cimorene

Last night we were in Stockmann Buffet after the Lucia procession, warming up with hot beverages and desserts, and

waxjism got into a long and extremely loud discussion of the various brain-scarring porn scenes they had seen in the past, especially in reference to the guy who plays Ray in Generation Kill, and no, you don't need to tell me his name, because I don't care and will immediately forget again. Anyway, the conversation included such gems as - the concept of keeping one's voice down is foreign to my wife, who would be annoyed if I suggested the possibility of being ashamed to yell about porn in a restaurant -

"I was like, 'Is he actually going to come? Yeah, he is'."

"Because masturbation is just really not sexy."

"And it's like, 'Let's have sex with children now!' I mean, they're of age, but they didn't look it."

Anyway, in Finland everybody, or nearly everybody, does understand English, but it is slightly more private, because a) children don't know it¹ and b)most people's English isn't quite good enough to follow a fast conversation and c)many people automatically tune out of conversations not in their native language in any case (although given what I've learned about my buds being unable to understand rural Swedish dialects, I wonder if we could just teach them to speak Southern and use it as a successful secret code?).

So then we got ready to leave and

morningfine was putting on her coat and Wax goes, "Dude, you're being felt up by a kid." Apparently she hadn't even noticed? So there was a surprised huff of laughter and we turned around and indeed, right behind

morningfine's chair was a tiny high chair containing a tiny fat toddler crowned with angelic brown pre-Raphaelite curls, and he was twisted around in order to put both hands on her ass! Or, actually, her skirt.

She was wearing an A-line skirt made out of some vintage sheets from the 70s bearing a giant cream, marigold, and salmon-colored hippie print of flowers, and his mother quickly explained in charmingly accented English that he loved the flowers. It took him a minute to let go, too. Meanwhile, the father was talking in Swedish on the phone, and the mom seemed to be a native speaker of Spanish or Portuguese perhaps by the accent. At any rate it seemed likely that she had understood the whole conversation. Hopefully her child only speaks Swedish and Spanish, though, and not English. And isn't a language prodigy who knows what masturbation and sex are.

1. Although my niece Carmela, who is 5, understands a LOT of English, not surprisingly given how much of a GIANT TV&movie geek her dad and aunt are, and how much Wax & I have been around speaking English with her dad constantly since she was tiny. She understands a lot of English, but we are not actually sure exactly how much, since she has made only a few attempts to speak it; however, the result of telling her what something meant is usually "I know THAT." Anyway, it's not a 100% effective secret language on her either. I keep telling Mece he should use lolcat instead. As for me & Wax, I'll have to teach her some phrases of Spanish and Japanese (my suggestion that she remember kirai for visits to her mom was met with dubiousness).