Looking for the Positive...?

I was at my Spanish class last week and was attempting to explain - in Spanish - what I am doing for work this winter (estoy removando la pintura del barco?). However, explanations being difficult, and my classmates being much more into English, they spent the break asking me for further information. Turns out one of the older guys in the class had spent some of his career with the Coast Guard, and was commiserating with me about my daily grind. "Grinding is the worst job," he told me sympathetically. "The only thing worse is having to get into the holding tank." The holding tank. aka the black water tank. aka the shit tank.
Well, today Adam and I climbed in and hauled out some 7 or so buckets of dried shit, as well as tools and a massive ventilation tube, that a cleaning crew had thoughtfully left for us the week before.
I am sure there is some humor to be found in this situation...

My Liberation

I cheat again. I seem not to be able to form focused thoughts without external encouragement. I wrote this in response to an exercise I was given a few months ago to describe influential experiences in various stages of my life. So, while the story is from high school, and while I may have lost some of the lessons, I like it, and decided I want to share.

My acting career through high school was a slow, determined, and often painful process. Through middle school and high school, and perhaps earlier, I auditioned for every play offered by my local theatre company that had a role in it for someone close to my age. It was years before I got my first call-back, and then part, in a play. I was not a particularly strong actress – a little shy and self-conscious and thus rather inhibited. However, my senior year of high school I auditioned and was cast in the play Nevermore!, based on the life of Edgar Allen Poe. It was a fun call-back – I read for the part of Annabel Lee, Poe’s love interest from youth as well as the subject of the poem. I was told by a friend at the audition that the guy reading Poe and I had "real chemistry"; however, I was cast in various Ensemble roles and wound up playing three different small characters in three different scenes.

However, the one that involved the most on my part was a scene based off the story The Telltale Heart. In the scene, I was supposed to come across the body, or the heart, or whatever, hidden underneath the floorboards and let out a blood-curdling scream.

The first time we had a read-through of the scene, I let out a intentionally comical “eek.” The director let it slide. The first real rehearsal of the scene, I think I managed a bit more of a half-hearted “Ahh!”

I wasn’t really sure what was being asked of me and hoped I’d get a little guidance. I think I got a bit of eye-rolling from the director – he’d worked with me before. Not exactly tolerance; not exactly irritation. I can’t remember if it was that rehearsal or the next one, but I had resigned myself to try and scream and not hold back, no matter what it cost me. A scream is not something you can really practice in the safety of your own home, nor was it something that I had experience doing, and I think I was afraid that I would open my mouth to scream and I wouldn’t be able to produce something that sounded like a scream. No volume, wrong tone – I’m not really sure. Afraid of failure at screaming is an odd place to be.

However, the moment came, I let loose, and out of my mouth came the most incredibly perfect, horror film/haunted house blood-curdling scream. The kind that gave people chills. I was very proud of myself. My friend was very proud of me. Even the director (I think) was very proud of me.

And it was so much fun. I looked forward to screaming each rehearsal and each performance. I screamed so much that I lost my voice for the first time, although fortunately before opening night. I was renowned for my scream. The House Manager commented to me that he would always know when to start opening the doors for intermission when he heard my scream and said it was awesome. Strangers were stirred. I made an impression; I was memorable.

Yes, I greatly enjoyed the other aspects of being in that play. But the scream was the most liberating.

An Ode

A woman I worked with recently on the boat recommended to me a magazine called Ode (www.odemagazine.com). It was started by a couple from the Netherlands, and their tag line is "To People. To Passion. To Possibilities."
Now, I have a bit of an issue with the whole "passion" concept, but I do like this emerging trend of focusing on the positive and the inspiring in the world. I was told it should be easy to find on the newsstands, but I haven't come across it in Philly or NYC. Perhaps the East Coast is not quite openly enthusiastic enough.
But worth looking for...

On my economic awakening in Buenos Aires

Oof! This got long... Was on a rather energetic monologue on this subject the other day, and was encouraged to write it down and share. Was talking about culture shock – or cultural experiences that could only be felt first-hand – with a friend and her fiancé in New York City, who had just come back from an extended period in Costa Rica. Started comparing our “robbery” experiences.

