He lived in a small house, right outside the town of Osh, in an Uzbek neighborhood, mahalla. It was in the evening and we had to sit on the bench by the door, covered under yet green grape tree. On the bench with us there was a elderly Uzbek woman with a little boy. He apparently feel off a horse and she needed to consult the magician about the demons that made him fall. There was also a large businessman, his SUV parked outside, who kept checking something on his cellphone.

I had an odd feeling about all of that. At the beginning I wanted to laugh but then I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Confronting our parents is not something that we do in our family.

We entered the house, it had a smell of a very old carpet and were asked to sit on the blanket on the floor. An old man, bald, much like any other man his age in Osh came in, talked quietly to my mother first and then turned to me.

“There are a lot of dark powers waiting for you in America,” he said to me. “People are jealous here, jealousy creates demons in people.”

I nodded and then he performed a ritual. He told me to lie on the floor and tuck up t-shirt. Then he got a piece of paper and placed it on my stomach. He a small container of water that he started saying things to. He then lifted the container above my body, did a couple of circles and dropped a couple of drops on the paper. Throughout all this my mother looked extremely serious and concentrated.

The guy folded the piece of paper, wrote something on it, folded it and gave it to me.

“This should keep you safe from the demons,” he said.

My mother thanked him, as if he just cut my appendix off with that magic and gave him a five hundred som bill (somewhere around $15). He tried to to resist it, shaking his head and looking down, but took the bill nonetheless and put it in his pocket.

My mother took that piece of paper later that night and a small leather bag for it with a rope to put around my neck.

Maybe it would have worked, if I actually believed in this stuff.

“I don’t play sports. My presence would actually be bad for our team,” is the default answer that I give him.

It doesn’t work. He probably thinks that I’m being humble, which would be funny because I think that I have absolutely nothing to be humble about.

Anyway.

Today they started the game at 7.30 PM and since I had to go to work at 8, I decided to come see the game. Antoine got very happy and hugged me only to find out that I was not joining, that I was just stopping by. I felt guilty to a degree but at the same time I actually do not know how to play soccer.

They started playing.

A funny feeling crept up to me soon after the game started, as I started getting interested and cheering for our team. There I was, standing in front of the audience seats, my hands in the pockets of my army jacket, yelling, waving my hands. Have you ever seen actual team coaches at the games?

This suddenly put me in a childhood mode. I started pretending to be a coach, getting into a role, yelling louder, imitating them the best way I could.

I used to do that a lot, when I was a child. When I was writing homework, I would imagine being a scientist or an engineer or a philosopher working on difficult world-solving problems. Walking around, I would imagine being an old poet that looked at everything around himself and was constantly overwhelmed be the feelings that the surroundings evoked in him; planning to write a poem about this and about that. Same thing happened when I played sports, even though I had never been good at it. Standing behind everyone in defense, I would imagine being a big shot defense player at a prestigious club.

I forgot that. Somewhere along the way through high school and college, I completely forgot about that. Somewhere there I decided to try to find myself.

It didn’t work.

Meddle is the best Pink Floyd album. It’s the one, where Roger Waters’ phoniness had not yet taken over the band and they are at the peak of their creativity. This album gets overlooked too much because of other Pink Floyd albums, which had more ambition (Dark Side of the Moon, WishYou Were Here and even The Wall). What I like about Meddle is that they don’t seem to want to try to say anything in this album, the ambitions are purely musical. It starts with uplifting and even alerting One of These Days (I’m gonna cut you into little pieces) but then dives into an exploration of musical themes and topics. From soft and whimsical Pillow of the Winds, to fearless Fearless, through very relax and chill San Tropez to American Seamus. It culminates with a journey of a lifetime, the song worthy of the original Pink Floyd Sound, Echoes, that originally took an entire side of the vinyl. Pink Floyd knows how it is are in this album and it shares that greatness with the rest of us.

Listen to it.

How good do comic book movies get? You shouldn’t consider The Dark Knight to be a comic book movie, because it’s not, because it’s intended to be a full-blown thriller with little resemblance to the original material. So now, how good do comic book movies get? Was Spiderman good? Or The Fantastic Four? Or The X-men? With all due respect to those huge mega-movies, I honestly don’t think that they come even close to Watchmen.

Most of the crap that this movie gets from the viewers and reviewers is not fair. Not all of it. Surely there’s some poor acting and the plot is not entirely the same as in the original and some of the strong imagery didn’t transform but overall I thought that the movie did what it was supposed to do. The characters are the same, the moral questions are the same, so the whole movie feels the same as the comic book. Even a bit “cooler” maybe, because of the artistic style of the movie, with the slow motion, music and fight scenes.

Obviously, it had to have those fight scenes to be kick ass, otherwise the movie would seriously boring for the most part (at almost 3 hours, that would be bad). So yeah, I believe that Watchmen is pretty much as good as comic book movies can get.

Once upon a time I came across a blog entry that advised on what to do, when you have to do something but don’t want want. I don’t remember the exact blog (and hoping that the authors are not reading this) but the cure was this: do nothing. By nothing they didn’t mean not doing anything to resolve the matter of utter laziness, they meant doing nothing, not listening to music, not reading any blogs, not looking at the pictures, facebook, gmail, twitter and everything else that imply even a tiny quantum of effort (see how I used quantum there? funny, right? because quantum cannot be big or small, it’s as small as it gets, the literal meaning of dx/dt). And then that nothingness is supposed to bore so bad that even the most boring thing of all boring things will seem exciting (granted, of course, you’ve had enough sleep, unlike the majority of sheep at this college).

What I have to do in the next couple of hours (hopefully before closing the library, going to Harvard, kissing Julia or falling asleep) is to write half-page responses to the essays that we were assigned to read. In the beginning these responses did not seem too difficult. But either from limited nature of my mind or unlimited nature of my laziness, I got really, seriously behind on them (God, I’ll be really mad at you, if my Essays professor is reading this right now).

Got nothing to do? Check this out. Trippy.

Must catch up on Biochemistry. Must Must Must.