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Today I did something that will change my life.
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Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:52 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

The150 Bodies Found in a Shallow Grave Thing *

5th June 2009 was a big date in Peru.  
It was a date that has destroyed the current administration, and leaves Peru at a crossroads – will it become more like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela (poor, socialist, ruled by rich dictators) at the next election, or more like Chile, Argentina (rich, democratic, ruled by rich elites who have sold off every possible natural resource to the West)?  
The fight started with the Awajun – they finally came to town.  They blocked the roads hereabouts for a month or two, and when there was no gas, food or (eek!) beer left, they blockaded every city, from jungle to coast, put it under house arrest, and demonstrated in the streets, shouting and shaking their spears.
The fight continued with the government response.  They gave them two days to put the toys away, before they were going to move in with bombs.  And move in with bombs they did.  I’d never called a friend or neighbour and heard gunfire in the next street before.  The bodies were piled on the ground in the square outside my business.  

And then both sides started lying about it.  

• Never trust a bloody journalist.
• Bullets sound unreal, like the Gulf War mk III showing on CNN.
• All that boring political background you tried to pick up was suddenly worth it.
• Spears and rocks are as scary as submachineguns.
• Everyone’s politics undergo a Damacene conversion in the presence of a raging mob.
• The Foreign Office are crap.
• First over an avalanche, first past the roadblock, first out of the massacre? = A dangerous place to be.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:09 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Investigative Journalism Thing *

See, we attract attention, we foreigners.  We people from other cities.  Especially the ones with a particular colour of skin.  We attract attention, interest, envy and  … a taste for revenge.
We’ve been calling too much attention to ourselves for ages, of course.  The volunteers who sleep around, the ones with an alcohol problem, the ones with a too young girlfriend, the ones who dress like indigents, the ones with two partners here and another back home, the ones out clubbing till five AM every night, the ones who wouldn’t mind a bit of cheap Peruvian weed, and the ones whose local partners are disturbingly young … and there’s the reputation of a thousand mochilera hippy backpacker tribes stomping before us.  Then there’s an attempted homicide, and the press is Officially Interested.  We Give Good Story.

What do you do if someone breaks into your house and steals from you in Amazonas?  You go on the radio.  You denounce them.  That’s what the radio is for.
And in an area with no newspapers, cinema, books, shops or leisure industry, the Story is all that counts.  Truth becomes irrelevant, and the chisme (gossip) serves as an unofficial rule of law in a region where police don’t fart without a kickback.

A friend witnessed a steering group meeting of journos from the local radio.  They were chatting about  an expose they’re planning about my business.  Listing the separate clods of dirt that they’re hoping to dig up on us: drugs, child abuse, sexual abuse, fraud.  “That place is where you go to get a foreign prostitute, nothing more,” commented one journo, who has been a personal client for two years, (without a single sexual favour, I might add).  Their primary method of investigation will be to look for ex-clients of the business on MSN and offer them money for information that these accusations are true.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:06 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

The ‘the world owes me a living’ Thing *

Arrogant bloody Brits.  I know they infest everywhere back home, but they don’t often travel, at least not to places that are hard to get to.  So after four years away, I’ve lost my native acceptance that there’s nothing you can do about these twits, and am shocked all over again that there are people in the world who feel themselves so innately special that they should have an easier ride than you, just to thank them for sharing the personal glory of their presence.

Distraction – arrogant bloody Brits who are so accustomed to the all forgiving cushion of the welfare state that they bugger off at a moments’ notice with ‘a headache’ or ‘major depression’, or because they think 'Buenos Aires sounds more cultured', then piss off down the pub to embark on another bender; who disappear for a fortnight, leaving me with the refunds to give out to customers who had stupidly expected the attitude that a job was something valuable, or worth doing well.

Another distraction – arrogant bloody Brits who fuck off to get their jollies on $9000 tours of Machu Picchu after nine days’ work, leaving me with S/2500 to repay to dubious clients because ‘Peru isn’t very clean really.’  
It’s the third fucking world.  You’re comparing the place to Switzerland, and the worst you can come up with is ‘it’s not very clean’?  