A couple of months after we arrived in Buenos Aires, Dirk got his backpack stolen while we were sitting and eating lunch in Plaza San Martin. We had gotten sandwiches and were sitting on a bench when this boy, somewhere around seven, separated from his friends and came over to ask us for money. We told him no, that we didn’t have any, and Dirk offered him his sandwich. But the boy said, “Ya comí” and then turned to walk away. He was wearing gray sweatpants with the bottoms cut off above his ankle, and had a big square hole in the butt of his pants that we commented on. We finished our lunch and some five, ten minutes later were getting up to head to class, when Dirk realized the backpack which had been under his feet, and which usually would have been looped around his legs, had vanished. Two days earlier, our camera and my wallet would have been in the backpack, but that day they were in the new purse which was over my shoulder. What was in the bag was: our Spanish workbooks from class; a Spanish-English dictionary (a good one!); El Beso De La Mujer Araña, which we’d just started reading; my juggling balls; and Dirk’s boomerang, for which he’d recently spent an hour trying to get out of a tree.

We tried to talk to a policeman in the area, but while he was sympathetic, there was obviously no point. We realized we’d gotten off lucky, but still felt violated, taken advantage of, naïve. I’d never been robbed before. Later we heard of friends of friends who’d gotten robbed of several hundred US dollars at gunpoint at 10am in the relatively safe neighborhood of Palermo, as he was crossing the railroad tracks. Dirk was livid and swore he’d kill the kid – or at least shake him really hard – if he saw him again. Then we joked about how it could be good career-development for the kid. Their were some crazy good jugglers on the streets in Buenos Aires, and if he knew how to read, he could teach himself English and start talking more to tourists.

While I knew of the existence of the economic crash in Argentina in 2001, I only slowly came to understand what it meant, and still have only the vaguest of ideas about it now. Through conversations (in Spanish, so forgive any inaccuracies), what I understand is that previously, the peso had been tied one-to-one to the dollar. After it was ‘untied’ (or however you phrase it), the peso quickly devalued to the dollar until it was three- or four-to-one. On top of that, those who had US dollars in their bank accounts found them converted to pesos, while debts were to be paid off in dollars. It is, to me, a mind-boggling absolute disappearance of personal value, and people dropped in their economic class practically overnight.

One visually noteworthy result of this was the rise of the cartoneros, groups of the (at the time, newly) poor who come in from the favelas (as they are known in Brazil; I don’t know what they are called in Argentina) at dusk to sort the garbage that had been left on the corners. They separate all the cardboard and other recyclable materials, which they then take to centers and exchange for pesos. It seems like a worthy occupation, but now, some six years later, people are starting to get annoyed at them: one, for the mess they leave behind from the garbage, and two, that they are still around and on every streetcorner sorting trash, every night. I’m sure it is more complicated, but that is what I’m aware of.

There are many opinions by porteños in relation to the residents of the favelas and the poorer Argentines one sees on the streets. Some porteños tell stories of favelas in which the residents were moved out and new housing was constructed for them, but they chose not to live there in exchange for the comfort and familiarity of their own shacks. Consensus holds that one shouldn’t give money to the kids playing the bandoneon or juggling in the subway, as they are sent out for sympathy’s sake and give all their money to their parents at the end of the day. A woman we got to know in Mendoza told us of a woman she saw regularly begging on the streets in rags asking for money for food, but who owned a dozen apartments for rent throughout the city – real estate being the most expensive and thus a highly lucrative trade in the country. She also told of women begging who were able to make more money in a day than she herself was able to make teaching in one of the area schools.

However, the strangest experience for me was one night, when I was out with a Brazilian friend of mine and having a few drinks in a scruffy bar with a solid mix of tourists and locals in the trendy neighborhood of Palermo. We’d ordered a platter of picadas – cheeses, salami, ham, and olives. As soon as the plate was set down, two girls and a boy, around six or so, came up and started stabbing at the cubes of food on the plate with toothpicks and shoving them into their mouths. We were too shocked to say anything at first, and the justification running through my mind was, well, if they’re hungry, they’d probably appreciate it more than me. But my other thought was that it was horrific. They swarmed up like rats and violated us and stole our food. The first two ran off and the last one was having some trouble and Camila finally told him to go. Camila is a bit friendlier to people on the streets than I, and I decided that if she was okay with it, I could be okay with “sharing” too. But I think we were really just too shocked to do anything. It was better to have two-thirds of our food stolen than our wallet. And I’d rather give away food than money. Wouldn’t I? But still… it didn’t seem like a good thing to encourage.

