In my delusion, I believed that I would care to sit at this computer and type up a review of an entire decade of my life. At my job, I'm occasionally asked to type up a review of an album or movie. I have yet to complete one, but I've always been one for going overboard before setting foot on the ship.
In truth, I sit at this computer and work all day, at least five days a week. In addition to my work, which involves the typing of several hundred emails a day and various reports, I also carry on correspondence with several friends via email and revel in the potpourri of mirth and madness which is the Internet.
I'm glad someone out there has (or at least bothers to make) the time to create all the glorious things the Internet has to offer (from www.badmovies.org to that ultimate in "I meant to be in bed hours ago" websites: Youtube). For myself, at the end of a lengthy day typing email responses to anonymous characters regarding their online purchases, the last thing I feel compelled to do is to remain seated at this desk and type more (I recognize the irony in that I'm doing that very thing right now, but the mood has struck).
That is why I don't write more on this blog. That is why, in my way, I'm admitting that in all likelihood, my Decade in Review will go the way of my San Antonio Adventures.
Suffice to say, my 20s were eventful, potentially no more or less than an average young person in America.
In that time, I did not die (although I sure wish I had following the 20th birthday party and my bartender's killer birthday mixes). I moved to the States. I travelled to Europe. I moved several times. I fell in love. I got sober. I settled down into home-ownership in the middle of nowhere. I gained weight. I've made and lost friends. I've rekindled old acquaintances and friendships. I attended my 10-year high-school reunion (held in Las Vegas of all places). And in one striking moment of genius, undermining all the ideas I had about MY TWENTIES, I turned 30.
If you want my thoughts on turning 30, as my friend Greg did since he is about to in a week or two, just ask. I'll share. I've been there. I can help you through it.
28.6.07
Decade in Review (that's ten years, you know?), Part One
Some Background...
When I was in elementary school back in Wisconsin, I remember flexing my arithmetical prowess (actually, the concept of subtraction reduced me to tears in first grade and required special tutelage from my classmate) and realizing that in 1997 I would be 20. I remember that it felt much the same way that 1980 must have felt like in Sci-Fi terms to people in the 50s. Certainly by then there would be space exploration, flying cars and cloud cities. Beyond that, I had no idea what "20" would look like, feel like, mean, or anything beyond the fact that it would occur in the year 1977 + 20 (I was particularly proud of not needing a calculator to figure that one out). It has to be the adult equivalent to when you reach those glorious and mythical "double digits" when you are child. It certainly must be twice as cool as turning 10 (merely a turn of phrase, I was not so bright to recognize that 10 x 2 = 20).
Then something unexpected happened. I'm not talking about leaving Wisconsin, moving to Guam, figuring out I was "different," dad losing his job, the discovery that certain chemicals make you feel "different" and "less different" at the same time, discovering punk, discovering that punk mostly sucked, dropping out of college, or any of the other unexpected turns my life took. It was something that happened at a County Fair. Amidst the funnel cake-peddling booths and funnel cake-ejecting rides, there was a purple tent with stars and moons and hands (and no greedy Lucky Charms Leprechaun to chase down as the kids did in the commercials). For something like a dollar (it could have been more or less... my math, as we have established...), I could get my fortune told. I don't remember too many particulars of the experience, other than walking away with the understanding that I would not live to see 20. Strangely enough, on another occasion at a different County Fair, another "fortune teller" confirmed this. These are not necessarily the nicest things to tell a relatively well-behaved boy from solid Mid-Western stock.
These events may be where the word fortune took on a sinister connotation in my book. I was the kid who'd get the fortune cookie at the end of the meal that would read something like "Rome wasn't built in a day, and you're no brick-layer." Fortune became something to be made or had for other people. For me, it was something that was coming to get me.
As most children do, I took the news as if it really had nothing to do with me, and I went about my life. There were more pressing matters than 20, after all (see above). Still, in the back of my mind, there was always this sense that the flying cars and space exploration should really get here early if I was to enjoy THE FUTURE.
After I dropped out of college and moved back to Guam, my life had settled into a surreal mundanity. Work, sex, drinking, art, etc. sort of became a mainstay of a life that felt simultaneously on hold and coming to a close. I felt a bit like someone had told me, "You've got 6 weeks to live, what are you going to do to make the most of it?" but had a such a bad case of ennui which prevented my bothering to care.
Over a drunken night at Denny's, our sober-up-enough-to-drive-home haunt, while I was lifting silverware and my roommates were "grocery shopping" (a nice way of saying we stocked many of our sundries by lifting condiments from restaurants), I confessed this back story to my roommates. They sat listening with awe (they may have been drunk and impatient for their side orders to arrive) and incredulity. Augmented no doubt by the effect alcohol has on my ability to express my feelings, though, it soon became apparent that this pending (if not impending) doom was bothering me just a bit. Therefore, it soon became settled that live or die, my 20th birthday would an occasion to remember. I may not live to see 20 years and a day, but my roommates were certain to tell the epic and heroic tale of me turning 20. I remember approaching it with a sense of giddy anticipation and dread.
When I was in elementary school back in Wisconsin, I remember flexing my arithmetical prowess (actually, the concept of subtraction reduced me to tears in first grade and required special tutelage from my classmate) and realizing that in 1997 I would be 20. I remember that it felt much the same way that 1980 must have felt like in Sci-Fi terms to people in the 50s. Certainly by then there would be space exploration, flying cars and cloud cities. Beyond that, I had no idea what "20" would look like, feel like, mean, or anything beyond the fact that it would occur in the year 1977 + 20 (I was particularly proud of not needing a calculator to figure that one out). It has to be the adult equivalent to when you reach those glorious and mythical "double digits" when you are child. It certainly must be twice as cool as turning 10 (merely a turn of phrase, I was not so bright to recognize that 10 x 2 = 20).
Then something unexpected happened. I'm not talking about leaving Wisconsin, moving to Guam, figuring out I was "different," dad losing his job, the discovery that certain chemicals make you feel "different" and "less different" at the same time, discovering punk, discovering that punk mostly sucked, dropping out of college, or any of the other unexpected turns my life took. It was something that happened at a County Fair. Amidst the funnel cake-peddling booths and funnel cake-ejecting rides, there was a purple tent with stars and moons and hands (and no greedy Lucky Charms Leprechaun to chase down as the kids did in the commercials). For something like a dollar (it could have been more or less... my math, as we have established...), I could get my fortune told. I don't remember too many particulars of the experience, other than walking away with the understanding that I would not live to see 20. Strangely enough, on another occasion at a different County Fair, another "fortune teller" confirmed this. These are not necessarily the nicest things to tell a relatively well-behaved boy from solid Mid-Western stock.
These events may be where the word fortune took on a sinister connotation in my book. I was the kid who'd get the fortune cookie at the end of the meal that would read something like "Rome wasn't built in a day, and you're no brick-layer." Fortune became something to be made or had for other people. For me, it was something that was coming to get me.
As most children do, I took the news as if it really had nothing to do with me, and I went about my life. There were more pressing matters than 20, after all (see above). Still, in the back of my mind, there was always this sense that the flying cars and space exploration should really get here early if I was to enjoy THE FUTURE.
After I dropped out of college and moved back to Guam, my life had settled into a surreal mundanity. Work, sex, drinking, art, etc. sort of became a mainstay of a life that felt simultaneously on hold and coming to a close. I felt a bit like someone had told me, "You've got 6 weeks to live, what are you going to do to make the most of it?" but had a such a bad case of ennui which prevented my bothering to care.
Over a drunken night at Denny's, our sober-up-enough-to-drive-home haunt, while I was lifting silverware and my roommates were "grocery shopping" (a nice way of saying we stocked many of our sundries by lifting condiments from restaurants), I confessed this back story to my roommates. They sat listening with awe (they may have been drunk and impatient for their side orders to arrive) and incredulity. Augmented no doubt by the effect alcohol has on my ability to express my feelings, though, it soon became apparent that this pending (if not impending) doom was bothering me just a bit. Therefore, it soon became settled that live or die, my 20th birthday would an occasion to remember. I may not live to see 20 years and a day, but my roommates were certain to tell the epic and heroic tale of me turning 20. I remember approaching it with a sense of giddy anticipation and dread.
28.1.07
Back in Wisconsin...
In the fifth grade, we all had to do a report on a specific explorer from the Age of Exploration. Some kids chose Vasco de Gama. Others presented reports on Francis Drake or Francisco de Coronado. I chose Ferdinand Magellan, the first man to circumnavigate the globe. In researching and ultimately presenting my report, I came across the name of a small island in the Pacific Ocean, where, after months of hard transoceanic sailing, Magellan and his crew stopped to refresh their water and food supply. This island was Guam. Little did I know at the time, this would not be our last encounter. Unlike countless other American school children, I would not be able to simply forget Guam’s existence once the report was over and graded.
It was the summer before 6th grade. We lived in a small wooded community on the extreme outskirts of Milwaukee County. It was almost suburban. We had been living in that town since we moved from California so my dad could help run an airline in Milwaukee.
There may have been another town in there as well. I don’t know. We moved a lot. Dad worked for Continental airlines and had been transferred from airport to airport. We followed close behind, packing up our lives and moving from Illinois to California, California to Wisconsin. We always moved. That was a given. How far was the thing that was up in the air. Would there be a change in time zones? Or could we maybe keep the same phone number for once?
Of late, Continental had not been doing well in Milwaukee and was going in and out of business there. Consequently, dad was working either the hour and a half drive to Milwaukee or the hour and a half flight to Detroit. We all wondered if Detroit would be our next “home.”
That summer, dad had received a call from an old boss of his whom he had worked for in Chicago. He was in Guam, and felt dad was the right man to fill the city manager position. Mom and dad had flown out to interview and check out the island. For that week, there was no school and no parents. It was just my older brother David, my younger brother Erik, and me.
David was six years older than me and practically an adult. He remembered Illinois better than Erik (two years my junior) or me, since we left when I was only three. He knew our grandparents. He was also balding, even though he was about to begin his senior year. Erik and I made fun of him for that.
Erik was the “creative” one. He was a strawberry blonde firecracker. Because he was extra-tall for his age (we were all tall) everyone assumed he and I were twins. That wasn’t true, but we were known to draw closer together in situations outside the safety of home.
The day mom and dad were to come home from the interview, we went to meet them at the airport. Erik and David had made banners on the computer that read “WELCOME HOME GLOBETROTTERS!!!” We had seen the Harlem Globe Trotters that previous winter, and surely this is the farthest that a Pavesic had ever traveled. While classmates of mine often took winter vacations to such exotic places as Florida, we only went to the Wisconsin Dells and, if we were really lucky, to a trailer park in Iowa on a dammed up river.
To make the reception more “island,” we each dressed in colourful, tacky, mismatched clothing. The islands, as we saw it, were brilliant and dazzling exotic locations where people dressed brightly so as not to be eaten by tigers in the jungle. Erik had on red and white striped shorts and a yellow t-shirt. I had a on a pink shirt with green shorts. David, certainly the most authentic and prepared, had on a real Hawaiian shirt and Panama hat that some friend of his must have bought for him on their travels.
Aside from the excitement of seeing mom and dad again, we were terribly anxious, almost frantic. What was it like over there? Were there headhunters? Was it like Tarzan or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea? Did they get the job? Were we going? Did they bring us anything? Did they bring us any tropical diseases? Would I get my own room? Oh yeah, did they like it?
My parents are larger than life people, even now that I’m taller than they are. But when I was still little, they were enormous. My dad was Santa Claus, benignly towering, with white hair and a white beard. His belly didn’t shake like a bowl full of jelly, but his gruff booming voice still could not hide his warmth when he smiled and laughed. He annually donned his Santa outfit for company and school parties. Kids at school would look at me in awe on those rare occasions that dad was not at work and picked me up.
“Your dad is Santa Claus?” they would say with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. I’d smile knowingly and bask in the brief fame and adulation such a status would bring me among my classmates. It was the only thing I was famous or adored for.
Outwardly, mom was the opposite of dad. Her favourite costume, aside from the comfortable nightgown that was the uniform of her housewife profession, was more about Halloween. She would dress as a witch, an outlet for her more assertive side. Though benevolent to her own children, who had gotten used to the cackling and sinister smile, she was often viewed outside the home as “bitchy.” It was not that she was sinister. Her smile was really quite pleasant. However, age and three children had done something to her eyes that turned her genuine smile into something with more going on behind it than one was comfortable thinking about. She was also dangerously intelligent.
After their long trip, they were excited to have their sons pick them up and drive them back to the house they’d recently bought on Woodward Street. It was a giant two-story colonial-style home in the woods. Covered in white siding and brick, it sat back off the street, veiled behind the branches of the large trees which populated our neighbourhood. It was the oldest house we’d ever lived in, built sometime before mom and dad were married. Made of wood, it groaned and creaked with the wind or a footfall. It was a warm home.
It wasn’t long before my dad received a call saying that he was wanted for the position. “When can you get here?” Family meetings began at once to determine whether or not to accept. For once, Erik and I were included in the decision. We were put in charge of finding out more information about Guam to help the family make up its mind. Hitting the World Book Encyclopedias and National Geographics, we prepared our presentation on this tropical island in the Western Pacific that was 36 miles long, 6-12 miles wide, populated by close to 150,000 people, ringed by coral reefs, had no major exports, and was an unincorporated trust territory of the United States.
I felt so adult to at last have a say in a family move that I couldn’t help but stamp it with my approval. We always moved, and it was always the adults’ decision. So now that I was a grown-up, it was only natural that I vote for Dad to accept the job. We sat around the dinner table, a large solid circle of reddish coloured wood around which we’d eaten for years. The table was blanketed in maps, picture books, encyclopedias, lists, notes, and the remnants of dinner, including dad’s beer stein.
After much debate, with me stomping my feet and pouting in the best argumentative style I knew, it was decided that the Pavesics would go to Guam. Well, most of us. David was starting his senior year in high school and wanted to graduate with his friends. Mom was not wild about it, but finally consented to let David move in with some friends from Boy Scouts who’d make sure he would go to school and behave.
