water under the bridge.

Tonight was the annual cocktail party at my old house in Oakland. It's one of the least exclusive events I know, and you're encouraged to bring friends or co-workers--often it turns out they know someone else at the party anyway. Sometimes, it's a small Valley.

When Anna and I were dating, I once told her that if I got married, I could easily invite 200 people to the wedding without thinking very hard. She was skeptical, since she was still deciding whether I was a fountain of bullshit--I am, but not so it matters--but then she started meeting the horde, and saw that I wasn't showing off. It is actually a very big group, and while relationships vary as you'd expect, by and large we know each other well enough. The accumulated weight of shared experience.

Tonight there was my ex-girlfriend C, who was quite justifiably angry at me for a few years, until I got my head out of my ass and apologized, and eventually we became able to talk like old friends. Just last week, at a dinner party, I got to tell the remarkable story of our first date, which is one of my favorites. Of course everyone at the table has known me for years, and known her almost as long, and that just makes it all awesome.

There was also my ex from The Bad Relationship, who doesn't want to remember anything about our mutual past, but we did have quite a civil conversation about the labeling of the numerous cheeses. She reportedly acknowledged Anna's presence in the room, as well. Small steps toward a more peaceful world.

Many of us have dated, several have been married and divorced; sometimes the pairing up happens within the community, and sometimes the pairing up brings in a new person. (Or several, in my case: on the way home from the party when my late friend J and his wife H first met Anna, H commented how much she liked Anna and how well Anna and I seemed to fit together. J said, "Yeah...don't get too attached. We've seen this before, and they don't necessarily stick around." Anna was unable to convince H to tell this story at our wedding.)

(In my defense, this seems a little unfair, since my pre-Anna girlfriend was around for 3 years and still talks to my friends, if not, for mysterious reasons, to me. Nonetheless, a valid point.)

Most of the gang is a bit older than me, so they've had the pleasure of watching me grow from an obnoxious, if usually charming, twentysomething single guy, into a charming, if occasionally obnoxious, thirtysomething husband and father. These are my people. We've all grown up together, gone to Burning Man, eaten lovely food, helped each other, trusted each other, adjusted our expectations to what we're all capable of.

Across the community, biological families range from the fabulous like mine, to varying levels of dysfunction, all the way down to the horrific. No matter what we each started out with, now we have each other, too.

Our traditional dinner toast is "Here's to the family you choose."

I should be asleep

...and I'm not. The douchebags upstairs managed to wake me up (thankfully not Anna) with the dulcet tones of their subwoofer again. They turned it down when I went upstairs, then 20 minutes later turned it back on, louder and with dancing. At that point I was awake in the living room, so I went upstairs and knocked, and like magic, the music stopped and the flashing party lights went dark...and they refused to answer the door. It's like they're two-year olds. At least they then gave up and went drinking elsewhere. A mere five weeks until their lease is up! It's not clear the leaseholders actually live there now, and there's no signs of anyone moving, so I wonder if the landlord will have to evict them.

I've taken on some additional responsibility at work as a result of the tech lead leaving in a few weeks, going on a crusade to catalog and prioritize all the broken things so the team can stop fighting fires, which is both demoralizing and prevents them from working on actual interesting things. I'll have more to say about it post-holidays.

Holidays! I'm not sure what's happening on Christmas, yet. I've been known to spend California Christmases watching movies with friends, and I think once or twice by myself, though of course I don't really remember except that I'm satisfied with how it's all turned out in the end.

My memory is horrible: I had a brief IM chat with a friend, and the next day:

"Sorry for being all weird yesterday. I realize you probably didn't notice anything at all, but I just wanted to say."
"I don't remember what you said, but I'm certain you weren't being weird, so it's all fine."

I'm very present and involved in the conversation when it happens; just, when it's done, I'm on to the next thing and the details will more or less immediately slip my mind. It's a little weird when people thank me for saying something they found really helpful and I have no idea what it was. I try to speak directly to whatever's in front of me at the moment and put my attention on that, and if you can do arithmetic you can correctly guess that we cannot be thinking about past things and have 100% of our attention on the current thing.

That's all mostly true, but it's worth considering whether it's using Zen practice as a way to explain my memory which is just as bad as it has always been, long before I ever heard of Zen.

