the most miraculous miracle of all

Something I hope not soon to forget:

Me-- Do you know what a 'caterpillar' is?
Student-- Yeah.
Me-- What does a caterpillar turn into?
Student-- ......a cat?
Me-- No.

A lesson learned

I don't mind working until nine or ten at night. Doesn't bother me. But 8am--or 5, 6, or 7am, for that matter--I complain about. And having to work at 8am every morning hasn't gone well for me.

Generally too discombobulated upon waking to manufacture--or give a rip about manufacturing--new outfits, I arrive to class bathing in the smoke of last night's outing, with the wrong class materials, toothpaste inexcusably far down my blouse, shirt buttons incorrectly matched, and sweating from the hustle from apartment to metro to institute--convinced that the 'warning' I received about tardiness to class wasn't a joke. Time ... is something that kills me.

What I'm saying is: I don't work well with 8am.


But my Mon-Wed-Fri 8am class ended today! Hallelujah and good f,ing riddance, my friends. This class has been brutal.


And now I'm free free free . until I start my new class on Monday at 7:30am. ...

Intelligence Tes:

Which one don't belong?

The waterfront. Discovery Park. The Ballard Locks. Ivar's. UW. Capitol Hill. Vegans. Essential Baking Co. The park below the park below Kerry park. Transantiago. B&O Espresso. Easy Street Records. Compline. Recycling. Cycling. Mount Rainier. Chianti. Those Damn Liberals. Snoqualmie. Alkai. Golden Gardens. Joe Bar. Lenin. Roxy's Deli. International District. Bubble Tea. The Elesyian. Market St. The Montlake Cut. The arboretum. Barnes and Noble. Elliot Bay Books. Pies & Pints. Sip & Ship (<3<3<3). Lake Washington. The Stranger. Aurora. SAM. SBOC. Hundreds and hundreds and HUNdreds of parks. Ferries. Tolerance. Men. Plans. A canal. Man-made water basins. Crooked teeth.

Wherein we find that the interior decorating card isn't in my hand

Welcome to my room. Make yourself at home. ... I still haven't.

The spring has never been more necessary

Un retrato de la Plaza de Armas

They may not be as quaint as the original plazas dotting every city in Spain, but Chile does what it can to ensure every town is equipped with a Plaza de Armas (as well as an Avenida Alameda, and a Bernardo O'Higgins, and an Independencia, and a San Martín, and an Estado...o sea, all the streets have the same names, laid out in different patterns in each city...or lain out? I never know.).

In any case, I wish I could take you on a walk through Plaza de Armas on a weekday afternoon. Everytime I walk through the plaza, I can't help but laugh to myself (and sometimes, embarrassingly, out loud) at all the silly antics of the plaza patrons. And, if you were with me, I'm certain we would make our way blindly through the caricatures and amateur paintings of every picture-postcard scene that exists in Chile until that strange stone sculpture caught our eyes with its stature so disproportionate--as if it were trying to look more important than it actually is, than is actually ever was. Who made that decision, anyway? But there's no reason to dwell on any one pecularity for too long.

A mime draws a crowd of families and lunch hour passers-by.
There are ponies that look awfully similar to brooms with bits of wig on them.
There are llamas wearing miniature hats--which I still think is criminal. Llamas were never meant to wear hats.
And the local pigeon brigade flocks in for a feeding frenzy sponsored by a heartful niña--sending a plaza dog cowardly into refuge beneath the nearest park bench, where he peers out apprehensively between the feet of a bench-sitter, perhaps considering how to send the pigeons exploding off into the overcast afternoon but, perhaps, too overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the little bastards--I know I am.
A man standing by a tree with a large amp splays irreverant decibels into the overcrowded air--an incomprehensible geyser of good intentions, but pitifully little creativity.
Ice cream. Mote con huesillo (stranger, to me, than the mysterious "red bean drink" that you might find in an East Asian restaurant)--it's a summer drink with peach nectar, a dehydrated peach (pit intact), and wheat berries in the bottom. Cotton candy. Roasted nuts that, anyone will proudly boast, are sold in New York by the now-famous Chilean who launched the company, Nuts4Nuts. The whole plaza smells like fair grounds.
And at twenty collapsable card tables men play chess as the church clock absently chimes the hours away.

The Plaza was a good idea.

I felt old for the first time the other day when I asked a student what he would do if he won a million dollars, and he said he'd use "those check things" to share his money with family.

Those check things? "Those check things"?! And just like that...I'm old.

An observation that I'd like to elaborate on, must elaborate on, cannot say without elaborating on, but have no time to elaborate on:

One night last weekend a Chilean friend took me to this very famous-for-being-traditional restaurant called La Piojera (which, I learned this morning means--a place where lice abound). This place is a mock 'fonda'--which is the traditional party places that spring up all over Chile during the week of the Dieciocho (the 18th of September-- Independence Day).
... Bueno. So I went to La Piojera because I missed the entire week of Dieciocho celebrations when I fled across the border to Argentina. And, obviously, I can't not experience the Fonda. It's Chile. It's what Chile was born to be.
And, in that case, Chile was maybe born drunk. I've never seen so many extremely drunk people in one place. Bakan.

And here's the bit I should not just leave off on, but I'm going to. My friend/cultural tour guide explained to me: Latin America was colonized by thieves and drunkards. And now you understand the cultural situations Latin America finds itself in.

... Así es.

A Word About Ambition

I have two long-term goals in my life, no three: 1) To be a teacher. (And I don’t mean an unqualified teacher of my-boss-is-making-me-learn English as a second language in some hoity toity South American metropolis. — In the end, this may not have been the most shining of experiences [but certainly not the dullest, either, Jena Past], but I’d like to think that it will have contributed some sort of hash mark that will probably look much more significant, in a nonchalant sort of way, only after several other hash marks have been had.) Oh Christ. What a desultory line-up of perfect tenses—ESL text books are doing a number on my syntax. Number Two. 2) To not ever have children. 3) To have one Original Thought, one time in my life. (I wouldn’t mind having two or three of them, but that seems unjustifiably selfish—seeing as (a) these opportunities are so hard to come by, and (b) I think we’ve all got enough on our minds as it is.)

I was recently accused by a roommate (Surprise! I moved!) of having no ambition. No ambition! Me! No ambition! I’m ambitious, damn it. I want things. I’m getting there. Maybe there’s no emblematic white picket fence to be accounted for; maybe my ambitions are a bit more unconventional, but shove it. I have ambitions.

And, if it’s not immediately apparent that this is actually a lofty ideal, I can at least agree that The Original Thought is an obscure ambition. (An ambition, nonetheless.) But let’s think about this: How many people do you know personally who have had some brilliant, or even very idiotic, but still a very strikingly original idea? It’s all been thought before[pessimistic overstatement]. There are a handful of protoids (that’s original!) that have the gall to call dibs on originality.

—Love, taken. Hate, taken. Every degree in between, taken taken taken. Sibling rivalry, thought of. Eternity, covered. Finiteness, covered. In betweens, theorized a hundred times over. Anything pertaining to individual or collective responsibility, free or regulated markets, personal or financial or abnormal growths; all manner of manias, every obsession, every fear has a name.— So what’s left to think? Everything is a rerun of some obtusely brilliant man’s description of what is or what may be or what should be or what was once.

My ambition is to be an inventor of an Original Thought. Just one, so as to keep an overinflated market at bay. … So that’s pretty boring. I’m going to go read a book on the metro and stew over the acheivements of others. And then I’m going to log my fourth and fifth hours of work for the day, and call it a night. I have no time for ambitions.