The hardest part of the economic discrepancy for me to reconcile was, yes, I did choose to come to Buenos Aires because it was an amazing and international city, with a blend of South American and European culture. But a large part of the justification was that yes, it was cheap, and the dollar would go far. Before the crash, it was one of the most expensive places to visit in South America; now it is as expensive or more so for locals, but we can live like the rich on a third the cost. Yes, I am contributing money to the economy and to local businesses, but simply going out to lunch with a porteña friend of mine has hugely different economic connotations for each of us.

I taught English in the city briefly, and found myself disproportionately stressed by the experience. Largely, I felt like I didn’t sufficiently know what I was doing. But some of it was what I was getting paid in comparison to living costs, of which our apartment was the most substantial component. I was teaching a mere 17 hours a week, and getting paid $5 or $6 per teaching hour. However, for each hour teaching, I was using probably another two to three hours to plan and research my lessons as well as to travel to my students. I was feeling overwhelmingly sorry for myself. When I finally started making plans to return to the US to work much more lucratively here, I found out that my porteña friend was teaching some 35 hours a week, recently cut back from 40, and was stressed because she was breaking up with her boyfriend and would no longer be able to afford her apartment, yet was estranged from her parents and couldn’t go live with them. She of course had no opportunity of moving somewhere else to work and earn money. I felt small.

With my students, too, there was a difficult cultural justification. They all worked for multi-national companies and interacted regularly with their equivalent positions in Europe and the United States. Many of them had been doing the same position since before the crash, and had been able to travel freely at that time; however now, by weight of economics, they are virtually stuck in Argentina. When business people from their company came to visit in Argentina, their expense account meant something completely different. In class, my students told me of restaurants which they highly recommended but would say it was out of their budget except for the most special of occasions. Yet for me, with the dollars in my bank account, it could be accessible. Except that I was at that time largely out of my US dollars, and making my income in pesos... But think: I would never buy a $100 bottle of wine; yet a $30 bottle I might at some point splurge on. But in Argentina, that bottle of wine that is $30 for me, is $100 for a porteño.

One of our Spanish teachers told us that she, as a contract worker as most teachers are, would not be able to go visit the United States without someone there to sponsor her, and who would say that they could cover her financially if she got into trouble while there, and I guess ensure that she would leave again. Yet there we were, taking advantage of Argentina’s economics, and enjoying the incredible culture, and the friendliness of the people (not at all the arrogance I had been warned of – a little economic humility? I don’t know).

As with so many things, it doesn’t seem fair. A fluke of birth… But I am not writing this to offer any wisdom or trite resolutions, merely to share a little bit of my newly expanded realm of experience.

Returning Home, and the Continuing Search to Belong

Written January 2007.
I have been warned that this sounds bitter. Truly, I do not mean it to. Maybe just a little tired, but amused.

The 10 Year High School Reunion. What pain, what strong emotions this concept brings. We are 28, 29 years old, supposedly adults with careers and family, well into the promising future indicated by our graduating dreams from ten years ago. The moment of potential should be realized - we should know now who we are, why we are here, what our contribution will be. But, at the same time, names not thought about in years start to resurface, and with them the insecurities. Of belonging – in high school, in a culture, in a city. Charleston is a difficult city to have as a birthplace. As desirable as she is with all her charms, she can be rather coy, and selective as to who she allows into her family.

So the questions remain - if the same girl who got the lead part in the first grade play got the lead role in the Senior Play, why should I think that after another ten years we are really all that different? And if I had so little in common with these people and this city ten years ago, why should ten years apart – and ten years away – mean we are more to each other now?

