Bars/establishments/anyone with a sense of humor.

When things just line up.

[Caption unnecessary]

Cats with a sunny disposition. (sarcasm)

Getting dirty.

Going shoeless.

The unknown.

People you meet on the road.

Street food…anywhere.

Poprocks. In bulk.

Curiosity.

Garlic.

Warm summer nights.

Adrenaline.

Storytellers. People who’ve been to hell and back and can still smile. People who are kind, people who are intelligent but not arrogantly so, people who can laugh at themselves, people who have a conscious, people who know it’s ok to spoil themselves, people who give, people who have their priorities in order, people who are low-maintenance, people who love food and travel, people who are happy with themselves. People in general, but only some people. The guy who flipped me off today is excluded from the list for good! So there.

“Two-percent moments”. They’re the moments that would make it in a story told about someone long after they’re gone, the moments of a person’s life that define them, complete them, definitively alter their path, and flash before their eyes upon death. The moments that make living so extraordinary. A collective aggregate of important, beautiful, and calamitous events and occurrences and moments that would amount to two-percent of your entire life. Not the monotonous hours spent completing trivial tasks and empty formalities, but the most joyous and tragic occasions of a person’s life that they can’t and won’t forget; the stories your grandchildren will be hearing about before bedtime, wide-eyed, curious, and patiently awaiting another adventure, another momentous tale about their rogue ancestor (“Our grandma was a robot????”).

What are my “two-percents”? I’m not sure, and I won’t be sure until the end, but I feel one of them would have to be this moment overlooking an Uruguayan sunset, an hour outside of Tacuarembo, captured by my sister. We were making a loop around southern South America; from Buenos Aires down the coast to the sacred Land of Fire, traversing Patagonia on cold local buses and weaving our way up north through Chile and eastern Argentina. From northern Chile, a hop to Salta, a quick dash to Iguazu, and then to the mysterious, wholly underrated land known as Uruguay, where we would travel inland to gaucho country. It was the first time the trip really registered – that I was doing what I loved most, that there’s a whole world to see and I was seeing it; it was on that trip I realized how little it takes to make me happy, and I’ve felt as free and open to possibility as that infinite horizon ever since. The best feeling in the world is knowing you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. That you’re in the exact place you’re supposed to be at the exact time you’re supposed to be there. Nothing could be changed to improve on it. Life, chance, God, fate, whatever you believe in, presents you with a matchless moment, not even a blip on the continuum of time and history and the world, but a perfect miniscule snapshot of what life can be like on the only planet in our galaxy – that we know of – to enigmatically and incidentally support life.

I didn’t want to turn back. I would be perfectly content just standing in that spot, absorbing an Uruguayan winter while sniffing the delicious smell of wood burning from a kilometer away, staring at the horizon until darkness fell, and then I would be just as happy staring at the stars until morning. I hadn’t showered for days, my hair had developed unintentional dreads, I was sore from sheep-herding all afternoon, our finances were worryingly questionable (the moments I was on the road with less than a dollar in my pocket have been some of the best of my life), and my mind was dizzy with calm uncertainty for over two months. I was certain of one thing, however, and it’s that the breeze I felt at this moment I will feel again, in my two-percents.

2012 Bucket List Update: learn how to make pierogi

I’ve taken pierogi for granted my whole life simply because they came so easily and abundantly. I would ask my grandma for some and a few days later, they would appear on the table in a greasy metal bowl, like out of thin air. Then I would indulge. But gone are the days of magic pierogi. My poor grandma’s hands have been stricken with arthritis, making it difficult, time-consuming, and painful to pinch the lips of each and every pierog. And I wouldn’t dare ask. You grow up and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around your pierogi needs.

So I added it to my bucket list of 2012, to learn how to make pierogi in the name of self-sufficiency.  But when describing how much of each ingredient is needed, my aunt seemed content to leave me with “some flour” and “just enough water”. There is no recipe. Just hunches, experience, and second nature. And I’ve no idea how to achieve any of the other aspects of quality pierogi: thin dough that melts in your mouth, the perfect savory-bitter potato and cheese filling, and so much more. Thus far, I’m left without a clue as to how to master these doughy enigmas. I am a master at eating them, however.

Behold. The American Hamburger.

Making the perfect burger is a God-given concern. And by perfect, I mean it should be absolutely imperfect thereby confirming its perfection.

Condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, obviously) oozing and spurting from one side, a grease-laden bun that shines in the sunlight and blinds passers-by, and two malformed steaming beef patties that drip with juicy grease. The buns should act like soft sponges effectively soaking up the last drop of juice. Heavy on the pickles, light on the attitude, this burger – and every good burger – screams: “This is me. Take me as I am or leave me for my flavors to marry until some other deserving individual picks me up and appreciates every bite.”

