My Blue Streak

A Blue Goodbye

2009-04-09T14:24:00.007+02:00

Today I sat down to write a post, time on my hands for the first time in weeks and I said to myself, "It doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't matter if it's any good. Just write whatever comes and hit publish and then cringe a little. BIG DEAL."

Eyes to keyboard.

Sigh.

In the end, you just have to post what comes to you, what you feel inside, right? For me, this is it.

Working full time sucks. I have no time for anything anymore. It's a good thing that the 8 hours are not excrutiating like they were before, which makes life feel like less of a prison sentence but I still don't like the ratio of work/do laundry/cook/run errands to fuck around/rest/write/do-whatever-I-want. But that's life. We all live it. It may be part of the reason why I don't post much lately, but it's not all of it.

I didn't start this blog to have an online journal. I didn't start this to keep in touch with old friends or with family.

Well,maybe I did when I started and that's why I had linked to my blog on my myspace page and my facebook page for the (real) world to see. Those people that came here through those links or because I accidently told them about it may still read now.

The truth is, I don't really know.

They don't normally comment and frankly, it gives me the creeps thinking they might be there but not knowing for sure. I'm sorry, but it does. It's like inviting someone over to your house for a party but when they show up they just look in through the back window and sometimes you can feel their eyes essaying your cheeseball and your ham and pickle roll-ups but you don't see them.

I'm starting to think that maybe I only want people to drool on my cheeseball if they brought some mean spinach artichoke dip to share. And I'm not talking about comments; I don't give a fuck if they comment or not. I'm talking about sharing. I'm talking about writing.

It's not like I have big secrets that I want to tell and I'm trying to go all AWOL and undercover, it's just that I want to go somewhere else with my "writing" or creativity or whatever it is I'm doing here and I don't feel like this is the right outlet anymore.

Maybe I told people I knew because I wanted validation and readers and had to start with people I knew. What it has turned into has been a communication tool, to learn about people; some very far off and away, some relatively closer (like fellow expats), some with quiet family lives, some with crazy party lives, some of them living the country life, or small town life, some living in places and living lives that I know are not in the cards for me but that I want to experience, albeit vicariously. Maybe these are people that in real life I would never cross paths with or even if I did, (say maybe if they were my bikini waxer ) I would never know they could write their asses off. I might judge them and think we had nothing in common, but somehow across pixels and networks and webs, we happened to meet, thankfully.

Some of you are capable of writing about the day to day in ways that make me laugh my ass off or think for days about a few little phrases you cooked up, and you're honest and open and, hey, even your grandmas have your urls or you have your same story printed in the Irish Times for all eyes to see. I love you for that.

But that ain't me.

What I really want to communicate I'm not for some reason, and I'm trying to figure out why.

To those people that I had the good fortune of crossing paths with on the internet, discovering their talent that they so generously share, to those people that through their writing have given me so much more than boring updates on their lives a la facebook, I don't want to cringe when I hit 'publish post' to share myself with them anymore.

And, come to think of it, I don't want to share myself anymore with those that don't reciprocate by showing themselves to me through their own writing. That may sound horribly ungrateful to those non-bloggers and maybe friends that have been reading my posts, some of whom have told me in person that they enjoy reading. I'm sorry if this comes across as unappreciative of that, pero eso es lo que hay.

I guess I'm feeling less generous with my innards these days, except to those that have shown me theirs.

So here lies Bluestreak. For now, anyway.

At least for awhile, I'm going to that place that made me feel I had something to write about to begin; these streets and that Spanish sunshine and Luigi and, well, life.

Adios,

Blues

Half-assery/sorry Rasslery and an update on the job front

2009-03-29T17:44:00.009+02:00

I can't keep up with this thing, can I?

I've contemplated quitting because I can't stand to be half-assed at one of the things that I actually enjoy doing. But it turns out I like you people more than most people I actually know in real life, and would feel too sad to say goodbye.

So here I am, being half-assed as usual.

I was honored to be invited over to Rassles house to play nintendo (i.e. to guest post) and I told her I'd be right over as soon as I was done with my chores and she hasn't heard from me since. I'm trying to figure out a way to beg for forgiveness but unfortunately my head remains inside my own ass, making even posting this extremely difficult for obvious reasons. Rassles, I AM coming over to play nintendo, so please save a nutty bar for me. It may get to you too late for you to ever use my stupid post, but you can save it for when you are too busy, or if you ever have one of these wordless bouts like I do. Lucky for the devout Rassles readers among us, you never do. Fuck, did I mention I'm sorry? I would buy you one of these if I could:

At this point, maybe people are done reading my apologies for things they don't know anything about and want some details about the jobby job.

Words come and then evaporate like NOx emissions (I don't know what I'm talking about. Do NOx emissions evaporate? We'll get to this ignorance later) and I try to hang on to them but a memory of a word is hard to keep once it has slipped away and become a contaminant. My mind is a mess of formulae and chemical elements I should have memorized my junior year of high school.

So, I'll use math to describe my current situation:

Making money + a quiet mind + a level of responsiblity that I'm comfortable with = something that resembles contentment + X, where X equals unforseen bullshit.

Or, we can do the long calculation.

My desk is positioned in such a way that makes it impossible for me to read blogs, fuck around on facebook all day, or actually work on anything other than what I'm supposed to be doing. This is my excuse for why I haven't been round these parts in a long damn time. While being away from blogging is not good for me -150, being away from facebook is +125. Be gone, oh ghosts of yesteryear, pulling at my mind and making me feel old, what with your pictures from 1997 and all.

I cross the Guadalquivir river every day en route to work and actually see the horizon again on a regular basis. I cannot describe what this does for my spirit. +200

Guess what? I get free shit: Almost-Free (EUR .75) lunch everyday + 300. Free legal advice twice per month, although I hope I never have to make use of this benefit +50. All the language courses and computer courses I care to take. Free +100. Did I mention I like free shit? Access to an English speaking doctor, free of charge, every wednesday in my office with no appointment. This man better brace himself for unprecedented levels of hypochondria, and he better brush up on his dermatology cause I'm about to shove my moles up in his face on a weekly basis. Hello, blue skies. Fuck off, melanoma. +500

There are beautiful views from any office in the building. Beats the dungeon I was pissing my life away in before in 8 hour increments. I have no good memories of that place, just memories of my sanity slipping away one day at a time. +100

The pay is nothing to sing about, but this is an economic crisis, so I'd be stupid to look at my absolute income rather than my relative deprivation. Besides, considering the level of stress I'll have to endure compared to my last job, I make a killing. But I can't afford hired help anymore, so it looks like I'll have to clean up after my sloppy self again and I've never been very good at that. -10

In my last job, I dealt with three kinds of people: 1) Those whose behavior I was responsible for, whose potential for fuckupery no words can describe; 2) Those that I was responsible to, and to whom I had to bear the unbearable shame of the behavior of the aforementioned fuck-ups. These people were the company clients who served rations of shit day after day for my eating pleasure; and finally 3) My bosses, who were nice enough but were too busy to notice I was about to jump out the window or hang myself with the telephone chord. They only called when there was a major problem. Basically, this meant that every time the phone rang I almost went into cardiac arrest thinking about what kind of fecal storm was about to hit the fan blowing on my face.

Such is the life of cannon-fodder middle management.

In my new job, I am positioned squarely at the bottom of the food chain, happily munching on discarded food that untrained labor entails.

Well, to be honest, I haven't really been able to clearly identify the food chain at all and I don't even know if there is one in the traditional sense. I only know that I am only responsible for the task at hand and the actions of others effect me and my ability to work very little. This gives me a sense of freedom that makes me want to do cartwheels. Naked ones. I don't even know exactly who my direct boss is and it doesn't seem to matter. I just know that I need to show up and do my job.

I share an office with a Hungarian, an Italian, and a Dutchman. In the office across the hall there is a Turk, a German, and a Spaniard. I have no idea what they do, but I know it doesn't involve me. They aren't up in my business demanding explanations and they don't make me cringe because they are so brain dead that they can't even fill out a time sheet properly so that their dumb asses can be paid. I know that most of them are experts in whatever it is they do and they are probably freakishly intelligent. Mostly I like them because they don't need me to do anything to bail them out of some mess they've created. I know that they are pleasant people to share coffee and lunch with and at this point in my life, I don't need any further information from anyone. +1050

I enjoy a standard, American work schedule. This is really meaningless to anyone who doesn't understand the burdensome tradition of the Spanish siesta. The siesta tradition sounds great to people that don't live here, but to anyone who has to live it, it translates into an extremely long working day, where you are on the go all day without a nap to be had by anyone. The only people that enjoy the siesta are the old school señoritos who have wives at home that iron their underwear and cook them paella on demand. Normal, working families get nothing from this set-up. The luxury of being off work at 5:00 p.m., no words can describe.
+1000

Did I fail to mention what my actual job is? Well, it turns out I spend the entire day reading gigantic documents pertaining to sinter beds, coke oven gas, and heavy metals. Now, I realize that to the untrained ear this sounds like sex, drugs, and rock & roll, respectively, which is more or less what I thought I was getting myself into. It turns out this shit is heavily dense and I don't understand a lick of it. I was trained to be a sociologist, not a geologist or whatever it is these people are. Yet, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, people (smart ones even) believe that I am qualified to do this job, and I have yet to question their judgement openly.

But, I'm just a proofreader. I don't have to understand it. I just need to make sure every sentence has a subject and a verb and that the adjectives are in the right place and shit. It's mechanical. I don't give a fuck what the varying nitrogen oxide levels are or what the combustion thresholds are. I just care if that comma is supposed to be there and if this shit needs to be hyphenated or not.

Brainless work? I don't care. When I leave for the day, my job disappears in a poof and freedom takes its place. Nothing weighs on my mind. Nothing makes me lose sleep. And if that wasn't enough, the end product of my labor is actually something I care about. So +100,000,000 in-yo-face.

Can I get a "hell yeah" from the audience please?

-Blues, in need a new avatar (Nevermind, I'm getting way ahead of myself).

Pictures: Big and Small by cmbellman and Puente Triana by Serlorencen both from Flickr.

"Please don't wake me, no don't shake me...

2009-03-15T11:31:00.008+01:00

...Leave me where I am
I'm only sleeping
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there's no need

Please don't spoil my day
I'm miles away
And after all
I'm only sleeping"
-
The Beatles, I´m only sleeping lyrics.

When you are unemployed and kidless, sleeping in is not a luxury. There is something discomforting about waking up late and being starkly aware that you are not expected. Anywhere. By anyone. Nobody needs you to make them breakfast. Nobody needs you to pack their lunches. No reports need to be on anyone's desk by any time.

"Enjoy it while it lasts", a platitude spilling forth like vomit out of the mouth of every single person I've shared any conversation with in the past three months, and in the most bantering tone. "Yeah, I know". Thanks for the advice, oh brilliant one, endowed with the knowledge of obscure things. I would have never thought of that one.

Something is pressing in on your skull. It's the feeling of too much rest melded with perpetual boredom and guilt. You know if you lay your head back down you could easily sleep two more hours, despite already having slept ten. This isn't silky, princely rest. It is rest with resignation, surrender, defeatism, because there's nothing else to do but rest. You know that you'll feel better if you only get up and do something, tire yourself out a bit and actually earn those z's again. But it doesn't matter one way or the other if you actually do, to anyone.

Suddenly that all changes.

"You're hired."

On Monday I will have to be somewhere. Someone will be expecting me, like, really fucking early in the morning. If I don't show up things will be bad. People will be angry. Important shit won't get done, I guess. Cogs and sprockets will cease to link up, wheels won't go round, and the whole machine will malfunction. My presence will be required.

Nothing has really changed yet. I haven't started working. I don't deserve my double digit hours of sleep. Not yet. But now they feel like hard-earned vacation sleep. When I start to stir I grasp at the dreams so they won't leave me yet and let me hang out there for just a little while longer in sweet luxury.

I wish I had a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of employment again, to sleep in and enjoy it and pay credence to the million and one trite comments people have made about taking advantage of it, instead of sleep having felt like this for two months.

Oh, if I had only known that my presence would be required, mandatory again so soon. Ain´t life just like that?

-Blues

Anyone have a light socket I can plug my existence into?

2009-03-10T14:02:00.008+01:00

I haven't looked for a job in almost ten years. They seem to creep up on me before I even want them for some reason. Maybe this is where I have failed, by never pursuing anything, just taking whatever shit pile falls from the sky and smacks me down. But I hate looking for a job. I hate it more than working at a mind-numbing-fuck-my-cerebral-cortex job.

See, I have an "enchufe", literally a socket, like a light socket. Everyone knows that you need a socket if you want to connect a plug, you can't just plug something directly into the wall. Looking for job in Spain with no enchufe is akin to trying to plug in a lamp directly into the wall with no outlet, making a bunch of fucking holes in your freshly painted living room wall, never even getting close to the electricity wiring or actually jamming it into wires and getting electrocuted and then getting repeatedly frustrated because you're sitting in the dark, in a room full of holes with your hair on fire. No outlet, no light. No enchufe, no jobbie-job. Thems the rules around this place.

Despite hating this concept and disagreeing with it on every ethical level, I find myself relying on enchufes and also being them. This whole country is a mess because of enchufes. You go to the bank to open up an account and the person that opens accounts doesn´t even know how to type so you wait all morning while he pecks away at his computer, essaying it forever to find the "F" as in "fuck me" key, taking a coffee break mid-way through. The extent of his applicable experience consists of being someone´s brother-in-law.

My enchufe apparently wants me to have a job more than I myself even want one and has pestered me since before I left my other job for me to let him help me. Initially he offered me a job in his company, which didn't materialize into much. I woudn´t have made a good fit anyway there, but he worked his magic elsewhere, through his wife's company, and when that failed, his wife's former employer. And the enchufe gets gradually weaker, but you can still get a little flicker of light from it. Please stay lit, motherfucker!

Today was my second interview.

As far as interviews go, I know all the rules. I myself have spent the last three years interviewing people for positions. I paid close attention to what candidates considered appropriate interview attire (their instincts were almost always wrong).

I paid attention to see if there was any shit under their fingernails (you'd be surprised), how punctual they were (Don´t you dare show up late without calling, you idiot, and don´t show up thirty minutes early and stare me down until I interview you ahead of schedule), if they made eye contact (not avoiding my gaze but not creeping me out either), their handshake (not too firm, not a dead fish. Confidence, but not aggressive confidence).

Thus my instincts to continue this protest against washing my hair, and to wear a leopard print top and some hot pink stilettos, and turn up an hour late had to be abandoned in favor of clean hair, black suit, with no flare or anything that stands out other than my vast experience and impeccable professionalism (can you tell I´ve bought into all this bullshit?). Fingernails clean and manicured? Check. Shoes shined? Check. Self-esteem? Uh...check.

Deep breath. Remember, you don't give a fuck if you get this job. Oh, but you do, but your life has been a path leading to this. Shut up! You don't give a fuck, you're gonna ruin it if you are overly eager. Ok, these people are gonna have to beg me to work for them. Please hire me. Don't you see everything I've ever done has lead up to this point? Whatever, I might consider a position here with you chumps. I might let my talent grace your organization. Oh, please, pretty please don´t let me wither away into an unemployment statistic.

"Hello, I'm here to interview with Ms. Rodriguez"

"Right this way, I'll lead you to the interview panel," says the receptionist.

Interview...um...panel? What the fuck? All I heard was, "Let me lead you to the dungeon of doom where you will have your soul picked apart and you will have to justify your measly existence before a board of PhD's in Bullshit Detection."

Another deep breath.

When I get nervous it's physiological. My voice shakes. I don't give a fuck about this job so why is my voice shaking? My hands tremble. These bastards are gonna have to beg me to work here, so why can't my hands stay still? I can't find the right words. I don´t know why I am acting all jumbled and flustered, these motherfuckers should be jumbled and flustered.

Later in my mind I torment myself by revising what I had said and imagining I could start over again and practice what I would say if given another chance, something more eloquent, more thought through.

Well, I guess I have going for me that I've spent my entire life squirming my way out of uncomfortable situations without anyone seeming to notice I was squirming and nervous as hell, so maybe I did ok.

Fingers are crossed that the outlet I'm trying to plug the lamp of my livelihood into isn't burned out, or worse, filled with water and ready to electrocute me to my economic death.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was just about to post this, when I got a call with a job offer. As you may have suspected, I didn´t make them beg. I thought about it for a second though.

"The Dogs of War" by Stephen Poff found on Flickr.

"The Directors of Distillers Company Limited" by Charlesfred found on Flickr.

"My, what is that you´re wearing?" by Dave77459 found on Flickr.

Hope adorned

2009-03-03T14:59:00.026+01:00

When I was two weeks shy of my 21st birthday I landed in Madrid with $2000 in my pocket, my room and board paid for the next four months, and no intention to go back on the date of my return ticket. Loose ends had been tied. Where I had been unable to sever love bonds, thankfully, they had been severed for me, albeit with a torturingly dull blade, leaving a wound that for some reason wouldn't scab as quickly as I wanted it to so I could scratch it off with emotionlessness. But with my rose tapestry luggage, and a worn copy of The Fountainhead in my back pocket, I was exceedingly hope spangled that Europe would help my bleeding coagulate into indifference.

I was on my own. For the first time and last time in my life I was a firm believer in human agency unencumbered by an increasingly more flexible structure wherein I could invent myself.

I was meant to be in Sevilla for university but had a few weeks to situate myself in my new world. My parents had generously put me up in the Hotel California on the Gran Via in Madrid for a couple of nights to gather my bearings until I could manage to find a hostel or some other arrangement and make my way down south where I was expected.

I took no pictures of that hotel room on the Gran Via to conserve my memory. Film at that time was reserved for splendid cathedrals, quaint plazas, important monuments, things I thought I might only see for a short time, not knowing I would walk by them every day for years en route to work. Even without pictures, my memory conserves the tall ceilings, old world decorations and the busy street below my window that I gazed out of. The tub was miniature, the faucets and light switches and pillows all different. I stared at the bidet in befuddlement. Something inside me told me this memory is important; keep it.

I knew loneliness wasn't far off, but for the moment I cherished that I alone made every decision for myself. I decided which streets were worthy of walking down, what I wanted to eat and when and where. I felt in charge of my fate. It's a feeling that only comes accompanied by solitude but that I am grateful is a part of the assemblage of my human experience.

I wandered around Madrid alone. A child of new America, sprawl America, strip mall America, who had never so much as been to Chicago, New York or San Francisco, I stared up at the tall buildings until my neck could no longer take it. I watched all the busy, beautiful people in their perfectly tailored and pressed clothes. I looked down at my own dorky attire but couldn't pinpoint exactly where I had gone wrong. I just knew I wasn't quite right.

I wandered into a cafe where I realized that after three years of high school and college Spanish I was incapable of even ordering breakfast.

"Un croissant y un cafe con leche", a man barked to the waiter.

"Un croissant y un cafe con leche", I repeated insecurely when the waiter finally muttered something unintelligible to me. I salivated at the gorgeous looking orange juice I saw others enjoying and tried to remember how to say it. Jugo de...something or another. Oh well, cafe con leche it shall be. I wanted desperatly not to look like a dumb tourist and would give up orange juice to do so.

I wandered up to what appeared to be a train station with loads of people rushing up and down the stairs in a fury. The sign above the stairway, plain as day, read "Sevilla". Excellent, I thought. I'll get my trip to Sevilla all figured out, it will be one less thing to have to worry about. I went down the steps and told the woman at the ticket counter that I wanted a ticket to Sevilla, since obviously this was the train to Sevilla. She stared at me dumbfounded and answered, "But you are in Sevilla." I thanked her and walked away in complete provincial confusion and worked my way back up to the street level. It was days later that I realized this was the Madrid subway. I had been at the subway stop called "Sevilla". I had never seen a real underground before. The awareness of my own ignorance was humbling.

I thought about where I had come from and I felt an aching to be someone else. No, I wanted to be someone.

Months and years later I clung to being the person that moved to Spain that had learned Spanish and became this bicultural entity. It was the only thing that had ever defined me. In Spain I was Bluestreak, la americana. At home I was Bluestreak, "she lives in Spain, dude." I guess I thought this gave me the social and cultural capital to trump all the motherfuckers who had pushed me aside. I had been chiseled out into something worth mention. Or something. That feeling wore off a long time ago and metamorphisized into something resembling inadequacy.

For awhile I have arithmetically examined my life and summed up all of the parts of me that remained after culture had blended beyond a novelty, after I had subtracted people being impressed with me living in Spain which was now nothing other than an annoyance to me that they thought it interesting, or people here finding it curious that I was an American that spoke such good Spanish which equally annoyed me, after I had subtracted all the scabs I'd shed over the years. The sum total terrified me that I was left with an embodied dialectic, a person who had defined themselves by a contradiction.

But I'd be a hopeless idiot and a waste to think that I can't reinvent myself whenever I want.

Maybe I'll never have the same sense of agency that I had those first few days in Madrid when I was just 21. There may be times I want to take a bite of food that I decide on and Luigi says, "Don't eat that, babe, that's nasty, you're gonna get sick." There may be streets I want to take and he will say, "No, cariño, that's not the right way, we're gonna get lost, let's go my way". But as any structure that impinges on any actor, these structures also enable me, and I´d be floating off into fucking nothingness without them...without him. And this one who licked my war/love wounds and helped coagulate my blood, and gave me the go ahead when my scabs were clear for picking doesn't deserve the tired, defeated version of me. He deserves the hope-spangled one.

