chucanita

[chucanita]

meet me in montauk

[chucanita]

🍃🍂

[chucanita]

featuring the blanket my abuelita made me <3

[chucanita]

6 p.m.

[chucanita]

[chucanita]

Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

[chucanita]

Mescalero, NM

[chucanita]

King of Weeds from the series Truppe Fledermaus by KAHN & SELESNICK

[chucanita]

[chucanita]

it’s time

[chucanita]

Our curriculum stipulates we read Beowulf but I got permission to teach this adaptation of Gilgamesh instead, so now I can share this with the kids and I love that.

when i was a kid, i had this copy of the epic of gilgamesh that included a speech by enkidu upon his death and it was and remains one of the most beautiful and devastating things ive ever read. since leaving my childhood home and without access to any of the things that remained there, i have never been able to find that passage again. i figured out pretty quickly that it wasnt included in the original text, so every couple of years i spend a couple of hours scouring the web for it, and over the years i began to forget it, so it seemed an increasingly futile search. (i did find it once, a long time ago, and had it saved to my og tumblr blog before i deleted the whole thing on whim once and it was lost again.)

well today, as i lay reading the kite runner in bed while my wife dozed beside me, buried in a mountain of white linen, something about the friendship between the protagonist and his playmate reminded me of this passage and i went hunting for it again. and i found it:

“You will be left alone, unable to understand

In a world where nothing lives anymore

As you thought it did…She made me see

Things as a man, and a man see death in things.

That is what it is to be a man. You’ll know

When you have lost the strength to see

The way you once did. You’ll be alone and wander

Looking for that life that’s gone or some

Eternal life you have to find…

Why am I to die,

You to wander on alone?

Is that the way it is with friends?”

- Herbert Mason, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative

[chucanita]

[chucanita]

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

[chucanita]

I wasn't raised by my real parents, and while she was raising me, Coqui insisted that she was my biological mother. My father was just another one of the very many men of proud European ancestry that made his way into my matriarchal bloodline under nefarious circumstances, but no one ever believed Coqui was my mother, not when they really thought about.

My "surrogate mother" had been my tía Estella, not long enough after she had crossed the border to have learned English. "Se llama IVF," Coqui had told her, while tracking her ovulation. Estella, my mother, had never heard of of IUI; she still quite doesn't understand it. But, she tells, when I was a little girl she caught herself staring at me often and wondering if there could be any possibility.

When I was an adult, I took a DNA test to find family on my late father's side I had heard talk of. They said he had several biological sons with several different women while he was married to Coqui - while she could never conceive. All the boys were Named Raúl, after him. When he learned that I, his youngest, was to be a girl he wanted to name me Raúla. Thankfully, Coqui had snuck Ana onto my citizenship papers for Mexico, and Estella had a fondess for Tiffany.

The DNA test matched me to Estella and her family tree, and nothing has ever been such a huge shock that I somehow always knew was coming. While I was homeless in San Diego, while I lived in poverty in the lower valley of El Paso, while Coqui abandoned me to the Catholic orphanages of Cd. Juarez as a method of discipline- I always imagined myself as a Rapunzel - the ward of the wrong type of bruja with another destiny unfolding just beyond the horizon. And then I got the call from Delilah and we all met at our mother's house as sisters for the very first time.

Someday, I'll finish the book I've been writing for years about the journey of my life - and what it could have been, and what it is becoming. Today, I just want to reconnect with my family and community. There was a time when I enjoyed speaking about my journey in reconnection openly and in real-time, but as an educator, I've also learned that stories are sacred, and they shouldn't be put out into the world half-formed when it can be helped. Today, I can only gift snippets.

[chucanita]

when i was a kid, i had this copy of the epic of gilgamesh that included a speech by enkidu upon his death and it was and remains one of the most beautiful and devastating things ive ever read. since leaving my childhood home and without access to any of the things that remained there, i have never been able to find that passage again. i figured out pretty quickly that it wasnt included in the original text, so every couple of years i spend a couple of hours scouring the web for it, and over the years i began to forget it, so it seemed an increasingly futile search. (i did find it once, a long time ago, and had it saved to my og tumblr blog before i deleted the whole thing on whim once and it was lost again.)

well today, as i lay reading the kite runner in bed while my wife dozed beside me, buried in a mountain of white linen, something about the friendship between the protagonist and his playmate reminded me of this passage and i went hunting for it again. and i found it:

“You will be left alone, unable to understand

In a world where nothing lives anymore

As you thought it did…She made me see

Things as a man, and a man see death in things.

That is what it is to be a man. You’ll know

When you have lost the strength to see

The way you once did. You’ll be alone and wander

Looking for that life that’s gone or some

Eternal life you have to find…

Why am I to die,

You to wander on alone?

Is that the way it is with friends?”

- Herbert Mason, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative

[chucanita]

[chucanita]

caliéntame los piecitos que muero de frío