32:19 Ben Franklin Bridge - Miguel Bosé, Velvetina

A beautiful day in beautiful Philadelphia. Cranked up the headphones on my MP3 and listened to Miguel Bosé's Velvetina album.

I like Miguel Bosé. You have to hand it to him, he started out as the Spanish equivalent of David Cassidy and turned into the Real Thing somewhere along the way. He was relevent to la transición and la movida, appeared in a Pedro Almodóvar film as a transvestite judge, and just when you weren't sure that you could take him seriously, he started reinventing himself on every album and producing music that made you wonder about why you weren't thinking about such things.

To top it off, the guy come right out as a proud bisexual and went on to date Ana Torrojas to sweeten the deal. Is there such a thing as too cool?

It was encouraging and strangely validating as a father to see that my three year old son's favorite song was the first track on this album, Ójala Ojalá. He would not let us turn it off. He asked a lot of really uncomfortable questions about the video (is there a war, Daddy? Why does he have a cross but no one else does, Daddy?). Daniel can sing parts of the song, even the bits that drift through Italian, English, French, and back to Spanish.

20:00 Around Old City w/440 Hz tone on MP3

Warning: this is a bit geeky...

I've always had a good ear for tones-- I can go several years without hearing a song and sing it in pitch. If I would train my ear better, I guess I could say I have perfect pitch.

So I've always had this idea of listening to a 440Hz A tone on a regular basis to train my ear. I realize some people like to use a slightly different frequency for A-- no argument from me, this is just the tone I get off of my pitch fork. This actually works pretty well-- I can hit a 440Hz A pretty consistently.

I had this idea of generating a reasonably long 440Hz tune as a sound file, loading it into my MP3 player, and listening to it for long periods of time. A perfect time for this would be while I was running-- I'm a captive audience at that point, and running always puts me in a kind of meditative mood anyway.

So I needed to generate a 440Hz A sound file. I found a command to do that on a Linux machine:


sox -w -s -t .nul /dev/zero 440.wav synth 300 sine create 440


This creates a 51MB file, so I guess you could actually just make it a minute by replacing the 300 with a 60. It's just that there is an annoying skip every time the MP3 player loops back around to play again, and I wanted to minimize that.

I created the .wav file, then transferred it to my MP3. I was all set.

I took off running from my office in Center City in Philadelphia. I didn't take a particular route, because I did the bridge yesterday-- besides, I just like running around Philadelphia and learning the streets. I turned on the MP3 player and put it on a constant loop with my new 440Hz sound.

The first thing I noticed was that it put me into a very weird place, mentally. I normally have a lot of mental chatter (this must be what "hearing voices" means)-- I try to shut it off, usually unsuccessfully. The tone kind of blocked that out. The second thing I noticed was that my perception of this constant frequency, constant amplitude sound varied a lot. I can actually "perceive" it as higher or lower. The file is a simple sine signal.

Finally, one very unexpected effect was that, without the monkeys chattering up there, I ran faster! How very odd. I was able to concentrate on my form (I learned my running form out from a book called ChiRunning by Danny Dreyer), up my cadence, keep my posture erect, and strike mid-foot, not on my heel. Nothing hurt, and I had a sensation of running fairly effortlessly. Nice.

33:35 Franklin Brige into Camden, NJ

33:35 - from my office at TRF at 718 Arch, past the Mint and Independance Hall, over the Ben Franklin into New Jersey.

I loaded up my MP3 with Joni Mitchell's For the Roses and ran in the rain-- fast. It's been ages since I listened to this album-- back when I was a Marine and drove around in an Orange Volkswagen and lived with Charlotte. I forgot what I was like back then. It's okay running music, not stuff that would normally make you want to run fast, but for some reason it works for me.

7:41 minutes in the rain!

Very cold! I ran out the front door with a T-shirt and shorts, and within three minutes had decided something I had not decided for a long time: to cut it short.

I remembered how, when I was a 21 year old Marine, I would run with my platoon in 15 degree weather. How big of a difference after twenty years.

Guess I'm a wuss now. Anyway, I bought a running jacket (my other one is still in New Orleans).

