Stephanie’s southwestern desert mountain town survival guide

So, you want to (or you’re being forced to) leave your large East Coast metropolis for a small Southwestern desert mountain town? Allow me to utilize the 7 months (!) of information I’ve gathered to provide some pointers to assist you in your transition. Just follow these simple tips and you will find yourself flourishing in a desert in no time.

Tip #1 Obtain a car and driver’s license.

The best car you can obtain if you want to fit in is a white Subaru Outback with a coexist bumper sticker on the back.

Once you have a car, it’s easy to get a driver’s license. Just use your people skills to chat up your 21 year old examiner and he will not notice that you put his life in danger several times over the course of the road test.  He will want to pass you because he’s 21 and he thinks you’re nice.

Helpful hint: Develop an appreciation for reggaeton.  It makes driving around all day (should this be what your job consists of) feel both more fun and more natural and it drowns out the sound of the planet and your soul simultaneously dying a little bit every time you turn the engine on.

NOTE socially, being in a car is different than being on the subway. You’re not supposed to stare at and evaluate everyone around you when you’re in a car, like you are supposed to on the subway. People in cars aren’t expecting to be looked at, and they don’t like it.

Tip #2 Assume everyone around you gets really angry when they drink and is drunk right now.

Assume this triply when you’re driving.

People in rural areas are often quite isolated, dont’ have adequate resources to address a variety of needs, and may turn to substances in order to cope. Of course this happens in cities as well, but people in rural areas are forced to interact with much fewer people in a given day and so they may be a little more gruff and rough about it. They may also be super excited to interact. Talk to people often because they are really interesting, but initiate or respond with caution.

Tip #3 Adjust your thinking and vocabulary regarding race

People liberally use the word “Hispanic” here and you must learn not to visibly flinch every time you hear it. They usually do mean Spanish as in from Spain. As I said in other posts, people who trace their ancestry to Spanish colonizers 400 years ago consider themselves Hispanic and definitely have hegemony in this town. There are complicated dynamics between them and Native people and Mexicans. White people are generally seen as other and outside of all of this. According to one source, black people are pretty much read as white.

Tip#4 Pretend to like dogs

Everyone has them and is really into them and you need to learn to pretend to feel the same way or everyone will hate you. It’s annoying at first, but after a while, you’ll probably have  somewhat internalized your performed affection for dogs and it will start to become less upsetting when they jump on you all the time everywhere you go, which will help you not be in a constant state of terrified/irritated fight-or-flight, which is better for your heart.

Tip #5  If at all possible, bring your community with you.

If they can’t move with you, make them visit all the time. And talk/email with them all the time, even though you are generally horrible at staying in touch and you can’t stand the phone more than anything. You will need to maintain these active connections to stay sane.

It is notoriously difficult to make friends in this place. People who are drawn to mountain desert towns tend to be pretty introverted and internal and are consumed with their own spiritual or whatever quests. Many such folks don’t love to stray outside of their social comfort zones to get to know and welcome new people, though there are of course many exceptions. It is thus recommended that you lie about how long you plan to stay in town (say you are here for good) so that people will be more likely to think it’s worth investing in a friendship. It will also be useful to you to familiarize yourself with the basics of your astrological chart. This is information people will want to know about you and it will help them decide if they want to be friends with you.  Also, it’s probably significantly easier to make friends if you live right downtown and drink a lot, so try that, too.

Tip #6 When bad things happen during the year, write them down and send them to city hall to be stuffed in a four-story tall puppet called Old Man Gloom that will then be burned in a large, cathartic ceremony that involves the whole town and is awesome.

Here’s what it looks like.

Tip #7 Riding your bike will be much more difficult than it was where you came from,  but ultimately worth it.

You will need tons of specific-to-this-area accessories to help your tires not be punctured by 70 thousand cactusy thorn-seed-things called goat heads every time you leave your house. Also, sometimes tumbleweeds get snarled in your tires. And there’s like no bike infrastructure. So be careful and be prepared to spend some money and feel lots of frustration.  But it’s freer and better than driving your new car all the time, and riding bikes always makes you like a place better.

Tip #8 Don’t panic if you start to lose your edge.

