15 life tips for the unitiated, or, how to flourish as a stranger in a strange land.
April 5, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
Thirty years ago, my grandpa’s girlfriend found out he was still married, to my grandmother, who no longer lived with my grandpa. So upset at that initial “I’m married’ confession to even hear the details, this woman, who later became the woman I called “Grandma,” climbed on a bicycle and rode from his house in a rage. In tears, she pedaled furiously down the gravel driveway, and crashed. My grandpa fetched her, told her the rest of the story, and shortly after, married her, right around the time my parents married.
That was in California, near San Diego. Meanwhile, thirty years later, in San Jose…
I got a call from my mother, who had ridden my dad’s bicycle from his apartment in San Jose, pedaling furiously, also because of a confession about another woman. She was riding around town, beside herself, determined to stay at a hotel and fly back to Buffalo the next day. It was late afternoon when she called me, and after I heard her out, she said, “I’m going to go get some dinner.”
Imagining her riding back and forth between downtown San Jose and its airport, knowing my mom well enough to also know she would not return to my dad’s apartment that night, I asked her if she’d found a hotel room yet. She said no. I said, “Mom, get a hotel room. The first rule of survival is to make your shelter, even before you find food.”
She reconciled with my dad a day and a half later, but in the meantime, had a place to stay.
You’re not going to believe this, at least, not if you’ve heard me ranting about hunting, fishing, and camping, but I spent one hour of every day of my senior year of high school in a class called Outdoor Living. I needed a science credit and couldn’t fathom chemistry, so while I spent half my day surrounded by fellow over-achievers in AP English and History, I took another class with the kids who were destined for management positions at Wendy’s: the slacker science class. My teacher spent an entire unit on survival skills, and even though I hated the class, I remember a disturbing amount of it.
I hadn’t thought about it until that class, but the idea that one needs shelter more than food probably stuck in my head because I wound up later living in a lot of different, alien places. I don’t move to new cities with a boyfriend and an SUV, I move with a couple suitcases and a willingness to walk. And after doing so in Seattle, Portland, various parts of New Jersey, New York, Brooklyn, southwest England, Barcelona and now Austin, Texas, I can authoritatively call myself an expert on surviving in the non-wild wilderness we call the civilized world.
Some of the things I’ve learned, most people don’t and shouldn’t have to, because they give themselves “luxuries” like cars and familiarity. Other things, everyone should know, especially every woman, and I’m continually astounded how many don’t. So here’s a mixture of both.
- No one judges you for doing something alone. It is usually more fun to eat, shop or travel with good company. But the self-consciousness and fear that prevents most people from acting alone is largely imaginary: no one cares, and as long as there are other people within shouting distance, you’re probably safe.
- Rely on the kindness of strangers. Anyone who works at a bar, hotel, or any form of public transportation, knows from experience how to help the lost and confused. Elderly people and parents with small children are also usually trustworthy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to the fair or flying to Guam: tip the bartender well, trust the bellhop, and be kind to the curly-haired grandmother sitting on the bench. Also, just because you didn’t stay at that hotel doesn’t mean you can’t ask the bellhop to call you a cab like your suitcase is upstairs in room #321.
- Conversely… if you’re female and alone, it is never rude to be rude. Most well-adjusted men know where it is and is not okay to engage a strange woman in conversation. The ones that don’t are the ones you probably shouldn’t get to know, even if their biggest crime is general cluenessness. Safe zones include: Bars, hotel lobbies, Toys R Us, and gas station pumps with at least one car between you. If someone approaches you outside one of those settings, feel absolutely free to respond in one sentence, smile politely, and turn away.
- If you’re worried someone’s following you, take some advice from a Wiccan book I’ve kept for the past ten years, and turn all the way around instead of glancing furtively over your shoulder. If someone actually is following you, he might be alarmed by your confrontational pose, you won’t look as scared as you would if you kept glancing, and you’ll be in a better position to fight back. And if it was just your imagination, the only people who’ll see you do it are the pigeons.
- Lost or overwhelmed? Find a restroom. I don’t know about Morocco, but in the US, even the worst parts of town have a crowded bar, grocery store, Starbucks, or McDonald’s. Head for the stall and get your bearings. It may sound gross, but no one is going to notice you studying your map or digging frantically through your purse in the bathroom. Collect yourself and then return to the fray.
