What happens when you have too much time on your hands

These are apropos of nothing. I was just bored during the 17 flights I had to take to make my way from South Carolina to Oregon, and got to thinking. (I know, shhh.)

These are not meant to be definitive or anything, it's just what I like. And by "I like", I mean what I like right now. It's impossible to commit to hard-and-fast favorites, but one of the criteria I used when thinking up these Top 3's was that the items had to have been on the forefront of my mind for at least the past 5 years (or so).

Top 3 80's Songs

1. It's My Life - Talk Talk. Not to be confused by Talk Talk, by the band Talk Talk, off of their album Talk Talk. I love the singer's voice and his phrasing.
2. Desperate, But Not Serious - Adam Ant. His voice is dark, the horns are bright, and the lyrics make no sense. Welcome to the 80's!
3. Call Me - Blondie. I have a girlcrush on Debbie Harry. The lyrics in this song are simple, straightforward, and unapologetic.

Honorable Mention: Sweet Child o' Mine - Guns 'n Roses. Lovers of guns, roses, and apostrophes. I like this one mainly because of Slash - his guitar playing shines in this song and makes me want to go to a concert, tease my hair, sit on some dude's shoulders, and scream "I love you Slash!!! Wooooooo!!!" Then I'd take a swig of Miller High Life and pass out.

Top 3 90's Songs

1. Better Man - Pearl Jam. This is a song, see, that could have come off sounding very sensitive-ponytailed-man, but instead grabs you and makes you think of every woman you've ever known who has lived this song.
2. Blow up the Outside World - Soundgarden. I actually don't know how to explain why I like this one. All I know is it makes me close my eyes and rock out.
3. Paranoid Android - Radiohead. That intro gets me every time. There are so many contrasts in melody and feeling, and Thom Yorke's reedy voice adds to the tension in the song.

Honorable Mention: Grace - Jeff Buckley. I'm a big Jeff Buckley fan, and this is the first song of his I remember hearing. Another song that I like mainly because of its contrasts; a melody that's full of longing, and a voice that sounds almost anxious.

Top 3 Songs That I Hate With a Burning, Itching Passion

1. I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) - Meat Loaf. I won't even get into the old and tired jokes about the title. Also, I won't speculate on what it is he won't do, because I'm pretty sure I've narrowed it down and I probably wouldn't do it either. But aside from the lame title, Mr. Loaf has to be the most annoying singer I can think of. The stupid title, the stupid voice, and the stupid instrumentation make this one stupid song.
2. We Built This City - Jefferson Airplane. I can't explain this one. A fairly average mid-80's song, but from the moment my 5th-grader self heard it, I knew that I would hate it for the rest of my life. And look here, I was right.
3. (Everything I Do) I Do it For You. Oh my God, Bryan. Actually, I hate everything you do, but this one...this one just trumps it all. And to think that you do it for me, in your treacly, trite way, just makes me feel icky inside. This is just wrong, Bryan. Go find a girl who will appreciate the fact that you rhyme "love" with "love" and forget that I even exist.

Honorable Mention: I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston. Aaaaaaand IIIIIIayayayIIIIIIIII wiiiiill aaaalwaaaaaays looooove youuuuuuuuu woahhhhhhhh! My work here is done.

Top 3 Covers That I Like Better Than the Originals

1. Take Me to the River - Talking Heads (originally by Al Green). There's something slightly wrong about this song. He's singing to a 16 year old. I don't care how early people hooked up back in olden days, that just ain't right. And when David Byrne sings it, and the Talking Heads play the music, all that wrongness comes out in all the right ways.
2. Rusty Cage - Johnny Cash (originally by Soundgarden). Soundgarden made this song badass enough, but when Johnny says he's gonna break his rusty cage, you believe it. That man will do it, no question. I also love how he brought out a country twang in an alternative rock song.
3. Got to Get You Into My Life - Earth, Wind, and Fire (originally by The Beatles). I might get in trouble for this one, because omg teh beatles are teh awesome!!1!! And they are, but whereas the original song was good, this one brings out the basic melody and makes it groove. The one downside is that this song is from the worst movie ever made in the history of the universe, as well as whatever was around before the universe: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Honorable Mention: None. I got nothin' for this one. Suggestions welcome.