However, the truth of the matter is, as much of a gray sheep as I felt myself to be throughout most of my twelve years of school, my classmates have known me – well or not – longer than anyone else outside of my family. In my high school graduating class of some 70-odd people, about a third of us had been classmates since first grade. And while I haven’t lived in Charleston since I graduated, it is the closest thing I have to a home. Yet without a family history in the Lowcountry, I can never consider myself a true local. Yes, these days, I hear that the times are changing and with all the Yankees coming in I can more confidently claim my Charleston birthright. Yet how seriously can I take this statement when everyone who can, lists their Charleston pedigree with bios stating that they are “native Charlestonians” of anywhere from five to eleven generations?

For, alas, I was only born there. And my lifelong instinct to blend in, wherever I am, has meant that my accent, which didn’t broadcast me as out-of-place when I lived there, now is straight neutral – from “The West,” as defined by an online quiz; or “Yankee,” when I return home. I visited Charleston a few years back with my boyfriend at the time, and was craving a patty melt at the John’s Island Café. It was everything I hoped for and after I licked my plate clean, our waitress cooed to us in her thick Southern accent, “So, y’all like it here? Where’re y’all from?”

“Actually,” I said patiently, used to this line of questioning, “I was born here, but I’m living in New York now.”

“Really?” she drawled. “I grew up in Connecticut, but I’ve lived here three years.”

Sigh…

I’m tired of being treated like a tourist in my own home town. From an extra thick layer of solicitous ooze from people in the hospitality industry, to patronizing comments about the pace of life in the South versus the North when people see the Pennsylvania license tags on my rental car, I am weary of being the “other.” I know about these things – my best friend from high school always loved to play the role of “the Southerner” for the tourists. She thought it was a game. She’d walk around barefoot and in overalls (okay, this was normal), but be extra-friendly and attentive to visitors and then giggle about their accents as they tried to respond to her Southern charm.

It is on this experience that I blame my vagabond ways. Since I started college, I haven’t kept the same mailing address for over twelve months. Each summer I spent in a different place. After college, I moved briefly overseas, and then to New York City, when you can be considered a New Yorker as soon as you can make sense of the subway – a process that can take as little as a few weeks. In three years, I lived in three apartments. I was invited into the City’s outer circle, but I couldn’t afford to stay. Upon leaving New York, I found a lifestyle that allowed me to indulge my itinerant lifestyle, and haven’t since lived in once place longer than four months. I worked in environments where a typical question was, “So, where is your storage shed?” I am sometimes convinced that the reason I am with my current boyfriend is because he is more homeless than I am – he was born in Germany, moved to Mississippi at age five, Kansas some years later, back to Germany after high school, and has been transient ever since.

I am looking for a place that feels like home. I am looking for many things, but this is where I seem to want to start. But home is more than just walking down the street and admiring the architecture, or even knowing that you have family nearby. It’s knowing where to look for the perfect gift, where to find the best Chinese food, the color of the air when it is yellow-green under the trees after a spring rainstorm, the way a piece of paper melts when you step outside into May humidity.

I know if I moved back to Charleston it would be as unfamiliar as moving to a place I had read much about but never visited. As steeped as she is in history, Charleston stays alive because she changes, for both good and bad. I visited recently, this past New Years, barely a week after my high school reunion. I didn’t intentionally miss my reunion, but the timing was off, and I was afraid of attaching too much significance to a event renowned for being uncomfortable. So, I visited my best friend, and her two year old baby I hadn’t seen and her house and her husband, and thought about how different we were and how little we have in common. And how, despite all that, she knows me better than anyone I have known before or since. And how, despite all the traveling, or perhaps because of it, and despite how pale I am, and the fact that I have forgotten how to say y’all, and that I would be clueless to suggest a place to go for a drink, if I were to move back to Charleston, I would still be welcomed home. And while I might not necessarily choose to do so, it is still a comforting thing to believe.

I cheat

As I am feeling lazy, but desire to contribute, I am posting two article-type pieces I wrote a while back. The first I wrote about a year and a half ago, when we were living in our van in New Zealand. But I guess that will be rather obvious...

My dad said to me, some years back, that life is a balance between time and money. By which, I took him to mean that we usually have more of one or the other, but we need a healthy combination of both to truly enjoy either. For lack of a better goal, I have spent my independent life trying to find this balance.

