Rhypophobia

My stomach has yet to decide how it feels about American food.  Most days it is fine, but then there are days that it kicks into high gear and my food begins to rocket through my body at record speeds.  And this doesn’t always occur at the most convenient moments.  For example, I was at a football party the other day, and we were all in the living room watching the game, eating, drinking, and in general carrying on in the loud way that you do when watching sports.  Suddenly, the chips and queso seemed like a veeeeery bad dinner choice.  I sat on the couch and tried to act inconspicuous as the first wave of cramps and chills washed over my body, hoping and praying that it was just a touch of indigestion and everything would return to normal if I promised not to eat any more Little Caesar’s fast and ready pizza.  My hopes sank (along with OU’s possibilities of beating Miami) as the next set of goosebumps marched their way down my arms.  I had no choice but to ask the owner of the house where his bathroom was.

Why is it that you can be at the loudest event ever, but the moment the bathroom door shuts you are immediately hit with the conviction that everything outside that door has stopped in an effort to find out what you are doing?  While part of you realizes that no one has even noticed that you left the room, the rest of you insists that they can hear every move you make and as a result you spend the entire, agony-wracked time trying to make as little noise as possible.  You could be having a KISS concert in your living room and you still, the moment that bathroom door shut behind you, would be trying to micromanage every rectal contraction for fear that your lavatory activities may overwhelm Ace Frehley’s guitar solo , capturing you during what really is one of man’s most vulnerable moments.

I thought I had gotten over this fear during my stay in Peru, thanks to the combination of nearly constant attacks on my lower intestine and the complete lack of privacy in all Peruvian bathrooms.  I quickly lost my very American rhypophobia (fear of defecation) solely for the reason that I could not be picky about where and when I used the bathroom.  My main hope was only that there was a bathroom.  And so, at some point, I stopped caring whether or not people could hear me, and I was really hoping that attitude would continue here in the US.  Unfortunately, it would seem that it hasn’t and this makes me sad.  Can’t we all just admit that everyone does it and stop considering it something to be ashamed of?  I mean, if you think about it, the only people who don’t poop are dead.  Therefore:  To poop… is to live.

Here’s to life.

 

Food for Thought

I have had to revise my opinion of peppers.  I would say all vegetables, but I feel like this statement would be too general and unfair to those earthen products that were not involved.  You see, I tended to view vegetables as peace-loving produce that spend their days soaking up the sunshine, breathing in the aroma of freshly tilled earth, making small talk with the bees and butterflies that visit, and in general letting time bring them along their life’s path until it’s time to bid farewell to the field they’ve known and lay themselves down in the farmer’s basket.  And for the most part, the vegetables I’ve met have not disputed this fact.  They never complain, they always give off such a wonderful aroma and taste when they are used for a meal.  But then, the other day, a single red bell pepper made me stop and reconsider all that.

 

I was making breakfast burritos, like I often do here, and the pepper I was going to use was almost too far gone to use.  Its skin, normally so smooth and shiny, had become a bit wrinkled, a bit tired of holding that vibrantly round shape.  The color, instead of fading like everything else does as it ages, had instead darkened, changing from a festive red to a more somber maroon.  In general, it gave off the impression of being tired, of being at the end of a life that had not been all that kind, and now it was resigned to the end it saw coming.  But then, when I opened it up, I found a bug.  A dead bug that was not large, but was still much too big to have any business being inside so small a pepper.  At first glance, it looked like a moth.  It had the delicate wings that cover everything they touch with a dusty shadow.  But a closer look revealed the body of something more akin to a mayfly.  A bug of a much more annoying variety trying to pass itself off as something worth preserving (not squashing with the nearest flat object).

 

And that bug made me wonder if maybe my earlier views weren’t a little naïve.  Maybe the world in which this pepper grew up wasn’t all sun tanning and playing in the rain.  Maybe the neighborhood it grew up in was full of desperation, plants willing to steal your sunshine without any hesitation or guilt.  The inconsistent availability of water filling everyone with an uncertainty that put them on edge, making everyone selfish with what they had and suspicious of anyone who showed more than a passing interest.  Maybe along his row, the grasshoppers had preyed on the inhabitants like mafia lords in a rundown Italian city.  Maybe the thieves, disguised as butterflies, would attack just when you had let down your guard, a bit embarrassed of always being so suspicious of those whom you had never even met.  Then being snatched from the vine just as it reached the prime of its life.