Top 3 Sitcom Theme Songs

1. Good Times: I always wanted to get up and dance to this song when I heard it. And I will be forever in debt to Dave Chapelle, who finally cleared up the mystery of what it is they sing after "scratchin' and surviving". (It's "hanging in a chow line.") I always pictured James and Thelma as the singers.
2. Diff'rent Strokes: "It don't matter what you got/Not a lot/So what?" So true. So, so true. And you Puerto Ricans out there, don't tell me that about a second after the name of the show comes on, you don't expect the voiceover dude to come out and say "Blanco y negro".
3. All in the Family: Maybe it was the song coupled with the images that went along with it during the intro, but I always feel a little verklempt when I hear it.

Honorable Mentions (because I can't do just one): Barney Miller, The Rockford Files, Sanford and Son

Puerto Rican on board

There's something kind of cool about spotting a PR bumpersticker on a car. The further away you are from PR, the more my neck cranes to look at the car. Why am I looking? What does it matter who is inside? I don't know, but I look anyway.

This weekend I saw one of these on a car here in Portland:

I've seen similar ones around town a few times. A few months ago I saw one up by Fort Lewis , in Washington State. The most random place I've seen a PR bumper sticker was on a car in Wyoming. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the sticker and the license plate:

We have one one our car. I'd post a picture of it but I can't find one similar to it online, and taking a picture of the one on our car would be pointless as it is pretty worn. It is a Hurricane Wilma survivor, you see. Prior to the storm, it was in perfect shape. After the storm, the colors were stripped, and sometimes it looks like the part that says "PR" actually says "PA". It kind of looks like those European decals that have the initials of a particular country, but on either side there is a tiny PR flag. Except now there are only one and a half tiny flags. I feel a little embarassed about that; surely I should be taking better care of my national-pride bumper stickers, but I keep forgetting to get a new one when I'm down there. I can order one online, but I keep forgetting to do that too.

That sticker has allowed us to meet, as much as one can meet someone speeding down a highway, a couple of interesting characters. One of them was in Florida, pre-Wilma. We were speeding down the highway headed towards Miami - speeding because if we didn't keep up with the rest of the horde driving 90 mph, we'd surely die - and Dave tried to change lanes. Unfortunately, a car in the lane he wanted to get into was sitting in his blindspot and he didn't see it. Fortunately, he noticed just in time and came back to his lane. A few seconds later, a maniac in a giganto SUV pulls up next to our passeneger side and starts yelling at us in Spanish. He was not the guy in Dave's blindspot, but he witnessed the incident and decided that Dave was a menace. As this gentleman hung halfway out his window and swung his fist at us, not looking at the road, rolling along at 90mph, yelling barbaridades at us and accusing us of being reckless, we wondered why he was yelling in Spanish and not English.

Dave: How does he know anyone in this car speaks Spanish?

Me: Must be that he saw the PR sticker.

Dave: That thing's coming down!!

I stalled, and eventually the shock of the incident wore off. Passive-aggressive victory on my part, and so PR Sticker stayed to survive a hurricane. A couple of years later, back in Portland, Dave came home one day and said "I think I met a Puerto Rican today." Again, he had been driving down a highway, and a car pulls up alongside him. This time, though, it was a friendly woman who looked like Celia Cruz (according to Dave, I wasn't there to verify this). She smiled at him broadly and gave him a thumbs-up. He was confused at first, but decided that, once again, it must have been the PR sticker, working its magic.

But the best one, and, again, not seen by me because I wasn't there, was Dave's sighting of a car whose owner had typed up BORICUA in Word, printed it on a plain sheet of paper, and taped it to his back windshield. I imagine that's the equivalent of a temporary license plate. Until your real PR sticker arrives in the mail, sent by a relative or some website, you have to put up your paper document somewhere on your car.

