Family and Friendship…

Yesterday was a great day.  I finally made it out of the city and went hiking with friends and friends of friends.  Roxana organized all of us to get together and go hiking for the day and have lunch in Pirque, a small town outside of Santiago.

Yesterday was one of those days where I couldn’t take anything too seriously.  Maybe its how being in nature makes me feel a little giddy, but I forgot how much good humor I find in all situations even if I have a tendency to laugh at maybe not the most appropriate times as well.  I remember camping with a friend of mine years ago in the desert, setting up our tent and going for a bike ride.  When we returned, all of our things were gone.  Our tent had blown away in the wind.  He was pissed.  I couldn’t stop laughing.  I remember him not being very pleased with my reaction.

I am pretty sure this comes from growing up on ridiculous comedies and maybe also the last 10 years of reality tv shows combined.  I was happy to sit in the back of the bus like a trouble maker scheming with my French friend and being disciplined by Roxana.  I swear she is such a leader and such a great organizer.  The price I pay for my sense of humor is that I am not a great leader, nor a good organizer.  In fact, I fail when it comes to those things much of the time.  I don’t have the personality to pull off what she does.  She even had all of us introduce ourselves and do that thing where you have everyone say one interesting thing about themselves.  I wanted her to have a clip board and a headset and pass out name tags too.

Friendship is so important to me.  It always has been.  I rarely get to see my family and to make up for it I have made exceptionally close friendships in my life with both men and women…they are like my replacement family.

I’m not sure if I consider my biological family close.  It bothers me.  I try to call my mom once a week.  I try, but I don’t always do it.  I haven’t seen my sister in almost 7 years and my brother…I haven’t seen him in at least 3 or more years and I only see my other brother due to the fact that he lives semi close to my parents, so when I see them maybe once a year, I usually see him as well.  Is this normal for us in the US?  My dad and I have never been very close, but his one wish for me was to actually write to my sister to say hi and break the ice a little between us.  Why weren’t we talking?  I have no idea.  I think it’s merely just a lack of consciousness we have for communication.  I feel my real family fading away in the dust and it bothers me immensely.

Sometimes I think about how years ago I couldn’t imagine never seeing my siblings…how they were such an integral part of my life.  How did I ever end up with this completely disconnected family?

I always remember the one time my brother came to California because of his job.  He just happened to visit me as well.  I met him at his hotel and we spent the evening together.  The next morning his flight was canceled and he irritatedly referred to the rest of the day together as “dead time.”  That kind of stung. But then at the same time I hear from so many people that know him about how much he talks about me and how much he thinks about me.  He isn’t the only person like this in my life.  Why can’t we just say how we feel to the actual person we have these feelings for?  And why is it easier to express it to someone else?  My mom always says, “You know your dad talks about you a lot,” but he isn’t talking about me to me so how would I know?  In addition to this, my family has always had a habit of insulting each other and its sort of an affectionate thing.  Tough love.  I kinda have a feeling that this is normal for many American families.

So much of American culture is based on independence.  If you are still living with your family after 20 years old then something is wrong with you…or at least that is what we assume.  I haven’t lived near my parents since I was 18 years old other than a small stretch of time when I needed to stay with them for financial reasons.  I missed out on a consistent relationship with my brother and his family and all of my nephews and my niece.  Suddenly my niece is 14 years old this year.  Suddenly my parents have grey hair and all kinds of medical problems.  When did they age?  I was never around long enough to witness all of the transitions.

Maybe I needed them more.  Maybe leaving them so young was actually a premature thing to do because the lack of them has made me seek it in others and I’ve maybe stayed in relationships way too long or formed bonds that maybe I shouldn’t have because of this.

At the same time, to appear needy at least in the US is completely unacceptable and so I was taught that I need to do it all on my own and I need to be proud of this.  I am proud of it.  I have done a lot just solo…more than I give myself credit for most of the time.  I’m definitely not afraid of being alone.  I can take care of myself and I can support myself just fine even if I slip up sometimes and get my Ipod stolen or forget my keys or have to go back to my apartment two or three times after I intended to leave to get something else.    One of my ex-boyfriends used to call me “two trips” because I couldn’t just leave the apartment the first time.  I’m not perfect.

