"Please don't wake me, no don't shake me...

...Leave me where I am
I'm only sleeping

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy

I don't mind, I think they're crazy

Running everywhere at such a speed

Till they find, there's no need

Please don't spoil my day

I'm miles away

And after all

I'm only sleeping"

-
The Beatles, I´m only sleeping lyrics.

When you are unemployed and kidless, sleeping in is not a luxury. There is something discomforting about waking up late and being starkly aware that you are not expected. Anywhere. By anyone. Nobody needs you to make them breakfast. Nobody needs you to pack their lunches. No reports need to be on anyone's desk by any time.

"Enjoy it while it lasts", a platitude spilling forth like vomit out of the mouth of every single person I've shared any conversation with in the past three months, and in the most bantering tone. "Yeah, I know". Thanks for the advice, oh brilliant one, endowed with the knowledge of obscure things. I would have never thought of that one.

Something is pressing in on your skull. It's the feeling of too much rest melded with perpetual boredom and guilt. You know if you lay your head back down you could easily sleep two more hours, despite already having slept ten. This isn't silky, princely rest. It is rest with resignation, surrender, defeatism, because there's nothing else to do but rest. You know that you'll feel better if you only get up and do something, tire yourself out a bit and actually earn those z's again. But it doesn't matter one way or the other if you actually do, to anyone.

Suddenly that all changes.

"You're hired."

On Monday I will have to be somewhere. Someone will be expecting me, like, really fucking early in the morning. If I don't show up things will be bad. People will be angry. Important shit won't get done, I guess. Cogs and sprockets will cease to link up, wheels won't go round, and the whole machine will malfunction. My presence will be required.

Nothing has really changed yet. I haven't started working. I don't deserve my double digit hours of sleep. Not yet. But now they feel like hard-earned vacation sleep. When I start to stir I grasp at the dreams so they won't leave me yet and let me hang out there for just a little while longer in sweet luxury.

I wish I had a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of employment again, to sleep in and enjoy it and pay credence to the million and one trite comments people have made about taking advantage of it, instead of sleep having felt like this for two months.

Oh, if I had only known that my presence would be required, mandatory again so soon. Ain´t life just like that?

-Blues

Resolutions of the teeth (and self) improving variety

Well, that’s it. Another year has come and gone.

Happy belated birthday, world (or I should say, Happy Birthday de facto international standard Gregorian calendar).

I’m not about to post my new year's resolutions here and jinx myself, like I’ve done before.

I will tell you that one of these undeclared resolutions concerns quitting a certain disgusting habit in the hopes that my teeth will stop resembling those of some poor chap that was born on the lower end of the feudal scale during the Elizabethan era and that my lungs will be in slightly better condition than those of an unlucky coal miner.

Ahem.

Those Elizabethan serfs had an excuse for the unseemly state their teeth were in; they were busy worrying about more pressing matters such as rotting garbage in the streets and no structured sewage system and oh, you know, stressful things like the bubonic plague. I have no excuse other than wanting to inhale poison for some reason because I guess my life is just too damn easy. My teeth have been unsuspecting casualties.

In light of my rediscovered love of my own teeth (and lungs), I’ve scheduled a visit to the dentist.

The Spanish dentist.

Don’t freak people, this is a first world country. I promise Bluestreak will not end up with gold caps. Although that would kind of rule.

Sometimes I think we Americans might obsess a little too much about our teeth compared to other people. Our teeth do generally kick ass. Well, mine are starting to look as if I’ve been munching ass as opposed to kicking it, but I’m generalizing here.

As an American I know what a dental visit should consist of.

When I go to the dentist I don’t want it to only last ten minutes and to basically just have my mouth rinsed out with a little white hose and then get pat on the back and be told to keep up the good work with the dental hygiene.

No.

I want my teeth to have the living shit scraped off of them and for my bleeding gums to be mercilessly poked at. I want to have to grip the handles on the chair in fear and I want to experience some mild pain. I want the procedure to seemingly go on for eternity. Then I want to be scolded and slightly humiliated for not flossing as much as I should. That would be a normal visit to the dentist.

