funny

funny, stories

Here in Guatemala, after the rain, these huge beetles come out. I mean, really freaking huge. And slow. Flying, slowly, loudly, seeking..uhh..well, I really have no idea what they’re doing at all. They come in numbers, too; we’re talking 5-8 at every street light, and who knows how many in the darkness in-between. The little ones are the size of a film canister, the really big ones would give your hands mass a good run for its money.

After living here for 9 months good dave gave in to bad dave, in a weak moment my goodwill caved in to crude desire. I punted a giant flying beetle.

So, did I mention that these beetles also have a giant Rhinoceros-like horn?

funny

Great photo that came in on my blog feed (blog: bubblevisor). Or maybe it’s not an out of control hippie van but an engineerhippie van.

 

out of control OR enginerd hippie van

I have one problem and it’s bothering me–what music would be heard coming from such an impressive vehicle?

Would it be bumpy piano hipster rock (Arcade Fire, Avett Bros,…) or heavy metal, old school classic rap (Gangster’s Paradise) or classical (if classical, what classical? Baroque? Romantic? Modern? Stravinsky?). Phillip Glass? Pink Floyd? U2? Classic rock?

Actually nevermind, dumb question. The obvious answer:

 

funny, motorcycle

Sometimes I forget that for work I get to ride a dirtbike around on a crazy old rocky highway through mountains between towns to hang out with poor kids and give them school supplies. Did I mention that’s actually for work?

There’s always stuff to whine about here, but for now I settle for beer with my crackers and cheese.

And it just so happens that there’s a store just down the street that sells Guatemalan beer and Guatemalan corn chips. Not good old crackers and cheese, but close enough and maybe better really.

And yes, when Profe Jorge and I ride around on the motorcycle we do sorta look like a couple of Mormons. They call us milk and chocolate.

Yes, we do look like mormons

 

funny

1. Understand english

2. Understand spanish

3. Understand soccer

4. Know FC Barcelona

 

funny, photography

So yesterday I’m like “alright. I’m making scones.” Also yesterday I got pegged by a hum dinger of a cold, headache and stuffy nose and all the joy. After four trips to the grocery store, I had the ingredients ready to make scones. I made the scones and forgot one of the three cups of flour. A mistake like that has consequences: there was an aesthetic casualty.

 

 

funny, ideas

M, this is for you.

A few days ago I realized April Fool’s day is coming up soon, and I have been thinking a lot about it. Lots of things have come into my mind and heart when I realized that April Fool’s day is something deeper, a clear window into human condition. I only realized this when the concept of birthday and the concept of April Fool’s day came together in my mind, which happened thanks to my dear friend from school and my old Troop leader from Boy Scouts,  who were both born on April 1st.

Wait, April Fool’s day? There are a lot of Holidays that are great for getting all windy about–Commercialized Christmas, unThankful Thanksgiving, Egg-riddled Easter, Baffling Boxing-Day, et cetera–but really Dave, April Fool’s day? Yes, April Fool’s day. And a birthday. Humor is one of things we still really have no clue about, and birth is the beginning of life.

Is this whole post just a hackneyed cliche? Ends and means, friend, ends and means.

In the past six months, my mind has been really occupied by this thing, human essence, human condition, or whatever you might want to call it. Living in Guatemala has been a wild experience so far–not at all what I expected, but more learning than I can shake a stick at it. Two things have been separately wandering around my mind–the celebration and remembrance of birthdays, which many don’t do here (the lower two thirds of the population, the poor, usually don’t know their date of birth), and why we find humor in the unknown and unexpected (like April Fool’s jokes).

Two days ago, in a twinkle of a moment these two things dovetailed and immediately made all the sense in the world and opened up this window, this lens that helped me understand this idea of humor and the celebration of birthdays.

It’s long, so click to read more–

Continue Reading

funny, photography

Note that the burners are going under all three pots. The fourth burner is going too, making hot cocoa.

Nikon D200 + old school Nikon 28/2.8 e series lens + carbon legged tripod + bounce flash

juggling
Note the pots

 

funny, stories

One-fifty said the woman. Not cool–last time they were one quetzal even, so I got on her case a bit. Are you sure? They must have gone up, last time they were a quetzal. Are they harder to find now?