Dad was to start right away, which left mom, Erik and I to close up life in Wisconsin. We started school that fall with the understanding that this would be temporary. We were leaving the United States. We had passports. For once, there was something interesting about me. The kid who wore thrift store and garage sale clothes to a school populated by pre-teen fashion plates was going “abroad.” The kid from the older neighbourhoods was leaving. I would be the worldly one, well traveled and cultured.
I’d bring the picture book I had to school to show off. It was a glossy book with full-page pictures showing life on Guam, circa 1974. In it there were pictures of jungles and wood and tin shacks. There were pristine white sand beaches and water so blue that no Crayola set could compare.
And there were Chamorros, the native people of Guam and (according to my research) distantly related to the Filipinos and Vietnamese. We lived in a small town in Wisconsin where you were looked at with suspicion if your last name didn’t end in the traditionally Polish “-sky.” There had been one black kid and two Puerto Rican kids I had befriended throughout my childhood there. I had, however, never seen an Asian. Chamorros had rich brown skin and bright white smiles. They had straight black hair that was mussed up and sticking in different directions from beneath Budweiser baseball caps. They dressed in strange clothes reminiscent of pictures I’d seen of Mexico, or minimally in a pair of pants and nothing else. In the pictures, they were all standing smiling with their grandmother in front of a shack, playing volleyball in a bare dirt patch in the jungle, surfing on small waves in a bay or sitting behind the counter of what appeared to be a primitive convenience store.
I was afraid, of course, that while I was enjoying this new-found fame at school, I would soon be living in one of these clapboard shanty-town homes with a tin roof and plastic windows. I wasn’t good at volleyball and didn’t have a grandmother. I didn’t really even know what surfing was.
If the kids were fascinated, the adults in the community were abuzz with the news as well. Neighbours came by to chat, drink coffee and offer packing assistance to my mother (who was now alone since her husband had gone off to work overseas). Rumours spread around town that we were moving to “Guatemala” or “some place in Africa.” With each new announcement, we’d patiently await the standard confused look and inquiry into where Guam was exactly. When David told one his classmates that his parents were moving to Guam, the high school senior looked back at him puzzled and asked, “What’s a guam?”
These came not only from kids but adults as well. I was able to correct their mistake in what Guam was and give a precise location and description of the island. It made me feel superior, a feeling I still enjoy to this day. I had known about the existence of Guam for years. I was not just passing along information I had just learned. Guam was old news to me, since that school report on Magellan. Many of the facts I was passing along were things I’d known for quite some time. I imagined this was how old-money felt toward the nouveau riche.
With much fanfare, hoopla, cardboard boxes and tears, we finally said goodbye to the house on Woodward Street. In the course of four months, we had sold, donated and discarded a large volume of the possessions that had cluttered our monstrous home. We had packed my dad off to Guam where he would call us from tomorrow (due to something called the International Date Line). We had packed up my older brother and moved him into the home of friends. My mom had coordinated selling the house and being drill sergeant to a crew of moving men. They loaded our belongings and furniture into a truck and drove it to the sea, where everything would be loaded into a ship.
After a five hour flight to Los Angeles, a six hour flight to Hawaii and an eight hour flight to Guam, we were there. Endless hours of seeing nothing out the plane windows but an unbroken expanse of white clouds and blue ocean made it good to be back on the ground.
We arrived at five in the morning. The first thing I noticed was how heavy the air was. Wisconsin summers are not dry, but the humidity on Guam was oppressive. Even though the sun was not yet up, it felt like I was breathing water. It was warm and sticky, and the nice travel clothes felt highly inappropriate for my new life as a jungle explorer. As we exited the plane, we could see my dad’s red face beaming white teeth over the heads of everyone else in the terminal. The cold tile floors were a blessing following the brief moments of walking allowed on the airplane. The clacking of people’s heels as they rushed along to immigrations, baggage claim and customs was music.
The airport was a massive structure of concrete pillars enclosed in glass. Each solid pillar rose straight up, only to fan out into a bowl shape where it met the ceiling. Dad pointed out that these pillars were shaped like latte stones, the stilts on which the Chamorros built their traditional homes. The walls were covered in big-game fish and native implements made out of coconuts, coral and woven palm fronds. Sharks and Marlin and Tuna hung on the walls next to the monitors for arrivals and departures. A strange canoe with a long pole running alongside it on struts (I’d later learn to call this an outrigger) sat on a platform in the middle of the baggage claim area. It was like a museum with flight announcements and luggage.
Outside, the sun was just coming up over the water that was the horizon. Gigantic clouds caught the first rays of light and turned from their evening deep blue to purple and orange. The airport was situated on a cliff. The air was even more oppressively hot and sticky. Dad marched us along to a car, a tiny white thing that was nothing like the gigantic station wagons we had back in Wisconsin. As we drove, I marveled at how different early morning Guam looked from my picture book. Buildings were made out of concrete. Cars moved down paved roads with traffic lights where carts pulled by beasts of burden on dirt tracks should have been. It was quiet. My dad explained that the buildings had to be strong to stand up against earthquakes and typhoons. I didn’t remember that coming up in my research or our discussions on whether or not to move. Neither did mom.
We pulled into a driveway in front of a bright pink concrete box. “Welcome home!” my dad said cheerfully in his husky voice. There was something different about him, but I couldn’t place what. Mom, Erik and I stepped out of the car and stared at the tiny, nondescript concrete structure dad referred to as home. We had been warned that houses here would be smaller than in Wisconsin, and definitely smaller than the beast we had been living in. But this house looked no bigger than the garage we emptied and left behind. It was a stout bunker of a house with a flat rood that overhung the walls by a couple of inches. We noted as we passed through the door that the walls were almost a foot thick. I know David would have beat my mother to it were he here: “Are we expecting a bombing?”
Unlike the warm, soft feel of the one we left, this house had no carpet. The cold floors were tiled. The walls were bare and white. There were no beams in the ceiling, moulding along the walls or other flourishes. Everything was stark right angles. Since our furniture was somewhere on a ship in the middle of the ocean, my father had rented a couch and a TV. In my bedroom, a bare futon pad lay on the floor. Erik’s bedroom was the same. I tried hitting the wall to feel the shake and hear the hollow sound you would when you did the same back in Wisconsin. It hurt. There was no shake, no sound.
I then realized I was exhausted. Dad pointed out that it was nighttime back in Wisconsin. He had to go back to work and left us to “settle in.” Mom went to bed and was out like a light. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Everything felt out of place and foreign. I couldn’t trust it all enough to close my eyes. When I gave up on the idea of sleep, I decided to explore the neighbourhood. There were no trees to speak of. At least nothing I thought of as trees, like the massive oaks and elms I was used to. Each house on our street was the same as ours. Featureless boxes of concrete were lined up along the block. Nobody had a lawn, just gravel or red dirt. Each house was painted a different ridiculous colour. You just don’t colour a house blue, purple, pink or green back in Wisconsin.
Woodward was a great name for the street we left. Any lot that had a house on it had a least ten trees. Those that didn’t were still dense forest. All the houses were made of wood. I imagined someone turning onto that street and seeing the sign. The driver would know what he was in for. I assumed our new street would be named Concrete Street. I decided to ask my dad that night what the street name was, since there was no sign. He explained that this was a brand new subdivision and hadn’t been named yet. Later, he informed me that the town of Dededo had finally named our street Biradan Kopa De Plata. I again tried to imagine someone about to pull onto our street and see that written on a thin green sign. He’d expect something foreign and awkward, and that’s what he’d get. At least that’s what I got.
When it came time to go to our new school, dread finally set in. Everything had been strange and unfamiliar, but at least it was all from the vantage point of a small house that contained my mom and little brother. The school was situated on a cliff overlooking a beautiful bay. Like everywhere else, the buildings were solid, and new-looking. My mother took me in to meet the Headmaster. She was a smiling Filipino woman with a mane of black hair and a pleasant smile. Her name was Mrs. Santos. Although I was a tall eleven year old, my impression was that she still towered over me. This added to my intimidation. She led my by the hand through a series of outdoor pathways to a building on the very edge of the cliff. This was it. My doom.
I was never one for going back to school. Each year was an ordeal of tears and pleas that finally ended with me being in class and mom safely on her way back home. It crossed my mind that I might be able to overpower her and escape, but to where?
We came up to a door and she knocked. She then pushed the door open and before me was a primitive classroom. It was dimly lit in contrast to the bright tropical sun just outside the door. A roomful of foreign looking children turned away from the chalkboard to look directly at me. So did the teacher. It dawned on me that as strange as everyone in this room looked, I was the outsider. I was in the minority. I was exotic. The freak. They all wore uniform white tops and navy blue shorts or skirts.
I was given a desk right between Lisa, a Chamorro girl, and Wendy, a Chinese girl. They had round faces and bright large eyes, unlike the image of pinched squinty faces kids back in Wisconsin had of Asian people. They greeted me warmly, and much of my fear began to fall away. They helped me get up to speed on the class lesson my entry had interrupted. They got in trouble for talking in class, because they, of all people, took the time to let me know what page we were on. They had familiar first names, which made it easy, even if their last names were Castro and Chen.
My family stayed on Guam. My parents still live there. As kids do, I quickly adapted to my new life as a Guamanian. Those kids, who seemed so foreign and strange at first glance, became the status quo for me. I would go on to graduate from high school with many of these same students, including Wendy and Lisa.
I was still odd to them. I constantly compared things to the past life I led, always prefacing it with “back in Wisconsin…” Soon, my classmates would make fun of that. Mimicking the elongated vowels of my Wisconsin accent, they’d push their eyes together (in opposition to the way kids back in Wisconsin would stretch theirs out to pretend to be Chinese) and say, “Baack in WiscONsin.”
The friends I had left behind, back in Wisconsin, never wrote to me. I made new ones on Guam. I experienced my first typhoon and first earthquake and wondered how people could live through blizzards. The idea of residing in a house made of wood seemed foolish and dangerous. I became “allergic” to wearing long pants. I had gone from checking myself for ticks after tromping through the forest to watching out for monitor lizards while trekking through the boonies. I learned to love the taste of salt water on my lips, the sting of sea water in my eyes. Last names like Castro and Chen became common and natural names for people to have. Names like Kowalsky and Peterson took on an unusual sound to my ears.
When we returned to Wisconsin for my brother’s graduation from high school, everything seemed foreign. It had become as strange as Guam seemed when we first arrived there. The faces of old classmates, now into puberty, were different. Their pale skin and freckles looked unnatural and alien.
Within a year, I could hardly remember the life I left behind. Years later, when I moved back to the States, people would ask me what it was like to grow up in Guam. The only reply I could offer was, “I don’t know. What’s it like to grow up in the States?”
At the end of the school year in Guam, we had to pick a country to do a report on. For some unknown reason, I chose the small Asian country of Bhutan. As I presented it to the class, my mind started to wonder if someday I’d be packing up my life and following my parents to this tiny mountain kingdom. Would I be meeting new kids? Would we have to learn to live in an entirely new type of building? Would adapting to a new school be easy? Would kids there soon get over my being exotic, adopt me as one of their own, and eventually stop teasing me every time I said “Back in Guam…”
It was the summer before 6th grade. We lived in a small wooded community on the extreme outskirts of Milwaukee County. It was almost suburban. We had been living in that town since we moved from California so my dad could help run an airline in Milwaukee.
There may have been another town in there as well. I don’t know. We moved a lot. Dad worked for Continental airlines and had been transferred from airport to airport. We followed close behind, packing up our lives and moving from Illinois to California, California to Wisconsin. We always moved. That was a given. How far was the thing that was up in the air. Would there be a change in time zones? Or could we maybe keep the same phone number for once?
Of late, Continental had not been doing well in Milwaukee and was going in and out of business there. Consequently, dad was working either the hour and a half drive to Milwaukee or the hour and a half flight to Detroit. We all wondered if Detroit would be our next “home.”
That summer, dad had received a call from an old boss of his whom he had worked for in Chicago. He was in Guam, and felt dad was the right man to fill the city manager position. Mom and dad had flown out to interview and check out the island. For that week, there was no school and no parents. It was just my older brother David, my younger brother Erik, and me.
David was six years older than me and practically an adult. He remembered Illinois better than Erik (two years my junior) or me, since we left when I was only three. He knew our grandparents. He was also balding, even though he was about to begin his senior year. Erik and I made fun of him for that.
Erik was the “creative” one. He was a strawberry blonde firecracker. Because he was extra-tall for his age (we were all tall) everyone assumed he and I were twins. That wasn’t true, but we were known to draw closer together in situations outside the safety of home.
The day mom and dad were to come home from the interview, we went to meet them at the airport. Erik and David had made banners on the computer that read “WELCOME HOME GLOBETROTTERS!!!” We had seen the Harlem Globe Trotters that previous winter, and surely this is the farthest that a Pavesic had ever traveled. While classmates of mine often took winter vacations to such exotic places as Florida, we only went to the Wisconsin Dells and, if we were really lucky, to a trailer park in Iowa on a dammed up river.
To make the reception more “island,” we each dressed in colourful, tacky, mismatched clothing. The islands, as we saw it, were brilliant and dazzling exotic locations where people dressed brightly so as not to be eaten by tigers in the jungle. Erik had on red and white striped shorts and a yellow t-shirt. I had a on a pink shirt with green shorts. David, certainly the most authentic and prepared, had on a real Hawaiian shirt and Panama hat that some friend of his must have bought for him on their travels.
Aside from the excitement of seeing mom and dad again, we were terribly anxious, almost frantic. What was it like over there? Were there headhunters? Was it like Tarzan or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea? Did they get the job? Were we going? Did they bring us anything? Did they bring us any tropical diseases? Would I get my own room? Oh yeah, did they like it?
My parents are larger than life people, even now that I’m taller than they are. But when I was still little, they were enormous. My dad was Santa Claus, benignly towering, with white hair and a white beard. His belly didn’t shake like a bowl full of jelly, but his gruff booming voice still could not hide his warmth when he smiled and laughed. He annually donned his Santa outfit for company and school parties. Kids at school would look at me in awe on those rare occasions that dad was not at work and picked me up.
“Your dad is Santa Claus?” they would say with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. I’d smile knowingly and bask in the brief fame and adulation such a status would bring me among my classmates. It was the only thing I was famous or adored for.