And so do I.

-Bluestreak

P.S. I´ve missed you guys. I´m catching up on your blogs slowly. I know it goes without saying, but I´ve needed a break from the pixelated wonderland to find my voice again, and I hope I´m not fucking jinxing it again. Thanks for sticking around.

Artwork Hopper, Edward Hotel Room, 1931 and Automat 1927.

A Day in the Life of an Unemployed Blues

2009-02-13T19:54:00.000+01:00

You are Bluestreak (or Blue Streak, as you have not been entirely unambiguous in terms of the spacing between your bisyllable name).

You are 32 years old, recently turned.

You are unemployed, by choice, as if that means anything other than that you are fucking nuts.

You wake up late.

You look at the clock and feel incredibly guilty, not because you have anywhere to be or anything to do, but because somewhere in the back of your mind you have the hunch that productive human beings who contribute to the machinery of society wake up earlier than this.

Yawn.

You opt not to shower again, and a heated debate takes place in your mind as to whether or not the brushing of one´s teeth is absolutely essential. The voices in favor of brushing win, since you know what happens to those that don´t take care of their teeth.

You read your book (you're reading In the Name of the Rose again, cause you love it and you just can´t buy another book right now until you finish the twenty million fucking books on your shelf you haven't read yet, that you wonder what the hell kind of intellectual ambition/jackassery possessed you to buy them to begin with).

You walk the streets that many people back home would give their left eye to visit on vacation but somehow that doesn´t mean shit.

You walk on the sunny side of the street y hace un día de miedo and you wonder why you ever thought looking for a job was a good idea.

An old woman speaks to you. "My child, guapa, can you spare any change for a coffee?" You reach into your pocket and purposely pull out only part of the change and tell her that´s all you have on you. You´re fucking unemployed and you can´t be giving money away, you reason. It´s not enough to get her a cup of coffee. Then you realize that not only is this the most interesting conversation you´ve had all day, but it´s the only conversation you´ve had all day.

You decide you need a cup of coffee and you go to the place you took your best friend when she came to visit, eleven (yes, eleven) years ago and you stare at the table where you sat with her and the fist of loneliness hits. When you go to pay with the change leftover in your pocket you realize there are only twenty cents there and you feel like an asshole for having not given all of it to the woman. Ugh. I can´t win.

You mosy on home and release the culinary monster that lives inside you on days when you have fuck all to do besides consume, prepare to consume, or think about your consumption.

Eventually, Luigi shows up to enjoy the roast chicken you have been basting, cooing at and otherwise speaking in infant-directed talk to for a couple of hours now.

The chicken is graciously and lovingly received by both self and spouse and the unidentifiable carcass, which are the only remains that you were unable to inhale are disposed of, as are the ideas you had of making chicken salad with the leftovers.

You then decide to witness the offering and slaying of a blogger virgin to the gods. Who are you to laugh? You can´t even think of anything to write about. But this qualifies as human interaction, right?

You drink way too much coffee for someone with nothing to do.

You space out for a bit and when you come to you realize you have re-grouted your entire kitchen floor and you go, "Oh fuck am I ever bored".

You decide it might be a good idea to start job hunting soon.

-Bluestreak

It might just be my imagination.

2009-01-31T20:55:00.016+01:00

I have been house/home-hunting/obsessing for some time now.

Let's face it, I've done a lot of pissing and moaning. We could have filled the swimming pool we don't own with my tears of woe-is-me self pity.

I've been utterly frustrated by what I can afford in this city that has Manhattan prices with Tijuana salaries (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit on both ends but you get the idea). So, with all the frustration and spite that has percolated in the crock-pot of my wretched soul for a couple of years now, I contacted a handful of home-owners who were offering rentals that were far out of my price range by sending the following email:

To whom it may concern (i.e. people I'm about to insult),

We are a couple with a stable income (bold faced lie), looking for property to rent for an extended period of time, three to five years minimum (if we damn well feel like it). We are willing to pay up to X euro with parking and all fees included (clearly an insulting offer). If you are interested in showing the property with what we are able to pay in mind, please feel free to contact me.

Kind regards (i.e. eat shit if you don't answer me),

Bluestreak

I wrote this email with all the spite my mean little fingers could anxiously deliver to my keyboard, knowing that I would be contacted, knowing that we would go see the flat with an "I told ya so" air about us, knowing that we would feel superior to all the greedy fools who thought their stupid little flats were worth a killing and who had hitherto laughed at us young folk and had drop kicked us out of the housing market by their irresponsible "prices-never-go-down" speculation.

Within the hour a woman called me and wanted to set up a time to show her flat.

Surprisingly, I didn't even get remotely excited. My excitement has been exhausted, sold out. I have no further excitement left in me to waste on this. Months before, when I would see a flat, I would show up and think, "This might be my new street". I would get in the elevator and wonder if that would be the elevator mirror I would be checking my hair in every day. I would pass someone in the hall and mutter "Buenos dias" and wonder if that would be my new neighbor and imagine the rooftop parties we would share and coffees we would invite each other over for and cups of sugar we would borrow. And then I would leave feeling defeated.

This time I had contemplated not even showing up. I yawned in the elevator and went over my grocery list in my head.

When we got to the flat we saw exactly what we expected to see; an overpriced flat that wasn't even worth the insulting offer we had proposed.

I wanted to turn my nose up and laugh at the assholes and think, "Who do they think they are with their shitty little apartment?" I wanted to shake their hands and thank them while thinking "Good luck to ya, assholes! I wouldn't live here if you paid me to!"

But I looked at the couple and I saw the woman, pregnant, staring at us wide eyed and hopeful. I saw her husband, full of pride, describing the new fine cabinetry and tilework they had poured all their money into. I saw a couple that had no room for their growing family, that had bought a tiny, dark, overpriced flat at the pressure of all their friends and family who urged them, "Buy! Buy! Buy, before it's too late and the flats cost double!" at the precise moment the market was about to turn on them. I saw a couple that needed to get out somehow, that had tried to sell at a price that wouldn't send them into bankruptcy to no avail and that was now trying to find a tenant who would at least cover a portion of their mortgage so they wouldn't drown in financial ruin and have some hope at affording their unborn child's future. I saw a couple that earned hopeless Spanish professional salaries and that had invested the little money they had managed to save on a couple of properties in the hopes that their future would hold more than a fifty year bondage to the bank and a savings account without a dime in it.

I saw us. I saw what we would have been if my husband had not fought my pleas tooth and nail to buy a house at the worst possible time in history. I saw a glimpse of the financial ruin we would be in if we had done what I had wanted to do. I saw myself, chained to my desk in the job that was sucking the life and spirit out of me that I wouldn't have even been able to contemplate leaving so that I could reinvent my world and self again and find fulfilment in something different and live a life that felt a little less like a waste of human creativity and potential.

I broke down in the elevator going down, this time not in my own self-pity for not being able to afford anything decent for my hard earned cash, but for the regret I felt for writing that email full of spite and condescension that gave the couple a glimmer of hope that they would find a tenent and escape their impending financial ruin.

Maybe I just have a wild-ass imagination.

I hope so.

-Bluestreak

"Se vende" by Adrian Coto from Flickr.

The Hyperreality of Home

2009-01-23T12:43:00.000+01:00

My father moved around a lot when I was growing up. I lose track when counting all of the homes that we lived in, but there must have been at least 12 that I can remember before the age of 12 when I went to live with my mom; the house in Lake Havasu, the house on Terrace, the house on Brown... Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oregon, Missouri, back to Arizona, back to Missouri, and back to Arizona again. It was all very exhausting and annoying for a pre-teen.

Whenever we found ourselves in Phoenix, my dad would drive by our old house on Terrace. I'm not exactly sure why, maybe because my sisters and I pleaded with him to do so, because it seemed like our home that never was. I don't know what was so special to us about that house. When we moved I must have been just six years old, but I always wanted to drive by it.

This was my first experience with the disemboweling feeling of nostalgia and the useless grasping at a fleeting sense of home.

I inherited both habits from my father, the aimless moving around and the drive-by nostalgic self-torturing. I've lived in fourteen homes since I left my parents house at 18, the average time spent at each place being one year.

It turns out there is one house, my current house, that I moved into accepting its status of infra-home, with the intention of staying just until our lease was up and moving somewhere else. It was a temporary move, a stepping stone. This just so happens to be the house I've lived in the longest (3.5 years) second only to the house I graduated from high school in (6 years).

This is as home as home gets.

But it isn't.

The most authentic, vivid feeling of home that is able to tug at my heartstrings is only present in its residual form. It only really happens once I have left a place.

Yes, I know home should be wherever Luigi and kitty are. In theory it is. But inside I'm in some sort of home-purgatory. It isn't that home is unreal. It's hyperreal. My own misrepresentational memories of it have filtered and recreated an unrealistic expectation in my mind of what home is supposed to feel like.

I'm the idiot tourist described by Baudrillard walking through Disneyland nostalgic for the Main Street America depicted there that was never real to begin with.

Do you know what this means?

It only means that I'm horribly, pathetically ungrateful. Believe me, I realize this. No need to point it out.

I can see myself though, in the future, driving or walking passed my street, and not being able to turn my head away from looking down it, thinking about the people that are occupying the ossuary of my home, sleeping in my room and larcenously taking a shit in my toilet. The nerve.

- Bluestreak

Tea with the Mad Hatter by fd from Flickr.

Welcome to Disneyland and Main Street, USA by andy castro from Flickr

Goodbye Karey

2009-01-13T13:59:00.015+01:00

I don't have much to say today because I think you all know my words don't come out in my way right now. Or maybe it is in my way but they don't come with ease anymore.

I feel a strain.

Heavy paperweight on heart.

There's some kind of muzzle but I don't know why. Or I do but I don't know how to say what the muzzle is made of. Because the muzzle is a little muzzling when trying to describe the muzzle. See?

Oh, it's not just about muzzles.

When I was in grad school and was attempting to read more than was humanly possible in a single day, I would go to sleep at night and have strange dreams of misplaced and sometimes invented words floating around in my brain, nonsensical sentences, ornamental paragraphs of pure jabberwocky monologue.

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe."

- "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll

This is what my voice feels like right now; recursive nonsense, my mind a think tank of anti-thoughts.

Life feels a little like that too, and looks a little too much like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and I feel kinda like I'm the one bent over with the flower growing out of my ass, when I'd really like to be standing up, clothed, with the flower in my hand, maybe giving it to you, which I'm much more comfortable with.

On top of a jibberish voice, I have some sort of rhetorical laryngitis. I try to speak but it's just an inaudible, bleached out and faded whisper.

So today I'm just here to whisper.

I'm here to whisper a goodbye to Karey. I don't want to say she's a blogger, because she's so much more than a blogger. She is someone I love as a writer, but mostly as a person. And I'm just happy I get to share the earth with her and somewhere far away she's giving people huge smiles ear to ear.

It's strange how blogging friends come and go. I guess like how real friends come in and out of your life, probably because they are real friends.

The departure is just a little more abrupt I suppose.

So, Karey, if you're still out there, this is as good a whispered goodbye as it gets on the internets:

-Bluestreak

P.S. Pare, if you're out there, I miss you somethin awful too.

Old Wire Dog Muzzles by Feltbug from flickr.

Bye. by Nathan from flickr.

Resolutions of the teeth (and self) improving variety

2009-01-06T04:55:00.010+01:00

Well, that’s it. Another year has come and gone.

Happy belated birthday, world (or I should say, Happy Birthday de facto international standard Gregorian calendar).

I’m not about to post my new year's resolutions here and jinx myself, like I’ve done before.

I will tell you that one of these undeclared resolutions concerns quitting a certain disgusting habit in the hopes that my teeth will stop resembling those of some poor chap that was born on the lower end of the feudal scale during the Elizabethan era and that my lungs will be in slightly better condition than those of an unlucky coal miner.

Ahem.

Those Elizabethan serfs had an excuse for the unseemly state their teeth were in; they were busy worrying about more pressing matters such as rotting garbage in the streets and no structured sewage system and oh, you know, stressful things like the bubonic plague. I have no excuse other than wanting to inhale poison for some reason because I guess my life is just too damn easy. My teeth have been unsuspecting casualties.

In light of my rediscovered love of my own teeth (and lungs), I’ve scheduled a visit to the dentist.

The Spanish dentist.

Don’t freak people, this is a first world country. I promise Bluestreak will not end up with gold caps. Although that would kind of rule.

Sometimes I think we Americans might obsess a little too much about our teeth compared to other people. Our teeth do generally kick ass. Well, mine are starting to look as if I’ve been munching ass as opposed to kicking it, but I’m generalizing here.

As an American I know what a dental visit should consist of.

When I go to the dentist I don’t want it to only last ten minutes and to basically just have my mouth rinsed out with a little white hose and then get pat on the back and be told to keep up the good work with the dental hygiene.

No.

I want my teeth to have the living shit scraped off of them and for my bleeding gums to be mercilessly poked at. I want to have to grip the handles on the chair in fear and I want to experience some mild pain. I want the procedure to seemingly go on for eternity. Then I want to be scolded and slightly humiliated for not flossing as much as I should. That would be a normal visit to the dentist.

But this isn’t a normal place, this place I’m in.

This is a place where fucked up things occur, like when a few days after my last dental appointment I went back to the medical center for my gynecologist appointment and the woman that assisted the doctor with my pap smear (i.e. "the nurse") was also the woman that had assisted my dentist with my cleaning days earlier (i.e. previously known as "the dental hygienist").

Um, am I dreaming, is this hell, or am I perpetually living in a Dali painting?

Ok, ok, one of my other resolutions (fuck it, I’m now declaring them) is that I’m gonna try to quit being such an ungrateful bitch and as you can see, that leaves me without a whole helluvalot to blog about. So in that vein, I think I should mention in my most grateful tone that my healthcare is free here and for mere convenience, I’ve felt the need to sign up for private health care at about eighty bucks a month which covers anything that could possibly go wrong with my body or mind, including my beloved grinders and biters. But apparently the nurses under my plan are jack-of-all-trades or jack-of-all-orifices.

Wish me luck on my next visit to the dentist. Oh and on my inadvertently mentioned new years resolutions.

-Bluestreak

"Mouth 4" by ysin from Flickr.

"Bailarina" by Salvador Dali

Warning: Consuming Raw or Undercooked Thoughts May Results in Half-Assed Blogging

2008-12-20T08:37:00.005+01:00

Hi.

I've been silent because I'm...percolating. I'm out of a job and I don't quite know how I feel about that just yet.

I'm also "home" now. You know, the home that's not really my home (i.e., my parent's house that has never been my home). I fucking HATE the light switches in this joint, I have no idea where they are and the silverware drawer is in the darndest spot.

So, I'm in my country, sans Luigi. And it's a damn shame that you have to be separated from someone to really realize what they mean to you. Humans are ungrateful fucks like that.

Basically my time at home has consisted of me driving around my city, at times letting my memories spill over me. It can be pathetic.

It's amazing how urban organization can effect how you experience home and homesickness. I've seen the sunset for the first time in ages. The beautiful Arizona winter sunsets where the air is so thin you can see for miles and miles. I've gone from sprawl to density. Open, visible horizons to claustrophobic shaded cobblestone streets. Lonely, buffered, car interaction to get-off-of-me-and-quit-bumping-into-my-ass-human-interaction.

Oh, and car time = music time. And music time = I might cry at any given moment. I never drive in Spain. I walk everywhere, which means even if I have my ipod, I listen to whatever crap I have on it that I thought was cool at one time but has turned into a broken record. But in the car I get little treats (or little torments depending on my mood) here and there of songs I haven't heard in forEVAH. Today I sped down the freeway listening to Snoop Dog and, well, I rocked the eff out, cause I roll like that sometimes, yo.

So there's my little update. I'm silent because I don't know how I feel about job, Home I, Home II, life. I'm a crock pot of emotions and the stuff inside needs to reach at least medium rare so I can make sense of some of it.

Miss your blogs big time.

xoxo
Bluestreak

Don´t expect a thematic post, I´m just rambling

2008-12-03T09:48:00.006+01:00

I’ve been a bit busy lately.

I made a ginormous Thanksgiving feast for 20 some of my unsuspecting Spanish in-laws FROM SCRATCH.

No, I’m not insane.

If Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart could spawn, I would kill myself and be reincarnated as their gifted organism. No, scratch that. My husband would be. God or whoever is responsible for reincarnation might allow me to be a mole on his freakishly culinarily prodigious ass.

Luigi usually gets all the credit for the gourmet cookery around this place, but my cranberry sauce makes you want to rub it all over yourself and lick it off while a turkey gobbles circles around you and my blueberry pie makes you want to quit your job and become homeless and hang around outside my building in hopes that I might one day invite you in for piece of it.

I know I said food was for pussies and all, but seriously, I make a mean spread. And plus I’m getting tired of that stupid fucking diet recipe that is beginning to taste like soggy arseholes.

As exhausting as this panoply of traditional American food is to make in this crazy place where basic necessities of life such as Crisco and brown sugar are impossible to find, if I didn’t at least try to pull this off, I would be miserable on Thanksgiving. I NEED Thanksgiving.

But now it is finally over and Christmas is nearing and...I’m going back on the chute-the-chute again.

Back to the BIG.

Big houses with big cars and big boats parked outside. Big people wearing big clothes walking big dogs. Big plates of food on big tables in big restaurants.

Back to the world where you can do the following without fear of becoming a social pariah:
-eat an apple while walking down the street.
-go grocery shopping in your pyjamas.
-write a check for $2.00.
-speak English, loudly.

Back to the world where suddenly everything makes sense, where an American hairdresser can earn more than a Spanish doctor, lawyer, and engineer put together and enjoy a lower cost of living.

Back to the world where I listen to fucktards having stupid conversations and I know they are fucktards. Here they are all just Spanish people speaking Spanish. I can’t discriminate against fucktards here because I can barely recognize them. My prejudices here have never fully developed because I communicate on a subnormal level. I can’t wait to be able to cast my judgement again over idiots deserving of my scornful gaze.

Back to the world where nobody cares where I’m from or laughs at my funny accent or how guiri I look.

My only hope is that it doesn’t feel too good, that the obnoxious machinery of the American dream doesn’t reel me into its rusty wheels and try to spin me round again scraping me with loose spokes and screws and other false promises of grass-is-greenery.

But chances are, it will.

It will be too short a visit to make me want to get the hell out like I did before.

But it will be short enough for all of the nuances of "home" to bolster my idealization of it and for it to nag at my bifurcated sense of self and grab hold of the half that corresponds to it with its monster claws, and scream, "This is where you really belong".

No. It's not.

Ahhh, let the roller coaster ride begin again.

-Bluestreak.

Blues is Back

2008-11-26T11:55:00.003+01:00

I should have known that swearing off blogging would suddenly bring me something to blog about.

This week my ass has been Rasslefied, big time. She still has rights to my blog, and could attack at any time still, declaring a coup over my header or posting Japanese dwarf porn, like she did over at Praying to Darwin.

But since thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I know some of you eat your weight in deviled eggs and green bean casserole, I felt the need to post and to give you advice as your diet guru so you can keep those pesky holiday pounds from adding up.

I am on a roll here, dropping serious poundage.

Unfortunately, my weight loss is not the Oh-Cool-I´m-So-Glad-My-Arms-Arent-Goliath-Satisfying-Salamis-Anymore weight loss, but rather the Holy-Fuck-What-Happened-To-My-Tits-And-Why-Are-My-Eyes-All-Sunken-Into-My-Head-N-Shit weight loss.

But for you more proportional types, you may benefit from knowing all about my new diet, guaranteed to drop pounds like "Galileo dropped the orange."

It´s really quite simple. You don´t have to keep an extensive diet journal, or measure proportions or even step on the scale, because frankly, you don´t give rat´s ass when you´re on this diet.

You just follow this simple recipe. The trick is, you have to eat this meal every day for every meal. But don´t worry, you won´t even want to eat anything else.

Bluestreak Delight

½ lb. Self-centered Materialism
¼ cup Unemployment
¼ cup Homesickness
2 cups Self-Loathing
2 ¼ tbsp. Disappointment extract
½ cup minced Guilt
1 Bad Auspice, peeled (alright, I admit I threw this in cause it sounds like allspice)
½ tsp. Existential Instability

To make:

Put the ½ lb of Self-Centered Materialism into a non-microwave safe dish, wrap in tin foil, and microwave on high until the whole mess explodes and turns into the Realization That You Have Become A Shallow MuthaFucka Who Doesn´t Contribute Dick To Society. If it didn´t electrocute you and you are still standing there, excoriate that shit out of the microwave with an ice scraper and slop it all into a blender. Add the ¼ cup Unemployment, the ¼ cup Homesickness, the 2 cups Self-Loathing, and the 2 ¼ tbsp Disappointment extract. Blend on high until thoroughly mixed. Add the ½ cup minced Guilt and the peeled Bad Auspice and blend for another 2 minutes or until it reaches a ripe, shit-brown color. Sprinkle with Existential Instability.