- Reminding yourself that “you can always take a cab home,” takes the stress out of most situations, as long as you keep cab fare with you, and have the number of a cab company stored in your phone.
- Don’t drink unless you can accept the worst case scenario if you have one too many and your judgment flies right out the window.
- It’s okay to go home early.
- Don’t be afraid to get lost. Some of the best love affairs, creative epitomes, and undiscovered coffee shops have been discovered when I was lost. Just be aware that it all gets a lot more stressful after dark, and/or in ouchy shoes.
- Keep the following in your purse at all times: Antibacterial handwipes (Purell won’t do it if you have actual dirt on your hands); an iPod with cheering comfort music on it; almonds (to avoid costly emergency meals when you’re too starving to take another step); and if it makes you feel better, pepper spray.
- If you look sexy, you’ll get admiration, and (maybe) sex. If you look competent, you’ll get a job, the trust of strangers, entrance into any building you want without question, and that fabulous rent-controlled sublet. I’m not advocating women hide their feminity. I’m just saying that if you look like you’ve got money in the bank, a husband, and a full three car garage, you get access. Think J. Crew instead of Victoria’s Secret.
- Pay attention to landmarks. Navigating any new place is much easier if you note the tall building that looks like an owl (Austin’s got one downtown) and the big billboard with a salon advertisement on it.
- Most bus systems can’t give change, and most bus drivers are friendlier than they look.
- Regardless of what I said earlier, it’s always okay to show a little cleavage and a big smile, if you need some help and attention.
- Serendipity is your best friend. Planning the entire experience sets you up for disappointment, and you’re liable to miss the local treasures the guidebook missed. Leave the house with one planned destination or event and leave the rest up to chance. It is very, very important than you have time to pause for the shop, restaurant, or conversation that just seems to “catch your fancy.” Following those whims creates about 97% of the magic any individual will ever need in one lifetime.
Bilbo Baggins will tell you that every good adventure is scary by definition. The important thing is to find the wizards, dwarves and enchanted mini-swords that give you the courage to take it.
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inside the revolution, part two: life is just a chicken breast.
February 26, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
My mom’s fond of cooking chicken- breading it, baking it, frying it, putting it in sauces from Asian to Mexican, tacos, salads, pastry shells. When she’s stressed or bored, she goes into the kitchen with a package of skinless thighs and goes to work. She’s never made a chicken omelet but it’s only a matter of time. And that’s the nice thing about chicken- it’s a meat of many colors, adaptable and diplomatic.
I’m twenty-eight years old and have moved twenty times. I’ve lived in six states and three countries, although Spain was only for a month, probably too short to count. I leave it on the list, though, to give my brother a reason to call me pretentious.
What defines relocation, in that context? I had a boyfriend who used to startle me by asking, “are you moving in this weekend?” when he only meant, “are you staying with me this weekend?” To me, a “move” does not require a certain length of time, but intent to stay. You can travel to Thailand for a year, but if you train from village to village, staying with strangers and at hostels, you’ll probably say you “traveled around Thailand for a year.” Move into a Bangkok apartment intending to marry a local, however, and you’ll probably say you lived there, even if he calls off the engagement a month later.
I count the two or three weeks I spent in Seattle in the summer of 2008, because I fully intended to stay, but I do not include the three weeks my mom and I spent in Vegas in January of 2009, because we had no intention of leaving our hotel room. Only two of the locations on my list lasted less than a month, the longest, five or six years.
To finish up the illustrative statistics, roughly half of those moves were initiated by my parents or as a family decision, the other half were solely mine. That means I’ve caught up fast with my parents, absorbing, without realizing it, both their fearlessness and their fear. The logistical challenges of packing up one’s belongings and carting them across the country to a foreign city do not bother us- the logistical challenges of staying put, do. If we had a dispute with the neighbors, or the kids in school were horrid, my brother and I rarely had to compromise, wait, or adapt. We’d soon be on our way. It bred a certain arrogance and dissatisfaction that’s hard to root out.
