¡Cinco de mayo!

Incase you were wondering whether or not that was the upper half of a Dora the Explorer piñata strapped to the back of my motorcycle...go with your instinct.

In the Spanish class that I "teach," the girls asked if we could do something fun for Cinco de Mayo. So I decided that making a homemade piñata full of awful Mexican candy would be a great thing to do. After searching for a Mexican market in west Salt Lake, we stumbled upon one sort of by the train tracks, almost under the freeway, behind a bunch of buildings. The only entrance was through a big bay door with thick strips of plastic covering it. Like sometimes you see in the back of a grocery store, indicating areas where normal civilians aren't supposed to go.

After browsing through the candy section, and checking out the staggering selection of piñatas, Colin talked me into splitting one with him, for a birthday party we were going to later on. He surmised that, after we beat the hell out of it, we could probably patch it up, and I could refill it with all of the candy that presumably, as adults (and given the nasty nature of Mexican candy in general) we wouldn't likely eat.

So I agreed, we strapped Dora to his bike, and off we went.

Because we ended up clubbing Dora around midnight in a friend's living room—who happens to live above a terribly grumpy old woman named Shirley, who does nothing but wander around the complex in a bathrobe, bitching about this and that all day—the piñata sustained pretty minimal damage. Nobody wants the wrath of a Shirley in a bathrobe at midnight because of a noise violation. Ultimately, the legs and crotch region were a total loss, but the upper torso area maintained a great deal of structural integrity.

So I packed up the remaining candy (which was most of it—one only needs to eat a single strawberry flavored hard candy with a salt-chili powder packed core to realize that he or she never wants to do that again) and took Dora home, and did some patchwork. I mostly just had to close up her gaping torso, which rendered her as good as an almost new, upper half of a piñata.

Albeit clearly a second hand, wind ravaged piñata, the girls were thrilled at the prospect of destroying a candy packed Dora with a cane, instead of studying subjunctive verbs.

The second thing that made Cinco de Mayo great, was a text I received from a mystery person, to which I decided to respond, due to its emphatic nature. (My responses are in the green.)((Also, "Can you," followed by 8 question marks, was the very first message I received.)

61 questions marks, in case you were curious.




And then I died. An infinitely better result than I ever could have hoped for.

I hope he/she found the Drake. I also hope the Drake gets kicked in the crotch for standing up a 9 year old. And on Cinco de Mayo of all days. FOR SHAME.