But this isn’t a normal place, this place I’m in.

This is a place where fucked up things occur, like when a few days after my last dental appointment I went back to the medical center for my gynecologist appointment and the woman that assisted the doctor with my pap smear (i.e. "the nurse") was also the woman that had assisted my dentist with my cleaning days earlier (i.e. previously known as "the dental hygienist").

Um, am I dreaming, is this hell, or am I perpetually living in a Dali painting?



Ok, ok, one of my other resolutions (fuck it, I’m now declaring them) is that I’m gonna try to quit being such an ungrateful bitch and as you can see, that leaves me without a whole helluvalot to blog about. So in that vein, I think I should mention in my most grateful tone that my healthcare is free here and for mere convenience, I’ve felt the need to sign up for private health care at about eighty bucks a month which covers anything that could possibly go wrong with my body or mind, including my beloved grinders and biters. But apparently the nurses under my plan are jack-of-all-trades or jack-of-all-orifices.

Wish me luck on my next visit to the dentist. Oh and on my inadvertently mentioned new years resolutions.

-Bluestreak

"Mouth 4" by ysin from Flickr.

"Bailarina" by Salvador Dali

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

Warning

Beware.

There are dangers of going abroad.

You could get kidnapped by FARC while enjoying a peaceful holiday in Colombia. You could accidentally catch a flight on Phuket Airlines and the airplane could turn into a "flying coffin". You could go down to Mazatlan and eat a salad and become infected with hepatitis. You could get caught up in a bird flue pandemic in China. You could get your ass reamed, as it were, by an angry bull during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.



Lots of things could go wrong.

But the unanticipated dangers are the worst kind.

Like the danger of forgetting who you are, the danger of having the compass that guides your decision-making process malfunctioning, or the danger of the gravity of your convictions suddenly being absent, because this place is like fucking outer space, and you forgot; sometimes there’s no gravity here. You should have planned for that, because now you’re floating away into space and you should have been wearing your fucking space suit cause there’s no oxygen here either, you idiot.

There’s the danger of isolation that leads to an annulment of personality, an annulment of everything you ever thought you were. This annulment of personality leads you to becoming susceptible to contracting this horrible disease called loneliness that is not cured by other people anymore. It’s not cured by your fellow expats and it’s not even cured by the people you love the most that are nearby. The cure is still unknown. Studies are being carried out but thus far they are inconclusive. Correlations of variables have proved spurious.

I remember when I first moved to Spain my parents gave me these purifying pills for the water, in an effort to make me safe and keep me from the dangers of life in the big, bad abroad. You just drop one in a glass of water and it kills all the bacteria so it won’t make you sick. I guess they didn’t know Spain was a first world country and the water was potable here. They should have given me a fucking space suit, or better yet, another kind of pill that would make a day to day life of isolation potable.

I guess these are my excuses for why I’ve been silent lately and when I do speak it’s not at all funny or entertaining. I want to read all of your lovely blogs but I look at my reader and I’m overwhelmed right now. I want to post something that will bring you laughs and make you smile, but I don’t have it in me right now.

Maybe these are excuses too for why I just quit my job in the middle of a financial crisis.

-Bluestreak, unemployed and floating off in space somewhere.

"Kaleigh running" by Ryancbriggs from Flickr
"Spacewalk" by AlbinoFlea from Flickr

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.

Holy Shit: thanks for the sanity.

You know how there are certain friends that have had such a formative effect on your life that when you talk to them it is like having a conversation with yourself, except without the feeling of the little voices that make you think you´re losing your fucking mind all the time? You can usually tell within 5 seconds of listening to their sense of humor again that it is exactly like yours. There are a few of these people in my past. Only a handful. At this age I don´t know if it´s possible to find new friends that have the same effect, because you´re fully formed now, you´re fucking thirty-something and you may as well be 80, your mind is a damn rock, and besides you are busy as hell and don´t have time to hang out, you miserable adult. You are who you are today because of those people in your past that helped shape your personality.

