Just to illustrate what I’m talking about:

Liv: Diego! Diego! Look at what I’m doing!

Diego: What now?

Liv: I’ve been having so much fun with this Meiji era photo transmogrifier that I found through tofugu.com! Look at all these cool pictures that I made!

Diego: ….

Liv: The Meiji era – you know, the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, right before the Taisho period, when Japan opened itself to trade and Western culture?

Diego: ….

Liv: Look! Aren’t these great? Look at this picture of Bob and I that we took when we were dressed in yukata for Gion Matsuri! Don’t we look amazing? I mean, it helps that we were already in yukata and in Gion but it looks so real!

Diego: This is creepy.

Liv: No! It’s cool! And look at this picture of me when I was in Thailand on Poda Beach!

Diego: Ugh. What is that thing you’re next to?

Liv: It’s a cliff.

Diego: Well, it looks like a big, round turd.

Liv: IT DOES NOT!

Diego: It’s like Turd Mountain. It’s like the sky crapped it out. It’s the Turd-tanic. Where’s Leo? And look at that thing you’re wearing – it looks almost as old as the picture.

Liv: It was mom’s!

Diego: Well, there you go. Turd-tastic.

Liv: YOU SPOIL EVERYTHING!

Diego had a college roommate who hailed from Texas. Big Jeb was his name. They were roommates in the early years of the century, when it had become acceptable for men of all creeds to address each other as “bro.” “Bro”s were dropped at reckless speeds, but not from Big Jeb’s mouth: he preferred the strange epithet, “bruce.”

A bruce, Big Jeb explained, is a rowdy, ill-mannered guy. Go on. Picture a guy named ‘Bruce.’ How do you picture him? Yup. Loud. Jerky. Don’t be a bruce, man. No one likes a bruce.

Diego was delighted by this term and for him, it immediately replaced “bro,” “dude,” and “man.” The term was soon used by all of their soccer buddies and roommates, and everyone was a bruce until proven innocent – even if the object of the game was to not be one. Women could be just as unruly as men, so a female bruce was naturally dubbed a brucette.

Big Jeb moved back to Texas after graduation, but as far as Diego was concerned, the Bruce was still loose. By that point, all of Diego’s high school buddies were bruces, too. When Diego’s dog piddled on the rug, he was commanded not to be a bruce. It was a brucey-bruce world.

In 2005, Diego moved up to New York City, as did a number of his high school friends. The Bruce had come to the Big Apple and was taking it by storm. The Big City Bruces now party in midtown Manhattan instead of Channelside and are prouder to be bruces than ever – one of them has bought a domain name. There has even been talk of creating a Bruce fashion line.

Koko is one of my oldest friends. She moved to New York City in 2003. Her two brothers are bruces. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she, who used to exclusively call people “punks,” referred to her brother Ron as a bruce the other day.

“How far does this bruce thing go?” I marveled.

In just a few short years, the bruce has traveled from Texas to Florida to New York City. Japan, even – I’m sure I called Sean and Bob bruces once or twice. You know. When they were acting like bruces.

The big question is – what can’t the bruce do?

My brother Diego is smart, successful, charming, and chicks think he’s handsome. What some people might not know about him is that he possesses a particularly nasty, cutting wit. If he weren’t a news segment producer, he would have no problem finding work writing barbs for the Worst Dressed pages in celebrity magazines – so keen and unforgiving is his attention to detail. As a boy, he immediately picked up on all of our family friends’ quirks. Thanks to Diego, my Tia Rosita’s mumbling and moustachioed second husband will forever be The Swedish Chef to me. Likewise, it was Diego’s fault that my parents and I could never again look at their friend Giuseppa after Diego pointed out her slightly wobbly right eye.

“Look at it next time,” he’d say. “It’s as loose as a turd in a punchbowl.”

Clearly, he should have been the writer – not me.

One by one, the people in our lives unknowingly fall prey to Diego’s cruel humor. He’s always the first to notice when something is amiss, and when he combines his wit with his powers of persuasion, an object or facial feature is forever ruined for us.

Recently, Diego has turned his powers of observation to fashion. Hounded by the epithet “metrosexual” since his teens, Diego makes no secret of his appreciation for style. He also makes no secret of his disdain of my own attempts to explore it. Let me elaborate: if Diego is the style hound in the family, I am the bargain hound. Lately, while scrounging all of my earnings for graduate school, I’m even more of a bargain hunter than usual. Yet, 2 years of living in Japan and hating Japanese fashion has made me desire new clothes more than ever. I badly want to wear something new, and I badly want my new items to be appreciated. If my brother should be the one admiring something I’m wearing, I know I’m on the right track.

