My mother had super powers, but no one ever believed me. They weren’t super powers like comic book heroes have. Rather, they were more practical super powers that made my childhood extremely unbearable. For example, just by looking at a new friend that I brought home after school, my mother could tell if he would be a bad influence on me or not.

She could even predict if he would wind up in jail and in how many years. I never believed her analyses and I was sure she was completely wrong, but I couldn’t defend my new friends either. It was just easier not to bring them home anymore.

Somehow, she knew everything that I did. When I got tired of my paper route, I quit without telling anyone. I rode my bike home about two blocks away in about two minutes. As soon as I went into the house, my mother was standing by the door waiting for me with her arms crossed and she was glaring at me as I stood there silently. Then she asked, “Why did you quit your job?”

I never did find out how she knew I had quit, but somehow she knew! She could sense my every move no matter where I was. When I was little, I was only allowed to ride my bike around the block. By the time I was twelve, I was allowed to ride for about a two-block radius.

One day, as I was about to cross my mother’s imaginary line that I was forbidden to cross, I heard her yelling at me. How could she know where I was? Anyway, she yelled, “¡David! ¿A dónde vas?” I looked behind me so sure that I would see her there, but she wasn’t there! But I had heard her voice loud and clear.

She also had x-ray vision. Whenever someone sent me a card in the mail for my birthday or some other special occasion, not only did she know if there was money in the card, but she also knew exactly how much money was in the card. But the one thing we both knew for sure was that she would talk me out of my money. She would play on my sense of gratitude for her being my mother. She would remind me how she had raised me, provided me with a good education, and had also provided me with loving relatives who cared enough about me to send me money. She knew exactly what to say. I never kept any of my gift money.

My mother also knew that my first girlfriend would make a fine wife. She could tell just by looking at her. I pointed out to her that she was wrong when I got divorced. Of course, she didn’t believe it. Somehow, I was entirely responsible for the divorce and proving my mother wrong.

Whenever I think of all the excuses that students have given me, I always think of Renee first. She was in my Spanish III class with five other students. This college didn’t have a foreign language requirement, so all the students were in the class because they genuinely wanted to learn Spanish. I remember when I gave them the midterm exam, the department head asked me how the students did. I said that everyone got an A, but that I wasn’t surprised because they all studied extremely hard. Well, the department head didn’t like my answer. She said that she found it hard to believe that the entire class got an A. She said that department expected the grades to form a bell curve. I said that if a student earned an A, I would feel obligated to only give an A to that student and nothing else. At the end of the semester, I assigned every student a hard-earned A. That was my last semester there.

But back to Renee. She was very pretty in a plain sort of way, but not extremely beautiful. She had light brown hair and hazel eyes. She was thin and of average height. Whenever we had to act out a dialogue from the textbook, she really poured her heart out into it. Oh, yes, she was a theater major. We also had a student named Joe who was studying to be a broadcaster, so he would always read the directions for the grammar exercises in his deep, well-modulated voice. Sometimes he would act as the narrator for our dialogues. He would announce such things as, “El día siguiente,” or whatever else needed clarifying. In one dialogue, Renee played a tourist at a restaurant in Spain. She asks the waiter what different meals on the menu are. Apparently, she can’t find anything that she would like to eat. She’s getting flustered by all this. Finally, the waiter says that they do have something that they serve to most Americans who eat there: Hamburgers! Well, for a simple dialogue that most Spanish students wouldn’t take all that seriously, Renee memorized the lines in about a minute and then demonstrated a wide range of emotions that added tremendously to the performance. We all had fun with this simple little dialogue. I really enjoyed this class.

I gave a lot of homework, but since there were only six students, I painstakingly corrected everything they did. The students complained, but since I actually read and corrected everything, no one complained. Then, Renee missed a whole week of class, and she didn’t notify me in any way. When she showed up to class the next week, she said she was sick. She would explain everything to me during my office hours. Well, she said she missed class because she was extremely sick and had to go to her doctor in Champaign, who used to be her mother’s doctor. She didn’t tell me her illness and I didn’t press her to tell me what it was.

She started missing class more frequently. She finally came to my office to explain her situation. She closed the door behind her and told me to sit down. She sat down, but then said nothing. I asked her what she wanted to tell me. Finally, she said, “I have cervical cancer.” She explained how her mother had died of cervical cancer, so she went to her mother’s doctor who regularly tested Renee for cervical cancer. “I’m only twenty-two!” she said. “I don’t want to die!” She hugged me and I hugged her back as she sobbed uncontrollably. I told her that she should worry about getting healthy more than anything else.

