MORE ADVENTURES

Here's Elsa, part of the El Cisne family. She has some sort of mental illness or disorder so she is pretty reclusive and impaired, but she is cleaning yuca for lunch.
After lunch we went to a river and played on the rocks

Rocks! river! tree! cows! boys who were flirting with me aggressively despite being 15 years old!
If you look close, the leaves look like pot leaves. OF COURSE pilar took a picture to show what a good time I was having in ecuador "Soy la virgen del la hierba!"

Little cousins playing video games in the house....

Which I realized was a little more natural than I had thought, storing the head of the pig we ate last night in a bedroom. YUM!

Pili and Dita's Excellent Adventure PART II

More Photo-a-day! Here, we have the first part of me and Pilar's trip to El Cisne towards the west of Quito. This was my first or second weekend in Quito after orientation so I had no idea what was going on, ever. I just nodded and followed Pilar, who sometimes dragged me down a road literally. The first picture is the beginning of our trip. We were looking for the Laquisha (ghetto girl name) bus but only the Mitad del Mundo bus would come by. Like 35 of them in a row. Pilar was getting mad so I took a picture of it.

Next photo is of the treasured drink of Ecuador, Avena. Avena is made my soaking oats in water or milk or either of those with fruit and sugar in them for a few days. After that, you put it in a blender until it is a thick grey paste. After that, you add more sugar. It is great for kids! Also, for the first month or so, I was confused when people would call avena "quacker." After seeing it written down, I now understand: Quaker oats. Anyway, here is an avena cart sold by the polish nurse-bear, perhaps named Avena. Let's all get a cup from the disabled guy selling it outside the bus window?

After arriving to El Cisne, we actually settled down the the ceremony celebrating 60 years of marriage of a couple that were presumably more than 60 years old. The ceremony was pretty sweet, except one of the daughters gave a speech about how proud she was of her parents but also some how connecting this to gay marriage being wrong. But my gay-dar was honking Sra. Olivia. I gotta tell you.

After that, we ate huge quantities of meat and drank heavily. Remember that time when I semi-passed out on a balcony? Yeah, that happened. This is Pilar and my cousin Bolo drinking shots of cane liquor at about 5 pm. Bolo was extremely nice and friendly and I felt enormous pressure from my family to sleep with and possibly marry him. I did not bend to thier expectations but it was still eye-openingly awkward.

Oh next up is the little cousin Diego who is totally strange. He made me promise to put this picture up on the internet and I told him I would and put that off for 6 months. disculpame Diego!

The next morning, unbelievably hung over, Pilar and I decided to take a walk in the jungle for a while. because nothing clears up chucaqui like dense vegetation. Here's Pilar in her natural environment

houses are often built off the ground so that there's less humidity and bugs and animals getting in. Example A:

Back at the house, here's Tia Laura making lunch outside in the open fire.
And here's me outbehind the house at the beginning of the forest.
I'm going to start a new entry because my formatting is messed up

Writer Writer Write Write

I am Dr. Writer McLiterary and this is my famous essay. Please bown in front of my genuis, and yes we may use that as a noun. This is a phallic symbol and you wish your mother had bigger boobs. Adjectives are meant to dangle and dingle ends in "el." Puncuation fits neatly inside quotes which begin with commas and end with "he said." Indugle my metaphor and hyphenate my hyperbole. Both will end up brilliant by the time your eyes notice the footnote explaining my brilliance.

So, I'm not so into writing these days. I'm obviously doing less, and the thing's I'm doing I've done and written about before, but I don't even feel like putting my fingers on the keyboard. When I enter URLs, its with a single finger, filled in automatically on my seearch bar, or I just look through history. I bookmark everything and comb farther and farther back in blogs and archives. Every article published on the priests abusing deaf boys? Sure! The blog the lady who made Juno kept when she was a stripper? All pages, please. Every photo Kelly O has taken of drunk people? BRING ME THE RICHES. I've been following Charlie Sheen and have culled through every page of Sarah Silverman's twitter. I hate them both less.

So I'm learning, even if I don't take note of it, and if its mundane pop cultures stuff I'll only make references to. I will make me more obscure-sounding and erudite and less approachable. That's what I'm going for.