But this pepper, despite looking like all the others it had known, despite its calm demeanor and stable countenance, had fought back.  It had rooted itself in the ground that it grew up in and refused to be bullied.  And throughout the rest of its life, during the scorching hot days when merely breathing was difficult and the blessed rain that turned into life-threatening downpours, through the silent battles against the ever-hungry jaws of grasshoppers and the long days of seemingly endless boredom, this one pepper had within it the proof that at one point in its life, it had seen through at least one thief’s charade and won. 

 Or, it had snapped at an unintentionally annoying insect, one that was just trying to be loved by dressing up its wings, and had forever hidden the evidence of its transgression deep within itself.  Spending its life proud of the radiant sheen of its outward appearance, while secretly hiding the proof of its shame and regret. 

But for all the mysteriousness surrounding the situation, the pepper’s story remains unsolved.  For even if bell peppers were capable of sharing their stories, I ate this particular one for breakfast this morning.  I guess we’ll never know. 

                             

 

Somedays you need a little help

Last week there was one morning that I woke up with too much on my mind and not enough planned for the day that could distract me from it.  Like many women, I find that I can’t give my thoughts too much leeway or they become like really loud echoes in too small a space, bouncing around in repetitive nonsense until your head hurts.  When I get this way, the calm countryside where I live is the last place I want to be because, although it has many charms, the ability to escape your thoughts isn’t one of them.  So, I grabbed a few necessities and headed into the capital city, having created in my mind the only thing that could save me from myself:  lunch at my favorite restaurant, with a great book, a journal to release my thoughts, and the real kicker – a glass of wine.  There is something about wine that slows down the thoughts speeding around my brain and instead gently nudges my attention towards other things, like the loveliness of that breeze on a hot day or the beauty of light as it plays on water. 

Admittedly, I do not drink wine that often and therefore it takes very little to accomplish very much.  Mind you, I had one glass, just one, and I drank that with my lunch.  As I sipped my way through that one glass, I would pause from time to time to write in my journal, slowly releasing my thoughts from their eternal jumble.  I went back and reread what I had wrote, and while I won’t repeat it all, there were a couple of paragraphs that I think very accurately describe the turning point of that day (and yes, it did end up being a good day), and so I thought I would share them here.  Nothing mind blowing, but I know a few friends who will be amused.  And so, here is my thought process when it is being helped along by a little liquid love.

“Why does getting exactly what you wanted so often make you want to throw up?  I’m having a bad day, and all I could think of was a book, a salad, music, and wine.  And for awhile, I had exactly that. I sipped my wine while I wrote, then read my book while chasing carmelized pecans around my salad, the whole time letting the music soothe my mind like a warm bath.  But now, inexplicably, I feel like I should take that peaceful moment and deposit it in the nearest toilet bowl.  Apparently my body, as well as my mind, is determined to make me miserable today.”

Now, just for the record, I would like to say that I am not quite halfway through this single glass at this point, so don’t start thinking it is the alcohol that has me nauseated.  It’s not.  It was more a factor of a salad that was more than I could eat and anxiety that had been building up over time.  So this was the last bubble of panic before the wine kicked in.

“Nauseous feeling is gone and has been replaced by the sincere conviction that I should drink wine a lot more often.  I’m peacefully relaxed, content and soothed by my own presence, leaning into my own fingertips as though they belonged to the world’s most celebrated masseuse.”

Bad day has been successfully eliminated at this point.  Now, I am not advocating alcohol as the means to solve all your problems.  But somedays you need a little help focusing on the good parts of life.  Sometimes it’s a friend making you laugh that snaps you out of it, other times it is throwing yourself into a project.  That day though, it was healthy food, a relaxing atmosphere, and a glimmering glass of wine.

Cheers.