Drink the whole slimey Bluestreak Delight in one gulp, and choke on it too. Enjoy with Salty Tears of Self-Pity, and perhaps a Jack Daniels and Ginger Ale if you´re feeling antsy, and a pack of Marlboro Lights.

The duration of the diet is until you wake the fuck up and become a balanced human being again or until you completely emaciate.

Everyone will be all, "Dude, you´re so skinny".

It rocks.

Happy Thanksgiving Ya´ll. Food is for pussies.

-Bluestreak

It's Not Sexist if You Say it in a Song

2008-11-25T22:43:00.005+01:00

It's Rassles again. Of course.

It's Blues' fault. She said I could do what I want.

Banal Simultaneous Sister Bashing

2008-11-24T20:07:00.028+01:00

It's very exciting, writing on someone else's blog. Usually I live here.

It makes me feel dangerous, like I'm undercover, and I wish that I had a Groucho Marx mask so I could run around representing Freedonia and calling out sweet burns and confusing the crap out of people. "Now, what is it that has four pairs of pants, lives in Philadelphia, and it never rains but it pours?"

So for now, much like Blues left Arizona, I've expatriated from Sometimes I Make Lists. I know. I know. It's like, the worst title ever. I deal.

On with the blog.

My sister, the Yellavitch, is like this twenty-one year old turkey carving prodigy. She’s a brain surgeon, but operates on tender roasted birds. And she goes all blue and soft while she does it. Not that she turns blue. She's calmer than normal. She moves like water, if water was steady, precise, and methodical, and really fucking good at carving turkeys.

But you give her a pumpkin, and her artistry disappears completely. Instead of an eerie grinning jack-o-lantern, you get a useless, gaping hole.

"What is that?" I slide over to the kitchen table, where her holed pumpkin sits. “Not like, a mouth or something?” I inspect the pumpkin. Poke it a little. “You could give it teeth so it looks like the Sarlacc.”

“No, it’s a circle, and I don’t know what that is." She's separating seeds from the pumpkin guts and trying to ignore me.

"You know, the giant mouth in the middle of the desert. And then we could put that Luke Skywalker action figure in there, so it's like he's getting swallowed and all, 'Ahhhhh!' you know?"

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I made a circle. Deal with it.”

“But wouldn’t it be awesome if it was the Sarlacc?”

“No one would get that. I don’t get it.”

“You totally know what I’m talking about.” I pick up the knife and touch it to the pumpkin. “Return of the Jedi. I’ll show you.”

“How do you even know that? How did you get to be such a dork?” She grabs my hand. “Can’t you just leave it alone?”

“I’m fixing it.”

“It doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s a fucking circle.”

“But this would be so cool. Everyone would love it.”

“No, you think it’ll be better.”

“It will be.”

“Get your own pumpkin.”

“Yeah, I fucked it up. I tried to make the Bat Symbol and it just looks like an eclipse or something.”

She laughs at me. “You would. Don't touch it. No one knows what the Sarlacc is.”

“Yeah, but then, when someone does know---“

“You’ll know that person is worth talking to.”

I point the knife at her. “Exactly.”

“Stop testing people, not everything is a test.”

“Oh, whatever, you test people too.”

“No I don’t.”

I gesture towards the pumpkin and trace a circle in the air with the knife. “You made that circle out of spite.” Jab. "You knew I wouldn't be able to deal with it being just a hole."

She tries to hide her smile, but she can’t fool me. She’s my sister. “Spite is completely underutilized as a method of accomplishment. And it pisses you off.”

“But spite is my thing.”

“I learned it from you, butthead.”

“Whoa. Language.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She snatches the knife from my hand. “Leave my pumpkin alone. Why do you always do this?”

I start helping her separate the seeds. “Because I can.”

"Stop trying to correct whatever I do. You never do this to Katsisch."

"That's because she's meaner than I am. She's a bitch."

Katsisch yells from her lair in the basement. "STOP TALKING SHIT ABOUT ME."

"She really is a bitch," Yellavitch agrees with me. "And you know what? She would only be able to do a circle anyway. Because of her tiny t-rex arms."

"I CAN FUCKING HEAR YOU."

Yellavitch yells down the stairs. "If you want to fight, stop watching The Tudors and get up here." She looks at me. "Do you realize she's been watching that show for three days straight?"

"She's a history person, you know."

"No, she just likes the guy from Bend it Like Beckham."

"Creepy weepy eyes Myers?"

"He is so hot."

"Gahh, no. Seriously? He always looks like he's on the verge of tears. It's annoying."

Katsisch's voice echoes up the stairs from the basement. "DO NOT TALK ABOUT JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS LIKE THAT."

"CAN YOU DO ANYTHING WITHOUT YELLING?" Yellavitch hollers back.

"Obviously not," I say and join Yellavitch at the stairs. "JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS CUTS HIMSELF BECAUSE OF YOU."

"SHUT UP." Damn, she is shrill.

Yellavitch has one. "THE OTHER DAY I KILLED A MAN JUST BECAUSE HE LOOKED LIKE JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS."

And now the Dog is having a barking conniption.

"I WANT TO WATCH THIS."

It's so easy to piss her off. I walk back over to the table. "That really is a good looking circle." I face the pumpkin towards Yellavitch. "How is it that you're so good at carving turkeys and such crap at carving pumpkins?"

"You are an awful, awful sister."

"I'm better at being a sister than you are at carving pumpkins."

"Worst. Sister. Ever."

“You know what would make me the best sister ever?”

“If you say you turning that pumpkin into the Star Wars mouth thing I will stab you ‘til you’re cold.”

“I will gut you like a fish.”

“I will swat you like a fly.”

“I will roast you like a turkey.”

“I will kill you ‘til you’re dead.”

“DAMMIT.”

That means she won.

"WILL YOU GUYS STOP IT? I CAN'T HEAR THE TV."

"SHUT UP, KATSISCH." Ahhh, banal simultaneous sister bashing.

...

I might regret this...prolly not

2008-11-22T19:49:00.005+01:00

Since my voice is muted with weirdness these days and my dirty fingernails cannot type a single word I´m happy with, I´ve decided to let Rassles loose on my blog this week with but a few misguidelines. She did, afterall, draw a picture of me.

Check out what she did over at Ginny´s house while she was away on vacation.

Girl cannot be trusted with a password.

So stay tuned.

-Bluestreak

Effort to change my karma

2008-11-20T18:09:00.005+01:00

When I was in 5th grade I had a hermit crab as a pet. God knows what possessed my prepubescent mind to think that it would be a good idea to have a crustacean as a not-so-furry companion. But I loved that little pincher. I took it to school with me in a shoe box. On the bus all of the popular girls came over and stuck their pretty nails out for the crab to snap at and giggled and I gloated at the attention. In my mind it made me popular in some disturbing sea-animal way.

But one night I left my hermit crab near the window overnight. And in Prescott, Arizona it gets COLD and that poor little crab crawled out of his hermitage and died. Died of fucking cold. What kind of monster does that to an unsuspecting crustacean?

Karma, dammit.

Right now, I sort of feel like that hermit. I’ve been towed around to various places beyond what I would consider my will (ok, that’s my attempt to not accept responsibility for my life choices) and I’ve snapped at things that scared me and that I didn’t like from within my stupid shell that in the end doesn’t protect me from the elements.

And for now I’m staying inside.

Which makes this some sort of shitty-assed public apology for my friendship ineptitude (you know, things like not returning your phone calls, your emails, or commenting on your blogs). But at the moment, I’m inside my little shell freezing my little lobsteresque ass off.

Even crabs need warmth and love, but right now I’m just trying to find it within my own hermitage. See?

Those of you that have been blogging for awhile now must understand these funks. The ones where the microcosm of the internet becomes eclipsed by the macrocosm of those that breathe the same air as you and share your meals with you, whose smile you can experience if you say something funny and who can feel real pain if you inflict it on them. Not like you faceless internets. Sorry, that’s kinda mean. I love you. I know you have real faces that smile and cry and all that shit.

I’m starting to wonder how much of my blogging corresponds to a real desire for creative expulsion and how much of it corresponds to just another one of my forms of escapism or another attempt at seeking attention like when I lugged that little hermit crab to school against his will. On the escapism note, when I peek into the tiny fragments of your worlds that you allow me to see I forget my cumbersome life. Then I verbally eject a small fragment of half-truth in hopes of...of what? If it were true creativity, I would likely keep my blog private just for me. But it’s something more about the gratification of attention that leads me to believe this is really about escape. Hmmm, dammit if this isn’t a repetitive theme in my life.

And it´s gotten me fuck all in a tangible sense, and now I find myself unemployed, among other things, and at nearly 32 trying to figure out what the fuck I want to be when I grow up from within a damn seashell. But I still try to escape into your fragments a bit, into the multiperspectivalism you supply me with.

This week I only escaped a little and when I did I came across a couple of gifts that helped me escape even more and I gloated like I did with my little crab.

Mountainlover and Mongoliangirl had both honored me with this award:

In an effort to help my karma, which right now is badly influenced by the hermit crab window incident, I hereby pass these awards on to:

Mackin Ink especially for this post

People in the Sun especially for this post

Almost Royal especially for this post

Regardez Moi especially for this post

Whiskey in My Sippy Cup for a post that I cannot for the life of me find but all her stuff is good so check her out.

Moutainlover especially for this post (Am I allowed to re-give a blog award? I don’t care, I don’t follow rules here).

Tobi et al for the many laughs you give me.

Some of these people might not even read my blog and will therefore never really get their awards, but I don’t care, because there is something in those posts that I go back to again and again and wanted to share them with you.

(NOTE TO RASSLES: I would have passed the award on to you, cause you know I love every little word your fingers type, but you already have two of these awards now, and I’m sure you already blew them up poster size and put them on your wall next to your NKOTB posters, so another one would just be redundant. And plus, I´m still waiting for my drawing, biatch.)

Ok, I think I’m done here, going back inside to clean my pinchers.

-Bluestreak

Warning

2008-11-10T09:50:00.013+01:00

Beware.

There are dangers of going abroad.

You could get kidnapped by FARC while enjoying a peaceful holiday in Colombia. You could accidentally catch a flight on Phuket Airlines and the airplane could turn into a "flying coffin". You could go down to Mazatlan and eat a salad and become infected with hepatitis. You could get caught up in a bird flue pandemic in China. You could get your ass reamed, as it were, by an angry bull during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.

Lots of things could go wrong.

But the unanticipated dangers are the worst kind.

Like the danger of forgetting who you are, the danger of having the compass that guides your decision-making process malfunctioning, or the danger of the gravity of your convictions suddenly being absent, because this place is like fucking outer space, and you forgot; sometimes there’s no gravity here. You should have planned for that, because now you’re floating away into space and you should have been wearing your fucking space suit cause there’s no oxygen here either, you idiot.

There’s the danger of isolation that leads to an annulment of personality, an annulment of everything you ever thought you were. This annulment of personality leads you to becoming susceptible to contracting this horrible disease called loneliness that is not cured by other people anymore. It’s not cured by your fellow expats and it’s not even cured by the people you love the most that are nearby. The cure is still unknown. Studies are being carried out but thus far they are inconclusive. Correlations of variables have proved spurious.

I remember when I first moved to Spain my parents gave me these purifying pills for the water, in an effort to make me safe and keep me from the dangers of life in the big, bad abroad. You just drop one in a glass of water and it kills all the bacteria so it won’t make you sick. I guess they didn’t know Spain was a first world country and the water was potable here. They should have given me a fucking space suit, or better yet, another kind of pill that would make a day to day life of isolation potable.

I guess these are my excuses for why I’ve been silent lately and when I do speak it’s not at all funny or entertaining. I want to read all of your lovely blogs but I look at my reader and I’m overwhelmed right now. I want to post something that will bring you laughs and make you smile, but I don’t have it in me right now.

Maybe these are excuses too for why I just quit my job in the middle of a financial crisis.

-Bluestreak, unemployed and floating off in space somewhere.

"Kaleigh running" by Ryancbriggs from Flickr
"Spacewalk" by AlbinoFlea from Flickr

Some Fellow American I Am

2008-10-29T16:08:00.005+01:00

Today I was at Starbucks getting my morning coffee (yes, although I live in Spain where there are thousands of quaint coffee shops, I prefer anything dehumanizing, industrialized and mass-produced).

While I was in line I was eavesdropping on a conversation taking place between two American men about Phoenix, where I’m from. They were obviously both from there, talking about streets and places I knew.

And I didn’t even say hello.

Why?

Because if I have to withstand one more conversation that resembles this, someone´s gonna have to put my ass down:

"Wow, you live in Spain???? Wow, HOW NEAT. You must love it! So what brought you here? Oh, that is a DREAM. That is so AMAAAAZING."

These are the same conversations my mother gets me into when I’m home and we are at the sushi bar or at the supermarket when she starts bragging about her daughter right here that LIVES IN SPAIN, OH MY GOD, I´M GONNA CUM. And then the person says,

"Spain, WOW. You must just LOVE IT! What a life, what a DREAM! Do you__________________(complete the question with any one of the following phrases that make me want to head-butt any hard object within the vicinity):

go to bull fights?
go to the running of the bulls?
speak the language?
get homesick?
just love it there?

Why do these conversations bother me so much? I guess because for a few moments my life becomes a caricaturized version of itself, an abstraction of itself, and it implodes in its own simulacrum.

And that’s annoying.

-Bluestreak, sometimes I’m a scarecrow of myself.

Today I had my citizenry questioned (and probably deserved it, but whatever, Dipshit)

2008-10-25T18:03:00.005+02:00

I spend a good portion of my life abroad waiting.

Waiting for old ladies that cut me in line.

Waiting for people to unload their sundries from their car on a narrow Spanish cobblestone street while I’m trying to get by on my public bike that I just waited in line to be able to get.

Waiting for my Spanish friends when we’re walking to another bar because they don’t walk at the normal pace that Americans do.

Waiting for wait staff to decide that they might take my order if they are bored and have nothing better to do.

Waiting for people to do things when they are damn good and ready.

Today, in the spirit of biculturalism, I attempted to partake in this very Spanish custom of making random strangers wait. I was getting my groceries from out of Perplexus´s car and got lambasted by a man with his family who couldn’t get by. His exact words (translated) were:

"I guess our concepts of citizenry must be different".

Dude, bite me. He only said that because I’m a foreigner. If I were Spanish, he would have waited like all Spanish people have to do for each other all the damn time.

I admit it; I shouldn’t have made him wait, as it always bugs me when Spanish people make me wait. BUT FUCKING HELL, "our concepts of citizenry must be different"???. Yeah, dude, I was right about to start chucking random pieces of trash in your direction, and then pull my pants down and take a piss on your shoes, because you know, that’s what we do where I’m from.

-Bluestreak, the damn foreigner.

My happiness can be bought for the low price of 500,000 euros (or I´m only posting so I can abuse the hyphen key).

2008-10-23T18:21:00.007+02:00

Sometimes when I’m looking for material to post on, I try to look deep within myself and find some really dark hidden reality inside of me to enlighten you all with so we can make some kind of human connection however fragile across these windows of integrated circuits and pixels n shit.

But, let’s face it, I’m not that substantive, and to be honest, sometimes I’m as shallow as that stagnant, piss-temperature puddle I just fucked my boots up in on my way to work. Trust me, I live with myself, I know this about me.

Shopping makes me happy. Not ephemerally, evasively happy, but real, Capitalism-Has-Hooked-It´s-Fangs-Into-Me-And-I´m-Ready-To-Speak-In-Tongues-For-This-Shit happy.

I know that deep down I’m a materialist. If someone gave me 500,000 euros it would buy my happiness. Or at least I feel like it would. I would buy a house in Arizona and a flat in Spain and I would quit my Being-Penetrated-In-My-Ear-Canal-Would-Be-Funner-Than-This job.

I know, I know, you will say that if I had the money, I would just find new things to be unhappy about and it wouldn’t bring REAL happiness. Well, save it, cause luckily I don’t believe in real happiness. How could I? I’m kidless. Everyone knows you can’t even fathom real happiness until you spawn. Duh.

So in the meantime, I’m gonna drool over some new boots I might treat myself to if I start feeling really desperate for some happiness relief and dream of the day I can tell The Man to get his dick out of my ear canal.

Anyone have a Q-tip?

-Bluestreak

Tomorrow I promise more rice cakes

2008-10-21T12:18:00.012+02:00

My blog is on a diet.

I’m only allowing my blog to indulge in homesickness posts every once in awhile. But lately, the filler posts are the equivalent of a rice cake where prose is concerned.

But today I’m feasting on a cornucopia of longing. Esto es lo que hay, bitches. Because the pendulum of homesickness swings back around to me again, this time with the weather. The fucking weather. I know I’m not the only one that feels nostalgia when the weather changes, but in me it brings out steady, corkscrew-to-the-brain homesickness.

It’s only when trips are near that I allow for this sort of pandering. When I know I’m not going to be relieved of this place for another six months I go about my business in a robotic sort of way. The phantom limb of home moves with me fittingly and the gaping hole in my persona the size of the Grand Canyon where my roots used to be is ignored. But as a trip home approaches I experience a homesickness coup that lobotomizes my brain and effectively wreaks cognitive havoc on my life. I might seem normal, but inside I’m curled up in a foetal ball.

The truth is, I hate the trips home. I need them, but I hate them. I build so many expectations and so much anxiety around these trips, that they could never possibly fulfil all that I’ve built them up to be in my mind. With just two weeks to spend at home, and with everyone I know pulling me in different directions, I leave feeling like I´ve been to 17th century England where I´ve been tried, drawn and quartered for high treason.

I never experience home like I used to.

Oh, yeah, and there’s the guilt. The guilt of not spending enough time with everyone. But harsher yet, the guilt of not actually even enjoying the trip that so much angst went into planning and anticipating.

I know what you´re thinking. Chill, Bluey. Well, I´ve never claimed not to be high strung.

I’m buying my flights home today. That’s what this is really all about.

Oh, and I´m cold. And cold = October = pumpkin carving contests I won’t be in = Halloween parties I won’t be going to = nephews dressed up like pumpkins I won’t be kissing. And yes, I´m bitter.

So today I get to be sad.

And I ain´t apologizing for it, RTL.

-Bluestreak.

"Homesick" by silviadinatelle:: from Flickr.

Unattached Shame at the Flea Market (it´s just like a Mini Mall)

2008-10-20T09:14:00.005+02:00

Remember how I once wrote about unattached shame? (vergüenza ajena)

If you didn´t really grasp it then, watch this video and you will feel what I´m talking about:

Found on Larry´s blog over at Aquanaut Drinks Coffee.

I´ve got the Monday blues.

-Bluestreak

Tallying up the points of substance use

2008-10-15T13:49:00.009+02:00

Lately I´ve been listening to some good music. "Will you welcome please, the Grateful Dead"

And, well, because my life is one giant fucking cliché, it has brought back memories wherein I ingest certain substances for recreational and/or educational purposes.

I´ll elaborate. Some of you may be shocked, others will think "that was nothing". But here is the confession about my past and present drug use:

Marijuana - The Omnipresent vice

Marijuana has surrounded me since, like, birth. I´m surprised I´m not a total pothead. The first time I smoked pot, I had a lovely pole vaulter blow the smoke into my mouth cause I didn´t know how to inhale. He was nice like that. The following 5 years can be summed up as me always having a bag of schwaggy weed. Always. My nickname during this time was Heads. As in, Heads in the Grass. I don´t really smoke pot anymore. I don´t think the nickname sat well with me.

So let´s summarize my experience, along with a point value system to see who the winner of this game is:

Smoking pot while chilling on a terrace on the island of Kauai +50
Smoking pot with a parent before going for breakfast with Grandma -150
Husband having mental collapse after a bong rip and subsequently begging to be taken to the hospital -50
Getting caught smoking pot behind a bowling alley by the cops and your friend passing out during the interrogation -250
Smoking pot on a giant rock in a valley of Sedona, Arizona while contemplating vortexes +75
Smoking pot and then remembering you´re an aerobics instructor due to give a class and your roommates are laughing at your oxymoronic existence -100

TOTAL POINTS: -125
VERDICT: YOU LOSE AND YOU SUCK.

Psychedelics

In college I dabbled in psychedelic drugs like acid, mushrooms, ecstasy, mescaline (yeah, I freaking ingested some synthetic peyote, ok, WTF???), and some other drugs that were acronyms that I can´t remember because the drugs effectively killed the brain cells required for remembering their names. Most of these experiences involved trips to Disneyland or a water park of sorts, or camping in the Arizona desert. I don´t regret any of these experiences. I would do psychedelic drugs again, if I were in a controlled environment. And by controlled environment I mean in a padded room with a straight jacket on and a team of medical professionals ready to euthanize me.

Let´s look at how I stack up with psychedelics.

