New Blog

Since I moved from Xela, this blog would be a misnomer so here's my new blog:
http://misadventuresinnewyork.blogspot.com/

Here are the old ones, too:
http://misadventuresintomsriver.blogspot.com/
http://mis-adventuresinmadrid.blogspot.com/
http://misadventuresinlalaland.blogspot.com/

Learning in Guatemala

I scribed this on my iPhone while taking the four hour bus trip from Xela to Guatemala City.  So for most grammar and spelling errors, I'm going to blame autocorrect...

I have learned so much in Guatemala. All I could write would never be enough to express just how much or exactly how I feel but I'll still attempt to put down at least some of it here.

Cultural Observations
1. The road is also an optional second sidewalk
2. Beans can be had at any meal and/ or at any time
3. Improvisation is key
4. Time here is relative.  When I say 4, I could really mean say 5 or 6 or oh even 7...
5. The menu is merely a suggestion of what the restaurant would like to have on a perfect day
6. Hot water and internet are pretty much like grandparents: slow to get moving and a little grumpy sometimes but when everything is good with them, they give you all the love and care you need in the world
7. Let go...just let go of thinking and holding onto the idea that you can have everything the way you want it or the way you think you deserve it. Take what comes and enjoy it, or, conversely, if it sucks just let it pass without letting it take too much of you. You can't completely control or dictate your own happiness or your own sadness; you can just live in this moment and take it for what it's worth and hopefully you won't take it for granted.  Probably all obvious stuff but it's good to have a firm grasp of the obvious...
8. Have faith. Ha! Whoever thought I'd be saying that one. Not to go all Paulo Coelho Alchemist or anything but I've learned that everything will be calm and good again after calamity and that I can trust in stability.
9. It is important to be kind to others (this is obvious...like duh) but first you must be kind to yourself.

Hiding Behind Easy

EPIPHANY!  Ok, maybe not, but it seemed like one.  Maybe it's more like an idea...

Being here in Guatemala, things have been easy and fun for me.  I kind of got accustomed to it.  I kind of wanted things to stay like that, too.  I began to get stubbornly attached to the idea that things should remain easy and fun.  Me...stubborn!?!?  Shocking, I know. 

Life is supposed to be challenging and difficult.  When things are kind of easy and swimming along, you kind of forget that. I guess I have just had a lot of challenging times, and so completely embraced easy and kind of like staying in it.  But I realized that we can't hide behind easy and try to keep things as such.  When you don't face things or you try to avoid difficult things, then you're really learning nothing.  And if you're not learning anything, then what's the point of living?  I'm not saying a person shouldn't enjoy life when things are easy, but, at least for me, a person shouldn't try to maintain an easy life as the status quo as an avoidance response.  Am I making sense?  Bueller...Bueller...

Van Damme V. Stallone

I believe in magic.  Ok, not the stupid card trick, rabbit out of the hat, let´s cut the girl in half magic (though that kind of stuff is kind of fun if done with witty and hilarious commentary) but like the magic that comes from ideas, literature (can I say A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez... http://salvoblue.homestead.com/wings.html) and the kind that makes life more fun to think about.  Like reading astrological profiles or believing in fate or kismet (though please don´t name a child Kismet or some such similar ridiculousness).  Not that I believe in it because magic or miracles necessarily exist in reality, but just because believing in magic or fate or whatever you want to call it (I´m sure another language that I don´t know must have coined the perfect term for this but being that I am constantly confronted by how much I don´t know, I really can´t come up with a specific term so I´ll just use few small words instead) make life more interesting and imaginative.  Coincidence v. serendipity...who will win?  This fight might be more exciting than Van Damme v. Stallone from when they were super awesome and kickass back in the day (my money is on the former though part of me hopes for a tie and a hug of brotherhood at the end).  But I, as usual, digress. 

Believing that certain things happen because of fate or magic or what you will, make it fun to read astrological profiles and see signs in the universe and give your head over wholeheartedly to books like The Alchemist while still keeping your feet on somewhat solid ground.  It also allows your imagination to grow and your horizons to get bigger because with magic available, almost anything (anything?) is possible.  You´ll only limitations are your own mental constrictions.

I love stories.  I hate lying.  But I love stories.  Paradox.  My life is also a continual confrontation of paradox.  But I think fate is a story we tell ourselves.  It´s a story we can believe in.  We give ourselves magic because life is...sometimes tedious.  But the more imaginative we are and the more stories we dress our lives up in, the more magical it can become.  But, always, there is the necessity to watch where our feet are.  Are they still on the ground?  You need a surface to have a comparison with the sky. 

