Today I rode through a little town in the middle of nowhere in a developing country in Central America on an old dirtbike, to my desk inside of a warehouse-building-turned-office.
stories
Boxers-related embarrassment: part II
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.
The girl with the prettiest eyes
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.
Gone a year
My friend died a year ago.
The phone call I received at 8:30am one year ago lasted less than twenty words, and it’s etched deep and forever in my heart. I can’t say much more–I wrote about it some months ago, and what I wrote then for memorial day was all I had to say, and still is all I have to say, about that day and that phone call.
After an IED claimed his body and life here on earth, it was months before I could sleep right. Nightmares? No, and I thank God for that. I honestly don’t know if I could’ve handled nightmares without spiraling downwards with utterly crippled emotions and mind. I simply couldn’t sleep right. I would try to stay at school and do homework, but couldn’t focus; I don’t mean that I wouldn’t, or didn’t want to..literally I could not focus. Months passed, and than one night I slept and woke up rested.
That was the single most bittersweet morning I’ve known in my life so far.
Some time later, one night after a long week and one particularly long day, I was still awake in the early morning, really troubled.
Joe believed and understood more than I do and likely ever will who God is, what redemption is, and the both heart-crushing and soul-saving beauty of the death of God himself, in human form as the carpenter’s son. I knew that Joe was in a better place.
Somehow I didn’t have peace about his death though. “Why the hell wasn’t that me?” I would ask. I could’ve joined the army, I could well have been in that Stryker instead of him. He was married and wanted to help troubled kids after he finished in the army. Joe White was larger than life.
I didn’t have peace.
That night, restless and painful, I sat on the deck stairs looking up at the stars as the wind spoke through the trees, and peace came.
Peace came.
Like the small wave that reaches just further than the rest, to where you’re standing, cool fresh salty water splashes over the tops of your feet cleaning off the sand, and it comes far enough past your heels to even wash away the footprints behind you.
Peace came.
Joe loved and he loved with more depth and soul and power than most folks will ever imagine could be..except for the folks that knew him. Those who knew him knew that there must’ve been something bigger, something else. It was something more, oh you bet it was something more: it was god. Full, real love–something so damn big that it doesn’t fit in this universe, but sometimes when someone actually realizes it, gets it, and decides to live by that, when you meet and come to know one of them, you catch a glint of this light, a blinding beautiful shimmer. That was Joe. His life shone with a glimpse of eternity.
I can’t write anything else, but I want to put something else here: notes he wrote. I copied these off of his facebook account, and they’re some of the most moving things I’ve read in my life–because he poured himself into what he wrote, and he had a lot of soul to pour into things. Some of them are also some of the funniest things I’ve read in my life.
I’m going to have a Rockstar, today, for Joe. He always had one in his hand–everybody’s got their vices, his was Rockstar. At the end of the day was it even a vice? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. You should have one for him today, too.
—
BOB! go to sleep.
Tuesday November 18 2008
at first i considered him a mouse problem (i’m assuming he’s a dude mouse because i’m uncomfortable with the thought of sharing the room i get naked in with a female). anyway anyone (even if it is a mouse) who steals cookies that my girlfriend makes for me is a problem. but he just helped himself to them like his mother never taught him manners. so i trapped him under a pillow one night and punched it as hard as i could (it was on my couch and i’d rather get rid of a couch pillow then have mouse guts all over my hand.) i heard something pop and thought it was the mouse but i’m pretty sure it was just my knuckles now because when i lifted the pillow he was no where to be seen. i took it as a sign to leave him alone (well more like i didn’t want him thinking i was a problem and bite my johnson off while i was sleeping at night… well sleeping anytime really i’m not sure why i put at night.. whatever. i have serious ADD) so i named him bob and told him to help himself to MY cookies. i’m such a nice guy. i’m sure bob’s forgiven me for trying to turn him into mouse sauce with my fist. at least i hope he has. i am sharing my cookies after all.
—
Simple?
Monday April 7 2008
God is good. God is merciful. God is faithful. and God is love. sometimes it’s just that simple. everything else is only matters for the brief moment it is relevant and then disappears for the rest of God’s eternity.
Mildly-tragic irony
(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.
Three highways
Holy crap.
I can’t remember the last time I said or wrote that, and I am so serious about it I’ll say it again. Holy crap..so much fun :D
Pertinent facts:
’82 Suzuki 750
3 highways
one awesome motorcycle shop along the side of one of the 3 highways
a (much needed) pair of earplugs, a (also much needed) twinkie and bike talk with the two resident motorheads at the above mentioned shop
one quart of oil (which I didn’t know I very badly needed until I was pulling out of the above mentioned shop and the oil light flickered twice; I almost ignored it, too. That would’ve been really, really really dumb)
hundreds of miles
sun-warmed post-rainstorm air that smelled fresh and honey-sweet during a stretch of highway through fields and woods
a cup of coffee and a strawberry bear claw on the way home, from a great small town bakery with an awesome “won’t close till the pastries are pretty much gone” policy
“Just along down the way, there is a place where no plow blade has turned the ground”
-40 Acres, by Caedmon’s Call
On that note, only very tangentially related, here’s a cool picture:
Appreciation
I have never thought to myself “Hmm, I could appreciate coughing.” Now though, I appreciate coughing.