The other week, I went shopping with Momo. While I’ve never been much of an impulse shopper, Momo is the one person who can inspire me to pick up something new without stalking it first. That particular afternoon, a sunny yellow headband adorned with matching covered buttons caught my eye. It seemed impossibly cute and Momo agreed. Since it was only $3, I figured I couldn’t lose. I squirreled it home, excited to show Diego my new purchase. It was the first new thing I’d bought since arriving home in New York.

Eventually, Diego came home.

“Would you like to see my new headband?” I asked, bursting with pride. I had loved the way the yellow looked against my dark hair in the store and pictured myself wearing it with a black shirt. In my vision, I was rowing a boat across the pond in Central Park, my hair was wavy and my wide smile was slicked in a coral-hued lipstick I had yet to buy. I presented my new bauble to my brother, who examined it diligently. I beamed, awaiting his verdict.

“Nice. Real nice, sis.” sneered Diego. “Wow. You know what that headband looks like? It looks like the chit that people can’t get rid of, and then they combine it with more chit to create … even more ridiculous chit!”

“You don’t … like it?” I asked weakly. I sat, heartbroken – my lovely headband threatening to slide from my grasp.

“Come on, sis,” said Diego callously. “You know better than to buy chit like this. It’s like a cross between Mary Poppins and Curious George.”

And just like that, my lovely new headband was ruined. Each time I tried to put it on in the following days, my inner voice crooned lyrics about feeding birds and flying kites. After a week of attempts to wear it, I gave up and banished it to the far rung of my accessories holder.

A couple of Sundays later, I met up with Diego and Joy for brunch and ended up tagging along with them to Bloomindale’s. They were headed to a black tie wedding in Greatneck that weekend and they both needed shoes to wear with their fancy ensembles. Joy quickly found a pair of very beautiful black pumps that even Diego approved of. That done, we perused displays of clothing and shoes to hunt for Diego’s own items. As we looked, he delivered his typical sharp, short edicts any time an offending item caught his eye.

A pair of strappy, flat leather sandals? “Hi, Sister Roberta.”

An A-line fringed blue dress? “Who disemboweled Cookie Monster?”

Diego left Joy and I in the shoe sale while he browsed menswear. I browsed through the 3 pairs of size 5s and Joy was smitten by a pair of flat, black, gladiator sandals. She fell even more in smit with them when she tried them on and we waited for Diego to return so Joy could show him. Beaming, she bounced in her chair.

“I love them,” she said. “And I know Diego will love them, too!”

When Diego finally returned, Joy thrust her sandaled feet in his direction to best show off the shoes – so sure that his face would melt in a smile to match hers. But my brother’s face remained cold and slack, flexing only to curve into a judgmental grimace.

“Baby,” he said. “They’re okay. Too much hardware. They fit funny – like Spartacus’s cobbler was blind in one eye. I don’t know. And you just spent however much on those other shoes for the wedding!”

Joy’s face crumpled.

“You don’t … like them?” she shrunk into her chair, deflated. “I really thought you would.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” scowled Diego. “But they just don’t look worth the price tag.”

As I watched Joy’s mood darken, my inner feminist wanted to shout: Stop! Who cares what some guy thinks? Don’t let him tell you what to do! If you like the shoes, buy the shoes!

… but who was I to talk when just that morning, I’d ripped my Mary Poppins headband from my head and crammed it into my purse in shame?

In case you weren’t sure, “Heifer” is not Heifer’s real name. It’s a nickname. She has an official name, given to her at the shelter. It’s pretty and feminine, just like her. I often call her “Heifer” because she thinks and eats like a cow. That she’s female, porky and has never given birth makes the already brilliant nickname even more appropriate.

In the past, before we fell out of touch, I’ve also called her:

• Little Miss Tiger Stripes
• Little Miss Moo
• Little Miss Crunch and Munch
• Mitts

Since visiting my parents, I’ve been toying with new nicknames for her – inspired, of course, by her new look:

Business in the front, party in the back? Skidmark? Buns of Flesh? Ms. Clean? Please help.

It was the summer of 2002. I’d just graduated from NYU and was trying to adjust to the adult world. So far so good; I was working at a popular magazine and had found a cheap share in the East Village. I also thought my new roommate, Gia, was very cool – even if I was too shy to befriend her.

By June, however, things at work had taken a strange turn when pay was inexplicably frozen for my department. Each morning since missing our May paycheck on June 1st, we trooped into accounting to see if our checks had come in and each morning, they had not.

“We’re working on it,” said the accountants. “All you can do is wait.”