I am thankful for Roxana because currently she is my stand in family and she does a good job of it.  She also does a good job of including all sorts of other people that are new here.  Our new addition was a guy from the States who lost his financial job during the beginning of the economic crisis in the US and changed his life becoming a yoga instructor and looking towards spirituality instead of the American dream.  That’s not much of a unique story these days.

I think I would absolutely go crazy if I didn’t have at least one good friend here that I could really communicate with inside out.  I’m realizing so much how I actually do need people in my life and maybe being so overly independent isn’t all that its cracked up to be.

The mountains were beautiful yesterday and it was so nice to breathe fresh air again.  Between that and having laughed all day, I feel somewhat renewed from all of it.

Desperate Expats

I couple days ago I had yet another great idea for making a reality TV show.  Has anything been done on expats living abroad?  Everything I do, I imagine it as a reality TV show.  In the past I wanted to do art gallery reality TV show, yoga reality TV show, my church TV show…there was plenty of good drama in all of that…trust me.  None of these ever happened of course and I’m assuming this will be a fleeting idea as well.

Desperate expats living in Santiago, Chile, starring Roxana the successful, career driven New Yorker working in the financial industry and me the artist teacher from LA trying to find some inspiration to do art again, but both trying to make some changes in our lives.  It’s perfect!

Yes, I’m from “LA” now, when people ask.  Not Long Beach.  Not that I’m really even from there either.  I’m from a small town in Maryland called Emmitsburg.  No one has ever heard of this place, probably not even most people from Maryland.  I was once at a club in LA and some arrogant guy asked me where I was from and I told him and his response was “I’m sorry.”  I was not pleased about this.  You wonder why I was so hesitant in losing my “Eastcoastness” all those years.  But now, no, it’s just LA because I need it to fit into my Roxana and I are from the opposite coasts theme for our show.

Roxana and I are roughly around the same age.  I think she’s older than me.  But, we seem to have built completely different lives in the States.  Let’s just say that while she was living the Sex in the City lifestyle in New York, I was picking out clothes at the Aid’s Assistance Thrift Store in Long Beach.

We met about a month and a half ago because she was advertising a room in her apartment for rent.  It’s a really nice place.  At least, I think so.  Extremely clean and new, it’s in a very tall building in an area called Belles Artes near a street lined with trees and cute cafes.  She has a roof top pool and a gym.  I’ve never had such nice things!  And for all of these features, I just had to decline.  How unlike me to live in a place that offered so little to worry about?  I mean, it even came with a real oven and real cabinets to put dishes and things.  So unlike my former loft where I would at times boil water on a hot plate to take a bath because my hot water heater was so small.   I could be too bored in a place such as this.  The truth is, I didn’t take it because of the price, but now we are friends and it’s my home away from home.  And she’s a great cook who makes delicious desserts with fruits and sweet sauces, and she invented a dish with my eggplant that I never thought of before.

She has a habit of being extremely positive and clear thinking, and directly yet politely tells people not to bring their negativity around her.

This friendship is really making me see how I no longer want to live in so many ways.

The other night I sat at her kitchen table checking my email and she came out of her room holding some kind of circular thing with clothes pins on it.  My little head popped up from my computer, like a cat that hears its food dish being filled and immediately, thought…is she throwing that out?  I said, “I want that.”  And she replied, “Girl, you don’t even know what this is.”  She’s right, I didn’t.  But, it’s like somehow it’s become instinctual for me now to see some random free item and contemplate how I might need that thing in the future.  This is what living in Long Beach taught me.   Taco Tuesdays and the 99 Cent Store.   Save everything because who knows when I’ll be getting paid next.

It’s not all Long Beach, but Long Beach was where I really perfected this behavior.

Part of this thinking I blame on my mom.  We lived like the Grapes of Wrath.  Any moment we might have to pack up our 1927 Chevy truck and run from the dust bowl.  I never remember my mom ever buying anything nice for herself and instead, only provided for the needs of me or my siblings.  We saved money for problems like what if the basement floods or what if the car breaks down and then we only spent money on problems like when the basement finally did flood or when the car finally did break down.

