Sometimes I like to share my G-Chat convos. This is one of those times:

Scene: Discussing music playlist for my upcoming dinner party

me: I'm on isoHunt
searching for torrents
and always giggle when I come across these albums called things like
"Electro House you NEED 2007"
cuz let me tell ya...
I don't need no electro house

Monica: haha
what kind of music for Friday? the old standards (dean, frank)

me: I'm going to play **exclusively** only music from commercials--you know iPod ads and Mitsubishi commercials. Bands like the Ting Tings and Cat Power...maybe even that new Madonna song from the Sunsilk ad

Monica: haha
Feist?

me: I don't know what it's called. I just call it "that shampoo commercial song"

Monica: Why don't you throw in Of Montreal for their song that runs in the Outback Steakhouse ads (even though the lyrics were completely changed for the ad)? What lead you to this decision?
me: Well, there is just so much good music in advertising these days...

Monica: no kidding

me: i may even throw in a few of the old standards. You know, like:
"A dollop of Daisy...A dollop of DAAAAY-Sy"

Monica: haha
awesome

me: and 30 seconds of the aardvaark song

Monica: I know you love that damned aardvaark song

me: I do!

Monica: is it two double-as?

me: I do love it

Monica: or just one: "aardvark"?

me: Ahh...I just added it for good measure

Monica: one

me: It's "aardvaaark," actually.

Monica: thankfully, google chat has a spell checker

me: It's three and one double-A actually. Five total.

Monica: and ironically enough, google comes up as a misspelled word

me: no. firefox has a spell checker
not google

Monica: well, whatever

me: haha
i do love that itunes song

Monica: and it doesn't have 5 As...

me: "i ain't freakin I ain't fakin this"

Monica: haha

me: mmmmm that hasn't been proven yet, Moe

Monica: yeah - it's catchy
Uh, yeah it has

me: I should just play all Frank and Dean
and then slip that in randomly
and be like
"what? what's the problem? it's a classic!"

Monica: haha
go for it - it's your party
all right
have to get to work

me: ok ok
you go work

Monica: it's gonna be a loooong night

me: I'm going to blog this.

Labels: conversations, friends, music, parties, Sony Aardvark

I'm not quite sure why I've had such a hard time putting the words down lately. A friend asked me this over drinks one night not long ago. We'd finally managed, after weeks of conflicting schedules, to meet in the cool September evening on a street corner in Chelsea--a location chosen for no reason other than its equidistant proximity from her apartment and my office. Wine poured, cigarette lit, we launched eagerly into that scattered kind of catch-up people do when it's been much too long. Racing from my new job to her new-old boyfriend to the mutual friend in absentia and, of course, the book club that only lasted a couple weeks but which brought us together (in person) for the first time.

"I expected there to be something good like the last time," she told me when the conversation drifted (inevitably) to the blogs which we both had admittedly been neglecting as of late. A touch of disappointment was audible in her voice--or perhaps it was merely my self-imposed guilt. I knew what she was referring to and she wasn't the only one of my friends surprised to not have found anything "good" in the previous days.

"I know, I know, I know..." I said, nodding my head and taking a sip of wine. "Well my laptop isn't working..." I started with the usual explanation, but then stopped, my eyes fixed on the couples passing down the street--shirts tight, arms linked, oblivious to the world...details logged for some future composition. She's a writer too, and if not her then whom else to tell the truth?

"Really, it's just not ready to come out yet, I think. It's all there kind of building up, but I'm not quite sure how to write it..."

And I guess that's really what it boils down to. I've never been very good about writing every day. I'll try, working in spurts, but really preferring the haphazard midnight moments of inspiration. The funny thing is that I have the stories...I write them all out in my head, laying on my bed, watching the sunlit patterns on my bedroom wall. I work out the dialogue, the colors, the reflections, and shadows...all of it. I laugh or cry or simply revel in how raw it feels, but it's that final step--translating it all to paper (or the screen, in my case) that seems to evade me lately.

