traveling swallowing dramamine

covery

so here i am at abaco.

i come here every day now, not (just) because it is my favorite place to hang out in granada but because i no longer have internet in my piso.

i don't have internet in my piso because:

a) at best, alicia took our money to pay for the past five months of internet and didn't deposit them in a timely fashion, so telefónica cut the internet. and it would cost an extra 140 euros to turn it back on. so we not only don't have internet, but we more or less lost the money we gave them.

b) at worst, alicia took our money to pay for the past five months of internet and did not give it to telefónica but kept it for herself. so not only do we not have internet, but my roommate is a liar and a thief and i lost 95 euros for nothing.

95 euros. she said it was 15 per month for the 5 unpaid months (we thought she was taking care of this while she was in the canaries. surprise!) - november through march. i gave her 75 euros on march 11th or thereabouts. on march 22 she requested 20 more for march. i said "didn't we already pay march? and isn't it 15 a month?" and she said we'd had some kind of offer for the first three months, and no we hadn't paid march, etc. i was like, well....okay... and i gave her 20 more euros on march 24th. on that same day the internet was cut.

so she has to come up with not one but two receipts of bank transactions showing that she deposited my 75+20 euros and cecile's 120+20. i guess it's possible that she deposited the first round but i would be dead surprised if she deposited my 20 euros to pay the internet bill the day the internet was cut.

jaime came over to help us talk about it. he'd called telefónica for me the day before, and indeed the company had not received a payment from alicia since october. we didn't really do any direct accusations and she offered to go to the bank and get a receipt. which is fine, but she has to actually do it, and she's not so big on actually doing the things she says she's going to do.

between her and our fucking landlord, i'm tired of getting perpetually fucked over with money. i am almost positive that the landlord isn't going to give us our deposit back (one month's rent - 200 euros for me) - and how am i going to contest that in the states? plus i have no control over how the apartment is gonna look by the end of july since i'm leaving at the end of may.

so, since i can't force alicia to disclose her bank information and i can't force 95 euros from her, and i can't control whether or not i get my 200 euro deposit back, i'm planning on leaving at the end of may without paying july rent (which was already the plan, and the landlord and alicia were aware of it) - or june rent - or the june utility bill, which will include april and may. the utility bill shouldn't be much since we don't have AC. it won't be 95 euros out of alicia's pocket - unfortunately. but it will get me a little of my money back. and then i'll basically get my deposit back by bailing on the june rent.

i already googled credit scores and they're not international. cecile and alicia will be ok in june. when alicia didn't pay the january rent, the landlord told us on january 22 that he would give us an eviction notice on february 1. but i think you get 2 months before they can evict you. the bills come through the landlord too. fuck that guy. i would try to get someone to sublease for the last two months, but cristian tried to sublease to me and cecile - and this was the plan from when he first got the apartment, and the landlord knew that - and when we all sat down to sign the papers, pablo told cristian that to take his name off the lease he would have to pay 240 euros. so that leaves me with the choice to pay 240 euros to legally sublease the apartment and ensure pablo that his rent is paid - OR - um, bail and save 200 euros (400 if you count july). guess which one makes more fiscal sense.

barrett said, what have they done to you over there?
and i said, i've been fucked A LOT.

and the shit gets me down, you know, and stresses me out.

but i'm past the point of caring. i no longer am interested in dealing with unpleasant things.

for example:

splitting the gastos with alicia is a total pain in the ass because she's like, "well i wasn't here in february" - not like she ever informed us that she was going to flake out for three months, but anyway. and our utility bill was way higher than we expected, and cristian, who was in fact here in february and most of march, is gone. so if alicia didn't split the utilities three ways with us and pay cristian's part, we'd have to do it in halves, which would have been 112 euros per person. and i'd only set aside 40.

so alicia's talking to cecile about it, and i just wanted to go in my room and close the door, or go outside, or do anything besides talk to her. i'm tired of her and pablo and all the shit. i wanted to have a nice friday.

anyway we did the bill in thirds, thank god, and subtracted some bullshit 34 euro heater inspection fee that the landlord should really pay himself. so the utilities came out to 62 euros per person, which is fine. except we're almost certainly going to have a fight with pablo about our little deduction.

