hold on just a second don't tell me this one you know i know this one i know this song i know this one i know this song

So. I'm currently floating on the aftereffects of one of the best weekends of my entire life. Seriously. It was like a non-stop party. And not the kind that makes me claustrophobic and sends me dissolving into a corner. It was, however, the kind with many much musics (not to be confused with many much moosen).

Friday night was populated with salsa, cumbia, bachata, and my personal favorite merengue. Lesson 1: always say yes to a night at the salsa club even though you went to bed at 4am the night before. Lesson 2: sometimes it may be best to keep your mouth shut and not let on that you speak Spanish. Lesson 3: eventually the inebriated Nicaraguan who wants your phone number will settle for your hotmail address, and everyone goes home safe and happy.

Saturday night saw epic performances by Ra Ra Riot, Andrew Bird, and Death Cab. As you can probably imagine, I went mostly for Andrew Bird. And he did not disappoint. Nothing short of phenomenal, in fact. Since none of the little video that I got is good enough (i.e., I was too impatient to hold up the camera for more than 30 seconds and/or the microphone picked up my neighbors' chatter better than the music) to bother uploading it, you'll just have to trust me on the amazingness factor. Or go see him for yourself. I highly recommend the latter.

Just say the word, Andrew, and I will run away with you and your sock monkey and your victrola.

We sang happy birthday to him. While he was on stage, we got a wee bit of rain. Then this happened:

And then there was Death Cab. And they were awesome. I've never listened to them particularly obsessively (as I have with many others), but I found myself singing along to most of the songs they played. Tons of fun. (There's a good deal of video from the show already up on youtube; just search for "death cab july 11 berkeley" or some such similar string, if you so desire.)

After the concert we watched this wonderful documentary called Young at Heart. Cackle-and-guffaw-out-loud funny, and beautiful in so many ways.

Here's a taste:

You should watch it, too.

Then there was Sunday, highlighted by barbecued goodness, a new friend, a special visit from an old friend, and a motorcycle ride. Not to mention the freakin' gorgeous Palo Alto weather.

Plus, I got to talk on the phone to Claire, Joseph, Mom, Dad, and Vanessa.

Can life get better? I submit that it cannot!

18: scene

There are just a few degrees of separation between me and a famous film director.

At least, he is going to be famous. His name is Cary Fukunaga, and I heard about him from a colleague a couple of times removed who happens to be related to him. His feature debut, Sin Nombre, scored a couple of awards at Sundance last month and will hit theaters in the next.

I was doing some light research, reading a bit about the making of the film, scanning reviews, watching the trailer, finding this all somewhat interesting and coming to the conclusion that Sin Nombre would probably be worth watching. And then. And then I found out that one of the producers is Gael García Bernal.

I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

And now that the original train of thought has completely derailed, let's continue with the theme, shall we? and take a moment or two to appreciate a few beautiful people of the male variety. It may appear that we're going for pure aesthetics here, but, in the case of many, if not all, the men I greatly admire (these from afar), their good looks are not what first caught my attention. It was their voice, their demeanor, their wit, their music. Their honesty, perhaps. Speaking of honesty, though, the aesthetic layer is indeed a welcome enhancement.

                                              

                                                

                                                 

Only recently, say in the last five years or so, have I begun to appreciate portraiture. I used to find portraits (painted or photographed) boring, mundane, deserving of less attention than other works with more exotic themes. I have come to realize that portraits—good portraits—celebrate the joys, reveal the sorrows, and capture the confusion of human existence. The really great ones do all of these things at once, while at the same time offering a glimpse of universal divinity in the individual person.

People are beautiful. Really, truly beautiful. Take the time to look around and you'll see.

(photo sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7)

05: open up

There are twenty-three hinged doors in my apartment.