Over the years, my willingness to move evolved into a sense that, if or when anything went wrong, it was my duty to move. We moved several times for promotions for my dad, causing both his professional growth and our financial comfort. We moved to flee neighbors who held loud late-night parties and parked dead cars in their front yards, again to avoid forced busing to a school forty-five minutes away, a third time because pollution was making us sick (I found my hormone test results taken after we left Spokane- wow). In those cases, staying would have been simply due to fear. Ergo, if you’re unhappy and you’re not packing boxes, it’s because you’re afraid of change.
Those concepts, of location, happiness, and fear, are almost inextricably linked in my family’s consciousness. We’re addicted to change, convinced that unhappiness is our fault, and only curable by renting a U-haul.
This has come to a head here in Buffalo, a city a recent Forbes survey dubbed the “eighth most miserable city in the country.”
Twenty moves in twenty-eight years… but I’ve lived in Buffalo for more than a year.
When I visited my relatives in Seattle before Christmas, my aunt told me, “don’t stay there just because you’re ready to settle down.” I think about going home, about the Puget Sound, the superior jazz, the pine trees, family members who I know I could have a margarita with on a Friday night. I also think about the family members who stiffen when I mention Obama, meditation, or sex, the region’s fondness for Goretex, and the obese people who wheel themselves around Wal-Mart in electric carts.
Buffalo has a similar balance sheet. Relationships I tried to build here, have not lasted, my job’s kaput, the weather’s awful. On the other hand, living is cheap, bars are the best in the world, and my mom, brother and I know a lot of people here, whether by face or by name. It’s here, oh-so ironically, where we find a sense of community we haven’t experienced since I was in high school.
Could we find that community again, if we lived in Seattle in the same spirit? Maybe. Probably. I’m not sure if it matters where the next chapter of this story takes place. I’m not sure if it ever did.
I was jabbing a knife into some raw chicken breasts last night, duplicating something I saw Rachel Ray do to pork chops on the TV at the laundromat last week (we don’t have TV at home). As I stuffed the slivers of garlic into the white flesh, I thought, this is what it always comes down to: hum along to the radio, wash the dishes that have collected through out the day, turn on the oven, and try a new recipe. No matter what I do or where I go, from Portland to Devonshire, if you give me an evening alone at home, that’s probably how I’ll spend it. I usually wind up taking so long with the cooking that I’m not very hungry by the time I sit down to eat. I usually feel angry with myself for not having a nicer dining space in which to eat it. And I usually stay up too late with a craft project or blog afterward, like I am tonight.
But instead of staying put and changing my habits, I move, thinking I’ll establish a different routine somewhere else. That I’ll find myself eating with a lovable man instead of the cat, preparing great meals instead of “could be better” experiments, sitting down in a cute little dining room instead of at the Ikea thing mounted on the kitchen wall. But here I am, ten years out of high school, after so many different apartments, cities, roommates, jobs, weather patterns, sink-to-stove arrangements, and still, if I’m by myself on a weeknight, I’ll probably just cook some damn chicken and eat it alone. And by god, if that’s what I tend to do, what’s so wrong with that? Why am I looking for instant perfection?
Because at some point we forgot to enjoy the benefits of our fearlessness and started feeling compelled by it. We forgot that it’s okay to settle.
Mr. Hotness told me a few weeks ago that instead of changing my life, perhaps I needed to change the “writer’s perspective” on that life. That I needed to go into the “room of my depression” and sit there till I got bored and left. It was a beautiful metaphor, and one I’ve had in mind ever since. Sticking chicken into the oven last night, I kept mentally poking myself, looking for signs of having walked into that “depression room-” but I hadn’t. I even had fresh rosemary, for Pete’s sake, and my, how the asparagus glistens when it’s been burnt in olive oil. So my cooking skills won’t “catch me a husband” any time soon. I’m starting to find real, plain, boring old life just a little more interesting than my quest for an imaginary, perfect one.
The equation is pretty simple. If you say, “I want this kind of apartment, this kind of companionship, this kind of entertainment, this kind of landscape outside,” you can expect to be dissatisfied. If you say, “Ah, a night to do anything I want! Let’s put on a ‘Frasier’ DVD and have a beer,” with the cat snoring in the corner and your fuzziest slipper socks on, suddenly, you’re having fun. I’m not talking about rose-colored glasses or blind complacency, just acceptance. Or “acception,” as that cab driver in Chicago told me last December.
