Wow! Time flies (and other obvious, trite observations)

People like Miget are crazy and/or powered by a tenacious sense of intestinal fortitude that enables them to chug along and write write write for public consumption. Me, clearly... I have neither the discipline nor the crazy-head.

In the past three years, some stuff happened along the way, namely:

• Everyone got pregnant. Everyone. EVERYONE. You think I'm exaggerating? I know where to buy cheap baby clothes sets, can extol on diaper sizes (one of the major lessons learned on Guam is that diapers come in different sizes!), and can do a pretty mean estimation of how big in circumference the baby mama's gut (sorry, glorious woman oven) is. All this while touching an actual baby literally like three times, thank goodness.
• My hair got long. 
• My neck got sunspots.
• The youths are into these things called the Tumblr and Snapchat and Vine. Also, instead of being a beacon of hope, they have become a source of frustration and despair as I tolerate their laziness/lack of gumption... therefore meaning that I got super old.
• iPad is also now a youths thing, which basically means that whenever I go to a restaurant I'm assaulted by about 50 iPads simultaneously playing "Frozen" but at different start points.
• The parental units decided to ship out, also desde Sanlågu, and are en route. More specifically, in da vill, down da block, within easy "stopping by distance and just to check up on you and make sure you're not doing anything to remotely embarrass us like not do regular yard maintenance." 

Felis nochebuena, felis pascua, felis navidad, tiempon minagof, etc. etc.

Ginen si Walter A. Manglona yan i man'amko giya Saipan. (Like the spaceships in his earlier video, I don't get why he would ask for a Maserati because Saipan has literally one road and the speed limit is 35, but whatever.) Umespiha yu' i kanta "Puengi Yu'os," lao ti siña gi Youtube.

Na'maolek i ha'ani-hamyo!

Two odes for a dead boonie dog

Never was boonie dog more persistent

Chasing cars he was sure quite consistent

He peed on my car

But did not wander far

For this dog's loyalty was infinite.

*****

Guard dog ferocious I never did fear

On his left side a flippy flop ear

He sprawled in the street,

Humped all dogs in heat,

But no bark could I ever hold more dear.

(Photo lifted from Guam Animals In Need Facebook page. This dog is different than Woofie in that Woofie had significantly less fur, more of a limp, and generally liked to play dead when he wasn't being . . . dead. Damn I miss this dog.)

Regrets

Okay, I take back the unkind words I wrote in the previous post about Ernest the Pretty Good whoring it up with the mangy dog from the corner who pees on my car. That mangy dog just died in the backyard. Rest in peace, Woofie. May you have all the cars you could chase/mark in heaven.

Triste yu'. SAD.

Destroyer of Christmas mirth and cheer

Don't be fooled by the tail that's wagging so fast the camera can't even capture it. Ernest the Mostly Awesome has been downgraded to Ernest the Pretty Good on account of: 1) Whoring it up with the mangy dog up the street who pees on my car, and 2) Chewing through the extension chord for the outdoor lights, thereby depriving our neighbors of festive twinkle. In hindsight it's a good thing we didn't get a light-up nativity scene. Given Ernest's penchant for chewing on plastic things, it would be less than stellar to wake up to a decapitated wise man.

Come on in . . . or not

(Photo from Don Farrell's collection at Guampedia, you can see more here!)

The Boyfriend and I haven't had many guests at our house. First, it's a certifiable health hazard since we got a little slack with the cleaning when work lives got way tinane'ne'ne'. Second--and this is what embarrasses me--I only realize now that I've had a bit of shame about my neighborhood, unacknowledged, so much so I didn't even know I had it until I spent some time reading (some) military wives' blogs. I got over it.

You see: the barking pack of flea-bitten boonie dogs down the street. I hear: an awesome security system.

You see: the tall weeds. I feel: rainy season in full swing, and in the meantime, my banana plants are doing just fine, thanks.

You see: a small house. I live: in a place that's manageable, where when I open the doors the cross breezes air it out mad fast.

You see: concrete building materials. I know: strength in a typhoon.

You see: little square boxes. I get: that all together, the inhabitants form a clan/i familia/a network, on a road whose namesake marks history and foresight.

You see: a ghetto canopy over a driveway. I cherish: the nights spent underneath those playing cards, saying prayers, or barbecuing.

You buy: Paradise/Talo Verde/Anonymous Rancho Whatever Estates, whose brochures cry out "Just like the States!" I pity: a place with no signs of life.

