Genteel Poverty

Two very important people were re-introduced into my life recently: Casper the much bigger puppy, and Laura Scholten, once-and-future room mate extraordinare!

Kenny has no time or wherewithall to care for his dog, so I´m the one who takes him for walks. Sometimes, at night when it´s cool enough, we jog down to the little bridge and back. He´s a very good dog, doesn´t chew on our things (much), doesn´t bite, doesn´t bark or bother us, especially considering that he´s terribly neglected. He looks like this.

But. Potty training seems to be beyond the scope of Casper´s little doggy potential. He´s 3 months old, which probably means at this point that he just wasn´t trained soon enough. And because his mother (yours truly) cannot supervise him constantly, we´re making little to no headway. So I am living in a house that smells like dog piss and K and P´s fried pork. And apple incense and pot. What a life.

Then Laura came! It was so much fun to show her my life. She thinks that Jill and Bob are critical self-centered jerks, which confirms something I have felt for a while now. They always make me feel like they´re dissapointed and like they wish I would just go away. It´s like everyone was super nice at the beginning but now they´re not.

Kenny, on the other hand, has been really nice lately. And when Laura came, he pulled out all the stops, making conversation, bringing home wine, inviting us out for drinks, and recommending we go to the Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua this week, which is where we´re headed (but that, as my parents used to say right before bed, is a story for another time).

I had to paint the living room. We were spending all out time at home, and so we were feeding ourselves. On a VSB, very serious budget, which we still are on. For lunch Laura at cereal, that she was also eating for breakfast and dinner. I decided to make cabbage salad with a cabbage and a tomato. Consider, the vegetables we have at our disposal are few, namely only the ones that do not need refrigeration. I needed a lemon for the salad, but no worries! We have a lemon tree in the yard. After squeezing the lemon on the salad, Laura asked me, is that a lemon or an orange? A lemon! Smell it, Rachel. I smelled it. It was an orange.

We ate the salad anyway.

We spent all day Friday painting, with Fight Club on the tv to provide packup soundtrack and burnout inspiration. I am Jack´s bad attitude toward the work environment. While we were still taping, Laura and I ran out of tape. First we went to the dictionary to look up, masking tape. You can say it two ways: cinta adhesiva protectiva (adhesive protective tape) or cinta de enmascarar (masking tape). I memorized them both and we walked down the street to the store. I asked for the tape the first way. Confusion. I asked for the tape the second way. Confusion. I produced our masking tape sample that we brought along because you must always anticipate confusion. Oh, the lady says, ¨masking¨. Yeah, I say, masking! Laura, who speaks about as much spanish as a pull-string doll, said, Rachel, you said cintura, not cinta. Shit. I just asked that lady for a protective adhesive belt. Although I guess I could have used one of those, too.

We spent all day painting the living room white. It didn´t really look any better than it did when it was ghastly green on top and sky blue on the bottom. But whatever. Jill told me to do it, and I don´t give a shit about the house any more. That evening Jill stops by to see how the work went, and to introduce me to the new massage therapist, Angela, who is sweet and shy but at least she´s a friend for when I get back. Jill says, it looks nice, although I see there are a couple screw ups where you got paint on the walls, but you can fix that later. Thanks for the generous praise, boss. Then she says, but I asked you to paint the kitchen. Excuse me? Yes, remember, we talked about it and we decided on the kitchen?

Shit. The truth of the matter is this: Jill´s decision-making proccess is tedious in the extreme, my opinion doesn´t matter that much and I´m generally apathetic anyway. She rambles out loud about what she maybe wants, and I tune out because it´s like watching a dog chase its tail. So she maybe decided on the kitchen, but I thought it was the living room, and I don´t really listen anymore, which is a problem. Hopefully when I get back from vacation I can check back in for the last 3 weeks. But at least the living room looks nice even though there are a couple screw ups.

We left for Nicaragua at 5AM the next morning.

Ha

This is a conversation that happened:

Rachel: Hey Kenny, see that guy over there with the shaggy hair? The one who´s probably about 17? I think he´s really cute. Maybe the only cute guy in San Pablo.

Kenny: That, guy, over there? With the backpack?

Rachel: Yeah.

Kenny: That´s the guy who tried to rob our house.

Rachel: Oh.

Fiestas

Tonight I went to the bullfights. No blood. In Spain, I think, and Mexico, they kill the bull. Here they ride it only, lasso it, and put it away.

