I had a good run over to the gym today. A car of teenagers pulled up next to me hollering shit at me. I managed to pick out a “suck my dick” out of the lot of it. Why is this good? Because I managed to get my response off before they were out of earshot.

As they were pulling off I flipped them off and managed to get out a collection of responses, “fuck you,” “va te faire foutre” (“go fuck yourself”) and “gasamarak” (“may God shorten your life”), before they got away. They pulled off the road a bit ahead of me. I kept running toward them and was gesturing for them to get out of their car and bring it. They rolled up their windows and pulled away when I got near them.

It sounds sort of serious, but it wasn’t really. For one, they were Bilani teenagers. I outweighed the biggest one of them by probably 30 kilos. The standard of attractiveness is really thin for the guys and really chubby for the girls. There are a couple Maures who work out at the gym, maybe 2 or 3. It is mostly Black Africans, a few Moroccans and Libyans, and some French and us Americans. If it had come down to it, I could have probably held my own against two or three of them. It never would though. Maybe at night, but not in the middle of the day. Physical violence just isn’t condoned. It would be like a fist fight breaking out in a fancy restaurant; it could happen, but it just won’t.

They drove away from me and then pulled back and rolled down their windows and asked if I was English. I said I spoke English (I am still jogging at the point and wasn’t going to get into semantics) and they said they were sorry. I thought that was interesting. Then they drove on. I headed on to the gym feeling proud for having remembered to curse back before the other party was too far away.

Well, I went and watched it last night. It was nothing remarkable. Because we are five hours off Eastern Time it didn’t start until nearly midnight. To fill the intervening time we cooked and cooked and cooked. Then I ate and ate and ate. It was wondrous; chocolate chip cookies, salsa, tortilla chips, maffé, rice pudding, three different cakes, bissap wine… By the time the game actually started I could hardly keep my eyes open.

It didn’t matter all that much. I didn’t care about either of the yankee teams playing and because the game was playing on the Armed Forces Network all the commercials were replaced with little Army infomercials. I managed to stay awake through it and got my football fix for the next year. In watching it I’m sort of sad I didn’t see it the year the Titans played and I might have actually cared.

After the game, the pilot for American Dad came on. That was pretty entertaining. Nothing terribly original, but good for some laughs. When I finally made it home at around 6am, I slept till time to go to the gym at 6pm. Other than the guy who kept calling me to complaining that I ought to come teach his class since his teacher hadn’t shown up (which I disagree on), a very relaxing day.