hold the helicopters

You know you’ve neglected your blog when…

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Grace’s Aunt Gail <email@address> wrote:

Hi Grace,

I’m thinking that you are very busy or that peru is only marginally
internet enabled. How is life? I miss your blog. All is well with us
and I’ll tell you more if you return this form:

I’m fine and received your email ( )
I’m fine and didn’t receive your email ( )
I’m not fine, airlift me out ( )

Love, Gail

Ouch. Have I really fallen that far off the map? Peru, or at least the nicer parts of Lima, are hardly internet dead zones. True, the computer in my apartment seems to have developed a strange beeping disease that might actually signal hard-disk death, but on the other hand, I’m writing this on my laptop from a wifi-enabled coffee shop less than 2 blocks from the house. And it’s not that I haven’t had a free moment since my last post, in — oh wow, has it really been that long? — February. But where do I start? I’m looking out the window at the rush-hour traffic on Santa Cruz, at the crowded and decrepit combis passing by (did you know that all of Lima’s “public transportation” is actually privately owned?) and I have the worst writer’s block of my life. In all that’s happened recently — switching continents, starting a new internships, moving into a new apartment, weighing options for the summer, for law school, and everything else — I can’t think of one bite-size, blog-style anecdote. I will, though, I promise. Today is hopeless — I’m antsy from the giant cappuccino I just drank and annoyed by the cigarette smoke and people in what’s normally a completely deserted cafe. So not now, but soon, I’ll tell you about my internship, and about my apartment in Miraflores, my housemates, my friends, Lima, the beach at Punta Hermosa, and trying to speak Spanish again after 2 and a half years of attempting to put it completely out of my head. For now, let’s add an option number 4 to the above email from my fantastic and hilarious aunt:

(x) I’m fine, I received your email, I love it here, I love and miss you too, and I’ll write more soon.

headline of the day

Iowa Lawmakers Take Up Smoking

[, Budget]… but it’s better without that last bit. And on the very same page of the local paper, today’s runner-up: Carpenters fans try to stop demolition of home

happy birthday to blog

Happy birthday to blog, Happy Birthday to blog, Happy Birthdaaaaaaay to Blaaaaaa-ooooooggg…

That’s right. Three years ago, my wee blog emerged, awkward and ungrammatical, into the wide world of Blogger. Actually, that would be 3 years ago yesterday (I was so busy celebrating that true to form, I forgot to pop in and wish it a happy birthday). Things have been lonely and slow in blogland for the past couple weeks — it seems like either there’s nothing going on, or too much to say, and either way it’s a bit tough to post. I’m hoping to write more this week and next, but for now, here’s a blog retrospective:

3 years ago: Between semesters at the University of Buenos Aires, my first solo trip ever included highlights like the fake Tren a las Nubes through the mountains in northern Argentina, almost missing my train in Bolivia, the spectacular views (and winds) of the Patagonia, and the hike that ensured I will never again be able to so much as look at granola.

2.5 years ago, July: J and I visited a bunch of Incan ruins, spent the night on an island in Lake Titicaca, saw the overrated (and now sadly earthquake-devastated) nature reserve/fish oil factories at Pisco, and made our first Peruvian enemy.

2.5 years ago, August: I got a taste of the melodrama that is Brazilian politics, and swore never to return to Brasilia.

2 years ago: I was halfway through an internship with Creative Commons in San Francisco during J-term of my senior year at Middlebury.

16 months ago, September: I took my first bush flight to a red dirt runway in Gurue (Mozambique), tried to master the art of getting food in less than 3 hours when ordering from a restaurant menu in Milange, and tore my hair out at the pointlessly convoluted local bureaucracy.

1 year ago, December/January: I was still processing Mozambique, amusing my friends in Cambridge with questions like “is it safe to carry a laptop on the Harvard campus?” (Answer: would anyone actually want to steal your wheezing 5-year-old laptop?), and loving the Berkman Center and Cyberlaw class.

11 months ago: I was seeing another side of Rio, annoyed about the Middlebury history department’s ban of Wikipedia, and trying to find a place to live.

I’ll stop going by months. This is me in Rio:

Reveling in the unabashed geekery of the International Free Software Forum (actually, that was in Porto Alegre)

Not quite getting Brazilian online social networking

Crossing an invisible line into Brazilianness (Brazilianity? Brazilianism?)

