isoglossia

The looks on the faces of these boys reflect giddy, kinetic fun, but the racket they were making sounded like boiling cats. Adam was intrigued. I told him no way in hell.

Okay. Maybe when you turn two.

Lunapark Blumenfeld is set up in Nova Gorica through Sunday.

Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, 20 Uruguayan pesos
According to Bibliotecas Virtuales, Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855-1931) was a great poet, journalist, diplomat, and avid gardener whose lavish home has been converted into a cultural museum. He has also been honored on Uruguay’s postage stamps.

I spent one day in Uruguay and this is my souvenir. It wasn’t so much that I was dying to visit Uruguay as it was that I needed to have left Argentina in order to re-enter it for reasons that should be clear to anyone who has worked while on a tourist visa .

On the other hand, I wasn’t averse to the idea of seeing Uruguay. I had heard that the Uruguayan was even more fanatical about yerba mate than the Argentine, and this I had to see. The claim was borne out within minutes, as every male over the age of three sported a special case of finely-tooled leather whose sole function was to carry a thermos of hot water, bag of yerba, drinking gourd, bombilla, and other accoutrements of the mate fiend.

I walked around, changed some money and bought postcards and stamps (no San Martín on them) to give the illusion that I was visiting Uruguay as a country rather than as a waiting room. I sought out a fantastic lunch of shellfish, drank a beer, and re-boarded the high-speed catamaran that whisked me back across the River Plate. At the Argentine end I got a new visa and faced a ten-hour bus ride back to the Humid Pampas.

That was five years ago today, and that’s what I know about Uruguay.

Money shot #4 was one million old Turkish lira

Money shot #2 also featured a fellow named San Martín

Branding violation
Any Slovenian beer consumer can tell you that this constitutes a serious violation. It just isn’t done. Present a Laško drinker with an Union-logoed glass and he is as likely to urinate into it as drink from it. And vice-versa. Or something.

Reasonable expectation of respect for the social construct violation
We all have one, yes? A colleague whose mobile phone rings on average every seven minutes? And this person never seems able to find the volume down control, let alone the vibrate setting. And this person’s office doorway, which is never graced with a closed door, is directly across from yours. And one day this person, who is not six years old all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding* decides that the default ringtone for all of her 205.7 daily incoming phone calls should be set to “Crazy Frog”.

(If you do not know what Crazy Frog is, I want to be you, and do not for the love of god click on this link.)

*When I tell Magda this, that Colleague X has put the Crazy Frog ringtone into her phone, she asks me, “How old is she?” in the way that one does not when expecting an answer but rather to point out the contrast between five and 35.

Genitale verite violation

You would think that at a large Italian supermarket it would not be all that difficult to find some nice, wholesome toddler-appropriate toys, the kind that do not go far out of their way to educate, the kind that are not overly concerned with representing the world as it actually is, nature red in tooth and claw and so forth, but then you would not have bought the Wild Animals pack which Adam spent a good part of Saturday morning trying to gnaw his way into, sort of like a wild animal. When we finally reached the checkout I ripped the packet open to reveal three big cats, a zebra, giraffe, rhinoceros, and an alarmingly biologically correct Cape buffalo. Spay and neuter your pets and Cape buffalo!

Previous violations

Magda: It says here that Rudolph Valentino’s wife had 500 pairs of shoes!
Adam: SHUUUZ.
Me: That’s a lot of shoes.
Adam: SHUUUZ.
Magda: Oh, no, wait, it was Valentino who had 500 pairs of shoes.
Adam: SHUUUZ.
Magda: He had 350 suits and 500 pairs of shoes…
Adam: SHUUUZ.
Me: That seems like an odd proportion of suits to shoes.
Adam: SHUUUZ.
Magda: Well, you don’t wear a suit all the time, but no matter what you wear, you’re wearing shoes.
Adam: SHUUUZ. JUUUUICE…

“Your sons are killing me,” Magda has grown fond of saying. It’s interesting for me to notice how much more accusatory that sentence sounds with a plural subject. Last week a quick visit to the doctor returned a “95%” likelihood of this latest swelling turning out to be a brother rather than sister for young Adam. Our experience with obstetricians is limited, but so far each time this one has claimed to see 95% of a penis, she’s been dead on.

Though we’ve known all along that the possibility of a second boy hovered somewhere around 50%, now that it’s all but sure it feels quite different. Like terrifying. Recent saccharine images notwithstanding, Adam can be a real handful, an enormous little macho pain in the ass, a terrorist-extortionist, an animal, and the idea of giving him the malleable clay that a younger brother would likely be for him to mold in his own couch-divin’, bone-crackin’, pig-bitin’, rootin’-tootin’ Yosemite Sam image is unsettling, to say the least. Magda already feels assailed from two sides, and the latest version isn’t even out yet.

At the same time, she’s very pleased. Regular readers will recall that Magda has a morbid fear of Barbie^® and the color pink, as well as a ready list of other reasons she is generally against the idea of having a daughter. I’m in quite a contrary situation: while I won’t say I’m disappointed  that we’ll have another boy, Magda has also declared a permanent ban on all procreating following this birth, and I am still getting used to the idea that I will never have a daughter. I somehow always thought that I would.

As Magda has pointed out before, “we already have all the boy-baby-crap.” Quite true. But what harm could there be in letting this latest boy play with Barbie^®s on a strictly experimental basis? I’m sure Adam would be tolerant.