For the last hour or so, I have been drifting in and out of sleep and therefore failing miserably at watching this movie that I am supposed to discuss tomorrow. It's not a bad movie; I have just been staying up late all week and my body has announced that it can't take it anymore. A familiar battle, this: the mind begging the body to forego sleep in favor of any number of activities requiring consciousness and clarity, while the body insists that both it and the mind are starved of rest and it is not going to sit idly by while—well, in fact, that's exactly what it is going to do, and with eyes closed, if you please. 

My point is that I have just slept through the last hour of the day without having written something first.

My counterpoint, then, which I may have led you to believe was my topic by announcing it at the start, is that there are twenty-three hinged doors in my apartment. 

Yes, I counted. It occurred to me as a question worthy of exploration, and so I explored. By counting. Included in this tally are closet doors, cupboard doors, a door that conceals (or reveals) nothing but a built-in ironing board, the oven door, refrigerator and freezer doors, the door to the circuit breaker box, and my printer's paper tray, which happens to look very much like a door on this particular model. 

You may think that last one to be a bit of a stretch, but it's really not so odd when you consider that I had gone on to contemplate (but ultimately not to count) other hinged items under my roof, like this pretty calligraphy box, my oboe case, CD- and DVD cases, my electric teakettle with hinged lid... And what about books? Granted, they don't have mechanical hinges, per se, but their spines do a pretty good job filling that function. The action of opening a book mirrors the physical movement involved in opening a door, and once it is open—either the door or the book—you are presented with new opportunities for exploration, in worlds which are unique in their position on that side of the door/book cover.

It might be argued that sleep is a door, behind which swirl the bizarrely beautiful and beautifully bizarre mysteries of the dreamworld. (And you thought that doors theme wasn't even my point.)

Soon I'll be pulling back the covers and gladly crawling through that door into sleep and dreams. After giving these other two movies a go, that is.

for the 21st-century nomad

The N55 Walking House is a compact, solar- and wind-powered "modular living system" that can walk across any terrain. The idea is to allow people--and their homes--to escape rising flood waters. (Found via WebEcoist.)



Anybody else think of Howl's Moving Castle?

ten times ten and seven times seven

This is my one-hundredth post on Etxerantz.

As it happens, never in the first ninety-nine posts did I mention where the name etxerantz comes from. It is a Basque word, etxe meaning "house" or "home," -rantz being the directive case suffix (itself a compound of the allative -ra, "(going) to," and the destinitive -rentzat, "for"), indicating "toward." Hence the full title, Etxerantz - Toward Home. Now you know: both where the name comes from, and how nerdy I am. But you probably had a pretty good idea of the latter already.

I wanted to do something special to commemorate my hundredth post. Like it or not, I am conditioned to measure accomplishments in numbers. And the number 100, in our base-ten society and double-is-better culture (like it or not), is kind of a big deal. My first blog topped out at 55 posts before I retired it; interestingly, the next one ended up with exactly 55 posts as well. (In its defense, it was meant to be short-lived, documenting only my five-week stay in Peru.) My photo blog is marching steadily toward its centennial, but, being very young still, shan't celebrate the big three digits until February. Having reached one hundred posts here helps me to be optimistic about the future of this writing space. I hope to celebrate with you many hundreds more.

Let's do one thing at a time, though, shall we? The task at hand is, or at least my desire was, to write a special commemorative centennial post. However, I did not come up with anything meaningfully worthy of such a weighty calling, and rather than spend more time brooding over it, thus unnecessarily delaying the next etxerantz installment--who really cares that it's the one immediately following the ninety-ninth, anyway?--I opted to post something that has nothing to do with the number 100 (though number 3 under the second category comes pretty close).

