Out Of The Flame

Dubious comparisons XIII

2011-09-11T11:55:00.001-07:00

Sonny has come up with the dubious comparison to end all dubious comparisons. Here's Spain's president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero...

...suspiciously resembling television's Sheldon Cooper.

My future thesis?

2011-07-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

A brief guide to Katy Perry metaphors from her latest CD, “Teenage Dreams”, songs 1-12, in order.

1. We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach

Got a motel and built a floor out of sheets

I finally found you, my missing puzzle piece

I'm complete

(Puzzle piece means penis.)

2. We went streaking in the park

Skinny dipping in the dark

Then had a menage a trois

Last Friday night

(OK, no metaphor here.)

3. California girls, we're unforgettable

Daisy dukes, bikinis on top

Sun-kissed skin, so hot

We'll melt your popsicle

(Popsicle means penis.)

4. 'Cause baby, you're a firework

Come on, show 'em what you're worth

Make 'em go, oh

As you shoot across the sky

(The “oh” part is an orgasm, and what’s shooting across the sky is, well, you can imagine.)

5. I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock

I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock, cock, your peacock

(Yep.)

6. You fall asleep during foreplay

'Cause the pills you take are more your forte

I'm not sticking around

To watch you go down

(In case it’s not clear, what’s going down here is the erection of the fella she’s talking about in this song.)

7. Summer after high school when we first met

We make out in your Mustang to Radiohead

(She uses “Radiohead” to slyly suggest she was giving him head in the Mustang. No one makes out to Radiohead.)

8. Kiss me, ki-ki-kiss me

Infect me with your love and

Fill me with your poison

(Love means penis, poison means jizz. Or viceversa.)

9. I can feel this lightness inside of me

Growing fast into a bolt of lightning

I know one spark will shock the world, yeah yeah

(Lightness means penis, bolt of lightning means erection, spark means orgasm.)

10. She is a pyramid

But with him she's just a grain of sand

This love's too strong like my cement

Squeezing out the life that should be let in

(Cement means vagina, life means penis.)

11. The taste of your honey is so sweet

When you give me that hummingbird heartbeat

(Honey means jizz, hummingbird heartbeat means penis.)

12. He put it on me, I put it on

Like there was nothin' wrong

It didn't fit, it wasn't right

Wasn't just the size

They say you know when you know

I don't know

I didn't feel

The fairy tale feeling, no

Am I a stupid girl

For even dreaming that I could?

(I’m outta here.)

U.B.A.N.

2011-06-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

A few months into my tenure as a fratlord, I became aware that the hard-drinking, chinstrap-sporting upperclassmen who were charged with running the local chapter of our frat were butting heads big time with our national authorities. For fraternities, you see, are much like McDonald’s franchises, with a central organ dictating rules of behavior to its numerous satellites. (Also, like McDonald’s, you can always count on a few disgruntled employees discharging bodily fluids atop the double cheeseburgers or teabagging your McFlurry, just because. That, in a nutshell, was our chapter.)

The confrontation came down to one basic disagreement: The national authorities (hereafter referred to as “nationals”) wanted more subdued, well-balanced behavior. We did not. And so this standoff went on for months, then years, with nationals sending in emissaries and supervisors and instructors to imbue a sense of responsibility and honor into our everyday lives. We grudgingly attended these sessions, returning to our beer shotgunning and our youngin hazing as soon as the drones were through with their yammering and out the front door.

Compounding the issue was our relationship with our house mother, Ruby. Actually, I should say their relationship, because I had no real beef with her. She got paid to live in our Southern mansion, downstairs, to make sure things didn’t get too far out of control. As one would expect of anyone with such a job, she spent most of the day locked in her room smoking weed and downing hard liquor. But then she would emerge at extremely inconvenient times, threatening to call the police if we didn’t stop the party or screaming at us for destroying furniture or freaking out over someone (Chotchsky) climbing down from the second-story bathroom window into the yard, just because it was faster that way.

Naturally, the brothers didn’t take kindly to all this opposition.

And so at some point during my sophomore year, an official resistance movement rose out of nowhere. It was called U.B.A.N., which stood for United Brothers Against Nationals. Its founders (and only members) were Fat William and a Spanish kid named Emilio who thought he was Che Guevara reincarnate. They harbored a deep, unshakeable resentment toward Ruby, possibly because the previous year she had confiscated their bongs and harshened their mellows one too many a time.

At first, U.B.A.N.’s activities were limited to carving their initials on people’s furniture and sending out the occasional mass email. Meanwhile, the rest of us were wondering how to pronounce this awkward acronym. Did it sound like “auto-bahn”? Did it sound like “auto-ban”? Who knows.

Ignored and mocked by the rest of us, Fat William and Emilio decided to take their freedom struggle to the next level. One night they (allegedly) relieved themselves on Ruby’s door. I say allegedly because no one actually saw it happen; furthermore, even if it did happen, it would have been a completely ordinary occurrence in our house, where peeing on doors was rarely done with actual malice. It had more to do with the offender not being able to find his way to the bathroom in time.

Ruby took one whiff of her door in the morning and immediately picked up the phone to alert nationals. By this point, nationals were avidly looking for reasons to revoke our charter, Clint Eastwood style, and were more than happy to hear about this.

U.B.A.N. did not stop there, oh no. A few days later, they (allegedly) keyed Ruby’s stupid-looking car, which just about pushed Ruby off the ledge and guaranteed that every little incident from then on would be directly communicated to our overlords. When anything got set on fire, when brothers punched holes in the walls, when pledges were blindfolded and hauled off in unmarked vans, there was Ruby, a fully fledged mole, taking mental notes.

Faced with this new reality, the chinstrap-sporting uperclassmen engaged in a desperate, last-ditch effort to salvage our reputation. One of them had the brilliant idea of naming me the fraternity’s education chair, tasked with bringing up everyone else’s GPA. I don’t think they actually expected me to do anything; rather, they wanted to be able to truthfully tell nationals that we cared about our grades and had named a specialist to spearhead our academic recovery.

I had no clue how to proceed. I began to assemble a cold-test collection. The idea was that brothers would hand over their old tests and I would gather them in a black plastic filing box I found on sale at Wal-Mart.

As weeks went by, slowly but surely the container began getting filled. Sure, it was mostly used as an extra seat when our couch was taken up by one too many a Halo player, but it was there, and I like to think were all slightly proud of it, a symbol of our ability to pool our resources together for the benefit of all. It was like having my own version of U.B.A.N., except with less violence and body fat.

Then one fateful night, Chotchsky and I came back to our room intoxicated. That was normal. We clambered up into each of our lofted beds, the kind that can accomodate a desk underneath, forcing you to sleep with your face inches from the ceiling. So far so good. Until Chotchsky rolled over with such gusto that he found himself in the air, like Wile E. Coyote, and plummeted toward the ground, where he landed, with a great crash, on the cold test file.

Shards of plastic flew all over the room, and by the time it was all over, the black box was completely flattened. “Dude, are you all right?” I asked. “Yeah, yeah,” mumbled Chotchsky, and climbed back into his bed. The next morning we awoke to find that the dream of academic improvement was over, and that a giant welt had taken up residence on Chotchsky’s side.

Predictably, our chapter got shut down at the end of that year.

Dubious comparisons XII

2011-06-21T00:00:00.001-07:00

Leigh uncovered this historical dubious comparison: This, my friends, is a portrait of the one and only Paul Revere, a.k.a. "he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

By now it is MORE than obvious where this is going. Yes, he is the spitting image of Jack Black. Hollywood studios, take note.

Things people send me

2011-06-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a collection of random shit that appeared in my inbox of late.

Malaria sends along another piece of evidence of my mom's Flanders-like ways. "Dishwasher clean!" reads the little note, and I'm not sure why the exclamation mark was necessary.

I also heard from Christa, who writes, "sometimes I think you are going to grow to look like a young Al Pacino," and attaches the following photo. Well, I am flattered. From this day on, I will do my best to progressively chip away at my American accent until I sound like Tony Montana.

And finally -- this doesn't quite fall under the "things people send me" category, but I figured I'd throw it in here. It's Malaria's birthday today! Happy birthday! In her honor I resurrected the dormant Chickster franchise, in the form of a Chickster limited edition CD case. You know you want one. The strip is referencing Malaria's unfortunate confusion of the terms "narcoleptic" and "necrophiliac".

Didion

2011-05-31T15:08:00.001-07:00

"As it happens, I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History."

It was the best of times

2011-05-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

When I left for college sometime around the beginning of this millennium, my mom was forced to figure out how e-mail works. (I’m not much for long phone conversations about things that aren’t immediately relevant to my wellbeing.) This being my mom, she went all out: daily reports, stuffed with details, about everything going on back home in Buenos Aires, from current events to my sisters’ day at school to wonderfully naïve questions about what I was up to in the Northern Hemisphere. I’ve saved those e-mails, and might someday return them to my family in edited form as a sort of diary of their lives throughout those years.

What I didn’t know about all this is that my mom was printing out the responses I was sending back to her, about once a week or so. And so the other day I decided to take a trip down memory lane and reread them, handpicking my favorite parts for your benefit and translating them from the Spanish original. Keep in mind that most of these are completely serious statements -- I’m not trying to be funny or messing with my mom -- which makes them all the more amusing.

- “I’ll ride my bike out to the supermarket later to get some essentials, like Snickers bars.”

- “Don’t worry about the beer pong thing; whoever loses has to drink the other team’s beer, and I always win.”

- “It turns out we have to live in the frat house until Friday, we can’t leave unless we’re going to class or have a valid excuse, basically we have to stay there 24 hours…so don’t bother calling me on Wednesday, because I won’t be there.”

- “Chotchsky just interrupted me and ran off with one of my cardboard boxes, so I have to go chase him.”

- “Grandma called me last night, and I was doing my econ homework with Plissy, and on top of that the Domino’s guy showed up, so it got pretty crazy.”

- “I have to wash my sneakers. How the hell do I wash my sneakers? I suppose you I have to take out the insole and the laces, and throw them in the washer, right? Let me know if that’s what I have to do.”

- “Last week I cooked grilled chicken breast, steak, pizza, burgers, chicken tenders, fried egg, etc., and my fridge is filled with good stuff like yogurt, milk and Gatorade. When I come back home I’ll cook something for you guys. You’ll be proud of my chef-like skills.”

- “I paid off my speeding ticket. It was like 130 dollars, but hey, tough luck. For the trip back, at least I already know that the state of Virginia has some goddamn devious cops.”

- “I spent the night in a cheap motel in Wisconsin, where I got a good night’s sleep only because my car is so old that I doubt anyone would want to take it. If I had a real car, I would have been worried.”

Professor Professorson

2011-05-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, and as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper. It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly, and Arch felt like some master of hounds as he led the boys deep into a story or poem, driving them on with questions, forcing them to test cadence, gesture, and inflection for feint and doubletalk until at last the truth showed its face for an instant before vanishing into some new possibility of meaning. He sometimes arrived at the end of a class dripping with sweat, hardly knowing where he was or how long he’d been there, all his damned dignity gone.

-Tobias Wolff

Phew, long quote. Glad you’re still with me. I’ll explain its relevance shortly.

But first: You might be one of the handful of close, loyal friends who have been reading this blog from its inception, in late 2008, back when it was little other than an inchoate bunch of ASCII characters. (Not that it got much better.) Or you might be a more recent inductee, most likely a fashion-savvy French teenager or an Indian national who owns a travel agency or a macrocephalic Muslim baby with uncommonly advanced Web browsing skills.

To both of those groups, I am much indebted.

This blog started, partly, as a way to document the process of recovering from a very harsh blow -- leaving behind my job and my career and my friends, moving out of the country where I had spent the past seven years -- and, mostly, as a vehicle for bitching. Moaning, groaning, whining, the whole array. You know as well as I do that bitching in front of an audience (that’s you!) is much more rewarding than bitching in front of whatever poor Foolia or Malaria happens to cross my path. More importantly, I like to think that everyone who keeps coming back here shares my sense of humor to some degree, if not my worldview, and that makes me feel less alone. Makes us all feel less alone, I think.

Around the middle of last year, while road-tripping across arid West Coast terrain, my friend Balderdash shared some news: he was going to start a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Generally, I pay little heed to his career choices, considering his obnoxious interest in Romantic German poetry and certain obscure aspects of Japanese culture, but this piece of information caught my attention.

“You mean, I could just compare any two things in literature and someone would pay me to do that for a few years?” I asked.

Indeed, he said. All I needed was a finely tuned research statement, and an idea.

“But I took, like, two literature classes in college, and one was on ‘Lord of the Rings’,” I said.

Not a problem, he said. You have the right background.

“But I never taught a real class in my life,” I said.

Shut up already and apply, he said.

(I’m oversimplifying here. You also need, at a minimum: very high GRE scores, two extremely polished 20-page pieces of literary analysis, four languages, a unique back story, squeaky-clean letters of recommendation, a fair amount of money for application fees, and a boatload of patience.)

And so, here I am, less than a year later. A very generous university in the Northeast has decided that it will waive my tuition and pay me a salary, every month for at least five years, to study and teach literature, and write about what I learn. I’ll travel to conferences. I’ll spend summers abroad. I’ll make undergrads tremble from way up in my ivory tower. (OK, maybe not ivory tower. Whatever the grad student equivalent is -- ramen tower, perhaps.) I am still, to this day, surprised that such a program exists. But that, among other things, is the beauty of the American system of higher education.

Who knows what I’ll do with my degree, if I even make it to the end. If nothing else, it’ll bring newfound prestige to this blog. “I’m reading something by this guy, Dr. Futbol, he’s pretty good,” you can tell your friends. I might teach for a bit if I like it. I might be moved to write about something more substantial than salami. I might lose interest in literature, like I lost interest in daily journalism, and join the Canadian Football League. (That last one seems unlikely.)

During these past few months (years?) of extended super-sabbatical, I’ve been in great company: Foster Wallace, Carver, Hemingway, Salinger, Proust, Roth, Bukowski, Murakami, Cortázar. Which is all well and good, except it felt like looking at a sunset from behind a glass window, because literature cannot be an individual experience, it refuses to be so. Any good piece of art is engendered not simply to entertain, but to probe, to extract commonality, to simultaneously individualize and universalize the human condition. I know who I am, and Cortázar knew who he was, but neither of us can know who we are in the context of everyone else until we start up a dialogue.

It is that dialogue that is missing in my life. I want accountability of thought, like Tobias Wolff (a teacher himself) so eloquently mentioned above. I want to hear stories from others and share stories with others. Not stories about park openings and school closings and gridlock and blight; instead, I want to hear about the small things, about habits and emotions and hushed conversations and tiny ideas. About life as defined by literature -- I want to know where you were when you read “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, and how it made you feel -- and viceversa, about literature as defined by life -- I want to know the ways in which Chabon read you, the ways in which you fit into his universe, and thus fit into mine.

Starting in August, I’ll finally get to hear some of those voices, and I couldn’t be happier.

(I started with a quote and I’ll end with a quote, like every bad graduation speech and wedding toast.)

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” [Oshima] says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads -- at least that’s where I imagine it -- there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.”

-Haruki Murakami

Let's talk street art

2011-05-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

I take walks every day. Long walks. Often enough that I've completely exhausted all possible walking paths starting from my house, in every direction. I've been doing this for a couple of years now, save for the times I'm out traveling. It clears my head. I listen to music, I listen to the New Yorker fiction podcast, I listen to NPR. It's a bit disconcerting to have a smooth radio voice babbling away in English in my ear while I trudge my way through Buenos Aires, but I think I enjoy such incongruities.

One of my regular routes, down by the river, is home to the area's largest collection of graffiti. Most of it is of the mediocre, pointless variety: trite, flashy letters spelling out someone's name, or worse, half-assed tags in thin black spray paint. To me, those have neither aesthetic appeal nor artistic value, and my brain files them under the category of urban pollution.

Lately, someone with (at the least) some artistic aspirations has been hard at work down there. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I believe the following three pieces are the work of a local high school girl. Two of them, at least. Because I'm no longer a journalist, I decided I wouldn't bother to track her down. But I couldn't resist taking photos.

Granted, the first thing I thought when I saw this one was "Banksy knockoff" (see below), but then I came home and Googled around and there doesn't appear to be any Banksy piece that looks like that. Which means that even if the style and concept are borrowed, the execution is original.

See what I mean?

Then there's this one, which, as you can see, maintains a certain line. The black and white with a single, gentle, pinkish color intruding; the proficient shadow work. But I have no idea what it's riffing off of. All I will do here is say "weeeeird," in the style of Chris Griffin.

Finally, there's my favorite: this mural of headless, butt-naked people with balloons coming out of their gaping neckholes, blindly moving around in some barren land while a giant simian face looks away. Of course, the reason I like it so much is because it reminds me of Daniel Johnston's art.

I'm on to you, graffiti ripper-offer. (But please, keep doing your thing.)

Dubious comparisons XI

2011-05-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

This is J.D. Williams from the acclaimed HBO series "The Wire". He plays some drug dealing guy or another. After a few episodes, I realized that his facial expressions reminded me of someone, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

And then it came to me. He looks like Olivia from "The Cosby Show".

Dubious comparisons X

2011-05-03T12:28:00.001-07:00

We did it, everyone! Ten dubious comparisons! As a special treat, here's a surprisingly not-so-dubious one from Sonny, redeeming himself from that unlikely Vince Vaughn offering. On the left, it's Prague's glummest son, Franz Kafka. On the right, Argentine-born Real Madrid striker Angel di Maria. I think it's the ears that really do it for me.

Just...just stop it, OK?

2011-04-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Recently I've become inundated with Facebook friendship requests from hot women, Hispanic women, and hot Hispanic women. That could mean one of two things: either my mojo has reached global proportions and women I've never met are clamoring for my attention, or, more likely, Facebook has become so spamalicious and unregulated that these fembots are allowed to stay out there, trying to steal our information (and our hearts).

It all started about two weeks ago with this gal, going by the name of Romiinitah DC. I don't think I ever met anyone like this in DC, and if I had, I would have banged her. Poor Romiinitah, by the way, only has 36 friends and they're all horny teenage dudes. I can tell because the only thing on her wall is a heated male-only discussion over who's gayer than whom. Pass.

Agustinaa Velazquez, pictured below, soon followed suit. I have no idea what's up with the double and triple vowels, but it became a pattern. Agustinaa pros: she likes to take self-photos of her butt while wearing a skimpy thong. Agustinaa cons: she has only one friend, a gullible chap by the name of Nicolas Rodriguez. Her only status update since joining Facebook, as far as I can tell from her wall, has been "who wants to have a threesome?" Thanks but no thanks, buttocks lady.

Here's where the efforts start getting laughable. I'm friended by someone named Yëszëniiäh Minx (actually, with a name like that, it could be an alien). Yesz, which is what I'll call her from now on because I'm not about to type all those double vowels and triple umlauts, features some sort of a logotype photo looking sultry with all of her prepubescent friends in a pose that can only be described as stand-up spooning. "Look at us!" they seem to be saying. "We're all a bunch of high school LEZZZZZBIANS!" Sorry, Lezzy Yeszy. Maybe in ten years.

At this point, either a) the spammers start getting devious or b) I expose a completely innocent young woman. This is Estefania Uriarte, from Buenos Aires. Her name is spelled correctly, without any repeated vowels. She has a fairly real-looking profile and a real-looking Peruvian boyfriend she's in a relationship with. She also has a bevy of profile pics (but, granted, she's attempting to look sexy in all of them). If this was an isolated friend request, I wouldn't accept it, but I might give her the benefit of the doubt -- maybe I met her while I was drunkenly hovering around the city, or more likely she just searched for Buenos Aires people and randomly friended me. BUT! In light of what comes next, her request is highly suspect.

You see, now I start getting friended by nondescript Latin American women, all with real-sounding names and nonsexual profiles. This here is Libertad Mendoza.

This is Ariana Enriquez. She's a systems engineer with a good 400 friends. Her wall looks completely normal, and I suppose I could complain about her tendency to type like a 9-year-old ("ALiStaNdOO,,mis MaLeTAs,,Xk mAñAna,,SalgOo,,muy temPranOo,paRa,,la,,cOstA,,AdIsFrUtar De La PlAYiTa Con Mi NiÑo,,hermosOo,,t amo,,mi bb.") but perhaps that's just nitpicking.

Having exhausted their supply of photos of Hispanic women in suggestive poses, the spammers now turn to fictional anime women in suggestive poses. Here's Mexico City's own Jen Rivera, friends with about 100 men, whose interests include Limp Bizkit, Vin Diesel, Vin Bizkit and Limp Diesel (OK, I made those last two up). She likes friendship and dancing and the city of Bandung, Indonesia. I am intrigued, but I'm not about to start a relationship with a cartoon character. Unless it's Jessica Rabbit.

Finally, the spammers, frustrated at the ineffectiveness of their approach, give it one last shot. This here below is Diani Llerenita. They're trying to make me curious, see? They think that by now I'm addicted to photos of strange Hispanic women ages 12-22 and I'll be unable to resist the lure of Diani's cryptic silhouette. Well, not on my watch, assholes.

This little piggy went to the ER

2011-04-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

I get it. I understand how my middle toe could be confused with a healthy, pink, tasty, tiny sentient being. So I don’t really hold a grudge. If I were a carnivorous spider, raring to transfer some deadly poison from my fangs to some fluffy, Disney-eyed mammal, I would not think twice before latching onto someone’s delicious toe. Especially a fresh, immaculately clean toe, temptingly swaying back and forth in the quiet night.

Like I said, I don’t really blame the arachnid. What happened is I woke up in the afternoon with at least eight microscopic welts on my confused toe, itchy welts at that, and I wondered what kind of mentally retarded mosquito would strike with such fury in such a reduced area. I walked downstairs and found my sister Foolia. “My toe itches,” I told her. “Why?” she asked. “I think a mosquito bit me like a million times while I slept,” I said. She laughed and shrugged.

If I may digress here for a second, there’s something you should know about me and mosquito bites. The truth is, if we’re going to be perfectly honest here, I don’t hate them. Yes, it’s annoying to get bitten. No, I would never want to be stung simultaneously by a cloud of ravenous bloodsuckers. But, hear me out. You know when one mosquito stings you just a single time, say, in the forearm or the ankle? And it takes you a few minutes to come to grips with the fact that yes, you’ve been stung, and there’s nothing you can do about it now? Well. Once that’s done with, I find the act of scratching the welt so pleasurable, and I find such comfort in the certainty that I will wake up the next day and the bite will be gone, that I don’t find it to be a particularly irritating situation. I kind of enjoy it. Sitting in front of the TV, occasionally digging into the wound. Maybe I just like being in control, even briefly, of my brain’s pleasure centers.

Point being, I was almost looking forward to scratching that toe for a couple of days. But then I woke up the next day and the toe looked scarlet and puffy, like it was angry at me, so I left it alone. And a day later, I could barely walk on it. I poked at it and found that a large blister had developed. So I cut a tiny hole in the blister and applied pressure. A fountain of clear liquid sprouted. A few hours later, the toe began losing its shape, now engorged on one side, flat on the other.

I limped downstairs again and ran my situation past a more useful human being, my mom, who took a single horrified look at the toe and informed me that we were going straight to the emergency room, right now, because that thing was hella infected. I’m sure she didn’t say hella, but I just wanted to pay homage to No Doubt’s hit song “Hella Good”. Anyway, I slid into some flip flops and the moms drove me to the hospital, gripping the wheel so tightly that I finally got to personally witness the term “white-knuckled” in real life.

I showed the on-call doctor my ailing toe. “Do you know what bit you?” she asked. “No. I was hoping you would tell me,” I replied. “No idea,” she said. “I figure it must have been a spider, right? What else could it have been? Unless there’s a cobra loose inside my house,” I suggested. “Yes, a spider’s a possibility,” she said, noncommittal. Then she scribbled something down on her prescription pad and shoved it at me. “Take these every six hours till they run out, and these other ones every 24 hours.”

Needless to say, the prescription pills severely disrupted my sleep cycle. But I diligently took them, even the giant ones that I was unable to swallow, so I had to chomp down on them and break them up into smaller pieces in my mouth and wince and recoil at the horrid taste. After about a week, the bruising faded and the swelling subsided and my toe was looking almost normal again, except that with all the unexpected activity, the skin had expanded and then shriveled up like a raisin, making it look like it belonged to Joe Biden.

This is where this story should end. But it doesn’t. This little bastard toe, this spoiled little piggy, might I add, the one who had roast beef without having to go to market, began swelling up again. I gave it a day, but you see, now I’m an improved human being, able to tell an infected digit from a healthy one, and I realized on my own that it was time to get back to the emergency room. “You know, sometimes spider bites result in ulcers,” said my new doctor, which baffled me. First, I thought ulcers only happened in stomachs. Second, she refused to elaborate on how my toe could potentially become ulcerated, and how I’d be able to tell, so essentially she just scared me for no reason. Then she criticized my first doctor, saying that I should have been taking pills for at least twice as long, and wrote me another prescription for the same damn medication. “Is there something that I can take every 12 hours rather than six?” I asked. “I like to sleep.” There was. So here I am, back on antibiotics and antihistamines, but at least sleeping through the night.

And no, I didn’t gain any superpowers, thanks for asking.

Dubious comparisons IX

2011-03-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

Wow. These dubious comparisons are really coming along. To kick us off today, here's generation Y's Evel Knievel, motorcycle daredevil Travis Pastrana, who apparently really dislikes taking photographs sans helmet or baseball cap.

Pastrana not only sounds a lot like a young Jerry Seinfeld, but looks like him, too. See?

Our next dubious comparison comes courtesy of Sonny, who contributed this incredibly dubious gem. He claims that Argentine soccer referee Saul Laverni, pictured below:

Looks like Vince Vaughn, especially Vince Vaughn "in that movie with the chick from Friends." The resemblance seems extremely tenuous at best, but hey, this is what dubious comparisons was created for. So, many thanks are owed to Sonny for his un-keen eye.

And finally, here's one that will amuse two, or at most three, of my readers, while annoying the other 743,325 daily visitors. I finally realized who Flour's friend "Electric" (pictured below, and I apologize for his inadequate size) looks like.

The obvious choice is Argentine pop singer Gustavo Cerati, from whom "Electric" clearly takes a styling hint or two.

But his REAL dubious doppelganger is Kid, from Kid n' Play. (And, really, I just wanted an excuse to use this picture again.)

A goochy guide to Rio

2011-03-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

So, I hear you went to Rio de Janeiro for the world-famous carnaval.

You heard right.

Well? How was it?

It was fun.

(Sighs) I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way, then.

I guess so.

All right, let’s start with the language. Were you able to understand Portuguese?