I'm not sure which sticker will replace our battleworn veteran, who has brought us such joy and such fear for our lives, but I'm thinking...

...will not be it.

Stealing ideas for a post

My friend at Zoo, Askew posted a list of popular books created by the National Endowment for the Arts; they estimate most adults have read 6 of the 100 books. Without having gone through it beforehand, I'm posting the list and bolding the ones I've read. Then, if I really have read six or less, I'll lie be honest about my results and resolve to get to readin'.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Okay, so more than 6. Some of these I have copies of, waiting in the wings, like Vanity Fair. I was happy to see, though, that my period of teenage nerdery led to my having read a good number of the ones listed. I was bowled away by the storytelling in Notre Dame of Paris, especially when Hugo weaves the priest's character so finely so as to show you that although he may be the bad guy, he's also human, and people's bad motives usually come from somewhere. And I found Jude the Obscure so emotionally heavy that when I finished the book, I involuntarily heaved a heavy sigh.

Others I read in school, and actually read them rather than buying Cliffs Notes. Among those are Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Hamlet, I admit, was another one I read because I "had to", but I was lucky to have an English teacher who took care to make Shakespeare seem not-so-inaccessible, and I found myself falling into his rhythm with her help. One Hundred Years of Solitude is another book I read in high school, and I remember my Spanish teacher telling us to not freak out about the cast of thousands, and to not try to keep strict tabs on who was related to whom; the important thing was to just read and enjoy the story. I did that, and after that I wasn't scared to read large books that spanned generations -- which served me well for reading the historical fiction series of books by Edward Rutherfurd, one of my current favorites.

I was almost done reading Lolita while riding on the Long Island Railroad one day, and then accidentally left it behind when I left. I was only a few pages away from the end so I went to Barnes and Noble and finished it there. More than once I went to Barnes and Noble to use their art books for research. I wasn't the only one who treated is as a library, either, and I never saw anyone get hassled for it. Not that the NYU library wasn't great, but B&N was closer, and sometimes laziness wins.

My mom made me read Little Women when I was about 9 or 10. For some reason I wasn't interested, and for some reason she totally forced me to read it. I ended up loving it, and asking my mom if I could plant a flower garden, because the girls in the book each had one. My aunt Wandy gave me The Little Prince; she gave me several books throughout my childhood, all in beautiful hadcover editions, and I remember always loving each one of them (one I remember in particular was Stories for Free Children. It was one of the first times that I read something as a child that actually made me think). I read The Little Prince and Stories several times, even though I'm not a re-reader by nature.

Losing myself in a good story is one of the greatest pleasures in my life, and I have to smile at the thought that for almost every book I read, I have an associated memory. Where I was, or how I felt, or what happened to that book. I've been going through a reading lull lately, but Dave's been wanting me to read Doctor Faustus, so I think I'm going to pick it back up tonight and dive in.

My new favorite word

Cockaigne.

I learned this word through my daily Doctor Dictionary email. At some point I appear to have told dictionary.com that I'd like to be sent random words and its definitions. And, I mean, not to brag (really, no, don't make me brag, it's so off-putting), but most of the time I already know these words. Every once in a while, however, along comes a Cockaigne to bring me down a notch or two, and amuse me in the process.

Now, in and of itself, it's a great word. Not quite a portmanteau in terms of spelling, but aurally, it kind of gets there. But what makes it truly great is not just how it sounds, but also its definition: "An imaginary land of ease and luxury. "

A life of ease and luxury in Cockaigne, indeed. Never mind Utopia...Cockaigne's where it's at!

The Land of Cockaigne, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1567

And why didn't my Dutch and Flemish Art professor show us this painting in class?

Motivation: Grab it while you can

Dave and I have a Nintendo Wii which I love very very much. Last month we got WiiFit, a game that is meant to get people off the couch and playing exercise-related games. The Wii allows you to make your own avatar, called a Mii. You get to use it as your character on a lot of Wii games, including WiiFit.

