Castration Doesn’t Hurt
by Marina J. Neary
as told by Bailey Griff
Part 1: What You Could Get for $35 Back in 1998
ASCII to ASCII, DOS to DOS. That was pretty much my mantra for the first thirty years of my life. Don’t have a heart attack just yet. I’m not the first English major to become a computer geek. I breathed algorithms and sweated programming languages, bled XML and ejaculated Javascript.
Then one day my Mommy slipped me a brochure about an upcoming Irish festival in Philly. She thought it would be a good idea for me to unplug myself from my Macintosh for a day and reconnect with my Celtic roots.
My Daddy’s daddy, or maybe my great-uncle second cousin, was from County Mayo. Or was it Roscommon? Not sure. They didn’t keep good records back then, which is a shame. Anyway, he sailed to America during the Famine on this ship called Cornflower (or was it Corn Beef?) and landed in Hell’s Kitchen.
From there he came down to central Pennsylvania and settled in the coal-mining region. So, my Mommy thought it would be a great opportunity for me to go and learn about my ancestors. For thirty-five bucks you basically got a full-body Blarney experience, like a miniature trip to Ireland. All you can eat blood sausage, all you can drink Guinness.
The only thing that wasn’t included was the raffle tickets for a chance to win a signed U-2 poster. Dude, I’m there! Maybe I’d run into some more Irish computer geeks. Maybe we could discuss some latest Mac software over a pint of Guinness.
Well, I didn’t run into any computer geeks, but I ran into this college chick, Rinnie Olenski. To be exact, she ran into me. No, not ran — bulldozed! We were standing in the same line for beer, and she just started verbally spamming me, in Gaelic. Having intimidated me sufficiently with her linguistic abilities, she took pity on me and switched to English.
She had that Hammer Glamour look. I confess, I have a weak spot for chicks from the ’60s horror films. Rinnie was wearing a tight leather dress, high-heeled stocking boots and enough eyeliner to make any male raccoon want to mate with her. She came to an Irish festival looking like she was going to the set of The Avengers.
It wasn’t just her boobs that impressed me but also the rib cage to which they were attached. It was so wide and roomy that you could park a WWII tank inside! Now here’s a woman who probably never suffered from asthma. Geez! Her lung capacity must have exceeded mine by at least sixty percent.
This observation left me humbled and a little emasculated, to be honest. But it wasn’t the right time to fight over gender issues. When you haven’t had a steady girlfriend since your junior year in college, you don’t exactly look the gifted horse in the mouth, or, in my case, in the rib.
Her speaking accent was a peculiar mixture of British and Central European. She basically sounded like the Bride of Dracula who had spent a few semesters at Oxford. Later on it turned out that Rinnie was actually a Polish Jew, or a Jewish Pole, from Russia, or one of the nearby republics. She hated her heritage and wanted to escape it.
Her biggest, most pressing question was: how does one turn a Jewish princess into an Irish rose? With plastic surgery — God’s gift to ethnic beauties! Rinnie had been trying to save for a nose job since the age of sixteen, but then every time some minor emergency would set her back. The poor thing kept having car accidents, hip injuries, kneecap fractures, minor concussions, enlarged lymph nodes that required biopsies. All those annoying trifles kept her from getting the nose of her dreams.
Personally, I thought her nose looked just fine. It certainly didn’t detract from her ample boobs, child-bearing hips, dancer’s legs or any other parts that a starving heterosexual thirty-year old man would be more interested in.
Copyright © 2011 by Marina J. Neary