I just talked to my dear friend Mary. My god, do I miss thee. Can you just hang out in my brain and then when I need a laugh or need to make fucking decisions consult you as needed?

Could I get this lovely handful of friends in a room and can we give each other shit again for hours? And can we just toss our beer bottles from our chairs into your kitchen again and listen to them crash? No? Come on. I´ll let you laugh at me until I can´t take it anymore, or you can slam my back again into the asphalt in front of your damn apartment complex and then act like it was the funniest joke ever (thanks Josh and Mary, I doubt you even remember that, you A-holes). And then I´ll write all over your face with permanent marker while you´re passed out. No? Doesn´t sound like fun anymore? Are we too adult for this shit?

There´s been talk of a New Years reunion of the lovely handful. If any of you A-holes are reading this (I know some of you read this and you biatches never leave a comment) and are even thinking of not meeting me in New York in January, I will hunt you down and make you drink with me whether you are in Seattle, San Francisco, fucking Milwaukee or Philly. Either that or I sweartogod I´ll drunk dial you at the most inopportune moment.

All I want is a few hours of the crazies being around the table with me and not just in my head.

Peace.

-Bluestreak

Shreds of Home

"Home."

On the way home from the airport, we pass a street we normally would have taken, that leads to a house that now some creepy faceless people are living in. They are sleeping in the room I used to sneak boys into, swimming in the pool I used to jump from the roof into, cooking in the kitchen I used to fight tooth and nail not to have to clean, slamming doors I once defiantly slammed for effect. They check their mail from the box I got the my pen pal letters from, my college acceptance letters from. It's all very violating.

Then we arrive "home" to a massive, cold house where my parents now live, an unfamiliar place where I don't know where any of the light switches are. In the middle of the night, jet lagged, I essay the house for shreds of home (and to self-flagellate with my memories like I tend to do). There's that end table my mom got in the divorce, the family picture from 1989 where we were all wearing matching sweaters that is cheesy as hell, my mom's Women's Anatomy book that I learned about the female orgasm from, the lighthouse lamp that used to sit on top of the piano that was always lit when I came home way past my curfew. These little pieces of "home", all this shit from my childhood, is as if on display in a giant, overly air-conditioned museum. It's mildly nauseating.

Then I go outside at 4 a.m. and feel the rush of hot air, the smell of summer grass and orange groves, the dawn coming earlier than anywhere I've ever known. I see lightning from an electrical storm far off. People are already walking their dogs. And I remember the city, beyond the back wall, the only city I can ever call home, with its hot hair dryer breeze, its desolate, sad strip malls with all their convenient, solitary familiarity. And I think, "Oh yeah. Home." And it ties my stomach up in knots and reminds me of the vast, sad distance that normally separates me from this and the abyss of time that has passed since I've seen these shreds of home.

-Bluestreak

Age blows

Age. It is happening and it is not what I expected. It is much more annoying.



I remember being 21 years old and thinking that I had absolutely no problem with ageing. I knew that the physical was not going to be there forever and the things that really mattered got better with age (sex, intellect, finances, emotional well-being, and ummm, there must be a few more examples). In other words, I had the optimism of a village idiot eye-balling the haystack he just tossed his fucking needle in.

For some reason, my 31 year old self has forgotten all about my 21 year old wisdom. I see my crows feet, my bastard arms that aren't supposed to look like that, those funky gray WTF hairs, my changing nose, the weird spots that appear out of nowhere, my fading and blurring tattoo (that just turned 13!)



My boobs are holding up alright against gravity-the-infidel, but let´s be honest, that´s only because they don´t weigh much. Plus I haven´t had kids yet, so we´ll see how it goes, I´ll keep you posted.

But what about sex, intellect, finances, emotional well-being? Yeah, yeah. Shut the hell up. I want to look hot, okay? And I don´t want to have to give up food and alcohol to get it.

