September 15th, 2010 – 2:43 p.m.
Read it and weep: I did seven hours straight of farm work at the neighbors’ farm today. Then, I got to suffer through the two mile hike uphill back home. Liz beat me home and then she went on a run. I don’t understand how she has the inhuman endurance for this shit. I am collapsed in a chair by the kitchen table and I don’t plan on moving for at least another 40 minutes.
I learned how to milk a cow today! I remember doing it as a kid a few times (Utah -- represent!) but I was definitely out of practice. Let’s just say it’s very different from similar activities. I kept trying to do motions that came more naturally to me (no pun intended) but I wasn’t being rough enough. Ha. You have to squeeze the top of the udder and bring the milk to the tip, and then increase the pressure from your forefinger down. It was so difficult. I milked for a good 20 minutes and only got maybe two or three cups of milk. Then, Luz (the mom) came over and just laughed at me. She essentially said she’d finish it off (ha) and proceeded to get triple the amount that I had in about 5 minutes. Pathetic. It’s okay, I just need to practice more.
New fact I learned today: Horns are not exclusive to bulls. Some female cows have them too. I didn’t know this. At first, I thought our cow was some strange female/bull hybrid, because she was large and had horns – yet, she had ample udders and no dangly bits. Then, at risk of asking a stupid question, I asked anyway. Apparently female cows have horns occasionally. It’s a genetic thing.
Then, I went to collect eggs from the chickens. Sounds easy, right? WRONG. This chicken “coop” consists of an approximately 8 by 8 foot cage clusterfuck of at least 250 chickens. You have to step up into it while opening the door and blocking any of those feathered fiends from escaping. There are three little cabinet-esque fixtures at the corners where the chickens lay their eggs. You have to maneuver through the sea of squawking and somehow steal these un-fertilized babies from their mamas. I gathered at least 50 the first time. Even though their living condition seemed a little harsh, I know that many farmers in the United States keep chickens in much less humane surroundings. These hens can at least walk around – they’re not confined to little cages. They also are fed only whole grains. Oh – something I learned – the fence surrounding the cage is electrified. This is, apparently, to protect the chickens from night stalking predators. Well, I tripped and grabbed the fence out of impulse to keep myself from tumbling. I received QUITE a shock. I have no idea what the voltage was, but it was fucking painful. Somehow, I didn’t drop any of the eggs.
September 18th, 2010 – 9:52 a.m.
I slept in until 8:00 a.m. today. I know, so indulgent. I woke up at 5:00 – the usual time – fed the chickens, fed the cat, wrote down the worker hours, then I just collapsed back in bed. Lately, I have been doing a lot more work than usual. Additionally, Liz and I finished off a box of wine last night, so that could have easily contributed to my lethargy. Last night was a LOT of fun, but before I get to that, I must recap our visit to the neighbor’s yesterday. They are really starting to consider us an extension of their family. They have always been hospitable to us, but I think they love us now. We went to help out Luz twice this week. She always puts us to work, but she feeds us really well. It’s definitely worth the trade off. Yesterday we milked the cows again. I did much better than my first time! I developed a method of switching hands every 50 squeezes or so to keep from getting too tired. Being ambidextrous has a few perks. Luz said that for my second day I did really well. Liz, somehow, went crazy and got a couple quarts out of just one teat. She is way too good at milking cows. I think she was using the alternate hand technique too, and she also was perched underneath whereas I was hunched over and reaching down. I must observe her skills more closely!