Grateful for . . .

waking up to chickens in the yard,

hearing chickens STILL at 2pm in the afternoon,

the neighbor's band pracice,

when the people down the street have a party and/or wash the car and blast the Chamoru music,

the 15-minute drive to Tumon Beach,

86 degrees year-round,

this precious double life I get to live, outside/insider, local/not local, the watched/the watchee,

rainy season under a tin roof,

drinking beer under the canopy in a friend's yard on a Saturday night,

waving to neighbors,

stars,

my zori tan,

kåntan Chamoru gi i rediu,

a loving family, and

generous people.

Goobernatorial elections

Voting options irritated me in Sanlågu. Like, sure, eight years of Dubya was a travesty in the federal/global sense, but in general you're far enough removed from D.C. that you simply don't meet the guy at your local grocery store. If there's any upside to the stateside political ruling class/elites, it's that those guys are probably not gonna shop where you do, among the unwashed proles.

Not so in Guåhan. It's been at least THREE times where I've been at a coffee shop and a certain World of Warcraft-playing Level 70 Dwarf-Priest lieutenant governor candidate made me shake his hand in spite of my looking fully engaged with my blank screen.

These are dire times. One goobernatorial candidate's family essentially runs corporate empire (health insurance, grocery stores, real estate, Budweiser/Pepsi) on this island, and the best thing one of the other candidate's more fervent supporters could say to me was, "Well, none of those federal charges stuck!"

So what caused me mere irritation in Sanlågu is giving me straight-up hives here in Guåhan. There isn't enough sunscreen in the world to keep my skin from somehow getting scorched if I vote Sunshine/Democrat. And as for the Republican slate, the campaign motto of "All About You" might as well end with "because, in the end, I need to ensure you get paid so i familia gets paid via your health insurance deductibles, weekly grocery bill, and that six-pack you so desperately needed when voting was all said and done."

And for parting words . . . I imagine that there were liberties taken with the translation, but I can only turn to Plato: "Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being ruled by those who are dumber."

The Canine Rototiller

Meet Ernest.

She is technically the neighbor's dog and technically has a different name, but seeing as she likes to run around our yard, bark at the 200-pound wild pig that brazenly visits under the full moon, and sleeps near our door, I like to think she is partially ours.

Her original name (her original name, other than the neighbor's selection for her) was Ernest the Awesome, but given her farts when you pet her stomach and the utter destruction of The Boyfriend's kangkong/seedling boxes, she got demoted to Ernest the Mostly Awesome.

The infinite wisdom of Chris Rock

I made a conscious decision not to post musings here about politics/colonialism/race/militarization/the environment/sartorial choices, since there are others far better equipped to expound on such subjects--in blog form--than I. You'll see some of those writers to the right.

Also, I have no other place in my life to publicly post photos of slugs or what I ingested for breakfast.

But despite a mighty effort, I can't ignore those nasty "little" incidents popping up in daily life, whose occurrences increase in their frequency and ability to irritate me. The Drowning Mermaid's recent post about contact with military personnel exposed the marrow more clearly than I (and I imagine, a lot of locals) care to admit, and my mood's been a bit on, ahem, check, as it were.

So without yakking on about my thoughts on racism and all that other shit--acknowledging that her post touches on profound theories of local/tourist, military/civilian, Chamoru/not Chamoru--I guess the best possible way to (not) explain where I'm at personally, desde Sanlagu para Guahan after two and half years here, is to rely on Chris Rock to do it for me:

"If you're black, you gotta look at America a little bit different. You gotta look at America like the uncle that paid for you to go to college . . . but molested you."

Uncle Sam, indeed.

Airport/plane scenes, Guåhan-style

Scene 1
Whereupon the plane taxis to the gate, and over the intercom you hear, "Auntie, can you please sit down? The fasten seatbelt sign is still on."

Scene 2
Whereupon waiting in the U.S. Citizen/Green Card line (note to self: always take Line 41, which is only for U.S. passport holders, which therefore moves at least twice as fast as the Green Card one), the guy coming back from training at Fort Benning looks at the quicker moving Line 41.

He says, "That line's moving a little slow because there's a youth soccer team who played in Korea. See that groups of kids up front?"

And I say, "Yeah, Korea--that's cool."

And he says, "Yeah, that guy right there is my nephew."