I had gone to the market for fruit in the morning, searched for mangoes that looked good, and asked for the price.

She explained the price of the carton and how many, but I really didn’t want to do any mental math at all, so I just nodded and said Ok, I’ll take three.

Four for six quetzals, said the woman quicky. I thought–well, I guess if she’s gonna offer me a deal I oughta take it, so I said Sure, sounds good.

This afternoon as I pulled out the bag of four mangoes and thought about the price, I did a calculation. Six divided by four.

I was about to be frustrated, until I thought about having four mangoes instead of three.

funny

Unofficial name change:

I’m David Francisco.

(Trying to use my actual last name when I call to reserve the cancha just makes for a lot of problems)

funny, other

Here in Guatemala

1. Possums eat chickens, and in return folks eat possums. You know how possums love to play dead? Sometimes they’ll decide to play dead after they’re caught and clubbed. Then sometimes they come back to life after being skinned. Can you say angry-zombie-possum?

2. Common courtship process:
i. Boy and girl meet
ii. Boy decides he likes the girl, drives up to her house sometime after one in the morning and cranks a love song on his stereo for some indeterminate amount of time
iii. Girl goes to window and swoons for this indeterminate period of time, or goes to window to glare briefly then goes back to bed.
iv. Depends on the result of iii: (negative) the boy repeats step iii until he goes back to step i, or (positive) the boy and girl start to date.
v. After some time of going out, they become “novios,” something pretty similar  to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Then after being novios for a while, they get married.

…at any point in the process, either the boy or the girl can tell the other that they do or don’t like him/her; often neither this event nor whether or not it’s reciprocated generally affect any of the five steps.

3. It is not a meal if there are not tortillas. Literally, like it doesn’t count as a meal without them–if you eat what we United-States-ians would usually call a meal, and it’s without tortillas, you actually get to eat another meal (with tortillas, of course) because the first time around didn’t count. This is pretty awesome, although may bode ill for my health if I don’t play a ton of soccer…and number four…

4. Soccer is different. It’s like…eating a meal or walking to work. I’m used to “oh cool, yeah lets go play soccer!” Here it’s not really something to get stoked about. Not that people don’t love it…they really, really really love to play soccer…it’s simply a part of life. Just about everybody has a brother who’s played semi-pro, or plays semi-pro.

5. In the U.S. if we’re going to make a gesture to signify the person we’re talking about, we generally point with the hand or nod with the head. What’s the most common way to do this here? A kissing-like-gesture with the mouth. This one took a while to figure out.

6. They drink lots of fruit punch. It’s very delicious and very specific: apple and pineapple juice with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, only served hot and with little pieces of coconut floating in it.

7. Coffee’s like this: brewed light, heavily sugared and always with sweet bread to dip. Once in a blue moon somebody in a restaurant will order coffee with milk–beyond that, coffee with any sort of dairy product mixed in is purely out of the question.

8. There are tons of motorcycles. They all–
1. Look different
2. Have nearly the exact same Chinese chassis and engine

9. There’s more of life and death and heaven and hell than you can shake a stick at.

funny, stories

Part I is here: http://wp.me/s14q4r-boxers

I love to take naps. If you’ve spent time around me, you’ve probably seen it. A few weeks ago Tuesday was a free day–apparently October 20th is an important day in Guatemalan history, a revolution of some sort took place a while ago.

I woke up early (5:300ish) to go running with one of my buddies here, Andy. Best I figure, Andy somehow got a tiny bit of Gazelle DNA in his system, at least by the way he runs it seems like that’s the case. I need to go find me some Gazelle steak to eat. We got back at 7ish, ate food, he left and I ate some more food and read a book for a while. I didn’t have much success reading my book, as I really just wanted to sleep. I decided to crash for a nap in my room–Barcelona had a game against Copenhagen at noon, so I had a few hours to sleep. It was already a good day.