I like to believe in magic and fate and see signs because it gives my life character (as if it needed more of that), but also because it allows me to keep certain things, ideas, and people around.  I have a landlord here and she reminds me of my grandmother, Nan, who passed away just before Christmas last year.  My grandfather, Poppop, died a little after her.  My landlord is so sweet and it gives me comfort to think that I have her to take care of me in some way, like how I used to have Nan.  It´s good to feel that somehow Nan is protecting me.  Coming back home tonight, walking in through the second door, I smelt a scent that reminded me of Nan and Poppop´s home from when I was a kid and they would let me stay up late in front of the tv, munching a bag of potato chips, and falling asleep.  I like to believe that they are both with me, especially Nan, watching and helping and though I know this is magic, it´s good to feel.  We can carry our magical ideas around with us and we can let them grow; we can see signs or things that don´t really exist in places or scents or moments.  I don´t think it really hurts to have some magic in your life.  Sometimes it broadens things and makes you think in different ways.

Xela is Limbo, My Life is Limbo

Thanks to S for the title :)  And for making me think, too :) 

Xela is limbo because there are a lot of foreigners that come here just for a time but don´t stay permanently...like me!  But then how I thought that my adult life is limbo because all I ever do is move and change jobs. 

In a seemingly unrelatedly comment but actually not (you´ll see later), I love math.  Like I could genuinely do standard deviation if you gave me a bunch of numbers and some interesting context behind them (ok, fine, the context doesn´t even have to be that interesting...).  I like how orderly numbers make everything.  It´s probably why I like to make lists (though I don´t always complete them.  I think I just like to make them so as to feel that the chaos that surrounds us all is somehow neatly confined into some words on a screen or piece of paper which I just might lose).  But it would be kind of fun if we could quantify our life experiences in some manner.  This of course would be completely subjective because you could decide how many points each thing was depending on how much experiential, learning, or emotional impact you felt it had on you.  For example, a normal day or group of time where nothing momentous happened or a day or so you just kind of lived through, well that wouldn´t really generate much if any points at all, like .00435.  But if you moved to another city then that would be like 4 points.  If you moved to another country, then that would be like 11 points. China for me would be like 342132 points.  I feel like with this point system (and this is where my seemingly tangential love of math comment becomes pertinent), my adult life of limbo would seem less desultory and more like a coherent measure of value and worth seeing that it would be a somewhat high number.  But here I go again trying to find a way to claim success through quantification as a means of justification when I don´t really think success exists in the way its socially decreed.  I don´t really think success or failure exists at all.  Life exists in the absence of them.  We create them in our head.

Stuck in the Middle

I feel like I live my life somewhere in the middle of the following phrases: what were you thinking and you can´t do that.  The former being a prohibition I don´t really respond to with any sort of eloquence and the latter mostly being consummately ignored.

You set up a life for yourself and once everything is all set up just how you want it and are comfortable, you long to leave it.  But while contemplating leaving it, there are so many practical concerns that haunt you: what about the lease you signed, what about the people you promised, what about all your stuff, you just bought the new dryer and now you want to leave...But when you really want to leave a place, you just go.  All of these previous concerns don´t matter or are easily figured out.  The lease you can get out, people that truly care about you will understand your need to leave, some stuff you can take with you and the rest you can leave with family, and you can sell the dryer and use the money for wherever you want to go.

Oh the Ennui!

I don´t want to do anything. All my life, I´ve been occupied and busy.  I´ve always been super motivated or, if not motivated, then too busy to contemplate not being motivated.  I could list all that I´ve done but that would be stupid...whatever I´ve done is nothing really though it does matter to me.  It´s so strange to have come from a flurry of hyperactivity to just wanting to have nothing to do.  I do work now but not quite that much, just enough to stay comfortable.  There are things that I want, material things, but I don´t want them so much that I want to do more work to have them.  It´s weird to have come from a perspective of working all the time just to afford an apartment and pay my bills with just enough extra money to spend on the diversions that took away the rest of my time.  This is what life is supposed to be anyway, no?  Working to live and then having a few extra hours every week to call your own.  It´s all kind of silly and absurd...

Now that I have free time, I absolutely love and adore it, but I have that nagging feel that I should be doing more.  And there is definitely more things I could do; volunteer, work more, teach more, take Spanish classes, write another book, figure out this Spanish keyboard so that I actually know where both the hyphen and slash are...but when I search my thoughts and my ambition, I find...nothing...On the plus side, there is no real restlessness stirring which I usually encounter...only a calm that hasn´t been this strong and permeating before.  There is a touch of boredom and ennui to it, but nothing troublesome.  No strong desire to move to another place or get another job, a desire which has seemed to become the hallmark of my adult existance thus far.  Tangentially, I remember in the past if I had more than  a week off of work, I´d go crazy with having nothing to do.  But I guess it´s slightly different now considering I´m working in the mornings.  And of course I have all those axioms and quotes in my head, like the unexamined life isn´t worth leading and how man doesn´t like to take the path that leads back to himself...yada yada yada...those and similar phrases meaning to me that people like distractions and work so as not to have to face one of the most fearsome things: themselves (well, this would be the second most fearsome thing after the Spanish keyboard of course).   Then that would mean that this free time would allow me to get to know myself better and examine life (ha like what I´m doing now with this here blog), but that might just be some silly philosophical justification for what just might boil down to sheer laziness. 

