In Which the Public Becomes Private and the Private Public

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Last night, as he introduced fabled British writer Jeanette Winterson, Chip Rolley, the Artistic Director of the Sydney Writers Festival put forth the argument that much of what may have been private in our lives half a generation ago is now public. This is underwritten by the theme of the Writers Festival of “the public and the private,” but it seems that this is only half of the conversation. Sure, people now talk about meeting strangers with whom they have “public relationships” on Twitter. This is the age of supposed freedom of information, both yours and everyone else’s, but it seems that this comes at the price of an analogous inversion. While our previously private lives become public, there is sizeable support to make what was previously public into a private affair.

I grew up coloring under desks and on the floor of national literacy conferences. I went through a phase, in third grade, where the process of living stressed me out to the degree that it resulted in a little bit of pediatric acid reflux and a lot of not wanting to go to school. Because it was agreed upon by my recently divorced parents that I liked the academic engagement of school and wasn’t trying to bail to avoid it, they took into account the fact that my third grade teacher was controlling and overly systematic, especially for a kid with a clear sense of his own systems, and when I put my foot down, no one made me go.

I may have resisted going to school (I missed 22 days in third grade) partially because I really enjoyed going to work with my mom. The range of people in her workplace (then Philadelphia’s Mayor’s Commission on Literacy) seemed both more varied and more interesting than the potential interpersonal engagement of the school day. Everyone seemed to enjoy having me around, and often there was the promise of half a sandwich eaten in the office or in a restaurant full of other adults who had been mysteriously consumed by their offices and were, at lunchtime, released out into the streets. Plus, I understood the work that my mom did as a program manager for Welfare-to-Work programs to be of chief changemaking power, so I felt like I was at the center of the action. Change, as I understood it at age nine, was made by non-profit organizations that were both separated from governmental forces and by some invisible tether of funding and legislation, inextricable from them.

It makes infinite sense to me, as I’ve watched the funding for my mom’s programs be systematically eviscerated over the past fifteen years, there would be sizeable pressure to turn to private foundations, and even more so, individual funders working together to crowdsource changemaking operations. (She told me a particularly excellent story last week about a conversation she had in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, where she said to a lobbyist, that, very basically, if they continue to cut funding to Welfare-to-Work programs to the point where it’s impossible to run them effectively, those individuals who are currently on welfare will never be able to pay taxes and will remain the financial responsibility of the government, which seemed to make the most rudimentary amount of sense to him.)

Last night, I was still puzzling out how Chip Rolley’s ideas squared with my evolving rearticulation of my mid-‘90s understanding of the public and the private when Winterson began to speak, before she read, about the fundamentality of artistic engagement. She said that “[t]o say art is a luxury is to say that being human is a luxury.” My mom would argue that the American federal government has not, in recent history, had an overwhelming interest in the humanness of Americans, but many people at the same time seem to be realizing that people behave like humans if they are treated like humans, and that such collectively human behavior (advocating for a larger, cooperative, human whole) is essential to the future of human kind. So while Rolley was arguing that our private lives have become public, Winterson seemed to argue that we should capitalize on art as a way of unifying the public and the private, and of underwriting the presence and command of many separate private lives underneath so much public buzz.

Winterson said something else that was especially intriguing to me, both as an idea and as an echoing of another classic one that’s often overlooked. Speaking about her engagement as a reader of poetry, she said: “a poem is a practical thing, like a piece of furniture, maybe more so.” This made infinite sense to me, as when I write a poem, I’m interested in taking apart a cross-section of factors – the sound, the processing, the space, the atmosphere, in an interest to situate it in the multivalence that’s familiar to us as the aspects that make up fabric of any particular moment. To read a poem, in my understanding, is to engage in a practice of guided looking, both at the event of the poem and at the event of the cross-section of ideas that any moment holds, using that poem as a framework for what to see and how to look for it, to make sense of the component parts that any moment might contain.

