Last night there was a thunder storm. Scary shit. Especially, since I was standing on my balcony trying to get a decent photo of some lightning. I got about 5 shots of actual lightning bolts. There are a few of lightning lighting up the sky but the bolts are elsewhere. This is one lucky shot which has been touched up using Photomatix and Picasa.
I should be studying for my Internal Medicine final. However, I can't help letting my mind wander. I had been getting interested in HDR photography. So, I set out to find out about it and try to create some images of my own. This is one of my first attemps with Qtpfsgui.
Wendell finally, showed up in my town again. Last time, I got the golden axe, eventually. This time when I fed him a red turnip, he gave me the country guitar. The next night, K.K. came into town and after he played K.K. Casbah, we traded. He gave me his bushy browed picture.
I am all sorted out with this months bugs, now. Finally, after catching a spider. I lack two fish, though. The sunfish and the angel fish. I even stood out all night, once, when it was raining. Oh well.
Earlier this month, Freckles moved into my town. One day, it gave me a picture but something happened to it and now it is gone. So, I really don't know if it was a glitch and that thing gave it to me but it was lost. Or, did I accidentally sell it? I don't know.
Finally, the most horrible thing happened. Fricken' Poncho moved away. I never even knew it was about to happen. I never saw it coming. I loved that damn teddy bear. Crap. I mean, come on, I was sick and still trying to go out to the Eurovision village. I still managed to check in everyday. So, I don't know what happened. Elvis moved away. too. I was upset by that too. Oh, Poncho... how could you.
The Finn had won a ticket from the city of Helsinki for the Final dress rehearsal. That was really cool, but I was wishing I could see the spectacle too. Then an amazing thing happened. A few days earlier, I had been handed this 'you could win tickets to ESC' ad for a website, www.jaiku.com . Well, later that day, when I got home I logged on and found that I hadn't won. However, it was really interesting, so I kept checking it an posting stuff. Finally, on the day of the finale, I was hanging out online there because they said they were going to give away tickets to the final. Lo and behold, I won. I couldn't fucking believe it. In fact, I didn't until I had that ticket in my hand. What an incredible turn of events. I went and I took photos. Of course, I was quite aways back and I only had my digital camera which doesn't have any zoom objects. It was awsome.
Well at Finland's Lordi won the Eurovision Song Contest last year in Athens, it hosted the ESC this year. It was in Helsinki at Hartwall Arena. It was a few weeks ago, too. I was sick and yet still caught up in the excitement. I spent several days hanging out at the Eurovision Village in front of Kamppi. There, were many artists who came to sing or give interviews. So, I got lots of great photos of Scootch, Todomondo, Alenka, Roger Cicero, the Bulgarians, etc. This is a photo taken after Scootch performed. As I was taking this photo, a photographer snapped a photo of my hands holding my camera and my friends who were standing beside me. That photo came out in the Helsinki Sanomat.
When I was growing up, I remember my uncles and mother spoke in this slang, I could here only when I was around them and their friends. I could see when the spoke this way they looked powerful and full of possibility. They would pop their chins up, tilt their heads and cock an eyebrow, “Simón”, somebody would say with a nod; which meant more than yes. My uncles would wear a rolled bandana on their brows sometimes; mostly when they were going out to play basketball. They would say the name of our town with a strong accent on the U and pronounce the S clearly. Not like, the other people I knew; who said the whole word so lazily and uninflected, it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language.
They didn’t always sound like that. When we went to the store or when my mom had to speak with Sister Francis, the principle at school, which to my dismay was quite often, she sounded different. She sounded like them. In our home we could be different but when we walked in the world we blended in with them.
The walls of my grandfather's den were covered with a combination of black velvet paintings and scowling revolutionaries and banditos. That place was like a great cathedrale, it was never finished. To this day, many years after his death; it remains a shrine to his procrastination. Its floor still bare, our names etched into the cement still visible, the wood panelling bearing rectangular cut outs for light switches never installed, and pink panther colored insulataion hanging from the rafters where the ceiling panels are no more. The walls still hold the banditos and Emilio Zapata but the black velvet paintings are gone.
My uncles would talk about the Man, and the Pigs, and say things like chingada and cabrón. None of them were fluent, but their speech was spiced with Spanish slang. They didn’t sound like the Brady Bunch. I grew up relating to them and to the Brady Bunch. That isn’t such a comforting thought. I wanted to connect more to what they were but that was in the past, that struggle they grew up with was gone. My struggle would be something else entirely and it wouldn’t come until a decade or more had passed. When it would come I would go through it with such passivity; one might not consider it a struggle at all. On the Brady Bunch,
I smile when I think of my uncle David. His face is a reminder of where we come from. He looks like the colossal Olmec head from Tres Zapotes which I first saw at the Mexican National Museum of Antrhopology. I guess if you looked at all of use, unless you have lived in the
Through all of the years until mine, my family has been called Mexicans, refugees, immigrants, braceros, wetbacks, beaners, Hispanics, etc. In my parents’ generation, they began calling themselves Chicanos and this is what I call myself. I am a Chicana. Some people of my own generation and those after me may call themselves Latinos, Hispanics, Mexican-American or just Americans. It is a matter of the environment in which one was raised.
I didn’t watch the Brady Bunch for all of the 1970s; it was cancelled in 1974. Although, I may have watched reruns, I also tuned into the other shows of the time; Good Times, All in the Family, Maude, and the Jefferson. I was a kid at this time; I wasn’t learning politics at St. Francis of
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