Friday, April 16, 2010
unemployment suicide
dear unemployment, there’s no easy way to say this, so here it goes: although we’ve just spent a wonderful year together, i feel we need to go our own ways now. i’ve found a job. it actually should be no surprise to you that i’ve been looking for one for a while now. you were jealous and i denied it, but it was true. yeah, sure, he may not be as much fun as you, but he fills some greater needs that you just can’t. plus i actually like him a lot; i know he can make me happy in ways you would have never been able to. i do want you to understand that i value the time we’ve been together above anything. you’ve taught me so much about life and i feel i’ve grown so much since we met. and of course, we had some amazing times together and i wouldn’t take it back for anything in this world, but we’ve just grown apart, ya know? look, unnie, you don’t have to get all dramatic about this, ok? i’m sure there are plenty of other fishes in the sea for you to get together with, it’s just that what we had is now over and i need you to move on as i have. no, wait! wh... what are you doing??? what is that? drop that right now! please don’t do that! listen, i was just joking, ok? this was just a silly late april fool’s joke. i’ll do whatever you want, but, please, just don’t do it! no, unnie! nooooooo...
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
the bird and the stone
i eat a lot of pretty much anything i can get my hands on and never seem to know where to stop. names such as "food disposal", "dumpster" (because there are never leftovers at a restaurant table when I'm around), “black hole”, and my favorite “mary poppins’ bag” have been used to describe such eating habits.
when i was younger my mom, wise as only a brazilian mother can be, told me in portuguese, “passarinho que come pedra sabe o cú que tem”. this proverb of dubious origins (my mom likes to make them up sometimes) translates into something like: the bird that eats stones knows its own butthole.
i identify with this saying for two reasons: first, because a couple of my older sister's nicknames for me are “piu” (an onomatopoeia for a bird’s song in portuguese; the same as “tweet” in english) and "pissirinha", which is something like birdie, but in the "i language" - when you substitute every vowel in a word for the letter "i", hence "pissirinha" instead of "passarinha" (for the nickname in question the last letter on the word was maintained because it indicates gender - for those who speak portuguese or spanish and know what i’m talking about). these names somehow came about when i was about 11 years old and we were making a comic book where all the people had dragonfly bodies and spoke in this high pitched voice using that strange tongue i just explained. the best part of this comic book (i have no recollection of what it was actually about, by the way) was that the heads on these insect people were cutouts from old pictures we had. we made sure to only select the faces of folks who were at the edges of the photos or in the background, unaware that they were even in the frame, because they tend to look pretty hilarious. you can’t really get those kinds of results with digital pictures anymore… anyhow, somewhere out of
that came my nicknames and all of this jibber jabber was meant to imply i identify with birds (i even have this little bird i draw everywhere who is kinda my alter ego).
the second reason why i identify with my mother’s statement is because my eating habits have forced me to become aware of the opposite end of my digestive tract (and the damages that can be caused to it) from a premature age. my earliest memory is of an episode when i must have been around 6 to 8 years old. i decided to eat three whole large red guavas at once, against my mom’s instructions never to eat more than one at a time. the thing about guavas is that they have lots of small seeds inside them and if we eat too many of those little bastards they all bunch up into a chunky mass inside our intestines. let’s just say that there were tears and blood involved on the evacuation process. it literally felt like i was passing a huge stone.
so there you go. i am the bird, relentlessly devouring (almost) everything that comes my way, and the food is the stone. actually, food isn’t necessarily stone, but i guess i make it so sometimes, going at it the way i do.
when i was younger my mom, wise as only a brazilian mother can be, told me in portuguese, “passarinho que come pedra sabe o cú que tem”. this proverb of dubious origins (my mom likes to make them up sometimes) translates into something like: the bird that eats stones knows its own butthole.
i identify with this saying for two reasons: first, because a couple of my older sister's nicknames for me are “piu” (an onomatopoeia for a bird’s song in portuguese; the same as “tweet” in english) and "pissirinha", which is something like birdie, but in the "i language" - when you substitute every vowel in a word for the letter "i", hence "pissirinha" instead of "passarinha" (for the nickname in question the last letter on the word was maintained because it indicates gender - for those who speak portuguese or spanish and know what i’m talking about). these names somehow came about when i was about 11 years old and we were making a comic book where all the people had dragonfly bodies and spoke in this high pitched voice using that strange tongue i just explained. the best part of this comic book (i have no recollection of what it was actually about, by the way) was that the heads on these insect people were cutouts from old pictures we had. we made sure to only select the faces of folks who were at the edges of the photos or in the background, unaware that they were even in the frame, because they tend to look pretty hilarious. you can’t really get those kinds of results with digital pictures anymore… anyhow, somewhere out of
that came my nicknames and all of this jibber jabber was meant to imply i identify with birds (i even have this little bird i draw everywhere who is kinda my alter ego).the second reason why i identify with my mother’s statement is because my eating habits have forced me to become aware of the opposite end of my digestive tract (and the damages that can be caused to it) from a premature age. my earliest memory is of an episode when i must have been around 6 to 8 years old. i decided to eat three whole large red guavas at once, against my mom’s instructions never to eat more than one at a time. the thing about guavas is that they have lots of small seeds inside them and if we eat too many of those little bastards they all bunch up into a chunky mass inside our intestines. let’s just say that there were tears and blood involved on the evacuation process. it literally felt like i was passing a huge stone.
so there you go. i am the bird, relentlessly devouring (almost) everything that comes my way, and the food is the stone. actually, food isn’t necessarily stone, but i guess i make it so sometimes, going at it the way i do.
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