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

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.

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

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

Cardilicious escapism

"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.

Echinacea? Is that what I need to be taking?

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

Piecing together my Habitus

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

I think I'm back from holidays

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

I knew it: I'm a redneck

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.

The Whole World

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

"vergüenza ajena" of the "guiri"

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

Cosmetological Entropy

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.