I slept like a log until I heard a door-sound. Here I’ll give you four relevant facts:

1. A cleaning lady comes by every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
2. There’s a bathroom right by my bedroom, and the bathroom door is loud. When someone goes into the bathroom, it almost sounds like my door’s opening. I’m used to it now, so I don’t worry much when I hear what sounds like my door opening, because usually it’s just someone using the bathroom. Besides, my housemates are all awesome at knocking-first.
3.  On a warm morning, after a hard early run, there is only one way to take a nap: boxers only (in the privacy of my room, of course. No indecent exposure, thank you very much)

…and number four, which I wasn’t aware of…

4.  Sometimes the cleaning lady comes on Tuesdays.

Yeah, you can probably see where this is going. So I woke up to what sounded like my door opening, but didn’t worry about it. Somebody was probably opening the bathroom door.

Then I heard footsteps in my room. Then I heard sweeping. She was sweeping the room. I was napping on my bed in my boxers and this poor soul, the cleaning lady, came in to clean. I thought and thought and thought…did she even notice me? What about my boxers? Even if she didn’t see my self on the bed, my boxers I was wearing, green polka dotted…are awfully hard to miss. This is why I usually wear pants over them. More footsteps, more sweeping. She lifted up my napsack in the corner of the room, swept under it, and put it back down. I didn’t move–I wondered to myself, maybe she just simply won’t notice me.

A little bit more sweeping, then suddenly a pause..and panicked gasp of air. Then very quiet but also very hurried footsteps, and the sound of my door closing very quickly. Then silence. The poor girl.

It was a week and a half before we saw her again.

In a not-very-surprising turn of events that followed, I was unanimously nominated to be the fill-in house cleaner till she came back.

The End.

Disclaimer:
This may or may not have actually happened. I say this because if it did happen, I’d like you to think it didn’t (no duh), and if it didn’t I’d like to not ruin the fun by having you think it didn’t. Your call.

funny, stories

Guatemala is a land rich in culture and history. There is war and violence, poverty and pain, pride and love and more variety than you can shake a stick at; its anthropology is deep and rich.

With this deep and rich anthropology comes a particular thing: you generally can’t tell a Guatemalan by hair color or skin tone–there’s lots of variation. There’s only one quick way to tell if someone’s not of Guatemalan heritage: eyes, brown eyes. There are immigrants, African or North American, but they’re not too common.

Today was absolutely stunning. This weekend was a national holiday weekend for Guatemala, along with many other Catholic countries of the world. My unofficially-adopted Guatemalan Uncle, Profe Jorge, invited me to travel with him for the weekend. Not wanting to be stuck alone in Barillas, I traveled with him. Today we went to Santiago Sacatepequez, which I guess is the go-to place to see the celebration of Dia de Todos los Santos: they have an absolutely wild and beautiful crazy kite-festival celebration in the cemetery each year. Of course, there’s also delicious and cheep food aplenty.

We parked about a half mile away from the downtown area and began to walk. Not five minutes later we passed a pretty blonde and blue-eyed girl walking the other way. “Well that’s curious” I thought to myself–a little part of me inside said “hey Dave! There’s a good chance she speaks English. Go talk to her!” It’d been a long time since I’d talked with a pretty girl in English. “Nah, that’s silly, I won’t bother” I thought to myself. We kept walking, and a few minutes later made it to the downtown area.

Not more than ten minutes later, I saw a group of three that didn’t quite look Guatemalan, but I wasn’t sure–they were at least thirty feet away and I couldn’t see their faces with the way they were standing. Two of them, a guy and a gal, were dressed somewhat tourist-ly. The third, another gal in a rose colored shirt, looked less like a tourist then the other two but didn’t seem dressed like a local. All three were fair-skinned, so I figured they were probably not from these parts…but I couldn’t see their eyes so I didn’t know. I should also add that (even though I don’t ever think think much of how a girl looks without having seen her face and smile) the gal in the rose colored shirt, she looked pretty.

Just as I was turning away, something caught her attention and she turned her head and glanced over her shoulder. I saw her face and her eyes and my jaw dropped. I was mildly paralyzed for a moment or two, jaw dropped. Think of that one time when you were walking along and noticed that the sun was getting low. You turn to look at the sunset behind you and see the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen in your life, and your jaw actually drops and you gasp a little bit. Yup, it was like that. This girl had the prettiest eyes.

