Tests and Testosterone

So I missed yoga tonight, which has me feeling kind of annoyed, precisely the kind of feeling that yoga is meant to take away, no? It all started this afternoon when I glanced down (it's finally warm enough to go barefoot) and thought, "I can't do yoga next to someone and force them to look at feet that look like this!" I mean, sure, with my glasses off my feet are just adorable little peachy blobs at the bottom of my legs, but for someone with real vision it was not going to be pretty. I was working from home today -- the weather during my "spring break" (M-W of this week) was kind of eh but today it got beautiful, so I did a lot of my reading and e-mail from my deck -- and so decided to get a pedicure from one of the places just down the street, carefully calculating backwards so I'd have enough time for my toes to dry before I headed to yoga, about a 20 minute walk away. Except when doing my oh-so-precise calculations, I hadn't taken Hank into account. Yes, today in lieu of a small Vietnamese woman doing my pedicure (which does always make me feel a bit colonial, even though I am not French and have never said "Indochine") it was a slightly larger Vietnamese man, complete with thin mustache, long nails on the thumb and pinky of each hand, and a jaunty newsboy cap (like those of pre-baldness Britney Spears) worn at a slight angle on his head. Hank (an altered version of the American version of his Vietnamese name) weirdly and kind of sleazily hit on me for basically the entirety of my time in the chair, which was much longer than usual. He complimented me on the beauty of my arm hair, and stroked it. He asked if my breasts were real, as they were also just beautiful. Really, beautiful! (Wink here.) Did I have a boyfriend in Spookytown? Did I have a boyfriend in New York? Did I live alone? He had trained in massage when living in New York and would gladly give me a full body massage for far less than massage parlor prices. He's free on Sunday! He could show me the best place to eat pho and would buy me wine and take me dancing. I thought he was just kidding, or gay, or both, until about halfway through (in general, East and Southeast Asian men display no interest in me whatsoever), but the blowing on my toenails to dry them before the topcoat (this is not usual practice) really sealed the deal. Let's just say I did not give him my usual generous tip.

I had said earlier that I had been thinking of posting a little anti-male screed, but then had decided not to, in part because I am indeed working very hard on focusing on the positive right now (my epiphany yesterday that no matter how long I live here in Spookytown it will never really feel like home to me, so that my future plans need to take that into account, is both helping and hindering here). And I'm not anti-male, really, not at all. But I've just had to deal with so much nonsense in the last month or so that it is making me wonder if it is excruciatingly difficult to walk around with a lot of testosterone coursing through your system and still behave with integrity. Surely it's possible, given all the incredibly great men I know who are friends of mine, partners or husbands of friends of mine, or both. And yet I have to deal with things like the questionable pedicure (which sounds like an Edward Gorey book, now that I think about it) or being hit on in my own kitchen by Mr. Dishwasher Repairman. Or having someone at a conference dinner spend hours being charmingly and directedly flirtatious and plying me with drink and only after not spending the night with me (sweet; not my type, plus I'm not good with the conference hookup) somewhat punitively mention his girlfriend several times on the walk to the conference venue the next morning -- this after days of conversation where whoops! she had somehow miraculously never come up. Or being out with male friends or acquaintances and have them not answer their girlfriends' calls while with me, and then have them tell me about how they are lying/lied/will be lying about the fact that they were out with me even though our interactions are completely platonic. In every possible way. Which makes me feel kind of sleazy, even though I have only the most innocent of intentions. (Full disclosure: for two days least week I exchanged far too many e-mails, each one quite brief, with a long-distance unavailable crush, kind of like IMing for old people, until I realized there was no point in torturing myself and so what if he does like me more than his current girlfriend? and if I like spending time with him more than almost any other man I know [the also-not-a-viable-prospect Zen Boy the only exception in recent months]? What difference does it make? He'll never be able to offer me anything real. But those days with four e-mails apiece probably are something that shouldn't be reported to the GF.) Oh, not to mention the married or in-relationship men who write to me on my internet dating site and invite me to help them cheat on their wives or girlfriends (just got one today in fact). And there's more, but by now you surely have the general idea.

