Jo Marie, the American woman (pardon my incorrect language) I met when I went to the U.S. embassy, told me something that deepens daily in truth. Peruvians tend to blame the individual ( Read more... )

I utter the words “Bajo en Independencia,” way before my stop. They come out of me vacant and choked, and I can feel all the eyes on my red, peeling back. Who is this foreigner? It’s not that they are puzzling deeply over my existence, but that that moment of interest, of notice, exists. That moment of attention-which I sometimes craved in the ( Read more... )

I just got back from Máncora, a Peruvian beach town 20 bus-hours away from Lima. I just wrote an hour-long blog only to have it lost at the last minute. This is the consummating event of a misshapen vacation. Here is a summary of the results ( Read more... )

I walk by a piece of cookie, the kind with chocolate on top. When I return from my errands with bread, tomatoes and limes, the chocolate has begun to melt. It was dropped recently.

I fuck up with the left hand on one of my drum stick exercises, so I switch to the other stick, thinking this will make some difference.

I wrote a lot last night, which I will upload as soon as I find CD-RW's. In the meantime, here are some pictures, but I don't know if the links will work, and you might need an ofoto account to see them ( Read more... )

Nilton brings out a very interesting quality in me. It’s shame. Shame for being from the U.S. Tonight, when I said goodbye to him and Sebastian, but forgot to open my outer doors, I felt like such a schmuck opening my door at his knock. I was so embarrassed and made up some lie that was supposed to be funny-“I fell asleep”-to further underscore ( Read more... )

This weekend I went to my first rave. Tiesto, a DJ from the Netherlands, was the lucky bastard who got to make the crowd go crazy with a mere touch of his fingertips. It dawned on me for the first time that it would be such a fucking rush to have this kind of power. But Tiesto seemed not to be too cocky, as the smile that broke on his lips when ( Read more... )

El Comercio, Peru’s leading centrist newspaper, is chock full of things about the U.S. It kind of makes my stomach turn. The arts and design section for today features a biography on Philip Johnson, the architect who did the Crystal Cathedral, among other things. There are two full pages devoted to this. Later looking for possible night ( Read more... )

This weekend I went to the beach, La Mina, in the Reserva Nacional de Paracas. I met Nilton on a street corner where he and his French class friends were celebrating the Friday with a few Heinekens (after about half an hour, a police officer asked us to hide the evidence). Nilton and I took a bus to the city of Pisco, which was one of those ( Read more... )

I just watched six feet under, and it made me lonely for my baby. Made me long for those days when we would watch it on her couch, ben and jerry’s pint in fist, crying silently at the end of each poignant episode.