Transportation in the Philippines is like a jar of rocks. To fill every space, you start with boulders (if your jar is the aquarium at Sea World) or at least some decent stones, like David might have slung at Goliath. Call the boulders "airplanes" and the stones "buses." There are a couple of national discount airlines that hop around among the various domestic islands; or, if you want to take the ultra-cheap route, you can stick out your thumb for overnight bus trips.
Once you've got your boulders and stones in place, and once you've arrive at your city, you need something more targeted. You need some pebbles. Depending upon whether you want to pay for the shiny, tumble-polished variety, or just pick from among roadside debris, you'll either hail a taxi, or hop inside a Filipino innovation known as the "jeepney." A jeepney looks like a smallish 1950s single-wide chrome diner on wheels. You can find hives of them under highway bridges, or just wave at one on the street if it seems to be going in your general direction. Climb in through the open back and inside you'll find vinyl-upholstered benches lining the length of the vehicle on both sides. It's best to grab a seat near the rear if possible, because once thirty more people squeeze in with you, you'll find that exhaust fumes are better to breathe than nothing at all. Most jeepneys have names: for example, "Miranda," "Roadrunner," and "Jesus Christ."
After adding the pebbles and reached your area of town, it's time to really fill in the cracks. You need something small, something fine-tuned, something that really knows the neighborhood. You need sand; which is to say, you need a tricycle. In the Philippines, a trike (as they're usually called) is not a red peddle-pusher for kids. It's a small motorbike--decade-old Hondas and Kawasakis are most popular--with an enclosed sidecar attached. Riding in one of these is similar to being dragged down the street in a tin lunch box. Though their top speed is only about 30 mph, the only padding between your rump and the road is the single bike wheel to your right, and the soldered iron shell around you. That said, because the trikes can only run locally, the drivers know their neighborhoods backwards and forwards, and if you remember to negotiate a price before climbing in, they won't even be able to extort you.
So there you've got your jar of rocks: boulders, stones, pebbles, and sand. Its a haphazard blend, but strangely beautiful the way it all comes together.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Contiguity
Since leaving Nebraska in the fall of 2002, I've not felt a desire to return permanently. The state remains at the center of my mapa mundi, the point around which, in my mind, the rest of the universe revolves. But I haven't wanted to come back. I blame the cosmopolitan east coast, or even moreso a year in Oxford during college. Once I began to move in those circles, I didn't want to leave them. People would ask me, "do you think you'll move back someday?" And I would answer: "I don't really know," while suspecting that the real answer was "probably not."
So I was caught off-guard when, upon returning to the state for a couple of days after a month of cross-country travel, I discovered that I saw my motherland differently than in recent years.
My view was from the balcony of a friend's apartment in Omaha. She lives at the western edge of the city, looking out over a fresh six-lane road with new developments on one side and alfalfa on the other. I arrived at the bottom of the magic hour, that thirty minutes or so after the sun has slipped below the horizon but the sky retains its sunset glow. Because there were no clouds that evening, the sky was a perfectly blended strata of colors, from dark purple overhead, to midnight blue, to muddy green, to yellow, to reddish gold right above the horizon. Sparse tree branches and power lines cut tangled black silhouettes against this backdrop.
In that moment, Nebraska did not seem like a parochial, sealed place to me. It seemed to be a place, a distinct place, a place where I am from, but one that bled into the wider world to the east and to the west.
So I was caught off-guard when, upon returning to the state for a couple of days after a month of cross-country travel, I discovered that I saw my motherland differently than in recent years.
My view was from the balcony of a friend's apartment in Omaha. She lives at the western edge of the city, looking out over a fresh six-lane road with new developments on one side and alfalfa on the other. I arrived at the bottom of the magic hour, that thirty minutes or so after the sun has slipped below the horizon but the sky retains its sunset glow. Because there were no clouds that evening, the sky was a perfectly blended strata of colors, from dark purple overhead, to midnight blue, to muddy green, to yellow, to reddish gold right above the horizon. Sparse tree branches and power lines cut tangled black silhouettes against this backdrop.
In that moment, Nebraska did not seem like a parochial, sealed place to me. It seemed to be a place, a distinct place, a place where I am from, but one that bled into the wider world to the east and to the west.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Sommerset
Thought I'd try to use Paper Logic as a travel blog for a bit.