Reflecting on violence, muggings, gunfights, police corruption, and whether I’d rather live in a favela or go to a midwestern mall

It’s both interesting and strange to read over my old posts. Some things I still agree with, some things I can’t believe I ever wrote. Some posts were so embarrassingly naive that I had to take them down (sorry — but I never claimed that this was a faithful historical record). I don’t know if the blog has improved exactly, but it’s definitely evolved. I’ve changed, too, I guess. Hopefully for the better.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. If the blog weren’t so busy stuffing its virtual face with the delicious virtual cupcakes I bought to assuage my feelings of virtual birthday-forgetting guilt, it would thank you for putting up with my occasionally coherent ramblings for the past three years. But since in reality the blog is just as awkward as it was when it was born, I’m doing the doting parent thing and writing its thank-you notes myself. Thanks to everyone for all the the nice comments, the support, and for caring enough to stay in touch. Thanks for the letters and emails and care packages (even the ones that disappeared in the black holes of the Brazilian or Argentine postal systems), for the advice and encouragement, for making me laugh and for sticking with me through what have definitely been the strangest and best years of my life so far. It’s been great having you all along for the ride.

a cattle’s eye view of the iowa caucus

Iowa has more pigs than people. A lot more, actually. I don’t know how many exactly we have of either, although I did hear once that the ratio is 5 to 1 in favor of the pigs. Which is part of the reason that I think the Iowa caucuses are silly. Candidates crisscross the state in the snow eating corndogs and trumpeting farm-state causes for months in advance; our phones ring off the hook with pre-recorded surveys (Press 6 for Ron Paul), pre-recorded candidate pitches (Hi, this is Bill Clinton), and unfortunately real people lecturing us on abortion; we mess the electoral calendar up because our state constitution demands we be FIRST IN THE NATION; and then it builds to a fever pitch and it’s all anyone can talk about and Iowa is mentioned a zillion times a day in the press and my own small town gets a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal. After all that… only about 300,000 people show up to vote, or I guess closer to 350,000 this time around which I think broke some records. But let’s be clear: that’s not a whole lot of voters, even in a not-very-populous state (Iowa has about 3 million people and about 1.8 million registered voters.) Based on my quick and imprecise mental calculations, that means we’re looking at a ratio of pigs to caucus-goers of about 50 to 1.

But anyway. I’m going to stop now, because I don’t want to rain on Iowa’s only media parade. And because, honestly, there’s something sort of charming about the weird, anachronistic proceedings of caucus night. I say this as someone who just got back from my first caucus ever and who is currently watching as the Iowa results are plastered all over the news. It’s interesting… the most participatory form of democracy I’ve ever experienced, although not necessarily the most democratic. Like a throwback to the good old days, by which I mean the 1800s and town hall meetings and supremely archaic procedural rules that no one, including the caucus chairs, actually understands.

In case you’re interested, I took some notes. Kind of like liveblogging, only with a really long time delay, so I guess not really. Also probably not a very good overview of caucus rules — if you want that, the Wikipedia entry is decent.

iowa, 4 days before the caucuses

You have reached the Armstrong family at 472-****. Please listen carefully to our pre-caucus voicemail message, as the options have changed.

If you are calling on behalf of a campaign, please hang up.

If you are conducting a voter opinion poll, please hang up.

If you are conducting an issue-specific poll, please hang up.

If you are a pre-recorded message from any candidate, please hang up.

If you actually know or are related to someone in the household, please leave a message. Your call is important to us. Thank you and have a nice day.

*BEEP*

this made my day

From Delta’s website:

Checked Baggage

You can check two bags per passenger free of charge.

Each bag must:

• Weigh 50 pounds (22.5 kg) or less.
• Not exceed 62 inches when you total length plus width plus height.

Exceptions:

• Passengers traveling to or from Key West and Marathon, Florida are limited to only one checked bag.
• The free weight allowance is 70 pounds (32 kg) for tickets purchased in Brazil, or for tickets purchased in Japan when traveling to/from Brazil.

For once, the fine print is working in my favor.

Rocinha v. Middle America

– Americans are sort of crazy, aren’t they?

The question came out of nowhere at dinner last night to celebrate my last day of ESL teaching, and it caught me a little off guard.

– What do you mean?

– Well… you know, there are a lot of unbalanced people. And then one day someone goes into the mall and just starts shooting. It’s not like that so much here.

– So, um, you’re saying that Brazil is more… tranquil than the States?

– No, not exactly. But you know, it’s just so easy there to get guns. And everyone has a computer, right?

– I guess, most people…

– … So they all have computers and they play a lot of violent videogames. And well, maybe the culture is different, too. It seems like there are a lot of messed-up people.