While I’m not one to deny the pleasures of a Big Mac, fast food chains offer a certain deceptive treachery that threaten the quality and standards of hamburgers everywhere. Think of any fast food commercial. Not only do all their burgers look exactly alike, but not one sesame seed is out of place. I cannot believe that there are people who individually glue them onto the bun with tweezers. Impudent trickery, I call it! And they expect to be compensated generously for their toils. But any respectable person knows that this is nothing but a cheap ploy; any awesome person would wait for the real thing at the price of a little inconvenience. A real burger should be made with real ingredients, a good hamburger should look sloppy, unassuming, unique, and of genuine effort. And of course, if you must unhinge your jaw to clamp down on the whole thing, you know that that is a burger worth Skyping home about.

Just like how the people who accept and celebrate their flaws are the people worth getting to know, the perfect burger worth getting to know is sure to be an ugly-beautiful mess that spurts liquids all over my blouse, like a delectable Jackson Pollock. My burger theory: any decent person can spot and appreciate a decent burger. This hasn’t failed me yet! And a very cool person indulges at least once a week. Let’s call it basic life maintenance.

Moscow, Former USSR, Russian Federation

*Written on January 6th, 2012 in Charlotteville, Tobago*

These four old Americans have been discussing grapefruit for thirty straight minutes – I shit you not. Every time I think they’ve exhausted the subject, someone pipes up with a tidbit about citrus more disinteresting than the last: “At our local grocery you can get five ripe beauties for two dollars!”, the others become wide-eyed in disbelief. One bitter old man adds in the most matter-of-fact way I’ve ever heard someone discuss fruit: “Now, listen here, I used to have such a hankering for grapefruit, but the quality just isn’t the same anymore. It just isn’t the same”, as his wife and friends solemnly nod in agreement. When they finally move on from grapefruit, they turn to the next most dull topic imaginable: the mechanism in your refrigerator that turns off the indoor lights when the door is closed. Don’t ask about the segue; for all I know, they’ve had a ‘hankering’ to discuss this for quite a while.

I bring this up because the world is a strange place, but your small world, your own world is even stranger. As I’m sitting there in this fenced-in local restaurant, amusement quickly turning into boredom and disdain for these people who have nothing else to talk about except grapefruit, a tiny little girl runs along the street outside, trips on a crack in the weather-beaten tarmac, and falls on her frail body. She begins to wail fiercely, the kind of unsettling cry of a small child who is in incredible pain and there is nothing an outside party can do about it. I run out to see if she’s okay. Her legs are cut up and bleeding lightly, her palms have large abrasions on them and her delicate chin is cut up as well. Her big watering eyes look up at me in between cries that shake her whole body. I kneel down and ask her where she lives. Lips quivering and wiping her runny nose with her forearm, she feebly points up the hill. I pick her up and run up the hill giving her a bouncy piggy back ride, carefully trying to avoid aggravating her wounds. She stops crying and I think I hear a small laugh in there. Children are resilient like that. Either that, or people just hear what they want to hear.

So I drop her off at her grandmother’s house and quickly inform her what happened. Her grandma affectionately scolds her for being so clumsy. I think about how clumsiness – and awkwardness, its social counterpart – isn’t something you necessarily grow out of – I’m living proof of this. Before I go, her grandmother thanks me and hands me three ripe grapefruits.

I know when I’m being mocked.

The other side of it: snapshots in the grand scheme of things are just that – individual moments of the bigger picture that aren’t necessarily representative of the whole. From simply looking at everything I ate on February 9th, 2012, one might assume that I’m dehydrated, I have a severe vitamin deficiency, and that I’m trying to lose weight. None of these are the case; it just happened to be a busy day where I didn’t have time to indulge in healthy foods. Then again, I could have done a lot worse. The fact is, very few of us eat exactly what we should. I’ve never met or heard of anyone who lets the government-issued food pyramid dictate their lives right down to every meal. Life, money, and general tastes get in the way.

Food for thought. HA.

DC is a diverse place but the metro brings us all together.

Dupont: The tantalizing Krispy Kreme glow catches your eyes before it catches your nose.

Wet benches border the Eye of Dupont. I used to come to these seats to read and to breathe, but all benches, not just these, are uninhabitable for a person on the run. Grass is softer and nicer anyway.

Coffee time.

Adams Morgan: I grab my books and my music and I come here for triple shot cappuccinos with latte art.

Rush hour lights weave through Rock Creek Park. Everyone has somewhere to be.

The secret Krispy Kreme glazing process is visible from the store’s window. I stand there hours at a time, hoping to unravel the secrets that allow perfectly glazed rings of fried dough.

The Capital Bikeshare system relieves a city teeming with traffic.

It’s late. The end of my day. Time to go home.

The Capitol Building serves as the epicenter of the four quadrants of DC, no doubt an homage to justice, liberty, and the American way.  Another symbolic oddity of this building: many people claim that, excluding the Washington Monument, the Capitol is the tallest building in the city. Usually following this statement is the misguided citation that there is a long venerated law that dictates no other architectural structure in the District of Colombia can be taller than the Capitol. There is actually no such law, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception surpasses America’s most beloved building by a staggering forty feet. Only after the Old Post Pavilion and the National Cathedral it is noted as the fifth tallest structure in the District. To level with the Basilica, the Capitol would have to add something forty feet in length to the top of its celebrated dome, and it just so happens that forty feet is the length of a T-Rex, the mighty ruler of the Cretaceous Period. I’m sure the Museum of Natural History would generously donate its T-Rex skeleton for this endeavor in the name of patriotic one-upmanship. Dinosaur skeletons in all these museums are all replicas anyway. You think they’d expose such a precious artifact to me the grubby hands of deviating schoolchildren? I think not.

