Happy Ending?

This is a picture of my friend Frida and I. She is the manager of the spa at the hotel where my gym is. I met her when I went to work out the first time. I have never made a friend at the gym before. I had always sorta thought that was not so much a heterosexual thing [Let me take this opportunity to congratulate the gay men who enjoy free gym sex. I think if we heterosexuals found a way to steal this idea, we’d all be in much, much better shape. Can you imagine how much more exciting the thought of a trip to the gym would be if there was a chance that someone might try to get busy with you in the showers? I might finally be able to get rid of that pesky back fat.] Luckily, Frida had recently moved to Samarinda and was cruising for some new friends. This worked out perfectly because at the time I had zero.

I now feel a lot like a cast member of that show Hotel from the 80s starring Connie Selleca before she married John Tesh [who once dated Oprah???] and became a born again Christian.

Everyone I know outside of the University either lives or works at the Swiss-Bell Borneo Hotel. Thank god I joined the gym here or I surely would have gone bananas by now.

Today, I decided to try a message and a body scrub at the spa that Frida manages. I figured I should take advantage of these things while I’m in a country where I can actually afford them [an hour or message and an hour of scrub cost about $35]. I wasn’t sure if I should keep my undies on or not. However, since I gave up intimate grooming around the same time I gave up make-up I figured why not spare the nice lady my very retro look downtown.

I am a pretty sturdy girl. For better or worse, I never miss a meal and my body has always been under the impression that the best way to cure any minor depression or heartbreak is to eat a pizza and sleep for about ten or twelve hours. Therefore, when the little masseuse asked, “Mam, you like strong muscles?”, I said sure. I figured that I would be more than able to take whatever she was about to dish out. Well, I learned a very important lesson about underestimating the strength of a masseuse because they are cute, little, and Asian. Don’t do it. Jesus Christ! At one point, I was sure she was about to pop my head right off. I know that I winced more than once. I thought about asking her to be a little bit more gentle, but soon realized that I had no idea how. It felt good when she was finished, but the during part was a little painful.

When it was time to turn over she asked, “You want message here?” and pointed to my chest. If she had just gone there I would not have stopped her. It would have just seemed like it was a normal part of the message and something only some uptight, Irish-Catholic, nevernude would think of refusing. However, it felt weird to say, “Yes, Mam! I would very much like you to message my breasts right now”. As a result, I declined. I am both curious and frightened to see if my answer to this question will change after 5 or 6 more months of living in Samarinda, a town where the possibility of any sort of romance is pretty slim.

Say What?

Well, as most of you know, I am a big talker. A really big talker. In fact, I have actually been accused of being a Bigmouth more than once. I have also been accused of not knowing when to stop, when to quit, or when enough is enough. These things are very closely related to having a very, very hard time closing my mouth. However, I always figured that this will help me avoid ulcers; I don't really keep anything bottled up. There is usually no mystery as to where I stand. I have finished recounting numerous stories to friends and family only to hear the response, "Wait. Did you really say that?" Of course the answer is always yes.

Anyways, given the fact that I certainly have the gift of gab you would think that I would be good with languages. Guess what? I'm the worst. I think it's because it's the same part of your brain that deals with math and my brain doesn't really deal with math. I think when my uncle told me in the third grade that math was pointless for all but a fraction of the population who would go on to be engineers and physicists, I really took these words to heart. If I want to figure out tip at a restaurant I have to do an invisible multiplication equation with my finger on the table [which I recently noticed my Nana does as well]. However, I usually skip the invisible math all together and put on what my friend Megan calls my "pretend math face" and wait for someone else to figure out the bill. It's just better that way for everyone involved.

Getting back to language, I currently live in Indonesia where I know about 5 words of the national language of Bahasa. Unfortunately, the 5 words I know [what, milk, miss, thank you, help] do not allow me to say anything useful or string together anything resembling a sentence. Being a girl who usually finds it physically impossible to keep her trap shut you would think this would drive me up the wall. But guess what? It doesn't. I almost find it relaxing. All I can do is smile and nod. At first it is disorienting to hear all these words that don't make any sense, but soon, it feels normal. There is no pressure to make conversation with people you don't have much to say to, or be charming. You simply can't. When my driver picks me up in the morning he says "Hello, miss". I say "Hello". With that out of the way we both settle into our seats for 30 minutes of comfortable silence and listen to the radio.

