The Really South: Goodbye Lima

I´ve noticed that I have a nasty habit of going AWOL for a long time just after leaving somewhat disconcerting posts. Well, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am currently in Cusco (Cuzco? ...Both work) after spending a wonderful last couple days in Lima. I ate some wonderful ceviche, had my first anticuchos (marinated beef hearts... delicious!), drank free whiskeys all night at a party hosted by Lima´s DedoMedio (Middle Finger) magazine, and crossed Barranco's beautiful Puente De Los Suspiros (Bridge of Sighs).

We'll see if this video loads, but this was one of my highlights of my trip -- the relatively new "Circuito Mágico Del Agua", which is a park that consists almost entirely of water fountains:

The Ladrons and the Gringo-Swindling

* The word "ladrons" translates approximately to "thieves" but it also somehow reminds me of "toilets" for some reason which is appropriate enough.

** Also note that all the facts of my accounting of the events of yesterday are highly suspect... this includes the names of the people I interacted with, to my accounting of anything I think I might have said since I don't speak spanish...  I just got tired of writing "supposedly" to qualify every sentence and so you can mentally add those in if you like.

OK... a full accounting of the events of yesterday would take a long time, but suffice it to say that yesterday while wandering the streets of Lima I ended up bumping into a man named Jose, who was playing in a band in Barranco later that evening.  We talked as well as people can when one person doesn't speak better than pre-K English and the other doesn't speak better than pre-K Spanish, but we were having a good enough time and soon I agreed to buy him a drink at a bar.

We get to a dark bar -- I think that we were the only people there at the time, and soon another friend of his shows up.  I agree to get pisco sours (the drink I'm holding here) for the three of us, and we order a plate of alpaca meat with other goodies.  Both were tasty enough.  And we had most of the conversation in Spanish... so I was having a pleasant time with good food and drink practicing my Espanol.

There is much more to this story really (including their attempts to get me to buy an expensive bottle of "ayawaska" from a shaman -- this is a sort of hallucinogenic elixir which appeared to me to look like blended toilet water), but in any case, I ended up walking out of there $150 poorer from the three drinks and alpaca meat I had bought... which might not sound like the most money in the world to Americans, but things are cheaper here and my friend Fabi assures me this is about the price you would pay for a good meal at the most expensive restaurants in town.

In any case, I probably would have been out a lot more except for the convenient fact that I didn't have any credit cards on me and hadn't brought enough money to pay the bill I had already racked up anyway, and so the party had to end sooner than my compadres had originally intended... I imagine I could have been blindsided by a much larger bill later if they hadn't learned sooner how little I was carrying on me.  

The owners of the bar wanted me to leave some sort of collateral behind while I picked up the rest of the money. I was only carrying my passport and camera, and I didn't want these people to know where I was staying, so this seemed to me to be a horrible option, but I luckily had a cell phone on me from Fabi's mom, which was supposed to help me get out of any emergencies.  I thought this qualified, and so I called and luckily Fabi came to the rescue.

It took Fabi about a half hour to arrive at which point Jose and his friend (the one in the picture... I don't remember his name) were gone.  As I sat and waited I actually had a very pleasant time trying to talk with some of the staff of this bar in Spanish, who for the most part spoke no English whatsoever.  But I started our conversation by noting to one that "that was an expensive Spanish lesson..."

The Really South (Prelude): A Lesson from Avshalom Caspi

A couple years ago as I was in graduate school, working my ass off on my dissertation and generally feeling stressed out of my mind, we had a guest speaker come to town by the name of Avshalom Caspi, who I had the privilege of joining for a free lunch at a classy restaurant as a part of his festivities. Dr. Caspi is a widely regarded authority on the study of genetics and personality development, and conducts ridiculously massive studies including one which consists of surveying an entire birth cohort of New Zealanders every two or three years (others are more ridiculous). He also has long flowing hair and was wearing bright purple socks with yellow spots with his suit at the time.