I've been here before, in this space between daydreams and storytelling, and I know that soon enough it will all come tumbling out and it will be good and I will read it and tweak it over and over again in that perpetual search for the perfect phrase.

"It'll show up in a couple weeks, I'm sure," I told her. A promise more to myself than anyone else.

Labels: blogging, conversations, friends, Writing

I was going through some old notebooks from college this weekend and came across this journal entry that I wrote after a trip that a group of friends and I took to Guatemala during the spring of my sophomore year. It's another unpolished piece and a few of the cliche descriptions make me want to cringe, but I was taken by the underlying sentiment of indignant idealism that could only come from the pen of 19-year-old.


For more than two hundred years, the walled city of Antigua served as the military seat of the Spanish colony of Guatemala, which encompassed most of present-day Central America. Situated in a narrow valley at the base of the volcano Agua, the original city was destroyed twice before someone realized that walls or no walls, a capital city at the base of a volcano is, strategically speaking, never a good idea. In 1773 it was moved to what is now Guatemala City, but the missions and many of the Spanish style buildings still stand. For Agua, more than 250 years have passed in silence, and the volcano is believed to be dormant, but constant rumblings and daily bursts of steam from the menacing cone-shaped mountain seem to threaten otherwise.

But for now, the only strategy in Antigua is tourism. The streets are crowded with accents. Well-to-do Europeans, red like cooked lobsters, mix in with dread-locked college students in their natural fibers and Birkenstocks. And of course, Americans, heaving their weight around the bins of the marketplace, knocking over piles of coffee grounds with their nylon fanny packs. On my second day there, my friend Toby and I try to use a public phone to call home, only to realize that we've forgotten the US country code.

"Quick," I joke. "Find a fanny pack!" Spotting one around the corner I wave to the woman and ask, "Are you American? Do you know the country code?"

Turns out that it's "one."

"Well I wonder who decided that," snickers Toby.

__________

I'm in the town center and I'm alone today. The rest of the group left around five in the morning for a day trip to Panahatchetel, a village on Lake Atitlan, an impossibly beautiful body of water occupying the crater of an extinct volcano. Being one of the only students fluent in Spanish, I volunteered to stay behind to serve as a translator for the two students whose stomach's didn't agree with the Guatemalan food and who were now spending the day retching in an Antiguan clinic.

Around noon I walked them back to their hotel rooms and left them with water and strict instructions to take the Cipro I'd acquired from a nearby pharmacy where, interestingly enough, a smile seemed to serve just as effectively as an actual doctor's prescription. I wander in the direction of the town center, where the locals gather daily to pawn their wares on the tourists that fill the streets. The city also serves as the market center for the surrounding villages and so each morning families ride in on bright green and red buses, packed to the nines with piles of textiles, coffee, and crates full of live chickens.

Male and female, hovering around five feet, the natives quickly run amongst the clusters of foreigners proffering their goods. "Senor, senor! Solo Cien Quetzales!" The men carry bundles of hand-woven blankets strapped onto their backs. The women balance large baskets of coffee beans on their heads. Even the children, no older than ten, walk around with plastic bags filled with sliced mangoes, popcorn or coconut candy tied to sticks carried on their shoulders. It's the "15 cents a day" kids from the commercials. The ones that look at you while flies buzz around their faces and John Lennon imagines in the background.

A little boy gazes up at me with his giant eyes and even though I know he's been pulled out of school and sent here precisely to make me feel this way, I hand him a coin and take a bag of mango slices. There's history in these round almond eyes, the cafe con leche skin, the silver-capped teeth that reflect the sun--smiles that literally beam, I note.

I continue to wander around the market, touching blankets and smelling bags of coffee. I come across a display of large wooden salad bowls complete with eight small salad plates and serving utensils. I think about how back home the set would probably only come with four plates and wonder if that really means anything.