I´m really writing this looking for justification and meaning in my own laziness...and I really can´t find any.  I also can´t find any real and overt justification for doing more things besides the obvious goodness of doing work.  But in the back of my mind and heart, I feel like doing more activities is the right thing to do, and not because society or some exigent moral code tells me so, but more because my own head and heart do.  And they´ve led me this far...

Shutting Up

I sprained my ankle...again.  At least it´s not my knees?  Those will probably come later...

A lot of people have been talking about politics lately which is somewhat disconcerting for me.  I went to college for politics because I was just good at it and it came easy.  I was good at literature and literature came easy to me but I loved to read and I just thought it was taking the easy way out to study literature when I´d do it on my own anyway.  Alas, I went with political science.  And I really enjoyed learning about how countries change, develop, and implement ideas into tangible forms.  I have also always liked learning about the capabilities and frailties of man, and you can see that in probably almost any discipline, but in politics it´s definitely easier to see than in some others.  Any man made institution is inherently flawed, just as man is, and so it´s incredibly interesting to be able to see an institution, understand it, and critique.  So many people skip past the understanding it part though and just head straight to critique...

But it´s hard to listen to people talk about politics for two reason: most people talk out their asses and or talk to show you how much they know (which is usually very little but they think it´s quite much).  Most people talk to show you how much they know.  They have read a book or an article or two or have watched the news recently or have stolen another person´s opinion so they use this as their main basis of knowledge.   This is frustrating to hear because it´s just someone listening to him or herself and having that person think that she or he sounds educated and intelligent.  I studied politics for four years then did a year of grad school for it and read just such an intense amount that sometimes thinking about it I feel inundated.  But I know from all that I read, compared to everything that´s out there to read, I´ve read relatively nothing.  I read the most prevalent and utilized contemporary political books for scholatistic purposes and study and most of them were amazing and I´m really grateful I had the opportunity to be exposed to them, but I know that my knowledge is minimal and I don´t want to take what little I do know and parade it around so as to make myself feel like I´m knowledgeable and well educated and to show off my knowledge to others. 

And people get so intense and aggressive in political discussions.  I think passion is great, but I´m so used to analyzing politics and talking about in classes where people have done similar readings and can have a fruitful or at least semi productive discussion based on what they´ve read and how it coelesces, dovetails, or diverges from their own thoughts.  These conversations from school were usually quite objective, too.  Usually people thought about things when someone pointed out something different in opinion or something another hadn´t seen.  When you do that in a conversation with people in general at the dinner table or whatnot the more you diverge from what they think or what to hear, the more passionate and obstinate they get about their opinion usually instead of considering another side.  It´s horrible.

I guess I´m saying that I pretty much loathe regular political conversations nowadays.  Maybe I´m an elitist or something, but I would really like to discuss politics with someone, anyone, who wants to really discuss things coming from a humble sense of knowledge and not from a need to show off, and someone who wants to discuss things in a more objective manner, not becoming more stubborn or incensed when someone disagrees or says something they don´t like.  Until then, I guess I should keep my own big mouth shut.

Guatemalan Time

I´m having trouble getting my thoughts to express what I really want to say...oh well...

My friend and I used to have this joke about guatemalan time which is anywhere from one to three hours after something is supposed to start or after you've arranged to meet someone.  It´s really an approximate time since it´s completely normal and even expected to be late here.  Nothing really starts on time.  Time is relative.

It´s funny and interesting how different people and places deal with time.  In Wulingyuan, the small town I lived in in China, everyone was about ten minutes early.  I'd hear the knock on my door and be like, “Really?  Early?”  It took me a bit to get used to.

Growing up in NJ and the east coast, the standard is to be on time.  Sometimes I even wanted to be late but it was hard because I had internalized being on time.  I just...couldn´t...be...late.  Except at night.  Going out anytime before 11pm is early. 

Living in California for the past ten years, everyone was about ten minutes late.  Being more than an hour late was considered rude.  And, conversely, everyone went out earlier at night, most likely because the bars closed earlier than they did on the east coast.

Paris and Madrid are pretty similar to NY in regards to nightlife.  Go out late.  Stay out late.  People are usually somewhat on time for work though but Madrid is definitely more hurried and on time during the day.

It´s like I move to a new place and try the culture on like clothes and swirl around in a circle but none of the clothes are mine.  I´m borrowing.  Even in the US, I´m borrowing.

