but it may not be true

So get this.

Yesterday, I fell off a moving bus.

I KNOW.

Also, this.

Some days, Medellín is too damn much for me. It's brash and rough and aggressive and wily.

But that was yesterday. Today is different. Today was a much softer day, and at different points, my little paisa heart swelled with pride and I thought, "this is the best fucking place in the WORLD." What I'm saying is, it's happening! I am getting to like this place all on my own!

Also, my internet has been broken for the past four days. There's no TV in the apartment so mostly I've been listening to audio books and reading "The Savage Detectives" in Spanish, which is way better once you have a vague grasp on Mexico City geography. This is a nice life.

Also, my mamita is back in the hospital. No one can figure it out. It sucks.

I can't get the photos uploaded from my computer so I see no need to prolong this post. That is all for now.

que revolución hay en mi corazón?

Today was a dumb day. I basically used my wiles (yeeees) to not leave the apartment all day except twice. The first time I left, I only walked to another apartment in the same complex so I'm not sure that really counts. When it started to rain, I decided the apartment was in need of a deep-clean, so I busted out the Avett Brothers and went at it.

There is nothing like spending a few hours on your hands and knees scrubbing grout to really make you long for a trip to the Exito! (Seriously, what is happening to me?) Anyway, I was pretty sketched out by the way Celina had told me to get places, but I ignored my suspicions and walked to la Ochenta and then tried to find the Exito de Colombia, assuming it would magically appear on 80 and Colombia. I was wrong, and some lady at a drug store told me to walk to the one in Robledo, which was "close, maybe five blocks". I knew she was wrong because she pointed in the direction I had come in and I had walked at least 6 blocks, but I figured "Hey, maybe it's seven blocks in that direction!" So, on I went!

And this is how I walked to Robledo. Robledo, by the way, is not worth walking to. I realized I was backtracking in a weird way, because I crossed this weird creek behind my apartment (actually, now that I mapped that, it's even funnier what I did because I was walking in exactly the wrong direction). So, finally, I got to Robledo. A neat thing about getting to know Medellín this way, on foot, is that I get to see how ridiculous the Paisa knack for exaggerating distances is. To the untrained ear, "I live allllll the way up in Robledo" implies that it is far. However, now I know that it is not far at all, or even inconveniently situated. At all. With my newfound confidence, I'm definitely gonna start taking my camera on these dumb jaunts.

Anyway, after I did my grocery shopping (no canned black beans, but they had canned goulash!), I decided a chicken nugget snack was in order (Hi! I am five years old!). Since every Exito has a Frisby, I found the one here and went to buy chicken nuggets. The lady was really mean and acted like I was an idiot because I didn't understand when she greeted me by brashly grunting that all she had was a medio pollo. I asked, "no french fries?" To which she replied, "Oh, yeah." So finally she actually came out to the counter (this exchange was happening with her standing way back in the kitchen area and exchanging snide glances with the only other person working there) and said, "so you want half a chicken?"
"What? No. I want french fries."
"You don't want half a chicken?" she asked again, serving up some chicken nuggets for a waiting customer who must've ordered before me.
"Don't you have any more of those?" I asked, pointing at the nuggets, looking into her eyes searchingly, pleadingly.
"Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. I have half a chicken." I couldn't understand how that meant she had nuggets. Did 'half a chicken' mean 'half a chicken's worth of chicken parts'?
"Okay, I'll take it. With the french fries. And a soda. To go."
"Fine. But I don't have a lid for the soda. And it's gonna be a few minutes."

I sat and waited. Sitting and waiting gave me time to reflect on something that always trips me up. Half a chicken. Because chickens are living beings, I am always confused by that type of terminology. After all, it's hard for me to think of someone referring to my thigh separately from my drumstick, so often I forget that those are two different pieces. What I'm saying is, as I was sitting, I realized that half a chicken is not one or two pieces, but more like four pieces of chicken. Furthermore, upon inspection at home, I realized that the chicken I was working with must've been a really interesting specimen because it had three breasts and a wing (no nuggets--gypped all the way around). So now I'm stuck with a bunch of crappy chicken. This is gonna take days to deal with.

Life is hard.

Also, there were good articles on the internet today. This one was particularly moving. Seriously, read the comments. Some of the things resonated with me really deeply. I think there were other things I thought about that were interesting today. Oh! This song! Ha! I am owning my loner-ness?

Now that I am reading back through this whole thing, it seems weird and sad to me, but it was a satisfying day! I guess there are always things that are hard to express, and things that can be gratifying in ways that are surprising. Maybe tomorrow will be a more obviously impressive day, but I'm moving through, and I'm doing okay!

swimming pools and owls

Well! A few days have passed and my visit is feeling much softer. My sense of mobility is improving and that is helping tremendously. I spent the weekend in San Jeronimo, a town that used to be about three hours away but is now only an hour away with the construction of a massive tunnel that runs through a mountain and takes about seven minutes to get through. It's supposed to be warm there, but it hasn't been particularly warm any of these last few times I've visited. That didn't stop me from getting into pools like this one:

life is hard?