ANYWAY. Dude. Polar bear!

in memoriam

Yesterday we had J.D.'s memorial service, starting with about 90 minutes of people standing up and sharing stories or thoughts about J.D., then a whole mess of food, and then folks took the room apart, laid down carpet foam, and it became a chill party. There were a couple very nice altars, one for the community to put stuff on, and one main altar:






Jon Logan, among other things a brilliant ambient music DJ, did the most amazing slideshow, set to this Aphex Twin song which will, for a long time, make me cry.




All my photos are here.

I might have thought, after moving his dead body, that the fullness of J.D's death would have hit me already. Maybe it did, and now I'm just having sadness about it; I don't think the psychoanalysis matters.

Matt L. called me yesterday afternoon to ask if I would work with him in bringing the wireless microphones around to people who wanted to talk, which of course I did, so I ended up helping the memorial after all, and in such a public way that everyone thanked me for all my hard work. I also got to say my own piece, which was fun. I'll post links to video, if there is one (there should be, since it was live-streamed).

I was really struck by how many people, in their grieving, made what they were saying be all about them. We didn't cut anybody off, though it was an option: "really awkward" is not the same as "inappropriate." J.D.'s mother started off with a long prepared statement that talked (in not entirely accurate terms) about their estrangement, and after a brief field trip into the crazy, ended by encouraging people to resolve their own estrangements. A few more people echoed that sentiment during the sharing, and one guy afterward was talking to me and talking about how he was going to call his father the next day, since they'd been estranged for a few years.

"...and I realized aw, crap, I gotta make a phone call."
"Yeah, you do."
"I should."
"And you know, it might not work."
"But then I know I made the effort."
"Exactly. The best we can do is to be the ones to set ourselves aside and reach out. It might not work out, but we tried."

I was pretty angry at J.D. for a while after he moved to Colorado, because he left a vast quantity of stuff in the house we were both moving out of, which took me about a week and a half to dispose of. He never quite apologized for it, and without that I didn't have much to say about it, so it just sort of hung in the air and dissipated slowly like a bad smell in a poorly-ventilated room. Our friendship always had a bit of awkwardness to it, so it's not clear what would have changed had we actually worked it out. We talked and saw each other and hung out and had dinner. Life continued. So I think it's okay, and I don't regret anything.

I didn't see him often in person, but I talked to him every day on ICB, and now our conversation is ended. I guess this is it, then. Our friend is dead.

dead bodies are weird

It's been a few days since J.D. died, days packed with J.D.-related events, and I'm still kind of sick and I'm ready to be done with all the mournful socializing. Friday night a bunch of us got together to eat some food and hang together; yesterday a group of mostly the same people went to his house to help out his wife by carrying out his last wishes that his friends take away most of his stuff. He had a pretty solid collection of books, and an absolutely stunning collection of CDs, but since he mostly gathered CDs so he could use them in DJ sets, the collection is incomprehensible to most of us: vast stretches of obscure and usually wonderful electronic music. Nonetheless, we did the best we could, and many of the DJ pals found some exciting stuff in there. I got an Iron & Wine CD (he's even better than I thought), some Apocalyptica, a whole bunch of Bob Dylan, and I think every one of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. Inexplicably, I also took Sounds of North American Frogs, just because.

I mentioned before that I helped the hospice nurse move the body from the big fluffy chair where J.D. spent most of the past several months, onto the hospital bed where the nurse could do some cleanup and put a shirt on the body so we could have some last moments if we wanted, before the crematory guys came. There was a certain unreality to the whole experience: an hour before, I'd stood in the doorway for a few minutes, hands in my pockets, fascinated by J.D.'s labored breathing as he slept on morphine, watching his clock tick down. That wasn't the J.D. I knew, and yet it was: just a few weeks earlier he had bravely and generously had some folks over to watch movies for my bachelor party. He was vomiting and hiccuping the whole time, and everyone just took it in stride, made sure he had a clean pan to vomit into, and enjoyed each other's company (though not, alas, the movie).

This is the very blunt list of things I noticed about seeing and moving a dead body. I'm not likely to ever forget, but I feel compelled to share.

• I picked him up and thought, "Wow, he's so lifeless." Which is ridiculous thing to think, because he was dead. But, we have the "lifeless" as an everyday word, and never used for genuinely dead things: it's stuff like artistic performances, or bad food.
• The nurse thought I might be able to move J.D.'s torso: not a chance. After months of wasting away he still weighed a good 180 pounds. Also, "deadweight" has new meaning.
• A dead person's head will loll around and backwards in a way that a live person would never tolerate, even when unconscious (I think because it would prevent breathing).
• The jaw slacks in a certain unmistakably not-alive way.
• Hands are ice-cold, but the head is still warm, as the brain is the last thing the body tries to protect as it shuts down.
  