''The clarity that does so much damage.'' (Jack Gilbert)

Still, men could have been crushed, and weren't. Their bodies bounced back elastic. I think of Hemingway. His novel about the rodeo. Writing the voice of an impotent man. What making love felt like, then putting pen to the paper to become that other man. I write by hand now and really it doesn't change everything. And eventually he killed himself. Do people still ask themselves why? Or is his genius enough? To explain?

I walked home eating Churros. Fried dough in sticks, rolled in sugar. I learned about it in high school but thought it would be bad, it was foreign and could not convey the grease, the sugar, the outer crunch and the inner give. It was magnificent. I ate and the air smelled like ylang-ylang flowers. The sensuous luxury of nature here doesn't matter. People don't appreciate it more. Life isn't more graceful, or just, or intoxicating. It's only amazing to see from far away, as a picture of what you don't have. Here it smells like ylang-ylang. The men push each other with their hips to get closer to the parade of women in lingerie. The next event.

But maybe that is how nature should be appreciated. Incorporated silently into life, like furniture. Comfortable. A staple. Closer, not separated by the distinction of ''that special thing''. And people's lives here are slower. Their world is small. I imagine they feel very safe. Jill asks, ''What do you suppose it would be like to grow up in a town like this?'' ''Probably, I'd be happier''.

''I am not writing about myself as a rational human being. I am writing about the substances of an animal and female life: magic, pain, the cracked nails of four feet, and the days like this one, when it is difficult to speak to a good-looking man.'' (Bhanu Kapil Rider)

Men in cowboy hats. So many. I love men in cowboy hats. They're sexy until I see their faces, up close, and then I look away quickly so they don't think I'm interested. All the men in the bars are old. I stumbled into a dance, next, of grinding high schoolers. I felt like a rabbit. I can't do this.

If I can't express myself poetically in my own language, what hope do I have for speech? It is such an act of faith, this approximation. Yet, for all the exteriority, how we think we know each other. What we know is what gets out. Not beyond that.

Leaving a party is the same in every country: alone, early, I know I've never fallen in love after sundown anyway. My head is clear and sober.

The last American women who worked at the hotel brought a man from town home, they fucked, and he got furious that she wouldn't pay him. After. We're assigned different, secret rules. So many men here have said I'm the most beautiful woman they've seen. While the women with no cellulite in their legs dance by, incandescent and prepared for this. All this.

I don't trust anyone. But I trust the shyness in myself that knows what it doesn't want.

I am a very nice symbol. But I am awkward. I am beginning to own how awkward I am. It is its own form of stubbornness. I know I live an equally bright life in other forms.

I understand the immigrants who assimilate poorly. How does anyone manage such flexibility. To overcome being foreign? The heart, maybe, doesn't distinguish. But. Everything else.

There were fireworks in the park bursting right above my head. It felt like the first time. My hair doesn't glimmer like tape. A small boy blowing bubbles into the rodeo. A bull through an incandescent globe. Bucking, then calm, and caught, unenthusiastic and afraid.

Oh, Just Some Sundries

My love for papaya has reached the proportions of an affliction. I literally think I am twisting my stomach into knots with the quantity of papaya I eat. Also, somewhere along the way I have baptized it a ¨complete food¨, therefore able to substitute nutritionally for an entire meal. We always want to render what we love most into something more perfect in our minds.

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Our house now has cockroaches, it appears, although most of the ones I have spotted are thankfully of the on-their-back, dying variety. I will be honest, I don´t quite understand the visceral repugnance most people feel for them. I suppose they are proportionally more unpleasant than other bugs because of their unusually large size, but they are a beetle type of insect which means they only have six legs. It´s the centipedes that bother me. House centipedes. Thanks be it to every deity ever worshiped, I have never seen one in this house. I have woken people, namely my father, in the middle of the night to destroy those creatures because the very sight of them makes me almost hysterical. I mean, really, all bugs bother me on a dermatological level. So, logically, I have moved to a country with spiders as big as my hand?

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Yesterday Pablo said something that ruined my day. He told me he hates gay people. He might as well have killed a puppy in front of me. I felt so betrayed. Now, I´ll be honest, I don´t think of gay rights as something I care about on an active level. The environment has always been my big issue, and then genocide and indigenous rights. But yesterday made me realize that maybe I just took gay rights for granted. I mean, I love so many queer people, and homophobia just hasn´t fit into my world thus far in my life. The idea that you would hate someone because of who they love is so ludicrously preposterous I almost refused to believe in it. I told Pablo, ¨Don´t ever say that in front of me.¨ ¨Why not?¨ ¨My best friend is gay¨¨Ok, I hate all gays except for your best friend¨¨No! Don´t say that! Ever! I am not ok with that. I never want you to say that in front of me ever again¨. I had to walk away at this point because I would have attacked him with everything I had, and it wouldn´t have changed him. People here are stubborn. And my anger wouldn´t help. But I spent the next five hours or so walking around the hotel, sullen and feral.