A woman walks over to me and smiles. She's missing a tooth in front and long black hair is wrapped in a woven scarf. "They are all carved by hand," she tells me in Spanish. I smile back at her and tell her that I think they're beautiful. Her smile widens when she realizes that I speak her language. She comes closer and asks me where I'm from. I tell her that I'm Puerto Rican but that I was born and live in the US. She nods her head and says, "I thought so, you are too pretty to be from Guatemala. The best-looking Latinas are from the Caribbean." When she says this, she touches her own face and I'm not quite sure what to say. Instead I look down at the bowl and ask her how much for the set.

"300 Quetzales," about 30 dollars. "But for you, since you are Latina, only 250." I know that I can get it down to 200, but I don't try. I tell her that I'll take it and she starts wrapping it in newspaper.

While she wraps she asks me questions about what I do and where I live. I tell her that I'm a student and that I live in Washington, DC. She asks me if I've ever been to the White House and gets excited when I tell her that yes, I have. She raises one of the sheets she's using to wrap the bowls. We declared war on Iraq yesterday and President Bush's face is on the page. "Have you met him?"

"I shook his hand once."

She looks down at the page and sighs, "I think he looks like a good man."

This catches me by surprise. Most of my friends hate the President and many are angry about the war. "Why do you say this?"

"His eyes. He has the eyes of a good person. Here the politicians don't look like that..."

From the little I've read about the country's political history I think I know what she means, but I know that I don't really understand--and I'm thankful for that. As I take my bag and turn to leave I remember what she'd said earlier. "You know," I start. "The Guatemaltecos have the most beautiful eyes that I have ever seen." I bend down to give her a kiss good-bye and she says, "Es el dolor de la gente." It's the pain of the people.

I feel like I'm bridging something, or maybe it's more like a scale and I'm somewhere in between the cooked lobsters and the cafe con leche. I feel it every time I talk to someone. This morning, the man at the bakery asked me where I'm from and I told him. Just like the woman in the market he told me that Puerto Ricans are more beautiful than the Guatemalans. I protested and told him that I'd seen many beautiful women during my time in the country. "Muy India," too native, he said, wrinkling his own Mayan nose. Again, I don't know how to respond.


__________

A few days pass and we're back in Guatemala City. The group is together and we're in the van heading for the airport. On the main highway we pass a billboard advertising a local newscast. The team of anchors smile broadly in coordinated suits. They look strangely American. Their fair skin and Anglo features contrast starkly with the faces I saw in the marketplace. I point this out to the friend sitting next to me.

"What does 'La Voz' mean?" He asks, referring to the slogan printed in bright yellow letters across the billboard.

"The Voice," I say. It says, 'The Voice of Guatemala."

He looks at it and rolls his eyes. "Doesn't really look like it..."

Labels: conversations, Guatemala, memories, travel

I've been trying to go back and tie up all my loose blog ends by completing and posting those entries that I'd left unfinished and stuck in draft mode. This is one that I started back in the Fall, and have only just now completed.

"Matching Christmas sweaters..."

Vanessa and I were sharing plates of homemade pasta at a little Italian restaurant near her office. She was temping and I had yet to start my job, so we took our time--dipping bread in peppery olive oil, sipping Chianti. The place was a rare find among the generic Lexington Avenue sandwich shops and make-your-own salad places. It's the kind of NY Italian you miss when you're far from home: checkered tablecloths, yellowing photographs of Sofia Loren, and the Best of Dean Martin swelling out over the loudspeakers.

We had been talking about our impressions regarding marriage. Neither one of us is ready to "go there" just yet; we each have a list of things that we'd like to accomplish first, and an idea of who we'd like to be as women before we're ready. Unlike those who rush about like the White Rabbit, afraid that they'll miss something, we're willing to take our time. This does not, however, preclude our willingness to talk about it. I was about to be a bridesmaid for the first time, and we were trying to figure out what exactly that thing is that makes two people say: "Yeah, it's you. It will always be you."