By July, we hadn’t been paid in 8 weeks. My work lunches had once been bought from Wendy’s or Au Bon Pain; now I was bringing Cup Noodles and washing them  down with the office kitchen’s packets of Swiss Miss hot chocolate. Dinners were similar. Heifer was only fed twice a day, as opposed to her usual 6 feedings. I know. I was a cruel mistress but times were hard.

July 4th came – a beautiful, sunny day. Gia and her boyfriend had organized a barbecue to be held on our roof top.

“You’re more than welcome to come,” Gia said as I slumped, hunger-struck, on our couch. “Nick’s making all sorts of great things!”

She didn’t have to tell me – I’d seen his grocery bags, overflowing with meats and thick cobs of white corn. My eyes had bulged to see him plucking fat scallops from their shells and wrapping them with thick pink bacon before piercing them with a skewer. Nick was something of a gourmand; there were blue corn chips instead of regular tortilla shells and bunches of cilantro to cut into the hamburger patties. He’d also bought juicy sausages and was busily browning them on the stove. Their exquisite perfume made my eyes water with desperation.

The guests began arriving bearing 6-packs and I shrunk further into a corner. Gia had invited me to join the party, but I felt uncomfortable doing so because apart from Gia and Nick, I didn’t know anyone there. One by one, they trooped upstairs and finally, Nick, too, was gone. When the door slammed shut, another gust of deliciousness was fanned my way and then, finally, I was alone.

I got up and stars of hunger swam in front of my eyes. Now that everyone was gone, I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to have my ramen dinner. The wonderful smells of barbecue preparation had left me even weaker, and I dragged my feet to the kitchen with effort.

That’s when I saw them – the 12 brown meat patties lying atop the stove. I’d been left alone with the burgers.

When you’re hurtling down a hunger spiral and left alone with meat that doesn’t belong to you, several things could go through your mind. One of them might be guilt for wanting to help yourself to an innocent little patty. Another might be the thought that there are so many, no one will notice that one’s gone. Besides, you were invited to the party – why can’t you have a burger? That said, if you take a burger, will you have to go to the party? Oh, but don’t those burgers look luscious. Wouldn’t it be nice to eat something other than styrofoam and MSG this week?

That’ll probably be the last thought you have before you eat one. It was the last thought in my mind, anyway.

The next was: this meat is raw.

Raw. Not rare, mind you. I love rare meat. This meat was raw. When I horrifiedly spit it out into a napkin, I saw that it was cold, pink, and marbled with gelatinous white fat.

There’s just one thing to do when you’ve had a blob of raw hamburger in your mouth: wash away the injury with a cold beer. Fortunately, I knew just where to find one.

It’s now been 7 years since I was hungry enough to steal a browned-on-the-outside-completely-raw-on-the-inside burger and I still haven’t figured out why anyone would brown just the outside of their burgers and leave them alone before taking them upstairs to finish grilling. Does it help pack in the marinade? Could it be to prevent them spoiling? Why leave them at all?

Gia doesn’t know, either. Shortly after the party – my first rooftop Fourth of July in New York City – we became friends. Eventually we became close enough that I could confess to her my crime of hunger. She had broken up with Nick by then so I suppose neither of us will ever know.

The accounting department finally paid us the next week, with never a satisfying explanation as to why they had withheld our checks for 8 weeks. I paid my bills and bought soap, groceries, and lipstick. Heifer went back to eating 6 times a day. That’s why I call her Heifer, you know.

With Sean in Cork, I don’t get to analyze a person’s accent much these days. Enter: a 2-week long visit with my parents! My parents have been speaking English for nearly 35 years. After all that time, you’d expect them to be fluent – and they are – but sometimes, the flaws in their fluency come through. Since they speak to me in Italian over the phone, I’ve rarely heard them speak English since I moved out of the house. Sometimes, when it’s been a while, I forget that English is their third language until I hear them speak. A small sample of my Guatemalan dad’s pronunciation quirks:

• dump/jump/plump/etc = domp/jomp/plomp. Colomboss Circle really used to be the domps.
• snail/stop/sell/etc = eh-snail/eh-stop/eh-sell. I keep getting all this jonk mails. Who are this eh-sexy eh-slots and why are they mailing me?
• bus/fuss/just = bass/fass/jast. In the 70s, The Jackson 5 and ABBA were popular, as well as De Hassle. The who, dad? You know; do de Hassle ….

Idioms:

• “global warming” = “global warning”
• “kid in a candy store” = “pig in a candy store.”

