This post again has a misnomer for a title. Although not entirely.

1. How We Are Hungry (Dave Eggers), p. 58; Fish (the protagonist) is driving to Bakersfield from San Jose, both in California:

Fish passes a huge beef-processing plant, where a hundred thousand cows are kept so close they can’t move their tails enough to swat flies. There is not earth visible below their doomed hides. He rolls up the window, the stench vile, punishing. Those stupid cows, he thinks, born to die, born to be eaten, born to walk in their own feces. Jesus! It smells fetid, bloody and sweet, like human innards, if you could open yourself up and bring it all to your nose and inhale.

I don’t really like this book, not all that much. This has been the best of the short stories that aren’t short-shorts (“On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home” was great, and not just because I have for years now loved titles that follow the old formula of beginning with the word “on”); it’s called “Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance.” This is definitely not the point at which I should’ve entered into Eggers’ oeuvre.

Regardless, I like this passage — in part because I remember this same section of that drive, or one very like it (it’s quite possible that there are two such awful “farms”), and in part just because it’s so demonstrative of the vaguely heavy-handed emotions that Eggers is trying to evoke.

2. On Monday, I went and tutored two 10-year-old girls in English, way up in the northwest of Madrid. It’s a small area that’s in the city proper still, and on the metro line, but should properly be called a suburb I think; it feels different than the rest of the city. These girls spoke very good English, for ten-year-olds; one of their mothers seems to speak some English, but the other speaks essentially none, so I’m not writing it up to their parents. I will say that between school and an unhealthy love for US pop, these kids seem to be doing something very like what the kids who like anime do in the States — forcing themselves into the language. Maybe it’s that. They could also just be bright and motivated.

Anyway, the point is not these girls. On the way back, I stood in the metro station for a few minutes, having just missed a train. Waiting beside me was a young man, with tattoos and a red-green stripe sweater thrown over a shoulder. His shirt said “Love Thy Neighbor” in gothic script; one of his tattoos said “Punk/Ska-core” in a plain font. He had the scruffy sort of beard that you see on young men, men who can’t really grow facial hair, and FTMs on hormone therapy; it didn’t look bad but asked for a redo.

I don’t remember this, because I am pretty awful at remembering images. I wrote it down, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. Not because I wanted to sleep with him (I didn’t really), but because I found myself wanting to talk to him (in Spanish, probably, despite the English tattoo; only in Spain and Germany are there so many kids still getting punk tattoos, and this kid didn’t look German). He looked a bit older than me, and to be honest I probably wouldn’t've liked him very much (for every punk kid I like, there are five I don’t like) — and he probably would’nt’ve liked me, dressed formally for school. But I found myself thinking, gah, here’s where I wish I was outgoing — and here’s where I think people do that thing where they see someone on the metro and then go home and post on the craigslist Missed Connections board. “You: absent-mindedly scratching your punk tattoos on the Metro from Lacoma. Me: writing in my moleskine and listening to a podcast while wearing a sweater. We never looked at each other at the same time. But we could be friends.” And of course I wouldn’t ever post this — but I think I get the appeal.

There are two main stories of Missed Connections that I think of: the one in Ghost World, with a sad-eyed Steve Buscemi. And the other is this website, which someone shared with me a while back; this guy drew a picture of the girl he saw on the subway, and ended up finding her. I remember reading/hearing that it didn’t end up working out, but it’s still a fascinating story. He’s also a talented artist; he’s the one who did this president/Obama image that got around a while back.

Anyway, the second people I wanted to talk about are not people I wanted to talk to, but rather people who I wanted to talk about. (Lots of people-watching happens on the metro, since it’s an enclosed space; I think that’s pretty much always the case.)

I was on the metro coming back from school and I sat next to a man reading a book in English. I couldn’t see the title, but the impression I got from chapter titles was that it was one of those skeptic books, that go over things and say, “Well, is this really the case?” Seated across from him (and from me), were two young women, dressed in super-practical clothing, those sort of leather shoes that make you (me) think school-mistress! (not teacher, oh no — mistress. maybe even schoolmarm; both have a suggestion of oldfashion-ness), and long skirts. They were wearing badges, and I looked at them and saw the word Jesúcristo, and then looked away. Oh. But then I looked again, because the title was longer, although that word was large: under their names it said La Iglesia de Jesúcristo de los Santos de los Ultimas Días. Ohhhhhhhhhh. End-of-story. I never did figure out what these two American-looking Mormon girls were doing here.