Girl Anachronicles

Yesterday I found a website that trumps all other nostalgia websites I’ve come to know so far:  I’m Remembering. It’s a blog built on a Tumblr engine, its theme is specifically 80s and 90s nostalgia. I Love the 80s never had it so good and so right. I found things in there that I had forgotten about in the longest while, and others that I remembered but I couldn’t find elsewhere on the web.

Some examples:

Sea-pony whose only power is to blow bubbles underwater, yay...

I owned this exact My Little Pony seahorse, with the clamshell stand that would never stick long enough to the bath tiles… goddamned doll also looked like it was always dirty. It had a blowhole to blow bubbles, but being the little motherfuckers we were, we used it as a squirt-horse instead.

***

..he stares at you from his perch while you're sleeping..

This one came from nowhere. I suspect it was a hand-me-down toy, like many others we had – our youngest aunt was only 9 years older than me, not enough time to deem the toys obsolete and throw them away, so I inherited tons of them! I loved this Rowlf puppet so much that I salvaged him time and again from the trash bin and many charity collections, and is now probably slowly dying in a room in Mom’s house.

***

..creepy little clown to live on your nightstand. Whose idea was that? ..

This was obviously a pre-”It” item. I barely even remembered him until I saw him in the imremembering.com site. Then it was like opening the memory floodgates: the lamp in its full glory, then how it came apart little by little, until at last the only thing that remained were those immortal plastic balloons.

***

..plastic lasts forever..

I was amazed when I saw this pic. We had these exact two cups at home (among a myriad of other assorted plastic cutlery pieces, such as Transformers bowls and He Man dishes). I still keep a plastic Hello Kitty cup from that time. These things indeed last forever!!!

***

...all it was missing was the alternative of an alien head.

This was another hand-me-down from my aunt, but boy, did I have fun with this! This was the one piece that got me drawing fashion designs as an occasional hobby. Of course, by the time it got to me, the color pencils were long gone, so I had to make do with a carbon stick.

***

MUSIC! FUCK YEAH!

This was one fucking useful toy! I used it every day: I played the Read-along vinyls, I played my Rainbow Brite record, I played just about anything that would fit into that record player. I would play things time and again until I made my mother nauseous. I’d put on plays for the whole family – and would force them to watch, god forbid they turned away! I was such an attention whore when I was a kid … I dunno what happened…

***

If only I had been able to shrink tiny enough to play IN this castle...

I almost went into tears when I saw this: my favorite toy ever! This castle was a Little People castle, but it eventually became the “anything goes as long as it fits” castle. This castle was under siege by the GI Joes, it became soon the reign of She-Ra and friends, He Man knocked at its drawbridge! Even the Thundercats visited every once in a while…

And as a bonus:

RUN AWAY!!!

Not a toy, but a fixture in our local McDonalds playground. This tree reminded me of a talking tree featured in one of my favorite local children’s show – Titi Chagua. Talking trees were this thing I adored and abhorred at the same time. It eventually turned into indisputable adoration, until I was at last transfixed by the Ents. I <3 talking trees.

So, if you’re already over 21 and like going on a nostalgia binge … http://imremembering.com

Sunday mornings are something you lose after you stop being a child: the carelessness, the feeling of freedom, the anticipation of a day filled with games and fun. Saturday mornings were cool too, but not in the same way: Saturdays were the days Mom would stuff you in the back seat  early in the afternoon and would take you shopping for groceries. Fun, but not the same kind (plus sometimes you’d get a good berating for having too much fun in the fruit section).

Ahhh, the time is ripe for mischief. Banana stand: have at you!

My Sunday mornings were all about Dad. I’d gently wake him up at 6 am – …let’s be honest, I poked away at him, starting at 5:45 am. He’d begrudgingly wake up (although he would never admit to being bothered by it) and he would make me breakfast. Breakfast by Dad was a special thing. Dad didn’t know how to cook – he still doesn’t, unless nuking a cordon bleu chicken breast counts – so the options were limited. But he got creative, I think he barely ever went with the cereal-and-milk option. The usual would be far more delicious: sweet bread rolls with butter spread, sliced salchichón, and sweet cold coffee w/milk. Unhealthy as hell, but completely addictive, to the point in which I’d be glad to have that breakfast again today.

I'm amazed my blood health turned out normal after years of this.

After placing the breakfast dish in front of me and gluing me to the TV set, Dad would go back to sleep a bit longer, until the cartoon block was finished near noon and I’d go back to poking him awake. After that, it was usually game time: Dad would fill up the kiddie pool with the garden hose, and I would tow out all the barbies, water games, rubber toys, and other waterproof items. After that, dad would play with me for hours at a time, until Mom called us in to eat lunch. Those were the days.

