The Luxpats

Author: luxpat

  • Rikka Will Be the Last to Arrive

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    You may not be interested in this post, but seeing that it’s the reason I haven’t posted anything in an embarrassingly long amount of time,  I felt that I should get it over with. There are other things to talk about soon, like this hike called Lion’s Head where someone dies every couple of years…

  • That Kind of a Woman

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    I asked my mother if she ever thought she’d find herself sitting naked on a toilet in Africa with a shaved head and a tattoo on her hip. She thought about it. No, she hadn’t, she said. She and Dad have come to visit us and their grandson for three months. Her head was not…

  • Where Are You, Gary? Have You Killed Anyone Yet?

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    It was Valentines’ Day. David and I didn’t have plans, but that wasn’t unusual. Holiday celebrations are a luxury of the settled. We’d spent the past three months so disoriented by this land of opposites, by driving on the wrong side of the road and by Christmas in the summertime, that holiday traditions felt like…

  • Life Lessons from My Time in the Airport Bathroom

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    Title photo credit: Matt Chan @ Flickr.com I had a character defining moment. I never thought it would be in an airport bathroom. I thought when the moment came, I would learn who I really was as I was saving another person’s life, or confronting a robber in my home, or something equally righteous and…

  • Poor Customer Experience is a Design Problem

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    Yesterday, I had the conversation below with a Telkom customer service agent. I learned many things from this conversation, including that if you ever want to look deranged, all you have to do is laugh hysterically at the same time that your eyeball is twitching uncontrollably. Me: Hello, you just installed my internet yesterday but…

  • Getting Dissed by a Dolphin

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      Growing up, there were two kinds of kids in the world: kids who had been to Disneyland and kids who hadn’t. If you were in the first group, we poor kids naturally hated your guts. My own family’s version of a vacation was a 13-hour non-stop drive to Salt Lake City to visit relatives…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts, Part III

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    The zoo is an hour’s drive in the rain, through soupy fields of rice paddies. Occasionally we pass a farmhouse that seems to float in the water around it. A family sits on the porch: a grandmother,  a mother, and a small boy watching a teenaged boy steering their water buffalo through the muddy furrows.…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts

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    They send a car to fetch me in the morning, even though the call center is only a kilometer from my hotel. I am a client, and they are careful about security. On the drive we pass through shafts of dusty sun that pierce the dome above us. Even the sunny days steam here, even…

  • Conversations: Gypsy Bar

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    One evening, I had drinks with a black friend at a gypsy pub at the foot of the mountain. I say black because it would matter, when he said, unprovoked, “What some people don’t understand is that the whites came and built everything. Some black people just want to take it all without working. They…

  • Conversations with the Tribe

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    “The gardener is Luke. He’s wonderful, he’s from Malawi.” I follow Bronwen’s elegant pointer finger to the smiling man on the lawn. His grin splits his face into deep lines. “How are youu?” he calls. … “Don’t worry about making friends,” Amanda says.  “We’re not as cliquey with foreigners as we are with each other.”…