"I'm telling you...matching Christmas sweaters," Vanessa repeated. "That's what I think of when I think of marriage. Fuzzy yarn reindeer with little pom-pom noses. Ugh."

I laughed. "You guys will never wear matching Christmas sweaters. You know that... For me, it's more like always having someone to eat breakfast with on Sundays. You know, lingering over coffee and swapping sections of The New York Times."

Her face brightened and she nodded, "yeah, I do love Sunday breakfast with him."

The conversation drifted elsewhere, but later that afternoon I started thinking about what we'd said. I realized that the things we had each described had absolutely nothing to do with marriage itself. In fact, they were little more than decontextualized images symbolizing our respective fears and desires when it comes to relationships in general.

For Vanessa, it's the loss of individuality; her fear of one day not being able to recognize a self apart from her relationship. For me, it's the yearning for constancy; a desire to finally have the opportunity to build and grow a connection with one person. We both know and understand that marriage is much more than just the wedding, and certainly more than Sunday papers and--God forbid--matching Christmas sweaters, but it's still difficult to separate these ideas from the reality we both understand lies beneath.




*Come on now...what's the quote from?

Labels: conversations, friends, life decisions

The following is an excerpt from a recent late-night (approx. 2:30-3:00 am) text convo with BFF Matt:

BFF Matt: Every once in a while, when I start to feel like maybe I can get used to this place,* I end up in a bathroom stall with a guy throwing up on my left and a couple getting it on to my right... What the fuck am I doing here?

Me: Wait...were you pooping? Why were you in a stall?

BFF Matt: Of course... I was going number 2!

Me: At a bar?!

BFF Matt: You know I have irregular bowel movements...it's out of my hands, or maybe my pants...

Me: This is going in the blog.

*BFF Matt lives in Vegas, where he is Teaching for America...

The next day I received a call from him. He wanted to clarify that the bar that he had been at was in The New Frontier Hotel & Casino and featured a midnight bikini mechanical bull riding contest and copious line dancing. I think this was supposed to justify his actions, but really, I think it only makes it worse...

Labels: BFF Matt, conversations

On passing a boy of about 10 or 12 crossing Flatbush Avenue:

BFF Vanessa: You know, I've seen, like, three midgets already today.

Me: Um....yeah. Except that wasn't a midget. It was a small child.

BFF Vanessa: Well I'm not counting him...

Labels: conversations, friends

I had to call my insurance company a few minutes ago to get some information regarding a claim. Here is an actual snippet from our conversation:

CareFirst Operator: What is your name?
Me: Alejandra
CF: Ok, Honey, and what is your last name?
Me: No, not "Honey," it's Alejandra.
CF: Not Honey?
Me:Uh...no. Who's named "Honey"? It's A-le-jan-dra.
CF: Oh...Sorry.

Labels: conversations

In a previous post I confessed that I often blog from a Dell Notebook instead of a Dell Desktop. This has not been the case lately, however, as my laptop went into hibernation a couple weeks ago and has yet to be coaxed out. There seems to be some kind of problem with the port where the AC adaptor connects and so the battery won't charge properly.

My current laptop is actually one that I inherited from my mother in December of my senior year at GW when my laptop died and my dad refused to buy me an iBook.

"Borrow your mother's for now," he said, "and we'll see about getting you a new one for your birthday." My mother, aware of my dad's inability to make decisions regarding major electronic purchases, reluctantly relinquished her brand new laptop.

"I guess I'll never see you again," she said sadly as she gently brushed her hand along the casing.

I quickly grabbed the computer before she could change her mind, stuffed it in my carry-on, and high-tailed it out of Jersey on the next Metroliner.

That was two years ago and my dad never quite got around to buying me that iBook I wanted. I think he purposely hesitated so that he could use the "Oh no...you're out of college now. You have a real job and can buy it yourself" excuse.

