W.M.A.C.

I'm reconnected! Yay! And just in time because I have some really important news to reveal.

Although deep down I knew it had to happen eventually, I didn't think it would spring up on me so soon into this adventure. I figured I'd have to sit through at least a few hundred more annoyances before I found it, but I have. I've dont it. It's over. The other day on the subway I finally came accross the worlds most annoying couple (W.M.A.C. for short). I've mentioned before this Chilean phenomenom of everyone being in a relationship and their intense love of public displays of affection, but these two really topped the cake.

During our brief subway ride (about 7 stops) they did all of the following things while sitting RIGHT NEXT TO ME (this is not including the fact that they were both gross and I feel like I should make note of that):

- made out
- held hands
- carressed various body parts
- laid in each others laps
- played the 'i love you more' 'no, i love YOU more' game
- discussed their future together
- baby talked
- called each other 'baby'
- read to each other
- discussed their future children/apartment/life
- refused to sit in two seats not next to each other, therefore forcing my ass to move over and have to tolerate them next to me the whole ride

Is that enough, or shall I go on? I mean, can you think of anything worse than these two? Cause I'm finding it particularly difficult to do so. They seriously topped anything I could have pictured the W.M.A.C. to be.

Man, sometimes I hate people a lot.

Loves (annoyed loves),
- E
-

Lots of things

I have a lot of things to tell but for lack of time they will be in list form.

Here goes...

- I have been an incredibly lazy blogger. I don't have any excuses except that I've been busy and blah blah blah blah blah...you don't wanna hear it.

- Chile's biggest export is copper. Copper is very valuable right now. This means people will go to great lengths to get their hands on some. This means they steal the goddamn electrical cables all the freaking time. Long story short, I have no phone or internet in my apartment until the phone company gets off its lazy ass to go and replace the stolen cables from in front of my building. These are the times that I am reminded I live in a third world country.

- The other day I had this really surreal experience. I was leaving this apartment building and I get into the elevator with this little girl (maybe 3 or 3 and a half years old) and her grandmother. The little girl looks up at me all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and says 'mama!' This was confusing for a lot of reasons. First, she was way to old to be confusing other people for her mother. Second, I was pretty sure I still didn't have any children. Third, um, what the hell? For a split second I imagined this whole ridiculous scenario. Like, I had been in a coma or something and I have amnesia and completely forgot that three years ago I gave birth to a child and there's probably a baby daddy around somewhere and oh...dear...god...what the hell am I going to do?! Thankfully, grandma quickly jumped to the rescue with 'no, that's not your mother.' Which raises the question, why does a normal looking three year old need someone to remind her that the girl that just walked onto the elevator is not her mother? Some mysteries shall simply remain so. On the bright side, I still do not have children. So, yay!

- The wedding is coming up and panic has set in all around. I swear my family wouldn't be this dramatic about it if I was getting married. My god. What a fiasco. On that note, I need to buy a fucking dress! And get a date! And buy the gift! Turn the panic mode switch on someone, please. Haha. Kidding. I am and will continue to be completely relaxed about it. Possibly. I hate weddings.

- Lately I've taken to thinking about all the things that I don't know how to say in Spanish that I might need to know how to say and it freaks me out that I don't. Like, it could be something simple like not knowing bank lingo but mostly I've been into panicking about health related issues. Like, what if I get athelete's foot. I don't know how to say athlete's foot in spanish! Or what if I desperately need some kind of neosporin type thing. I knwo they don't have neosporin here. How do I get some kind of neosporin-equivalent?! I don't even really know what the purpose of neosporin is. I just know I put it on things. This is a very serious situation because, realistically, ANYTHING could happen to me and when things happen for which I need to go to a pharmacy, communication is key. Last time I tried to get some kind of dayquil for a cold and I ended up with some insane pills that I swear to god must have been really strong doses of benedryl or something because I was dying. And this was the result of 'i need something for a cold'... 'we have this on sale. it's the same as - insert name of some Chilean medicine I've never heard of-' ..'um, sure ok.' Do you see the problem?! I cannot exist like this. I need to know things.

- People in this country really, really, really like 80s music. What do you all think about that? I'm still way too confused to have any concrete opinions.

Must get out of internet cafes and join the real world. I promise to write again soon.

Loves,
- E

Oh my god

I've had this website written down in my notebook for about six months now and everytime I see it I say to myself, why on earth would I have written down this website in my notebook. And now, I know.

Yes, it's fantastic. Completely fantastic. See if you can't rummage around this place and find some incredible stuff. And Domo Kun to you sir.

(WHY is he so angry with the groundhog (?) !? We don't know! So good.)

The Day After

Yesterday would have been John Lennon´s 66th(?) birthday. Some shit like that. You know why I don't know? Because it was my birthday bitches...and, well, usually I spend that day thinking about me. How does that make that different from any other day, you ask? Good question. Jerk.

Two years ago at this time I had written a short 'word on the street' for 34th Street about turning 22. Yesterday I remembered it because I thought, sweet jesus, joseph and mary that feels like it was about 8 billion years ago.

What is it about birthdays that makes one feel so utterly helpless? Possibly it's the fact that TIME PASSES AND YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. It's pretty stressful, although red bull and vodka certainly helps.

Anyway, I probably feel more 22 now than I did when I was 22, but something about 24 sounds so much older. I certainly don't feel 24, except sometimes when I do. Like, whe my students say 'how old are you, like 28?' Then I feel 24. Or 50. Either way. Point is, I've reached my - gasp - mid-20s technically and there are just soooo many things you can't get away with anymore in your mid-20s and this feels like it should be presenting a problem for me. It is.