Take ecstasy at a rave in the middle of the goddamn desert where some idiot puts Icy Hot on your temples that temporarily blinds you and upon regaining eyesight finding your 14 year old cousin standing in front of you, also on ecstasy, and the friend you came with laying on the ground with a credit card in his mouth to stop himself from grinding his teeth out. -500
Take mescalin with some lovely boy on a camping trip and take pictures of plant life, laughing hysterically all night long. +100
Realize you should have pitched the tent before you were tripping balls. -25
Take mushrooms and then turn up to the house you just moved into and have to deal with your new roommates for the first time, while your sister smokes a cigarette in the house, something that was specified as prohibited behavior as a roommate. -150
Take acid with a sibling and then realize that being around your sibling without drugs already makes you feel like you need to be institutionalized, rendering the consumption of said drugs rather superfluous. Feel as though you would rather cuddle a cactus than continue the trip. -75
Take acid and then watch the movie Rubin and Ed, the most awesomest Crispin Glover movie EVER. +80
Accidentally answer the phone while tripping, and it´s your dad. -90

TOTAL POINTS: -610
VERDICT: YOU LOSE. WHAT´S WRONG WITH YOU? SRSLY.

Rx drugs

In grad school I became friends with a group of psychiatrists, one of whom helped save me from scholarly damnation by getting me drugs invented to help keep me from procrastination and worry.

Take Strattera and write your Masters thesis in a week. +1000
Take Propanolol and calmly give a lecture to 200 people, defend your thesis, and lead any discussion. +600

TOTAL POINTS: -1600

VERDICT: YOU´RE A WINNER. MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH A SPANISH PSYCHIATRIST IMMEDIATELY TO PUT YOU ON ADHD MEDS AND SAVE YOU FROM LOSING YOUR JOB.

So that´s my chronicle of substance use and abuse.

I didn´t mention alcohol, because I might need to do a tally that´s like 3 posts long, and I already know I would be in the red numbers.

Peace,

-Bluestreak

Drum roll please...

2008-10-14T15:53:00.006+02:00

I´m not one for awards or achievements of any kind. Receiving them, that is.

I´m trying to recall any awards I´ve received in the past and the only one that comes to mind was when I was in the 5th grade Science Fair. I won 2nd place for an Acids and Bases experiment that was 100% designed by my dad´s girlfriend at the time, a 2nd grade teacher. I had no clue what acids and bases were but just saw a bunch of nicely organized cotton balls with different colors on construction paper. I remember being terrified when I won because I thought someone was gonna ask me a question or I would have to talk about it and everyone would realize I was a huge fraud (this same fear has accompanied me to date). My dad´s girlfriend had the best intentions, but being a second grade teacher, she could have made sure I had some inkling for what my project was about. Oh well, she ended up leaving my dad, which I thought was great for me, because I had recently seen Parent Trap and had a whole plan concocted in my mind for reuniting my parents. (Side note: the writers and producers of that movie should be burned at the stake).

Anyway, Awards and Achievements.

Grade school and Junior High, nothing. I was "uninvolved" according to my parents´accusations. I think it was because they forced me to do music and I hated it, quitting violin lessons cause the violin was too heavy, quitting singing lessons for fear of having to perform, quitting guitar lessons because I was embarrassed for having drooled on my guitar in a moment of intense concentration during a lesson once (my mouth was all full of braces and rubber bands n shit).

I tried out for the basketball team and made the "B team", which was a consolation prize for not making the "A team" (read: REAL team). They didn´t want us rejects giving up on our stupid dreams so they created a new team just for us. I sucked even on the "B team".

I tried out for cheerleading. (Insert game show noise alerting failure).

Gaaaaaawd.

High school, nothing. No Model U.N. No student council. No Spanish club. I joined track and field because I was in love with a pole vaulter, but asked the coach if it was possible to just go to practice and never compete. A resounding NO, was the answer. I quit again.

So you see, given this history, actually receiving an award makes me light up like a Christmas tree. I´m all silly and giddy now because I have an award for that scrapbook that never was.

Tobi et al awarded me with this:

“This blog invests and believes, in ‘proximity’ meaning, that blogging makes us 'close'. They are all charming blogs, and the majority of them aim to show the marvels of friendship; there are persons who are not interested when we give them a prize, and then they help to cut these bows; do we want that they are cut, or that they propagate? Then let’s try to give more attention to them! So with this prize we must deliver it to eight bloggers that in turn must make the same thing and put this text.”

So I´m passing this award on to eight bloggers, all for the same reason: because they make me drop whatever I´m doing, no matter how important whenever I see them updated in my reader:

El Guiri

Gnomespeak

Formerly Fun

Praying to Darwin

A Free Man

Sometimes I Make Lists

Xbox4NappyRash

Sanity, Interrupted

Thanks, Tobi, for making me smile.

xoxo

-Bluestreak

Hyperbolic Sentiment

2008-10-13T10:36:00.010+02:00

One of the things that I discuss a lot with my friend Perplexus, a fellow expat, is how living abroad seems to intensify feelings because your usual frame of reference vanishes. Suddenly, the diluting familiarity of surroundings is gone and you exist as if in a lonely contextual vacuum where sensitivities become exaggerated.

The black bile of sadness seems more steadfast;

Fear more hysterical;

Loss more penetrating;

Indecision more weighted;

Dissatisfaction more frustrating;

A falling out with a friend more dispiriting;

A fight with a spouse more turbulent;

An argument with a sibling or parent more significant.

You can have a bad day, or a bad couple of weeks, and...fuck...all you can think about is being on a flight back through the looking glass where the strata of context fit together like the most perfectly matching puzzle pieces. You want to be anywhere but in this wonderland where everything feels slightly off and the layers of environment that surround you do not comfort you or anchor you.

But you also recall that you´ve felt here more than you´ve felt anywhere.

More alive.

More humbled.

More ignited.

More open.

The spectrum of human emotion more extensive.

The repertoire of human experience more complete.

The panopticon of your mind less foggy. Maybe.

Or maybe all of this added junk of another universe has just bifurcated your mind into two incomplete parts.

Sometimes I envy people who have never left home.

Ok, maybe a lot.

-Bluestreak

"The Uncertain Stability of Two Subjects in a Catastrophe" and "The Modern Goddess of Satirical Mutilations" from Flickr by DerrikT

Cardilicious escapism

2008-10-06T12:40:00.012+02:00

"And you may find yourself

living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself

in another part of the world
And you may find yourself

behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself

in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself-

well...how did I get here?"

This is a question I ask myself constantly, but especially when I find myself, like this last weekend, in a village with population 324 in the middle of Don Quixoteland eating, I kid you not, brain, tripe, and pig ears for dinner.

I´ve always thought the fact that I can easily tune Spanish out and shut off all the shit-talking noise around me was a plus, but I´m realizing this might be a disadvantage when your organ-indulging, culinarily derranged in-laws, are ordering your dinner for you.

"And you may ask yourself

What is that beautiful house?

And you may ask yourself

Where does that highway go?

And you may ask yourself

Am I right? ...am I wrong?

And you may tell yourself:

This is the precise moment when you close your eyes and suddenly your brothers in-law convert into Lollypop Guild members and Glenda, the good witch appears in her pink bubble and hooks you up with some rockin ruby slippers that you click together and say:

"There´s no place like home, there´s no place like home"

And then you open your eyes and you find yourself here instead (I´ll be the blonde):

And all this Don Quixoteland, organ-eating madness was just part of a really long dream that was sometimes an adventure, sometimes erotic, but sometimes a tooth-spitting, naked-in-public nightmare.

And someone hands you a margarita on the rocks and a salty tear drips into it, but it´s okay, cause you like your margaritas with lots of salt.

And someone is roasting hot dogs. Yummmm.

But then you realize what hot dogs are made of.

"Same as it ever was...
same as it ever was...
same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
same as it ever was...
same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
same as it ever was..."

And then you open your eyes and you snap back to surreality and say, fuck it, "Please pass the ears".

-Bluestreak

Modern Outdoor Dining by Spacepotatoe from Flickr.

Italicized are lyrics from Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads.

I was expecting a serious ass kickin'

2008-10-02T12:30:00.005+02:00

Bluestreak has been reviewed.

When you voluntarily submit your blog for review at a site whose domain name is http://www.iwillfuckingtearyouapart.blogspot.com/ you have to kind of expect to get a good ass reaming.

I was prepared to have my limbs removed and then get beat over the head with one of them while being figuratively sodomized. (sound familiar, Key? I've had limb-fantasies ever since that post)

If you don´t know the folks over at Ask and Ye Shall Receive, they refer to themselves as dominatrixes who "love to deliver a well-placed and timely spanking". Formerly Fun refers to them as the "cool kids" that let you sit with them at lunch. I tend to think of them as the "bad kids" smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster at the 7-11 who may or may not kick your ass into an oblivion and then chuck your remains into the dumpster on your walk home from school, depending on your level of bad-assness and/or your ability to not talk shit (by having a crap blog).

Well it turns out the bad kids didn't chuck me in the dumpster after all. So this is my BIG THANK YOU to Calamity for the very kind review and the friends who commented.

If anyone else has any suggestions on how I can improve my blog, please feel free to comment here or at the review site.

-Bluestreak, silly grin ear-to-ear

Less Elitism Please.

2008-09-30T11:06:00.019+02:00

Am I on acid right now? Thoughts and words be flowy melty collidy happy rollercoastery flowery...oops I´m all forgetty-sprinkled.

Dumb it down for me, girlfriend (is that sexist?), I’m not following. When you speak it’s like this guy:

This elistism must be stopped.

Dear Senator John McCain,

I am writing to urge you to rethink your choice for V.P. running mate. I’m a regular American, a Main Street American, if you will. I find that Sarah Palin exists on such a superior intellectual plane that her nuanced thought bytes convolute in such a way as to surpass any normal person’s ability to comprehend such highly complex analytical theses. Her interview with Katie Couric was more difficult to understand than Kierkegaard and Heidegger´s Ontology of Existence.

Maybe this is because my dumb-ass received its formal education in YOUR STATE. Yeah, you remember, the one that ranks 50 in the nation "on factors including expenditures for instruction, pupil-teacher ratios, high school graduation and dropout rates, and reading, writing and math proficiency".

Please can you choose someone else or ask her to please dumb it down so the non-elite can follow her highly complex thought processes? Or you could just ask her not to drop acid before her next interview.

Yours Truly,

Bluestreak

P.S. Eat shit.

Dude, do you not realize you're all up in ma face??? Get back in line.

2008-09-28T13:15:00.009+02:00

I've been thinking lately.

Neil's recent post plus all of the constant touching, bumping, and close-talking of the Spanish populace as a whole have me thinking about personal space issues in foreign contexts. And here are my thoughts:

Get. The. Fuck. Off. Of. Me.

There are some people that can get away with unreasonable proximity due to their obvious standards of beauty as defined by me and standards of hygiene as defined by 21st century Western culture (the vast majority anyway). In all honesty, there are certain people I don't mind rubbing against me on the bus, ok?

But, as a general rule, most humans fall into the category of People I'd Rather Not Have Skin-On-Skin Contact With At The Fucking Panaderia.

Maybe this isn't a cultural thing. Maybe it has to do with different types of urban cities. Maybe if I had spent my youth hopping in and out of subway cars in New York City, or avoiding accidents in the 'bicycle kingdom' in a bustling Chinese metropolis, maybe I'd feel differently. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up in a place where there is always a parking space available and if the Quiznos you just walked into is too crowded, there's another one just down the road to get your lunch from.

Whatever it is, I find myself screaming internally, "MOVE IT DUDE" on way too many occasions.

This feeling is intensified when waiting in line for anything when you realize that if lines were formed with seats all in a column, most people joining the line would just come sit on your lap.

Just for the record, I am a fervent supporter of the social norm of queue-forming with every ounce my being and believe it to be an essential component of harmonious social interaction and/or me not losin' my shit while I'm buying bread.

Unfortunately though, queue-forming is a fuzzy phenomenon in Spain, and, well, let's just say they cross the line in this regard. Constantly.

Disrespecting the queue-forming social norm + some idiot breathing down my neck and bumping shoulders with me when it is clearly not necessary = me wanting to give Spain the most gigantic kick in the cojones I've ever given it.

And this makes me realize that there are certain things I'll never get used to here. I'm not one of those foreigners that likes to point out to Spanish people how everything in my country is better, or wave my flag around, for obvious reasons.

But I feel like the older I get, the more stubborn I'm becoming with the line-cutting, close-talking violators of personal space and sometimes I just want to say:

We do it better over there. Now GET OFF ME and mind the queue.

-Bluestreak

I ask a friend for pictures of when we were in college and she posts this on facebook

2008-09-27T10:27:00.006+02:00

At least I know she´s been reading my blog. Here´s the story if anyone missed it from a couple days ago.

I hope she has this picture framed with my name engraved on the frame, because this is pretty much a visual representation of who I was in 1997 (and probably still am). A minor wreck.

-Bluestreak

"Your Mom Is Melting My Brains"

2008-09-24T22:13:00.004+02:00

This is the text message that I just got from my husband.

I assume he is on the phone with her on our landline and is texting me with his cell phone.

I think I know what he might be on about.

I have to admit, his parents can be a real pain, but they don´t melt brains like my parents do.

-Bluestreak

Screaming Marble Head by T.SC from Flickr

Control (the Remote kind) and Home

2008-09-20T15:15:00.018+02:00

I think I´m understanding for the first time what it might be like to go through withdrawal of a drug.

Boredom.

Emptiness.

The daunting task of searching for something that will fill a void with something that resembles joy.

Hiking?

Yoga?

Reading?

Art?

Additional family members?

Yes.

Will these things give me (at least) the illusion of having an ounce of control over my life rather than being a receptor for other stronger-willed stimuli?

Will they help me convert into the person that I try to convince myself that I am?

This week I read Xbox4NappyRash´s post about pressing "play" and not keeping your life on hold waiting for something outside of your control (in his case, waiting for his partner to become pregnant).

I´m waiting. I´m waiting to find "home" here, in its abstract sense, as a construct that my own unreasonable thickness will allow and accept.

Home and also other things. And in the interim I´m missing a lot of good living. And there´s a person in my house that shares my life, that loves me, that doesn´t know why I won´t press "play" so our lives can go on.

But why, when I contemplate all of these things, am I suddenly filled with homesickness, as a twisted sort of way to convince myself that my problems originate in my geographical location and not in that useless mental module that sits between my shoulders, when I know damn well that is not the case? I do this to myself to evade responsibility.

I know it.

But I get out of bed.

A flash through my mind.

Brown Road and Stapely intersection in Mesa, Arizona is suddenly there. Why? I don´t know why. There´s a strip mall there with a Mormon-owned restaurant called Fudgeworks, and maybe a smoke shop or something. It´s there in my mind, I haven´t asked to recall it, it just pops in and I go "oh yeah, thanks for the reminder of that random place, brain". This continues throughout the day, on my walk to work, while I stare at the screen, while I inhale a tapa for lunch. Random shreds of home make their appearance in my brain in a spontaneous spectacle I´m forced to watch.

And then I read Keywork´s latest and it hits me that at least my pieces of home are still standing and not inundated, and I could potentially be there in a matter of hours, finances and time permitting. Not like other people whose homes, in both the abstract sense and very real physical sense, are now under water. Home is out of reach for me, but at least I sleep soundly knowing that it does still exist somewhere.

Both of those posts I linked to above made me realize that I do in fact have some control over my life, unlike others that really do not, and I need to wake the hell up already.

Time to get ma shit together.

-Bluestreak

"Remote Control" by ThunderChild_tm from Flickr.

"Dwelling" by DistractedMind from Flickr.

Echinacea? Is that what I need to be taking?

2008-09-18T19:14:00.001+02:00

I need to lighten up, I´m told (thanks miss hell). So I did, literally. Like the new light blue, instead of the blackness? It might betray how I really feel though, but I´m trying to not be a whiner, I swear. I might even try to post on something happy and light soon. If I can come up with some fucking material.

In the meantime, I´ll point out further flaws of mine.

My walk down memory lane got me realizing I can´t remember jack.

One of the things about ageing, besides saggy boobs and WTF hairs, is you begin to surprise yourself with how that heavy sonofabitch sitting on your shoulders stops functioning at optimum levels.

I saw a good friend of mine a few months back and we were reminiscing about a disaster trip to Mexico we once took on a whim over spring break where I wrecked my white pick up truck. Damn, how I loved that truck. It was perfect for denying people a ride and for claiming not to be able to drive because I couldn´t fit everyone in it. It was a pain though, in the help-every-goddamn-person-under-the-sun-move-their-shit sense.

Anyway, back to my lame-ass memory: I remember having three days of crazy fun typical of two semi-single twenty somethings in Mexico with the truck I had promised my parents I would never, under any circumstances, take to Mexico. Everything was going well until the day we were supposed to leave. We ended up at the bar and had the genius idea of staying another few days. So we headed for the ATM to withdraw probably every penny to our miserable part-time working names and on the way there were involved in an accident. The other "car" if you can call it that, was like someone´s science project and probably contained pieces from 100 different junk yard cars. They were driving down the wrong side of the road and slammed into me, almost killing me. But no, I´m alive.

No injuries.

No deaths.

No Spanish.

No, those were not just beer bottles you just threw into the back of my pick-up.

No, Señor, I do not want you to impound my car and take me to jail. Por favor.

FUCK.

I don´t know how the hell I got out of that mess. Seriously. I don´t remember. And I didn´t even remember that the other guy threw the beer bottles into the back of my car, and that the woman "helping" us by translating tried to steal my camera, until my friend reminded me of it when we were reminiscing about the story. I´m wondering how much more of the story I don´t remember. Did I have to have sex with anyone? No, I´m sure I didn´t. I do remember begging a police officer at the impound for my keys and somehow getting out of Mexico that very night, barely making it across the border before it closed.

The weird thing is, it´s not that I can´t remember because I was drunk. I remember remembering the story. And now I don´t remember it.

Nor can I remember names and faces anymore. I just went to Detroit for a family reunion/ Grandpa´s 100th B-day, where I had to have one of my cousins whispering other cousins names into my ear before they walked up.

To further prove my inability to remember shit, I just lost a $400 bet with my husband because I thought Lorraine Bracco (Tony Soprano´s therapist) and Debra Winger (Terms of Endearment) were the same person. I also thought Tobin Bell (from Saw) was Freddy Krueger (or Robert Edmund, as he´s known in real life).

$200 a pop lost on those bets. Whatever, he can send me a bill. And then I´ll light it on fire. If I can remember what it was for.

-Bluestreak

Dumb. Just dumb. And funny.

2008-09-17T16:32:00.010+02:00

Tobi got me all worked up with her awesome post about the housing market.

I try to avoid thinking about this stuff because I like to keep my faith in humanity and the spectacular brain-power demonstrated when we pull all of our collective neurons together to create the phenomenon we call Economics. Um, not really. I´m a cynical bitch and a sociologist that can´t fucking figure society out. For instance, I´m slightly puzzled by the fact that when we all put our heads together the only thing we can manage to do is take a steaming dump of stupidity on ourselves.

Then, we expect the President Of Whatever Freaking Country You Live In to solve the problem we ourselves created in our own greed and imbecility. That´s like going to see your general practitioner and expecting him to cure AIDS while you´re sitting in the waiting room about to get your colon fingered.

Enough of my rant. I´m in a bad mood and need someone to make me laugh. Or to buy me a house.

I leave you with a funny anecdote that I found originally here (specific to Spain but is applicable everywhere I think) that I posted before, but in Spanish, and maybe some of my readers would be able to laugh at it a little if I translated it (it´s probably a sucky translation but whatever). It made me laugh. I promise, those are tears of laughter. Maybe.

“Well, no, housing prices never drop. Here is what a time traveller from the future explains:

I decided to take a ride in my time machine and explain to all of you how things are going in the future:

Fortunately, the predictions of so many Bubble Theorists have never come to pass regarding the housing market in Spain and housing prices have continued to rise annually at 17% for the last 50 years. As such, we have become the richest country in the world, because for example, an Attic on the Castellana in Madrid costs more than the state of California and the Tokyo Imperial Palace together. Sure, no one lives on the Castellana anymore or in any other place in Madrid, because those houses are for investing, not for living.

Although I, for example, work in Madrid, I bought an awesome 430 square foot flat, just 150 miles away, that with the highway is just a quick trip. In order to pay the mortgage we have brought together three families; a notary public married to a university professor, an IRS inspector married to a public attorney and a federal judge married to an architect. So, we put five of the salaries toward the mortgage and one to live on. We´re so happy with the purchase because although in the beginning it was difficult to make ends meet, I´m sure that further down the line we won´t even notice it. Besides, since the purchase a year ago, the flat has gone up in value 17%, and if that weren´t enough, the notary public´s wife is hot as shit.

Although professionally things are going well (I´m the CEO of a multinational corporation), the truth is that the inflation we are suffering in this country due to the fact that we are the richest in the world is making it so we have to tighten our belts a little. But it´s just a matter of getting used to being frugal. When we first started having to eat Spam made out of lizards, we complained a bit, but now it´s just two quick flips on the grill and it´s tasty as can be. In any case, we´ll take advantage of the fact that labor laws have changed and now children that are 10 years old can work, so I think I´ll pull the little one out of school and put him to work. The extra income will help to go towards the mortgage.

My salary is 2.000 net Tochos. The Tocho is the currency that substituted the Euro when they drop-kicked us out of the EU (envy can be so ugly), and it is equivalent to one euro cent. In the safety deposit boxes of the Central Bank of Spain, they don´t keep gold slabs anymore, they keep bricks. Because bricks have shown themselves to be a much safer and more profitable investment than gold.