And as I'm reading, or talking to a friend (hidden neatly in Maryland's hardwood flooring), or driving home from my uncle's listening to Modest Mouse and bone-crushing volume, I'll get these flashes of verbalization, smart things, reaction, phrases that help me understand what's goin on. These are often innapropriatley timed and awkardly said. For example, I was at a potluck attended by very fancy people, McLean (actually, it was somewhere else, but I can't spell that place) families with art collections. My sister was an an excellent production of Rent taking place in their basement. My Hobo Best Friend's Dad who's been a father figure to me for years asked me why I'd gotten my nose pierced. Its hard for me to explain usually beyond "I like it." But here, with a plate of roasted autumnal vegetables and spanish tapas in my hand on a plastic plate, the words came:

"Well, in a lot of way, having this on my face has freed me from how people view me. Before, I was constatnly worried about not looking strong enough, tough enough, brave enough, bad ass enough. But getting the piercing helped me feel proud in a number of ways. Firstly, It makes me proud that I actually followed through on something that I wanted to do. It's not just a dream for the future, I actaully went through with it. Secondly, it lets me not worry so much about how I look. It's a symbol that I don't take my self too seriously, that I'm not afraid of imperfections that I aquire through my life. Also, It's freeeing. For example, before I got the piercing, I would never wear a cardigan like this. I would feel preppy and fake and not true to my inner strong self, even though I actually like the cardigan. But with the piercing, even as I see the cardigan and know that it's preppy, I don't need to worry about that being my only presentation to the world. It's bigger than that, and there are more symbols involved, more data to make a conculsion. I feel like I am presenting part of my self that I am proud of to the world: parts that aren't scared, that follow through, that are strong and face outwards. It's almost a definition of my sexuality...."

at this point, I realized Hobo's Dad had cocked his head upwards and raised his eyebrows. Those are facial symbols I know and love, the "what the helll is she talking about???" face. And the Armenian music prodegy and her diplomat husband were looking, and the Jewish lady with frizzy hair and her 7 foot husband. Important, but not appropriate.

And I'm saying these things because I'm not writing them. I'm not getting out my long sentances and alliterations and observations on gender roles in my damn computer where they belong and instead am burdening my friend's parents with my inner thoughts about my facial structure. Not so classy, sweetheart.

First Photo

Hello Dear Bwog Weadurs,

I have not been writing because I am a critically lazy person who needs to eat cheese and watch The Big Bang Theory. However, I am also attentive to my readers' needz and will post some pictures from my time abroad. Did you guys know that I went to Ecuador? Me neither.

So, the plan is to put up a picture a day in medium-chronological order from my time in Yekuador. I'll tell a little story background for it and then you can see what I saw, hear what I heard, smell the rank odors that I smelt.

Let's begin!

Here's a sideways photo of Pilar on my first day in Quito. She and Jimmy took me on this very long hill up to a church. I had no idea where I was but later realized that I was in like landmark #1 of Quito. She says that this is a picture of the "virgincita" on the steps. Even then, I did not believe her. She has two children, after all. We walked to the bascillica and didn't go inside but admired all the gothic architecture outside. This is the church in Quito that you read about in guide books that has native animals instead of gargoyles guarding the church. It's really adorable, except some of the lizards and other skinny-torsoed animals have sort of started to crumble and the rebar is visable.

After the church, we walked to get ice cream and I was fixated on whether the ice cream had purified water in it. Only later would I know that a. freezing kills germs and b. I will have diarreah for the rest of my life. My wedding night, I will have dirreah. And I will still not know how to spell it.

Also, I ate some kind of purple ice cream called "mora." little did I know that a. that was a really bad example of mora ice cream and b. I would eat approximately 4 servings of mora every day. Also, I got diarreah a lot.

Later that day, I took a two hour nap and woke up gasping. It was embarrassing but sort of thrilling. We ate stir fry for lunch and I was so pleased that I hadn't been asked to eat huge steaks yet. Also, we had mora juice.

Looking back, besides that walk from the church to the store that sold ice cream, its very hazy in my mind. I remember the bright sky, the steep hills, and not being able to understand anything anyone said. I feel like I was reading lips for most of my information, Jimmy and Pilar's bright magenta from the mora.

Specifically

It's the first night I've felt like writing in a while, the first time I'm not up late watching TV or trying to sleep but actually just reading chapters over and over from childhood books or my old planners, months by month. I'm very tired, physically, from running a lot and stretching and doing rediculous! looking ab exercises with Emily and Abby. We all just lied on the living room floor on our backs on dirty bath towles and did thrusting motions to the beat of Ka'nan's Waving Flag. Occasionally Emily's mom or her wife (of the mom, not Emily's) would come in from the garden, laugh at us, and pick thier way to the bathroom or to get water.