Here's my dilemna in pretend logical terms...

Things I should be doing/not doing by now that I'm not doing/doing:

- something... with my life.
- having some sort of plan for something I should maybe do with my life.
- planning my wedding to my rich rich rich fiance that I'm going to marry asap before he gets away.
- avoiding weddings like the plague
- writing more
- making some effort to live more like a human and less like an animal
- getting over certain fears of certain things that I shouldn't be really afraid of even if they are kinda gross and not at all attractive (I'm making strides on this one)
- reading more
- reaching impossible levels of intelligence
- stop really disliking about 75% of the children I see/meet
- put my college degree to some use
- learn to speak english properly (this one is also moving along kinda nicely)
- update my blog regularly
- live in chile for a year.....oh ...wait...

Now sure there are plenty of other things I had hoped to be doing by 24, but those dreams were crushed long ago, thankfully. And sure there are probably millions of things I want to do before I turn 30 but I figure I have a good 5 years to continue procrastinating in that department. And really 24 isn't a milestone year at all.

If I'm being honest I've done a decent amount with my 24 years and, if nothing else, I can hold my alcohol pretty well and I'm pretty fucking clever sometimes and I totally live alone in a foreign country and I'm not completely repelling anymore and 24 is looking kinda promising on some weird, optimistic level.

Before I know it, 'I'm 24' will stop sounding really really weird and then...BOOM...25. And here we'll be again, lamenting the passing of time and hoping we can someday have a birthday where we look around and realize we live in an awesome city and have an awesome job and have a saint bernard because, fuck it, those dogs are adorable as all hell. and by 'we' i mean 'me' cause I don't really like any of you that much. (should 'me' have quotation marks there? prob not.)

So, happy birthday to me. or 'me.' And Sean Lennon, who also shares a birthday with me because I only share with the top dawgs yo.

(How great is the word 'yo'?)

Gettin´older,
- E

Fears

Among the many fears that I already claim my own, I have added quite a few more since I have been in Chile . They include, but are not limited to, the following:

- fear of strange cheeks
- fear of gross people touching me on the subway
- fear of throwing up on public transportation
- fear of being trapped in an enclosed space with a couple
- fear of earthquakes
- fear of exploding water heaters
- fear of being held up at knife/gun point
- fear of running into random family members at the mall and/or at a bar
- fear of the cell phone comapny calling me
- fear of having to go within 50 feet of what they like to call 'hospitals'
- fear of the mall on a weekend at the end of the month
- fear of getting caught in protests and the inevitable clouds of tear gas
- fear of people who dress like clowns and ask for money on the bus

As of a few days ago I can now add 'fear of spiders' to that list.

The thing is, I've never really feared spiders, per se. I certainly don't find them adorable and cuddly and when, in the ninth grade on the first day of class, my biology teacher went around the room making random students hold a tarantula I did my best to make sure she didn't come anywhere near me because there was no way in hell I was about to hold that thing in my hand without throwing it and running out of the room screaming like a small, female child. But, I'm not one of those girls who is like 'eeeww a spider...i have to find a boy to kill it for me...hee hee.' No sir, that's not me. I kill my own spiders and I have no problems doing it cause frankly my space is not a human-spider communal space.

So, the other day I found this huge, gnarly spider crawling around near my bed. And that's when it started....

Wait, let me go back.

At some point early on in my Chilean adventure I had this conversation with one of my aunts about spiders. Apparently here in Chile we don't have any dangerously poisonous animals, except for this one spider. A spider which, it just so happens, is common in households everywhere. At first I thought she was kidding, so I laughed, naturally. And then she was like "no, I'm serious." This is while we were taking a table out of a really cobwebby part of the house...so, you can imagine...

Anyway,I didn't really think much of it until I saw a spider in my apartment and even then I didn't think much of it because I killed the sucker right away and didn't see another one and forgot. Then, when Abby was here I mentioned to her that if she sees one she should kill it right away because if it bites her it might be deadly and she freaked out a little and I pretended like it was no big deal and that they don't come into houses ever anyway (which is a boldfaced lie) when really what I wanted to do was hug her and be like "we might die! dear god, what do we do?"

Have any of you seen the movie Aracnophobia? That movie was a turning point in my young life and pretty much the reason I can't watch scary movies ever.

So, fast forward to a few days ago (last week) when I find this GIANT spider walking around near my bed. That's when it hits me, right? Like, if I hadn't seen it that thing could have crawled on my face during the night and I could be dead by morning. The thing is, I realized, I have no idea what these fuckers look like. So, after I killed it I did what any other normal person would do — I walked through the maze of crap that is my apartment, sat on my bed and googled the little suckers.

Image googled. "Araña del rincon."

This is what I found:



I FREAKED OUT because that's exactly what the splotch on my floor looked like, but then I realized the err of my ways because, quite honestly, that picture looks like every spider I've seen ever and HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IF A DEADLY THING WAS IN MY APARTMENT OR NOT?! So, I freaked out again. Then I got a paper towel and removed the evidence and immediately began cleaning my apartment because this one website said that was the best way to keep them out. So now I'm totally freaked out about spiders. I have nightmares about them crawling on my face while I'm asleep.

It's nice to know my list of fears really is neverending.

Ugh.

— E