He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.*

The Irish are quite deft in the art of dark humor. The grim jokes run freely through Ulysses, and you always have the feeling that it is not only possible to laugh at almost anything, but that you should laugh at everything. In hard times, it does seem to be a great sanity saver.

In my years working in New York, there were many moments when times got tough, and I mean life/death, insanity, love/loss, fear of starvation kind of tough. Pretty much immediately, I learned to embrace my love of dark humor and wield it as a weapon against self-pity and sorrow.

I was pretty miserable slugging away at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square as a waitress after graduation. It was definitely the worst job I have ever had and, let’s pray, will ever have. However, my coworkers were a hilarious bunch and we always came up with some pretty evil jokes to pass the time. Some were on customers, like when my friend served a child a pint of pure grenadine syrup after his mother complained in a rude manner that there wasn’t enough in the previous Shirley Temple. We then watched the child burst into frantic hyperactive shenanigans, and then crash into a kiddie puddle on his insufferable mother’s lap. Entertaining. Another time, we convinced a few unsuspecting waiters that our cocaine addicted manager (who later was fired for doing coke in the office, stealing money and liquor, and left amid a sobbing tantrum) had overdosed. When he showed up to lead our meeting, he was very confused at the reactions from a few of his staff members.

When I worked in the publishing industry, life was better only in that I was a little closer to literature, and because it was a job I actually needed to have graduated from college to obtain. Our office could be a bit crazy at times, and we all kept ourselves from jumping out the window by concocting ridiculous situations and making sure everything was fair game for jokes, including suicide, heart attacks, and serious illnesses like tuberculosis and pneumonia.

New York is a fantastic place for dark humor, and in my next two jobs, I easily discovered macabre minded individuals to share a cackle with me.

Barcelona and Santa Fe, on the other hand, are not really friendly shores for this kind of comedy. Certainly, I have found kindred spirits in both places, but there is something about the plentitude of sunshine, the relaxed pace of life, the focus on things like living rather than working, the mañana attitude, that keeps people from finding it amusing that you would tell an annoying man hitting on you at a bar that you would like to take him home, chop him into pieces and store his body parts in your freezer, and that this would actually entice him further rather than scare him off.

Could a swim duck? says I.*

I am sure every major country has its share of small idiosyncratic nonsensical design issues. However, it seems that Spain, for all of its seemingly first world status, has quite a few. In my apartment, for example, there are a few random problems that conspire to drive me insane.

First, our electricity can be a bit fickle. By no means can we use the washing machine at the same time as the stove. However, now, it seems that even using the oven while using more than one burner on the stove will cause the power to short out. This forces the frazzled chef at the moment to run through the dark apartment to reset the power breaker, often several times in the course of one cooking session. The fear of ruining the dinner versus the fear of tripping over a chair and breaking your neck on the hard tile floor is a surprisingly equal contest. Especially if you hate the taste of burned garlic as much as I do.

Second, our hot water heater is in the kitchen. Which is absolutely fine for washing dishes, but a bit water wasting for showers, since the bathroom is quite far away, it takes a long time for the hot water to arrive. The main problem, however, is the fact that on windy days, you take the chance of dying in a gas explosion by washing the dishes (yes, I do use this excuse). The exhaust pipe is connected directly outside without any sort of wind protection, so the wind blows directly into it and extinguishes the pilot light on the gas heater. Thus, gas happily pours into the kitchen and into the unsuspecting (at first) nostrils of anyone within a few feet. Did I mention I live with a smoker?

Third, we cannot use our telephone and internet at the same time. Sometimes, if someone calls here, the internet will remain connected, but most often, and especially if we call out, we are forced to wait until the end of the conversation to reset the router and then continue with our stalking of people on facebook. This started happening after my roommate requested that the bill be changed to her name. The company told her that she would just have to sign up for a new account, which would take a month. After a month without internet, the new account still wasn’t set up, and meanwhile she was still being charged by the old one. When the technician came, he rerouted all the wires in the building, causing our phone calls to go to our neighbor two floors above. So the fact that he somehow made it impossible to use our phone line and DSL line at the same time is not a surprise and we are too scared to have them try to fix it, really anything is possible here.

Our building is also rather eccentric. Like most buildings in Spain, the front door locks from the inside with a key, in addition to locking automatically behind you. At night and on the weekends, our neighbors lock the door, which means we have to go down with our keys to let guests in (even though we have a buzzer, it only unlocks the regular lock). Sometimes when people try to leave, they won’t be able to get out of the building and will have to come all the way back up to ask us to release them. This can be especially problematic if we are discussing the recently departed guest in loud voices when they ring our doorbell. Oops. Also, in the case of fire, it is quite possible that you could forget to grab your keys, well, too bad. There aren’t any fire escapes and if the front door is locked, you become carne asada.

Elevators are other common death traps in Barcelona. Most people are timidly thankful for the existence of an elevator in their building, especially since Spanish floor labeling includes several named floors, making a fourth floor apartment actually as much as seven flights of stairs. However, no one can be fully thankful for the presence of an elevator here, because using one is a serious threat to your life and sanity. Apparently the automatic sliding doors the rest of the world takes for granted haven’t been invented in Spain yet as I haven’t seen a single elevator here without a set of outer and inner doors, both of which must be fully closed for it to operate. That’s just annoying though, except when the wind blows one of the doors open while you are inside (have I mentioned how drafty buildings are here?) and your elevator stops. At least it is probably very spacious, at least three by two feet, so you can almost sit down and wait for someone to rescue you.