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:03 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

The Attempted Homicide Thing *

People who come to Perú to work for me go through these clearly defined stages - dependence and credulousness, insistence that it's just like home, boredom, defiance and then the honeymoon phase of proper cultural adaptation begins.  The majority of them are short termers, and during the 'resistance' phase they always know better than anyone else about anything and everything related to their adoptive country (of all of two months).  You can tell them their NBF is a lying, thieving rogue, who's been badmouthing them to half the city, or point out the armed  terrorists from Sendero Luminoso recruiting in the local square, and they'll simply outright accuse you of invention.  As if I had energy or breath to be so concerned as to invent.

Anyway, so one thing I have to do in my job is vet the people who the foreigners hang out with.  I could phrase it more prettily, but that's essentially what it is.  And to recommend as mates for the duration the folk who won't rob, rape, infect or maltreat them.  It kind of flies in the face of anything I'd do back in Europe, but here - christ, people can be so gullible and unaware, and one of the nightmares that drives me is not to be even in part responsible for the stupid misjudgement that ruins their holiday and perhaps their life. 

But nobody knows everything.

So, last month, one of our staff went out for a drink with someone I'd known for a year, here, someone who an ex staff member has been dating for five or six months, someone whom I would have regarded as a friend.  She went out for a few beers, asked him to walk her home, and popped in to his place to use the loo on the way.  He then battered her, strangled her, smashed her head repeatedly against a metal door, forced her to her knees pleading for her life, and tried to kill her.

Yeah.  Deep breath.

She's not naive, or a fantasist, a flirt, or a wallflower, or any of those things, those explanations, excuses or provocations one might grasp at.  When trying the hell to work out why or how someone whom you know well could simply flip into violent killer.  She's a level-headed twenty seven year old forensic scientist, and she bit his hands and scratched him, hoping to leave clues, thinking that the end was near for her.  Her recollection is hazy - her head wounds were severe, she also lost consciousness several times while fighting to get his hands from her throat.  When a witness called out, she exploited the distraction, threw some of her scattered and dropped belongings at him, and ran to the door, through it, screaming loudly for help.

Our supposed friend then switched his cell off, and went to bed to sleep it off.

This girl then - god, this poor, poor girl - endured ten hours of interrogation - from us, her disbelieving friends, and then from the police, all unable to take in the total volte face that had changed this guy from amiable clown into attempted killer.  After ten hours, she was allowed to a hospital.  Her head had swollen to twice it's size, and slowly turned black as blood passed down from the main point of impact, on the inside of her skin, blackening her face as it steadily seeped.  He is a boxer by training.  He's small, compact, and strong.  At first she couldn't sleep simply for the pain caused by the hammering he'd given her ribcage.  She had gouge marks on her throat where she'd tried to rip his hands from their strangle hold about her neck.  Her back, neck and feet were covered in wounds -long gashes that resemble claw marks.  But the greatest damage was internal.  It was weeks before she managed to sleep alone, petrified that this man could come and get her, finish the job.  Her voice is soft and querulous now, and she has problems doing anything alone.

The 'friend' who did this, who destroyed her personality even more effectively than he smashed and beat her sixty kilo frame, stated to the police that a white faced spaniard had broken into his house and fought him. (Not the girl.  Him. That 'fight' resulted in defence wounds - in teeth marks and scratch marks to his hands - an unusual manner for a man to fight, even had there been in 'spaniards' in Amazonas that day.)  He accused the girl's boyfriend of having paid someone to come and kill her.  He accused [her / me / all our staff / his own girlfriend] of selling drugs to him, and to other peruvians in the city.  He then blackmailed her and us, made threats to destroy our business if I and F continued to help her.  (We continued to help her.  He followed through on those threats.  He failed.)  He got himself a fancy lawyer, within two hours of being picked up on the run.  The lawyer rubbished the testimony of the eye witness who had seen him trying to kill this girl with his bare hands - rubbished her testimony on the grounds she is a prostitute.  Intimidated her into dropping the part of her statment that mentioned he had on previous occasions also beaten her, too.  He paid the police a cash bribe to drop the charge of 'attempted homicide', to 'robbery'.  And then he paid the police to let him walk free, just twelve hours after he had savagely beaten and nearly murdered an innocent woman, a foreigner in his city.  Then he tried to explain it all way to his foreign girlfriend, by saying that his wicked father had made him do it.

