My Community Art Project and Why I Want to Create Again…

In July I started working on a mural as a community volunteer project in one of the poorer areas of Santiago.  The community is about a 40 minute bus ride from where I live in Santiago and for about six weeks before the start of the mural, I helped Roxana with a project she initiated by volunteering to teach English to kids.  More than anything, it became a play session with the kids, creating games to practice the alphabet, numbers and very basic vocabulary.  They loved it.  They loved it so much that when I came back recently to paint, the kid’s faces lit up, asking me when the next class would be.  My heart sank a little, thinking about how we hadn’t planned to return again.  They actually really missed us.  This wasn’t some boring class that they were forced into, they actually had become quite affectionate with us.  It made me think about how these kids need so much more than a 6 week volunteer project, they need this type of nourishment all of the time.  I think it takes time to build a relationship and I wonder about what a shame it is to begin getting close to the kids, only to leave them just as they were becoming so comfortable with us.  At the same time, it was obvious that we made some kind of positive impression on them.

When I first started the project in July, I had the help of Roxana, my friends Angela and Dinah, and a few others from the community.  And because of the winter, we put a hold on finishing the project.  For the last two weekends, I came back to finish.  Having this break was actually good for me because after learning more Spanish, I was able to communicate a little more with people in the community.  So when I noticed a little group of children behind me, watching me paint, I let them join in.

This is the first time I’ve ever painted with kids in this way and they really did a good job.  At first they were a little shy and nervous about putting the paint on the wall, fearing that they would do something wrong and so a lot of what they painted ended up being very small.  I encouraged them to eventually paint larger.  And, so the whole mural is by no means consistently proportional, but maybe that gives it some character.  The little girl and her cousin actually consistently painted with me all day, painting butterflies, dogs and flowers.  I gave them little instruction and basically let them do what they wanted.  I think they were a little surprised by my confidence in them for allowing them to paint so freely on something so large and so public.  They were really proud of what they painted too and I like to think of them getting older and remembering what they had painted years ago.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how my feelings toward my art career have changed.  I spent so much energy working and developing my art in the States.  I used to joke that my art was like my kids that I had to always pick up when my show was over and I was tired of driving them all over the place on the freeway in California and that they were spending so much of my money.  I look at photos of my loft now and I don’t miss it.  I think I allowed the whole idea of art as a career to take over so much that it replaced the joy of creating and expressing myself through my painting and ultimately robbing me of enjoying all the other things in life that I love because I was forcing myself into this certain artist lifestyle that was more determined by what I thought I was supposed to do according to the art world rather than finding the passionate within myself to forget about “making it” and just create.

In the States, I somehow lost track of my original attraction to art as I saw it more and more as a means of paying the rent.  Being here has separated me from continuing this and now I’ve been able to return to the desires that I initially had when I was younger, back before I was even in art school when I would stare at paintings and imagine other lifetimes or listen to music that really caused me to think differently of the world, no matter how simplistic the lyrics or how accomplished the artist.  All that time spent trying to make money from my own art detached me from enjoying my own work, let alone the work of others.  Sadly, I think even art school detached me from this in ways because suddenly I had all these people in my life constantly discussing what was good art and what was bad art, or what was marketable, more intellectual, low brow, etc…  All of a sudden art seemed so serious and no longer mysterious and fun.  It’s like I couldn’t see something without comparing it to something better, making some kind of judgment about it in my mind.  All that imagination and inspiration I felt long ago…how did I abandon that?  It’s like through trying so hard to pursue art, I disconnected myself from my true feelings and desires.  Sounds like the opposite of what art is supposed to do.

I realized something lately through learning Spanish.  Because I can’t express myself in Spanish like I can in English.  I don’t know the words or I don’t know how to put the words together.  I have to limit myself in what I can say and it’s quite frustrating to not be able to form what I can in English when I want to express something.  So I have to keep it very basic.  And since I don’t have the words, it’s put me more in touch with recognizing how I feel.  I mean I have to really thinking about what I am feeling, so I can choose the correct words.  So now I can appreciate the beauty in expressing something simple again.  And because I have been learning a lot of Spanish through the arts; through music and through books, now I am concentrating on the very simple beauty of how the words are used.  This is art, because language is expression.  It makes me appreciate so much how we express our thoughts.  It makes me not want to take this for granted.

