Musings from the God of Cities

This is an email I sent Cap earlier today. I sent it to him since we both share a love for words. I figure i might as well immortalize my ramblings here:

i was walking around yesterday, and for no reason memorable enough to have stuck around in my brain, i was thinking about the word "amateur". it only occurred to me yesterday then that it's derived from the french word for lover ("one who loves"). this epiphany gave the word a whole new color for me. so i decided to do a little investigation. this is what i found on dictionary.com:

When Mrs. T.W. Atkinson remarked in her 1863 Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, “I am no amateur of these melons,” she used amateur in a sense unfamiliar to us. That sense, “a lover, an admirer,” is, however, clearly descended from the senses of the word's ultimate Latin source, am tor, “lover, devoted friend, devotee, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective,” and from its Latin-derived French source, amateur, with a similar range of meanings. First recorded in English in 1784 with the sense in which Mrs. Atkinson used it, amateur is found in 1786 with a meaning more familiar to us, “a person who engages in an art, for example, as a pastime rather than as a profession,” a sense that had already developed in French. Given the limitations of doing something as an amateur, it is not surprising that the word is soon after recorded in the disparaging sense we still use to refer to someone who lacks professional skill or ease in performance.

this weekend, for reasons that i myself have not yet figured out, i volunteered to take care of kate’s dog, nanook. nanook is a jack russell terrier, not unlike “eddie” from frasier, or that dog wishbone on pbs. every time i see a jack russell terrier, i think of how cap once described the breed as being “real butch little dogs”. it was cap’s assessment that kept me from saying “it’s my girlfriend’s! I wanted a bigger dog!” whenever strangers came up to me on the street to ask me about the pooch. anyway, this sunday i decided to sleep in and didn’t get put of bed until 8 a.m. with a sense of “gosh, i’ve wasted half the day away already!” and decided to walk the dog. it was rainy and gray, but not entirely unpleasant. i was crossing the street by city hall, when a guy in a gigantic s.u.v. pulls up to to the crosswalk and waits for the light to change. the guy looks out of his window and calls to me. we have the following conversation:
him: hey, excuse me, what kind of cat is that.

me: (thinking he might have meant “dog” or something) it’s a jack russell terrier.

him: no, what kind of *cat* is it.

me: (getting rained on, unamused look on my face, in a deadpan voice, not quite sure if this guy is being an asshole, or if he’s just a big weirdo, or did he think i was walking a cat) it’s a dog.

him: oh, ok. (and drives off)

now, if i were an asshole who enjoyed making indirect insults at people’s dogs (and had very small genitalia prompting me to buy a very large s.u.v.), i would probably laugh at the object of my ridicule after having made fun of them so that they would know that they had been insulted, or at the very least i would wait until there was a bit of a crowd, so that other people could bear witness to my quick wit. the way this guy was by himself, and there wasn’t anyone on the street, so i guess he just made that weird attempt at a joke for the sake of his own bemusement. *shrug*

my father has imposed his tales of papua new guinea on his local newspaper and is now making me edit the article for him. just below is a copy (as of yet unedited) of said article. i realize that it is a bit hypocritical of me to mock my father’s inability to conjugate, spell, and generally speak the language of the country that he’s been living in for over 20 years, given what i said about my boss writing to that leather dude about his grammar, but i don’t mind being labeled a hypocrite for the sake of entertainment. so, here it is, folks... enjoy.