After the Atomic Wars brought on by the owners of the government funded housing projects in Southern Spain, the population has been reduced to 5 million Spanish people and 50 million Ecuadorians working their asses off, constructing 800.000 houses annually (Construction is 98% of the GDP). So it looks as though there are 20 houses per inhabitant (they are almost all empty because as I said before, houses are meant for investing, not for living in).
90% of the land has been developed and now we are thinking of developing under the sea (you can´t live under the sea, so these housing developments will be just for investment).

This is what is known in the world and admired as the “Spanish miracle” and it is the subject of numerous studies and doctoral theses in the field of Psychiatry. Every year thousands of scholars of the human mind visit from all over the world. I wouldn´t be surprised if many of those scholars stayed here to live, because you can´t live anywhere in the world like you live in Spain.

Well, that´s all I can tell you about what is awaiting you in the future. I´ve got to run so I can hunt some lizards for dinner.”

-Time Traveler."

Hope you laughed a little.

-Bluestreak

15 years in 10 bullet points

2008-09-12T18:58:00.022+02:00

I´m not one for memes but this one I like, cause I get to obsess over my past. Found it on Fned´s site, read hers here.

Supposedly, I should sum up the last fifteen years of my life in 10 bullet points, so here goes.

1). 1993 - 1994= sophomore/junior in High School/ Hell. This time in my life completely sucked. I had braces (didn´t fix anything). I had zits (still do). I had no boobs (still don´t). So what´s the difference between then and now? Now I don´t give a shit.

Finally got asked to one of the stupid school dances that are designed to make fragile teens feel even more awkwardly pathetically inadequate than they already are. Got asked to the dance by super hot basketball star. Then he dumped my ass for some chick at our church. Jerk. Quit going to church.

2). 1995= Graduated High School/Hell. Discovered mind altering substances of many kinds. Hung around crowd that was so calculatingly un-hip that if you weren´t as un-hip as them, you were a total sell-out. Everyone was in a band and we would all stand around like idiots listening to the shitty music at underage shows (ok, some of it was good, but not half as good as we pretended it was).

3). 1996 - 1997= Happiness starts. Met my handful. Happiness short-lived because then, had my heart ripped out, chewed up, crapped out, stomped on, and finally hit by lightning by one of these guys (you'll never guess who. Watch long enough and you'll see him). He broke up with me probably because of my emotional, sexual, intellectual, social and musical retardation. But he never said it in so many words, cause he was too nice and was also one piss poor communicator.

Happiness sort of continues anyway vis-a-vis the consumption of way too many drugs and alcohol. Roommates had traveled through Europe. Europe? What? That sounds like fun. Ok, I´ll go. But before I leave, I think I'll have a brief love affair with my best friend. This helps get over nice bass player man.

4). 1998= Enter Spain. Wow, this feels like Disneyland. Seville is the caricaturized version of Europe, the replica of the Spain I had in my head, only better. Dropped out of school and started teaching English. Met my husband at La Carbonería. He was wearing a Pearl Jam t-shirt and his hair was long and curly enough and he was completely wonderful in his insanity. We were both sad and lonely and clung to each other like flies on shit.

5). 1999 - 2000= came to my senses and decided I needed to get the eff out of Spain and finish my degree. Moved back to Arizona. Lived alone. Loved living alone. No one took out the trash? My own damn fault. House clean? Yup, thanks to me. Had lots of phone sex with my boyfriend that was a million miles away.

Worked at an Irish Pub where the owner verbally abused all of the waitstaff but loved me and would beg me to go gambling with him, until he finally pissed his pub away. Like a loyal employee, I would go.

Managed to graduate with a degree in Religious Studies, a Certificate in Latin American Studies and a Minor in I-Don´t-Know-Why-the-Hell-I-Went-To-College-Cause-I´m-Never-Gonna-Get-A-Job-With-This-Shit.

6). 2001 - 2002= Moved back to Spain as an illegal immigrant and moved in with my (now) husband. Fought like assholes, mainly over him not doing jack shit around the house and me being a miserable bitchy girlfriend. Besides that, lived VERY well, on VERY little money. God, Spain was the shit in 2001.

7). 2003= Got married. I was only 25. Applied to grad school, got in and moved my Spanish husband back to the states. He hated it because no one understood his jokes, but, hey, we were happy spending 24-7 together and I would piss myself laughing at his jokes, cause they were damn funny even though nobody else got it.

8). 2004= Felt like the biggest fucking moron on the face of the planet in grad school. Had my ass reamed with feelings of total inadequacy on a daily basis. Questioned every single day why I was putting myself through the torture of the self-realization of cerebral ineptitude. But for some damn reason, I loved it. Felt happiness being surrounded by people with mild intellectual curiosity. Had my hand held by my husband while I shat myself from fear of scholarly leprosy.

9). 2005= Passed my Thesis defense with no revisions. Then put said thesis (i.e. my heart and soul) on bookshelf along with my masters degree in Sociology to collect dust and haven´t looked at them since. Moved back to Spain and joined the ranks of people in the real world that need to actually work and earn a living and leave fantasy-credit-card-land behind.

10). 2006 - 2008. Turned thirty. Began to feel the dull persistent pain of homesickness. Put my husband high up on my list of People I Blame For All The Shit That´s My Own Damn Fault. Beginning to discover that everything I ever thought I knew about myself needs to be scratched out and re-drafted in its entirety. Kinda too soon to write about this stuff. Wanna know what happened? This, this and this, oh, and this. I'm not liking this bullet point much.

So that's the last 15 years of my life in 10 bullet points. Ok, I need a nap. Hope you don´t need one after reading this.

-Bluestreak

Stuff I write about (labels)

2008-09-11T16:17:00.003+02:00

(Just house cleaning again, don´t mind me, trying to de-clutter my blog)

How the hell did I get here?

Who the hell am I? (identity/cultural crisis)

People I love

Thirties crisis rears its ugly ass head

Happier than usual

Stuff I used to take for granted

Where is home?

I´m a guiri, you got a problem with that?

Language effing me up

Excuses for not doing shit I wanna be doing

Feeling proud of my country

Obsessing over the past

Reasons why prostitution is better than my current gig

Stuff I might regret posting

I´d rather be a sociologist

Spain gets a foot to the cojones from me again

Everyone around me is good looking

Expat purgatory

Oh fuck, I´m revealing my identity

How the hell am I ever gonna afford a house here?

I´m just that shallow that this kinda shit makes me happy

Spain is an enigma

Blogging about blogging

Don´t get me started on this (sexism)

Facebook is the spawn of the devil

Was that dog food I almost just ate?

Mullets

Proof that my thirties crisis has not gotten the best of me

Linking to way too much other shit

Seville is amazing

Suspicions confirmed: I´m a redneck

I'm 100 and I'll do what the F@&! I want*

2008-09-08T12:39:00.014+02:00

Seeing as though traveling home confuses the hell out of me and makes it nearly impossible for me to write a coherent flowing post with paragraphs about my trip, I'll make a list of things that happened while at the celebration of my Grandfathers 100th birthday bash:

1). Received unsolicited sex advice, AGAIN, this time of the anal variety from my brother who is six years my junior. Ewwwwww. This is so wrong. In my mind, you are like six years old. Quit it or I'm telling on you. I know you are married with two kids and so that must mean that you are sexually active, but spare me the information overload re anything involving an anus, especially yours. I also found out that he knows something extremely embarrassing about me and I refused to let him tell me what it was, something he may have seen or found in my apartment. My curiosity is kind of killing me but I just can't deal with having that conversation and being able to control my vomit reflex at the same time. I screamed at him to stop when he started to say it (in front of a lot of other relatives...IDIOT), so I have no idea what it's all about. And I'm racking my brain trying to think of what it could be, because, fuck, I don't need a lot of props and have never taken sex pictures of myself, so that's out. I hope to god my younger brother didn't spy on me having sex. SICK.

2). Glared at my brother in law with the look of death for mentioning my blog on multiple occasions in front of family members that should not know about it. Knock it off, Carl, or next time, I'm taking you out to the parking lot, and getting you high until you turn into a mute. I don't even smoke weed, but it will be worth it to shut you the hell up.

3). Had someone convince my atheist husband, the biggest religion critic I know, to play guitar at a Catholic mass in honor of my Grandfather's 100th birthday, and TO TAKE COMMUNION IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE DAMN CONGREGATION. Now that's love. He then proceeded to play La Bamba in front of 400+ drunk Irish Michiganders who were previously singing "I wish I was back home in Derry". Boy's got baaaaaaaaalllls. Oh, then he spilled his drink on a $1700 guitar. Oops.

4). Realized that my liver can't swing it with the younger generation in my family. The Kamikazes, Washington Apples, Jolly Ranchers, and Oatmeal Cookies have been superfluous elements in my life as of at least 10 years ago. So why did I do that to myself and then try to eat that bean burrito from Taco Bell? Also realized that even with all of the above shots, I still cannot handle watching my youngest brother hitting on girls at a bar. Nor can I handle drunk husband trying to talk to youngest brother about kinky shit. NO. CAN'T HANDLE IT.

5). Raised my glass to "kid-lessness" with the very, very few people remaining in my family who have decided not to supply the planet with more inhabitants for now and bless it with their reproductive ability. Biological alarm clock ringing, yes, the stupid whore, but snooze has been enabled for now.

6). Remembered how extremely controlling and manipulative my family can be. Something is wrong when my uncle is passed out on the ground, covered in a table cloth, and I am sneaking off to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette so that my parents and none of my aunts and uncles see me. What am I, 15??

7). Sang "Don't stop believing" by Journey at the top of my lungs together with the coolest freaking people on earth (my 50 some crazy cousins).

8). Listened to my Grandpa give me stinging advice as if he had ESP into my life, even though I don't think he knew who he was talking to at the time. But I took it to heart even if it was meant for someone else. I also listened to him with tears in his almost completely blind eyes tell me stories of my deceased Grandmother. That alone was worth my trip home. This man is as hard-headed and controlling as they come in my family, which is saying a lot, but damn if he can't bring tears to my eyes within five minutes of sitting next to him.

Happy 100th, Grandpa.

- Bluestreak

*thanks, Kristy for my title.

Piecing together my Habitus

2008-09-01T11:03:00.001+02:00

It is strange how my experience here in Spain changes over time. Initially the challenge of language trumped every other cultural challenge and kept my mind so occupied and entertained that I was completely blind to the cultural inconsistencies between myself and Spanish people that I would come to realize later.

I may be grossly overestimating myself here, but I think that at this point, I probably understand 95% of spoken Spanish. The problem is that within that 5% that is lost to me, it seems like 60% of Spanish humor and potential cultural connectedness is contained.

This can make it difficult to not be a total vacant, absent bitch at a party with Spanish people.

So, I go to a party, like Friday night. I do the normal thing I do when I´m in the company of all Spanish people. I sit in a chair smoking, being the quiet weird wife of my Spanish husband. And I think about how far that is from who I am, from what anyone who has ever known me well knows. I´m the furthest thing from quiet. I´ll talk to you until your ears feel like I´ve chewed them up and passed them through my digestive track. And I´ll listen to you if you have an ounce of humor in you.

That´s the normal me.

But here, among them I watch the people around me with bored indifference and feel such a disconnect with them on the deepest human level, that it pains me to try to make conversation. I see them laughing. I understand what they are saying. I smile to be polite, but in every moment I know how out of place I am and how brutally laborious it is to have a genuine connection with them. I know how goddamn difficult it is to say anything of interest to them and how difficult it is to find anything they have to say a diversion from the prototype that I have in my mind of them.

And I come across as a bitch. And I know it. And I can´t do anything to stop it. And I probably am one.

But then I go home to the states. I sit in a room full of Americans and I am completely and utterly entertained by how my language flows out of their mouths and they say things like "ass monkey", or "give me a pound, dog" and I tear up with laughter at expressions, poise and behavior that I had forgotten about. It just feels so effortless. And everyone amuses me greatly.

And I realize that those measly two weeks of happy, effortless understanding and cultural connection isn´t enough for me. So I try to find the pieces of my habitus here somewhere. Here in Spain. Here online.

But the pieces are lost.

I have my fellow expats who understand me better than anyone here or there possibly could. But I hate sometimes that their habitus are as altered as mine and I long to be in the company of people that are just American, the unaltered ones. Without this addiction called Spain in them.

And this is probably what I´m doing in the blogosphere. Looking for those pieces of my habitus and looking for the people whose dispositions I envy and miss.

Going home again this week. Back and forth never ceases to fuck with my head. Grandpa´s 100th birthday and reunion of cousins and brothers and sisters and all the people that can say things like "it´s hotter than crotch" and make me stare at them with glee and amusement at their effortlessness without all the nonsense and confusion in their brain that I have.

-Bluestreak

American Cultural Soup by MotherPie from Flickr

Ministry of Home Absorption by excauboi from Flickr

Cause I´d rather be pimping than working

2008-08-29T08:38:00.013+02:00

Ok, this is my final attempt to help Ghost of Keywork get votes for Hottest Blogger, besides I´m well out of material for the week, and bored as hell at work. If you haven´t voted yet, just hop on over and vote. We could help this well-deserving hottie win a trip to NY (he is, after all, paying his debt to society).

If you are like me, and are more into personality as opposed to looks, consider the following statements he has made in the last few days in the blogosphere, which swept me off my feet with his grace and charisma:

"How does this Mormon-With-Lots -Of-Wives thing work? Do I have to be Mormon?"

"Well, I haven't killed anyone yet, so I would say the detox is going well"

"Tired of doing something 'just because'? So was I. Know what I did? I snagged a couple of ankle monitors and now I do things because I 'have to or I'll go to jail for 90 days'."

"Violence in trees is a big turn on for me too."

"I guess I could have just cut to the chase and said, 'I want to fuck a cartoon, I'm a dork'."

"...I could have Jesus giving me a foot rub and people would still know that I'm no good."

"...I think I´m tearing up. Kidding, I just got maced by a librarian."

"Look, my panties, you've bunched them up."

So come on, friends, get your vote out for Key, one day left. If you hadn´t noticed, I voted for him cause he makes me piss myself laughing. Oh, and cause he´s hot in uniform.

Good luck, Key.

-Bluestreak

Keep it in your pants old man

2008-08-27T08:01:00.004+02:00

You may recall how I told you about how everyone around this place does everything at the same damn time? It´s like Spain has one collective herd mentality mind and they get together each morning and vote on whether they should scratch their balls first or put their slippers on before getting out of bed.

So it´s August, and if you live in this city, that means "NOT EVEN GOD" IS WALKING THE STREETS, as the Spaniards say. This city is a ghost town.

Ghost town= chances of some dirty old man with plaid shorts and sandals whipping out his dick at you manifold exponentially.

So I walk these lonesome streets, you know, because I have to fucking work in August like a schmuck (and yes, I´m bitter), unlike every other person that lives in this place, who is currently at the beach right now eating an ice cream cone (I swear they are all eating an ice cream cone right now, it´s clockwork around here). This means that if you are unfortunate enough to have to walk the streets in August, everyone that passes you is a potential pervert prepared to whip out his chorizo surprise for your benefit.

It hasn´t happened yet (maybe I´m not as old-man-dick-whip-outable as I´d like to think). Although I did see a man peeing in a bush and when he saw that I could see his exposed genitalia, he didn´t seem to mind a bit. But admittedly he didn´t whip it out for my sake, so he doesn´t count. He´s just an asshole that pisses in the street (the street pissing epidemic in Spain is deserving of it´s own post so I´ll save it). But the potential for whip-outage is always there and I see it in their perverted eyes.

It´s like they are pissed cause they aren´t at the beach either and so whoever they pass is going to either see their dick or fear they might.

-Bluestreak, avoiding old man wiener for a few more days.

p.s. if you didn´t vote for Ghost of Keywork yesterday as Hottest Blogger, do so now here. He has reconsidered his hot-awareness strategy by posting a military picture of himself, which might not be for you, but it´s better than old man dick, so vote. But it´s still the house-arrest-anklets that get me.

"La sombra quebrada de una farola" by González-Alba from flickr
"Barrio Sta Cruz" by Jose OHM from flickr

Relief? Oh, and whoring.

2008-08-25T12:50:00.019+02:00

I quit my other job today. Not the whore-job, but the other one, where I pretend like I know more than fuck all about microalgae.

Suddenly I have...oh my god...is that?...free time? Um...what? Time to keep my toenails looking like they are appendaged* to a normal humans´foot? Time to throw away chocolate boxes and other such clutter that has colonized my domicile? Time to question why I´m whoring myself out for money to the highest bidder at my regular job (well, actually the only bidder that showed up for the auction)? Time to make my life resemble Groundhog Day a little less? Time to not just pretend like I´m going to go to the gym and actually cook the poultry mutha fucka in my fridge like I did yesterday? Time to wash my hair? (Washing it feels like a tiresome bitch right now, as does quitting smoking, which should be description enough to tell you what my hair smells like). Time to call family members? (Uh oh, I have to remember that sometimes family members actually read this). Time to spend the money I no longer have?

Time to wish I was elsewhere?

I´m not used to all this time. It´s agobiante. This afternoon with all this free time, I´m going to do what I do best; Nada. As in, nadadamnthing.

By the way, speaking of whoring people out, I thought I´d whore out my new blogger friend ghost of keywork, cause the dude really needs to win a trip to NY and I´m not about to stand in his way. You may recall how I feel about going to NY (so I may as well spread a little NY karma) You´re supposed to vote him as the hottest blogger here, which is hard to contest because he´s the only person I know with the balls enough to A) post a real life picture of himself and his house-arrest-ankle-bracelets on his blog and B) call himself hot after doing so. He deserves some kind of award for that, right?

-Bluestreak

Photo by monkeyc.net from Flickr

*yeah, i know that´s not a verb. So what?

Bullshitting

2008-08-25T07:56:00.007+02:00

Today I opened my closet and put on one of those Halloween costumes. One of the many that I have that are nicely pressed that scream "I´m responsible! I´m avoiding fuck-upery today!" Then I glared at myself in the mirror. Bullshitter. I didn´t even pretend to consider to wash my hair because I couldn´t think of any compelling reason to do so. One last glance in the mirror before leaving. Yup, that´s what I usually look like. Yup, you´re just your same old self. Can someone smack me in the head, I mean...pat me on the back, cause that took a lot of work?

Almost my entire adult life has consisted of me waiting to be summoned to a meeting by my bosses/grad committee/ family/ whoever, where they sit me down and say "Uh...we´ve been reviewing your file...and...our data indicates that....you´re full of shit".

Today when I get off work, I´ll go home, and put my big girl panties on (or are they my fat panties?) and I´ll roast a goddamn chicken, cause that´s what I´m supposed to do. This is who I am. Then I´ll go to the gym that I´ve been paying for for god-knows-how-many-months-without-going because I´m supposed to fucking go and I´ll take my frustration out on the treadmill and if I´m lucky, I´ll zone out and not think about how much it sucks. Then I´ll go home and go to bed really early and hope that gets my mind anywhere but where it is now, with the weight of bullshit responsibility.

But don´t ask me not to smoke today or I´ll smack your ass down.

-Bluestreak

"12 Thanatos" by rent-a-moose from Flickr.

Heated Quest for Home

2008-08-23T14:45:00.000+02:00

I hate fighting.

It makes me feel like an asshole. Whoever said fighting was good for a relationship? Horseshit. Some things are best left un-communicated, for example "why the fuck am I the only one to ever do a goddamn thing around here?" while chucking an empty chocolate box that has been there since, yeah, Christmas onto the floor in disgust. See? I´m following the rule of using "I" instead of "you" in the explanation of my feelings (i.e. accusations). Isn´t that one of the golden rules in marriage counseling? I´m trying, people.

So I bitch about an empty chocolate box (one among many useless items that should have been tossed away months ago that still linger around my house, because, you know, if I throw anything out that means I actually care and still have some dignity left in regard to my current place of habitation). But what I meant to say was "why the fuck am I the only one who has spent the last two years looking for a new house for us without so much as a "meh" from you?" (a horribly unfair and inaccurate statement, just for the record). That kicker has come out way too many times lately and the chocolate box incident was added in to cure the boredom of endlessly repetitive "dialogue" regarding the house quest. It was added in for variety.

It´s hard to feel at home here. Damn hard. This isn´t my country. This isn´t my culture. My home is a 24 hour and $2000 journey away from here, in a country where $2000 means a hell of a lot more than it does in the U.S. The house is fucking symbolic. Yeah, I know it´s the worst possible time in history to buy a house here, or nearly anywhere. I don´t want to buy a house; that illusion was done away with ages ago. And it has, of late, become the last thing that I want, which I´m now recognizing is a problem of it´s own. But if I don´t find a place that feels like home soon....I´m gonna....fuck...no... I´m not gonna do a damn thing. I´m just gonna really start wondering what I´m doing here and why the hell I left my country, and my feeling of home. It´s been 3 years since we moved back to Spain. I don´t want to go back to America and I don´t want to want to go back. I want to find home, if it exists for us. Preferably here. But I haven´t yet.

And I don´t want to fight about it anymore. And I´m sorry about the chocolate box.

-Bluestreak, bitch.

"Cristina´s World" by Andrew Wyeth

Holy Shit: thanks for the sanity.

