The un-argue

By denying myself nothing, my thoughts ponder through life's loves

Where would I be had I been there still

What would my life look like now

My blood tiptoes at the edge, in my mind waiting for me to respond to myself

Drama with out drama

Love with love with out showing love

His love confuses me

My brain wants to hurt more than my heart and the time is never enough

I reach for his hand and he gives me a few versus

I reach for his versus and he gives me a few nods

I reach for the nods and I get a few emotions

Finally

I think

Finally

We feel together

And the war begins

He said, she said

And now, alone in the night with my trusty light

I wish it were all better

Or I had been all better

Like the end of a good Saturday morning cartoon

I want to respond with the same naivety as ever

Yet I feel robed of my chest of innocence

Though I robed only myself

And now I want to know how to resolve the broken chest

And resolve the unresolved

To fix the fight and fight to fix the non-fights

Argue I say

And argue not they say to the self inflected hole in my soul

The family tree waves at me less a few leafs

Yet after the leafs fall, and the familiar wind moves on

The tree remains unmoved

There lives a faith the leafs will come again in the spring

Life will repair its line

In the quite night, by denying myself nothing, I give my self everything

 

Peru Week 1 - Part 3: No Bones About It…

One of the other benefits to the school is Emily, the On-staff event coordinator. She puts together excursions for students six days a week ranging in price from free to 85 soles (about 25 dollars).

 

Thursday I went on a tour of the San Francisco church (cost: five Soles) in center of Lima. The church is from the late 1600's and had old Catacombs underneath it. This tour was defiantly an experience.

 

I suspect from time to time I have found myself on top of this blindfolded high-horse where I consider myself open minded and worldly. Then, I go and do something like this little tour and get knocked off my high horse of worldliness and back to the ground of ignorant American-ness. Let me explain, I thought the catacombs would be a progression of underground tunnels, what I did not think is that I would be looking at around 25,000 human bodies that were tossed to rot in the basement of this church from the late 1600's to the early 1900's.

 

Let me clarify that the people were no longer rotting, rather in the mid 1960's they made the place a museum and cleaned all the bones and organized them all nice-like into petty designs in wells and holes. What this means to me is that these peoples bodies not only did not have a final resting place but they were scraped, cleaned, sorted and shaped for a shit ton of silly tourists, such as myself, to swing by and have a good look at. Meanwhile the tour guide rushes us to the next pile of bones so he can get through the whole tour and on to his next group of silly tourists. Did I mention that the pieces of bone that had broken or were not pretty had been tossed in a hand full of out of the way cubby holes?

 

I couldn't get through it fast enough and was bothered to say the least. Someone afterwards asked me what I was expecting to see and I felt like a babbling idiot saying, "Well, well I don't know, I didn't think that, I mean that would never happen in the U.S., families would be fighting over bodies to get bones back, and they just wouldn't do that… they, they, we, they, we, well I never, well,"  

 

In hindsight, I wanted to kick my own ass for not knowing better, for being so shocked, for being so ignorant and American. Yet still I find myself a bit out-of-sorts about it. I will use the F-bomb again. What the fuck was that that I saw?

 

Note to self: You don't do well with human remains just lying around. Try to check future school activities to avoid dead people as municipal art projects.    

Peru Week 1 – Part 2: School is fun for everyone!

I love my school! There are a hand full of administrators and teachers, they are mostly female and everyone is incredible sweet and patient. There are only about ten students right now and they range from my retard level to absolute advanced level of ambassadors and language teachers brushing up an advanced literature. They are all almost entirely awesome. We all have three beaks a day between classes. The school puts out coffee, tea, water, juice, a snack and crackers every day for all the breaks. There is a mother like woman that walks around preparing the snacks and making sure that everyone is eating.  Every Friday and Monday they do something for people that are either coming or going. Most everyone helps prepare food or clean and so on and then everyone sits around and talks in broken Spanish/English, shares stories, and eats.

 

On Fridays they provide the national alcohol of Peru called Pisco, and make the traditional drink called Pisco Sour. Pisco is basically a distilled grape with the flavor some where between vodka and a light smooth subtle tequila. It surprisingly is not that bad. The drink however, is not that great, it is Pisco, Goma (a type of sweet clear syrup for drinks) the clear part of an egg, a bunch of fresh lime and a dash of Angoras Bitters. They shake the cocktail in a shaker until frothy and drink. The jury is still out on what I think about it. I think I would be inclined to like it if we lost the Goma and egg. I will take one for the team, and experiment with the alcohol on behalf of all Americans and get back to you.

