It is with this introduction in mind that I will now attempt to present to you the blog I have entitled “A Day in the Life of Me (Now In Technicolor!).” I am giving out more details than I normally care to give (though storing away many in my acorn tree for winter), understanding that I may bore you, but as I so rarely find time to update this blog I figure you can take a paragraph a day and be satisfied for a while.
I live in a very colorful house with the Asian wife of a famous Peruvian painter and Argos. Argos once attacked me (don’t let those innocent glazed eyes fool you! he’s vicious!) and stole a sandwich right out of my hand, nearly severing two of my fingers in the process. As a result our relationship has been a little tense ever since. But men don’t take hints so he still follows me around the house and whines outside my bedroom door when I close it behind me. My heart is cold.That blasted invention called the alarm clock pries me brutally out of my slumber at precisely 7:52am every morning from Monday to Friday. I gather my consciousness enough to hit the snooze button, check to make sure I don’t have frostbite, and then go back to sleep. It is horrendously cold in my room at 7:52am. It is horrendously cold in my room at all hours of the day. I sleep with my sweatpants tucked into two pairs of socks and with four shirts and a hood over my head (picture not available), and I still wake up shivering in the night. I relate my morning ritual of finding the motivation to get out of bed to an Eskimo standing by the hole he has dug to go ice fishing and wondering whether he should jump in. The reasonable response to this dilemma would be to step away from the hole before insanity grants you the urge to jump, but luckily I am not sane, and so every morning around 8:19am I finally get out of bed.
My office is literally next door. This is good in that I can afford to leave the house at 8:59 and still get to work on time, but bad because I’m afraid that our neighborhood watchyman (this is the Peruvian adaptation of “watchman,” being the security guard that has a station at the entrance to the neighborhood) reports to my coworkers all of my social comings and goings. On one occasion I didn’t come home at night because I had stayed at a friend’s house, and the next day the watchyman told me how worried he had been. I ordered him a pizza to say that I was sorry, and secretly hoped that I was buying his loyalty.
In the office I do boring things. I read about international human rights law and the Peruvian juvenile justice system and make calls to branches of government bureaucracy that never seem to be able to offer any useful information. I often leave the office, mostly to do interviews with the parents of kids who have had problems with the law or meet with organizations that might be able to contribute a shovel full of dirt to the mountain of statistical information that I am attempting to build. Nine times out of ten the person I am supposed to meet does not show up. This is life.
Work ends at 5pm. I leave at 5:02pm, so that people won’t think I am in a hurry to get out. After work I normally hang out with friends. Now, I don’t know what your impression is of South America, but just to make sure we’re on the same page, I’m living in Lima. This is not the jungle. People wear pants*. When I say I am hanging out with friends, I don’t mean that they are teaching me to play the panpipe or that we are dancing in circles around fires waving branches and painting our faces. We hang out in parks talking, watch movies in living rooms, take pictures of graffiti and skateboards, walk to the beach, or window shop at the mall built into the cliffs. There will be no future National Geographic articles on the peculiar and unexplored habits of my friends, but I enjoy them tremendously nonetheless.I crawl into bed at night with the TV normally on a dubbed episode of the Simpsons, shivering until the very last minute when my body finally surrenders to sleep.
*I honestly read in a Canadian magazine the other day some snide comment about Peruvians being so primitive that they had only just started to wear pants, and it obviously irked me in a way that cannot be fully expressed in words. If you would like to get the non-verbal explanation for how I felt upon reading such derogatory balderdash, I would suggest that you go stick your hand in a freezer for 10 minutes, and then immediately place it on a lit stovetop. The scream that ensues should adequately sum up my rage. Actually, I don’t suggest you do that. But you can imagine.