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I also ended up at a couchsurfing meeting in the centro. As much as people talk about how scary it is, I really like the centro here. It's still pretty old school, with old cafes and kinda sleazy bars and neat museums. I don't tend to be as impressed with the brand new construction that crops up all around the outer edges of the city. That's probably not too surprising.

So, that's been my life lately. It's been helpful to remember (and constantly remind myself) that part of the reason I wanted to come here was to get to know this place on my own terms and see if I could love it. It's also helpful to remember the Legacy-of-Luna-esque lesson of flexibility making things easier.

Also, I know this is gross, but, y'all, chorizo, like this, makes things easier:

(We were supposed to be meeting someone to hang out and instead ended up in this town, Sabaneta, which is famous for delicious chorizo and we decided it was okay to be sort of late and make a quick stop for chorizo. This is how we are.)

I'm still not sure how long I'll stay here, but I'll worry about that some other time. There's more eating to do. There's also more reading to do! Mel did me the favor of passing along this article, which I understand has been making its rounds on the internet. I've totally been quietly obsessed with one of these blogs (this one), and I had no idea about the Mormon thing! But, dude, whatever! I love it like I love cooking blogs and design blogs and even those vintage outfit blogs, just because I love imagining a world of air conditioning and people shopping at Target and having all the right kitchen tools when they need them. Something about imagining those things is so comforting. Also, owl crafts.

I've been reflecting on my love of owls lately. My love of owls began before the dawn of the designy, cute screenprinted owl craze, with this weird shelf that was directly above the kitchen sink in the house I grew up in. It was full of owl figurines. I always loved the idea of people collecting things, and it appeared my mother had been collecting these owls. There were all kinds of owls--owls made of tiny seashells, creepy realistic owls, cartoonish owls.... One time, I asked my mom why she liked owls so much and she explained that one person had given her one owl and she had displayed it at our house and then EVERYONE started giving her owls. It was really disappointing to realize that my mom hadn't even sought out to start the collection, but now that I am nearing the end of my nomadic life (for now), I'm fantasizing about stealing her owl collection for my new home, where I'll sit around and read Mormon blogs and write in this blog and make owl crafts in my free time.

Right?

new wanders

Well, it's sorta been a while, huh? I got resentful (of myself?) and resolved never to write in this blog again, but the truth is that sometimes the mood strikes and I want to write things here. I am resolving to be more consistent with writing (either here or elsewhere or in one of my twenty-eight notebooks) in 2011. Hmmph (arms crossed).

I'm in Medellín now, in my parents' apartment. I've been forcing myself to be outrageously social for weeks now, so today I decided to fill my quota of alone time. Besides, it's raining. It's supposed to be "summer" here right now, but instead it's decidedly "winter" today in a region where the season changes by the day and is only determined by the apparition of rain and perhaps a slight breeze. Don't serenar yourselves, folks. Careful!

Being here is hard. In truth, I've always had some nostalgia about certain Colombian things: my grandmothers, almuerzos they made, afternoon sunlight. But the awakeness that being here requires is dizzying, frightening. My wit is always five, ten paces behind: my tongue is tied, I don't get it, I don't like it. I've joked often that one of my most beloved skills is my aptness at being uncomfortable, but I think it's because this place is the root of all my malaise. My inability to belong, to "hang", my discomfort with class, family, gender expression: all these things live here. As long as I wander the earth, I can rest uneasy knowing that these things are in a box somewhere in Colombia, but once I arrive upon these soils, they bloom like ink in water. It's fucking exhausting.

I'm tired of being told not to go anywhere alone. I endure countless lunch dates and museum tours that inevitably arrive at the conversational destination of la seguridad. Either someone will steal my bicycle from under me or they will blow scopolamine in my face (best safety advice so far? don't breathe!) or kidnap me. There are boys on motorcycles who come around once a week asking for the cuota everyone owes them for maintaining the peace. It is pretty evident they spend most of their days on the street on more hedonistic pursuits than peacekeeping. But it's even more exhausting to be warned about abstract dangers, like "Don't go out by yourself or someone's gonna fuck with your shit!" Thanks for the warning?

I find myself myself wearing my time in Mexico like a badge--not even in the context of security, just to prove that I've crossed a fucking street by myself in my life. I daydream about walking down a street without the lurking fear that someone is totally gonna "fuck with my shit" because my inability to hang is SO visible that I am like shit-fucking-with bait.

At this rate, my lofty goal of resolving my bad feelings about this place isn't really going to get accomplished this time around, or maybe ever.

That's where I'm at today.