Even speaking no Bahasa it is possible to get most things I need, like credit on my cell phone, as long as I am willing to humiliate myself a little. In a situation like this my need for chit chat totally wins out and I simply go to the phone guy and say "pulsa", he says some things I don't understand , I give him some money, and he gives me credit for my phone. Taxis? I just smile very politely at the English speaking hotel staff and ask them to call one for me and give them my address so the driver already knows where I live before I get it. Easy Peasy.

At the beginning of the post is the second picture I have posted of David Cross. I was thrilled to find this one because he's on a rollercoaster and I also love roller coasters. I do have a mild obsession with him. He is the only celebrity I have ever almost given crazy eyes to in public. I was a little relieved one night when he left the bar I was in because I feared that I had begun to look at him like a crazy, crazy preson. It's not a romantical thing, I just think he is hilarious. When I first heard his CD "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" in my discman I laughed out loud through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I was in public at the time. Fortunately, I was on the 22 Filmore bus in San Francisco so I totally blended in looking no more crazy than anyone else on the bus. Anyways, he had a guest spot on the show Just Shoot Me a bunch of years ago where he plays someone's mentally disabled brother. After a few episodes it is revealed that he is actually not mentally disabled at all and is just pretending because he is really lazy and he doesn't want to do stuff. I would be completely and totally lying if I said I did not relate to this character in any way right about know. It's not like I'm pretending not to know Bahasa, I really don't. However, I'm not sure knowing how to speak it would be much easier. Right now I can get through most situations simply with a nod and a smile. It's kind of a novel experience for a Bigmouth such as myself.

Welcome to the Jungle

This weekend I went to this Canopy Bridge off the road between Balikpapan [the slightly more modern city with expat oil guys and a Starbucks] and my hometown for the next 8 months, Samarinda. When I climbed the many flights of stairs to the top I was yet again reminded of a fact I sometimes forget: I am totally afraid of the great outdoors. I like nature in very controlled, small doses. This is part of what makes Borneo such a perfect spot for me. Thanks again, Uncle Sam. I think at heart, I am really just a big Sissy Mary. Or perhaps, I just have a very real and deep respect for Mother Nature. I did make it all the way up and I did cross all the wobbly bridges up in the trees, but I'm not sure I really liked it. The whole thing made my heart beat a little too fast and I had one or two visions of plummeting to my death. I mean, in a nation that is way up high on the corruption index, can I really trust they are inspecting their canopy bridges in the jungle as well as they should be?

Jungle canopy bridge inspections aside I just feel like if it's a battle between me and Mother Nature I am going to loose every time. She is much bigger and badder than myself. I had a sorta romance with my lab partner from sophomore year biology class [I say sorta because I though it was a romance and he thought it was a collection of "super fun" weekends] a couple of years ago who was really into extreme sports [As one of my friends pointed out it was never going to work since the only things he had ever seen me do to the extreme were be extremely sarcastic, extremely tipsy, and extremely loud] . He spent all of his free time extreme skiing, extreme kayaking, extreme mountain biking, extreme hiking, and extreme exercising. To be honest, just hearing about all of it made me feel completely and totally exhausted. But more than that, I could in no way understand how anyone would want to have a collection of hobbies that could very likely make them dead. Call me a weenie, but I like my hobbies to have a very, very small chance of landing me in the morgue. Maybe you can make it to the top of Mount Everest. But who cares? Why try? In the battle between man versus nature, nature will most likely be the victor. Perhaps this is the sort of attitude which keeps me from both fully enjoying canopy bridges in the jungle and from being a CEO.

This is a picture of me happy because I have reached the other side of the canopy bridge. I am with one of my new baby friends. I do not call them baby friends because they are immature. On the contrary, they are super smart, ambitious, and mature. They all have career plans and have started applying for jobs, internships, and fellowships for next year. I only call them my baby friends because I am just about old enough to be their mom. I have had young friends before. My favorite guy in Brooklyn is also barely 22. However, he has hair longer than mine and plays in a metal band so that friendship felt a bit different; he never made me question my own level of maturity in the same way. These girls have all hit the ground running at their Indonesia posts. They have found places to volunteer in their communities, started learning how to speak Bahasa Indonesian, and made friends with the locals. I, on the other hand, have really impressed myself with the fact that I was able to harass one of my co-workers enough to get cable installed at my little house and have begun flossing my teeth on a regular basis [if there only was a way I could let Dr. Heller, my 68 year old hip-hop/soul music loving dentist in Chinatown, know about the good news, I know he'd be super proud of me]. Basically, they make me feel like a combination of these two people.