Nope! Or, to be more precise -- in any conversation between two Brazilians, I could usually figure out the subject matter. I could have told you when my host and her friends were debating the merits of Android phones, or when they were talking about what kind of guys they like to hook up with, or when they were debating the day’s plan of action. But I generally couldn’t make out how they felt about the thing in question. To make things worse, Brazilians are the loudest populace I have encountered, ever. They’re always screaming about something. As it turns out, they’re not necessarily angry. This is why, about ten times a day, I had turn to my host and ask “what’s HIS problem?”, gesturing in the direction of the seemingly irate bus driver or the rambling drunken cross-dresser teetering across the street or what have you. I could never tell when a situation was serious, which completely threw off my color-coded Homeland Security danger meter. At any rate, Portuguese feels like someone chewing on the Spanish language and then spitting it out, and I’m not a fan. I thought this would all be mitigated by the fact that English is the new Esperanto and everyone knows at least a little bit of it thanks to CSI and such, but other than my well-educated host, everyone else’s English was highly dubious. These same people with their iffy English took it upon themselves to brag about how good their American accent was, and why couldn’t the rest of the world speak Portuguese this well, so I was forced to shoot them down from their perch of ignorance.

Did you actually learn any Portuguese?

You know what really grinds my gears? When you visit a country with the explicit intention of partying the week away, and the locals assume that you want to (and should) pick up some of the local language, and so they take it upon themselves to correct your accent and grammar whenever you jokingly attempt to use their funny-sounding words. It’s like, OK -- I’m obviously going to forget everything I learned as soon as I step off the plane in Buenos Aires, especially with so many of my brain cells swimming in beer, so lay off, ma’am. Anyway, here’s what I retained. Janela means window (window is funny in just about any language -- see fenster, German). The name Gustavo is pronounced gooch-tavo (actually, more like goosh-tavo, but I wanted the word gooch to appear on my blog). Bosta, Spanish for horseshit, is pronounced boshta. Frango means chicken, as I learned during a past layover in Brazil. And instead of carajo, which is our word for damn, as in “damn, boy, you better get that goiter checked out,” these people say caraca. Oh, and obrigado means thanks. Thus, the only full sentence I can put together in Portuguese goes something like “caraca, isso e um boshta frango janela, Gooshtavo, obrigado!” (“damn, that’s one horseshit chicken window, Gustavo, thank you!”)

Changing topics -- the intense soccer rivalry between Argentina and Brazil is a well-documented fact. Did this come up at all?

Oh boy, did it ever. You see, we really dislike Brazilian soccer teams, and we celebrate when they lose, but that’s it. The hate is strictly confined to the realm of sports. Not in Brazil. They despise any and all Argentines, with a passion. Example number one: I was watching TV and a commercial came on where the bad guy was a full-on Argentine stereotype -- a good-looking (you know it) long-haired fella wearing an Argentine jersey and spouting out characteristically Argentine words like “che” and “boludo” while annoying a frazzled Brazilian dude. Example number two: We were riding in a cab and the overweight cab driver cranes his neck and takes a look at me and says “where’s he from? He looks Paulista.” (Paulista being the word for people from Sao Paulo, Rio’s biggest rival city.) Upon my friends informing him that I was visiting from Argentina, he says: “Argentine? Oh, man. I don’t know what’s worse -- Paulista or Argentine.” He then spent the rest of the ride applying all of his brainpower toward this vexing question, but I couldn’t tell what his conclusion was (I told you; this was a recurring problem). Needless to say, for the first time in my life, I didn’t correct people when they wrongly assumed I was a gringo.

Let’s talk about food.

As you would expect from a country whose best-known dish is rice and beans, the cuisine is sorely lacking. The steak tastes like it came from an Argentine cow carcass left out in the sun for six months and then stomped on by a class of kindergartners with muddy rain boots. American fast-food franchise restaurants abound -- Subway, KFC, Domino’s, Outback -- probably because the local offerings are so deficient. There was one local burger franchise that I kept seeing over and over called Bob’s Burgers, and I was extremely curious about this Bob fellow, and his burgers, so I finally talked my host into taking me on my last night. I ordered a Big Bob, which looks EXACTLY like a Big Mac, down to the smooth-edged bread in the middle, the shredded lettuce, the special sauce, the size and thinness of the patties, etc., except the meat tastes significantly worse and the special sauce is too thick and mayo-ey. It also inhibited my bowel movements for 48 hours. To top it off, my host informed me that there is no actual Bob, neither in commercials nor in the form of a funny human mascot. So, don’t go to Bob’s. But it’s not all bad news when it comes to food. I had some reasonably fresh fruit and fruit juice, some tasty beef stroganoff (which, apparently, every Brazilian in their 20s knows how to make; however, their English is not advanced enough to comprehend beef stroke-one-off jokes), and the culinary highlight of the trip: an incredible, enormous fish bought straight from the fish market and shoved into the oven, some obscure variety, with a side of calamari and rice and some shrimp doused in lime whose flavor was so vivid that I briefly felt like a decapod crustacean myself. Fried sardines at the beach also weren’t half bad, if extremely salty. And, for dessert and random snacks, they have this chocolatey treat called brigadeiro which they make at home by combining condensed milk and Nesquik. Depending on who makes it, it ranges from delish to just all right. In summary: I advise any future visitors to stick to things that swim near Rio, and tropical fruits.

Is it true that Rio is one of the most expensive cities in the world?

Indeed. The only comparable place I’ve been to is maybe Stockholm, or New York City, except Rio’s far dumpier than either of those. The only product that is adequately priced there is beer. The rest is outrageous: CDs for 30 dollars, bus rides for almost 2 dollars each way, admission to major tourist attractions like the Sugarloaf Mountain or the gigantor Jesus Christ hovering around 30 dollars, etc. I thanked mega Jesus every day that I had an apartment to stay in and wonderful people cooking homemade dinners for me. Even with all that, I spent a bit more than I had budgeted.

You mentioned beer. What can you tell us about alcoholic beverages?

During carnaval, they had me drinking from the wee hours of the morning (10 a.m. for me) till the end of the night, which gave me the opportunity to sample several kinds of beers. First thing to know is that Brazil collectively drinks light beers exclusively, mostly pilsners. I like that. I sampled five major brands: Skol, Itaipava, Antarctica, Devassa and Brahma. The latter I knew from Argentina already and have always found to be disgusting, so, no surprise there. Then comes Skol, which tastes like someone projectile vomiting down your throat. Devassa is all right, outside of their intensely annoying “conga-conga-conga” ads and their ridiculous slogan that claims that “everyone has a Devassa side”, with a woman in a suggestive pose, the implication being that everyone’s a turbo slut at heart. This may or may not be true, but undertones of sluttiness don’t make the beer taste any better. The two superior beers, Itaipava and Antarctica, are fairly similar. Itaipava hails from my host’s hometown, Petropolis, so we drank it out of hometown pride, I suppose. Antarctica appeared to be the unofficial beer provider of carnaval, dominating the styrofoam containers of street vendors. I’ll go ahead and award the Futbol gold medal of excellence to Antarctica. (They gave me a free hat.) Other than beer, the official cocktail in this country is the caipirinha, composed of a sugarcane-derived alcohol known as cachaça and a boatload of crushed lime and ice cubes and sugar. I sampled one at a bar on my first night, and it was such a terrible combination of gross and sweet that I couldn’t finish it. My host’s dad whipped up a better one for me a few days later, with decidedly more expensive alcohol, and I at least made it through that one. I can see women not hating this, their palate far better adjusted from years of cosmos and appletinis. But as for me, I’ll take a whiskey and Coke any day of the week.

Did you get to see all the scantily clad, sequined women and/or the over-the-top floats and/or the costumed, choreographed hordes of dancers and/or the professional samba bands and singers?

No. Well, I watched them on TV, for whatever that’s worth. To witness it in person, one must purchase a ticket to the sambodromo (local word meaning something like Samba Thunder Dome). Because the sambodromo is fairly small, seating about 20,000, and the city is so expensive in general, tickets to this event start around 200 dollars, and no one has that kind of money except flabby American tourists in cargo shorts and visors flanked by flabby wives. And so these 20,000 flabby American (and, fine, European) tourists get to see the action live, while the rest of us must pursue an alternative. The younger crowd gathers penuriously at predetermined areas of the city in what is called a bloco (I assume this word means block, as in block party and such). Streets all around the meeting place are closed to traffic, and thousands of intoxicated youths gradually flock to the area, filling up sidewalks, then streets, until no one can move anymore, while mobile beer vendors make a killing. At some point in time, a rundown truck with either a) large speakers or b) a brass band in the back begins making its way in one direction or another, and the crowd is offered the option of walking very slowly, half-dancing, behind the truck, or staying put. This goes on for a few hours. My host and her friends located said blocos via an iPhone app, which may be practical but doesn’t strike me as a charmingly Brazilian thing to do. Of course, locating and getting to the bloco is only half the battle -- it’s just as hard to find the damn truck, especially if it is already in motion. In summary: If you’re coming to Rio for the pretty costumes and the dancing, forget about it. However, if you’re into being crushed against a sweaty guy in a Walmart-caliber wig and oversized plastic glasses, Rio’s the place to be. Also noteworthy is that these swarming crowds of drunken revelers inevitably end up peeing all over the city, to the point where the government had to launch a campaign asking people not to pee all over the city, but all that came of that is I took a picture pretending to pee next to one of their signs (see top).

Did anything about the locals surprise you?

First: bus drivers. They’re out of control, swerving and slamming their brakes even more than their Argentine counterparts, which is saying a lot. They’re also tasked with making change for you whenever there isn’t a second ticketing employee on board, and that’s just terrifying. Second: Adults with braces. I have never, ever seen such a concentration of orthodontia in one place. For the first time in two years, I felt like I didn’t stand out. According to my host, the ubiquity of braces responds to a recent drop in the cost of treatment, and thus everyone and their mother are getting them. I can’t tell, however, if their teeth are collectively crooked, like the British, or they’re just perfectionists, like the Americans. Third: Unattractive women. I was under the impression that Brazilian women were basically a bunch of butterfaces with tight, tan bodies. Butterfaces they certainly are, but there seems to be an uncontrollable wave of obesity and cellulite and breastlessness rocking this country, and so people-watching at the beach is a largely pleasureless experience. Also -- you’d think that Brazilian women, residing in the country that (one assumes) invented the Brazilian wax, would keep their bikini-bottom area religiously clear of shrubbery. I’m sad to report that they don’t. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

Rio’s supposed to be sunny and super hot all the time. Was it that way for you?

Nay. ‘Twas cloudy as shit, with periodic gaps of rain, a la wet-season Miami. However, it was indeed hot all the time, and I sweated through my T-shirts so fast I wasn’t able to keep to my overly optimistic schedule of two days per T-shirt. Locals solve this problem by showering twice a day, usually in the morning and at night. While we’re on the subject of bathing, I might as well let you know that they have a perplexing shower system where instead of using handles to regulate hot and cold, there’s a large switch next to the showerhead that can be moved between Winter/Summer/None (winter, obviously, meaning hotter water, summer meaning lukewarm, none meaning cold). At first, I found this to be a great timesaver. But then I was forced to use a shower where winter was too hot and summer was too cold and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to find a happy medium, even though my host told me I could further regulate the water temperature by messing with some other lever, so I had to toggle back and forth between scalding and freezing for five minutes and thus swore off Brazilian showers forever.

OK, I think I’ve had enough irrelevant information. Anything else you’d like to add before I end this interview?

Yes. 1) For some reason, Brazilians keep their super glue in the fridge. My host tried to explain why, but all I heard is “bla bla bla we like it when our children mistakenly eat super glue.” 2) Brazilians love 80s music, and they love to cover American 80s songs but with samba rhythms and acoustic guitars. I must have heard at least three different versions of “Kayleigh”, none of these being even remotely close to the original. 3) I got to watch a made-for-TV cop movie with Mario Van Peebles and the guy from Office Space. 4) The Portuguese term for wife-beater is mamae to fortinho, which means, “mommy, I’m strong!”

I’m outta here.

Suit yourself.

True Argentine Facts (No. 2)

2011-02-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

"Ace" is a brand of laundry detergent sold in Argentina. After flying home on one of my college breaks, I noticed that the logo reminded me of something. Oh yeah. It looks EXACTLY like a friggin' bottle of Tide.

I asked around a little and found out two things. One is that the brand is pronounced Ah-Say, as in the first two syllables of "a sailor went to sea-sea-sea." Two is that Ace is a fairly ill-reputed brand, the cheapest of laundry detergents, reserved for extremely thrifty or impoverished housewives.

I dismissed Ace as a the cleaning equivalent of a Chinese electronics knockoff and continued with my life.

And but then my wonderful sister Malaria, who is not actually malaria-ridden, quit her oppressive job at Argentina's largest television news network and jumped on board with the local subsidiary of a certain bathroom-and-cleaning-products-multinational that makes everything currently in your medicine cabinet/Lazy Susan/pockets, from razor blades to fratty deodorant and body wash to crunchy potato chips to minty toothpaste to, wouldn't you know it, Tide laundry detergent. I was thus forced to refloat the Ace question.

"Do you know there's this detergent brand named Ace that's totally ripping off the Tide logo? Does your company care?" I asked her.

"Uh, yeah," she said. "We make it."

Malaria explained that as this giant multinational entered the Argentine market, they saw it fit to change Tide's name and market it as a low-cost alternative to all those other premium detergents. That makes no sense, I argued. I bet everyone would buy Tide, if they left the original brand name and hiked the price and advertised it as the choice of North America. After all, thousands of confused Argentines spend more than 6 dollars a meal at McDonald's every day (McDonald's having successfully positioned itself as a high-class eatery here, a phenomenon I might address someday but not right now).

Malaria said she'd think it over, which is our own special little code for "leave me alone." The point is, I got to the bottom of this shady business. Argentine fact: There is a brand of detergent that looks like Tide, smells like Tide, has Tide's logo, is sold by the parent company of Tide, and yet is named Ace and is significantly cheaper than Tide and is universally derided. Strange shit, my friends. Strange shit.

Dubious comparisons VIII

2011-02-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

Ah, dubious comparisons. That's one well that'll never run dry.

Today we host Peter Moren, singer/guitarist for Swedish outfit Peter Bjorn and John. More than anything else, that band needs a comma. Anyway, regardez:

And you know who he looks like? SNL's Fred Armisen playing Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You're welcome.

True Argentine Facts (No. 1)

2011-02-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

The television series “Life Goes On” (1989-1993) aired in Argentina under the title “Corky: The Power of Affection”.

After being hazardously exposed to incessant commercials, the entirety of Argentine society simultaneously began using the word “corky” as a synonym for “person with Down syndrome”. I was in elementary school at the time, and, of course, all the kids started calling each other “corky” whenever anyone did something stupid, or just because. The adults followed suit, and soon “corky” became an official word, besting other terms like “mentally disabled” or “retarded” or even “mongolian”.

In the mid 1990s, the country’s most popular television commentator, Marcelo Araujo, began referring to Boca Juniors defender Carlos “Red” Mac Allister as “Corky”, ostensibly because Mac Allister’s facial configuration. Argentine audiences were amused, but “Corky” Mac Allister was not.

Nowadays, the word “corky” continues to enjoy a central role in Argentine vocabulary. It is commonly found in phrases like “estas medio corky hoy” (“you’re kind of corky today”) or “ese chabón es un corky total” (“that guy is a total corky”).

Dubious comparisons VII

2011-01-31T15:34:00.000-08:00

This vague resemblance was particularly hard to document given the penchant that these two have for looking extremely stupid in every photo.

Here's Jonathan Bottinelli, an erratically violent defender for Argentine soccer team San Lorenzo, whose fans are affectionately known as The Crows:

And here's Mr. Dax Shepard, professional dumbass. He is either shirtless or grimacing in every one of his photos except for this one. You might be interested in knowing that his first movie role was in a romantic comedy known as "Hairshirt" (?! I want a shirt made of hair!) and he played Vomiter at Party. Enjoy.

Slowly but surely

2011-01-29T14:34:00.001-08:00

I've recently gone from a hate-hate to a love-hate relationship with "Infinite Jest". Mostly because of passages like:

"You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal."

Also because I found out, by rereading the footnotes, that Gerhardt Schtitt starred in "The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass", and I get the sense that, if I start scanning this asshole of a book a little more attentively, I'll find plenty of amusing inside references.

And finally because I am no longer confused by the handle of a guy who posts in grad school lit forums as Disney Leith.

Trenes, camiones y tractores

2011-01-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

I just had my second dream about buses. In the first one, the bus pulled over and we all clambered out to feed wild pigs by the side of the road. In the latest one, we stayed on, myself and a very much married friend from college who insisted on flirting with the driver for the length of the trip. (The driver, needless to say, was not her husband.)

These details are largely irrelevant. What’s interesting here is the transportation theme, the recurrence of dreams where I’m in motion. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. For a few years already, my brain has urged me, at every juncture, to move. If I stay put it floods my body with anxiety. When I travel, especially if it’s a long journey, it shuts itself off and allows the exterior world to enter.

I hadn’t necessarily noticed at the time, but in retrospect, I’ve been craftily tricking my brain into believing I’m in constant motion. Every six months or so I embark on a quixotic quest for mental tranquility, usually involving an endless plane or train ride and then some bouncing around between cities. Europe, Bolivia, the U.S. -- all of these fall neatly into this definition. It works like a charm: I come back refreshed and energized, and this lasts about a week. Then I’m mildly content for three months or so, and then I have to start planning another trip or I start losing my head.

I take aimless walks every day (daily constitutionals, if you will) as well as occasional long bus rides into downtown, and these are part of the system of deceit. My brain thinks I’m going somewhere, and while I’m in motion, it allows me to contemplate myriad issues. When I’m home, motionless, all I can do is dream up ways to not be home.

This all goes toward explaining why I was forced, by my brain, to book another flight. I’m heading to Rio in a month or so to sample the joys of carnival. And I will devote the upcoming month to shopping for the perfect thong.

The Radioactive Nipple

2011-01-23T22:16:00.000-08:00

In 1998 Sonny and I, high school sophomores at the time, began attending the home games of a lower-division soccer team called Atlanta. This team wasn’t popular, well-respected or even interesting to watch. I suspect Sonny picked them because a) the stadium was reasonably close to his house, and b) their fan base was known to be traditionally culled from the Jewish community. Maybe Sonny felt more at home here than watching other major league teams, whose fans are ragingly anti-Semitic, homophobic, xenophobic, mysoginistic, uneducated, violent, and probably bad at Jenga; Atlanta fans were all of the above, too, except they kept their anti-Semitism under wraps for the most part.

We were young, and easily entertained, and the tickets were cheap because there was really no demand, so we decided to make it a weekly thing. We invited different friends to come with us each Saturday. We learned the names of each of the players and the referees, in order to add precision to the insults we hurled unapologetically.

Then we decided to up the ante and make ourselves a flag. We bought a large rectangle of yellow cloth and a can of dark blue spray paint. After an entire afternoon of heated debate over what we should write on the flag, we eventually settled on the following: The Band of “The Rat” Rodriguez. We (that is, the band) decided that The Rat Rodriguez, a hilariously mediocre major league player living out his final years in lowly Atlanta, deserved our support. The fact that his nickname was The Rat only fueled our admiration.

The following Saturday we arrived early and tied our flag right above the players’ entrance to the field, so that The Rat wouldn’t be able to miss it. “Rat! Rat!” we screamed at the top of our lungs when the players came out, until The Rat read the flag, smiled awkwardly and gave us a feeble wave of acknowledgement. We were thrilled.

Of course, Atlanta lost again that Saturday, and the fans, having reached their breaking point, leaned over the railing and spat relentlessly on the home team as they were leaving the field. Sonny, seizing the day, hocked a giant loogie in the general direction of the players, and unexpectedly found himself clocked in the head by some elderly Atlanta fan who clearly wasn’t having any of this. I smiled from my seat as the Atlanta fans started punching each other, Sonny stuck in the middle; this, my friends, is what great memories are made of.

Sonny, never a quitter, decided to make a bigger, better flag, if only to spite the other fans, and sought out professional assistance. “I’m out,” is what I told Sonny when he asked me if I wanted to split the cost of a 50 dollar flag. But his younger brother, Mota, who was gullible and easily pressured back then, forked the money over. The cash was promptly delivered to a flag maker whose last name was Gords. (Gords, by the way, happened to himself have sired an obscure soccer player.) A week later the flag came back: a thick, sturdy work of art in blue and yellow, far more visually appealing and, in large block letters, SONNY AND MOTA printed across the front.

That flag got Sonny to shut up about flags for the next year or two. Then, senior year, we started following another team, Racing Club, this time with Red in tow. We needed a new flag to go with the team’s traditional light-blue-and-white pattern, and Sonny and Red looked to music for inspiration. Specifically, to a song titled “Bluebeard vs. the lethal love” by cult rock band Patricio Rey y los Redonditos de Ricota, a band I have written about before. The song, directly translated, goes as follows:

This time, finally, you’ll enjoy prison

The studly inmate will liquefy this prison

Beautiful cats, full mermaids

Tight shirt, radioactive nipple

Claiming the loot for the prison

Of the god, Bluebeard, of this prison

In the spirit of picking the most absurd element out of an already convoluted song, we all went back to Gords’ workshop and placed an order for a flag that said, in big letters: RADIOACTIVE NIPPLE. We had to wait another week for Gords to work his magic, during which week it was revealed that Red thought Gords’ last name was Borts, and we thought he was just being funny every time he talked about going to Borts’ place to pick up the flag, and eventually the misunderstanding cleared itself up. Red was also strangely insistent on making sure that Gords (or Borts, as he called him) included the required accent in pezón (nipple), which Gords eventually did, but it looked more like an apostrophe, so thanks a lot, Red.

At this point I’ll have you know that The Nipple, or The Nip, as we lovingly called the flag, witnessed eleven games, ten of which ended in ties and one of which ended in a win, so our favored team never lost with The Nip on the field. This tidbit, of course, means that something terrible happened to put an end to The Nipple’s earthly existence after eleven games, and I’ll tell you about it in a second.

For now, let’s focus on how The Nipple lived fast, and not on how it died young. Aside from accompanying us to the Racing stadium, it proudly hung at an Argentina-Paraguay match, its presence tolerated because the Argentine flag coincidentally shares colors with Racing and thus with The Nipple. The game ended in a 1-1 tie, and the next morning we opened up the sports paper and found a blown up color picture of a Paraguayan midfielder celebrating the team’s lone goal and, in the background, our expertly placed flag with the words RADIOACTIVE NIPPLE right there on the page, clear as day. “We didn’t win because of this one,” reads the caption underneath the photograph, in all likelihood referring to the Paraguayan player but, in our minds, a criticism directly leveled at The Nip.

The Nipple also joined Sonny and Red on my school’s senior trip to Cancun, meaning it probably got more ass than I did in high school.

And then one day we were walking toward the Racing stadium with The Nipple carefully folded under Sonny’s arm when we ran into a group of River Plate fans, the team we hate the most, with a passion, and they snatched The Nipple out of Sonny’s hands and ran off. (In Argentine soccer, it’s considered a particularly worthy feat to pilfer other teams’ paraphernalia.) Devastated over the loss of The Nipple, we scanned the River Plate stands in hopes of seeing it surface one last time, even if it was in mockery, even if it was lit aflame, but no. We never saw The Nipple again.

An uncharacteristically optimistic Red clings to the belief that The Nipple is being used as a cleaning rag on a ship that’s traveling the world. I, on the other hand, assume it was burned or tossed. Sonny also thinks it’s alive, stowed in the back of some River fan’s closet, alone and forgotten.

We all coped with The Nipple’s disappearance in different ways. It was the last flag we made, probably because we got so attached to The Nipple that it broke our heart to see it go, and also because The Nipple was irreplaceable, really. Sonny and Red later decided to print themselves some custom nipple T-shirts, with a photo of The Indian Solari holding a gun to his head on the front and two large nipples plastered onto each sleeves. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but they used an extremely low-quality gif of a nipple they found on the Internet, and so they ended up with a blurry, pixelated, stretched-out nipple on each arm, making them look like nipple Nazis or something along those lines, and they realized this rendered the shirts unusable.

The wet bandit

2011-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

Twenty years ago, when we moved into our house, I was perplexed to find my assigned bathroom -- a fairly sober blue-and-white affair, with silver trimmings -- came with a bidet installed right next to the toilet.

Bidets are one of many pointless traditions that Argentines inherited from European immigrants. I don’t know a single person who actually uses a bidet, and yet every respectable full-size bathroom in this country includes one, as if the bidet granted the owner some sort of intangible, automatic prestige. The way I see it, it’s an evolutionary phenomenon, sort of like mammals slowly getting rid of their prehensile tails. You might not use it, but anyone who’s anyone still has one, so you might as well keep it around for a while.

For years, the bidet served as a receptacle for my literature of choice. Conveniently located next to the toilet, it saw me through my Beverly Cleary phase, my Enid Blyton phase, my John Grisham phase, all the way to the present, where it’s normally clogged by past issues of the New Yorker and whatever fiction I’m reading at the moment (“This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff, if you must know. “Infinite Jest” is too heavy to lug back and forth to the bathroom, and its weight would likely cause the bidet to crack in several places).

In retrospect, I’m surprised I never got curious about the bidet. I could have turned the handles and watched the stream of water bounce up and down, my very own personalized fountain show. I could have parked my naked butt on top of it just for kicks. I could have filled it with water and deployed some plastic toy boats to float from one side to the other. The possibilities are endless.

But I didn’t. My young mind immediately categorized the bidet as furniture, no more than a resting place for my paperbacks, and furniture it remained -- until yesterday.

What happened yesterday is that Foolia had a bunch of friends from college over. Right now, many of you might be wincing and thinking “oh, no!”, and yes, this is the correct reaction. So these kids were up all night playing video games and doing God knows what else and when they finally all left at 6 a.m., this meant I could finally go to sleep, as they would no longer be screaming at the television.

I tiptoed to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

As soon as I turned on the light, I knew something was horribly wrong. My books were all resting on the cold ceramic tile, piled up next to my flip flops, which were drying out on the floor after my visit to the pool that day. The fact that someone had tampered with my reading material was mildly annoying on its own, but then I put two and two together. If the books are on the ground, that means…no, it can’t be. I leaned in closer to the bidet, and there it was! Leftover accumulations of water! And, to top it off, an errant hair was resting placidly in the middle of the bidet. It most definitely didn’t belong to me, as I just recently sheared off my locks and this hair was about a mile long. It was like the cherry on the shit sundae.

