Month: June 2019

Okay, Let’s See What I Can Do Here (Wisin y Yandel, AT&T Center, June 1, 2019)

Music! That’s a subject that’s been much on my mind lately.

So I went to two concerts this month. On June 1 I went to see Wisin y Yandel and the concert was awesome, even if I was outside my comfort zone. And you need to leave your comfort zone sometimes, you know? The entire concert was in Spanish. And not just Spanish, but Puerto Rican Spanish. Even most of my Spanish-speaking coworkers can’t cope with Puerto Rican Spanish.

It looks to me like that’s because, Puerto Rican Spanish is a sort of mini version of English. You know how English is French on top of German on top of Latin (with bits of the other languages of the Roman Empire sprinkled in there) on top of Common Brittonic? Well, Puerto Rican Spanish is mostly Spanish, but where English has Common Brittonic Puerto Rican Spanish has Taino and the Spanish has words that came from Africa with enslaved African people and also from English, thanks to attempts to force Puerto Rican people to speak English. I do wonder where some of the peculiarities of Puerto Rican Spanish come from, like the dropping of the “d” from final syllables — You can see this in prominent display in the Wisin song Corazón Acelerao. I wonder if maybe that’s a Portuguese influence? Portuguese does have an “-ão” ending, though it doesn’t make them participles.

But, you know, “¡Manos arriba!” is pretty clear in any dialect.

I knew about half of the songs. Several of the songs I prepared for the occasion weren’t on the set list and several that I hadn’t gotten around to study yet were.

One of the moments that I really felt moved by was when they started listing Latin American areas and people started lighting the flashlights on their phones. My assumption was that they were asking people to light their phones by where their ancestors came from. They didn’t list Czechia or Latvia or Germany or Scotland, so I felt kind at loose ends for a moment until I realized how pretty the AT&T Center looked bathed in all of those lights.

There was music, and dancers, and pyrotechnics, and costume changes and more music and more pyrotechnics. It was very impressive.

And then at the end of the concert, Wisin fell from the stage. I was looking directly at the stage but was pretty far back, so it wasn’t clear to me that’s what had happened and no one seemed concerned, so I assumed that he had jumped down there for some reason. Then the house lights came up and everyone was leaving so I just left. I was mostly kind of let down that the concert just sort of stopped with no encore. Later I found out what had happened and felt really bad about feeling disappointed in the ending, but, like I said, I didn’t hear any gasps or anything or anyone saying, “Wow, I hope he’ll be okay” on my way out, either.

And since Wisin wasn’t seriously injured (he got checked out at a local hospital), I have almost nothing but good memories of my first Reggaeton concert and I’m considering going to see Maluma in September.

I was about to publish this post and then I remembered the Gratuitous Amazon Link. Since I’ve been talking about Wisin y Yandel, I figure I should use one of their albums, only I’m sort of a baby fan right now, so I just sorted them by user reviews and picked the highest one. So here it is: Los Extraterrestes, Wisin y Yandel.

Yes, I Know I’m Fighting a Losing Battle Against Writer’s Block

I don’t know what’s up with that. I sit down and open WordPress once a week or so but never make any progress.

Well, there’s an exceedingly slim chance that this might end up being a health blog about cancer. That’s something I could write about.

I’ve been having a “globus sensation” for the last day or so. A globus sensation usually is the result of GERD or stress or an abrasion in the throat but rarely it can be esophageal cancer. There’s also a slight chance it could be inflammation of the larynx from either bacteria or a virus and I found one story where it turned out to be a tonsil stone.

And I don’t think it’s cancer, really. I don’t feel nauseated and I can still eat and there’s no blood in my sputum (that’s the stuff you cough up when you cough) or stool. But it’s a nice unsettling thing to discover is an option at 3:00 in the morning. Actually eating soft food (I’ve been sticking to soft food because if it’s a scratch I don’t want to make it worse, not because I can’t eat not-soft food) and drinking cold water makes it feel better. And since eating makes it feel better, that increases the chance that it might be GERD.

I’m starting with throat abrasion and working my way up from there. That was the most common explanation when I first looked up “I feel like there’s something stuck in my throat” 12.5 hours ago. And I did eat some carrots and felt one go down the wrong way about 18 hours before that (about six hours before the sensation started), so I’m operating on the assumption that it’s a scratch in my throat and will be gone within three to four days, so by Sunday or Monday. If I still feel like this on Sunday morning, I’ll go to the Doc in a Box and have them look at it.

Come to think of it, the second most common explanation when I first looked up “I feel like there’s something stuck in my throat” was something stuck in one’s throat. So I guess it’s not impossible that that piece of carrot is still in there somewhere.