I don't really mind all that much. I am still eager to make the switch to a Mac--[although lately I'm kind of irritated by those stupid commercials with the "young hip guy" that represents Mac and the "old stodgy guy" meant to represent a PC. I think they're incredibly arrogant and obnoxious. Personally, I've never had any trouble connecting my "trendy japanese digital camera" to my PC or "capturing a family vacation." So suck it, trendy Mac.] but until then, I've got a pretty great notebook. And I also inherited my mom's stellar business service package (I think it's called "Dell Support 3.0) which provides free next-day in-home visits from Dell service technicians. It's pretty amazing (or so I thought). Last fall, BFF Matt spilled an entire glass of red wine all over this very same laptop and fritzed out the keyboard. Two days later a tech guy showed up at my office and switched it out for a new one.

Anyway, so the reason my computer has been MIA for the past two weeks has nothing to do with Dell or their level of tech support--it has to do with me and my dislike of tech support guys. Basically, I hate talking to those guys with their scripts and their constant assurances that they "understand how frustrated" I am and their "sincere apologies for the inconvenience." I hate that they always ask permission to place me on hold and then transfer me to their supervisor who reads me from another script in order to find out if I was "thoroughly satisfied with the level of support" I received. I know that it's meant to be polite and everything, but really, all I want to know is when is the technician coming to replace my motherboard. That's all. I don't care that you're recording the call. I don't want to know what the weather is like New Delhi. And I don't want to go through a list of prescribed steps when I already know what the problem is. I need a new motherboard. That is all. When can you deliver it? But of course, I have to sit there and pretend to plug and unplug and hold the power button down for 10 seconds while Raman(that's my guy's name) reads and stumbles over his script. "Sure, I'll hold the power button down, but I'm telling you it's the motherboard, Raman."

So I sit through 35 minutes of this and then Raman goes to check through his little manual after asking me if it's ok to place me on hold with all the elegance and reverance of a man asking for a woman's hand in marriage.

"Sure, whatever, Raman, but I'm telling you it's the motherboard." He puts me on hold, and I sit there flicking back and forth between Family Guy and Sex and the City reruns, waiting for Raman to come back and tell me that I need a new motherboard.
"Hello, are you there Ms. Ramos?"
"I'm here, Raman."
"Excellent. Yes well I've identified the problem and have determined that you need a new motherboard. I will send over a technician to replace your motherboard within 24-48 hours."
"Fan-fuckin-tastic."

Anyway, so Raman promises me that a technician will call to schedule a visit within the next day. I thank him, listen to another 5 minutes of customer service script, am transferred to his boss, tell her what a great job Raman did and how freaking satisfied I am with his tech support abilities, and finally hang up.

This was three days ago... I've yet to hear from the technician. I have, however, received two weird phone calls.

The first came last night at 12:59 am. As in after midnight! I realize that these guys are in India, but you'd think that they have some idea of times zones. The message that the Dell guy left went something like this:

"Hello, Yolanda (comp's still under my mom's name), I am calling from Dell to follow-up on the service call we received from you on the 24th. I see that you are not available now and am truly sorry that I missed you and so I will have to ask for a call back. Thank you and have a very good day."

WTF?! I'm sorry but the only people who are allowed to call me at 1am are drunk boyfriends, not Dell customer service reps.

The second call came just a few minutes ago. It was a prerecorded message telling me that the delivery of my new motherboard has been delayed due to inclement weather (read: psycho monsoon that has been raging all over the East Coast).

So here I am...72 hours later and still completely motherboard-less. It just sucks.

Oh and I better not get any comments about how Applecare is soooo much better because I think the only thing even more obnoxious than sitting on hold with some guy in New Delhi is listening to the Pussycat Dolls at the Apple store while waiting for my name to get called up at the "Genius Bar."

Labels: conversations, Gadgets, Grief caused by Dell notebooks