I was flabbergasted. What could possibly possess some random 19-year-old dude to come into my house, use my bathroom (we have at least two guest bathrooms for, you know, guests), take a giant dump, and then, despite the overabundance of toilet paper RIGHT NEXT TO THE TOILET, decide to delicately remove all my books and magazines, turn the handles, and direct a pressurized jet stream of water right up his asshole? And all this with the rest of his friends hanging out upstairs? And then leave a long hair behind as a sort of signature?

I woke up this afternoon hoping it had all been a bad dream, but no, the bidet was still wet. Perhaps I should have asked Foolia to personally sanitize it, seeing as my books will now be resting on the disgusting ass particles of the wet bandit, but instead I calmly informed her of the incident and asked her to tell her friends to no longer use my bathroom. “If they’re going to use anyone’s bidet, they should be using yours,” I told Foolia.

Meanwhile, for anyone else with a bidet in their bathroom, a piece of advice: cut the water supply, or put a DO NOT USE sign above it, or tear it down with a sledgehammer and replace it with some nice shelves for your books. You never know where this kid might strike next.

Female issues #1

2011-01-05T18:08:00.000-08:00

[In this new segment, I take a front-page teaser from one of the many Cosmo magazines lying around my house and lovingly write the article myself.]

YOUR VAGINA: What’s normal in your southern zone and what isn’t

Normal: Occasionally feeling not-so-fresh

Not normal: Occasionally feeling crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery.

Normal: Short-term soreness or swelling

Not normal: Picketing, Million Man Marches

Normal: Pubes

Not normal: Publix stores

Normal: UTIs

Not normal: WMDs

Even less normal: HBO

Normal: Distinctive, sometimes pungent aroma

Not normal: The smell of burning leaves

Even less normal: The smell of McDonald’s fryer oil

Normal: Moistness upon sexual stimulation

Not normal: Moistness upon TSA agent stimulation

Normal: Vertical smile

Not normal: Vertical sneer

Normal: Several species of bacteria coexisting

Not normal: Mario Van Peebles waving hello

Normal: Shyness in public

Not normal: Home to an ATP Tour event

Facebook update of the day

2011-01-05T17:29:00.001-08:00

Life is full of bullshit thanks to the stupid people you let in your life.

HAH! This girl needs to put out a motivational calendar ASAP.

You go, Andre

2011-01-03T22:29:00.000-08:00

"You see, Wally, the trouble with always being active and doing things is that it's quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely dead inside. I mean, you're doing all these things, but are you doing them because you really feel an impulse to do them, or are you doing them mechanically, as we were saying before? Because I do believe that if you're just living mechanically, then you have to change your life. I mean, you know, when you're young, you go out on dates all the time, you go dance or something, you're floating free, and then one day you find yourself in a relationship, and suddenly everything freezes. And this can be true in your work as well. And I mean, as long as you're really alive inside, then of course there's no problem. I mean, you know, if you're living with someone in one little room, and there's a life going on between you and the person you're living with, well then, you know, a whole adventure can be going on right in that room. But there's always that danger that things can go dead. And then I think you really do have to kind of become a hobo or something, you know, like Kerouac, and go out on the road. I really believe that. I mean, it's not that wonderful to spend your life on the road. I mean, my own overwhelming preference is to stay in that room if you can! Now, of course, if you live with somebody for a long time, people are constantly saying, "Well, of course it's not as great as it used to be, but that's only natural. The first blush of a romance goes, you know, and that's the way it has to be." Now, I totally disagree with that. But I do think you have to constantly ask yourself the question, with total frankness, is your marriage still a marriage? Is the sacramental element still there? Just as you have to ask about the sacramental element of your work—is it still there? And I mean, it's a very frightening thing to have to realize suddenly that, my God, I thought I was living my life, but in fact I haven't been a human being. I've been a performer. I haven't been living. I've been acting. I've acted the role of the father. I've acted the role of the husband. I've acted the role of the friend. I've acted the role of the writer or director or whatever. I've lived in the same room with this person, but I haven't really seen them. I haven't really heard them. I haven't really been with them."

(From "My Dinner With Andre")

Ignoramuses

2011-01-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

We played a game on New Year’s Eve.

My sister Foolia passed around blank slips of paper and cheap pens. The idea was for everyone to write down three things they wanted for the upcoming year. Not so much resolutions, but requests.

“I could just ask for happiness,” Foolia told me. “But who knows how long that would last.”

“Why don’t you go with ‘happiness, forever’,” I suggested. “And you’d still have a word left over.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spied on her entries as she wrote them down. Health. Happiness. Originality.

I got to work on my own list. When I was done, I slapped my palm over it so everyone would think I just jotted down something intensely private. Still, I left just enough room between my fingers for my sisters to make out some of it.

Malaria craned her neck. “I think number one was Love,” she informed everyone at the table.

“No, no, not love! Lou! Lou!” I explained, desperately tracing over the U to make it U-ier.

“I think the third one is Phillips,” said Dyslexia. “Do you want a rechargeable shaver or something?”

“NO! It’s Phillips as in Lou Diamond-Phillips! Lou Diamond-Phillips!”

“Who the hell is that?” asked my sisters in unison.

“You guys don’t know anything.”

Happy New Year's!

2010-12-31T23:10:00.001-08:00

(At our New Year's dinner)

Dyslexia: Did you know the human eyeball is 92 percent water?

Futbol: I wonder if you can drink it if you're really, really thirsty.

Lies and the lying wiseasses who tell them

2010-12-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

If you’ve learned one thing about me from reading this here blog, it’s that I don’t believe in lying. This doesn’t mean I never lie. Like everyone else, I resignedly participate in the massive system of little white lies that keeps the world a-turning. For instance, when my dentist asks me, “How are you?” I always reply with the universally accepted “good” rather than the more accurate “shitty, because my neck hurts thanks to your damn braces and my teeth appear to be veering off in random directions and your loudmouth dentist husband is probably cheating on you, or at least I hope he is.”

Other times I lie to reward a valiant effort that didn’t turn out all that well. “Seriously, this is great,” I’ll say to family members who insist on buying my Christmas gifts from Argentine novelty teenager clothing stores such as Rever Pass, because I really do value the intention, and I understand that I’m hard to shop for. (Sidenote: What the hell is a “rever”, anyway? Were they going for “river” and just missed the “i”? Or are the owners a bunch of secret genius polyglots alluding to the French word “rêver”? My money’s on a mistype.) And as an editor, I try to blunt my critical knife around beginning reporters, unless they’re churning out puff pieces, in which case I tear them a new asshole. (Like tissue paper, in case you were wondering.)

There is a third type of accepted lie on my list, and that’s the hilarious lie. I never start these hilarious lies myself -- in other words, I wouldn’t just walk up to you and say “dude, I just pantsed John Boehner and he was wearing manties,” or something of that sort -- but I usually become passively mired in them through silence and/or implicit agreement. Like the time when my friends decided to convince a stranger at the bar that I was a serial poopsterbator, and I didn’t counter those allegations because, hell, it was pretty funny, and then the stranger ended up denouncing my perverted ways to the whole bar. Hilarity is a double-edged sword.

Another time I was having dinner with my friend Chotchsky’s wonderful family when Chotchsky, who likes to think of himself as the second coming of Bam Margera, decided he was going to give his dad a massage. “Want a massage, dad?” Chotchsky offered. “No, thanks,” his dad said. “C’mon, dad, it’s just a massage,” Chotchsky insisted. “I said no, thanks,” said his dad. This went on for a while, and then Chotchsky decided to draw me into the argument.

“You know, Futbol gives his dad massages all the time. Right, Futbol?” he said, looking at me.

I put on my best poker face. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “It’s pretty common in Argentina.”

“SEE, DAD?” laughed Chotchsky. “I TOLD YOU! They do it in Argentina ALL THE TIME!”

Now Chotchsky brings this up every time he wants to mess with his dad, and meanwhile I don’t know if Chotchsky’s dad thinks I’m a creepy third-world father-toucher or he’s just playing along with his son’s shenanigans.

There’s an even bigger lie I’ll probably never be able to leave behind. A couple of years ago, Sonny, Paraguay and myself were bantering in Paraguay’s apartment, probably discussing something inane like which bus I took to get there, when by some divine misunderstanding Paraguay thought I said that I drove a bus all the way there. I laughed, and was about to correct him when Sonny jumped in. “You know, he’s actually considering a career as a bus driver, now that he’s unemployed,” Sonny said, straight faced. I sat by idly as the lie got bigger. “Just yesterday he took part in some open tryouts for bus drivers,” Sonny said.

“No way!” said Paraguay, looking at me. “You just showed up and they let you drive the bus?”

This was the point of no return. I could laugh it off and explain the joke, or keep embellishing the story. I chose embellishment.

Five minutes later, Sonny and I had created an extremely detailed alternate universe where I was a bus driver wannabe. I told Paraguay exactly where the test-driving circuit was located, that I hadn’t done all the well in the tryout, that it was organized by the 168 bus line, that it was hard to switch gears on those big old buses, that I was doing it just so I could write about it later, and that deep down I felt bad taking the job from someone who really needed it.

I thought this lie would fade into obscurity, but no. Paraguay became so enamored with the idea that he keeps bringing it up. “How’s the bus-driving going?” he’ll ask me. If Sonny’s around, we’ll look at each other and suppress laughter, but when he’s not, I’m doomed to a long conversation with Paraguay about the potential of a second career in public transportation.

Haunting your dreams

2010-12-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

Today, I received this e-mail from a friend:

"i had a dream sequence last night where we were drinking pink lemonade at a glass table and i was telling you that i had discovered the joys of bikram yoga and so on and so on and how incredibly mentally and physically beneficial it is and you were quiet, took a long drink and said, "no shit!" and then we kept sitting there until i moved into the next dream sequence. what does it all mean?"

"i think it means i'm an asshole," i replied.

Goatees of yore

2010-12-14T23:21:00.000-08:00

I think it's time for me to start pursuing more innovative facial hair styles. For inspiration, I'm turning to former British Prime Minister Benjamin "Dizzy" Disraeli.

Riding in trains with dogs

2010-12-12T18:21:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed, the intellectual field of dogs riding in trains is of great interest to me.

Today I saw a train dog that trumped them all. He was a black lab, in fairly good shape. He sauntered onto to the train a couple of stops before the downtown Buenos Aires central station, which is the end of the line. When I say saunter, I’m not exaggerating. The dog very calmly walked four or five steps into the train, then turned 180 degrees and stared at the open doors until they closed. Once the train was in motion, the dog found an unclaimed spot between two seats and lied down.

Soon enough, the train pulled into downtown and everyone poured out of our car. The dog followed, matching the speed of the crowd. He patiently waited in line to pass through the turnstiles. When his turn came, he trotted below the metal arm and into the busy station.

I forgot about train dog and navigated my way underground to the subway. This is no easy feat. It involves going down a set of stairs, sorting several obstacles that include columns and newsstands, then taking a hard right onto a narrow platform. I waited ten minutes for the subway to arrive. I found a seat. The subway took off.

And who do I see scampering down the aisle but train dog himself, a dog that clearly has been granted with an unprecedented (at least in the animal kingdom) ability to decipher and take advantage of Buenos Aires’s convoluted public transportation system. I’m telling you, if I picked a random tourist and asked them to do what train dog did, odds are about 10 to 1 that they wouldn’t make it.

Everyone in the subway car smiled, including me, because how can you not be amused by a commuting genius dog. He started sniffing people’s hands in search of food, and eventually guilted one guy into handing over the remainder of his chocolate chip cookies. The dog engulfed them, then licked his chops.

If you happen to read this, train dog, please know that you're my hero. In my book, you’re just as cool as commuting pigeon.

Stop giving me your business cards

2010-12-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

This is probably the dumbest business card I've ever received. It's for a photocopy place inside the National Library. The card just says PHOTOCOPIES, and below it, 5th FLOOR. What is the point of a business card? Do they think I'll be walking down a random street and suddenly think to myself, "Hey, that copy place inside the giant library that takes forever to sign in and out of was pretty good, wasn't it? Why don't I jump on the bus for two hours and take my business to them?" I really don't get it. They don't NEED to advertise. They already have a captive audience: the people inside the library who aren't allowed to take books home (i.e. everyone). And those people can get to the copy place by simply following the big sign that says PHOTOCOPIES, or walking toward the noise of copies being made, or asking a security guard. There's no competition inside the library, either. It's just them. There's no need for a card. Please call their number, tell them they're idiots, and then hang up.

I like to think that every time this real estate company makes a sale, competing realtors raise their fist to the heavens and yell: "O'DOUUUUUCHE!!! YOU'VE SCREWED ME AGAIN!" I'd really like to hear O'Douche's sales pitch: "Sir, you can have absolute trust in O'Douche. We've got years of experience, and no one knows the market like O'Douche does. Our realtors are all trained the O'Douche way. "

(Perhaps I should clarify that, in Spanish, U's are pronounced like an English "OO", as in poontang, or Duhamel. Otherwise this company name would sound like O'Dutch, and that wouldn't be funny, other than the Dutch Rudder jokes.)

Schopenhauer sez

2010-12-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

"Un cuadro hay que contemplarlo al modo como cuando nos acercamos a un soberano; esperar el momento en que tenga a bien hablarnos y el tema de conversacion que quiera elegir; en uno u otro caso no debemos ser los primeros en dirigir la palabra, pues si asi lo hiciesemos correremos el riesgo de no oir mas que nuestra propia voz."

"Before a picture, as before a prince, every one must stand, waiting to see whether and what it will speak to him; and, as in the case of a prince, so here he must not himself address it, for then he would only hear himself."

And I write songs

2010-12-04T13:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know what's going on. I'm grading street papers, writing songs, going America all over everybody's ass. Must be the realization that my applications are almost done with, and by almost done I mean I still have another paper and a month of work ahead of me.

So, this song. It isn't finished. The lyrics are largely jibberish. But isn't that what the Internet is for? Enjoy.

I grade street papers

2010-12-04T08:38:00.000-08:00

This morning I spotted a bunch of scattered pages outside my house from what appears to be a young girl’s school notebook. (This is a common practice in Argentina. At the end of the year, everyone from office workers to college students to drooling babies throws out all their paperwork, blanketing the city with lovely trash.) Normally I’d ignore this sort of thing, but the one I walked by mentioned Britney Spears. Britney! So I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket.

It reads:

“My favourite singer is Britney Spears. She is a really good singer. She was born in USA. She can’t play an instrument.”

OK, let me stop you right here. First off, if you’re going to write like an American, you might as well spell “favorite” their way. Second, Britney is not a good singer. Autotune is a good singer. Third, the word USA is plural, as it refers to an agglomeration of states. You can’t be born in USA, much like you can’t be born in Netherlands or born in Falkland Islands. Well, I suppose you can, if you’re Dolph Lundgren and people find your speech impediments cute/sexy, but you should know better, young lady. I will, however, commend you for that last statement. I love the passive-aggressive criticism. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that this was the best part of your dumb little essay.

“She started her career in TV adverts when she was eight. Her first ablum was Baby one more time (1999).”

Adverts? Who says adverts? And what are your sources, little lady? I doubt you know all this off the top of your head, and if you do, that’s just plain sad. Also, you’ve misspelled “album”. Good work. The fact that your teacher didn’t notice means he or she is likely stupider than you, so you got that going for you.

“Her best song is Toxic. I like Britney because she’s fantastic and she’s lovely.”

Finally, a display of brain activity. Her best song is, indeed, Toxic. Now, why don’t you apply your little Wikipedia whiz kid skills and search for that song. See how it was written by some random people? See how it was first offered to Kylie Minogue? Still think your beloved Britney deserves any credit for opening her mouth at random intervals and thrusting her hips? I didn’t think so.

Now, your next line is probably the most problematic of the entire essay. You claim you like Britney because she’s fantastic and she’s lovely. That doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING. Your brain-dead teacher should have taken his or her little observation about Toxic (“why do you like it?”) and moved it to this sentence. After all, one does not need to state reasons for liking Toxic. It just makes you wanna dance! But “fantastic and lovely”, that you need to justify. Critical thinking, people! I’m sure there are lots of assholes out there who thought Hitler was fantastic and lovely, and, like your teacher, no one pressed them on their reasons. So by saying Britney is fantastic and lovely, you’re directly supporting Nazism. You happy? You happy, little girl?

“She’s my favourite singer because she sings really good.”

Again with the favourite. What you need is a dictionary. And a thesaurus. And a brain. She sings really good? What is this, Billy Madison 101? You tell me do stuff an’ I done runnin’? Conditioner is good? Shampoo is betta? Furthermore, your logic is, as per usual, horribly flawed. She doesn’t sing “really good”. I told you before: she has machines do it for her. On the rare occasion she does her own singing, your eardrums will recoil at her cloying, overdone, American Idol voice. Just like my brain recoils at reading your poorly thought-out essay. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul (and your teacher’s).

Thanks, America, for spreading your vapid pop culture among our schoolchildren!

Au revoir, asshole!

2010-12-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

My insufferable dentist has, at long last, decided to remove my braces -- but only the bottom part. This makes my mouth look like one of those old fat people who walk around nudist colonies with their penis out but with an oversize T-shirt on. The top teeth have months, or even years, to go before they are ready for unveiling. Regardless, I will revel in this small victory. This is what my bottom teeth used to look like:

And this is how they look now. Hooray!

(Yes, I too have noticed the imperfect tooth in the front. My dentist claims she can fix it with whatever magical material they use for filling cavities and such. I'll believe it when I see it.)

Dubious comparisons VI

2010-11-27T19:26:00.001-08:00

Today's soccer-themed dubious comparison brings us a double whammy. First up is Manchester United striker Dimitar Berbatov, whose last name is perpetually misspelled in my head because I'm used to the word "verb" and not "berb". Anyway, look at his face:

And then tell me he doesn't look just like Andy Garcia. You can't. Because you'd be wrong.

Our second comparison involves another striker, this one playing for obscure Argentine team All Boys. (When Ziggy heard their name, he started yelling "all boys here! No men allowed!") His name is Mauro Matos, and I'll be darned if he doesn't look just like reality television's own Tailor Made. Here's Matos:

And here's the Made man:

You're welcome.

The return of Alf

2010-11-22T12:39:00.001-08:00

Remember my other grandma, the one whose phone I set up so she'd be greeted by Alf every time? Well, her phone broke. The top part with the screen somehow parted ways with the bottom part with the numbers. I tried calling Malaria with the bottom half to see if it still worked, and it did, except the speaker was on the top half, so all I could do was speak incessantly, never getting a reply. It was kind of nice, actually.

Anyway, my grandma has been talking about getting it replaced for a while, and it turns out my uncle had the exact same phone lying around unused. So she's using that one now. We had a family dinner last Saturday to celebrate (or mourn) the return of my parents, and I immediately asked to see her phone so I could set up an Alf welcome message, this time choosing a slightly different phrasing.

Today I got this e-mail from my grandma:

Hello Futbol,

Who is Gordon Shumway??????

Love,

Grandma.

Little Arthur

2010-11-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

My grandparents (on my mom’s side) are a stereotypical, nagging, elderly couple living in an old house that’s way too big for them. I’m not sure what they do to pass the time, seeing as they have no computer or DVD player. My grandma cooks a lot, and my grandpa whistles a lot.

Over dinner tonight, I found out that they own a Roomba, which they brought back from their last trip to Europe. This came as a big shock to me, what with their Luddite ways.

Keep in mind that these people no longer have pets or young grandchildren to shower with affection. So when they started gushing about the Roomba, I wasn’t too surprised. My grandfather immediately went upstairs to bring down the user’s manual, which he handed to me, and a laminated printout with photos of the Roomba in different positions.

“It’s like he’s showing us photos of his grandkid,” I said to Malaria.

I asked them all sorts of Roomba questions, because I sensed that they really wanted to talk about it. I learned that the Roomba talks to them in several languages (“The other day he was calling out to us and I could hear him through the door, poor thing”) and that sometimes they just sit around for half an hour at a time, watching the Roomba work its magic (“Doesn’t that sort of defy the point?” I asked). My grandpa revealed that he dismantles it and cleans the brush periodically to keep the thing in proper working condition.

I told them that, considering how much they love their Roomba, they should at least give it a proper name.

“We already have,” said my grandma. “He’s Little Arthur.”

“Okay...and where do you keep Little Arthur?” I asked.

“Upstairs, in the room you used to sleep in when you were kids.”

“And I suppose that’s now officially the robot’s room, right?” I said.

After dinner we all marched upstairs to the robot’s room. There was Little Arthur, resting placidly on his charging dock, the smug bastard.

My grandfather pulled out a big box with all of Little Arthur’s attachments, which he put on my lap as if I that was something I might be interested in. Eventually, after some coaxing, we convinced them to fire up Little Arthur. Apparently they had assumed we’d settle for staring at it.

The first thing Little Arthur did was head toward the stairs. “I think Little Arthur is suicidal,” I told my grandparents. They did not find that thought amusing.

We all stood around while Little Arthur ran into our feet repeatedly, almost like a dog excitedly sniffing out a new person. It lingered around Foolia. “FRIEND?” I said in my best robot voice.

The room was crowded, and Little Arthur couldn’t go more than a foot without bumping into something.

“How cute, it’s like a baby learning how to walk,” said Foolia.

“Yeah, an incredibly stupid baby,” I said. “So, uh, can we see what happens when it reaches the stairs?”

My grandma, horrified, decided it was time to put Little Arthur away.

I can’t get this image out of my head: my grandparents, sitting on the living room couch, heads swaying as they follow Little Arthur around the room. Then they carry him back up to his room, give him a pat on the head, and maybe even feed him a little something, leftover mashed potatoes or peanut M&M’s.

Narcoleptics Anonymous

2010-11-15T00:32:00.000-08:00

I feel for my sister Malaria. She works as a producer for an Argentine news network, a third-world CNN if you will, and because she is fresh out of college, she was given the worst schedule possible. She wakes up at 4:30 a.m., leaves home at 5 a.m., and gets back home at 3 p.m.

This means her hours and mine are completely opposite. I go to bed at 5 a.m., so I hear her rustling around in the dark right before I shut down for the day, making me feel simultaneously guilty that I’m living like a rock star and happy that I’m living like a rock star.

Malaria’s undesirable work schedule results in her being constantly confused and sleep-deprived. She plops herself down on the living room couch every afternoon and instantly dozes off, TV blaring, phone ringing and my mom screaming things like “food’s ready!” to those of us who choose to exist on the top floors. Nothing disturbs her slumber. You could sing “My Heart Will Go On” at the top of your lungs right in her face, and she’d probably just turn over and keep on sleeping.

What amazes me most is her discipline. If I had that job, I’d be constantly tempted to pull all-nighters, eventually settling upon the weirdest sleep schedule possible, something like 4 p.m. to midnight. But not Malaria. Despite her erratic sleep patterns, she always wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and is ready to roll at 5.

Except for tonight, that is.

It all started at 8 in the evening, when I got home from my weekly soccer game. The light was on in Malaria’s room. While eating dinner, I noticed that every five minutes her alarm clock would go off, just a short burst, and then silence. I assumed Malaria had fallen asleep with the light on and was slapping that snooze button with mechanical precision. Then 10 p.m. came and went, then 11. Same pattern: alarm clock every five minutes, three or four beeps, silence.

Around 1 a.m. I got suspicious. I’ve hit the snooze button for fairly long periods of time myself, but never for five consecutive hours. You’d think at some point she’d wake up long enough to either a) get the crap out of bed or b) turn the alarm permanently off and sleep till work time.

By 2 a.m. I reached the point of complete incredulity. There was no way Malaria was in there. She must have been sleeping over at her boyfriend’s. And this goddamn alarm clock was going to keep going off every five minutes till tomorrow, so I decided I might as well go downstairs and turn it off.

I knocked softly on Malaria’s door as a precaution. No answer. I knocked harder.

“YES?” said a startled Malaria from inside. I gathered myself.

“Could you turn off the alarm clock?” I asked gently.

Malaria thought about this for a bit. “What alarm clock?” she said, confused.

“The one that’s been going off for the past six hours.”

She did as ordered, and apparently went back to sleep. I returned upstairs, feeling bad for waking her up.

By the time I was ready to go to bed it was 4:55 a.m., but Malaria was nowhere to be seen. I started worrying. What if she misses work because I made her turn off her alarm? I certainly don’t want the end of her attendance streak on my shoulders. But I already woke her up once…what if she’s not working today for some odd reason?

Better safe than sorry, I decided, and back downstairs I went.

Knock knock.

“YES?” said Malaria again, obviously half-asleep.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” I asked.

These must have been the most confusing ten seconds of her life, because after a long pause she said something like, “yes, wait, yes.”

I decided my own work here was done and retired to my room. It was with relief that I heard Malaria head out the front door at 5:05 a.m.

Someone's gotta bring home the bacon.

Existential questions

2010-11-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Uh, why do our house's ants love this roll of paper towels so much?

Cross that off my bucket list

2010-11-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

If you google "konsome panchi lyrics", you'll find that the number one hit is this very blog. Just sayin'.

We musn't let anything happen to Piggy (updated)

2010-11-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

Today, both parental units took off to Los Angeles for a 10-day vacation, leaving me and my two younger sisters in charge of the house, completely unsupervised.

For us youngsters, this is a time of glee. There are no plans for raucous parties or irresponsible behavior, as of yet, but the absence of sobering authority makes for a nice change of pace. As a bonus, we got to watch our parents freak out for days in advance of their departure.

“Let me show you how to use the washer and dryer,” my mom said to me yesterday.

We went down to the laundry room and she had left tiny white post-it notes above each dial on the washing machine, Ned Flanders style. “Correct temperature setting is 5”, they said, or “push this button to start”, never mind that the word START is prominently printed above it.

I informed her I’ve done laundry for eight years and thus am capable of operating this strange device on my own. She ignored me and launched into a breakdown of all the different types of laundry detergents and their proper functions: there’s a special detergent for whites, another one for blacks, and a third one for colored clothing. I refrained from telling her that this was the most racist clothes-cleaning system I had ever seen, but I did inform her that I will only use one type of detergent, and I will not divide my clothes between whites, blacks, browns, blues and reds, but simply between whites and colors. That’s my system, and it has never failed me. My mom knew better than to engage in this argument, and she resignedly led me to the next appliance, an ever-malfunctioning oven. She also left a note on the dishwasher, which at first I thought said simply "dishwasher", as if we had no idea what the dishwasher looked like. But upon closer inspection, I found it actually said "dishwasher [is] clean".

Then it was my dad’s turn. He knocked on my door today.

“Futbol?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Come out here for a second.”

I did.

“I wanted to show you where the Rolexes are, in case we don’t come back,” he said.

“That’s a little pessimistic,” I said.

“Just in case,” he repeated, and led me to the stash.

He also left a big wad of cash for us to blow on food. At this point, we began assigning each other roles for the coming 10 days.

