Jean Fitz's Weblog

Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose

2012-01-31T01:20:00.002-06:00

My yoga teacher said today, "Peel away the things that no longer serve you." That immediately meant to me that I should be peeling away the tension in my right hip, and all of the muscles around it. Blasted runner's hips!

"Car Ride from Bird's Point of View" Graphite on Paper, c. 1989.

I did this while also thinking about all the things I've been purging this past month since I've gotten back from Mexico. This included old clothes, pointless grudges, obsolete grad school binders, and dust collecting on the top edge of hanging picture frames. I also thought about my digital clutter that is still peeling away: useless photos, documents, doubles of almost everything, incorrect formats, mystery articles and forms that I downloaded (in my sleep, maybe?)

One of the nice things about peeling away what you don't need is unearthing what it is that does serve you...namely, an envelope (analog, not digital) of your childhood drawings that your mother kept.

"Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose" Ink on Paper, c. 1990.

Here is this week's picks from years 7 and 8 of my childhood. These are clearly the years when one has an acute sense of ladies' shoulder pads and a fascination with things in flight.

Awareness of the placement of shoulder seams? Check.
Understanding of knees and elbows? In Artistic development.

You can see through to the other side of the paper a little bit where my mom had dutifully written "Jean Age 8" and "Jean Age 7". For the piece I am titling, "Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose," I am willing to believe I was onto the next drawing and had forgotten to add the suggestion of a nose. I am also willing to believe that I did not worry myself with things that did not serve me. In this case, it was a nose. The image is better without it. I will take this as a lesson from my 7 year old artist-self: Don't bother with things you don't need, move on to the next project, and just keep drawing out what you see around you.

Like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

2012-01-14T01:49:00.000-06:00

Mural on the exterior of a Zapatista school.

How do I sum up a 4 month trip to Latin America and what it's like to be back? Maybe it's like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

I had some of the best chocolate while traveling in Mexico but I will take Chicago tap water any day over all the chocolate in the world. "What's it like to be back?", I'm asked. I just stammer: "Water, I like water. I drink water here, lots of water...man, it's all about water...the American bathroom experience is an incredible privilege. Water, water everywhere."
I felt the polar extremes of traveling (and incidentally, life) in these past few months. When you're traveling:

-You're either on top of the world (or a mountain) or you want to hide under a bed as far away from the world as possible.
-You either want to use all your new vocabulary words or don't want to say a word.
-You want to know everything about the people around you or want to run away...or at least blend into the crowd and disappear.
-You can feel terribly lonely or you can desperately crave time to yourself again or both at the same time.
-You can have the best meal of all time and the worst meal of all time.
-You can not think of home for days, swallowed up by another world, or wish you were around anything familiar. Anything...like peanut butter...like that one sweater you didn't pack, or that one friend you couldn't fit in your bag either...or someone who really understands your jokes.
-You can see it all or see absolutely nothing in a damp noisy hostel, sick with Montezuma.
-You can see the kindest most generous side of people or the sickest and coldest side of humanity.
-You can have the best night's sleep looking out at stars in the jungle or you could sleep in an upright bus seat for 18 hours fearing to open your eyes because the Argentinian orthodontist sitting next to you will take it as permission to start talking to you again.
-You could wake up in Guatemala with half your face swollen or...you could not.
-You can feel like an old lady wishing the 20 year old Australians would take the party elsewhere or you could feel 3 years old and not know how to ask for toilet paper.
-You can attend a Mexican wedding on the beach one week, be in a Zapatista community in the mountains of Chiapas the next, and days later be in the Cancun airport tipping with American dollars for a Caesar salad.
- You can feel completely independent and liberated or you can feel tied down and dependent on strangers and guide books.
Here is some excerpts of writing from my last days in Mexico:
"..After 15+ hours in the autobus from San Cristobal to Chetumal, I finally made it to the town, near the Belize border at 2am. During the bus ride, I took lifesaving Dramamine for motion sickness and contemplated the stars and palm trees lit by the moon out the window. In my Dramamine-induced state, I tried etching into my mind the grand thoughts and poetic moments that can only happen on a bus in the middle of Mexico doped up on Dramamine. But like my eyeglasses and my sun hat, the transcendent thoughts disappeared into the abyss. I would have gotten too sick trying to write it down on those roads..."

Bus survival pose with mustard yellow hoodie.