2008-08-21T09:35:00.000+02:00

You know how there are certain friends that have had such a formative effect on your life that when you talk to them it is like having a conversation with yourself, except without the feeling of the little voices that make you think you´re losing your fucking mind all the time? You can usually tell within 5 seconds of listening to their sense of humor again that it is exactly like yours. There are a few of these people in my past. Only a handful. At this age I don´t know if it´s possible to find new friends that have the same effect, because you´re fully formed now, you´re fucking thirty-something and you may as well be 80, your mind is a damn rock, and besides you are busy as hell and don´t have time to hang out, you miserable adult. You are who you are today because of those people in your past that helped shape your personality.

I just talked to my dear friend Mary. My god, do I miss thee. Can you just hang out in my brain and then when I need a laugh or need to make fucking decisions consult you as needed?

Could I get this lovely handful of friends in a room and can we give each other shit again for hours? And can we just toss our beer bottles from our chairs into your kitchen again and listen to them crash? No? Come on. I´ll let you laugh at me until I can´t take it anymore, or you can slam my back again into the asphalt in front of your damn apartment complex and then act like it was the funniest joke ever (thanks Josh and Mary, I doubt you even remember that, you A-holes). And then I´ll write all over your face with permanent marker while you´re passed out. No? Doesn´t sound like fun anymore? Are we too adult for this shit?

There´s been talk of a New Years reunion of the lovely handful. If any of you A-holes are reading this (I know some of you read this and you biatches never leave a comment) and are even thinking of not meeting me in New York in January, I will hunt you down and make you drink with me whether you are in Seattle, San Francisco, fucking Milwaukee or Philly. Either that or I sweartogod I´ll drunk dial you at the most inopportune moment.

All I want is a few hours of the crazies being around the table with me and not just in my head.

Peace.

-Bluestreak

The Olympics bores me to tears. Come on, world, let´s do something I care about.

2008-08-20T09:36:00.001+02:00

Alright, I get it. These people are crazy machines and they deserve semi-deity status. But why is this so important? How did the entire world get together and decide unanimously that people running and jumping over hurdles and doing crazy shit with sticks would be the main thing that would unite humanity? I thought sex, alcohol, and food united humanity. Oh, and religion, but that´s no fun.

Is the Olympics supposed to give me hope? In what? In the fact that there are super-humans among us and I´m not one of them? In human potential? In dream achievement? Does it remind us of that great idea we had that there are winners and losers and the winners are there cause they deserve it? Aaaaaaaa, fuck this.

Rassles got me thinking about some missing activities from the Olympics, so here are some of my ideas of what we could do every four years as a world with various representatives from different countries (I´ll volunteer if necessary):

1). Play drinking games and then vote on which country handled themselves the best, acted the dumbest, were the funniest, made the biggest asses out of themselves, lost all their money, etc. Losers get to be drunk and stupid.

2). Make a bunch of food and then vote on which meal was the yummiest, which was the sickest, etc. The losers have to eat their sick ass food.

3). Watch representatives from different countries have sex (OK, I´m not volunteering anymore) and then vote on who was the sexiest, kinkiest, sickest, etc. I don´t think there are any real losers in this case.

4). Every country gets to play music and then we vote on who ruled the most (this is NOT EUROVISION) Kill me, Eurovision.

If the Olympics had these activities, I would watch them happily and it would give me way more faith in humanity than watching a superhuman do weird-ass flips on a balance beam, cause then I would begin to identify with the human race again.

-Bluestreak

"Yay for the Olympics" by kk+ courtesy of Flickr.

I think I'm back from holidays

2008-08-14T01:12:00.000+02:00

Wow. I thought that two weeks of combining Spanish in-laws with my own family would have meant loads of inspiration for writing. WRONG.

Combining two parallel universes that have never been combined has made me question if I haven't disappeared into some existential void, the two worlds canceling eachother out. Can someone confirm this?

Really, the lack of inspiration is because every seed of a thought was brutally filibustered by the mental rape that is my parents constant gibbering. My mother does not seem to understand that people who live in a harmonious society have conversations in their head all the time. These conversations are called thoughts. When and if said thoughts are deemed valid, they pass through a vocal phenomenon and are manifested in what is called speech. My mother, however, has confused thoughts and speech and all thoughts pass through the vocalization process, rendering me helplessly incapable of dealing with life and wanting to head-butt the nearest saguaro. Maybe I spend too much time alone and am not used to other people talking to me for hours on end. My stepdad on the other hand, is slightly more tolerable to listen to at length, only because his endless monologues tend to have a thesis, albeit a fuzzy one loaded with contradictions (for example: "everyone on welfare is lazy" can inspire in him an hour long rant until he finally comes up for air, to fill his coffee mug as if more stimulant were required).

I'm probably exaggerating a little, and being horribly unfair to my sweet family that just hosted my non-English-speaking-in-laws for two weeks. But everything felt magnified when suddenly all of this gibberish I normally half-listen to, half-pray I didn't just hear, had to be processed into Spanish in my brain and then spewed back onto my unsuspecting in-laws in their tongue, which meant I had to listen to the shit three goddamn times (once in all its original craze, next inside my throbbing head, and thirdly out of my own noncompliant mouth after a weed-out-the-most-crazy-element selection process was made).

If it hadn't been for the paradisiacal island of Kauai to balance out the verbal anarchy taking place around me, I don't know if I would have made it back in one piece.

So, I'm back (I think).

-Bluestreak

Photo: "Rhizom-E-ros ≥ Mimesis.Catharsis ²" from Flickr by jef safi

trip home in numbers

2008-08-06T10:03:00.001+02:00

Number of people currently drunk and posting under "bluestreak": 1

Number of days home: 2

Number of siblings still willing to get drunk with me: 2

Age difference between me and one of said siblings, which explains why they will still get drunk with me: 9 years.

Number of family members that tonight I discovered have been arrested and spent at least a night in jail: 2 (WTF????!!!!)

Number of beers needed to be able to begin to handle a meal with Spanish parents-in-law who have accompanied us on this trip to the states: 2 (clash of civilizations post in workings)

Number of times I've felt like banging my head against the wall during a meal: >10

Number of cigarettes smoked that I was made to feel like a crack addict for smoking: 10 (yeah, I'm an asshole, I know I said I was quitting)

Number of cigarettes my instincts have told me to smoke: 1000+

Number of times people have asked me when I'm going to have a kid: 28

Number of times I've wanted to smack someone for asking me a stupid question: 28

Number of times I've wanted to throw up because one of the people asking the question was younger brother who attempted to discuss my sex life at the dinner table: 1

Percentage decrease in size of functional ovaries each time I'm asked the question: 3.5%

Projected weight gain during next two week period due to a mix of nervous eating and gorging on food I miss: 10 lbs.

Number of people that need to get their ass to bed and sleep it off: 1

-Bluestreak

Shreds of Home

2008-08-04T12:44:00.000+02:00

"Home."

On the way home from the airport, we pass a street we normally would have taken, that leads to a house that now some creepy faceless people are living in. They are sleeping in the room I used to sneak boys into, swimming in the pool I used to jump from the roof into, cooking in the kitchen I used to fight tooth and nail not to have to clean, slamming doors I once defiantly slammed for effect. They check their mail from the box I got the my pen pal letters from, my college acceptance letters from. It's all very violating.

Then we arrive "home" to a massive, cold house where my parents now live, an unfamiliar place where I don't know where any of the light switches are. In the middle of the night, jet lagged, I essay the house for shreds of home (and to self-flagellate with my memories like I tend to do). There's that end table my mom got in the divorce, the family picture from 1989 where we were all wearing matching sweaters that is cheesy as hell, my mom's Women's Anatomy book that I learned about the female orgasm from, the lighthouse lamp that used to sit on top of the piano that was always lit when I came home way past my curfew. These little pieces of "home", all this shit from my childhood, is as if on display in a giant, overly air-conditioned museum. It's mildly nauseating.

Then I go outside at 4 a.m. and feel the rush of hot air, the smell of summer grass and orange groves, the dawn coming earlier than anywhere I've ever known. I see lightning from an electrical storm far off. People are already walking their dogs. And I remember the city, beyond the back wall, the only city I can ever call home, with its hot hair dryer breeze, its desolate, sad strip malls with all their convenient, solitary familiarity. And I think, "Oh yeah. Home." And it ties my stomach up in knots and reminds me of the vast, sad distance that normally separates me from this and the abyss of time that has passed since I've seen these shreds of home.

-Bluestreak

Who am I and why do you care?

2008-08-01T13:18:00.003+02:00

who am i?

I am culture clash incarnate.

I am Bluestreak, thirty-something, American desert rat that ended up in Southern Spain by a series of random events (crushing fist of fate). Living in Spain used to seem like a big deal, but now it is just la vida. Besides the fact that everyone can tell I´m a guiri (i.e. gringo), I mix well and this feels like home. But a big part of me is never at home here (or anywhere, I´m discovering). I started this blog because my mind is usually in a million places and none of them are in the present moment that is this sad, smelly, dark, lifeless, messy, shit hole of a cave I sometimes refer to as "my office", where I usually write from.

One of the main reasons why I live here in Spain is because my husband Luigi is Spanish. We met while I was a study abroad student in 1997. He is wonderful and clumsy and kind and beautiful and sweet and messy and everything he touches turns to gold and wherever my home is, it´s with him. We speak a weird sort of Spanglish and his accent in English makes me purrrr like a kitten.

what do i write about?
Spain sometimes deserves a big kick in the cojones that I am honored to deliver when provoked. But this blog is not about Spain itself, but rather how I deal with the accumulation/rejection of a foreign culture. But there are no hard fast rules here, so sometimes this blog is about whatever life brings my way. It is, however, almost always about me, as if I were the most important human to grace the face of the planet, and as if you cared. What else am I gonna write about?

why do i cuss so much?
When I write, I curse as if my afterlife had been decided when I stole that piece of candy from 7-11. Why? Because I find it fucking funny, and when I need an adjective, noun, or verb, I find them very easily from my list of favorite swear words, and they are the words that are always on the tip of my tongue. I guess you can say it is because of laziness as a writer. Whatever. If you think I curse too much, I´ll have you know that before each post I publish I have to go back through and edit at least half of the swearing out, so I am already making an effort to please the puritan a-holes (edited) that might mistakenly end up here.

readers that know me
If you are related to me via kinship or marital ties I must have given you my blog address during a severe lapse of judgement that probably involved alcohol. Either that or someone else in our family opened their big-ass mouth. In either case, I suggest you re-think your visit here or get ready to be disappointed in me.

If you know me in real life, please have mercy and never mention my blog at any gathering (not like you would), but if you do, I might poison you while you´re in the bathroom to protect my shame.

So that´s me.

-Bluestreak

p.s. if you´ve read this far and you don´t hate me yet, leave a comment, lest I disappear into the vast graveyard of abandoned blogs.

Economics of a Recalcitrant Heart 101

2008-07-29T11:25:00.000+02:00

I also thought about entitling this post: Why I´m Such a Bitch to My Family.

I am writing this post in an attempt to sort out in my own brain why I go through moments of family disconnect while living abroad. I´ve got my mom currently up my ass over this and it has got me thinking about why I act this way.

I have posted about it before. Maybe you have had enough. Homesickness. But this post is about how I deal with it, or decide not to deal with it.

Sometimes I let it rush over me and drown me in a sickly sad cesspool of agony and tears and I feel the pain of it and wallow fully in it in the most pathetic way imaginable. And sometimes that wallowing feels kinda good to get out.

Other times, I have a completely different strategy. It is the strategy of completely ignoring that there are two different universes of culture, people, family, friends, love in my head and in my life simultaneously (one obviously being more salient than the other for reasons of proximity). When I need to deal with homesickness and am exhausted by my first strategy, I use this second strategy; total withdrawal from second, less salient, non-present universe.

And this pisses off my family big time.

And hurts them.

Because, after weeks and maybe months of daily phone calls, emails, picture sending, etc (things that usually happen when I´m NOT homesick), I completely drop off the radar and disappear like a damn bandit. To me in these moments, it feels more harmful to my aching little nostalgic heart to actually speak to them and hear about THEM in particular, than to just not call, not know, not think, not care. My Spain world becomes my only world, the only world whose existence I can deal with. It is called economizing the heart. Sometimes my love is zero-sum. It just is.

The irony is that this way of dealing with homesickness actually induces more homesickness in me.

But my heart behaves like an incapable moron sometimes, and does what it damn well pleases.

I leave on Saturday to see them. I can´t even describe how that feels, so I´ll end here.

-Bluestreak

Photography: "The Infamy of a Story Never Told" from Flickr by Felipe Morin

Age blows

2008-07-28T18:52:00.000+02:00

Age. It is happening and it is not what I expected. It is much more annoying.

I remember being 21 years old and thinking that I had absolutely no problem with ageing. I knew that the physical was not going to be there forever and the things that really mattered got better with age (sex, intellect, finances, emotional well-being, and ummm, there must be a few more examples). In other words, I had the optimism of a village idiot eye-balling the haystack he just tossed his fucking needle in.

For some reason, my 31 year old self has forgotten all about my 21 year old wisdom. I see my crows feet, my bastard arms that aren't supposed to look like that, those funky gray WTF hairs, my changing nose, the weird spots that appear out of nowhere, my fading and blurring tattoo (that just turned 13!)

My boobs are holding up alright against gravity-the-infidel, but let´s be honest, that´s only because they don´t weigh much. Plus I haven´t had kids yet, so we´ll see how it goes, I´ll keep you posted.

But what about sex, intellect, finances, emotional well-being? Yeah, yeah. Shut the hell up. I want to look hot, okay? And I don´t want to have to give up food and alcohol to get it.

A friend of mine once said, "my goal in life is to look good and have fun parties" and I envied her honesty about her lack of depth. Because I´m discovering I may have been being a bit dishonest this whole time, pretending to care about other shit more than my fleeting youth. And now I admit that I might spend more time in the mirror doing WTF double-takes than feeding my intellect. Truth be told.

So does anyone care to remind me that there are things more worthy than the fountain of youth? Or is ageing just the mortal coil that´s gonna just be with me from here on out?

-Bluestreak, shallower and shallower every day.

p.s. Don´t you dare tell me i look good unless you saw me naked when I was 21 and have seen me naked recently, and then your flattery MIGHT be taken seriously.

Alice in Wonderland illustrations by Sir John Tenniel from Fundraw.com.

Grad School: I don´t talk about this much cause I try to suppress this shit

2008-07-24T16:56:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine sent me this article from salon.com. The author, a T.V. reviewer does a fine job of comparing prostitution to what the majority of us have accepted and know as the daily cubicle grind. That is, get it up the ass by The Man in exchange for money.

I am currently trying to remember when the precise moment was that I decided to stop idealizing my future and just deal with the life-sucking reality of needing money.

Could it have been at midnight on my 30th birthday, by chance? Could it have been the day I defended my MA thesis but for some reason let the door hit my ass on the way out, because I could not spend another day of living like a damn leech?

The pull. Have you ever felt it? This fucking academic pull. The pull is the thing in my brain that teases me telling me I quit something I was somewhat good at. I quit that outlet for all of my brain energy that actually produced something tangible and real and above all, worth it (the creation of knowledge), that I now use to decide which pumps to wear to work and which lame report no one will ever read I´ll put together for some dumbass in H.R.

I know, I know. 95% of the what is produced in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences ends up in the stacks bound and never to be cracked open again until some schmuck thinking there might be a job for him in academia goes to write his thesis and finds that shit again, buried under a giant pile of "knowledge". An enormous chunk of what goes on in academia is intellectual masturbation, mutual intellectual masturbation (I´ll cite your pointless study in my next journal article that no one outside our esoteric jerk circle will read, if you do the same to mine. Aaaah. That feels good.)

I know all these things.

But I feel the pull. It´s the same one I used to feel for travel.

I feel this pull because I know that in the context of those circle jerks, some people really get off, I mean, they really create something worthwhile, that even the jack-offs all around them are contributing to or are at least contributing to the environment that allows them to do so. So maybe I don´t mind being one of the mediocre ones, if I´m part of a process that I believe has worth.

But then there is that annoying bug inside my brain that brings up the point that maybe I quit because I could not cut the mustard. Ok, those bastards in academia did scare the living hell out me when they demanded a coherent argument when I had no possible way to formulate one (ignorance is not bliss in grad school, it is called humiliation). It also scared the hell out of me that all of the professors in my department had degrees from the Ivy League, so where the hell did all the state University PhD´s go to make a living?

Thoughts about going back arise when I stop thinking about the practicalities of money, mortgage, life, kids, responsibility. I start thinking about it when none of those things fulfill me or seem to have a glimmer of hope to fully do so. But even in the crazy ivy tower world, it is a rat race. The University only lets you stick around if you are producing good shit.

And this is where I ask myself the scary question: am I capable of it? Answer to self: Oh fuck, maybe not. And then I go home, watch a stupid movie, wake up the next day and go to work. At least if I was a prostitute I wouldn´t have to get up so damn early.

Time for a change.

-Bluestreak

"Reality tag" by Scoobymoo from Flickr

I knew it: I'm a redneck

2008-07-22T17:33:00.000+02:00

It is official. If you could not tell from my word choice, I am including the results of this 100% reliable, mind-boggling quiz I just took which I found on Almost American´s blog.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
The South
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

That´s right people, my accent is "the lowest common denominator of American speech" which must mean redneck. It also indicates that everyone thinks I do not have an accent, I could be from anywhere. I just thought you, as the reader, should be aware of the fact that when I write, I write with a proper redneck (or as we like to say, shit-kicker) -yet-accentless-accent.

Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona you get fooled into thinking you are not a shit-kicker like those freaks outside the city, just because you do not like creamed corn, you do not wear Wranglers or other displays of redneckery, you vacation in San Diego, and you know what a mango is.

But this is an official quiz; SCIENCE, folks. Them's the rules in post-Enlightenment. And science proves otherwise. I am 100% unsophisticated folk, but worse, with apparently NO accent. Now I know what Spanish people mean when they say we Americans have no culture. If you are void of accent, you must be void of culture too.

Accuracy is important to me. So I would like to ask for your collaboration, dear reader (and I do love thee). From now on, please read in shit-kicker non-accent tongue.

Thank you for your cooperation,

-Bluestreak.

P.S. RTL always knew I was a shit-kicker. Here it is, R.T., confirmed in writing. I was in denial before.

Know what I love about Spain? Portugal.

2008-07-21T11:05:00.001+02:00

Reasons why my weekend in Portugal kicked serious ass:

Other reasons it kicked ass:

1). Didn´t smoke. Ok, just one. Thanks dude from Chiringuito. Thanks too for not hitting on us. I know you were almost blinded by my whiteness when I came up to bum a smoke, therefore you couldn´t see how hot I looked underneath the glare.

2). Played drinking games in rooftop luxury. What? How old am i again? Thirty-what? Thanks to the one that was young enough to remember the rules to those games. I had long filed those memories away under "stuff you should never do again if you have any dignity".

3). Ate ridiculously cheap food that was ridiculously good. Thanks, fish haters, more for me.

4). Had only thirty seconds tops pass between severe laughter seizures, thanks to you and your lovely madness.

Now I just need to make a list of reasons why I need to get back to work.

-Bluestreak

Back to the Present

2008-07-16T16:01:00.000+02:00

Quick update on me for anyone who gives a damn before I proceed to post on some sick shit: Head has been pulled out of ass and am finally thinking in present tense instead of past. Pat on back. Nothing like a good massage and having your hairs ripped out by the roots by a fucking sadist to put you in the present.

I am in awe right now.

In-law Land never ceases to amaze me. Although this is the place of weird flamenquín fans I discussed earlier, it is also the place where Bob Dylan just played, so it has something going for it in my book that it never had before. There are two other things In-Law Land has that are high on my list right now of things that make my eyes roll back into my head with pleasure:

1) A kick-ass massage
2) A thorough wax job (I told you I get embarrassingly personal).

Let´s start with the latter because I have bitched many a blue streak (in real life, not yet on my blog) about waxing, hair removal, and the endless-hell-that-is-my-ape-like-albeit-blonde-body. If it were not toxic, I would superglue every single hair follicle on my body shut after first having each hair ripped out to its death. I don´t care if it isn´t natural or if I have bought into sexist consumer culture and the barrage against women convincing them that they should go through these painful procedures in order to remain youthful and sexy. Blah blah blah. Bullshit. Hair is sick. Get. Off. Of. Me.

I´m actually one of these weird people that gets pleasure from getting waxed (that is once I get over the initial fear that the aesthetician’s jaw will drop to the ground and then she will proceed to tell me that I am the hairiest individual she has ever laid eyes on). I actually like the feeling of having my hairs ripped out. I know that is weird, especially since and I have zero tolerance for pain normally and if you come near me with a syringe I will pass out before you get within 3 feet of me.