“I’ll be the treasurer,” Foolia told me. “You can be the trash man.”

“Fine, I’ll be the trash man,” I replied. “But you have to be the dishwashing lady.”

“OK. You can be the cook, too,” Foolia generously offered.

“I’m not too sure about that. How about we make Malaria the cook?”

“That might not end well,” said Foolia deep in thought, and then volunteered: “I can make lemon squares!”

I considered her proposal for a second.

“If we ate lemon squares all week long, I’m pretty sure we’d all die of the diabeetus,” I said.

“Fine. Can I be in charge of security then?” Foolia asked.

“Uh, no. I’m security. I’m the one who keeps security-guard hours.”

“OK. One more thing. If there’s a cockroach, you’re killing it,” Foolia said.

“Not a problem. And what about Malaria? She needs a job.”

"She'll be the pampered child."

Having sorted all this out, we walked downstairs. The car was waiting outside to drive the parents to the airport. Malaria was napping on the couch, and she was awoken so she could hug them goodbye. As my mom slowly inched toward the door, you could sense her apprehension.

“Is someone locking the door behind us?” she asked.

“NOPE!” I yelled.

“I’ll do it,” said Foolia.

“I’m going to close the door and then open it right back again to see if you’re celebrating,” threatened my mom.

“NOPE! HAVE A GOOD TRIP!” I yelled.

With that, they were gone. Foolia and I performed a brief celebration jig, and a groggy Malaria joined us briefly from the couch. Then she fell right back asleep.

I’ll keep you updated on how the week goes. My money’s on a Lord of the Flies-type scenario.

----11/05 update

A bunch of Foolia's loud friends apparate into the house as soon as the sun goes down. Foolia decides to order empanadas for everyone. She comes to my room to ask me what I want.

"Now I'm the boss of this family!" she tells me.

"Uh, maybe you should check who's handling all the annoying minutia and who's sitting in bed reading," I say.

Update-within-an-update: Now they're all singing the theme to Doo-An-Heif Men.

----11/06

All quiet on the McFutbol front. Foolia and Malaria's boyfriends/man-dates spent all day here, which is unheard of. I tanned out on The (new and improved) Lung. Several meals have been scheduled with multiple grandparents, so that we can avoid cooking. We ordered sushi and the girls went to bed early, probably because they exhausted themselves yesterday celebrating their newfound freedom. Oh, and last night I had a nightmare where David Sedaris's dad was my dad (yes, I was reading Sedaris right before I went to bed) and then he died and I had to go to his office job in his place, and his wife (Sedaris's mother) yelled at me because I was late for work. Clearly, my psyche is not coping well with the pressure of running a household.

----11/07

Foolia thawed some frozen pizza for lunch. Later that day, after my weekly soccer game, I hit up a bar near my house with Sonny. We tried to order sandwiches for dinner and were told that there was a private event going on that night and that pizza was the only food available, but that the pizza was free. Free? I asked the guy. Yep, totally free, he said. While we were eating the pizza, me and Sonny speculated on what the catch was. "Maybe it's some sort of swingers meeting, and we're expected to have sex with people after dinner," I said. Turns out, there was a mediocre rock band playing. So we ate the free pizza and took off as soon as their set started. While the nutritional value of my diet might be questionable, I like the general direction that this is going in.

Other things I did today: beat Clash at Demonhead, the game that ruined my childhood. Kudos to Scott Pilgrim for reminding me of this sore spot in my videogame history. Also: was made aware of Kat Dennings topless photos. My subsequent research only cemented her position at the top of my celebrity crush list.

----11/08

We may have left the playroom windows open for four days, but thankfully Malaria thought to close them in the middle of a 5 a.m. storm, right before she went to work. Foolia remembered to turn on the lights out front before she went to bed, but only half of them. I noticed that someone left the lights in the yard on for two days, but kept forgetting to ask about it. "Congratulations," I told them. "I think we can all agree that, between all of us, we made things slightly worse."

But no, in all seriousness, we're being extremely responsible. Today the three of us had dinner together: I peeled the potatoes, Malaria made the mashed potatoes and stuck the frozen chicken tenders in the oven, and Foolia did the dishes. Also, Foolia went to the store to buy more unhealthy snacks and sodas, not that we needed them. This is all going too well. I suppose there's no need to update anymore, at least until something major gets botched.

Oh, one last thing. In one of my trips to the laundry room, I found a plastic bag containing a bottle, and one of those tiny notes from my mom attached. It read: "WATCH OUT! Poison for the clovers in the yard." This is classic. Like, if it didn't say watch out, does she think we'd drink it? Or dunk our chicken tenders in it? And besides, in what universe do clovers need/deserve to be poisoned?

Ten thousand strong

2010-11-03T15:57:00.001-07:00

Dear Out Of The Flame-ers: Congratulations! Thanks to your relentless clicking, this blog has reached 10,000 visitors. To commemorate such a momentous occasion, let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

I kicked off this mutha by bitching about my braces and my mullet. I still haven't been able to rid myself of either. Shortly thereafter, Sonny and I came up with a plan to go out each night for only 99 cents, which surprisingly got him laid. We also got our rocks off at the Indian Solari's rock show.

The following year, I developed a short-lived comic strip about a hipster chicken and got caught in a bus with a foul-smelling salami. A Manu Chao concert inspired me to write an uncharacteristically political post, and then a couple of posts about where I've lived, and what I was listening to at the time. I grew bored and left for Europe, but not before meeting this cool-ass train-riding street dog that I still see around these days.

Upon my return, I wrote a song about the cats in my yard. I also wrote a service-y post explaining how to use the darn bus. I tried my hand at boxing. I got obsessed with furry grabby things from the 80s, and eventually got my hands on some.

Sonny, meanwhile, wasn't doing all that well. First he got hospitalized for abusing prescription drugs. Then he started disappearing sporadically. Eventually, he checked himself into rehab.

I grew restless again and took off for Bolivia on a rickety train; later, I crossed the river to Uruguay. As if that wasn't enough, I went on another family vacation. Then I got back to writing about serious topics, like my old Ford Taurus and a completely unwarranted hailstorm. But, of course, that didn't last, and I took off for a coast-to-coast sex tour of the U.S.

I returned to Buenos Aires to resume my drinking, aided by the elusive Mindy Metalman and Flour. But something told me I wasn't in the right place. So I took to the library and began working on grad school applications.

So there you have it. Two years of my life condensed into a few paragraphs. I wonder if I can use this as my cover letter.

Cotton-eyed Joe

2010-10-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

A few months before finishing college I received a letter informing me of my acceptance into a prestigious newspaper training program. The goal of said program was to handpick about 20 fresh-faced grads, fly them out to California, and teach them to scour articles for errors and grammatical mistakes. After two intense weeks, each kid would be sent out into The Real World™, to put their skills to practice. Each participant was arbitrarily assigned an eventual destination for the summer, the choices limited to local newspapers in the most remote, undesirable and underpopulated corners of America.

And so, for the second time in my life, I sold off all my belongings, packed a single bulging suitcase, and boarded the plane. All I knew about this two-week West Coast adventure was that food and accommodations were covered by the program, and that’s all I cared to know, really.

Had I stopped to consider what I was doing -- heading to a workshop for people who enjoy hunting for typos -- I would not have been surprised to find that the majority of the California crew was a bunch of galactically dweeby nerds. I mean, we’re talking full-on stereotypes here: the thick glasses (which in Spanish we call “bottle-butt” glasses, and you can probably figure out why), the lisps, the awkwardness. All good people, but good people with whom I had little to talk about.

Then there was Joe. Joe was a local boy, picked for this program, it seemed to me, because he happened to attend the college where the training was taking place. I like to imagine that the professor in charge saw him wandering the streets and said, “hey, kid, wanna be in newspapers?” and Joe said “I guess,” or just grunted in approval. At any rate, he was an asset: he knew the professors well and thus was able to push the slacker boundaries, and he had a working knowledge of the neighborhood.

Joe was a flabby, imposing fellow, and his sloth-like movements seemed plucked right out of a Hollywood film, like the tree army in Lord of the Rings or the rock guy in the Neverending Story or Andre the Giant in that “as you wish” movie my older sister insisted on watching over and over when I was too young to object. Like the rest of the kids, he wore glasses, except he had taken a bat to the face or something at a young age and one of his eyes was wonky. Sometimes the left pupil would take a coffee break and he’d end up staring in different directions. Most problematic was that after staring at the computer screen for a predetermined amount of time his eye would gradually stop focusing, and Joe would have to press his hand against his temple to get it to cooperate. This is not a joke. I’d find him late at night in the computer room, leaning toward the screen, his fingers pushing into his eye socket, appearing deep in thought like a fat version of Rodin’s Thinker, but basically just trying to make out the blurry words on his iMac.

I knew Joe and I would get along swimmingly when, after we were given our weekly meal allowance, he fanned his dollar bills and jokingly proposed: “Let’s go to the grocery store and blow it all on alcohol!”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, straight-faced.

“Let’s do it,” countered Joe, calling my bluff.

“All right, let’s go,” I said.

Seeing as neither of us was backing down, we got into Joe’s car and headed to the closest Safeway. We bought a cooler and ice and a healthy supply of Bud Light. Joe spent the rest of his lunch money on a bottle of Captain Morgan’s Private Reserve. As we uncorked it in celebration that night, we both agreed that it was the best-tasting alcohol to have ever touched our collegiate lips.

We threw a couple of room parties and, before you knew it, we had bonded with most of the grammarians. The two weeks flew by. We kept busy imitating the professors behind their backs, evading our assignments, eating out all over the city, and skipping out to Joe’s house in Santa Cruz with a couple of like-minded females for a night of moon-gazing and, uh, video games.

To top it all off, we found out that Joe and I had been assigned to the same newspaper in Minnesota. And this extremely generous newspaper, unaware of what it had coming, had decided to foot the bill on a three-bedroom apartment for the two of us to use at our leisure over the summer.

When we moved in, Joe brought along a truckload of sci-fi DVDs, but most prominently positioned on his shelf was “The Big Lebowski”. I, ever the Spartan, had nothing to contribute to the common cause other than my suitcase. So I bought a Foreman grill, and we both pooled our cash together for a small color TV, mostly because cable was included and we didn’t want it to go to waste. We made plans for a beer pong table and eventually carried them to fruition, turning the third bedroom into a venue for intoxication, much appreciated by the worn out and overstressed reporting interns who would knock on our door on weekend nights.

Our job, running from 5 p.m. to about 1 a.m., was ideal. We got out in time to hit up the bar across the street, and then we could sleep off the hangover in time for work the next day.

Up to this point it was all well and good. But when it came time for actual work, Joe’s “the Dude abides” attitude started screwing me over. At first it was simply irksome: We’d have to proof pages out of a common pile, and it seemed that I got two done for every one page he looked at. Meanwhile, he’d take long walks, disappear on extended dinner breaks, and generally just lounge around the newsroom. Every night, the final deadline for printing the newspaper would find us scrambling to finish up the work, dooming some peeved senior editor to another night away from the wife and kids.

As the summer wore on, Joe’s work slowed to a glacial pace. I coaxed and prodded, then the intern coordinator had a sit-down with him, but nothing seemed to change his ways. Considering how lazy he was, it was amazing that he could muster up the energy to be so resolute.

I tried to invite him to partake in my athletically minded lifestyle, hoping it would provide some motivation. He came to the gym with me and I showed him the ropes. His sleeveless T-shirt was drenched in sweat in no time.

“Are you sure you can handle that much weight?” I asked Joe.

“Yeah, dude, I’m fine,” he said.

After showering at the apartment, we headed to work. A few hours into our shift, Joe told me his back was hurting.

“That’s normal,” I said. “There’s a lot of muscles there you haven’t used in a while.”

“No, it actually hurts,” he said, rolling his shoulders.

“I bet you can sleep it off and it’ll be fine in the morning,” I said.

As the night wore on, I noticed Joe was no longer walking to the printer to pick up pages to proof. He explained that walking made his back hurt more. Faced with this new information, I decided to bring back two pages every time and hand one of them to Joe.

This worked all right, until I came back from one of my trips to the printer and he was lying on the floor, belly up, his head poking out into the hallway.

“What the hell?” I asked.

“I thought it’d help to lie down, but now I can’t move,” Joe explained.

So, up until the deadline hour, the rest of us kept working, sidestepping Joe on our way to the printer, while the women in skirts strategically plotted their paths so as to avoid his prying eyes.

At 1 a.m. I plopped down next to him.

“What now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

I consulted the other two adults still in the building, and we decided that the right thing to do was to get Joe checked out by a professional. An ambulance would be overkill, I thought, so we came up with a game plan: Two of us would lift Joe back onto his office chair, then we’d wheel him down the freight elevator, then I’d go get the car and pick him up out front. It worked to perfection. (And, might I add, you haven’t lived if you’ve never pushed a hefty human being down a freight elevator.)

I drove to the closest hospital, checked Joe into the emergency room and anxiously waited for news. Anxiously, I say, because I wanted to get to the bar before closing time. Turns out, his back muscles had somehow clenched up, so the doctor administered a relaxant in shot form. I dropped Joe back at our place and met the rest of the newspaper crew at the bar, where among tall mugs of Honeyweiss the night’s episode was quickly incorporated into intern folklore, if not weaved into outright legend.

And so, every time I go back, the few remaining witnesses of the evening ask me to recount the story of Joe, and I, like a medieval minstrel, gladly accept.

Dad-isms

2010-10-25T19:03:00.001-07:00

A couple more classic Dad moments shared by Foolia a few months ago. I never got around to posting them.

1) Foolia [talking about the World Cup]: It's kinda crazy that the teams that came in first and second last time are already out, huh?

Dad: You know what that means...it's a conspiracy. Between the Pope, who's German, and God, who's Argentine.

2) [Driving under the Pueyrredon tunnel]

Dad: This bridge is very poorly constructed.

Foolia: Maybe it's because it's a tunnel.

God bless you, Gordon Shumway

2010-10-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

It’s not like I have this long, illustrious tradition of cracking “Alf” jokes, but inspiration seems to strike once a decade or so.

The first instance of “Alf” humor, caught on VHS for posterity, stars baby Foolia sometime in the early 90s. She still hasn’t learned to string words together. The image shows her plopped right in front of the TV, gleaning valuable life lessons from “Alf”, like her three siblings did before her; until I burst into the frame, nonchalantly step out in front of her and fire up a soccer game on my Super Nintendo. I must have been 11 or 12.

At first, Foolia is disconcerted by the onscreen change. I’m counting on the possibility that, to an illiterate baby, a bunch of soccer-playing pixels aren’t distinguishable from a hirsute, schlocky alien from Melmac. But then, somehow, her tiny baby brain processes what has just taken place, and she grows indignant.

“AUF!” she screams, pointing at the TV, face reddening. “AUF! AUF!”

I ignore her.

Cut to a few years ago. For some reason, we were talking about Danny Elfman, which led me to bring up the “Alf” theme. And while we were all singing it together (actually, more like trying and failing to imitate the sound of a saxophone), I decided to perform the dubbed introductory voiceover of the Spanish version. “Con…Andrea Elson!” And ending with: “Y…Benji Gregory!” This became another running joke, with Benji Gregory’s name invoked every time we talk about opening credits, or child actors gone to ruin (although we have no idea what became of Benji Gregory).

Then the next year, Malaria was using this el cheapo cell phone that allowed you to customize your ringtone, with a single obnoxious beep per note. You know, that classic old cell phone sound that everyone hated. In my hands, of course, it became a weapon of “Alf” destruction, and I began to roughly translate the theme into ringtone form. The notes came out OK, but because the phone had very limited options as to the duration of silences, the tempo was hilariously off. The fun ended when Malaria swapped that cell phone for a real one. That was a sad day.

And then, the pinnacle of Alf jokes: Last year, my grandma got herself a cell phone and asked me to teach her to use text messages (bad decision). While tinkering around with her phone, I noticed there was an option to customize the welcome message that appears upon powering up. How could I leave that stone unturned? I typed in: “Hi, grandma, it’s Alf!!!!”

I was hoping she’d ask if Alf was literally living in her phone, but no, she was too smart for that.

Yesterday I was riding back from the opera with my grandma and she turned on her phone in the car.

“Does it still have that Alf thing on it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Hah! Let me take that off for you.”

“No! I like it!” she said.

Ni yanqui, ni Marxista

2010-10-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

“Futbol?” asks my dad, knocking on my door.

“Yes?”

“What do you want for dinner? Pizza? McDonald’s?”

“Either is fine.”

“What?”

“Either is fine!”

“What?”

“I’M OK WITH LEFTOVERS!”

Then I hear him walk away, and he says, to my sister Foolia: “Futbol is the only person I know who, when given two options, picks a third one.”

“Neither Yankee nor Marxist,” Foolia wisecracks.

I was a teenage writer

2010-10-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while rummaging through my old Word files from high school, I found something labeled “Story”. I clicked on it, assuming it would be some dry essay on Kafka or Camus (yes, whoever came up with reading lists for my Lit classes back then wasn’t exactly the sunshine and rainbows type) but instead I found an author-less short story titled “The Ruby’s Glow”. I looked up the file info and it had been originally created in 1999; which would put me at 16 years old.

I gave it a quick read. The story very obviously dealt with my main preoccupations at that time: Soccer games, and fitting in, and hanging around Sonny’s neighborhood, and getting mugged by hooligans on the way to the game, all written in a rip-offy Julio Cortazar style. I had to read it three times from start to end before I was actually convinced that yes, this was written by me. I can’t remember exactly why I decided not to share it with anyone; probably because Sonny was writing similar literature at the time and I didn’t want to come off as a copycat, and also because I’m usually wary of sharing my creative manifestations when they’re somewhat personal.

The good news is that enough time has gone by that I don’t give a shit about putting it up here. And, honestly, I was impressed with it. I have no idea what possessed me to go upstairs to the computer and vomit out this short story at 16, but I can tell you for sure that I can't write anything as unselfconscious as this, at my current age. So, in recognition of 16-year-old Futbol, here it is: An unedited, literal translation of “The Ruby’s Glow” (originally titled “Die Heiße Schlacht”, but that was just young me trying to be pretentious). Perhaps the only thing you need to know before reading this is that Atlanta is a small local soccer team in Buenos Aires. And their fans are known as the Bohemians. If you think this is about the Atlanta Braves, well, you’re wrong.

THE RUBY’S GLOW

“Come on, asshole, we’re gonna miss the bus.”

I didn’t care anymore. Musical notes were floating around, celestial, crystalline, transparent; shimmering, ephemeral bubbles of an uncertain destination. I found myself secluded. Outside was mayhem, the streets of Palermo, Dorrego, the hooligans, that effervescent feeling that overtakes conventional reasoning. Inside was death. But not dark death, the one with graves and hopelessness. It was the endless prairie, the silence filled with life, the cusp of relaxation.

“You hear me, dickwad? Hey, Quique, let’s see if you can get him to snap out of it.”

It was like swimming in sounds, submerging myself in honey, infinite sweetness. Everything had lost its dimensions. I could almost touch it, I felt its heat on the tips of my fingers. The smell of grass, the smell of jasmine. This is what silence must smell like.

“It’s coming, dude! Just leave the kid, see if he learns to fend for himself.”

A faraway siren, a warning. Something telling me I had to go back to the surface. But I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to stay here, in the light and in the darkness, with vineyards from La Rioja and providential springs. Suddenly, invading the periphery, a putrid scent, infecting. Blinding light, intolerable. Smoke.

“Whoa, chill out, Quique! One was enough, no need for a beating! Get over here, the bus is pulling over.”

Nothing lasts forever, nothing lasts forever, nothing lasts forever. Maybe death does. I climb in. Steps to perdition, to oblivion or to remembrance. Conventional people, innocent and guilty at the same time, distort my view, give it that characteristic gray of the afternoons. They must be looking at my face, my features, my clothes. Sons of bitches. Gray, then gray, then more gray, over and again. All of them the same. Always the same people. Every Saturday, the corner of Costa Rica and Dorrego, where the 93 bus stops. On the way to the Atlanta game, on the way to mediocrity.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. We’re the guys of the Bohemian, and we’re here to ask you for a contribution for today’s game, OK?”

They pull out their purses, their wallets, they pull out their resignation. The old man in the third seat grabs his plaid coat, rifles through his pocket. He runs his fingers through the scant greasy hair he has left. He frowns, his expression changes. He looks up, meets my expectant eyes. I hold his scattered and anxious stare, I ponder human fragility for a few seconds. He seems to be begging for something, expecting something, like a dog that looks at his master hovering above it, dominating it. An injured dog.

“Come on, old man, I don’t have all day.”

I never felt comfortable with my personality. I learned to separate myself from it. I am one, he is another, an abstraction that allows me to continue living and following the Bohemians. In fact: during my first years here, the guys teased me. When I blew up, they wouldn’t call me by my name; they themselves sensed my transition into someone else. That’s when I became Fert, the wild lunatic who bowed down to no authority figure. My problems with Fert multiplied; I hid inside my fog, peeking out now and then out of simple curiosity, just to see what was going on.

“Answer me, God damn it! Where the fuck is my money?”

That was Fert, roaring up from the most remote parts of my being, ready to disappear at the worst possible moment. The old man was looking at me, compassionate, strange, somewhat melancholic. I don’t look back at him. Fert does. The old man fishes something out of the tattered pocket. You can tell right away it’s an antique. The years have turned it opaque, worn, hopeless. Something stares at me from the center of the medallion, or the coin, whatever you want to call it. There’s a jewel in the middle. Red, probably a ruby. The old man is too calm. Ready to fall asleep. I take the medallion, wrap it in my pale, trembling fingers. Yes, they trembled. They weren’t trembling because of the medallion, or the situation. They trembled for the old man, they shook erratically, they refused to settle down. Curious, because I’m not usually a nervous person. Then the old man closes his eyes, the nostalgia disappears, the neighborhood warmth. I fix my gaze upon him. Obsessed by his wrinkles, coursing back and forth over utter peacefulness. Furrows of silence, but of the good silence, the one I told you about earlier. My fingers calm down, they hang lifeless. And that’s where I spend the rest of the trip. Once again caught in my own web, or Fert’s or whomever’s, even if he doesn’t have a name.

“That fucking moron is out of it again! That’s twice today, man. Go make him snap back again, Quique, I won’t bother you again after this.”

The old man sleeps, or dies, it’s the same to me. I can’t see the difference. The guys start chanting, “hey Bohemian, you can’t lose today…”, Quique’s footsteps echo and magnify themselves, overcoming the singing. Dizziness, nausea. I want to get off, but I can’t. Quique closes in. What was I supposed to do, start singing with the rest of them? That wasn’t an option. Quique pushes me, I fall on the old man, the 93 takes a turn at full speed, a whirlwind of grotesque colors. The old man isn’t breathing. I look at him before I fall. Hospital white. Ruby red. For some reason I see red, even though I don’t think there was anything on the bus that was that color, aside from the medallion and the little emergency hammer, the one they hide behind some plastic.

“Hey, are you OK, kid?”

I don’t understand, I never did understand the human drive to commit aberrant acts and then avoid the consequences. With complete innocence, no acknowledgement. But they always know what happened, in some lost corner of their conscience. I knew. I’m not like the rest. Maybe Fert is, not me. That’s why I’m here. I got off the bus, I left the web of emotions behind. Because I’m ballsier, ballsier than the rest of the guys, who continue to go every Saturday, they cheer for the Bohemians till their last breath, they’re the rulers of Villa Crespo, they’re the dirt under the sole, they’re birds of prey waiting for a victim. Once in a while I yearn for those Saturdays of collective madness, for the day we chased the Flandria fans down the road. But it’s one thing to play dress-up, pretend, put on a costume for a bit. You have to know when to step out of the illusion, to distinguish the center from the fog. To choose. Now I live in silence. I relish the crystal-clear bubbles of destiny, of freedom and death. And I don’t exist in heavy, lonely silence, as is commonly believed. I can define it now: I live in the essence of opacity; I live in the ruby’s glow.

Mr. Present

2010-10-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

There’s a store near my house called Mr. Present. I’m not translating. This is what it’s called. Mr. Present. Think of it this way: Living near a store named Mr. Present is the equivalent of you living down the street from Señor Regalo in Topeka, or Peoria, or wherever the crap you people read this from.

The first time my grandma mentioned its existence, I barraged her with questions: Do they sell presents of all sorts? Do they have an anthropomorphized gift box as their mascot? Where is this “Mr. Present” you speak of, and is he an actual person?

I made her show me all the trinkets in her apartment that had been purchased at Mr. Present. They were all kitchen items, but I refused to give up the idea of Mr. Present being some sort of capitalist nirvana, with every single product known to man available for purchase.

From that day on, every time my grandma commented on how she needed to get a gift for one of her bridge partners’ birthdays, or how the tray on her DVD player wasn’t operating correctly and she needed to replace it, or how she needed a new vacuum cleaner, I would advise her to go to Mr. Present. She would laugh and then patiently explain that Mr. Present doesn’t sell these things. “But it’s Mr. Present!” I’d counter. “They sell EVERYTHING!”

What’s interesting is that every two or three months my grandma would learn her lesson and stop asking me for advice on where to get gifts; but then she’d forget, and once again leave the lane wide open for a Mr. Present slam dunk.

At some point last year, my sister Foolia became obsessed with purchasing a pair of bookends. This, we soon found out, is one of those items that Argentina as a country is completely unaware of, much like mattress pads. I suppose we’re expected to use mate gourds or rare steaks to prop up our books. And because the concept of a bookend has not permeated the collective imagination of our entrepreneurs (and our linguists), we have no word for it.

Foolia was having lunch with me and my grandma when she asked us if we knew where to get bookends, and I of course suggested Mr. Present. “You know, for once that might not be illogical,” said my grandma. And so it was decided: We were going to Mr. Present.

We stopped at a few bookstores on the way, trying to figure out how to even ask for bookends.

“Hi, uh, do you sell book holders?” I’d ask.

“What?”

“Book holders, you know, these things that prop up books to keep them upright.”

Then they’d give me a quizzical look and we’d all walk out of the store in embarrassment.

We eventually made it to Mr. Present, but I saw nothing but kitchen items on display. That was extremely disappointing.

“There’s no way they have bookends here!” I complained. “Who even had this dumb idea?”

POSTSCRIPT:

My mom’s pepper mill broke last week.

“Guess where I’m going to look for a replacement!” she said, smiling.

I shrugged.

“Mr. Present!” she said.

So, apparently everyone now thinks Mr. Present is my favorite store of all time. Well. I guess that’s the price of comedy.