The chicken, by the way, was delicious. When I cooked asparagus again tonight, I did not burn it. And that little forward step, my friends, could have happened in any city from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
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home for the holidays, part one, or, the power of acception.
December 15, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Thursday afternoon I flew from Buffalo to Chicago, with a mere half-hour layover before boarding a flight to Seattle. I’m not sure why I booked such an optimistic schedule. We were held up in Buffalo waiting for a pilot, and then de-icing the wings, and landed in Chicago half an hour after my flight to Seattle had departed. It was the last flight of the evening, so the ticket agent rescheduled my flight to the next morning, and gave me a few flyers for local hotel brokers.
Alone in a strange city late at night, I promptly did what any sane person would do: order a Mickey Dees Angus mushroom and Swiss burger. Restored by the fragrance of fake meat, I called the number on the flyer. The broker gave me a confirmation number for a Doubletree room twenty minutes from the airport, and told me the hotel shuttle arrived every hour on the hour outside “Door number three.”
I went downstairs, wondering if my luggage was still in Chicago. Collaring an airport employee, I was sent over to the Southwest office, where a woman informed me that the suitcases were held in a high security area. The luggage dudes were understaffed, basically, so even if she requested them, it could take two to four hours. Wilting at the thought of boarding the plane the next morning in what I was wearing, I shuffled outside to wait for the shuttle.
I had left my down-filled coat in Buffalo and brought a lighter weight Seattle-worthy coat instead. It was nine degrees in Chicago. Shuttles came and went, but none were mine. Another shuttle driver and the red-coated Commander of Taxis urged me to return to the airport and use the courtesy phone to call the hotel. Doing so, I was told by the Doubletree employee, “Oh, no, we don’t send it out unless it’s requested. But I’ll let me him know. He’ll be there in forty to forty-five minutes.”
“Are you kidding?!” I squealed.
“That’s how it…”
“Never mind, I’ll get a taxi,” I said, slamming the phone back in the cradle. Muttering to myself, I went back out Door Number Three, to be shoved by the Taxi Commander into a cab.
The cab driver had a mysterious, thick accent and friendly manner that was not immediately reciprocated. Still scowling to myself at the inconvenience and cost of having to stay at a hotel of unknown quality, my luggage-less-ness, Woman A telling me false information and Woman B wanting me to wait another hour at the airport, I did not feel like chatting.
We drove past fancy strip malls, and then poorly-lit ones, my concern about the quality of the hotel we were bound for growing. The driver kept trying to start a conversation. I relented, telling him about missing the flight, that I was from Buffalo. I don’t remember what I said next, but it was a short, passing remark about how I wasn’t sure how I’d wound up living there.
Quick flashback. Two nights before, my brother told me he’d read my last blog and found it, as my entries have been for the past couple months, “Good but… depressing.” I told him I blogged less often these days because I had a hard time describing life in Buffalo positively. But that night I got out my journal and attempted to write a rough draft explanation of the benefits of living in Suckallo, the strange challenge (and therefore opportunity for growth) it presented. I wrote several versions, never quite circling in on my point. What I clarified instead was that the series of events leading my present circumstances was just… plain… odd.
I’m in England when my mom calls in tears- my dad’s cheated on her and doesn’t want to patch things up. I convince her to come to England for an adventure. She gets on a plane. She’s questioned at the airport, accidentally reveals my status as an evil illegal alien in the country, and is denied entry. I follow a week later. My brother puts her up in Buffalo, but is working full time and getting worn out coming home to a tear-soaked mother. I could interview for a job in NYC, or go with her to Seattle to stay with her parents for a while. She refuses to go without me. So instead of going back to Manhattan to look for work I follow her to Grandma and Grandpa’s. We return to Buffalo a month later anyway. I’m engaged to an Englishman who wants to move here, but won’t discuss how or when. My mom and I go to Vegas, convinced she should get a divorce right now. We return to Buffalo. Mr. Hotness asks me to wait for him there. So I get a part-time job to pass the time. I get tired of waiting for him. My mom and brother fly back to Oregon to sell my parents’ house. I’m left by myself in Buffalo, and need a full-time job to support myself, so I take on more responsibilities at work. I’m promoted. My mom and brother return from Oregon. They can’t find apartments here they like, so we continue to live together. My boss and I struggle to communicate or even get along. I start looking into ways to leave Buffalo, as an au pair or in a volunteer home stay in Europe. When those options look unworkable, I try getting an apartment in a prettier area outside Buffalo. I discover prettiness in Western New York is often walled in by wind and snow, and besides, another year at this job sounds wretched. The next thing you know, it’s December, and I’ve lived in Buffalo a year, and have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
I wanted to know whose fault it all was. Mine? Bad karma? Family? The cat?