Photo alteration of the 80s led us to believe that the whole family would fit inside these pools... we feel we've been had.

All Sundays… Father’s days …

Our first stray was a cat. It was around Christmas-time and I was probably no more than 6 years old. It was customary in the family – back then – to deck the living room in basking glory (that means putting up a huge-ass tree that barely fits through the doorway and throw the boxloads of new, old and inherited ornaments on it … then, as an afterthought, plant the nativity scene – all old and stinking of mold – underneath). My mom tells that this particular year a cat started coming around. It was a dark colored cat, clean and well kept. It looked more like a lost cat than a cat born on the streets. I used to put out a tiny saucer of milk for him and pet him (or her?) for a while.

Then, one day, my mother had the brightest idea of them all: bring the cat in! And then go out. Yes. Leave the feline unattended … with a huge-ass fir treeeeeeee!

You know where the tree ended up, right?

And you know where the cat went, right?

After that, the strays that appeared were only fed, not brought in. I remember this black pup that came every afternoon to get his customary buscuit. This wasn’t a stray, he was a neighbor’s dog, but I liked to think of him as partly mine anyway. That’s why his demise under the tires of a car was a bit more painful than it should’ve been. His absence after that was my first taste of what happens when something you love goes away.

All the while, we’d been proud family to a small pack of white poodles. My parents started off with two (male & female), to pair them off and get at least one litter of purebred white poodles. At one point, there were about 6 or 7 puppies running around the house (additional to momma and pappa poodle). I was a very happy toddler, I had the best playmates ever! What else could I ask for?

Fuck playing with other kids! Dogs are AWESOME!

Things changed: we moved, my parents got divorced, time passed… eventually only one dog remained from the vast empire of curls: Laika, the original female (a sort of Eve). Then I brought in Sasha, handpicked by my grandfather to be our next canine companion at home. Some years after that, I got my first true stray: Lucky.

Lucky was a black kitten. I found her under a tree, mewing her lungs off. I glimpsed her mother’s body squished in the middle of the road. I couldn’t resist. I knelt on the floor, opened my arms, and Lucky came home. I took her to the ved, fed her, cared for her, and all was fine until the day one of my family members left the door open. After that she never came back inside (mostly because my father’s boxer wouldn’t let her). I was later told that she was sighted alive and well, in the wilderness of our yard (which was pretty expansive), nursing a litter. I guess muy job was complete.

That was 1999 and, after that, I didn’t get a stray for the longest while.Pets came and went: 2nd and 3rd generation litters from the pets we already had, adoptions, hand-me-downs. I had the most tragic deaths in 2003 – my 4 dogs, Sasha included, died in a fire that destroyed everything I had. It took me a while longer to realize I hadn’t been the best pet caretaker. Two adoptions later – both resulting in handing them over to someone better suited for the job – I finally had my first era of my life without a pet. And lord, did it suck!

Eze and I got a hamster to fill that void. Medea was the cutest thing – totally tame, 0 hamster bites in her year of life. She died a terrible death: tumors killed her off slowly. It was a painful thing to watch and I cried her death for the longest you can cry a hamster death. After that, I was certain I was ready to care for a dog again.

A few years later, Caprica came. A friend called me one night to tell me that her kids’ tutor had found two puppies abandoned in a park nearby. I asked about the approximate age of the pups: I knew I didn’t have the time to bottle feed weeks-old puppies. I went there next day, committed to at least help the woman out to find a place that would take good care of the pups. When I arrived, she said someone else had already adopted the male pup. Only the female was left: a tiny tuft of hair and mange, dotted with the teeniest ticks, still smelling of mother’s milk. My first thought was that I wasn’t ready to take on this. Hell, that was my first, second and third thought, for the next 3 hours. I brought her into my car inside of a small cardboard box, and I set course toward Humacao, looking for a no-kill shelter I had heard about. As it turns out, no one in Humacao knew about the shelter, no one could point me in the right direction. I drove around, lost, for the next few hours, and the puppy was so well behaved, she only voiced discomfort once, as I proceeded to step out of the car in a gas station to ask for directions.

I remember she woke up when I stopped the car, looked at me, and yelped twice loudly, as if saying “What the hell is taking so long?”. I fell in love right there and then. A pup that could withstand hours riding around in a  car without crying or peeing on my seat was a special pup. She stayed. We named her Caprica, after the home planet in our favorite sci-fi series, BSG. She made our lives more complicated, more expensive, more difficult… but also, much more pleasant. She was our first child.

..she spent her first 3 months with that startled look on her face. I guess she wasn't expecting to be rescued..

