November 2010
18 posts
cotidiana
Today , when I didnt have enough cash at my empanada place by work, they told me i can pay tomorrow. gotta love becoming a regular.
attempting the bad poetry thing.
Sitting during the kids final with nothing to do, I scribbled poetry fragments as I was taught to do in my religious poetry class, then saw where they took me. Here’s one, which is apparently about boxing, after the fragment ‘bellweather for mayweather’ came to mind, who knows why. also tumblr spacing is annoying
bellweather for mayweather
hollow belllow the bells,
jump front...
contextual age
My teenage students, guessing my age today, gave me the absolute low ball charity guess of 28, the way you guess someone in their 60s is 45. 30s or 40s to them is a teacher, 20s just isn’t. These kids had 26 and 30 year old siblings, so I must be older than that.
Whereas when I’m wheeled into the ER, next to piles of decrepit olds [sorry], they think I’m 16.
What can I say...
mayonesa, mierda
the chilean obsession with mayonnaise needs to end. i think i can count on one hand the number of times ‘sin mayo’ did not result in persistent globs of mayo. should i say im allergic? to what? eggs? vinegar? right, lol.
poems and encantations
the other night, in a slight mood, out of the night that covers me, came upon me from the subconscious the long ago words of frost, two roads diverging in a wood. those poems we have memorized, an encantatory power. and i started to cry—idle tears of tennyson who knows. just reading that poem, so deep within my soul its by heart words. and I wish we had more words that were a part of this,...
metro math
I was sick of the metro today, so i did some mental math to pass the time. I figured I have lived 8929 days, but I couldnt quite finish the hours, getting to times 20, and not being able to divide that by 5 and add in my head. but on my napkin at lunch i got the numbers of
202,296 hours
12,137,460 minutes
7,280,247,600 seconds
thanks dad
I believe I was around 60 days off due to forgetting...
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea…till human voices wake us, and...”
– TS Eliot
cinema y silencio
I still think there is a silence to cinema, in contrast to television, that I cannot explain. Certainly, by nature, the cinema was silent and tv really comes from the talkiness of radio serials. But it is very subtle. A movie does not have a meta narrative, always talking at me, making connections to this which happened which will happen all with in this little world talking at itself. No matter...
libros libros libros
Trying to get back into reading some in Spanish. Trying to delve a little into Cortazar, who I might call the OTHER argentinian :) But I certainly feel how much more familiar just the shift to Chilean Spanish is, reading some Fuguet, the escritor de jovenes of the moment it seems, of whom I read a good book in English as well. Also, Anne Carson is awesomely smart.
nice people
There are some nice people left! My phone fell out of my pocket in a cab—-the taxista went back to my building and others [no luck that way though] and called my friend, left a number, came back the next night, and returned my phone AND my metro card. Such unnecessary altruism.
sometimes, in my most secret heart, i get incredible waves of nostalgia for california and the life i had there.
settling into santiago, for the first time in quite a while after the whirlwind of lawschool illinois camp spain and various interspersed chaos, and starting a life, however a short, i can take a deep breath, and remember what was behind all that, not so long ago, just as i watch the...
