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

Hope adorned

When I was two weeks shy of my 21st birthday I landed in Madrid with $2000 in my pocket, my room and board paid for the next four months, and no intention to go back on the date of my return ticket. Loose ends had been tied. Where I had been unable to sever love bonds, thankfully, they had been severed for me, albeit with a torturingly dull blade, leaving a wound that for some reason wouldn't scab as quickly as I wanted it to so I could scratch it off with emotionlessness. But with my rose tapestry luggage, and a worn copy of The Fountainhead in my back pocket, I was exceedingly hope spangled that Europe would help my bleeding coagulate into indifference.

I was on my own. For the first time and last time in my life I was a firm believer in human agency unencumbered by an increasingly more flexible structure wherein I could invent myself.

I was meant to be in Sevilla for university but had a few weeks to situate myself in my new world. My parents had generously put me up in the Hotel California on the Gran Via in Madrid for a couple of nights to gather my bearings until I could manage to find a hostel or some other arrangement and make my way down south where I was expected.

I took no pictures of that hotel room on the Gran Via to conserve my memory. Film at that time was reserved for splendid cathedrals, quaint plazas, important monuments, things I thought I might only see for a short time, not knowing I would walk by them every day for years en route to work. Even without pictures, my memory conserves the tall ceilings, old world decorations and the busy street below my window that I gazed out of. The tub was miniature, the faucets and light switches and pillows all different. I stared at the bidet in befuddlement. Something inside me told me this memory is important; keep it.

I knew loneliness wasn't far off, but for the moment I cherished that I alone made every decision for myself. I decided which streets were worthy of walking down, what I wanted to eat and when and where. I felt in charge of my fate. It's a feeling that only comes accompanied by solitude but that I am grateful is a part of the assemblage of my human experience.



I wandered around Madrid alone. A child of new America, sprawl America, strip mall America, who had never so much as been to Chicago, New York or San Francisco, I stared up at the tall buildings until my neck could no longer take it. I watched all the busy, beautiful people in their perfectly tailored and pressed clothes. I looked down at my own dorky attire but couldn't pinpoint exactly where I had gone wrong. I just knew I wasn't quite right.

I wandered into a cafe where I realized that after three years of high school and college Spanish I was incapable of even ordering breakfast.

"Un croissant y un cafe con leche", a man barked to the waiter.

"Un croissant y un cafe con leche", I repeated insecurely when the waiter finally muttered something unintelligible to me. I salivated at the gorgeous looking orange juice I saw others enjoying and tried to remember how to say it. Jugo de...something or another. Oh well, cafe con leche it shall be. I wanted desperatly not to look like a dumb tourist and would give up orange juice to do so.

I wandered up to what appeared to be a train station with loads of people rushing up and down the stairs in a fury. The sign above the stairway, plain as day, read "Sevilla". Excellent, I thought. I'll get my trip to Sevilla all figured out, it will be one less thing to have to worry about. I went down the steps and told the woman at the ticket counter that I wanted a ticket to Sevilla, since obviously this was the train to Sevilla. She stared at me dumbfounded and answered, "But you are in Sevilla." I thanked her and walked away in complete provincial confusion and worked my way back up to the street level. It was days later that I realized this was the Madrid subway. I had been at the subway stop called "Sevilla". I had never seen a real underground before. The awareness of my own ignorance was humbling.

I thought about where I had come from and I felt an aching to be someone else. No, I wanted to be someone.

Months and years later I clung to being the person that moved to Spain that had learned Spanish and became this bicultural entity. It was the only thing that had ever defined me. In Spain I was Bluestreak, la americana. At home I was Bluestreak, "she lives in Spain, dude." I guess I thought this gave me the social and cultural capital to trump all the motherfuckers who had pushed me aside. I had been chiseled out into something worth mention. Or something. That feeling wore off a long time ago and metamorphisized into something resembling inadequacy.

For awhile I have arithmetically examined my life and summed up all of the parts of me that remained after culture had blended beyond a novelty, after I had subtracted people being impressed with me living in Spain which was now nothing other than an annoyance to me that they thought it interesting, or people here finding it curious that I was an American that spoke such good Spanish which equally annoyed me, after I had subtracted all the scabs I'd shed over the years. The sum total terrified me that I was left with an embodied dialectic, a person who had defined themselves by a contradiction.