I woke up last night (somewhere in the middle of it, after taking a long time to fall asleep amidst coughing fits) coughing, but then wasn’t able to cough because the coughing muscles were finally completely spent; I tried to cough and all that happened was this really pathetic sound, “cchhHHeeeaaaaahhh.” It sounds like wind-knocked-out wheezing less the charm, all the ugh of coughing minus the momentary relief of the actual “cough” part. The only thing I can think to liken it to is when you’re puking and you’ve basically emptied your belly, but your system is like “oh no I don’t think so, we’re going to keep at this.”
A different perspective can be a mighty thing. I appreciate coughing.
Apologies, I believe this is the most unpleasant thing I’ve written here by a long shot. Does anybody have some crackers and cheese to go with my whine?
The book
A bible should be filled with food crumbs, ink stains and creased pages.
Greatest
The way a soccer player celebrates a game-winning goal has to be one of the greatest things ever, whether Saturday morning pickup or the World Cup final. Iniesta looked like a little kid after he scored the goal today*. Picture a child one sunny afternoon celebrating a backyard goal in London or Guatemala or Seattle or wherever else; it’s just so honest, pure and joyful.
The same goes for the moment of a loss–a missed shot or a bumbled save. Straight up pure sadness, dejection and disappointment show their full colors. Again in that moment the pro athlete is no different than the little heartbroken child.
In these greatest moments we’re all like children in wonder and feeling. That means something and is not small.
We all should take this to heart more often.
—
*For when I can’t remember why that means anything special: the ’10 World Cup final was today, Spain vs. Netherlands, and Iniesta put the ball in the net in the 26th minute of stoppage time for the win for Spain. VIVA ESPANA VIVA VIVA LA FURIA ROJA!!!!
By the way, Iniesta’s tank top writing is a tribute to a fellow Spanish soccer player who died of a heart attack not too long ago.
"Put that on a label, baby."
That’s my new (and likely semi-permanent) favorite phrase.
This how it came about. We were sitting eating hamburgers and salads, and I was reading the backside label on the bottle of Newman’s own Light Honey Mustard dressing.
It went like this:
The Great Salad Dressing Balloon Race. An armada of balloons loaded with Light Honey Mustard. The starters gun – Bazoombah! They all rise majestically into the air. Newman’s Own Balloon, with fewer calories, more taste, and secretly propelled by charity, flies faster than Kraft and further than Wishbone. First across. First on the ground. El Piloto quaffs much quaffs of Newman’s Own Light Honey Mustard in victory. A medium light Italian starlet, daughter of Butch Cassidini, named Bitch Cassidini, leaps into the balloon basked, kisses Piloto, her lips smeared with Newman’s Own Light, she murmurs, “You taste of Sicily, of Vesuvius, of Naples, baby,” and patting his fanny she whispers, “and no fat.”
–the ingredients list is after that, followed by the nutrition information. That is nuts! It’s slightly vulgar and very odd. It’s seriously gutsy and awesome marketing. Naturally I then read the backside label on the bottle of Newman’s Own Ranch Dressing:
LEGEND: When Butch Cassidy got zapped in Bolivia circa 1911 by the local cavalry, he had a revolver in his hand, six peso in his pocket, and a recipe for Ranch Dressing in his safe deposit box which was later given to me in reverence of the motion picture and in return for a percentage of the gross. On the back of this recipe in Butch’s own hand was writ: This stuff is so good it ought to be outlawed.
Again, awesome marketing.
After a bit of talk and laughing and some mild arguing, this happened:
David (me): “and that marketing director had to stamp it off, and be like ‘yeah, put that on a label-
Jason (my brother) finished the sentence: -baby.”
And so it was made: put that on a label, baby.
That’s my new line; I think I’m going to keep it for a while too.
Wow, today
Ok…I’ve resisted a long time. I have not wanted to be one of those harking naffs who writes a really boring several paragraphs every day about every day. Well here are lots of paragraphs about today, because today was nuts.
1. World Cup:
-Tim Howard, you are incredible. Past making boss saves, the one corner at the end, when the other keep jumped up to punch it and his HAND was just barely higher than your HEAD. That is awesome. To the rest of the boys in red, white and blue: you rock. Way to represent your country to the world, what an incredible run. I can’t say it any better than a radio announcer did: “there is nothing left. Those boys left everything they had on the field.”
2. My little sister:
She’s in Texas right now for the annual National Jumprope Tournament, she spent all of yesterday puking her guts out and her 4 person team took first place in their age bracket today. Like…what? How does that work? How is that humanly possible? She will be on ESPN competing against all other 4 person teams for the Grand Champion title.