Spelling, as discovered through IMs:

• “yuppies” = “yappies.” There is a new Applebease [sic] in town and all the yappies were there.
• “Thanksgiving” = “Thanksgiven”

My Italian mother has an easier time of it; her accent is quite good and her pronunciation issues are only limited to the inclusion of “l” in “salmon,” “h” in “graham,” or “o” in “leopard.” Sometimes, though, she too confuses her idioms and phrases:

• Bumble Fork = Fork Wood. They kidnapped your cousin’s son and left him in the middle of Fork Wood.
• [Pizza Hut] Pan Pizza = Pizza Pan. Hi, yes. I’d like to order one Pizza Pan with mushrooms.
• Hearts of palm = palmetto hearts
• Milk cartons = milk cartoons
  

When she spells, she tends to follow Italian rules, resulting in sentences like Hei! Uao! I really liked the pictures of the lasagna. It looked gnammy!

My parents love to jeer at each other’s English mistakes almost as much as they laughed at my own Italian and Spanish errors when I was a child. That’s right, my own – lest you think I was just mean-spiritedly picking on my parents as though my own eh-sheet didn’t eh-steenk. Four words for you: I eat my pigeon. But it’s all good. The mistakes you make in a foreign language sometimes help you learn, and sometimes remind you of how far you’ve come.

There are any number of vermin, reptiles and insect life here on the great limerock state of Florida. I hate most of them, especially the snakes. They are horrible and beady-eyed, writhing sickeningly through the grass. They often blend in with the blades so that every step on a lawn could set off a flickering tongue. My second most hated Florida critter is the no-see-’um.

Y’all call ‘em “midges” in other parts of the U.S.A. We call ‘em “no-see-’um”s here ’cause, well, you can’t see them. You’re sitting outside on the porch with a Bud, watching the folks inside through the screen door, and suddenly you’re whacking the new crop of welts on your arms and legs. They come out at dusk in their magic cloaked swarms, jeering at the all-too-visible palmetto bugs and fire ants, and flock towards light sources … which is probably why I’m clawing at my ankles and forearms as I type in the lamplight, raking up a nice crop of angry red lumps. Time for bed, y’all.

Years before I moved to Japan, my parents were themselves brand new expatriates. They came to the U.S. in 1975, newlywed and broke. My mother cried when she saw the run down Brooklyn apartment they were going to live in. My father flipped burgers in a hospital cafeteria. After my brother and I were born, he took a job in Bumble Fork, Florida. By that point, my parents were itching to escape the northeastern winters. They also figured Bumble Fork – a small town on the Gulf Coast – would be a good place to raise their children. They rented a house on a street named “Pinwheel” and began to build anew. Again.

They made friends – mostly other Italians and Latinos, with a few Scandinavians thrown in for poos and chuckles. Dom and Linda. Jon and Gladys. Benny and Fabrizia. The Garcias. The Johanssens. The Blancos. These were our surrogate family members for holidays big and little. We saw our real families about once a year, but for the day-to-day, my parents’ gang of fellow expatriate pals filled in. Sunday dinners. Days on the water. New Year’s Eve parties set to the tune of Juan Luis Guerra and Gloria Estefan. Our Florida family was happy – its members not only proud to represent their homelands, but secure in the fact that they could recognize another countryman in our little town on sight.

I can’t tell you how I suffered as a teen every time my parents began speaking in Italian or Spanish in public. Not that they were speaking the language itself, mind you – it was what they said. Complaining about the food, giggling at someone’s pants, cursing a lazy waitress underneath their breath. It always seemed to be the epitome of rudeness. I was so sure that someday, someone was going to understand them.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my parents would say as I blushed into my soda. “No one can understand us.” They were so convinced, so secure in their inner circle away from home. They knew every Latino or Italian in Bumble Fork and should another stumble into town, they could pick him or her out on sight. Besides – why not speak freely in a country where no one understood you? It was the next best thing to being invisible! That was a sense of cozy security I wouldn’t understand until I myself was a stranger in a strange land. It was also a sense of security that would be shattered for my mother one fateful trip home to Italy in 1997: for one split second, she forgot where she was when she decided to ridicule a woman’s outfit, only to be mortified when the woman shot her an enraged glare. It was enough to stun her into respectful silence … until she returned to Florida.

It’s been interesting being here in Florida with my parents this past week and a half. They live in Tampa now, which is not where I grew up. I don’t know this house so when the phone rings, I can’t find it. When my friends come up to visit me, I don’t know where to take them for dinner. I open the wrong cupboard to find dishes and ask my mother if I can have a cracker – seconds before I remember that I’m a grown woman and can have 50 crackers if I want.