furthermore, the rent and gastos are due on the 5th, but apparently pablo had come by on the 3rd and was like, "um, what's the deal? where's the rent money?" to cecile. she was like, "uh, rent is due on saturday." and he's like, "well, i'm not going to be in town on saturday." and cecile said, "i'm pretty sure that's not our problem."

still, cecile comes to me yesterday and is like, "i forgot to tell you earlier, but pablo wants his money by 3pm today" - it was 2:50 when she was saying this. i was like, what the fuck. he can't do that. like, he really actually cannot demand rent money on the spot before it's even due. but since i knew we were probably going to have to fight him for those 34 euros from the gas bill, i was like, whatever, i'll go take out money. i walked to the caixa ATM on constitución, and it was so hot outside i wanted to go swimming, which is fantastic. but then we couldn't get a hold of pablo and alicia was saying we should call him but she didn't have saldo on her phone, and i didn't volunteer mine because i don't give a shit about pablo and i'm tired of alicia taking my money in all her various ways -

see how endless this is?

but here are the nice things. i watched kill bill v2 and knit a bunch and read a book. cecile and i made lunch together, a cucumber tomato avocado salad, and she split some kind of moroccan savory pastry with me, and we had strawberries with sugar and cream for dessert. we listened to summerteeth because she requested wilco, and we picnicked on the floor in her room with the french doors open.

then we went to abaco and the weather was beautiful and i started making notes on the story i've had in mind for a long time. i can't figure out where the tension is. but i made story notes and i haven't done that in three years.

then i made a list called "dreams," which is embarrassing. but i did. i wrote down things i want to do.

i don't know if i'm going to be able to go to grad school next year. in the time it takes for me to reapply and eventually get in, i don't want to just wait around. i want to keep moving forward. i was walking down the street the other night and i thought, wow. i did it. i wanted to go to spain and here i am. i wanted to apply to grad school and i went all the way with it. i was scared of both of those things and they seemed impossible but i did them anyway.

i wanted to be the kind of person who made things happen, and i am that person.

so my list is of things i think would be awesome to do. not like, "what awesome things can i realistically do with my english degree?" i mean awesome like, i want to perform with a dance company. i want to work in a theater, write plays, perform, apprentice for a costume designer. i want to work in a small, laid-back office in a job where i use my writing and editing skills. i want to take tap again, and voice lessons, and piano lessons, and ballet and modern class.

then i made a list of cool places to live.

and things i like to do.

things i'm good at.

long-term goals.

so it was sometime yesterday i realized that i was happy.

two years ago, when it finally occurred to me that i was depressed, i wrote about how i'd once told jesse, during a bad couple of weeks, that i felt like i'd "lost the joy of living" - not suicidal, but totally drained of that spontaneous happy feeling. marcia later supplied the word "ahedonia" for that feeling of loss.

july 16, 2006:
and it occurs to me that i do feel like that all the time. no. not all the time, but the days that are good are the ones that are noteworthy now. i never thought it consciously back then, but to say i'd lost the joy of living implied that usually i felt joy in living. that was the baseline feeling. these days the baseline feeling is something i fight against. i have to find ways to stay up.

i've got 34 posts tagged "anhedonia &etc," which run from april 22, 2005 to april 15, 2007. and there have been dark days in spain when i considered using that tag again. but i have refrained, because i think of that as a finished chapter.

spain has been difficult for all the normal reasons and also for some bizarre ones. like i said, i've been fucked a lot. but when i'm down - and i've been down - it's not the same lifesuck feeling.

so here i am, planning to cut and run and possibly be chased all the way home by my insane robber roommate and my jackass landlord, and i'm losing money left and right, and i've lost my internet lifeline.

and overwhelmingly the feeling i have is: whatever. i'm tired of you assholes always killing my buzz. i'm gonna go think of nice things to do.

i'm waiting on a response from one more school. the other eleven responses have been rejections. but brooklyn college offered me a place in their MA english program. (i'm not going to accept.) and on the MFA blog at UNCG, the program director said that they sent out the first round of rejections over spring break, and that no news is good news. i'm not at all taking this as a sign that i got in. but that does mean i made it past at least the first cut.