And about ten minutes later, looking at the old dude holding up our line, the same observant Fort Benning trainee notices it's the mayor of Mangilao.

Scene 3
Walking back to the car, I run into the spokeperson for one of the utilities, and we chat about her half-marathon in Australia for about five minutes before her ride pulls up.

As someone who has traveled extensively throughout the world, I can attest that contrary to Friendman's claim that it (the world) gets smaller and flatter, it is only at Guåhan's airport where I can own such small and special experiences.

Kåtu

Unlike other people who blog but stray, I'm not gonna publicly berate myself for not keeping up regular updates, life gets in the way, blah blah blah, unsure of focus for writing, blah blah blah.

NONE OF THAT.

Instead, here's the feral cat The Boyfriend and I have been feeding for the past four months. She was pretty mean in the beginning (as evidenced by the consistent hissing despite our daily offerings of quality food), and so we called her Sourpuss.

But suddenly (about as fast as the chicks and chickens in our backyard mysteriously began to disappear), Sourpuss got really friendly with me. She started rubbing up on my feet or legs when I would feed her, and The Boyfriend and me never got around to catching her and taking her to the local animal shelter to get spayed because we wanted her to keep coming back.

HOWEVER. (You see where this is going. Maybe.)

It turns out that cats get friendly--not because they realize that the wonderful smartly dressed humans in Barrigåda occasionally dispense chicken breast and other tasty morsels--but because they GET PREGNANT.

Sourpuss, we are now taking the discourtesy of renaming you.

An introduction is in order. To all friends and familia: say "håfa adai" to her majesty SluttyCat (pre-pregnancy).

Full of it

One of my biggest fears, in being charged with the care and maintenance of this house, is the septic tank system. To my knowledge, there’s no handy dandy gauge that lets you know when the tank is nearing capacity—literally, when it’s full of shit.

According to my mom, the tank needs to be pumped “every now and then.” But I’d prefer not to be alerted—even if it just “now and then”—by overflows in a bathroom whose existence is already marked by a questionable state of cleanliness.

This tank business is all new to me. In Guåhan, sewer hook-ups are not consistent throughout the island, in part because there are still major tracts of land that are “undeveloped” (or “pristine,” or “primitive,” depending on your perspective). On my little seven house street alone, we all have septic tanks, in no small part because hooking up to the municipal sewer lines would individually put us out about $10,000. Additionally, because we’re on a slight slope, we would have to install electric pumps. Which, in a typhoon or post-typhoon conditions, wouldn’t work... and again, leave us to deal with the shit.

I think of these issues whenever I’m behind a sewage-related/pump truck, which isn’t infrequent. A few months ago I also escaped near death as I followed a truck which had three port-a-potties strapped precariously to its back. That would have been a gruesome end.

This morning, I had the delight of following a Todo Mauleg truck for a few blocks. In Chamoru, todu maolek means “It’s all good.” Which is a sentiment I can’t argue with. Especially when you can handle your shit.

Here’s to the company that “comes rushing to get you flushing”!

Håfa i mas bunitu na mångga gi Guåhan? (Could you be the most beautiful mango in Guåhan?)

Probably not. For one thing, you're a bilembines (star apple). And as confused as I am that you're around (considering that my grandma's tree fruited something like two months ago), I would still consider chopping you up, sprinkling brown sugar, and roasting you in the oven. If only the oven didn't create an ungodly unfathomable heat around 4 in the afternoon...

Håyi hamyo?



Yeah, okay, you're definitely contenders.

Ya hamyo?



I am impressed.

Given my bloggy keen interests in plant life, don't worry, ti kumakaduka yu' (not going batty/fuminihi). It's just that once I abandoned the greenery-starved regions of Sanlågu where I rode my bike, I picked up new interests.



Hågat's Mango Festival 2009 was two weeks ago. Unfortunately the photos of the bob-for-mangoes didn't turn out, and technology has yet to evolve a simultaneous web and smell-o-cast of the mango donut demonstration pavilion, but you'll have to take my word that kimchee mango pickles are gof mångge'.

Given that the backyard banana trees are doing wonderful things by not dying on me (unlike the Indoor Bonsai Ficus Number 1), too bad the bananas themselves continue to curse my existence. Blech. One day I will in fact be able to eat a banana.



Until then, I stick to the left side of the table. Or maybe at a house somewhere in Sinahåña or Chalan Pågo, where the despondent owners of a mango tree put a massive sign out front begging people to take them off their hands. This story might be apocryphal, but I'm willing to keep driving to determine if it is so.

