51 things

Here's how it works as written by the person who tagged me… I'm not sure where this original project started but I got tagged and decided to continue it by tagging those of you whom I consider to be great friends or I haven't heard from you in a while and would love to hear what you have to say. Hope you'll play along because it would/will be fun hearing from you.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

As you might guess from the title, I'm actually going to do two lists: one for Cape Verde (because it's so deserving) and one for me (because I'm supposed to).

1. Last Sunday, I visited a coworker in his town. Had no particular plans, but we hiked for several hours, I nimbly danced my way out of a nasty fall while jumping across rocks, his 7-year-old daughter fell in love with me, I got fed four times (once for cake, which was so delicious even without frosting that I scribbled down the recipe on the back of a receipt), I attended the meeting of the local community association, and I spent quite a bit of time lounging around in his house, where his bottomless baby son [predictably] peed on my lap.

Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I mentioned twice that I should get going. The first time, they said it was too early to leave; "ka bai" (don't go), his daughter told me. The second time, they said it was too late to leave and convinced me to sleep there (his daughter was overjoyed). I woke up the next morning in my slightly pee-caked jeans, used my finger and a little bit of toothpaste to brush my teeth outside, and got fed a fifth time before catching a ride to work in the back of a pickup truck. This is Cape Verde.

2. Cape Verdians wear sandals and flip flops (usually flip flops, and usually cheap plastic ones) in many situations where lesser people would surely perish without boots. Hiking? Flip flops. Hiking down a steep, uneven cobblestone road in the rain with 20 kg of sugar cane balanced on your head? Flips flops. Tilling the field with a sharp pickaxe-like instrument that you pretty much aim at your feet? Consistently flip flops.

3. Flip flops are also a beacon of civilization. Because they're cheap and plastic, they break. Because they break when they're being walked on, and because broken things are trash, and because trash usually becomes litters, you find broken sandals in the places where Cape Verdians walk. And that usually means you're close to the place where they live. Which is awesome news if you've been hiking in nowhereland for two days (ahem) and would really like a bite to eat.

4. Booty-shaking is a science here. Women of all shapes and sizes move their butts in ways that are not physically possible.

5. Cape Verde is poor, but not remotely as poor as mainland Africa. Some people here are hungry some of the time. No one starves. No one goes thirsty; even when it gets really dry, they still sell water for about a penny per gallon… less if you have running water, which is common in larger towns. People here wear nice clothes, hats, jewelry. Youth compete in soccer leagues. Whole families are addicted to a Brazilian soap opera about vampires. Of course, it's unsustainable because it's all built of remittances, but at least for now it's comfortable.

6. That said, nobody in Cape Verde has water heaters. And after six months here, I almost find it hard to believe that everybody in America does. Coming back to hot showers will be eerie and glorious.

7. Recently, it came up in conversation that I like classical music. The 50-year-old man I was talking to nodded, telling me enthusiastically that he also likes classical music and offering to lend me a DVD of one performance that he particularly loved. I agreed, and a moment later his daughter returned with his collection. Flipping past Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, and at least a few Steven Seagal movies dubbed in Portuguese, we came to the piece d'resistance: Shania Twain: Up! Close and Personal (to be fair, Shania was backed up on violin by Alison Krauss).

8. The shortage of resources here extends to names. Across nine islands, there are at least three towns called Tarrafal, and on our island we know about 15 people called João or Bia.

9. We call São Nicolau the "Isle of Man" because no female Volunteers currently serve here, but if you look at it on a map you may notice another way in which it is quite manly.

10. During the day, jobless men play games in the streets — usually a type of mancala without end buckets, but sometimes a card game. I have watched the card game and am convinced that it has no rules. Or at least, no sense of suit, number, or trump. After a while, it actually comes as sort of surprise that they take tricks and play clockwise.

11. On São Nicolau, there are three old ladies who buy fish in Tarrafal, load it into the back of a Hilux (a public-transport pickup truck with benches on either side of the bed), and ride with it to Ribeira Brava to be sold. The road between the two towns is 26 kilometers, and it passes through several smaller towns where these fish ladies have customers. I caught a ride with them one day and saw how they makes their deliveries. About 50 meters before the target house, they take their pipe out of their mouths and start screaming the customer's name: "DILMA! DIIILLLLMAAAAAAAAAA!!" When they get closer, they add, "PEXI NA STRADA!" (fish in the street). Then, with the truck still going full clip, they drop the fish onto the pavement (sometimes in a bag, but it tends to break). The fish, still fresh and slimy, race forward for a bit as if going for one last swim before being cleaned, cooked, and eaten. The fish lady replaces her pipe and takes a puff.

