Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals Read Online Free PDF Page A

for hours and hours. As children, he had inculcated us in the finer details of plate tectonics, ensured we could spot fake trilobite fossils at a glance, and trained us never to leave home without our emergency bottle of hydrochloric acid, in the event that an innocent bike ride would result in the immediate need to determine the chemical composition of a mineral sample picked up along the way.
    His motto was that if you understood, you’d never have to memorize. You didn’t learn the periodic table by rote; you comprehended it. Ag stood for silver because argentum meant silver in Latin, which was where Argentina got its name. Ask him to pass the sugar at the breakfast table and he’d end up explaining the entire fermentation process for you.
    As a consequence, our “why phase” as children lasted only a matter of days. Other kids got the pleasure of watching their parents roll their eyes, throw up their hands, and plead, “Just quit asking questions!” But by the time we were three, we actually knew why grass was green (a result of the chlorophyll), how come the sky was blue (the cones in our retina respond most strongly to the short blue wavelength of the color spectrum), and the reasons birds flew (a column of decreased air pressure created by the movement of their wings).
    This tutelage continued even as adults, and today we weren’t going to get out of the bathroom until we learned the workings of the entire plumbing system in the house. By the time he’d finished and we all knew how to fix the sink in the event that a meteorite came crashing down on it, I couldn’t quite remember what the point was.
    â€œDon’t throw any paper in the toilet,” Catherine summed up. Instead, we were supposed to dispose of our used bits of tissue in the wastebasket, a rule in force in the bathrooms throughout Central America.
    Now that we were on the subject of strange Latin American habits, there was one other issue I needed clearing up immediately.
    â€œDo they ever switch their soda from bottles to cans?” I asked anxiously, wondering if anything had changed in the two decades I’d been gone.
    â€œNo,” my father said, happy to continue today’s lesson. “They drink it out of plastic bags.”
    This was something even my sisters had a hard time buying. “What—you go to the store and buy yourself a little baggie of Coke?” Heather asked.
    â€œOr Pepsi,” my dad added, launching into a lengthy explanation of the raw materials of Honduras that might have been titled:
    â€œThe Scarcity of Raw Materials Combined with a Limited Economy and
the Resulting Cultural Anomalies Among the Honduran Population”
    Author’s note:
For reasons of length, the full text has been omitted. See abstract below.
    Abstract:
In Honduras, it’s cheaper to drink soda out of a bag.
    To get a sense of what Honduras was like, you have to know a little bit about its history, which has had a lot more to do with bananas than any sane country is likely to consider prudent. Beginning in the early 1900s, this yellow innocuous-looking fruit has been the source of civil unrest, military occupation, strategic alliances, and, of course, potassium.
    In the early twentieth century, Honduras became the epitome of a banana republic—and not the kind selling high-quality cotton shirts at the mall. This was a poor nation that relinquished its national hold on its own interests in the pursuance of a higher good: money. Like a poor kid who invites his unpleasant rich neighbor to his birthday party in the hopes of scoring a Game Boy, Honduras welcomed U.S. investment in the region and in return offered to sing the tune “Happy Birthday” in English. 2 In exchange for the construction of roads and railroads, Honduras handed over its fertile farmland to American banana companies, which in the end turned out to be like getting the cartridges for free while having to rent