The Hyperreality of Home

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

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

Tallying up the points of substance use

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

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

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

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

15 years in 10 bullet points

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

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

Age blows

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.

Death by hyphen

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

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