I think the joy of just being able to express myself is returning.  I’m remembering those early feelings of discovering well known artists and writers for the first time and how I felt when I would see something inspiring.  I feel it through learning a new language and sharing my language with others.  It brings me back to what I had already figured out when I was a teenager and later forgot about, that my love of art involves other people.  It doesn’t come from me isolated in my studio trying to conquer a project to get paid.  The end product – the actual finished painting, for me is only 25 percent of why art is so important.  Painting with the kids, painting with other artists, using art to ignite conversation, to influence others, to make someone’s life more inspiring, to connect myself with others…these are all more interesting and give me more of a reason to start again.  I guess that everyone has their own role in life and probably I will never be like some of my friends here whom are very successful in the financial industry and can assert themselves in ways I can’t.  They are great at what they do, and their passions are different than mine.  But, I can assert myself artistically in ways that they can’t.  I need to keep in mind what I can do and what it means to be me and somehow it almost seems like a responsibility to myself to create art because its the greatest way I know of how to give myself to others.

Getting back to myself..

For so long I have been talking about manifesting the things I want and trying hard to attain these things, in order to improve my life.  I feel like I have been doing the work for this for years now.   I’ve read so many books that have made me change parts of my life in terms of how I take care of myself physically or that have altered my perspective about life in general.   I’ve tried going to all kinds of churches and spiritual centers, I’ve done 12 step programs…I did the Artist Way.  All of these things gave me something, but they never gave me that thing that kept me from feeling still partially dissatisfied.

My friend Roxana asks me this question:   “What is it you have to offer other people?”  As I rack my brain for the most truthful answer to this question, mostly I find myself silent.  This she says is what I really have to work on.

Personally, at first I found this very frustrating as my immediate response was:  AGH!  I’ve done enough already!  I mean, from everything I have mentioned above, I felt like this is actually more of time in my life to finally relax, and instead her question left me once again thinking of what more I could do artistically or what kind of project I could get myself involved in..

But then, I realized the other day after the 4^th of July how much I just enjoy laughing and being with people…I enjoy making people laugh.  I enjoy laughing at myself.  In fact, I love it.  I love all of the ridiculous things that I do and all of the ridiculous things that happen to me and I love sharing it.  For so long I feel like my sense of humor has been buried, in the midst of trying to become someone I am not.  And, while it might not be the most productive way of being, I secretly love being that person who didn’t read the schedule and who asks what we are doing for the rest of the day.

Recently, my friend wrote me from the States informing me in a long email about how she was so inspired by me and the things I have accomplished that she pushed herself to attempt becoming an intern for LA Yoga Magazine, and upon inquiring into this, instead was offered to be one of the staff writers.  She actually wrote about owing it to me for getting this new position.  This makes me feel somewhat weird, because in so many ways, I don’t see myself doing anything that magnificent here.  I mean plenty of people travel and many people work abroad in much more unique and amazing careers.   And, I always imagine how I need to keep striving to be better to achieve that sort of status whether it be as an artist or in something else.  In fact, I am always seeing how I need to be more like her.  It has never occurred to me that maybe by just being me in all that I am not…is enough.  It was enough to somehow change part of my friend’s life.  In addition, I have received so many comments on my blog from people, emails and such that have really blown my mind.  For one, I am astonished that people actually read the thing, but for some people to keep reading every entry and to write me about how I inspired them or made them think just makes me feel great.  When I think about it, maybe what I see as a life that I constantly want to change and alter and improve upon is actually just the life that is okay as it is.

So maybe the most honest answer that I can give to what it is I have to offer people is actually just me being myself.

And instead of always searching for something outside of myself to give to the world, I am better off beginning by just expressing the person I am now and investing in things in which I find joy.  That is the most positive thing I can offer at this point.  This constant search for something beyond what I am in this moment, has only lead me to constant struggle and this is not the kind of energy I want to continue sharing.  Certainly, volunteer work and furthering my art career, along with using the social system that we have of entering certain careers is important, but those things can never be fully realized until I am okay with being without them first and by just being solely the person I am in all honesty.