I was supposed to have gleaned many lessons about how to conduct research from him at this lunch, but given my generally stressed out state at the time I don´t remember anything from that day at all. Except for one thing: he told me that when he and his wife got married, they made a vow to one another that they would have a trip once a year where they would go someplace exotic for a full month. And after some 15 or so years of marriage, they have stuck by this vow, travelling to places like Madagascar and Ecuador and Thailand.

At the time this was a sort of revelation to me: you could conduct research that was good enough to get you papers published in Science and get you a job at Cambridge, while at the same time taking vacation that lasted an entire month out of the year. My last several years of almost incessant working started to seem... unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive. That year, I resolved to do one of these trips myself (I ended up in Turkey) and currently I am sipping pisco sours in Lima, Peru, just a couple days away from Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Thanks, Dr. Caspi! I´m now trying to spread the good word to other hopeless workaholics.

More later...

Big 3-0

A Facebook comment from DJ Dan on the event of my 30th birthday:

Happy Birthday! Your personality is now set like plaster.

This was an allusion to the belief among some psychologists that your personality is "set like plaster" and basically impossible to change after age 30.

My reply:

Fuck! I had so much self-improvement planned for last night that I just didn't get around to.

An interesting reply, I think... perhaps not proving that personality is fixed at 30, but maybe in several ways illustrating that I have much self-improvement left to do. Let's hope the psychologists are wrong.

Summer Nights at RayLen, w/ Rosetta Stone Star

A little over a week ago I went to the second concert by my multi-talented friend Leah at RayLen vineyards. The first concert was a classical concert (which meant that I can't name any of the songs), which was held around April -- here's a picture that was snapped by alert concert-goer Brad:

The first concert was great and widely attended. But the second to me was even better. By June you could look around the RayLen grounds and see fields of ripe vines in every direction. We were just a day or two shy of the solstice, and so the days were long enough that the final songs of the concert were played against the setting sun. There were probably close to two hundred people listening to the concert over glasses of wine on the lawn in front of the winery.

The second concert also featured a much more eclectic set of music... only a smattering of classical songs that I couldn't remember the name of. This concert featured a set list ranging from Leah crooning Elton John's "Your Song" on the piano, followed by a cover of Vince Guiardi's "Christmas Time is Here" from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (a Top 10 Christmas song ever, btw). Over the course of the concert Leah played not just the piano, but also the bassoon and guitar, all while singing most of the songs. There were also some other unusual song selections which escape my mind at the moment. But I remember the last song sung at the finale was a sort of sensual version of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On," which Leah said she hadn't originally been planning to do but maybe the ambient wine got the best of her. I dunno.

In any case, it has been about a week since the concert, and I had sort of forgotten to do this post, until I was working through my Spanish using the Rosetta Stone software and stumbled onto none other than Leah again, who was providing important clues into the proper use of the past tense:


I am trying to get at the heart of the mystery on this one and have contacted Leah for clues. No answers yet, but she did perhaps unwittingly confirm that this is in fact her. So guitar, piano... bassoon... Rosetta Stone superstar... what doesn't she do?

Hip to be Square

About a month ago while sitting at Krankies one day, innocently drinking a Boddington's Pub Ale, I suddenly found a little square piece of wood shoved in my face... Doodles had enlisted me to create a piece of artwork for the Electric Moustache's "Square" exhibit.

After making a trip to Michael's to get art supplies, I went about making my first piece of artwork in several years, and to the best of my knowledge my first painting ever. Here it is, and my sister's are below:

I titled this one "European Rooftops" after taking photos of various
buildings I liked from Google images and smooshing them together.

Doodle's first picture, which she titled "Ganesh"

Doodle's second picture, "Simon Bolivar," modeled after a famous portrait.