How we evacuated from Hurricane Katrina

I'm laying in bed, listening to the rain tapping the window of our house here on Rodman Street.

It's been six weeks to the day since we evacuated from Hurricane Katrina. I was sure we would return in a couple of days-- New Orleans had always been spared in the past. I grabbed an extra shirt, my guitar, and (thank my higher power) the laptop.

My parents and brother evacuated to my our house in Lumberton, just outside of Beaumont, Texas. They urged us to evacuate with them, but we had some Spanish friends who wanted us to go with them. It was a hard decision, but in the end I thought it would be better for my family to go with Elena, Beau, and Luis. As it turns out, it was the right decision: Lumberton was directly in the path of Hurricane Rita, and my parents and brother had to evacuate a second time.

We drove to Lafayette to the house of one of Elena's friends, Antonio. We were all doing pretty well until Katrina went to category five and it looked like New Orleans would take a direct hit.

We had all been in an excellent mood, playing guitar and watching movies. But then someone turned on the Weather channel and we all started getting depressed as we watched the Hurricane inch towards our home. After about an hour of this, we were all ready to jump off of a bridge.

At that point, I made the smartest decision of the evacuation: I switched the TV back to Jack Black's "School of Rock". Immediately everyone snapped out of it. Pads of paper came out, and we started planning. Soon we had decided to evacuate further west, to Houston.

I'll get on my soapbox here: I hate the news. My parents are news junkies. During the Hurricane, they had Fox and the Weather Channel on 24/7. When I called them, everyone in the house was depressed. I, on the other hand, had to shush the people on my end and eventually take the call outside, as the Spaniards were laughing (albeit nervously) so loudly. The news is a good thing. We should all watch the news. Then we should turn the news off and go live our lives. Hearing that you are about to take it in the shorts is bad enough without listening to it over and over from a series of vacuous baritones in gimme caps. If you hear bad news enough, it stops shocking you. You come to expect it. You come to believe that you deserve it.

We didn't buy it. We got in our cars and went to Houston.

Elena is a woman from Extremadura in Spain. She's pretty and smart, and just enough sarcastic that you know she's an española. Her boyfriend, Beau, looks and sounds like a Louisiana good ol' boy, but he's got a degree in Physics and a really big heart. Luis is funny and tries to cheer you up even when he is frightened. He has a great smile and was really great with Daniel.

I miss the people I evacuated with.

We were kind of like the party from the Decameron.

When we got to Houston, it looked like New Orleans was really going to get hit. We went to dinner at Chili's and generally had a good time, but wondered what was going to happen to our city.

The next morning we found out. Devastation. When the levees broke, our world changed. We would have been okay to get back to New Orleans and go on with our lives with the damage from the storm (in fact, our house was not at all damaged), but with the flooding from the levee, New Orleans was suddenly a very dangerous place to be.

That Tuesday, I talked on the phone with my boss. He told me that I was officially on vacation, and that when my vacation days were over, I would not be paid anymore. That was sad, but understandable: Phoenix Health Systems just doesn't have the cash flow to float a month of paychecks for the 60 people in its New Orleans office. And it put me in a weird position: I could not take my family back to New Orleans; not with reports of Cholera and Typhoid. I am still not sure about these reports, but I wasn't going to risk it with a four year old boy. I've seen people with Cholera when I was in Bolivia, and it is horrible.

I also could not leave Sonia and Daniel anywhere by themselves. Sonia's English is good, but she is not confident enough about it. Besides, there was a disaster-- I wanted to be with them.

Sonia and I talked it over. By a very odd coincidence, we had tickets for the weekend to go to Philadelphia from the New Orleans airport. We were going to check it out as a place to live, because after Ivan, we had gotten tired of evacuating from hurricanes. We were going to check towns that had direct flights to Barcelona to see if any were livable. We had gone to Atlanta over the July 4th weekend, and I thought it was nice, but too big, hot, and trafficky. So we had tickets to fly to Philadelphia now.