that may not sound like much. but at this point in the whole gory process, it's enough for me.

morning curtains

i.

i went to the beach today. you know, on the mediterranean sea.

ii.

when i wake up, the first thing i see are the curtains. and something about the way the light comes through them makes me think that i'm waking up at home. in my house. this has happened every day for the past week.

this morning i realized it will never happen again.

iii.

i woke up at 7:07 because i was dreaming there was a hurricane coming to hit new orleans again. my whole family was at a house. it was not our house, like when everyone moved to baton rouge and no one lived in their house anymore. it seemed like we were all there, but everyone was waiting for someone, just pacing around waiting for their mom or dad or whoever to get there. my mom was there and she told me to go check on someone and i didn't want to go. all the adults looked doomed and tense in that clenched-jaw joking way. we were in some empty subdivision and we were outside and my whole family, but it was like fifty people, all of them were marching down and around the cul de sac, second lining, and my mom was in the lead.

iv.

this week i dreamt that i found a store in granada that sold raisin nut bran. then i woke up. but i wasn't sad, because brett brought me raisin nut bran from home.

such a lonely-looking feeling

when i was working on oak street, my coffeeshop of choice was, of course, the oak street rue. at night sometimes i'd meet becca there or take michael with me to hang out.

i don't know if this was the first time i brought michael there or not, but i parked on oak street about twenty feet from the carrollton end, and we got out the car, and michael said with this sheepish look on his face, "it smells like snowballs."

i looked at him agape. "are you serious?"

because a year-round snowball shop (or shoppe) had just opened on oak street, not far from where we were parked. it was called "the queen of the ball" and it was done up all barbie pink with polka dots, ornate mirrors, three sets of tables and chairs sized for grown-ups, kids, and tiny kids.

but he hadn't seen the shop(pe). he really did just smell snowballs.

snowballs really do have a smell.

i was delighted.

procacious ballerina

i have been taking dance classes for so long that i get mad when the teacher gives a stupid exercise.

maría josé, whom i like a lot, and who likes me a lot, gives stupid exercises about fifty percent of the time.

she gives us grande battements en fondu, which i think totally destroys the benefit of doing grande battements. you can't get the same stretch when your standing leg is bent without losing your alignment. it's not fucking jazz class. if i do a battement on a bent leg i have to work harder to keep my hips straight and therefore can't kick as high and therefore don't stretch as much. stupid.

yesterday, we started the barre with pliés, followed by tendus, which is normal. except when she put on the music for tendus, she indicated that she wanted us to do the exercise at doubletime. so the first exercise we do to work our feet is psychotically fast. fast enough that we would've had trouble doing it warm. but we weren't warm. it was the second exercise. it was the first tendu set. it made no sense technically, served no useful purpose. shit like this makes me want to be passive-aggressive. i screwed up the exercise on both sides and i did not care. it was stupid.

then she gave an adage in which we repeatedly did promenades and turns en dehors when it would be more natural to turn en dedans, and vice versa. she does that a lot, but yesterday it was especially bad. it's not difficult technique work. it's bad choreography.

she was acting like a hardass because this teenage boy, presumably a former student at the studio, was in town. i think he goes to the conservatory in madrid or something. his name is carlos, and he acts like he's total hot shit. he jumps to the ceiling every time he jumps, and everyone oohs and ahs, and i intentionally don't look. i've danced with dudes. i've seen them jump. the dudes i've danced with had better technique and better taste.

so i was annoyed with maría josé for giving stupid exercises and trying to impress carlos, and i was annoyed with carlos for jumping across the room without consideration for anyone else.

but i was really sweaty by the end of class, and i love that.

bromear

one of the hard things about living in a foreign land is my inability to make jokes in the native language.

i'm the boring quiet girl at the party. lisa offers this spoonerism: "awkwardly social." even if i can half-follow what's being said, it takes me so long to work up a sentence that by the time i can insert myself into the conversation, everyone else has moved on to a different topic. so when i talk, not only do my sentences barely make sense grammatically, but they often don't even make sense in context. if i'm awkwardly social, the people i talk to are patiently baffled. i'm probably being too hard on myself. but it's an accurate portrait of how i feel talking to most every non-english speaker in spain.