So I’m sitting there in that cab gazing out the window at the passing Targets and burger joints, and mutter something to the cab driver about how random it is that I live in B-Flo. He says, “I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you find yourself in this strange place, and you look around and think, ‘How did I get here?’ This odd series of events just happen, all these weird things, and there’s no explanation for it all. It’s like, whatever your belief is, God or fate or whatever, something is pushing you.”
I stare at his right ear through the open window into the front seat. He’s just summed up the thought process I’ve been running for the past two days.
“Believe me, after I turned forty I realized, it is better to be easygoing. I don’t worry now. Acception,” he said, meaning “acceptance,” “Acception is the only way. It is out of your hands.”
Some part of my tired brain registered that this man was probably talking a really weird series of events- like being a Turkish neurosurgeon who finds himself fleeing some extremist group of his brother’s, and lands in Chicago because his mother’s second cousin lives there, and gets this curvaceous but talkative waitress pregnant, and the next thing he knows, is supporting fourteen Turkish-Irish kids as a cab driver. Or something.
The conversation was slowly restoring my will to live, my head lifting slightly from the back of the chair as I said, “It’s like when we were sitting at the Buffalo airport waiting for them to de-ice. I knew we were going to miss my connecting flight. And I was getting more and more stressed out until I realized, my getting stressed isn’t going to make any difference. Might as well relax. It’s all out of your hands.”
“Acception,” he agreed. “It’s the only way to look at things.”
We continued along this vein until we pulled up in front of the Doubletree. After a heartfelt goodbye I climbed out of the cab with my two suitcases, walked up to the front desk, and told the busty woman at the counter, “I have to apologize, I don’t know who I talked to, but I called a while ago from the airport and I did something I never do, I let stress get the better of me, and I was so rude-”
“You’re the taxi lady,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, nodding, “I spoke to you? I am so sorry…”
Using the policy of “acception” herself, she asked me about my flight, gave me two extra bottles of everything: shampoo, face wash, lotion, a razor, man’s deodorant (“but deodorant is deodorant”), chocolate chip cookies, and a toothbrush. She and her fellow front desk agent worked out the next morning’s schedule for me: wake up call at 6:20, order room service breakfast, catch the 7am shuttle back to the airport.
The hotel had been remodeled the year before; I had clearly gotten a steal at eighty dollars. Elegant decor, a hot shower, some TV, and a pillowtop bed wrapped me up in a warm embrace. The next morning I turned on an episode of the Arthur cartoon, made a cup of Wolfgang Puck coffee, ate a delicious breakfast, put on the bare minimum of yesterday’s clothes, hopped on the shuttle, and returned to the airport.
If I had caught my flight the night before, I would have slept or read through it, arriving late that night, keeping my relatives up so they could fetch me at the airport, probably feeling pretty scratchy the next day. Instead, I spent the four hour flight talking nearly non-stop to a Buffalo pilot who lives up the street from me, and a girl covered in piercings, on her way to Seattle to become a live-in nanny. Seriously. The flight flew by, with political debates, arguments about whether the pilot looked good in orange, and exchanges of family sagas.
I landed bright-eyed and bushy tailed, collected my suitcases, and walked out to a balmy morning, where my aunt, cousin and her little boy waited to pick me up. I desperately craved my flat iron, but other than that, I was in high spirits. I’d been revived by a good night’s sleep, some four-star treatment, fun conversation on the plane, and this guy of mysterious provenance, reminding me that if you can’t figure out what the heck is going on… it’s probably beyond your scope of understanding.
Now I know three things: it’s no one’s fault, my life is a lot more normal than a lot of cab drivers, and acception works.
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how do you measure, measure a year?