By bureaucrats, for bureaucrats

2010-10-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

The Argentine National Library is a cube-like building not too far from downtown Buenos Aires. When I say cube-like, I’m not joking -- it’s literally a right-angled block of cement resting on a column that’s thinner than the rest of the structure, making the library look like some sort of hovering alien bookmobile. The thing, because one cannot call it anything else, was built in the early 60s -- like much of D.C., with which it shares its Brutalist aesthetic. And, like D.C., it’s boxy, gray, industrial, and stuffed with bureaucrats.

Consider: it takes me an hour and a half to get there, on average. Once there, I am forced to, in order to gain access to the library, fill out a library card with all my info -- address, occupation (none), phone number, e-mail. Not just once. Every single time. If I go to the library five times a week, I have to fill out five separate cards.

One cannot actually rent books from this library; one can only read them within the unfriendly confines of the fifth and sixth floors.

“I can’t take the books home with me, can I?” I asked the front-desk lady during my first visit.

“No, because they’re national patrimony,” she answered.

As if that was a logical response. What the fuck does it matter if it’s national patrimony? I can borrow this goddamn patrimony for two days, read it, and return it, can’t I? I mean, it’s not like they don’t have twenty different editions of every well-known Spanish book; who would suffer from two or three of those being temporarily leased out? No one. They could even come up with a plan to rent out certain popular books and withhold rarer ones. But no.

Once you get inside and up to the fifth floor, you are invited to sit at one of eight computer terminals to find the books you want. These are the clunkiest, most outdated computers I have ever seen in any public building. The mouse doesn’t work on half the terminals; the other half has a printout over them that states that “this terminal does not search by topic.” Oh? Then what’s the point of even having it? Even worse, the book-finding software is almost impossible to use, especially for browsing, or finding related literature. You better know the exact title of the book you need, otherwise you’re poop out of luck.

After making the request electronically, you have to wait around while some ill-paid proletarian who dwells in the belly of the library hunts around for your book. You cannot request more than three books, which is a pain for us working on papers that involve significant amounts of research, i.e. everyone. After a considerably long time, your name will appear on a television screen: This means that one of your books has been found. You can walk up to the desk and grab it, but you’ll have to keep your eyes on the screen until they find the other ones.

Eventually, you’ll be able to get to work. Except that: The vast majority of the fluorescent overhead lights are out, and no one bothered to change them. And, the building is surrounded by busy avenues on either side, so the background music includes all sorts of sirens, revving engines, etc. And the concept of silence is not too strictly enforced inside, either. Oh, and there’s no wi-fi. The largest public library in a city of 13 million has no wi-fi, free or otherwise.

And, you are not allowed to bring backpacks into the reading area. Which means you have to take out your laptop and all your errant sheets of paper, and cram your backpack inside a small locker before proceeding. A security guard stationed at the entrance will then take down your name -- again -- to register the fact that you came in with a computer.

The library closes at 9 p.m., but they’ll kick you out at 8:45. The bottom line here is that if I leave my house after lunch (2 p.m.) I will likely get no more than three or four hours of productive work out of the voyage, making it a completely impractical endeavor (although, I suspect, this is a sentiment that those running the library want to foster, so as to reduce their workload).

Today I went back to the library, anxious to work on my paper, and the book-finding system told me that the Tennessee Williams play I was using all through last week had been checked out. What are the odds, I thought. Then I searched for my other book, an incredibly obscure work by a Spanish poet. Gone as well. With about twenty people in the entire library, I thought it unlikely that someone would be using those two very books at the present time, and so I assumed some employee had botched something.

I went to the main desk and asked politely.

“Go up to the sixth floor and check with reference,” they told me.

Up to Reference I went. A grumpy lady behind a computer terminal heard me out.

“What’s the name of the book?” she asked. I told her.

“It’s been checked out,” she said. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

“Yeah, the other one I’m looking for isn’t there either, and I used them last week, so maybe something got messed up,” I said.

“They’ve probably been taken out for a display or some sort of an exhibition,” said the lady. “It happens quite often.”

“No, you don’t understand. These two books are completely unrelated; it would be very strange that both would be gone at the same time,” I insisted.

“What’s the name of the second book?” she sighed.

“Cat on a hot tin roof.” (By the way, the entire conversation was in Spanish except for the title of this book, because I was looking for the English version.)

“Ah, el gato sobre el tejado caliente!” interjected a gray-haired library manager sitting idly around with a coffee mug in his hand. “One of my favorites!”

He insisted on talking shop with me, so I had to alternatively beg this woman to indulge my theory that these books had to be somewhere within this library, while at the same time discussing the revolutionary nature of Tennessee Williams’ catalogue with the old man (which I would have been more than happy to do in a different place and time). Eventually, the grumpy lady gave me a form to fill out and take to another reference librarian.

I handed the form to a much more energetic, younger employee, and she told me to sit and wait while she looked into it. This was not too far from where I had left the idle old manager, and when he saw me waiting on the couch, he came right back to pick up where he had left off. He told me about a speech he had written for the bicentennial and he quoted Derrida and Shakespeare. I have no idea how he figured out that I’d be receptive to such a conversation just by listening to me complain about lost books, but there you have it. We both agreed that life is much too absurd to waste time on unworkable, petty situations, which was ironic considering I was stuck in his stupid time-hoovering mess of a library.

Finally, the books resurfaced. No explanation or admission of guilt by any party. It is more than obvious that the jerk night-shift librarian did not check them back in properly when I returned them, but more importantly: I had to interact with six different people just to get my hands on the books.

And this, my dear friends, is at the heart of the Latin American problem, or at least of this particular problem. I’ve always wondered -- why not simplify the system? Why not automate it? Why maintain an illogical management hierarchy? Why is this part of the world so averse to efficiency?

It was my dad who, as we were standing in a crowded immigration line just to get an official stamp on our boat ticket from some Uruguayan official, explained it to me: It’s about jobs. The government’s generally fruitless efforts to keep unemployment down involve keeping as many jobs as possible -- any jobs. For every process made faster, for every intermediate step lost, a job goes with it. And so, it turns out, down here it’s not so much greed that is good -- it’s bureaucracy.

Kevin Smith

2010-10-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

[Arriving at my cousin’s First Communion]

Futbol: Hey, looks like Kevin Smith got invited too. [I gesture in the direction of a Kevin Smith lookalike]

Foolia: Where?

Futbol: Right there, behind us, with the glasses. He’s like a skinny Kevin Smith.

Foolia: Which one?

Futbol: The one wearing that ridiculous formal leather jacket.

Foolia: [scans the crowd]

Futbol: Do you even know who Kevin Smith is?

Malaria: Nope!

Futbol: Seriously? You haven’t seen Clerks?

Malaria: Nope.

Futbol: Mallrats? Dogma?

Malaria: Nope.

Futbol: Jersey Girl? I’m sure you’ve seen Jersey Girl.

Malaria: Oh yeah, it’s the one with that guy.

Futbol: Ben Affleck?

Malaria: No, no, that other guy. And that actress [names famous actress who most definitely was NOT in Jersey Girl].

Futbol: You must be thinking of about another movie.

Malaria: I guess.

Futbol: What about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? You seen that?

Malaria: Nope.

Futbol: Well, he played Silent Bob.

Malaria: [shrugs]

Dyslexia: Oh, I know who you’re talking about. I saw him doing standup on TV once. He was pretty funny.

Futbol: He’s hilarious. I recommend you all watch his movies.

Dad [had to chime in]: I don’t think he’s very good.

Futbol: What are you talking about? How is he not good? I mean, some of his movies are better than others, but…

Dad: His movies don’t really have a deeper meaning.

Futbol: So? They’re comedies! Who said comedies had to have meaning? And I’ll take a good meaningless comedy over a bad meaningless comedy any day.

Dad: It’s not so much that -- [switches argument completely on the fly] I think he contributes to the McDonaldization of cinema.

Futbol: I disagree. I actually think his movies are original.

[Post Communion]

Futbol: Hey, there he is again. I should ask for his autograph.

[Kevin Smith walks past us]

Futbol [to Dad]: So, which Kevin Smith movies have you seen?

Dad [stops to think for a second]: None.

Futbol: What the hell!

Dad: [mumbles something incoherent about how he was just making an argument for the sake of making an argument]

Tales from the bus

2010-09-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

Can’t tell you why, exactly, but stranger-than-normal things have been happening to me while riding public transportation.

Last week I was coming home from the National Library and the bus got lodged in massive gridlock. Strangely, the opposite side of the road was completely clear, which means no one was getting through coming the other way.

I had a window seat, so I strained my neck to try to see what was blocking us ahead. That’s when I started to hear the faint sound of trumpets and rolling drums. Sure enough, after a few minutes, a company of 100 or so primly dressed soldiers on horses came marching down the road, blasting a military hymn. I hope you can grasp the ridiculousness of the situation. One second, you’re motoring along on your way home; then suddenly the bus is besieged by fancily clad soldiers clasping tubas on quadrupeds.

This is a good example of why most of us have a love/hate relationship with Buenos Aires. If you’re a tourist, shit like this is wonderfully quaint. If you’re trying to get to work, not so much.

Then last night I was heading downtown, listening to the new Maroon 5, and I noticed that someone was speaking very, very loudly whenever the bus came to a stop and the engine stopped roaring. Most people will adjust their conversational volume to adapt to the lack of exterior noise, but this guy sure wasn’t.

I first checked to see if he was actually talking to someone. Nope -- he was standing by himself, and I could see him rant in several different directions, sometimes turning around to address the back of the bus, where I was sitting. Then I checked for a tiny Bluetooth cell phone mic -- none in sight.

(I submit that anyone who can’t contain their speech in public settings should just wear one of those mics. At the very least, it’d create some confusion.)

I assessed this guy more carefully. He had a pair of Ray Ban aviators resting on the top of his head. He had neatly trimmed sideburns and a groovy soul patch. He was fairly well dressed. No doubt, he was the least crazy-looking crazy guy I’d ever seen. So I took my headphones off to listen to his rant.

“You like my glasses, don’t you,” he said to us, laughing. “You like my glasses.”

Interesting. Then the bus started up again and I missed where he was going with that. Next time we slowed down, he was talking about his friends and family.

“I don’t know if they love me because they need me, or they need me because they love me,” he said loudly.

Nice wordplay, I thought. Then more engine noise, and then:

“These anarchists, these idealists, all these artists, they walked away when I needed them.”

Again, another shrewd observation. Everyone else in the bus was looking away, but at this point I was extremely tempted to answer whenever he left a sentence lingering in the air. I contained myself just because, if he really was unstable, he might mistake my friendly intentions. And a bus is not the easiest place to escape from.

“If I brought happiness to one person, if I made them laugh, that’s enough for me. God damn, that’s enough for me.”

He rambled on and on for a good half an hour, moving from the middle of the bus to a seat right in front of me. And then he got a text on his cell phone, and he shut up while he was reading it and responding to it. That just floored me. A guy who clearly can’t contain his speech suddenly shows incredible restraint when a text comes in? Minutes later, a call came in, and he had a completely normal conversation, saying hi at the beginning, telling the caller that he was riding the bus on the way to the hospital, hanging up with a talk-to-you-later.

And then he announced to the rest of us, in case we hadn’t heard, that yes, he was heading to the hospital. (If you’re keeping score at home, I think this is about the point where Team Insane-o scores and finally breaks the tie with Team Eccentric.)

“Yeah, I’m going to the hospital,” he said. “I’m going to help all the poor people, the people who need me.”

Then he started getting creepy, reliving some sort of past conflict in his head, cursing, asking someone to step up and fight with him. At this point I had to get off anyway, so I brushed past him as quickly as possible, hoping he didn’t assume that I was stepping up to the plate. He didn’t.

And that was the last I saw of crazy bus man.

Rejected cereals

2010-09-17T13:36:00.001-07:00

Honey Bunches Of Goats

Jeerios

Korn Flakes

Czechs Mix

SoCo Puffs

Froot Lupus

Honey Bunches Of Goiter

All right, I’m all tapped out.

Glee, immigration and an excuse

2010-09-11T14:08:00.001-07:00

Number one: I'd rather shove barbed-wire tampons deep into my ears than be forced to listen to that overwrought, autotuned, a capella version of Lady Gaga's Poker Face as performed by the milquetoast cast of "Glee" one more time. For some reason, the female members of my household insist on watching this show when it airs originally (on Thursdays, I think?), and then the next-day rerun, and then the next day. They kindly crank the TV up to 11 as a courtesy to everyone else in the house.

Relatedly, I have no respect for anyone who uses the word "gleek" in conversation, especially the hodgepodge of E!News anchors who continually interrupt my channel surfing. That includes you, Sal Masekela. The appropriate collective noun should be something more along the lines of "mentally gleetarded," and their theme song, rather than that Journey song which has now been irreparably ruined for the world, should be "Total Eclipse of the Brain."

Number two: This guy is my hero. Be sure to read his follow-up post, in which he explains the issue a bit more articulately. I recently had my own run-in with overzealous, power-tripping Customs and Border Protection agents.

Number three: If you're wondering why my posting has slowed to a trickle, well, it's because I'm working on grad school applications. Not that I owe you anything or need to justify myself to you people. (Just kidding, your empty adulation is my lifeblood.)

The worst cell phone company in the world

2010-08-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my American friends complain about, I don’t know, dropped cell coverage by AT&T in certain overdeveloped urban settings, or a weak Verizon signal out in the boonies, or what have you. I bitched too, believe me -- when per-minute prices went up, or some inflexible company forced me into a new calling plan.

Boy, did I not know a good thing when I had it.

It is generally accepted that customer service in Third World countries is deficient. If you, America, think you have it bad because your problems are addressed by some deviant idling away in a jam-packed foreign call center, you’re probably not considering that for every frustrated American yelling into their phone, the rest of the world is getting a busy signal. In other words, it’s better to get crappy customer service than none at all.

And yet, even with that prior knowledge, my cell phone company here, Movistar Argentina, has taken horrendous customer service to new depths.

As a policy, they have decided to send every one of their clients spammy, relentless text messages at all hours of the day and night offering the chance to WIN 5000 PESOS! or urging you to RECHARGE AND DOUBLE YOUR CREDIT TODAY or asking you to GET UNLIMITED TEXTING FOR 24 HOURS FOR ONLY 7 PESOS.

These texts are real-ass texts; you don’t pay for them, but they make the same sound a normal text would make and come at random hours of the day. If you are expecting an important call or text, these can make you jump out of your seat needlessly. What’s most perplexing about this practice is that every single Movistar user is enrolled automatically for these messages. If Movistar is your provider, you’ll enjoy a handful of these texts every week whether you like it or not.

I tried coexisting with the obnoxious advertising until I could no longer tolerate it; this breaking point came a few days ago.

So I went to their site and looked for a way to e-mail customer service. There was no customer service address and no way to get in touch. They wanted me to log in, so I grudgingly tried to create an account, but it wouldn’t recognize my phone number (possibly because I have a prepaid plan). That ended the website approach.

After some Google sleuthing, I found a forum filled with equally disgruntled Movistar users who revealed that you have to personally contact the company to put an end to the texts. Sigh. Apparently, by calling *611 from my cell, I could reach customer service and wouldn’t be charged. I tried that, but right after the whole “this call might be recorded for quality assurance purposes” shtick, another louder prerecorded message urged me to use the website, then ended the call. Three attempts, same results. I found an 800 number to call from a landline; after entering my cell number, the call got dropped just like before.

(More Google research revealed that Movistar only has flesh-and-bones customer service agents respond to calls from users with monthly plans; prepaid users get systematically ignored.)

With the website out and over-the-phone customer service a failure, I had one avenue left: Twitter. Now, I have a deep-rooted personal dislike for Twitter. It’s clumsy, visually unappealing, it appears to have been programmed by a 12-year-old on crack, it’s limiting and user-unfriendly. It does nothing that Facebook doesn’t do. It’s simply a forum for self-involved pricks to release their supposedly witty quips into the wind. The few times I have checked it out, it felt like thousands of people screaming loudly at no particular thing.

In order to interact with Movistar’s Twitter-based customer service representatives, I had to first create a Twitter account. That was obnoxious. Then I had to tweet my problem onto their wall: “hello -- I would like to know how to opt out from your annoying promotional text messages.” Then they tweeted back: “just DM us your phone number.” Then I had to go Google DM (turns out, DM is charmingly subversive Twitterspeak for private message, abbreviated as PM through the history of the internets, but not here). Then I had to figure out where the DM option is. Turns out, you can’t DM someone who isn’t following you. Half an hour later, I tweeted at them again: “don’t you have to add me so I can DM you?” Eventually, they added me and tweeted back: “try now.”

Finally, I was able to DM them: “thanks. the number is 555-5555. between you and i, it’s ridiculous that I have to create a twitter account because you won’t pick up the phone.”

Their answer: “we can address your problems over here too. what can we do for you?”

OH, REALLY?! YOU CAN USE THE TWITTER TO HELP ME? GEE, THANKS! THAT’S NOT A REAL GODDAMN ANSWER! THIS WAS THE PART WHERE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR SHITTY CUSTOMER SERVICE! AND FURTHERMORE, I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I WANTED HALF AN HOUR AGO! IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS, CHECK MY WALL! OR YOUR WALL! IT’S STILL THERE!

So I calmly messaged them my request and my phone number again, which they responded to by asking me whether I was the owner of the phone and to give them my name and ID number. Bear in mind that each of these message exchanges took 15 to 30 minutes. Finally, they said the request had been processed and that I should be spam-free within five business days. In short, it took me all afternoon to opt out of a compulsory “service” I had never asked for in the first place. Unbelievable.

And I’ll say it in Spanish, in hopes that one of these Movistar dingbats will stumble upon it: El servicio al cliente de Movistar Argentina es horroroso, de lo peor. Mandan spam de manera compulsiva mediante mensajes de texto que nadie pidio, y le dan la espalda a clientes con planes prepagos. El site no funciona, la atención telefonica es inexistente, y la unica manera de contactarlos, via Twitter, funciona, pero implica una gran perdida de tiempo. En cualquier pais serio ya hace rato habrian perdido la mayoria de sus clientes o se hubiesen comido una linda multa por perjuicio al consumidor. Tienen suerte de estar operando en Argentina.

In other news, you can now follow me on my fake Twitter account.

Divine signals

2010-08-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

A giant moisture stain in the shape of the United States has materialized on my ceiling.

Stop it, stop it, ahhh!

2010-08-20T23:51:00.000-07:00

The following bands and solo artists will be playing in Buenos Aires over the next three months. I don't know why they all decided to come down at once, but I'd like to take the opportunity to respectfully request that our imperial overlords stop sending us their stinky, washed-up musical acts and begin sending us the delightfully ripe ones.

Linkin Park (One thing: I don't know why, it doesn't even matter how -- ah, fuck it.)

Green Day (Haven't matured one bit since I was in seventh grade. Come to think of it, neither have I.)

Jonas Brothers (Now with that distinct post-pubescent body odor!)

Bon Jovi (Livin' on Vytorin.)

Norah Jones (No mas Norah por ahora. Por favora.)

Echo & The Bunnymen (Supposedly, you're still cool. Also, you're not American. I'll allow it.)

Smashing Pumpkins (What, did Zwan break up?)

Diana Krall (Elvis Costello needs to tighten his leash on his wife.)

Regina Spektor (Regina, I have nothing but love for you. Except that for some reason you decided to play only a single night. And it sold out during the pre-sale. And you didn't add more shows. That's dumb.)

Peter Frampton (Ooh, baby I love your gnarled, arthritic way.)

Twisted Sister (Is there an age limit for cross-dressing? Should there be? Something to consider.)

and last, but not least:

Kenny G. (I rest my case.)

Dubious comparisons V

2010-08-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

Today's dubious comparison pits annoying Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic against MTV's reality show stud, Kenny a.k.a. Mr. Beautiful. While searching for their photos I realized that someone else on the Internet had beaten me to the donkey punch, which doesn't happen too often. But, here it is anyway. Djokovic:

And, uh, this guy:

(A brief Spanish interlude)

2010-08-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

(For my friend Sonny, who likes to imitate Julio Cortázar's writing style but may not be reading him closely enough.)

"Hay imbéciles que siguen creyendo que la borrachera puede ser un método, o la mescalina o la homosexualidad, cualquier cosa magnífica o inane en sí pero estúpidamente exaltada a sistema, a llave del reino. Puede ser que haya otro mundo dentro de éste, pero no lo encontraremos recortando su silueta en el tumulto fabuloso de los días y las vidas, no lo encontraremos ni en la atrofia ni en la hipertrofia. Ese mundo no existe, hay que crearlo como el fénix. Ese mundo existe en este, pero como el agua existe en el oxígeno y el hidrógeno, o como en las páginas 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75 y 456 del diccionario de la Academia Española está lo necesario pare escribir un cierto endecasílabo de Garcilaso. Digamos que el mundo es una figura, hay que leerla. Por leerla entendamos generarla."

The invisible dick of the market

2010-08-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

It is a well-established fact that multinationals are assholes. Generally, they: muscle out smaller competitors; rewrite laws to their advantage thanks to their lobbying clout; exploit dismally paid workers in remote former colonies; surreptitiously move their headquarters around in an attempt to maximize tax evasion; and, worst of all, finance the campaigns of the George W. Palins of the world.

But if you live in a third-world country, like me, it gets worse. Not only do you get all of the above; you’ve also been handpicked to experience an unbelievably deficient product lineup at ludicrously inflated prices.

Today I went to the mall with my dad. We walked into the Polo Ralph Lauren store to check out their winter sale, and found out that the button-up shirts were marked down to $100 rather than $150, and the options consisted of a sad-looking striped white-and-blue shirt and a shrill plaid shirt that would have offended even the most lesbic of lumberjacks.

That was the last straw.

GILLETTE

The good douchebags at the Gillette Razor Company have decided against importing the Gillette Fusion -- that is, the five-bladed razor cartridges -- into South America. This is, most likely, because they’re still getting rid of a hefty pile of leftover Mach 3 (or three-bladed) razors, the ones that America has collectively decided it has no use for. Their reasoning must be as follows: “Hey, what if we just sell them the same old razor that Americans stopped using three years ago, but even better, we JACK the prices so it costs MORE than our newest incarnation?”

This results in me shaving my face with a rusty handsaw.

OLD SPICE

Remember the Dark Ages of manly scent, when there was only one variety of Old Spice deodorant, and their body wash didn’t exist, which meant that college freshmen had to dab on pungent liquids like Aqua Velva in a pitiable attempt to give off an aura of suaveness and sophistication?

This is what Argentina is like today. Your choices of Old Spice deodorants are: Pure Sport, and Fresh. Body wash does not even exist in this friggin’ country. Guys are expected to use soap, and if there’s anything I learned during my time in the U.S., it’s that soap is for fairies, especially Dove soap. I mean, if you HAVE to use soap, use something that is somehow linked to being badass and getting wasted, like Irish Spring (which is, coincidentally, another product that’s unavailable here).

My Old Spice deodorant label says it’s made in Mexico. Mexico! Just a hop, skip and a fence jump away from the U.S.! Would it be THAT hard to send us some U.S.-made deodorants with their rainbow-like array of choices? And don’t you think that Old Spice body wash would be a hit, in a market that has never heard of such a thing?

Deep down, Argentine men are tired of smelling like Malbec and steak. Seriously. We want to smell fratty just as much as everyone else does.

DELL

Aside from the fact that this company appears to run afoul of U.S. laws on a semi-regular basis, I never had much of a beef with them. In fact, the only two laptops I have ever owned have been Dells, and they’ve served me well. Generally, Dell has the best prices in the industry, with mediocre design and generally reliable performance. I can live with that.

But now these knuckleheads have decided to disembark into Latin America, and here’s their business plan: take old processors, shove them into a bunch of laptops with poor specs, and then sell them for twice the U.S. price. I’m serious. The same Dell laptop you could have bought two years ago for $600 is now retailing here for $1,200. And the cherry on top is that you can’t customize them: they all come in the same color, with the same fixed configuration. And, unlike the U.S., they cost just about the same as any other comparable brand.

Their slogan for Argentina must be something more like Dude, You’re Getting The Shocker.

CREATIVE

These people I’m legitimately mad at. I bought some nice-ass Creative computer speakers right here in Buenos Aires about a year ago. A bit overpriced, but reasonably so -- say, I paid 90 dollars for a 70 dollar set of speakers.

After about three months, the volume started wavering unpredictably. I checked online and found out that, for this particular model, every single set of speakers had this defect. This is why Creative wasn’t selling it in the U.S. anymore. It was off the market, completely.

My theory is that these shitheads bundled up the entire production of faulty speakers and shipped it off to faraway third-world countries where they wouldn’t be held liable for their dickhead ways. This is how I ended up with their speakers.

Eat shit and die, Creative.

SNICKERS/M&M’s

I think Mars is the umbrella corporation to blame for my inferior candy. What these assfaces do is, rather than ship my Snickers and M&M’s directly from the U.S., they manufacture the candy in Brazil and in the process modify the recipe in some mysterious way.

Ingredients-wise, the biggest change, as far as I can tell, is the replacing of corn syrup with sugar, which usually brings about some degree of improvement, but in this case just completely neutralizes the flavor. And it’s not just that. The nougat is weirdly solid and chunky, the caramel is off, and the peanuts, particularly inside M&M’s, are so often rancid that you wonder if the Mars Corporation hires Brazilian jungle monkeys to wipe their asses with them.

If it tasted medium-shitty, then we could probably live with it. But it doesn’t. It tastes shitty-shitty. So, every time I travel to the U.S., I get about ten desperate e-mails like this one from my dad:

“Oh, and don’t forget to bring me that famous Yankee candy, you know, the round one with peanuts inside and covered in chocolate. The bag is yellow, and it starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘M’.”

I wrote a poem, yes?

2010-07-31T21:21:00.001-07:00

Everything in my room vibrates at the same frequency:

the electric heater;

the energy-saving lightbulb;

the clicking hard drive.

Their Hertzian precision

makes up the soundtrack

to my nights.

Konsome Panchi

2010-07-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

Immediately after seeing this, I e-mailed Balderdash: "As our resident expert on Japan, I'm going to need you to explain this to me."