"I ate practically nothing except leftover lime-flavored peanuts, corn nuts, and Mexican cookies the whole ride...mostly because of the lack of meat-less options at the bus stops. A few hours in, the bus got some sort of rock or debris stuck in the back wheel. We didn't move for hours while it was repaired, since we were hours from any other bus to pick us up. I didn't bother to look at the time. I just stared at the moon or closed my eyes. At some points, military officials shined flashlights in our eyes while marching down the bus aisle with guns strapped to their chests. I think this happened a couple times at various checkpoints. Things blur..."
"...I got to Chetumal so late, I assumed I would not see my friend I was planning to meet. As I usually do when I get to a foreign town without a plan, I ran into some Dutch travellers. I shared a cab with the family going to a nice hotel. By nice, I mean the bed had bed sheets! The hotel where my friend was staying the next night was either not accepting guests at that hour or did not have any vacancies. I just understood “no, you can’t now” in the receptionist’s Spanish. My blasted Spanish. I’m not sure I’d do better in English at that hour though. I went to the other hotel with the Dutch family and I paid for a rather expensive room. It was easy to rationalize the expense considering that in the week before I had been living for nothing while sleeping in a cinema...I crashed immediately in my new fancy room with a mini fridge and hair dryer and television I would never use. I had not had anything to eat. Sometimes sleeping is easier than finding food..."
"...the next morning I got a hold of my friend using the correct string of mysterious numbers to make a Skype connection to a Mexican cell phone. I walked around the block to her hotel room. Exhausted but happy to see a familiar face, we walked towards the water, to see the Atlantic side of things, later the duty free zone at the Belizan border, and then I was off to an overnight bus again to catch a morning flight out of Cancun..."
My last exhausting days of the trip made my arrival in Chicago that much sweeter.
The first person I talked to in the United States was, of course, a customs agent. Our conversation went something like this:

Customs Agent: [Looking incredulously at my list of countries I've visited] What were you doing in Guatemala?
Me: [Envisioning insects biting my face] Umm, beh, uhhh, well, traveling?
-Customs: [Furling his brow] So how long were you in Mexico?
-Me: Since September.
-Customs: [Furling brow more dramatically] What were you doing?
Me: [Private panic about what I've been doing with my life.] Well, just, uh, studying Spanish.
Customs: [Eyebrows relax] Oh, you're a student. So what brings you here today?
Me: Well, I have a connecting flight to Chicago. I'm going home.
Customs: Yeah, but why today?
Me: [Existential crisis...yes, why am I back today? Why not next week or tomorrow?] Well, umm, I have to work now.
Customs: [Eyebrows start furling again] but you said you were a student.
Me: Well, I was but now I have to work. I'm finished being a student. And it's time to work.

This is a google image for "furled brow" but also resembles the customs agent.

Customs: [Stares incredulously again for a long moment with my passport and looks tired] Welcome home.

So here I am at home. My Chicago accent is back in full force and people laugh at my jokes again. And yes, it's definitely time to work...and visit friends...and absentmindedly eavesdrop on Spanish conversations in the grocery store...and eat peanut butter...and take hot showers...and listen to Pandora...and drink large glasses of sweet, delicious Chicago tap water.

I touched lions and dinosaur eggs. Now what?

2011-12-08T23:45:00.000-06:00

I’m not a PETA member or an animal rights activist per se. Maybe it’s time I step up to the plate. I do love animals and cuddling fluffy puppies...or baby tigers as the opportunity arises. I’m a vegetarian primarily for health reasons but of course, support and appreciate fair treatment for all animals. While there are so many issues worth fighting for in regards to the rights and dignities of humans, the way we treat our animals is also a sign of how we treat each other. Thank you, Upton Sinclair, Howard Lyman, Julia Butterfly Hill and countless others for pointing out the sick relationship we have had and continue to have both biologically and mentally with our eco-systems. I try to avoid soapboxes on my blog but I thought about all of these issues rather intensely this past weekend.

I wrote to my sister when I safely got back into Oaxaca last weekend... “I went with my Swiss classmate to visit this really wealthy man's house and spent the night in his mansion. He owns a private zoo. It was the strangest past 24 hours of my life. One for the book.” My sister has suggested I write a book.

