This is all you get for a while.

I shouldn't be writing here.  I know, for the sake of my professional self, I shouldn't heed the nagging requests of those who've earned the right to nag -- friends, ex-coworkers, the like; my family, concerned that I maintain employment so I won't be crashing on their couches the rest of my life, have remained dutifully silent.  

Closet-Ids, lusting, hedonistic creatures who masquerade as upstanding citizens, shouldn't blog.  They should hit the bar with those closest friends and evacuate their perverted recesses.  Binge and purge.  A blog, to those swelling, pulsing with inappropriateness, who fancy themselves mildly clever, is the hot pinprick to the throbbing thumbnail recently hammered.  What screams forth will stain.

Eh, but what's protecting my reputation?  I'll be smeared across the pavement sometime soon anyway, some hairs or teeth or fingernails fender-snared souvenirs for the taxi-driving author of my hit-and-run.  The pretty blond girl kneeling beside the crumpled me won't realize for years that she's the reason the speeding driver never even noticed the dark-haired, moderately-tanned giant trying to dodge traffic.  And nobody will ever know if  it was a rush of testosterone that propelled me onto the highway, or if the sun-warmed-since-dawn head cheese sandwich I purchased from the lady with the salmonella-crusted fingernails was the impetus.  (But, hey, eating street food lends a certain credibility, an inalienable authenticity, to traveling, because nothing's realer than dysentery, nothing's cooler than cholera.)

So, we'll back it up a few months.  Last August I returned to Nicaragua for three weeks, visiting friends, reacquainting myself with vos, and ogling every nica I judged to be eighteen or older, so mostly the already pregnant and/or married.

A few months back in the US was all I could handle, so after Thanksgiving I flew down to murder-capitals Guatemala and El Salvador.  In Antigua, Guatemala I spotted an appropriately disheveled homeless man slumped into a urine stained and scented corner, his shirt reading, "Más vale bolo famoso que alcohólico anónimo."  In San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, I realized that the smacking sound that emanates from every single Guatemalan household, every single day around lunchtime has nothing to do with an insatiable midday horniness -- this is no concert of balls slapping -- but rather with that ubiquitous mealtime staple, the tortilla (which is prepared fresh and in infinite quantities for lunch, and then recycled at dinner and the next morning's breakfast, after which the cycle begins anew).

In Playa el Tunco, El Salvador, while I gauged the time of day by the number of popsicles I'd yet eaten, volunteered at a local orphanage, and spent my free minutes devouring pupusas like any addict who knows he'll be divorced from his love for the foreseeable future, a Salvadoran friend of friends, an artist, was gunned down in San Salvador.

Back at Charlotte-Douglass International Airport, walking through the terminal toward baggage claim, I passed the line of posters commemorating all the classic cinema filmed in the area.  Shallow Hal, for example.  When it took me fifteen confused seconds to realize the racing movie wasn't pronounced [dah’-lay] (as in dale, pues) but rather Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, I realized I already felt out of place.

Luckily, months prior, Davidson College had fulfilled a dream -- offering me the opportunity to work with its inquisitive, inspiring and unfailingly quirky students, under the supervision of a renowned professor/political scientist, while living in the beautiful, climatically-perfect city of Arequipa, Perú, all the while being paid in dólares!

So that's where you find me now.  A few months deep into working in Perú.  The rainy season has passed, which means that the stench of sewage no longer pervades the avenues in the late afternoons, the roads no longer converting daily to shin-deep conveyers of rain-diluted waste from higher-ground reservoirs; all river-spanning bridges are open again, and the road is no longer an unpredictably-cratered, vehicle-disabling landscape rived anew by each day's downpour.  And though the ceiling of my apartment now bears yellowed, dining table-sized splotches of water damage, paint flakes and particles have mostly ceased to snow down; you can no longer appreciate fine powder ever so gently detaching from the ceiling if so much as massaged by a breath; exposed surfaces are no longer obscured beneath dusty accumulations through which you could finger-trace messages to be slowly but surely buried.  (And even though non-experts assured me that the paint probably wasn't lead-based, it's nice no longer worrying that I might roll onto my back and breathe through a gaping mouth in my sleep.)

My apartment also features the world's first electric bucket shower.  I don't have real hot water, just the common-to-poorer-parts-of-Latin-America-standard electric shower head, that which sizzles as electricity heats the water that exits the wired attachment and sometimes gives you a little shock or, if you're tall and your head comes near the contraption, might trigger flashes of white behind your closed eyes.  My shower-head water heater trips the apartment's circuit if it's left running for more than a minute.  Which means I have to exit the shower, walk down the hall, and flip the switch if I want hot water.  And I want hot water.  Solution: shower in thirty second intervals, lathering or shampooing in between.  Somehow, probably due to the conditions to which I subjected myself during 18-months of backpacking, I find this more amusing than annoying.

That ability to find the humor in situations, to have patience, is something I developed, at least more fully developed, traveling.  There's a reason that my current boss' main concern, when contacting my professional references prior to my hiring, was that I would be able to laugh in and at any situation, no matter how stressful, how dire.

And so, instead of exasperation, I can only laugh when a Radio Shack employee, presumably someone semi-educated in things electronic, is adamant that 1080p is a higher definition than 1440p.  Or, later, when a group of Radio Shack employees try to explain to me that the "Grounded" light on my surge protector will only illuminate if the adaptor is placed atop (or, perhaps, buried in) dirt -- "Es que, pues, mira, gringo: 'ground' es tierra.  ¿No lo sabes?"

Everyday presents another opportunity to learn, to appreciate, to laugh.  Tomorrow I will begin the process of navigating legal channels to secure a falsified document.  I will have to pay legitimate doctors so they will record, officially, that a particular student suffers from allergies severe enough to prevent her from receiving a specific vaccine, proof of which is required for entry into an adjoining country we will visit.  Once it's been officially established that our student can't be vaccinated, I'll be able to request a falsified vaccination card, proof that our student received a vaccination never administered, so as to avoid the potential for any problems at the border crossing.

¡Viva el Perú! 


[I have no idea why the text color/background formatting is suddenly off.  Nor do I care to figure out why.]