But I'd be a hopeless idiot and a waste to think that I can't reinvent myself whenever I want.

Maybe I'll never have the same sense of agency that I had those first few days in Madrid when I was just 21. There may be times I want to take a bite of food that I decide on and Luigi says, "Don't eat that, babe, that's nasty, you're gonna get sick." There may be streets I want to take and he will say, "No, cariño, that's not the right way, we're gonna get lost, let's go my way". But as any structure that impinges on any actor, these structures also enable me, and I´d be floating off into fucking nothingness without them...without him. And this one who licked my war/love wounds and helped coagulate my blood, and gave me the go ahead when my scabs were clear for picking doesn't deserve the tired, defeated version of me. He deserves the hope-spangled one.

And so do I.

-Bluestreak

P.S. I´ve missed you guys. I´m catching up on your blogs slowly. I know it goes without saying, but I´ve needed a break from the pixelated wonderland to find my voice again, and I hope I´m not fucking jinxing it again. Thanks for sticking around.

Artwork Hopper, Edward Hotel Room, 1931 and Automat 1927.

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

Goodbye Karey

I don't have much to say today because I think you all know my words don't come out in my way right now. Or maybe it is in my way but they don't come with ease anymore.

I feel a strain.

Heavy paperweight on heart.

There's some kind of muzzle but I don't know why. Or I do but I don't know how to say what the muzzle is made of. Because the muzzle is a little muzzling when trying to describe the muzzle. See?

Oh, it's not just about muzzles.

When I was in grad school and was attempting to read more than was humanly possible in a single day, I would go to sleep at night and have strange dreams of misplaced and sometimes invented words floating around in my brain, nonsensical sentences, ornamental paragraphs of pure jabberwocky monologue.

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe."

- "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll

This is what my voice feels like right now; recursive nonsense, my mind a think tank of anti-thoughts.

Life feels a little like that too, and looks a little too much like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and I feel kinda like I'm the one bent over with the flower growing out of my ass, when I'd really like to be standing up, clothed, with the flower in my hand, maybe giving it to you, which I'm much more comfortable with.

On top of a jibberish voice, I have some sort of rhetorical laryngitis. I try to speak but it's just an inaudible, bleached out and faded whisper.

So today I'm just here to whisper.

I'm here to whisper a goodbye to Karey. I don't want to say she's a blogger, because she's so much more than a blogger. She is someone I love as a writer, but mostly as a person. And I'm just happy I get to share the earth with her and somewhere far away she's giving people huge smiles ear to ear.

It's strange how blogging friends come and go. I guess like how real friends come in and out of your life, probably because they are real friends.

The departure is just a little more abrupt I suppose.

So, Karey, if you're still out there, this is as good a whispered goodbye as it gets on the internets:







-Bluestreak

P.S. Pare, if you're out there, I miss you somethin awful too.

Old Wire Dog Muzzles by Feltbug from flickr.

Bye. by Nathan 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

I might regret this...prolly not

Since my voice is muted with weirdness these days and my dirty fingernails cannot type a single word I´m happy with, I´ve decided to let Rassles loose on my blog this week with but a few misguidelines. She did, afterall, draw a picture of me.

Check out what she did over at Ginny´s house while she was away on vacation.

Girl cannot be trusted with a password.

So stay tuned.

-Bluestreak

Effort to change my karma

When I was in 5th grade I had a hermit crab as a pet. God knows what possessed my prepubescent mind to think that it would be a good idea to have a crustacean as a not-so-furry companion. But I loved that little pincher. I took it to school with me in a shoe box. On the bus all of the popular girls came over and stuck their pretty nails out for the crab to snap at and giggled and I gloated at the attention. In my mind it made me popular in some disturbing sea-animal way.

But one night I left my hermit crab near the window overnight. And in Prescott, Arizona it gets COLD and that poor little crab crawled out of his hermitage and died. Died of fucking cold. What kind of monster does that to an unsuspecting crustacean?