She was graduating that semester, and she was suddenly struggling with all her classes. She came back to my office a couple weeks later explaining how her doctor was going to give her a hysterectomy in order to save her life. She cried because now she would never have children. I comforted her the best I could. The surgery was scheduled for a couple of weeks later, after the semester ended. Well, she made up all the work and got an A on the final exam and an A for the final grade. I told her to call me if she ever needed to talk. I never knew how her surgery turned out. And I never heard from her again, either.

Eduardo Garcia was the only real Mexican in the neighborhood. And no one could talk him out of it. Eddy, as he was known, was the neighborhood bully, the terror of the classroom, and the pride and joy of his parents. He had a stocky build, red hair, freckles, blue eyes, and light skin. But he still looked Mexican. His sister Graciela, who greatly resembled Eddy but looked even more Mexican, was also in our grade at Holy Cross School with Eddy and me.

Eddy was a year behind in school because he was so smart, or so he told us. I remember once in the second grade, before school started, he took off his belt and started hitting me with it. I tried unsuccessfully to defend myself. Eddy was much bigger than me. Then the school bell rang and we went in to school. Sister Bartholomew saw that I was crying and asked me why. I tried to tell her in my best English, but the class laughed when I said, “Eddy hitted me with his strap.” Of course, Eddy denied everything in a very believable fashion and that was the end of that incident.

Over the years, Eddy acted as if we were friends. One day, he invited himself to my house after school even though I made all kinds of excuses why he couldn’t come over. I was afraid of him ever since he hit me with his belt. He didn’t listen to me and he came over to house at 4546 S. Marshfield Avenue anyway. He was surprised that the hallway door was always unlocked. He saw my bike in the second-floor hallway outside our apartment door. We never locked the bikes up because no one knew the bikes were there. The next day, my bike is gone. My mother called the police and we go to Eddy’s house to look for my bike. I had described it in detail to the police. I only found the wheels of my bike on another bike. Well, the police made Eddy give me the wheels immediately. And he had to give me the rest of the bike by the next day, or I could call the police again and they would come back with me to Eddy’s house for my bike. Sure enough, the next day, the rest of my bike is in my hallway. After that, Eddy didn’t talk to me very much anymore, much to my relief. I think he over-reacted and took the entire incident way too personally.

A few years later, we were sitting on the stairs of the field house at Davis Square Park just hanging out until dark, but before curfew, on a warm summer night. It was one of those nights where we were all bonding talking about everything and anything. That night, everyone there at the park was Mexican, except for Chuck, the wannabe Mexican who was actually more Mexican than some of the actual Mexicans there.

Anyway, someone started talking about a previous trip to Mexico and soon everyone began recounting his or her favorite trip to Mexico. Suddenly, Eddy showed up. No one in our group liked him, but everyone was afraid of him. Eddy asked what we were talking about and we told him Mexico. He smiled and immediately took over the conversation, cutting off anyone who tried to say anything. Eddy asked a few questions of everyone such was when and where and how and what they did in Mexico.

Then, he said, “You call that going to Mexico? That’s not going to Mexico!” We knew better than to contradict him. “When I went to Mexico,” he continued, “we drove there in a pickup truck. That’s going to Mexico. I didn’t go to a city and live in a house with relatives. No! I rode on horseback away from all the cities and I slept in a tent. I wore a holster with guns and I hunted for my own food. That’s going to Mexico!”

Well, no one said anything and Eddy finally left. We were relieved when he did. But he really ruined the wonderful night we were having until he showed up. We all agreed that we should all pitch in and send him back to Mexico.

Perhaps I spend way too much time on the Internet. But I don’t think so. Am I addicted? Of course not. I could walk away from the computer at any time! I mean, once I finish this blog entry. And, I’ll stay away from my computer until my next blog entry tomorrow. So you see? I’m not addicted to the Internet!

Okay, I must admit that I have been using computers ever since Bill Gates invented MS-DOS and lifted the C:> prompt from UNIX, with enough slight modifications to make it look original. And, I’ve been using Instant Messages even before AOL offered IMing to their subscribers.

My friend Vito showed me how to send an Instant Message at UIC in 1991. We used to IM each other all the time. In a school of about 25,000 students, there were only about five of us at UIC IMing each other. I would always check to see who was online and then IM them. I really enjoyed IMing strangers out there in cyber space. I’m not even sure why. Now that I think of it, I’ve always loved talking to strangers since I was little–even when they weren’t listening.

Anyway, over the years, I’ve met a lot of people in cyber space through IMing and chat rooms. I love talking to total strangers and I’ve met a few interesting ones. One that I occasionally remember is joie.