We visit St. Petersberg Beach when the weather is nice. The waves are green and warm as soup, lapping up against white sand. Orange-gammed seagulls and thong-clad grandmothers stroll along a surf that stretches towards the massive pink castle-shaped Don Cesar hotel. We choose sunset for our visits and I swim with my parents for the first time in 20 years.

We talk about our family – first the ones in Italy and Guatemala and then the family we’re not related to. After all these years together, the divorces feel like personal betrayals and the deaths make us cry. It was Dom’s 77th birthday this week. Benny’s still giving Lucci and Brada bags as gifts. Jon won a prize for Bumble Fork’s best Victory Garden. Giancarlo’s new wife is a plastic surgeon so Mitzi and Velma are giddy, expecting VIP treatment.

My parents pause to gawk at a sun-dried old man wading through the surf, just past us. His long gray hair is in dread locks and even though his mouth is closed, we can see he’s toothless. He must be in his 90s. Or his 50s – it’s hard to tell with a leathery pelt like that.

“Isa,” my dad asks my mother in Italian. “Isn’t he part of your swim group?” They both cackle uncharitably.

“I was wondering why the water is so warm,” my mother says. They giggle like impish kids and for one second, I’m back at Peck’s Crab Shack, burying my humiliated face into my pile of garlic crabs. The next, I’m back on the Midosuji, groaning to Sean that if I hear just one more person scream, “えええええ!” I’m going to pull the emergency brake. Maybe then, the train attendants will finally do something other than show off their pretty white gloves.

Just a reminder, there are two days left in the Blognet contest to vote for I Eat My Pigeon in the Best Diarist category. Click here to boost my ego. If you want to, that is. No pressure. It was seriously a huge honor just to be nominated.

Q: Why should you vote for me?

A: Because I make punny blog post titles like the one above. “Hark! Plugs!” It sounds like “spark plugs”! Get it?!

Pardon me. I always get punny when I’m hungry. But that’s why they make crabs, gator tail, and u-peel-um shrimp – something about the Omega 3s curbs poorly wrought wit.

I’m here in Tampa, visiting my parent for 2 weeks. American Airlines now charges $15 per checked bag and $7.95 for wifi in the terminals. No more peanuts. No more earphones. Snacks available for a small fee, payable only by cash or debit. No movies or TV – just 2.5 hours of delay on the tarmac.

I arrived at night, which meant dinner. My mother announced at the airport that she’d been cooking all day: risotto ai frutti di mare and a prune crostata for dessert. Mamma mia, indeed. We are going to St. Petersburg Beach today for Father’s Day; my first Father’s Day with my dad since I moved out of the house 11 years ago. When I dressed this morning, I picked through the summery clothing I bought in Thailand and Viet Nam. New York is still rainy and cold but Florida is, well, Florida so bring on the sunscreen. I chose a fitted black cotton halter top embroidered with roses and realized that I – a city girl – had no beach bag. In a pinch, my turquoise silk scarf from Hoi An doubles as a furoshiki. There’s your multicultural craftiness for you.

In Florida, I’m with Heifer – the beloved cat I tearfully left with my parents when I moved to Japan. For a good six months, I debated not even moving abroad because I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving her behind and when I finally made the decision, the plan was to stay for only a year before settling back in New York for good. I don’t blame her for being angry – I’d be furious. But I had somewhat hoped that at the first whiff of me, she’d remember what we meant to each other. Alas.

Heifer pretends not to see me, but I can’t stop looking at her. She is my beautiful Little Miss Tigerstripes, after all. With her little white feet, big ol’ ears and big green eyes. Because she now eats the other cat’s food and has developed a nervous licking tic, she has become fat like a croissant and bald-assed like a baboon.

“Heifer,” I call as she waddles past without so much as sniffing my leg. “Don’t you remember? You used to jump into my bed as soon as I turned out the lights. You’d burrow underneath the blanket and purr until morning.”

“Heifer!” I say as she chooses the furthest chair from me. “Don’t you remember? You used to steal the potatoes out of my leftover chicken vindaloo. And then you’d sprawl across my computer when I was trying to work. Me. That was me. You used to meow in response every time I talked to you.”

When I look into her big green eyes, rimmed in rings of black and white, I could swear she does remember and is trying to torture me for it. Like Darin last week, she seems to say: “You stayed away longer than you said you were going to.” It’s not enough that I’ve felt consumed with guilt for the past 2 and a half years. She has to twist the knife.

“This is just like you, Heifer,” I tell her. “You always did like punishing me.”

Heifer tucks her little white feet under herself, just like a roosting chicken.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know how many times I can tell you I’m sorry.”

She stands, stretches – her black stripes standing to attention – and quietly pads out of the room. Her hairless bottom seems to mock me.