Karma, dammit.

Right now, I sort of feel like that hermit. I’ve been towed around to various places beyond what I would consider my will (ok, that’s my attempt to not accept responsibility for my life choices) and I’ve snapped at things that scared me and that I didn’t like from within my stupid shell that in the end doesn’t protect me from the elements.

And for now I’m staying inside.

Which makes this some sort of shitty-assed public apology for my friendship ineptitude (you know, things like not returning your phone calls, your emails, or commenting on your blogs). But at the moment, I’m inside my little shell freezing my little lobsteresque ass off.

Even crabs need warmth and love, but right now I’m just trying to find it within my own hermitage. See?

Those of you that have been blogging for awhile now must understand these funks. The ones where the microcosm of the internet becomes eclipsed by the macrocosm of those that breathe the same air as you and share your meals with you, whose smile you can experience if you say something funny and who can feel real pain if you inflict it on them. Not like you faceless internets. Sorry, that’s kinda mean. I love you. I know you have real faces that smile and cry and all that shit.

I’m starting to wonder how much of my blogging corresponds to a real desire for creative expulsion and how much of it corresponds to just another one of my forms of escapism or another attempt at seeking attention like when I lugged that little hermit crab to school against his will. On the escapism note, when I peek into the tiny fragments of your worlds that you allow me to see I forget my cumbersome life. Then I verbally eject a small fragment of half-truth in hopes of...of what? If it were true creativity, I would likely keep my blog private just for me. But it’s something more about the gratification of attention that leads me to believe this is really about escape. Hmmm, dammit if this isn’t a repetitive theme in my life.

And it´s gotten me fuck all in a tangible sense, and now I find myself unemployed, among other things, and at nearly 32 trying to figure out what the fuck I want to be when I grow up from within a damn seashell. But I still try to escape into your fragments a bit, into the multiperspectivalism you supply me with.

This week I only escaped a little and when I did I came across a couple of gifts that helped me escape even more and I gloated like I did with my little crab.

Mountainlover and Mongoliangirl had both honored me with this award:

In an effort to help my karma, which right now is badly influenced by the hermit crab window incident, I hereby pass these awards on to:


Mackin Ink especially for this post

People in the Sun especially for this post

Almost Royal especially for this post

Regardez Moi especially for this post

Whiskey in My Sippy Cup for a post that I cannot for the life of me find but all her stuff is good so check her out.

Moutainlover especially for this post (Am I allowed to re-give a blog award? I don’t care, I don’t follow rules here).

Tobi et al for the many laughs you give me.


Some of these people might not even read my blog and will therefore never really get their awards, but I don’t care, because there is something in those posts that I go back to again and again and wanted to share them with you.


(NOTE TO RASSLES: I would have passed the award on to you, cause you know I love every little word your fingers type, but you already have two of these awards now, and I’m sure you already blew them up poster size and put them on your wall next to your NKOTB posters, so another one would just be redundant. And plus, I´m still waiting for my drawing, biatch.)


Ok, I think I’m done here, going back inside to clean my pinchers.

-Bluestreak

Some Fellow American I Am

Today I was at Starbucks getting my morning coffee (yes, although I live in Spain where there are thousands of quaint coffee shops, I prefer anything dehumanizing, industrialized and mass-produced).

While I was in line I was eavesdropping on a conversation taking place between two American men about Phoenix, where I’m from. They were obviously both from there, talking about streets and places I knew.

And I didn’t even say hello.

Why?

Because if I have to withstand one more conversation that resembles this, someone´s gonna have to put my ass down:

"Wow, you live in Spain???? Wow, HOW NEAT. You must love it! So what brought you here? Oh, that is a DREAM. That is so AMAAAAZING."

These are the same conversations my mother gets me into when I’m home and we are at the sushi bar or at the supermarket when she starts bragging about her daughter right here that LIVES IN SPAIN, OH MY GOD, I´M GONNA CUM. And then the person says,

"Spain, WOW. You must just LOVE IT! What a life, what a DREAM! Do you__________________(complete the question with any one of the following phrases that make me want to head-butt any hard object within the vicinity):

• go to bull fights?
• go to the running of the bulls?
• speak the language?
• get homesick?
• just love it there?