But here, in Xela, specific time arrangements are more recommendations than actualizations.  Which has its advantages and disadvantages.  It makes me think of my own culture and how people from the US are used to getting things exactly the way they want it.  Everything is so specific and particular.  Like in the US I can get a meal personalized.  I can order a hamburger cooked medium well with only one slice of cheese, no onions, and two pickles.  My favorite Starbucks drink in the US is a 160 tall non-fat raspberry mocha with whip.  I'm laughing now even typing that.  And if we get something that's not the exact way we want it, we complain and get compensated or have things changed.  You can't really do that here. 

I've seen people come here to Xela and expect to get things the way they are used to getting them back home, catered to their specific desires.  And it's great when we can get something the exact way we want it, but you can't really obtain things that you're used to from back home here.  And I've seen people get upset here when they get something not the exact way they want it or can't have things the way they are used to having them.  I'm wondering if this has more to do with control or if it's more about thwarted expectations.  I kind of think the root of most unhappiness is control.  A lot of people want to control their lives and what happens in them but that's a fallacy.  Control leads only to unhappiness because if you spend all your time focusing on how to make everything be the way you want then you're not really enjoying your life.   

Life here is more improvisation.  You work with what you're given.  You accept what you have and try to make it work.  You don't try to make what you have perfect and specific to how you want it (though I'm sure people still do) but it's more that you accept what you have here and see how you can make it work.  It might not be a 160 tall non-fat raspberry mocha with whip but it could still taste pretty damn good and you might even enjoy the difference if you drop previous expectations.

Where I Stand

Here I sit in my new apartment with my new boyfriend: cable.  Cable and I have been together and broken up many times in my adult life.  I have to say though that cable is a great boyfriend.  You can turn it one whenever you want and make it go away when you don´t like it and it never gets mad at you or upset.  Usually though you do have to pay for it which makes the whole operation a little uncomfortable but my cable is of the best kind: FREE!

Fountain of Sorrow by Jackson Browne is playing.  I love this song.  It reminds me of Saturdays when I was a kid and my mom would be in the kitchen doing something or other and I´d be cleaning the entertainment center in the new living room since it was one of my chores.  I read somewhere that many of your memories are false.  Like they did a study and asked people where they were during some major event, say JFK´s assassination, and most people had these really clear recollections since it was certainly a defining moment.  But when the researchers checked up to verify the veracity of these suppositions, many of the memories couldn´t have been possible because places people remembered didn´t exist, other conditions they thought existed didn´t actually exist then, etc.  Even our own memories lie to us.  The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves, even when we don´t know we´re lying.

I love traveling.  Everything is ephemeral.  All I´m making now is memories and not building permanence.  I´ve traveled so much and I know when I travel the best thing for me to do is to just try and live every moment without a view to anything, to see it, to breathe it, to be part of it and to just relax memories of the past and not have thoughts to the future.  When you´re in your hometown or a place where you want to build a stable and lasting life, like how I was in LA, you are surrounded by your past or the future you want to build for yourself.  Here I don´t have those same restrictions.  I stand in now.  And it´s awesome.

Better than Disneyland

What is home? For me right now home is forgetting. Forgetting yourself, where you are, and everything that normally holds you and keeps you stationed in a moment. It can be when you are in a certain place or with a certain person or some certain time you spend, but home to me is the complete forgetting of discomfort and like a mini oblivion from everything that holds you back. The only other feeling home needs is familiarity because otherwise I'd be conflating home and happiness. There's a sense of the familiar, a sense of security, that makes you feel warmth. I feel like we carry the capacity of home inside us too, taking it with us wherever we go, but that it can only be realized at certain junctures in our lives. Sometimes you can be at the house you grew up in and be surrounded by the feeling of home and at other times all you want to do is get away from that place and it's not home at all, only a familiar and lonely place. It happens with people too where sometimes you're with someone and there's this incredible sense of home and safety but at other times that same person can make you feel lost and unsheltered. And it happens with other places as well; there have been some places I have lived in or visited that have made me forget and felt as familiar as my bones. I can recall a day just sitting with my friends at our favorite cafe near my apartment in Paris, our waiter (surely he belonged to us, or at least he does in my memory) calling us princesses everyday (for surely we were) (I love how some memories are mini fantasies) and there was nothing else then, only friends, coffee, comfort, solidarity, and a breathtaking city all around. But when I visited Paris again, it was still magical, but it no longer held that exact same feeling I had then. I wish I could say that home can develop if you stay in a place long enough or stay with someone long enough or I guess just will it to happen but that's not true. Familiarity develops yes but not that feeling of home. You can't force home. And when you're there you never want to leave and it's like one of the best places in the whole world. Even better than Disneyland.

Unexpectations

Maybe life is just a constant journey with the unexpected...or maybe that´s just my life...