The trip to Papua New Guinea (PNG) ,regardless the way you organize it, is
a long one. I selected the standard route from the West Cost to New Zealand
and from there to Australia before arriving to Port Moresby,the PNG capital.
It was the beginning of July, I was leading a group of 11 volunteers of
Habitat for Humanity. Our destination was a remote rain forest area
in the north west of PNG to help the locals to build houses.
The landing in Port Moresby was less than exiting: the countryside vegetation
was in a very poor condition and even if it was the winter season in the
southern emisfere, it looked like the dry season was at its pick. Till there
,we
had traveled very large modern planes and it was time to tast a small plane
of ancient vintage to cross the country for reaching the north west coast .
The sudden disconfort of the new travel leg was compensated by the
view. Whereas the coast in the south was arid, the vegetation of the
interior was luxuriant. From the plane we could spot very huge ,steep
mountains covered by a dark green vegetation. Water falls coming from
the top of the montains flowing into narrow dark valleys were very frequent.
Ranges of montains, one after the other, some covered by a thick fog, other
lighted up by the equatorial sun were flowing under our eyes. I remembered
that there are very few roads in PNG because the terrain . The domestic
flights are the most common way to cover long distances . No surprise
that the locals , living since ever in a forced isolations, speaks some 800
different languages and are grouped in small tribes and clans that have very
few contacts , or none at all ,with the outside world.
Our destination and base camp was Lae, a small town on the Solomon Sea .
Lae is located in a huge valley surrounded by mountains coverted by
emerald green vegetation and dotted with coco-nut trees. It was breezy
and cold. We could smell the sweet of distant sugar cane vegetations
mixed with that of the ocean. We spent that first night in PNG at a
Pesbitarian Guesthouse. The accomodation was rustic, the surrounding
vegetation was just spectacular : an abundance of flowers and trees I never
saw before ,were everywere. It was a sort of introduction to the wonders
of the nature that we were going to experience. The isolation of the people
and the lack of roads has created in PNG a sort of unique situation: in most
of the places the nature is basically untouched. We realized that the
following day on our way by truck to the village of Boana. The truck had
seen better days and trail took our breath away for two opposed
reasons: on one side the truck was negotiating a bumpy trail and was
proceeding at the edge of a slope whose end we could not see and on the
other side we were in a gogeous surrounding, among huge mountains, in
a thick vegetation dotted with flowers and waterfalls. Colorful butterflies
paid short visits and tree branches constantly whipped the sides of our
truck . Somebody of my group said that it was likea Jurassic Park without
the dinosaurs and we all agreed defintion was quite correct. The truck
stopped in front of a swinging bridge and we got the first encounter with
the people of Boana who had made a few hours across the forest, down
the mountain to greet us and to help us to carry our belongings. The people
in PNG and friendly, shy, curious and very gentle. It was not uncommon to
arrive in the middle of a local market and having poor ladies offering us
local fruit and insisting for not wanting to be paid. At the bridge, that was
jumping and rolling under our feets, I had the first chance to try my
limited
knowledge of the local language (Pidgin) . From there we went up to the
mountain with our new friends. Brownish bats , the size of a large chicken,
were flying in the sky. Snails, spiders, butterflies, insects: every living
creature there was larger than we could imagine. We were hiking and
watching. Along the trail we were welcomed by other people till we arrived
at the fringe of the village whose huts, made of bamboo cane sides
and straw roofs , could be glimpsed among the vegetation. We were
requested to stop and an old man came along and apologized to me
for a poor welcome ceremony we were going to have. The reason :
a person had died the day before and they could not dispaly the full
range of a formal welcome. So we got flowers around our neck and
accompanied by songs and dances performed by few people who
played drums, we arrived to our place , a cabin with a corrugated
roof. In the meantime some 200 people (the entire village) was there.
I introduced my group, there were speeches in Pidgin and in English
(somebody made the traslations) and then we got the encounter
with the kids. Dozen of them, all excited. From that moment to the
end of our stay, we were always surrounded by vociferous ,curious,active
smiling kids who considered a privilege to help us in any way they could.
Basically we adopted them temporarely and the entire village adopted us.
The following day we started working on two houses whose frames were
already in place. We were helped by a group of students of the PNG
University who had a few weeks vacation by some local adults and by
the village kids. I will never forget the nights we spent with those
students around a camp fire at the fringe of the forest whose sounds we
could clearly ear. They were curious abount everything related to the
USA and in return we learned about hunting in the forest with bow and
arrows and learned stories of gosts that they sweared dwell the forest.
Occasionally, in the late evenings, we brought some kerosene lamps in a
square place next to a chapel and the people of the village,dressed in
traditional costumes, accompanied by drums, would dance, sing and
perform short plays under the blu sky coverted by thousand of bright
stars. The days passed by, we completed our task, get a beautiful "houses
dedication "ceremony, and each of us received a "bilum" ( a sort of net-bag
that everybody carryies in PNG). The day we left the village,we saw people
coming out from everywhere and lining up along our trail . We hanshaked
dozens of hands, received pounds of sugar canes, bananas, mangos and
so on. Most of the people came with us up to the bridge. Once again we
had to handshake everybody. It was than that I decided I will organize
another trip to PNG.
I learned there that we can have very little and to be perfectly happy.
I learned also that sometimes those who have very little in reality have a
lot if they live a simple life, in harmony with the nature and with their
neighbours.