Just how many matchboxes does it take?
Are you out of your gourd? This was the question my father would pose when he saw you doing something completely, obviously, utterly and undeniably crazy. I never remember what I was doing at the time, but how could you forget a question like that? My gourd? The dried...
Knowing if it’s really a quake
When I was a child, and a dogged reader of Highlights magazine (or maybe it was World, the mini National Geographic), there were occasional articles on "decorating your earthquake shoes" or some such. The idea was for the kids living near the San Andreas fault to have...
Contradictory Evidence
In Spanish when you say you have "mixed feelings" about something, you have "sentimientos encontrados," which, when I parse the words, I end up with feelings that run into each other on the street. You know, like that Reese's Peanut Butter cup commercial from eons ago...
Spring
Disclaimer: I know it's not yet spring. But it's beginning to look alot that way, so I declare it the beginning of bearshapedsphere's spring.I have a long history of hating spring, and spring-like weather. Crappy things tended to abound in the spring when I was...
Spring? por favor?!
In honor of the near end of winter, I shall address the freezitude that is a Santiago dwelling in the invernal months here. Sure, in general, it rarely dips below 0 C/ 32 F, which in your estimation is not really cold. Judging by the hits, a bunch of you live in...
Whirr, clack, swing, latch.
And then there's the story of the elevator itself. The elevator is like a nosy neighbor. It's always around, makes an identifiable noise, has its own personality.Personality?! you ask. Aha. You are a person that lives in a building with a modern elevator. The kind...
On going unnoticed
When I tell the story about the water, or any of the other trials and tribulations of living in a circa very freaking old building in a city that doesn't exactly take care of its old treasures, I have to include my neighbors. I've had a couple of living situations in...
With a foreign accent
There's something in particular that I don't like of my own manejo (mastery) of Spanish. Besides than the occasional mistakes, the tendency to double r every r that ever walked and my personal shibboleths, any words with an r/d combination such as adolorido (pained or...
Proud to be…
I used to think that people from the United States, or Americans, as they are known in their home country, were the only people to claim themselves as percentages of this and that nationality, or just claim themselves wholesale to be X (where X stands for Irish,...
Arroz con leche/ rice pudding
A bleak day in the capital city with not much to distract me other than my french-chilean neighbors asking if they could pirate my wifi (which I don't have, and which wouldn't be pirating in any case, since they asked), has me thinking of hearty homemade food.One day...