Why do these conversations bother me so much? I guess because for a few moments my life becomes a caricaturized version of itself, an abstraction of itself, and it implodes in its own simulacrum.

And that’s annoying.

-Bluestreak, sometimes I’m a scarecrow of myself.

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.

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

Drum roll please...

I´m not one for awards or achievements of any kind. Receiving them, that is.

I´m trying to recall any awards I´ve received in the past and the only one that comes to mind was when I was in the 5th grade Science Fair. I won 2nd place for an Acids and Bases experiment that was 100% designed by my dad´s girlfriend at the time, a 2nd grade teacher. I had no clue what acids and bases were but just saw a bunch of nicely organized cotton balls with different colors on construction paper. I remember being terrified when I won because I thought someone was gonna ask me a question or I would have to talk about it and everyone would realize I was a huge fraud (this same fear has accompanied me to date). My dad´s girlfriend had the best intentions, but being a second grade teacher, she could have made sure I had some inkling for what my project was about. Oh well, she ended up leaving my dad, which I thought was great for me, because I had recently seen Parent Trap and had a whole plan concocted in my mind for reuniting my parents. (Side note: the writers and producers of that movie should be burned at the stake).

Anyway, Awards and Achievements.

Grade school and Junior High, nothing. I was "uninvolved" according to my parents´accusations. I think it was because they forced me to do music and I hated it, quitting violin lessons cause the violin was too heavy, quitting singing lessons for fear of having to perform, quitting guitar lessons because I was embarrassed for having drooled on my guitar in a moment of intense concentration during a lesson once (my mouth was all full of braces and rubber bands n shit).

I tried out for the basketball team and made the "B team", which was a consolation prize for not making the "A team" (read: REAL team). They didn´t want us rejects giving up on our stupid dreams so they created a new team just for us. I sucked even on the "B team".

I tried out for cheerleading. (Insert game show noise alerting failure).

Gaaaaaawd.

High school, nothing. No Model U.N. No student council. No Spanish club. I joined track and field because I was in love with a pole vaulter, but asked the coach if it was possible to just go to practice and never compete. A resounding NO, was the answer. I quit again.

So you see, given this history, actually receiving an award makes me light up like a Christmas tree. I´m all silly and giddy now because I have an award for that scrapbook that never was.

Tobi et al awarded me with this:

“This blog invests and believes, in ‘proximity’ meaning, that blogging makes us 'close'. They are all charming blogs, and the majority of them aim to show the marvels of friendship; there are persons who are not interested when we give them a prize, and then they help to cut these bows; do we want that they are cut, or that they propagate? Then let’s try to give more attention to them! So with this prize we must deliver it to eight bloggers that in turn must make the same thing and put this text.”

So I´m passing this award on to eight bloggers, all for the same reason: because they make me drop whatever I´m doing, no matter how important whenever I see them updated in my reader:

El Guiri

Gnomespeak

Formerly Fun

Praying to Darwin

A Free Man

Sometimes I Make Lists

Xbox4NappyRash

Sanity, Interrupted


Thanks, Tobi, for making me smile.

xoxo

-Bluestreak

I was expecting a serious ass kickin'

Bluestreak has been reviewed.

When you voluntarily submit your blog for review at a site whose domain name is http://www.iwillfuckingtearyouapart.blogspot.com/ you have to kind of expect to get a good ass reaming.

I was prepared to have my limbs removed and then get beat over the head with one of them while being figuratively sodomized. (sound familiar, Key? I've had limb-fantasies ever since that post)

If you don´t know the folks over at Ask and Ye Shall Receive, they refer to themselves as dominatrixes who "love to deliver a well-placed and timely spanking". Formerly Fun refers to them as the "cool kids" that let you sit with them at lunch. I tend to think of them as the "bad kids" smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster at the 7-11 who may or may not kick your ass into an oblivion and then chuck your remains into the dumpster on your walk home from school, depending on your level of bad-assness and/or your ability to not talk shit (by having a crap blog).