The exhibit happened last week, and was accompanied by a silent auction. I was around for most of the auction, watching my picture from afar. I was amazed when someone actually placed a bid down (the first piece of art I've ever sold!). I resisted the temptation to walk up and talk to the bidder, as I imagined he would ask "what can you tell me about this painting?" and then I would say something stupid like "This is the first painting I've ever made... I was figuring out how to use acrylic paints as I was going along," and then the man would be filled with regret and try to scratch his name off the bid list.

Talkin' Cajun Yard Dog

I've been to Charlotte many times now, and had this conversation many times with my friend Jess -- a distressed Charlotte native:

Jess: "You know that there are other places to eat in Charlotte than Cajun Yard Dog, right?"

DW (channeling Homer Simpson): "Whatever Jess. Cajun Yard Dog is like steak. And why would you eat hamburger when you can have steak all the time?"

Mmm.... Cajun Yard Dog. Step through the door in an unassuming strip mall, and suddenly you are back in New Orleans. Some personal favorites: The seafood platters, the Po Boy sandwiches, the crawfish etouffe, the "okrachokie" appetizer (fried okra, artichoke, and calamari), and some of the best shrimp and grits I've had in the south, all washed down with a pint of New Orleans' Abita beers. Then there is the "smothered cabbage" side dish which absolutely cannot be missed: cabbage cooked in heavy cream, white wine, three cheeses, hot sauce, and a bunch of other probably heart-destroying things until it basically tastes like decadent mashed potatoes...

Well, last weekend, Jess and I got a group of seven folks together to go to head to Charlotte for the day. After watching a movie, the seven of us tried to figure out where to go for dinner. The two choices? A Mediterranean restaurant, and Cajun Yard Dog. Where should we go? I abstained, saying "I'm impartial; either is fine with me". One by one, everyone else abstained, until getting to DJ Dan, who said "I'm partial... let's go to Cajun Yard Dog." And of course, I was perfectly happy with the outcome. This of course led to a familiar conversation:

Jess: "You know that there are other places to eat in Charlotte than Cajun Yard Dog."

DW: "Whatever, Jess."

After being at Cajun Yard Dog so often that I know
the waitress's name, I figured I should buy a shirt.

The Good Folks @ Alexander's in Clemmons

This kindly security guard helped me get the car towed after it got all broken up around Chestnut & First St.

One of the fun things about blogging is the sense that you can hold people accountable after they shit on you (yeah, don't think I've forgotten, Northwest Airlines... I still hate your guts), by bringing their sins to light and airing your grievances and contempt with the world and generally smearing their reputation. The last two weeks I've been without a car, and was gearing up to write scurrilous comments about Alexander's Auto Shop in Clemmons, where I was getting mycar fixed. A month ago, I had the ignition switch fixed by them. Then, about 10 days later, (after they had told me I would "probably never have to fix that part again"), the ignition switch broke again. Since then, I've been without my poor Rav4 for two weeks as they've been working on it. I mean, really, two weeks to get an ignition switch fixed??

But my irritation was misplaced and undeserved. It was clear that they were working on the car almost every day, and a major part of the delay was the fact that my particular Rav4 model has some unusual/rare parts and some ambiguities with their model (there are two different 1997 Rav4 models). When Alexander's kept getting the wrong parts delivered to them by their parts supplier, the mechanic working my car started driving to auto yards himself to find the right part. It was soon discovered that the problem wasn't actually the ignition switch, but a bigger problem with the steering column.

Despite the fact that they had put hours upon hours of work into this thing (the main mechanic said "I felt horrible every day I got back to the shop and saw your car still sitting there"), and despite the fact that the problem ultimately was different than the one that was supposed to be covered by the warranty, I got the car back without paying a cent for their work, without even suggesting this myself at any point. The mechanic gave me some tips on detailing with future auto body shops so that ambiguities about my car's particular model wouldn't get in the way.

So basically, I want to thank you guys -- I appreciate the help greatly, and will definitely recommend you to anyone.