Awesome.

-Awesome- replied one of my 10 year olds today to my, by now must be growing stale, greeting of -Hi! how are you?- Cool! I thought: I must be teaching them something after all, it’s only taken 6 months for a kid to a) reply to me, and, b) use the word “awesome.”

And awesome’s how I felt today. It’s how I responded this morning to the same question when I was buying olives and feta cheese at El Raco de Ferri, a booth at the central market run by an exceedingly friendly Greek guy with really frizzy hair. -Estoy muy bien, pues…un poco resacado, pero de buen humor. - Translation: -I´m Awesome, but I´ve got a bit of a hangover. I am, however, in very good humour.

Yeah, I had a great night last night. Having a half-empty bottle of wine, I felt obliged to “echarme una copa...o dos” and “terminarla.” I did so in a very civilized manner, while watching the fifth instalment of El Quixote... Then I got drunk and cleaned the house. Had a wonderful time. My rationale for cleaning the house in this moment, if you´ll believe it, was this: since I´m drunk I may as well clean because I sure can´t study Spanish in this condition, moreover, I may even enjoy the cleaning, and then tomorrow, when I´m sobre, I won´t have to waste time cleaning and I can study. The mirror-image of this thinking would, of course, be the one habitually invoked by my mother: “sure I might as well be drunk as I am.”

This kind of fundamentally economic thinking has characterized my decisions more and more of late, especially when it comes to time management. Referred to as “opportunity cost” by economists, it implies the necessary surrender of one choice in return for another. If, for example, I´m reading a book, or speaking in english, I´m not reading or speaking in Spanish; If I spend money on lunch, I won´t eat dinner, and so on. Which brings us back to cleaning the house with a bottle of wine: aside from representing what, at the time, was the best allocation of my resources, it sure is a nice surprise to wake up and find your toilet´s sparkling clean, and you can´t even quite remember why…

Soooooo slow

76€/month for phone and internet is unacceptable: now that I´m semi-retired that´s like 1/6th of my income, so I don´t regret cutting my internet connection at all, but I sure do miss it. Casa Americana´s computers are dying a slow, stress-inducing death, which has stolen at least 1 and a half of my halfly-written blog entries and attempts to upload cool photos.

Not that I don´t have time to post: I´m not terrribly busy here: my days aren´t exactly full, but they sure do fill-up pretty quickly, to the point that they seem to gather a momentum of their own. In fact, I think it´s taking me longer to do stuff now - that, or stuff is taking longer to do. For example, I tried to bake some cookies and make some dinner one day after work and freaked out when I ran out of time. Somehow in the 2 hours between 8pm, when my class finished, and 10pm, I managed to not make cookies - that is, I tried and failed. I mean, not that I tried and they sucked, rather, I failed to organize myself sufficiently into a state of cookie-making preparadeness.

Let me explain myself: the supermarket closes at 9:15pm, which shouldn´t be a problem because I live beside the supermarket. So, I biked home, which takes 10min, opened the fridge, realized I needed chocolate, went to Mercadona and bought chocolate. Fine up until here. Return home, start mixing, and, Fuck! Eggs! The supermarket has now closed, so I head down the street to the Consum, which closes at 9:30pm, fifteen precious minutes later, but do I make it on time?... Nope. Great. What now? Aha! the 24hr supermarket/gas station! Off I go, but do they have eggs? Nope. What time is it? 10pm...Screwed yet again. All this is to say...what the fuck?!!

2 questions immediately present themselves: 1) Owen, what the fuck is wrong with you*, why don´t you just chill out and buy the cookie mix pre-made like the rest of the male heterosexual world? 2) Where the fuck did the time go?