Back on track: so Capitol Hill divides the city into four areas – Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, and Southeast. The most famous parts of DC – the monuments, the mall, etc. – are not in any quadrant but lie on the border of Northwest and Southwest. This area is teeming with a diverse sample of America’s population as well as the earth’s population. This is a roundabout way of saying ‘tourist’. If you’re on the mall and you’re not a tourist, you’re probably a jogger. The plight of the DC jogger is a tough one. You constantly encounter the formidable task of navigating through seas of people who don’t know how to walk, who are annoyingly enamored by every single thing simply because they’re experiencing it in their nation’s capital. If they excitedly point to a squirrel scurrying across the path, it’s because it’s an American squirrel. And that’s an American bench.  If it’s cherry blossom season, forget it. Given the crowds, a casual jog somehow transforms into an exercise of overt photo-bombing in springtime. You can’t run five feet without permeating some German family’s totally original photo of the Lincoln. If tourists are friendly to me, I reciprocate the kindness. I’ve spent a lot of my life being a tourist (I’ll be pretentious for a moment and opt for traveler) so I know what it’s like to be in a new place, excited beyond belief, and not know what the fuck you’re doing. The problem is when someone of self-righteous disposition approaches me and demands my attention and an immediate solution to their stupid problem, like directions to the nearest metro map. They’re from the grand state of Mississippi after all, it wouldn’t be right – nay – it would be un-American for me to refuse to devote my limited knowledge and capabilities to solve their dilemma. If they’re really mean, I point them towards the ghetto.

Moving on to Northwest DC. This sector is the largest, wealthiest, and most diverse in the District. It’s home to pockets of cultures from all over the globe: Ethiopians, Vietnamese, Koreans, West Africans, Latin Americans, Pakistani, and more. My favorite side effect of this is that these people tend to open restaurants. And I tend to eat at them. I seldom use taxis but when I do, three times out of five the driver will be Pakistani. Four times out of five, he will be on his cell phone. When they’re not on their phone, they’re almost always friendly and conversational. This means that my odds of getting an amicable Pakistani driver who is not on his phone is twelve percent. One out of two of these drivers will be willing to discuss food with me. I enter a taxi, and there is a six percent chance I walk away with an authentic recipe of Korma. These odds are large enough for further justification to take a taxi should I feel the need.

NW is also home to mind-boggling wealth. Politicians, executives, and businessmen alike settle here with their well-to-do families and obnoxiously manicured lawns. When walking through one of these neighborhoods, simple observation can lead you to believe there is even class warfare among their garden gnomes – why is one gnome carrying a wheelbarrow while the others are standing around with their noses in the air completely tool-less, without even a bucket to carry flowers to help his wheelbarrow-toting friend?? It’s an obscure quandary, to be sure, but a question worth asking. But even before warfare between the classes and lawn ornaments, NW occupies a great deal of its energies to a different kind of combat, a Trojan Horse of saturated fats and darling decorations: cupcake wars. Georgetown is the battlefield, Georgetown Cupcakes, Baked & Wired, Sprinkles, and others are the ill-fated players. Cupcakes, you see, are fashionable. These tiny individualized cakes say soooo much about how haute you are, so enthusiasts have vested interest in debating which cupcake retailer deserves the crown title. Before I come off as innately, perhaps unjustly, anti-rich people, the truth is that NW harbors the most affluent zip codes in the District. Real estate prices stagger to the millions in areas like Georgetown, Spring Valley, Dupont, and Friendship Heights. If you’re going to be hit by a car in these areas, it will likely be an Audi, Merc, or one of those terrible Beemer SUVs. God forbid you’re hit anywhere near Embassy Row where there is a larger chance that your aggressor has diplomatic immunity. What can I say. I think about these things.

Southwest is probably the least celebrated quadrant of DC, and it’s mostly full of dirty Potomac water. It’s peppered throughout with various Smithsonian institutions and federal buildings, but SW’s most notable landmark is the Jefferson Memorial. Popular opinion dictates that this is a silly location for a memorial. If I’m on the Mall, people will ask me where this memorial is because it’s not in plain sight like the rest of them. The next question is almost always ‘why is it soooo far away?’ in an obnoxious tone, as if I’m the one who decided to plop it there, as if it’s my fault their new sneakers are giving them blisters. To any DC resident, the Jefferson is a hopeful guiding light for late-night jogs, a beautiful, substantially less-visited vestige where they can be locked inside an airy lacuna of history while enjoying sweeping panoramas of DC’s world-famous landmarks and their world-famous reflections in the equally dirty Tidal Basin. The Jefferson is impressive from afar, but even better from up close.

This concludes an outline of generalized characteristics of Western DC. It is by no means comprehensive, but simply the impressions of a sarcastic Squeaky Robot.