Thursday, April 3, 2008
bleah bleah bleah
While I have a ton of stuff to do and work on, I'm having a really hard time starting... I guess this is what people always talk about in terms of the difficulties when you don't have a place to go everyday.... so today I just mostly took pictures (and looked for kitchen equipment unsuccessfully in the market)
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Making a home
I’m really fighting these feelings of terror and guilt about not moving more quickly on my project. Being kind to myself is very much an active project, especially as I don’t feel settled and nested in (but I guess I always have these out-of-place feelings whenever I move to a new neighborhood or city, it’s just exacerbated by language, by the assumption that I should be doing). So, yesterday I decided to go work on making myself a blissful “me” home and went shopping (really is that ever not the answer of what to do?!?) for stuff to outfit a kitchen. I meant to head down to one of the big Markets, el mercado de 20 Noviembre, but that just seemed like two much, so I ended up going to MARO, mujeres artesaneas de los regiones de Oaxaca, a grassroots women’s collective where I have bought a lot of gifts for myself and others. It has been around for 15 years and about 200 women participate, most in villages all around the state of Oaxaca (although at least 5 live in the city to run the store). The goods range from embroidered and woven textiles to tin ornaments, hammocks, leather huaraches, and rebozos.
It was essentially deserted, so I wandered around, looking for stuff to augment my mostly plastic kitchenware. I ended up finding not only some beautiful and unusual handblown glasses but also a big ceramic bowl with painted tulips, a little kitch-art shrine to la virgen and a woven plastic grocery bag with sparkles (I am such a magpie!).
I’m slowly building a shrine to protect my house and my fieldwork and I figure that since Guadalupe is so important not just to the nation as such but to pregnant women and mothers particularly, she is more than appropriate.
As I was browsing, I ended up talking with one of the women who works there. She told me that she’s 80 (I would have guessed her more like 60 and may have misheard her) and she and her husband make leather goods (particularly huaraches and purses). Her grandfather was an amazing artesian, but neither of her two sons have any interest and instead are in the computer engineering and tourism fields—they don’t want to work with their hands she told me, they don’t want to work so hard with all the time it takes. She worries that all of these skills will be lost and no one is interested in working on the really fine detailed work that has been her family’s legacy. She is the oldest of 14 children (all still living, and all but one in and around Oaxaca city, one brother is in Oakland) and in 1968 she crossed the border to work in California because there was not enough to eat for all. So, she spent two years living in Monrovia working in a clothing factory and picking strawberries in Oxnard. The later she especially did not like and told me how it wrecks your back and the air! So she came back to Oaxaca and hasn’t been back to the states for over 30 years, which she does not miss because she never learned English and life was so restricted there. So….
It was essentially deserted, so I wandered around, looking for stuff to augment my mostly plastic kitchenware. I ended up finding not only some beautiful and unusual handblown glasses but also a big ceramic bowl with painted tulips, a little kitch-art shrine to la virgen and a woven plastic grocery bag with sparkles (I am such a magpie!).
I’m slowly building a shrine to protect my house and my fieldwork and I figure that since Guadalupe is so important not just to the nation as such but to pregnant women and mothers particularly, she is more than appropriate.
As I was browsing, I ended up talking with one of the women who works there. She told me that she’s 80 (I would have guessed her more like 60 and may have misheard her) and she and her husband make leather goods (particularly huaraches and purses). Her grandfather was an amazing artesian, but neither of her two sons have any interest and instead are in the computer engineering and tourism fields—they don’t want to work with their hands she told me, they don’t want to work so hard with all the time it takes. She worries that all of these skills will be lost and no one is interested in working on the really fine detailed work that has been her family’s legacy. She is the oldest of 14 children (all still living, and all but one in and around Oaxaca city, one brother is in Oakland) and in 1968 she crossed the border to work in California because there was not enough to eat for all. So, she spent two years living in Monrovia working in a clothing factory and picking strawberries in Oxnard. The later she especially did not like and told me how it wrecks your back and the air! So she came back to Oaxaca and hasn’t been back to the states for over 30 years, which she does not miss because she never learned English and life was so restricted there. So….
