Panama

Before I left for Lima, my friend at work brought me a picture of Machu Picchu from a travel brochure. She went there years ago before they regulated the number of visitors and hikers. She stayed in a hotel just outside of the ruins. When she looked out the window of her hotel room, Machu Picchu was right there. In bed she stared wide-eyed out the window thinking, That’s Machu Picchu.

She said, “The best part is when you’re standing on the ruins looking at the Andes all around you and you’re the same person as you were at home. You’re the same person, but you’re standing in the middle of an ancient civilization.”

Today I had this same feeling, but I was still flying over South America. From the plane, Dave and I could see the mounds of vegetation protruding from the ocean, the long fishing boats, and the fog hanging over the water. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I was in Panama. How did this happen?

These are the things I know about Panama. One: There is a certain kind of hat that people in Panama are known for. Two: When I was eight years old, my grandpa had a lady friend visit our house and she was from Panama. He had emphysema, so she may have been one of his nurses. He liked to flirt with them and give them his money. This one was a woman who was about my height – I was small for my age – and she had a baby. The baby looked huge in her tiny arms. I was bewildered that a woman so small could make a baby at all.

We got off the plane. The inside of the airport was humid and we were dressed for frigid New York temperatures.

“We’re in Panama!” I said.

Airports, Dave observed, are just malls that you fly in and out of. While we wandered around looking for our terminal, pretty ladies with stacks of advertisements tried to bully us into sampling Paris Hilton’s perfume. We passed shops purveying the quintessential Panama hats and Rolex watches and duty-free shops selling expensive liquor. Who would buy a Rolex watch on impulse?

“Let’s play the find-the-most-expensive-item-in-the-store game – oh, there it is,” Dave said, indicating a liquor aptly named Louis the Fourteenth. It came in its own locking travel trunk, s it should for $3,400.

“It probably tastes okay,” Dave said.

Dave looked for a lunch that would make up for the sardine tin of pasta he ate on the plane. There were Flying Dogs – apparently what people in Panama call the hot dog – and Quizno’s and McDonalds and Cinnabon. We probably passed five different Cinnabon stands. All Dave wanted was a sandwich.

At the terminal, where the passengers loitered around the desk, bored and waiting to board, the announcement for our flight came. The voice on the loudspeaker told us important information about boarding but did not switch into English. We realized that no one was going to translate anything for us at this point.

I never thought I would ever be in Panama, even for a layover. After graduation I despaired, wondering if my adventuring days were numbered and if I would spend the next twenty years working a number of menial, minimum wage jobs to pay off my education. Sometimes I feel like my brain is turning to the consistency of a deep chowder. As I was listening to this language that might as well be a secret code, my ears perked up. I felt the familiar feeling of the unfamiliar. It occurred to me that I was same person in a different hemisphere.

Love at First Sloth

Essential Poe Facts

Very important facts about Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in the Bronx:

There was no bust of Pallas above the chamber door, I am quite devastated to report.

There is this bust of Poe in the corner of the living room.

It's made of chocolate.

Poe rented the cottage for $100 a year from a farm.

The Bronx used to have farms, as well as forests.

Poe used to drink and play cards with the nearby Jesuit monks. Naughty.

According to the educational video played in a loop in the attic area, the cottage was built with high ceilings in order to conserve heat.

The low ceiling theory doesn't hold up – I nearly leaped over the barriers and lit a fire in the wood stove by rubbing together my dry, dry hands.

Poe had the best writing desk ever. Perhaps it’s a reproduction, but I don’t care. Just look at it.

Poe wrote next to this picture of penguins. You heard it here first.

Virginia Poe passed away in this bedroom.

After Virginia died, Poe wrote a prose poem called Eureka that anticipated the big bang theory.

The Bronx Historical Society volunteer guaranteed that if you read any sentence in Eureka, you will get a headache.

Poe was really, really depressed and thinking about Eternity when he wrote Eureka.

He considered it his magnum opus and submitted himself to death after writing it.

The educational video in the attic said that Poe spent the happiest years of his life there.

Ten minutes later it said they were the most excruciating years of his life. So which one is it?

Probably the latter.

Dirt Candy

My pictures did not come out, but here are four leeks. Or are they scallions? Hmm...

There comes a day in the life of every young woman when she does something absolutely abhorrent to her body in the name of having a cool experience. This is exactly what I did at Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant in New York City that serves whimsical dishes made exclusively of photosynthesizing things that grow in the ground.

When one hears “vegetarian,” one envisions something healthy, like steamed carrots. Dirt Candy wants to shatter that association and melt maple butter all over it. Here are some things that are vegetarian: French fries. Waffles. Deep-fried waffles. Ice cream. Five-cheese ravioli. Speculoos cookie butter. Speculoos butter on a deep-fried waffle.

In conclusion, “vegetarian” and “healthy” are hardly synonyms. I learned this lesson the hard way at Veggie Galaxy in Boston a few months ago as I choked down the last bite of vegan cream cheese waffle and this week I learned it again. I am no stranger to making myself sick with yummy foods. Everything I ate at Dirt Candy was deep fried, slathered in butter, or alchemically transmogrified into cotton candy.

