Bohol is an island province of
the Philippines. It consists of the island itself plus 75 surrounding islands. Its
capital is Tagbilaran. Its most popular tourist attraction is the Chocolate
Hills, which are called that because they sort of look like a range of giant chocolate chips. If they really
were made of chocolate, you know some corporation like Hershey’s would have
seized the land and strip mined the hills a long time ago.
I wouldn’t know anything about
Bohol if I lived in a stinkin’ nursing home. The only reason I know Bohol even
exists is thanks to one of the members of my pit crew. That’s what I call the
crew of people I’ve hired to come into my home and do miscellaneous stuff for me like get
me dressed and out of bed. One of them came in recently wearing a yellow
t-shirt that said Spirit of Bohol. I asked him what Bohol was and he said he
thought it was part of the Philippines. He said he got the t-shirt from a
resale store. So that prompted me to look up stuff about Bohol, which I never
would’ve done otherwise because I don’t spend a lot of time wondering about things
like Philippine provinces. I’m not especially proud of that trait. I wish I was
more the naturally curious type of person who embarks upon research adventures
without prompting. But, sadly, I am not.
But if I lived in a stinkin’
nursing home, the people helping me get dressed and out of bed would all be
required to wear boring-ass
scrubs, which are all a stern solid color like grey or dark blue. Sometimes
they’re adorned with stuff like Smurfs or rainbows or unicorns, but nothing
interesting.
Another thing I also learned
about from a resale t-shirt of one of my pit crew guys is the spread of
communism in the 20th Century. On the front of his shirt was Lenin,
Stalin and Mao and it said The Three Terrors. It was a parody of a concert tour
t-shirt of The Three Tenors and on the back, instead of listing all the cities
and dates of the stops along the tour, it listed, chronologically, countries
that turned communist. The first date was Russia in 1917, followed by dozens of
countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Hungary and China.
Whenever this pit crew guy worked with his back to me, like washing
dishes, I learned more about the spread of communism in the 20th Century.
But if I lived in a stikin’ nursing home, all I’d see when someone had their
back to me would be a solid wall of a stern color.