Outwardly, mom was the opposite of dad. Her favourite costume, aside from the comfortable nightgown that was the uniform of her housewife profession, was more about Halloween. She would dress as a witch, an outlet for her more assertive side. Though benevolent to her own children, who had gotten used to the cackling and sinister smile, she was often viewed outside the home as “bitchy.” It was not that she was sinister. Her smile was really quite pleasant. However, age and three children had done something to her eyes that turned her genuine smile into something with more going on behind it than one was comfortable thinking about. She was also dangerously intelligent.
After their long trip, they were excited to have their sons pick them up and drive them back to the house they’d recently bought on Woodward Street. It was a giant two-story colonial-style home in the woods. Covered in white siding and brick, it sat back off the street, veiled behind the branches of the large trees which populated our neighbourhood. It was the oldest house we’d ever lived in, built sometime before mom and dad were married. Made of wood, it groaned and creaked with the wind or a footfall. It was a warm home.
It wasn’t long before my dad received a call saying that he was wanted for the position. “When can you get here?” Family meetings began at once to determine whether or not to accept. For once, Erik and I were included in the decision. We were put in charge of finding out more information about Guam to help the family make up its mind. Hitting the World Book Encyclopedias and National Geographics, we prepared our presentation on this tropical island in the Western Pacific that was 36 miles long, 6-12 miles wide, populated by close to 150,000 people, ringed by coral reefs, had no major exports, and was an unincorporated trust territory of the United States.
I felt so adult to at last have a say in a family move that I couldn’t help but stamp it with my approval. We always moved, and it was always the adults’ decision. So now that I was a grown-up, it was only natural that I vote for Dad to accept the job. We sat around the dinner table, a large solid circle of reddish coloured wood around which we’d eaten for years. The table was blanketed in maps, picture books, encyclopedias, lists, notes, and the remnants of dinner, including dad’s beer stein.
After much debate, with me stomping my feet and pouting in the best argumentative style I knew, it was decided that the Pavesics would go to Guam. Well, most of us. David was starting his senior year in high school and wanted to graduate with his friends. Mom was not wild about it, but finally consented to let David move in with some friends from Boy Scouts who’d make sure he would go to school and behave.
Dad was to start right away, which left mom, Erik and I to close up life in Wisconsin. We started school that fall with the understanding that this would be temporary. We were leaving the United States. We had passports. For once, there was something interesting about me. The kid who wore thrift store and garage sale clothes to a school populated by pre-teen fashion plates was going “abroad.” The kid from the older neighbourhoods was leaving. I would be the worldly one, well traveled and cultured.
I’d bring the picture book I had to school to show off. It was a glossy book with full-page pictures showing life on Guam, circa 1974. In it there were pictures of jungles and wood and tin shacks. There were pristine white sand beaches and water so blue that no Crayola set could compare.
And there were Chamorros, the native people of Guam and (according to my research) distantly related to the Filipinos and Vietnamese. We lived in a small town in Wisconsin where you were looked at with suspicion if your last name didn’t end in the traditionally Polish “-sky.” There had been one black kid and two Puerto Rican kids I had befriended throughout my childhood there. I had, however, never seen an Asian. Chamorros had rich brown skin and bright white smiles. They had straight black hair that was mussed up and sticking in different directions from beneath Budweiser baseball caps. They dressed in strange clothes reminiscent of pictures I’d seen of Mexico, or minimally in a pair of pants and nothing else. In the pictures, they were all standing smiling with their grandmother in front of a shack, playing volleyball in a bare dirt patch in the jungle, surfing on small waves in a bay or sitting behind the counter of what appeared to be a primitive convenience store.
I was afraid, of course, that while I was enjoying this new-found fame at school, I would soon be living in one of these clapboard shanty-town homes with a tin roof and plastic windows. I wasn’t good at volleyball and didn’t have a grandmother. I didn’t really even know what surfing was.
If the kids were fascinated, the adults in the community were abuzz with the news as well. Neighbours came by to chat, drink coffee and offer packing assistance to my mother (who was now alone since her husband had gone off to work overseas). Rumours spread around town that we were moving to “Guatemala” or “some place in Africa.” With each new announcement, we’d patiently await the standard confused look and inquiry into where Guam was exactly. When David told one his classmates that his parents were moving to Guam, the high school senior looked back at him puzzled and asked, “What’s a guam?”
These came not only from kids but adults as well. I was able to correct their mistake in what Guam was and give a precise location and description of the island. It made me feel superior, a feeling I still enjoy to this day. I had known about the existence of Guam for years. I was not just passing along information I had just learned. Guam was old news to me, since that school report on Magellan. Many of the facts I was passing along were things I’d known for quite some time. I imagined this was how old-money felt toward the nouveau riche.
With much fanfare, hoopla, cardboard boxes and tears, we finally said goodbye to the house on Woodward Street. In the course of four months, we had sold, donated and discarded a large volume of the possessions that had cluttered our monstrous home. We had packed my dad off to Guam where he would call us from tomorrow (due to something called the International Date Line). We had packed up my older brother and moved him into the home of friends. My mom had coordinated selling the house and being drill sergeant to a crew of moving men. They loaded our belongings and furniture into a truck and drove it to the sea, where everything would be loaded into a ship.
After a five hour flight to Los Angeles, a six hour flight to Hawaii and an eight hour flight to Guam, we were there. Endless hours of seeing nothing out the plane windows but an unbroken expanse of white clouds and blue ocean made it good to be back on the ground.
We arrived at five in the morning. The first thing I noticed was how heavy the air was. Wisconsin summers are not dry, but the humidity on Guam was oppressive. Even though the sun was not yet up, it felt like I was breathing water. It was warm and sticky, and the nice travel clothes felt highly inappropriate for my new life as a jungle explorer. As we exited the plane, we could see my dad’s red face beaming white teeth over the heads of everyone else in the terminal. The cold tile floors were a blessing following the brief moments of walking allowed on the airplane. The clacking of people’s heels as they rushed along to immigrations, baggage claim and customs was music.
The airport was a massive structure of concrete pillars enclosed in glass. Each solid pillar rose straight up, only to fan out into a bowl shape where it met the ceiling. Dad pointed out that these pillars were shaped like latte stones, the stilts on which the Chamorros built their traditional homes. The walls were covered in big-game fish and native implements made out of coconuts, coral and woven palm fronds. Sharks and Marlin and Tuna hung on the walls next to the monitors for arrivals and departures. A strange canoe with a long pole running alongside it on struts (I’d later learn to call this an outrigger) sat on a platform in the middle of the baggage claim area. It was like a museum with flight announcements and luggage.
Outside, the sun was just coming up over the water that was the horizon. Gigantic clouds caught the first rays of light and turned from their evening deep blue to purple and orange. The airport was situated on a cliff. The air was even more oppressively hot and sticky. Dad marched us along to a car, a tiny white thing that was nothing like the gigantic station wagons we had back in Wisconsin. As we drove, I marveled at how different early morning Guam looked from my picture book. Buildings were made out of concrete. Cars moved down paved roads with traffic lights where carts pulled by beasts of burden on dirt tracks should have been. It was quiet. My dad explained that the buildings had to be strong to stand up against earthquakes and typhoons. I didn’t remember that coming up in my research or our discussions on whether or not to move. Neither did mom.
We pulled into a driveway in front of a bright pink concrete box. “Welcome home!” my dad said cheerfully in his husky voice. There was something different about him, but I couldn’t place what. Mom, Erik and I stepped out of the car and stared at the tiny, nondescript concrete structure dad referred to as home. We had been warned that houses here would be smaller than in Wisconsin, and definitely smaller than the beast we had been living in. But this house looked no bigger than the garage we emptied and left behind. It was a stout bunker of a house with a flat rood that overhung the walls by a couple of inches. We noted as we passed through the door that the walls were almost a foot thick. I know David would have beat my mother to it were he here: “Are we expecting a bombing?”
Unlike the warm, soft feel of the one we left, this house had no carpet. The cold floors were tiled. The walls were bare and white. There were no beams in the ceiling, moulding along the walls or other flourishes. Everything was stark right angles. Since our furniture was somewhere on a ship in the middle of the ocean, my father had rented a couch and a TV. In my bedroom, a bare futon pad lay on the floor. Erik’s bedroom was the same. I tried hitting the wall to feel the shake and hear the hollow sound you would when you did the same back in Wisconsin. It hurt. There was no shake, no sound.
I then realized I was exhausted. Dad pointed out that it was nighttime back in Wisconsin. He had to go back to work and left us to “settle in.” Mom went to bed and was out like a light. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Everything felt out of place and foreign. I couldn’t trust it all enough to close my eyes. When I gave up on the idea of sleep, I decided to explore the neighbourhood. There were no trees to speak of. At least nothing I thought of as trees, like the massive oaks and elms I was used to. Each house on our street was the same as ours. Featureless boxes of concrete were lined up along the block. Nobody had a lawn, just gravel or red dirt. Each house was painted a different ridiculous colour. You just don’t colour a house blue, purple, pink or green back in Wisconsin.
Woodward was a great name for the street we left. Any lot that had a house on it had a least ten trees. Those that didn’t were still dense forest. All the houses were made of wood. I imagined someone turning onto that street and seeing the sign. The driver would know what he was in for. I assumed our new street would be named Concrete Street. I decided to ask my dad that night what the street name was, since there was no sign. He explained that this was a brand new subdivision and hadn’t been named yet. Later, he informed me that the town of Dededo had finally named our street Biradan Kopa De Plata. I again tried to imagine someone about to pull onto our street and see that written on a thin green sign. He’d expect something foreign and awkward, and that’s what he’d get. At least that’s what I got.
When it came time to go to our new school, dread finally set in. Everything had been strange and unfamiliar, but at least it was all from the vantage point of a small house that contained my mom and little brother. The school was situated on a cliff overlooking a beautiful bay. Like everywhere else, the buildings were solid, and new-looking. My mother took me in to meet the Headmaster. She was a smiling Filipino woman with a mane of black hair and a pleasant smile. Her name was Mrs. Santos. Although I was a tall eleven year old, my impression was that she still towered over me. This added to my intimidation. She led my by the hand through a series of outdoor pathways to a building on the very edge of the cliff. This was it. My doom.
I was never one for going back to school. Each year was an ordeal of tears and pleas that finally ended with me being in class and mom safely on her way back home. It crossed my mind that I might be able to overpower her and escape, but to where?
We came up to a door and she knocked. She then pushed the door open and before me was a primitive classroom. It was dimly lit in contrast to the bright tropical sun just outside the door. A roomful of foreign looking children turned away from the chalkboard to look directly at me. So did the teacher. It dawned on me that as strange as everyone in this room looked, I was the outsider. I was in the minority. I was exotic. The freak. They all wore uniform white tops and navy blue shorts or skirts.
I was given a desk right between Lisa, a Chamorro girl, and Wendy, a Chinese girl. They had round faces and bright large eyes, unlike the image of pinched squinty faces kids back in Wisconsin had of Asian people. They greeted me warmly, and much of my fear began to fall away. They helped me get up to speed on the class lesson my entry had interrupted. They got in trouble for talking in class, because they, of all people, took the time to let me know what page we were on. They had familiar first names, which made it easy, even if their last names were Castro and Chen.
My family stayed on Guam. My parents still live there. As kids do, I quickly adapted to my new life as a Guamanian. Those kids, who seemed so foreign and strange at first glance, became the status quo for me. I would go on to graduate from high school with many of these same students, including Wendy and Lisa.
I was still odd to them. I constantly compared things to the past life I led, always prefacing it with “back in Wisconsin…” Soon, my classmates would make fun of that. Mimicking the elongated vowels of my Wisconsin accent, they’d push their eyes together (in opposition to the way kids back in Wisconsin would stretch theirs out to pretend to be Chinese) and say, “Baack in WiscONsin.”
The friends I had left behind, back in Wisconsin, never wrote to me. I made new ones on Guam. I experienced my first typhoon and first earthquake and wondered how people could live through blizzards. The idea of residing in a house made of wood seemed foolish and dangerous. I became “allergic” to wearing long pants. I had gone from checking myself for ticks after tromping through the forest to watching out for monitor lizards while trekking through the boonies. I learned to love the taste of salt water on my lips, the sting of sea water in my eyes. Last names like Castro and Chen became common and natural names for people to have. Names like Kowalsky and Peterson took on an unusual sound to my ears.
When we returned to Wisconsin for my brother’s graduation from high school, everything seemed foreign. It had become as strange as Guam seemed when we first arrived there. The faces of old classmates, now into puberty, were different. Their pale skin and freckles looked unnatural and alien.
Within a year, I could hardly remember the life I left behind. Years later, when I moved back to the States, people would ask me what it was like to grow up in Guam. The only reply I could offer was, “I don’t know. What’s it like to grow up in the States?”
At the end of the school year in Guam, we had to pick a country to do a report on. For some unknown reason, I chose the small Asian country of Bhutan. As I presented it to the class, my mind started to wonder if someday I’d be packing up my life and following my parents to this tiny mountain kingdom. Would I be meeting new kids? Would we have to learn to live in an entirely new type of building? Would adapting to a new school be easy? Would kids there soon get over my being exotic, adopt me as one of their own, and eventually stop teasing me every time I said “Back in Guam…”
17.12.05
How Many Times Have I Told You!
"How may times have I told you not to hump your sister while she's sniffing my butt!"
The words had barely left my mouth when my mind raced to figure out exactly how it was that I had come to be able to put those words together. Not only that, but that I had actually said it previously, validating the existence of the "How many times have I told you" prefix.
Sadly, I pictured Jeff Foxworthy on stage, that wry self-satisfied smile splitting his face like fire wood, exclaiming to a joyous audience, "You MIGHT be a redneck...if you say "How many times have I told you not to hump your sister while she's sniffing my butt" ... and you MIGHT be talking to your dogs!"
Riotous laughter. Another HBO series. Two more books. More money than a true redneck ought to have. List goes on.
Me. I say that (out loud, just to make it worse), and this strange sense of ick comes over me.
What brought me to this point? Who is this man? When did he get THAT tone?
