Cachupa is Very Filling.

I am walking down the street.

There is a problem- there is an immensely disconcerting problem on my mind.

I am visibly grappling with this problem. I am talking to myself. My arms are moving about as I walk.

My hair is extremely rough. The red dye is beginning to fade. It’s probably due for some retouching.

There is a problem.

It is a foundational conundrum which I believe to have very far-reaching implications on the general domain of Statistical Learning :

It is an issue involving statistical learning models and what I believe to be an unfounded presupposition of input variable completeness.

I look extremely unkempt.

I look like I just emerged from weeks of living alone in the desert with wild animals.

And that is actually true. All except the wild animals part. I really did recently emerge from living alone in the desert.

For some reason there are like no animals in the wild on this island- at least I haven’t come across any. For some strange reason.

Someone is laughing at me. He’s in the grocery store by the left.

It’s Meky. I can tell from his voice.

I’m angry at him for mocking me.

Of course I’m not entirely sure, but I believe I’m the one he’s laughing at. I feel sad about being laughed at, but at the same time I somewhat understand. If I was in his shoes I’d probably laugh at myself too.

Walking about the island like an insane person, with no definite purpose. Wonder why he won’t just get a job. Always having sand in his hair. Talking aloud to himself. Fighting against problems nobody can see. Getting arrested every once in a while. He has a computer that is probably worth a few thousand dollars, but he has neither money nor food to eat. Strange guy. Very very strange guy.

Yeah, I’d most likely laugh at myself too.

Meky is cool though. We met in a restaurant at Espargos earlier in the year. I was there for some breakfast. I still had some money left from the hundred dollars I landed in the country with. That morning he introduced me to Cachupa- Cape Verde’s flagship meal.

It’s very filling.

Hmm.

It was indeed pretty filling.

I like Meky. He’s very tall. Tall and burly. He is like a wall. Like a smiling, brown-skinned wall. I like him.

But he’s pissing me off this afternoon- Why is he laughing at me?

I don’t have time for him and his painful derision right now- I have an illegitimate statistical learning presupposition to worry about.

I need to pay him back his money soon. I’ll feel comfortable enough to really dish him a piece of my mind then.

It’s difficult to properly express annoyance at someone when you’re owing them money. You can’t really say the things you want to say, how you want to say them.

Don’t worry Mister Meky. Wait till I pay you back your fifty euros. Then you’ll know what’s going on.

I needed some money that day. I needed to open a Cape Verdean bank account, and a deposit was required by the bank.

I had recently reconnected with an NGO in Nigeria, and we had just vivified a monthly financial agreement which was hibernated by my travel to the USA for studies a few years earlier.

My Bank of America account was unusable because my balance there was a very negative number.

I had a Nigerian bank account. In fact, I had some money in it. It was to my inestimable dismay however, that I learnt the Central Bank of Nigeria had banned the use of debit cards outside the country- in a bid to somehow prevent a further devaluation of their currency.

And so the little money in that account had been transformed into a sequence of meaningless numbers which could not rescue me from the hunger and general pecuniary anguish I was experiencing.

Oh God, these Nigerian people have struck again. They want me to die in this place.

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Meky owns a grocery store.

A grocery store is like heaven when you’re hungry to the core, and you’re like friends with the owner.

He helped me with some direly needed food. He wrote me a cheque for fifty euros after holding on to my GoPro and tripod and other recording gear as collateral.

This is not a GoPro.

He looked at me, with a smirk on his face.

Ah, Meky. GoPro. Chinese GoPro clone. Whatever. Just sign this cheque you this wonderfully benevolent being so I can move forward with my life and not die of frustration in this strange land pls

Thanks to him, it was possible to open the account. The new account still was not usable for the NGO connection though. There was another infuriating complication with international transfers that precluded it’s use for that purpose.

This life and problems.

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Meky’s voice is sounding more distant now.

I keep walking, and grappling with this very important problem that no one can see.

Stolen Binoculars and Free Food.

I just stole back my gas cylinder from Yengis’s apartment.

Well it’s my gas cylinder to begin with. It’s not really stealing if it’s yours right?