12. Cape Verdians have a meal called "lanche" that happens about the same time as brunch. It consists of coffee, juice, and normally a small assortment of bite-size foods like pizza squares and baked, breaded tuna balls. On a normal day, most people in most jobs seem to do perfectly fine without lanche. But if you're working in the field, or are traveling for business, or are attending a formação (training session), then lanche is for some reason required, and the hours of 10am to 1pm are useless without it.

13. "Packing light" is not part of the lingo here. Travel of even a few days requires a full-size suitcase, and if you're going on a plane or boat, you'll take two. If that plane is headed out of the country, you probably also have a few boxes, and maybe a guitar case or one of those huge old-fashioned trunks that Americans prefer to leave in one place for decades at a time. Again, the fact that Cape Verdians can move all this stuff seems not physically possible.

14. Especially on my island, hospitality here puts midwesterners to shame. If they're eating, some of the food is for you (I just had lanche because it was brought into the room where I had been reading online news, and before I could finish sheepishly shutting down the computer, they were urging me to dig in). If they're going somewhere, you can hitchhike. If you're stuck, then of course you can spend the night. And while you're at it, why don't you come back next Saturday for the baptism/wedding/birthday party?

15. The living room decor here is not unlike what you'd expect to see at a 6-year-old girl's tea party, which adds a strange ambiance to my meetings with male coworkers in such rooms.

16. Sixty-two degrees is considered serious jacket weather, especially in beach towns that are normally much hotter. To my surprise, I'm starting to agree.

17. Cape Verdian folklore, as once passed down through storytelling and now immortalized in printed comic books, centers around a mischievous wolf called Lobu (wolf) Xibinhu. I find the choice of animal strange, since there have never been wolves here. Wouldn't it seem strange to you if Smokey the Bear were actually a giraffe?

18. Native to São Nicolau (and very few other places) is the dragoeiro, or dragon tree. They call it that because its bark takes the form of spindly, slithery, dragon-skin-like tendrils, and because you can extract from it a "dragon blood" (some sort of sap, I suppose) that tastes great when mixed with local liquor. It grows for hundreds of years and is rare enough that you're not allowed to cut them down, which is pretty cool.

19. Soccer Futebol is serious. We have two stadiums with FIFA-size fields on this island alone, and only 16,000 people live here.

20. Everyone here is happy when it rains.

21. Pork is something you reserve, like people used to reserve hams during the holidays. When enough reservations are made, somebody goes and slaughters a pig, and then a kid shows up at your doorstep with a still-warm chunk of leg in a grocery bag.

22. The biggest party of the year is carnival. It lasts for four days but gets talked about for two months in advance, partly because it takes that long to make all the costumes.

23. I've never met anybody here that lives alone.

24. Based on what they know (which is not always representative, but that's another issue), Cape Verdians think America is great. Especially now that we have Obama.

25. Time moves more slowly here. Few events are expected to start until hours after the announced time. New Year's parties, for example, didn't even let people in until 2am. And the sort of man-on-the-street interviews that American national news would cut off after 15 seconds go on for minutes here. And when they have nothing to say, people are content to sit with each other in silence. Again, they'd rather do it together than alone.

27. My favourite number is 27.

25. My favourite way to spell favourite is with a U, wavy red line be damned.

24. I love writing stories, especially when I can weave in a lot of tangential details that relate back to the main thread in obscure ways. Unfortunately, I only write stories that are true. I don't have practice with the other kind. Now that I mention it, actually, I wonder if I ever made up things when I was a kid. I'll have to ask mom.

23. In real life, I never lie. I used to invade people's privacy sometimes, but I didn't like that, so now I don't do that either.

22. Most things that I do are at least tangentially about love, the goal being to increase both the world's capacity for love and the amount of love in it. Peace Corps, for example, has three official purposes, two of which are about finding love for other cultures. The other is about development, and I try to accomplish that in a way that's good for the earth, knowing that we can't share love with others in this life if we have to compete for the resources to keep living.