This, my friends, is his answer:

Don't ever forward me this kind of thing again. "Konsome-Panchi" is the name of the snack, where "konsome" is Japanese for French "consommé" and "panchi" is Japanese for English "punch" (the attack, not the drink). Here are the lyrics to the song:

"Konsome-, Konsome-, Konsome-Panchi

Ponchi janai yo, Konsome-Panchi

Umasare kiite ru Konsome-Panchi

Konsome-, Konsome-, Konsome-Panchi

(Musical interlude)

Konsome-, Konsome-, Konsome-Panchi

Panchi de genki, Konsome-Panchi"

I won't bother translating. So at the beginning of the commercial we see the dog Panchi wagging his tail in his wooden house, and then the kid come trudging by, obviously heartbroken. Panchi tries to cheer him up with a sign that says, "Dekkaku nacchata," which means, "My, you've gotten big!" (a reference to his more sophisticated interests, and possibly a double entendre). Panchi also sports a big ear, perhaps signifying his willingness to listen. Or more innuendo I'm missing. Or possibly a kind of surrealist free-association. Anyway, the kid isn't buying it, whereupon Panchi assumes the head of a princess, looking into a mirror and holding a sign with the words "Kore ga watashi?," or "Is this really me?" This is susceptible of any number of interpretations. The kid's still down in the dumps, so Panchi starts in with his charming antics. These, we know later, actually worked, because we see the kid full of spunk again, macking on the hoes. (Is it PC to call a five-year-old-girl a hoe? If one takes away anything from this commercial, it's that the Japanese are precocious.) The "Panchi de genki" from the jingle (and the product bag) is a handy summation of the process: "With (Konsome-)Panchi, health/vigor!"

FYI

2010-07-20T13:22:00.001-07:00

Just so you know: if you search for Mindy Metalman on Google, I'm the third hit -- right above the Amazon listing for "The Broom of the System". Suck it, Foster Wallace.

Napa, Vegas, Death Valley, LA, Boston, Pittsburgh, Norfolk, etc., enough of this crap

2010-07-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

OK. I’m sick of writing about my trip. I’m just going to trim the fat and narrow this post down to a few select conversations and situations and things.

SOME WI-FI NETWORKS I LATCHED ONTO

wifi4usnotyou

shitstorm virus

palms bitch

DRIVING DOWN THE COAST

[Curly floors the accelerator during a straightaway. The engine revs loudly. Curly and I start singing the theme to “Back to the Future”. The car gets up to 88 mph.]

Curly: “Great Scott!”

SAN FRANCISCO SCI-FI

Curly: “See those tall cranes? That’s what George Lucas was inspired by when he came up with the AT-AT walker.”

Me: “NYAAAAAAH!” (That is my nerd sound, by the way.)

SUPERPOWERS

[Passing outside a strip club.]

Large dude: “Hey, you guys wanna check out some nice-looking girls?”

Balderdash: “No, thanks, man.”

Large dude: “What’s wrong? You don’t like girls?”

Balderdash: “We’re all gay. SUPER gay.”

HUNGRO

Balderdash, explaining why he wolfs down all his meals so quickly: “There are three brothers fighting for food in my stomach. I've internalized competition.”

ONLY A GEOLOGIST

Curly, while driving past a rocky ridge: “People say, Death Valley, why? You’ll see right here why. It’s gorgeous.”

And later: “Look at how that copper is oxidizing!”

(Thanks, dad.)

GLITZ & GLAM

Balderdash, summing up Vegas in a few choice words: “Each night they build Atlantis and destroy it.”

Balderdash, summing up the pirates vs. mermaids show we foolishly stopped to watch: “This is like Chippendales meets Hooters. I don't think this is how Homer envisioned it.”

NOT SURE WHY

Blackjack dealer, referring to me: “This guy has some cojones.”

DREAMS HAD

Sleeping in tents and/or rapidly shifting locations will bring about strange dreams.

First, I had a dream where I was trying to get a train ticket out of some city where I was stranded along with Curly. And while I was trying to figure this out, Curly bought himself a T-shirt that said, on the front: “Nada, The Musical: Now A Show On MTV” and then he put on a Rastafarian wig that was attached on top to a yarmulke.

Another dream: I’m having lunch with Balderdash, who in this alternate reality is now a journalist who works for a newsletter put out by Arm and Hammer, the baking soda company. Balderdash tells me he is very unhappy with his job. I reply: “You should stop working for Arm and Hammer and get a job with the hammer and sickle.”

HOMELAND SECURITY

Apparently, airport X-ray scanners cannot tell the difference between a giant liquid-filled container and a Murakami book. I got stopped three times, and each time they asked me if I had something liquid in that pocket of my bag. This is all extremely reassuring.

THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A BIG STRONG MAN

Helping old ladies get their bulky carry on bags into the overhead bin.

RED SOX’S DAILY DIET, NO JOKE

Two to three protein shakes; one McDonald’s double cheeseburger, one McDonald’s Big Mac snack wrap; one to two Lean Pockets. That is all.

FIRE HAZARD

A guy knocks on Red Sox’s door at 10 a.m.

Guy: “I’ve come to check your fire extinguisher.”

Red Sox: “I don’t think I have one.”

Guy: “Uh…let me see your kitchen.”

(Yes, of course there was a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.)

NEW DRUGS

Teenager on the corner whispers to me and Red Sox as we walk by: “Hey, you want some papoose?”

BASEBALL TALK

Red Sox: “And remember the Randy Johnson bird explosion?”

Me: “That’s a good name for a band.”

MIGHT AS WELL

Homeless guy, to Red Sox: “Give me those sunglasses. And get me a large steak-and-cheese with mayo, a large Sprite and a slice of chocolate cake.”

I GUESS IT’S A HOBBY

Red Sox, during his daily checking of the Halo message boards: “Oh man, ViCtoRy_X, why would you say that?”

AH, YOUTH

Red Sox’s sister’s husband, at the restaurant: “I’d like to fuck the guy who made these nachos.”

ROWDY

Random guy in the middle of Red Sox-Phillies game at Fenway : “DEREK FISHER SUCKS!”

Red Sox, sitting two rows behind: “Derek Fisher’s my dad!”

Random guy: “I’ll bend your dad over and FUCK HIM IN THE ASS!”

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The first thing I saw upon getting off the plane at the Pittsburgh airport was a Mr. Rogers exhibit. And then two fully clothed mannequins, one representing George Washington, the other Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris.

AT A DINNER PARTY

Guy: “People who make it big in more than one discipline are amazing.”

Girl: “Like Sean Paul.”

Guy: “What?”

Girl: “Sean Paul, the rapper.”

Guy: “What are you talking about?”

Girl: “Not only did he win a Grammy or an Emmy or whatever, he also won an Olympic medal.”

Me: “Doing what? Isn’t he Jamaican? Don’t Jamaicans only win speed events? Isn’t he kind of stumpy to be running fast?”

Girl: “I’m not sure. I think it was water polo or something?”

Guy: “Jamaica? Do they ever win at water polo?”

Me: “To the Internet!”

PITTSBURGH PIRATES

Bleacher tickets are nine dollars. They have four giant costumed pierogies racing each other between innings. It was dog day in at the stadium, and these bored dogs were all barking their heads off. And, when we told the ticket booth attendant that it was our first time and we just wanted the cheapest tickets available, he goes, “yeah, I wouldn’t come here if I were you, either.”

CHOTCHSKY’S LIST

Chotchsky left me a printed list of things to do at his apartment while he went to work:

1) Sleep

2) Tan on my roof

3) Jerk around

4) Make your face less stupid

NO PRESSURE

We show up at happy hour and about a dozen of Chotchsky’s colleagues are already sitting at the table, drinking beers.

“This is Futbol,” Chotchsky says to the crowd. “He’s a great conversationalist.”

AT THE VIDEO STORE

Me, to Chotchsky: “What’s that movie with Ronald Reagan and a chimp…I forget the name.”

Attendant who happens to overhear me: “Oh, we have that.”

Me: “Oh man, sweet.” [We all check out the cover of “Bedtime For Bonzo”.]

Chotchsky: “Are we getting that?”

Me: “Nope!”

AT THE SANDWICH SHOP

Attendant: “Is one bag OK for the two of you?”

Chotchsky (to me, under his breath): “Two guys, one bag.”

Attendant (hears him): “The sequel of the year.”

AT TARGET

Check-out lady looks at my items: “Teeth whitening strips and superglue…are you planning some sort of prank?”

AT THE BRAZILIAN STEAKHOUSE

Me: “Can I try a piece of that?”

Chotchsky: “Sure.” [Starts cutting.]

Me: “No, no, smaller than that.”

Chotchsky: [Sticks fork into entire steak and plops it on my plate.]

Me: “Asshole!”

FINAL GOODBYE

Me, as I walk away into the airport: “To the next step!”

Chotchsky: “Shut up.”

FLIGHT BACK

I watched “12 Angry Men”. I don't why it's called 12 Angry Men when only one of then is consistently angry. It should be 1 Angry Man and 11 Mildly Annoyed other dudes.

GLOBALIZATION

A cleaning lady at the Sao Paulo airport was singing Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” with a hilarious accent.

INFESTATION

While we were sitting on the plane in Sao Paulo, waiting to take off back to Buenos Aires, a prerecorded announcement played: “Due to Argentine health regulations, the cabin will now be sprayed down.” And with a loud hiss from the sides, a cloud of something sanitizing invaded the cabin; I tried to hold my breath. Ick.

Mindy Metalman likes this

2010-07-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

A break from our regularly scheduled programming. This is: Tuesday night.

8:30 PM

I show up at Flour’s posh downtown apartment with a bottle of Chardonnay under one arm and the New Yorker fiction issue under the other. I briefly ponder whether I’ve become a walking, talking, stereotype. Nah.

In the living room I find Flour and her knockout roommate, Mindy Metalman. Mindy is a blue-eyed dynamo with a great set of thick, perfectly smooth hair. She has some sort of a fashion-slash-advertising job and is something of a minor Internet celebrity thanks to her “Mindy Metalman likes this” stickers, which she plasters all over town.

I presume there is some artistic or moral intention to this practice, maybe pointing out that we should spend more time appreciating real, bricks-and-mortar things instead of pixels and data and Google dust, but I’ve never actually talked to Mindy about her intended message, or had any conversation of importance with her, really. Possibly because I find her intimidating.

9 PM

Flour and I polish off the wine, so Flour goes to the kitchen and pours us some scotch on ice. Mindy is sitting on the other side of the room, tapping away at her Macbook. I inform Flour of the new life I am planning to start as a man of letters. She fills me in on what she has been doing the past few months, which boils down to: guys, drugs, booze, feuding with members of her family, drugs, and booze. And guys. This is about par for the course with Flour. Her face looks even paler than normal and she’s developing some dark rings under her eyes. She drops hints about how I’m one of few “healthy” friends she has, and boy, I guess the standard for health is not too high then.

She’s been flirt-texting back and forth with a member of one of Argentina’s most popular bands, Babasonicos. “What does the guy play?” I ask her. “He’s the keyboard player,” she tells me. “They don’t really have keyboards in most of their songs,” I point out. “Well, he’s also their producer or something,” she says.

She invites the guy over, but when he senses that there are other people hanging out with Flour, he comes up with a shoddy excuse. I make a sarcastic remark implying that the guy has delusions de grandeur and that being a keyboard player/producer in a band is pretty much the lowest rung on the ladder, and Mindy laughs from the other end of the room. Flour, however, did not look amused.

10 PM

Mindy cracks open a bottle of red. Flour keeps checking her iPhone periodically and suddenly: a text comes in, she bolts from the couch with no explanation and returns five minutes later, sniffling spasmodically. The coke dealer cometh!

I play us some Passion Pit and Vampire Weekend, which is my way of getting the party going, because I’m a straight-laced boy. We order some empanadas: spinach, ham and cheese with sugar sprinkled on top, and spicy meat.

10:30 PM

“Are we going out tonight?” Flour asks to no one in particular. I say I’m up for anything. Mindy Metalman seems hesitant.

“Let’s go to the bar, but I’ll only have one drink,” Mindy decides.

We bundle up, head downstairs and try to hail a cab in the freezing cold. When an empty taxi finally comes in our direction, it slows down, then zooms right by Flour’s outstretched arm. I think this is because Flour has Bad News written all over her doll-like face, but I don’t share this insight with anyone. Mindy successfully flags down a cab soon thereafter.

11 PM

We’re at a downtown bar called Dada, so named after Dadaism, an artistic movement that sought to expose the lack of meaning and absurdity in everything, which you might be aware of thanks to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

I’m pretty sure that naming your bar Dada is a mating call for intellectual blowhards.

My theory is proven correct as soon as we walk into the place. It’s Tuesday night, so the crowd is sparse. I see: A weathered old man in his 60s ranting about something or other surrounded by three far younger, unattractive women; a former Argentine television star of the 80s who devoted herself to the underground music scene once her fifteen minutes were up; a fella sitting alone at the bar who looks a lot like singer/songwriter Jorge Drexler.

Mindy walks down the bar and kisses people on the cheek. This is her scene, apparently. Once she’s done, the three of us settle into a table for four. I get a beer, Flour gets whiskey. I can see Drexler looking longingly in our direction. I wave him over and he plops into the empty chair. He’s extremely drunk and his teeth have turned a deep burgundy.

“I can’t get over how much you look like your profile pic,” he tells Mindy. He explains to the rest of us that he had added her on Facebook a few days ago and never thought he would actually get to meet her.

I ask Drexler if anyone has ever told him he looks exactly like Jorge Drexler, and he says he’s received lots of celebrity comparisons in his time, but not that one. No, he doesn’t think he looks like Drexler at all, he says.

I pull up this photo on Flour’s iPhone and hold it up right next to Drexler’s face. The girls love it. We all laugh. Drexler orders us a bottle of wine.

12 PM

We’re taking a smoke break outside the bar when we’re joined by a paunchy old man. He’s an artist; the kind of artist that expects you to know who he is before you engage him in conversation.

“My paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars,” he informs us. “I can’t even afford them myself.”

Flour googles him and we look at some his paintings on her iPhone. He peers over and marvels at how far technology has advanced. All of his paintings are of rowboats sitting on the water. For a while, in my drunken stupor, I have this raging internal debate about whether to ask him if, no offense, he doesn’t think it’s trite to spend his days sketching boats bobbing on a lake, as talented as he may be, but finally I realize there is no non-offensive way to ask this question and I decide against it.

The artist would eventually leave the bar with a younger lady attached to each of his arms. Those women must really be into rowboats.

1 AM

We run out of cigarettes and Flour’s getting fidgety, so we tell Mindy we’ll be right back and head out to a quiosco around the corner. It’s still frigging cold, and Flour latches onto my arm. She’s paranoid about getting mugged, so she drags me across the road a couple of times for no reason. We stop in front of a building where, she says, her brother is renovating the entire top floor. At the quiosco, Flour buys two packs of Marlboro Reds and some chocolate for Drexler, who had asked us to bring him back some.

One of the packs of cigarettes goes to a surprised yet extremely grateful bartender.

Back at the bar, Flour and I get into this involved discussion about sailing and train stations and God knows what else, but the point here is we finish off Drexler’s wine bottle and order more Scotch.

2:30 AM

The place appears to be closing down, which is reasonable. We approach the bar with hopes of settling our tab.

“Wanna get one last drink in?” Flour proposes.

“Sure,” I say, scanning the bottles of liquor behind the bar. “How bout some Jagermeister?”

“Two Jagers,” Flour says to the bartender.

We’re both under the impression that we’ll be getting them in a glass, with ice, to sip at our leisure, but no, they give us a Jager shot. Flour seems confused.

“I guess we’re taking shots now,” I cheerfully say.

Then we order two more shots.

Mindy slaps one of her “Mindy Metalman likes this” stickers under the Jagermeister advertisement on the wall. She tells us that she wanted to make some custom Mindy Metalman scarves, but it’s already the middle of winter. Maybe next year, she says. I tell her I’d wear one, if she gave it to me for free, but I keep that last part to myself.

3 AM

We’re still drinking, sitting at the bar, and when I turn to my right, I see Mindy and Flour chatting up another old guy, this time a 70-year-old, with enormous glasses and a pockmarked face. I think they’re talking about road trips, and old man river is waxing philosophical about the days gone by, where you could hitchhike up and down the continent.

“Leon Gieco* is right,” I say, interrupting the conversation. Everyone turns in my direction. Mindy bursts out laughing.

“You’re something else,” she tells me.

(*Leon Gieco is an Argentine musician. He looks like this.)

The old guy, far from being annoyed by my comment, buys us another round of Jager shots and does one himself. The bartender tries to tell him that he shouldn’t, that he should stick to beer or wine, but the old man waves off the advice.

3:15AM

They’re just about ready to kick us out of the bar. The girls have found out that the old man, whose name is Renato, lives very close by. He invites us over, and we all walk there together.

3:30 AM

Renato’s place is incredible. Huge, towering libraries of books; a loft-like second story that overlooks the living room; a roomy kitchen. He fixes us all more drinks and fires up the stereo. Flour and I head upstairs to parse through his books. Mindy flirts with Renato downstairs.

4 AM

We have a string of blurry conversations. One involved Murakami, with me arguing that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a masterpiece, and Mindy Metalman revealing that she couldn’t get through it, so we try to figure out what accounts for our differing viewpoints. We decided that the source of it is that I actually can empathize with the idea of someone climbing to the bottom of a dark well for a few days to try to make sense of their life, while she finds it dumb.

5 AM

I get locked into an intense conversation with Renato; it turns out, he’s a renowned art critic and a curator at Buenos Aires’ largest museum. He has a bunch of great insight on life and I like the way his mind works.

I’ll say things like, “I think it’s interesting that you left the top of your bookcase empty, sort of implying that you’ll always have new books to discover and read,” and he just about explodes with joy. He starts referring to me as his young grasshopper.

Meanwhile, Mindy and Flour are dancing in the middle of the living room and whispering to each other. Then they kiss.

“This, THIS is what life is about,” Renato says to me, and laughs his throaty laugh.

I feel like I’m the young protagonist in Almost Famous.

8 AM

We make it back to Flour’s apartment. The sun has come up.

“Wow, it’s late,” Flour says.

“How late,” I ask.

“8 AM,” she says.

I pass out in her bed.

4 PM

I wake up, groggy and disoriented. Mindy is up and around. Flour is sleeping, now in Mindy’s bed. I have no idea what this means. I say goodbye to Mindy and creep out of the apartment. I take the train back home, my stomach lurching with every sway and sudden stop. I decide to write all of this down before the taste of Jager leaves my mouth.

My foray into country music

2010-07-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Just to switch things up here for a second, here's a song fragment I wrote last year and finally got around to recording: "Love don't seem to get me down before you came around" (I pretty much decided this song deserved the longest title and saddest lyrics possible).

Pacific Northwest

2010-07-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

(I’m getting a bit tired of this format, so I’m just going to plow ahead and get a bunch of cities done in one shot.)

There are three characters you will need to be acquainted with for the West Coast part of this story. They were all roommates and choirmates of mine during senior year of college; all of them are genuinely interesting, smart people, who couldn’t get laid if their life depended on it. Which is why I fit in with them so well.

Batting first is Curly McSexyface, a bizarre product of the Napa Valley whose passions include geology and the movie industry; like countless others before him, he moved to L.A. to pursue his latter passion and is currently disillusioned and between jobs. He once ghostwrote a book about his grandfather that he didn’t get proper credit for. His pale complexion demands that he reapply sunscreen every time he steps out of the car. He has a nasty habit of Tourette’s-like cursing in traffic, his two most common triggers being missed exits and gridlock. He was an Eagle Scout. He writes his scripts in coffeeshops. He is concerned about potential riots and/or mass murderers, so he keeps a ~~loaded~~ gun in his room.

Redemptive characteristics: Curly is the most supportive, least self-centered guy in the bunch; his wonderful tenor vibrato; his tendency to overplan, which bailed us out of several potential disasters; his sense of humor and musical taste, which most resemble my own, making them awesome; and my general hunch that he will, sooner or later, succeed at something big time, if and when he stops trying to make it happen.

Up second is Balderdash, an Oregon-bred misanthrope who looks, deceptively, like a surfer boy, thanks to his princess-like blond hair, symmetrical face and dreamy eyes. The truth is, he has little interest for things other than Romantic-period poetry and practicing his Japanese. This rules out professional sports, women, drinking, and all the petty things that keep the proletariat soporifically content. He is starting a six-year-long literature-related PhD later this year. He once taught in Japan, and his school took the opportunity to use his visage in several pieces of advertising. During college, he recorded a CD entitled “Celibates and Sybarites”, which was basically forty minutes of screeching and one track with special guest Curly McSexyface. He was raised among two brothers, both of whom are taller than him, so now he has this complex where he HAS to scarf down his food during every meal, and he has to make a competition out of everything: climb the highest rock, get the most skips out of his stone, run the fastest, etc. He also has self-published at least two books of poetry, which he graciously sent to me every time. Thanks a bunch, man.

Redemptive characteristics: Balderdash is the most high-minded, knowledge-pursuing guy in the bunch; his strange insistence on luring me into arguments over the existence of absolute good and evil and truth; his incredibly abrasive personality, which results in occasional hilarity; his love for karaoke and guitars.

In the three-spot is Leviticus, a northern Virginian who generally acts like a good old, God-fearing (and loving) Southern boy. He has the squarest jaw of all four of us and is the only one of us who doesn’t exist in a constant state of sarcasm. He was homeschooled and raised in an intensely religious home. His father is a terrifying man with a thick New York accent. Leviticus’ hobbies include weightlifting, reading the Bible and defusing other people’s arguments. He didn’t drink at all during college, but then went on to cover the beer industry as a newspaper reporter. He is the only one of us currently employed, at a regional daily of some repute. He works himself to the ground -- without a doubt, he has the best work ethic of us all. He does not curse, ever.

Redemptive characteristics: Leviticus is the best-humored, most unflaggingly optimistic guy in the bunch; his inability to shoot down an idea, be it good or bad; his love of journalism; his positive energy; his ability to charm adults; his Christopher Walken impression.

Now, on with our tale. We called this section: Brofest.

SEATTLE

The best thing that happened in Seattle was at the bar on the first night, while sampling some local brews. For some reason we got on the topic of preposterous, Urban Dictionary-type sex acts, and Balderdash’s friend Greg, who was hosting us while we were in town, asked us if we’d ever heard of the Spiderman.

“No? It’s hilarious,” he said. “First, you start banging the girl from behind, doggie style, OK? So you’re going at it, and then when you’re about to cum, you pull out and spit on her back, to make her think you finished on her.”

[Leviticus shifts uncomfortably in his seat.]

“But instead, you fucking finish on the palm of your hand. Then, when she turns around, you fling it at her face and say ‘Spiderman!’”

[Leviticus leaves the table. We look at each other, then resume the conversation and ask Greg if this is something people actually do.]

“Well, I heard a story about this guy, I think he was a frat guy somewhere, who actually did it once. He told a couple of friends, ‘look guys, I’m doing it tonight, I’m serious,’ and so later that night he arranged it so he was banging his girlfriend while his friends were watching through the window. Anyway, he goes through with the whole thing, and then when he’s at the end, he throws his palm toward her and says “Spiderman!” but he ends up hitting her in the face and knocks her unconscious, and everyone freaks out and they have to take her to the hospital.”

[Generalized laughter slash calling out the story as bullshit. Leviticus eventually returns to the table.]

But back to the sightseeing.

Seattle is home to the first Starbucks, which is certainly not something to brag about. I presume this is why there is nothing distinctive about the Starbucks except for a tiny bronze plaque at the entrance. And the hipsters playing music out front.

I might as well get this out of the way: West Coast cities are overrun with hipsters. I guess they invented hipster. That’s all I’m going to say about this.

Seattle has a lovely waterfront, which we used for skipping rocks, and a strange statue of a troll, which was perfect for troll toll jokes, but no one in the group knew what I was talking about.

MOUNT HOOD

Someone had the brilliant idea to camp out atop Mt. Hood for one night. It’s an 11,000-foot-tall volcano somewhere in Oregon. We drove to the top in our packed-to-the-brim Toyota Matrix, a loaner from Balderdash’s mom, and set up our tent on a random clearing.

We went on a hike, until it started raining. We had no wood or matches or lighters to start a fire. We did, however, have a guitar, an egg shaker, bongos, a harmonica, a flute and a zither, which is a smaller, even more effeminate version of the harp. So we all huddled in the tent and passed the instruments around and tried to make some pleasant noise.

That was the coldest night of my life. I slept fully clothed, jacket on, inside a perfectly fine sleeping bag, and I kept waking up because the air coming into my lungs was too chilly. I was trembling uncontrollably by the time when the sun came up. Turns out, it had snowed during the night, and now everything was covered in white. I put on Curly’s extra jacket (see? I told you, always ready) and his woolen hat and then his other hat and waddled my way to the car, where I turned on the heat full blast and ate a muffin.

And that is the story of how I narrowly beat hypothermia, frostbite, and human icicle syndrome.

PORTLAND

This was the third day of our trip, and we already looked like castaways, with disheveled beards, uncombed hair, muddy clothes, and pale faces from our encounter with icy death. We hit up some famous donut shop whose specialty is a maple-and-bacon donut bar, with a strip of bacon resting on the top. I wisely opted for the less intimidating Portland Crème donut. Curly McSexyFace’s turned a shade of green when he realized the bacon atrocity that he was about to consume, especially after ingesting two other donuts.

We visited a wonderful bookstore, with a selection I would KILL to have in Buenos Aires, literally, kill, just tell me who to put a bullet through and I’ll do it. Then we went to a park and threw pine cones at each other and played on the seesaws and slides.

When it started raining we took refuge in a movie theater and indulged in the afternoon showing of “Hot Tub Time Machine”, one of many miscalculations on this trip. At least we got to sit somewhere warm for an hour and a half.

We met two of my female friends that night for a bar crawl, which was great, and really, just about the only entertaining female contact we would have for the rest of that trip, except for Curly McSexyface’s sister, who seemed mortified at having to hang out with us, and rightly so.

EUGENE

I have no idea what Eugene looks like. All we did here was sleep. Apparently, Balderdash had no interest in showing us the city he grew up in.

BANDON

This is a gorgeous beachside town where we stayed with a genuinely warm and welcoming family that is somehow related to Balderdash, but I found that hard to believe. This is the kind of place where high school girls go swimming at 5 a.m. and camping on weekend nights, for fun. Everyone here seems healthy and well-balanced.

I had to sleep in the same bed as CurlyMcSexyface, but we defused the situation with some well-timed gay jokes.

And then (NO TIME TO STOP! MUST...PRESS...ON!) we drove south on the 101 while listening to Albert Hammond Jr.’s “101” and stared out at the ocean as we left the sleety, rainy, haily, cloudy, unpredictable Pacific Northwest weather behind for good.

Duluth, Minn.

2010-07-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

"Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this threadbare sofa in this one-story copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our senses: 'What would we even do with such a house?' "

-Jonathan Safran Foer

What’s interesting about “Graceland” (and may I remind you that I had earlier decided to make this the official soundtrack to my trip) is that every song sounds exactly like it should sound. It’s as if Paul Simon had dipped his hand into the rippling pond of creativity and plucked out something perfect and complete. You change one note, change one beat, change one harmony, and the whole thing disintegrates and slips right through your fingers, or becomes the latest Katy Perry single, or the opening theme to Alf.