 

Parallels

“As for whatever other changes may have occurred within me during these last few months, perhaps I can’t even feel them yet.  My friends who have been studying yoga for a long time say you don’t really see the impact that an Ashram has had on you until you leave the place and return to your normal life.  ‘Only then,’ said the former nun from South Africa, ‘will you start to notice how your interior closets have all been rearranged.’”                                            – Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Granted, I haven’t been living in an Ashram, but there are many parallels that can be drawn between my time here and yoga.  You do spend a lot of time in silence or in study.  You learn to live a little quieter, a little more peacefully, a little more patiently.  You find yourself in strange and uncomfortable positions, and then you find that you have become stronger because of them.  You learn and you grow and bit by bit you move from who you were to who you want to be.

As you pass through your Peace Corps experience, you at times notice the ways in which your time abroad has changed you.  The way you no longer go insane waiting for people to show up to meetings.  The time you find yourself spending in conversation with complete strangers.  The priority you place in watching the sun set.  However, for the most part, you don’t really notice the difference between who you are now and how you were when you came.  The switch has been too gradual for you to really see the difference.  That’s why I liked this quote so much.  I can say without any doubt that my time in the Peace Corps has been worth it, but I think it will take many years for me to fully understand the significance of my time here.

 

 

 

Covered in poo but still wagging my tail

The neighbors have a painfully skinny black dog that I befriended when it was a few weeks old.  Now, when I sit outside my house it will run up to greet me in a panic of excitement.  Today, as I sat outside and enjoyed the relief of the shade and breeze, the puppy sprinted over like it always does, only he had found another method of staying cool in the hot Piuran sun.  He had jumped into the irrigation canal (aka, barely running water that is the recipient of sewage and dishwater) and then for a little extra spice had followed it up by rolling around in the manure from the corral.  Needless to say, my enthusiasm at seeing him did not quite match his joy at seeing me.
 
But it occurred to me, as I did my best to avoid his affections, that this may be the look we have when we approach God.  Starving and filthy, wagging our tails and eyes full of hope that He may have some small bit of goodness to give us that will get us through one more day.  But God, unlike me today, doesn’t retreat behind a wall to keep us from dirtying Him with our past actions.  He loves us back, washes off the cr@p we’ve covered ourselves in, feeds us, and gives us the attention we so wildly crave. And then, when we are once again clean, fed, and happy, He watches us as we dive joyfully back into the mess we just came from.  I only wonder if he becomes exasperated with our inexplicable desire to become a mess or if He understands that’s what we do and loves us inspite of it.  I sure hope it’s the latter, because I’ve rolled in my fair share of smelliness.

 

How to hold your head high after you duck and cover

Ever tried to appear dignified after shrieking like a girl because a bug flew at you?  I´m not going to say that it is impossible, but only the truly talented are really able to accomplish it.  I find that to achieve it, you should probably go about it like this:

1)  Make sure the incident occurs behind closed doors.  If you are running down the street, flailing your arms windmill style about your head in panic, there is no recovering your dignity.  However, a shriek and a crash behind a closed door creates interest; it´s a mystery.  They have no idea what kind of battle is being fought.

2)  Emerge from behind the door with the offending critter in your possession.  This implies that you have won said battle and therefore deserve a little respect.

3)  If possible, capture the assailant alive.  Even better, bring it out in your hand.  Not only are you proving yourself the victor, you are demonstrating your lack of fear.  That was not a shriek they heard, it was a battle cry.

Follow these three steps, and you just may be able to walk away from a potentially embarrassing moment with a little of your pride still in tact.

 

Watching paint dry

What in the world am I doing in an orange room in the middle of a Peruvian desert?  Sometimes I stop whatever it is that I am doing here and notice where I am (at this moment, I am pondering the slowly drying paint on my walls).  I mean, how did this happen?  I am not one of those people who has dreamed of joining the Peace Corps ever since they saw Dirty Dancing.  I am more one of those people who stumbled across the PC web page while researching international volunteering options.  And then, WHAM!, one application, interview, various doctors appointments, and acceptance letter later, I was on a plane for Peru (it was more a lot of smaller, spaced out smacks than one giant wallop).  Somehow, despite the 8 month application process, I was still a little bewildered when I got on that plane.  And now, 15 months later, I continue to have moments where I am a bit surprised by the surroundings I find myself in. 