That said, one might be surprised by how much time and energy I managed to put into what one might have expected to be something of a throwaway blog post. Ah, but I take these silly lists seriously, you see. I'm doing my duty here (not that I don't enjoy it): I was tagged, after all. And I liked Vanessa's variation on the sevens theme. That was a lot of v's. Here's my own slightly modified edition:

7 Things I Can Do:
1. ride a bike
2. write
3. host a slumber party
4. surprise people by speaking Spanish when they least expect it
5. get lost in strange cities (and enjoy the experience thoroughly)
6. play the oboe (and English horn, when I can get my hands on one)
7. cartwheels

7 Things I Cannot Do:
1. speed-read
2. fly a plane
3. control the size of my netflix queue
4. fall asleep with cold feet
5. understand everything
6. ski
7. survive without water

7 Favorite Foods:
1. lomo saltado
2. tacos al pastor
3. tofu
4. pumpkin pie with fresh whipped cream
5. costa pork salad
6. snow day black bean soup (it's kind of a family recipe)
7. chocolate (pretty much any variety, but especially the hot, drinkable kind)

7 Books I am Currently Reading (or at least intending to read in the near future)
1. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
3. Casi una mujer by Esmeralda Santiago
4. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
5. Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
6. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
7. A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters

7 Songs That I am Currently Listening to Obsessively *Note: if you follow no other link on this page, you really ought to click on the one labeled "Elephants on Parade." you won't regret it.*
1. Headphones by I'm From Barcelona
2. Airport Surroundings by Loney, Dear
3. Face to Face on High Places by School of Seven Bells
4. To Cure a Weakling Child + Boy/Girl Song by Adem
5. Mirando by Ratatat
6. Elephants on Parade by Podington Bear
7. Incubator by A.R.S.

7 Favorite Words:
1. cacophony
2. luciérnaga (Spanish for firefly)
3. Flugzeug (German for airplane, literally "flying stuff")
4. ma'muaang (my best shot at transliteration. Thai for "mango")
5. matzaqik (Maya K'iche', said at parting and roughly equivalent to "take care;" literally "don't fall")
6. q'omer (Quechua for green. the sound transcribed q' might be my favorite phoneme.)
7. sassafras

7 Travel Destinations Currently High on my Wishlist:
1. Toronto
2. Bolivia
3. Chile
4. Lassen Volcanic Park
5. Iceland
6. Berlin
7. Australia (all of it. yes, I know it's a whole continent. could take a while to save up enough vacation time.)

un-original

Thanks to Anna-Lisa, for offering the material for the following, um, allusion.

Feel free to plagiarize--er, I mean allude to--this theme, should you desire a break from something more serious.

(Why do we find these exercises so enjoyable? Why do we feel the need or the desire to encapsulate our lives and personalities in a series of lists? Is anyone else reminded of the early email days when these 'about-me' quizzes were all the rage? "Twenty questions: Copy and Paste and change my answers to yours" "Everything you want to know about me (and more)" "Fill out this survey and send it to all your friends!" "Because I'm bored..." Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia that keeps us coming back?)

Enough philosophizing already, Skylark. On to the meaningless(?) -ologies.


*FOODOLOGY*

What is your salad dressing of choice? depends on the salad, but usually a balsamic vinaigrette is nice

What is your favorite sit-down restaurant? does La Taquería count? I mean it's not sit-down fancy, but I often sit down to eat there

What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick of? as Jack would say, TACOS!

What are your pizza toppings of choice? lots of veggies

What do you like to put on your toast? peanut butter & honey

*TECHNOLOGY*

What is your wallpaper on your computer? a photo of a "lime zone" two-hour parking sign against a bright blue sky. I take weird pictures.

How many televisions are in your house? zero

What color cell phone do you have? rrred. and shiny.

*BIOLOGY*

Are you right-handed or left-handed? right

Have you ever had anything removed from your body? hair. clothing. four baby teeth.

What is the last heavy item you lifted? a computer (desktop PCs are heavy)

Have you ever been knocked unconscious? only by the powerful need for sleep

*HYPOTHETICOLOGY*

If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die? no, not really

If you could change your name, what would you change it to? Marion Cotesworth Hay

Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000? tempting, but only momentarily. I don't think that $1000 would make up for the burning sensation and related ill physiological effects, such as but not limited to the likelihood of not being able to taste anything for the next couple of weeks. I am assuming here a time limit, though, and perhaps there isn't one. In which case, I would probably reconsider. Oh dear, I fear I may be over-analyzing this. It's not like anyone is really going to make me such an offer, anyway.