I guess there are two major conclusions I'm drawing from this, both of which, in the end, are in fact kind of positive. The first is my continued resolution to not be in a relationship rather than be with someone I'm kind of ambivalent about because it seems better than being alone. Stovie and I were talking about all this the other day and he pointed out that a lot of people just aren't that happy with the people they're with, but stay with them for whatever constellation of reasons. But then while in this not-so-fulfilling relationship, maybe there's the hookup with the cute fellow conference-goer from another country when far from home. Or one person becomes the jealous, checking-in-all-the-time type because there isn't a secure foundation and so everything and everyone starts to seem suspicious and like a threat, and so lying takes place, because how else can the non-jealous person have a life? The second is the reinforcement of my continued resolution to end up with someone that I can live in a transparent (and thus integrity-filled) relationship with. I don't mean telling everything all the time. But multiple phone calls a day, or knowing where your partner is at all times, or what's going on his life, this should all be because of life integration and interlinking and all the good things, not a defensive control mechanism. I see it in the lives of people around me, although not as many as I'd like to see. So surely I can find it for myself -- now if I could only figure out where...

Back to the homeland

So in mid-January, all the Pangeans gathered from far and wee and spent a week in Puerto Rico to celebrate the 40th anniversary of my parents' honeymoon there. Now, I've spent basically all my life misrecognized as Puertoriqueña (seriously, even when I was a tiny baby on the beach in Nueva York, all the Puerto Rican beach goers would talk to my mom in Spanish, apparently working on the presumption that anyone who produced a baby who looked like me must have the same island origins), so it was nice to finally go back to the place where it all started.

I was so busy with job-type stuff all around the trip (conference interviews in California the week before, Cactus U visit just a few days after) that I didn't have time to think all that much about what it would be like down there, but in the end it was mostly really a lot like I had expected: warm, pretty where still nature-oriented, decrepit, and seriously colonial feeling. Almost everywhere in Puerto Rico reminded me of somewhere else -- not sure why. The green area around the fort in Old San Juan weirdly felt just like the marina in Berkeley, except that the constantly-blowing wind was a balmy 78 degrees and not a nippy 50-something. And there were fewer parasail-skateboarding teens.


I think this will be the album cover for the Pangean Family Singers' upcoming release. And perhaps the one below will be for Mom's solo album.
These black grackles are almost the same as the ones in Berkeley as well, except with more pointy-uppy tails. The streets of the old city were kind of like Spain-meets-New Orleans,
but with more parking for appointees to the consulate of the King of Belgium,
and less room for the disabled. Seriously, once you've wheeled yourself up on this sidewalk, what can you possibly do? It's like 2 1/2 feet wide, so wheel yourself down the street with one wheel hanging over the edge? I think this is a de jure only handicapped ramp.
Many of the photos with Stovie look like they are stills from a romantico ad campaign. This beach, on the Atlantic, was in walking distance of our first rental house, just around the corner. It was filled with wavy goodness, and Stovie and I swam every day (I actually sometimes managed to go in twice a day).
The Carribean was much calmer, lending itself more easily to meditation. And brief kayak trips out to mangrove islands surrounded by wee little brightly colored and friendly tropical fishies, who swam right up to our legs and checked us out (by this point, my camera was dead, so no pictures of adorable tropical fishies, sorry).
We went hiking in the same rain forest my parents visited 40 years previously, but this time only the sprightly youngsters (who were also wearing appropriate footwear) made it up the slippery path to the viewing tower.
Up here it felt a lot like Marin, mostly because of the fog overhead and view of the blue ocean. Except with tropical rainforest below and not dry California grasslands. This made Stovie pensive.Overall, the food wasn't all that great (with the exception of super-tasty fish empanadillas and stews), and we occasionally found ourselves seeking out alternative foodstuffs, or drinking away our culinary sorrows.
Also entertaining were the trash egrets,
imitation vinegar (39 cents as compared to real vinegar at 52 cents, and Stovie point outed -- isn't it just easier to make vinegar than to make imitation vinegar? it seems kind of insane),
and the inflatable Christmas decorations still hanging around weeks after the holiday itself (these inflatable things are Mom's worst holiday nightmare back on The Island, and she complains about them from Halloween right on through to Xmas).
However, equanimity was easily restored by Stovie-led yoga classes on our back deck overlooking the Caribbean -- the yogic effect further enhanced for me by the addition of a $1 temporary tattoo (it is, I believe, two intertwined dragons), put precisely in that yoga-chick place on the lower back. I bought 5 from the vending machine at a fish restaurant a few towns over in the hopes of getting the giant squid tattoo (it was SO cool) and just used up the last one last week. Now I'm in yoga-chick temporary tattoo withdrawal.