After just over a month on the road, with adventures to Hawaii, Maine, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, Memphis, North Carolina, DC, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New York again, and DC again...I'm now in a Starbucks in Sommerset, PA.
After a quick look around, I opted against pitching a tent at the Woodside Campground, and instead checked in at the A-1 Budget Motel. My room is off of what looks like a greenhouse for entirely artificial plants. Kathy, the front desk worker is exceedingly friendly and helpful. It was her promise of free waffles for breakfast that really drew me in.
In giving advice about restaurants in the area, she plugged the Pizza Hut. But she also noted the Ruby Tuesdays down the road, "which, as you know, is a more upscale restaurant. They usually don't build them in towns like this--only 5000 people or so--but they did so because we are located right off the Turnpike, so they do well."
Sadly, the wi-fi did not work, despite Danny's, the Indian maintenance man's, best effort. He wanted to know why I got an Apple. "They're the most expensive computer on the market. Did your family tell you you would get no viruses? My friend who has a new Apple paid $3000 for his. For that, you could get a giant-screened PC. The Dells, the Acers, the Gateways are so very, very cheap."
I've been kicked out of Starbucks. The nice girl who was happy to describe to me all the different flavors of tea--"since I've basically had them all," she confessed--and her manager, who might be her mother, informed me that it's time to go. And so it is.
After just over a month on the road, with adventures to Hawaii, Maine, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, Memphis, North Carolina, DC, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New York again, and DC again...I'm now in a Starbucks in Sommerset, PA.
After a quick look around, I opted against pitching a tent at the Woodside Campground, and instead checked in at the A-1 Budget Motel. My room is off of what looks like a greenhouse for entirely artificial plants. Kathy, the front desk worker is exceedingly friendly and helpful. It was her promise of free waffles for breakfast that really drew me in.
In giving advice about restaurants in the area, she plugged the Pizza Hut. But she also noted the Ruby Tuesdays down the road, "which, as you know, is a more upscale restaurant. They usually don't build them in towns like this--only 5000 people or so--but they did so because we are located right off the Turnpike, so they do well."
Sadly, the wi-fi did not work, despite Danny's, the Indian maintenance man's, best effort. He wanted to know why I got an Apple. "They're the most expensive computer on the market. Did your family tell you you would get no viruses? My friend who has a new Apple paid $3000 for his. For that, you could get a giant-screened PC. The Dells, the Acers, the Gateways are so very, very cheap."
I've been kicked out of Starbucks. The nice girl who was happy to describe to me all the different flavors of tea--"since I've basically had them all," she confessed--and her manager, who might be her mother, informed me that it's time to go. And so it is.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Rainsummer
I love the hour before an evening summer storm. By seven o’clock, the long sunset has begun anyway, and the cloudveil merely adds to the darkening. It gives you the feeling of being a kid, staying out later than you were allowed tonight, because something special is going to happen. The air smells like a woman cooling off from exercise. You tilt your head upward and wince because you can expect at any moment the first pebbles of water to plummet down from three thousand feet above at tremendous speed and plink you in the eye. And once you’ve seen the drop growing bigger it’s too late to avoid it.
I remember in the summertime as kids, my sisters and I would go out into the driveway, or sometimes just out on the front porch and watch the leadgray curtain approach our neighborhood. Linen shorts and t-shirts, maybe thong sandals too, but most likely bare feet. We’d skip-toe out to the grass and roll around, daring the storm to come. The bugs had all fled, even the bees that gave us so much fear. It was just the prickly soft grass and its the hard dirt scalp, and we’d press our faces into it making our noses itch and run. Dane Espegaard was across the cul-de-sac, and if he and his brother Ryan appeared, and their big cat Abraham, I’d go to meet them in the middle, carefully picking my feet up to avoid a shard of brown glass or a larger tooth of gravel. Abraham would stalk the boulevards on the perimeter never looking at us.
The rain came and it was always too short. I loved the rain because something was happening. When you’re a kid, you get impatient for that. When you’re an adult, you just want someone to share the moment with.
The rain, the rain, the rain, fat and cold and riding a cool front. Abraham trotted for cover under the eaves in the bushes at the tall gray Barnell house. Sometimes we’d play in it and get our hair and cotton t-shirts plastered to our skinny little bodies. But I also liked to abstain, upstairs on my bed in the corner, reading the Hardy Boys in the gray light in the shadows, or else downstairs folded over the back of the couch, looking out of the front windows as the world got drenched. Never much liked it after the rain was done—everything was wet and muddy, grass clippings clung to your ankles, the late summer sun came back again and nothing was special anymore. No, I liked the rain, when the world was different and you had the sense that someday you’d share this with someone.