So this is why I haven't been in contact a lot lately.

The girl?  She is healing, on the outside, teaching me daily what it means to be a survivor.  Trying to hold it together as she is trapped here until the first hearing has been processed. (This she must do, if she is to have any reassurance that this will go on his record, that at least he won't be able to do this again - maybe next time more successfully - to someone else.  Someone less 'lucky'.)  He has happily exploited her misguided generosity; she didn't press that he go to jail immediately, and she resisted the overeager DA's attempts to pin a false rape charge on him. 

So she can't leave the house, for fear of meeting him and being attacked again.  She can't go home until the judicial process has ground to at least 50% completion, and its lumbering bulk is plastered with inefficient bureaucracy and inexplicable delay.  The money she had saved for a year in Peru is gone, spunked uselessly on lawyer's fees.  (Thanks, by the way, too, the British Embassy's spectacularly useful suggestion that she visit the local tourist information office, if she needs 'help'.)

People always say, don't they, how normal and quiet the guy had always seemed, when the pizza boy wigs out and shoots half a bus station of bystanders.  Well, he didn't seem that normal.  He was clingy and a brichero, he dressed like a comedy eighties throwback, he would spend hours pontificating about his love of nazis and the 'aryan master race'. (I'm exceptionally relieved that his loyal law student lover is safely two continents away from here, in India.)  But he was more clown than threat.  Less Sid Vicious, more Jerry Dammers.

My city is a safe place, in an unsafe nation.  One extraordinary incident doesn't change that.  But he did do it.  No matter how much worming and squirming and shitflinging Xxxx X Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx this man tries to do to get away from this.  No matter how he has exploited her generosity in resisting the pressure to inflate the charges.  He did this, he did this.  He did this.  And it will come back to haunt him.

(* why I did not write much lately, signed molesworth esq)

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:25 pm ~ There are shitloads - 14 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Moving Home Thing *

I used to love watching Alvin Hall take a perfectly normal, successful business professional, and strip bare their spending habits until it became frighteningly obvious that their attitudes to money had been both formed and fixed at age five or six.
Attitudes to money are nigh on impossible to change.  And if they do so, it's as a result of repeated painful trauma, not of logic, or effort of will.

I am a pessimist, a cynic, an idealist, a dreamer, and a fearful soul who doesn't take financial risks.  I plan and save, and I'm generally well aware a week before I'm hitting the last few shekels.  Repeated experience of both relative wealth and genuine poverty has taught me this - left alone, I'd be a spendthrift.  I pick my targets for spending to excess - although they're not particularly sensible, they do relate to quality of life (I haven't bought any clothes or shoes in around seven years, but I've bought 62 international flights in that time.  I don't really drink if I go out dancing, but I'll blow a week's scrapings and savings on a really nice wine.)  I don't have a pension, health insurance (no NHS in this country), a home, or a steady job.

My husband is a rationalist, and optimist, a spendthrift, a promise-maker, stingy as hell then suddenly a blow-it-all-and-worry-later ball of financial stress.  He's never saved a centimo in his life, and pays off loans by taking out another credit card.  He lurches from the brink of one financial disaster to the next, and bizarrely, does almost enough out of it to survive.  We've tried for various arduous years to meld these two worlds together.  They don't go.

Finally, the cynic in me is winning.  If I have a job I love, a man I love, a world I love in Peru, but no pension, no health insurance and not always enough food to eat at forty ... the creeping awareness of the last cent coming echoes dangerously at me.  I don't always have enough to pay for food here.
Let me say that again, you might not have thought about it properly: I don't always have enough to pay for food here.
I certainly don't have enough to pay for anything else.  It's not an easy situation in which to be 38 and looking at the Rest of Your Life picture.