We did a lot of planting in Luz’s greenhouse too. I never thought I’d say this, but just being in her greenhouse makes me crave salad. She has the most delicious heads of organic lettuce, onions, cilantro, celery, green onions, etc… After I’ve weeded, or planted, or harvested for a few hours, I can’t stop smelling my fingers. I know, disgusting, but you have no idea how good fresh cilantro smells. Once a week, Luz sells her wares at the feria. It’s basically a massive farmer’s market in the center of San Isidro. There are at least 50 or 60 booths of people selling everything from vegetables to homemade cheese to necklaces to hot food. We went on Thursday and bought some of Luz’s lettuce and tapa dulces. Tapa Dulce is a cylindrical chunk of hardened sugar cane that is used to make frescas or shaved off as a sweetener to use in cooking. Frescas are these delicious juices that are essentially equal parts sugar, water, and fresh fruit juice/chunks. We had some pineapple frescas at the feria this week in addition to some hot beef empanadas… good lord. I was in food heaven. Speaking of irony, despite how I feel like I’ve been eating poorly in town, Luz told me that I look a lot skinnier. She’s only known me for a little over a month! It was really encouraging. I even got called “tiny” this week. I can definitely say that I have never imagined anyone calling me that. I had better be careful. With all of these compliments, I’m at risk of becoming a narcissist. Thank the lord that there aren’t any mirrors here.
Actually, Liz made a really astute observation – I’m going to butcher it, I’m sure. She was much more eloquent in the moment than I will be in clumsily relating it. She said something about two things that she took for granted most – clocks and mirrors – and how both of those things are nonexistent on the farm. It’s humorously poignant: the one working clock we have on the farm doesn’t keep proper time. It’s about 25 or 30 minutes slow depending on the day and adjusting the gears doesn’t help. We measure our tasks without empty numeric labels. We feed the chickens a little after sunrise. We water the greenhouse before it gets warm in the morning. When the sun becomes higher in the sky, we start breakfast. We eat when we’re hungry. We let the chickens out around noon or one. This is when the sun is highest. We eat lunch shortly after. We read, work out, talk, play guitar, write, and study Spanish until dusk. Then, we lock the chickens up and eat dinner. We watch a movie and, one night a week, devour a box of white wine between the two of us. After dinner, we relax. We’re both usually in bed by 7:30 or 8. I used to be nocturnal – now I can’t ever imagine making a habit out of waking up after sunrise. Not looking at a clock once throughout the day is incredibly liberating. We don’t need time even when catching the bus in the morning. The bus is there by 6:25 – it takes us about 30 minutes to walk to the bus stop based on how high the river is. That timing isn’t bad for a two mile hike. So, we have plenty of time to get ready after we wake up in the morning. We leave when we have our things together. The only time we really need time (haha)is when we’re catching the bus back from town to our farm. It’s funny how being back in civilization forces one into old habits. Plus, the once-a-week luxury of being out and about usually includes a few drinks and a good meal. Those two things – coupled with intense relaxation after a week of strenuous work and meager meals – could make anyone forget the notion of time.
September 19, 2010 – 11:18 a.m.
It feels like it should be at least 5 o’clock in the afternoon. The tips of the fingers on my left hand are searing. I played guitar for at least a couple hours today. Poor Liz had to endure me fucking up chords over and over again. I have almost the whole introduction to “Stairway to Heaven” memorized (in case you are uninformed, knowing this is mandatory for all terribly amateur guitar players). I also am learning “Society” by Eddie Vedder. SUCH A GOOD SONG. Go look it up right now if you haven’t heard it. It also fits my situation perfectly. Oh, and American Pie. What is a cheesy fireside sing along without it? Other recent songs in my repertoire are “While You Were Sleeping” by Elvis Perkins and “Lua” by Bright Eyes. Such depressing songs. The last one is maybe slightly self indulgent, but what good sad music isn’t? Next on my list is anything by Fleet Foxes. I’m not sure what I’ll start with – I’ll probably just download the tabs from their entire self titled album. Once I get less terrible I’m going to move on to Neutral Milk Hotel. We have a bunch of saws and buckets here for the instrumentals. I am also crazy enough to wail like Jeff Mangum. I just need a trumpet. I seriously cannot wait until Kelly and Six get here. I am going to have a full jungle band at my disposal.