DISCLAIMER: Proceed only if you can bear TMI (too much information):

Spain is full of waxers, and this is where I was turned onto the whole joy of it all. But for some damn reason the ole U.S. of A. has surpassed Spain in the waxing of the nether regions (i.e. Brazilians, thanks Sex and the City). When it comes to that area of the body (the area that really matters) wax jobs SUCK here, and by here I mean the whole fucking city of Seville because my hairiness has been around town, believe me. Brazilian, Caribbean, what the hell does all this mean?? They still do not get all the effing hair off. I am sorry but there are certain areas of my body that I should not have to ask to be serviced (that sounds gross, I am talking about getting waxed here…Ok, admittedly still gross), it should be understood. No words should be exchanged. They should just think to themselves “Aaaw, honey, trust me, you don´t want that there….let me just…RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” and then life would be golden.

Lucky for me, this happens in In law Land. They are ahead of the hair-game. They are ahead of their time for being such a small Andalusian city. Maybe they watch more late-night free Spanish T.V. porn and know what the nether regions are “supposed” to look like in 2008.

As for the massage, I was delightfully surprised the other day when I spent the day at the spa and got a GREAT massage. Normally it is like someone tickling you with a feather over here, they do not seem to get that they need to actually work at it and bust some muscle into it.

So here I am today in the NOW, happy, relaxed, muscles that feel like butter, hairless and loving it. The present is good right now. My past was much too hairy….but those were the 90´s. It´s forgivable.

-Bluestreak

Lice, Flamenquines....camp.

2008-07-13T16:16:00.001+02:00

I have been a little distracted lately and have not been able to post. Ok, very distracted. VERY.

Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to put me in charge of 53 pre-teens for a two week, lice-filled summer camp. So I have been a tad busy. By some miracle I escaped unscathed and lice-free, but much more addicted to cigarettes.

Camp has made me realize that I need to be around people more, even if they are dwarf-shaped and completely insane (i.e. children). It is good to be out of my cave.

Camp also made me realize that I have a limit to the number of flamenquines I can consume in one lifetime, despite my uncanny ability to eat almost anything that is put in front of me. If you do not know what flamenquines are, imagine a corn-dog without the stick. I know that does not sound good, but now, imagine you are eating the corn-dog and everyone around you is trying to convince you it is some kind of fucking delicacy. Believe me, I am all for fried phallic food, that is, if I am at the Idaho State Fair talking to some dude with a mullet and missing teeth. Flamenquines are stickless, glorified corn-dogs, whose only missing element is the fair ride that allows you to vomit the thing up afterwards with ease.

Yesterday was the last day of summer camp. Once all the kiddies were with their respective parents, we headed to in-law land to pay a visit. Requests to eat out at a restaurant that was mildly non-cateto were ignored as usual. I whispered to my husband upon entering the restaurant of choice, "If they serve us one of those fucking corn-dogs I´m outta here" (empty threats, of course).

Luckily, by the time the famous flamenquines had arrived I had downed the precise number of beers which allow me to surpass the bitch threshold and no longer cared what dish I was about to eat nor which health codes had been violated in its preparation.

I ate the flamenquin.

Then I sat silent while everyone talked about how fucking great flamenquines are and how in Cordoba they are the size of a kids arm and are sometimes filled with shellfish. I closed my eyes, controlled my vomit reflex out of politeness, while really wishing for a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Yo-Yo, or a Gravitron.

Yessssssss.

-Bluestreak

P.S. I´m quitting smoking today. Fer reals.

Photos from Flickr:

On On The The Yo Yo by base10

The-Claw-III by thephotoholic

Outgrown

2008-07-02T13:09:00.000+02:00

2:00 a.m. Alone, weird apartment in España profunda (Alomartes, Granada -- DON´T google it). Don´t ask.

I have no idea how I ended up here.

I am thinking of the sweetest, truest words I have heard from any friend in a long time:

"You have outgrown your old self".

Thank you.

And I am thinking "Anda que la vida no da vueltas ni ná".

Then, four nut-covered chocolate donuts later I am thinking, "What´s so bad about a fat ass?".

-former aerobics instructor, current donut overdoser, Bluestreak.

artwork from Flickr by nuanc

Death by hyphen

2008-06-26T19:03:00.000+02:00

I´ve been SUCH a bitch lately.

Why are you crying? I don´t KNOW. I´m angry and I don´t know what or who it´s directed at. You hate the house, job? Yes. Is that why your a such a mess? MAYBE.

Is it possible that I remember happier times, but in those times I wasn't really happy either, I was just thinking about the past remembering illusive better times or obsessed with the future? That this might be the case does not bug me nearly as much as not knowing for sure if that was the case or not. Was I ever happy before or not??? What am I, fucking senile?

I'm sad. I'm cry-your-eyes-out-over-that-song-from-the-mixed-tape-someone-gave-you-eleven,yes,eleven-years-ago-sad.

I'm get-your-life-turned-upside-down-because-of-a-fucking-sunflower-field-with-just-the-right-light-sad.

I am feeling the drawbacks of the information age. It is not natural to be able to know about peoples lives from your past just by googling them. These are ghosts that never rest in peace. Facebook is the spawn of the devil.

I'm angry too. I'm be-a-bitch-to-my-sweet-husband-no-good-reason-angry. He cannot avoid my ridiculous whatever-crisis. He is dodging my fly-away bullets that I am shooting at myself and whatever moves. I can't even decide what kind of a crisis it is I'm going through (Thirties crisis? Identity crisis? Cultural crisis? I´ve-turned-into-a-total-sell-out-and-have-given-up-on-my-dreams-crisis? Should-I-have-a-kid-or-is-my-life-gonna-get-a-million-times-more-complicated-if-I-do-crisis?). If I knew I could read some self-help book or watch Oprah and shut the hell up. Marriage blows, especially when you are married to me right now. I KNOW, babe.

I talk to a good friend, my real-life friend. Talking to M is like getting a free 1/2 hour therapy session on the phone. That is, if by therapy you mean, having someone tell you all your problems with go away if you just reproduce. "You only think about what an inconveience kids are, you don't know the good" Why couldn´t I have just gotten knocked up and not have to deal with torturous decisions, this constant state of examination of if I should have kids and what it will mean, and blah-di-blah-di-blah. I seriously wish I had gotten knocked up five years ago and avoided the whole overanalyzation-of-when-is-the-right-time-part. Can someone just give me a kid? Drop it off at my house, all helpless and cute and little, and force me to make this decision, cause apparently I have gotten to the point over the years of being absolutely incapable of it.

I was better at this 5-6 years ago when I KNEW what I was doing. Hello, no one was gonna stand in my way. Cabezona. Or at least had the illusion of knowing what I was doing. THAT is the feeling I miss. THAT is happiness. Feeling 100% sure your decisions are the right ones. I guess that is what being young is and making impulsive decisions that will forever inform the rest of your life.

Ah, Cariño. I love you. I could never be without you, I never could before, no matter how dumb of an idea it seeemed for us to try to make this thing work being from different continents. I'm here fully aware that this life is gonna be rough being over here, in this place that I blame everything on. Leaving you would be like gnawing off my own arm, leaving here like amputating part of my spirit. But that doesn't mean I'm not gonna suck to be married to sometimes. It doesn't mean I'm never gonna look back and be sad for roads not taken. Sorry 'bout that. P.S. wanna have a kid?

Clip from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

artwork from flickr:

Mixed tape love by e.c.
and

The last Sunflower by Bernat

This Blog Post Cancels itself Out.

2008-06-23T16:19:00.000+02:00

Ok I only have two nouns in my head right now. One is “drag” and the other is the Spanish equivalent, “coñazo”, so I guess I will use arithmetic to get my point across:

Lack of Inspiration +Homesickness +thirty something crisis + identity crisis - living arrangements I am happy with - a job I like = a blog that is a drag to read.

So, nothing has come to me lately to blog about that does not sound like me whining and feeling sorry for myself, and while trying to think of a topic that would be fun to write about, I started thinking about the fact that I blog and it is making me feel anti-blog. It all just irks me somewhat, it just feels so narcissistic. I feel like it is on par with gathering a group of people in a room and orating a speech to them and then waiting for them to comment on my brilliance or at the very least not stone me to death. I would never do that (wait, what am I saying? I did that all through grad school and considered it to be the closest thing to torture I have ever felt).

So why do I blog? I guess it is more for my sake than others. Hey, maybe I like to hear myself talk and am interested in subjects that I would bring up. Come on, do I really think I have something valuable to say to you, the consumer of information about my fucking boring life? Some people blog as an escape from their normal lives. I suspect that such is the case of THIS GUY, probably THIS GUY, and most definitely THIS GUY. Other people I know blog to keep family and friends informed about their lives abroad, posting pictures and updates, which I think is great, but I feel like facebook and my picasa web albums get that job done for me. Besides, I do not need my family members having their suspicions confirmed about how disturbed I am, which is why I like to be at least somewhat anonymous here (ok, so my siblings are allowed here, but if they do not already know that I am somewhat disturbed they must not have been paying attention since, say, birth).

Weirdly enough in light of all of this, I think about ways I can get more traffic to my blog. Why on earth I would do such a thing? Once I had to give an hour and a half lecture on the Sociology of Religion to a SOC 101 class of about 150 college kids, the memories of which are mostly suppressed and the rest are filed away under “Most Terrifying Experience Ever”. So, why would I possibly want a lot of readers? Don´t know, I´m stumped.

Ok, so there it is, a blog post about blog posts. My e-world is going to implode in on itself any second now. I promise next time, dear avid readers, to post on something only slightly more interesting than a pile of rocks but probably slightly less interesting that picking your nose.

I just can´t blog about Spain right now, I can´t even complain about it. Because right now I just want to kick it in the cojones. Sorry.

Artwork from Flickr by scarlet_rose77

MOSAIC

2008-06-13T11:57:00.001+02:00

I don´t usually do these kinds of things, but I thought this one was really cool.

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Where do you live?

Here's how mine came out:

Where are all the men? A research proposal

2008-06-12T12:11:00.001+02:00

The other day it dawned on me that after living here for the past three years, I have an abundance of American girl friends and not a single male American friend. Even when I was studying abroad here ten years ago, the vast majority of the students on my program were women. Here in Seville, as an expat, you can join the American Women´s Club, but to my knowledge, there is no American Club for men and women (at least not in Seville).

I have never really been a girlie girl, have always mixed socially with both men and women indiscriminately, and looking back note that my greatest girl friends have been slightly tomboyish. Girls night out in fact, is a new concept for me, and even seems a little weird sometimes. And while I love my americanitas (could not live without them), I am starting to realize that I miss the company of American men in a social setting.

So where the hell are all the American men?

In an effort to distract myself from my dreadfully boring job and being the sociologist that I am, I would like to examine this matter further. Here are my research questions for my imaginary study:

Is there a substantial difference between the rates of emigration of American men compared to American women?

Does gender inform country of choice? (i.e. are American men less likely to emigrate to a country like Spain, whereas they are more likely to emigrate to a country like Japan or Germany?...If so, why?)

Do American women have more tolerance for permanent cultural change due to how we are socialized?

Is there a difference between men and women with regard to retention in a foreign country (I mean, are women more likely to stay after spending time abroad and men are more likely to return home after a time?)

My admittedly weak hypothesis that is based on no real data other than my own experience is that most American men in Spanish-American relationships end up living permanently in the U.S. with their Spanish partners, whereas American women in Spanish-American relationships end up in Spain. Why? I think that in mixed Spanish-American marriages, traditional roles and expectations of gender are a factor in determining whether or not women will stay in a foreign country long term (that is, we American women are more likely to “follow our men” because it is ingrained in our skulls that that is what the good wifey does), whereas American men are more likely to convince their Spanish wives/girlfriends to go back to their country (cause that is what good Spanish mujercitas do too, follow their men). I could be way off here, which is why I should carry out the study and find out. Any thoughts? (or stones to throw at me?)

The main problem I can see with my study is that it would be impossible to get rates of emigration. There is no official data of who leaves the country and where they go. Anyone have any ideas of how one could obtain a list of emigrators that would be representative of all American emigrators?

Now I just need to quit my job, go back to an academic setting and do sociological studies all day. Is that asking so much?

Homesickness?

2008-05-25T23:06:00.000+02:00

Ugh, that heavy feeling again. What is it?

Homesickness? Well, yes. Sort of. But homesickness is a constant now that never goes away - not even when I am home, because my home is neither here nor there. It is something never found again.

Regret? Maybe that is not the right word. Maybe frustration that I could not have chosen more than one way. Sadness for the doors I have closed along the way to be able to go through this one.

Is this normal? Is it part and parcel to being "foreign"? A constant state of re-examination of what-ifs? Or is this what any mildy neurotic thirty something feels that has not had children yet to take away that curse of looking at ones wrinkles in the mirror too much or the sickness of dwelling on paths not taken, (wrong?) turns, U-turns...

God, I sound so unhappy. It is not like that. How lucky to have had a life with so many brilliant choices. I chose this one, which was the greatest. So what now? Forget the past? But I am too afraid to lose my memories, or that the only universe that exists is this one -- and not the one with the open Arizona roads and a cabin in Strawberry, and wood-paned walls, and vintage blues.

It is fading.

And I do not remember a time when I did not think in Spanish or have Luis at my side.

But it is scary to think of the essence of me dissovling into this morphed version of myself that I am observing as if from the outside. This person that feels almost Spanish on the inside, but will never be Spanish to anyone else.

American as ever here, far from American there.

Ugh. Who am I? How did I get here?

"Naci en Alamo"

No tengo lugar

No tengo paisaje

Yo menos tengo patria

Con mis dedos hago fuego

Con mi corazon te canto

Las cuerdas de mi corazon lloran

Naci en Alamo

No tengo lugar

No tengo paisaje

Yo menos tengo patria

-written by Dionisis Tsaknis

"I was born in Alamo"

I have no place

I have no countryside

And even less a homeland

With my fingers I make fire

With my heart I sing to you

The chords of my heart cry

I was born in Alamo

I have no place

I have no countryside

And even less a homeland

Mackin Ink put it so well. "oh, i must be homesick. which is only a problem when you realize you're already at home".

-Bluestreak

Arizona Highway from Flickr by Embot

Original Video Clip Vengo with Remedios Silva Pisa

The Whole World

2008-05-22T19:38:00.000+02:00

In Spanish the expression “Todo el Mundo” (literally, “The Whole World”) is what people here say when they mean “everyone”. A bit exaggerated? I think not.

You decide to spend the day at the beach. Not only is the Whole World on the highway heading there, but once you get there, the Whole World is already at the beach.

You decide to go shopping at the Corte Ingles. The Whole World is there. Get me out of here, you think. But you stay until around 2:00 and then the Whole World leaves to go home for lunch. The place empties out because the Whole World eats lunch at the same time.

You want to go to the Arabic Bathhouse on a Saturday? No, no spots left. The Whole World has been booked for two weeks already.

You want to go for a bike ride instead, taking advantage of that new public bike system you signed up for? No, no bikes left, anywhere in this city. The Whole World is going for a bike ride, apparently.

What is it with this place? It seems like whenever something new happens, it just gets overcrowded with people. I just do not buy claims that the birthrate here is dangerously low, requiring government incentives for having kids (apparently the Whole World decided to just have one kid, which isn’t enough to support the Whole World on social security). All I hear about are horror stories about there not being enough spots in the public or private schools, and two year waiting lists for child-care, and the like. Not to mention the crowded playgrounds with kids literally lined up by the dozens for their lone chance to go down the slide.

Do any other Americans living in Spain get the feeling that this place is freaking crowded in every aspect???????????

I guess it could be worse.

-Bluestreak

Crowded Bus from Flickr by Poggis

Dirty Women

2008-05-07T17:41:00.000+02:00

As per Kate´s request, I have decided to address the dreaded issue of housework in the context of mixed Spanish/American marriages.

Cleanliness standards here are based on an antiquated division of labor in the family that is obsolete.

I can rationalize this shit historico-sociologically until I am blue in the face, but the fact is, if someone were to stop by my house RIGHT NOW (A Spanish person, that is), they would not think “Oh my god, those people are slobs”. They would think “Que perra es la Bluestreak”, and dear husband would be left out of the equation altogether. They might even sympathize with the poor guy for living with a woman that does not own up to her responsibilities (which have done nothing but multiply exponentially over this period of egalitarian “progress”).

I think this is what bothers me most of all regarding this whole topic, the frowning upon the wife who does not do her job. Not that I was not also bugged by the marital problems I experienced in the past when I realized that I, Bluestreak– biggest slob I know, and utterly incapable of cleaning up after myself-- had somehow mistakenly been designated RESPONSIBLE for an even bigger slob than myself if that is humanly possible; my husband.

Initially I kicked and screamed. Nothing would extinguish the feminist fire in me (really the slob in me). And then one day I said, “Fuck it, I´m getting a maid”.

And I did. Marriage no longer a juggernaut experiencing downward spiral.

What a cop-out feminist I am, you say. And, yes I HAVE thought about the fact that my privileged situation has allowed me to employ another woman/cheap laborer and perhaps I AM contributing to the problem and not solving anything. My ability to NOT clean has been allowed by cheap female labor. Progress???

I do not see things this way though, as I do not undervalue the profession of cleaning (or childcare). This work is low paid (well, wait, it actually is not that low paid here) and has a stigma attached to it because it just so happens that it has always been associated with women. But that is not the real issue. The real issue is, I just do not have time for everything, dammit.

And if I am gonna work 50 hours a week TOO, I will be damned if I am gonna spend Saturday cleaning the entire house BY MYSELF. So I decided, it is either fair and square chore list or fork it over for a cleaning lady.

This has not solved everything. My dear cleaning lady only comes once a week for four hours. The dishes still need to be done, the crap still needs picking up, and the laundry still needs to get done. I would love to say that all this stuff has been so fairly divided between my husband and I but that is not the case. But, my husband is one hell of a cook and this has saved him many a hard night of wife-nagging. That combined with the cleaning lady, and, well, I am in a much better mood nowadays.

I do not think this addresses Kate´s question about the unrealistic expectations in Spain with respect to domestic cleanliness. But I think that will be solved a generation (or two) from now when houses are altogether dirtier because there just is not enough time in the day. Or, maybe kids will even have to do chores over here, just like we did in the U.S.

I think in the future the old ladies will definitely stop sweeping the street.

No time for that in our future.

Spanish Paradox #12,072

2008-04-22T10:48:00.000+02:00

Until I moved to Spain ten years ago, I did not know what a clean home was. I do not mean your run-of-the-mill, vacuumed-and-dishes-washed clean. I am talking your-underwear-are-even-ironed clean. The social institution of marriage for many decades here has meant that in traditional families, males have had a life outside of the home, whereas womens life has been inside the home and often times her only source of pride has been how skillfully her sheets are ironed and that her floor is more immaculate than the Virgin herself. Despite all of the relatively recent changes in the division of labor in Spain (this is the country, after all, whose defense minister is a pregnant woman), we still have a few generations of women who take pride in their impeccable homes and of men who take pride in the fact that their women take care of all that crap for them. I could go off on a HUGE tangent here, but I´ll focus….

My point is, Spanish women keep impeccably clean homes.

This fact stands in stark contrast to the situation one finds upon entering a Spanish public bathroom (to date I have only encountered ladies rooms for obvious reasons…I can only assume the worst of men´s rooms). You would think that when all of the immaculate women come together in a social setting where they must share sewage infrastructure, they would sort of team together to help keep the public bathroom at least tolerable. The main problem I find is summed up nicely here:

Now I admit, there are basic features that a public restroom needs in order to function normally which are usually absent here -- namely, toilet paper, soap, paper towels or working hand dryers, trash cans, and sometimes toilet seats.

But, good Lord. When I walk into a Spanish public restroom the first thing I think is:

“Come on ladies, it does not have to be this way”. For crying out loud, is it really going to come to THIS??

And then I fantasize about the days when I lived in a country where not only were you almost guaranteed to find toilet paper, soap, and a hand dryer, but you were not likely to find a toilet seat covered in piss, and you would likely also find toilet seat covers to keep things nice and sanitary. Are those things really a luxury?

Oh, the things I had taken for granted.

-Bluestreak

"vergüenza ajena" of the "guiri"

2008-04-07T10:35:00.000+02:00

It is always interesting for us foreigners to begin to understand a concept or idea that has no equivalent in ones mother culture. For example, the word “Procrastination”, or any equivalent, does not exist in Spanish culture (maybe it is so deeply embedded in their subconscious that it defies verbal expression, because anyone who has spent any time at all in this country knows it exists here).

In Spanish there is a concept called “vergüenza agena” which literally translates to “unattached shame”. There is an enlightening discussion on Word reference regarding vergüenza ajena that I thought was interesting and the final definition given is fitting. The person posting defines vergüenza ajena like this: when “You feel the shame the person who's making a fool of himself should be feeling - if he were only aware of what he was doing”. Bingo.

So why bring up vergüenza ajena? Stacy and I were talking about the vergüenza ajena we sometimes feel when we overhear conversations of American students here sometimes. She referred to two American girls that were speaking in Spanish to each other and it made her cringe with vergüenza ajena. We started to contemplate why we feel this way-- the poor things, after all, they are just trying to learn the culture and are just having fun. Stacy suggested that maybe there is something we recognize in ourselves in them that makes us cringe. For me, I think it might be just straight up envy of them for living a time like I once did with no stress, when everything was romantic and interesting and wonderful and I saw Spain through the beer-fogged lenses of a workaday gringo. “Stay a little longer my dearies”, I feel like saying, “It ain´t all sangria and siestas”.