Back home, I can support myself, even in a recession.  In a job I dislike.  In a climate that sogs the soul.  And  ... alone, at least for a year or two.  We can't afford (yet) for both of us to move there.  There'd be a year, maybe two years' gap.  Maybe more.
And I can't imagine that.

But regular meals without the cuticle chewing stress of not knowing if I get paid this month would happen.

(* why i did not do my blogging homework, a series)

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:25 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Family Thing *

My Peruvian in laws are generally generous to a fault, but they have an annual habit of lining up in a group to stand around me screaming at me to change my ways.
There's a lot of incidental detail but the upshot is usually generally that I Am Not Peruvian Enough.  The word "we" is invoked, usually to indicate "we Peruvians", as if calling on the spirit of a master race I would always be prevented (by cold European character defect) from joining.  Reality never figures in these screaming circles, it's simply an excuse to browbeat me for not actually being them.  If I agree, gold, whimper pathetically, sit in silence, or yell back, it doesn't make any difference.  The scream circles is not intended to change me.  It's more a family custom.  I'm not the only victim. It's not intended to achieve anything at all.
And of course, it's conducted in a second language.  Have you ever tried defending yourself from a circle of angry shouting harridans,k when you didn't really get what they said, and it takes seven minutes of brow knitted concentration to manage a full sentence yourself?
...
It happens each year.  Not a lot.  But enough.

I'm not good with bullying.  I don't put up with it.  Not any more.  So I'm left with a dilemma.  I started by avoiding the family.  Christmases, vacations alone in the kitchen, flying visits where I pretend to be so bad at Spanish it would be futile to start a conversation.  And ... they just come here, move in unannounced, throw out half my belongings, refuse me food and get everything set for screaming circle to get going.

This isn't going to change.  Not unless I am the one to change it.

And nobody's going to protect me from this, but me.

(* I meant to write a blog, but the dog ate it, part of a long series of short excuses)

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:07 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Thing Is ...

The Thing Is...

...I haven't been in any more than silent mode for months now, because the Things were piling up.
The family thing, the marriage thing, the moving back home thing, the homicide thing, the investigative journalism thing, the 'the world owes me a living' thing, the 150 bodies in a shallow grave thing ...
...and now I need to go to a neighbouring country via the jungle, get through a court case, and introduce three non spanish speaking green newbies to rural Peru.  I'll tell you about all - most - of the things, but it isn't going to happen in the next week.
As everyone here always admonishes me, when I'm shocked by some appalling injustice ... patience.  I'll be writing on paper, in the back of pick up trucks through the jungle in places without computers for a while.  Patience.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:31 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Conversations that have been fucking me off

See if you can recreate ... can reconfigure the grit-teeth, bitten fury, awesome, teeth-gringingly annoying content of some of these recent conversations.

"Please can you take that stuff about me off your blog?" I say, jaw clenched, to the law student.  "You don't need to remove everything.  Just the bits that are actually libellous."  She's got my name, my company name, the city we operate in.  The very small city.  I recognise that, to her, it's an interesting South American story.

"No, you're right, it is your decision.  But I do have to tell you that when i travelled two days, put my business card on the table, said 'employ her;  she's better than your other staff,' I put my neck and my business on the line with that recommendation, and if you then don't bloody bother to turn up, then that does actually have an impact on my business relations with a company that is actually our closest rival.  So, yes, I do think you should turn up to work next month, because you should do what you said you should do."  She didn't.  It was part of her South American story, and she's in the Thai chapter now.

"Maybe to you, you feel like you're suffering some sort of unfair economic deprivation, and that in comparison with life on the dole in your home country, you're actually living thin.  But I live in Peru, and by the standards we have here, I haven't seen you cut back even slightly.  You smoke all day, you eat a la carte in restaurants and never cook, you drink fancy US gaseosas, you go out every night clubbing."  He puts his knife down, having finished his rare steak, salad, and fries.  Looks abject.  Like many South American visitors, he's not used to negotiating and haggling, and so he's overdone it in fear he's not negotiating hard enough.  "The people you work with don't do that because they can't afford it, so according to my eyes, according to my context, here, you're not in any way shape or form 'living thin'.  So I advise you that when you arrive at the next job, the excuse of poverty when you've just finished a tour of millionaire Andean retreats and party / surf spots in Ecudaor - it really isn't going to wash.  A new suit of clothes costs really very little in Topi-Top and it's not something your pervuian co-workers will ever have asked for as a job perk.  Peruvians are grateful for any job, and they do their best when given it, so if you go into contract negotiations saying 'you don't pay me enough not to look like a bum,' you're simply going to be out on your ear."