Following sixteen years of thorough education I was loosed upon the world with the idea that I could do anything. But I soon found that “anything” is not a real option – one must make choices. But how? How to find a job that is fascinating enough to devote one’s life to, yet which leaves time to pursue a diversity of other interests? One can work a job purely for the money earned, and thus the lifestyle provided. But we spend too much of our life at work – at bare minimum some 40 hours a week – to have such a dichotomy between “work” and a “real life” outside of office hours.

I spent three years at a not-for-profit arts organization, where the temporal benefits outweighed the financial. Yet I felt strangely disconnected between my actual labor and its fruits – intellectually I knew I was a fundamental part of the machinery for successful operations, but I felt replaceable and tangential.

So I decided to cut all ties, go for a walk, and think things through. I spent a month in Ireland, traveling cheaply, and slowly. I was hooked – by visiting a small region over a longer period of time, I was able to discover a much stronger sense of a place than I had previously through the whirlwind concept of “doing” a whole country in a week or two.

Following my return to the States, I found a position working on small cruise ships operating along North America’s west coast. The hours are long, without days off for potentially months at a time, but life is simpler. There is not the same division between work and play – you are always on a boat, no more than 50 meters long, with more or less the same people, surrounded by whales and dolphins, glaciers and arroyos. You clean, paint, talk to guests and coworkers, anchor, dock, and repeat again.

Of course, it is not a lifestyle for everyone – any attachments “on shore” make the periods cruising feel interminable. But people often find positions on the boats to finance a travel lifestyle – work hard, save money, and take months somewhere new, exploring and relaxing.

Currently, I am spending the year living and working in New Zealand. This past austral summer, I worked as a waitress at a restaurant on the South Island. Not necessarily the intellectually stimulating situation that I imagine my family would have chosen for me, but I find the instinctive physicality of it appealing.

I have a simple life. My partner and I are now traveling the island in our Toyota van – it is our transportation and our home. We also spend a substantial portion of our time tramping – seeing the country from the roots up, so to speak. I have minimal monthly bills, I get an embarrassing amount of sleep, and I am able, with not completely consistent success, to send cards and presents to friends and family, for birthdays, weddings, births, and deaths. Time, for many I know, is a scarce commodity, yet I have some to spare.

Yes, I do sometimes yearn for a more extravagant lifestyle. But I am of the generation who views it as our prerogative to see the world – we are so fortunate that we no longer perceive travel as a retirement reward for decades of hard work, and I have managed to find a lifestyle that allows me this option.

In all of this, however, I have a nagging fear that I am wasting my potential, discarding like a spoiled child the benefits provided by my advantaged background to live so selfishly. There are those who find ways to travel, yet also to give back to the world that created them. And, in all honesty, as much as I say I find more fulfillment working as a waitress or a deckhand than in previous office-based jobs, these options are only satisfying in the short-term. Before long, I do need more intellectual stimulation. Perhaps I could find it progressing through the ranks as an officer on the boats, or in the right office environment where I am closer to more tangible results, or perhaps through a new combination of something physical but academic, like teaching. But the difficulty remains that the decision still needs to be made, and with a real position comes both responsibility and the associated loss of freedom. I will no longer be able to take off as completely to a random corner of the world and be surprised by the similarities and fascinated by the differences I find there.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera discusses the ideas of lightness and weight. So often lightness is described as positive and fine, while the opposite is heavy, dark. Yet, he says, weight is also associated with the burden of responsibility for others – the weight of a lover pressing down on one’s chest, the heaviness of a child resting on one’s hip. “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” He suggests that it is only through the burden of responsibility that one can find fulfillment in one’s life. The airiness and freedom of being, which is so romantic and liberating, has the danger of leaving one drifting above the splendor of the world without becoming a part of it. But the opposite danger is to become so weighed by one’s burdens so as to lose the beauty of the larger view. This, I suppose, is the real balance to strive to achieve. I am no closer than any other.

the beginnings?

Starting this right as I am contemplating an end to my gallivanting, traveling, wandering, and drifting. A return to the real world and responsibility. What timing! That doesn't sound very entertaining... But so it goes. As Dirk and I have discussed, we have managed to do a rather good job on the details of our life; it's the big picture that we have neglected. We'll see how it goes.