Juan of Words

Sin Senos No Hay Paraiso

True or False?

Okay, I know what you’re thinking!  But before you go getting all offended…or excited, about my very sexy blog title this time around, let me just say IT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE THINKING.  Yes, there was a television series with this same title in very recent history, which in part was the inspiration for this post.  Nevertheless the subject matter in this piece is much more PG – a big BOO for quite a few of you out there also, I know.

So what is the allure of these infamous lady lumps for us guys?  All women want to know.  The truth is you won’t find any scientific answers here – mainly because the most obvious reason for me is just the simple fact that we don’t have them.  Plain and simple.  They are something foreign to us, hidden underneath all those layers of clothing and undergarments, hidden for so many years before we actually get to explore them (eww, go ahead and let it out…it’s okay), and that in it of itself makes senos so sexy to us.  We are pretty simple animals after all.

Now I am digressing!

Still the idea of there ‘being no paradise without breasts’ seems a little excessive.  No doubt they are a beautiful part of the female anatomy that can fill in our tees and sweaters like nobody’s business, but when a woman is forced to make that difficult decision between her breasts and her life there definitely should be no question about what comes first.  Life.  Perhaps it is not my place to be saying this.  I’ve not actually had to deal with this reality myself, or with the heartache of having a loved one go through this very personal dilemma themselves, but my reality is full of beautiful women from all walks of life for whom I care a great deal about.

These words then, are dedicated to them.

Breasts, no matter how big or small, real or fake, do not define the woman.  They are a cup size, not a lifeline.  They are sexy!  They can make us guys go crazy.  They can bank in some pretty good perks if used in that way.  They can feed.  They can make a girl feel like a woman.  But at the end of the day, senos are just that: senos.  Another part of the female body, like any other part of the human body, male or female, subject to illness, old age and unannounced shifts and changes.

That is all.  No more.  No less.

And for the thousands of you out there suffering through this choice or helping someone along right now, remember: just because someone, at some point, decided to coin the phrase ‘sin senos no hay paraiso’ – it don’t mean a DAMN thing.

Don’t buy into the hype! 

Salud, Dinero, Amor Y Perfumes: Mi Sueño Cagao

Health, Money, Love And Perfumes: My Shitty Dream

Growing up smart...sort of.

No job.  No money.  No lover.  Just big dreams and even bigger ideas.  At fourteen, I was a man on a mission.  One way or another all three were going to be mine…and sooner, rather than later, no matter what it took.

Only one problem…well several really.  I wasn’t old enough to get a real job, my only mode of transportation was a bike, and I was too shy to make the first move with any of my crushes.  All my girlfriends until now had asked me out.

So there I was Saturday morning, all dressed up in my most professional clothes (black jeans, a button up faded baby blue shirt, and black tennis shoes with white socks) sitting in a room full of grizzly looking adults, most of them in their mid to late thirties at least, all of us wanting to make a few quick bucks.  I’d convinced my parents this was a legitimate job that had actually agreed to pay me from the dozens I’d cut out of the classifieds section of the local paper and called incessantly for an interview, so they dropped me off.

You sure about this? They kept asking as we pulled into the industrial park where the little offices of my new job were.  This doesn’t look like much of a business. But after watching me leave on my bike every afternoon and come back sweating and frowning from not having found a job, this was progress.

Not even the Hartz Fried Chicken all-you-could-eat buffet by our house had wanted to hire me, and they gave everyone a job!

I guess I should have known better, but I needed to believe I was now making my own money.  The job sounded easy enough.  All we had to do was carry around our boxes full of knock-off perfumes and colognes, convince people that our products were better than the real thing, get them to buy them, then split our earnings with the company at some percentage I hadn’t really paid attention to, in order to make a few bucks in cash for the day.  The smarter, or less desperate, people in the training class began to trickle out as they realized from the over-excitement in the air on the part of our trainer that this was an impossible mission.

The rest of us, down from about 20 to six, all squeezed into a four door small Toyota corolla with no air conditioning, each with our box of fake parfums sitting on our laps, riding solemnly, resigned almost, as our trainer drove us from one shopping strip to another in the dead heat and humidity of a mid-July Texas summer.  We must have smelled awful,which could have accounted for our overall failure as door to door sales people, but every time he’d stop, we’d jump out of the car, run up to as many people as possible, spraying cologne after cologne on ourselves or them, harassing them to buy at least one bottle from us.  Nobody did!

Most people just looked at us dumbfounded wondering why we were selling perfumes to them in the parking lot of their grocery stores.  After six hours of this we returned empty handed…except for our knock-offs of course.  I wasn’t giving up though.  It had taken me this long to find a job and I was going to make a sell!

