hey The utter beauty of bilingualism is that sometimes you can find a word in your second language which doesn't really exist in your mother tongue to describe how you feel. Today's word, children, is "demoering" (pronounced duh-mooring), which is the Anglicised word bastardised from the Afrikaans (South African official language; one of eleven official languages in this country) term "Die moer in" (dee-moor-uhn) which basically means that someone is going to get the smackdown laid on them because I am up for a barney (barney = SA term for brawl. Like rawl). The closest sitDiary term I could think of was "aggressive," so I chose that. But really, I am demoering, not aggressive. Aggressive is a few stops before demoering. Exactly why this state of mind prevails today I am not sure. But it does. At this stage, I want to be honest and say I'm torn between writing something interesting and/or profound, which I can probably fake my way through fairly adequately; or writing down the utterly bizarre and weird events of the last 24 hours. For posterity as much as amusement... I think I will go for the latter. Fainthearted: be warned. Read no further. You ever gone for a piss and decided to spit through it? This may sound disgusting, girls, but I think its fairly common amongst the guys. I may stand to be corrected here... So you're standing there, spraying out the bladder through the ol' fire hose, and you drop a big spitball right through the yellowish stream... and it just falls through. I'd have thought that the spitball would be obliterated through the sheer force of 3-cups-of-coffee-pee, or at least have an altered trajectory, but it just falls straight down. It's true. I just tried it like 10 minutes ago. Totally legit for me, though, because I'm a career scientist, so I can call it an experiment. For other guys, it's merely boredom-relief. Nevertheless, the sun shines on us on d+2 after the marathon. The residual agony of Saturday and the hot but evil Ballet woman who gave us some ballet and Pilates exercises as part of the day has been reduced to a dull throb in the extremities, following a 5/8 of a mile swim at my local gym yesterday. Or one kilometer, if you're metric. Either way, 50 lengths of the gym pool - heated, luckily - has done a great deal to resolve the issue. The nipple chafing has healed, and is not as invigorating as some might imagine, but my backside is still a mite on the raw side. Weird thing happened after the swim. I was still in a world of pain; and exhausted from the swim, so I went to park in the gym steamroom for a couple minutes just so I could warm through and not have to stand, otherwise I'd have just parked in the shower. This dude comes in and sits next to me, a few feet away. I am in my dodgy Speedo (a story in itself, I tell you) because you're supposed to sit on something in there like a towel or wear shorts - I'm assuming this is so nobody else has to sit in the sweat which rolls out through the crack of your backside? - and he is in little boxer-brief thingies, which he proceeds to whip off. So he's buck naked, which doesn't freak me out since it happens in gym showers a lot, and I'm still in my dodgy Speedo, and then, out of the blue, he drops the gem "would you like me to suck your c*ck?" Now, apart from the dry-rape of me 4 weeks ago by a large, amorous and exceptionally plastered woman at Mario's 28th birthday bash, I'll admit to not having many people beating a path to my door. The reason for this is still unclear, as far as I can tell, because I'm basically a good guy, and not like so butt ugly I'm a modern art masterpiece or anything. I digress - the point, though, is that a question like that does not rear it's er... head... very often. Especially not by young gentlemen. Especially not in public places like the small steamroom in the local gym. I'm not sure what turned him on to me, really - I can't imagine he assumed I was making "come to bed" eyes at him, because you can't see all that clearly through the steam. Anyway, I'm just sitting there thinking to myself "...what? what did he say? I mean, I know what he said, but surely he's not being serious!" So I said, all naive, "Pardon?" and he said it again. By now I was fairly sure he was serious, because he walked over to me and nearly put my eye out with his enormous, hard er... you know what I'm saying. Now, don't get me wrong, here. I am not homophobic. I am also not a prude, because that would be hypocritical given all the dodgy things I myself have done, and in public places, too. But this? This was more than a little unexpected. Most of the guys I do karate with are less tolerant and would have been demoering (you see how well it works?) right there and then and would have just kicked him in his poes (another SA-ism for which there is no decent English word. A poes is the SA equivalent of the c-word all women hate. For a guy to be "kicked in his poes" means to be beaten. Badly. Like, in hospital). But, because as I have said, I'm a nice boy, with a decent upbringing, and politeness and courtesy always prevail, so all I said was "No, I'm fine, thanks." And I smiled politely. And then I got the fuck out of there. So that was Sunday afternoon. Then the Spanish fucked out in the soccer and re-acquired the title of Biggest Losers in Football History. I have never seen such a woeful performance. They weren't even close. What a disappointment. And that was after the excitement of the Grand Prix at Indy. Apart from that, from my window, the bay is a mirror. Two weeks ago I was entranced by the stillness and photofrozen beauty of it. Today, it makes me want to skim a massive rock across its surface, just so I can make sure it's not damaged in some way. In fact, that's probably the best way I can describe demoering - the uncontrollable desire to break stuff. laters