After we got our exercise in, we looked at lists and things we'd made in high school. We were obsessed with making these huge (literally, we used a large roll of butcher paper and a few poster board) lists of things we loved and hated. Some things that seemed prophetic at the time now just seem banal ("I love: freedom, being right, pure sounds, being outside at night, talking to boys on the phone"). Some things seem pathetic in retrospect only ("I hate: not having enough money, that I want to be foreign" and the fact that most of the people on the I Love list were fictional characters, family members, or beloved teachers). Other things really get to the root of the problem ("I love it when someone figures out what they are trying to say, when you can understand directions as they are given"). And others you just have to laugh at (three different tries at spelling "dirreah," Sigmund Freud highlighted as "Leader #2," A certain unnamed person crossed off I Love and moved to I Hate.)

It was nice to look at the lists for giggles, but it also brought back very visceraly a time of my life three or four years or so ago. When we made them, these lists were the highlight, the pinnical, the absolute most articulate and interesting and organized and open about the things I loved and hated in this world. The free assocation, the loose placement of the words on the page, the varied hand writing: these are things that show me how I felt about making the lists. How helpful and clarifying they were. And of course the scattered and messy words themselves, how they showed what mattered to me. They brought up this very specific time in my life, the winter of 11th grade and the time I spend with Emily in those afternoons and weekends.

And reading that brown thick paper puts me there, reminds me of my motivations and how I felt and what made me mad or cheerful in that particular time. And of course seeing those things so clearly makes it easy to compare myself to my 11th grade winter self, to see the distances between the two.

Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite opinion-makers talks about remembering a period of his life with the same eerie clarity in Killing Yourself to Live.

"What's so disquieting to me is how this kind of life- a life of going to joyless keg parties and having intense temporary aquaintences and spending most of one's time in basements and crappy rented aparements with five bedrooms- was once my life completley. Those were the only things I ever did. That wasn't part of how I lived, that was everything. But now its like those experiences never happend at all. I can recall having conversations with people in college that would seem impossible to have today (both in subject and overall tone)."

He describes meeting a girl at a party and discussing the merits of Soundgarden album and then never speaking again.

"The whole episedoe now strikes me as random and innapropriate and inexplicable. But that used to be my life, all the time. That used to be my life, all the time. That used to be normalacy, and now that normalacy is completely over. Things like that will never happen to me again, even if I want them to. And I did not choose to stop living that life, nor did I try to continue living that life, I just didn't notice when it stopped....When you start thinking about what your life was like ten years ago- and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail- its disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completley dead. They die long before you do. "

So here Chuck's talking about maybe his sophomore year in college, a time whose details I'm intimately familiar with. I used to take a nap twice a week at 11 30 AM, I ate a ton of yoghurt, there was a constant fight in my life about vacuuming the stairs. Whenever I'd see a dog I'd get innordanantly happy, and I was trying to reduce my cheese intake. I spent hours at night in those basements and apartments and I once had a 45 minute conversation centering around Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam, an album I have never even listened to.

But those details are recent, and it scares me to think that they will get lost without getting caught on butcher paper of their own. For example, those Saturday nights with Emily in high school, we usually consumed huge bowls of cereal, watched two thirds of a movie, reviewed every single romantic encounter we had ever come accross, discussed how much we hated our fathers, and scared ourselveles thinking "the devil" was going to enter the room. We generally listened to The Smiths. I remember attempting to smoke weed one time, but we had made the cigarette of graph paper glued with honey, so I just ended up burning my hand and having to keep it in a bowl of ice water for two episodes of Will and Grace. And I can remember the emotions that went with those evenings, and I can judge those times objectively, but I think what's most important is those details, the little actions that pushed the clocks around.

But Chuck mentions that he doesn't notice when those things stopped and how other things replaced them. For me, I keep track of how and when habits drop away. And in my experience most of the time the changes and what cause them have been obvious. Being at college stopped the sleepovers and added the Strawberry Jam. The verbal honestly of improv made me less drawn to the release of butcher paper.