Now we would not be able to make the trip from New Orleans. We decided to try to change the dates on the tickets and go see if Philadelphia would be a good place to live. I called that Tuesday, and they managed to get us out on Wednesday.

We flew out with our ridiculously few possessions. By afternoon Wednesday, we were in the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia. We were clean, safe, together, had some clothes, and a maid. We watched our neighbors waiting on rooftops, dying, on the television. Again, I switched the TV back to PBS kids and we watched Barney and Caillou.

I started sending out emails, searching for headhunters. The first day was a little disappointing-- Google found a lot of dead headhunter links. But I found one-- then another. I sent an email to the USNA alumni association. They sent my resume to a bunch of headhunters.

That Thursday, I went down to Starbucks to get coffee. I asked for a "Hurricane Discount"-- I felt stupid doing it, because obviously I was not starving to death standing in line at a Starbucks. I wondered why I had asked... then I found out. A woman behind me said, "I heard you say you were from New Orleans. My family and I were talking last night about how we could help out. Can I do anything for you?" Her name was Linda. She offered to let us stay in her house. I told her we were set on that, but that I needed to get my resume in front of people. She said she would do what we could.

On an aside, Sonia and Daniel and I had dinner at Linda's house last night. We've been friends since that day she stuck out her hand. Sonia and her really clicked. She's rallied the folks from her synagogue to collect toys and clothes, furniture, pots and pans... they've really helped us out. Her sons, Abraham and Noah, have played with Daniel tirelessly, even though they are both over ten years older than him. Her husband, Ira, has been a generally good guy, and also plays with Daniel patiently and treats him like the smart little guy he is. Linda really has been a true friend.



(To be continued...)

USAA Insurance comes through!

We left our home in New Orleans just before Katrina hit. USAA, after initially balking, looks like it's going to pay up for our evacuation expense!

Thank you USAA! I just got off the phone with a supervisor over at USAA, and it looks like our Renters insurance policy covers our evacuation.

When I called USAA initially, I told them there was no damage to our house. I figured honesty was the best policy here. When I was younger (and more foolish), that had not always been my policy, and all of the "truth management" I had engaged in only led to problems.

Initially, a claims person there told me that since our house had taken no damage, we could not get any evacuation expenses.

I could feel my blood pressure rising, so I asked the lady to have a supervisor call me, then politely got off the line. I actually was less interested in talking to a supervisor as I was in simply ending the conversation-- I never get anything good done when I'm mad.

I talked to a friend of mine who evacuated to Dallas, and he told me that first off, I had to remember I had done nothing wrong here. This was good advice, because some part of me always feels guilty about getting angry. Then he told me to call back and ask for a supervisor.

I did just that, and talked with a nice lady named Deanna. She listened patiently, then put me on hold for a moment. When she got back, she said, bewildered, that she had no idea why the previous person told me we would get nothing. We would receive what USAA calls "Additional Living Expenses", and quoted my policy:

PROHIBITED USE. If a civil authority prohibits you from use of the place where you reside as a result of direct damage to neighboring premises by a covered CAUSE OF LOSS we cover the ADDITIONAL LIVING EXPENSE or FAIR RENTAL VALUE loss as provided under 1. and 2. above, for no more than two weeks.

So we have to go back and collect up our receipts for those two weeks. But we're covered!

Moral of this story-- if you are a Katrina refugee, get a copy of your policy (you may have to download it from your insurance company's website), and if they tell you there will be less compensation than you think you deserve, nicely but firmly ask for a supervisor. The "we don't pay for that" phrase may just be a way for them to weed out the folks who will put up with paying for insurance that doesn't pay off when a disaster strikes. If you have USAA and you lived in Orleans parish, it seems that they will pay evacuation expenses.

Ben Franklin Bridge - 33:00

Not a bad run-- ran from the TRF office here on 7th and Arch, past the Mint, over the Bridge to Camden, New Jersey.

A little pain in the lower left calf. Style is good, I've really shortened up my stride and increased my cadence, and I'm striking mid-foot instead of on the heel.

Cloudy today. Listened to "Gilgamesh" on my MP3-- the ultimate running book-on-tape. There's a part where Inkidu is trying to convince Gilgamesh to go ahead and kill the monster Umbaba that makes you run faster.