What's in my backyard

Like most other blogs, this one has obviously taken a break--partially because I had to figure out how to do some Photoshopping, and partially because the subject of this post took about two months to develop.

First of all, here's a decent view of our backyard. The grass was just cut, so the weeds aren't the usual foot tall. The vines you see at the base of the banana tree bunch are chains of love, which is this nasty invasive species from Asia which is basically covering all of the natural vegetation (including, unfortunately, massive swaths of land by the roads with their respective papaya and breadfruit trees, and the swordgrass). But you can also see our mansanita tree, and the banana trees' suckers sprouting up, in the bunch and to the left. Oh, but wait . . .

What's that? (Click on the photo to enlarge.)

I noticed this the blossom growing a few weeks before I left for Sanlågu in May, and so had a chance to at least take some shots to capture the rate of growth. Surprisingly enough, unlike everything else that shoots up here on Guåhan, the fruit bunch takes a relatively long time to mature.

Here you see the inside of the blossom beginning to face upwards as the blossom leaves fall off.

But the leaves don't just fall off--they do this interesting curl just before doing so. It's pretty elegant.

Slowly you see the rest of the bunch beginning to form . . .

I really don't know why industrial designers haven't taken this shape into account when doing new light fixtures.

Anyway, that is what I saw. And then I went away for three weeks, and then got lazy and forgot to take more pictures of the trees (actually, the weeds got long and annoying, or sometimes it was raining or it was too late in the day to catch good lght, or I didn't want to walk out there because the mosquitos would feast, and basically I was a wuss).

But finally we cut down the banana bunch and gave them to Nanan Biha.

According to her, we probably should have cut off the blossom about two feet ago so that the tree's energy could channel into the fruit (as opposed to the flower), and then let the bunch go for another month to ripen.

But as you can see, there are plenty more plants that might bear within the next year or so, so it could possibly be ensalåda fafalu from the backyard.

Back to Guåhan

I've been gone for three weeks to Sanlågu and just returned a week ago to a blooming bunch of bananas, a bathroom where the cockroaches ran wild (you can tell by the eggs that were laid in our absence--gross), and a dead bonsai ficus in the living room. Disappointed. Dumesganananao yu'.

But at the same time, it's stories like these that make me glad to be back in our turquoise house on Guåhan:

POWER UPDATE: 9:15 A.M. - GPA: Chickens cause power outage

Pacific Daily News • news@guampdn.com • June 10, 2009

9:15 a.m. — Two stray chickens shorted-out a transformer in a Guam Power Authority substation this morning, cutting electricity to Anigua, Agana and Agana Heights.

GPA spokesman Art Perez said power went out at about 6:50 a.m. but was fully restored by 8:15 a.m. Perez did not expect lingering power problems to affect any of the villages in the outage.

Perez said the outage was unusual. GPA employees found the animals when they went to inspect the source of the outage.

“The chickens are not OK,” he said.

You can find a photo of the surprisingly well-preserved birds here
(probably for another week more) and another article on why the Guam Power Authority is trying to protect its dåggan.

Morning surprise

The title of this post could be taken in so many ways, but happily, over the weekend, it only meant one thing ...



... PUPPIES. These guys got loose from the neighbor's cage and of course I couldn't resist feeding them a little.

You call that dirty?

At least two locals who grew up here have told me that they would prefer to live in Washington state or Saipan, because the air is "cleaner" and "fresher" there than in Guåhan.

Now, The Boyfriend is not the greatest photographer in the world (although he is pretty good), but he wouldn't have to do anything by way of Photoshopping to improve the actual look of the sky here. This is Tumon Bay during an outrigger canoe race in October 2008.



I'd say that's pretty awesome, particularly since I spent over three years biking in this mess in Sanlågu. Locals, that is what I would call air that is neither clean nor fresh. You can ask all of the accumulated particulate matter in my lungs.





(Thanks to Creative Common license users Ben Amstutz and Al Pavangkanan.)

The reading life

If there is one thing that I do miss about the old places I used to live in Sanlågu, it's the availability of high variety bookstores and libraries. When I was younger, I used to buy at least one book a week. By the second year that I was working a job in Los Angeles, I began to stop buying books altogether once I realized the supreme wonders of the Los Angeles Public Library system, with its reasonable selection of academic titles, awesome online book catalog and automated email reminders, and ability to get the latest titles out to readers within a month's wait at most.