"No, I'm not sticking my nose into your private life, but you're not in Europe, and you can't keep secrets here.  It's a tiny, tiny mountain town with no leisure industry, and everything you're doing is seen, is remarked upon, is used to criticise the shit out of other foreigners."  I feel bad, because one of them is crying, but I also know they're tears of rage, not humiliation or repentance.  "You've been caning it.  you're out in the clubs every single night till 5am for about a month now.  What impression does that give people here - in this religious, quiet, closed community - of our business?  Of our morals?  How are they supposed to send their kids here?"

"And what do they say about the quality of our work?" crybaby blurts defiantly.  "And what about him?  He goes out every night.  Why is it only the women you're talking to?"  Bingo.  Tears of rage.  Angry that we know, not that she's out of order.  This is not La France, it's South America, and she's left me with no option but to state what she wants never to be stated.

"Sweetheart, if the gossip gets to me, it's gone to everyone else first.  You have two lovers.  And so do you.  And so do you.  He doesn't, and he doesn't drink.  You can't keep secrets here.  And you can't work here and keep on the lash like that."

The rational one speaks.  Calmly, too.  "But what is it you actually want us to do?"

I stifle the sigh.  "To be discreet.  Nothing more.  It's your private life. Not mine.  But don't destroy the reputation of everything I've worked for.  Do you think you can do that?"

And this is why I'm welcoming a brief interlude between one short term, vacation-working foreigner and the next.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:33 pm ~ There are shitloads - 10 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Change

(written in April 08)

It strikes me suddenly that I could be doing this forever.  Getting up alone, waiting alone, eating alone, working and watching impenetrably difficult TV alone.  Waiting, alone.

I tend to stagger through the days assuming that after two years it gets magically easier.  At some point this year, I will awaken to fluent Spanish rolling from my lips, and a wide circle of friends.  This will occur magically at that moment all the websites tell you is the limit of average culture shock, and the previous two years of silence, inertia and isolation will melt away.

It's as good a technique as any, though, that's the sad thing.  I have friends who I email only in Spanish.  When foreigners are here, they do compliment me on my spanish.  But the locals stubbornly refuse to play along.  I can go to a cafe I have visited at the same time daily for coffee for 18 months, steadily, and they'll refuse to understand 'un cafe'.  A question is met with blank incomprehension.  It doesn't matter to these people if I stalk them 24/7, or if I go into a coma for 10 years - their reaction'll be equally poisonous.  So what do I do?  Just wait, and trust in magic?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 2:36 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

be cool, brother. I don’t have much, but I’ll share it with you

In lieu of anything I want to post (I have posts inside, murky, bitter, and many, but they come out in a mad tumble of too many thoughts even as I reach for the late night dog eared journal, and then I realise I have to work 12-14 hours a day for another fortnight and getting some sleep would be a better idea than scribbling away in the darkness by the light of a mobile phone; might incubate a few less tearful moments, also), and as Post of the Week apparently died (the minute they elected me as a judge - only latterly letting me know that there had been something they had wanted me to do, a week earlier, you know), here's an excerpt from my favourite Colombian blogger.  It reminds me of Valentine's Day South London stylee, weirdly.

Streetwise Bachelor Degree

FIRST PROBLEM:

You’re walking alone on a dark downtown street. It’s late.

This is a timed exercise. Get it right, you get nothing. Don’t get it wrong.

Halfway up the block you see a couple getting robbed across the street and twenty meters up. The thief is alone, scraggly, a glue-sniffer or crackhead. He menaces his victims with a long piece of broken glass held high over his head.

