My childhood was filled with a disgusting trait that doesn't look good on anyone. Envy. Envious of all the kids in school that were eating corndogs. Growing up Muslim eliminated the possibility of eating the pork infused chicken/pigeon meat rod coated in the crispy, yet spongy, exoskeleton that is the key to the corn dog. This all changed in March of 2004 with the introduction of ALL BEEF CORNDOGS. I'm sure I'm lying about the date...but who cares. This brings us to today. I've been losing weight because I misheard the College Freshman "15" as the College Freshman "50." I'm almost at the weight to my pre-competitive eating days...but I have my fall backs. Today, I was going to get a salad for lunch. I ended up with a corndog. Well, a corndog and a pastrami sandwich. I couldn't tell you which one was the entree and which was the side. I got a flashback to when I first moved to Portland and was eating bologna sandwiched and corndogs for every meal until that pack of 20 corndogs was empty. The true struggle with this meal, however, isn't that I couldn't determine which was side and which was entree....it was that I was driving. I eat and drive all the time, but this is the first time in my life that an ambulance appears behind me and whips their sirens on...waiting for me to move the fuck out of the way. I didn't know which item to put down...because I didn't understand the hierarchy of my food options. I had my right hand on the pastrami, left on the corn dog. So I just braked. I panicked....the ambulance driver was now also blowing his horn at me. I looked in the rear view and could see what I could only assume was screaming and cussing me out to get out of the way. So if you lost a loved one, in Vancouver, WA due to emergency services not arriving in time...just know that the entree is whatever you make it.
I was always wise beyond my years. In elementary school, I completely understood the concept of racial stereotypes and saw how they potentially hold true. Can you believe that? Baby Marmar so smart he was able to see these small separations between a group of people, so young, so innocent, yet so different. Let's start with the black kids. Was it a stereotype that they all had outty bellybuttons while the rest of us had innies? I don't know, but it was and is true. I haven't seen a black belly button in years, but I can assume they found their way back inside. There was this kid named Tod in first grade who used to lift his shirt and flick his outty belly button. He provided me and Austin Reeves hours of entertainment. Not only did the black kids have outties, but they also opened their ketchup packets in the most creative ways. Everyone else would follow the rules, and tear at the perforated edge. Not my black friends. They used to twist that motha fucka til it POP POPPED! Some would fold that motha in half, then bite a hole in dat bitch, and squirt it all over their fries!
The Mexican kids want nothing to do with you if you're not Mexican. They will also only speak Mexican to make you think that they only know Mexican and to remind you that you, are in fact, not Mexican. We had an influx of Mexicans in 6th grade. I was really excited because I thought they were like me. They weren't. And they let me know that on a daily basis. They wanted nothing to do with me.
The white kids' parents loved them. If you took a look outside after school where the parents are all lined up in their cars to pick up the kids, you would have guessed that they segregated the line and put the whites up front. They didn't. They were just lined up in order of who loves their kids the most. I had to walk home from school.
I always found it interesting that I was never part of a stereotype. I was universally accepted....so I thought. I was too naive and stupid to realize I was in fact categorized like the rest of the class....and it was the worst one of all. I, Marmar Muhammad Abdulhadsfasdfl, along with some other Indians and SE Asians, fell into the stereotype of kids who had smelly backpacks. My backpack wasn't even smelly, it just smelled like the spices my mom used to cook our meals. Probably because she would pack my backpack with a makeshift lunchbox with those homemade meals.
"What are you having for lunch?"
"Lunchables! What about you?"
"...a yogurt sandwich."
"EWWWWWWW!!!!!!"
"Fuck off, Tod."
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