Dreaming of a Normal Christmas

THE VERY WEAKLY TIM

Hi Everybody,

Okay, I'm extremely lame, it's been like a month and a half since my last installment. Lotsa stuff happened. Let's get to it.

First off, it's very close to Christmas here, and since I promised a long time back to write about the weird stuff going on here in Spain (and not just the weird stuff going on in my head), I'll let you all in on the Christmas traditions here.

If you've been to Spain, or have friends here, or can spell "Spain" (watch that second vowel, it's tricky) you know that this is (or was) a Catholic country. *My* country was discovered in a particularly fervent attempt at being very Catholic (vease "Reyes Catolicos"). Most people here are named "Maria", even the male president (Jose Maria Aznar). The language is littered with lotsa cutesy catholic-influenced sayings like "En un santiamen" (I'll get to it in the time it takes to say the benediction) and "Donde Jésus perdio el gorro" (Where Jesus lost his hat, kinda like the Texan "Out in East Jesus") and finally the constantly heard "Es la hostia, Tio" ("That's the communion host, uncle", which translates more or less to "What a cluster"). Where was I... oh yeah, Christmas. So, you'd figure that being catholic would make everyone brush off their church suits and go to the Cathedral for the yearly visit. Nope. That's what used to happen, but not anymore.

What happens now, at least if you live in Barcelona (which I do), is that they have a bunch of basically pagan traditions which they kind of Christmas up. The Catalans are proud that they don't do Christmas like the folks in Madrid. Add this to the fact that Catalan humor *is* scatological humor and you get:

1) The Caga-tio. This is a contraction of the two words "Cagar" and "Tio". "Tio" means Uncle. "Cagar" is what you do several hours after a big meal. The Caga-tio is a log with two legs at one end, made up to look like a kind of strange two legged animal. They put a blanket over it, and tell the children that if they feed it and treat it nicely, the Caga-tio will, um, cagar presents for them on Christmas eve. So the kids put a bowl of milk under the blanket every day and wait. Finally the big day comes, and Mom and Dad give the youngsters sticks, and they take turns hitting the Caga-tio with the stick, while singing in Catalan, "Caga tio, tio of Christmas, cagar me some presents or I will hit you harder". Then the kids have to close their eyes and pray for a few minutes, and magically, the Caga-tio fills up with presents. I'm not making this up. They only do this here (thank god).

2) The Cagoner. Maybe you can see where this is going. Cataluña has a tradition of making very artistic "Belenes", or nativity scenes. Most houses mount one well before Christmas, and the children make a daily habit of moving the three kings (Reyes) closer to the manger each day. They don't arrive until January 6th, which is the holiday known as "Reyes" here, and it's when the kids really get their big presents, Christmas being more of a socks and underwear holiday. The tradition of the Cagoner is that there was a Catalan shepard in Israel (again, I'm not making this up), who must have had, um, an especially big meal just before the baby Jesus was born. So every shop that sells nativity scenes also sells little figures of a Catalan shepard squatting down and thinking hard about life with his pants around his ankles. This year they also had "Caga-Monica Lewinskis" and "Caga-Popes". How's that for Catholic?

3) Burning Bragas y Calzoncillos Rojos. This one is more about Noche Vieja (New Years Eve). On New Years Eve, everyone has to go out and paint the town red. No big surprise there. You might even know about Las Uvas... the tradition that everyone swallows twelve grapes at midnight for good luck. This is where it starts to get Spanish: At midnight, if you're fortunate enough to be dating someone, and I mean even if it's the first date, you exchange red underwear with your date. They are to be worn that night, and that night only. The next morning, you are to burn the underwear with your date. I suppose this is better than firing pistols into the air (which they don't do here, mom). But it makes me wonder how many fires get started this way (what do you tell the cops when they come?), and how many kids get born around September 30 as a result. They also have a saying in Catalan: "Que no carda al cap de l'any, no carda tot l'any", which is kind of like "If you don't get lucky on New Years, you won't get lucky all year." Guess I can see why. Gotta love them Spaniards.