Still, I wouldn`t call my coming here a mistake.  Not in the least.  I mean, I won`t be presenting my case in a powerpoint for all to see.  I´m not going to map out my progress in charts and diagrams that I can strike with my metal pointer, throwing in a haughty glance that seems to further emphasize the point that this is why I am here.  Because as a returned volunteer from Bangladesh once told me, years after you have come back you`ll continue to find ways that your time in Peace Corps has changed you.  I like that.  I like having a life experience that impacts you so much that you can not fully understand its effect on you until a lot of time has passed.  It seems more meaningful that way.  Or maybe I am just a bit slower than most and so those epiphany moments take a little longer for me to fully grasp.  Who knows?

 

My Little Peculiarities

I was reading a book the other day, and a quote from the movie Wedding Crashers came to mind.  “True love is your soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another”, which turns out to be how I feel about books.  Most people who have known me for awhile are aware of my addiction to reading.  It doesn’t really matter where I am or what the content of the book is; the moment I pick it up I lose track of the world around me.  There are many reasons for my infatuation with the written word, such as the genius of some clever phrasing, or the way a scene slowly forms, word by word, in my mind.  But the greatest joy I find in reading is the moment when I find a thought or phrase that either echoes and/or develops an idea I am already pondering.  Or it says something that I would swear was stolen from my brain, something that I read and exclaim, “That’s me!”.  I love that.  I love recognizing myself in the words of someone else, especially when they are able to express it so much more articulately than I ever could. 

The latest example of this is the book The Vagabond, by Collette, which says:  “It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the color of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.”  I actually stopped reading to write that one down, because lately I have been wondering about my travel itch, the delight I find in discovering something new and then leaving it behind.  I am slightly puzzled over why I do not want to remain there and continue to enjoy it, and this quote shed a little light on the subject.  Because I really do love to meet new people and experience new things, and it’s a whole lot easier to do that when you don’t stay in one place. 

I’m sure the majority of people who are reading this are wondering why I feel the need to analyze this piece of my personality, but after so many weird looks and exclamations of disbelief over my decision to join Peace Corps, I wanted to prove to myself that this part of me is not something completely abnormal.  If you look around at everyone you know and notice that you A) aren’t doing any of the same things they do and B) don’t really want to, at times it’s difficult not to wonder if this represents some flaw in yourself as opposed to a preferential difference.  It turns out that it is a little abnormal, but at least it is an abnormality that can be used for the greater good.  And that’s enough for me.

 

Further Exploration of the Last Frontier

A while back, I took you all on a rambling, slightly incoherent tour of my mind.  I would like to take a moment to revisit that post, not because it is worth repeating but because I, like the rest of the world, have yet to discover the key to understanding the workings of the female psyche.  And until that happens, I feel like it is my moral obligation to provide research material for those brave enough to study this territory. 

Mainly, it is my complete unwillingness to cry that has me puzzled.  For the past few weeks, I have been fighting back tears.  Now, it is not the tears that puzzle me, it is that the tears are completely unnecessary.  I am not, in any way, sad.  I can’t even claim frustration as a valid emotion right now, so the constant availability of tears queued up behind my eyes has left me a bit unsettled.  Which isn’t to say that I can’t pinpoint the beginning of this watery episode, because I can.  It all began on the bus ride from Piura to Lima for our one-year medical checks.  These bus rides are 14 hours long and so they provide movies in route, and in this case, the movie they were showing was PS –I love you.  I won’t say much about the movie, other than that I place it in the same category as A Walk to Remember and The Notebook.  In other words, it is one of the world’s worst/best chick flicks, depending on how you look at it.  In all three of these movies I remained dry-eyed throughout the film, then headed to some secluded spot for a few hours of unrestrained weeping.  Except in the case of PS – I love you, because I was trapped on a bus for the next 11 hours and they have insensitively ignored the need for a secluded crying corner (and trust me, on a 14 hour bus ride, there are plenty of reasons to cry).  This left me with no choice but to recline my seat back as far as it would go and let the tears stream back to wherever it is they originated.