A friend of mine once said, "my goal in life is to look good and have fun parties" and I envied her honesty about her lack of depth. Because I´m discovering I may have been being a bit dishonest this whole time, pretending to care about other shit more than my fleeting youth. And now I admit that I might spend more time in the mirror doing WTF double-takes than feeding my intellect. Truth be told.

So does anyone care to remind me that there are things more worthy than the fountain of youth? Or is ageing just the mortal coil that´s gonna just be with me from here on out?




-Bluestreak, shallower and shallower every day.


p.s. Don´t you dare tell me i look good unless you saw me naked when I was 21 and have seen me naked recently, and then your flattery MIGHT be taken seriously.

Alice in Wonderland illustrations by Sir John Tenniel from Fundraw.com.

Where are all the men? A research proposal

The other day it dawned on me that after living here for the past three years, I have an abundance of American girl friends and not a single male American friend. Even when I was studying abroad here ten years ago, the vast majority of the students on my program were women. Here in Seville, as an expat, you can join the American Women´s Club, but to my knowledge, there is no American Club for men and women (at least not in Seville).

I have never really been a girlie girl, have always mixed socially with both men and women indiscriminately, and looking back note that my greatest girl friends have been slightly tomboyish. Girls night out in fact, is a new concept for me, and even seems a little weird sometimes. And while I love my americanitas (could not live without them), I am starting to realize that I miss the company of American men in a social setting.

So where the hell are all the American men?

In an effort to distract myself from my dreadfully boring job and being the sociologist that I am, I would like to examine this matter further. Here are my research questions for my imaginary study:

Is there a substantial difference between the rates of emigration of American men compared to American women?

Does gender inform country of choice? (i.e. are American men less likely to emigrate to a country like Spain, whereas they are more likely to emigrate to a country like Japan or Germany?...If so, why?)

Do American women have more tolerance for permanent cultural change due to how we are socialized?

Is there a difference between men and women with regard to retention in a foreign country (I mean, are women more likely to stay after spending time abroad and men are more likely to return home after a time?)

My admittedly weak hypothesis that is based on no real data other than my own experience is that most American men in Spanish-American relationships end up living permanently in the U.S. with their Spanish partners, whereas American women in Spanish-American relationships end up in Spain. Why? I think that in mixed Spanish-American marriages, traditional roles and expectations of gender are a factor in determining whether or not women will stay in a foreign country long term (that is, we American women are more likely to “follow our men” because it is ingrained in our skulls that that is what the good wifey does), whereas American men are more likely to convince their Spanish wives/girlfriends to go back to their country (cause that is what good Spanish mujercitas do too, follow their men). I could be way off here, which is why I should carry out the study and find out. Any thoughts? (or stones to throw at me?)

The main problem I can see with my study is that it would be impossible to get rates of emigration. There is no official data of who leaves the country and where they go. Anyone have any ideas of how one could obtain a list of emigrators that would be representative of all American emigrators?

Now I just need to quit my job, go back to an academic setting and do sociological studies all day. Is that asking so much?

The Whole World

In Spanish the expression “Todo el Mundo” (literally, “The Whole World”) is what people here say when they mean “everyone”. A bit exaggerated? I think not.

You decide to spend the day at the beach. Not only is the Whole World on the highway heading there, but once you get there, the Whole World is already at the beach.

You decide to go shopping at the Corte Ingles. The Whole World is there. Get me out of here, you think. But you stay until around 2:00 and then the Whole World leaves to go home for lunch. The place empties out because the Whole World eats lunch at the same time.

You want to go to the Arabic Bathhouse on a Saturday? No, no spots left. The Whole World has been booked for two weeks already.

You want to go for a bike ride instead, taking advantage of that new public bike system you signed up for? No, no bikes left, anywhere in this city. The Whole World is going for a bike ride, apparently.

What is it with this place? It seems like whenever something new happens, it just gets overcrowded with people. I just do not buy claims that the birthrate here is dangerously low, requiring government incentives for having kids (apparently the Whole World decided to just have one kid, which isn’t enough to support the Whole World on social security). All I hear about are horror stories about there not being enough spots in the public or private schools, and two year waiting lists for child-care, and the like. Not to mention the crowded playgrounds with kids literally lined up by the dozens for their lone chance to go down the slide.