After that, we were pretty content. We had a run-in with a stray dove: fed her for a few weeks – a very complicated thing to do – and eventually realized Eze’s father could do a better job at it, so we took her to his house, where a stray cat promptly killed her with a swift swipe of the paw. We also got a second stray dog, bigger than Caprica herself. We quickly took her to Eze’s parents’ home, but she apparently had a taste for freedom, and she ran away successfully on her second attempt.

A year and a half after Caprica came into our lives, we got our last stray.  I was driving to the supermarket on a Sunday morning, and the tiniest cat crossed the road right in front of my car. I saw another car pass over him, I remember I yelped “Noooo!” and stopped dead on my tracks. Thankfully, the pickup truck on the next lane took my cue and stopped too, ‘cuz when we came around, we found the cat clinging to their front tire. He was a mess of oil-ridden hair and eye secretions. I grabbed him, got him in my car and took him to the nearest vet, thinking that they would take him in. No luck, except the attendant was nice enough to give me a box to put the cat in. I kept him that night, bathed him and cleaned his eyes, with the idea to take him to the shelter the next day. The next day was a holiday. The cat stayed – to Eze’s chagrin. And after that, I had already named named him. He was definitely mine.

Thing about strays is: in my case, these animals have proved to be the most thankful critters, capable of infinite affection. They both came into my lives with a slew of diseases and conditions that have cost me more money than what I have, but it’s been worth it. I’m not sorry in the leastest bit of having taken them in. They were born on the streets, but they have become family, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happiness is a bundle of fur and legs.

I just recently realized that most of what I am – the rebellion, the unwillingness to conform, the mental allergy to business suits, the outright refusal to “grow up” – is a direct effect of my aunt (of all people!).

My aunt is only 9 years older than me. You could say our initial dynamic was closer to that between sisters than bewteen aunt and niece. She played dolls with me and I borrowed her Barbies, inherited her toys and some of her clothes… As time passed, she became what an older sister usually becomes for a little sister: a role model. As she filled out and became a woman, I admired her fashion sense, flair and style… mind you, her style was this:

..oh for the love of god, gouge my eyes out with a spoon..

Yes, my aunt was a child from the Summer of ’69. If you do the math, you’ll realize this makes her an 80s teen. Her adolescence was spent teasing her hair to inhuman volumes and collecting rhinestone brooches to pin to her denim jackets. She wasn’t a trashy, punk 80s girl – that would have been outrageous and too forward for our family. My aunt was a perfect ringer for Molly Ringwald (sans the red hair): spiffy blazers and glam jewelry, bangles riddled with charms, bright-white hi-tops with pastel-colored leg warmers, pouffy hair-barrettes … everything you hate about the eighties was in my aunt’s closet.

The wondrous color of PINK, together with denim it's a **winning** combi- BARF!

Her pasttimes and preferences left nothing to be desired! She was a full-on eighties girl: a fan of Wham! and John Hughes movies, she loved hanging out at the mall … a regular Robin Sparkles.

That is what I looked up to when I was an awkwardly budding kid. I even developed tiny crushes on her boyfriends. The extent of her effect on me could be exemplified by one incident: our first shopping spree. She had just gotten her first office job – and after a few failed attempts at getting a career (and then dropping out), hell, that’s the best she could do! We went shopping for shoes to go with her polyester, shoulder-padded suits. She spent around $100 on pump shoes of different colors. Right now it seems like no big deal, but for 9-year-old me, $100 was a LOT of money. After that, she spent the rest of whatever allowance she had left on music, she even bought me a Nelson Nelson cassette (omg, this last phrase just dated the whole episode and made me a whole lot less cool).

Aaaaafter the rain... best cassette EVER! ...until the next one I bought.

I wound up crying in my mother’s arms because I couldn’t wrap my head around so much money spent on shoes and music.

But, for all that blind adoration, little by little, I came into my own.  I think it all started the day she got married: a few weeks after that, I visited their apartment for the first time. Keep in mind that my aunt’s first marriage was when she and her beau were both just 20 years old. They had met at the mall store they worked at, and they dated for barely a year before tying the knot. A month or two beforehand, he had moved in with us at my grandparents’ house. Those few months were so fun for me, but I’m guessing my grandparents were less than thrilled to have their youngest daughter’s twerp of a boyfriend living in with them… during a hurricane event … with his computer crap and his stinky oscar fish… yeah, didn’t think so.

So I wasn’t at all surprised to find that their whole apartment was sort of like walking into a disaster area, or a college dorm: trash and dirty clothes strewn evereywhere, a flea-ridden kitten trampling all over the place, a huge black cat glowering in the corners, a white poodle dog – I’ll never understand what crossed my mother’s mind to hand the dog over to my aunt! – I mean, the place was a veritable ZOO… without the keepers. I was particularly appalled that I couldn’t even see the floor in their room, the trash and dirty laundry were packed that tight. And as I walked into the bathroom, the first thing that caught my eye was the little diaphragm box, and with that, the magic was gone. I fell out of love with my aunt.