Help, my personal cadre of geeks
On an unrelated technie note, I’m finding that my laptop (a Macbook Pro) is running much hotter than usual and that if it is not directly plugged into a grounded plug but plugged into a grounding adaptor (i.e. the wall socket is a two prong and I have a two-three prong adaptor to plug in three pronged things) there is a little electrical current that seems to be along the outside of my case. If I run my hand over it, it will stop and it’s not all the time, but it’s present even if I use the Mac two prong plug. Any ideas? Is my laptop (please no) about to explode?!?
Is April Fools Mexican?
I went to google something yesterday afternoon (the correct answer turned out to be “mosquito dunks”) and instead of google.com I got this weird Apache/ CPanel page, and then using my “google bar” gave me an error. I of course immediately decided that this was a very unfunny April fools prank (I mean it would be the ultimate hackers’ accomplishment to take down google, even if only for 10 minutes), how could I live without having the answers to the most inane and random searches!?!?!?! When I vented to L she laughed and said no, it was just something wonky in our Cablemas service…. but weird, the page was in English. And I’m still getting it randomly, forcing me to plum the depths of my memories for alternative search engines. But, since no one pulled any pranks that I saw yesterday, or mentioned it… I’m going to conclude that Mexicans are not all about marking the 1st of April with juvenile gags.
Yoga en espanol
Last night L and I decided to go to yoga. She’s been a number of times and has a teacher she has really liked (who is Dutch but teaches in Spanish), but when we went Mon night, there was no yoga class. So, last night it was. We got there a little late because I had been visiting with my friend Rafa (whom I had not seen in a year and a half) and entered a bare room with wood floors and an open set of shelves with various yoga apparati. Three women had already formed a front row so we set up at the back of the class and waited for the teacher, Pablo, who sort of looked like a stereotype of a yoga teacher (jacked arms in a tight t-shirt, scraggly hair and goatee, loose pants). L had gone out to the bathroom so it was only I when he asked rapidly and quietly “como estas tuespanol?” and I was like “huh? Did he just ask how I am today? My brain works slowly in Spanish…” so he, and two of the women chuckled as he slowly enunciated in English “do you have experience with Yoga.” Yep, such a great start to trying to center myself and let go of anxiety!
It was an ashtanga flow class which I haven’t done much of and it totally kicked my ass and not in a good way. A lot of quick jumping into and out of chadarunga, very little time for working on having a well formed foundation, and then he really pushed the stretches… and he did adjustments which I was not entirely comfortable with—sometimes yes, thanks for the help in getting deeper, other times, I was like “I’m not going deeper for a reason and thanks, now my back hurts” (grrrr, and yes, that was all inner monologue). I think that for me the class dynamic was really set by what I experienced as a very demeaning attitude in the beginning and it just kept going, there was this weird underlying competitive vibe that L told me later she was furious about. It was the kind of class where we were holding downward facing dog for a couple minutes and I didn’t feel like I could release into child’s pose or skip a vinyasa. Plus, he kept talking about how since we were all women, we should be able to get really deep into this or that, we must all be so flexible. And I have really unflexible shoulders and L’s hamstrings are pretty tight, so there was no real “do what your body needs today.” So, I know not to go back to him. The good thing was that since he was saying things first in Spanish and then in English, I learned some new words… when I could hear him as he was consistently quiet and even L who’s fluent had a really hard time following him. I now know “bend your knees and rise” and “inhale/exhale deeply” ☺. So… it was not the best experience, but at least it was a cardio workout.
I’m still incredibly frustrated by the slowness with which I my brain works in Spanish and my tongue’s inability to reproduce a lot… but since my project is a lot about listening and observing, it’s not the end of the world. I do realize that it takes me a couple minutes to get into the swing of a conversation in Spanish and then I can sort of hold my own.
On a completely random and unrelated note, I cannot keep my feet clean! I have an informal shoes off in the house policy and my floors don’t look, or feel, dirty and yet, 10 minutes after taking a shower, I have black soles…. I know that I’m not the most domesticated, but really!
