DC is an armpit

It really feels like it sometimes. This guy from work told me to look at it more positively, like, as if I am entering a rainforest. But I can't shake the feeling that I need to rub deodorant on everything around me in order to survive the intense suffocating heat. DC is an armpit.

Try these fruit bars. I bought them when I was really hungry in Safeway (along with a whole lotta cornbread, which was also delicious), and it was such great luck that I liked them! I wonder if I could just make my own fruit bars by putting some raspberries in my bag with some mushy carrots and hopping up and down on them. I think they're vegan too! They are also fun for kids because they come in squiggly shapes! I love squiggles. Actually, I just like saying squiggles. That word's gonna be in my head all week now. Like the week I had the words 'sigourney weaver' stuck in my head. Everytime someone asked me how I was doing I just had to scream "SIGOURNEY WEAVER!" Now someone will ask me where I'm from or how much work I've gotten done today and I'll shriek "SQUIGGLIES!!!" at the top of my lungs.

I want a brick pizza oven in my kitchen. That is my one and only vision for the future right now, besides universal health care, seeing military money transferred to social services, education being recognized as a right, and freedom and equality for all.

I will post some fuzzy pictures soon from my camera phone. Yes, the one with a pink jelly cover and Dooney and Bourke keychain with a pink heart on it. What can I say? My uncle has good taste.

I got a bike!

and it's purple! But too bad biking around DC is TERRIFYING.

I shall bike to work everyday.

Also, who knew that the Lincoln statue was not the same thing as the Lincoln Memorial? I told Kabir he lived 4 blocks away from the Lincoln Memorial, when it was actually 22 blocks away from his building. Good thing no one ever trusts my sense of direction. Well, one person did. I told a tourist on the metro who was looking for the Washington Monument to get off at Judiciary Square on the red line, which is actually very far away from it...I figured that while he may curse me at first, he'd thank me later for adding years to his life by power-walking 3 miles to the monument.

I own a misleading and incomplete map of DC. Granted, I tore it out of the back of a Congressional Directory given to me at work (the only time I've ever used it), but still. I finally decided to invest in the inaugural edition map of the DC metro area with Obama' grinning proudly at the part in my hair (which I am sure will be my bald spot soon) at Safeway, where the cashier who rung me up basically said, "HEY YOU'RE NEW TO THIS CITY!", and everyone was like, "DAMN, WOMAN, WHO ISN'T?"

Exactly. My new status as a DC resident will never be a novelty.

The other day, I walked into an elevator in which lingered the effect of 50948730 cans of beans some farty asshole ate. It was the longest 2 flights of my life. Normally I would walk up the stairs, so I believe my lethargy that day was being punished by some higher, divine, gassy being.

Speaking of smelliness, I've been rationing my Altoids, which I bought the first day here, not only because they're mad expensive, but because I always seem to smell like coffee. ALWAYS. I think it's because I always spill some on my clothes. But I found out they have gelatin in them, which grosses me out. It seems kind of counter-intuitive to put horse hooves in your mouth as a breath freshener.

Metro musings

The thing about being short is that on the metro you get a lot of armpits in your face. It doubly sucks if you are claustrophobic. I envision myself vomiting on the tall, pit-stained assholes around me just so they would get the hell away from me.

Yes, so I've made it to DC in one piece (more or less) a little less than 2 weeks ago, and have been working at USAction for about a week now, taking the metro back and forth like another cog in a machine.

Riding the metro gets me thinking about what it would be like to be a giant squid. Or any other deep sea creature. It might be because it's nearly impossible to go against the flow of body traffic just like a current, or the fact that we sway back and forth with the motion of the train like underwater plants. It could also stem from the deep sea episode of Planet Earth I saw this weekend with Becca.

Ok, so that video didn't have anything to do with underwater plants, but man! So cool! Venus fly traps are the weirdest things alive. Also, I kinda feel like that frog on the metro during rush hour.

I also hate how quiet it gets, even when it feels like all of D.C.'s professional population is in your particular car. My inner camp counselor oftentimes thinks about starting a round of "row row row your boat" to boost morning morale, but mostly just to freak people out. I think I would get a kick out of bugging all the grumpy morning people. That might make my day.

One thing that I've come to realize is how easy it is to ignore everything around you, at least as a middle-class, commuting professional in D.C. EVERYONE has a freaking ipod, newspaper, some cheap paperback, knitting project, kindle, blackberry that gets service underground, etc. etc. People are totally lost in their own little worlds.

On the bright side, I get to eat PB and Js again, throwback to grade school. But it might take a while before the proportions are right (a little too much peanut butter). Normally, I would wad up my pb and j into a delicious wonder-bread ball and dunk it repeatedly in a glass of milk. Judge away, haters, I like my soggy food.

While my mind may have stayed put in Mrs. Burke's fourth grade, my body has aged 50 years. I have a FREAKING ULCER. Seriously, folks, my stomach grew rebellious with a diet of frozen boca burgers and red sauce from the jar annihilating my insides. As of now, my stomach is preparing to reject the peanut butter and jelly sandwich i so generously offered to it as a peace offering.
Gotta go.

But before I sign off, good news, I found a place to live! It is glorious.
More on that later.

A Day in the Life of a Recent College Grad

"College Grad" should actually be read: "unemployed bum".

Today I....

11:50 am: woke up, ate stuff

12:30 pm-2pm: went to the car dealership and spent money I don't have

2-4 pm: Napped wonderfully

4- 5 pm: rode my bike pointlessly around st. paul

5-7pm: lost many rounds of tetris against Sudha and pretended to help with dinner

7-10 pm: ate dinner while watching Cillian Murphy beat up infected people in post apocalyptic London/Manchester

10pm - 2am: Had a couple of beers while shootin' the breeze with some good friends

Doesn't sounds too bad, huh? But I can't imagine doing this for very long. I hope this isn't the case, because I feel like my brain will turn to mush and my bones will become porous. And I really get my ass kicked in video games.