So when I fire up the game, it wants to analyze my age, weight, BMI, etc. I stand on the board and let it do its thing. The results show that my BMI is a bit on the high side of normal. That's enough of a bummer, right? Well, it's even more of a bummer when you see your Mii get fat right before your eyes, and the chirpy computer voice says, "That's overweight!"

Which is a tad better than the Japanese version of the game, which just says, "You're fat!"

More than any personal motivation I might have to lose a few pounds -- my appearance, my health -- I feel inexplicably indebted to that Mii. I can't let her gain weight! Because of this, I've dropped 10 pounds. What kind of a person would I be if I just let her let her appearance go?

You might ask what kind of person I actually am if it takes a cartoon to spur me into action. And to that I would reply, "Good question."

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

One of my birthday gifts from Dave this year was a book called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. It's about a Dominican boy living in New Jersey. Oscar is fat and nerdy, much to the dismay and bafflement of his family and peers. He is obsessed with girls, but doesn't have the rap that other Dominican boys have. Instead of learning to dance merengue, he's immersed in role-playing games and reading and writing science fiction. As a child he was the life of the party, always dancing, cracking jokes, and flirting with older girls, but then...then he got fat, and it all went downhill from there.

This book pulled me in for various reasons, one of them being that the author throws in words and phrases in Spanish and doesn't feel like he needs to translate them all. I don't know that I would call it Spanglish, but for an English-language novel, it comes close. I thought that was brave of him, to assume that non-Spanish speakers would still be interested in the story even though some of the narrative is in another language. I can definitely attest to being very comfortable with swinging from one language to the other even within the same sentence, so it was fun to read a book written in a language that's similar to my own brain's. But more than anything I was drawn in by Oscar himself - a misfit in his own culture.

He's expected fit certain Dominican molds: be a ladykiller, be in at least decent shape, be more interested in a social life than in shutting himself in his room to read sci-fi. The bigger he gets, the more shy he becomes around girls, the more looks of derision he gets, the harder it becomes to be less of a hermit. He wants to be the Dominican guy that others expect him to be, but it just isn't him.

It reminds me of my own teenage years. As a child I also liked to entertain others, in my case by making up stories and songs on the spot, and regaling my audience with my creations. As I got older, I became more introverted. I didn't feel like I fit in at all with others my age (and I won't claim to be an anomaly, I know many teens feel the same way). I wasn't overweight like Oscar, but I wasn't bikini material either -- not an easy thing when you live on a Caribbean island. I was a huge reader and would also hole myself up in my room, although my preferred books were more along the line of The Count of Montecristo and Notre Dame of Paris. The more I holed myself up, the harder it was to be like so many of the girls I knew: outgoing, comfortable flirting with boys, easy to make friends. The few times I hit the nighttime scene in Old San Juan, I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. And of course, that kind of thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you think you stick out, the more you appear to others to be uncomfortable.

Going away to college, in New York no less, was my way of breaking out of the environment that I felt was forcing me into a vicious cycle. Oscar, too, found a certain level of freedom with a change of scenery. For me it was going from the Caribbean to New York, for him it was going from New Jersey to the Caribbean. Years later, reading this book, I felt for Oscar because it's so hard to wonder how it is that you turned out so different from everyone around you. And it made me think about just how deeply your culture shapes your expectations of yourself and of others. Are either of those sets of expectations always accurate? Probably not. I probably thought I was more awkward than I really was, and I probably thought none of the other girls my age had any insecurities at all, which is highly unlikely. But when you're in the thick of it, it's hard to see that.

When I was living in Florida, I had an African-American coworker who sat right next to me. She once asked me what I had studied in college, and I told her I majored in art history. We talked a little bit about that, and she said, "Sometimes I would like to go to a museum or a gallery, but all of my friends would look at me like I was crazy. I'm supposed to want to go to a club." I was surprised to hear her be so blunt about what her own peers expected of her, and given how headstrong and independent she was, that she'd agree to comply with those expectations. But being a part of your community is a strong motivator. I could see where she was coming from.