• That thing on TV where they close someone's eyes? I tried it, and it turns out that's why various cultures put coins on the eyes, which are otherwise determined to stay half-open. There's all kinds of things to say about why that feels creepy.

When I've talked to friends and relatives with hospice experience, they all independently say that no matter how ready you are, death is always shocking. The alive-to-dead transition is a sudden between-the-eyes direct education in how fragile and transient we are.

You often hear someone want to remember a person in a certain way: in their full alive-ness, instead of wasted and dying. And we ourselves always want to choose how we are seen and remembered. My last memory of J.D. is of moving his dead body, but it doesn't bother me. It's just part of the cycle of my J.D. memories. I wanted to be there for the end, partly out of curiosity (like most of us, I've been lucky enough to never see someone die), and partly because I felt it was something important that I could do, and I was right. It is something I can do, and it was a great privilege to be able to do it.

I've always wondered how it would go when it came time for one of us to die, and I have to say that as a community we've done magnificently, in taking care of J.D. and his wife, and in grieving freely and openly together. It's a chance for us to really see each other, and to forget about whatever stories we may habitually tell ourselves about how we see each other or what we can tell each other. We're free to spontaneously start crying, or start giving out hugs. There's a great sense of openness, of everyone creating an accepting space for everyone else.

Given his dedication to community, I can only imagine J.D. would have been overjoyed to see it.

J.D. Falk, 1974 - 2011

My old friend and housemate J.D. died on Wednesday night, following many months of fighting a very aggressive gastric cancer. Remarkably, at pretty much this exact time:

21:15 <dr.msk> JD's RFC is published.
21:16 <dr.msk> RFC6449

That was a little weird, even for the already-weird experience of someone dying. (RFC stands for "Request For Comments", and they're documents that define technical standards. Things like the World Wide Web and email are defined in RFCs. They're not as big a deal nowadays, but it's still cool to write one.)

There's a lot to say about J.D.: the anti-spam group he founded has one obituary, and there's an ongoing public memorial page. He was kind, generous, welcoming, affable, open-hearted, and tirelessly put his energies into building and supporting communities of all kinds. He was a remarkable DJ, and was developing into a remarkable maker of electronic music. He was also kind of a flake, and despite the years-long prodding from his wife, he left a lot of not-quite-resolved relationships behind, including with me. But he and I had long ago said everything that really needed to be said, and it turns out that once someone's dead, it's easy enough to let the unresolved stuff matter even less than before.

I could exhaust my supply of synonyms describing him, but read the memorial stories and you'll get the idea. I'm not so good with remembering stories on demand, especially under strain.

I had the difficult privilege of being in the house when he died, and helping the hospice nurse move his body from the fluffy armchair where he spent much of the past six months over to the bed so the crematory guys could pick him up,. I have a lot to say about the whole experience, much as it starts to make things seem about me; but I'm kind of a mess, and I get a lot of interesting stuff out of being a mess.

Good-bye, J.D. Thanks.

death approaches

An old friend and twice-housemate of mine, JD, who has been gravely ill with cancer all year, is finally down to his last days (possibly hours), in 24/7 hospice care at home. On Sunday, while he was still in the hospital, I helped move furniture around so a hospital bed and other gear could come in, and me and his wife and another friend were talking about funeral home and other arrangements. I'm part of the funeral-planning committee, though Anna and I got sick again as soon as we got home, so I haven't done anything yet except to suggest that a post-funeral reception is going to be many hundreds of people and therefore it's not practical to have at someone's house.

I've been watching my own reactions and impulses, along with everyone else's. I've been thinking it would be nice and interesting if I could see him one last time, but he very graciously had some folks over for my bachelor party a few weeks ago, so we had a solid hug then, and I don't feel like there's anything unsaid between us. Some people have a need to go see him, but he's exhausted and ready to die, and doesn't want visitors.

That last part there is exactly why we say things like "Don't wait until the end to say what you want to say." In addition to death sometimes coming on suddenly, even if there's some lingering, you don't know that you'll be able to see them. "Don't wait" isn't some philosophical point. It actually means "don't wait." It's not something to think about, it's something to do.