I just got the hiccups. Fuck. They are so violent. I can’t stop laughing. The harder I laugh, the more intense my hiccups become. This is vicious. I must go drink some water while reciting the alphabet backwards and doing a headstand and having Liz scare me.
5:28 p.m. – same day
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. Words materialize in my head and I can’t hold onto them long enough to string together a coherent thought. It almost hurts to write. It feels like a chore. It’s easy when I’m describing the mundane details of my life – when I’m padding the lapses of monotony with a certain breed of anecdotal humor. This is what happens when you write for an audience – invisible critics magically emerge. They hover above you, silently chiding your imagined phrases before they even appear on paper. See, I just used a thesaurus. Does that mean I’m losing my touch? The word – appear – was originally materialize. I already used that once in this paragraph. I have a bad habit of stumbling upon a word that has a perfect ring – the faultless platonic ideal of a concept somehow scrunched behind a symbol– a melodic tone that reverberates precisely with the emotion that I’m trying to convey. Then the duplications emerge. But maybe that’s what life is. It’s a string of endless repetitions made to feel different by a change of scenery or different music. The same monotony disguised by different players, languages, cultures, scenes, aesthetics. Maybe I’m feeling down because I’m hormonal. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had anything real to eat in days. Maybe it’s because I’m filthy and riddled with dozens of bug bites. Maybe it’s also because I don’t speak the language here very well and – as difficult as it is to express myself in English, my native language – it’s impossible to convey what I’m feeling in Spanish. Maybe it’s because I’m shrinking and I’m afraid of what is going to happen once I look “normal”. Once I am “beautiful.” (Being grotesque is empowering – people never listen to you just because they want your attention. When you aren’t pretty, you are aware that if people are actually listening it’s because you have something valuable to say). Maybe it’s because I miss home. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of going home. Maybe it’s mostly because I know that none of this matters – that all emotions, no matter how powerful, are labeled with a cosmic expiration date. Can the tragic heroine be subject to a certain breed of hubris, or is that specific only to males? All of my questions simply lead to more. This is a symptom of that ancient sickness – philosophy. No real answer is ever reached – but the discursive nature of questioning is one that defines its own purpose through the circularity of the argument. What is the point in defining, delineating, demolishing, deconstructing our world if we’re all going to be decomposing beneath it someday? Maybe absolute hedonism is the real answer. Then again, an excess of pleasure can only be a catalyst for pain. And vice versa. One who knows nothing but pain has the ability to find pleasure in the most minute of things – in the momentary releases of pressure.
I can feel my mind spiraling downward. The harder I search for the answers, the more I realize they don’t exist. No, maybe it’s not a downward spiral. Maybe it’s the elevation – the altitude – that is birthing this vertigo. Philosophy is just a different temple I have built to shroud myself from the harsh elements of reality. Some people have faith, some people have religion, some people have money, some people have drugs. I mediate my interaction with reality through my own rudimentarily inquisitive brand of metaphysics. It doesn’t matter how hard discursive meanderings of the mind are manipulated in regards to encountering reality. All this futile construction does is increase the distance between the imagined and the actual. Yet, here I am, unable to escape the shaky scaffolding of this logic. I want to conceive pure thoughts outside of this structure but It’s impossible – all thought is only conceivable within it. Cognition is the worst curse that humanity could bare. It isn’t the act of being expelled from the garden that broke us – it’s our ability to recognize and understand the difference between paradise and hell. But I still pretend to be an idealist most of the time. It’s nice to imagine some ultimate truth lying in the realm of the transcendental. It’s nice to entertain the thought that there is something supra-intellectual and universal; some intangible a priori absolute that is entirely inconceivable to the human mind. I don’t know if I really believe in this. It seems more like a finely articulated fairy tale – another God delusion that emerged in the face of 19th and 20th century mechanical rationality. People need their ghost stories – their specters. But then again, I don’t really believe in anything. When I was younger I had strong opinions. The more I tried to develop them, the more I seemed to realize that I know nothing. Even as I began to delve into the complexities of politics, of literature, of art – I just became tired. Now, after spending hundreds of thousands of hours reading and attempting to make myself better, I feel nothing but the burden of knowing slightly more than most people. It isn’t even that I’m smarter. My common sense is severely lacking most of the time, and I generally make flighty and un-thought-through decisions without a second glance. I just doubt that most people would be able to explain Hume’s notion of subjectivity, or talk at length about Kant’s critique of judgment. The discourses on aesthetics, one of my previous passions, are completely useless. Maybe It’s better if I settle for a sub-standard education at a sub-standard university. Maybe I should fall into the structure of the system and make myself a productive member of society. Maybe I should stop running from conformity – because God knows that is what I’ve been doing all along.