For me, this echoed Shelley’s famous adage: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” except that now, our public interest is in a practical and often private-sector management that may not necessarily be grounded by legislation. In both cases, the poem is identified as a tool for indicating the means to collective use, a tool for looking at any part of our world and developing an understanding of how it might be deconstructed into its component parts. It also highlights the poem as a tool for considering how that deconstruction might then perpetuate an educated fusion in the interest of making both sense and use of those parts that, like legislation, provide a structure in which to develop our own design framework, a way of grounding our private lives, the strongholds of our humanness, in the public sphere.

Innovating the Mismanagement of the Social: A Call for Common Language

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I facilitated a workshop yesterday at Social Innovation Sydney’s Social Enterprise Unconference, fueled by a similar workshop I facilitated last month at Sydney’s first TrampolineDay in response to some ideas raised by the questions of other facilitators. At TrampolineDay, I threw together a half hour workshop on Social Innovation as Storytelling, the meeting of a growing trend among certain circles of social innovators to capitalize on the medium of the story, and a draw from my own background in poetry, which, for me, has always been a process of pushing a story into its potential multivalent modes – pulling out its sound or its shape or the character of its shadow in an effort to explore it in an infinite set of new ways.

What stuck with me at the end of yesterday’s unconference, however, wasn’t the content of the workshops or the outcome of my own, but a conversation I had that was uncomfortable in the moment, and that, in retrospect, speaks to greater concerns I have about the limited common discourse among many social innovators that’s used to talk about questions of diversity, and their prime positioning to do as much harm as they do good if their collective lexicon isn’t addressed.

At TrampolineDay, when I facilitated my workshop for the first time, there were several people who seemed particularly engaged by it. I spoke extensively with a couple of them and kept up email correspondence in the weeks that followed. As a classic socially-inclined introvert, shy but hopelessly friendly, when I saw one of them again at yesterday’s unconference, I beamed at her, both genuinely excited to see a familiar face (a rare thing on my Watson year) and grateful for her particular brand of support and feedback.

We finally got a chance to talk at the start of the first afternoon session at yesterday’s unconference, our topics ranging from the potential singular impact of social enterprise and, when we figured out we were weeks away from being the same exact age, the simultaneous sophomoric mastery and rearticulated perplexity of being 23. I told a couple of my favorite Watson stories, and because I felt especially comfortable, I mentioned that, in some of my travels this year, being transgender has made certain spaces particularly challenging.

The next five minutes followed as if written by queer activists into a sketch about things not to say to your trans friends. I was met with the familiar inappropriate questions: “what was your previous legal name?” and “when did you come out?” but the one that generated a wider radar of concern was the comment: “when I met you I thought you were a girl.”

Several red flags went up immediately. Firstly, this person is aware of other people using male pronouns for me, and even corrected herself earlier in the day after using a female pronoun, so she’s clear on both how others perceive me and how I prefer to be read. Secondly, my gender isn’t hers to comment on. We all have private thoughts about each other, but if we divide and isolate ourselves beyond amelioration by being thoughtless and rude, we’ll never get anything done. For social innovators, alienating potential allies due to a lack of language that creates a culture of respect and fairness seems particularly dangerous.

Thirdly, her reasoning for having this perception was that “there’s something very feminine about me.” That’s fine, although the idea that some measure of innate femininity automatically makes me a “girl” was especially upsetting because it elucidates the need for some baseline for talking about questions of gender and gender identity, and about ideas of queerness, especially among individuals who want to do work that creates social change.

When I mentioned that I pass as male, almost seamlessly, to the best of my understanding, she was incredulous. The tone of the conversation was decidedly both friendly and businesslike and so no one was going to come to blows over any of this, but I was aware once I had left that I had permitted myself, the way that I present, and the way that I identify to be systematically dismembered by someone who made a series of damaging, hurtful mistakes because she didn’t have the language that would have made me feel respected and she didn’t think to ask to find out what that language might be when she realized she was uncomfortable with the language she had..

If these are the individuals who want to be the private sector leaders of the decades to come, they need to understand how to engage with as wide a range of constituents as possible, to effectively use the social, in its widest form, to innovate. I’ve been in a variety of spaces dominated by social innovators this year where issues of queerness of any kind have been stumbled through and where, as a trans person, I’ve been made to feel absolutely alienated. It feels deeply ironic to me that although storytelling is becoming a buzzword among social innovators, many communities of social innovators fail, by means their lack of a common discourse and the trust that requires it, to generate circumstances in which the medium of the story may be used to its greatest potential.

