Well, as I write this, I am sitting in an empty room–nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor. Nothing but lil’ ol’ me and my computer and all my bags, packed, ready to go. I figured I ought to write some sort of year wrap up kind of post. Well, not really a wrap up, but more of a “see ya later” kind of post. I took last summer off from blogging and will probably do the same again this year, who knows. So! Thanks for reading, especially to my loyal readers! A lot of the time I feel like the posts are aimless and not very interesting, but hopefully someone is enjoying them. I also come up with lots of ideas that I never end up doing… they’re usually huge ideas that I don’t have time for, so maybe this summer I’ll do one of those. Who knows.

Well, tomorrow’s a pretty big day. The big 2-1! Wahoo! haha, I have no idea what to expect… should be interesting. Anyway, I need to go take my bags upstairs and check out, so… sianara for now! Have a great summer everybody and I’ll be seeing you soon…

Note: Sparkling Grape Juice.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, one and all!! Whether you’re a part of my strong Mexican readership or a whitey like myself, it’s nice that on days like this we can all come together and celebrate Mexico… or… Mexicans… or at least tacos. Let’s be honest, nobody really knows what this holiday is about. The translation for “Cinco de Mayo” is vague at best. Cinco? Sounds to me like Sink-o. As in, “Oops, you sink-o my battleship-o.” Or maybe it’s more along the lines of “Put your dishes in the sink-o.” We may never know. Thankfully part of the holiday is in English: Mayo. Personally, I’m not a big fan. I mean, what is that stuff anyway? Some kind of weird butter-like oil? Do you really need to be piling that onto your sangwhich? I say no. Let’s put an end to US mayo usage!

Well, that was a bit of a tangent. Back to the topic at hand: So we have “Sink-o” as in battleship and mayonniase. Now, “de” is a tough one. I had to search the books for it, but it turns out the word has heavy usage in the Chicago area, although it’s often pronounced more like “da.” The loose meaning is “the,” although some small tribes still believe it could be untranslatable in meaning (think: detente, those gay French… and Kissinger). They contend “de” is a conglomerate of meanings, stemming from words like bark (like on a tree), iced tea and cell phone. Again, untranslatable. For our purposes, we’re going to go with the somewhat more mainstream “the.”

Thus, I have concluded Cinco de Mayo means “Sink the Mayo.” I couldn’t agree more, my Mexican friends. Sink it! Sink it now! And while we’re at it, let’s sink relish, as well. I don’t know what it is… I don’t want to know what it is. It just should be gone. And not-so-coincidently, mayonnaise just happens to be, according to wikipedia, one of the “mother sauces” in French cooking. Ah-HA! So it IS evil, after all. (What’s even funnier about all of this is that Cinco de Mayo is ACTUALLY about the Mexican victory over the French in the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, and not Mexican Independence Day, as many believe. That’s called coming full circle in the most ridiculous way possible. And for the purposes of the rest of this post, I will pretend to not know anything that I just told you.)

In the US, Cinco de Mayo is much like St. Patrick’s Day, Oktoberfest and other holidays that were made up in other places and have become excuses for Americans to get their par-tayyyy on. These are, perhaps, the few days out of the year that we acknowledge there are other countries in the world. They better appreciate that, too, or else it’s lights out for them.

I’d like to introduce a new one of these days to the calendar, though. We don’t have enough of them. Thanks to some clever word play on the part of my brother Kevin, I’d like to introduce “Jeety de Mayo.” (Now, of course, we will need to ignore everything I just said about “Mayo” meaning mayo as in mayonnaise. In this case, I think “Mayo” should stand for the month of “May.” Or… sunshine.) Now, you’re probably asking youself, “Bollocks, Jeety of Jeety de Mayo fame, how can I celebrate Jeety de Mayo with my friends?” Well Nigel, I’ll tell you. (You’re a very British Nigel, in this hypothetical.) First, you need a stereo with really big speakers and a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango in the Night.” You will be playing track #7, Little Lies, on repeat for donkey’s years and doing the Charleston. (Not because it’s my favorite song or anything, but because I find it comical in this situation.) If you fancy that, we move on to part two. That includes lots of hooch. After all, the first Jeety de Mayo happens to be landing on May 16, 2007… Jeety’s 21st birthday. So there’s some of this, some of that, probably a screnning of “Dumb and Dumber,” cake, ice cream and Bob’s your uncle. (By the way, I have no idea how this degenerated from post about a Mexican holiday to a bunch of British slang, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can find them here.

I don’t know what I just wrote, but hopefully you do. Finals week is coming up and I’ll probably be losing my mind soon (or have I already), so I don’t know how much posting I’ll get to. Hopefully a lot and I’ll just blow off class, but we’ll see. Alright, peace out my homies.

Two of the better photographs to show up on Jeety’s Joint. I think the phrase “three generations of awkwardness” drescribes the first one. In the second one, I believe I’m showing cinco fingers (counting the thumb), so I thought that was approrpriate. I also think I was telling Scott not to take a picture of me in the voice of a strong black woman.