Maybe what upset me most about the incident was that I began to start hating Pablo! Which is the worst. Because the only thing worse than people hating gays is people hating gays and then other people hating people who hate gays. That is way too much hate. So I am trying to put it beyond me, trying to continue to love Pablo the way I loved him before. Maybe in a few days I will ask him humbly why he feels the way he does, and maybe we can share our thoughts on the subject, but I don´t want an emotional scene. It´s not worth it. But yeah, that made me really, really sad. It really hurt.

The People You Meet In the Caribbean

1. THE BUS STATION ATTENDANT

He begins, as all good Tico boys do, by visibly checking me out while I wait for the bus. Do you speak Spanish? I look at him like he´s speaking Mandarin. He continues to try to speak to me and I continue pretending I don´t speak a word of Spanish, because I am kidding myself pretending that that will convince him to leave me alone. And the game is harder than you think, because what he is saying is a clear as English. He tells me I have beautiful eyes. Never heard that one before! In fact, that´s probably the only pickup line they ever use. Except that no one is ever necessarily trying to pick me up- I don´t sense that it´s so goal oriented. People here, they're just flirtatious, and I¨m just a shy 5-year-old inside who wants to be left alone by strangers because they´re probably teasing her.

Bus station boy stands about 3 feet away from me and stares at me for the next 10 minutes. I don´t know if this have ever happened to you. It´s unusual- unusually rude, unusually creepy, and unusually ballsy. As uncomfortable and offended as I was, I had to keep suppressing a laugh because it was so silly. When the bus pulls up, I lose it. ¨Don´t you think it´s rude to stare at me so? Please, a little respect. I said that lie because I didn´t want you hitting on me all this time!¨ I make a couple of grammatical mistakes, but it´s good enough to put him to shame. He lowers his eyes, says sorry in English and Spanish, and walks away.

2. MELANIE AND WINDEL

2 of 10 siblings, they were born in Costa Rica on the Caribbean side but moved to Florida when they were kids. Now considering early retirement, they are looking to move back home. Widnel is my bus seat buddy on the way to Puerto Viejo. He is a giant. Remember when I say this that I am used to tall men- my father is six foot four or more. Windel is six six. He has size 13 feet. His hands are bigger, fingers spread, than a plate. He is sitting next me to for 5 hours.

Tomorrow he is borrowing a friend´s truck to go down to the zona libre in Panama, where you can buy cheap electronics tax free. In Costa Rica electronics cost more than in the U.S. Windel is going to get a stove and fridge for his house in Cahuita, which he shows me pictures of on his iphone.

We get into a conversation about what I´m doing in the country, and he asks me a series of my favorite questions- What is yoga? Is it a religion? If I´m a Christian, can I do yoga? Is it a form of meditation? What are the benefits? I explained that it is a series of physical postures to stretch and tone the body, focusing on deep breathing and the present moment. While meditation uses the mind to calm the restlessness of the body and mind, yoga uses movement to balance this restlessness while giving the body a massage from the inside out. Yoga was ¨invented ¨, if you will, by a bunch of Hindu mystics, but it is more of a science than a religion. You can be an atheist and practice many aspects of yoga. The idea is to achieve ¨bliss¨, which means union with the divine, but yoga doesn´t posit anything higher than that, so if Christ is your god, it´s about letting go of your individual self and getting a little closer to him. I love to explain yoga in layman´s terms, because it is such a beautiful and simple thing. Windel, once a skeptic, seemed pretty down with yoga.

3. SARA, GARRET, CAM, AND DAVID

Once Windel gets off the bus in Cahuita, I chat up my other fellow gringos in the nearby seats. We are all heading to the same hostel so we decide to split a cab. David works for UPS, Garret mentors at-risk youth in LA, Cam is a kinesiologist who plans to travel the world, and Sara is an overbearing college student from Canada. We get to the hostel, Rocking J´s, which is covered head to toe with mosaics and super trippy murals. I rent a hammock for $6 a night. The 5 of us go out on the town to eat and drink. Puerto Viejo is a sleepy little Caribbean party town with dirt streets, Rastas galore, surfers, Rasta surfers, and lots of mostly young people on vacation. Most people get around by bike. You can smoke weed everywhere, in the restaurants, in the streets, on the beach. The beach is a rough surf with rip tides and coral reefs, with tons of palm trees, and almond trees that bend over to kiss the waves with their leaves. One of the liquor stores in town projects movies onto a big screen across the street each night, so you can buy a beer or whatever and drink while you watch the movie for free from the picnic tables. Sara and I followed the boys around for a little while while they chased tail, and then we all went back to the hostel. While it was clear that these were not my people, it was nice to explore with companions, and I always disengage from groups easily.