There is a great history of collective action among queer communities, and the approaches to collectivity of social innovation have much in common with those of a range of queer activism in ways that are fascinating and likely useful. Many social innovators, this young woman included, believe that their efforts in the private sector will change the world. This cannot happen if the social innovation community as a whole does not take responsibility for developing and maintaining a common lexicon that affirms all people and, greater than that, perpetuates spaces in which people who belong to many different communities can rely on being treated fairly and where offensive and demeaning language is an unacceptable aberration and not the uncontested norm.

The power of the social lies in understanding the myriad ways that social engagement can be utilized and the basic concerns of the range of those who make use of it. What was so upsetting about the conversation I had yesterday, was not only that I was treated in a way that felt demoralizing at best, but that the person with whom I was speaking perceived no space to ask questions about approach, to ask questions about how to talk about trans issues in a way most likely to be respectful, despite my efforts to talk candidly about my experience and encourage her to ask questions about confusing ideas or language. She told me, “I have one gay friend,” which is irrelevant to me, but which was said in a way that made it feel like: “I’m not responsible for being able to manage this language,” which made the situation that much more damaging because it felt as if her comments were not only hurtful, but unapologetically so. The social innovation community has the potential to harness the essential support of those both involved in and tied to the history of public, community-driven activism in order to maximize its own effectiveness, however, if it alienates its allies, one young leader at a time, that potential disappears very quickly.

Goodbye, Little Grouch: Learning from Maurice Sendak’s “Max”

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My mother does not customarily sing and, with the exception of one song, I do not remember being sung to as a child, but often, in the car, she sang to me the chorus of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” with its final line changed, appropriately, from “hot tramp,” to “little grouch.”

The line: “Little Grouch, I love you so,” more or less summarizes my relationship with my mother between the ages of zero and five. What felt singular and right about this line to me, as a pedantic, bossy, shy and indefatigable four year old was that I could be loved for my grouchiness. That my status as a “little grouch” could be not only part of the affection I received, but the foundation of it. This generated in me a fundamental brotherhood with all little grouches, and despite the popularization of a certain other grouch, I earned my little grouch stripes by learning from Max.

Maurice Sendak’s Max was made sweet by his love for terribleness and by his desire to be loved both for his own terribleness as well as in spite of it. He tested boundaries so that his mother’s love might be proven to him, so that he might secure himself in his sense of belonging, a relationship he emulated with the Wild Things. He was a mischievous creator of an independent, encompassing world that both built a collective of which he was both an integral part and the clear leader, and which still enabled him to keep his role as his mother’s own “little grouch.” The love he received, his take on the world – as his to rumpus in, as his to build practices and passages that could be explored in and out of weeks all without jeopardizing his mother’s love – this became what I wanted as a child.

There are many children’s books that mythologize the loving of badly behaved children by their parents, but few that mythologize the loving of children who behave badly out of an allegiance to their own private worlds – children whose behavior will, on some level, not change, whose world-making is part of their self-understanding and expression. What was revolutionary to me about Where the Wild Things Are was that Max atoned for his unruly behavior by using that energy to create a private universe, and that his act of creation was presented as a satisfactory way to manage the general unrest of a young mind that sees its mirror in no place. Max is not made to reform his grouchiness. He is left alone to figure out how to use it.

My mother firmly abided by this style of parenting – that unrest is best managed by the opportunity for creation, and as if to prove her indebtedness to Max, she still has a poster of the wild rumpus in her bedroom. As a child, I saw the poster as a perpetual homage to the productivity of a rumpus, to the infinite acceptability of a properly expressive little grouch and, more so, to the fact of my being okay in a way in which no book or movie or other attempt at the general validation of an unusual kid could have enabled.