The girl, she cries. The guy panics and forks over something from his pocket. The thief spins drunkenly on his heel and runs in your direction. The couple huddle away in the opposite direction, the girl’s hand over her mouth.

The thief is fucked up. He’s looking past you as he approaches, wobbly but aggressive. He gets a car width away and notices your face and pauses, but he’s already committed to demanding all your valuables. He also holds the piece of glass high over his head, angling down in a theatrically menacing gesture. You notice he has a piece of cloth wrapped around the glass to keep from cutting his own hand. It might not be enough to keep from injuring himself if he stabs, but probably good enough if he slices, so while the guy may not be a pro, the glass isn't strictly for show.

In your pockets, you have: a handful of change, a wad of bills, a small folding knife, and a canister of pepper spray.

You:

1. Give him a fuck-off look and continue walking. This can work surprisingly well. But if it doesn’t work this time, you’ll have your back to him if he follows through on his aggressive posturing.

2. Run. This would probably work. Doubtful he’d be able to get a swipe at you, and probably wouldn’t give chase, but it’s a gamble. Maybe a chase would make him think you’ve really got something worth taking.

3. Pepper spray him. We assume this works, but against a cracked-up assailant, how well? If it doesn’t incapacitate him immediately, surely it’d provoke him. If it does incapacitate him, would you then proceed to kick him until he stops moving? You sure you wanna start down this road, Caped Avenger?

4. Give him a swift boot to the balls. Good bet, but if you miss or he doesn’t go down, now you’re in a fight with a guy who has a stabbing device and may not feel pain. Not to mention, it’d be altogether less icky if you didn’t have to touch this gutter-dweller in any fashion. Seriously, the guy is disgusting.

5. Knife him. You could unfold the blade in your pocket and maybe slash at his throat before he can bring the shard of glass down from over his head. However, while a mortal wound to the neck might make a sober person only want to stagger away and try not to bleed out, someone who’s fucked up might not even notice, and this would probably lead to a contest of pointy things. Are you a trained and practicing knife-fighter? Even if you win, you’ve still just stabbed a guy, and that’s not exactly a victory for anybody.

6. Turn your pockets out, give him all your money, and slouch away for a good cry and a reprimand from a Colombian who will explain how it was all your fault.

You have three seconds to come up with a plan.

To find the answer, you're going to have to read the full post, you know.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:06 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Here's my heart and soul, please grind them into hamburger, and enjoy

The problem is, there are so many times when I.just.want.to.go.home.

When you have to remind yourself that you're not being unreasonable, asking for a wage or a wage slip.

When people say to me yet again that the problem is that WE, los peruanos, WE are like this.  When they don't listen or can't hear me that this one person speaking is not a unified group, that they are not 'all peruvians', and that I am more than a simple skin colouring somehow deficient in human content.

I'd really like someone to call me a useless imbecile bitch, fire me, and refuse me food or shelter because it's actually true, and not just because I'm white, or they didn't get a kickback today.

Mutters to self: There aren't any firemen in Peru.  There's no rescue team coming.  The only person who will fight for me is me.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:29 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

I seem to be having problems adjusting to the reality of today.

I seem to be having problems adjusting to the reality of today.
Yesterday was real, allright.  For several days now, life has been way
too real.  Since the moment I blundered into The Secret, life has been
burning a hole in my retina.  I've been weirdly transported into
moments of calm, moments of storming, grandstanding rage, moments of
selfless love.  Even moments of wide-eyed tranquillity, when I see
everything rationally and coolly, and learn to put my fire aside for
the longer view.  Let's just say that this wildly veering clarity
isn't that normal, for me.

I was watching how he dealt with it when a boyfriend smacked up his
mother, how he called the guy and threatened him, called him
'cobarde'.  Thinking about how no one had ever, nor would ever do that
macho protective thing for me.  There wouldn't be any angry calls from
a brother or an uncle or a dad, suggesting that he pick on someone his
own bloody size.  The only person who would ever stick up for my
rights not to be cheated on and lied to and then dismissed would be me
myself.
And that this is a lesson, life would teach me, eventually, whether I
wanted to learn it or not.

