This is Just to Say

January 29, 2009

Dear Jen,
If you don’t update your blog soon, the world will think your food poisoning did you in. (:

Love Mom

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A Few Brief Notes This Weekend

January 24, 2009

I recommend not getting food poisoning in South America. As such, I also recommend not eating the bananas, or not drinking the water. It’s really not clear.
This Monday at 7:30, funny lady Abbi Crutchfield will be hosting Monday Night Stand-Up at Pete’s. It’s free, and Abbi writes way more new jokes than I do.
My uncle emailed, “Today on ‘Frasier’ , Niles was caught correcting the grammar of the graffiti in the men’s room of the coffee shop with a red pen. I thought of you.” I am the family pedant! Hurrah!

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On the Subte in Buenos Aires

January 21, 2009

A subway poster for Prenatal Yoga featured an unflattering photo of a very pregnant woman on all fours. The ad’s first sentence would have offended half of the women in New York: Pregnancy is a very special time in the life of every woman. Seriously, it’s not an ad for a church — why offend people when you just want to sell them yoga? Apparently this is inoffensive in Argentina. The poster didn’t even go on to talk about yoga just yet — it continued in the same vein with something I couldn’t quite translate but I took to say something about how “although it’s only nine months,” it’s blah blah special blah blah women are babymaking machines and don’t you forget it blah blah.

Interestingly, in Spanish, it’s totally fine to just call people “embarazadas” (pregnants). In English, in contrast, people usually don’t mean anything good when they say, for instance, “blacks” instead of “black people”; people with epilepsy prefer “people with epilepsy” to “epileptics.” Calling pregnant women “pregnants” sounds seriously not right to a modern liberal English speaker.

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Pack Heavy! You are an American!

January 18, 2009

In 2007, shortly before I left on my Mideast tour, author Tim Ferriss blogged about packing ultra-light, skipping around the world encumbered by only 1.5 pairs of underwear, a bike lock, and a single breath mint.

I fell for it. I left for the Middle East with a few shirts, one pair of practical shoes for tromping through rough terrain and one pair of high heels for the stage, a bottle of sunscreen, and a single red lipstick.

One of the other comics, in contrast, had brought at least twenty cute outfits, several bikinis, a hairdryer and many hair products, a full makeup kit, and a wide variety of push-up bras. Her luggage wasn’t that much heavier than mine, and she looked way prettier everywhere we went. In all the photos, she looks vibrant and polished, and I look like I have just been to the gym.

Somehow, on my way to Buenos Aires, I fell for it again. I am not a dude. I enjoy having 4 or more different brands, formulations, and viscosities of lotion to apply to my various body parts. I like to write on fine-ruled legal pads. Wide-ruled legal pads ruin it for me. I do not consider it an adventure to find out if Argentine tampons work differently.

Once in the last two weeks, I walked 20 or so blocks to an office-supply store to buy a notepad that fits in my purse. I have a fine-ruled legal pad I brought with me, and I’ve been conserving paper like a medieval scholar. Write smaller! Skip adverbs! (The latter is good advice anyway, I wrote self-referentially).

I didn’t bring a lot of clothes, figuring that I’d have fun shopping for more. I did buy some little dresses and shirts. That was nice. But then I ran out of underwear, and since I don’t plan to do laundry here, I decided to buy the kind that come in a package at the drugstore (hot!) They come two or three per package, depending on the style, and I’ve bought maybe four packages of them so far. I’m going to be wearing Argentine drugstore underwear for the next year and a half.

I thought I might buy a new bra, but all of the places that sell bras are tiny little stores staffed by ladies who help you with the bras — in many instances, the bras (even inexpensive, everyday bras) are displayed in glass cases, and you have to point at the one you want, and a lady goes into a back room and brings one out in your size, sort of like how shoe stores work. Bras here don’t have cup sizes — there’s just one measurement around your whole torso-and-breasts complex, in centimeters. This is not a fun adventure.

I only brought one book. I’ve poked my head into many large bookstores, and none have an English-language section. I found one bookstore with a single shelf of used English-language books, and contemplated catching up on my Henry James.

Shopping in a foreign place is fun! But it’s more fun when you’re just wandering about, seeing what kinds of wonderful things you happen to find — not when you’re out of mascara, wishing you had the David Sedaris you’ve been meaning to read for a year, and bobbing down the street with boobs untethered.

If I could do it again, I would’ve brought SEVENTY-FOUR POUNDS of books, legal pads, notepads, underwear, bras, lotion, gym clothes, bikinis, hair appliances, interesting hats, framed photographs of my favorite U.S. Presidents, etc. I say seventy-four because seventy-five is the limit for normal-weight checked baggage, and if Continental is charging me a $15 fee for the first checked bag anyway, by god I’m going to take advantage.

Pack heavy! You are an American!

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Did Craigslist Really Randomly Generate This CAPTCHA?

January 18, 2009

Instead of asking me to write “smallbavaria whencesoever” or the usual nonsense, Craigslist demanded that I demonstrate my humanity via the following:

It’s like my CAPTCHA is the title of a book of inspirational anecdotes for aging Baby Boomer feminists.

