Irrelevant

After two weeks of emailing someone named Joaco trying to make a reservation to camp in Villeta (a little town one hour outside of Bogota), it turns out that the best way to organize a trip is to make no plans.

We planned to meet at 10am... we left at 12pm.  At that point I turned my watch to “Chrono” mode and let the face show 0:00 for the rest of the weekend.  Time is irrelevant when the only goal is to have a good time. 

We got off the bus and followed pointing fingers to the Salto del Mico waterfall.  This wasn’t the kind of tourist attraction with guides or lifeguards on duty, but As Felipe said, “Hagale como los modelos--sin pensar” (Just do it like models--without thinking).   Apprehension is irrelevant when looking over the top of a cliff getting ready to throw yourself over the edge into the water. 

We didn’t know the Spaniards we were following in the dark, but we had a feeling they would lead us to a place where we could set up camp.  Eventually we landed in what was essentially the backyard of someone’s farm where a whole crew of Paisas from Medellin were also squatting.  We ate all the marshmellows before we even got the fire going and we ended up having Saltines and aguardiente for dinner.  Taste buds are irrelevant when the shots are free and taken in good company.

We brought out the guitar and I started going through my standard repertoire--The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Hallelujah, etc.  It was nothing impressive until one of the Paisas started freestyle rapping over the strumming.   I would repeat the theme and sing the lyrics of the chorus in English and he could spit for two or three minutes straight in legit Spanish rhyme.  Language is irrelevant in a predawn jam sesh around a campfire. 

We didn’t pay to use the pool at the camp site, but the tents that we rented came with complimentary swimming that night when the Made in China plastic generously allowed the rain storm free entrance.  But sleep is irrelevant when everyone can have a good laugh sitting around the breakfast table recounting the sensation of  the rising puddles washing over our elbows and toes. 

We hardly registered the sleep deprivation, distracted by riding on mini train cars, drinking Guarapo, getting sunburned, playing water volleyball, swimming in the river (and me mooning all the tourists when one sneaky waterfall tried to steal my swimsuit bottoms).  Although despite the blaring reggaeton music, I did manage to pass out on the bus ride back to Bogota--at least until I was awoken by the Paisa with a request to perform one last duet with the rapper.  Self-consciousness is irrelevant when an entire bus of people are waiting for the white girl to sing.

Traveling is a lesson in present-mindedness.  There are too many factors out of your control to waste energy being preoccupied.  Somehow things always work out, and if they don’t, as my friend Willyn says, “Es un cuento para los nietos” (It’s a story for the grandkids). 

Ode to Alice

I don’t think I ever actually got the joke about the birds that shit in the priest’s hand, but the best part was watching my parents helplessly wince at their elementary-aged children hearing the “s-word” from their Grandma.  She paid no mind to their rolling eyes and just watched us with a belly-bouncing laugh.  

One could never be sure what sort of dirty (and sometimes racist) jokes, gossip stories, local scandals, or reports of recent deaths would be told upon arrival at 2215 Crescent, but there were certain things that could always be counted on at Grandma’s house:

A bowl of strawberries or grapes on the table.

Dr. Pepper in the fridge.

A bowl of mixed nuts on the counter.

A loaf of white bread in the drawer. 

An item of supposedly vastly underestimated value recently excavated from the basement on the dining table, ready to be reappraised and sold for a great fortune.

Rosaries stuffed in between the couch cushions. 

At Christmas time, a dancing Santa doll that would moon the unsuspecting button-pusher at the end of his jingle.

It was those simple acts of mischief--naked Santas, the jar of nuts with a coiled snake, the fake cockroach under the donut--that never ceased to amuse Grandma.  Reminiscing the glory days with neighbors and visitors was the highlight of her day.  Uncle Bob’s friend leaned over the kitchen table, raising his eyebrows over his down-tilted nose in true George fashion: “Well shoot, we was just sittin ‘round smokin ceegars when ol' Clark sawr one of them brown recluse spiders and he up and killed that thing right der with his shot gun."  Grandma sat with a close-lipped smile, shaking her head and laughing from her shoulders through the entire retelling.  

