1. Trump supporters are REAL!!!
And they’ll invite you to dinner only to cancel because they don’t actually wanna see your Puerto Rican tears (unless they get to collect them into a vial for their youth elixir). Ask them what brand of paper towel they use, $50 they say Bounty.
2. You know what else is real? Pickpockets.
At least in Puerto Rico people are honest about taking your stuff (politicians excluded), but whoever snuck my phone out of my purse at Le Bain, clearly has never needed to hold a gun up to an old lady’s face while his-or-her accomplice loads a generator into the back of their pickup. Fingers too slick.
3. Being Puerto Rican gets you mad discounts at all the places that matter.
Not only did I get me and all my friends (that’s like two people tbh I’m not that popular) into MoMA for free, I got $20 off a glass pipe and FREE PAPERS for all that organic tobacco! #krippykush
4. The fundraising game is strong and it is everywhere.
From $1 coffees to raffles at restaurants, small town church cookouts and T-Mobile’s epic home-run donation, you can feel the nonprofit love. Also, shoutout to my baby sis for selling cookies at her school! You go girl!
5. Bartenders and bouncers never know where to find the birthdate on your driver’s license.
Just yell at them in Spanish about postmodern colonialism and wave your hands around a lot, they’ll letcha right in, sweetie.
6. Confusing Spanish Harlem with (actual?) Harlem and booking your Airbnb in the latter is an exhilarating mistake.
Especially when you’re phenotypically as white as I am, but like, clearly boricua. Don’t front, papi. You wanna talk about gentrification? Si’down.
7. People still confuse Puerto Rico for Costa Rica, humanitarian crisis aside.
Don’t assume your yoga instructor that gives morning classes on a grassy knoll beside a pumpkin patch is actually an enlightened cosmic being, not everyone watches the news. Or knows how to differentiate words.
8. Taking a dump on Trump and the rest of the USA isn’t gonna save us.
But neither is wiping their bumholes. If Anthony Bourdain can apologize for sexism, America can apologize for imperialism – and, you know, obliterate Jones Law, amongst other things. #Bourdain2020