21. My haircut has never changed. People have tried, but I always end up with what my mother used to call "a little boy's haircut." I think that's the way we actually used to order it at the barber shop in San Diego (which was next to the mediocre but wonderfully-named Royberto's Mexican Food). I'm not sure you'd call it a haircut anymore, though, or even a hairstyle. After seven scissorless months, it's just hair. Some day it will become clear to me that people take me less seriously when I look like this, and in the interest of professionalism, I will shave it down to scalp fuzz. Until then, the mop stays on top.

20. I dearly miss my cat, Sophie.

19. I don't like clubs, or disco dancing in general. In fact, unless it's a Flaming Lips concert, I'm not in favor of much that hurts my ears.

18. I dearly miss my friends and family. Which is exactly what a person in my position is supposed to say, but I wouldn't have expected it from me. I've never been in the habit of reaching out to people. Yet now, when reaching out is harder than ever before, I suddenly see how much I have to gain from it. (You and I need some face time, and we're getting it when I get back.)

17. What I wore to 8th-grade graduation fits me better now than it did then. What a misproportioned young boy I once was.

16. I tend to bake on vacations if the opportunity presents itself.

15. Crushes keep me alive. I may try to give the impression that I have some choice in the matter, but girl, if I like you, I'll actually do anything for you. And I'll be happy about it. Being romantic is the most fun thing I do.

14. I can put a good portion of my foot in my mouth. A friend took a picture once. It looks awful.

13. Fellow Peace Corps volunteers think that I usually wear pants and a short-sleeve button-down, since that's all they ever saw on me during training. U.S. friends know my uniform to be shorts and a T-shirt. Both groups seem to find it hard to imagine me the other way, which I find funny.

12. The silliest song ever sung about me is called "Either Chase," by Sam Spencer.

11. I probably have a bit of an Internet addiction, but I attribute it to the fact that I love learning. In an earlier, age, I probably would have haunted libraries (in fact, at an earlier age, I did — I had a rack installed on my bike specifically so I could strap down books with a bungee cord and schlep them home). Now everything in libraries seems so dated. But they could still teach me something I've wanted to understand for a while: advanced physics, especially relativity and string theory. It'll probably go right over my head, since I was too lazy to take basic physics courses in college… but that, of course, doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

10. I am occasionally interested in teaching, but mostly as an exercise in learning and logic and writing. I like the idea of working hard to understand something complex, then manipulating it into something that sounds simple (if you keep up with my blog, you may remember an old post about this). I believe that most bad teaching is a shortfall in explanation or enthusiasm, and it excites me that both can be remedied.

9. The tallest tale I ever told was about 7'4".

8. I never went to summer camp; when I was a kid, I never asked (even though I watched "Salute Your Shorts"), and my parents never thought to offer. But now I wish I had. Last week, I listened to an episode of This American Life about camp, and it made me outstandingly sad because it reminded me how complete a world you can invent in the company of others, and how much fun it can be to live there, and how much you can care about it. I don't like knowing that inconsequential things are inconsequential. I wanna feel them.

7. I rarely get up later than 8:30, even on weekends. Actually, especially on weekends. It gets so quiet, and I hate to miss that.

6. I'm no good at drawing or dancing, but I enjoy both on occasion (though usually not at the same time).

5. Good food gives me more pleasure than most things. I think about food all the time, and am constantly searching for ways to improve my culinary finesse. This makes me a bit of a food snob, which I find distasteful; but I can't change who I am, so I just try to be nice about it. Besides, we all have our vices. Sometimes dipping your Big Mac in microwaved Velveeta is exactly where it's at.

4. It's a bit early to worry about this, but I don't know where I'll live when I'm back in the states in 2010. Thoughts are on DC, SF Bay area, NYC. Any ideas? I kind of like the people in Missouri, but I don't know what I'd do there.

3. When I was a kid, I believed I could fly. I had memories of doing it.

2. Because computers and Internet are scarce in Cape Verde, almost everything I write here starts out on paper. Item #18 on this list is still true, but on paper you can see that it was originally about a specific person whose name is now scratched out.

1. Of all the wonderful things my mother sent me for Christmas, I love my Oxford dictionary and my new blanket the most.