If you give a two year old a camera, she will take this picture of you. Because you are legs and arms and squatting and apparently, you don’t even have a head.

The photographer is a towheaded two year old that I walked around with, pointing and oohing and aahing at the pet and animal section of the HomeCenter (our version of Home Depot) while her mom had some paint mixed, and everyone I encountered told me how lovely she was, and probably imagined that if I were her mother, that her father must have a very strong straight hair and golden skin genetic makeup, because she is all Coppertone perfect without spending a speck of time without sunscreen and her hair is decidedly straight.

Or maybe they thought I was the Eastern European nana.

In other news, funny names abound in Chile, like this one for a peluquería, or hair cut place:

Often these bad names are in small, indie, low-budget haircutteries (hair butcheries?), like the one called Blow-up that I see on Curicó (or is it Tarapacá? one of those streets that changes name a hundred times before becoming Vidaurre and finally petering out into the Panamerican highway, where it shoots off into Sazie, names most Santiaguinos never think about, because they just know how to get there). Anyway, CutMe, is not a peluquería for gangmembers, to say nothing of teenagers with that problem we won’t even make fun of because it’s just too sad.

It’s just a name, which presumably comes from “Cortame el pelo” which would mean “cut my hair!” but if you shorten it, and get Cortame, it does sound like Cut Me. Which, speaking of, I finally got a haircut to undo the terror that had been inflicted on my hair a few months ago, a style I like to call, curly on top, rattail on bottom. To be honest, the haircut was hilarious, in that I finally, after all these years of being alive, understood what people meant when they talked about bad haircuts. I’d never had one I’d disliked so strongly, but now I am all sympathy. A very nice woman named Claudia at a nondescript haircuttery in a shopping arcade in Providencia fixed my hair and told me that given the way I look, I should consider dating men down to 30 years old. Thank you Claudia, I’m sure all the 30-year-old men in the world are relieved to know that we have their blessing.

In other other news, this was too funny not to share. Long ago, my mother sent me a box of stuff to Chile. I’d asked her to send me innertubes for my hybrid tires, which are 28″ (as opposed to the mountainbike’s 26), and wider than a road bike tire, which means if you use road bike tire tubes, you flat out all the time. I bought them, had them shipped to her house, and she packed them up with a bunch of stuff which she sent to me when I used to live in Bellas Artes, when Bellas Artes was all taxiboys and stepping over sleeping people in the street. (now it’s fancy, and the hybrid tubes are easier to find here as well). One of the things she sent me was a box of four “paint markers” with which to draw on the window. I have no idea why, I’m not particularly draw-happy, and I like my windows smudged with dirt, not painted festive colors.

However, with time, I’ve come to use my windows as an extension of my whiteboard. I use whiteboard markers to write what I want to remember, and my neighbors probably look quizically at my window, and think, what? now what? because my handwriting is awful, and it would be backwards and in English, and who writes on their windows, anyway?

Well, I recently came across the paint markers, and have occasionally used them to scrawl this or that on the window. I was just wiping off the out of date stuff the other day, and I came across this, with the light behind it, which made me smile more than I ever thought rabies could.

And there’s more to that story here, but really, things other than getting bitten by cars and hit by dogs (I mean…) really do happen here in Chile. I’m off to go do some of them right now.