So here's the story before I adapt it to the book:
My friend from language school was invited by this wealthy Mexican man to visit his home. They met on a weekend excursion to see ruins outside of town the weekend before. Red flag! Where have I seen this before? Right, the other stranger's house in Mexico. Read here: http://heartjean.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html
My Swiss friend was willing to go if I would join her. It wouldn't be so strange if there were two of us going, would it? I've done far riskier things. We decided to accept his invitation to stay at his home for one night. I think we had an exit strategy...like, if it was really awful we could always stay at a hotel or something.
We took a 3 hour bus to the town Tehuacan in the state of Puebla. Our new "friend" picked us up at the bus station in a fancy car with his niece and nephew riding along. Nope, nothing strange here. A few minutes later we arrive at a large gated home.
As the gates opened to his driveway, a bullet-proof-vest-wearing-guard shooed the scores of chihuahuas out of the way of our car pulling in. The wealthy man sells chihuahuas on the side. Good business, he says.

We entered the house filled wall-to-wall with taxidermy-- (I was assured all animals died of natural causes on his property). While the wealthy man and his nephew attended to some business at the dining room table, the niece brought out a baby leopard for us ladies to cuddle. At this point, I have no idea where this animal came from. The nephew and wealthy man were still talking about something at the table so the niece started opening cabinets and showing us fossils, dinosaur eggs, pre-hispanic-mesoamerican artifacts. We passed them around like we were shopping for a good centerpiece at The Pottery Barn.
The wealthy man found us in his office a while later fondling artifacts thousands of years old and posing with stone tablets with mysterious inscriptions. The occasional flamingo could be seen sauntering past the office window in the backyard. The wealthy man openly admitted he bought his pieces on the black market. He wanted to start a museum one day. Fascinating, right?
Well, as you can imagine, we had many questions! Number 1: Why did he invite us strangers to his home? His round-about answer suggested that he enjoyed sharing what he had and that he trusted foreigners in his home far more than his fellow Mexicans. Hmmm. After leaving our things in guest bedrooms, we went for a ride to the local shopping mall for sandwiches with the wealthy man and his niece. You're right, this isn't in the guidebooks.

Nighttime had fallen on the house of enchanted black market treasures...so what to do?---- That's right!...say goodnight to all the exotic animals in the backyard! So off we went out the back door of the house: myself, my Swiss friend, the niece with a baby tiger on a leash, the nephew and two guards following behind walking with flashlights. We followed closely behind as the wealthy man clanged on the cages with his flashlight and cooed at his cats. By cats I mean, lions and tigers...and bears and zebras and monkeys suddenly emerging out of the darkness! The feeling of walking down a pitch black pathway and then realizing you are within inches of a white tiger's face is a sensation to remember.

My Swiss friend and I later retired to guest bedrooms to quietly whisper our private reactions to these strange environs. "Um, why are we here again?" "Was that really a dinosaur egg?" "Does it matter?" "How many foreigners are buried in the backyard?" "Just kidding, haha!" "I think I walked through monkey sh!t...or was that from the chihuahuas?" "How does the wealthy man have money again?" "Look at the pretty marble floors in the bathroom." "He was married to how many European women?" "Which Mexican political party's campaign did he support again?" "Is that his nephew or a cousin? Are you sure that's his niece? No, I heard niece." "What kind of laws are there for having tigers in your backyard in Mexico?" "Is this what you imagined when you met him last week?"

The next morning I couldn't eat the cow intestine soup served for breakfast but my Swiss friend said it had interesting texture. I had quesadillas and we sat surrounded by jade skulls and arrowheads discussing what mountains the wealthy man had climbed and how much he likes Russia. It was a largely male dominated conversation with the nephew and wealthy man at the heads of the tables with us four girls quietly chewing our breakfast, speaking in rapid Spanish and using sprinklings of choppy English. Soon thereafter we went to see all the animals in the private zoo in their full daytime glory. The wealthy man often opened the metal doors so we could take unobstructed photos of the amazing creatures.

The wealthy man says that his cats have a huge rate of reproduction. More "mainstream" zoos don't understand how he does it with such a small space. He says it's because he loves them and the animals have fun looking at each other. At one point, I tried to tactfully ask about how he learned to take care of so many animals and if he has a lot of legal obstacles. His short answer was that he just started reading about animals over time and that he has to keep microchips in all of his animals so that they are accounted for by the government.
So what to do with that information? Well, in that moment, you can only feed marshmallows to 7 foot grizzly bears and pet the fine silky black coats of jaguars. We had our choice of the stuffed ones inside or the live ones in the cages.
After hours of being up close and personal with dozens of species in the wealthy man's zoo, we went for lunch in town and were dropped off at the bus station...without a scratch.

He was a nice enough man but I was ready to scratch under the surface a bit more. Luckily, others have scratched here before questioning whether these animals should be confined as they are. There have been petitions to move the animals to a better habitat. There is also a short film investigating its ethics as well. I'm not sure what to do next. But writing about it is a start.