Our elevator scares even seasoned Spanish elevator goers. First, it drops several inches and bounces slight back up when you step inside, giving you the comfortable feeling that perhaps the cables aren’t that tight. Then, it inches upwards while making a host of nearly human whining sounds. Certainly I have never heard a machine make such noises. Sometimes it jerks a bit for no apparent reason, or sometimes one side scraps along the elevator shaft, creating a sound like a thousand forks being scraped across a porcelain plate. You must be careful never to push a button more than once or it will refuse to move. Sometimes it takes you to a different floor, just for the heck of it. Sometimes it likes to have a little fun with its human cargo by stopping between floors or by keeping its doors closed. I guess I don’t blame it – the life of an elevator must be pretty boring.

Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!*

Things I saw/heard walking home tonight:

“Hola guapa.”
“Hola _____.”
“Hello there.”
Many variations of the hot hissing sound men make that causes me to quiver to my very core and wish to become their slave forever because it is so seductive and powerful.

A beer seller asking if I wanted to buy a beer and then offering me “something else.”

One of the largest prostitutes I have ever seen. He/she could give Tyson a run for his money.

Wet streets: BCNeta, piss, beer, blood, an oil spill.

Trash in the streets: Beer cans, bottles, crusty pizza boxes, voided metro cards, empty sugar packets.

‘Life’ in the streets: A cockroach flapping its wings while trying to get off its back, a man jogging, a dead parrot curled up in the corner of a building.

Police ticketing beer sellers while prostitutes loitered nonchalantly nearby.

A bicing brazenly parked outside a restaurant.

A flower seller asking me if I wanted to buy a rose, “regalo?”

sunshine marrying*

I chose this picture of a few forlorn rose petals in the sun after a wedding in Sitges to bring up my disappointment over the vote today by the California Supreme Court on Proposition 8. I truly don’t understand it.

How can the government have the power to pass a moral judgment on the validity of your love for another person? By upholding measures that deny gay people the right to marry, the government is deeming their feelings and their basic rights as irrelevant, unworthy, and wrong. On what basis does the government have the authority, wisdom, and ethical sensibility to base this judgment?

Why not ban people from marrying each other if they have only known each other for a few days, if they have been married before, if they are a certain difference in weight or height, if they have ever been in prison, if they are both sterile, if one person has voted and the other person has not, if they don’t pay their taxes….all of this seems just as arbitrary to me in the face of making a decision about with whom you want to share your life and love. I say that anyone prepared follow through with such an important commitment deserves to have their union recognized by their government. All the objections seem to be purely religious in nature. What about the separation of church and state? The 1st Amendment? The 9th Amendment? Or the fact that the constitution never actually mentions marriage?

Why have we not come to a point in our growth as a species when we realize that our complexities go far beyond what our ideas of nature, religion, and history are able to explain?

In light of all of this, here is a sweet article about a lesbian couple marrying in Connecticut.


For the record, Spain, despite its large Catholic population, legalized full marriage rights for gay couples in 2005.

Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end.*

My grandmother passed away last night. My mother and family had been by her bedside for a week and she went peacefully and gently. I cannot be there in person (curses to the dubious legality of my living abroad), but I am doing my best to be there in spirit. When I left for Spain, I knew that something like this could happen, and that, given the limited resources of my family and myself, as well as the logistics of immigration controls, I may not be able to return to the United States if something of this nature occurred. I think this is the hardest part of living abroad, not being able to be with your family when struggling through grief. I will add this to my list of reasons to return to America eventually.

I wrote a poem for my mother, although I am not sure she will be able to read it through her tears. I would like to share it here, even though it is slightly off the tone and topic of this blog. It is an attempt to project my love further, and to feel closer.

One of the things I keep thinking about when remembering my grandmother is how she enriched my childhood by sending several large boxes of old library books to our little cabin in the woods each summer. Reading was my saving grace as a child, my education where the NM public schools failed me, my entertainment when I was lonely in the mountains, my comfort in the incredible darkness of New Mexico nights. My grandmother fed my passion for literature, literally, and I will be forever grateful.


Alma
– for my grandmother

Five in the morning, Barcelona, Spain,
my father’s voice crumbles warmth,
in trembles and pauses, you are gone.

My mother has lost her mother, and
she wails into the phone, a plastic
beacon to her far away daughter,
we are women alone in this moment,
and we have lost more than words.

All day, I stared across rooftops, sun
came and rain fell, dogs barked in the plaza,
people drank cans of beer on benches
below the balcony, laundry sagged,
clouds hid the sea, and I cradled my grief.

Now, I touch the mysterious fabric
of death, and watch my love fold
your life into words, spelled by heart.

Grandmother, mother, Alma, your name
is kind, nourishing, gentle. Your soul
is a word of worship where I am. Alma,
now you are pure soul, complete grace.

I knew you through my mother, your patience
mirrored in her, your strength filled her voice,
your honesty held her truths, your love lived
in her arms. You were never far from our lives.

Alma, you gave me words, boxes every summer,
heavy and full of dusty secrets. Pages of worlds,
stories that shaped me, lives that lived through me,
journeys taken into what it means to be human.

Alma, I give you these words, late and humble,
sent across the world, but meant with every
breath to bless, celebrate, and love you.

Life, love, voyage round your own little world.*

Well, it has been nearly nine months now. Oops. Life here sometimes seems like an alternate reality, another world, where time has a separate existence. Everything in the U.S. seems to continue along obediently following time, whereas here, I feel like I have stepped off the wheel. It keeps spinning, but I am standing still. Yet, time passes here as well, I am now 30 years old and I have been here for nearly a year. It is cold again, the leaves are changing and falling. The Christmas lights are on. But I don't yet feel a part of this time, I still feel like I am living in somewhere in the middle.

A lot has happened in life and love in the past nine months, and I will update you all on the events as I struggle to get my blogging momentum going again! The picture below is from the catacombs in Tarragona from a trip with my parents in March.