Everyday starts off pretty much the same where we usually wake up in our beds, groggy and begrudgingly get out of bed.  Then work or school or whatever our routine.  But periodically we get things thrown our way that are difficult or fun or awesome or challenging or all four things together.  We also tend to form opinions of people based on the roles they play in our lives and it´s hard sometimes for people to break out of our views of them or the roles we set up for them.  I´ve found from traveling that having expectation and pretensions only limit me and limit those that I know and what I can experience.  My guatemom, for example, at first she was nice, protective, and welcoming and now she´s somewhat combative and deceptive.  What I had come to expect became misaligned with reality.  But then at other times there are people or situations that you don´t expect much of and they pleasantly surprise you.  Like today where my computer just decided it had had enough of work (I feel like this sometimes too but I keep going) and died my first hour into working.  I trust my Spanish language skills but only so far.  I can get a computer on my own but I don´t really know what I´m doing.  I kind of don´t know what I´m doing buying a computer in the states where I speak English.  Feeling lost and anxious, I had a friend who just offered to help me, not a person I would have thought of or even called.

We live life and through our experiences we build impressions of who we think people are and how they´re supposed to behave, even if we don´t intend to do it.  When I meet people, without intending to, I put them into categories.  My past experiences have decided how I view the present and sometimes I can´t see situations or people clearly.  Everyone is limited by their past, but our past is how we learn and how grow.  It reminds me of a line (TRITE MUSIC LYRIC ALERT!!!!!!  BEWARE!!!!!)  from a Jackson Browne song, ´´And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems it would be easier sometimes to change the past.´´  We think about our past and it lives in us.  Our past is something set, defined, but our future is amorphous and open.  With something already accomplished and complete, we can analyze and pick it apart.  But with our future, all we can do is guess.  Our past forms what we think for much of the future.

Living here in Guatemala, I live in the present.  I don´t really think about what´s happening in my life now or analyze it or be reflective.  I only live it.  I just go with how things are and do not have expectations about my life in Guatemala.  But I have been thinking more and more about my past from when I was a teenager and younger.  It has began to haunt me a bit.  It´s weird how your life changes and certain places or situations change your thinking or behavior.  We can expect to be a certain way in our lives or we can expect certain people to behave a certain way, but what has tended to end up happening is the unexpected and people surprising you. 

Just Enough of What You Bargain For

Oh Mexico...I had to make my border run last week which was...interesting...

I don't enjoy, ok fine, I loathe, completely and utterly detest, riding the buses here.  The buses are the same affairs I had to ride in elementary school.  And I didn't like them then either.  But here it's riding them over multiple potholes and other miscellaneous things jutting up from the road.  It's like discomfort exponentialized.  I was also a little terrified of going to the border by myself since I hadn't ever done it before.  I don't mind traveling alone as long as I know what I'm doing, but I had no clue what I was doing.  Meh, life is about challenging yourself, learning, yada yada yada.

Off I go at 7am from my house to take my first bus from Xela to San Marcos.  The bus left at 7:30am, on time.  It was the first bus I can remember that has ever taken off on time during my entire stay here in Guatemala.  I was surprised. The bus driver even asked me where I was going as I was disembarking from my Xela bus.  He pointed to the next bus for me which I thought was really nice since a lot of people don't go out of their way to be nice here.  The next bus I caught in San Marcos to Malacatan took off early.  Amazement again.  Was I really in Guatemala or had I entered some weird alternate universe?  Getting from Malacatan to the border was a little more difficult and included a lot of asking around, but not super difficult.

Once across in Mexico, I found the nearest restaurant and ordered lunch.  The proprietress looked at me like I had seven heads or had suddenly fallen into lunacy when I told her I didn't eat meat, but I was used to this from China.  It's always quite comical though. After going over the fact that I don't eat meat she asked if I wanted chicken.  Hahahaha.  This was like in China when I would say I didn't eat meat and then the person would go through all the different types of meat, "Do you eat beef?"  No.  "Do you eat pork?" Still meat so no.  "Do you eat chicken?"  Yep still meat so no.  It was always kind of funny.

Coming back across I was nervous.  So far things had gone so well which I was really happy with but I don't really trust happiness or when things go so swimmingly so I was definitely nervous.  Back on the Guatemalan side, the border official told me it would cost a certain amount to come back through.  I told him I didn't have that much money and asked if I could give him half that amount.  He said he would explain it to me in English.  I told him in Spanish he could explain to me in Spanish.  He did and then jokingly asked if I didn't trust his English and thought it might be bad.  I laughed and said of course not but since I was a Spanish student I needed all the practice I could get.  He accepted my lower offer and off I went, back to my three bus rides.

Making it back to Xela, I was exhausted but happy to have made it through without any real issues.  It's always kind of scary being in a country you haven't grown up in.  You don't know it's idiosyncrasies or what to expect.  It can make life exciting definitely but it can also make it...well, more than you bargain for.  But my border run was just enough of a bargain for me.