So things bubbled and burned inside, I cried a lot, I forgave him a
lot, I acted pretty inconsistently, The Secret shooting darts into my
hip as it burned in my pocket.  And then I let it out.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:58 am ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

your mother (who, like you, does not yet exist)

I'm sorry about this, you won't like it at all, but sometimes, specially on the days when I can't see anything bright or fun or worthwhile, and everything I try flies back at me like a cherry milkshake in the face, google translate really makes me laugh:

Letter to the Son I have not

You better, Benjamin, like the name that I'm going to make. I chose because it called my grandfather and I think it 'cool' to tell Benja in front of my friends (or your uncles affection).

You better not be weeping, or inherit my stature ridiculous, but that's it: and from that you do not go out with a beautiful moon as I have in the cheeks.

But is also true that you're a fan of football and you are a fan of the 'U' and me to the stadium on Sunday. If you want to buy a box at the Monumental. All provided that mariconada [= gay stuff] not start with that you like basketball, or worse, tennis.
The only thing that might like it more than football is swimming, because it could treparte on my shoulders, as your grandfather did with me and train to be an eminent diver in Acapulco (or in La Herradura, it does).

You better, son, you hit the first borrachera [=lairy drunk girl] you with me: it extraordinary that we are going to get back together and farra morning, and we are waiting for your mom upset and gown.
You better talk to me for sex and drugs with the naturalness with which I could speak, I do not know, college or Labrador that I'm supposed to buy.

You better, man, you are sincere to me is, I know that if I lie to save a cocacho [=??], for at least looking at treatment as one of your friends, because in fact you're going to be one of mine, and you better hope you will like that idea.

You better, Benjamin, not be a journalist, much less a poet [says the journo]. Till you are two years old, instead of those calzonudos [= pig headed kids] read fairy tales like Cinderella, I'm going to read theories of economics and medicine, the professions will cost you a million. I thank you for it.

And you most chibolo [= kiddie], I did not come with pendejada [= asshole] you have soul or underground or punk or gothic or dragqueen Emo [Emo is feared adn reviled as 'gay suicide boy music' in Peru]. You reventaría ribs [= I'll break your bloody ribs], to say the least.

But above all, son, born You better someday, but not because I say to anyone, or your grandmother or your mother (who, like you, does not yet exist) are some nights when I look in the mirror I think your grandfather, and I suspect that I, frankly, could also be a wicked father.

Bastardised from a genuinely good blog, in spanish, Busco Novia.

And if you really want funny writing, try this guy. [link doesn't always work, bizarrely.]

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:58 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Question of the Year

Kay asks if I'm really catholic.  It's a good question.

I left England in 2005, with the intention of completing one or two years of directionless international travel, then another two working at something worthy before I came home.  I managed a year and a half of bumming on seven continents - clearly not as skilled at directionless as I'd imagined - and am embarking on year three of something worthy in sudamérica.  In reality, I did a lot of bored, lonely wandering.  I spent a year trying to stop reeling in wounded shock after meeting someone temporary, somewhere temproary, doing something temporary, yet with the absolute certainty that this was the first person in all my (then) 35 years I could want to pass forever with.  Another full year simply blinked away, meeting the man I married.  And a huge amount of the void which all that aimlessness left me with was spent giving myself stupid projects.

And they were stupid projects.  Sample:
- Every third day, say 'yes' to any request from any human, no matter the context.
- Pick two topics in each country, and research the hell out of them every spare minute I had.  (Really.  I remember India - three months spent cramming on 'mafia involvement in government elections' and ... bollywood.)
- Ask everyone I met what place on earth they were happiest in, that wasn't their home, and then be obligated to go there.
- Eat every animal that wakes me up too early.
- Only speak to other foreigners at fifteen day intervals.
- Make a list of my greatest fears, and confront them, in alphabetical order. ("Why are you so attached to the importance of Fear in your life?" said the Poet.)
- Interrogate every religion, and find the one where I fit.

