The most important thing that makes these my favorite shorts is that they just feel so unbelievable comfortable. There’s something about them that fit so good and the texture to them is just a little bit different then regular shorts. They’re not the same type of weave that I’ve in my other shorts. The mesh and the cut are just a little bit different. They’re such nice shorts that I even remember buying them at the Nike Outlet store just outside of Seaside, Oregon when I was still in high school.
I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to do with my hands.
Here’s a picture of me in my favorite shorts. They’re plain, simple, unappealing. They are currently being paired with the only ironic t-shirt I own (it reads “the Supes are back”), which itself is ironic because I don’t like ironic t-shirts and this t-shirt was not always ironic. The t-shirt is also complemented by a week of stubble, which I grew because everybody (read: my mom) asks to see more pictures of me to see how I’m doing and the beard helps disguise just how weight I’ve dropped. Several bouts with malaria and a blood infection are way more effective at shedding pounds than jazzercising.
(This current paragraph was originally unintended as I outlined this post, but I decided to use it to point out that jazzercise is recognized as an official word by the spellchecker.)
Perhaps the only thing frustrating about these shorts is that I’ve never been able find another pair like them. I haven’t even been able to find the same pair to start a stockpile for that unenviable day when these shorts will see their end, be it a ripped crotch, lost in luggage, eaten by rats (slightly common here) or just plain wearing threadbare. I have searched high and low online and offline for shorts that have the same distinct qualities as my shorts, and I just haven’t been able to.
I also have a pair of speakers. No, they’re not my favorite speakers, but they’re my only speakers, and that makes them my favorite. They’re just little desktop speakers that I got them here in Nampula, and that they’ve lasted longer than a week means they’ve beaten the odds for life-expectancy of just about anything here. Currently they’re sitting under my end-table and will get pulled up on top when its time to listen to music. But using them while they’re under the end table has an unexpected consequence: resonance.If you ever sing in the shower you know what resonance is. If you never sing in the shower then, my friend, you’re just not living. You know when you’re in the shower singing your heart out to Taylor Swift (I’m going out on a limb and assuming that a majority my readers are 14 year old girls) and you hit that one note in than one song she sings--you know, that famous one--and that note just rings out forever? That’s resonance. What does that have to do with my speakers? Do I only use them to play Taylor Swift? Do I sing in the shower? We’re not there yet, no, and all the time!
By putting them under the table, it acts like putting them in a cabinet and slightly amplifies the volume. It also manages to ring out some notes clearer than others. I first discovered this effect by listening to a song and hearing a harmony in the synthesizers that I hadn’t heard before. And yes, I know what you’re thinking; the song was Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins. This prompted me to start experimenting with placing my speakers in other random places that I new would oddly modify the sound. I tried the fridge, the freezer, under the counter, the bathroom, the shower (it was a super busy week, if you couldn’t tell). This was all in an effort to find some combination of space that would allow songs to just echo and ring out in brand new harmonies without it turning into an indiscernible echo like any music they play at an empty Mariners game.
Lost? Good. If you’re not, you might be as crazy as me and should get yourself checked out.
Where does any of this intersect? Well, last month or so, my laptop just went bananas. Actually bananas would have been really tasty. I’d better say my laptop went porcupines. The screen all of a sudden started flickering and developed this bad habit of going crazy and freaking-out more than a 14 year old girl at a [Taylor Swift concert / Justin Beiber meet-and-greet / “Twilight” blah blah blah I give up on this analogy] and rendered most of what was on the screen as illegible. I was sure a wire had popped loose, and so needed to take it apart.
Unfortunately, to take it apart necessitated a really super small, really super specific screwdriver (T5-Torx). So, I was off to the city to hit the stores looking for just what I needed. I first decided to hit one of the hardware stores to see if they had anything for me. The problem, as I’ve mentioned before, is that that there are really only 5 types of stores here that all have a very short supply of all the same oddly specific items. You have the hardware stores (tools, nails, tin roofs, cement, pipe, tiles, barbed wire) the appliance stores (water boilers, blenders, speakers, electric clothes irons, cell phones and chargers) office supply stores (notebooks, paper, computer cables, calculators) the non-edible grocery stores (powdered milk, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, pots and pans) and the plastic bucket stores (plain old plastic buckets).
I had already tried my luck in the outdoor markets, and by luck I mean absolute lack of it. The outdoor markets sells tools like American hardware stores get rid of the useless stuff. They put fingerless gardening gloves on a table with odd-sized windshield wipers and a sign saying “ALL ITEMS $1” and next thing you know you’ve bought a specialized 9-volt battery tester before you’ve even had time to ask “since when did my tongue stop working as an acceptable tester of 9-volt batteries?”. Being as my screw driver was an oddly specific tool that nobody here really has a need for, I thought I might be able to find one, but after a good hour of searching I gave up that route.
This screwdriver, like my favorite shorts, was turning into something that was going to be impossible to ever find here. No matter how diligent I was, and how long I looked. I just didn’t find it at all. But, much like moving my speakers from spot to spot, each store I entered held a surprise of its own. I usually just asked if they had the screwdriver, and upon finding out the answer was no, asked if they knew somewhere that might. They always gave me vague descriptions of locations. They’d say things like, “Up this street and over a little bit next to the people playing checkers” and, “Behind the butcher, but not too far behind, just a little.” They also gave me and even vaguer descriptions of the shopkeepers. Things like, “he’s Indian” (because half the shopkeepers are Indian) or, “he’s Chinese” because the other half of shopkeepers are Chinese) or, “he has an eye patch and his wife is really super fat”.
And these directions, like the sounds I’d never heard before from the speakers, showed me placed I never had bother to stop in before--a store that sold nothing but counterfeit movies, another that sold only printer cartridges and disco balls, and one that had a shop window full of sequined fabrics that when I entered the shopkeeper said, “We have no drugs, come back at a later time.”
But at the end of the day I was tired and screwdriver-less. I had discovered a lot of new places, but it ultimately led me no where and back home. Just like how the shower was the best place for my speakers, I can’t leave them there all the time and eventually have to return them to the end table. And just like I had come to face reality with my favorite shorts--that they just didn’t exist and I would never find another pair like them--I was forced to come to grips with the fact that I would never find this oddly specific screwdriver to fix my broken laptop screen.
And then one night, something amazing happened. I was sitting in my living room when there was a knock on my door. One of the kids had been working on fixing something extremely tiny and had a pile of screwdrivers. They belonged to Victor and he wanted me to hold on to them and return it to him. After looking at the tools, guess what I found…
My screwdriver. The T5. The really tiny one I had spent a day and a half looking for.
On reflecting on that moment of discovery, I didn’t jump up and down with joy for finding the screwdriver I needed. Nor did I curse the wind over wasting over a day looking for what was right next door all along. You know what my first thought was?
Well, maybe now I’m gonna find some more of those shorts.
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