4. YASETH, LAURA, AND WHATSHISFACE

The next morning I meet 3 Josefinos (from San Jose), who have hammocks near me. They're childhood friends on vacation. Laura, 19, is in school for nutrition and has an 18-month old. Yaseth, 28, is a chef and has lived in CT and Italy, but right now he's just hanging out, looking for something new. He speaks English, but Laura doesn't really, so I default to Spanish. Whatshisface doesn't talk much- he's probably really stoned. We take a walk to the beach and find some really nice spots, and just sit and hang out. Laura and I chat, but she's really hard to understand, her words are so fast. It's like in English, if I said to you, "Do you have a car?", it's going to come out "Djuva car?" Say it out loud. That's basically how we speak, and we understand one another. While meanwhile some poor non-native speaker is wandering around wondering what the hell "djuva" means. Yaseth is the third Costa Rican chef I've met. That's a lot of chefs for a small country.

5. THE ROMANIAN BROTHERS

I meet them when I go to buy bottle water at a little hostel's restaurant. They're playing pool and smoking, and we strike up a conversation. Some adorable kids come with a basket of homemade bread in their arms, straight from the oven, and we each buy some. I'm skeptical because baked goods in this country are reminiscent of those horrible little buns they used to put in school lunch. Actually, this bread is yeasty, warm, smoky, and full of melted butter and cheese, and sugar, so it's sweet and salty and just soaked with delicious filling.

The brothers are from Canada, but their family is Romanian and they speak in it to one another. They were traveling for a while, but they stayed in Puerto Viejo because they loved it so much. They've been living at the hostel now for 2 months.

6. MOISES

Moises is one of those people I'm not sure is really real. He's from Mexico City, has a head full of dreads, and his body is covered with indigenous tribal tattoos of lunar eclipses, sacred geometry, and skeleton gods. He is a jewelry artisan and has an open, generous face. He was staying at the hostel, and said hello to me and I sat down at the table like we had known each other a long time, and we were friends for the rest of my stay. He taught me how to weave bracelets and offered me tea several times a day. I taught him a few words of English here and there. Moises is special because he's the first real friend I've had in Spanish. I've had a few relationships here and there with the people I meet incidentally, but this is the first time I have crossed the language barrier spontaneously and gotten to know someone just because they seemed nice. And because of that it is much less awkward, because I don't feel the cultural barrier. Believe it or not, it's the first time I've felt like I have things in common with someone who only speaks Spanish. He's traveled a lot, which I think makes him different from the people who barely ever leave San Pablo. And he speaks clearly and slowly, so I understand him. And he corrects me when I speak badly, which is so helpful. I think in 2 days my Spanish improves more than in the last 2 months in Costa Rica. As the days move toward the weekend, the hostel seems to convert more to Spanish. At meal times everyone crowds this little hole in the wall of a kitchen and then eats at the long picnic tables. Several of us are non-native speakers, but we're in amongst the Argentinian slang and the Tico slurring doing the best we can, and for once, it feels like we, or at least I, and doing ok.

7. MY FRIENDS

I was at the hostel bar with Moises and this lovely French girl who is doing her masters in organic agriculture. And I'm feeling that Friday night loneliness. Really just feeling so far from home, so anonymous, so far from anything that feels like home or emotionally safe. Those things are all I really want.

And then I see someone who looks a lot like this kid who goes to Wednesday night vespers at Wesleyan. And then I notice that he is carrying a Wesleyan water bottle. So I run up to him, and, lo and behold, his name is Paul and he is here with 5 other Wesleyan students, 3 of whom I know and love personally.

Great Joy! Ague and Veronica went to an international high school in Costa Rica and they are back to visit the country over winter break. Meggie, Nick, Paul and Su are here to join them. Somehow they chose the exact same city and the exact same hostel on the exact same night as I did. Incidentally, this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. On my birthright trip last January, we picked up a stray 2008 graduate we found in Jerusalem for a couple of days. It was the Wesleyan sweatshirt that got him. Lesson: I need to start sporting some Wesleyan paraphernalia because we are everywhere. I think it truly speaks to what a great choice the school was for me that I really feel like I have some je ne sais quoi in common with other students and grads. As people i generally like them more than other random people I meet.

