I went to the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. In
university I studied blood and snow.
It hasn't been much use to me.
Now I live in Taiwan,
where I teach English. Taiwan is
an island in the Pacific Ocean.
There are many islands in the Atlantic Ocean too. I know this because I've been to some
of them.
In the Atlantic Ocean
people wash sheep at sunset. They
wash the sheep in the ocean when the big sharks aren't around. Big sharks don't like heavy rain in the
afternoon. So if there's heavy
rain in the afternoon people wash their sheep at sunset.
I wanted to visit a
local tribe on one of the Atlantic islands. I bought a cassette tape and a video tape and went camping. I spent some time with the tribe. Circumcision is important to them. When a boy is circumcised there's
a special circumcision ritual at which the people all drink clam soup.
There were mountains on
that island, and eggplant too, and I wanted to go climbing but couldn't,
because there was a scorpion eating eggplant in my shoe. You can't climb a mountain with only
one shoe.
So I returned to the
city and went to a circus. I saw a
robber there snickering at a clown because the clown's small head was really
funny. But I didn't think it was
so funny.
The next day at a
large exhibition I saw a big cockroach.
The cockroach said: "Does the horse scold mother?"
"No," I said. "The horse doesn't scold mother. Mother scolds the horse."
"Does mother scold
the big horse or the small horse?" the cockroach asked.
"Mother scolds the
big horse because the big horse eats mother's marijuana."
"Does mother hit the
big horse?" the cockroach asked.
But I didn't know the
answer to this. Although I'd
studied blood and snow in university, it didn't help me much with that
cockroach. To tell the truth it
hadn't helped me much with the scorpion in the shoe either. Because finally the scorpion not only
ate the eggplant, but the shoe also.
That was on an island
in the Atlantic. In Taiwan things
are no less strange.
Question: What is the
point of this story?
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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