Dirt Candy, it turns out, gets completely booked at least three months ahead of time. I found this out when I tried to make a reservation online. I might have secured a seat sometime in June of 2014. Instead, my friend Abbey and I showed up around the time the doors opened and tap danced in their window until they seated us. (Until someone forgot that reservation they made three months ago.) Every time someone got seated, we hovered in the window with a look of disdain that burned into the very essence of their beings, especially when they sipped a beverage. The unseasonable October heat was oppressive and I was dressed for autumn.

Inside, the seating was intimate. The waitress pulled the table out so that I would be able to squeeze into the bench against the wall. We ordered jalapeno hush puppies with maple butter. We liberally applied the maple butter. Maple butter is a shameful thing to waste.

Everything on the menu was enthusiastically named after its primary vegetable ingredient. Mushroom! Cucumber! Potato! I took my chances the Parsnip! while Abbey asked for the Corn! as her entrée. My dish was described as “parsnip pillows” – essentially, extra squishy parsnip gnocchi. On Abbey’s plate, a tempura-fried poached egg sat atop some very cheesy and savory corn grits.

One of my main motivations for wanting to go to this vegetable alchemy lab was to try a dessert made of vegetables. We wavered between an ice cream bar made of peas and rosemary eggplant tiramisu. We asked the waitress what we should order.

“You want the tiramisu,” she said very seriously.

Of course, the tiramisu was two dollars more than the other desserts. When the plate arrived, we first saw this white fluffy cloud hovering on the plate. The woman next to me leaned in.

“Is that a wedding veil?” she asked.

No, that was the rosemary cotton candy. Resting below the cloud was a 2” by 2” square slice of tiramisu. It tasted like tiramisu, but also like eggplant. Somehow it worked. The cotton candy tasted like rosemary and I haven’t had cotton candy since age ten and probably will not have it again. My pancreas got so angry at me. I can’t believe you've done this, said my pancreas.

As we walked out of the restaurant, I felt like I needed a small perambulator on which Abbey could wheel me through the streets of Manhattan. Instant nausea. Between the butter and the sugar and the creamy sauces and all the disparate food items, I felt like my entire body shut down in order to digest the chaos. I wanted to make words and talk to my friend, but apparently walking and digesting and listening and speaking at the same time was more multitasking than I could manage. I suggested we walk it off, perhaps in the direction of a hospital. The walking did not last long and I ducked out early to go home and recover.

Was it worth it? Yes. I enjoyed the eating. Can I eat like this every day? No. I felt a little sad after the meal because I don’t get to see Abbey too often and here I was channeling all of my energy into assimilating the parsnip pillows. We made some jokes about the cotton candy being a poodle, but the thing is I actually felt like I ate a poodle. If I ate a small, snooty dog, that is exactly how I would feel. The Dirt Candy experience, although delicious, was a good reminder of why I eat the way I do.

One thing to cross off my list.

Bird

I don't encounter a lot of wildlife at work. Once a friendly puppy bounded into my office, but it was promptly removed. Another time I caught a giant venomous spider in a plastic cup - perhaps a suitcase stowaway originating from the American west - and set it free in our parking lot. Last night was one of those rare brushes with the animal kingdom. The lull in incoming phone calls was interrupted by a bird thumping against our picture window.

My co-worker Heather and I leaned close to the glass to get a good look, hoping it was not dead. The bird tumbled back onto the concrete, its wings flung awkwardly to the side and the wind knocked out of its lungs. Soon it began twitching, its chest heaving violently.

"That's it. The bird's fizzling out," I said sadly.

Our picture window is tinted like a pair of FBI sunglasses. During the day, you can't see in from outside unless you are pressing your nose to the glass. Heather speculated that the bird might have been somehow impaired before the impact. Such a collision seemed otherwise unlikely.

"Maybe it was having a stroke as it was flying by the window," she suggested.

"Or a brain aneurysm," I offered. "It probably has all sorts of neurological damage now."

I kept trying to envision the bird straightening out and flying away like it was nothing. In reality, the quick little pulses of the bird's chest did not make the situation look more hopeful. Now its tail was pointing upwards, it seemed to be curling into a ball. It's gauzy bird-soul was rising to the deck of the ship, trying to balloon its way to the avian heavens.

"I think it's having a seizure," I said. "What can we do? Should I give it CPR? What if it has a family?"

I imagined how mouth-to-beak resuscitation might work and what sort of diseases I might get from performing it on an accident victim. I considered going on break and bringing it breadcrumbs from the kitchen. Maybe the resulting sugar rush would give it the energy it needed to resume flight. I felt so helpless just watching and not taking action.

I left the office for a few minutes to use the copy machine. When I returned, the had bird flipped upright, looking tired, slouched, and hung-over. My hopes were skyrocketing.

"I wish it would just fly away like nothing happened," Heather said. We were still hovering at the window with our eyes on the concrete ledge below. I kept picturing the bird fluttering into a nearby tree. Suddenly, the bird straightened its posture, took a few hops in place, and flew into the bushes.

Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.

The Millionaire's Bestiary

My short story "The Millionaire's Bestiary" appeared in Defenestration Magazine last week, so I drew this condor. Click the sensitive condor below to read the story. Go on. He's handsome, right? I am so proud of this crayon condor. It is the best condor I have ever drawn. Also read the other stories in this issue, because they are about Ronald Reagan and groovy love-powered vehicles.