I remember in the summertime as kids, my sisters and I would go out into the driveway, or sometimes just out on the front porch and watch the leadgray curtain approach our neighborhood. Linen shorts and t-shirts, maybe thong sandals too, but most likely bare feet. We’d skip-toe out to the grass and roll around, daring the storm to come. The bugs had all fled, even the bees that gave us so much fear. It was just the prickly soft grass and its the hard dirt scalp, and we’d press our faces into it making our noses itch and run. Dane Espegaard was across the cul-de-sac, and if he and his brother Ryan appeared, and their big cat Abraham, I’d go to meet them in the middle, carefully picking my feet up to avoid a shard of brown glass or a larger tooth of gravel. Abraham would stalk the boulevards on the perimeter never looking at us.
The rain came and it was always too short. I loved the rain because something was happening. When you’re a kid, you get impatient for that. When you’re an adult, you just want someone to share the moment with.
The rain, the rain, the rain, fat and cold and riding a cool front. Abraham trotted for cover under the eaves in the bushes at the tall gray Barnell house. Sometimes we’d play in it and get our hair and cotton t-shirts plastered to our skinny little bodies. But I also liked to abstain, upstairs on my bed in the corner, reading the Hardy Boys in the gray light in the shadows, or else downstairs folded over the back of the couch, looking out of the front windows as the world got drenched. Never much liked it after the rain was done—everything was wet and muddy, grass clippings clung to your ankles, the late summer sun came back again and nothing was special anymore. No, I liked the rain, when the world was different and you had the sense that someday you’d share this with someone.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
While Jesus Waits in Hell
Flip flops slap across the freshly mopped marble floor of the new Cathedral. Outside, it is the first hot day of the year in Houston. Inside, the shade is cool—people in t-shirts enjoy the feeling of their own bare arms, swinging free, uninhibited, putting flowers around the statutes of the saints, around the Roman altar, the brass-plated tabernacle, still open and empty, but without so much of the horror. We committed murder yesterday, but that was yesterday. We’re different now. Time has passed—last night, this morning—and things are different now.
The candles are still not out; all the sticks stand empty. The rose quartz basins of holy water at the entryways are still padded dry; nothing for the people in t-shirts to bless themselves with as they slip in and out through the heavy doors, going for another load of clean linens, reserved pew placards, boxes of new candles, more flowers—lilies, petunias, forsythias, hydrangeas—nothing to bless themselves with except their own hands. The baptismal font, though, has been refilling since early this morning and its granite lips are now brimming over again. The sound of the fountain’s trickle, running out of the mouth, down the chin, down the neck, shoulders, spreading over the torso of the interior column, soothes the anxious brows of the t-shirted people as they make the preparations. Tonight, the font will be the co-Star; right now it supervises.
Across town at a supermarket, someone has just purchased the last lamb roast from the butcher. Raise the interior temperature to 160ยบ, says the meat man. It is high strawberry season in Texas, and you can purchase a whole box of them for 99¢ (limit of four). In dairy, the sample lady is giving out brochures and little medicine cups of ultra-active yogurt culture drink—new from Japan, she says, sold in little five-pack bottles, one for each day’s lunch. At the front of the store, Janelle is slicing samples of bunny cakes patted with coconut flakes to give Peter Cottontail the impression of fur.
Further out to the west, rollerbladers enter Memorial Park from the bayou mo-pac trail. The foliage is lush and green in many places now, but the leaves still droop limply, like a stilt-legged colt not yet used to its own weight. Wick-away mesh shirts and sports bras and a Big Brother throwing routes to a Nike-ed kid over a broad-blade grassy patch where the ground warm and damp with life. A man and wife push their rubber tire stroller under the shade of an oak and pull out foil wrapped sandwiches.
Houston bakes. It is Saturday, this Saturday, this one, holy Saturday. Inside the Cathedral, flip flopped feet slap the floor on their way out of the sanctuary—whap, whap, whap, whap—to return again soon in full-toed leather.