One day, out of the blue, she IMs me. How she found me, I’ll never know. I did the asl thing and she told me she was f/27/Phillipines. That is the one thing I noticed about about every female I ever met on the Internet: She is always 27! I mean, ALWAYS!

So I met joie, her screen name, about four years ago when she introduced herself to me. I figured she was just another scammer, so I didn’t take her too seriously. Usually, I just like to chitchat online for awhile and then I never hear from that person again. And usually that’s how it happens.

However, joie was very persistent. I tried everything to discourage her from getting too involved with me, but she insisted. I was too old for her I told her. She lived too far away. Nothing dissuaded her. Age was not a barrier. She was actually an American dental student from Illinois. Her English was very good so I believed her. But something was really amiss. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I kept waiting for her to ask for money or to lay some sort of scam on me. Then one day, I didn’t hear from her anymore.

About a year later, I receive another IM from joie. This time she’s in Singapore. But I thought she was in the Philippines! She told me that she was never even in the Philippines. And, get this, she was still 27! Just to confirm that she was the same person with whom I had spoken before, I asked her to describe me, which she did better than I had expected because she remembered almost every personal fact about me that I had told her.

She still had the same screen name, so I asked her what it meant. Again she told me that is was an acronym for “just on internet enough.” But something was wrong. But what? I still don’t know. Anyway, she still insisted that when she finished her dental internship in Singapore, she would return to Elgin, Illinois, so she could marry me. I could feel the scam coming on.

But wait! She was very serious and sincere about the whole thing. When we chatted, she always wrote in perfect English with very few typos. She was actually quite witty. Then one day, she says that she wants to e-mail me a very personal letter so that I may understand her better. In this letter, she explains how her father had died when she was fourteen. When her mother remarried, her stepfather raped her several times until she went away to college. She was afraid of what he would do to her, so she never reported the rapes. I didn’t know what to make of this letter.

When she IMed me the next time, I told her I was very sorry for what had happened to her. Anyway, she still wanted to marry me. I had been telling her all along that we would never get married for all the reasons that I had alread enumerated to her. But she was persistent! Then she sent me some pictures of herself. They were obviously taken by a professional photographer. She was definitely American, or so I thought as I saw her pictures. She was very pretty with short brown hair and blue eyes. Then, I don’t hear from her for about three months. I figured I would never hear from her again. Good riddance!

Well, one day, three months later, she IMs me again. Why hadn’t she IMed before? She was sick. I keep pressing her for more information and she finally tells me. She has malaria. I don’t really believe her. I’m sure that this time she’ll ask for money. But no! She doesn’t. She is continuing her dental internship despite her illness. She is bedridden for days. Some days, she interrupts our chat so that she can go to the doctor. She promises me that she will get better and then she’ll come to Illinois to marry me.

I keep telling her that we’ll never get married, but she’s persistent. Then, she suddenly stops IMing me. I figured she got sucked up by that mythical black hole in cyber space. Then, I receive this unexpected e-mail from her. She tells me how sad it was that we never got together. She even wrote a poem for me, or so she wrote in her e-mail. In the poem, she writes about all the things we missed out because we never met: our first kiss, getting caught in the rain, walking hand in hand, etc.

About a year later, joie IMs me again. She still has the same screen name, she’s still 27, she’s still in Singapore, she still has malaria, and she still knows enough personal facts about me for me to be sure it’s her.

However, she begins talking to me as if she had never met me. She tells me some facts about herself that I don’t recognize. For example, now she is no longer from Elgin, Illinois. She sends me some more pictures of herself. Only she is no longer white. She’s inexplicably black now. I broach the subject subtlely. But she insists that I’m mistaken.

I’m sure she only wants money from me. But she doesn’t ask for any. I am obviously IMing the same person as before, but something is terribly wrong! What? I don’t know. Suddenly, she stops all communication to me. And that was the last I heard of her. And she never even once asked me for money. I was always awaiting some sort of scam that never materialized.

This joie will always remain an enigma to me. Luckily, I knew better than to get emotionally attached to her. Who she was or what she wanted from me, I’ll never know! But I did learn to be “just on Internet enough.” No more, no less. That’s my joie de vivre.

Once, I saw my father wearing some very new dress pants. I was surprised to see him so dressed up. Then he asks me, “Guess how much I paid for these pants?” I really wasn’t sure how much they cost, but knowing my father, I knew he didn’t pay full price. I said, “Thirty dollars.” He said I was way too high. I kept lowering the price until I reached ten dollars and even then I was wrong, so I gave up. My father had the biggest smile on his face. “I only paid fifty cents!” How? He went to the Salvation Army! And just to prove it to me, he unbuckled his belt and showed me the price tag that was still stapled to the waistband.