Eye Trip: Arctangents & A Miniature Queen

Growing up, my sister Elyse would often refer to me in not so favorable terms. “Uch… you’re such a nerd Jason,” she’d say in a typical Long Island accent. Well after this post, I’m sad to say that I think I may have provided enough evidence to support that claim.

For the past several weeks I’ve been building all my own living room furniture since the Peace Corps doesn’t exactly provide a six-figure salary (or even five-figures for that matter). Just 4 blocks from my apartment there’s a place called Placa Centro, a Chilean company that sells big sheets of particleboard covered with a wood-looking finish just like the furniture you can buy at Ikea. Hmm.. I thought. Could I build an entire living room from 2.5 meter by 2 meter particleboard sheets? Of course! So, like a good nerd I broke out some 3D modeling software and started to design. I measured the heights of some chairs in my office and a sofa at a friend’s house and even found out that through a lot of research, Herman Miller, the company that designed the famous $700 mesh-backed Aeron office chair, determined that the most comfortable seatback angle is 25 degrees. After about a week (and after several passionate uses of the arctangent function to determine the best locations to mount the seatbacks), I had models of a chair, a side table, a coffee table, and – most challenging – a working futon, all made from 1.8 centimeter thick particleboard (a tad less than 3/4 inch for those of you still stuck in the Stone Ages). I then broke apart all the models to create a list of all the pieces I’d need to build all the furniture. At Placa Centro, you give the list to a woman at a computer, and after entering all the dimensions the computer optimizes the layout of the cuts on the board to minimize the amount of wasted wood. The computer then prints out a diagram of the board with all the cuts on it, which then gets passed on to the guys that operate a big wall saw. Here, they cut the board into all the rectangular pieces you need for free. They’ll even glue a wood-looking border on the sides of the pieces you request so you don’t see the particleboard innards. Most people get a few big cuts, so I think the guys cutting the boards wanted to kill me when they saw my list of lots of tiny cuts. Usually it takes an hour or two… I was told to come back tomorrow by a guy clenching his jaw and shaking his head back and forth. :) The next day I headed back there and immediately spotted my order resembling a giant-sized pile of cards during a game of 52-card pickup. Back at home I began the construction process, and three weeks later after installing well over 300 screws I had my very own living room. I even used the scrap wood from my order to build a floor lamp complete with a 99-cent paper shade supported by 4 strings. Coming soon to an Ikea near you… the latest line of flat-pack furniture by Kreiselman Designs. There may be an ounce or two of dork in me, but for $150 I’ve got a pretty damn cool living room! Check out the pics at the bottom of this post.

Besides my venture into the world of furniture-making, this past week was a BIG one for Loja. All the offices closed at noon on Wednesday and many people didn’t come to work at all. Why? Because The Queen was coming. Not the type of queen you typically think of though. This one’s less than 3 feet tall, made out of wood and lives in a glass box. She’s the Queen of Cisne, or La Reina del Cisne. All throughout the province of Loja in southern Ecuador, you see stickers, shrines, pendants, figurines, and business names all dedicated to this Virgin Queen. (I’d imagine it would be pretty hard for her to have sex trapped in her little glass box.) Even the stadium here is called Estadio Reina del Cisne. Most of the year she sits in the town of El Cisne about 45 miles from Loja in an enormous, Gothic-style church, but from August 16 – 20 she’s carried from El Cisne to Loja by an enormous procession of 500,000 people (yes, half a million people!) from southern Ecuador and northern Peru. This is by far the largest religious procession in the country. According to local lore, the ancestors of the people in this area made the long and difficult journey to Quito in the late 16th century to find a fitting religious statue. They returned in 1594 with the carving of La Reina del Cisne, and since then she’s been the ‘Queen’ of the people here. (Thank you ‘Lonely Planet’ for filling in the blanks in this story!) When she finally arrives in Loja, there’s a lot of fanfare to say the least. Dancing troupes, military salutes, marching bands, fireworks, thousands of rose petals released from balconies, doves released from paper mache bells, a concert and a huge outdoor mass on the main plaza in the city. I didn’t do the whole 3 day walk, but I did walk against “traffic” for an hour or so and then turned around and walked with everyone else back to Loja, which was good enough for me to get a feel for it! The number of people walking was astounding and there were tons of people selling everything from sunglasses and umbrellas to freshly grilled pork skin and bags of cotton candy, each stuffed with a fake $100 bill. It was definitely something to see! On November 1st, the whole process is repeated in reverse and the Reina will rest in El Cisne again until the following August.