Considering that most of my blogging of late has dealt with the question of violence in one form or another, this conversation was definitely food for thought. It’s always a little strange to me to hear how the States are perceived abroad, and interesting to see how some things make such a (to me) disproportionate impression on foreigners. But the most extraordinary thing about this conversation is that the person involved has lived in Rocinha his entire life — and if you’re worried about gun violence then Rocinha is not particularly safe even by Rio’s lowered standards.

So I was left wondering: Rio has its share, and more, of corrupt cops and shoot-to-kill bandidos — but is it somehow comforting that the motivations for the violence are relatively straightforward, and that there are, to some extent, “rules of the game”? A horrifying number of innocent people are killed every year in the drug wars, but is it somehow less frightening because it’s often from stray bullets rather than direct fire? Are the isolated shooting incidents in the US that much scarier precisely because they’re so random, so senseless, and so devastating? Because they happen in places — malls, churches, schools — that should be havens rather than targets?

I tried to say how incredibly rare these disturbed-individual gunfire incidents are in the US, but there’s no denying that they’re more common in the States than in other places… and if even one is unjustifiable, then the number that we’ve had is terrifying. All I know is that if someone who has grown up in Rocinha — a neighborhood that’s seen NUMEROUS people injured and killed in shootouts this year alone — is saying this, we in the States need to do better.

score: thieves, 2000000; plucky British beachgoers, 1

I cried laughing when I heard this story, so even if it loses a bit in the retelling it will hopefully still be amusing:

My friend was at Ipanema beach and had brought along a backpack with a couple of books. For the purposes of the story, I should note that she’s British but living in Rio, is about my height but skinnier, and speaks excellent Portuguese. Anyway, she had staked out a spot and was lying down in the sand with all her stuff when she was momentarily distracted by a vendor trying to sell her something — and while she was looking the other way a guy grabbed her backpack and sauntered off.

She realized it was missing as soon as she turned around, and immediately saw the guy walking away with her backpack. She was so angry she didn’t even think, she jumped to her feet and literally sprinted across the beach in her bikini to chase the guy down. She ran up behind him and punched him, grabbing at her backpack and trying to wrestle it from him. “It’s not what you think,” the guy said. This made her furious. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT’S NOT WHAT I THINK?!? You are bloody HOLDING my bloody BACKPACK!!” she shouted at him. At least I think that was the general gist of an impressive tirade in Portuguese and English, combined with some even more impressive smacks across the face. The guy was taken totally by surprise. My friend looked around for a police officer (“they harass me all the time when I’m doing nothing wrong, and where are they when they could actually be useful?”), but failing to find one, wrenched her backpack free of the guy’s grip, then grabbed HIS backpack and took that as well. She smacked him a few more times — his glasses had been knocked into the sand by that point — swore at him a bit more, and finally turned around and stormed away. Still furious. But carrying both backpacks.

She never got her cellphone back — it had somehow disappeared from her bag — but, as she noted reflectively, she now has a whole bunch of Brazlilian-made handicrafts as new decorations for her flat. It was an insanely stupid impulse (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME) but the mental image of a 5′6” girl in a bikini beating up a beach thief is too good not to share. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought so: she got an actual round of applause from the bystanders at the beach.

it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

… and by “beginning,” I mean that Rio de Janeiro’s merchants have been ready for Christmas since sometime before Halloween. I sometimes find the mid-October rush to out-Christmas one’s competitors to be sort of grating, but this year, I’m mostly just confused. Attention, holiday decoration suppliers: Rio hasn’t seen a white Christmas since, I don’t know, EVER. Stop pretending that evergreens and reindeer are necessary to celebrate the holiday. You can keep Santa, but please get the poor guy some climate-appropriate attire. Do you really want me to look at Santa sweating in his fake beard and wonder what he did to get on his own Naughty List, and whether maybe wearing one of those red felt suits for several hours might not actually be quite a bit worse than having to put coal in his own stocking?

The display that best exemplifies the Southern Hemisphere Christmas Identity Crisis in all its conflicted glory is the nativity scene on the front of the Botafogo Praia Shopping mall. Raindeer cavort in a forest, and there is a light dusting of snow on the evergreens. Next to a straw manger stand giant squirrels (easily half as tall as the trees)… and enormous bright-orange mushrooms rise out of the forest floor.

Ah, Christmas.

internet down

If I owe you an email/Skype call/Orkut scrap/message by any other online means… it’s not that I don’t love you, but to say that my internet connection is “intermittent” is a compliment along the lines of saying that Michael Moore should be named Miss Universe. Sorry, and hopefully it will be fixed soon.