It was an ashtanga flow class which I haven’t done much of and it totally kicked my ass and not in a good way. A lot of quick jumping into and out of chadarunga, very little time for working on having a well formed foundation, and then he really pushed the stretches… and he did adjustments which I was not entirely comfortable with—sometimes yes, thanks for the help in getting deeper, other times, I was like “I’m not going deeper for a reason and thanks, now my back hurts” (grrrr, and yes, that was all inner monologue). I think that for me the class dynamic was really set by what I experienced as a very demeaning attitude in the beginning and it just kept going, there was this weird underlying competitive vibe that L told me later she was furious about. It was the kind of class where we were holding downward facing dog for a couple minutes and I didn’t feel like I could release into child’s pose or skip a vinyasa. Plus, he kept talking about how since we were all women, we should be able to get really deep into this or that, we must all be so flexible. And I have really unflexible shoulders and L’s hamstrings are pretty tight, so there was no real “do what your body needs today.” So, I know not to go back to him. The good thing was that since he was saying things first in Spanish and then in English, I learned some new words… when I could hear him as he was consistently quiet and even L who’s fluent had a really hard time following him. I now know “bend your knees and rise” and “inhale/exhale deeply” ☺. So… it was not the best experience, but at least it was a cardio workout.
I’m still incredibly frustrated by the slowness with which I my brain works in Spanish and my tongue’s inability to reproduce a lot… but since my project is a lot about listening and observing, it’s not the end of the world. I do realize that it takes me a couple minutes to get into the swing of a conversation in Spanish and then I can sort of hold my own.
On a completely random and unrelated note, I cannot keep my feet clean! I have an informal shoes off in the house policy and my floors don’t look, or feel, dirty and yet, 10 minutes after taking a shower, I have black soles…. I know that I’m not the most domesticated, but really!
it's a good thing that I left my black eye-liner at home
I'll actually write something more substantive later (I have some stuff I want to get down), but I could not pass up the sort of farcical ridiculousness of one thing happening in Mexico right now.... emo kids are being beat up all over the country and have staged demonstrations in a couple big cities. Yes, this is not an april fool's news story (as I originally thought), but it's actually true and the big papers were reporting it long before yesterday.
I've noticed the emo kids here on other occasions and been quietly amused that the black eye-liner, tight black pants (with white belt), black banged bob look is so ubiquitous on either side of the border but hadn't realized that it was seen as either something more than trendy middle class kids (I know, that's totally dismissive) or as something threatening! Last night, walking back from Yoga I saw some emo kids running down the street in hunched over positions looking like they were comforting each other.... I wonder if this bashing of emo kids has reached here. What's interesting is that one of the reasons given is pure homophobia, that the slightly androgynous masculine aesthetic is so threatening as to provoke mass violence. I mean Mexico is not exactly a queer friendly country, but this is happening in cities (especially DF) which have become at least slightly more open.
This actually has nothing to do with my project (as it seems does little I'm informally learning), but I think does get at issues of gender and gender performance-- although there is such such such a classed rural urban split (which is complicated by generation and migration) in terms of identity performances.
I've noticed the emo kids here on other occasions and been quietly amused that the black eye-liner, tight black pants (with white belt), black banged bob look is so ubiquitous on either side of the border but hadn't realized that it was seen as either something more than trendy middle class kids (I know, that's totally dismissive) or as something threatening! Last night, walking back from Yoga I saw some emo kids running down the street in hunched over positions looking like they were comforting each other.... I wonder if this bashing of emo kids has reached here. What's interesting is that one of the reasons given is pure homophobia, that the slightly androgynous masculine aesthetic is so threatening as to provoke mass violence. I mean Mexico is not exactly a queer friendly country, but this is happening in cities (especially DF) which have become at least slightly more open.
This actually has nothing to do with my project (as it seems does little I'm informally learning), but I think does get at issues of gender and gender performance-- although there is such such such a classed rural urban split (which is complicated by generation and migration) in terms of identity performances.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Communicating old school style
If you feel like sending stuff South (and only things small enough to fit through a mail slot or under a gate please!), here's the direction Quezalcoatl 220, Colonia Centro, Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico 68000
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