What Are We Gonna Do With All This Trash?: We Don't Eat Dogs In My Country!

January 04, 2007

We Don't Eat Dogs In My Country!

Ok, so I have a funny story for y'all. I have a new student from Indonesia. He is muslim and speaks limited English. Everyday when I take the lunch order, I have to tell him which lunch contains pork. On this particular day, lunch options were hot dogs or burgers. I told him that hot dogs are made from pork and so I asked him if burgers were ok. He said "Burgers! Burgers! We don't eat dogs in my country! What kind of dogs do Americans eat?" All the while, he kept pointing at the picture of my dog that I keep on my desk. Now . . . that is some funny shit. What was even funnier was my horrible attempt at explaining that hot dogs weren't actually made from dogs. Why are they called hot "dogs" anyway?????

1 comment:

Mike said...: Some say the word was coined in 1901 at the New York Polo Grounds on a cold April day. Vendors were hawking hot dogs (then refered to by their German name, "dachshund") from portable hot water tanks shouting "They're red hot! Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!" A New York Journal sports cartoonist, Tad Dorgan, observed the scene and hastily drew a cartoon of barking dachshund sausages nestled warmly in rolls. Not sure how to spell "dachshund" he simply wrote "hot dog!" The cartoon is said to have been a sensation, thus coining the term "hot dog."

-- from, I swear to God, The National Hot Dog And Sausage Council.; 12:32 AM

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A History Of Trash

Trash, at first, was a pretty cool guy. You know, he’d come over with some beers, and you’d hang out and have a couple of laughs. Maybe Trash brought some weed with him, and you guys tried to sync up Dark Side Of The Moon with The Wizard Of Oz until you remembered you lost your VHS copy of that movie sometime in college and that you fucking hate Pink Floyd. Good times were had, nonetheless.

But then, you don’t know what changed, but Trash started to overstay his welcome. He’d just linger for hours, never taking the hint you wanted him to leave, no matter how many times you yawned obnoxiously or mentioned how early you had to get up tomorrow. Trash just didn’t get it. You were getting older. You didn’t have the time anymore to stay up until 3 a.m. to talk about the Port season of “The Wire” or how much you miss Jawbox. Eventually, you just stopped taking Trash’s phone calls and no longer replied to his group e-mails about sneaking into abandoned mental hospitals.

Last time you saw Trash, he was smoking alone outside a local dive bar, looking down at his decaying and mismatched shoes. You hoped he had been doing well. You hoped he had not been hurt by the disintegration of your friendship. And if he had, you wanted to comfort him. You wanted to tell him that even though people move on with their lives, it doesn’t mean they stop caring. You wanted him to see in your eyes a sincere appreciation for the time you shared, because all the relationships in our lives help make us who we are, and even if you weren’t the best of friends anymore, you wanted him to know that there would always be a piece of Trash in your heart.

But instead, you looked away and crossed the street. You were with your new girlfriend, and you really didn’t want to have to explain Trash to her. She’d never understand.