It has been a great comfort to me to know of Sendak’s own innate grouchiness and his ability to employ his grouchiness to get his young readers to use the singularity of the own inner grouch and not to dispose of it. This was expertly noted by New York Times book critic Dwight Garner in his May 8th appraisal of Sendak, in company with the best children’s authors that: “[t]heir stuff is anarchic and verges on the nightmarish. These writers want children to take themselves seriously. They want them to grow up a bit, starting now.” To facilitate this work, Sendak built a commitment in his readers to the form of the wild rumpus, where to love a Sendak book is to employ yourself in a renewable wild rumpus of your own.

In his absence, it would follow that we now have another kind of growing up to do. In a letter on Tuesday evening in which my father reflected on Sendak’s death, he noted that: “It’s one of those passages, too, that make people of the younger generations, yours and mine alike, shift a little in their comfort zones with the knowledge that somehow they have to stand a little taller now that the trailblazer has left the stage if they’re going to fill in the gaps that such a person leaves behind.”

As the decidedly less wild parent, I know that these words coming from my father make for a call to action that is much more comprehensively felt for its betrayal of his measured norm, further proof of the effectiveness of Sendak’s brand of radicalism. In any case, I agree with him. We owe Sendak the fruits of the lifelong validation of our innate little grouch that those of us have who were lucky enough to grow up with his books. We owe him the continuation of a body of work that says, as my mother did to me, with its intended, affectionate invitation to create worlds out of my wildness: “Little Grouch, I love you so.”

Americans in Anywhere: On Narratives of Place and the Return of Madonna

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Yesterday, I was sitting on a bench in a park across from Notre Dame and eating a sandwich. It was the sort of sandwich that took focus, concentration and for which I saw it necessary to fabricate a strategy of consumption, an approach, lest it fall apart. So I’m embarking upon my sandwich tactics and a group of Spanish-speaking tourists all wearing headphones through which their tour is conducted gather in front of me to look out at the cathedral. Their tour guide stops speaking and the group disperses around the small park. Several tourists take pictures of each other with the cathedral behind them and realize that their angle from the level of the park is imperfect. They remedy this by standing on the bench where I’m stationed and dead-locked with my sandwich so when I turn my head, the knees of a seventeen year old girl are about six inches from me on either side, a parent or guardian getting the shot of their girl in blustery Paris with the cathedral in the background. To me, this blew the code of tourist conduct, but it also got me thinking about the relationship between how the narratives we have about the place we’re visiting contribute to determining our experience of cities, particularly cities with a strong global presence.

For example – make a list of the first ten things you think of when you think “Paris.” In my Paris experience, regardless of where my conception came from about what Paris is or how deeply I know that this conception is wrong, my experience of the city, especially on a short visit, will in some ways be a test case for those ideas.

Furthermore, the travel blog is a strange fish because now when I write about Paris, I’m linking my myopic sandwich eating and the swarm of tourists to your narrative, especially if you’ve never been there. While Notre Dame has no particular connection to myopic sandwich eating, especially if you don’t have your own experiential narrative to counteract whatever other Paris narrative you’ve adopted, there’s nothing to stop you from approaching Notre Dame, should you visit Paris, and being unable to think of anything other than my experience with the tourists and the sandwich. Maybe this keeps us from experiencing “real Paris” but maybe, to us, part of what’s real about Paris is what the city proves about our own previously conceived narratives.

In a residential experience of urban life, I think this process turns out to be helpful. Everywhere I go in Philadelphia, for example, I’m reminded of stories I’ve heard about different places or experiences I’ve had there. I’m aware of what some of the popular narrative is about the city (in high school a favorite weekend morning activity was to bike to the steps of the Art Museum and watch tourists film each other running up them like Rocky, waving their arms wildly at the top) but that narrative doesn’t have too much to do with my life there. When I share my Philadelphia stories with other Philadelphians, or when I hear the stories of others, my sense of place as a resident is strengthened.