*MISCELLANEOLOGY*

How many pairs of flip flops do you own? two

Last time you had a run-in with the cops? there was this one time a few years ago when Claire and I called the cops because we saw what looked like a distress light on Y mountain. it wasn't exactly a "run-in," but we did meet and talk with them and one of them was very large and intimidating.

What do you want to be when you grow up? wise but not proud; childlike but not childish; warm and well-fed; loved and full of love; thoughtful and happy

Last person you talked to? Nikolai Ivanovich (ok so that's just an alias, inspired by a great scene in The West Wing. I tried to find the clip, but without success. read the dialogue here; watch the whole episode here.)

Last person you hugged? Nikolai Ivanovich

*FAVORITOLOGY*

Season? spring

Holiday? I like Easter

Day of the week? Sunday

Month? it's a tie between Febanuarchil and Jutembegusty

*CURRENTOLOGY*

Missing someone? no, not at the moment

Mood? somewhat contemplative, a bit scattered, mostly content

Listening to? Camille

Watching? these letters popping up on the screen

Worrying about? why I am putting so much mental energy into this mundane task

*RANDOMOLOGY* (doesn't this name applies to most of the items on this entire list? while we're on the topic, isn't it funny how the word "random" has come to be so common in the speech of youth in recent years? well, isn't it?)

First place you went this morning? down to the basement to see if the washing machine was being used (it was)

What can you not wait to do? board a plane to South America (as a figure of speech, of course. it's not like I will explode if I have to wait for that experience. I do. and I will not.)

What's the last movie you saw? Driving Miss Daisy

Do you smile often? yes! I find there is a lot to smile about (and it's nice to smile about nothing, too).

and now for something lighter

Paulette Huntinova (aka Paul Hunt) at the 1988 USA-USSR Gymnastics Summit:




(if you liked that, check the youtube vaults for his beam & bars routines)

i want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what's life all about anyway?

I first discovered the joys of Netflix during my freshman year of college. Julie had a Netflix account, and whenever she got a new movie in the mail we would get some lime tostitos or mint pirouettes (or both) and go either to her dorm room or to mine to watch the latest arrival on the big screen of one of our laptop computers. Almost invariably, the movie would end and Julie would be fast asleep, often in some odd contorted position or leaning against the cinderblock wall, and I would either have to wake her up and send her home with her eyes half-closed and her mind clearly waiting in dreamland, or I would turn off her computer, move her glasses to a safer spot than where she had placed them on the pillow next to her, and quietly head out the door, wishing sweet dreams to my friend who I'm sure was already dreaming them.

It was in that year that I began to develop my eclectic, sometimes quirky tastes in music and in film, thanks mostly to Julie, of course. She introduced me to Björk, now one of my alltime favorite artists, and she has quite the knack for scoping out the bizarrest of the bizarre music of the world. One of my most vivid memories from that year is the way that Julie's neighbor would wander in from the adjoining room in their suite and, without fail, ask bewilderedly (not so interestedly), "What are you listening to?"

Off the top of my head I remember only a few titles of films that I saw for the first time that year, but they are rather indicative of my current tastes in the moving picture art form:

• Genghis Blues ..... I am still very much drawn to eccentric documentaries, like Helvetica, for instance.
  
• Dancer in the Dark ..... Oh man Björk is bizarre so nothing really compares, but we can put this in the category of non-traditional musicals, like Once, maybe. Traditional musicals, on the other hand, I usually don't handle well.
• Behind the Sun ..... As a general rule, it instantly gets bonus points if it's foreign. The Brazilian films that I have seen, like City of God and Four Days in September, tend to be pretty fuerte, but well-made films.
• Spirited Away ..... I love Miyazaki films. If you have never seen any of his movies, and especially if you are skeptical of and/or averse to Japanese animation (not all anime is the same), go watch Spirited Away or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or Princess Mononoke or My Neighbor Totoro (my personal favorite) or anything else made my Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli. Seriously. Go now. Are you still reading this?