I know where I got it. No doubt. I heard it from the two folks who came together in that way to make me all throughout my life (less the closer I get to thirty, stragely). I watched as both of my brothers started to develop certain voice inflection and began applying certain idioms and turns of phrase to their regular speech. I stared in horror into a mirror, much in the same way as a man who has just killed his wife stares at his hands in a glossy daze in amazement at what those hands just proved they were capable of, as I myself developed THE LOOK, THAT TONE, and Worse, "Did I just say that?"
Now, for the record (legal, clarity, etc.), I must add that my parents never said "How may times have I told you not to hump your sister while she's sniffing my butt!"
For one thing, they resent it when I refer to us in any of the terms commonly describing to the colour of a neck or the hue of trash.
Secondly, I never had a sister. My younger brother tried to fill that roll, but...
Thirdly, while a very close family, we're not THAT close.
This is in reference to the tone. Still, I also cannot deny that I spoke the aforementioned collection of words.
You see, I have five kids. However, of those 5 kids, there are 20 legs. If you're slow, my children are quadrapeds. Animals. Ok? I make jokes with my honey that since we've been together for about 5 years and have 5 kids, we must be Catholic.
So...maybe people can stop worrying about why he is writing this lengthy confession about butt-smelling. I said it to my two dogs, who happen to be brother and sister. I happened to be picking up poo (as parents are wont to do around their children, apparently), and as I crouched to pick up more and bag it, that is when the strange melee of dog odds and ends came about, resulting in the ever more embarrasing statement I find myself writing about.
I'm sure I'm not off the hook. Did I really think those words would register with my two kids? Did I think?
I find that the longer I am surrounded by animals (my youngest, the kitty has just jumped up on my lap and is kneading a soft spot into my lap, occassionally pausing to bat at a lock of hair falling on my face), the more I find myself trying to reason with them, saying things my parents said and using the tones they did. I'll bet they didn't think that oldest form of parental revenge would come about in quite this way (Wait till you have children of your own!). I unfortunately, cannot use that parental threat, as I made the smart move of neutering and spaying my children. Thanks mom and dad, for not being like me!
I'll stand and give them the look. Dog grabs a pork chop off a plate? The eye. Cat scratches at the couch? "Son, what have I said?" Princess pees on the rug? "Young lady! Xena Ladybird Pavesic! What do you think you're doing?"
My eldest (don't I sound like the proud grandma at the rest home? or woman at the PTA?) is deaf. Does that stop me from standing over him, shrieking at the things he does, demaning explinations? Hell no. "WOULD YOU STOP THAT INFERNAL BANGING? WE INSTALLED THE CHILDLOCKS ON THE CUPBOARDS TO KEEP YOU OUT OF THE CLEANING CHIMACALS!" All the while, my little boy continue to struggle against the doors, creating a loud bang as each attempt is stopped by the childlock and brought back to close slamming against the frame.
I wonder what truths my parents tried to teach me will come out when I set up the fish tank?
The words had barely left my mouth when my mind raced to figure out exactly how it was that I had come to be able to put those words together. Not only that, but that I had actually said it previously, validating the existence of the "How many times have I told you" prefix.
Sadly, I pictured Jeff Foxworthy on stage, that wry self-satisfied smile splitting his face like fire wood, exclaiming to a joyous audience, "You MIGHT be a redneck...if you say "How many times have I told you not to hump your sister while she's sniffing my butt" ... and you MIGHT be talking to your dogs!"
Riotous laughter. Another HBO series. Two more books. More money than a true redneck ought to have. List goes on.
Me. I say that (out loud, just to make it worse), and this strange sense of ick comes over me.
What brought me to this point? Who is this man? When did he get THAT tone?
I know where I got it. No doubt. I heard it from the two folks who came together in that way to make me all throughout my life (less the closer I get to thirty, stragely). I watched as both of my brothers started to develop certain voice inflection and began applying certain idioms and turns of phrase to their regular speech. I stared in horror into a mirror, much in the same way as a man who has just killed his wife stares at his hands in a glossy daze in amazement at what those hands just proved they were capable of, as I myself developed THE LOOK, THAT TONE, and Worse, "Did I just say that?"
Now, for the record (legal, clarity, etc.), I must add that my parents never said "How may times have I told you not to hump your sister while she's sniffing my butt!"
For one thing, they resent it when I refer to us in any of the terms commonly describing to the colour of a neck or the hue of trash.
Secondly, I never had a sister. My younger brother tried to fill that roll, but...
Thirdly, while a very close family, we're not THAT close.
This is in reference to the tone. Still, I also cannot deny that I spoke the aforementioned collection of words.
You see, I have five kids. However, of those 5 kids, there are 20 legs. If you're slow, my children are quadrapeds. Animals. Ok? I make jokes with my honey that since we've been together for about 5 years and have 5 kids, we must be Catholic.
So...maybe people can stop worrying about why he is writing this lengthy confession about butt-smelling. I said it to my two dogs, who happen to be brother and sister. I happened to be picking up poo (as parents are wont to do around their children, apparently), and as I crouched to pick up more and bag it, that is when the strange melee of dog odds and ends came about, resulting in the ever more embarrasing statement I find myself writing about.
I'm sure I'm not off the hook. Did I really think those words would register with my two kids? Did I think?
I find that the longer I am surrounded by animals (my youngest, the kitty has just jumped up on my lap and is kneading a soft spot into my lap, occassionally pausing to bat at a lock of hair falling on my face), the more I find myself trying to reason with them, saying things my parents said and using the tones they did. I'll bet they didn't think that oldest form of parental revenge would come about in quite this way (Wait till you have children of your own!). I unfortunately, cannot use that parental threat, as I made the smart move of neutering and spaying my children. Thanks mom and dad, for not being like me!
I'll stand and give them the look. Dog grabs a pork chop off a plate? The eye. Cat scratches at the couch? "Son, what have I said?" Princess pees on the rug? "Young lady! Xena Ladybird Pavesic! What do you think you're doing?"
My eldest (don't I sound like the proud grandma at the rest home? or woman at the PTA?) is deaf. Does that stop me from standing over him, shrieking at the things he does, demaning explinations? Hell no. "WOULD YOU STOP THAT INFERNAL BANGING? WE INSTALLED THE CHILDLOCKS ON THE CUPBOARDS TO KEEP YOU OUT OF THE CLEANING CHIMACALS!" All the while, my little boy continue to struggle against the doors, creating a loud bang as each attempt is stopped by the childlock and brought back to close slamming against the frame.
I wonder what truths my parents tried to teach me will come out when I set up the fish tank?
17.11.05
Excerpt from a Life Coaching Newsletter
As always, your privacy is of paramount importance to us and we would hate to invalidate your feelings by betraying your trust issues and selling or sharing (although sharing is caring) your contact information with any outside (but NOT an outsider, yet perfectly right in its own existence) agency.
Be sure not to miss (although you are certainly entitled to if you wish to) "Change Your Story, Change Your Life" in the next issue of The Thriving Zone. I'll be sharing coaching insights and holistic stir fry recipes from my visit to the Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu. Following that, in our new column, the Carpool Lane, we will take an in-depth look at team building exercises that can maximize your workflow and corporate energy to build nurturing and long lasting opportunities for networking. Such skills as paper airplanes and pipe cleaner animals will be explored.
We'd like to ensure that you continue to receive and share in the positive experience that only stems from being a member in a life-affirming and nurturing Thriving Zone without interruption, if you choose to. It's ok if you don't want to. Your decisions are your own. And you're right in whichever you choose. Because it is yours. And no one can take that from you.
Be sure not to miss (although you are certainly entitled to if you wish to) "Change Your Story, Change Your Life" in the next issue of The Thriving Zone. I'll be sharing coaching insights and holistic stir fry recipes from my visit to the Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu. Following that, in our new column, the Carpool Lane, we will take an in-depth look at team building exercises that can maximize your workflow and corporate energy to build nurturing and long lasting opportunities for networking. Such skills as paper airplanes and pipe cleaner animals will be explored.
We'd like to ensure that you continue to receive and share in the positive experience that only stems from being a member in a life-affirming and nurturing Thriving Zone without interruption, if you choose to. It's ok if you don't want to. Your decisions are your own. And you're right in whichever you choose. Because it is yours. And no one can take that from you.
23.9.05
I Survived the Alamo. Chapter Three
Earlier, I promised some exciting subsections to my tale of adventure and opportunity in San Antonio, TX. At the time, meaning closer to my return from that jewel of central Texas, they seemed pretty damn exciting, or at least witty, engaging or self-gratifying. However, as hind-sight gains corrective lenses, and the temperance of time slowly pulls me from the muck, mire and drama of my own little brain, I realize that we can do without much of the detail. In fact, my mind gave up on the detail four months ago, so there really isn't anything else to tell. I'll try and breeze through to get to something really interesting.
The End.
--==--==--==--==--==--
The San Antonio Riverwalk
Way cooler than it was in Cloak and Dagger, although fewer machine guns and three fingered old ladies.
We went for a walk shortly after breakfast to view the historic splendor that is the San Antonio Riverwalk. It's a river that winds its way through the heart of downtown San Anton. And yes, you walk along it. Along the way there are a variety of restaurants, and it all seems to dump you right into a mall. Convenient.
Out front was a group of Andean musicians playing traditional pipes and drums. You've seen them in every tourist district in the United States. I don't know how they became a major fascination. All I know is many years ago, I was walking through a swap meet in Hawaii. The pleasant and oh-so mystical sounds of pan flutes and guitars and drums wafted over the used goods. I was hooked. I bought all their CDs and though t I was soooooo worldly. Well, they've moved up in the world from the days of swap meets in Hawaii. They are now ubiquitous in the realm of tourist dollars. Good for them, I say. I highly doubt that anyone at an Anne Klein or Neiman Mark-up is really concerned with sending money back to their expansive families in undernourished nations. While it seems that they all always play the same songs, this group was doing something different. They were playing covers of popular artists like Eric Clapton, the Beatles and Milli Vanilli.
And still more to come after these commercial breaks of productivity!
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
The End.
--==--==--==--==--==--
The San Antonio Riverwalk
Way cooler than it was in Cloak and Dagger, although fewer machine guns and three fingered old ladies.
We went for a walk shortly after breakfast to view the historic splendor that is the San Antonio Riverwalk. It's a river that winds its way through the heart of downtown San Anton. And yes, you walk along it. Along the way there are a variety of restaurants, and it all seems to dump you right into a mall. Convenient.
Out front was a group of Andean musicians playing traditional pipes and drums. You've seen them in every tourist district in the United States. I don't know how they became a major fascination. All I know is many years ago, I was walking through a swap meet in Hawaii. The pleasant and oh-so mystical sounds of pan flutes and guitars and drums wafted over the used goods. I was hooked. I bought all their CDs and though t I was soooooo worldly. Well, they've moved up in the world from the days of swap meets in Hawaii. They are now ubiquitous in the realm of tourist dollars. Good for them, I say. I highly doubt that anyone at an Anne Klein or Neiman Mark-up is really concerned with sending money back to their expansive families in undernourished nations. While it seems that they all always play the same songs, this group was doing something different. They were playing covers of popular artists like Eric Clapton, the Beatles and Milli Vanilli.
And still more to come after these commercial breaks of productivity!
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
3.9.05
Lose Weight or Buy New Clothes
Married life will do it to you. Then again, so does quitting smoking or cutting methamphetamines from your daily diet.
I recently attended a friend's wedding. It was a lovely affair...um, no, wait, that is not supposed to sound that way. But no, my boyfriend didn't go.
At the reception, my friend (the groom) and I were talking. We coverd such lovely topics as the intoxicated state of his new mother-in-law and the fact that I travelled further than anyone to be there, and what he should do on his pre-honeymoon. Then he smiled, sat back in his chair and said, "Well, I'm married now. I can finally let myself go." He's a personal trainer.
As I was walking home from our neighbour's house (our bathroom is being remodelled and I couldn't wait another week to go), I realized that somehow I was bringing back the midriff for men. I know it has come back for women, and mostly for those who's mid or riff you would not care to look at. How about mine? I was wearing a tanktop that was cutting into my armpits and giving my navel some peek-a-boo rehearsal. Admittedly, it was a really old wife-beater that has seen more stains than a throng of GWAR fans. It's a good thing the nieghbours are so far away, and really don't care.
Maybe it's time to get some new clothes. Now I don't mean new new. I haven't bought brand new clothing in years (except for the time we hadn't done laundry in two months and I desparately needed socks that didn't talk back). I just mean a nice trip to a thift store with actual changing rooms where I can get a sense of whether the pants would fit comfortably even if they weren't being pulled on over another pair. I probably own more pants that can be pulled on or off while wearing hiking boots.
That would be lovely. Shopping...something I don't do much anymore, unless Fred pulls me into a second hand shop because there's an awesome desk that we can't live without. I'd be willing to bet that our other five desks couldn't live without it either. They're a growing family and we're the fertility clinic.
This all unfortunately brings to mind a very important point. Where to put it? I recently rearranged all the dressers (another client in our booming fertility clinic, although their growth rate compared to the desks is like Central America to Norway). There is an entire five-drawer unit filled to the brim with T-shirts. Don't tell me I don't know how to fold. It's one of the useful things I picked up in the military without actually enlisting (entirely different and less suitable for all audiences tale). One of the other dressers has another drawer for T-shirts. There are three drawers of socks. Two of underwear. Two closets are filled with shirts ranging from cowboy shirts that look like corsets on me to oversized sweaters that are good out here in the desert for about a twelfth of the year. An entire shelf the full length of a closet is stacked with folded pants.
You'd think we should get rid of some things. But we can't.
Many of the T-shirts are collector's items. Well worn collector's items, but memorabilia just the same. It's not unlike Fred's collections of coffee mugs, tikis and crucifixes, or my collections of broken toys, renderings of the Last Supper and disturbingly tacky snowglobes.
There are T-shirts for just about every company either of us has ever worked for. Add to that a comprehensive museum of every Dot-Bombed start-up that ever said "Free T-shirt" in a 400-mile radius of Fred. There are series, such as Fred's Southwest airlines credit card T-shirts for every airport they fly out of and some depicting comic books he has worked on. Then there's my collection of small, tattered tshirts printed with a variety of Picasso paintings.