There’s another version of this where individuals move somewhere to take part in their narratives of place, as is the case with Wesleyan grads (and many other liberal arts grads, for that matter) who move to Brooklyn to enact their narratives of what liberal arts grads do when they move to Brooklyn. In this way, they need their Brooklyn narrative to order and make sense of their Brooklyn life. Their Brooklyn may expand from this point but it starts as something to reinforce, and then something, at least in part, to refute. I have some curiosity about whether this is an American ideal that we’ve pawned off as an international goal of travel – that we wish both to reinforce and refute narratives of a given place with our own experience of being in that place. I’ll have to think that one over, but I have five more Watson months in which to do it.

If this is an American practice, I’m curious as to where else in American culture it’s used – where else we use a process as a way to either refute or reinforce what we thought before about a given person, place or thing, and conversely, if it’s possible to capitalize on the fact of our collective narratives. Strangely enough, the best and most puzzling example I can come up with concerning manipulation of collective narratives is the return of Madonna. I’ve spent the last few days wondering about and making sense of the newest Madonna video “Give Me All Your Luvin,’” which seems to be a perfect example of the usage of collectively held narratives to provide a particular experience:

As a video, it speaks to the way we process information, interspersing sections that cut between shots that each occupy a fraction of a second with longer shots used to establish the narrative of Madonna’s chosenness as she is protected, guided and saved by a large group of masked football players. The narrative is established in these longer shots, each showing Madonna engaging in one specific action – being protected from rain, being shielded from gunfire, being carried on the backs of the football players, etc. The linearity of the narrative of these shots, reinforced by the video’s low light, lack of outlandish special effects and the heaviness of its red, black and white color scheme reference what we know about the beginning of Madonna’s career as the queen of the music video empire, as the video looks like an updated, narrative version of Robert Palmer’s 1985 “Addicted to Love” video right down to the color scheme and silent band of opposite sex extras. The plainness of the video may also go so far as to take a shot at refuting the wildness of Lady Gaga’s aesthetic, wordlessly underwriting Madonna’s history as the queen of pop and her continued effortless occupation of the throne which she is, as the video demonstrates, able to do without any scary costumes, elaborate sets or physical contortion.

The content of the song makes a similar set of references, playing into how we understand ourselves to be implicated in the unit of the pop song. The genius of the song is that it’s a metanarrative on what the unit of the pop song is designed to do. In this way, the unoriginality of the lyrics: “Don’t play the stupid game/Cause I’m a different kind of girl/Every record sounds the same/You’ve got to step into my world” only works because we know what kind of girl Madonna is. Madonna is a legend. The lyrics aren’t directed, as they usually are, at a secondary party with us as the listener as a third party, but directly at us, putting us into intimate discourse with Madonna herself. We are instructed not to “play the stupid game” of reading this as a pop song that sounds like a blissfully under-recognized B-side from the early career of The Go-Go’s. We are instead instructed to treat this song as a feature of Madonna’s legacy. Madonna does not need to win us over. Just as we’re sold on Paris before we step off of the plane because we have a narrative of how superlative it is here, we know the power of Madonna’s brand voice to the point where she no longer has to use it. She just has to ask us, point blank: “give me all your love,” and we do it, as if we were being held at pop song gunpoint, held up to fork over the one thing the pop song is designed to make us want to give, and it’s this, more than the song itself, more than video, that makes the song work, itself sold on the strength of the idea, of the collective narrative, of the Madonna empire alone.

Our Conceptions of Ourselves, Our Cities, as Based on Our Ideas about Other Places

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Yesterday, I arrived in Paris and was met at the airport by a friend who occasioned my first basic thoughts about what it might be like to come back to the US in July, to be with my people, and in my original and favorite spaces. I flew from Madrid to Paris on a flight with a class of sixteen-year-old girls who appeared to be students at a bilingual school in Madrid (they spoke mostly in English, but they spoke with greater fluidity in Spanish). As large groups of girls do with young, male strangers they decided I was cute and talked, well, about finding me cute until I extracted my passport and they figured out that 1) I was American and 2) I could understand everything they were saying which made them all enormously embarrassed. As a transguy, I often feel exempt from the game where high-school age girls find me cute and I get to find this endearing, because I look too young or because who finds a 5’6’’ guy cute anyway, and so I pondered this on the flight until I got off the plane and was met at the airport by a close friend who is living outside of Paris for the year as an au pair for a family of six.

