heajhilahaoi

An adolescent boy to call my own.

So I learned a new word the other day. Do you ever find that when you learn something, you begin to encounter it more and more? Kind of like a pregnant woman thinking that everyone around her is also pregnant. Or, when you buy a pet elephant, you begin to see elephant references everywhere!

But before I get to The Word I Learned, a little bit of background…

Most of you reading this are currently learning Existentialism with Ms. Corry. You may then recall the day she went off on a tangent and started reciting Baudelaire:

In order not to feel
Time’s horrid fardel
Bruise your shoulders
Grinding you into the earth
Get drunk and stay that way
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever
But get drunk

I thought this quote was pretty nifty, and looked up some more Baudelaire. He turned out to be a bit of a woman-hater, but I’ll let him this once. Anyway, I found the following:

Aimer les femmes intelligentes, est un plaisir de pederaste.

You’re probably thinking same thing I was. “What’s a pederaste?” So, I looked that up too.

Pederasty, as idealized by the ancient Greeks, was a relationship and bond between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family. In a wider sense it refers to erotic love between adolescents and adult men. The word derives from the combination of pais (Greek for 'boy') with erastis (Greek for 'lover'; cf. eros). In those societies where pederasty is prevalent, it appears as one form of a widely practiced male bisexuality.

Yeah.

Then I read the word in The Decameron. There was this story in which a wife is cheating on her fat slob of a husband with a pretty young boy. When the husband catches them bumping nasties one day, instead of getting mad, he’s overjoyed at the fresh, young gift his wife brought him because he’s a crazy old pederast.

The Universe has conspired to place this word in my path, I swear.

Ohhh, there’s more. I was out to dinner with my parents tonight, and I felt the need to tell them this particular story. Problem was, I didn’t know how to say pederast in Serbian (why would I?!). So I just sort of put an accent to it and said it anyway. And then there seemed to shine down a light from heaven and I may have heard some angelic singing, because I realized then that PEDER is a crazy derogatory term for ‘gay man’ in Serbian! So it turned out not to be such a useless language after all! My parents, by the way, were not impressed with any of this, my dad said “Of course we know pederasty is, sheesh,” or something along those lines.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

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