There is an entire stack of pants that Fred hasn't been able to fit into since we moved in together. It's my fault we still have those. I keep telling him to try some on and decide whether they will ever grace his legs again. Then, I throw them in the middle of a stack of my pants that I'm currently wearing. I need to just set them on his keyboard and make him try them on in front of me. Tee hee.
My pants are a different story. They each have stories. Where I got them. When I got them. Who with. How much. It's like journalism 101. Who, what, where, why, when and how much. As I rooted through the stack the other day, I came upon a lovely pair of irredescent blue plaid corduroy pants. You don't come across those every day. They were in the women's section of a goodwill, but had ample butt-room for me. They had been only $4.00. I haven't worn them in probably a year or two. There's no way they would fit right now, and I don't seem to retain the commitment to get more exercise and gain some air space between my thighs. I live in the desert. Heavy corduory that's too tight just doesn't cut it.
But how can you part with irredescent blue plaid corduroy pants? You just don't. You don't just throw that in the red cross pile. You have to carefully consider who would give them a good home. Who would wear them proudly and pass on the oral trdition of this pair of pant's history and cultural identity? Someone who knows how cool they are despite not being able to match them with anything. Those who know that's the point. Those...who don't mind you passing off hand-me-downs and aren't your younger sibling (my younger brother rolls his eyes every time he sees what I wear...and he knows it's not my mother that dresses me funny).
Hell yes I'm vain. It may not look like it. But if you dig down, way past all my surface pretensions, I'm really very shallow. I love my clothes, perhaps more than breathing. I have bad taste, but at least it is taste.
Then comes a big hurricane and there are lots of people in need. I'm torn. So are half the crotches in my pants, armpits in my shirts, toes in my socks, and, um, my underwear.
I recently attended a friend's wedding. It was a lovely affair...um, no, wait, that is not supposed to sound that way. But no, my boyfriend didn't go.
At the reception, my friend (the groom) and I were talking. We coverd such lovely topics as the intoxicated state of his new mother-in-law and the fact that I travelled further than anyone to be there, and what he should do on his pre-honeymoon. Then he smiled, sat back in his chair and said, "Well, I'm married now. I can finally let myself go." He's a personal trainer.
As I was walking home from our neighbour's house (our bathroom is being remodelled and I couldn't wait another week to go), I realized that somehow I was bringing back the midriff for men. I know it has come back for women, and mostly for those who's mid or riff you would not care to look at. How about mine? I was wearing a tanktop that was cutting into my armpits and giving my navel some peek-a-boo rehearsal. Admittedly, it was a really old wife-beater that has seen more stains than a throng of GWAR fans. It's a good thing the nieghbours are so far away, and really don't care.
Maybe it's time to get some new clothes. Now I don't mean new new. I haven't bought brand new clothing in years (except for the time we hadn't done laundry in two months and I desparately needed socks that didn't talk back). I just mean a nice trip to a thift store with actual changing rooms where I can get a sense of whether the pants would fit comfortably even if they weren't being pulled on over another pair. I probably own more pants that can be pulled on or off while wearing hiking boots.
That would be lovely. Shopping...something I don't do much anymore, unless Fred pulls me into a second hand shop because there's an awesome desk that we can't live without. I'd be willing to bet that our other five desks couldn't live without it either. They're a growing family and we're the fertility clinic.
This all unfortunately brings to mind a very important point. Where to put it? I recently rearranged all the dressers (another client in our booming fertility clinic, although their growth rate compared to the desks is like Central America to Norway). There is an entire five-drawer unit filled to the brim with T-shirts. Don't tell me I don't know how to fold. It's one of the useful things I picked up in the military without actually enlisting (entirely different and less suitable for all audiences tale). One of the other dressers has another drawer for T-shirts. There are three drawers of socks. Two of underwear. Two closets are filled with shirts ranging from cowboy shirts that look like corsets on me to oversized sweaters that are good out here in the desert for about a twelfth of the year. An entire shelf the full length of a closet is stacked with folded pants.
You'd think we should get rid of some things. But we can't.
Many of the T-shirts are collector's items. Well worn collector's items, but memorabilia just the same. It's not unlike Fred's collections of coffee mugs, tikis and crucifixes, or my collections of broken toys, renderings of the Last Supper and disturbingly tacky snowglobes.
There are T-shirts for just about every company either of us has ever worked for. Add to that a comprehensive museum of every Dot-Bombed start-up that ever said "Free T-shirt" in a 400-mile radius of Fred. There are series, such as Fred's Southwest airlines credit card T-shirts for every airport they fly out of and some depicting comic books he has worked on. Then there's my collection of small, tattered tshirts printed with a variety of Picasso paintings.
There is an entire stack of pants that Fred hasn't been able to fit into since we moved in together. It's my fault we still have those. I keep telling him to try some on and decide whether they will ever grace his legs again. Then, I throw them in the middle of a stack of my pants that I'm currently wearing. I need to just set them on his keyboard and make him try them on in front of me. Tee hee.
My pants are a different story. They each have stories. Where I got them. When I got them. Who with. How much. It's like journalism 101. Who, what, where, why, when and how much. As I rooted through the stack the other day, I came upon a lovely pair of irredescent blue plaid corduroy pants. You don't come across those every day. They were in the women's section of a goodwill, but had ample butt-room for me. They had been only $4.00. I haven't worn them in probably a year or two. There's no way they would fit right now, and I don't seem to retain the commitment to get more exercise and gain some air space between my thighs. I live in the desert. Heavy corduory that's too tight just doesn't cut it.
But how can you part with irredescent blue plaid corduroy pants? You just don't. You don't just throw that in the red cross pile. You have to carefully consider who would give them a good home. Who would wear them proudly and pass on the oral trdition of this pair of pant's history and cultural identity? Someone who knows how cool they are despite not being able to match them with anything. Those who know that's the point. Those...who don't mind you passing off hand-me-downs and aren't your younger sibling (my younger brother rolls his eyes every time he sees what I wear...and he knows it's not my mother that dresses me funny).
Hell yes I'm vain. It may not look like it. But if you dig down, way past all my surface pretensions, I'm really very shallow. I love my clothes, perhaps more than breathing. I have bad taste, but at least it is taste.
Then comes a big hurricane and there are lots of people in need. I'm torn. So are half the crotches in my pants, armpits in my shirts, toes in my socks, and, um, my underwear.
Sex on a Ladder
That got your attention.
If you ever see images of a couple having sex on a ladder, don't trust them.
With the way most ladders are built, the only way those photos were taken without the models breaking bones is by posing. No actual love making or hot action. They woulc have to be completely motionless or otherwise the whole erotic affair would end up a pile of naked body parts and bent aluminum.
Either that, or they lead such a boring sex life that they don't actually disturb the balance of the ladder. In that case, the ladder is just there to make you think they are kinkier than they are.
If you ever see images of a couple having sex on a ladder, don't trust them.
With the way most ladders are built, the only way those photos were taken without the models breaking bones is by posing. No actual love making or hot action. They woulc have to be completely motionless or otherwise the whole erotic affair would end up a pile of naked body parts and bent aluminum.
Either that, or they lead such a boring sex life that they don't actually disturb the balance of the ladder. In that case, the ladder is just there to make you think they are kinkier than they are.
2.9.05
Reading Two Each Other. What Is High-Brow?
When I was a child, back in the days when my brother and I shared a room, my parents, especially my mother would read to us. My dad did too, but at that age, mom was the stay-at-home, while dad was away at work all hours. Only later, when we were teenagers, did that role reverse, but by then your parents reading to you is super no bueno.
I loved it when my mother would read to us. She passionately believes in reading. This is a good thing since she is a language arts teacher...imagine if she lacked that zeal. I come from reading stock. I'm not voracious, but I enjoy books. She'd curl up with us, although the bunk bed was often asking a bit too much of the girl, and carry us along into imagination on the back of her voice. My brother and I could read. We'd been able to since well before kindergarten. But mom enjoyed the experience of shared reading, and bestowed that appreciation on my brother and me.
That was where I really got into two of my all-time favourite books: James and the Giant Peach and The Fattypuffs and Thinnifers. We ride the Great Glass Elevator and Wrinkle Time. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, as just about anything Judy Blume felt like wiping her nose with, was enjoyment and life-applicable.
Alright already! I liked it.
Well, my boyfriend was recently looking for something new to read. Despite his certifiable "voraciousness" for reading and amazing pace (I once dropped out of a speed reading class to enjoy the fleeting Wisconsin summer), I knew that there were still books under our roof that he had not read. These are, as he puts it, "too high-brow" for him to read...MY books. You'd think I was this amazingly intelligent, literate person, but no.
I have developed a taste in literature that finds very little comraderie in most circles today, especially in my age demographic. Rarely do I like many things written in the past 30 years. I tend to like Victorian literature, and anything else dark and nihilistic written since. Against the better and more perspicacious observations of those about me, I do NOT like the Beats.
Trash novels are just that, although I am currently reading a despicably trashy and completely made-up narrative biography of Omar Khayyam, written in the early thirties, and complete with all the attitudes of the day. An African slave is even referred to by the pronoun "it." Alright...I tend to the extremes.
If my literary taste (or lack thereof) was a novel itself, the dust jacket would be littered with the following quotes. My boyfriend once told me years back, "You're the only 21-year-old I know who reads George Bernard Shaw for kicks." A friend back in Chicago offered thanks for giving him the opportunity "to drop in casual conversation the fact that I know someone who 'enjoys the obscure Dickens'."
I can't help it. I have no real intention of reading any Steele, King or that guy who's name I forget but always writes about lawyers and thrillers. Give me Kobo Abe instead. I like reading Orwell. I LOVE sitting for a couple months with a good Dickens (Hey! He's long-winded and I have a short attention span). Kafka is always pleasant. I could rattle off titles and authors, but the unorthodoxy should be clear.
Anyways, I don't remember who brought it up, but a friend of mine and I were chatting over the romantic and potentially sensual aspects of couples reading to each other. She asked if my boyfriend and I did.
Her response to my response was that it would make a great piece. Hence...
We read in bed. We both read side by side. He takes it one step further and pretty much reads throughout the day as well. I read in bed at night, and it shuts off the "reality-sensitive" portion of my brain long enough to drift off to sleep.
I don't really remember how much we tried. I do remember climbing into bed with him, and for a while I was reading portions of David Sedaris stories to him. We'd lay in bed a giggle. Then, he'd start snoring, and my mouth would go dry.
"Honey, would you like me to read some more to us tonight."
"Yes..."
I know he finds my voice soothing. Why, I don't, but I stopped questioning why he loves me in favour of soaking it up while it's there.
However, the act of reading out loud actually woke me up. I did not find myself drifting off to Sandmanland when reading aloud in bed.
Occassionally, we still read random passages to one another. I'm currently reading a bunch of Erma Bombeck and inflict it upon him. He's reading one of him many books on the origin of the conscience blah blah something involving the bicameral mind or the nature of cultural something or other in post-Christ society. MY taste in literature is too high brow!
He'll pull off a line from one of his boooks. I fling a line of Erma Bombeck (or for real fun, Lytton Strachey). Thus it becomes a little battle across the bed. He hits me with a paragraph about an alternative sociological view on Christ feeding the masses, and I respond with an anecdote about being a two car family. He smacks my slowly drifting consciousness with a passage on the emergence of the subconscious in ancient Greeks and its impact on modern democracy. I retaliate with a particularly witty late 19th Century put-down directed at an emerging Catholic Cardinal.
Romance. Oh yeah. Sensual? You bet.
I loved it when my mother would read to us. She passionately believes in reading. This is a good thing since she is a language arts teacher...imagine if she lacked that zeal. I come from reading stock. I'm not voracious, but I enjoy books. She'd curl up with us, although the bunk bed was often asking a bit too much of the girl, and carry us along into imagination on the back of her voice. My brother and I could read. We'd been able to since well before kindergarten. But mom enjoyed the experience of shared reading, and bestowed that appreciation on my brother and me.
That was where I really got into two of my all-time favourite books: James and the Giant Peach and The Fattypuffs and Thinnifers. We ride the Great Glass Elevator and Wrinkle Time. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, as just about anything Judy Blume felt like wiping her nose with, was enjoyment and life-applicable.
Alright already! I liked it.
Well, my boyfriend was recently looking for something new to read. Despite his certifiable "voraciousness" for reading and amazing pace (I once dropped out of a speed reading class to enjoy the fleeting Wisconsin summer), I knew that there were still books under our roof that he had not read. These are, as he puts it, "too high-brow" for him to read...MY books. You'd think I was this amazingly intelligent, literate person, but no.
I have developed a taste in literature that finds very little comraderie in most circles today, especially in my age demographic. Rarely do I like many things written in the past 30 years. I tend to like Victorian literature, and anything else dark and nihilistic written since. Against the better and more perspicacious observations of those about me, I do NOT like the Beats.
Trash novels are just that, although I am currently reading a despicably trashy and completely made-up narrative biography of Omar Khayyam, written in the early thirties, and complete with all the attitudes of the day. An African slave is even referred to by the pronoun "it." Alright...I tend to the extremes.
If my literary taste (or lack thereof) was a novel itself, the dust jacket would be littered with the following quotes. My boyfriend once told me years back, "You're the only 21-year-old I know who reads George Bernard Shaw for kicks." A friend back in Chicago offered thanks for giving him the opportunity "to drop in casual conversation the fact that I know someone who 'enjoys the obscure Dickens'."
I can't help it. I have no real intention of reading any Steele, King or that guy who's name I forget but always writes about lawyers and thrillers. Give me Kobo Abe instead. I like reading Orwell. I LOVE sitting for a couple months with a good Dickens (Hey! He's long-winded and I have a short attention span). Kafka is always pleasant. I could rattle off titles and authors, but the unorthodoxy should be clear.
Anyways, I don't remember who brought it up, but a friend of mine and I were chatting over the romantic and potentially sensual aspects of couples reading to each other. She asked if my boyfriend and I did.
Her response to my response was that it would make a great piece. Hence...
We read in bed. We both read side by side. He takes it one step further and pretty much reads throughout the day as well. I read in bed at night, and it shuts off the "reality-sensitive" portion of my brain long enough to drift off to sleep.
