faccio cose, vedo gente

There is something that make me and Starbucks to be together. Really: to love each other. Every time I go there, a clerk makes me a little gift. At the one at University & Richmond they just love me and I love them back. There are these two very cute girls; one has black long hair, the other one has spiky blonde. The blond one astonished me when I ordered a coffee light frappuccino, when they usually ask for my name, and she didn’t. Uh oh… After a few minutes I heard something like: “coffee light frappuccino for Luca!” and yeah, she remembered my name since the previous time I was there. Every time I go there we talk for about 5 minutes; I still haven’t asked her name, though.

The black hair one has relatives in Italy, I offered her to make some practice of speaking with me, if she has free time. The young latino boy that works there, very kind too, made for me a special frappuccino with a *free* shoot of espresso, very tasty! And the previous clerk, Mr. Castiglione, gave me once a free pastry. Like they did yesterday, in the starbucks in the quarter of Kensington, where I took a frappuccino and a pastry, and paid only the former.

Conclusions: i feel like I found the love of my life: it’s not a girl, it’s not a man, it’s not a pet, it’s a company.

Open question: how do you offspring with a company? how do you present a company to your mum? will the priest marry us? are we a non conventional couple? do we need special laws? Hey Schwarzy, after the same-sex-marriage can we take care of people with widespread partners? Can u? Thanks, darling!

.:cultures::2::10 golden rules to start a fraternity

Somebody (oink oink) is expecting from me a sour comment about the frat party we went yesterday. Me, Kansas, Porcellina, and porcellina’s roommate (I’m so bad with names). In fact, I can’t really express a comment. There’s this point of the night when these five hundred guys (coarse estimate) are totally drunk and if they don’t have any more energy to rub themselves against the closest gal they just fall down. And if you’re in the middle of their way, they just fall on you. And if they are 6′3” feet long and 200lbs of muscles, it can be annoying. Not really for me, just for my shoulder.

While I was watching this artificial paradise (I had this deja-vù about the tale of Pinocchio, the part about the paese dei balocchi), I came up with the 10* golden rules to start a fraternity:

1. buy a greek version of scrabble
2. pick up each different letter and put them in a container
3. shake it
4. pick up three pieces
5. order the three of them in the way you prefer. For instance you could order them in alphabetical order (this means you know the alphabetical order, dial 911 otherwise for help)
6. that will be the name of your fraternity (this is not really a rule, but who cares?)
7. start playing football
8. convince your mates that it would be nice to jerk off together because it’s a friendship things
9. you’re almost there (again)
10. buy a huge house, I mean really huge, I mean, huge huge huge superhuge
11. go on a social network website like the facebook and make a group called the biggest facebook group ever or so. If it’s already there (in fact it’s really the case) join it. Ask your jerk circle to join it. Ask you mum and dad to join it. Other suggestions: the mailman, your neighbors, clerks at Starbucks (you know they won’t deny), George Bush, your pets, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Mario Bros (your plumber is ok too)
12. send a message to that group that you’re throwing a party. You don’t wanna invite people face-to-face. Stop jerking off for a second in case you’re still doing. Remember; tell your buddies to bring they own beverage (you can just write BYOB if the complete sentence is tiring)
13. you’re almost done!!!
14. the day of the party follow the directions to the place that you provided. enter the place: do you feel home? cool. people will arrive in a few hours, be ready, stop jerking
15. did I say stop jerking?
16. stop jerking, start drinking
17. did I say buy drink for yourself? did I?
18. let people enter. say to them that this is the fraternity Chi Delta Tau or whatever the name is, and it’s not a medicine, it’s really a fraternity. tell them that it’s the coolest fraternity ever. Say a loud “waaaazzzup man?” and shake your hand with the first and the last finger out.
19. I feel like you’re done. Really. You host a fraternity now. Yay!
20. As a future addition consider a fight in the middle of the nite. You might have problems asking people to leave the house, they’re part of the fraternity now: consider the fight at this time.

click here for more info. Turn the SafeSearch off to discover the truth

*Somebody will object about the number. It’s in base 20.

Yesterday I decided to go to the gym pretty late. The plan was: go there, work-out, shower, then immediately in the bed. But leaving my house at 11pm I felt quite guilty: I already imagined myself running in an empty gym, only me and the front desk guy who is locking all the doors around me. No way.

The gym is an institution here in the states. There were more people than around 7pm, all of them probably thinking that at this time it’s less crowded. So I worked out pretty well and I didn’t feel alone even though, in my mostly gay gym (it’s the 24hours fitness in Hillcrest) if you don’t feel alone you feel… ehm… observed!

.:lost in translation::5

Thanks to James [Nr.1] I discovered that the tapis roulant is called treadmill in the states. Yay!