People get cranky with Buddhism, and especially Zen, for constantly harping on death: the teacher Dainin Katagiri famously started a fundraising talk with "You are all going to die someday." I've never had much patience with the American religion of positivity, or the idea that everything happens for a reason. Saying that everything happens for a reason, without actually knowing the reason, is a measured dose of comforting predestination, often invoked by people who would otherwise strenuously insist that we live from free will.

If we can't figure out the reason why a 37-year old is struck down by a vicious cancer that doesn't normally strike any of his demographic groups, maybe that's because there isn't a reason. Does that mean his life didn't have meaning? He did work and created communities that still flourish, touching thousands and thousands of people. He's dying because people die. The choices he made, the relationships he had, are what matters.

JD was a phenomenal downtempo DJ, and this was a favorite song.



Don't wait.

making friends

You may have heard this story. It's one of my favorites. 2005 was a dry year, by which I mean I didn't date anyone and I was going a little stir-crazy trying to fill the time. I took a lot of awesome classes, including many months of ceramics in Palo Alto. One of the students was named Randy, and he wasn't strictly a student because he was about as good, if not as encyclopedic, as the teacher. He made beautiful, beautiful work: I have one of his bowls, and I'm looking forward to having a place to put it. It's thin and light, perfectly formed, with a stunning sparkly blue glaze that he developed himself.

Randy is also an abalone diver. Abalone is a large (more than a pound) mollusk that lives off the California coast. They're severely restricted due to over-harvesting, because once you slice them into half-inch steaks and pound them with a hammer for ten minutes, they're delicious. You can only harvest a few each season per person, and it's illegal to wear scuba gear when harvesting, so you free-dive down with a special prybar. You have to surprise the abalone when you pry it off its rock, or else it clamps down and it's all blood and badness and using up the precious oxygen you have carried in your lungs, down there in the water with all the tidal currents and sharp rocks of the California coast.

Abalone divers are insane. Randy and I got on well, and he invited me to a campout on Memorial Day Weekend with a bunch of abalone diver families who had been gathering for years. They were all insane, too. There were a few guys nearer my age, in their early twenties. Friendly bunch. One of them was playing with pouring diesel fuel on the fire. (Diesel burns rather than exploding like gasoline, so while this is very male, it's not as bad as it could be. Somehow, women never find this reassuring.) We were getting along just fine, but they'd known each other their entire lives, and I was the new guy. After a few more beers, Diesel Fuel Kid starts throwing a hatchet at a stump a ways from the fire, and not hitting it. The others tried too, with failure after failure. (What are they teaching these kids in school?)

Finally, I think. something I'm good at! (I'm not sure if I'd ever thrown a hatchet before that moment. I had thrown knives, and I knew that hatchets were often easier. They've got a good weight to them, and the spin is easier to control. Ask me sometime, I'll show you.)

I judged it in my hand a few times to get a feel for it. *thunk*

That broke the ice in just the right way. I haven't spent much of my life being good at normal guy things. But if you're with the right people, you can do amazingly well being the guy who has a couple of beers and then throws an axe 15 feet into a log on the first try.

[Chile] best emails ever

[I wrote this on November 30th, and for some reason didn't publish it.]

More awesome messages from my friend at school that I feel compelled to share:

If I understand right, you're in Chiloé, and I'm envious. I imagine you are eating every strange thing they give you, and taking photos like a delinquent.

Since Christmas is coming, I would like a gift from there, but something specific. It could be a freshly made curanto [seafood stew], but as it would arrive cold, it's better that I ask for the following. Go get a pen and paper, it's detailed.

[instructions for the vegetable-dyed wool yarn I'm supposed to find]

I want to make myself a scarf or necklace of wool, and your support of my cause would be an act of mercy in my life. Here's a link so you know what yarn looks like and you don't bring me a sheep: http://lamagiadechiloe.blogspot.com/2008/05/lana-teida-con-vegetales.html

If you can't buy the yarn, you can leave me 5 dollars to buy my Christmas present.

I sincerely hope you're having fun in the South of my daydreams. Enjoy it for me, and post lots of photos.

I don't miss you and it's good that you're gone, and your profile photo is horrible.

And then today, in response to this photo:

I saw the photos, and your "mystery plant" is called nalca, and it grows in damp places. On my family's land, it grows by the shore of the lake, and has a taste like an acidic apple, and they make chicha [a sweet alcoholic beverage] from it. (Don't drink chicha down South there, you won't remember your name, or you might think you're kissing the pincoya [Chilote female water spirit] when it's actually a sheep.) The plant is good for salad, or to eat solo with salt if you're really, really hungry.