This sort of music -- let’s, for the sake of brevity, call it “absolute music” -- ages well, and not just because the sound is universally and instantly relatable; it’s because it is transcendental.

Take, say, Bob Dylan. There’s no point to picking apart the technical aspects of his music -- is he a proficient guitar player? how does his scratchy warbling compare to other singers of his time? -- because you’re dealing with an absolute piece of art. You either take it or leave it, but it cannot be mechanically separated, then analyzed by parts. Sure, you can try to find flaws, but these flaws are inextricably bound to the whole, which in effect makes them not flaws at all but conduits, the blood-pumping arteries that let you, the listener, briefly share in that moment of artistic transcendence.

You don’t tell Picasso that his version of Las Meninas is sloppy and childlike and that Velazquez, that’s someone who really knew what he was doing. You don’t tell Mussorgsky that Pictures at an Exhibition is a bit stilted and it would be great if he could get a bit more Pachelbel in there. And not even Randy Jackson would have the cojones to walk up to Dylan and say, “look, dawg, the concept was cool, but that was kind of pitchy, it just didn’t do it for me.”

This is exactly why I roll my eyes whenever some Randy Jackson wannabe shows up in Duluth and moans about the freezing cold and 4 p.m. winter sunsets; or the outlandish Minnesota accent that sounds like it was fished out of a Coen brothers wet dream; or the proximity to Canada; or the fact that high school hockey playoffs are the sporting highlight of the year; or even the smell of soggy, putrid oatmeal that permeates every corner of the city, possibly because of the gigantic exposed piles of cereal grain and taconite that rise along the sides of I-35, not to mention the paper processing plant smack dab on Lake Superior; or the fungus-like swath of dive bars, particularly glaring considering the lack of a stable opera company or even a passable music ensemble; or the fact that 85 percent of the local newspaper’s headlines involve the use of the word “taconite”, and what the hell is taconite, anyway.

All these are very real deficiencies that serve two purposes: number one, they keep incompatible, unadventurous souls away (Dylan’s raspy voice and ridiculous inflection serve a similar function). And number two, these supposed flaws are actually a way inside, a direct path into the heart of Duluth.

You see, friends, if you engage in these rituals, indulge in a whiff of sulfuric Frosted Flakes, brave a single winter, then you’ll be privy to a huge secret:

Duluth knows something that the rest of the country does not.

It was apparent at the Chicago airport, waiting for my flight to Duluth to leave. Everyone was wearing woolen sweaters and asking each other about their grandchildren/jobs/college majors. People were smiling. No one freaked out about space in the overhead bin or unbuckled their seatbelt at the wrong time or argued with the flight attendants about inconsequential bullshit.

It was also apparent upon landing at the tiny Duluth airport, where the wifi is free and the lack of people milling about makes you feel like you just flew into some exotic lodge town in Colorado.

Five steps off the plane and I already felt like a load was off my shoulders. I left the airport. It was nighttime; it was misty and cool. I saw the headlights of JCrew’s Honda SUV grow larger in the darkness. She pulled over. I gave her a big hug.

“You’re so SKINNY!” she said.

We hit up our first bar almost immediately, and were joined by Pista, a thirtysomething writer (inasmuch as I am a writer, I guess) and former newspaper buddy of mine whom I could lavish with praise for the rest of this post, but all you really need to know is this: Her blog is the reason I started blogging in the first place. It’s my template of what a good blog can be. She is funny as shit and well read and artistically sensitive but at the same time prone to outlandishly inappropriate public behavior and color commentary, especially at bars, which makes her wonderful company. Within ten minutes of drinking traditional three-dollar bigger-than-your-face Minnesota beers together I told her she was acting like Chelsea Handler, and she took this as an insult, but I meant it in the best way, really.

I think one of Pista’s most endearing characteristics is her almost childlike fascination with, as we say in Spanish, meter el dedo en la llaga -- literally, to poke one’s finger into the sore. Anything gross or taboo or complicated, she’ll bring up right away, maybe just to see what happens, maybe just to see other people squirm. Which means that a) the boundaries of conversation have just been dynamited, resulting in greater freedom all around, and b) if the bad, gross and complicated stuff is funny, then it’s not longer bad, gross and complicated. It’s funny.

And so in classic Pista fashion she immediately brought up the question of whether JCrew’s current boyfriend was concerned about my visit (me having once dated the shit out of this girl four years ago); JCrew revealed that yes, perhaps there might be some trouble a-brewing.

With that elephant out of the room, we all drank like the olden days, and a soused Pista, upon remembering that there was leftover cake at her place, texted her boyfriend the following: “OMG cake!”

The next day, me and Pista took the bus. On the way to the bus station, we fine-tuned the details of our plan to, number one, replace all streets and sidewalks with bouncy material, sort of like a trampoline, so you can run on it and if you’re flung out of your car during a head-on collision you won’t die (my idea), and, number two, to also make the streets and sidewalks heated, to melt the snow and keep it cozy and warm in the winter (her idea). I think that as a team we will change the face of urban planning forever.

Duluth, in my opinion, is best enjoyed via the drudgery of routine, except that any routine is so pleasant here that it’s like a holiday from the real world. Trips to Target with JCrew; doing laundry and watching baseball next to Pista’s house feline, the gigantic Toonsinator, who possibly served as the inspiration for Garfield and tends to mistake my stomach for a Tempur-Pedic mattress; shopping for beer and getting talked into buying some sacrilegious Leinenkugel’s variant called Summer Shandy, which everyone agreed tasted like Pledge.

My old friends Buttfinger and Curly Sue, now a husband-and-wife team, came into town for a night of karaokeing somewhere outside the city limits called Gary/New Duluth, which certainly didn’t look very new and there was no sign of Gary. I like the name concept, though -- how about a Bill/New Buenos Aires, or Joe-bags/New Lexington, Lenny/New Chicago, etc.?

My karaoke version of “Like A Rolling Stone” attracted a Gary/New Duluth cougar in a Cleveland baseball hat who at least had the courtesy to walk over to our table while I was singing and ask whether I was taken (JCrew did the honors and shooed her away, which, in retrospect, may have been a mistake, considering that I could have turned my 2010 Sexual Frustration Tour back into the Sex Tour that very night, and contracted several venereal diseases that would have resulted in my children wearing Cleveland baseball caps for no reason whatsoever and settling in Gary/New Duluth).

The truth is, my stay in Duluth was unreasonably pleasant and smooth, a particularly jarring development considering the chaos that preceded it and followed it.

I mean, how can I complain: A day of hiking around a waterfall while having loud conversations about Dutch rudders and rusty trombones; a fabulous dinner at the city’s Italian restaurant, topped by an adventurous wine selection that thankfully did not backfire; the general sense that, although I left years ago, the city looks just about the same.

If I may come full circle with all the babble at the beginning of this post, here’s a little did-you-know moment:

Bob Dylan was born in Duluth.

I think that makes perfect sense.

Chicago, Ill.

2010-06-28T21:01:00.001-07:00

[I am writing this post in the style of Jay McInerney. Don't ask me why. There is no method to my madness. It just seemed appropriate.]

There’s no real reason for you to be in Chicago. You’ve been here before. You’ve seen the shiny bean and tried the deep dish pizza, neglecting the island of sausage that got left behind because everyone was too stuffed. You’ve also spent a night at one of those sweaty blues clubs with grizzled musicians who look like they’ve been run through a meat grinder and then sent out to battle with their Bolivian marching papers. You’ve seen the city from above, not from the Sears tower but from its close relative, the Hancock tower, which is not only free of charge but also gives you the opportunity to crack plenty of cock-in-hand jokes and variations thereof.

And yet you’re back in town, stepping off your flight in O’Hare and scanning the baggage claim for Catalina.

You’ve known Catalina since she was 19, back when her dye job was questionable but her looks were undeniable. You met her, of all places, on an airplane, on a flight from Buenos Aires to D.C. You remember your surprise when she took the aisle seat to your window seat -- what are the odds -- and, better yet, when the flight attendant waltzed down the aisle handing out foreign newspapers and Catalina daintily asked for a Clarín in a slightly off-kilter Spanish accent.

“Your Spanish is pretty good for an American,” you say.

“Actually, I’m Argentine,” Catalina says. “Well, I was born in Argentina. I’ve lived in the U.S. since I was 13.”

Whoops, you think to yourself. Botched opening.

The conversation picks up from there, even though Catalina is running a fever. Touch my forehead, she says, does it feel warm? It does. She asks you to hold her hand. You both stay up talking for the entire flight, ten hours. At the end, you exchange phone numbers: You invite her to New York City, she invites you to Chicago.

The question of why Catalina likes you right off the bat, which she clearly did, is one you’ve tossed around in your head. Maybe she was wowed: She was taking her first steps out of Chicago supersuburbia, a freshman in college, and perhaps mistakenly thought your Ivy League pedigree meant something. Maybe she had a palate for unique-looking Argentine men, or as an ex-girlfriend put it, “avant-garde and mysterious,” as opposed to her next boyfriend, whom she defined as “classically good looking.” Catalina’s avowed crushes on basketballer Manu Ginobili and news anchor Anderson Cooper certainly back this latter hypothesis.

What ends up happening is Catalina visits you in New York, twice in a handful of months, and you plan some elaborate outings: MoMA, Spring Awakening, a campus tour, a Yankees game, an impromptu concert of Argentine songs on classical guitar, a trip to a friend’s house up north where you get to show off your Trivial Pursuit skills.

She’s curious, sometimes hesitant and fragile, but aching for culture, for transcendence, for what lies beyond Panera and Chili’s and high school cliques and perfectly watered lawns. And while skinny blondes who could easily go into modeling are not necessarily your cup of tea, in this case, you’re more than happy to indulge her.

You end up seeing each other, on and off, for the next three years. If you were middle-aged, they’d call it an affair, but since you’re both in your twenties, you get to tell curious outsiders that there’s no need to slap a label on everything and that they’re close-minded for even asking.

She flies down to Miami; you fly to Chicago. You see each other in Buenos Aires. The arrangement is flawless.

Until this time around. She gives you a long hug at the airport, but no kiss. You get lost on the way to the car, and you spend an hour traversing three parking garages. She drives you to her apartment near Chicago’s Little Italy and tells you to put down your bags in her room.

You drink two beers at the bar, then you both get into her bed. She rolls over on her side, her back to you, and you stare at the ceiling for a bit. You both fall asleep.

The truth comes out in the morning, in spurts, like a malfunctioning garden hose. There’s hints of another person, hints of dating, hints of seriousness. You catch a documentary at an indie theater, something cute about babies. Finally, on the train ride back, you break and you ask the question.

“So, you’re dating someone, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Like, you guys are exclusive, right?”

“Yep.”

And that’s that. You have three more nights in this city, three more nights sharing a bed with a woman who has been spoken for. Just great.

As if that wasn’t enough, you’re out at the bar again that night and she tells you that her boyfriend wants to meet you. He’s a med student, she says. He’s doing cancer research. He just texted her to ask if he can come over.

You explain to her that this is a bad idea; that there’s no reason why her boyfriend would want to meet you other than to assert his power, or to sniff out the competition, to show that he’s not intimidated. You don’t want to be involved in these games, you tell her, and then all of a sudden her eyes widen and she’s focusing just above your right shoulder, which is exactly where he's standing, the cancer boyfriend, white teeth a-gleaming.

Catalina makes the introductions and the guy seems genuinely nice, suspiciously so. You offer to get everyone more beer and Catalina tags along, so you ask her what’s going on.

“I didn’t tell him about us,” she says. “I just told him we were good friends.”

Wonderful; now you’re stuck in some convoluted soap-opera-like web of deceit. Exactly where you didn’t want to be. Thankfully, the rest of the night is incident-free.

But the sexual frustration starts taking its toll after that: First, an unnecessary argument in the car about whether economics, as a discipline, is too abstract, too detached from the common man and real-life issues. You say yes and Catalina, an econ major, takes offense, and you spend 30 minutes squabbling over this point. Then her GPS runs out of battery and the charger stops working, so you get lost, over and over, and you arrive late for Second City, the renowned comedy troupe that has somehow become one of Chicago’s standard tourist stops.

The entire audience at Second City is white, and you notice this only because they behave like racist morons all night long. When the troupe launches into an improvised segment, one of the onstage comediennes says she needs “an occupation that starts with the letters S and M,” and someone from the back row yells out “sundried Mexican!”

“I don’t like you all very much,” the comedienne replies after a stunned silence.

During another skit, the audience is asked to volunteer suggestions as to how the scene will evolve. “Slap her in the face!” yells an intoxicated frat boy one row ahead of you. The comedienne makes a masturbatory hand motion along with the dumbest-looking face in her arsenal, then asks for other proposals.

Next on the schedule is Wrigley Field, and you get to see the hallowed ivy-lined outfield walls in person for the first time, but the Cubs lose to the worst team in baseball. To pass the time, Catalina tells you about the time she caught her first foul ball, at a White Sox game.

“Who were they playing against?” you ask.

“I think it was the Houston, uh, Asteroids?” she says.

“You mean the Astros.”

Conversations like these keep you amused well into the game. When, say, Andrew McCutchen comes up to bat for Pittsburgh and Catalina goes, “who is that guy?”, and you ask “which guy,” just to make sure, and she points to the field and goes “the African-American man,” you feel compelled to tell her that you’re not in Second City anymore.

Another day, she drives you to her childhood home to meet the rest of her family, and although you try to read into this gesture, you’re not really sure what to make of it. You part ways after a Chinese meal where you learn that General Tso’s Chicken is, for some reason, called Governor’s Chicken here.

You get dropped off back at the airport feeling vaguely dissatisfied, so you consult with Jay McInerney, who will likely put this more poetically, and more depressingly, than you ever could:

"You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish out justice," he writes. "But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.”

New Haven, Conn.

2010-06-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

New Haven is a fairly dumpy city somewhere in the state of Connecticut. A message to Connecticutians, or Connecticuters, or Connect-A-Four-ers, or whatever you call yourselves: If this is your “new” haven, I can’t imagine what the “old” one was like -- a bomb silo made of rotting Ikea wood? One of those colorful blowup bouncy castles smelling like fresh, chunky, cake vomit? A shallow hole in the ground next to a warmongering anthill? At any rate, it would be hard to do worse than New Haven.

This city’s sole claim to fame is Yale University, which is crammed in somewhere between the bus shelters filled with homeless folks and the other bus shelters packed with transient folks. The Yale campus itself is unimpressive: Typical, boringly Gothic buildings, dubious year-round weather and a bevy of the ugliest, dweebiest students I have ever seen.

But let me begin with New Haven’s FIRST problem: Location. As we all know, Connecticut has no respectable airports to fly into, which means you have to fly into a real city, like New York or Boston, and then take a train. I didn’t find this particularly daunting, having lived in NYC for more than my allotted share of time, but I was still dazed from 35 hours of flying, not to mention the abuse received from everyone’s favorite funky butt-loving customs official (to quote Henry Rowengartner).

So I grabbed a slice of New York style pizza at LaGuardia, hopped on the M60 bus to Harlem, like a pro, and thought I had it made, until this complete wackadoodle who looked just like Robert DeNiro circa “Taxi Driver” plopped down on the bus seat in front of me and asked me if I could tie his plastic bags together. Yes, you heard right. This guy was carrying several plastic bags filled with, oh, who knows, I’m guessing claymores, and apparently was unable to tie them together on his own.

I decided against crossing DeNiro and proceeded to tie his bags together, which led him to believe we were friends. This is when he started ranting about the “people in the back of the bus,” and at first I couldn’t figure what he was talking about, but then I realized he was being racist. Now, of all the places to be racist, I couldn’t think of a worse location than the M60 bus cruising through Harlem, but this guy, he just kept going, even after I stopped talking to him and focused intently on staring out the window, and even after I pulled out my iPod and dramatically inserted my earbuds. I have no idea what eventually became of him, but I sincerely hope some good Samaritan beat him to a pulp.

Upon arrival at the Harlem/125th Street station, I was greeted with, wouldn’t you know, five cops pinning a guy with a shaved head against the wall, literally bashing his skull against the hard brick, while a police German shepherd barked madly at the scene. The best part was all the other commuters, acting as if nothing was happening. Which is what I did, too.

Fourteen bucks will get you from Manhattan to New Haven, which is all right, I guess. I stupidly fed the vending machine a twenty, expecting a five dollar bill and four quarters back, and was instead rewarded with six fucking Sacagaweas. There is no reason for these heavy, metallic pieces of shit to be circulating. Like me and Chotchsky theorized, there’s probably an Inconvenience Fairy fluttering around out there, leaving Sacagaweas under children’s pillows.

I would end up spending the rest of my seven weeks in the U.S. trying to get rid of these giant coins, slyly leaving them behind as tip or apologetically handing them over in exchange for a bagel once I ran out of real, big-boy paper money.

Back to the story. For some reason my train car was filled with high schoolers going back home, which made no sense to me -- these kids live in Connecticut but commute every day to New York City for the great schools? That’s like me commuting to Bolivia for a tech industry job.

As soon as we entered Connecticut we began passing a bunch of pompously named stations, including Milford, reminding me of Milford Academy, where children should be seen and not heard.

The only amusing part of this train ride was when one of the high schoolers fell asleep and the rest of his rowdy classmates left without waking him up. It was fun watching him freak out two stations later. I hope he got detention for this, or whatever ridiculous punishment is meted out by American disciplinarians these days.

Then we got to New Haven and it turned out their train station is called Union Station. How original. There’s only about six billion others.

I made my way through downtown in search of Princess Pliskin, the reason why I found myself in this godforsaken town.

Princess Pliskin was my closest female friend throughout college, as well as occasional consiglieri and wingwoman. One of many reasons we kept her around is that she’s constantly trying to “keep up with the guys”, meaning she’ll attempt to match our drinking, our beer pong bouts, our eating of hilarious new fast food items, our Mario Kart playing, etc. Me and Chotchsky once decided she was best described as “an attractive, effeminate guy.”

She’s big into feminism and spontaneously combusts* at the mere mention of the word “marriage”. Which is why, every time she came back from her Women’s Studies class freshman year, Chotchsky would ask her, “so, how was Dyke Ed.?”

(*Although, if she combusts at the mention of marriage, then it’s not really spontaneous at all, is it. More like induced combustion. Anyway, carry on.)

She earned her current nickname freshman year while attempting to defend Dan Puckley on one of several occasions when he was trying to kick us out of his room; Puckley’s nickname at the time was Pliskin, so when she came to his aid, we all went, “oh yeah? Well, now you’re PRINCESS PLISKIN!” The name stuck through the years, evolving into the more informal Plissy, and beating out shorter-lived nicknames like Meatstick, Floater, Rimbaud and G.G. Gliskin.

In case you lawerly types out there were wondering, there is absolutely no link between her nickname and the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

She currently holds a very prestigious job for a very important politician where she slaves away 15 hours a day and comes home to sleep on a mattress not-so-carefully laid out on a dingy wooden floor. This is how American politics works, my friends. Someone has to keep the wheels a-turning. And that someone is Plissy.

Plissy is so devoted to her job, in fact, that when I finally located the campaign headquarters and announced myself at the entrance, Plissy told the secretary that I’d have to wait. Me. Her estranged college hero and role model. Ludicrous.

And wait I did, for a good half hour, leafing through my New Yorker until Miss New Haven 2010 penciled two minutes of Futbol face time into her schedule. She drove me to her nearby apartment and went right back to work. If I added up the total amount of time I actually saw Plissy that whole weekend, it’d probably last about as long as an episode of Gilmore Girls or some comparable WB claptrap. (I say claptrap, specifically, because it is my theory that both Gilmore girls have a bad case of Chlamydia, which accounts for their verbal diarrhea and dramatic incontinence.)

But no, I’m just joshing. Chotchsky flew into town and the three of us spent a lovely Saturday hot tubbing, drinking beers, playing Wii and shooting pool, including a historic stop at a highway KFC where we all ordered the infamous Double Down and then discussed whether the concept of “meat sweats” is an actual thing.

We also sampled what was touted as the best pizza in the state at Frank Pepe pizzeria, conveniently located within walking distance from Plissy’s place. It was above-average.

Eventually, Plissy went back to work, leaving me and Chotchsky to our own devices (which is always a bad idea). First we walked around Yale, finding a discarded frisbee and then proceeding to throw around said frisbee in the quad. Then we walked around some more, and speculated on whether people would assume we were a gay couple here to pick out a college for our son (conclusion: yes). Then we got into this dumb competition where the loser had to try to fit into the kiddie swing at the park, and I lost, but couldn’t get my legs through the holes.

And finally, bored and shivering from the cold, because Plissy hasn’t figured out how to turn on the heat at her place, we decided to take a photo of one of her ex-boyfriends, submerge it in a plastic cup of water, and stick it in the freezer.

“We wanted to preserve him for future generations,” we told Plissy when she asked what the hell was in her fridge.

On my last day here, Plissy and Chotchsky roused me from my sleep at 8 a.m. to play one final round of Mario Kart. I can’t even remember who won.

All I remember is this: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Days of miracle and wonder

2010-06-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Hi Internet peoples! I am back. So this is what I’m going to do: Write a short-ish post about every city I stopped in during my mega journey across the United States. Feel free to think of me as a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville. Or even as a slightly less titillating Tucker Max.

Less titillating, I say, not because I’m “better” and “more serious” than Tucker Max, but because I didn’t get laid at all. Not one time. This means that the proposed name for this journey, the Futbol Sex Tour 2010, was nixed in favor of the more appropriate Futbol Sexual Frustration Tour 2010.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The journey started with an ill-advised, patience-trying airplane trip, with stops in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Chicago, Ill.; and New York City. Followed by a commuter train from Harlem to New Haven, Conn.

The point here being: Never, ever, no matter how much money you save, purchase a cross-continent, two stop, thirty-some-hour airplane ticket. You will hate yourself in the morning. And in the afternoon. And at night. And the next day, in the morning. And so on and so forth.

My first leg, to Sao Paulo, had the makings of a winner: A brand-new plane with larger-than-normal touchscreens on the back of every seat and customizable movie and television programming including American sitcom smash hit “Two And A Half Men” (or, as I like to call it, Doo-an-Heif Men), a fact that will become important in a little bit.

I was browsing through the music selection and found a song by Elton John named “Jamaica Jerk Off”. What I couldn’t figure out was whether this song was about a person (a Jamaican jerkoff) or it was actually a call to action (Jamaica, jerk off!).

The Portuguese-speaking stewardess interrupted my ponderings by rolling the lunch cart down the plane aisle and helpfully saying to me, “pasta ou flaco?”, or at least that’s what I thought I heard. Flaco, in case you don’t know, is the Spanish word for skinny. So, faced with a choice between pasta or starvation, I went with the pasta. My dad would later inform me that the actual word was “frango” and it means chicken, but I still stand behind my choice.

Sometime during the middle of the three-hour flight to Brazil we hit an air pocket, which is the nice way of saying that the plane suddenly plummeted, completely out of the pilot’s control. This was no ordinary air pocket, as it lasted for a good ten seconds, if not more, where each second that goes by makes everyone more and more certain that we will all perish. Most people just gripped their seats and scrunched their faces during seconds one through five, but after that, it was mayhem. A woman behind started cursing in a Tourette’s-stuck-on-repeat style: “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

And me, well, I thought, how much would it suck if the last thing I heard before my death was this woman’s annoying voice? Do I have time to get my iPod going on so I can depart to, say, the sweet stylings of Ira Glass?

When the pilot finally pulled us out of freefall, everyone exhaled and the economy seating area was abuzz with tales of how we almost just died. I know, I was there, is what I would have said if I had been offered control of the PA system that stewardesses so enjoy abusing.

And just as I was regaining my breath, I looked to my left and I saw this doofus of a man, grinning widely, and on his screen, "Two And A Half Men" was playing. Yes, folks. He just had a near-death experience, and it took him about twenty seconds to go back to laughing at Charlie Sheen’s hilarious poop and fart and poopfart jokes.

Then came the longer flight from Brazil to Chicago where I settled in to watch "Monsters, Inc." for the billionth consecutive time, seeing as that movie never gets old, and airlines seem to agree with me by always having it available.

It is on this flight that I fell in love with Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, a gem of a record that would eventually account for the existence of Vampire Weekend and for my semi-sane survival of an endless night on the airplane.

I decided it would become the soundtrack to my trip: “These are the days of miracle and wonder,” he sings in the first track. “This is the long-distance call.”

I landed in Chicago at 6 a.m. and proceeded to get harassed by not one, not two, but THREE separate immigration officers. They sent me to what I call the deportation room, and seeing as it was me along with about eight or nine Mexicans who couldn’t speak English, it didn’t look very promising. After waiting in utter uncertainty for a while, I was granted a private interview with another immigration official who looked and talked like Seth Rogen. I liked him.

“2,500 dollars for seven weeks in the U.S. seems like very little money to me,” Seth Rogen said.

“Well, I’m staying with friends, so all I’m really paying for is food,” I told him. “And beers, of course.”

“Hah, yeah, I know how it is. OK, you’re good,” he said, and stamped my passport.

And just when I thought I was home free, some douche-faced prick at customs on a power trip decided to ask me all these questions again, but this time with a snotty undertone that suggested that I was a pedophile rapist and/or BP employee intent on coming into the U.S. for my own inscrutable, evil purposes.

Do you have job interviews lined up?, he asked me. Are you carrying resumes in your bag? Who are you seeing at each city? What does your ex-girlfriend do? Has she set you up with an interview at her newspaper? Why do you have your driver’s license with you? (For getting wasted at the bar, sir, I replied, but this guy wasn’t taking to my jokes like Seth Rogen.) Why is your bag so small? (Because airlines have all collectively decided to charge per checked bag and I’m a cheapskate, I answered, with absolutely no comedic success.) Why is your English so good?

And then, my favorite question, after he ran out of real questions:

Have you ever lied before?

Now, leaving aside the sheer pointlessness of this query, here’s the problem: I make a habit of not lying. I’m not going to say I’ve never lied before, because that’s impossible, but I will say that I’ve never consciously lied to anyone, or at least not that I can remember. I don’t like to be lied to, therefore I don’t lie.

And small transgressions make me extremely nervous, like using my friend’s brother’s ID to gain access to a sports facility, or trying to order alcohol if I’m not over the legal drinking age, etc. I’ve done it, and I hated doing it.

I don’t cover up for people and I refuse to get involved in their lies. Part of my well-earned reputation as an asshole stems from my inability to lie. Girlfriends quickly learn to stop asking me whether they look fat or whether their heels are pretty.

In short, as the guy who banged Martha Washington once said, “I cannot tell a lie.”