There's a lot more to write, but I have to get off to the company Christmas dinner, so until next time... Happy Christmas/Tu B'shevat/Kwanza... I miss you all a lot. -Tim

6 Million Catalans discovered in Cataluña

THE WEAKLY TIM

Hola, Howdy, Bon dia, Dobry Den,

Has it been a week since the last one of these? Well, ambition, like water and morality, seeks the lowest possible level at which it is comfortable. Which doesn't mean jack, but is meant to somehow make up for the fact that in spite of myself, I've discovered a routine here in Barcelona so boring that there hasn't been much to write about.

Oracle hasn't sent me anywhere for a while, with the exception of a few side trips to Madrid. I'm so dang glad that I didn't decide to go live in Madrid-- honestly, it's so flat and far away from everything, and the architecture is to yawn at. Here in Barcelona we have buildings that look like they were built by sand castle mechanics on extended acid trips (maybe they were). You compare the buildings here to ours in the States and think, man, we oughta use more tile.

I've been here for six months now, as of the 24th. Kind of a big deal, a milestone when you consider that my contract is only for two years. I go through days when I'm damn sure that I'll go back at the end of the two years (I can hear my mom sighing with relief), and then I have days when I'm certain I want to stay forever (I can hear my mom tensing back up).

My free time is all Spanish now. My house is like one big list of new words; During conversations I suddenly dive into my rucksack to scribble down something someone said. Okay, this is heaven.

My friend, Sònia, is earnestly learning English at this point. Which is real good for both of us, because I end up helping her out, and it makes me have to think about our grammer a lot. Quick. Is "When" an adjective or an adverb? Or neither? Why do we use the word "do" for negative commands ("Do not panic") but not for affirmative ones ("Panic")? How do you pronounce "Egg" and "Iron"-- some day, the answers I give to these questions, especially this last one, will mark her forever as having learned pronunciation from a Southeast Texan.

Sometimes I get kind of jittery about the whole thing-- what if I'm wrong? Weirder still is the fact that I have a lot of Spanish coursing through my head, so, for example, the other day Sònia asked me what the English word for "Pronunciación" was. I thought for several minutes about this, and concluded that there wasn't one, that we'd say, "how it's pronounced". Then we looked it up, and sure enough, it translated as "Pronunciation" (duh). But I couldn't pronounce it correctly! I mean, what the heck is that "t" doing there, anyway? I've always kind of complained about French pronunciation (damn that word), but really, when you have to explain it, English writing has just about nothing to do with English pronunciation. May as well be Chinese.

It's starting to get cold here. My first exposure to Spain was Christmas day in Madrid, when it was about 14 degrees (57F), and probably that impression will last forever. I don't remember much about that first day, but I do remember getting off the bus from the airport and coming out of the station in the center of Madrid, thinking, I might end up living here. It was different then, because I still wasn't sure I'd end up with a job-- I couldn't imagine coming here without a job. Now I find out that there are thousands of Americans living and working in Spain with a tourist visa from like 1978. Anyway, I set down my backpack on the curb of the Paseo del Prado and looked around. I can't describe the rush of thoughts I had... I was excited, and worried that someone might speak to me and I wouldn't understand them (this happened right away, too). I noticed that the first building I set eyes on was the American Express building. We're everywhere. I thought about my prospects of moving, and then about my job and my friends and my family back in the States. I really wasn't sure that this was what I wanted to do, but I wasn't sure that it wasn't, either (did that make sense). So I picked up my backpack and found the metro into the Puerto del Sol.

Just this morning a co-worker asked me why I had moved to Spain. I never have a good answer for this. Usually I say "for the fame and the money". Occasionally I say "for the adventure". If I had to tell the truth I think I'd say "I don't really know". Most of my expat friends here say pretty much the same thing-- we just ended up here.

Well, enough of that. I have to get to work. Lots to tell-- I just found out that Barcelona has its own Marathon in April, and I think I might run in it. We'll see. Hmmm, I didn't mention anything about dogs. I'm working like a... you get the idea. I'll write again soon. -Tim

Andorra

THE WEAKLY TIM

Bon dia! Howdy!