Having fully accepted my guiri (i.e. gringo) status, on Friday when I got off work, I cracked open a beer for my walk home and thought, either I am a total ghetto rat, or life is damn good and I am a guiri in Spain. And as the Spanish passers-by gawked at me, maybe even with vergüenza ajena, I wallowed in the depths of my guiriness, sat my ass down in a beautiful plaza and finished my beer.

This is living.

-Bluestreak

Here I go again: another uninvited harangue

2008-03-30T13:37:00.001+02:00

Those of you who know me in real life know that there is one theme I love to complain about above all other things: access to housing in Spain.

A bit of background: my husband and I have spent the last two and a half years oscillating between looking for a home to buy and looking for an unfurnished, nicer-than-current-house rental. Basically, we started to look for something to buy - got completely fed up with the whole thing after seeing that we could not afford anything we wanted to live in, then decided to rent. Once we started searching for a rental, we realized that rental prices had skyrocketed so much that it almost seemed more worth it to buy, so we stopped the rental search and started the purchase search again. And so the cycle has gone over and over again and we are finally back on looking for a rental again. And I am exhausted.

I have no idea what it is like in the rest of the world (aside from the U.S. which I think we can all agree is in crisis), but let me just say one thing about Spain in this regard: THIS BITES. In Spain average HOUSEHOLD income in 2007 was 23,400€ according to this article in El Mundo, and the average 80 square meter flat costs 190,000 euros to buy and 880€ to rent (according to Tasamadrid.com average per meter housing prices are 2374.61€ for Seville and according to idealista.com rental prices are at 11€ per square meter per month in Seville). To give you some visual examples, here is what you can buy if you are really well-to-do for 296,000€:

Here is the link if you are interested in purchasing it, as you can see, it is only missing a few small finishing touches, such as walls, and is practically "para entrar".

If that is a little out of your price range, consider this bargain, which is much cozier anyway (listed here on idealista.com):

95.000 euros, 15.807.000 pta
estudio de 9 m² exterior
bajo
1 wc
10.556 euros/m²

For that low mortgage payment, hell, I could get used to living in 96 square feet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (9 square meters).

If buying is not your cup of tea and you would rather wait, like me, to see if prices get better, you could choose to rent. Imagine cooking in a spacious, state of the art kitchen like this one in this home for just 420€/month:

Imagine the convenience of being able to wash your pots and pans WHILE you are cooking in them over your camp stove.

Please can someone explain how this makes any sense?????? And can someone also please explain the logic of "prices are never going to go down" that I have been listening to ad-nauseam for the last three years???????????

I am sorry but I know I am a real Debbie-Downer to some when I say that this situation cannot sustain itself and housing prices ARE dropping and I think they have a long way to go still. I am very sorry for all of the people that invested in real estate or those who had their hearts set on retiring a millionaire just by selling the crappy flat they owned.

But, alas, maybe I am wrong. I present you with the alternative, albeit sarcastically, a bit of humor I found in an anecdote someone posted on burbuja.info (a real estate "conspiracy theorist" website I like to hang out):

(Sorry if you don´t speak Spanish):

"Pues no, la vivienda nunca bajará. Mirad lo que explica un viajero del futuro:

Me he decidido a coger mi máquina del tiempo y contaros como van las cosas por el futuro:

Afortunadamante no se han cumplido las previsiones de tantos agoreros burbujistas y la vivienda en España ha seguido subiendo un 17% anual durante los últimos 50 años, de este modo nos hemos convertido en el país mas rico del mundo, porque por ejemplo un ático en la castellana cuesta mas que el estado de California y el palacio imperial de Tokio juntos; claro que ya nadie vive en la Castellana ni en ningún otro sitio de Madrid, por que esas casas son para invertir y no para vivir.

Yo por ejemplo aunque trabajo en Madrid me he comprado un piso de 40 metros la mar de apañao en un pueblo del Norte de Burgos, que con la autovía queda a un paso; para pagar la hipoteca nos hemos juntado con otras tres familias: un notario casado con una catedrática de universidad, un subinspector de hacienda casado con una abogada del estado y un magistrado del supremo (subcontratado a traves de una ett) casado con una arquitecta. De este modo destinamos cinco sueldos a la hipoteca y uno para vivir; estamos contentisimos con la compra porque aunque al principio nos está costando un poco luego seguro que ni se nota, además desde que lo compramos hace un año ya ha subido un 17% y por si fuera poco la mujer del notario esta de buena que lo flipas.

Aunque profesionamente no me va mal (soy director general adjunto de una multinacional, aunque también subcontratado a traves de una ett) la verdad es que la inflación que sufrimos al ser el país mas rico del mundo hace que nos tengamos que apretar un poco el cinturón; de todos modos es cuestión de acostumbrarse, cuando tuvimos que empezar a comer chopped de lagartijas todos nos quejamos y ahora se le da vuelta y vuelta en la plancha y tan rico que queda. De cualquier forma, aprovechando que han bajado la edad laboral a los 10 años a ver si saco al churumbel del colegio y lo meto en la ett, que un sueldo mas seguro que ayuda para la hipoteca.

Mi sueldo es de 2.000 tochos netos, el tocho es la moneda que sustituyo al euro cuando nos echaron de la UE a patadas (que fea y que mala es la envidia) y se cotiza a un centimo de euro. En la caja fuerte del banco de españa ya no se guardan lingotes sino ladrillos, que en este país han demostrado ser un valor mucho mas seguro y rentable que el oro.

Tras las guerras atómicas provocadas por los propietarios de vpo de andalucía la población ha quedado reducida a 5 millones de españoles y 50 millones de ecuatorianos trabajando de paletas, se han seguido construyendo 800.000 viviendas anuales (la construcción supone ya el 98% del PIB) y ahora tocamos a unas 20 viviendas por habitante (casi todas vacías porque como dije son viviendas para invertir, no para vivir) . El 90% del suelo esta ya urbanizado y se plantea empezar a construir ciudades en el fondo del mar (no se puede vivir en el fondo del mar, así que serían ciudades solamente para invertir) . Esto es lo que en el mundo se conoce y admira como "el milagro español" y es objeto de numerosos estudios y tesis doctorales en el campo de la psiquiatría. Cada año nos visitan miles de estudiosos de la mente humana de todo el mundo. No me extrañaría que muchos de esos científicos se quedasen porque la verdad es que como en España no se vive en ningún sitio.

Y eso es todo lo que os puedo contar de lo que os espera; voy a ver si cazo unas lagartijas para cenar

Viajero del futuro"

I hope you laughed as much as I did, if not cried.

- Bluestreak

Cosmetological Entropy

2008-03-25T10:27:00.000+01:00

Why is it that a trip to the hairdresser here means that I always have to end up with some crazy Euro-Mullet? Despite the fact that I ALWAYS bring a Picture with me in case the language barrier obstructs the lines of communication, inevitably the scissor-happy stylist asks, “¿Capas?”, which roughly translates to “May I take your lovely hair and form it into an ill-advised Euro-Mullet?”

Mullet aside, a trip to the hairdresser in Spain for an American is an entrance into the world of stylist anarchy. The mulleted result is the unintended consequence of salon chaos at its worst. In the States a trip to the stylist normally means you will have a stylist who will scrub your head, carefully comb your tangles out and then get on with whatever it is you asked him or her to do while chatting it up and working that tip and trying to make a loyal client out of you. This is the world of semi-controlled hair predictability. Enter Spanish hair-dresser chaos where you will tell the person wearing hospital scrubs that you assume is your stylist exactly what you want, she will nod and comment comprehensively, then she will walk away and you will never see her again. A different person will scrub your head, another one will yank your tangles out, then someone else will put dye all over it and leave you there for a really long time until your scalp feels like you have just been through chemical warfare. After that, another person will put you under a time-sensitive heat lamp and then pay no attention as to how long your left under there, and then once you are washed and dried by a person you have never seen before, finally the mullet-sculptor will make her entrance to see to it that you do not escape the salon mullet-free. This whole process will take approximately 4 -5 hours and no, you cannot make an appointment. Take a number.

There are certain things I had always taken for granted while living in the U.S.-- Escaping the salon in a timely manner un-mulletted was one of them.

Wish me luck on my next trip to the salon.

P.S. If you get bored, do a google search for mullets in spain and you will see what a widespread phenomenon this is.

Spring Fever....A Happy post about nothing.

2008-03-14T18:29:00.000+01:00

Ahhhh, Spring Fever. I admit to not ever knowing what that term meant until I moved to Seville. Why is the Spring so much more intense here?? Suddenly there has been a change in the air and I am not such a whiner anymore. It is just hard not to be insanely happy when the orange blossoms usurp the city like this and you leave work and you still have a little bit of day left! Everyone around me is suddenly so good looking too. What is with that? Maybe it is all the skin I keep seeing.

I feel like I have been complaining all winter and now I have something to truly be grateful for. It comes in waves living over here. But I admit that when I have visitors come to town, especially when it is spring, I start to view this city again like I did the first time I came here (thanks for the visit John and Kelly!). I guess it is easy to take the surroundings for granted when you have to get up and go to work every day just like anywhere else. Sometimes I think people are under the impression that we are in a constant state of bliss just for living here, when that is not the case at all….but I can say I feel a little blissful these days.

Maybe it was the trip to Barcelona last weekend that has made me so happy. You know you are an American expat living in Seville when you go to Barcelona for Indian food.

Life is good and it smells fucking great in this city.

It is Friday, I do not know what the hell I am still doing at work with this kind of weather, and I am about to go have a beer.

-Bluestreak.

A Political Post That Might Annoy You

2008-02-22T15:54:00.000+01:00

Most of you may know me as the non-politically engaged person that I am. I certainly do not consider myself to be a fervent member of any political organization or party and generally agree with many postmodern social and political theorists that claim that in the U.S. as in many modern democracies, there exists a false dichotomy between the two opposing parties (or to me it seems more like a Morton´s fork). For the most part, real political dialogue that allows multiple perspectives does not exist as it should in a healthy democracy.

That said, I will say outright that right-wing logic defies logic and being the logical person that I am, I normally lean left. Anyone who disagrees with this, is asked kindly to refer to one of the greatest pirates of our time who once said, "This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong."

Expats are often in the peculiar position once we leave our terra patria of defending our country´s behavior, customs, etc, often heatedly when in fact we would never do so back home. This is especially true, I presume, for Americans due to the fact that everyone outside of America seems to think they know what America is all about, after all, they saw it on T.V. We are more American than ever when we are outside American territory and explanations are often required of what America is REALLY like and who Americans REALLY are. This task has been particularly daunting over the last 8 years. Apparently, American people actually elected our current President, much to my surprise.

In tracking the democratic primaries this time around, I am suddenly filled with pride and feel like shouting out, "See????!!!!! I knew it. America is not as bad as the world sees us". For the first time EVER for me, I am actually excited about a candidate and not just because of the historical implications or the symbolic message it is sending the world over. I am excited about the prospects of, as an expat, defending something worthy of my defense. Call me crazy, and gullible to his actually amazing public speaking skills when you compare him to John Kerry (I won´t even mention Bush), but I truly believe that Barak Obama will make us expats proud.

ANOTHER REASON WHY OBAMA RULES THAT YOU CAN´T POSSIBLY ARGUE WITH

For me, it comes down to one thing: DEMOCRATIC REFORM ("Democratic" as in Democracy, not the Democratic party). Here are the things that he is proposing related to reform (taken from his website) that pushes any other political agenda to the wayside. He proposes to:

- Create a centralized internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance for everyone to see
- Create an independent watchdog agency to investicate ethics violations
- Publically finance campaigns to reduce influence special interest groups who right now basically buy their candidate.
- Create a "contracts and influence database" which will disclose how much money is spent on lobbying and who is getting what contracts and why.
- Require appointees to conduct the significant business of the agency in public (via debates online)
-Nullify Bush´s attempt to make presidential records secret until years and years have passed.
- Disallow the signing of non-emergency bills without the American people being able to view it on the White House website, and comment for 5 days.
- Disclose of the names of legistlatures who request earmarks with an explanation 72 hours before they can be approved by senate.
- Require cabinet officials to hold townhall meetings to discuss issues.
- Disclose of public communications about policymaking.

These propositions are 100% non-political, and unless you disagree with democracy, there is no way you can argue against any of this. To me this is the single most important issue at stake and any other thing the candidate is running on does not matter if he is capable of doing what he proposes here.

This democratic reform, of course, assumes that Americans actually care and are willing to participate more democratically. This, I realize, is a big assumption.

I will close with a quote from Indecision 2008, a featured segment from Stephen Colbert´s Colbert Report, to transmit my strong desire for American democracy to work while at the same time suspecting that it might not:

"Don´t fuck this up, America".

Expat Purgatory

2008-02-15T11:19:00.000+01:00

Seeing as I have gotten on a pessimistic note with my last post, why stop now? Now it is time to discuss Expat Purgatory (thanks Alexis for the term).

First, let us define the term:

Expat Purgatory: ex.pat (eks´pat´) pur.ga.tory (pur´gə tôr′ē)
noun

1. The distinct feeling that time stands still in the home country of a person living abroad. Side effects of such a state of mind include the re-surfacing of age-old issues out of the blue that would otherwise be resolved in a standard time-space continuum of a native living in a native land.

2. The state of being causing the sensation an expatriate experiences when returning to his or her native land upon which he or she only wants to re-visit places he or she remembers and has missed.
Ex: "Bummer. It would be cool to take Tiff to that new restaurant in Scottsdale while she’s in town but she wants to go to that lame restaurant we used to go to five years ago. She must be in Expat Purgatory."

3. A cause of the obsession upon returning to ones native land with driving by old places he or she used to live and houses of friends that have long since moved to Seattle, Atlanta, New York and Sacramento, so what the hell is the point of driving by?

4. A desperate sensation of not being able to move forward in one’s foreign land due to the inability to affront one’s past given the lack of any sensory reminders of it. Then when such sensory reminders present themselves (such as a hearing a song in a bar or being emailed pictures of an old friend) one’s past hits one like a ton of fucking bricks.

5. The sudden sensation that all one has done over the last 10 years of his or her life is assimilate a new culture and the realization that this is not enough because that culture then becomes as much a part of one as one’s ugly thumbs. This also includes the realization that besides the accumulation of said culture, one has done jack shit.

Expat Purgatory is a prime example of how space and time are essentially inseparable and meaningless one without the other. While time literally goes by with a space distantiation, it is meaningless because it lacks context. Space is meaningless too if the passage of time is not experienced. This is why it irritates me when I go home and they have torn buildings down that are supposed to be there or added new ones that are just wrong. The new space makes no sense because I have not experienced the time process there.

In Seville, however, I have welcomed the city changes with open arms. New bike lanes leading to a chaotic mutual biker-pedestrian and biker-driver aggression never before seen on the pacific sevillian streets? Bring it on. Light rail with obnoxious neon advertisement speeding by a 600 year old gothic cathedral nearly taking out 10 tourists in its transit and blocking traffic for miles? Sounds good. But you tear down a crappy gas station in Tempe, Arizona and replace it with a bright and shiny Borders Bookstore and that is just wrong. Put the scary gas station back with all the sketchy people hanging around. That is how I remember it, dammit.

I am in Expat Purgatory for crying out loud, have a little mercy.

- Bluestreak

Nostalgia for Brilliance Realized

2008-02-07T16:42:00.000+01:00

This is where the name blue streak becomes evident to anyone who had any doubt. I am here to bitch about Spain. For anyone that knows me that is reading this, you will know that I am in love with Spain while at the same time critical of it, usually in a half-joking way, but sometimes I am deeply frustrated by it. We have a highly complex relationship, Spain and I.

Having gone through a spell of nostalgia and homesickness, I began to seek out information on people I had long lost track of, and Google and other networking websites aided this process. I did not need to search to know that my two best friends from college, an Art major and an English major had long since been on a successful career track. The former working as a high-profile artist in Seattle whose breathtaking paintings, posters of which are mass sold, I seem to find everywhere I look and the latter working as an editor and a writer (I suppose, any English majors´dream job). But upon my searches I became aware of news on three friends I used to party with in college who were your typical hemp-wearing hippy-types that were majoring in Communications. The first works in the film industry in New York City, the second manages a well-known Jazz band in New Orleans and the third has been nominated for two Emmy Awards for his production work with the NBA and Sacramento Kings. Over the holidays I caught up with my old roommate from my study abroad semester, a Marketing major at the time, who is now living it large in Manhattan working for the Wall Street Journal in advertisement.

Was everyone I used to know just brilliant??? Is it possible that for a small cross-section of my life I happened to cross paths with abnormally diligent, success-driven, and talented people (disguised at the time as prototypical pot-heads)? Or are these people from my past just quintessential Americans, and I have somehow gotten away from that essence, having given it up for the pretty plazas with the cervecitas and the puentes? Am I in a place where brilliant people have less success at realization? Is it this place? Or is it the people and the stereotype of lazy Spaniards has some truth to it? This is, after all, the land of the funcionarios and aspiring funcionarios (civil servants).

Maybe people would think of my life and this would arouse similar romantic notions. Que bonito, I came to Spain on a whim followed my heart and here I am, living life to the fullest. But there is something dreadful in my suspicion that America really is the land of opportunity that I have left behind – not because it just exists as such but because the people make things happen there in ways I do not seem to see here, despite everyone around me be being some type of doctor or expert or architect or engineer. And what is my excuse for not making something grand of myself (aside from the obvious lack of brilliance)? Is it the inspiration that is lacking?

Maybe for an expat like me (and I consider myself to be a fairly average, usually happy human) it takes up so much of my persona just to accomodate this thing called culture that it almost feels like there is no room for anything else.

But that is bullshit.

So here´s to being something other than just bicultural. I have to find what it is. Hey, I said I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I was not kidding.

The Blue Streak is born

2007-11-29T16:09:00.001+01:00

Dear fellow Blogerati,

My attempts at this blog thing have always failed miserably due to a mixture of laziness, confusion, and mild annoyance. I abandoned my original blog because I got annoyed with myself for posting in first person plural (acting as if my blog were a joint-venture between my husband and me), when in fact I am a first person singular independent of my blog-indifferent husband. I got sick of my myspace blog because it is not as fun and I need more fun in my life.

So, I´m turning over a new leaf and am starting this one - alone, blog-indifferent husband left to his own devices, an Americana bitching (and laughing) about life in Spain. I'm here to post pictures and discuss all things but especially life as an expat, literature and film, anything taboo, and just generally things I find funny as hell, like raped olives and crazy ham legs on countertops. Sometimes I might speak Spanglish, like this guy.

More to come,

Bluestreak

My Blue Streak

A Blue Goodbye

Half-assery/sorry Rasslery and an update on the job front

"Please don't wake me, no don't shake me...

Anyone have a light socket I can plug my existence into?

Hope adorned

A Day in the Life of an Unemployed Blues

It might just be my imagination.

The Hyperreality of Home

Goodbye Karey

Resolutions of the teeth (and self) improving variety

Warning: Consuming Raw or Undercooked Thoughts May Results in Half-Assed Blogging

Don´t expect a thematic post, I´m just rambling

Blues is Back

It's Not Sexist if You Say it in a Song

Banal Simultaneous Sister Bashing

I might regret this...prolly not

Effort to change my karma

Warning

Some Fellow American I Am

Today I had my citizenry questioned (and probably deserved it, but whatever, Dipshit)

My happiness can be bought for the low price of 500,000 euros (or I´m only posting so I can abuse the hyphen key).

Tomorrow I promise more rice cakes

Unattached Shame at the Flea Market (it´s just like a Mini Mall)

Tallying up the points of substance use

Drum roll please...

Hyperbolic Sentiment

Cardilicious escapism

I was expecting a serious ass kickin'

Less Elitism Please.

Dude, do you not realize you're all up in ma face??? Get back in line.

I ask a friend for pictures of when we were in college and she posts this on facebook

"Your Mom Is Melting My Brains"

Control (the Remote kind) and Home

Echinacea? Is that what I need to be taking?

Dumb. Just dumb. And funny.

15 years in 10 bullet points

Stuff I write about (labels)

I'm 100 and I'll do what the F@&! I want*

Piecing together my Habitus

Cause I´d rather be pimping than working

Blogroll

Keep it in your pants old man

Relief? Oh, and whoring.

Bullshitting

Heated Quest for Home

Holy Shit: thanks for the sanity.

The Olympics bores me to tears. Come on, world, let´s do something I care about.

I think I'm back from holidays

trip home in numbers

Shreds of Home

Who am I and why do you care?

Economics of a Recalcitrant Heart 101

Age blows

Grad School: I don´t talk about this much cause I try to suppress this shit

I knew it: I'm a redneck

Know what I love about Spain? Portugal.

Back to the Present

Lice, Flamenquines....camp.

Outgrown

Death by hyphen

This Blog Post Cancels itself Out.

MOSAIC

Where are all the men? A research proposal

Homesickness?

The Whole World

Dirty Women

Spanish Paradox #12,072

"vergüenza ajena" of the "guiri"

Here I go again: another uninvited harangue

Cosmetological Entropy

Spring Fever....A Happy post about nothing.

A Political Post That Might Annoy You

Expat Purgatory

Nostalgia for Brilliance Realized

The Blue Streak is born