Well it turns out the bad kids didn't chuck me in the dumpster after all. So this is my BIG THANK YOU to Calamity for the very kind review and the friends who commented.

If anyone else has any suggestions on how I can improve my blog, please feel free to comment here or at the review site.

-Bluestreak, silly grin ear-to-ear

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

"Your Mom Is Melting My Brains"

This is the text message that I just got from my husband.

I assume he is on the phone with her on our landline and is texting me with his cell phone.

I think I know what he might be on about.

I have to admit, his parents can be a real pain, but they don´t melt brains like my parents do.




-Bluestreak


Screaming Marble Head by T.SC from Flickr

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

I'm 100 and I'll do what the F@&! I want*

Seeing as though traveling home confuses the hell out of me and makes it nearly impossible for me to write a coherent flowing post with paragraphs about my trip, I'll make a list of things that happened while at the celebration of my Grandfathers 100th birthday bash:

1). Received unsolicited sex advice, AGAIN, this time of the anal variety from my brother who is six years my junior. Ewwwwww. This is so wrong. In my mind, you are like six years old. Quit it or I'm telling on you. I know you are married with two kids and so that must mean that you are sexually active, but spare me the information overload re anything involving an anus, especially yours. I also found out that he knows something extremely embarrassing about me and I refused to let him tell me what it was, something he may have seen or found in my apartment. My curiosity is kind of killing me but I just can't deal with having that conversation and being able to control my vomit reflex at the same time. I screamed at him to stop when he started to say it (in front of a lot of other relatives...IDIOT), so I have no idea what it's all about. And I'm racking my brain trying to think of what it could be, because, fuck, I don't need a lot of props and have never taken sex pictures of myself, so that's out. I hope to god my younger brother didn't spy on me having sex. SICK.

2). Glared at my brother in law with the look of death for mentioning my blog on multiple occasions in front of family members that should not know about it. Knock it off, Carl, or next time, I'm taking you out to the parking lot, and getting you high until you turn into a mute. I don't even smoke weed, but it will be worth it to shut you the hell up.

3). Had someone convince my atheist husband, the biggest religion critic I know, to play guitar at a Catholic mass in honor of my Grandfather's 100th birthday, and TO TAKE COMMUNION IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE DAMN CONGREGATION. Now that's love. He then proceeded to play La Bamba in front of 400+ drunk Irish Michiganders who were previously singing "I wish I was back home in Derry". Boy's got baaaaaaaaalllls. Oh, then he spilled his drink on a $1700 guitar. Oops.

4). Realized that my liver can't swing it with the younger generation in my family. The Kamikazes, Washington Apples, Jolly Ranchers, and Oatmeal Cookies have been superfluous elements in my life as of at least 10 years ago. So why did I do that to myself and then try to eat that bean burrito from Taco Bell? Also realized that even with all of the above shots, I still cannot handle watching my youngest brother hitting on girls at a bar. Nor can I handle drunk husband trying to talk to youngest brother about kinky shit. NO. CAN'T HANDLE IT.

5). Raised my glass to "kid-lessness" with the very, very few people remaining in my family who have decided not to supply the planet with more inhabitants for now and bless it with their reproductive ability. Biological alarm clock ringing, yes, the stupid whore, but snooze has been enabled for now.

6). Remembered how extremely controlling and manipulative my family can be. Something is wrong when my uncle is passed out on the ground, covered in a table cloth, and I am sneaking off to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette so that my parents and none of my aunts and uncles see me. What am I, 15??



7). Sang "Don't stop believing" by Journey at the top of my lungs together with the coolest freaking people on earth (my 50 some crazy cousins).

8). Listened to my Grandpa give me stinging advice as if he had ESP into my life, even though I don't think he knew who he was talking to at the time. But I took it to heart even if it was meant for someone else. I also listened to him with tears in his almost completely blind eyes tell me stories of my deceased Grandmother. That alone was worth my trip home. This man is as hard-headed and controlling as they come in my family, which is saying a lot, but damn if he can't bring tears to my eyes within five minutes of sitting next to him.

Happy 100th, Grandpa.

- Bluestreak

*thanks, Kristy for my title.

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

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

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