On the metro my friend told me a story about, the night before, going out to clubs with some other au pairs and being refused entrance over and over again because her male friends weren’t dressed correctly or because they looked too drunk. Over the course of the afternoon, I heard a number of stories, all tinged with anxiety, about visiting the sprawling apartment of another family or feeling underdressed or underprepared to be in a particular place. She said something, at one point, about being dressed to walk down a certain street, which made me especially curious. Her overall discourse seemed to be one underwritten by the idea that Paris is selective and judgmental about whom it admits into its folds. She seemed to have a lot of anxiety about being included, in certain spaces, both public and private.

I realized, thinking about this later, that my Watson year has been entirely dictated by my trans identity, despite the fact that I’m frequently invisible as a transguy, I don’t seek out trans spaces and I almost never talk about my experiences from the perspective of gender. As a transperson, I never expect to feel included in a given space. Maybe this makes me a real, old guard American, that I believe that I make my own space by deciding that having a space in a given city, a given community doesn’t matter – that the decision not to care or to disregard my de facto exclusion is itself a way of forging my own space.

Six and a half months into my Watson year, I’ve been in a range of different spaces. I wonder, now, how my predisposition to decide that a space is not a space that wants me as a part of it impacts how I look at new spaces, as something of a permanent outsider. Understandably, I feel like an outsider in different ways in different places (I’m already startled, despite eight years of instruction in French, not to be able to speak Spanish to strangers here), but I always feel like I have my guard up, that I’m paying a lot of attention to what’s going on. Cities, in this way, make everyone included in a community of observers, and this might be part of why I’m so fascinated by urban spaces.

Yet, at the same time, it makes sense that residents of cities (or of towns, for that matter) build their patterns based on where they feel included. This follows in terms of membership in community institutions – religious organizations, museums, little league teams, etc. as much as it does both publically and privately-owned amenities – parks, supermarkets, etc. Many urban residents seem to want some balance, in their neighborhood, between feeling represented (this means different things to different people) and feeling like they’re a part of a greater structure (again, this means different things to different people). My dad, for example, has an infinite number of anecdotes about not wanting to be in certain places at certain times because there are “too many strollers” (he lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn). Choosing a place to live seems to be, always, a balance between commanding and forfeiting control, in terms of resources, neighborhood makeup, neighborhood design, accessibility, etc.

The way my friend described Paris made it sound as if she felt she had no control, that she wasn’t part of any sort of community and that she was devoted to attempting to perform a certain level of wealth, of status, of lifestyle, as an au pair for a well-off family, that seems to make her feel fundamentally uncomfortable.

Something I like about being on my Watson year is that the constant stream of new spaces and experiences occasions lines of thinking that will take a long time to complete themselves, so I’m able to explore an idea, understanding that I need to sit with it to be able to explore it to a place where it feels like I can reach some kind of resolution. The Watson year is, as my favorite things are, all about process.

I’ve been puzzling out how people make sense of their cities for a long time and I imagine that I will continue to do so for years, in many different contexts. Still, something about watching my friend wrestle with feelings of city-imposed inadequacy, as if Paris itself were judging her, makes me wonder about whether, in some ways, we determine our relationship to a given place based off of our narratives of what that place is and who we are based on where we’ve lived and what we know. I wonder how those narratives are overridden, and how they impact, finally, what it means to make a home in a given city, and how they impact the decisions of where we ultimately choose to be and the places with which we choose to identify.

Haircut Spanish

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A decade ago, I took out a set of Italian language tapes from the library. I was learning French in school and decided that I liked the process of learning languages and I may as pick up another one. I watched maybe four hours of the tapes, which were mostly concerned with the Italian that someone might need traveling to Italy on business. (The two phrases I remember are, predictably, “where is the bathroom, please?” and “may I have a beer.”) Eventually, I became bored with the tapes, or distracted by some other more pressing feature of my 7th grade life and that was the end of my instruction in Italian.

