Marinating

It's been four months since I left Central America, which to some might mean these videos are overdue. On the contrary.

This is the point by when I usually start to miss Latin culture, when I feel myself settling back into the constant hum of the anxieties of living in the states. No moment feels simple here, what with thinking about how the $5-10 I'll need at least to buy anything (anything) will all add up, about my wrist that now has a chipped bone after I smacked it on the back of a glass doorknob and will this cheap brace I bought actually heal it because lord knows there's no chance in hell of getting an x-ray for the uninsured, especially for a non-life-threatening injury, and just the constant barrage of being around people who must fill their days and do not know, could not if they tried to comprehend, how to sit, say nothing, and absorb a moment.

There is nothing complicated about any of these scenes, all from my trip to Nicaragua this Semana Santa. "Quotidian" in English has an implied negative connotation: a chore to dread, the day-to-day, a monotony. In French and Spanish, the connotation is neutral-positive: the word is more of a reassurance, something steady, something you can rest in, not something you're confined to. Most anything I ever do will be about trying to get back to or recreate communal, quotidian moments like these:

And, an addendum to my ode to Latin American buses last year:

The movies they play on the buses are legendary, or rather, the fact that the bus ayudante is actually being democratic in his selection of such cinematic œuvres is ... remarkable. On countless 8-hour bus rides between La Paz and Cochabamba, which I had to take because I couldn't splurge $50 for the 30-minute plane ride, I would to drown myself in Broken Boy Soldiers on my iPod as I watched the altiplano go by and try in vain to block out the gratingly dubbed apocalyptic Jean Claude Van Damme movies they played back-to-back-to-back, because of course I'd been stuck right underneath the speaker.

I infinitely prefer the Marco Antonio Solís.

Corcoveándolo

Heidi and I went to La Palma, on the edge of the Corcovado National Park, on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula last weekend as part of my last-hurrah trip in Costa Rica and some relief for her from the economic oppression to the north. It was rad, and I documented this with photos.

Starring: A Somali flag, Moustache Pedro, the pickle tree, a mathematical beach line, the burliest window cleaner ever, and the fly that died by the hand of the hitchhiker's guide.

I Love 'My' Dog As Much As I Love You

The neighbors' little lady made my day today while I was taking out the trash:

The Corn Islands

Photos, in which Rachel and Holly go on a bona fide vacation to a tropical oasis, Nicaragua's Corn Islands, on the Caribbean:

When Words Get Tired

Granada is a photogenic city:




Starring: a haircut at Hilda's, the Boy Jesus Laboratory, the Man of the Mauve, and more colors and patterns.

Latin American Beauty

Setting the colors and patterns of my walk to work down the railroad tracks through urban San José to urbane Swedish indie, and in the process flattering Lauren's artistic genius, possibly to the point of plagiarism:

Starring: graffiti tags in Japanese, the Alaska-shaped bough, my jelly-clad foot 30 feet up on railroad tracks over the road, et al.

(The track is "Young Folks" an older one by Peter Bjorn and John, who, incidentally, have a new album out this week. And no, there is no comma, Oxford or otherwise, in that name.)

Maniquies Machitos

Glitzy costumes from a (literally and figuratively) flashy Latino parade on morose Aryan mannequins:

Blood

Chronology is not one of my strong suits, as I've said before. But the great thing is, it's also not always necessary.

(Read: Holly just got around to imovie/vimeo and this is the most recent footage of anything she has. They're also some cute videos. But don't expect me to go FinalCutPro on you any time soon.)

Christmas is one of the best times to be part of the extended family. There's not actually a bad time, but Christmas Day is when the awesomeness is most heavily concentrated. The routine has not changed since I was 4 and there were 15 of us. Now, the whole clan is at 32 and will be at 33 (at least) by December. The morning of, everyone gets to Gammy & Granddad's and stays corralled in the kitchen while the big people eat scones, chat, and try to keep track of the new little people who weren't around last time we were here and are now running around asking how soon until we can run into the den.

And this is a literal "run." We have taken pictures every year, probably since before I was around, of the moment when we open the door to the kitchen and let the little guys sprint from the kitchen, through the dining room, to the big, open garden room, where the presents (whose number expands geometrically with all the new gift-giving combinations the new spouses and babies each year provide) sprawl on the platform under the mammoth two-story tall Christmas tree. Of course, usually the kids have been prowling the gifts for the last few weeks each time they've come to Gammy & Granddad's and know with GPS-specificity where each of their gifts is located, so the running is to see if anybody got one of the big, day-of gifts, like the bicycle and other things like that that would otherwise require an obscene amount of giftwrap. I don't remember the first year I was holding the kids back and not one of the ones being held back because both roles are equally enjoyable.