Cultural Differences

There's one culture difference that seems to be confronting me and those I know rather frequently.  It's not that I didn't anticipate cultural differences - usually I seem to enjoy them and find them rather comical as they point out how culture is all quite relative and just how diverse and interesting people can be.  But this one major cultural difference that keeps confronting isn't something to write home about: sexual aggression and groping.

I've lamented how I've been groped four times in the three months I've been here.  It's not that big a deal - it's more just annoying and takes away your sense of safety.  But most of the female friends I know here have had the same thing happen to them, too: either groping or exposure to sights that should really remain unseen.  I've never really experienced anything quite like this.  At times I find the whole idea of groping outlandish and just so overtly ridiculous.  I know things that are illicit are exciting for the sheer fact of being illicit: like it's exciting when you're a teenager to make out in a movie theater because it's something somewhat illicit but still accepted, but how exciting can groping really be to a person, especially considering that it's really a huge affront to another person?  It almost seems like a cultural norm here.  Usually illicit actions aren't normally things that annoy and disturb another human being.  I get no sense of joy out of disturbing a perfect stranger.  I'm wondering exactly why people do things like this.

Yea, I just googled, "why do people grope".  Surprisingly, google, which is supposed to be omniscient, can't give me an adequate answer.  The discussion board I read stated that girls should know better and the underlying idea seemed to be that females should expect to get groped when they go out to certain places which is of course total bullshit.  Whatever a girl (or if it's a guy that gets groped or is exposed to something he doesn't want to see.  I'm just going to stick with the pronouns she/ her for simplicity's sake) does, it's never her fault if she's groped or someone exposes himself to her unless she literally picks up his hand and puts it on her.  Some people opined on the message board that it's a dominance thing and I'd agree to that more than the "because we're guys" justification.  Even wikipedia was a lost cause, focusing mostly on rape (which definitely needs to be focused on) but not anything else really.

I've heard before and seen a few ideas about sexual aggression being related to dominance and not lust or desire per se.  But then why is it so prevalent here?  In Guatemala, why are men needing to dominate?  If anything, they have the more dominant position socially here, at least in first appearance.  Do they feel they need to re-assert their dominance in this manner?  Or is it because women here are more protected and sheltered so males feel they need to assert themselves more?  Or is it because most women are so out of reach here - socially you're either chaste as a woman (a virgin) or you're loose (a whore) (am I oversimplifying?  probably...binaries are so easily to fall into) and since most women are more of the former then acts of sexual aggression would be an outlet of dominance, yes?  Ok, hypothetically I'm a man but I can't have most of the woman I want and can't really even flirt with them or show myself to them in a sexually healthy manner so a way that I seek dominance is to illicitly touch them or expose myself to them in a sexually unhealthy way so I feel appeased and like I've regained my "masculinity"?  Not buying it completely...This topic is actually really difficult and annoying to think about.  All I really want is to never get groped again and for it to never happen to my friends.  But that's not a possibility either. 

Why am I even trying to understand this in the first place?  So many strange and difficult things happen to everyone in life - sometimes we get angry or sad or have other ways of coping with things.  I try to understand things because I feel that when you understand something you can deal with it in a lot healthier manner.  What you understand doesn't bother you as much.  But I really don't understand this.  I've lived for about two months or more in the following cities: New York, Paris, LA, Madrid, Wulingyuan (ok fine not really a city) in China, Washington DC, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and my hometown: small town Jersey.  I've traveled a bit, too, and the only other time I was groped was in LA by a latino teenager on his bike.  I was also in a semi-bad neighborhood (woohoo there were approximately four gang-related shootings in my block alone then!).  But never anywhere else.  And here there are so many stories of this kind of thing. 

I don't think men should ever put their hands on females in any manner unless it's invited.  Not because of any real moral issue but mostly because it's not a fair fight.  I've playfully wrestled with guy friends and generally men are stronger than females.  Like even a guy my height and thirty pounds less than me could still kick my ass.  My upper arm strength - negligible.  Let's not get started on my (lack of) coordination.  I always side with the underdog (Rudy!  Rudy!) in a fight but some fights should just never even be contemplated.

I'm going to go with my latest best guess and say that groping or sexual exposure is a form of dominance and assertion.  The perpetrator, whether it be male or female, does it so as to feel in control and like s/he is doing something that puts them at a higher level to the person they are groping/ exposing themself to.  And this makes them feel good at some primitive level.  The satisfaction they get is from the dominance and from being able to control that environment as the aggressor while the other person is not even asked permission.  I still don't feel like I completely understand this and I'm oversimplifying.  I'm sure there are other factors involved, like socioeconomics, self-esteem and insecurity issues, permissive norms within a gender social group...yada yada yada. 

Option #2

An actual plan: stay here until I save up $5000 and write a second book?