I feel sort of sad for my parents when I visit them back east and our big dinner out is a night at Perkin’s.  This is a restaurant chain back east where the food tastes like it was taken out of box and heated up in the microwave.  And they have money.  I’m positive of this.  They could buy nicer things, have nicer things, but they are so bent on conserving and saving.  It’s my mom mostly.  My dad makes the money and has handed over his check to my mom for the last 40 years.  He has no control over it.  He has always wanted to go to Italy, but is convinced he can only read about what it must be like to go.  This makes me feel guilty for living abroad.  It makes me feel like I don’t want to share my experiences with my family and it makes me want to only project a poor person’s life.  But I need to change this attitude.

The other part of this thinking, I blame on years of imagining myself living the very romantic life of a poor artist.  I’ve always had this vision of living in a tiny apartment in the city filled with art work and struggling to get by.  Shouldn’t the fantasies of living the artist life be filled with shows and selling art and making it to the top?  Mine weren’t.  All of the time spent visualizing this lifestyle, manifested this lifestyle.  I had what I always wanted.

And it just plain sucked if you think about it.

My beds have never been new.  I’ve had the same scratchy bath towels for years.  I want some damn comfort for once.  Especially as I observe the life of Roxana.

It’s time to step it up a little.

Roxana tells me that my new story is that I’m an artist from LA that is seeking out new inspiration and I chose to teach English and do some volunteer work in Chile.  But that’s not all true, says my little censor!  You went bankrupt in the US and now you’re here because what else should you do and that’s that!  (said in a way in which I’m not even sure of that being the reason for being here).  I love honesty and maybe too much, because I feel like every real thing has to be said or it’s just not right.  But, maybe all those things I’ve been believing about myself aren’t really real anyway?  And maybe it’s okay to dress it up a little in a more positive way, even though it’s almost painful to do this.  But, if life is what we make of it, then maybe it’s okay.  I pretended a lot when I was kid, so why not now?  So then now maybe I can tell people how important I am.  How famous I am.  I know five languages and have many books.  That’s more like the kid I once knew.  When I was a kid I played house, and I didn’t just have a house.  It was a mansion made of sticks and grass.  I was a lawyer, I owned a restaurant, I went on vacations constantly and I had a fabulous sports car bicycle.  I never once played homeless person.   Never once did I tell my kid friends that we had to be careful not to eat too many of our mud pies because our monopoly money might run out, although I’m sure a circular thing with clothes pins on it would have been appealing enough to make it into my pretend home somehow.

Roxana and I talked the other night about how living abroad and being alone makes you befriend people that you would probably never have befriended in the States simply because you need some kind of friendship and bonding.  Probably we would never have been friends in the States.  We would have been too different and stuck in two different worlds and so I’m happy about my friendship with her right now.  It’s waking me up a little and helping me see what I can have in life and maybe someday I’ll even be able to write about how important I am and be serious about it.  Of course, not in a superficial way, but in a way in which I am appreciating myself and seeing how I am doing a lot in my life.  Now is not that time, but hopefully I am on my way.

My New Home

Two days ago I moved into my new apartment.  Hopefully, this will be the place that will last at least until the rest of the year.  My roommate is Chilean.  She’s has her own vintage furniture store and she’s also a painter, my age.  It’s perfect for me.

I traded this:  (Depressing – kind of looks like a room at the hospital)

For this:  (Much Better)

I’ve also been making myself meet Chilean people to have language exchanges where we meet up and speak half in English and half in Spanish.  Yesterday, I met a girl from Peru and was so happy to be able to understand mostly everything she said!  It kind of gave me some reassurance that I am making some progress and maybe Chilean Spanish really is the hardest to learn.

The more I meet and get to know the Chilean people the less I feel homesick.   The more I integrate and stay in the present moment – stay focused on what I can do here – the less I think of what I don’t have here.  I guess that makes sense.  The more I think of what I do have and what I can do, the less my mind wanders toward the negative.