You might as well take advantage of all of the healing-ness and spiritual whatever available here. The witty, sharp, irreverence and curiosity to stay on top of the most interesting, innovative ideas and discourses happening in the world energy that served you so well in a big East Coast city will lie dormant and useless here, leaving you no choice but to feel kind of isolated and eventually explore other ways of connecting to the world, yourself, and others. So, go ahead and learn to read Tarot cards. Get body work. Talk about astrology and chakras. It will fall off of you as soon as you leave. But do stay really direct and fast in your interactions, cause that’s also valued here.

Tip #9 Adjust for the altitude

Cooking times for everything really are different and baking just won’t work at all.  Drink water all the time as you won’t feel thirsty, you’ll just suddenly become dehydrated and pass out and then it’ll be too late. And you won’t feel your sweat cause it evaporates right away. At first you may find it difficult to breathe just walking down the street or even eating. Also you will be absurdly drunk after one drink, so be careful when drinking, especially if you’re going to drive, which you are cause you live here. It’s better to be the one sober person on the road, than drunk with everyone else. Some people also get headaches from the altitude.  Altitude adjustment problems  go away in a few weeks, a couple months at the most. And then you have tons more oxygen-carrying blood cells than normal people and you become superhuman and can run really fast forever or jump a thousand feet at a time when you get back to sea level.

Also you might as well learn to ski because  you live on a mountain and it’s really fun.

Tip #10 Remind yourself as often as possible how amazingly you are handling this super hard transition  Most organisms die outside their natural habitat. So, way to still be alive. You’re the toughest. And you have lots of oxygen blood cells to show for it.

Triathlons, Rodeos, and Sikh Dharma

Yesterday I participated in my first ever triathlon. It was a 5k run, then a 20k bike, then a 400 meter swim. Santa Fe insists on having the swim last (contrary to how normal triathlons go) evidently to see how many exhausted people they can drown. The side of the pool was lined with cramping folks. But I didn’t cramp or drown. I did really well. I beat my goal (which was basically to finish) and finished in the first third of my division. I never thought of myself as an athlete because I was always so awful at sports, but then I decided to invest in an inhaler (I had asthma and didn’t know it) and some training, and then I became an athlete. During the race I pushed myself harder than I probably ever have before, and was nauseous for the rest of the day as my body struggled with unprecedented levels of albuterol and purple gatorade, but I feel really happy and proud, and I’m going to do another one in August.

Happy finisher

A couple of weeks ago we went to our first rodeo. It was exactly like how you think it was. It’s one of those things that has become so absurd and caricatured over time that there’s no more thing which you can caricature, only the caricature itself. Like national presidential campaigns, or America in general.

First we all had to rise and worship Jesus (via a “non-denominational prayer” that involved angels and was dedicated to the name of the Son) and then we had to rise again and worship America, and then throughout we were privy to a steady stream of flowery odes to the independent, up-by-your-bootstraps, “work-a-day” cowboy lifestyle. I was totally fascinated with the cultural experience. What made it even more extreme, if that’s possible, was that it took place on pride weekend, so we had attended the pride parade all day and then went to the rodeo, and then were going to more pride events that night.

The rodeo with Sangre de Cristo mts (I think?) in the background. These guys helped the cowboys with all the wrangling and whatnot

The rodeo consisted of about 8-10 events that involved  doing things to animals that they didn’t want you to do to them (like sititng on their backs for 8 seconds or jumping on top of them from off of a running horse and wrestling them to the ground, or tying their legs up in a certain way as you gallop by). Between events there were four year old cowboys trying to ride baby sheep. There were also races and performances wherein women rode horses in impressive formations. I liked those parts a lot better cause they didn’t involve any potential injury to person or animal.

Here is a guy trying to sit on a bull for 8 seconds

We went with a close friend of ours who is a vegetarian and a sensitive soul. We stayed at the rodeo for about two hours and she appeared to be having an anxiety attack the entire time.  Anne, on the other hand, was enjoying this very valuable opportunity to be exposed to the most talented of the cowboy world, a world she already imbued with magical, idealized powers having something to do with nature and masculinity and I don’t even know what. She was super into it. As for me, I was happy to observe everything and everyone and I appreciated this glimpse into another culture and their values, but the frequent sudden, loud noises and the people falling hard off of bucking animals and the baby animals being wrestled and tied again and again started to fray my nerves after a while, and I eventually joined my friend in a hunched-over, protected-from-assailing-sensory-experiences position and waited for Anne to feel like she had had a sufficiently cowboyful time.

I’m glad I went, but I don’t think I need to go again.