A New Short Story I Probably Won't Finish

I started a new short story yesterday morning with my mocha but didn't finish...

A white blanket of fog hangs over half the city-town, hiding and disguising it. My stomach timidly rumbles as I wake up, making its customary morning lament. I only wish I could ignore it and all my daily responsibilities that fall through my mind as I lay in bed, waiting for the motivation to drag myself up and awake.
I had once had a different life and sometimes in the early morning before I have full control of my thoughts or late at night when I'm too fatigued to hold them back, memories of my other life come flooding back. When we're children we learn in science class about all those terrible effects of the earth: tectonic plates shifting, monstrous waves emitting from the ocean to swallow whole towns, furious winds moving in a circle like a crazed, jealous husband, but they never teach you about the more treacherous calamities that sit in your own head and heart.  Usually my thoughts capture me at home, but it's even happened to me in public a few times. Once I was at a bar restaurant standing next to my best friend, looking at her friends sitting at a table as they casually and gracefully ate and talked. The song that was playing changed to a different song, one from my past life, and sadness gripped my chest as a single memory from my old life came flooding back. At first I tried to deny it, ignore it, but of course it was useless. The only thought that came to my head, a rather customary thought of mine, was: escape. My nerves came up to the edges of my skin and I tried to make them calm down as I asked if we could go somewhere else, somewhere...different...less crowded maybe.
We left but by then the sentiment had taken full root and all I could do was be carried by it. We came to a second place but I had to make my apologies and bail. Run. The song still played in my head even though we were many moments gone from the first place. I left my friend and his friends. I got into my cold, winter-bitten car, finding no warmth anywhere. Turning on the engine, rotating my key into its socket, I tried to collapse the memory the song evoked in my head.  Instead of a blank mind I received the only warmth I would get then, fresh warm tears sliding down my icy cheeks.
I drove through the darkened streets, nothing on my mind but the reverberations of the memory from the song. I wanted to go home but I remembered I had left home and I was visiting here. I could go to my rented room, turn the heater up as high as it would go, and fall into this overwhelming nostalgia. Or I could fight it. But I had tried that before and I always lost.
Or...
I could plan my escape.

Rainy Season

The rainy season has started.  I love that time when you go out after a good bout of rain and the streets are pretty much deserted and you feel like the only person in existence. I also enjoy curling up under bed covers with a good novel in the middle of the afternoon as the rain plays about your windows, the grass, and everything else that remains uncovered.

That's all.

The Other Day...

The other day I woke up to lack of water (not too unusual) and the power cut out for about an hour (also not too unusual).  Then I was walking home in the middle of the day up my two back alleys when a man came up and tried his best to grope me.  I understand that walking home alone past 9pm is risky, but midday, really?  I attempted to hit him as best I could while yelling as many vicious things as I could in English.  He ran away.  I felt defeated and upset but at least a little, I don't really know the word for this, it's not proud, but I did feel like I put up a fight. 

This story is my roundabout way of saying that life is the unexpected and our way of dealing with it.  With all the planning we do, all our thoughts, all that we hope to be, and all that we try to achieve, there is still that one thing that tends to get in the way: life.  I should know this by now - I have been through enough unforeseen circumstances and have heard and read enough to know that the things that test us the most are the things we never really saw coming.  Sometimes these things are great - like falling in love.  Whoever plans to fall in love?!  It just happens and it's a mini-miracle (or a big one depending on the person and the circumstances), but of course there is the flipside where there are the negative things that come and leave their scars on our hearts and souls and whatever makes us breathe and believe. 

But how we react initially and in the long run really determines who we are.  There are times when we just want to sink into sadness, when there is an overwhelming gulf that threatens to overtake us (and it does), and there are times when our strength prevails and we fight with an endurance inside us we never knew we possessed.  I remember so many times just wanting to give up, just thinking that I had fought enough and all I needed now was rest but that for some reason, either problems didn't come or I had more fight in me than I believed.  I think that all of us have more fight in us that we think and I think all of us have this desire to be more (whether we actualize it or not...).  Life comes and we struggle and we flourish, but always there is us...fighting...surviving...sometimes losing...always learning even if we don't really want to...

Fragility

Been realizing the fragility of life...hope that doesn't sound too pretentious but I guess even the idea of writing a blog is somewhat pretentious - thinking that what one says has import and needs to be read by others...meh, whatevs.  I was just thinking how things in life are constantly in flux - locations, jobs, relationships, feelings, and I have that Berkeley staple from one of my classes: the only constant in life is change. 