I started this blog to have something fun to do…to record my time here and because I imagined I’d go crazy if I wasn’t working on something creative.  And, I came here for the love of traveling.  Travel and writing, along with sharing a sense of humor have been by far the things in which I find the most joy in my life.  To not permit myself to do the things in which I find so much enjoyment, would keep me from fully expressing that which I am.   And this is part of the reason I have always felt unfulfilled in the past.

As I’ve mentioned so many times on here, I never allowed my mind any amount of silence in the US.   And here, I just don’t worry about much at all.  I sometimes wonder if it is because the energy here is different.  Maybe in the US, we have a shared energy of things having to be just right all of the time, a shared energy of not having enough, of not being in the right place.  All of this can be very confusing and contradictory as we listen to so many people in all sorts of authority roles tell us how we should live our lives.  Perhaps it’s our media, our news never having anything positive to say, the fact that we love competition, the fact that we for the most part are obsessed with work, the fact that we often love to see people get what we think they deserve and nothing more and that also as a nation we seem to thrive off of fear.  It seems to consume us, making us afraid of not having insurance for every possible thing that could go wrong and making us feel like we must save and save for any conceivable emergency that might happen instead of actually using the money that we earn for any kind of true pleasure.  We go to work sick because we fear disappointing others and we only rarely take vacations.  We are accustomed to attaching guilt to those that actually do miss work.  We are conditioned to avoid certain people and places because we imagine them unsafe.  It seems like we live a large part of our lives thinking only about what could go wrong.  We have no training to handle any uncertainty or to see where it actually may be of value.  I wonder if this is why I felt like life was so overwhelming back in the States and why it was so hard for me to move beyond things or to say goodbye to things a lot of the time…so afraid to be without my own false security.  I’m really not sure, but here, I just don’t feel that kind of pressure and I sometimes wonder how I will feel when I once again am living in the US.

I am not saying it is better here or that there aren’t people here that don’t fall into the same category.  And, there are certainly tons of things I miss and wish I had here.  So many things are much more available and more convenient in the States and being here has in fact made me more appreciative of those things.  Let me repeat once again how much I realize how spoiled I was in California.  I had a very good life despite the numerous complaints I often daily voiced.  I lived near the beach with many great friends, not to mention inexpensive food of different varieties from all over the world available always, stores open all night, tons of cultural things to do, places to ride my bike, places to do just about anything imaginable.  Maybe the only thing absent for me in California was joy.  And I’m not talking about the joy that comes from always being constantly entertained, but merely the joy and happiness for all that I have and all that I am and all that I CAN do. Losing my job and experiencing periods of unemployment during the last two years in the States began to shift my perspective on this.  And here, while I can only rarely eat food at a restaurant, as food is very expensive, and while I don’t have a car to escape the city and the smog (it’s much, much more expensive to even own a car here, not to mention gas is at least double the price here than in the States), I now depend on the few friendships I’ve made, and I find activities to do on the weekend.  And I actually get really excited about the possibility of getting into a car and spending the day walking in nature…not such a novelty in the States.  But, I actually feel like, wow, I GET to do this here, while in the States, I only felt that things were never enough.  The ironic thing being that I always had so much more there.

I don’t love it here.  I do love my own country.  But, I am also trying to understand how I can love a place full of so much hostility.

Sometimes I read the news feed on Face Book and I see so many complaints from different people in the States.  I see people write about what they consider are incompetent people at their jobs.  I see people write about their neighbors, their relationships…with so much negativity.  I get it.  I just wonder though if we have all jointly manifested this kind of national unhappiness through all of the expectations we have created of one another, including ourselves.  And, I just wonder if somehow we could all practice a little empathy.  It’s not necessary that everyone be perfect nor that we all be the same.   And also I wonder if we could practice a little more joy for that which we do have an abundance of, especially compared to the rest of the world.   If we could all realize how much we have available to us and how much freedom we waste by not changing parts of our lives that are no longer doing ourselves or anyone else justice.  These are things that many people are unable to change in other parts of the world due to many reasons that are economic or social or because their governments won’t allow it.  We ARE actually free to do what we want.  It’s not always without a lot of effort and not always without giving something else up, but the point is that we GET to make those choices.  It just takes some courage to live life a little less secure and to allow our real selves to be expressed.