November 9, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
How to measure the success of a journey? In the money you earned, acclaim you won, position you gained? In the love shared and offered? In the- wait- we know this song- it’s Rent‘s “Seasons of Love:”
How can you measure
the life of a woman or man?In truths that she learned,
or in times that he cried.
In bridges he burned, or
the way that she died?
I envy my friend in Mongolia, describing her frozen sink and sleeping bag bed. I stiffen with resentment talking to a girl at a garage sale, selling a cute purse that was her “one indulgence” while living penniless in Brazil. I look around at my belongings and see an accusation: this stuff is weighing you down.
Four months abroad last fall was not enough.
But I have not traveled again since last November because I measured the success of that journey in the lack of money and direction I had when I returned, the difficulty of loving someone in another country, the general shock of being told that I had a week to pack my bags and leave England.
I chided myself that I was experiencing the predictable result of making irrational, risky choices. I’ve tried all year to do the rational thing, to seek order as opposed to chaos. And look what that obsession with rationality has gotten me. I’ve had an apartment of my own for two of the past eleven months, and am not earning enough to decorate it, myself or my friends- this “real” job sure has improved my quality of life. We all know I could care less about my keen new title, much less the ever-building responsibilities of the position. The friends I’ve made- we’ve discussed that as well. I’m a drag to be around, self-absorbed and cranky in my unhappiness. If I put all this year’s intimacy, romance and sex into one clump, it still would not fill a month of the year’s calendar. I’m not writing, painting birthday pictures for nephews, creating new collages to hang on my wall, knitting.
I am so tired of complaining, moping, whining, sleeping, being short-tempered, distracted, stressed out, all with the goal of more responsibility, more rationality, more future-thinking, more boredom.
I talk to friends and feel bored with me.
Hard work does not bring one rewarding relationships, romantic love, familial peace, personal creative satisfaction, a sense of home. It just brings more work, and more worry that you won’t get all the work done, your boss will take away your right to do that work by firing you, or you’ll keep doing the work forever and ever without being any happier than you are today. It doesn’t matter how practical you are- life is still wacky and uncertain.
Working as a nanny in England, I had no future, no plans, no money, no apartment, and I was the happiest I’ve ever been. We can slave away avoiding risk or we can just follow our frikken bliss and take our chances. It’s a question of what scares you more: extreme discomfort, or that “quiet desperation” we all know too well.
I am not moving to East Aurora. Burying myself in the snow of a small town, committing to this job and this area for yet another year, alone, was a beauty of a “rational” way to avoid taking real risk. And that’s not my credo.
If I measure a year in happiness experienced or spread, my 2009 would not be worth singing about. But 2008 was play-worthy, and 2010 will be, too. You wait and see. It isn’t about luck, Cupid’s attentions or your bankroll, it’s about what you love the most and what you fear the most, and finding a way to seek both. I’ll get there. It’s just taking me a little longer to find my map this time.
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Guest blog by Peaches.
August 10, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
A 2009 college grad, my friend Sarah joined the Peace Corps and arrived in Mongolia about a month ago. She regales friends with her exploits via email; this is her most recent.
Apologies for my silence; we have been having some fantastic rain storms over here, storms that have knocked the power clean out three different days, electricity running in spurts through the house, stopping again in time when night falls to leave us in ink black darkness, laughing in the living room as ten of us search for the one candle by the glow of cell phone screens. So, bear with me for the next two years. Utilities are disappearing acts in Mongolia and always a source of amusement.
A rumor that runs through all of Peace Corps is that no matter how hard things get for volunteers, they always reassure themselves with one simple statement: “At least I’m not in Mongolia.” Statistically, Mongolia is the second most difficult Peace Corps program, following closely behind Mauritana, which suffers from periodic and serious food shortages. From speaking with current volunteers in country, I would argue that food shortages coupled with six months of winter where the temperature averages -30 would make Mongolia take the cake. I don’t know how my resume of art publications, dance instruction, and interests in experimental Spanish literature and opera convinced Washington, D.C that I was able-bodied enough for Mongolia, but sure enough, here I am, awaiting my fate which will be revealed on August 15th (mark your calendars and start praying), the day I find out which god-forsaken part of the country I will be shipped out to to start my life and share whatever appropriate talents I apparently have. The one safe bet is that I included my short time in the equestrian world and that being noted, the only place where I could possibly function is Mongolia. The other night, as shooing ten cows out of the yard with the help of my guard dog and a few rocks, a man literally rode through our gate on horse back, inquiring about my family’s whereabouts. It was quite the perfect moment.