Peru Week 1: Peruvian Time & Death to The Ice Cream Man

 I pose this question: Can anyone tell me why a country that is 81% Roman Catholic, does not celebrate "Fat Tuesday" aka "Mardi Gras" i.e. the night before Lent where, "Catholics across the world are to give up a vice until Easter and because of this should spend more time eating and drinking everything filthy they can get their hands on the night before such day," does not celebrate it?  I am dumbfounded and if there happen to be any anthropologists, theologians, sociologists, or car mechanics out there that can answer this little question I promise you one Alpaca hat from Peru.

 

So, that little task out of the way and we are off with the story… I get to Peru late on "Fat Tuesday" and there is no "Fat" to speak of. There is however Peruvian time. By Peruvian time I mean this. My bags take an hour to get out of the plane and onto the baggage claim, the car service I had secured the day before did not show up and the money exchange could not exchange my money to make a phone call to the service. Some two hours later I make it to my hostel to "sleep"  though three hours of one guy hitting one two girls in the same room, in a different language, for the majority of the night.  Early the next morning I wake up, take my first shower in three days, get a map, a taxi, and head off to school, I arrive feeling more retarded and out of it than a sorority girl at a ruffy party. To top it off, the emails that I had been sending to the main office in Chili were not being communicated to the school in Peru. Thus, the school was at the same time worried that I had died and also not expecting me. They find the placement test; I take it and score just high enough to enter into course 1A. For those who are unfamiliar with placements tests. I was barely allowed into the school for as much Spanish as I got right and I suspect the administrators were surprised I knew the Spanish word for taxi, which consequently is actually "taxi". 

 

Four hours latter school ends, my brain and body hurt and the school has phoned my new "mother" Monica to pick me up. While I am not shopping for a new mother, when staying with a family in a different country, they transfer the family temporarily to you. So mother is mother, bother is brother and so forth. Luckily, I suspect they recognized my age and shinning personality so they placed me with a 53 year old woman who does TaiChi and Riki. She is very nice and reminds me a bit of an old pseudo-grandmother of mine. She has an older boyfriend named Pepe, whom drives a 76 Camero (yes in Peru, holy shit) and owns a used car lot. I am, if nothing else, amused.

 

Monica has a maid, Teresa, who brings her 13 year old son to work everyday (its summer break here so he is out of school). Teresa is here 5 days a week and whether I make my own bed or not, she will remake it tucking the sheets in so tight that for the first few times I got into bed I thought someone had short sheeted the bed. There is also a woman from Ecuador that is staying here with her 9 year old daughter. I am still trying to figure out the story behind them.

 

As I write this little tale I am sitting in the backyard at your standard plastic table and chairs. The yard is edged by a nice little garden with a few fruit trees and cactuses.  Monica usually has nice soft music playing and the doors and windows are always open. It's beautiful and tranquil here. All except for the ice cream men. These little devils ride around on pedal bikes passing by the house or in the neighborhood every five to ten minutes. They don't play the traditional American or Spanish music, rather, they have a horn that sounds like a bird has just fallen from the sky and is dying a painful death just a few feet from you. The first time I heard it I thought someone was in trouble. The second time I waited for the final painful breath. Finally when it didn't end I asked Monica what the hell was going on and she explained to me it was the ice cream man.

 

Later that day I saw one of the bastards. They ride and where all yellow. It's like the devil incarnate but rather than red and horns out of his head, he is yellow and has horns on his bike. I am going to kill one of them before I leave. Maybe not them, maybe instead I will find out where they all park their fleet of torturous ice cream bikes one night and attempt to disassemble all of them for good. I suspect if I actually did this, they would just send the little demons back to hell for a few more and then spend most of their afternoons outside my window until my ears began to bleed yellow.  My window does open and also faces the street, so in the afternoon, the few siestas that I have had, I have spent time contemplating different things to throw from my window in hopes of knocking one out. I am always open for suggestions if one should fall my way.  Chao.

A Journey To and From Home

I was home for only a few days when I raced, sadly, to get moved out of my fabulous little apartment in an attempt to flip my life around, move in with my mother and then out of the country for school. Just as I attempt to wrap up a few details and see some old friends, I land my self in the Emergency room. Almost two weeks later I am up walking around, postponed, frustrated but not defeated.

