A Blue Goodbye

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

Eyes to keyboard.

Sigh.



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

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

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

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

The truth is, I don't really know.

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

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

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

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

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

But that ain't me.

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



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

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

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

So here lies Bluestreak. For now, anyway.

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

Adios,

Blues

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

Or, we can do the long calculation.

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

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

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

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

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

• In my last job, I dealt with three kinds of people: 1) Those whose behavior I was responsible for, whose potential for fuckupery no words can describe; 2) Those that I was responsible to, and to whom I had to bear the unbearable shame of the behavior of the aforementioned fuck-ups. These people were the company clients who served rations of shit day after day for my eating pleasure; and finally 3) My bosses, who were nice enough but were too busy to notice I was about to jump out the window or hang myself with the telephone chord. They only called when there was a major problem. Basically, this meant that every time the phone rang I almost went into cardiac arrest thinking about what kind of fecal storm was about to hit the fan blowing on my face.
  
  Such is the life of cannon-fodder middle management.
  
  In my new job, I am positioned squarely at the bottom of the food chain, happily munching on discarded food that untrained labor entails.
  
  Well, to be honest, I haven't really been able to clearly identify the food chain at all and I don't even know if there is one in the traditional sense. I only know that I am only responsible for the task at hand and the actions of others effect me and my ability to work very little. This gives me a sense of freedom that makes me want to do cartwheels. Naked ones. I don't even know exactly who my direct boss is and it doesn't seem to matter. I just know that I need to show up and do my job.
  
  I share an office with a Hungarian, an Italian, and a Dutchman. In the office across the hall there is a Turk, a German, and a Spaniard. I have no idea what they do, but I know it doesn't involve me. They aren't up in my business demanding explanations and they don't make me cringe because they are so brain dead that they can't even fill out a time sheet properly so that their dumb asses can be paid. I know that most of them are experts in whatever it is they do and they are probably freakishly intelligent. Mostly I like them because they don't need me to do anything to bail them out of some mess they've created. I know that they are pleasant people to share coffee and lunch with and at this point in my life, I don't need any further information from anyone. +1050

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


• Did I fail to mention what my actual job is? Well, it turns out I spend the entire day reading gigantic documents pertaining to sinter beds, coke oven gas, and heavy metals. Now, I realize that to the untrained ear this sounds like sex, drugs, and rock & roll, respectively, which is more or less what I thought I was getting myself into. It turns out this shit is heavily dense and I don't understand a lick of it. I was trained to be a sociologist, not a geologist or whatever it is these people are. Yet, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, people (smart ones even) believe that I am qualified to do this job, and I have yet to question their judgement openly.
  
  But, I'm just a proofreader. I don't have to understand it. I just need to make sure every sentence has a subject and a verb and that the adjectives are in the right place and shit. It's mechanical. I don't give a fuck what the varying nitrogen oxide levels are or what the combustion thresholds are. I just care if that comma is supposed to be there and if this shit needs to be hyphenated or not.
  
  Brainless work? I don't care. When I leave for the day, my job disappears in a poof and freedom takes its place. Nothing weighs on my mind. Nothing makes me lose sleep. And if that wasn't enough, the end product of my labor is actually something I care about. So +100,000,000 in-yo-face.
  
  Can I get a "hell yeah" from the audience please?
  
  -Blues, in need a new avatar (Nevermind, I'm getting way ahead of myself).

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

A Day in the Life of an Unemployed Blues

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

You are 32 years old, recently turned.

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

You wake up late.

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

Yawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Bluestreak

It might just be my imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bluestreak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I just have a wild-ass imagination.

I hope so.

-Bluestreak

"Se vende" by Adrian Coto from Flickr.