This is the first place I went in rural Peru. We went for a walk during a multi-day ICT training for internet entrepreneurs, and discovered this lovely cow. I inserted a clip of it into a preliminary cut of a short promo video I made for the telecom, but the cow appears right after an important government official, and the transition is jarring. At least that’s the feedback I got. So the cow’s gotta be axed from the video, but I wanted to at least memorialize him (her?) somewhere. Voila.
(It’s a song. Google it.)
Well, another summer is coming to a close. I’ve got a new baseball glove and some shoes to show for it. I’ve got blueberries. I’ve got pieces of video. I’ve got the echo of a Peruvian sunburn that will stain freckles on my chest for months. I’ve got a 90% designed yet unedited book of mediocre poetry almost ready to self-publish. I’ve got some lofty plans.
What I don’t have is a proper thesis topic. I don’t have a plan for getting hitched, other than a to get hitched at some point in the near future. In a foreign country. With no one there. I don’t have time/motivation to do pottery or go swimming, I don’t have a proper schedule (not a complaint), I really don’t have any complaints at all right now.
But it’s summer (and another, and another), and this weekend is a birthday party and a wedding and soon school begins again, my last and final year EVER EVER, which in itself is a little sad. “I want a new beginning. / I want a mango. That’s it.”
I realized I hadn’t yet posted any stills of P., my good friend and the telecom lead in Lima. Our interview lasted two hours, and he had just returned from the dentist and was on painkillers, poor guy. He kept stumbling over the word “sustainability” in English, and this video still represents the moment I broke into convulsive laughter.
The dog was just a dog. A little terrified of the camera, until he realized it wasn’t moving.
Rode the subway with my landlord today.
As if on a motorboat, as if on a wide sea.
He spoke of cold things: divorce, immigration,
his voice rising in waves over the swelled train tracks
but I was thinking about summer, how fast it goes,
how the baseball field stays fluorescent even at night.
And all the commuters looked like pretty statues,
even the woman flashing a grimace as she stared at us,
even the old men, even the kids.
Someday it will be difficult to remember
even this moment, the way the train flew through tunnels
without listening to our lamentations, without offering remorse.
From La Oroya, the Panamerican highway outside of Lima, Huaral, and somewhere in the jungle, respectively:
I’ve been feeling sort of like crap and therefore got less than an hour of sleep, but in that brief rest, I dreamed of Huancayo. So I came to the editing studio this morning, on a Saturday, to get work done. For some reason, I feel better when I’m working on this video. When all my attention is focused on understanding the Spanish interviews, I completely forget how I’m feeling physically. Which further illustrates that it’s all mental to begin with.