Still, I remained curious about the nature of language taught for limited use abroad. About four years ago, from one of the carts outside of the Strand Bookstore, I bought a small book of instructional Spanish issued by the US Air Force during World War II. This book is broken into chapters with vaguely offensive illustrations and guidance for the best ways to explain, for example, that your plane has crash landed or that you’ve run out of jet fuel or how to explain to a set of school children that you’re looking for some sort of town official and that they should keep a safe distance away from the aircraft.

After nearly three months living in Spanish-speaking countries (two and a half months in Ecuador, followed by 11 days in Spain), tomorrow is my final Spanish-speaking day for the foreseeable future before I revert to my archaic college French for two weeks in Paris and then return to English in Australia. While I understand that my Spanish-language abilities have improved, I understand that they would have improved more if I had been, well, speaking more Spanish. This isn’t to say that I’ve been surrounded by English speakers, just that, as has been the nature of this particular chapter of my Watson year, I haven’t done too much speaking at all. Still, whereas I arrived in Quito terrified of, for example, ordering a sandwich, (the first time I did this, I was nearly too nervous to eat the sandwich once it was brought to me) at this point I can negotiate with no particular problems, even in situations that require more detailed conversation.

At points in the past three months, I’ve thought of the sort of instructional language guide, in the style of the ‘40s-vintage Air Force manual, that I might make for myself, if I were, in some alternate universe, able to go back and do this part of my Watson year over again. I might include some notes on adjusting to changes in accent (I chatted with a woman working in a café this afternoon about what she referred to as the “strange mix” of my accent, and about adjusting to changes in accent and colloquial language between Quito and Madrid). Additionally, now that I’ve mastered it, the one sub-lexicon I would be especially mindful of including would be the phrases necessary to get a successful haircut.

I’m particular about few things, (I can see my parents rolling their eyes in disagreement) but among them is the ability to get a haircut exactly once every three weeks. Outside of the three-week window, I start to feel like, under a full moon, I run the risk of turning into the wolfman. In university, I cut my own hair, not trusting anyone else in the state of Connecticut, licensed or otherwise, to do as good of a job as my NYU-area barber at home. I’ve become less specific, this year, about the outcome of these haircuts (mostly leaving them up to the barber’s discretion, which has resulted in a range of outcomes, most objectionably a haircut in Quito left long in the back and the front and cut short on the sides and the top that made me look upsettingly like the lead singer of the ‘80s band Flock of Seagulls).

One of the secret joys of being abroad has been the opportunity to think about barbershops and hair salons as viable locations for cultural exploration as much as a café might be, or a stadium. In Toronto, I had my hair cut in a basement barbershop where both the décor and the barbers looked, by design, straight out of 1940. In Quito, one peluqueria where a disaffected young woman cut my hair was occupied by this particular stylist and by one other woman who were so engrossed in their telenovela (soap opera) when I entered that they watched for a full five minutes before they noticed I was there (which is my fault, as I was unnecessarily hesitant to bother them).

Today, the young woman who cut my hair was friendly, but not overly chatty, distracted by the pop-radio station but not to the point of my ending up with an uneven haircut (which happens more than I might expect it to). After several rounds of trial and error in Quito, today I felt comfortably able to have an involved conversation with her about my specific feelings about length and angle and hair gel (something I’m firmly against as I look young enough already). While she cut my hair and asked me questions, I watched her face to see if she could understand me, or if she was suppressing some eruptive language-induced laughter, and she didn’t seem to be. I was one of her first haircuts of the day and so she was short the 3.50 in change that I was owed and overturned her tip jar to give it to me. I accepted 2 euro and let her keep the rest of it, appreciating the excavationary gesture of looking for the change and, greater than that, the opportunity, one last time, to exercise my haircut Spanish. I have no idea when I’ll need it again, but hopefully I’ll be back, at least to see more of Spain, and maybe even long enough to put my haircut vocab to use.

Like the Mountain-Bound Bear

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Of all of the things to think about, I’ve spent much of this week thinking about the song often sung to (and by) preschoolers: “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” The curious thing about the bear who goes over the mountain is that he goes “to see what he could see.” I’m not sure it was intended, but there’s a double meaning here, both that the bear goes over the mountain to see whatever is there to be seen, and additionally, that he goes to see what he, personally, can see. He goes to both to find out what is available to be seen and to find out the limits of his ability to see what’s there.

