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.