No. No I don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

Well I was hungry. And Yengis was asleep. So I had to silently creep in through the window. I tiptoed across his studio apartment- across the strange smelling Senegalese rugs and grotesque traditional masks and a sound asleep Yengis, and and re-obtained my gas cylinder.

I needed to cook some food.

 

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I saw Izmir Bamba wearing my boxers yesterday afternoon. One pair of the three dark-grey Old Navy boxers I bought in San Francisco.

Dude didn’t even have a care in the world, strutting across the verandah of my living space wearing my underwear- my fucking underwear.

Like what the fuck dude. At least try to be a bit discreet with it, don’t flaunt my own boxers in my face guy.

I honestly do not know how he got a hold of it. I’ll seriously need to count my underwear to know how many I have left. Everything has been disappearing recently.

I think first it was my binoculars.

No no, first it was the ten escudo note that was on the stool by the wall when the police arrested me at the beach.

Neighbours didn’t even care that I was languishing in the cell at the police station the night before. Without having committed any actual crime.

Day broke, and then they also broke into my apartment to see what they could salvage.

 

And then there was my binoculars. Initially they used to borrow it. Especially that Lucio Cape Verdean guy. He is an annoying guy, I don’t really like him.

There was this day he was telling me I needed to learn to speak better Creole. With a very heavy air of condescension.

I was so annoyed. I felt like letting him know my thoughts on minority languages and their current state in the world regarding their relative incapacity to provide speakers with generally desired social mobility and the worldwide language shifts that occur as a consequence of that, but I decided to just let it slide. I was transporting a substantially voluminous container of water from the well behind the hotel back into my living space- I wasn’t really in the mood to engage in an argument.

And then like every two hours some random guy usually walks by my living space screaming “O LUCIO!!!! O LUCIO!!!!” At the very top of his voice.

It’s very very easy to dislike someone whose name is a recurrent source of disturbance to your life.

So yeah initially they used to borrow the binoculars. And then each time it got more and more difficult to retrieve it.

The first time they returned it after like a few hours, marvelling at the thing and wondering what end they were to look through.

The next time it took a bit longer.

The time after that I had to go upstairs to extricate my binoculars from the evasive hands of the pesky Cape Verdeans that lived there. It was broken. I was annoyed. I had to fix it with some glue. There was a part of the binoculars that the glue could not quite take care of- I left the entire thing to hang on the wall by the cord while I figured out how to fix the issue.

And then they stole the entire thing.

Motherfuckers.

 

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I played some soccer today. With the Cape Verdean guys.

I haven’t played soccer in years.

I was surprised at my performance. For some reason I seem to be much  better at soccer than I remember. I scored like three goals. And I was generally a considerably contributive member of the team. I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t expecting that at all.

I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with mind-body co-ordination. I haven’t experienced much physical growth in the past few years, given the end of adolescence- and so maybe that has given whatever part of my head is responsible for physical co-ordination, time to become accustomed with the way my body has turned out to be post- puberty growth-spurts and all. Mind-body co-ordination is possibly not as good when your body is changing so quickly. I don’t know. That’s just what I think though.

There are teenagers who are extremely prodigious at football. And their bodies are changing very quickly. I don’t know. I don’t know. The co-ordination thing is probably just one way of looking at it.

 

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Today has had its ups and downs. I was expecting some funds from the NGO in Nigeria that I have some sort of an AI research associate arrangement with. This afternoon’s walk to the bank turned out to be purely recreational, with absolutely no funds reception at the end of it.

I do not even have much time to dwell in this disappointment. Nino told me the Cape Verdeans are making some cachupa this afternoon. Cachupa is this interesting traditional Cape Verdean meal fundamentally based on boiled corn. Nino said the food would be ready in about an hour. That was like forty-five minutes ago. I need to get back to the hotel. Like now. Like right now.

The funds coming from Nigeria can keep doing whatever it is they are doing in international airspace, en route this island.

I need to get back.

I have to get some of that Cachupa.

 

Image:

Some dope ass Senegalese food. I had no idea people boiled carrots in stew before this.