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We had been held over for an extra day in Toronto because of the snow but on Friday we were able to get back. In the airport we didn’t have any trouble getting through customs and into the terminal where the plane takes off so my dad and I both got our shoes shined. We tried to guess where one of the men shining our shoes was from. He looked like he was from India, Pakistan, and Egypt but he was actually from Tel Aviv Israel. In general if someone thinks it will be hard to guess where they are from I can’t figure it out. But I play the game every time anyways. One time one of our clients challenged me to guess where he was from. I guessed India and Pakistan. It turned out he was Egyptian. Next time I’ll guess India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Israel. Eventually I’ll just go through the whole list of countries.

Before the flight we went to the TGIFridays bar in the terminal near the gate we were leaving from. We couldn’t find a table near the bar so we had to go to the empty glass cage that is better known as the smoker section. We were the only ones there and I felt like we looked like what humans in a zoo would look like on an alien planet. Having been through the full family tree on my mother’s side of the family Lisa and I spent time with my dad diagramming the family tree on his side of the family.

We hit on some interesting facts and people like my great uncle Audie, who had been a revolutionary interested in fighting in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war. The Spanish Civil War was the prelude to World War II. The Nazi Luftwaffe got their practice in Spain running bombing runs there and one bombing run resulted in the total destruction of the city of Guernica. Guernica is most famous to people because of the Picasso painting about the massacre, and not the massacre itself, and especially not as the beginning of the Nazis practicing mucking about in the world and doing evil things.

I also learned about my grandmother’s aunt Becky who had some fame in her time. She hung out with Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. They were all anarchists. The story goes something like this. Berkman tried to assassinate a steel magnate but at the time was the lover of Emma Goldman. When he returned from prison he was distrustful of most of the world and only would consort with a small number of people including Emma Goldman who was then starting to get a little older, maybe 35, and a young woman who he took an interest in and also became a lover with who was 16, Rebecca Edelson (aunt Becky). Becky had her own claim to fame when she got arrested during an anarchist fight during a union strike against the railroads where she was helping the railroad workers strike. While in prison she went on a hunger strike and became the first woman in modern history to have tried a political protest through a hunger strike. Somewhere in the archives of history a headline in the New York Times reads - “Girl ends eating strike by eating bon-bon.” That girl is Becky.

On the flight I spent most of the time reading Infinite Jest. It is obvious that David Foster Wallace has read Faulkner since I think of it as a modern equivalent to The Sound and The Fury. It is a little less pedantic and more drug oriented. I especially liked some passages on pg. 38 about a high-school relationship and on pg. 48 about a Canadian documentary about a paranoid schizophrenic that is studied in the show. The schizophrenic is afraid that someone is trying to inject radioactive materials into his bloodstream to extract information from his brain. Later in the documentary they take a PET scan of his brain to understand it better and inject radioactive materials to highlight the brain activity. I also liked this joke from Infinite Jest although when I retold it to Lisa she said she had heard it before.

“What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic? … You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there is a dog”.