One of the perils of text-based communication is the lack of cues that clearly signal irony being employed — no doubt we've all had our own mishaps behind this particular issue.
You can't cry about your mishaps.
"Our mishap in California set our program back a bit, but we've worked really hard to capitalize on the situation".
In Indonesia, my wife and I got stuck in a remote Javanese village when a road proved impassible, but a family took us in, and we ended up delighted by our mishap.
It wasn't exactly an easy trip — driving from one game park to the next, setting up and breaking camp, armed with all the proper gear — and I had taken to regarding our mishap-prone vehicle, which we had borrowed from a friend, as my third child, a moody teenager.
Vargas Llosa, in all his multifacetedness, in spite of and as well as his many rare gifts and talents as a novelist, remains fundamentally a great chronicler of the highs and lows of our carnal and passionate adventures as human beings – our many mishaps and shameful duplicities, our rare nobility and rarer moments of pure happiness.
That consciousness of consumption encourages patience and carries through to how we communicate and handle our daily interactions and mishaps.
When we fostered a baby pigeon, who'd had many adventures and mishaps in our yard (he fell through the fireplace, fell in the pool, and came to hang out on someone's shoulder out of the clear blue at various times), both boys would check on the bird and make sure he was OK; but neither of them ever tried to get into the fenced area we'd created for him.
I was reacting to all the behavior and mishaps happening in our mutual space and not focusing on his most innocent, beautiful, loving core.
And later, when we could afford to leave our rooms, we'd sit in a pub together and laugh endlessly at mishaps and in-jokes and personality quirks, as if our characters were part of ourselves.