We then proceed to the den, where we open presents one-by-one, youngest to oldest. These rules are never broken. It takes a few hours, and nobody ever gets bored, although everyone is quick to make sure you don't dally, because they have to wait for you to give your thank-you hug to your giver and then make sure they have the attention of their giver before they can tear into the gift. Inevitably, whoever is around the age of 6 or 7 (just old enough to be able to read the names, young enough to still be enthralled by the hunt) will be the go-to Present Finder for the group, too. This year, it was Andrew, who kept coming back to me, "Cousin Holly*, do you have a gift to open?" "No, bud, I'm out." "OK, stay there. I'll find one for you."

(*"Cousin" to differentiate me from Grandma Holly
and their (hopefully) future Chinese sister, Holly.)

While the footage might be older, the shots of the ever-expanding dinner and side tables (and Gammy surveying it all) might be some of the last ones since this year was the first year ever we did not all eat together but split into two different groups. On the one hand, this was a sad end of an era, but on the other, it meant I FINALLY GOT TO MOVE UP TO A GROWNUPS TABLE. True, we only had one table at our house, but it still was better to at least engage in conversation with my brothers, sister, parents, aunt, uncle, and grandparents, instead of watching the former, along with their other pairs of male cousins, hurl jibes at each other. Not that that isn't entertaining. Josh also remarked how, the next day when we got together for dinner out in Colbert, we all had a perfectly pleasant evening together and no one was having a drink, which would have been more than permissible, and I think there has been a bottle of wine from year to year, but it's just not habit. Besides this, the only other really critical detail about family dinner not captured in a photo here is the massive amounts of ice cream.

Later in the video, Andrew and I also did a 10 K cross-country ski race in February together. And I was not selective with the pictures I put in this: The kid really smiled THE ENTIRE TIME, and the closest he ever got to a complaint in 90 minutes on the course was, "Wow, this course is long." He is the happiest kid I have ever known. He also was a mailbox for Halloween that year.

Last year, he, his three siblings, and I spent a lot of time together and did the following: held a scavenger hunt in the dollar store (with two friends), explored down by the creek in the snow, played soccer, read stories (in many, many versions, loud v. soft, fast v. slow, e.g.), played multiple rounds of "abandoned babies," did school lessons, cooked dinner together, etc. Betsy discovered one of the best questions to ask Cousin Holly is, "Where are these earrings from?" and, anytime I'm wearing large discs, she asks if those are the ones I found hanging on the bush. She took some of the pictures in the later series in the bathroom and of me and Andrew when we were playing outside. She was giving him directions, too, in the vein of, "OK, now be really crazy like a monkey." And while the three of us were doing this, Adam was probably off exploring, and Katie was curled up inside reading for hours on end, i.e. exactly what I was doing when I was her age.

Then, the five of us also performed the marathon photobooth session required of all new owners of any Apple laptop:

(And yes, the song is in that terrible limbo between novel and nostalgic, but the thought of queuing all these frames to some other tune is not one I can entertain.)

And last, here's a tribute to Betsy, my Pacific Northwest version of Capucine:

In the first clip, I'm pretty sure she sings about someone who is "dead because she died [from falling off the table]" at the end, and I am trying to get her to say "girl," which she pronounces "gyearl," at the end of the second clip. She and I had some good times last year. In truth, all her siblings were equally filmable in their time, but she happened to be at that precise age when I had a camera to catch it.

One of my favorite Betsy moments last year, not captured on film, she and I were snuggling when she burrowed her nose into my shoulder. She, who has just discovered superlatives, pulled her head up, looked at me, and said with a big grin, "You smell the prettiest." "Oh ... that's really sweet, Betsy, thanks. [Pause] So what do I smell like?" "Hmmm ... donuts."

I'll take that.

Soundtrack for a Crab

Miriam posts multiple vids of Grayson and her babbling. I post ones of crabs eating to the beats of a couple different drummers. It works.