Jeff Spicoli

Auntie Mame

They also make me think about what I really wanted at their age. After I giving it some thought I realized that all I really wanted at 22 was to be cool. I wanted to see cool bands play. I wanted to live in a cool neighborhood. I wanted to drink at cool bars, eat at cool restaurants, and watch cool movies. I did all of these things and I had a really good time. I never really gave all that much thought to having a career or what my goals might be. To be honest, I'm not sure I do now either. Maybe it's a cop out, but a good part of it I attribute to my biological destiny. My grandfather spent a good portion of his career as a spy threatening to go and sell hot dogs on the beach [an idea that I can totally see the appeal of. Apparently, one of my aunts agrees since she was discussing a smoothie stand on the beach a short time ago]. In addition to this, I've been told my biodad had a hard time convincing the good people at the NBA that he really enjoyed his work for them all the time [I think me genetics may have prevented me from convincing the NYC DOE I enjoyed their abuse and harassment. It makes sense. It was a bit less glam than either the NBA and the CIA and both of those men were directly responsible for my genome]. See? I just don't think I was meant to be a captain of industry. My true greatest gifts are making inappropriate jokes, chit chatting, and grinding people's gears. I have yet to figure out how to parlay these into a fulfilling and successful career. However, since marrying well has not yet worked out I guess I will have to keep figuring out how to have a j-o-b. Preferably one that gives me the summers off.

My New Students

Some of my friends have asked what teaching is like over here and I realized that I hadn't really mentioned it. This is partly because I've never been a big work talker. I have never understood why people think I want to hear about their job in minute detail. Guess what? I don't. I have never met your co-workers, probably never will, and I have my own job I usually don't want to talk about. There are extremely few work stories that fall under the universally funny and entertaining category. However, because I guess I'm a total hypocrite, I will say a few works about my job here. But first I think I have to explain my point of reference a little bit.

My first real teaching job was teaching kindergarten in Flatbush, Brooklyn. During that year I chased a little boy down Newkirk Avenue, confiscated a pencil case filled with broken glass, had a student named Tupac describe sex as when you "put the pee-pee in the culo" [as demonstrated by his uncle and 12 year old sister], let the pervy old man Russian school aid rub my back so he would let me use the copy machine [the prospect of entering the classroom without the coloring pages I promised was far more terrifying], watched a Haitian school aid threaten to cut off the ears, noses, and penises of naughty students while waving around a giant scissors [she oddly had much better control over them than I did], had a principal with extreme cankles hide in the bathroom in order to surprise me in the classroom and threaten to fire me, and had a student tell me she knew all about the holiday of Hanukkah after watching a movie called Whitey Has Hanukkah. I felt a lot like a warden in a prison for midgets. I would get home each day and feel like I had been beaten with a stick for a very long time. I could not even unwind with a glass of wine. No way. I could only sit, drink diet coke, and either watch an incredibly stupid show like CSI or, on a very bad day, just stare at the wall. Things were so bad that I don't think David Caruso's horrible acting even bothered me at this point.

During that year I had two recurring fantasies. On was that instead of being a kindergarten teacher in the ghetto, I could be a garbage man. I thought it would be such a treat to be all alone on the back of that truck with nobody yelling at me or threatening me. I could be all alone with the wind in my hair busy developing great, chiseled arms. Wasn't all that freedom worth a little trash? The only thing I worried about is that it might be a little embarrassing at parties to admit I was a trashlady. My other fantasy was running away from home. I figured if I just went to Port Authority with a backpack and boarded a random bus I would be free. Sure I would be unemployed and have no health insurance, but at least I wouldn't have to go back to PS 182.

My second job was better, but not much. I enjoyed teaching high school, but again my boss had a special sort of hate for me [Bizarre coincidence I swear!]. I'm not sure what I did exactly, but she would constantly give me hate eyes, terrible evaluations, and suggest that I didn't have the necessary "passion" for the "vocation" of teaching. She sorta made it sound like being a nun, which had never really sounded like my sort of thing. She also would suggest I was not competent to teach illiterate gang members basic literacy skills and I was pretty sure this was not true. I actually loved the students but with all of their morning sickness, court dates, arrests, love triangles, and immigration problems they, oddly, sometimes lacked a bit of the necessary focus for the classroom. However, I secretly loved that some of the baddest boys liked me the best. One even dedicated a whole page to me as his favorite teacher in a book he made for class about his life [the next page was dedicated to the 69, his favorite sexual position which is apparently good for your health AND makes you stronger. Who knew?]. Even though I did love them the high schoolers, sometimes they too wore me out too. I had to remind them that telling someone to suck their balls ["mama huevos"], asking me if I was a virgin, talking about anal sex, and having a boy girl fist fights were all not really appropriate for class. However, at least at this point meeting a friend for dinner on a Tuesday night no longer sounded like an insane idea and I was able to give up watching CSI.