I don't really remember how much we tried. I do remember climbing into bed with him, and for a while I was reading portions of David Sedaris stories to him. We'd lay in bed a giggle. Then, he'd start snoring, and my mouth would go dry.
"Honey, would you like me to read some more to us tonight."
"Yes..."
I know he finds my voice soothing. Why, I don't, but I stopped questioning why he loves me in favour of soaking it up while it's there.
However, the act of reading out loud actually woke me up. I did not find myself drifting off to Sandmanland when reading aloud in bed.
Occassionally, we still read random passages to one another. I'm currently reading a bunch of Erma Bombeck and inflict it upon him. He's reading one of him many books on the origin of the conscience blah blah something involving the bicameral mind or the nature of cultural something or other in post-Christ society. MY taste in literature is too high brow!
He'll pull off a line from one of his boooks. I fling a line of Erma Bombeck (or for real fun, Lytton Strachey). Thus it becomes a little battle across the bed. He hits me with a paragraph about an alternative sociological view on Christ feeding the masses, and I respond with an anecdote about being a two car family. He smacks my slowly drifting consciousness with a passage on the emergence of the subconscious in ancient Greeks and its impact on modern democracy. I retaliate with a particularly witty late 19th Century put-down directed at an emerging Catholic Cardinal.
Romance. Oh yeah. Sensual? You bet.
6.7.05
What is irony?
Me. The guy who barely considers himself American. The kid who grew up overseas, pretending to be Asian so that I could get more dates. The boy who went to a private international school based on European college preperatory curricula. I, despite having been a Boy Scout in a troop based out of a U.S. Navy base, have little or no reverence for patriotism, jingoism, flags, slogans, governments and the whole lot.
Once upon a time, the Fourth of July (if it does indeed deserve capital letters) was an excuse to A) not work, B) barbecue and C) get drunk. Now, it generally serves as an excuse to avoid the greater masses of those persons finding themselves "celebrating" "something" involving red, white and blue.
Now, I like ties. For many years, they made execellent colourful belts. Silk ones blew because it was hard to keep the knot in place, and thus keep your pants up (not always a bad bit of circumstance, but generally...). A numebr of years ago, as I learned more and more what a freakish offshoot of the "gay community" I was, it dwaned on me that ties could be worn around my neck. More importantly, they didn't have to be worn all the way up as the suits did. Most importantly, they could be had cheap at finer and not-so-finer thrift stores. Mostest importantly, they offered still another pallette for mixing colours and prints that the more taste-oriented segments of society find distasteful, ugly or down-right disturbing. As Robotman once warned Monty, "Stop it! You're damaging Martha Stewart's aesthetic compass!"
I'm still in search of the perfect fish tie.
Some time ago, and I don't remember where, but somewhere, obviously, I found and purchased (goodbye, shop lifting days) a stars and stripes tie. I knew it would be just perfect and darling for any non-patriotic observance or occassion. It wasn't just a plain ole every day stars and stripes tie (thank God that makes no sense). If you hold it at the proper angle to the light, small irredescent swirls start to appear in random across it. It's so pretty.
Anyways, I hadn't worn it yet. Along comes July, as it has the habit of doing. Then, through the conspiracy of ordinal numbers, the Fourth appears. I'm getting ready to go meet up with some folks, and it seems like a tie kind of day. I open my cabinet wherein lies my collection of ties. There it is. The stars and stripes. Should I wear it? I was saving it for a date other than Independence Day. Isn't it too obvious to wear this tie on this day of all days? Doesn't that go against what wearing the tie is about?
Or...
Would it be even better that I, of all people, wear this tie, of all ties, on this day, of all days?
Thinking...it can kill you.
Once upon a time, the Fourth of July (if it does indeed deserve capital letters) was an excuse to A) not work, B) barbecue and C) get drunk. Now, it generally serves as an excuse to avoid the greater masses of those persons finding themselves "celebrating" "something" involving red, white and blue.
Now, I like ties. For many years, they made execellent colourful belts. Silk ones blew because it was hard to keep the knot in place, and thus keep your pants up (not always a bad bit of circumstance, but generally...). A numebr of years ago, as I learned more and more what a freakish offshoot of the "gay community" I was, it dwaned on me that ties could be worn around my neck. More importantly, they didn't have to be worn all the way up as the suits did. Most importantly, they could be had cheap at finer and not-so-finer thrift stores. Mostest importantly, they offered still another pallette for mixing colours and prints that the more taste-oriented segments of society find distasteful, ugly or down-right disturbing. As Robotman once warned Monty, "Stop it! You're damaging Martha Stewart's aesthetic compass!"
I'm still in search of the perfect fish tie.
Some time ago, and I don't remember where, but somewhere, obviously, I found and purchased (goodbye, shop lifting days) a stars and stripes tie. I knew it would be just perfect and darling for any non-patriotic observance or occassion. It wasn't just a plain ole every day stars and stripes tie (thank God that makes no sense). If you hold it at the proper angle to the light, small irredescent swirls start to appear in random across it. It's so pretty.
Anyways, I hadn't worn it yet. Along comes July, as it has the habit of doing. Then, through the conspiracy of ordinal numbers, the Fourth appears. I'm getting ready to go meet up with some folks, and it seems like a tie kind of day. I open my cabinet wherein lies my collection of ties. There it is. The stars and stripes. Should I wear it? I was saving it for a date other than Independence Day. Isn't it too obvious to wear this tie on this day of all days? Doesn't that go against what wearing the tie is about?
Or...
Would it be even better that I, of all people, wear this tie, of all ties, on this day, of all days?
Thinking...it can kill you.
8.5.05
I Survived the Alamo. Chapter One
Previously, Fred and Matthew journeyed to Texas for vacation and mom-seeing.
Runaway Brides, Waffles, and a Morbid Morning
I waited for the firemen to leave. I didn't want to wake Fred, and I couldn't go back to sleep. After waiting a safe period, I ventured out into the hotel. It was around 5 in the morning.
Hotels these days offer some amazing breakfasts, especially the cheap ones (hotels or breakfasts, you decide). This one had not only an amazing coffee machine that made it by the cup after you press the buttons for the desired type and strength, but a WAFFLE IRON! They had little cups of waffle batter set out, and a waffle iron with a built in timer to remind you when to flip and when to serve. It was early, and there was almost no one down, save for a couple of maintenance guys and the desk clerk.
CNN was rattling off, over and over, the top stories shaping our world, including the discovery of the runaway bride (the clerk and I shared views on taking her back: "Give me back the ring bitch"), some sort of sex and drugs blackmail scandal at a San Antonio area military training centre, the Jewish Cowboy running for governor, and the 60th anniversary of Hitler's suicide.
I made some waffles, vended myself some coffee and sat with my book (Burmese Days) to await the dawn. Man it got boring. The woman at CNN San Antonio reread the same stories over and over (I wonder if she was just looped), I drank more and more coffee, and stepped out for yet another smoke.
A walk! That would be lovely. I didn't have to go far. Right behind the hotel was the most beautiful abandoned mill I have ever seen. I want it. I walked around some more, found the jail, multiple bail bondsmen, two mortuary services, and a motel with "Fantasy Rooms" available. We definitely picked the right part of town.
Having had a morbid enough morning, I sauntered (I was in Texas, and could therefore not sashay) back to the motel, to find Fred awake and aggressively caffeinating.
Soon, it was time to go meet mommy for breakfast. I went in to take a shower. It was a pretty standard hotel/motel bathroom, although the room service here did not find it a "nice touch" to fold the ends of the toilet paper roll into a point. I got undressed, turned on the water, and as I pulled the shower curtain, realized that someone had burned cigarette holes into the curtain in the shape of a jack-o-lantern smile. Yay...The day was looking up.
"Romantic, Historic, Newly Renovated" the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk
Fred in his infinite internet-based intuition had booked our Microtel room only a short distance from where my mother was staying. While not exactly close to the convention centre where the IRA fest was to occur, the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk was undoubtedly costing the school my mom works for a pretty penny. Never mind the fact that my mother's boss (Mel) also dragged along the company credit card which was going to cost the school even more to feed them and us.
It was quite a fancy little piece of four star accommodation. At times, the place seemed more like a hipster club. The lobby was a split level affair with dark shades of black, red and gold. The entry way had a waterfall beneath a stone arch, emptying into a U shaped pond, lined with river stones. Speakers pumped out that strange blend of electronica, lounge and trip-hop that is all the rage in the urban-cool. The sound of the water and the tunes made for quite an impression. Not so much a fancy luxury hotel, as a high-budget afterhours club. The hallways were painted red, and the tracklighting and exposed ventilation ducts were hidden behind black metal grating along the ceiling, adding to the club atmosphere.
The Secret Knock
Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.
Thus was the secret, and ever so original, secret knock to announce our visit to my mother's hotel room (which she shared with her boss, Mel, and coworker, Karen). The door began to open, and I was on the verge of booming out my traditional, and ever so original, "Are you decent?" However, the room was dark, and my mother hurriedly crept out the door and whispered "Mel and Karen are still asleep." So, no...They weren't decent.
It was so wonderful to see my mom. The last time I saw her,a few years previous, I was in an unhealthy and far from sane period in my life. The funny thing was, SHE looked a lot healthier than the last time I saw her, and I know I did. Fred, mom and I hugged and kissed and 'so good to see you'd in the hallway before going back down to Citrus, the hotel restaurant.
The breakfast buffet spread was a tad fancier than the Microtel's. For one thing, there was no sign of either a soda machine or CNN. There were waitstaff and white cloth napkins. The buffet was pretty standard fair (no more waffles, though), with silver chaffing dishes with an assortment of grits, oatmeal, red potatoes, bacon/sausage and croissants. Yes, standard. Very standard. Plus, you could get a made-to-order-before-your-eyes omelet. No Do-It-Yourself waffle, but pretty fancy.
Before long, we had worked through what all of our flights had been like and what was going on with dad (still at home) and our animals (also still at home). Mel and Karen appeared, and much to the dismay of the hostess and our waiter (who wasn't sure what to make of us anyways), we rearranged our table, stole another chair and squeezed in for an intimate Guamanian breakfast (in spirit, since most definitely not in flavour). My family has always left a strange impression on the employees of food service establishments. We're outgoing and courteous, but also disarmingly chatty (even in the AM hours) with people serving us coffee and food. The nicer the restaurant (which I believe provokes a certain level of pretension), the more confused the staff is by our down home lack of status-consciousness.
We casually noticed that it was raining outside, and went back to gorging on the all-you-could-eat-ness of it all, catching up on the politics of Guam, the politics of the school they work at and I graduated from, and the goings-on with my brothers (who mom would be visiting with after the convention).
*The San Antonio Riverwalk
*Andean Cover Bands, and the Mall
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
Runaway Brides, Waffles, and a Morbid Morning
I waited for the firemen to leave. I didn't want to wake Fred, and I couldn't go back to sleep. After waiting a safe period, I ventured out into the hotel. It was around 5 in the morning.
Hotels these days offer some amazing breakfasts, especially the cheap ones (hotels or breakfasts, you decide). This one had not only an amazing coffee machine that made it by the cup after you press the buttons for the desired type and strength, but a WAFFLE IRON! They had little cups of waffle batter set out, and a waffle iron with a built in timer to remind you when to flip and when to serve. It was early, and there was almost no one down, save for a couple of maintenance guys and the desk clerk.
CNN was rattling off, over and over, the top stories shaping our world, including the discovery of the runaway bride (the clerk and I shared views on taking her back: "Give me back the ring bitch"), some sort of sex and drugs blackmail scandal at a San Antonio area military training centre, the Jewish Cowboy running for governor, and the 60th anniversary of Hitler's suicide.
I made some waffles, vended myself some coffee and sat with my book (Burmese Days) to await the dawn. Man it got boring. The woman at CNN San Antonio reread the same stories over and over (I wonder if she was just looped), I drank more and more coffee, and stepped out for yet another smoke.
A walk! That would be lovely. I didn't have to go far. Right behind the hotel was the most beautiful abandoned mill I have ever seen. I want it. I walked around some more, found the jail, multiple bail bondsmen, two mortuary services, and a motel with "Fantasy Rooms" available. We definitely picked the right part of town.
Having had a morbid enough morning, I sauntered (I was in Texas, and could therefore not sashay) back to the motel, to find Fred awake and aggressively caffeinating.
Soon, it was time to go meet mommy for breakfast. I went in to take a shower. It was a pretty standard hotel/motel bathroom, although the room service here did not find it a "nice touch" to fold the ends of the toilet paper roll into a point. I got undressed, turned on the water, and as I pulled the shower curtain, realized that someone had burned cigarette holes into the curtain in the shape of a jack-o-lantern smile. Yay...The day was looking up.
"Romantic, Historic, Newly Renovated" the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk
Fred in his infinite internet-based intuition had booked our Microtel room only a short distance from where my mother was staying. While not exactly close to the convention centre where the IRA fest was to occur, the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk was undoubtedly costing the school my mom works for a pretty penny. Never mind the fact that my mother's boss (Mel) also dragged along the company credit card which was going to cost the school even more to feed them and us.
It was quite a fancy little piece of four star accommodation. At times, the place seemed more like a hipster club. The lobby was a split level affair with dark shades of black, red and gold. The entry way had a waterfall beneath a stone arch, emptying into a U shaped pond, lined with river stones. Speakers pumped out that strange blend of electronica, lounge and trip-hop that is all the rage in the urban-cool. The sound of the water and the tunes made for quite an impression. Not so much a fancy luxury hotel, as a high-budget afterhours club. The hallways were painted red, and the tracklighting and exposed ventilation ducts were hidden behind black metal grating along the ceiling, adding to the club atmosphere.
The Secret Knock
Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.
Thus was the secret, and ever so original, secret knock to announce our visit to my mother's hotel room (which she shared with her boss, Mel, and coworker, Karen). The door began to open, and I was on the verge of booming out my traditional, and ever so original, "Are you decent?" However, the room was dark, and my mother hurriedly crept out the door and whispered "Mel and Karen are still asleep." So, no...They weren't decent.