so clearly if i have this much trouble making regular conversation, cracking jokes is out of the question. i can't toss off one-liners fast enough. when i tell silly stories in english, i usually take a long time getting to the point. imagine how much longer it takes me in spanish, when i have to stop every sentence and hunt for words. imagine how not funny the punch line is by the time i manage to get there.

but this, i have discovered, is an integral part of my personality. i like making jokes. it's something i do in virtually every social interaction. it totally sucks not to be funny in spanish. it makes me feel like a non-person.

in ballet class, however, the native language is neither spanish nor english. the language is ballet, and as i've said already, i'm fucking fluent in ballet. i don't feel rude speaking english at the studio. if i had to stop and think about the spanish words every time i asked a question or made a comment, i'd hold up the class. and they understand me. i could speak gibberish, and they could respond in gibberish, but as long as we demonstrate with our bodies while we're talking, everyone knows what's going on. i've taken a ballet class in czech and it was the same thing.

in ballet class i am kind of a smartass. as a little kid i was very serious and respectful, but for some reason, when i hit high school, i started cracking jokes in class. i can't hold them back; they issue forth unbidden, an embarrassing compulsion. i also laugh a lot at the teacher when he or she is trying to be funny, which totally brands me as a lameass. i can't help that either.

at my studio here, since i can't make jokes with my mouth, it comes out as physical clowning. if i'm struggling with a step, i announce this with an exaggerated demonstration of how much i suck at it. i guess i act like this to counteract the sometimes oppressive tenor of gravity in ballet study. it's a difficult discipline, obviously - painful and perfectionistic. you're staring your body down in the mirror and silently checking your technique compared to the skinny chick next to you. the teacher is forever in your ear, counting all the stupid things you're doing wrong that you should know already. it's nice to break the tension every once in a while.

there's a girl at the studio, alhambra, who is silly too, and i totally wish we were friends. she's kooky in the good way.

one day in class, maría josé was lecturing us on how our  "colocación" - alignment - sucks. of course none of us can finish a pirouette, she said, when we can't even balance in passé. and this is something you learn at the beginning - "al principio."

"de mi vida," alhambra said, dead-pan but self-critical.

that kind of joke makes me laugh in class. another day, maría josé was going on again about colocación - her main complaint against us, it seems -and she was saying that once you have your alignment, all the steps become easy.

zulema muttered, "i need to buy me one of those."

one of what, sylvia asked.

"una colacación."

i cracked up.

so. last night, after an adage exercise at the barre, maría josé informed the class that not one of us had our legs fully extended. and we're not pulling our legs out from our hips. and i'm sure our alignment sucked, too.

anyway, like every teacher that has preceded her in the history of ballet pedagogy, she noted: "yo quiero que mis piernas están más largas!" - i want to make my legs longer.

"yo no," i said. joking.

the class lost it. not only because they evidently thought what i'd said was funny, but also because they were caught offguard that i'd said it in spanish. even after maría josé stopped laughing and tried to return to the barre exercises, alhambra and zule were still giggling and doing ballet steps with crimped arms and legs.

and that, my friends, is a breakthrough. i made a typical smartass joke, in spanish, and it was both natural sounding and grammatically correct.

and it issued forth unbidden.

and everyone laughed.

last night in barcelona

killing time in this almost empty 'indie bar' (it's not even midnight) before the 3am bus
with a jameson on the rocks that i accidentally guilted the bartender with baby muttonchops into giving me for five euros -
half-drunk and half-drunk

i talked to him a little in my mediocre spanish and then this girl with frizzy amy winehouse hair came in and he's talking to her now
imagining how it feels, going to visit your bartender friend you have a crush on

i remember bringing karen with me to visit you - you slid immediately into the booth next to me - we ordered apple martinis, which were mediocre, and tried to be very cool, and you called them appletinis to mock us - i was nervous about being there, surprised by how happy you looked to see me

and now when i visit you - how you hover and look glad that i am there - it made me smile

beloved

the weather is totally disgusting. cold and rainy for days and my umbrella is very broken.

cecile said she would go to abaco except it's raining, and i said yeah, but when it's raining there's less people, and you can drink hot tea, which is cheaper than cold tea.

she said yeah, you're right - there are good things even about rain!

