine times while I would normally do them three times each. Even after the eighth time, there was still wax coming out but after the fifth flush my ears opened and I could hear again.

            I finished working out the chords for “Baby Boum” by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through it in French and sang and played most of my translation. I still want to go through the instrumental again and so I’ll do that tomorrow before uploading it to the blog. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning, I went to No Frills where I bought five bags of green grapes, a bag of black jalapenos, two bags of sweet plantain chips and two bags of green plantain chips, and fourteen bananas.     

            In the store, the black jalapenos looked jet black but at home, I realized they are really just very dark green. Maybe the store’s fluorescent lights make them look blacker. They basically taste like green peppers but with a little more heat. I could eat one without running for a glass of water.

            I worked on the annotated bibliography for my essay proposal and was almost done before lunch. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch. I had my last naan warmed up with peanut butter and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            When I got up from my siesta in the afternoon, I started getting ready for my bike ride. But then it began to squall outside and it looked like it was going to continue and so I changed back into my home clothes and started writing in my journal. After a few minutes, I turned around and saw that the sun was out and so I got dressed again and headed out. It was very windy and at Varsity Stadium the flagpoles were clanking in the wind. The plastic over the fronts of the high-rise construction site at Yonge and Bloor was flapping violently. On the way home along Queen, the wind was against me and giving me a brain freeze. It wasn’t the coldest day of winter but the wind made my face colder than it’s been on any bike ride this year. The wind’s resistance also made it feel like a very long ride. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos at 17:30. 

            I finished at least a first draft of my essay proposal with the annotated bibliography and I sent it to my Global Modernisms instructor for feedback. It’s due on Monday at midnight, so hopefully, there aren’t a lot or any changes I need to make to it and I won’t have to experience any last-minute stress over it. 

            I started reading “Combined and Uneven Development.” I guess the title is describing the way things develop in Capitalism. Uneven because the wealth is not equally divided. I hate these literary theory essays that we have to read in this course. I’d rather just read the literature.

            I had a potato with steamed frozen lima beans and the last of my gravy with a glass of raspberry lemonade. I ate while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story, Dr. Elefun gets a letter from his friend Dr. Von Holstein who lives in the country of Shangralee. He writes that he wants him to come and see his latest invention. But Elefun doesn’t want to go because Shangralee is a dictatorship ruled by Rudolph Hatter and he is afraid that if he goes there, he will be forced to work for the state as a scientist. Suddenly a robot car appears and kidnaps Elefun. Astro Boy follows the flying car back to Shangralee. While looking for Elefun he meets the robot resistance who are fighting against Hatter’s army. Meanwhile, Elefun reunites with Von Holstein who tells him he was forced to write him the letter. Holstein shows Elefun his invention, which he calls the ghost machine. It can make a ghost copy of any living thing. Hatter, who is clearly modeled after Adolph Hitler wants the machine to make a ghost copy of himself so in that form, he can live forever. Holstein sabotages the machine to explode, killing Hatter but also himself. Elefun is attacked by a giant robot but Astro Boy arrives just in time to save him. Elefun is sad about his friend’s death.