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Why are French balconies so fucked up?

January 17, 2009

This is not a pipe

Ceci n’est pas une real balcony, weirdos.

Seriously, if you’re taking the effort to put an adorable little railing up, why not build a real balcony on which a person might sit in an equally adorable chair and drink a cup of coffee? Why? Because you can’t afford the extra real estate in the air? You don’t have to pay for that.

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Dover Thrift Editions Easy Spanish Phrase Book: May I Send a Cablegram?

January 17, 2009

I was attempting to pack light (a topic that itself will be the subject of a future post) for my trip to Argentina, so, in examining my collection of a half-dozen or so books on how to speak Spanish, I opted to bring the two that weighed the least. One was Dover’s Easy Spanish Phrase Book, last printed in 1994. I may have had mine since then.

I see that the sale price of this book is now $2.00. When I was in high school — early high school, around 1992-1994 — there was no internet that I knew of, and I didn’t have a lot of money, and you could order “Dover Thrift Editions” through the mail for $1 each. This was VERY EXCITING to a nerdy fourteen year old whose family didn’t keep a lot of books around. I would peruse the catalog, send off a check for, say, $14, and a few weeks later I had The Turn of the Screw! And Spoon River Anthology (the story of a small town, written entirely in epitaphs!) And the Easy Spanish Phrase Book! Which I held on to for a decade or so before reading.

As soon as I began reading this book, I realized it was old. Not 1994 old. Old. One review on Amazon summed it up:

My husband … knows almost no Spanish. When attempting to shop on his own, he discovered that this book will tell you how to buy gold cufflinks, scarves, gloves, and almost every item of apparel except shirts and pants. It contains a very strange collection of phrases and does not appear to have been updated since its first publication in the 50s. Not useful if you want to ask the location of an internet cafe.

During the week-plus I have been here, I have often marveled that visiting a foreign country just isn’t what it used to be. Most obviously, I’m blogging right now. Voicemail’s a little wonky, but text-messaging works great. I’m doing billable work for a company I work for back in Manhattan, and emailing it to them from Argentina, just as I used to email it to them from my apartment 18 blocks away.

That said, here is my favorite part of the Easy Spanish Phrase Book:

When would a night letter arrive? Not until tomorrow afternoon. Very good, then. May I have some forms? It’s certainly good that I don’t have to adhere to a ten-word minimum. I would like to send a six-word cablegram, for 1 peso 8 centavos, in hopes that it will arrive sometime in the next five hours. Excellent!

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Capybaras, Horror Frogs, and Wolverines

January 15, 2009

Thanks to an astute commenter, I’ve been informed that the rat-like creature from my zoo post is a capybara.

My trip to the zoo prompted my mother to send me an article about a “horror frog” that “breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog’s toe pads, probably when it is threatened.”

Whoa! And what happens when the frog is done using its horror claws? According to one zoologist, “it would not be surprising if some parts of the wound heal and the tissue is regenerated.”

Where have we seen this before?

I thought so.

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Buenos Aires Photo Post: Zoo Fun!

January 14, 2009

Yesterday I went to the Buenos Aires Zoo!

They let you get pretty close to the elephants!

I took a picture of a peacock’s butt!

Tell me this isn’t a rat. These things run free throughout the zoo. They are larger than most dogs in Manhattan. They are like rats, but with rabbit teeth, and slightly ducky feet. What the fuck are you, crazy cracker-eater??? Kids were totally clustered around it, having fun playing with it and its many friends. This thing would be terrifying on the subway platform. I googled “Buenos Aires zoo rats” and got this lady’s account of a trip to the zoo, in which she posits that the creatures in question are beavers. She also comments on the “hybrid” deer-rabbit-kangaroo things that just run wild. Yeah, I was way confused by those.

I am a big fan of less-exotic, more accessible animals that you can touch. The goats kept poking their heads out from under the bottom of the fence!

This is a nice picture, but I decided I wanted to get a close-up of myself with a goat. This is difficult when you are taking the photos yourself with your iPhone, and the goats don’t understand what this is all about, and also they eat your shirt and purse.

The goat moved its head at the last minute, and I only got an ear.

The goat moved its entire head, as though the head had never existed in the first place.

My nose. Goat nose. We’re improving.

Aww…

Um….

Yay! I am calling this one a winner. I made a goat-friend! A goat on the subway platform would be confusing, yes, but hardly terrifying. We can all get along. I will buy extra purses that my new goat-friend will find especially delicious.

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February 19th in NYC: Buy Me, I’m For Sale!

January 12, 2009

WHAT PHILOSOPHY MAJORS DO AFTER COLLEGE

Thursday, February 19 at 8:00PM

at Ars Nova

511 West 54th Street (just west of 10th Ave)

New York, New York 10019

N/R/Q/W to 57th St; A/C/B/D/1 to 59th St; C/E to 50th St

From Socrates to Sartre, the greats of Western thought are empirically, profoundly, and unquestionably hilarious. Comedian (and Williamsburg Spelling Bee maven) Jennifer Dziura knows this is so, and now that she’s left the confines of Ivy League philosophy classrooms she wants to enlighten everyone!