I’m afraid of getting lost in the seas of people. I’m afraid of the truth – the reality – of my childhood trauma dissipating on that vast infinite plane of memories and tragedies. I don’t want it to be that way. I want to hold onto it forever because that suffering is what catalyzed my curiosity. I’m sure of it. After I left Mormonism, my world exploded. This awakening, the ballistics of this subjective explosion, emerged entirely from questions I had pursued – answers I had sought. I found them, and they were unexpected and shattered my world.
I may act the part of a romantic and I may proclaim idealistic statements, but the truth is, if I could forget everything I knew, I would. I would go back to being ignorant and having faith in a false God and in knowing that I could justify what my father did to me through the simple mantra: “everything happens for a reason.”
That is true. Anyone who tells you that there is some universally fitting justification for tragedy is a fool and is just peddling fairy tales. Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny, the myth of wealth leading to happiness, and determinism. They all belong together – they’re allegorical opiates obfuscating the absolute absurdity of human existence. Nothing happens for a reason. There is the notion of cause and effect, but it mostly is just a substandard justification slapped on the day-to-day happenings that would be impossible to stomach otherwise. Healthy people die without any cause or warning. Tumors attack the people who least deserve them – the people who have the most to live for are the ones who are sacrificed to the cause of entropy. I’ve never had to deal with a death in my immediate family, but I’ve seen very close friends go through this and even just being in their proximity is crippling. I am often empathetic to a fault. I am not sure why this is. It doesn’t matter whether someone dies over a matter of years – slowly deteriorating and stealing away memories of themselves as young, happy, and handsome. Gradually replacing these with a cadaverous, hollow shell of the person they once were. It doesn’t matter how charismatic you are – death won’t be charmed like everyone else who had the pleasure of knowing you. Sometimes, inexplicably, it just happens without a warning. Someone young and vibrant is ripped away from their family – leaving holes and shreds in the tightly woven tapestry. I’ve seen this happen to the people who least deserve it. And the families. The brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers are always the best people. Even me, some lost girl without any personal sense of morals, regains faith in humanity through witnessing the good in these people. Then, what is left? Broken individuals with no justification for their pain. In some ways, I can imagine that people supplying false justifications for these deaths is the biggest insult to those who have suffered the losses. Some regain the ability to live their lives. None are ever the same. Yeah, maybe they’re stronger or braver or wiser or more jaded or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Something like that is completely unpredictable and ultimately destructive. Death can never be stopped.
It’s funny how some people live their lives as if they were immortal. Not giving a shit about moments in time that are essentially priceless – wasting their days and energy working in jobs they hate to buy shit they don’t need. This is the one redeeming quality of mortality – the inevitability of an absolute end gives everything meaning. That first kiss, falling in love, playing childhood games, watching the sunrise, running at dusk, savoring a glass of wine, devouring the words of some dead literary prophet – these things – in their instances – can only happen once. Each moment is completely insular. Time just feels linear because of how quickly we age. How rapidly we are deteriorating.
Today, love somebody. See something beautiful that has always been a part of your routine. Write, dance, judge, embrace, sing, worship, condemn. Do what fulfills you. This is all we have – and we won’t have it for long.
OR DO WE?!
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