Comparatively speaking, teaching in Indonesia is a little bit easier. I get to class and look out onto a room full of polite, smiling faces. What do my new students consider scandalous? Beer! Kissing! Holding Hands! Women Smoking! Knees! Looking out at them it's hard to imagine that anyone is actually that innocent. I think its safe to say that I don't really have to worry about any of them saying anything about anyone's culo or suggesting that anyone do anything with their huevos.

I am calm, rested, and never once have to raise my voice. I had a class of 60 students the other day and they were all quiet and they listened to me. I must say it is nice to no longer count the days until Friday, the days until the next long weekend, the days until Christmas break, the days until Spring break, or the days until Summer. However, when all is said and done I would be lying if I said there in none of it I miss. Yes, when I taught in NYC I yelled, I screamed, I put my head down on the desk in utter frustration, and a few times called security to have a student cuffed. At the same time, I also laughed. Sometimes I laughed so hard my sides hurt and my eyes got watery. The kids were hilarious and some of the least full of shit people I have ever met in my entire life. I probably learned more from them then they learned from me. I might not have had the quietest classroom but they knew that I cared about them and listened to them. This made me feel like I was doing something good with part of my day. So while I am currently more rested and a lot less frustrated, I'm not expecting any laugh riots in any of my classes any time soon and I've always been a sucker for a good laugh riot.

Some Shots of My New Hood In the Developing World

A Store Front

Street Food

Paperboys

My Street

On the way to the University

Swimming in the flooded street

Houses on the river

The Corner Store

An Ojek Stand

3 sisters on their porch

Some Stuff

Where I clearly should have stayed in Bali.

I'm sorta hoping this place doesn't do too much business.

Because really when haven't you found yourself in the bathroom stall of a nightclub and thought, "Wow, what a really excellent time to sit right down and enjoy a nice, leisurely cigarette."

I plan on using this lotion EVERY day.

This is the Indonesian O'Dool's. It would be a lot like drinking Miller Genuine Draft [the champagne of beers] or Natty Ice purely for the taste.

Thank God this sign was there! I probably would have just hopped right up on the seat like it was a squatty potty without it.

The book for the hefty, yet fashionable Muslim Lady.

This is a stand selling some sort of smoked, gutted fish at the Surabaya Airport. It took a lot of self restraint, but I managed to board my flight without one.

Guilty

Does everybody remember the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russel movie Overboard from sometime in the late 80's. I'm not a huge Goldie Hawn fan [and please, please don't get me started on the awfulness that is her daughter Kate Hudson], but I have always loved this movie. She plays a spoiled heiress who falls off her yatch and gets amnesia and then to punish her for being a Paris Hilton like nightmare prior to the accident, Kurt Russel convinces her that she is his wife and lives with him in his filthy house with his unruly sons. Of course, as an heiress Goldie does not know how to do any of the household chores and is disgusted by every task she must perform [that is until she learns the ropes and of course falls in love with Kurt the sexy fisherman].

I have actually sort of felt a little bit like the Goldie Hawn character lately. I am extremely far away from being an hieress, but I have been relating to the part where she has trouble adapting to her new surroundings and the level of grime around her. I must confess, I am not sure I am doing the most spectacular job of getting hip to third world living. I had to step into river of brown water last week to get into my cab during a rainstorm last week. It sent shivers up and down my spine. I also went to lunch at the Chinese place across the street from my school. I kept dreaming of having lunch at Pizza Hut the entire time. Pizza Hut is clean. It does not have flies buzzing around, vegetables left out in a glass case in the hot, sweaty sun all day, and the waitresses all wear shoes. Lastly, I tried to walk a few blocks to find the post office. I walked about two blocks and realized I didn't want to walk on a road with no sidewalks and a ditch beside me that looked like it was full of some sort of raw sewage. It made me really miss my driver, Anto. He picks me up, smiles, and takes me to and from school. I had to go to the mall and get a sunday cup at McDonald's to mellow out.

I began to realize that while I do want to experience a new country and a new culture, maybe I don't want to experience all of it. Or maybe I want to experience all of it, but from a bit of a distance. Does this make me a jerk? Am I too much of a spoiled American who lacks a sense of adventure? Maybe I am. I still want a bit of distance between me and raw sewage and between my lunch and a bunch of flies.