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

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.

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.

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.

Heated Quest for Home

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

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

Who am I and why do you care?

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

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

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

This Blog Post Cancels itself Out.

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

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