Our nation's carp

Well, people, I'm back. Not entirely myself, still a little bruised and sad and freaked out by the whole not-getting-a-job thing and the uncertainty of my future (academic and otherwise), but getting better. If slowly. Really, a lot slower than I expected. Plus the jetlag from a recent European workshop has been keeping the energy levels a bit lower than usual -- I don't know why I have a harder time heading back in this direction, but I always do. My current plan: regain some equilibrium and balance, and only then figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life -- a daunting prospect, to say the least. That's all I'm going to say on the subject for the moment, as dwelling (as I was raised to do -- you know, to pre-worry, worry, and then dwell), it turns out, is not so good for me.

Anyway, my first post, predicated by a series of events over the last few weeks, was going to be a little "what the hell is wrong with so many men I interact with?" screed about being lied to and lied about, but I've decided to save that for another day and instead continue in my attempts to focus on the positive and the present rather than the negative and the absent (it's not as easy as it sounds) (really!). It's "spring break" this week, although since I'm research faculty and not teaching faculty I only get the first three days of the week off. I only learned last week that I had this little vacation time, and determined as I was to maximize said time and fill it with exciting artsy and social activities, it turns out that I have been too tired and low to plan anything really, too tired even to hop a bus up to New York and hang with J-ka et al, which is always delightful. So instead I've been letting myself engage in restorative lounging -- I spent yesterday and Sunday in pajamas right up to 5 or 6 pm, when I rushed off to various social events (Saturday's Irish-fest involved rather a lot of drinking, which may explain a good deal of Sunday's low energy levels) . But today I felt perky enough to head out of the house by 11 -- first, ten miles east to a new, recently hyped discount designer warehouse-type thing that turned out to be mostly too silly for me -- sure, in principle 75% off Prada is great, but when it means going from $4000 to $1000, it's still not headed into my closet anytime soon. After making a more modest purchase (a semi-punk pink ruffled lacy miniskirt, if you must know, which I now have to figure out where to wear) I headed over to our nation's arboretum, located nearby, to see if there were any adorably budding trees to reassure me that spring is really on its way. (It snowed and sleeted Friday night and has been cold ever since.) It turns out there weren't, at least not in easy walking distance, so as the day grew greyer and colder and windier I found myself crouched by the koi pond near the arboretum entrance, listening to the sound of chainsaws hacking down trees nearby and a woodchipper going at full blast. (Our nation's arboretum, by the way, apparently subcontracts out these tree-maintenance/destruction activities -- shouldn't they have staff for that?) Although the machine-generated noise rather undermined what was meant to be a more peaceful, meditative visit, I found myself entranced by the koi. Koi, which are domesticated carp, are meant to be all decorative and are bred for their patterns (e.g., Asagi, with blue scales on top and read scales on bottom), but they're actually kind of freaky and prehistoric looking, and even a little menacing when they swim to the surface and check you out with their bulgy eyeballs and waving whiskery things.

My old camera died a slow and painful death in Puerto Rico this January, and I only just replaced it with something slightly fancier, just fancy enough to confuse the hell out of me, especially since I seem to have put the manual someplace incredibly safe. But after calling J-ka's digital camera technical support hotline, she helped me figure some stuff out, and this is its first public appearance. Hopefully you'll be seeing some slightly better-quality pictures in the weeks and months to come as I figure stuff out, but in the meantime, here are some portraits of our nation's carp, supposedly newly surfaced after wintering at the bottom of our nation's (really quite shmutzy) koi pond.

This one was my favorite, although it did appear to be angry each time it swam by and all I was aiming at the pool was a camera rather than food pellets. Or maybe it could tell how much it reminded me of the delicious smoked whitefish my grandmother used to bring us from her deli in Queens?
This little white one (I keep on wanting to write "this little guy", but really, it could just as easily be a lady fish, no?) was the most persistent in its attempts to subtly indicate how shocked it was that I wasn't feeding it.
Although maybe it's cuter this way:
By the time we hit this little horror-movie moment here, I decided maybe it was time to head out...