Please keep publishing photos, and I will be a tourist from my chair.

The mystery plant is Chilean rhubarb, Gunnera tinctoria (unrelated to real rhubarb).

I do have good friends.

home.

I made it back without incident or delay, from Santiago through Miami to San Francisco, arriving yesterday morning.

The ride to the airport was a little weird. I was riding in a car with two tourists, looking out the window and wondering. "Did I just spend nine months in another country? That actually happened?". And beginning to realize that my response to coming back is vastly different than for all the people around me who have only been gone a week or two.

If you're coming from a Spanish-speaking country, Miami International is not exactly a shocking return to an Anglophone world, since everyone is still speaking Spanish (passengers and airport employees). In fact, at 5 AM, after customs, as I got off the inter-terminal light rail, I heard one employee tell a couple in Spanish that they could go get a cafecito, which is the diminutive of café "coffee," and Chileans are forever using the diminutive of everything (besides "coffee," I heard it used for "excuse me," "tea," "bread," "beer," "wine," "water," "towel," and "shower"). Curious, I went over to him.

"Hey, are you Chilean? I just heard you say cafecito."

"Well, it's kind of early, but there's a place over by gate 36 where you can get coffee."

"No, I just heard you say cafecito. Are you Chilean?"

"Yeah, there's one or two 24-7 places to get coffee here."

I thought, "Wow, you must be Chilean, you're not listening to me at all."

U.S. Customs, at least at that pre-dawn hour, really makes you feel at home. I always forget that they have separate lines for visitors and for U.S. residents, so I didn't have to compete for space with the 80 Québécois students and chaparones. The guy was maybe a little bored, but not unfriendly.

"What'd you go there for?"
"I was a volunteer English teacher for nine months."

"What's this $100 of stuff?" (I'd written $80 and then crossed it out.)

"Oh, I have a small bottle of liquor, a gourd for tea, a little carved wooden penguin..."

"Okay. Welcome back."

Anna left J with his dad for a few hours so she could come get me alone, which was a good choice. We went back to the apartment for a bit before she went and got the little chaos machine, and we had some nice family time before he went to bed.

Since then it's been dumping out my suitcases and pulling some useful things out of storage (not my cell phone yet, sadly). Anna and I are settling back in: we seem to still like each other, which is convenient because I have no income and nowhere else to live. I had a burrito for lunch yesterday, and today we went to Naomi Sushi and I had the multi-course omakase--fresh fish or no, sushi in Chile does not cut it.

In Trader Joe's this afternoon, I walked in and savored all the smells, of fruit and vegetables and other foods and the smell of mulled pear-cinnamon cider.

"It's a whole store, full of flavors! And that smell--it's spices! In the air!"

An old woman nearby chuckled.

"Sorry, I just spent nine months in Chile, where the food is really boring."

Suddenly another woman turned around.

"It is!"

She had just spent 3 days there with her husband and they were shocked by the blandness of the food, especially after being in Argentina, which, while it has its flaws, has pretty good food. She was glad to hear it wasn't just her.

Except for my urge to talk to restaurant staff in Spanish, what most strikes me about being home is that...it's really home. Except for the brutal months of non-rain, I love my life here. I already knew that I've chosen and constructed my life to be something I enjoy and that supports me and helps me learn, and that was one reason I went to Chile; now I see very clearly how much I've chosen, and chosen well. I love my girlfriend, my friends, my dojo, my apartment (technically our apartment, but we're working on the integration), my neighborhood, my town, my car. Stepping outside I get the smell of wet leaves, common enough in my homeland of the Northeast, but a precious treat here in California. Outside my second-story window is the giant morning-glory vine engulfing half of a very large tree; both dormant, waiting for April to bring the sun back. Down the street is the fantastic taqueria, and farther is Peet's and the indie coffee shop. The mist and clouds crash over the hills from the coast like giant gray waves.

Some of my habits of thought have changed, and I'm accustomed to some different things, and a few things are not as important as I thought. But this is where I belong.

Ancud, Chiloé

Pictures are uploading: the internet here doesn't reach into my room, and I've been busy out and about. There's also a lack of internet-capable places in town, which is charmingly small-town. Especially funny since there appears to be municipal wi-fi, which I think confuses my computer because of how many networks there are.

