Mexican Volleyball #1

I am not revising this unless someone pays me. Revision sucks.

I might not edit.

Listen up my sixth-grade students: know when to use a good excuse not to proofread.  
Short term memory loss qualifies. Can you imagine searching for a comma splice and finding it,
and then forgetting what you just found and having to find it all over again? (Insert student
comment: That’s called English class.)  

Mexican Volleyball

We are all racist in one way or another.  My Peruvian boyfriend calls the Latin guys who occupy,
each evening, the volleyball court across from my front window “The Mexicans.”  Probably, the guys
swam from a few other countries too - Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Shockingly, some of my
early evening athletes may have arrived at the park via airplane from the lower American continent.  
But calling them all Mexican is a hard spike in the volleying of South American social hierarchy. To be
fair, my boyfriend evens the score by recounting to my Jewish family that we met when I picked him
up outside of Home Depot. I guess its the same joke with different applications, and I am not
particularly looking to be politically correct or to even participate in political commentary in this blog.
If readers come at me for this, I’ll plead Brain Tumor.  Because that’s what I have right now.  A brain
tumor can cause one to reflect. Upon reflection, I surmise the unfair events of life are probably to
blame for my wrongfully placed cumulation of brain tissue.  I feel like the unfairness, the
unreasonableness, the crimes against humanity, the petty trespasses, and the big bullshit have
lodged themselves right in there, in a nice little package called a cavernous malformation that
blocks the cerebral spinal fluid from circulating properly - a potentially deadly circumstance.  

Metaphorically, I could say I myself am a cavernous malformation. When 9-11 happened, I might
have gone three days without knowing save for a close friend who was familiar with my recluse
habits and broke through my never-answer-the-phone policy to relate the disaster head-on.  At
Syracuse, I had no idea we advanced to the final four until the entire campus emptied onto M-Street
leading me to realize that I was doing what I have been doing for a long time - wondering the halls
alone. Owing to my childhood (says modern psychology), I think I have tried to stay in a cave for
most of my adulthood, but it seems this approach did not save me from being affected by the world.  
My brain simply warped into an absence (abscess?) of knowledge on the one hand - oh, about the
classics of Oscar Wilde (no relation), Shakespeare (still no relation), the difference between Louis
Armstrong and Neil Armstrong, and the fact that David Bowie died six months earlier, (Yeah.
I know.) - and a dense mass on the other hand.

Another word for the cavernous malformation is lesion. I picture a lesion being something like
an infected and infested bug bite acquired while on holiday in a third-world country, angry red, wide
open.  Probably, my anger accounts for a portion of the lump lodged in my brain. Back to the
unfairness of the world, etc. although probably more a bit more personalized in this construct.

The doctors try hard not to use the term tumor.  I discovered why when I used the word to
explain my prognosis to my sister-in-law who promptly and correctly burst into tears. Oh, I
back-tracked, it’s a benign growth.  I mean, usually, growth is good, right?

So I am parked at home for six weeks of recovery from unexpected, fortuitous brain surgery.