It was so wonderful to see my mom. The last time I saw her,a few years previous, I was in an unhealthy and far from sane period in my life. The funny thing was, SHE looked a lot healthier than the last time I saw her, and I know I did. Fred, mom and I hugged and kissed and 'so good to see you'd in the hallway before going back down to Citrus, the hotel restaurant.
The breakfast buffet spread was a tad fancier than the Microtel's. For one thing, there was no sign of either a soda machine or CNN. There were waitstaff and white cloth napkins. The buffet was pretty standard fair (no more waffles, though), with silver chaffing dishes with an assortment of grits, oatmeal, red potatoes, bacon/sausage and croissants. Yes, standard. Very standard. Plus, you could get a made-to-order-before-your-eyes omelet. No Do-It-Yourself waffle, but pretty fancy.
Before long, we had worked through what all of our flights had been like and what was going on with dad (still at home) and our animals (also still at home). Mel and Karen appeared, and much to the dismay of the hostess and our waiter (who wasn't sure what to make of us anyways), we rearranged our table, stole another chair and squeezed in for an intimate Guamanian breakfast (in spirit, since most definitely not in flavour). My family has always left a strange impression on the employees of food service establishments. We're outgoing and courteous, but also disarmingly chatty (even in the AM hours) with people serving us coffee and food. The nicer the restaurant (which I believe provokes a certain level of pretension), the more confused the staff is by our down home lack of status-consciousness.
We casually noticed that it was raining outside, and went back to gorging on the all-you-could-eat-ness of it all, catching up on the politics of Guam, the politics of the school they work at and I graduated from, and the goings-on with my brothers (who mom would be visiting with after the convention).
*The San Antonio Riverwalk
*Andean Cover Bands, and the Mall
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
I Survived the Alamo? (prologue)
"Well, the weatherman has been saying we were supposed to get thunderstorms for the last two weeks. Figures. It's been beautiful, but it looks like they are finally arriving." So said the man checking us out of the Avis Rent-a-Car lot at the San Antonio airport as we arrived at sunset on Friday evening. The giant Texas sky was, well, massive (Everything IS bigger in Texas, or so the T-shirt said), and the sun setting was leaving a broad smear of purples, pinks and oranges across the sky. The rains came, all two hours worth, and left us a wonderful time in Texas.
Fred and I were going on a vacation. Normally, trips anywhere involve going with some specific agenda and staying with "someone" who "knows where to go" and "what to do." While this trip did have an agenda, it was to be fairly neutral territory.
My mother lives overseas (in Guam, if precision is of any interest to you, Latte Heights if you want more specifics...Street addresses are meaningless there, so I can't go that far). She also a member of the IRA. That one gets people. No, it is not the Irish Republican Army. God, I could see our Danish and Croatian ancestors rolling if we thought it would be a good idea to be members of the nationalist army of a completely different country. Especially since the most notable of historic figures our family has produced was a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian military that helped squash the Boxer Rebellion...Big on migratory freedom fighters us.
Actually, my mother one year, co-taught (she's a teacher, by the way) with a woman from Ireland. In order to be polite, she asked the new teacher if she would like to go with her to an IRA meeting. The vibe of the introduction changed immediately. Mom, realizing what she had just said, quickly added that she was a member of the International Reading Association. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, gurl, I thought ya were asking me to join the army." They hit it off quite well after that.
Anyways, mom was coming to the States for the 50th International Reading Association's conference. She doesn't get to the States that often (I think this is the second time in like ten years), so it was a big deal. We had already lobbied hard for her to take personal days (in contract time, that's not easy) to go after the convention to see my brothers in Chicago. Therefore, it behooved Fred and me, with our flexibility and whatnot, to go see her while she was conventioning and conferencing in San Antonio. To boot, Fred's parents have a condo on the Gulf Coast in the "last undeveloped stretch of coast land in the United States," so we would also see them on this trip.
It was about time to finally meet his parents. We've only been together for 4 or 5 years, now. I think an appropriate courtship period has passed to finally ask his parents for his hand in marriage, or at least try to turn over the first impression made with my ever preceding reputation.
So...We go.
We planned on spending 4 nights in San Antonio hanging out with my mom. Then we'd drive down to the coast and spend 4 nights with Fred's folks.
The San Antonio airport is quite lovely. They have a whole bunch of tile murals on the walls of cowboys, Mexican dancing girls and limes.
We get to the Avis rent-a-car desk (Avis was the cheapest rental of our search, so we went with Avis. Yes, I get a commission for every time I say "Avis" in this text. If I had the skills, every "Avis" would also be a link to their website. Alas... Avis.
This lovely girl behind the counter was so much fun. She wanted to know all about the reason for our trip and what we were planning to do and such. According to the name tag, her name was "Trainee." I don't know if that was her name or her title. With some people's names these days, you never can tell.
Title or given name, Trainee was lovely. She had a smile and an opinion for everything. Included in these bits of opinion was the profluence of confusing one-way streets in San Antonio that changed names after a few blocks ("I hab lived here for 15 years, and Ah steel don't know mah way from one place to anuder."), her husband's attempts to provide her with Jamaican food in Texas to stave off homesickness (Boy, dat's not how chicken is made in dah islands. What's wit da soupiness? He tries, but jus doesn't know.") and the Gulf Coast (Well, dat place is not like dah beach. You want sand? Or gravel?" With this she would hold up both hands as if weighing the possibilities). We were having a marvelous first five minutes in San Antonio laughing it up with Trainee.
Then she asked, "Are you brudders?" No, was our reply. "Oh, are you spouses?" Wow! That was not the sort of question one expected to be asked while traveling with his boyfriend in Central Texas by the Jamaican woman at the rent-a-car counter. I love Trainee. I hope she changes her name to Manager sometime soon.
We got our rental car and headed for our Microtel, chosen for its free wireless broad band internet access and price as our lodging for the duration of our stay in San Antonio. It was located in one of those typical not-so nice areas, often downtown adjacent, in cities. After getting lost, ending up literally on the wrong side of the tracks, looping around the river which seems to also loop around us, and stumbling upon a building (I think it is the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Centre) whose facade was a giant replica of one of those Virgin Mary glass candles oft seen in supermarkets and dollar stores. Way cool, but for a moment if felt like I was back in the islands myself, with shanty structures and close-to-naked children playing in the semi-paved streets. Oh boy...Where the hell is our hotel?
Finally finding it, we check in, get to our room and collapse. I figure I should call mom to see if she made it in alright and if they wanted to do dinner or something. She had gotten in earlier in the day, and I figured she was probably wiped from the lengthy air travel and already asleep. I called and left a message in the hotel room's voicemail (fancy, that). Fred and I hadn't eaten, and did not feel like going out and getting lost some more, so we picked up the flier shoved under the door. It was from a "Chicago Pizza" place in downtown San Antonio. It also made a big deal of advertising that they use "Real" cheese (with that little swoopy logo you see everywhere making you think that yes, the real does belong in quotes) and if you order using your "cell" phone, you get a free Coca-cola. Well, how could I pass up a Chicago pizza (I do believe that it most certainly did not say "Chicago-style pizza" but only "Chicago pizza") with a free Coca-cola? So I ordered, and made damn certain that I let them know I was calling from a cell phone. I want my free coke!
It arrived quickly. My coke was a generic brand "cola" and I think the reason they say "Chicago pizza" is not that it is like pizzas made in Chicago, but was probably mailed down and reconstituted for delivery in Texas. Still, it served as dinner as we lay on the bed and watched the A&E Biography on Paula Abdul (what a trooper). Hey, we don't get any channels at home, so a definite part of staying in hotels is taking advantage of cable in all it's glorious reminders that I really don't want to pay to have it at home.
By the way, mom called. She wasn't out cold from travel. She was out, having dinner and seeing the city. Bugger.
We made plans to meet up in the morning for breakfast and assorted sundry mayhem, and in the meantime: "Good night. Sleep tight. Looking forward to seeing you in the morning. Love you. Bye."
That night, pizza gone, "Coke" drank, credits rolling on Paula Abdul's life story, George Orwell's Burmese Days started upon, I slept and I dreamed. I dreamed that firemen with axes were trying to breakdown my hotel room door and kill me. In a series of amazing action hero moves I could never pull off in real life (at least, I really hope I am never given the opportunity to prove that I cannot do it in real life), I dodged axes so that they plunged into each other, kicked some fireman ass (turning heroes in gyros), and ran for the fire escape (you don't use the elevators in such circumstances).
Waking with a start, I opened my eyes yto find there were flashing lights blinking around the corners of the warped and faded curtains of the Microtel. I got up, peered around the curtains, and there were fire trucks lined up in front of the hotel.
Oh hell!
It was 4:30, and I was not going back to sleep. I know that the Fire Department's presence was the reason for the dream, but I was not about to put myself in the way of any axes. I hid in the room, lights out, paranoically peering around the corner of the curtains, waiting for the fire trucks to go home. Fred was sound asleep.
As it turned out, it was prom weekend, and an after-prom party was underway on the third floor. Some kids thought it would be fun to spray the fire extinguishers. This set off the alarms (which Fred and I somehow slept through and therefore did not evacuate the building because of), summoning the Fire Department, invoking my action packed dream sequence, leading to about 4 hours of sleep for poor Matthew.
Matthew! Welcome to San Antonio!
Stay tuned for:
*Smiley Face Cigarette burns and CNN
*The Secret Knock, our first breakfast in San Antonio
*"Romantic, Historic, Newly Renovated" the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk
*The San Antonio Riverwalk
*Andean Cover Bands, and the Mall
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
Fred and I were going on a vacation. Normally, trips anywhere involve going with some specific agenda and staying with "someone" who "knows where to go" and "what to do." While this trip did have an agenda, it was to be fairly neutral territory.
My mother lives overseas (in Guam, if precision is of any interest to you, Latte Heights if you want more specifics...Street addresses are meaningless there, so I can't go that far). She also a member of the IRA. That one gets people. No, it is not the Irish Republican Army. God, I could see our Danish and Croatian ancestors rolling if we thought it would be a good idea to be members of the nationalist army of a completely different country. Especially since the most notable of historic figures our family has produced was a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian military that helped squash the Boxer Rebellion...Big on migratory freedom fighters us.
Actually, my mother one year, co-taught (she's a teacher, by the way) with a woman from Ireland. In order to be polite, she asked the new teacher if she would like to go with her to an IRA meeting. The vibe of the introduction changed immediately. Mom, realizing what she had just said, quickly added that she was a member of the International Reading Association. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, gurl, I thought ya were asking me to join the army." They hit it off quite well after that.
Anyways, mom was coming to the States for the 50th International Reading Association's conference. She doesn't get to the States that often (I think this is the second time in like ten years), so it was a big deal. We had already lobbied hard for her to take personal days (in contract time, that's not easy) to go after the convention to see my brothers in Chicago. Therefore, it behooved Fred and me, with our flexibility and whatnot, to go see her while she was conventioning and conferencing in San Antonio. To boot, Fred's parents have a condo on the Gulf Coast in the "last undeveloped stretch of coast land in the United States," so we would also see them on this trip.
It was about time to finally meet his parents. We've only been together for 4 or 5 years, now. I think an appropriate courtship period has passed to finally ask his parents for his hand in marriage, or at least try to turn over the first impression made with my ever preceding reputation.
So...We go.
We planned on spending 4 nights in San Antonio hanging out with my mom. Then we'd drive down to the coast and spend 4 nights with Fred's folks.
The San Antonio airport is quite lovely. They have a whole bunch of tile murals on the walls of cowboys, Mexican dancing girls and limes.
We get to the Avis rent-a-car desk (Avis was the cheapest rental of our search, so we went with Avis. Yes, I get a commission for every time I say "Avis" in this text. If I had the skills, every "Avis" would also be a link to their website. Alas... Avis.
This lovely girl behind the counter was so much fun. She wanted to know all about the reason for our trip and what we were planning to do and such. According to the name tag, her name was "Trainee." I don't know if that was her name or her title. With some people's names these days, you never can tell.
Title or given name, Trainee was lovely. She had a smile and an opinion for everything. Included in these bits of opinion was the profluence of confusing one-way streets in San Antonio that changed names after a few blocks ("I hab lived here for 15 years, and Ah steel don't know mah way from one place to anuder."), her husband's attempts to provide her with Jamaican food in Texas to stave off homesickness (Boy, dat's not how chicken is made in dah islands. What's wit da soupiness? He tries, but jus doesn't know.") and the Gulf Coast (Well, dat place is not like dah beach. You want sand? Or gravel?" With this she would hold up both hands as if weighing the possibilities). We were having a marvelous first five minutes in San Antonio laughing it up with Trainee.
Then she asked, "Are you brudders?" No, was our reply. "Oh, are you spouses?" Wow! That was not the sort of question one expected to be asked while traveling with his boyfriend in Central Texas by the Jamaican woman at the rent-a-car counter. I love Trainee. I hope she changes her name to Manager sometime soon.
We got our rental car and headed for our Microtel, chosen for its free wireless broad band internet access and price as our lodging for the duration of our stay in San Antonio. It was located in one of those typical not-so nice areas, often downtown adjacent, in cities. After getting lost, ending up literally on the wrong side of the tracks, looping around the river which seems to also loop around us, and stumbling upon a building (I think it is the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Centre) whose facade was a giant replica of one of those Virgin Mary glass candles oft seen in supermarkets and dollar stores. Way cool, but for a moment if felt like I was back in the islands myself, with shanty structures and close-to-naked children playing in the semi-paved streets. Oh boy...Where the hell is our hotel?
Finally finding it, we check in, get to our room and collapse. I figure I should call mom to see if she made it in alright and if they wanted to do dinner or something. She had gotten in earlier in the day, and I figured she was probably wiped from the lengthy air travel and already asleep. I called and left a message in the hotel room's voicemail (fancy, that). Fred and I hadn't eaten, and did not feel like going out and getting lost some more, so we picked up the flier shoved under the door. It was from a "Chicago Pizza" place in downtown San Antonio. It also made a big deal of advertising that they use "Real" cheese (with that little swoopy logo you see everywhere making you think that yes, the real does belong in quotes) and if you order using your "cell" phone, you get a free Coca-cola. Well, how could I pass up a Chicago pizza (I do believe that it most certainly did not say "Chicago-style pizza" but only "Chicago pizza") with a free Coca-cola? So I ordered, and made damn certain that I let them know I was calling from a cell phone. I want my free coke!