One of the fondest times of my life involved working part-time and being able to literally devote one or two full days out of the week to reading. I think that during that year I tore through about 100 titles.

Since then, I went to grad school, which effectively quashed any love for recreational reading outside the required 400 (frequently very boring) pages I got through a week. It's only now that I've started my reading again by limiting time on the internet.

And so it's off to find books once again. I paid $65 for a yearly friend-of-the-library card to the University of Guam library, and have found some titles I'd like to get have to come from off-island--and thus can take up to three months to get here and upwards of $50 in fees. So far I've taken out the cranky bastard Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific and am struggling to get through the last curmudgeonly chapter. I think it's two months overdue, but with a $.10 a day overdue fee, I'm not exactly in a rush to return it.

The Guam Public Library system I shamefully haven't looked into yet, but the on-going issue for me seems to be being able to get books that are most recently released or are a little bit, let's say, off-beat in topic (anyone on the cultural history of collective joy? anyone?). I do feel badly that here, like other library systems, the money is so tight that the air conditioner was out for two months and with it, the library's opening hours for two full months. The operational costs for protecting books in this tropical climate must be absurd.

Amazon delivers to Guåhan with shipping fees per book and thus eliminates savings from the cheaper prices, and MediaMail, which takes a week tops in Sanlågu, takes up to two months here. Barnes and Noble ships for free but costs way more than Amazon. Amazon's Kindle, or electronic reading device, is way too expensive right now, and each subsequent book in the library is going to cost at least $10 anyway. It would take me a long time to break even.

Which leaves three options in Guåhan: the Håfa Adai used bookstore (a great place to swap!), Faith Bookstore (good for local titles but with about 99% other inventory which I not only have no use for but am probably hostile towards), and Bestseller Books.

Bestseller is kind of like an airport bookstore; for shipping reasons (I'm guessing), its titles come in the airport/grocery store style compact editions. It does a good job of stocking local interest books in a way that online distribution has not yet acheived well for Guåhan-oriented titles. And because of its kind of limited selection of titles--once again, due to the high costs of maintaing and moving inventories on Guåhan--makes me think about getting into topics and titles I probably wouldn't otherwise purchase. Because last week I bought a history of Russian culture and politics since Tolstoy's death, called The Magical Chorus, which makes almost no sense to read on a tropical island in the western Pacific, but nonetheless does contain this pretty awesome excerpt:

"The 'sex problem' was a dominant topic in the influential intellectual salon of the St. Petersburg writer and philosopher Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Hippius, a red-haired beauty with the eyes of a mermaid... On May 1, 1905, a group gathered at the apartment of the decadent poet Nikolai Minsky, including Berdyaev, the influential Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, the writer Alexei Remizov (all with their wives), Rozanov, Fedor Sologub, soon to be celebrated for his novel, Petty Demon, and a certain musician, as an eyewitness recorded, 'a blond Jew, handsome, unbaptized.' They dimmed the lights and twirled in a dervish-like dance in a mock Dionysian mystery. Then they symbolically crucified the musician, who had volunteered for the part.

"The point of the fathering was to perform a blood sacrifice. Ivanov and his wife, Lydia Zinovyeza-Annibal, dressed in red chitons with sleeves rolled up ('just like an executioner,' that eyewitness put it) cut the musician's wrist, mixed the blood with wine in a chalice and offered it around the circle. The ritual ended with 'fraternal kisses.'"

There were three copies for sale, but almost nothing in nonfiction about Asia, other Pacific islands (including Hawai'i), South America, Africa, and any other countries in Europe. What's the process that booksellers here undergo to determined the local market interest? Bestseller Books otherwise has the best variety of manga, religious/self-help, and mixed martial arts magazines. Rock on, regional interests.

The city I should live in...

is apparently not Barrigåda, Guåhan.

It's New York City, because according to this quiz, I need to be assured that I:

"will blend into the crowd. You are the brooding type--introspective, creative, and eccentric--and NYC's cutting-edge, individualistic culture and ambience will appeal to you."

This is probably a nice way of saying that I'm mean and weird.

I wonder what options I would have had to tick off to get Guåhan. Prolly something to do with knowing how to barbecue at the beach real well and/or having had a few kids by age 25. I swear this island is crawling with i famagu'on.