My Best Friend Is a Handicap.*

South America
November 28th 2011

Published: November 30th 2011

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Tyrone

Life is rough

It may seem like paradise but pieces of pineapple kept getting in my straw.

There’s a word that people use here which means high maintanence/fancy pantsy. Unfortunately the word, spelled pupi, is pronounced like a dirty diaper. It makes someone sound quite the opposite of fancy when you say “oh, his wife is really poopy.” I saw Maria blast through the 5 stages of grief. We got trapped for an hour by an arroyo. If you don’t know what an arroyo is, check here, or here, or here. The water rose above the floorboards and she immediately denied it was happening before getting angry, telling God she'd stop texting random numbers "I'm pregnant" if he'd get her out of this, going into a deep depression and then finally accepting death. All in about 5 minutes. I was a judge in our annual science fair and one group was testing the varied effectiveness of different insulations (cement, cork, wood, etc.) against the elements, heating them, soaking them in water, etc. So you soaked the cork?

Our apartment is pretty awesome. Its enormous (we just bought a 2^nd dining room table set just because we didn’t know what to do with one of our extra rooms), breezy and has a great pool. However, being Colombia, this seeming paradise also has

Mud Volcano of Totumo

No one was there except us, usually it's packed. Great.

some peculiarities. The pool has a life guard who apparently hates Whitey. Maria would argue she’s not part of the ever oppressive Whitey designation (being of latin blood) but he treats her like a Mexican at a country club just the same as he does me. If we take drinks to the pool, even if it’s just a cup of water, he tells us not only that we can’t drink in the pool, we can’t even have our drinks within arms’ reach of the pool, meaning we have to get out to take a drink. We are, as far as we can tell, the only people he applies this rule to. Plus he makes us shower before we get in the water, even though he doesn’t ask anyone else to do this. Anyways, he’s the worst. Our maintenance lady is an enormously obese 30 something, who seems to have no idea how the ceiling in our bathroom is getting wet, even though it’s located directly beneath the bathroom above. I have a pretty good guess. We have alternating door men, one whose constant Shakira like dancing is bound to trigger the gun on his hip if he’s not careful and

Our friend Serapis

Teaching his daughter to surf

Scarface although Scarhead is probably more apt. He’s our maid’s uncle and when he tries to smile it’s his first time ever smiling and he’s about to poop his pants.Speaking of pooping one’s pants, I used to crack up when people told me about muddying their undywaters as adults but I almost did it walking home from school in Korea once and our shared suffering has made me less judgmental.

Hey, pomelo, you´re super difficult to eat and always give me diarrhea, stop being so delicious.

Every now and then it’s really nice to see the rich suffer, so while it sucked having the elevator in my building go out for nine days, I’m sure it sucked even worse for the people in the penthouse on the 16^th floor. Plus, the wealthy have a garage in the basement, just an extra floor to punish them for their ill gotten gain.

A sea captain sees an armed pirate ship approaching in the distance, and yells to his men, ‘Get me my red shirt so that if they hit me they won’t see me bleed!’ Moments later, to his profound shock and dismay, he sees approaching over the horizon a

Maria and Angie

You can tell we had the entire beach to ourselves.

dozen other armed pirate ships behind the first one, and yells to his men, ‘Get me my brown pants! We say a lady trip on a curb the other day and hit the deck at 6:30 in the morning and both Maria and I read this sign's obvious message; today is going to be awesome. Whenever I see toilet paper in a toilet in a public bathroom I disgustingly imagine some weirdo standing up after pooping to watch it go down. If you are one of said perverts, please stop. Gross.

Not sure if you’ve ever heard of Edward Mordrake but his story is insanely creepy.

If the pictures aren't a giveaway, we've been up to our usual antics of jumping in 100 tall foot mud volcanoes and going to isolated caribbean beaches. We just bought our tickets to Europe for three weeks in July, if anyone is game to join us, we'd love to have some travelling buddies.

We have a new addition to the family named Doug. He also answers to Chicken Dougget, Dig Doug, Stinky Doug (aka STD), Doug E. Fresh, and Douglas K. Peebody. He’s just about 3 months old now and may or

Little baby couch

With a little baby

may not be a boy, but regardless we’re keeping the name. His hobbies include valiantly fighting against pieces of trash on the floor, breaking the size/cuteness barrier and adding “clean poop” to the maid’s list of duties. If I was a dentist I’d just tell people to eat mangoes more b/c there’s no way you’re not flossing afterwards. If you can play the guitar, and you can't play White Lion's Let The Children Cry on guitar, you can't really play guitar, at least in my book. Happy birthday to me, I'm going to begin my quarter life crisis (yeah, quarter life, go ahead, do the math, I'm gonna be around for a long time) starting tomorrow. Home in three weeks, see you all then.

Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed Dougs bite,

Mongolian Party, T

"We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong. – Bill Vaughan

“Hugs not bugs.” - Doug’s motto

"Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy." - Robert Anthony

Movie: Hesher and Beginners were both awesome, for

Comfy

What he does most of the time, sleep.

completely different reasons.

Album: Listening to a lot of Band of Horses lately.

Youtube: Very much worth your 5 minutes

TV: Workaholics Teenage Mutant Turtle episode, community alternate timeline episode, always sunny jersey shore episode

*The title of a student essay, to be fair in Spanish adjectives are used as nouns, as in "he's an old" rather than "he's an old man".

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