.:facts::6

Today I spent my lunchtime with Steven. I just met him today, after he sent me some messages on the facebook. He is going to study to Bologna next year and (being pretty forward-looking for the average italian) he already started getting in touch with the language.

The thing I love to ask to foreigners going to Italy is why they do want to go there. Sometimes they have relatives there, or had italian ancients. Sometimes they rely on some italian legend or myth: italians are very relaxed, italians are very passionate, or whatever else. Steven relies on relatives; his grandfather has italian origins.

We talked pretty much in english (I love to talk in english because americans are usually very kind and they tell me that I have a very good english - even though I have a pretty strong accent - which is always cool for my ego) but I told him that next time we have to use more italian. I like this ambassador role. Ambassador Luca: how does it sound?

Yesterday I was in James’ [Nr. 2] car, he was talking with Francisco about some party he went and some funny situation in there. I was super tired and this memory came back to me, when I was to this bizarre party with the pig*, Sarah and Lupiano*. It was last New Year’s eve in New York and after the midnight in Times Square (well, it’s 56th street still Times Square? I doubt so) we ended up in this apt. in midtown full of science fiction writers, publishers and aficionados.

Some cold cuts, some nice little pastries, lots of words here and there from unknown people with big smiles, nice dress, apparently a little tired of everything. Everybody dressed up, everybody ready to show its credentials: I wrote this, I published that, I won this, I bought that, blah blah blah.

Kinda out of my natural environment, I ended up talking with this lady in her sixties, still in a good shape, wrapped in a golden suit with that kind of lips that talk by themselves, saying “I have a friend who runs a plastic surgery clinic”. It came out that this lady was some rock-star in the 60’s (how can I say “I have no idea about rock-stars in the 60’s because I wasn’t born” without offending the other person) and she lived in New york, Boston, and now she is (was) moving to London.

If you close your thumb and your second finger together you can see how much I know about rock music in general. Obviously, with my classical background is kinda hard to meet Beethoven or Stravinskij to a party, and at that time my english skills were kinda weaker, so for the whole night I acted very interested and very involved by the discussion, but the only thing I got clearly was that if you go to Boston and you don’t know anybody to show you the city, you won’t learn about the city and the bostonian life. Fair enough.

* Pig and Lupiano are not the real names of the people described here. We don’t want to care about their privacy though, so they are respectively Patrick and Luciano in future we might explain the enigmatic origin of their names

.:facts::4

At Ralph’s they sell this very tasty protein bars called Promax. Recently they started to sell two different kinds of them, differently priced. If you’re lucky enough, you can buy some of one type and some of the other and the cashier can just count all of them and price them with the less expensive one (20c difference). So I bought 12 of them, 4 high-priced and 8 low-priced.

If you’re unlucky by nature, the cashier counts them, picks up an expensive one, and spreads the high price on all of them, and that’s what happened to me. Obviously I told this to the cashier, but she looked at me and she smiled “it’s all ok”. So when I exited I went to this man, the one who takes care of clients (what’s his name?) and I told him the situation. I also told him explicitly please I don’t want to offend the cashier, in this being very very american (who fucking cares about the cashier in Italy?).

This smart man told me don’t worry and he went straight to the woman asking her about the money. Then she called me but the man took the money from her and gave it to me. There were 5 milliseconds when I crossed the gaze of the cashier: I read HATE and ANGER in her eyes. Now I feel bad, but with 1.60$ back, so not that bad after all…

Here’s an interesting joke from James*: What’s the difference between Los Angeles and New York?

In LA people say “Have a nice day” and mean “Fuck you.” But in NY people say “Fuck you” and mean “Have a nice day.”

* This is James Nr. 1 chronologically speaking; there is another James and we’ll call him James Nr. 2, following the usual decimal system

god moaning is not a blasfemy, just a nice salutation with the typical New Yorker accent.

.:lost in translation::4

the first time i was *really* confused was with the question what’s up that doesn’t have a proper equivalent in italian. It’s similar to cosa c’é, but this is closer to what’s going on so I wasn’t able to find a direct translation. Americans love to abbreviate in wazzup or even sup to help international students in matching to the original language.

What makes wazzup a very particular question is that the range of answer can be totally unpredictable: from “hi there” to “I’m ok” to “just chilling” to “good times” to “nothing”, which makes the situation even worse. What does tuKa do with a wazzup? He just tries whatever answer to one of these question: “how are you?”, “what’s going on?”, “how is it going?” and “what’s wrong?”… jeopardyyyyy

.:facts::3 >> .:shopping::1

Yesterday I bought this t-shirt for 9$ at Buffalo Exchange, then I discovered that the same t-shirt was 6$ at Urban Outfitters. Fortunately, it was out of stock there