Yesterday I had lunch with Corrie and her parents in Castro, then meandered over to Ancud. I'd thought about a trip back to Castro, but it's kind of a crappy road, so...no. Onward!

Ancud is a cute little town. I saw penguins today! Cute ones, hanging out on rocks, doing penguin things, off a secluded beach.

I spent a chunk of today chewing on an email from an old friend, who is sort of an old acquaintance at this point, since they don't respond to any of my attempts to keep in touch. That touches some unpleasant patterns in our history together, so I've been sorting out what I need in order for a friendship to feel alive and vital, and how reasonable I'm being in finally reaching a breaking point. It's a lot more fun to daydream about going home, but since it's here, I have to engage with it and feel my way forward.

Tomorrow will be 11 days until I'm back home with the girl and the kid. Hard to believe I'm traveling another week. I think I've been working too hard, and tomorrow maybe I won't do much of anything.

impromptu whirlwind

Yesterday I went to a bingo fundraiser in Quilpue, for Heather's host sister. I won! Actually I won the first two times, but the second time I didn't realize you had to muscle your way in front of anyone else who won, so I missed out on a shiny brand-new 220V blender with a non-U.S. plug, which was disappointing. But look what I did win!



Now, now. Don't be jealous. Envy is a sin. I know you wanted hot pink fuzzy slippers and a combination pumice stone/brush for your feet.

I'd skipped the asado at Bennett's on Friday, but Corrie sent me a text message saying there was an asado at her place in La Calera, with a guaranteed soft thing to sleep on and I could go to bed when I needed, so I decided to do that. Of course, La Calera is nearly 2 hours from Quilpue, and I left at 8pm, but that's okay. It's been a long time since I took the last bus of the night out to some random deserted suburb, hoping I got the directions right. Especially with my cell phone not working. (I fixed it by rebooting, which eased things.)

The asado was lovely, with people being pretty accepting of my not dancing. In fact, everyone eventually migrated to the living room, and hung around talking. I got to tell my story about taking advice, and to refer to Chilean women as "dangerous," which always gets a solid laugh, for the kernel of truth in it; although, following the Advice Story, someone suggested complicado, which is funnier.

I'd met a young couple who live across the street, part of the extended family, Edgardo and Kathy. I think Kathy is Corrie's host cousin--hard to keep straight. Anyway, I stayed in their spare bed, which was nice, although it wasn't until I got there that Kathy mentioned that (a) the bathroom is in a building next to the house, and (b) they have dog who will bite non-residents, so if you're a guest, you need a resident to escort you to the bathroom. That wasn't exactly convenient after a night of carousing, but it worked out fine and I had a lovely time lounging around with them the next day.

Edgardo invited me to lunch at his parents' place down the street. I like spending time with them anyway, but having rabbit for lunch sealed the deal. The rabbit turned out to be "don't swallow the ammunition" fresh, with oregano and cumin, and there was also the best cazuela I've had in Chile, plus artichokes and salad. The family has bees and avocado trees, and Edgardo picked a few pounds of avocados for me.

They brought me to the bus stop and we watched the bus pull away, so Edgardo started racing to catch up to it, despite Kathy (8 months pregnant) and I suggesting I could just wait for the next bus. Then someone tossed a full beer bottle out the bus window, and they said, "Oh, that bus is full of angry drunks. Better wait for the next one."

Two hours later, I was home. Today: still a little tired.

email from a Chilean friend

Too awesome not to translate and share.

Subject: Please, an act of mercy/compassion

Please, invite me to lunch this Friday before I go to the University, for two reasons.

First, I'm bankrupt, broke, and I want to try those incredible empanadas, which according to you are the best in Chile. Second, I like hanging out with you, and if it's with empanadas, even better, ñam , ñam, ñam. [This is Chilean for "NOM NOM NOM".]

If you don't have any money, I recommend you put on a ski mask, get your knife, and go over to Errazuriz Avenue to assault North American tourists who say they have dollars.

I would go assault tourists myself, but first of all, running with high heels, I could fall and break an ankle; and second, I don't know Aikido like you, in case there's a fight.

my friends

I have one (as far as I know) practicing Catholic friend, whose second job is as a parish musician, leading the music for services. His Facebook status:

Crucified: check. Dead: check. Buried: check. Time for late passover with friends, and get ready for the most overtly pagan of catholic feasts of the year tomorrow night.

I love you people.