Except it turns out that instead of returning to their normal place of residence, they have instead chosen to camp out behind my cornea until I break down and set them free.  And you would think that the theft of my computer would have allowed me to do exactly that, but still I refused.  There were too many people around, and as I established in the other post, I find it extremely hard to cry in front of others.  I can never manage more than a few tears, which is both embarrassing and completely unfulfilling.  I followed the theft up with a week of sickness, which left me physically tired enough to cry and with ample alone time in my room, but did not seem to put a dent in my stubbornness.  And now, as I said, I am fine both physically and emotionally, which leaves me unable to experience a good cry without feeling more than a little foolish. 

Consequently, I still have yet to free the tears from their anatomical prison, and this brings me right back to where I was before, meaning that I am still completely baffled by the physical consequences of female emotions.  Crying is not supposed to be like peeing, where the urge will not go away until the liquids have been released.  It is supposed to be a very conditional response to the situation at hand, like a stubbed toe or the loss of a loved one.  However, since my body refuses to respond sensibly to the logical arguments that my mind is making, I have been left with only one real option: cry.

And why shouldn’t I?  I am a girl, which is enough to earn me an all expenses paid pass on the sobway.  Why can I not accept that I have not been exempted from the natural law that dictates that all women will spend at least one hour each year completely abandoned to their tears, whether they need it or not?  On a side note, I do not mean to imply that men also do not feel the need to cry from time to time.  I am simply focusing on women because they are known to be more emotional than men, and because I have yet to hear a man tell a friend “You know, I had the best cry the other day.  No real reason for it.  It was just time for a good cry.”  Because women cry enough that we can rate them; we can distinguish between a good cry and a bad cry.  For example, a private weep-a-thon during a chick flick rates as a better cry than those few tears that are ashamedly shed in front of your boss during a hormonal slump.  We also seem to accept that not crying for awhile is reason enough to shed a few tears.  I mean, does anyone else see the absurdity of crying simply because you have not had a reason to leak liquids from your eyeballs for the past few months? 

As an adult, we supposedly have learned to pick our battles, and you’d think I would submit to nature and stop fighting its well-established law.   But I just can’t yet bring myself to admit defeat.  Perhaps this is because there are so many aspects of life that are beyond my control that I like to think that I at least have some say over my emotions and how they are expressed.  And then suddenly my hormones take a dive and there is a flood making a rush for my chin, and I am left with the devastating knowledge that even that illusion of control has been stripped from me. 

Hm… maybe that is a better representation of adulthood.  Childhood is spent in complete oblivion of the lack of control, then you discover the lack of control during your teen years and spend them fighting for it until you reach adulthood, where you finally accept it and instead learn to navigate life without it.  And yet, I still won’t be letting these tears go anytime soon.  I’ve got too much stubborn moment going to stop now.

 

Goonies never say die.

As you may gather from the last two posts, the Cozumel vacation was everything that the brochures claimed it would be.  But what goes up must come down, and that must be true emotionally as well as physically.  Coming back to Peru was a bit more difficult this time.  Maybe it was the gorgeousness of the beach, or the many laughs with the family, or the fact that I have a whole year before I will return.  Things that I had gotten semi-used to before I left are grating on me again.  I’ve been back less than a day and I have already yelled at one of the many machismo excuses for men.  People say it is Latino men in general, but that is simply not true.  None of the men in Mexico were this obnoxious.  Then again, I spent the last two nights trying to sleep on a plane and then a bus and that will make anyone cranky. 

But I noticed a big difference between my last visit home and my visit to Mexico.  On my visit home, I felt out of place most of the time.  I felt like I belonged in Peru more than I belonged in the US.  Everything seemed overwhelmingly extravagant.  So many lights and luxuries, not to mention a pace of life that I just didn’t have the energy for anymore.  But this time, I slipped back into it all without thought, without even a moment of discomfort.  I was home again.  And then, to come back to the life of a volunteer… it’s hard.  I’m back to missing my family, missing my friends, missing english, missing American food.  I know that what I’ll have to do is submerge myself in work and the culture here, and that soon I will feel right at home again.  But for the moment, I’m just a little sad.  But instead of booking myself on the next flight home, I will take a nap and then start a project.  Why?  Because goonies never say die.