I’ve thought a lot about this song as I’ve spent this week largely reacclimating myself to walking around a big, active city (Madrid) after my final two weeks in Quito which I spent largely scared and in my room at the edge of the Parque Metropolitano. The placement of the room at the edge of the park gave me the feeling of being at the end of the world, the woods the only thing I could see from my room, as if they extended forever.

I spent these weeks inside because, two weeks before I left, I received an email from my former host father who said, nearly a month after my departure from my host family (unannounced, in the middle of the day, for reasons I’ll explain), that he expected me to pay him for the rent I would have incurred had I stayed in the house (I was more than paid up when I left, but only for the time I had stayed there). He said, further, that barring my agreement to pay him (although he never asked me, outright, to pay him and he never named an amount, he just said that he expected me to pay him by some unknown means at some undiscussed time and place) he would contact Ecuador’s Office of Immigration and see to it that my exit from the country be prohibited.

I understood that this threat was much like the proverbial monster under the bed. I know that there is no monster under the bed but, at night, when I’m alone in my room, I become less sure. I don’t see a monster. I don’t hear a monster and yet I think that there still might be a monster there. I knew that he had really no ability to make any sort of case (we never signed a contract) and, furthermore, I felt that I owed him nothing, especially since I left because it became clear, very quickly, in a household of yelling, constant upset and general (and deep-seated) disorder, that living there was somewhere between deeply unpleasant and dangerous.

Although he continued to threaten me for several days, he eventually left me alone. Still, every time I went outside (infrequently, which is hugely unlike me) for the next two weeks, I vibrated with fear, waiting for a silver sedan to stop next to me with him in it, ready to do who knows what to settle the situation to his liking. This never happened and I left the country just over a week ago with no trouble, no problems with Immigration and I haven’t heard from him since. This leaves me to wonder whether some of my debilitating fear could have been prevented or whether being alone there, and a little shaken up to begin with from my experiences in my homestay, I could have done things differently. Once, a week before this situation unfolded and once several days after it began, I had my first two real, honest, can’t-catch-my-breath panic attacks. While anxiety runs in my family, I’m usually within the spectrum of relatively calm (often too intense, but not especially anxious). It was strange to watch my circumstances feel, for the first time, like they were really, unmanageably out of my control and to watch my responses to them similarly escape my best efforts to keep them in check.

I’ve spent my week in Madrid mostly walking around. Today, I walked from the apartment where I’m saying, in the northwestern section of the city, to the Prado, a distance of about six miles. I spent a long time in the Prado, writing about the dog in the lower right-hand corner of the famed Velazquez painting, Las Meninas, and I enjoyed the Prado, but I was almost equally as excited about the walk, to be out in the city and to internalize its design by moving around it. It’s still kind of exciting, a week after arriving here, to move around a city and not be scared. I’m used to being careful, but I’m not used to being afraid all of the time especially of a very specific occurrence. I’m not yet sure what this says.

The folks at Watson headquarters, who have been enormously helpful throughout this situation, and on whose recommendation I decided to leave Ecuador early (“if your safety is being threatened, get out,” they told me) also reminded me that the most important thing about the Watson year is the experience. My project may not go as planned, (as it definitely didn’t in Quito) but what turns out to be important is, in fact, whatever it is that I see. I have three additional weeks in Europe (a few days in Madrid and just over two weeks in Paris) before I head out to Sydney to begin the last leg of my Watson year. In these weeks, my project is taking a back seat to the basic process of being in these cities, in making what sense of them I can. While I’m tempted to think of all of the seemingly more valuable things I could be doing, and while I’ve always been so project oriented that I’ve never really given myself the opportunity to just explore a new place, I keep getting the sense that, without totally understanding why, exploring is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with this time. To this end, I’ve ended up feeling just like the bear, going over the mountain both to see what there is and to see what I can make of it, which, I guess, is okay enough for now.