.

so i just walked into abaco all drizzled on, and i walked up to the second floor where the girls who work here sit waiting for customers, and i clutched at my beautiful newly finished yellow knit hat and made a "it's gross raining outside" face at them, and they smiled at me beatifically.

they asked if i wanted a menu and i said no, a té cereza, and they smiled some more. then my favorite one brought it up to me on the third floor and i smiled and she smiled and said "you're in your spot."

i am a regular.

venga

i.

the temperature change is so gradual here. this morning i thought about wearing a skirt, but it was chilly last night so i figured it was still cold outside. i have on jeans, a tank top with a crocheted thing over it, a cardigan, the silk scarf cecile gave me for christmas. i stood in the sun waiting for the bus and thought 'it's cold' but also 'i'm not wearing a jacket anymore.' and i get a little bit mad that it's still cold, but that's because i'm used to louisiana, where you wake up one morning in march and it's hot for 8 months.

so this is what it's like to have 'seasons.'

ii.

on monday i did wear a skirt and i went to the secretary's office to see if i could get paid before the weekend. in january i had a 300 euro cushion in my bank account, because i spent dollars instead of euros over christmas. but after traveling, my euros have dwindled. i'm down to 41 and rent is due on monday. josé antonio said no problem, i'll pay you tomorrow.

then i had 3B and 3A. carmen and ivan came in late because they had been with a tutor. i showed carmen where we were in the exercise, and she nodded and motioned to me to come over, and she whispered, 'hoy vienes muy guapa.' it made me smile so big.

iii.

josé antonio paid me today and we talked about the seafood restaurant by the big lookout rock in salobreña. i haven't eaten there but i've seen them roasting pulpo over a fire. then salud came in bitching at josé antonio for not helping with recess, because they're missing teachers today. salud can't talk without yelling and has yelled at me at least twice. josé antonio didn't even look at her, he was like 'yeah yeah i'm coming ahora mismo,' and i was glad i'm not the only one who thinks she's a bitch.

iv.

agustín's been doing this really annoying thing where he says his throat hurts, so can i teach the class today? and then he grades exams. i actually like doing stuff with the kids; it only annoys me because it's a lie. he's making me teach the whole class so he doesn't have to grade exams at home.

so with the 5th grade we're doing directions and shops: butcher, bakery, bank, police (es)station. 

do you know i only just figured out why they add the 'es' before, for example, 'ski' and 'station.'

in spanish they say eski and estación and español, but they also have words that start with 's' - saldo, seco. i couldn't understand why it was so difficult for them to go straight to the 's' sound in english. literally the kids will look at an english word that starts with 's,' like Spain, and they will say: Espain. i'm like, no. stop. listen. SSSSSSSpain. and they go eSSSSSSpain.

so i'm on the bus yesterday and it dawns on me that the initial 's' in spanish words is followed by a damn vowel. that's why it's hard. i can't believe it took me so long.

v.

i reviewed the map exercise agustín had given them for homework, did transportation flashcards (hhhhhhhhelicopter), did an exercise in the activity book categorizing modes of transportation (by sea, by rail...), drew a modified map of the french quarter and did more work with directions: how do we get from maspero's to cafe du monde? i added a fortune teller somewhere along royal. then we did the alphabet (agustín's request). we went through all the letters twice and then i pointed to random letters (E, I, E, A, E, I, Y, G, J) - i gave them dirty looks when they said aaaaayyy for E and eeeeee for I and iiiiiii for A and they laughed. they knew i was trying to trip them up. those three vowels are so hard for them to keep straight.

then i taught them the alphabet song and they laughed when we did LMNOP. at the end of class they asked agustín why his class wasn't fun like mine. he looked really annoyed and said 'because ann is the fun teacher and i'm the boring one' and i smiled and thought to myself: gotcha back.