The candles are still not out; all the sticks stand empty. The rose quartz basins of holy water at the entryways are still padded dry; nothing for the people in t-shirts to bless themselves with as they slip in and out through the heavy doors, going for another load of clean linens, reserved pew placards, boxes of new candles, more flowers—lilies, petunias, forsythias, hydrangeas—nothing to bless themselves with except their own hands. The baptismal font, though, has been refilling since early this morning and its granite lips are now brimming over again. The sound of the fountain’s trickle, running out of the mouth, down the chin, down the neck, shoulders, spreading over the torso of the interior column, soothes the anxious brows of the t-shirted people as they make the preparations. Tonight, the font will be the co-Star; right now it supervises.
Across town at a supermarket, someone has just purchased the last lamb roast from the butcher. Raise the interior temperature to 160ยบ, says the meat man. It is high strawberry season in Texas, and you can purchase a whole box of them for 99¢ (limit of four). In dairy, the sample lady is giving out brochures and little medicine cups of ultra-active yogurt culture drink—new from Japan, she says, sold in little five-pack bottles, one for each day’s lunch. At the front of the store, Janelle is slicing samples of bunny cakes patted with coconut flakes to give Peter Cottontail the impression of fur.
Further out to the west, rollerbladers enter Memorial Park from the bayou mo-pac trail. The foliage is lush and green in many places now, but the leaves still droop limply, like a stilt-legged colt not yet used to its own weight. Wick-away mesh shirts and sports bras and a Big Brother throwing routes to a Nike-ed kid over a broad-blade grassy patch where the ground warm and damp with life. A man and wife push their rubber tire stroller under the shade of an oak and pull out foil wrapped sandwiches.
Houston bakes. It is Saturday, this Saturday, this one, holy Saturday. Inside the Cathedral, flip flopped feet slap the floor on their way out of the sanctuary—whap, whap, whap, whap—to return again soon in full-toed leather.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
A Microcosm
Before I left, though, my grandparents had bequeathed to me their old cast-iron skillet: chipped orange enamel on the outside, and thirty years of blackened grease coating the inside. It was heavy; it was perfect. You can’t buy skillets like this; they have to be earned over decades of use, so that all of the oils and fats of meals past soak into the iron and add their bouquet to meals present.
I didn’t have a toaster, and until my first paycheck, I didn’t have a whole lot of money either. So in the start-up trips to Ikea—make that Target—make that Walmart, I had to pick and choose. A toaster missed out of the first cut. Butter was cheaper, though, and I soon discovered a secret: melt a little (or more than a little) butter on the skillet, put a slice of bread face down on it, then flip and repeat, and you’d get toast. In fact, you’d get great toast, a crispysavory crust of fried butter locking in a chewybready core, at the ready for jams or fried eggs and cheese or even just plain. The technique worked so well that I began buying higher quality bakery bread to go with it. It just seemed fitting.
Pass a few weeks, establish ruts of the daily routine, and I noticed something I’d missed before: it takes a long time to make toast on my skillet. For one thing, my skillet is really only large enough to toast one regular-sized piece of bread at a time. And another thing is that you have to watch the toast all the time, to flip it at the right moment, just before golden brown would turn to smoke and charred black. You can’t just press and button and trust springs and levers to do the work for you. I began to have toast less frequently.
Then one day in Target, I noticed some very inexpensive appliances. I’d gotten a little money by then, a couple of paychecks, so that a $7 toaster didn’t seem like all that big a deal. At least it wasn’t on the margin anymore for making my month’s rent. I brought home the cheapest one, a little aluminum box painted white.
Now I have toast more frequently again. It’s nowhere near as good delicious, but it works as a vehicle for peanut butter and jam. Now, I pop down my bread—pre-sliced—while I’m frying my eggs and the two come up done at just the same time. And that is just how things are now.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Fearfully and Wonderfully
The world's best hairdresser: Miriam, a 40-something Colombian immigrant, now a U.S. citizen, who learned how to cut hair by practicing every weekend on her family members back home--8 siblings and God knows how many cousins. We found each other by accident my 1L year of law school. After the first haircut in October, I went to no one else. Miriam was a true craftswoman. It took her 50% longer to cut my hair than other stylists, but when she finished it was perfect. It's not easy to make my hair look handsome, but she did it. Miriam cut my hair each month of that year, until one day in late May I stopped in the salon on Broadway and she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. She'd talked in the past about attending secretarial school at Gateway Community College, so I figured she'd made good on her plan.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
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