*Ed. note: Erin, my ex-girlfriend, once asked me a very simple yet significant question. She was pretty mad at me and somewhat frustrated with what she viewed as my inability to organize and restructure myself into a smooth and well-functioning, punctual, glitch-free make myself a sandwhich, tie my shoelaces, remember my keys (oh yeah, it must have been the keys) machine. She asked quite simply and incredulously: ¨How do you get through a day?" i.e. You seem to be a perfectly functioning human being on the surface, but, (oh shock!) you forget your keys!? Thus, how do you, on a daily basis, manage to get from point A to B while completing all the little steps that make the trip possible? The answer, of course, is to go through the back door, or leave an extra key in the mailbox, or whatever. I didn´t know what do say though, I mean, how much of a fucking achievement is it to get through a day? What´s to it? So I´m apt to lose a few things along the way, I may have to return home once or twice to forget something I left there, I occassionally replace the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge, but, what´s the worst that could happen? I´m not going to explode, at least, not unless someone else were to blow me up. Anyway, I found this question quite humourous, both because it conveys a certain truth about my shoddy organizational skills and general absentmindedness, and because it seems to define her version of a successful day as some sort of a well-organized and productive journey that only ultra-capable people achieve. In retrospect, it also hints that days can be pretty damn hard to get through sometimes, I´ll give her that (but we were talking about normal, privileged, attend classes and feed yourself days).

This is one of a few recent incidents (we´re back talking about the cookies now) that have left me anywhere from confused, late, indignant and even incensed. Time just seems to go faster now. But this incident and another similar one that I have since forgotten made me think: they say that ¨time flies when you´re having fun.¨ Could it be possible, I asked myself, that this saying, which I have always taken to be a metaphorical comment about our perception of time passing, actually contains a literal truth? Could it be that it takes longer to do some things than others? Could it be that time moves at different speeds during some activities? For example, when attempting to arrive home, buy eggs and chocolate, (admittedly in two trips), and make cookies, than it does when, say, driving from Toronto to Waterloo, ON (150 odd - the last 5 or so especially, we always get lost - kilometres) where my cousins live? It sounds strange, but I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the case.

I think the phenomenon could have something to do with productivity differences between Canada and, say, Spain. I think it also explains how my days have managed to fill themselves up. You see, when you block off short bits of time in a strange and slow-moving country, you actually speed those hours up, which, as any worth his weight in soya sauce mathematican can tell, means you do less... Thus, an 8hour Canadian 9-5 workday followed by a 6hour post-work freedom/recovery period actually moves faster, yet manages, at the same time, so to speak, to accomplish more than an 8hr Spanish workday that begins at 9, breaks for 2hours between 2 and 4, and returns to work till 7ish. There are practical explinations for this, such as the time-erasive effects of driving in 2 rush hours/day. For me, personally, it seems to come down to a complete inability to divide time into productive chunks. Blocking-off time just doesn´t work for me.

Firstly, I can´t concentrate enough in a 2hr block of time to do 2hrs of work (I´m talking about intellectual work here, reading, studying, thinking). I need to be in the zone, and that means that I need spaces in between my blocks, big spaces, otherwise I´m thinking about the next block and everything falls to pieces, I forget the eggs and I burn the cookies.

Secondly, if I have 2hrs to, for example, do the shopping, I end up in a hurry, flustered, and caught in one of these wierd time warps I´ve been talking about. So, that´s why I feel like my days have a nasty tendency of filling themselves up so easily without properly compensating in that satisfying, you´ve done a shit load of work today feeling. And that´s why after my, I have to admit, almost pathologically relaxing day of a) 9am wakeup, yoga on the roof, brief halting run through the building sites north of my house, breakfast, or b) an hour or so of studying Spanish, then Spanish class till 2pm, 2hrs to prepare and eat lunch (don´t ask me how, but it always takes at least 2hrs - the sandwich has a lot to be said for it, but they eat those for dinner here, or for el almuerzo (snack)), I end up trying to squeeze writing a post into the space between my evening classes - and that brings me back to the slow computers, and that´s when ...the fucking computer crashes! Deep breath. The world will not end if you don´t publish your post, but you´ve just sucked an hour an a half of time out of the day. So that´s why I haven´t posted yet in April. I´ve also been in Sweden for two weeks having an awesome time.

Ah well, the barbarians are once again knocking at the gates, and I´ve got to run to class, but I´ll fill in the rest of the details tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that. For now, I´ll leave you with this wonderful image of me eating a mashed potato-wrapdog in Sweden. Dig it.

making paella

For me, the highlight of Fallas was easily the Paella competition on my street: chatting up old ladies for recipe tips and techniques, sipping cold beers, inhaling the smoke from the orange and pine wood fires...it was awesome.