I knew I wasn't atheist.  It was easy to act it, but I believed in the existence of evil, see.  (all the evidence suggests it springs from the depths of the human heart, rather than stalking the earth like a disembodied bogey on stilts, changing good people into bad - but my instincts resisted, stubbornly and pointlessly they resisted this.)   If I believe in evil, I have to believe in good.  And if there's good and evil, then there's either purpose, or freedom to lack purpose (which is different from The Void).  I might not have been too sure about The God Thing, but I couldn't shake the idea I had a spirit.  I clearly was religious, simply lacking religion - so why not go through the books, and see if I could find out what I am?

Actually it germinated as a project in 02, or 03, back when I was a career lesbian, when given the task of 'presenting something on the big Rs' at 8:30am every Monday for two thirds of a year.  There were real world consequences to these presentations, it wasn't a lip service exercise, so I had to take it seriously.  BBC/Religions became my New Best Friend (yes, I've always been a riot at parties).  I rattled through the Big Seven (judaeism, christianity, sikhism, buddhism, hinduism, islam (I can never remember Number Seven: it must have underwhelmed, somewhat)).  Then,in the interests of balance, and not wanting much to move onwards to Arhcitecture roundups, I recategorised atheism into seventeen subsets, and presented on these, too.  Humanism was appealing, but distinctly Victorian*.  Islam (as defined in the book, not the world) was beautiful - truly beautiful*.  (If I'd had to devise a religion, I'd have wanted it to look like that.)  Sikhism sounded scary*.
*This is Booklearning, before your knee jerks.  It wasn't anything related to the world that is lived.

I travelled, and I looked, and I read.  I did my homework.  I did my research.
And when I went to a place and looked with open eyes at what they prayed to, there were a few surprises.  Western Buddhism was really attractive to me, despite the parallels to viral Marxism.  Eastern Buddhism less so. 
Every single real-life example of Sikhism revealed stunning faith, patience and generosity.  Contrary to my prior reading, it was almost too good to be real.  I doubted whether I could live up to Sikhism's ideals.  Like Sufism, I couldn't find a place for the fallibility of man in the storyline, and worried about letting all the quiet generosity down.
The big surprise was Hinduism.  Man, I read 'Papa, am I a Hindu?' so many times, usually while paasing through Buddhist states, and while writing to Kay, oddly).  Offput by the AbFabness of western adoption of eastern religions, I still loved the primacy of spirit, the total acceptance of man as a flawed, fallible, craven thing, the direct communication with the (something that I read as God) (- the priest thing, it always bugs me, see).  And the monkey.  I'm not gonna go into why, here, but the monkey, it had lasting resonance inside.

Ultimately, though, they were all ... religions.  All the good stuff is quiet, personal, stored in your soul or in the sharing of acts of kindness or respect.  And all the bad stuff was usually in churches.  Bribes, gold statues, brutal rules, exploitation.  The stuff that humans excel at.  The formalised churches were always- always - always the same. 
(I've been told by the Poet that it's hurtful for a western Buddhist to hear this, and I'm sorry if that is indeed true.  It's not my schtick to knock anyone's spiritual beliefs; but at the Potala Palace I didn't see anything too different from the Vatican, and if that hurts, well, it's my own peace I have to make here, not yours.  I'm sorry for making your path harder, but ... it's your path.)

Every religion was bad, is what I found, and at the same, selfsame time, every religion was good.  If I chose one, I would be obliged to ignore uncomfortable truths about it.  If I didn't choose one, I'd be obliged to ignore uncomfortable truths about my soul.

So I chose the conflicted, hypocritical, double-dealing sky-pixie-story I'd grown up with; almost entirely on the basis that I know it very well.  I know its corners, I know its unexpected gifts, I know its self-serving lies.  But that's not what I practise.  What I practise is probably not far off what I'd practise in any religion - it's quiet, it's personal, it's direct, and it's a striving to respect myself and my fellow man.  It's the thing that unites atheism and religion in fact.  And it seems realer and more honourable than believing nothing.

We're not just nothing.  That's what it means to me to be a catholic.

Subnote: I don't think the Pope would approve of my version of catholicism.  But in my version of catholicism, he's not the one to decide.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:16 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]