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.

Where is the fun?

I have been discovering that it is hard to meet people in their 30’s here…meaning single people like me who have come here just to break up the routine of life in their home countries.  I meet a lot of people in the 20’s age range who are usually first time travelers and students, and beyond that I meet a lot of people who have come here to retire.

Roxana and I recently hosted an event for expats in their 30’s.  Although about 18 people confirmed that they were coming, only four people showed up.  And, I am no judge of appearance, but the two men were perhaps not in their 30’s.  The thing we did all have in common was the frustration we felt in connecting with other people similar to ourselves…30’s, 40’s, 50’s….it’s all the same.

After this event, we had to think about what kind of social life we are to expect here.

Around the time of this event, which I credit Roxana for organizing, (I just showed up and attached my name to the event posting), we met for dinner at her apartment and she invited her friend.

Her friend is a psychotherapist.  Maybe you can see where I am going with this – but suddenly dinner seemed more like an intervention for all involved.  He knew as much English as I knew Spanish, so Roxana had to translate.  He made me draw a pie of the areas of life in which I divide my time.  About three quarters of my pie was work.  Aside from my actual job, there were maybe 3 big slices of projects I was getting into, starting, finishing, creating…  Very productive!  The rest…the rest was time I spend on the internet researching things for projects I can start, finish and create.  Very productive, very driven and also maybe very boring.  My pie looks like a resume.  I was a little disappointed to discover my life resembles a corporation instead of a human being.  Where’s the fun…aside from the small sliver of pie that included dinner at Roxana’s apartment?

He also recognized that not one part of the pie reflected time that I spend being a woman.

A woman?

How from everything I’ve learned in life in the US about working hard and striving to do better does it come down to my biggest problem being that I’m not having enough fun?  And being a woman?

What a bummer.

My diagnosis:  I need to have more fun and go out and meet people and not to just network for work, but to actually laugh and just hang out and be idle.

When did my life become so serious?  The thing I love to do most in life is laugh and play and they might be the things I spend the least amount of time doing these days other than the times I am able to slip in some sarcasm or joke about some absurd situation I have put myself in and please believe those situations are ample for me here.  I love ridiculous movies.  The other night I stayed up until 2am watching National Lampoon’s National Vacation on TV for the three hundredth time.  And, thank god it was in English.  A while ago, I tried watching School of Rock and couldn’t bare Jack Black’s dubbed in Spanish voice.  The thing is, I still feel very much like a kid and I need to defend my silliness.  But, it’s kind of difficult when at the same time I am expecting myself to be like this person that is supposed to be constantly spiraling higher and higher towards success and self improvement in all ways every day.

I felt pulled in two directions sometimes in the US.  Because at times, I missed the days when I could go to an art exhibition and steal the wine and barely look at the art or the times when my friends and I would go dance every night at the Turkish bar in Laguna Beach instead of taking advantage of the studio spaces we were so fortunate enough to have at the time.  I mean, come on.  We had extremely affordable art studios in the most expensive art city in California and we only half used them for work.  Not to mention we lived in a place with tons of possible connections…an abundance of people ripe for networking, but it was the last thing I did.  Maybe ever since I turned 30, I felt like I had to pay for it by constantly working, worrying and wishing to get ahead.  Everything I’ve been doing for the last several years has been in order to fulfill some sort of purpose to improve my life.  I did yoga, because it made me feel better or I road my bike for exercise.  I met friends because there was an art show or some other event.  Occasionally I would see my old friends who were also trying to recover all their years of not getting ahead.  I also had a relationship with little romance.  We were like two individuals working as a team to help each other survive, very honorable, but we had very little fun together just as a couple in separation from everything we had going on.   In fact the relationship mostly involved working, be it for money or on ourselves.  I don’t mean to sound cheesy here, but a little romance can go a long way.  It does wonders to your soul to feel wanted and to feel the way in which god made me.  As a woman.

So it’s true.  Where is the time I spend being a woman, you know, kinda like I used to do once upon a time back in my early 20’s before I somehow forgot what it was like to live like a female and not a constant problem solver…

This question has really thrown me off.

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.