What the hell is Fallas? Fallas is a festival that coincides with the Christian celebration of San Jose (March 19). It´s really the pagan side of a very Catholic, traditional, staid holiday - what´s leftover of the rituals of spring renewal at the solstice. During Fallas, sculpted figures are erected throughout the city representing or alluding to various public, uh, figures or recent events/controversies. On the 19th, the last day of Fallas, all the figures are burnt to the ground, save one (the winner of the best Falla competition). The burning of effigies to mark the spring solstice clearly recalls the festival´s pagan roots and adds to the almost carnivalesque feel of the celebration, however, it does have a more recent Christian, and even cuotidian, origin. But, as the sun sets and after all the good little Christian families parade down the street during the day, the craziness begins (at night, duh) and all hell breaks loose.

Today´s Fallas evolved out of what had been a long and very practical tradition in Valencia: Carpenters, on the eve of the day of their patron San Jose (Joseph - he was a carpenter, remember?), would place a wooden figure covered in painted-on paper strips, on the street in front of their workshops. This rite was initiated by the carpenters´ guild as a way of cleaning out their workshops before spring and getting rid of old shavings and pieces of wood, which they later burned in a purifying bonfire. What used to be a utilitarian and even reverential custom changed at some point in the 18th century, when some of the carpenters began creating more elaborate and satiric figures, exposing and shaming real people to the public. Today, the figures include monuments up to 4 or 5 stories high.

¨Fallas¨ also refers to the neighbourhood group and the activities surrounding the actual figures. During Fallas, each neighbourhood group, or ¨Falla¨, organizes activities and events for their members, including this wicked cook-up (the Paella competition). They hire an artisan to construct the falla (and raise money throughout the year in order to pay him sometimes as much as .5 million€), hold parties every night on the street, march around the neighbourhood in traditional folk dress or aristocratic outfits (these people are called Falleros/as), banging drums and playing the same song over and over. There are more than 300 Fallas in Valencia and each one of them hosts its own local celebration as well as participating in the city-wide events (like the Ofrenda, or Offering: each falla marches to the Plaza de la Virgen bringing flowers, which they offer to a giant wooden statue...of the virgin, the flowers are placed on the bare wooden skeleton, forming the virgin´s dress, or, we might say, clothing the virgin), and of course, on the night of the 19th, each group BURNS their Falla. It´s an environmental disaster. The Polytecnic university is actually conducting an environmental study on this, because all the figures are made of polystyrene...

Anyway, I took some photos of what I think was the best part of all this. More than the nights spent shoving through hoardes of people and knocking old people into the gutters, guzzling rum and dancing to Shakira, I enjoyed wandering around the city looking at the monuments, buying buñuelos (deep-fried pumpkin donuts), oggling falleras, and: Paella. On my street there was a 25 paella cook-off. I settled in with a few beers to enjoy the spectacle:
This women in particular seemed to know her stuff, so I stuck by her, watching and learning: First, she fries chicken and rabbit in olive oil, adding chopped tomatoes after about 10mins. When the meat is browned, she adds artichokes and green beans, which she then fries for another 5mins or so before adding the water. The water should go up to the rivets, a little higher than you see in this picture because she tossed some more water in a second later.
When the water reaches the boil add the rice, roughly 100g per person. Stir initially, then let sit. That´s basically it. Except for spices: rosemary, paprika, safran, salt, pepper. Add during the add water stage. It´s really a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you´re cooking over a wood fire, but you can make a pretty good go at it at home on the stove or on the barbecue. I found this whole process fascinating.

¨So I´ve just made myself redundant at one of my jobs (Wall Street), let´s see how long it takes for them to notice and fire me…¨

I cut and pasted this out of a rough copy I had scribbled in between classes 10 days ago and didn´t have time to post. The plan was to make myself unavailable for certain inconveniently far away classes and let myself be pushed slowly and comfortably out of a job — while continuing to collect my monthly salary, naturally. That didn´t fly. So I quit. No more riding the immigrant train Mon to Thurs to Fuente del Jarro, the biggest industrial polygon in Spain, to teach a 1.5hour class. Well, actually I´m completing the last week of my ¨two weeks notice¨ from Tues to Thurs next week, but that´s it.