To this day, I'm not the most outgoing person. It can take me a while to warm up to unfamiliar social situations, although I find that I am able to warm up to them and lose my insecurities after a while, which is very different from how I was before. I want to be able to be okay when meeting new people. What's an even bigger change is that I recognize that I'm kind of nerdy, and that's the person these new people will be meeting, which used to make me uncomfortable. But now, I'm pretty okay with that.

Timbers vs Islanders, part II: Introducing the concept of "verguenza ajena"

So another year, another season, another chance for the PR Islanders and the Portland Timbers to converge on PGE Park.


After my one and only attempt to sit in the Timbers supporters' section during a PR-Portland match, this year I decided to meet up with some friends and sit in the stadium's beer garden. Good choice all around, except they decided to put some shelters for the players right in frackin' front of the garden, which hurt visibility. Oh well. It was a nice spring day, we were sitting outdoors. And we had beer.

But it looks like I can't expect an Islanders-Timbers match to end without some sort of brouhaha. I feel this story is better told in pictures.

I arrived early so as to snag a good seat in the garden. Both teams were out on the pitch, warming up. Sharing the space together, in soccery harmony. (Islanders on the top, a Timbers player on the bottom.)




After a while, they are ready to start. Here they are during the national anthems. The guy on the right is the guy they hire for every Islanders game. He's got the "sing the Puerto Rican anthem" position in the friggin' bag, so don't even think about it.



Match is underway. Now that they are actually playing is when things start to turn.




I start to notice, along with the entire stadium and the Portland coach, that our beloved Islanders are not exactly, let us say, sporting fellows. They take too long to take corner shots. They play too aggressively and start to rack up fouls. They dive. Pretty soon they start to get really brazen and one of them gets a red card -- he's out of the game. I believe that one was for a deliberatly thrown elbow in the direction of a Portland player's face.


I'm starting to get really embarassed. Obviously not for me, it's not my fault these guys are acting like neanderthals. But they are representing Puerto Rico, man! What the hell? Here is where verguenza ajena comes in. It sort of translates to "embarassment for a third party", but it refers to feeling embarassed for someone else. It's not just that I'm embarassed over the way these guys were acting just because they're Puerto Rican (which is bad enough). I was feeling embarassed for them, personally, because they were putting on a testosterone-charged spectacle. Living the stereotype of the machito.

So now we have the Islanders coach (top) and the Portland coach (bottom) staring each other down.




Then the elbow-throwing happens, and it's fight time!

That kerfuffle settles down, and it's back to playing. Islanders are trailing, and it's near the end of the match. The boys still have some fight left in them, though. No, I don't mean fighting spirit. I actually mean fight. As the last minutes tick away a Timbers player is taking too long in getting the ball in play, in the estimation of the Islanders coach. So the coach runs onto the pitch and just as the player is about to kick the ball, he grabs it and runs away with it. Think about this for a second. He runs. He grabs it from under the player. He runs away. Coach was kicked off the game, and then.....fight!

If it weren't for those stupid shelters I could have documented all of this a whole lot better.

As my friends and I walk away after the match, I was feeling really disappointed. Why were they acting this way? There was absolutely no reason for such a display. What a bunch of huevones.


I met up with Dave, who had been sitting with the Timbers Army, as he usually does. The story of how he grabbed some college punk by the collar after yelling out "go back to your shanties!" is pretty well-known among his TA friends by now, and he said that the ones sitting next to him would say something about shanties and then look at him expectantly. I asked him if anyone really did shout out anything inappropriate, and he said no. All in all people were surprised at the players, but as far as I could tell that didn't carry over into any kind of stereotyping or nastiness.

I told Dave about how I was feeling. "If it makes you feel any better", he said, "Only one or two of the Islanders players is actually Puerto Rican. And the coach is Irish."


I'm still not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse.


(PS: I apologize about the picture layout. I know it's funky but I can't get it to format correctly.)