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

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

Warning

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

Tomorrow I promise more rice cakes

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.

Hyperbolic Sentiment

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

Control (the Remote kind) and Home

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.

Holy Shit: thanks for the sanity.

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

Shreds of Home

"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

Homesickness?

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

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

Expat Purgatory

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