Let's talk for a moment about hassle. Those that know me, know that I tend to find my self slightly overbooked and overwhelmed. That being said I never got through blogging the rest of my India trip which I do intend to do in the near future, though I thought I would get to it right when I got back from India. And here we are, nearly a month back from India freshly stitched up, light one fabulous apartment and one severely diseased gallbladder, and desperately behind on a hand full of errands and a blog I really wanted to keep up. To follow is my poor excuse/unlikely stories as a reason for the severely delayed stories.

After a few hassles getting out of the south of India and back into the good ol' USA I landed on Monday the 26^th in the middle of the afternoon, wherein one of my best friends picked me up at the airport I went straight home and worked on some seriously gnarly jet lag for around 36 hours. After a brief chat with my landlord and a look at my future plans to attend school in Lima, Peru, I find myself in a mad dash to pack up my apartment, give away half my belongings throw away a forth and then divide the remaining forth in between sections of things going to a storage unit for later movement to a new state for grad school, a pile of things I am taking to my moms (where I will reside now while in the country) for everyday use, and a pile of things I will need while in Peru for a few months.

I pause for a moment to talk about moving. Moving, in a word, sucks. However this obnoxious daunting task can be accomplished in a mater of hours if well organized, and if all objects are simply going from one location quickly to the next. If this is not the case, moving quickly becomes more irritating than a pair of chafing dirty underwear that has not been changed in a period of weeks while in a sandy waterless desert. In short, my experience lasting over a week mirrored this irritation.

More than a week later, I finally mostly finished the move, all but a few odds and ends and a spot of cleaning. This irritation wraps itself up on a Thursday evening only hours before my gallbladder sends me into a gut wrenching late night trip to the ER, not but a week before I am scheduled to attend school in Peru. For those that know me best know that this could not possibly be the end of the story. The ER sends me home with a guess-timation of the problem, a stack full of appointments for Monday morning, and a bottle full of painkillers to get me through the weekend. Pleasantly, my family and I had been planning a surprise 60^th birthday party for my mother that Saturday, so I sucked it up and ran my errands for the next two days. There is something to be said for the soothing sensation of painkillers. Even when it doesn't relieve the pain, it's a nice fuzzy edge off the stabbing that might otherwise be consuming you.

Three days latter and a full 24 hours with no pain killers I head into my first appointment. This "scan" of my gallbladder yielded no results less the small fact that they weren't sure I had one because the radiologist couldn't find it.

Now I am fairly certain I would remember a little thing like having a gallbladder removed. It being that this was not part of my memory bank, I found myself feeling like I was ten again at the county fair where a swallowed a bit of the disappearing-reappearing ink. I spent the next few hours waiting for the doctor to call with the results of my missing gallbladder.

Luckily, I suspect given my urgent pleas in light of my schedule to leave the country, in the ER some days before, the doctor called me from his cell phone to explain the magic trick. It appears that my gallbladder is not missing; rather it is so damaged that the "scan" could not scan it. He informed me that he has spoken to a surgeon, got me an appointment for a consultation the next day and even reserved the O.R. for Wednesday. I felt like giving him a twenty five percent tip for such service and almost went as far as asking if his first name was Rumpelstiltskin wherein he wanted my first born, after all he was German and this really seemed like he was performing the impossible.

Nonetheless, I saw the surgeon and the next day, slept through the two hour surgery that was supposed to be a one hour surgery, while they yanked out the sick bastard. Later at a check up I would find out the surgery took so long because I had a bag full of stones, in a fluid sack and the damn thing was huge with chronic and acute inflammation due to the disease. I figured fuck it, treason is punishable by death, so good ridden to the organ anyway. I did however ask if the weight loss experienced during surgery counted as actually weight loss as fat content. The nurse declined to answer. The few days following recovery were less than fun, at one point I was quoted saying "almost as much fun as being beaten by a rabbit" I repeat this now because I think this phrase is something that should be used more often. This is not to say that today has been anymore exciting.

This morning I awoke at 5 A.M. to run to the airport to wait half the day on standby to board a plane headed to Atlanta Georgia and then onto Lima. Here now it's Monday February 23^rd and I am sitting almost alone in the Atlanta Airport at about midnight. My plane doesn't leave until 5 p.m. tomorrow; there is no wine, no people, no blanket, and no warm arms. Late tomorrow I will land in Lima, where the school, though thousands of miles from my life, will help me begin anew. The life in front of me has brighter possibilities than my earlier years ever thought possible. I suppose I can find some warmth for the evening in those thoughts.