The epic tales of police run-ins, pranks, and trouble-making are never fact-checked and they often wear a tone of the “And he caught a fish that was this big” kind of story.  But it doesn’t matter.  If your versions contradicts Grandma’s, she’ll just shake her head disappointedly, feeling sorry for your misguidedness.  And then the subject will return to what’s for dinner. 

Real Life

“This feels like real life,” he said looking out at the traffic from the window of my fourth-story apartment.  I was cooking pasta in the kitchen and we were listening to The Killers on the living room speakers.

Granted, my brother has lived in somewhat of a bubble for the past 24 years, but I knew what he meant.  I don’t know what it is about the four bolts I unlock every time I come home, or the dusty stairwell in my apartment building, or the cigarette lighters on the counter I use to light the gas stove,  or my goldfish, or hailing a bus on a street corner, or sticking the phone bill to the door with a magnet..... But it does feel like real life. 

It is romantic because it is concrete.  After graduation and liberation from the academic machine, the over-thinking under-feeling non-acting intellectuals are lusting to inhale any air that is not theoretical.  We crave the nonabstract.  Something as mundane as making tea with leaves pulled from a plant on the balcony feels almost photo worthy.  Like a kid riding his bike without training wheels, we want to shout, “Look mommy!  I’m doing it by myself!”

Ironically that sensation of so-called reality comes from a construction people like my brother and I have contrived from television advertisements and Hollywood images.  This is what people in the “real world” do, right?   They change their lightbulbs and buy sponges for the kitchen.  They water their plants and go to the bank. They walk anonymously down busy streets and make calls from pay phones. 

The even bigger irony is that this year of my life is probably the farthest from “reality” I could have gone, in that I will likely never live another year with as little responsibility as I have now.  My salary is enough to cover the bills (and some splurges on the side) and my work schedule has yet to impede the social caprices and personal whims that spontaneously pop into my cravings.  I never worry about making ends meet and I spend an embarrassingly little amount of time thinking about my future. I just bustle around in my make believe universe where there is only the present moment.  My life is a theater, a masquerade of adulthood.  

And I’m ok with that.   

Why not me?

Felipe is what they call a guerrero (literally “warrior,” more accurately “hustler”).  He swaggers through the labyrinth of the San Victorino street market like Jerry McGuire strolling through a floor of office cubicles--high-fiving and fist-pounding the watch makers and the shoe salesmen, not once losing his sense of direction in the dizzying mayhem of tent stands and food carts.  The streets are in his blood. 

For a middle-class suburbanite, his skateboard and tattoos might as well be a pedestal and superhero cape.  He is all that is cool.  Real.  Legit.  Street.  He’s worked at every rip-off clothes store and cigarette outlet, he knows all the tricks, he’s heard all the lines, he’s seen all the types.  

I found myself rummaging through my catalogue of memories in search for a credential-boosting scar story to tell him as he led me across the plaza, shielding me from the oncoming zombie attack of vendors with a light saber arm wave.  Being picked on by my older brother?  Too juvenile.  Surviving on only potatoes during a motorcycle trek in the Andes?  Too “study abroad”ish.  Losing a battle with my insurance company?  Too First World.  Losing my religion? Too existential. Losing a friend in a car accident?  Too personal.

There hasn’t exactly been a lack of silver platters in my life thus far.  The poor performance of my mutual fund is hardly considered a tribulation.

The philosophical “Question of Suffering” concerns coping with the meaninglessness of futile injustices.  But while the suffering of innocents is the most infamously senseless of life’s mysteries, statistically speaking it is exactly the suffering that seems to give life meaning--or at least perceived value.  There are hardly any Third World countries at the top of the global suicide rankings.  The top 15 includes countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world (including Japan, Finland, and South Korea).  It is those who do not suffer from life’s basic trials that lose the ability to see purpose in living.

For We The Privileged, the question sounds less like “Why me?” and more like “Why not me?”   If it is scars that make someone “legit,” if it is battles that strengthen the soul, if it is suffering that gives life meaning, if it is death that inspires life... where does that leave the white LIberal Arts girl?  

Felipe smiles at me like Gandalf smiling at a hobbit--wise and amused.  I will never see the world through his eyes.