Out on Playa Sámara this past weekend, I was on my way to take pictures of the beach at sunrise for a hotel review, when I became completely engrossed by these bizarre multi-colored tree-dwelling crabs along the road. While they were apparently unperturbed by the speeding motor vehicles a few meters away, most of them shot into their lairs when I so much as thought about farting in their general direction.

But not this guy. About 5" long, he had that big papa don air, and there wun't no way he's gonna interrupt his meal fur no silly white girl and her camera.

But I like the video with this track, too, because what if those were your baby's arms?

I ended up with about a dozen pictures of the beach and three dozen of the crabs. (I also missed the Palin nomination by about two hours because I was having so much fun figuring out which song's lyrics were most in synch with the footage.)

Epic.

Welcome to the Tragicomedies, or what will likely comprise Chapter 14 of my yet/soon/maybe-to-be-compiled memoirs, 14 because that was the number of the untouched page in my passport that now bears a Costa Rican entry stamp.

(I avoided the obvious title for these Costa Rica writings because 1. to repeat "Chronicles" would have been unoriginal, and if I've learned anything from Madonna, it's the importance of reinvention, 2. I'm trying to wean myself off of my alliteration addiction, although the ever-emphatic hard k alliteration was admittedly attractive, and 3. the "Tragicomedy" gives me something to aspire to when writing these.)

NO WAY! SAN JOSÉ?

So, yes, I moved. It happened quickly, and I arrived a month ago in San José feeling not unlike how it must feel to get swept up in a tornado and then thrown down: discombobulated and wet.

It’s rainy season here and will be through October. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen, and Lord knows I’ve seen my share of precipitation. Starting in the early afternoon, the clouds ominously swell and darken, and then they erupt. For about the next 10 hours. Every day. I half expect to see Piglet in an upturned umbrella floating down in the rushing, rising rivulets. And it turns out jellies are practical, as well as stylish.

For the initial fortnight after I got here, I stayed in a hostel that was 35 meters from our office, which meant most days I walked to work in the morning, the clouds hemorrhaged, and I walked right back to the hostel to hibernate. All this to say, there was little with which to orient myself psychologically and geographically, to travel a couple thousand miles in a couple days and then wander a few dozen meters each day in a perpetual cloud. But I didn't move to Central America to mope about rain, promise. (And the redemptive blonde beaches are coming up.)

In reality, I moved because I got a job that I'd found on a website. True story. And it's a legitimate one: I'm the editorial assistant for The Tico Times, “Central America's leading English-language newspaper.” Now, when I tell people I work for the paper, I have to remind myself that I don't have to add, "I just freelance."

And it's a good fit, at last. I knew my sentence-diagramming skills, bless my little homeschooled soul, were not honed in vain! Although I do wonder sometimes if letting this Recovering Oldest Child pour over every minutiae of others' syntax and punctuation isn't like letting a former anorexic become a dietitian.

Thankfully I only wield a pencil and not the editor's red pen. So if you see an errant comma or amusing malapropism, please don't correct me: the flaws mean progress.

But this is one of the best parts of this paper: you can buy it in the states. Also, we have a P.O. Box in Miami, so you can send me things at domestic rates. And my best skill is, arguably (wink!), good written correspondence.

c/o The Tico Times - SJO 717
P.O. Box 025331
Miami, FL 33102-5331

Now that being said, as international stamps open a whole new world of fabulous philately, feel free to send postcards and other things of lesser value (inflatable pool animals might actually have some utility here) to our local address:

Apdo. 4632-1000
San José, Costa Rica

Besides inserting carets with that pencil and relentlessly looking up entries in the AP style guide, I get to write occasionally, too. Last week, I was responsible for a short news item, (encouraging a) letter to the editor, and photo each on soccer, which we were not otherwise covering despite the fact there were THREE INTERNATIONAL TOURNAMENTS going on. So many conversations went, "But why would we cover Euro Cup if there are no Costa Ricans playing in it?" "Because every person in this country is watching it. [It's about the solidarity that makes the nationality irrelevant.]" And the fact that Euro Cup was on the covers of almost every national daily almost daily. When we were putting the photo in, I mentioned to my editor the bit of his caption that said "soccer-loving Ticos everywhere" was twice redundant. He laughed. But I will convert every one of them, or at least get them to stop with the piteous proffering that soccer "doesn't have enough scoring."

And now (probably to shut me up) they've got me on the national soccer team beat, which means I get passes to the games and, if I’m good enough, some interviews with players. Score!

