So I’m watching the Real Madrid – Barcelona game last week and eating ceviche (a really delicious central american dish with fresh shrimp) and my gut’s all like “something’s not right man. These shrimp are at room temperature.” I’m a tough guy, so I ignored my gut.
Six hours later my gut was like “screw you.”
When we were kids, on May Day (today) we would pick flowers and make baskets of them and run around the neighborhood leaving them on doorsteps and ringing the doorbell and running. It’s one of those oddly surreal childhood memories that makes me wonder if just the same my life now will someday be an oddly surreal memory. And whether that would be good or bad.
Happy May Day!
It’s the May Festival of Barillas, here are some pictures. Today the rural schools, tomorrow the urban schools (literally, not figuratively), so more pictures to come soon. As neat as it all is, the sharp difference between the bands and students of the rich kid schools and the poor kid schools is a hard hitting thing; I wish I was better at saying things with my camera.
Awesomely brilliant timing and speed from la Pulga, two freaking beautiful goals for the good guys.
Yes the good guys beat the bad guys today. And it makes me so happy.
(I’m less happy about dirty-slide-tackler guy snapping Zakuani’s leg the other day. Not cool, man)
Messi’s second freaking beautiful goal. Solo he schooled the three guys in white in the picture, one other guy in white and the enemy keeper.
Well, at least they pretended to.
The Jews (red capes and hats) shouted and jeered. The crowd began to get into it; that was the weird part.
So yesterday I’m like “alright. I’m making scones.” Also yesterday I got pegged by a hum dinger of a cold, headache and stuffy nose and all the joy. After four trips to the grocery store, I had the ingredients ready to make scones. I made the scones and forgot one of the three cups of flour. A mistake like that has consequences: there was an aesthetic casualty.
This one day I went with some of the healthcare admin folks who had 8 communities to visit. It was a long day: we started at six in the morning. I only went along for one community where we have some sponsored kids that needed shoes and backpacks–the rest of the time was tag-along. Close to the end of the day the healthcare folks had one community left to visit but got a call to go pick up an emergency–thankfully by chance a nurse was along with us. He’ll be working in one of the communities soon and wanted to visit it to see what was in store for him.
We arrived at the end of the road, the community where the emergency was is a steep half-hour walk. We waited there for a few minutes at the end of the road, and the contact who’d called us, the community healthcare-facilitator, arrived and said it’d be half an hour until the woman arrived. The emergency was a woman who’d begun labor earlier in the day and something wasn’t going right.
She arrived on a board being carried by half a dozen of the men from the community. The baby was already dead and the mother in severe condition. The dead baby’s father, grandmother and some of us who were in the pickup all climbed into the back and Don Checo put the pedal to the metal over a horrible road. It was an hour’s trip back to the hospital in Barillas. The whole time I didn’t see a single tear from any of the family members, not the grandmother nor the father. Things are like that often here, and I got to thinking about it. Maybe in country where there is so much death and pain, life has somehow a lesser felt value. I didn’t like that idea because it just seems so wrong, but nonetheless I thought it. I thought about my brothers and their wives and my parents and what it would be like if a child died in birth.
We got to the hospital where a nurse was standing outside to meet us–she placed an IV quickly and began checking vitals. The woman had begun to cry out in pain. I had already climbed out of the back of the truck–I thought about taking pictures of the nurse working, but out of respect or cowardice couldn’t bring myself to do it. As I turned to walk up to the office I glanced back at the grandmother and she was sobbing. In a moment I didn’t see her but I saw my mom and I broke down.
1. I’ve never once regretted having gone backpacking
2. Short stories
3. Poverty — ignorant and prideful people both the poor and the rich — poverty-making suppression and abuse of people groups
4. Supermacro help and supermicro help…everything else doesn’t work
5. 1977 Yamaha 250 two-smokers are really, really really fun and loud
6. Teaching (supermicro)
7. Taking beautiful pictures with a digital camera loses it’s charm
8. Catch-22
9. Alaskan bush pilots
10. Alaskan bush pilot
11. The ocean
12. Pike Place Market mini-doughnuts
13. Native America
14. Lost times and lost people that live on in tales and stories
15. The Beatitudes
16. Mayan numbers (I can do zero to five hundred, yo)
17. Queen Charlotte Islands
18. Murtle Lake, BC
19. Princess Luisa Inlet
20. Bicycle mechanic
21. Motorcycle mechanic
22. Whiskey and tobacco
23. Stout
24. Origins of Christianity
25. Galois Theory
26. Rag chewing
27. Indoor soccer goalkeeping
28. The motorcycle wave
This is the best thing that has shown up in my Google Reader feed; ever.
Quick, somebody fetch me a lot of money and a plane ticket to the UK. And starter rollers too, please–preferably in white and red.
The power to weight ratio is close to that of a new GSX-R600. One’s 0.29, the other is 0.35. Guess which is which.
http://sideburnmag.blogspot.com/2011/04/xr750-for-sale-on-uk-ebay.html
A digital SLR like this: indexed ISO adjustment wheel for the right thumb, shutter speed dial, manual/aperture-priority modes and only-auto white balance, two-position light-meter switch: matrix and weighted spot. Push-button 12 second timer, manual mirror-up mode. No external display, only an in-viewfinder needle light meter and small lcd counter on top for pictures-remaining. Super long battery life and well padded circuit boards, gasketed metal body.
Pretty please!
Oh yeah, and if it could look like a Nikon F3 or a Leica III series, without looking like it’s trying to look like a Nikon F3 or Leica III series, that would be a great plus.
Edit:
And if light meter needle could have little tick marks +/- EV in thirds, up to one EV, that would be some seriously wonderful frosting on the cake.
M, this is for you.
A few days ago I realized April Fool’s day is coming up soon, and I have been thinking a lot about it. Lots of things have come into my mind and heart when I realized that April Fool’s day is something deeper, a clear window into human condition. I only realized this when the concept of birthday and the concept of April Fool’s day came together in my mind, which happened thanks to my dear friend from school and my old Troop leader from Boy Scouts, who were both born on April 1st.
Wait, April Fool’s day? There are a lot of Holidays that are great for getting all windy about–Commercialized Christmas, unThankful Thanksgiving, Egg-riddled Easter, Baffling Boxing-Day, et cetera–but really Dave, April Fool’s day? Yes, April Fool’s day. And a birthday. Humor is one of things we still really have no clue about, and birth is the beginning of life.
Is this whole post just a hackneyed cliche? Ends and means, friend, ends and means.
In the past six months, my mind has been really occupied by this thing, human essence, human condition, or whatever you might want to call it. Living in Guatemala has been a wild experience so far–not at all what I expected, but more learning than I can shake a stick at it. Two things have been separately wandering around my mind–the celebration and remembrance of birthdays, which many don’t do here (the lower two thirds of the population, the poor, usually don’t know their date of birth), and why we find humor in the unknown and unexpected (like April Fool’s jokes).
Two days ago, in a twinkle of a moment these two things dovetailed and immediately made all the sense in the world and opened up this window, this lens that helped me understand this idea of humor and the celebration of birthdays.
It’s long, so click to read more–
Important edit:
250cc (pretty sure it’s a DT250)