I guess that the off-color comedies like Juno and The Darjeeling Limited* have found their way into my repertoire more or less as a result of Little Miss Sunshine. Easily in my top five favorites ever, that movie still makes me cry with laughter every time I watch it, and I cannot even describe how beautiful I find it to be.

I have been watching a lot of movies lately. That list I put up on the sidebar over there is rather long, as you can see, and those are only the movies that I have watched this calendar year and really liked or loved. Maybe I need to get a life. I'm working on that. In the meantime, I guess you could say that I am getting my money's worth from Netflix.


*If you haven't already seen it, I recommend for the sake of, um, decency, that you don't bother with Hotel Chevalier, the short tacked onto the beginning; it's not necessary in order to understand and appreciate the main film. You'll see on the DVD menu that it's easy to skip it. If you feel like you've been cheated out of a few minutes, check out the short making-of documentary. It's actually pretty interesting, and the only things they reveal are the hand-painted elephants on the custom-designed train/movie set.


(This post's title comes from The Purple Rose of Cairo.)

sometimes i like to pretend that i am a photographer

On Saturday afternoon I hopped on the 830 bus and headed "downtown" in an effort to speed up Netflix communications. After dropping my recently-viewed copy of The Fog of War into the blue metal belly of a mailbox with Saturday pickup, I began heading toward Smith's to pick up a few groceries.

Before I had traversed the three or four blocks to Smith's, I got distracted. It's not like I was in any hurry, anyway, and I had thought to bring my camera just in case something caught my eye.

So, now I share with you some of the scenes that caught my eye. Please join me in my wanderings around forgotten Provo.

a tribute to g5

My mom ordered some things from amazon.com and had them sent to me. Well, sort of. As you know, I recently moved. What you probably do not know is that my old address and my new address have a few things in common. They both contain apartment numbers and they are in the same city and state. Also, they both begin with the number 7. Now, I am not quite sure how this happened, but I am guessing that Mom was filling out the form, hit 7, my old address popped up (something to do with cookies, right?) and, well, next thing you know Pai is calling me to tell me that a box addressed to me has shown up at the old apartment. Whoops.

So the other day after class I stopped by G5 to pick up the package. It was weird, walking down the hill from campus, down that oft-cursed staircase and across the street, the same route I took several times a day for nearly three years, toward that funny-pinkish-colored building and up the stairs to an apartment that had become such a standby in my life and now has suddenly become strange.

I have been meaning to post a tribute to G5 ever since I started this blog, and I figure now is as good a time as any to do it. So now, if you will join me on a little jaunt down memory lane...

I would like to begin with breeannisms. This is what we call things that our roommate BreeAnn said, that for some reason or another just stuck, and we still remember them and laugh. There was this one time, for instance, when she picked up an afghan throw, wrapped it around herself, and asked, "Can I wear this as my clothe?" Another day, she announced that she was very hungry. "But that's okay," she said, "because today I'm going to eat a big food!" (I guess she meant a big lunch, or a lot of food, and combined them by accident. Kind of like in Mean Girls when Cady says "grool".)

We had a lot of fun with BreeAnn. For instance, Claire had this big, green exercise ball that we would hold out in front of us as we ran full force into the wall, or each other. This resulted in hysterical laughter, and we tended to do this around two or three in the morning. We were literally bouncing off the walls. I don't think our neighbors liked us much...

Speaking of our neighbors not liking us, this one time they wanted to share our wireless network and we told them no because more people on the network would slow down the connection, and we didn't even know any of these people. I mean, that's why we put security on the network in the first place, to keep people we didn't know from using it. Anyway, they were just appalled that we had refused their request, and the day after last hearing from them, the network "screwyougranary5" appeared in our range. We thought it was funny, and took it as a compliment that they cared that much.