But fragility is different than change.  Our lives are fragile and so are our relationships and so are we sometimes.  One second you can have a job and the next, nothing.  One second you can be without a job and then the next, have a job you really wanted.  One moment, you are with someone you think might be for the rest of your life and the next, you are no longer together (and can't US divorce stats stand for that one).  But I guess I'm overstating and oversimplifying in relation to time.  Yes, things are fragile and change abruptly, but usually they change over a longer period of time.  Our feelings, our lives are in a constant shift that accumulates with seconds, moments, days, hours, and not usually in a moment (though some major changes do happen in a mere moment or in just a few)...

But the fragility of relationships, whether they be friendships or romance, are really something interesting.  The only really durable relationship is the one with family - that usually can never be severed.  But we tie and untie the knots of other relationships like playing with strings.  I can't remember ever thinking of this topic before which is weird because I really thought I overthought everything in my teenage years but apparently not this topic.  It's also weird that some relationships are so fragile and others so durable - and it's not usually the ones we predict or think will end up the way they do. 

I have so many ideas in my head, not my own usually, but ones from books and fiction novels and popular culture, and it's hard to synthesize them or to extract what I don't really need.  But some ideas of Buddhism stay with me (and I hope they always do), about how wanting and desire lead to pain, and how if we want something that we don't have now then that is pain and the way to free ourselves is to not want.  But in a relationship, so many times we want a certain thing or we want to control a certain thing and that also leads to pain.  I'm thinking now of my friends that I see.  I try not to think too much of myself here as putting myself as example number one wouldn't really help as I don't think I can really view myself accurately and objectively.  But looking at the world and others is still hard for me to see even somewhat objectively but I guess it's better than looking at myself.  I just see that we as people want to have things a certain way or want things to be as we see them and that shows me just how fragile we are and how that wanting does lead us to pain.  But to not want is also something that seems nearly impossible.  I believe there is beauty in our fragility.  In our strength, there is much to admire and much beauty, yes, but in our fragility there is also beauty and something to admire.  There is also much ugliness in our strength and in our fragility.  When we are too strong, we hurt others without recognizing it and when we are fragile we often do things that hurt ourselves.  But, of course, life is a mix of all these things and it's not one picture but a continuous mural that I think I will never see the end of.

It's just a new thought, a kind of odd one, for me.  The fragility of people is easy to see.  The fragility of relationships, even when they seem to be or have been, the most strong, that's a new thought for me.   It makes me appreciate the relationships that have lasted and the ones I have seen endure.  It makes me understand that I can't really underestimate the importance of connection and how it affects us.  But it also makes me see that I should continue to move with how the tide is turning (to turn a metaphor) and to understand that fragility is an important aspect of life and its many facets.  There is fragility, durability, growth, and so much more that I can only really glimpse at and try to understand.  I should try to appreciate them all and I can even hope that fragility will become durability sometimes and accept the moments given with a better view to the future.

Cualquier

I've entitled this post cualquier for the simple fact that I utilize this word way too much and it probably doesn't mean what I think it means.  Ha, which reminds me of the Princess Bride line - "You keep saying that word.  I don't think it means what you think it means..."  But then again, I think most everything in life reminds me of a Princess Bride line.

So after being unmercilessly attacked by la grippe/ flu and food poisoning, I have somehow crawled my way out of bed to work and then type away because I can obviously not do much more than that.  The city lights gleam outside my window because c'mon, I do have the best view in all of Xela, besides being on top of one of the mountains here (sooooo cold up there!!!  even with six layers on and what I thought was an iron will) (note to self: when it comes to cold, you do not even have a plastic will, you have no will whatsoever).

So far, I've learned a lot of Spanish (yipee!) and can understand most of what people say to me (but I have to be paying attention, which isn't always the case.  But the first few days where I just said "si, si" to everything except to buy things have gone away).

And what I want to do for the next year or so of my life now is completely undecided.  And I love that it's undecided.  I know I should make plans - or I don't know so much as the inner list-maker and planner inside of me tells me that it's completely natural to make plans and what am I doing without having any plans?!?!?!  but a bigger part of me loves not having a plan right now.  Sometimes, in the off moments when I have extra time (i.e. I'm sick) I peruse the internet looking for possible new places to go but I really do like it here.  There are definite disadvantages - it gets cold in the morning and at night, it's not really safe to walk around alone after 9pm, and yea I get sick in non-US and non-European countries, but beyond that I'm actually learning Spanish, the people here are so warm, every day that I run is like an obstacle course (if I'm not almost run over by a bus or a car then it's not really a good run), and there's just so much to do here. 

Part of me really misses LA and when I see pictures of it or things that remind me of it, I feel a pang in my heart.  But I know I will go back there.  I just tell my heart to shut the hell up and that when it's time for LA it's time for LA and that now is time for me to grow as a person and learn some effin Spanish, volunteer, and do good things.  Once I've seen things and done good things, then hey, I can head back (hopefully) stronger and better because of it all.  And, if not, well then at least I can go into a Mexican restaurant and order in Spanish (which I probably won't do it but at least I'll be able to!).