Unfortunately, my parents weren’t convinced either they needed any fake perfumes, especially since they had already wasted gas money on driving me back and forth to this job where I hadn’t yet earned a single penny.  In the end, it was only through the compassion of my brother in law that I was able to finally sell two colognes – he bought them from me in the living room of our apartment.  That next day when I turned in my $60 for the two colognes, they gave me $10 back and offered me congratulations!  There was no denying it then.  I had just been ripped off, almost as bad as my brother in law.  I didn’t say a word, just turned around, stuffed my $10 in my pocket, and walked away, ashamed and embarrassed,  all the 40 minutes back home.

It wasn’t my summer for salud, dinero y amor, but it would be one day I told myself.

That summer still hasn’t come!  Not in the way I imagined it then, but it has manifested itself in millions of other small ways I could have never envisioned at fourteen…peach fuzz and all!

Los Trapos Sucios Se Lavan En Casa

Ones Dirty Laundry Should Be Aired At Home

¡Pinche huerco travieso!

De chiquillo siempre me metía en lo que no me importaba.  If someone was a having a conversation – the more private it was the better – there I was, con las orejas bien paradas, as my parents would say.  Trying my hardest not to be noticed, listening carefully to what exactly was being said, and making every attempt to make sense of what I was hearing.  When I didn’t understand the subject matter or context I’d make it up in my head – it was more fun that way anyways.

¡El metiche! That became my nickname and stuffing chisme after chisme into my morral became my business, even if I did not know exactly what to do with that information once I had it.

My sisters would get so mad when they would bring their friends over and could not have a private conversation without having to worry about Juan sitting around somewhere trying to listen. They were both in junior high at that time and their conversations never amounted to more than the usual schoolyard chatter, but I could never get enough.  It was like a rush of adrenaline to know that I could get caught at any moment or even better, that they might spill the beans on something really juicy that I could then run around telling the rest of the family about.

Neither ever really occurred, so I kept listening.

Then one day my sister had a steady boyfriend.  She couldn’t go anywhere with him without the company of at least my second oldest sister – just two years younger than her – and usually with the rest of us, her five younger siblings, tagging along for the walks in the park and trips to the pulga as well.  My parents were old school, used to the way things were done in their rancho in Mexico, which unfortunately for her, being the oldest and all meant she’d have to deal with having the least amount of freedom in her teens out of all of us.   So there we all were at the park.  She and her now-husband always walking in front of us, holding hands, exchanging words in the lowest of tones so as to not to be heard by the rest of us.  My other sister trying to keep us entertained, playing with us, making us run around all over the park, Los Patos, keeping up her end of the sisterly-pact, which I assumed meant ensuring my sister her privacy with her boyfriend.

I wasn’t having any of it though.  When it became impossible to listen to what they were saying or even keep a close eye on them – every time I’d get close they’d shoo me away, sometimes literally dragging me away – my anger and frustration got the better of me.  I must have been 10 or 11 years old, but I was a healthy sized boy with more muscle than even I was aware of apparently.  In one single motion my hands were on her legs, her legs, in that short ruffled mini skirt, went flying up above my head, then hers, backwards over that bench they had been sitting on, past his frantic attempts to grasp them, and finally pointing straight up into the air, her back laying flat on the ground, as she stumbled to get back up enraged that because of her stupid little brother her boyfriend had now seen her chones!

On the way home that day I experienced the real first cachetada of my life, as well as a banana squished and splattered across my hair and face, combined with a painful dosage of pelizcones on one arm and then the other, as both my sisters ganged up on me for having embarrassed them so badly.  My cheek burned so bad, and the pinches stung so much, that all I could do was cry.  How could they have plastered and humiliated me so much with that single banana!?

In truth, I deserved it, for being such a pinche huerco! And in the end I learned a valuable lesson: los trapos sucios se lavan en casa. Never again would I air our dirty laundry out there in public like that.

For what, another banana split a’lo Guey!? 

Boom, Boom, Pow!

Make it your New Year!

A time for new beginnings!  For drastic changes, for major decisions, for winds of change, or storms in some cases, and many other life-altering cliches…but really, what makes the beginning of a New Year anymore special for committing to doing something different than any other time of the year!?

Than say a birthday perhaps?  It is after all a more accurate measure of our actual time here on this earth.  Granted, there is much more hype to announce in unison with the rest of the world what we will resolve to change in the New Year: whether it’s losing weight, making more money, spending more time with family, quitting smoking, drinking less, partying more, or less, even having a spicier sex life, our wish lists of what we’d like to achieve over the course of the next 12 months can and will include anything and everything our hearts and minds can fantasize about.

And while that’s fine, my humble argument is for the seizing of that end of year momentum throughout the rest of the year.  So that when we feel it’s time to make another change – regardless of what month of the year it might be – we can take on that challenge as our own individual New Year’s celebration.

That we don’t have to rely on the comfort of so many others deciding to make a change with us, side by side, pushing us along every step of the way – that we might find our own strength within ourselves to make the changes we want to make.

So yes, Happy New Year!  And BOOM, BOOM, POW! for the rest of your own personal New Year’s celebrations throughout 2011.