They say that volunteers talk about two things: food & sex (but can’t that apply to most of the human race?) and so far, I would like to add a third to the list that in my experience, however short, has forged ahead of sex as a topic of conversation-bowl movements. Yes, everyone is very candid about the literal comings and goings of their bodies, if only to compare those movements with other volunteers. Mostly it’s because we are all terrified of things like worms and parasites and can’t help but compare notes when we are feeling like hypochondriacs. I, up until last week, had been immune to most issues. I ate everything that was put in front of me with no problems, slept like a log and seem to suffer from no abnormalities. Then the stomach churning came and the late-night hours running to and from the outhouse, candle in hand, were noticed by my host family, who couldn’t help watching me from the living room, and then inquired about my stomach, blaming the heat and my penchant for wearing shorts instead of pants.
But this weekend was different. After a wonderful Saturday spent with fellow TOFEL volunteers in the beautiful resortesque Terelj Park (I should have pictures up on the blog soon), where I managed to climb a mountain and get stuck in a slimy, smelly, quicksand strong bog (I scrubbed my sneakers clean and I swear, they look brand new) I spent the night at a friend’s house in town who was celebrating her birthday. After a dinner of pasta salad, cake, milk tea and dumplings, I noticed sharp fantastic pains in my stomach. Thinking it was just another intestinal adventure, I didn’t think much of it, except that it was torture to lie down, my back and spine hurt so bad. The pain came and went for another two days, coming to a head at night when my host sister would come into my room with a hot water bottle and blankets to rub my back so I could sleep. The third night, buckled over in pain and quickly becoming addicted to Tylenol, I called the medical officer explaining that I had an awful case of what I thought was constipation. The next morning my rib cage felt like it was about to explode and on the doctors orders, I was whisked away via a cushy land rover to the Ulaanbaatar to be tested and checked for whatever it was. Turns out I had a massive UTI that had my kidneys so swollen I was unable to sit, stand or lie down without wanting to cry. The wonderful medical officers promptly put me on medicine and bed rest not before giving me an allowance to buy some food. UB, however unseemly and well, unattractive, of a city it may be, it offers all the comforts of home. I ate shish kebab, pringles, chocolate and pizza before spending the night in the sick room at the Peace Corps office where I read two books cover to cover while listening to the traffic outside my balcony window, my well-being the talk of the staff and the absolute concern of my poor host family. My family has taken to calling me “The Sarah,” asking questions such as “where is the Sarah?” “how is the Sarah?” and saying things like “the Sarah needs food” and “the Sarah is outside.” After four years at Sarah Lawrence, where Sarahs were a dime a dozen and oft confused, I have a smug appreciation for this new-found title. The morning after my UB sleep over, well on the road to recovery with permission to return home, I had a homecoming that was as sweet as it was dramatic, with children running down the road to greet me, Mongolian gifts in hand ( a tiny little felt ger with a portrait of Chinggis inside, wooden Mongolian king and queen dolls, felt slippers from the countryside and a tiny wrestling boot pencil holder. “The Sarah, please don’t be sick!” my host sister, Zaya, exclaimed as I opened my gifts sitting in the living room with the family, Immortal Beloved dubbed in Mongolian on the TV. Of course, in the end, they all blamed the wet shoes I came home from the park in as the cause for my infection.
Attached is a picture of me with the whole gang, all thirteen of my family members, minus the one brother, Gana, who was out installing windows (which he fashioned himself in our kitchen for weeks, the smell of turpentine and cooking meat a perfume I will never forget) into his new house. The photo will be printed on a certificate given by PC to my family for successfully hosting a volunteer. The regular body count for any given night in my house is ten people, and this is a two room house, I occupying a large third that stands like a separate apartment. But in the almost-two months that I have been here, I have never once heard or seen any of the family members fight or raise their voices, minus yelling at the kids to buck up and behave. Ten people. Two rooms. When a German couple moved into town and started building their own house, my host sister said it was strange how many walls they needed. She didn’t see the need for so much space between two people. Makes living in a studio apartment seem positively palatial.