Some years after that, at the age of 14, I agreed to spend the afternoon with her. She had asked me to help her out with a few tasks at her workplace (little fact: she worked at a law office at La Milla de Oro, inside the Banco Popular building to be exact). That evening I had plans to attend the graduation of my boyfriend’s little sister, so it added to the feeling of anxiousness to make the day pass faster.

I hated the whole thing. I hated the feeling, the ambiance, the tasks, the EVERYTHING of what I realized working in an office would feel like. This was the day I vowed NEVER to work at an office or at a bank, EVER!

Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew!

I failed SO MUCH at keeping this promise to myself…

And so it began: an age of change, defiance, disillusionment with all that the 80s had sold to me through my aunt. An age of grunge, plaid, thinking for myself, questioning society, defining my sexual identity, discarding my religion … yeah, all those things that made a teenager out of the bumbling idiot of a tween I was.

Oversized jacket, second-hand beret, dorky lenses, suspenders and an older-than-time skort. I was a fashion plate!

So you have it (and to simplify): godless, sarcastic little me is a direct reaction to my aunt, who’s now a conservative Christian wife to an accountant/lawyer, living in a posh condo in one of the wealthiest areas in Puerto Rico – why am I not surprised.

This is a story about a tiny little stovetop of an island...

I went to one of the most accesible gas stations in Hato Rey this morning for my car’s yearly inspection. Since it’s a station sitting smack in the middle of a main avenue, I wasn’t surprised to find a queue of people waiting for their inspection too. I made #7, I got lucky. It was a hotter-than-hell morning, and we were expecting it to rain cats and dogs any minute (the weather here changes from one moment to the next with ease).

Since I wasn’t in the mood to sit in a waiting area with other random people – sit in a waiting area in Puerto Rico, and eventually someone will pull you into a conversation you don’t want to have, – I went to wait in my car, enjoy my tag-along coffee mug and a cigarette. Not the best option to fight the heat, but definitely the best option to avoid socialization.

I eventually got called into the inspection area, which is mainly the same as the waiting area: the waiting area is comprised by a small group of outdoor plastic chairs placed alongside the inspection area. Spared no expense on that one!

While the tests were being run, I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation held by two other people sitting at their chairs, and it was mainly this:

30-something dweeb who’s apparently a family man: “Ooooh the heat, yadda yadda yadda!  And you can’t even go to the beach like this, you don’t want the rain to catch up to you at the beach! [Ed. note: It's not like you're not gonna get wet anyway, you moron!] That’s why these days are great to go to the movie theatre…”

20-something girl that’s heading into the same sorry destination as her interloper: “Yeah, or to the bowling alley!”

.. uh-oh! here we go!..

30-sDWAFM: “Ah, yes! I went to the bowling alley in Caguas the other day. It was great. They have these sofas that are so comfy, really cozy, not like other bowling alleys. And it was empty, it only started getting full as we were leaving. And they have food and all sorts of stuff… Only $60, I spent! We had pizza, which was like $10, and 2 or 3 Pecsi pitchers, and a tray of mozzarella estís, which was really cheap, about $9-something [Ed. note: WTF, dude! NINE DOLLARS for a fucking mozzarella stick tray that probably had like 6 sticks? You got duped!]. It’s worth it”

Taste the fake cheese!

20-sGTHISSDAHI: “Cool! The bowling alley in Ponce is just as nice.”

30-sDWAFM: “Where is that?”

LAWL! And I had to stop listening right there. He also mentioned a few movies worth watching at the theatre, such as Shrek Forever After and Prince of Persia, you know, good movies… kill me now!

..it’s up for an Oscar, I can SMELL it, even over Jake G’s spray tan!

And then it got me thinking: this is the way most people deal with either hot, rainy or simply uncomfortable days: we’re avoiding our own condition of living in a tropical island. We keep escaping the heat and the rain and essentially just everything that makes our tropical paradise into something less-than-perfect. We’re native Puerto Ricans, and we just bought into the image sold by the Tourism Company of Puerto Rico. I don’t know how they did it, but they can apparently sell an imported ice bag to an eskimo. As soon as we break into the smallest sweat, well, it’s time to go to the mall! And if it rains? Oh, to the mall too! Apparently, people in Puerto Rico don’t like staying home (then why pay $1500 in a fucking mortgage, dude! if you’re not gonna be living in it?!), but they also don’t like being outside, at least not in Puerto Rico.

You know the Puerto Rican’s true image of paradise?

Ahhh, this is the life!