Oh.

Hellz.

Yeah.

My birthday week doesn't end until this Sunday. Gifts and kisses are all welcomed.

I am not making this up: These are the nicknames we gave our kids when they were babies. Guess who's the spawn and who's the beast:

'Tis what I call ... ahem ...mommyblogging. Heh.

PS : You know these kids are Sabater just by looking at their eyes. Everybody in the Sabater branch of my family have those big almond-shaped dark brown eyes.

This is one of the oldest memes of the blogosphere but it's just hit Facebookers, hitting me twice via Tracy Visselli and Aldon Hynes.

So here it goes :

1. My parents were into Santería back in the 1970s, but they were thoughtful enough to not force their kids into being initiated in the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion.
2. Even though my Orisha is Oshun (the Lucumi goddess of Love and Rivers), I really don't like rivers that much. Actually, I was a beach bum for most of the 80s --I used to go to the beach 4 days a week (yes, even during weekdays) and had a tan so deep people thought I was naturally ebony skinned like Naomi Campbell.
3. Whenever I talk about "La Negra", especially about what she wants and what she needs, am talking about myself in the third person
4. My father was in the 1950s part of a Mambo dancing duo called "The Mambo Jets". His brother, Jimmy Sabater, is a well known (and old school) salsa singer and an original "Fania All-Star". I met a lot of the Fania people like Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Tito Puente, Rubén Blades, and especially Pete "El Conde" Rodríguez, who was very good friends with my dad. Yet two people who I remember fondly are Héctor Lavoe (who was the nicest guy whenever he wasn't high) and Patato Valdés (who's hands were as big as truck tires). They both tried to teach me unsuccessfully to play congas; but I loved to spend hours watching them play whenever they were around.
5. Remember Vanessa Williams in that movie "Dance With Me"? The one that had that Puerto Rican heart throb, Chayanne? I was Chayanne's homework tutor in high school.
6. My native language is not English, it's Spanish. I couldn't write well at all in Shakespeare's language until I was about 25 years of age. I also speak, read and write Portuguese (with a carioca accent, thank you very much) and French (with a so-so Caribbean flavor). I can also read Italian and Catalan and understand them so-so (but I've never studied the languages formally).
7. Am dyslexic and couldn't read well until about 15. As for writing, I needed another 5 more years to get it right. Yet because I am so competitive, people around me had no idea. I've been always a voracious reader and total nerd with a capacity to remember every piece of information that tickles my fancy --whether useful or not.
8. One of my first jobs was as a door-to-door salesman of solar water heaters. In Puerto Rico. During a summer. Walking in the humid and sweltering Caribbean sun. My parents thought it would build character.
9. My brother and I almost died during an epidemic of dysentery in Puerto Rico.
10. I've smoked hashish. Didn't like it.
11. I worked as an extra in "Law and Order" once. HATED IT.
12. I love, love, love and miss terribly doing voice over work. Even if it were radio commercials and industrials. One of my silly little dreams is to be the voice of a cartoon character in a Pixar movie.
13. I've always been known as a fiery debater and many people thought that I'd go on to become a constitutional lawyer and/or public defender. My slacker instincts talked me out of getting a J.D. --I actually walked out of the LSATs. My father never made me forget how I had "walked away from my destiny".


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Back in July I wrote a post titled Pain that went under the radar for a lot of people but for my hardcore readers. It's interesting looking back at it that it's a post almost at the year's mid-point and that it was the first time I was openly acknowledging in more than a year that offline Liza was living a very different life than Liza online.

And yet I really didn't own up to everything that was and has been ailing me : 2008 goes down as the year I had to contend with the fact that the life I've lived for the last 10 years is over and that the physical pain that has been bashing me for the past year and a half has been amplified by the emotional anguish of knowing that my marriage is over.
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Today is Veteran's Day and instead of saying something trite, I wanted to pay a small tribute to my baby brother, Frank Sabater-Tirado. My brother joined the Army at about 19-20 years of age and served for over 15 years after years of debating whether to join a seminary, go to college or join the army.

He ended up in the military at a very young age. He trained all over the United States, Korea (from where he has some hilarious stories about the kinds of foods he tried to eat with very little success) and Germany.

Then Bush #1 declared war on Saddam Hussein.

I was visiting with a friend in Italy and we had literally talked to him over the phone the very day before the war was declared. What a fucking mess it is to have the US declare war and have yourself carrying an American passport, looking like you could come either from the enemy country or its neighboring states. To say I was harrased in Arabic, Italian, French and English for looking Arab and having a US passport is to say the least.

Anyhow, I totally freaked out because, after all, he is my baby brother.

At the time there were no cell-phones, no web, no digital cameras nor mainstream use of email. The fastest I could get him anything was a week because even if I sent things Express Mail or money through Western Union, being he was in a war zone, he would receive things one or two weeks delayed.

I felt I wasn't doing enough. I felt that I was a pussy for being here while I knew he was over there in a war he really didn't look forward to. At the time, being in the Army was more about peace-keeping but this was Bush #1, who had a score to keep with the monster he and his covert US operations had created in Iraq. My brother was going to war to fight a grudge between a tyrant and a maker of tyrants.

Yet letters and care packages are what kept him going. In those little things I found that I least, I gave him a reason to go on. They were not only incredibly important to his sanity; they became important for mine as well.

9/25/1990

Dahran, S. A.

Dear sis,

[...]

If you've been keeping track of time (something that iI'm not doing because it's a mental health hazard) I've been in the desert for a month or so. I'm used to the climate (it's as hot as being caught in a traffic jam in Bayamón at noon with no A/C in the car) but the scenery sucks. There's nothing but sand, dust,, rocks, a few bushes and not a single cloud in the sky all around you and as far as the eye can see. The wildlife is limited to a heard of camels every once in a while, jackals or wild dogs at night and lizards, scorpions, sand vipers and ants as big as your toe nail roaming around you all the time. Oh, I forgot the never missed desert flies and sandfleas which manage to get anywhere --even inside your protective mask or the crack of the your ass after you've used the field latrines. It may or may not be funny to you but for me it's just a reality.

We work between 12 and 14 hours a day, our days starting at 2 o'clock in the morning or "o-too-dark-hundred hours" in our lingo. Then, if possible, we go to the rear in our trucks for a shower and a hot mean and a "beauty sleep" in A/C before we go back to work. We rest for a whole 24 hours but it's not enough for almost a whole day of scorching sun and no place to hide from it and working at a rate that makes ants look like the laziest creatures on Earth. But that's part of the mission and "ain't nothing to it but suck it in an' drive on", or so we say.

[...]

Love,
Frank

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ZAMBONI.

If she gets away with being invisibly pregnant a 6th time, her choice would be to call him or her after an ice resurfacing company.

Mmm'kay. 

In other news, the soccer mom gets $150, 000 clothes allowance from the RNC. That's about 3 times the median household income in the United States --which is, if you need to know  $50,233.00 (2007 Census numbers).

Please remember, Sarah Palin is not an elitist.