Occasionally, we would vacuum the floor at one or two in the morning. I wonder how our neighbors liked that? Oh, speaking of vacuums... so, it had been just a few days since Claire had moved in, and she was vacuuming the living room floor. I was back in my bedroom when suddenly the lights dimmed for just a split second and immediately after that I heard *poom!* Wondering what had happened, I went out in the hallway and rounded the corner to see a huge dust cloud that filled the entire kitchen and living room. Then through the haze I saw Claire, sitting on the floor in shock next to our exploded vacuum. We ended up out on the front porch laughing for probably an hour straight. I think that might have been the night that we sprinkled the stairs and the porch below with uncooked spaghetti that a former tenant had left, and then BreeAnn thought it would be cool if it rained, because then the spaghetti would cook.

That reminds me of that cup-o-noodles sort of stuff that Nan used to make all the time, often for breakfast. It had some sort of fishy fragrance and it was very pungent. BreeAnn would show up at my bedroom door and complain, wrinkling up her face, "Nan made smelly noodles again!" At one point we had two roommates from Thailand. They knew all the other Thai girls in the area, and from time to time would invite them over. All of them. That was when we wanted to put a sign on our door welcoming visitors to Little Bangkok. We tried to learn some Thai from them, but mostly all we retained were the swear words. They just happened to be short, easy-to-remember words, which were exclaimed loudly, and fairly frequently. They would always be followed by "Don't repeat that!" but it was always too late. In the Little Bangkok days Pai used to make coconut sticky rice with fresh mango. Mmmmm... Claire and I would eat bowl after bowl of it, ignoring Pai's chidings that we were making ourselves sick, because it was oh so tasty!

Which brings me to the cinnamon rolls. Claire has this amazing recipe for cinnamon rolls. These are not just any cinnamon rolls. You make the dough from scratch and each roll takes up an entire pie tin, and once they are cooked and drizzled with icing, you peel off strips of yumminess. Claire has several baked goods recipes, collected from family and friends into a little booklet, and they are notorious for producing industrial-sized yields. And we usually forget all about this until after we have measured out the ingredients and begun mixing and then, whoops, this mixing bowl isn't big enough, hmm, neither is that one, we'd better get two! So it was with the cinnamon rolls. I don't remember exactly how much we made, but it was an all-afternoon affair, and even after half of the ward showed up and ate up a good portion of them, we still had maybe four or five pie-tin-sized cinnamon rolls left. Which we devoured during the next, oh, two days maybe. Beginning at around four o'clock the following morning, since we were still awake, hyped up on all the sugar we had already consumed. That was the night we started writing in a little notebook all the funny things that we said. We like to call them "bizarrities", which I am convinced will make it into the dictionary one of these days. We wanted to put a sign on the door that said "Bizarrities abound". I don't know why we always had these ideas about putting signs on the door and yet we never put one up.

Anyway, the night of the cinnamon rolls was followed in suit by midnight jaunts into the street, where I would frolic around in the drizzle while Claire sat down and came to a realization of the absurdity of it all. There were also countless late nights of paper-writing and such, often accompanied by lemon bars or brownies and of course large quantities of caffeinated beverages. Often I would fall asleep on the couch and Claire would try to wake me up and make me go to bed, sometimes with success, others without. And there was that one time I slept through the night in the windowseat. We got on a late-night Scrabble kick right before we moved out, but if you think that's nerdy, just let me tell you about the Friday evening we spent reading aloud from The Odyssey. Three different translations. I know. That was the life. In case you couldn't tell, I miss it.

the cosmos are trying to tell me something

I am not a little bemused by the melodies and the colors, but judging by the calendar, I think it has something to do with my being past due for a blog entry. Or two, or twenty. I consider yesterday's class discussion of blogs an exclamation point added to weeks of my mind's ignored pleading. Time to start writing again!