Cilantro and Lime

“Your problem,” she says around the lick’s worth of salt between her thumb and forefinger, “is you’re sober. This doesn’t have to be so difficult.” She gulps down the whole glass and slams it on the table. Makes a face. Bites into a lime. Makes another face. She does not have the same problem she so succinctly identified in me. “Not everything has to mean something, you know.”

An Open Letter to Hair Stylists

Dear stylists of the greater metropolitan Lincoln, Nebraska, area:

My name is Sam. Some of you may know me, others may not; that’s all right. I’m writing this as a kind of introduction that hopefully will save us some awkward hiccups down the road.

Something About That Terrible Nebraska Song

I try to avoid spending too much time having opinions about pop culture. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn that my taste in music is pretty damn awful, and my opinions tend to reveal that I just don’t get it. For the most part I try to let other people enjoy their favorite songs without disparaging them too much—to “let them be wrong,” in the immortal words of my Oma.

But there is one affront to culture that I cannot allow to go unchallenged: Lady Gaga’s execrable “Yoü and I.”

Cien cumpleaños de soledad

Many years later, as he faced a jury of his peers, Doctor Samuel Padilla would recall the weekend of his twenty-fourth birthday. At that time he was living in his grandmother’s house, an older building with shady gardens, a courtyard after the Roman style, and an ancient cat with three teeth.

An Impractical Guide to Latin America for Clueless Foreigners

I’ve been in South America for approximately eight weeks now, so I am confident in saying that that automatically makes me an expert of culture and language and sophistication. People who know me know I’ve always been a classy guy, but I think the epitome of class is sharing the wealth of one’s knowledge with the bumbling philistines of this world, that they might learn just enough to stop embarrassing themselves, and more importantly me, in front of classy Latin ladies.

Latin American culture is like the Thomas Riker to our William Riker—a clone created in a transporter accident in 2361 that has the same memories as you but has a goatee and is currently dating your ex-girlfriend. So here, in no particular order, are five things you should keep in mind when traveling the spicier, more southern America.