And of course, there's the geography. My life in Quito, the daily stuff you do for 20 minute periods that add up to an evening were different. I took a nap every Friday afternoon while Jimmy's metal band thrashed. I swam at my grandmother's house many day's after school and sat silently at the table while my uncles played online chess or read the paper. I read The Stranger articles that I'd opened on endless tabs. I stored money in my bra and shoes, never more than $50 in one place. I rode the bus standing up, listening to songs over and over. I ate ice cream almost daily. We'd come over to each other's houses at 7pm, eat french fries and chicken silently with host families, obsess about clothing and our bodies. We'd drink cane liquor and chase it with apple flavored soda. I'd take 2$ taxis to filthy clubs and eat shwarma. I watched hours of American TV sacked out on my back on my host mom's futon.

It's things like that, and rediculious conversations about the development of feminism with my grandma, answering "so, did you need to pee after you lost your virginity?" from my host mom, explaining Passover to a cousin, defending the fact that I looked fat to a neighbor, are things that seem absurd as I try to describe them here and I laughed at them when I pulled myself out of them and looked at it from Kalamazoo shoes. But in the situation, as it happened, it was normal, acceptable, expected. Before I went to bed that night, I'd usually be able to pull out of it to notice that that'd never happened before. But the next morning, and when I tried to write about it almost always, it was alreay old news. Of course I found an entire pig's head in the refridgerator. How else would I treat a headache besides herbs and a shower? Did it not always rain each night, was I not always afraid of being alone outside, did I not always eat hot dogs and drink fishbowls? My only home I'd ever known was on the corner of America y Caracas and the set of keys in my pocket could open the only door.

It's probably good that the brain can do this, can smooth over memories to make the past seem simple and the present seem sane. If I compare those three eras of my life, they all seem nuts to the way I live now. But as I return to any of them, as I did today, as I did for six months, and as I will once I set foot in Kalamazoo, the details will expand to normalicy and this present will slide backwards. I won't remember my interval-technobeat runs through Magruder Park. I won't remember being delighted to eat hummus again, to order a salad, to wear my green sneakers. It won't be important to me whether I drive Lester to school tomorrow or not. The snow melting, the mess in my room, should I donate this shirt to the thift store or not? will not matter one lick.

So I sit in those basements and bedrooms and do my little things, have conversations, interact, eat, prepare, study, rest, work, in the time-and-place-specific ways that we do. And most nights I'm siezed with the urge to write about it, to remember the routines that I completed, the behaviors I've been trained into. Maybe I put too much emphasis on my daily behavior. But to me, there's something important about not letting that stuff slip away. It's not so much to be remembered after I'm dead; its more to remember parts of myself that are gone while I go on living.

ALSO!

I just realized that you can't leave anonymous comments and that you have to jump through all these hoops to leave comments. No longer! Leaving comments is much much easier now, so drop me a line- no registration or type-out-the-jumbled-word required!

Culture Shock? More like Culture MOCK!

My internet in Quito was too slow to read most of the webcomics I usually keep up with, so I kept myself to Thursday Savage Love and incessant facebook. But I just spent the last hour and a half reading the last five months of my favorites ( Toothpaste For Dinner, Natalie Dee, Married To the Sea, XKCD, A Softer World, and, to a lesser degree, Questionable Content and SuperPoop)

NOTE: these links have bad words and sekzual references in them. some reference marijuana. Please avoid if this is not funny for you.

Another NOTE: It's much easier to get all this if you open each comic up in its own tap (Right Click, choose Open Image in Another Tab). Just for your help, grandma.

Reading them has really brought back all the things I am looking forward to about my life in our great nation: joys of the English Language, brilliant industrial developments the continuing drug war, liberal nut jobs, immigration reforms.

Things are going to be just great at Kalamazoo, too. I can look forward to classroom dynamics, people who think just like I do , playing games, cooking with my friends, bizarre fashion choices of my fellow students, making things smell good, having a really clean house, hip hop remixes at parties, working on my major, living with other people, yelling at people for eating cookie dough.

and in my own personal life: hypochondria , anxiety, getting at the clothes in my storage locker in Kalamazoo, personal transportation, speakin spañol, chillin out, interacting with local law enforcement, being a vegetarian, making fun of pop music/promoting public health, my own personal brain chemistry, puns, feelin great.

And of course the future: finally getting a Big Brother, havin babies (and pets!), staying in hotels all around the world, craft projects.

Enough links for you? Just one more? Okay. Gotcha with that one, didn't I? It's not all fun and games here in Washington. Now I must smack myself for writing that sentence.

I hope everyone has a nice friday and a good weekend. I'm off to eat breakfast foods, see "the worst movie ever made" and march for women's rights. See you pre-Oscars!