Te Anau

fasten your seatbelts, bogans and birds, as this promises to be a scattered ride.

Part One -

A question I get a lot of is: Jeremy, why aren't you updating your blog more often, are you gay or something? Lest you get the impression that I travel in latently homophobic circles, all of those questions come from Jesse Andrews, but he asks them all the time, in a manner he finds charming, I'm sure.

Here's the thing: I am now one with the outdoors. Everytime a gust of wind tousles your hair? That's me. Everytime you look up into the winter sky and a sliver of warmth comes Steve McQueening it's way through the hostile clouds, that's me. Wherever a child is starving, or a man's getting beat up by a cop, or other stuff from the cheeseball last chapter of Grapes of Wrath, that's socialism signaling its time has come, but socialism can get it's own blog, you know? The point is, I'm not on email very often, and when I am on I'm usually only on for ten minutes. I have a couple more substantive blog entries saved on my computer, but I need to hookup my laptop to the internet to upload them, which is problematic as high speed internet access is fairly novel in New Zealand and my computer has decided to react to me leaving it on standby and in a hot trunk for a week by shutting down every five minutes, like, all the way down, blue screen of death, cooling fans sputtering, game over. So I'm giving it a breather/spending most of my time looking for a place to watch the Superbowl tomorrow and condescendingly explain both the instant replay regulations and the reason why all Budweiser ads are hilarious to New Zealanders tomorrow.

Part Two-

I not a racist, especially if you don't consider El Salvadorians a legitimate race. Nor am I an anti-semite. My first serious girlfriend? Jewish! Potato pancakes? Two of my favorite things rolled up in one! Jerry Stiller, father on King of Queens and anchor of perhaps the most jewish comic family in entertainment today? Hilarious! That said, Israelis stink.

Specifically Israeli backpackers, who travel in New Zealand in large groups - unlike Germans, who wait until they're retired and then move through in testy, efficient couples), and Americans, who, I swear to god, all travel with their identically pleasant looking - that's neither praise nor backhanded dig, incidentally, it's like instead of a noses, eyes, and mouths they have "PLEASANT LOOKING" inked across their faces - girlfriends and all went to fucking U Wisconsin - Madison and all think I'm their best friend because of my flat drawl and reputation along the hostel circuit as "Magic Hands," which is another blog entry entirely.

Sample German Couple, a play I just wrote:

Setting - Five people in an unmanned internet cafe in Te Anau. Two are this German couple.

German Man: (loudly, to the small room at large) Does anyone know anything about the internet? the hotmail? the hotmail here does not work.

German Woman: (loudly, but in an aside to her husband) you are being very loud.

(silence from the other three of us)

German Man: (louder now)THE HOTMAIL, I CANNOT FIND THE MESSAGES. I FOUND THE ONE, BUT THE SECOND I CANNOT FIND.

(silence)

German woman: (also too loud, but matter of factly, not strained) YOU ARE TOO LOUD.

Anyway, holy shit, these guys - gangs of unruly, 20-something Israeli backpackers - stink. The smell bad, I mean, they seem to share the one shower a day rule ingrained into them during their time with the IDF as being shared between the six of them. I'm living with some now, and they're very nice, and if you know me you know I'm not Captain Hygiene by any stretch - some of you may remember the time freshman year when I saw a bar of soap for the first time in two weeks, for some reason thought it was a spider and threw it at Bud Vana, who is afraid of spiders, to unsatisfactory results. But I'm cleaner than Israelis, apparently. Except for now, as I wore a strip of flesh off my hip with my pack on the Hump Ridge and apparently bled all over my shirt last night, so I've been walking around researching Te Anau coffee shops with this huge patch of dried blood on the side of my shirt. In case you were wondering about my Hebrew Giving Tree shirt, it just says "The Giving Tree" in hebrew on the back, incidentally. My relief in knowing I'm not walking around with "fuck you, Palestinians" scrawled across my torso almost makes me forgive my Israeli roommates for turning me off cheese, particularly goat cheese, forever.

Almost.