La Isla and inter-racial friendships

I did my final independent study project with a partner (not so independent after all), an awesome girl named Sierra. Our interests merged at Lago Titicaca (yes, that is what it's really called) and the lake's relationship with the people who live around it. A broad topic, we knew, but, excited by our adventure (which is what we thought of our whole project, an excuse for adventure), we decided to travel there and then narrow our focus. We spent a good part of our time in Copacabana, a resort town/hippie mecca, interviewing people (mostly elderly people) and seeing what issues surrounding the lake were most salient.

Our research led us to La Isla del Sol, an island on Lake Titicaca. The people who live there are indigenous Quechuas, but speak a fair amount of Spanish because many work in the tourism industry.

Doing research as a dark skinned South Asian Indian girl with a blonde haired, blue eyed white girl in rural Bolivia proved to be more difficult than expected. Many people would look at Sierra and think, "hippie", and then see me and think, "guide". A conversation with two little girls running a small snack stand revealed their absolute incomprehension that Sierra and I could be friends. It dawned on me that they had never before witnessed an inter-racial relationship that was free from an economic agreement. For them , it had always been the dark one selling to the white one.

Interesting how that works out, huh? It made me realize that almost all of the interactions we had had with Bolivians involved some sort of financial transaction. Our host families were paid, our instructors, etc. The SIT program didn't really enable a lot of interaction with Bolivians outside the program/outside an economic agreement. We'd have to be super outgoing and trustful (which I felt like were qualities I did not possess while abroad) in order to make friends, which is complicated anyway, when you are probably exoticized and there is a certain power dynamic going on between native and foreign and white and dark.

As one of many uncomfortable situations to be in, the one on the isla surpassed all. I had grown up where having a friend with the same skin color as me was a novelty, not the norm, and I had, in fact, grown quite comfortable with it. But the feeling that I was an outsider persisted within the group of American students. This had been a pattern repeated over and over again throughout my time in Bolivia, but finally surfaced in full form in our conversation with the little girls. Children are so unabashedly honest, we have a lot to learn from them.

Es una barbaridad!

This blog's name and this particular post refers to something Mrs. Natalia Mendoza, our gracious host on Isla del Sol in Ch'alla , said to Sierra and me while staying at her house. Every morning, we would drink hot sweet tea and a piece of white bread, while Senora Mendoza made the morning soup. That's right, soup for breakfast! Living on the island is no piece of cake, and you need your energy. But the only problem was that neither Sierra nor I drink tea with sugar. In fact, Sierra had cut processed sugar completely out of her diet before coming to Bolivia. So after a few days of sickingly sweet tea (I mean half a cup of sugar in my cup of tea, no joke), I asked for tea without sugar.

Senora Mendoza: "No azucar?!" (No sugar?!)
Me: No, muy extrano, yo se (No, very strange, I know).
Senora Mendoza, shaking her head: No azucar, no azucar! Es una barbaridad! (No sugar, no sugar!? It's a barbarity!)

As she shook her head at us, she gave us two spoonfuls of sugar anyway. She laughed and tromped out of the room, as she usually did.

I miss Senora Mendoza.

I have a mullet.

My mother allowed me to study abroad in Bolivia under two conditions:

1) That I do not fall in love with a Bolivian
2) That I shan't cut my hair.

Fair enough, I thought, considering she didn't list don't do headstands in the middle of political protests or hitch-hike into Brasil or graffiti the streets of La Paz with an anarchist feminist group or get arrested. Unfortunately, I failed to live up to my promises. I strayed from the path of a good, polite, and considerate Indian girl and put my family's honor to shame.

I cut my hair.

To be more accurate, an Italian ex-hair stylist from Germany cut my hair in the back of a bar in Copacabana. His name was Sergio, and he was the first friend Sierra and I made on our independent study adventure. He was born and brought up in Germany to Italian immigrants. He and his brother shared a passion to beautify the world and chose to assist in this tremendous goal by going to cosmotology school. For proof of his talent, he had brought with him a photo album of his work. He seemed pretty legit. He was also the best dressed hippie in Copacabana, not to mention the cleanest-looking.

So we met up with him at the said bar, and we got to talking. He told us he was traveling all around South America and cutting hair along the way to fund his trip. I figured, when the hell else am I going to have this opportunity? So I asked him to cut my hair. He had already cut 3 other's hair in the bar that night and they looked amazing. He got all excited and immediately got his supplies out. I made the mistake of telling him to do whatever he wanted.

....3 hours later (or what seemed like 3 hours later) my shorn hair had collected in the corner of the room, like a dead possum (or five). Sierra and Cari were looking at me funny, and Sergio looked exhausted. I was getting a little nervous by now because Sergio, halfway through the haircut, had said, "I just don't GET Indian hair!". I mean, what the fuck was I supposed to get out of that??

Once he had finished, I reluctantly pulled myself to the bathroom mirror. Even in the dim light, I knew this was the WORST haircut I had ever gotten. It was a mullet. that's right, a genuine, bona-fide business in the front, party in the back, uncle jesse MULLET. But Sergio was so sweet and he had just told us about his paragliding experience today where he got electrocuted and nearly escaped death, that I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't like it.
So I just smiled and handed him 50 bolivianos (equivalent of $7, which I think was the most he'd gotten for a haircut).

Oh well, hair grows back right? Until then, I can break out my neon pink tights and headband and pretend I traveled in time from the 80's.