Do any other Americans living in Spain get the feeling that this place is freaking crowded in every aspect???????????

I guess it could be worse.



-Bluestreak

Crowded Bus from Flickr by Poggis

Spanish Paradox #12,072

Until I moved to Spain ten years ago, I did not know what a clean home was. I do not mean your run-of-the-mill, vacuumed-and-dishes-washed clean. I am talking your-underwear-are-even-ironed clean. The social institution of marriage for many decades here has meant that in traditional families, males have had a life outside of the home, whereas womens life has been inside the home and often times her only source of pride has been how skillfully her sheets are ironed and that her floor is more immaculate than the Virgin herself. Despite all of the relatively recent changes in the division of labor in Spain (this is the country, after all, whose defense minister is a pregnant woman), we still have a few generations of women who take pride in their impeccable homes and of men who take pride in the fact that their women take care of all that crap for them. I could go off on a HUGE tangent here, but I´ll focus….

My point is, Spanish women keep impeccably clean homes.

This fact stands in stark contrast to the situation one finds upon entering a Spanish public bathroom (to date I have only encountered ladies rooms for obvious reasons…I can only assume the worst of men´s rooms). You would think that when all of the immaculate women come together in a social setting where they must share sewage infrastructure, they would sort of team together to help keep the public bathroom at least tolerable. The main problem I find is summed up nicely here:

Now I admit, there are basic features that a public restroom needs in order to function normally which are usually absent here -- namely, toilet paper, soap, paper towels or working hand dryers, trash cans, and sometimes toilet seats.

But, good Lord. When I walk into a Spanish public restroom the first thing I think is:

“Come on ladies, it does not have to be this way”. For crying out loud, is it really going to come to THIS??

And then I fantasize about the days when I lived in a country where not only were you almost guaranteed to find toilet paper, soap, and a hand dryer, but you were not likely to find a toilet seat covered in piss, and you would likely also find toilet seat covers to keep things nice and sanitary. Are those things really a luxury?

Oh, the things I had taken for granted.

-Bluestreak

Cosmetological Entropy

Why is it that a trip to the hairdresser here means that I always have to end up with some crazy Euro-Mullet? Despite the fact that I ALWAYS bring a Picture with me in case the language barrier obstructs the lines of communication, inevitably the scissor-happy stylist asks, “¿Capas?”, which roughly translates to “May I take your lovely hair and form it into an ill-advised Euro-Mullet?”

Mullet aside, a trip to the hairdresser in Spain for an American is an entrance into the world of stylist anarchy. The mulleted result is the unintended consequence of salon chaos at its worst. In the States a trip to the stylist normally means you will have a stylist who will scrub your head, carefully comb your tangles out and then get on with whatever it is you asked him or her to do while chatting it up and working that tip and trying to make a loyal client out of you. This is the world of semi-controlled hair predictability. Enter Spanish hair-dresser chaos where you will tell the person wearing hospital scrubs that you assume is your stylist exactly what you want, she will nod and comment comprehensively, then she will walk away and you will never see her again. A different person will scrub your head, another one will yank your tangles out, then someone else will put dye all over it and leave you there for a really long time until your scalp feels like you have just been through chemical warfare. After that, another person will put you under a time-sensitive heat lamp and then pay no attention as to how long your left under there, and then once you are washed and dried by a person you have never seen before, finally the mullet-sculptor will make her entrance to see to it that you do not escape the salon mullet-free. This whole process will take approximately 4 -5 hours and no, you cannot make an appointment. Take a number.

There are certain things I had always taken for granted while living in the U.S.-- Escaping the salon in a timely manner un-mulletted was one of them.

Wish me luck on my next trip to the salon.

P.S. If you get bored, do a google search for mullets in spain and you will see what a widespread phenomenon this is.