I was trying to explain all this to the customs guy, and I could see him frowning in disapproval. This wasn’t the direction he wanted my answer to go in. So I swiftly reversed the course.

“Well, I guess we all lie every now and then,” I said.

“You’re damn right we do,” he answered. “Have a nice day.”

I stood frozen in surprise for about two seconds, then marched on right out of there. And that's the story of how I told my first lie.

Ah, America’s sweet embrace. It’s like spooning with the demon-priest Mumm-Ra.

Out Of The Country (Again)

2010-05-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

nycnewhavenchicagoduluthseattleportlandeugenesanfranciscolosangelesyosemitelasvegastijuanabostonpittsburghnorfolknyc. backinlatejunewithfreshmaterial. dontmissmetoomuch.

It doesn't even matter

2010-04-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

That one well-known Linkin Park song was running through my head tonight, over and over, until I realized something: it makes no friggin' sense. I'd like to have a conversation with the guy who penned these lyrics.

Me: "Hi, guy! Do you have something to tell me?"

Guy: "One thing: I don’t know why it doesn't even matter how hard you try. Keep that in mind; I designed this rhyme to explain in due time all I know."

"Sweet. I'm all ears."

"Time is a valuable thing. Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings. Watch it count down to the end of the day. The clock ticks life away. It's so unreal. Didn't look out below. Watch the time go right out the window. Trying to hold on but didn't even know. Wasted it all just to watch you go."

"Woah there, Nelly. So what you're trying to say is that, number one, it doesn't matter how hard you try, and number two, time goes by fast?"

"I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart. What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when..."

"You're making zero sense."

"...I tried so hard and got so far. But in the end it doesn't even matter. I had to fall to lose it all. But in the end it doesn't even matter."

This example decisively proves that if you say something fast enough AND it rhymes, no one will pay attention to content. I hope you're taking notes, Evo Morales.

Aftermath

2010-04-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

My dad made me take these pics for insurance collecting purposes. I also took a bonus photo of myself grinning and giving a thumbs-up next to one of the cracked glass panes, but he decided it wasn't appropriate.

Behold, the famous glass cupola.

This cupola is a crack whore.

Yep, that's where the hail hit.

Disregard my reflection (if you can) and, instead, focus on what's below: coffee table, wooden floor, modern couch, several remote controls.

The hail fucked up a few tiles, too.

And by a few, I mean a lot. The End.

Apocalypto

2010-04-19T14:29:00.001-07:00

There was a raging hailstorm last night, the epicenter of which was specifically located above my block, or that's what it felt like.

I was home alone for the first time in months, the rest of the family out to see Ricardo Darin in some play. I heard a couple of isolated, loud bangs coming from the living room.

"Great," I thought. "Someone decided to stay behind. Evening ruined."

That's when the power went off. And, in the darkness, what sounded like a German blitzkrieg operation raining down on the roof. I fumbled my way out of my room and, standing near the glass cupola, I took in the deafening noise of the giant chunks of ice, some as big as tangerines, crashing down above me. (Photo courtesy of the newspaper. My hands aren't that ugly.)

I ran downstairs, illuminating the way with my cell phone, all the way to the garage, where I thought we kept our emergency light -- a portable, rechargeable tube light that comes on when the power goes out. The light wasn't working. I trotted back upstairs to find Foolia's flashlight. The flashlight was almost out of batteries. Amid the chaos, the phone rang.

I felt like those dogs who freak out during fireworks; I literally couldn't think.

"Hello," I panted into the phone.

"Hey," said my dad. "How are things down there?"

"There's a giant hailstorm and the power's out," I informed him.

"Is water coming into the house?"

"I haven't checked yet. I've been running around looking for a flashlight."

"OK. Take a look and call me back."

I trudged up to the playroom and, indeed, there was a steady stream of water gushing from the roof down onto the staircase, sort of like the Poland Spring label but in the worst way. I ran back downstairs to grab some rags to soak up the mess. There was water seeping in through every upstairs window, and the metal gates that lead to the backyard were violently clanging back and forth, thanks to the wind. (Malaria later theorized: "That was probably the cats in the yard, pleading, 'Dad, please let us in! We promise we'll stop crapping out here!' ")

Once the upstairs area was marginally under control, I headed back down, fearful that the glass cupola would shatter at any moment and I'd have to find about two hundred buckets to keep the living room dry. I took out my cell phone to call my dad back and found a text message from Foolia:

"If you made all this up, you're a genius! Hah! Is it true?"

(Apparently there was no hailstorm downtown. To address her question, I guess the idea of making my dad freak out for absolutely no reason is quite funny, but I suppose I'd pick a milder subject matter, and not the entire house falling to pieces.)

"Thanks for your battery-less flashlight. Tell the rest I looked around and everything seems OK," I texted back. (And that's how I used up the last of my cell phone credit.)

As suddenly as it had come, the storm abated. My first thought was to go out to The Lung and see if any hail was left over. All I found was this, mostly melted.

And this strange, nightmarish combination of clouds and trees and moonlight.

The power was out in the rest of the neighborhood, too. I could see people starting to congregate on the sidewalk, flashlights bobbing up and down. I went down to the front door to spy on them.

The block was completely wrecked. Branches and chunks of tree all over the road; leaves carpeting the sidewalks; car after car after car with shattered windshields and rear windows. The weather was pleasant, most people wearing T-shirts.

I went back in and the phone rang again. It was my grandma. She wanted to make sure we were alive. The hail had cracked her sliding, floor-to-ceiling bedroom window up on the 8th floor of her apartment building, but she was OK. I hung up. My dad called again. I confirmed that everything was under control.

I lit some candles, read the New Yorker for a bit. Briefly considered going downstairs and eating everything in the fridge before it went bad. Later my family called again, told me they were going out to dinner and asked if I wanted them to pick me up. Sure, I said. By the time we all came back, the power was back on.

We took a closer look at the cupola today. There was massive damage: huge circular indentations all over, cracks running up and down the glass, and one pane that seemed a firm tap away from raining down into the living room. The roofer came and replaced about 50 busted tiles.

I went out on my bike today and the neighborhood was still covered in leaves and twigs and branches. At almost every corner, people had started impromptu trash yards, piling up all their damaged items, the most common one being white plastic outdoor tables. They looked like giant slices of Swiss cheese. Half the cars driving around had busted windshields, which, combined with the lack of traction, made traffic even more dangerous, if that's even possible.

Oh and my sisters complained that, once again, they missed out on all the cool stuff. In your face!

Another conversation with Red Sox

2010-04-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

futbol: someone made a video titled "chan ho park forever"

how could you love chan ho park so much

red sox: with much difficulty

he used to be half decent though

ugh, i have no motivation to do my accounting final type thing right now

futbol: isn't it early for final-type things?

red sox: well, we have a final exam and a final project

final project is in 2 weeks or so

which is when finals is

plus, its accounting....so its weird

futbol: hah yes

red sox: and unfortunately its an annoying accounting exam, cuz they just gave me an annual report and said 'analyze'

futbol: well, at least you've learned a useful skill

you can analyze anything

i can throw you a cat, and you can analyze it

red sox: ha, yes...so long as it follows generally accepted accounting principles

futbol: hmm. maybe a cat with a balance sheet stapled to its back

red sox: man that would be a great way for companies to deliver news to shareholders

futbol: peta would be all over it

cats getting stapled all over town

red sox: yeah, they might get involved

especially cuz id be using a catapult

futbol: making it as inhumane as possible

why don't you light the cat on fire while you're at it

red sox: nah, id rope some cushions around the cat

to lighten the impact

futbol: or you could outfit the cat with nike shox

red sox: if only they worked that well

Rightful owner

2010-04-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Macarena and Godito (or did you mean Gordito?):

I have found your 2 peso bill. Don't worry. I'll keep it safe until I find a way to get it back to you both.

It's a shame you didn't leave your phone numbers or home addresses on the bill. Is that T.A.M. under your names some sort of a clue, or does it just stand for Te Amo Mucho? Either way, Gordito, I'm pretty sure you're a lucky man/cat/Taco Bell menu item.

Please contact me at your earliest availability. I'm talking to you, Gordito. Especially if you're a Taco Bell menu item.

Hungrily,

Futbol.

The MacGyver of drunk

2010-04-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

We went to a couple of parties yesterday. First was an intimate gathering at someone's apartment where we met an American named Scott. (For the record, every time I have met an American named Scott outside of the U.S., he has turned out to be fratty.)

We invited Scott to come along with us to the second party. He eagerly accepted, then proceeded to swipe the still-untouched bottle of wine he had brought as a gift. Not the classiest move, but better than walking in empty-handed to the next party.

The second party turned out to be larger than expected; it was in a house, dozens of people drinking in an open courtyard, with a kitchen downstairs doubling up as a bar, and a terrace on top. We walked into the kitchen to ask if we could borrow a corkscrew. No, they said. Outside drinks should be consumed outside the party.

Thanks, jerks.

We briefly brainstormed some wine-opening alternatives. I proposed we look around to see if anyone looked like they were carrying a Swiss Army knife. Stoned Jim said he could try to use his apartment key. Andrea tried pushing the cork down with her thumb.

“That’s never going to work,” said Scott.

We dejectedly made our way to the terrace, which for some reason was covered in construction materials, when Scott spotted a loose metal gate, the kind with pointy ends, presumably to keep intruders out. It was resting on a wall.

“Put the wine on the floor, then hold it down,” Scott ordered.

I placed it on the terrace.

“Closer,” Scott said.

I put it down right next to the gate.

Then Scott raised the gate, at least 7 or 8 feet tall, high up in the air, and swiftly brought down one of the pointy ends on the top of the bottle. I felt wine splashing on my face and jumped back. Then I reached back down, grabbed the bottle and looked inside: the cork was floating, intact, in the wine. I took a swig.

“Great success!” I said.

From now on, I’m going to open all my wine bottles with metal gates.

Ode to the Taurus

2010-03-31T19:53:00.001-07:00

My first car was a rusting silver 1989 Ford Taurus. The front plastic fender was tenuously held in place by metal wires. It sported an unimaginably stupid-looking racing stripe that spanned the length of the car. The car’s previous owner, a irascible senior named Glenn Losi, helmed our college radio station and had already repeatedly threatened to fire me and Chotchsky from the rocking midnight show we hosted for almost a full semester, known to Lexington’s inhabitants as The Red Bull Hour, and by Lexington’s inhabitants I mean a smattering of our frat brothers and the two self-denominated Raging Intellectuals who hosted the moronic show that came on before ours whose sole redeeming act was the playing of Andrew WK’s “Party Hard” at the end of every one of their shows.

This is exactly what my car looked like:

I paid 800 dollars for it. I was in desperate need of a car after all my roommates had abruptly decided to pick up and move out to the countryside, dragging me along with them. I opposed the move because I not only lacked a car, but also an American driver’s license. I was outvoted.

That’s how I came to buy the first car I saw for sale, Glenn Losi’s ride. That very night we met at a downtown corner and he tossed me the keys.

“Take her for a spin,” Losi said.

“Uh, you coming?” I asked.

“Nah, I’ll wait here.”

I settled into the front seat; say what you will about American cars, but they have the softest, plushest seats in the world. Think Cadillac-level comfort. Everything else inside was a mess: the gear shifting was done via a lever that sprouted from behind the wheel, instead of the modern gearboxes we are all used to. The brakes squealed. Audio options were limited to a tape deck and fuzzy radio with glowing green digits that lit up the inside of the car.

I nervously cruised around downtown Lexington for five minutes, making sure to avoid police cars and potential damage to what was still Glenn Losi’s car.

“I’ll take it,” I said when I pulled back up to the street corner.

The car met my three requirements: 1) It worked. 2) It was under a thousand bucks. 3) The owner seemed trustworthy, and more importantly, was someone I could ostensibly beat up if anything went wrong.

I wrote him a check on the spot and drove the Taurus home. It felt good to park it behind our house, even if its lot-mates were a black BMW, a red Saab convertible, and a trendy blue Jetta. (Sidenote: the BMW got dented by a keg tossed out the window, the Saab broke down constantly, and the Jetta’s plastic innards started coming apart shortly after graduation. So I’m not too resentful.)

People have called me a Mexican with particular vehemence during two periods of my college career. The first was freshman year, when I let my mullet grow out and chugged Jose Cuervo while stumbling down frat house hallways. I probably deserved that one.

The second was right after I started driving Glenn Losi’s piece of shit car, without a driver’s license or registration or required insurance.

“Wow, you really are a Mexican,” they said, over and over.

Adding insult to injury, the movie “Road Trip” was particularly popular around that time and featured a scene where Seann William Scott tries to make it over a broken bridge -- in my car. He guns the accelerator, pedal to the metal, trying to gather speed as he approaches the jump.

“You know we need to get to 60, right?” his curly-haired stoner friend says.

“I’m trying, this car sucks!” Stifler replies.

(Start around 2:00 for the moment in question.)

Naturally, that became the requisite catchphrase every time I gave anyone a ride.

And then one night I was having a beer at the Lambda house, telling one of the brothers about how I recently bought Glenn Losi’s car, and he went, “the Losermobile? You bought Losi’s LOSERMOBILE?”

Still, I was happy in the Losermobile. Gas consumption wasn’t a concern, at $1.80 a gallon, and while all my roommates were constantly carting their cars to dealerships or to that sketchy Wrenchworks redneck guy for repairs and periodic servicing and oil changes and all those things non-Mexicans do with their cars, I was laughing it up, rattling around all over town.

A couple of months after me and my soulmate car were united in love forever, winter came. I had never driven in snow, having done all my driving training in Mexico, but I had no choice: No way to walk to class, and no plows to clear the way for me. It’s every man for himself on Virginia’s back roads.

So I tentatively set out on the Taurus, first slowly, swerving around a little bit to test the physical properties of rubber on snow. This isn’t so bad, I thought to myself. I can go faster than this. Hey, I won’t even be late for class!

As I was doing maybe 30 or 40 miles an hour on a hillside ridge, I lost control. I pushed the brake pedal; nothing. I slammed the brake pedal; nothing. The car was floating forward like a hockey puck, driven by its own momentum, no longer listening to the steering wheel. I could see a left curve ahead, and beyond that, a steep drop into nothingness.

This was one of two times in my life that I remember thinking “well, if you don’t do anything, you will die.” (The first was when I choked on a piece of hard candy at a young age; hardly interesting.)

There was the dropoff to my right and the side of the hill to my left. I picked the side of the hill. I swerved as violently as I could. The car drifted sideways for a second, then slammed into the accumulated snow on the side of the hill, face first. The front of the Taurus plunged into the snow, leaving the back of the car suspended in the air, the back tires spinning cartoonishly. I got out of the car, dazed, and left the door open. John Mayer was still singing on the CD player I had hooked up to the tape deck. It was a surreal scene. This is the song that was playing:

As I pulled out my cell phone, unsure of whom to call, I heard another engine rumbling in the quiet, chilly morning. It was one of my neighbors.

“Bad parking job, huh?” he yelled out the window.

“Yep.”

“I can’t help ya, but give me a minute, I’ll go get [unintelligible -- could have been Billy Mac or Buddy Brown or whatever country name you prefer].”

Sure enough, about five minutes later (at this point I had turned off the song, which still makes me feel strange inside when I listen to it today) a big yellow bulldozer rolled around, and the helpful driver chained it up to my car and pulled me out of the snow ditch.

“Thank you so, so much,” I gushed. “How much do I owe ya?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the guy said.

“No, I’m serious, you saved me a lot of trouble. How much? Twenty? Thirty?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he repeated.

Then he got back into his bulldozer and literally led the way out onto the highway, probably to make sure I didn’t pull another Evel Knievel move.

I drove the Losermobile all the way through senior year: I picked up my parents, flying in for my graduation on their very first and last visit to my school, at the Roanoke airport and immediately took them to Chik-Fil-A in the Taurus. I drove the beast from Virginia to Miami and back, earning only one speeding ticket along the way, and then a year later from Virginia to Minnesota. By that time, “this car sucks” had turned 16 and had topped 150,000 miles and her engine was still purring like a kitten with lung cancer.

Even though she clearly wasn’t built for sub-zero temperatures (especially her battery, which had a penchant for freezing on cold days and leaving me stranded), the Taurus handled Duluth’s icy streets with the skill and grace of a marginally unathletic hippo.

When we finally parted ways, it wasn’t because the Losermobile died; it’s because I was heading for Manhattan, which has no room or aesthetic patience for Losermobiles. I handed her over to my landlord, a guy going by the name of Taco, who also wasn’t Mexican. Taco gave me a month’s free rent for the car, that is, 625 dollars. So, if you want to get mathematical, it cost me 175 dollars to drive the Taurus for more than three years. I consider it, by far, the best money I ever spent.

Last I heard, the Taurus was still alive and kicking in Duluth; Taco sold it to an unsuspecting young newspaper reporter who recently moved to South America to work on an organic farm, undoubtedly fleeing all the Americans telling him how much his car sucks.

Serio?

2010-03-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

What's wonderful/horrible about living in Argentina is that everyone wears their political affiliations on their sleeve, or in the case of our local media, on their newsprint. I mean, cmon: our president dressed as a schoolgirl with a ribbon on her head and a frilly blouse, standing next to FRANZ KAFKA? You might be thinking, "how could this possibly correctly illustrate whatever story this is based on?" And the answer is, of course, that the cartoon has nothing to do with anything. I mean, you could make the extremely weak argument that Kafka --> famously wrote about bureaucracy --> and Kirchner's government is mired in it, like all governments before it. But then why is she in schoolgirl uniform? Sigh. Can you imagine this going over in the U.S.? Like, Obama dressed as a schoolboy standing next to, I don't know, Machiavelli?

The big question

2010-03-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

if you think some women want only your love

try giving them some coke

they won't remember the

color of your eyes

or what you whispered in their

ear.

but lay out some lines

and give them a matchstick

(to prove they are professional)

and

unlike a woman in love

they will return

faithfully.

and one must admit

that faith in any

form

probably

better than the

indifference of deserted

sidewalks.

and then one

wonders

again.

(Bukowski, "coke blues")

Weird-awesome dream

2010-03-25T22:18:00.001-07:00

Bear with me, because this one's hard to explain.

So there's two people having a conversation in the living room of a white townhouse. I guess one of them is me; the other is a bald man no older than 45. We're chatting, and suddenly the bald man stops talking. He completely shuts down: blank stare, frozen in place. I try to get his attention, but I know it's useless.

I grab a pickax and walk out the front door, down to the street, where I begin hacking at the pavement. Hack, hack, hack. Cracks start to form, then chunks start coming apart.

Underneath the surface I find a giant man who looks exactly like the bald guy, only about four times the size of a normal human. He has electrodes stuck onto his temples. He is lying in a few inches of water, facing upward.

I talk to him and give him some instructions and he nods, and then the dream pans back to the living room, where the original bald man suddenly comes back to life.

Great dream, huh?

I have half a mind to walk right downstairs and start drilling up the street. Except I'm scared I might find the giant version of me who controls what I do. Although...wouldn't the giant version prevent me from blogging about this? Unless he WANTS to be found. Well, I sure as hell am not going to facilitate any giant uprising. Please, leave your streets alone.

Ageism

2010-03-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

We celebrated Flour’s 28th birthday yesterday, and at the club, among her usual cadre of artists and homosexuals and homosexual artists, was an old man. White hair, spectacles, the works.

It was 2 a.m. and the music was thumping and this old man was sitting on the vinyl wraparound couch alongside Flour’s closest friends, bobbing his head. Occasionally, he would scooch over to her side and yell something in her ear.

“Who the crap is that?” I asked Sonny, who was sitting next to me, opposite old man river.

“A lawyer,” Sonny said, nonchalantly.

“Is he her lawyer? And why does he need to be next to her at all times?”

“All I know is that he’s a lawyer.”

When we all made our way to another bar, because the attention span of cokeheads is even shorter in the nighttime, the lawyer followed obediently. At this second bar, manned (not an intentional play on words) by very polite transvestites and smelling of fresh paint, the lawyer stood awkwardly in the middle of the dance floor, sipping his drink. Every now and then, Flour would walk over to him and exchange a few words.

I pushed Sonny for more information, but he insisted that he knew nothing else. Then he got up and walked toward Flour and the lawyer.

“Futbol over there wants to meet you,” I overheard Sonny saying to the lawyer.

I don’t know how the rest of the conversation transpired, but the old man never came over. Sonny eventually did. I asked him if he had learned any new information. Nope.

My list of unsolved mysteries continues to grow.

Oliver Outrage

2010-03-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Remember Letterland?

It's a magical kingdom populated by letter characters, each letter having an accompanying action or adjective that starts with said letter. Classics include Kicking King (why did the King go around kicking people?), Clever Cat, and the always-terrifying Sammy Snake. And let's not forget the Hairy Hat Man.

It's used in preschool to teach kids how to read good and do other stuff good too, and it certainly left its indelible imprint on me. (Note: I'm not sure if Letterland was used outside of European-style learning institutions, so this might not interest the majority of you.)

Well, check this out: According to Wikipedia, "in 2003, ten of the alphabet character names were changed to less pejorative ones, and Impy Ink gained multicolored ink (his ink was blue before)."

Seriously? Impy Ink gained multicolored ink? What is this world coming to!

Here's what the politically correct bastards changed:

-Fireman Fred is now Firefighter Fred (because girls can grow up to fight fires too!). I think the name has lost its ring, though.

-Lucy Lamp Lady is now Lucy Lamp Light. Uh...I see no reason for this one. Is the profession of lamp lady somehow demeaning to women? I'd say illuminating the world is a pretty important job, and women should be proud. Anyway. As long as they made her non-Asian, it was probably for the better.

-Naughty Nick is now Noisy Nick. Naughty Nick has probably been copyrighted by Playboy or something. (On a side note, I'm not sure we're setting the right example for kids. I'd take a naughty person over a noisy one any day.)

-Poor Peter is now Peter Puppy. Talk about an upgrade! From a poor dog to a dog. Let's hope this change placates the NAAPP (National Association for the Advancement of Poor People).

-Robber Red is now Red Robot. Fine. I suppose teaching kids about robbing stuff at age 4 was probably not the best of ideas. That said, if we follow this line of reasoning, we'd have to turn the Hamburglar into the Hamburger Robot. And nobody wants that.

-Ticking Tess is now Talking Tess. Considering Tess was the only black woman of the bunch, this strikes me as insulting.

-Vase of Violets is now Vicky Violet. You know, this is the problem with modernity. Everything has to fit a pattern. People don't understand that it was FUNNY to have a random lifeless object amid all these people. Ugh. I wish the sexually undefined Firefighter Fred would come around and slap the name innovators with his/her hose.

-The Wicked Water Witch is now Walter Walrus. OK, but how do you plan to scare kids into submission? Unless Walter Walrus is a pedophile...

-Max and Maxine are now Fix-It Max. a) That's sexist (to take Maxine out because women don't fix things -- they break things.) b) Max and Maxine were Xissing Cousins? WHAT? I actually got taught these things?

-The Yo-Yo Man is now the Yellow Yo-Yo Man. Good going, geniuses. It's not like he was ALL DRESSED IN YELLOW in the previous version anyway. Hey, let's make it so kids don't have to exercise their powers of perception!

The saddest change of them all:

-The Hairy Hat Man is now Harry Hat Man. Something makes me suspect that he is no longer a hillbilly who dances with roadkill.

Photography!

2010-03-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Now that my camera has been returned to its rightful owner, moi, I can flood this blog with photos, which, after all, say more than a thousand words.

My mom bought me this hand soap for my bathroom. It is the gayest hand soap I have ever owned. That stupid-face guy looks at me tenderly every morning. He seems to be sporting some sort of a subtle mullet. And the soap smells like after shave gone bad. Thanks for the homoerotic soap, mom.

I know this much: These yaks are up to no good.

My mom found this photo while digging around in the basement for something else. As you can see, it's a photo of an old couple: a squinting dude with a tan explorer shirt and a suggestively posing woman with a dotted blouse. On the back of the photo it says: "Dear all five of you! We also remember you always, we wish you a very happy year! And just so Dyslexia and Futbol don't forget us, we're sending this photo, with lots of love! Happy days, darlings! -Magda and Chuchú (December 1989)"

I had to go ask my mom who the crap Magda and Chuchú were. Turns out they lived in our same apartment building (Bermudez 680 tercer piso La Lucila, which is how I remembered of our address as a kid, one long uninterrupted stream of words) and they doted on me and Dyslexia (naturally, because they were old and bored and we were cute kindergartners).

At any rate -- sorry, Magda and Chuchú! We've forgotten you! You're probably dead! At least you're living on through my blog.

La Nouvelle Vague

2010-03-04T19:23:00.000-08:00

These are five things I have learned from my foray into French New Wave cinema.

1. Parking near the Eiffel Tower was a pain in the ass as early as 1959.

2. The French treat their kids like crap.

3. All French people chainsmoke all day long, starting at about 7 years of age.

4. Brigitte Bardot loves to parade her naked butt all over the screen. Also, she is a fan of smoking while sitting on the toilet, something I had never actually seen with my own eyes before.

5. Jim Jarmusch clearly stole the main character in “Stranger Than Paradise” from Godard’s “A Bout De Souffle”, although I’m sure that Godard stole it from someone else before him.

My vacation, in comic form

2010-03-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

This is what happens at the beach nowadays (click to enlarge):

And when, inevitably, someone makes a film version of this comic strip, the main kid will be played by this guy (click to enlarge, but I don't see why you'd want to):

I think you're on drugs :)

2010-03-02T20:06:00.001-08:00

(Melissa, who was recently introduced in my post about enemies, invited me over Facebook -- along with 300 other people -- to some sort of a Big Brothers/Big Sisters bowling thing. I promptly ignored it, but then I got this message in my inbox.)

Hi all:

I just want to clear something up with our bowling fundraiser because I think there's been some confusion.

If you're able to make any donation to our bowling team to go toward Big Brothers Big Sisters, however large or small, it would be much appreciated. You can click on the link on the event page to do so. If not, we completely understand! While you're certainly welcome to come out to Madison and go bowling with us May 1, we're not requesting that you do that. :) Especially for those of you who live far away, that request would be kind of absurd.

Hope this clears up any confusion!

Love,
Melissa

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(My reply)

wait. i don't get it. you want me to travel all the way to ohio just to lead your bowling team to victory? i mean, i know i have a reputation for being awesome at bowling (there's a reason why people call me "the half-strike king"), but doesn't that seem a bit much?

love,

the half-strike king

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(Melissa)

First of all, we are in WISCONSIN! Detail FAIL :)

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(Me)

WHOOPS. compensates for your fundraising request FAIL. the reason i got confused is because you're FROM ohio, melissa jean.

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(Melissa)

I think you're on drugs! :)