My Intimate Experiences with Dora the Explorer

This is a piece inspired by the book How to be Inappropriate by Daniel Nester. He has written a number of creative non-fiction pieces in bulleted format, analyzing various events in his life, and I thought it would be a good format for me to try out.

My Intimate Experiences with Dora the Explorer

1. Dora the Explorer premiered on August 14th, 2000. I was 4 years old, and it was the day before my birthday. The show was destined to become a hit.
2. In elementary school, kids liked to show of their miscellaneous phrases of Spanish they knew. ¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás? Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco. I could only count to ten, but I wanted to count further.
   1. I asked my nanny Julia if she could teach me numbers beyond 10. She speaks Portuguese, which she claims is “the same thing.” Though she repeated her numbers multiple times, I could never remember any number past diez.
   2. That day we were celebrating her birthday. In order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting her old age, she told me that she was turning sixteen, dieciseis. I believed this for the next three years until I could rationally proportion ages.
3. At a garage sale, Julia bought me a Dora keychain. It contained a mini-marionette of Dora that hopped when you pressed a button. I played with this toy so much, it broke. Afterwards, I stopped watching Dora. I do not believe these events are related.
4. Once, an ice cream truck came around my neighborhood. I decided to purchase a Dora the Exporer ice pop. Unfortunately, I did not make the mental connection that her brown colored hair would be flavored chocolate. I do not like chocolate. I threw the ice pop in the trash.
5. In 2012, I taught comedy at a sleepaway camp. I did not know much about comedy, but a lack of qualification did not stop me from pursuing my dreams. My co-counselor was Gabby. She knew more than I did.
   1. We asked our campers what they found funny. One of them said, “I like it when stupid people don’t notice obvious things.” Gabby said this reminded her of Dora. Within this group of campers, there was a 15 year old boy from Venezuela. We all looked at him instantaneously. Fate was decided.
   2. This Dora impersonator was not in fact Latino. He was half-Italian and half-Basque. Basque is a wannabe country within Spain. No one ever asked about his ethnic makeup, because he looked generally Latino. His skin was olive and his hair was cut near his ears.
      1. A side note: in Venezuela, Dora teaches English.
   3. Before the sketch can be performed, I had to be gather props. Coincidentally, I owned a purple Kipling backpack. This became Dora’s backpack. Inadvertently, I had owned a Dora backpack for a number of months. I couldn’t believe I had never realized this.
   4. The sketch was a success. The Dora impersonator gained legendary status, and so did Gabby and me.
6. At that camp, I lacked the ability to tell time because we could not use our phones in public. When my mother came to visit, she took me to Walmart so I could buy a watch. I entered the children’s watch section, and I figured I should look around in a different part of the store. However, when I noticed a shiny Dora watch sitting on the shelf, I knew that it was for me.
   1. This watch had plastic attachments marking every day of the week. The first day I wore that watch was a Friday.
   2. After camp was over, I never stopped wearing that watch. I wore it every single day into the school year. At first people humorously commented on this exquisite artifact, but soon it became another mundane aspect of life.
   3. Two weeks after I bought the watch, it already began to break down. The plastic ring that kept the extra length of wrist wrap in place broke down. I replaced it with a broken hair tie. This lasted for months.
      1. Until one day. I had to run the mile during gym class, but I forgot my hair tie at home. I tried to use the hair tie from my watch. Unfortunately, when I tried to wrap my hair in it, the tie broke. It was a sweaty day.
   4. Occasionally, I would forget to switch the proper date, and the false labeling on my watch would make me anxious. In order to calm my nerves, I would reverse the obsolete date onto the blank side so that it could no longer be seen. Instead of having a Wednesday label on a Thursday, I would have a white label that I interpreted as “Not Wednesday.”
   5. Overtime, these plastic labels wore out and lost their attachability. One day near the end of December, my social studies class was switched to a different room. The Wednesday label fell off my watch and I could not find it. At that point I only had six days of the week. I did not want to give the other days of the week an unfair prejudice, so I dumped all of the labels into the trash. I still kept the basic Dora watch.
7. Not everyone was accepting of my watch. My friend Besmah would ask me during social studies why I liked it so much. At that point, the Dora watch was more of a habitual object than an expression of my interest in bilingual children’s television.
   1. Besmah asked what I could do to change my watch. I told her she would have to buy me a new one.
   2. I asked her why she didn’t like my watch. Eventually she admitted that it terrified her. I teased her for a week.
   3. She never bought me a new watch.
8. Throughout the year of the Dora watch, I met a number of friends of the Dora impersonator.
   1. His friend Tony came to New York, and we decided to meet up. Tony is a rich boy in a rich family. He shops at Bergdorf Goodman and wears cologne from Polo Ralph Lauren. He noticed my watch. He said, “you need a new watch.”
   2. I did not tell him that he should buy me a new watch. I did not think we had reached that point of intimacy in our relationship yet.
9. My nanny Julia has a grandson. She keeps her grandson at my house at various times throughout the week. His name is Christian.
   1. When Christian lays next to me, he often grabs at my watch. A few times, I have taken off the watch so he could examine it. He likes put its in his mouth. It doesn’t bother me though. After a while, you get used to toddler saliva.
   2. Christian’s favorite TV show became Dora the Explorer. Julia set the television to Nick Jr. each day so he can watch. When Dora came on the screen, he bounced up and down in his crib with excitement.
      1. This influx of Dora was quite helpful to me because I was trying to learn Spanish. This was for two reasons. First of all, I had always wanted to become bilingual, but my French classes rubbed me the wrong way and I never got a full grasp on the language. Secondly, the friends of the Dora impersonator spoke Spanish, so I figured that was as good an excuse as any to attempt the language.
         1. I can now count past ten in Spanish.
   3. Christian acquired all sorts of various Dora memorabilia. He had a plastic imitation of the backpack, which played music. He banged it on the ground so the music would play over and over.
      1. I still think my Dora backpack is better.
   4. He also came with Dora DVDs. He put these DVDs in his mouth. He puts everything in his mouth.
   5. Julia begged me to play the DVD. I placed it in the Playstation 3 hoping it would work. Somehow, it was still operational.
   6. This summer, Julia asked me to help her out with her garage sale. Even though she was leaving for Portugal that following Thursday, she insisted on having a garage sale because her son Victor bet her 100 dollars that she couldn’t. Christian sat on the steps. He watched his Dora DVD at least 20 times.
10. I never stopped wearing that Dora watch, but overtime it became less and less operational.
    1. I thought that the watch had died in January because no numbers appeared on the screen. The watch ended up returning to normal the next day. At that point though, it was no longer reliable. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it would not.
11. On the day my Dora watch actually died, I was sitting in the back of the Herricks Summer Music orchestra, now a counselor of viola instead of comedy, although if you ask me, the viola is still a joke.
    1. My stand partner was an orchestra student teacher. He was a cellist but he wanted to improve his viola abilities, so he decided to join the orchestra of middle schoolers.
    2. At a particularly dull point of time, I showed him my blank watch and commented, “I think I need a new watch.” He told me about a friend of his who has a girlfriend named Dora. Dora has short black hair. Dora is Mexican. Dora looks just like Dora the Explorer. So he says.
12. Now, I believe the Dora watch is dead.
    1. Though the watch is gone, the memories I had with that dear watch will last forever.
    2. Besmah will probably be pleased that my watch is gone.
    3. No hablo mucho en español, pero puedo contar las diez.
    4. Tony is now one of my best friends. I’m hoping after reading this, he will buy me a new watch. My birthday is August 15th. You should bookmark that Tony.
       1. I’ll be waiting.