I hope everybody's doing great. After almost six months here, I finally got out of Spain for a day. Some friends and I drove into Andorra, which is a country so small that it usually gets mistaken for a dog hair or something when you're looking at it on a map. It sits between France and Spain in the Pyranees, and is the seat of the Association of Ridiculously Small Countries (which includes Luxembourg, The Vatican, Rush Limbaugh's Butt...)

A few facts: No one knows anything about the history of Andorra. Every article I looked up started with a statement like "The history of Andorra is obscured by the fogs of the past" or something. They do have a charter called the Carta de Fundacio d'Andorra signed by Charlemagne (conveniently locked away, and commonly believed to be a forgery with the sole purpose of giving the Andorrans claim against France and Spain). In 1933 a Russian declared himself King Boris of Andorra (I'm not making this up) but was escorted out of the country by several burly guardsmen.

Anyway, sometime in the last hundred years some genius decided to remove sales tax in Andorra, making it the Delaware of Europe. Every weekend, zillions of Spaniards from the south west and Frenchmen (Frenchiards? Froggians?) from the north east invade to buy watches and cheese. This weekend was no different, or maybe a little different. This weekend there was a Texan, too.

The French drive like hell. The Spaniards drive like hell, too. My friend Sònia was driving, and I got to see a side of her that I'd never seen: the brutal, French-hating, goddam-it-this-is-my-lane- so-go-back-to-France side of her. It was cool.

We looked at watches and violins and bought groceries. It really was a lot cheaper (eight yogurts for 500 Pesetas: ¡Guay, tio!). We saved about 3000 Pesetas ($19.38US). We filled the tank twice, for 5000 Pesetas. You do the math.

Woof, what scenery! The drive from Barcelona into Andorra was breathtaking. We kept passing shimmering reservoirs to bring tears to your eyes, followed by winding switchbacks up undulating hillsides to put lumps in your throat, and vast herds of sheep to put plugs in your nose. The city of Vella d'Andorra itself is a single street, and unfortunately, by the time you get there, you're so cranky at everybody that you want to punch anyone who has a French accent (or Spanish or Catalan). But it's pretty, in a little bit too modern way.

One thing that really is worth buying there is cigarettes, but I stopped smoking 16 days, 7 hours and 11 minutes ago. Thank god for one thing: The day after I stopped, Oracle Spain instituted a new rule saying that you could no longer smoke at your desk (did you American folks get that?). As you can imagine, this did not go over big with the locals. I don't like to generalize about the Spaniards, but as a people, they do not like rules that restrict their personal freedom (you wouldn't either if you had had Franco for 40 years). This extends just about to the ridiculous, with laws prohibiting smoking in Elevators only taking effect a couple of years ago.

As part of my campaign not to smoke, I started working my Rubik's cube again. I can do it in like three minutes now. I do it on the metro. I do it at work. The other day I was going to meet some friends for the opening of a club called "The Wild West", which is a Texas theme bar, basically. So of course I wore my Stetson and my Cowboy boots, and my Lumberton High School letter jacket. I looked real Texan (cuz ah am). I was standing in the metro, in my cowboy hat, working my cube. When I got off the train, I heard the kid behind me say to his girlfriend, in Spanish, "man, these tourists sure dress weird" (tia, estos guiris se visten gillipollas). I turned around, looked at the kid, and just smiled. "Um, um, except for you, sir" he said (Excepto que usted). Tim: 1 Spain: 0. Cool.

My friends Allie and Bibette came from Seychelles a couple of weeks ago. It was great, I got to see a lot of my city that I hadn't seen. I also got to play translator (fun, fun, fun). I kept looking at my Catalan friends and speaking English and looking at Allie and Bibette and speaking Spanish. We went to Sitges for a day and met an older Indian lady who tagged around the city with us. We didn't see a single dang Transvestite, which is kind of the whole point of going to Sitges. We had a blast.

Well, really no more to report. Drop me a line, I'll probably write again in a week or two. -Tim