May 5

So, Ada reminds us that today is Cinco de Mayo. To that I am drinking a beer (not Mexican but tastes like it) and roasting chiles y ajo y tomatillos. The apartment smells festive despite the fact that I am alone for the second Friday in a row (oh, well, I went out with Jenaya, Molly, et al, last Friday, but you know, _alone_).

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On May five some eight years ago, I met a girl named Jessica at a horrible Eugene Weekly singles party. I was lured there by my friend Nicole who worked for EW at the time and who enticed me to come because they were offering a free faux-Mexican buffet and one dollar shots of tequila. Now I normally hate tequila, but this seemed like a good idea. Anyway, Jessica and I were friends and almost lovers a few months later.

That night, after the bar(s) I came home to find Poncho, high on something like morning glory seeds, wearing camouflage shorts and a skin-tight black t-shirt featuring a hair-metal band I'd never heard of before or since ("Hardline") burning in our never-used-up-until-then fireplace some of Greg Schapp's personal effects. It was smoky and hot and I was drunk.

Oh, and Jessica made a big show of asking me about my "heritage" and I was ever so happy to explain that I was Mexican American (on Cinco de Mayo! of all days!) and she said something silly about "how nice it was to find someone in Eugene who wasn't white." In any case, we ended up friends. Then she dumped me (a few months later, dig) to hang out with local on-the-cusp-of-success musicians. One of them almost became successful, but for reasons unknown to me, didn't last with The Decemberists.

The last time I posted something about this mystery musician on this blog, he emailed me with a threat to clean my clock, or some dumb metaphor for kicking my ass. I'm pretty sure I could take him though--he's only about 5'3".

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Today I emailed Greg Schapp for his banana bread recipe.

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Over the winter holidays I watched a lot of Degrassi: The Next Generation.

There's this episode in which Ashley is going to London for the summer, and Craig decides to go with her, so he buys a ticket and tells her, and she rebuffs him. Says that he can't go with her--that she can't be with him, and well, his teenage curly-headed heart is broken.

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Canadian teen dramas touch our lives because they are like our lives.