A few moments passed and my mind was still in “pause” mode. In all my life I’ve never seen a girl with eyes like her eyes. This girl’s prettiest eyes were somehow a glimpse of her self, a little bit of curiosity and contentedness and happiness. I don’t remember if she was smiling at the moment, but I do remember that her eyes were.

“Ok Dave. You need to go talk to this girl, right now” I told myself with conviction.

I didn’t.

Half an hour later I knew what I had to do.

I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and held it in my pocket. My hopes, jittery, unsure and unsecure, written on a little piece of paper in my pocket. Eight digits. Maybe by some wild providence, maybe by a miracle or other act of God I would get a second chance. Is it okay to pray to God to get to talk with a pretty girl? I wasn’t sure, but I might’ve prayed just a tiny bit. One hour passed, I didn’t see her again. Two hours passed, I didn’t see her again. We left the cemetery where the incredible kite-festival celebration was and began the slow return to the downtown area–the road was packed with people.

We were walking on the right side of the road and there she was on the other side. Somehow I’d missed her when we passed and now she was a ways up the road from us. I saw her and my mind started to spin like a wobbly top. Shoot shoot shoot, she’s all the way over there. I can’t get over there in time, there are too many people. She was a long ways away, and I would’ve had to suddenly take off  running and pushing, chasing through a very dense crowd and–

“Ok Dave, you know what? You missed one chance at what might become the most beautiful thing that’ll happen in your entire life and you’re about to loose your second chance because you don’t want to get pushy in a crowd. Man up Dave, man up.”

I threw myself into the crowd, people glaring at me left and right. One man cuffed me in the back of the head as I stumbled by him. Well, ok..I may have actually crashed straight into him when I was acrobatically avoiding body-checking an old woman. I got close to the girl with the prettiest eyes, close enough for her to hear me.

The crowd was noisy, I had to almost shout: “Excuse me! Miss!”

She turned and looked around, only mildly confused, saw me and said with a smile: “Why hello! Another gringo!”

“You have the most wonderful eyes and smile I’ve ever seen!”

She looked at me, eye contact for a moment that seemed longer than a moment, and with her smile said: “and you do too, chico!”

I just about lost my balance again, but recovered and reached over the sea of people between her and I, the piece of paper in my hand, that scrap of paper with my hopes and thumping heart scribbled on it, 8 little numbers.

She stood up on her toes, reached and took the piece of paper, glanced at it and slipped it in her pocket. The crowd had gotten noisier. I shouted my name to her over the noise, and she shouted hers to me. She turned to keep walking, but then paused for a moment to glance over her shoulder and wink at me.

I definitely nearly lost my balance again.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Every single bit of this story is true, all the way up to the part where I saw her again.

The End.

——–

*I don’t know much of genetics or anthropology, but I’ll hazard a guess anyways. The indigenous people have brown eyes, so maybe in the world of eye-color-genes the brown gene is most dominant and the others are recessive.

funny, stories

(from a few weeks ago)

Observation #1: when sleepy, it is very easy to misplace things and very hard to find them.

Observation #2: coffee helps this. It helps a lot.

…now I’m off to go slog around the office to find where I left my coffee mug.

This may take a while.

funny, other

shining brilliant awesome as always. From the back of one of Newman’s cartons…

LEGEND:

The marathon in Africa…I’m halfway out and barely chugging. Mountain coming! Liquid needed! What’s around? Water’s bitter! Beer’s flat! Gator, blah blah!…Fading fast. Then a vision – sweet Joanna! – Tempting me with pale gold nectar…Lemon is it? Yes, by golly! Lemonade? No, Lemon aid!… Power added! Asphalt churning!… Cruising home to victory! Hail Joanna! Filched the nectar (shameless hustler) – in the market – Newman’s Own.

From the back of a  Pink Virgin Lemonade carton, to be exact. Is that not shining brilliant awesome? I actually think, if I could be paid to do stuff like writing things like that, I would be down for a career in marketing..maybe. Maybe for little while.