NEW GIRL AT SCHOOL SYNDROME

People keep asking me if I've “met any cool people yet,” how my coworkers are, etc. I can aver the coworkers are indeed cool and ever-so-quotable, and there are, naturally, cool people outside of work, too. (Including the 74-year-oldish man at the hostel who greeted me one evening with, "There's a very graceful swing in the pleats and structure of that skirt," as I was passing through the lounge. He was Scottish, so he could appreciate pleats, he said as he sat there in his suspendered corduroys. Within the next five minutes, he'd also told me about the beauty of the sound of bagpipes ("makes the skin tingle"), how he used to test silencers on the rats at the Pentagon, finishing with, "to make a long story short," a bit about the ironic desk he discovered that validated all his mothers' proverbs.) As with any place, you have to weed through other ridiculous characters, sure, but the good ones are there. And mercifully none of the weeds is at work. I would have more stories about the Ticos themselves, except they keep speaking to me in English. Here are some snippets of me doing my best to fit in:

Holly Would got lured out of a four-plus-year retirement into a rap battle in front of most of our newsroom staff with the reporting intern, who's from Hoboken and has sold "over 3,000 CDs in NYC." And in the maybe eight lines I spat out, I implausibly impressed all of them. One of the other reporters said they were thinking I wasn't going to step up, but I'd apparently won points for throwing down the word "guile." My sparring partner himself later asked me, "So how does a white girl from Idaho get to appreciate hip-hop, because you, like, really understand it?" GOOD QUESTION.

Then week before last, while watching Italy v. Holland with our Tico staff (all the North Americans were upstairs not watching), I turned a few heads for 1) being a gringa watching the game, 2) knowing which Italian Zidane head-butted in the last World Cup (Materazzi), and 3) knowing what Cannavaro had injured (left ankle). The ways I never expected to bond with our office accountant, tech support, and doorman. And they call the Dutch los tulipanes.

Later at a going-away party, my apparently long-lost twin — a girl with whom I share affinities for baseball teams that start with 'm,' countries that start with 'b,' and bandeau halter swim tops — and I are talking with a guy from Minnesota whom we've just met. Now, said guy is a bit beside himself with the fact that he can actually discuss sabermetrics with two level-headed gringas in Costa Rica. (Why more girls aren't sports fans is beyond me.) The best part was, when she challenges me to name the five other people the Kid, aka my Man, recently joined in the 600-homer club, which I do in about 5.6 seconds, he goes, "I just got goose bumps," and then he pulls up his sleeve, AND HE REALLY DID.

HOW D'YA LIKE THEM FIRST IMPRESSIONS?

I credit NaS, BBC Sport, and Sports Illustrated for Kids, respectively.

WHO SAYS PICTURE BOOKS ARE AN INFERIOR GENRE?

Although I know how much you all loved slogging through thousands of words on Adventures in Socialism and the Water Balloon Wars (and I didn't even write about the time I flooded the apartment after falling asleep in the bathtub with the water running), this round will likely be far more visual than textual because 1) Costa Rica doesn't have quite the revolution going on, nor I a blue bathtub, and 2) I have a camera at my disposal. Here are some bits from out and about in San José. Allez-y.

the more charming part of my morning commute

the national breakfast fare:
gallo pinto (black beans and rice), huevo, y cafe con leche
how have I not mentioned the coffee yet?

Quite possibly the best part of my day:
agua de pipa (coconut water), straight from the gourd.

Little circular beds of these flowers are all over downtown, but only until people uproot them to plant them back at home, I've been told.

New Favorite Material Possession: the Dragon Steeper.
The red version of this mug cost 1,000 colones ($2) more.

Cream with that sugar?
(Decor in a nearby café that was inexplicably removed a week ago by the owner.)

The below store is called The Galleon of Quality Stamps.
This explains EVERYTHING about Latin American bureaucracy,
all ghostly galleons of paper tossed upon cloudy seas of ink ...

Wonder if they sell any bibles.

You're gonna lose that call ...

Oh, and I got glasses. Ones I actually need.


This is how I know I am an editorial assistant.

Plus, I figure Amalie Benjamin needs some company in the Wildcat Alumnae Club of Bespectacled Brunette Sportswriters.

PLAYA = BEACH

You know all that rain? We beat it and went to the beach.

on the road from San José

And then we arrived.

bernard l'hermite

reflection.

reflectee.

Et voilá.