It arrived quickly. My coke was a generic brand "cola" and I think the reason they say "Chicago pizza" is not that it is like pizzas made in Chicago, but was probably mailed down and reconstituted for delivery in Texas. Still, it served as dinner as we lay on the bed and watched the A&E Biography on Paula Abdul (what a trooper). Hey, we don't get any channels at home, so a definite part of staying in hotels is taking advantage of cable in all it's glorious reminders that I really don't want to pay to have it at home.
By the way, mom called. She wasn't out cold from travel. She was out, having dinner and seeing the city. Bugger.
We made plans to meet up in the morning for breakfast and assorted sundry mayhem, and in the meantime: "Good night. Sleep tight. Looking forward to seeing you in the morning. Love you. Bye."
That night, pizza gone, "Coke" drank, credits rolling on Paula Abdul's life story, George Orwell's Burmese Days started upon, I slept and I dreamed. I dreamed that firemen with axes were trying to breakdown my hotel room door and kill me. In a series of amazing action hero moves I could never pull off in real life (at least, I really hope I am never given the opportunity to prove that I cannot do it in real life), I dodged axes so that they plunged into each other, kicked some fireman ass (turning heroes in gyros), and ran for the fire escape (you don't use the elevators in such circumstances).
Waking with a start, I opened my eyes yto find there were flashing lights blinking around the corners of the warped and faded curtains of the Microtel. I got up, peered around the curtains, and there were fire trucks lined up in front of the hotel.
Oh hell!
It was 4:30, and I was not going back to sleep. I know that the Fire Department's presence was the reason for the dream, but I was not about to put myself in the way of any axes. I hid in the room, lights out, paranoically peering around the corner of the curtains, waiting for the fire trucks to go home. Fred was sound asleep.
As it turned out, it was prom weekend, and an after-prom party was underway on the third floor. Some kids thought it would be fun to spray the fire extinguishers. This set off the alarms (which Fred and I somehow slept through and therefore did not evacuate the building because of), summoning the Fire Department, invoking my action packed dream sequence, leading to about 4 hours of sleep for poor Matthew.
Matthew! Welcome to San Antonio!
Stay tuned for:
*Smiley Face Cigarette burns and CNN
*The Secret Knock, our first breakfast in San Antonio
*"Romantic, Historic, Newly Renovated" the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk
*The San Antonio Riverwalk
*Andean Cover Bands, and the Mall
*Monty's Guide to the Alamo
*Lyle Lovett
*More Andean Cover Bands, La Cucaracha at your First Communion and Santa Coming through the Roof
*Dolores Del Rio Ristorante - Italian Food, Mexican Decor, beatnik vibe, Chicago blues band and a bellydancer
*Joe's Crab Shack - Got Crabs? Hope not!
*Goodwill towards Blind Men, Cold tourists, and parking restrictions on the Governor's Palace. If this is a regular candy bar: "Mommy, mommy, can Ricky come out to play?" Then this is an O'Henry: "Hi, Rick. Busy tonight?"
*The Triple Threat: Davey (I mean, David) Crockett, Casket makers and the Museum of Texan History and Taxidermy.
*So Long, San Anton.
And then!
*Port Aransas, the "last undeveloped stretch of coastal real estate in the United States."
*The Sand Castle
*Talcum Powder, Black Goo and Salt
*Giant Sharks Eat Tourists, Maybe Santa
*The Ferry, don't feed the non-existent dolphins your vomit.
*The Prophetess
*What Are Mexicans Doing at a Mexican Restaurant!?
And finally!
*This Hitchhikers Guide to Ontario California
3.11.04
Air and Water ShOWWWWW! Vol. 3 Invasion By Land
It all happened so quickly. It's hard to remember the details.
Oh cruel fate! Once velocity is finally achieved, a decent pace maintained. Why then, must I so horribly be confronted with gravity and the ground?
Previously...
Matthew and Charles, finding the weather to be lovely for the first time in weeks through the summer, decide to bike downtown to meet some friends. It's unfortunate that that same Sunday morning, Chicago's Annual Air and Water Show is playing to a packed lakefront. Many people. Difficult going on the bikes. Lots of nuisance. Judgements fly about the nature of our society and using machines of war for entertainment purposes. Guns don't kill people. Wars do!
We reached downtown in surprisingly good time. We had a lovely time with friends. Had a great lunch. La la la.
Once again, I forget that an Air and Water show is going on. How? It was just a couple hours previously that we waded through a water show of people trying to get downtown on our bicycles. All that people talked about at lunch was how they wanted to get down to the lakefront or how they were avoiding it at all costs.
So, when we get back to the lakefront trail for the ride home, you can imagine how surprised I was to find that it was even worse. It was no longer slow going on your bicycle. It was wlking your bicycle. It was so crowded I feel like the cattle must feel in those videos about ranching and slaughtering. Packed together, I know I was adding some tire marks to some achilles tendons. I know I was constantly banging my my shins against the pedals of my bike.
It was ridiculous. Why didn't we take the city streets? Oh right...I'm a moron.
By this point, we're pretty much locked in. The next exit from the lakefront is still a ways away.
The air show is in full swing. Abandoning the idea that little boats zooming back and forth on the horizon will keep everyone's attention, they pushed forward with the idea that loud planes zooming back and forth over our heads would be far more fun.
ZOZOZOOZOZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!
The jet flies one way.
ZOZOZOZOOZZZZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!
The jet flies the other way.
Oooooh. It's like hypnosis, with a shiny object passing back and forth in your field of vision. Only it's loud, and you have to crane your neck to track the shiny thingy. As far as I can tell, this is the air show. A jet plane flying back and forth. Big fun.
People always talk up the Blue Angels, like it's the coolest, freshest thing ever. I missed that part of my ride home.
Call me what you will (everyone does), but the only reason I can find interest in an air show is if the jet fighter flying back and forth over our heads starts dropping bombs, or participates in a real dog fight with another American jet. American War Technology Vs. American "Defense" Technology in an air-to-air battle to the death! Cut to commercial.
I do have to plug my cushy ass bike seat for a moment. The people who make HyperPlush bike seats get a big shout-out and kiss. I like to ride, and there's nothing like haveing a big soft wad of foam under my ass to absord the shock of the road for me. I sued to freak out the guys at the camping gear store about how comfy that seat was to ride to work on after a morning of heavy forbidden sex (wink to the censors). Ewwwww. Why did you tell us that?!
Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled trauma...
Finally, the flow of humanity allowed Charles and me to get off the lake front and back to the city surface streets. Blessed be.
At this time, the serenity and love for humantiy I had that morning had managed to run screaming from the thunderous sound of jet airplanes screaming overhead. It was over. I was surly. I was about ready to start running over people, or at least push them into oncoming traffic.
Managing to find open stretches of raod, Charles and I began to peddle torward home. Fairly smooth sailing. We're in the clear. All is wonderful.
Nice weather. Away from the crowds gazing at the pretty shiny objects flashing back and forth in the sky. I'm on my bike. Life is good.
This has been a sign. To make up for the stretch of time where the weather was unbikeable (at least to a wimp like me), the world has given me a stretch of days that are thoroughly meant to be biked through. And I did.
I biked everywhere. I went downtown, came back, stopped off at home, biked to Evanston...it goes on.
And then...after casting the ring back into the fires from whence it came, defeating the enemy, discovering that Darth Vader really is my father, destroying the Death Star, finding the Holy Gail with my dad, and other such trilogy happy endings...
I crashed.
Coming home one evening, I ran into some friends on the street. Not literally. We are still building up to my athletic demise. We stood and chatted for a while. Me, on my way home. Them, on their way home with a box of wine. We won't diverge there.
Goodbyes all the way around, and I hopped back onto my bike to proceed home. I was up on the sidewalk, as the street too narrow and the traffic too harrowing to merge back.
Suddenly, the bike disappears from under me. I go tumbling forward and hit the ground head first, catching the handle bars in my chest. Fortunately, I am a bike geek and was wearing a helmet. Otherwise, I may not be lucid enough to type this fine exposition on the elements and whatnot.
Picking myself up (no sense in drawing any attention to my wipe-out), looking around (in hopes of saving a little bit of face) and gathering my senses, I hear a man laughing. Just up the block, a man is standing outside is "office," shady and at street level, but who am I to judge. He began to tell me how often (especially in the winter) people slip on that metal plate in the streets.
Apparently, although I was still quite dazed and trying to nurse my owwiees on my knees and elbows, I had hit one of those metal plates in the sidewalk that covers electrical wires. He proceeds to babble about wanting to get his grommel kit and etch grooves into it as some sort of public service.
I'm not really paying attention to him, still trying to gather my senses. I proceeded to agree with everything he was sying and started to wlak home.
Only when I got home did I realize that my chest was in excrutiating pain. Well no wonder...the handle bars colliding with my chest had broken a rib!
The end. of the biking season. for now.
Oh cruel fate! Once velocity is finally achieved, a decent pace maintained. Why then, must I so horribly be confronted with gravity and the ground?
Previously...
Matthew and Charles, finding the weather to be lovely for the first time in weeks through the summer, decide to bike downtown to meet some friends. It's unfortunate that that same Sunday morning, Chicago's Annual Air and Water Show is playing to a packed lakefront. Many people. Difficult going on the bikes. Lots of nuisance. Judgements fly about the nature of our society and using machines of war for entertainment purposes. Guns don't kill people. Wars do!
We reached downtown in surprisingly good time. We had a lovely time with friends. Had a great lunch. La la la.
Once again, I forget that an Air and Water show is going on. How? It was just a couple hours previously that we waded through a water show of people trying to get downtown on our bicycles. All that people talked about at lunch was how they wanted to get down to the lakefront or how they were avoiding it at all costs.
So, when we get back to the lakefront trail for the ride home, you can imagine how surprised I was to find that it was even worse. It was no longer slow going on your bicycle. It was wlking your bicycle. It was so crowded I feel like the cattle must feel in those videos about ranching and slaughtering. Packed together, I know I was adding some tire marks to some achilles tendons. I know I was constantly banging my my shins against the pedals of my bike.
It was ridiculous. Why didn't we take the city streets? Oh right...I'm a moron.
By this point, we're pretty much locked in. The next exit from the lakefront is still a ways away.
The air show is in full swing. Abandoning the idea that little boats zooming back and forth on the horizon will keep everyone's attention, they pushed forward with the idea that loud planes zooming back and forth over our heads would be far more fun.
ZOZOZOOZOZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!
The jet flies one way.
ZOZOZOZOOZZZZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!
The jet flies the other way.
Oooooh. It's like hypnosis, with a shiny object passing back and forth in your field of vision. Only it's loud, and you have to crane your neck to track the shiny thingy. As far as I can tell, this is the air show. A jet plane flying back and forth. Big fun.
People always talk up the Blue Angels, like it's the coolest, freshest thing ever. I missed that part of my ride home.
Call me what you will (everyone does), but the only reason I can find interest in an air show is if the jet fighter flying back and forth over our heads starts dropping bombs, or participates in a real dog fight with another American jet. American War Technology Vs. American "Defense" Technology in an air-to-air battle to the death! Cut to commercial.
I do have to plug my cushy ass bike seat for a moment. The people who make HyperPlush bike seats get a big shout-out and kiss. I like to ride, and there's nothing like haveing a big soft wad of foam under my ass to absord the shock of the road for me. I sued to freak out the guys at the camping gear store about how comfy that seat was to ride to work on after a morning of heavy forbidden sex (wink to the censors). Ewwwww. Why did you tell us that?!
Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled trauma...
Finally, the flow of humanity allowed Charles and me to get off the lake front and back to the city surface streets. Blessed be.
At this time, the serenity and love for humantiy I had that morning had managed to run screaming from the thunderous sound of jet airplanes screaming overhead. It was over. I was surly. I was about ready to start running over people, or at least push them into oncoming traffic.
Managing to find open stretches of raod, Charles and I began to peddle torward home. Fairly smooth sailing. We're in the clear. All is wonderful.
Nice weather. Away from the crowds gazing at the pretty shiny objects flashing back and forth in the sky. I'm on my bike. Life is good.
This has been a sign. To make up for the stretch of time where the weather was unbikeable (at least to a wimp like me), the world has given me a stretch of days that are thoroughly meant to be biked through. And I did.
I biked everywhere. I went downtown, came back, stopped off at home, biked to Evanston...it goes on.
And then...after casting the ring back into the fires from whence it came, defeating the enemy, discovering that Darth Vader really is my father, destroying the Death Star, finding the Holy Gail with my dad, and other such trilogy happy endings...
I crashed.
Coming home one evening, I ran into some friends on the street. Not literally. We are still building up to my athletic demise. We stood and chatted for a while. Me, on my way home. Them, on their way home with a box of wine. We won't diverge there.
Goodbyes all the way around, and I hopped back onto my bike to proceed home. I was up on the sidewalk, as the street too narrow and the traffic too harrowing to merge back.
Suddenly, the bike disappears from under me. I go tumbling forward and hit the ground head first, catching the handle bars in my chest. Fortunately, I am a bike geek and was wearing a helmet. Otherwise, I may not be lucid enough to type this fine exposition on the elements and whatnot.
Picking myself up (no sense in drawing any attention to my wipe-out), looking around (in hopes of saving a little bit of face) and gathering my senses, I hear a man laughing. Just up the block, a man is standing outside is "office," shady and at street level, but who am I to judge. He began to tell me how often (especially in the winter) people slip on that metal plate in the streets.
Apparently, although I was still quite dazed and trying to nurse my owwiees on my knees and elbows, I had hit one of those metal plates in the sidewalk that covers electrical wires. He proceeds to babble about wanting to get his grommel kit and etch grooves into it as some sort of public service.
I'm not really paying attention to him, still trying to gather my senses. I proceeded to agree with everything he was sying and started to wlak home.
Only when I got home did I realize that my chest was in excrutiating pain. Well no wonder...the handle bars colliding with my chest had broken a rib!
The end. of the biking season. for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)