On Saturday we rent bikes to go down the street to Cahuita. If Puerto Viejo is a rollicking, pot-smoking, flirtatious 21-year-old in a belly shirt, Cahuita is her 32-year-old sister, married with kids. After 17 crotch-punishing kilometers on a one-speed mountain bike with a wire basket on the front, the kind you ride completely upright, we arrive in Cahuita which has a beautiful national park with beach trails. I share with everyone my love for pipa, and we eat our coconuts and walk the mangrove trail to the beach. It has very gentle waves and warm water. We splash around talking about all the people we know, what we want to be when we grow up, and, of course, capitalism.

On the walk back form the beach I saw my first monkeys in Costa Rica! Two kinds, black face and white face. Monkeys are way cool. Also, they have prehensile tails. I think maybe coming out of the trees was a big mistake for us in terms of having awesome body mechanics and also modes of transportation. Then we saw sloths! A mommy sloth and a baby sloth that she was carrying, and then this other sloth that came up to the mommy and kissed (well, licked) her! Of course I deconstructed completely into a cooing and sighing sack of ovaries and stood there until my neck was totally strained from craning up into the tree tops. We made our ET-reminiscent bike ride back, had a beautiful dinner, played bananagrams (!!!), and made up stories in hammocks until the wee hours of the morning. Sunday was another long and exhausting travel day to go back to the hotel, complete with prosthelytizing Nicaraguan dudes cornering me in the bus, but it was so wonderful to run into those guys and have a chance to feel really at home for a day. My friend Evan always used to say, "home is people", and I think that's part of the truth.

Vacacciones

This week is a much-needed vacation. I explained to Jay during a low point that I felt like a sandcastle that was being rained on and melting. It's just that my job, idyllic as it sounds, is draining. The guests are needy and they want to make relationships with me, but they're insidiously selfish relationships because they really only go one way. I could write a catalog of the woes of the average well-to-do American woman. And those conversations give nothing back to me, while they exhaust my sympathy. My English-speaking coworkers are frequently stressed. My Spanish-speaking coworkers don't understand me, not from a language barrier perspective (although my Spanish isn't really any better than it was) but from a cultural perspective. And the wind. When the wind lasts for hours and into days, it takes something away. From the body. Like a curse that you can't heal because you can't identify it, or what it's doing. Like leaky bowel syndrome. (Too far?). What I mean to say is that constant wind is exhausting because you have to hold onto yourself all the time.

Something fun was that my grandparents visited me at the hotel for a night. It was so nice to see family, people who love me, where I could be myself, where they were on my side no matter what. Maybe that's the thing about family: they're always on your side, in some way, even if they disagree with you and undermine you.

Had a stressful Kenny episode, wherein Bob suggested that I might be moving out of the house because things are bad in the house. This was news to me. When Bob told me that I needed to talk to Kenny, he admitted that he hates living with me because it feels like he's living with a mother again. And he HATES being told what to do. What he means is that the fact that he has to be considerate in washing his dishes, turning down the tv, and not leaving the common space a pit oppresses him. I was really taken aback, and assured him I don't care what he does as long as he does his dishes. I don't want to oppress him. He agreed it's just an unfortunate paring and we can try to work it out. God knows I don't like living with him because he's a resentful ogre who is one of the most selfish people I've ever met and it hurts my feelings that he doesn't want to be my friend. I'm just so used to community. This feels ugly and sad in comparison. So of course now Jill and Bob are thinking about moving me around for the rest of the two months, some weeks in the hotel (nice accommodations, but no space. I like to go home at the end of the day and get away) and then maybe if a massage therapist comes I can move in with her. I hate the uncertainty of it. Very stressful.

But now I'm in Monteverde visiting Evan, Debbie, and the kids. They are fostering two very sweet puppies, and my grandparents are visiting. Of course being re-socialized into family dynamics is taking its toll. Yesterday we went to the Sloth Sanctuary. For those of you who don't know, sloths are wonderful. They are peaceful, gentle, slow, friendly, and have very human faces. They also have the best body mechanics of any animal I've ever watched closely. Their core muscles are perfect, and they can gracefully and effortlessly move their entire body through the air while hanging onto a tree branch with any one limb. Later today we're going into Santa Elena to see some other animal museums. Tomorrow I am going to Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast, where I plan to spend as much time being horizontal as humanly possible, aided by hammocks, preferably.