So, that leaves me with my Spanish classes everyday from 12 to 2pm. Evening classes 6:30 to 9:30 at Casa Americana, and a pair of private classes with some snobby rich kids. Wicked.

valencia from the hills

This picture is from Lliria, a village about an hour away from Valencia. You can see the city in the distance, or you could if it was bigger (the photo not the city, well, ok the city too). As you can see, it´s REALLY flat here, the city included. There is a ring of mountains that surrounds the fertile Valencian plain, on which (the plain not the mountains) grow oranges. Em, you can see where the mountains meet the sea to the right of my right shoulder, they do the same thing on the other side. Maybe I´ll take some pictures facing the hills next time. The plain is dotted with farms and intermixed with light industry. Yes, I have lost weight, thank you for noticing. Seriously though, I feel really greasy. There´s oil in everything. If not, then it´s cheese or meat, and even then you´ll probably find oil on it.

valencia from my roof

took these pictures the other day while I was having some beers up on the roof. It´s uglier than I had imagined. The first and second pictures are looking towards the city centre, but in between are all the barrios (neighbourhoods) uh, in between. It´s about a 25 min walk from my place to the centre. This would be fine except that the metro doesn´t work past 11pm at night here, in Valencia, in Spain. People don´t eat until at least 11pm here on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night. Where are they supposed to go after they eat dinner? How are they supposed to get to dinner in the first place? There are cabs. A few, but most of them only operate during normal Spanish hours. Arriving at the bus station in the creepy part of town after 10pm? Good luck getting a cab. Or on the 11 O´clock express train from Barcelona? Yer fucked, think again. I get around most of this by riding my bike, and I like the little village I live in, but this is ridiculous. Get your act together Spain. Geez.

And another thing. Between where I live and downtown are five decades of disgrace. I mean this is fucking disgraceful! You can see what I´m talking about in the pictures, all those really ugly buildings they threw up on the fertile fields that used to lie between here (the village of Benimaclet) and the city. The worst thing is that the last two decades have been especially disgraceful, especially considering Franco´s been long gone for at least 20 years. You guys have to stop using that as an excuse. Are you telling me that town planners couldn´t see how they should have been building the city by looking at the older, far-nicer buildings? Or going somewhere else to find out what they were doing there? There is no residential architecture here post 1950s, and as you get closer to present day the buildings just get worse. They seem to simply throw up the cheapest thing possible without giving any thought to design, use of space, materials, innovation, nada. Sometimes I think Spanish architects have a toolkit with like 5-7 models in it, they sell these models to construction companies, and these guys throw them up as fast and as cheaply as they can. Actually, someone does seem to be cluing-in though. I read the other day that they´re considering a law that would limit some of the out of control construction. I fucking hope so.

The bottom picture is facing (South?) towards the sea, which I inevitably think of as South but is actually probably not South. Maybe it´s more like East. You can see smoke. That´s from fireworks. Valencia is the capital of fireworks. I have more to say about this. Below the smoke along the first line of the beach there are some new buildings.

There are no less than 31 cranes in this picture, I counted. And what look to be at least 16 buildings in varying stages of construction, each and every one of them the same as the next. Up close they´re even
more creepy because of the tiny differences they´ve concocted to play with your head, like there´s a sculpture in the courtyard in one of them and then not in the next, and as you walk past at siesta, passing nobody because everybody is inside, you can´t help but ask yourself, why? Why couldn´t you have altered the height of one of these buildings, knocked down a wing on one end to let in a bit of sun and break the claustrophobic monotony of the perfectly equal entrances? Fuck.

so long no post

so I forgot my password. I created this blog when I still had internet access at home, and my password was saved on that computer. I thought I knew the password anyway since it´s the same one I´ve always used, but, until now it hasn´t worked. Today though, for some reason, it has suddenly worked, the same stupid thing I´ve been trying to type-in at the log-in screen for two weeks.

Ok, well, blog´s up again. I took some pictures of where I live, will put those up here for you to see. By the way, looks like I´m coming back to Canada in August. My classes here in Valencia finish at the end of June, but I´m going to be working in a summer camp in Ciudad Rodrigo July 1-28, where I worked last year, then I´m coming home.