But I have to admit that this can be a struggle because many moments I spend thinking, I wish I could just talk to my old friends and laugh like I used to, express myself in ways I feel more comfortable.  I miss having people who know me so well.

I used to miss the east coast of the US for years and I don’t think, after 13 years I ever surrendered to living in California until the last two years.  I finally felt like I had a home – a community.  I felt settled in ways that I never felt before.  And to me, it was a huge accomplishment.  It meant that I finally felt okay with life, where I was.  I lost that idea that life was better elsewhere and I lost that lack of place that I used to feel there.  The more I think about it, that lack feeling I felt for so long in California was really a need for some kind of special identity to prevent me from fitting in, probably because I was too afraid to.  Too afraid of just being normal.  Of just being myself.  I held on to being “from the east coast” just as much as I think I was holding onto “being an artist” for so long.  In every office job I ever had, I had to make it clear that I was an artist because I sure as hell didn’t want to just be the office worker and how dare I just be Jen.

It’s amazing how much this false identification with words has kept me from changing parts of my life for so long.

If I didn’t drop my negative separatist attitude, I would never have made so many connections in Long Beach and who knows what possibilities could have happened if I would have dropped my attitude years before that.

And at the same time, if I hadn’t let go of my art and tried something new, I wouldn’t be here.

For years, I told myself, when I was in the midst of wishing I was everywhere else, that I probably wouldn’t leave California until I accepted it as home and accepted that nothing was really going to be any better anywhere else.  I didn’t want to leave California because I was escaping, I wanted to be able to leave for the joy of knowing another place.  Mentally I knew this, but I couldn’t make myself feel it.

The thing that really did it, that really made me feel at home was that I finally invested in the area.  I looked for things to do and I met a lot of people and finally I wasn’t living like an island anymore.  And actually, I didn’t just look for things…I had fun with it.  I had fun joining new things…spending a few weeks doing this thing and then looking into something else.  And I enjoyed imagining where each new thing could lead.  I made some of the best friends I have in the last two years.  And, I started to love my life so much that I didn’t want to leave right down to the moment I got on the plane to come here.  I didn’t have money.  I didn’t have a fabulous job.  I didn’t have a comfortable place.  But, I was abundant.

Where the hell did that feeling suddenly come from? (Coincidentally, while the plane was rolling down the runway, we came to a very abrupt stop just seconds before taking off which scared the bejesus out of me (apparently, one of doors was not completely shut…Shouldn’t they check that before take off?).  Anyway, was that a sign for me to stay?).

But, now here I am.  I’m glad that I am here.  I’m doing this because it’s good for me and it’s pushing me in ways I wanted and needed to be pushed, but my heart still feels like it’s somewhere else.

Can you fall in love with a place?

I think so.  And like all of my relationships when I would finally realize I was indeed in love, it was only after a long period of experiencing a good mix of pain and happiness.  Because it’s a love that comes from really knowing something inside out and for merely existing together in the day to day.  I call that love, home.

And, so I’ve decided that I’m experiencing some loss now, and my heart feels it.  I’m mourning things that have passed and knowing that everything in life is always changing and that whenever I do go back to the States again, it won’t be quite the same as it was.  So I feel like I’m leaving a great love in my life and suddenly I’m meeting someone else and it’s not the same feeling at all.  I’m comparing them to the former person.  I’m expecting them to be like the former person.  Trying to dress them the same and I’m missing the music we used to play and the way they used to make me laugh.  In so many ways, I feel that about Santiago when I compare.

But is it good to be that attached to a place or a person where it makes me suffocate parts of who I am because I fear that I’ll lose them?   I have a huge curiosity for life and that will never go away.

One thing I have always liked about myself is the ability to learn from the people I love and allow them to creep into my past without resentments.  And, I am going to use what my former residence has taught me.  And that is to invest in all of the great possibilities that are here and to forget about all the other places I could be right now.

I’m going to have fun with my new space and I even bought two small blank canvases just for the purposes of creating something for myself to hang on my wall.  Hopefully, this will get me painting again.  Photos to come….