Dear Beth: go hit your routine tomorrow like you never have before. Go hit it in the teeth with a big chair so hard, swing for the fences and show’em what you’ve got.
(no photo can capture the awesomeness here, so no photo here shall be)
3. Ham Radio:
After one evening (6+ hours) and one morning (2+ hours) of intense strong-coffee-aided studying of radio, I passed the FCC General Class Amateur Radio exam (lots of capital letters there). Jason and my pops did the same. We can now use all VHF/UHF bands and almost (there are, like, two tiny restrictions) all HF bands. “HF” means wavelengths from 10 to 160 meters. That’s some long waves. With a bit of practice, that means free (well…after buying a radio. Ouch.) and cooler-than-skype worldwide communication with friends and family.
It’s also a good excuse to, someday when I have the pickup I’ll go offroad-camping-exploring in, have a wicked awesome radio on the dash and a nice big antenna swaying from the back bumper.
4. “You can put that on the label, baby.”
(see the post above this one)
What a day.
Edit:
…and I just now (10:30pm) discovered a better way to slice cheese. No joke.
From the mountain
Here are a few black and whites I shot on a hike up to Camp Muir the Saturday before last. It was a very somber day; on the way to the mountain my friend and I stopped at Burger King for breakfast at 4:30, we got to the mountain at 6:00 and talked with the ranger about avalanche conditions. Static filled radio reports from his handset filled the office, he was strained and chewing tobacco: an hour and a half earlier there’d been an avalanche on the mountain. Status reports were spotty, but there were at least half a dozen climbers hit and one likely fatality.
The exposures were taken with the same camera and lens setup, a Nikkormat and Nikkor 50mm f1.4; I shot Kodak Plus-X 125 film rated at 100. I’ve gone on the cheap and am doing my own scans now, but unfortunately I couldn’t get the really-fancy negative scanner at school to work, so again the scans are with a low end flatbed scanner. Hopefully I’ll have good scans in a few weeks. And again, same deal with the scan # versus the exposure #. Lastly, I do plan to touch up the ones that have obvious mechanical/chemical errors, i.e. the odd non-graduated horizontal tint/shade line in #’s two and five.
That day left a lot on my mind and heart, but none of it is really present and/or clear enough to be able to describe coherently; I want to though. Maybe in a few weeks, or months.
Edit:
I added three more shots. 6/24/10 DP
Two excerpts–
–from All the Pretty Horses, written by Cormac McCarthy
——–
Rawlins mounted up. You ready? he said.
I been ready.
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once a jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and the thousand worlds for the choosing.
——–
That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
——
Smile-Sploosh
(written June 2nd 2010)
So, I rode the motorcycle to school today; ah man, I love it. It was rainy out, but that didn’t matter. Just like lemonade is great because it’s both sugary and acidic, riding a motorcycle is great because of both the sunny and the rainy days.
That all isn’t too relevant, except for the rain part. It was rainy in the early afternoon today, when I rode to school.
I parked the bike in an alley by my favorite cafe and began to walk to class. I turned in my last homework earlier that morning and was walking to my last class…like…legit, last class here, now and at UW. This class has no final exam…only the aforementioned already-turned-in paper. So this is it. The feeling of walking to that class must be a tiny bit like what Usain Bolt felt as he celebrated his 100m Olympic smash-win before the race was even over. Well…ok, maybe it wasn’t that epic. But if felt kinda awesome.
What I’m trying to say is that I was very content while walking to class; I was taking it all in.
Any Husky knows the main walkway down the middle of the quad is not a level surface; after a few years one gets used to it and can take the depressions and rises in easy casual stride, without so much as a downward glance. I’m definitely all there.
I’m walking to class, through the quad; almost there. It was still raining, so I’d left my helmet on for the walk. It is a typical full face motorcycle helmet, DOT and Snell approved and all that jazz. A sizable and vented piece of it protects my chin and beard very well; this lower-face-protection also kills my lower peripheral vision, but that’s not an issue for riding, since one doesn’t spend too much time looking at the gas tank. For walking it also didn’t bother me, because I was content and looking all around and taking in the sights, sounds and smells (I had the visor up) of the quad. Then out of nowhere somehow this random dude and I made eye contact–he was sorta staring at me, while walking perpendicular, crossing my path 30 or 40 feet ahead. He grinned…I was a bit confused. He went back to walking on his way, but glanced back again at me, grinned a little bit, then went on his way. I now believe that, just before this eye contact, he actually looked somewhere I hadn’t, namely directly-in-front-of-me.
Just as he wiped that silly grin off his face I splooshed right into a gigantic puddle I didn’t see because of the great part of my helmet that protects my chin and beard, and because I was so contentedly looking everywhere but directly-in-front-of-me. As the rainwater washed over my shoe and soaked my sock, I thought quickly: I was on my pre-victory walk. It was OK. I confidently splooshed through the rest of the puddle.