Walking in the Footsteps of a Child

This is a poem I wrote a couple of years ago for my dad. He´s in the hospital right now recovering from a mild heart attack. I called him the other day and he seemed in good spirits, not particularly surprised at what had happened. I wasn´t either. He´s treated himself like shit for years, smokes, drinks and doesn´t exercise, having been told that it´ll kill him. He had an operation a few years ago (5? 7?) to unblock some clogged arteries, and was told to give up his bad habits. I´m sure that operation cost Canadian taxpayers a few bucks and I´m inclined to say fuck it man, you had your chance, the next one´s on you. But hey, that´s not how it works, and I´m glad. I´m glad to say too that in the last few years my dad has finally found his groove. He´s found his path to ¨god¨, bought a sewing machine and makes quilts as well as his own outfits, he´s a local celebrity, well-known for his uncompromising committment to his own style of drag (he´s just a man in a dress, get over it, and no, he will not shave his beard), is on a baseball team, consistently avoids stressful situations, has the most long weekends per year out of anyone I know, spends more time sitting outside with a coffee in all weather than anyone I know, feeds himself, washes himself, and has his own MySpace website. The guy has a good time, seven days a week, and that´s fucking awesome.

My dad used to pick me up from daycare occassionally. Jesse Ketchum School is about 5 min walk from the Metro Reference Library in downtown Toronto, where he works. We´d walk down Bay Street and across Cumberland or Bloor Street until we got to Yonge St. and the Library entrance. On the way, there were always a lot of cars, it was rush hour. I´ve always had a strong sense of self-preservation and have, on occasion, attempted to injure my father. He was sort of like a new kidney, took awhile to get accustomed to, but after a few probing fork attacks was deemed acceptable and allowed to continue carrying out his function. One day when the traffic was particularly heavy, we were walking hand in hand along the sidewalk on Bloor Street, and I told him that, since he was older, he had a lot less to lose if, say, a car were to swerve out of control onto the sidewalk and wipe him out then and there, and that he should therefore switch places with me and walk closest to the road, absorbing any possible impact and saving me from an early death. He thought this was pretty funny.

Walking in the Footsteps of a Child

He told him once to walk on the outside;
It was because he was older, had lived longer,
And was therefore more prepared to die.

That´s what he told him, and that´s how he told it afterwards—
About a boy who wouldn´t walk on the outside edge
Anymore, when his dad, who had lived a lot longer,
Could take his place.

And that´s why when he was gone
His dad could never quite walk on the outside edge,
With nobody to protect but himself,
Nobody but a shadow of a boy, who once looked up to him
And smiled.

first past the post

October 2004...blogger since. This is my first post, it took me what, almost 3.5 years? I vaguely remember getting all pumped up one day about how I was going to have a blog and put stuff on it and write cool articles about whatever the hell I wanted, and develop. But I didn´t. Instead I kept at it, other things that is, I got a degree, I got good marks, I read a lot, wrote a little, but not on the blog, travelled, completed all the little tasks that comprise our everyday lives, yet, when it came down to sitting down regularly and writing something, anything, down, I just didn´t do it. I think I know why this is. Has something to do with a verging on obsessive compulsive perfectionism that I have let stop me from moving past the beginning stages of many things I write, not that I´m even proof-reading this stuff, but, I just want to do stuff that fits right, something you read and say yeah man, that´s it, you´ve hit it on the head, whatever you´re talking about, that´s how you have to say it, and you did. But I haven´t. So I hesitate and I stop and I forget about it. That´s why it´s taken me so long to post something.

It´s taken me since October 2004 to fucking sit down and follow through with a fucking blog, which is the most informal method of publishing available to us today. So, I want to write, or at least to try and fucking write and see what comes out, and I figure this is as good a place to start as any. I´m going to put a bunch of things on here. It´ll be a kind of diary/ notebook/ keeping in touch kind of place with a few creative writing pieces thrown in, but don´t expect anything spectacular. I´m going to try and post a little every week and see where it goes. We´ll see. As most of you already know, I´m living in Spain at the moment, so all those hours I´m not talking to you, you can read what I might have been saying to you. I´m going to try not to leave too much out.

O.