Here's some cowboy children of the sort that ride on baby sheep. They also had toy guns, but I didn't get them in the picture.

this is what a rodeo clown looks like

On the weekend prior to the rodeo/pride sandwich weekend, we went to Española for Solstice Peace Prayer Day.  Española is a tiny, dusty town about a 40 minutes north of Santa Fe where the Western Sikhs made their home in the late 60′s/early 70′s. It is also the heroin capital of the US. It is unclear how these two populations are related or whether they overlap at all. Basically this Sikh guy from India started this comunity that was appealing to a lot of white, middle class 60′s and 70′s people as it revolved around achieving happiness, health, and hopefully enlightenment through yoga and meditation and a certain clean lifestyle, and sending your kids to school in India. The Western Sikhs have long beards and long hair and often wear white tunics and both genders wear turbans and everyone’s last name is Khalsa.  You know of them because they make Yogi tea. Our good friend who grew up Sikh designed the package.  Here’s a recent article with info on Western Sikh history and current drama. There’s all kinds of financial intrigue and infighting and complicatedness.

Peace prayer day involves lots of music and dance and talks a longish barefoot walk to three different altars to make dedications to yourself, the world, and the universe. A big component of Western Sikhism as opposed to Punjabi Sikhism is gender equality, and they make a big deal of it, but people who had their period had to step in a different bowl of water at each altar than everyone else. But that might have been a Native American thing cause they were partnering with the Sikhs for the ceremony. Sikhs love Native American spirituality. The other big difference between Western Sikhism and Punjabi Sikhism is Western Sikhs can’t drink or use drugs. (People who live in New York – haven’t you noticed how Punjabi Sikhs are always the life of the party at the clubs? Not so with the Western Sikhs). Our friend who was raised in the community thus figured out that consuming a lot of nutmeg has a strikingly similar effect to consuming marijuana – except it lasts much longer. It’s true, I tried it. But also there’s evidently some toxicity , so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Anyway, I figured out that my connetion to spirituality is more intellectual/idea-related  than sensory/movement-related (in general) and the intellectual components of the talks was definitely lacking, so the day didn’t do much for me spiritually, but it was cool to see other people having lots of love and long hugs and even creepily extended eye contact.

There's Sikh Raffi keeping the crowd pumped as the runners brought the torch to the stage.

On the peace walk

We had a couple of visitors recently and we went on lots of hikes and I will leave you with some more pictures. You should visit and then you will have pictures. Plus it’s really fun to visit here. Plus I miss you.

This is abiquiu lake. It's a dam lake, which I learned is bad. But it's fun to swim in. People who don't have enough anxiety or adrenaline in their lives jump into the water off these cliffs, at least three or four stories high. Anne did that. I jumped off of much much lower cliffs. About two feet high.

arriving at ghost ranch

hiking in O'keefe country. There were no giant vagina flowers. Only these normal ones.

Cerrillos hills with Amy. It looked like alien land.

Sunday afternoon at the town of Cerrillos bar.

Some fireworks. Every kind of explosive is legal here all the time, so the 4th of July was crazy and confusing.

Santaphasia

I just found this draft I started a little over a month ago and forgot about. I will publish it. And then I will write something current in another post very soon. Thank you.

Well, it’s been three months. And I’ve been in an especially unreflective/uncommunicative place for a while (as you may or may not have noticed). I’ve been trying to cope with being away from my people and my habitat by throwing myself into various projects and exercising borderline-obsessively. I think there’s something about Santa Fe– the dramatic, expansive, beautiful  but harsh and lifeless environment, the weird, erratic quality of the weather, the narcissistic mythology around it – that really seems to disrupt ones ability to know how she’s feeling in general (let alone be able to communicate it) which is ironic cause so many people come here to get in touch with their innermost whatevers.

Our garden. It's wildflowers time. And on-purpose flowers. That's spring-storm sky in the background. Every home in Santa Fe has to have a garden with a buddha in it. You can have a Shiva or Ghanesh if you're a little edgy. You also have to have a Subaru outback. Failure to comply with these laws will result in being shunned and judged and inevitably getting your car stuck up a mountain somewhere.

But one thing I’ve realized as I’ve come into contact with more and more folks from all over the state (at trainings) and heard more and more stories (from Anne’s work, especially) is that Santa Fe really is an “amazing oasis” (the words my adorable, gay 21 year old drivers-license-test-giver-and proud-graduate-of-Santa-Fe-high used). It’s precious and uppity and obnoxious and the rest of the state hates it, but the rest of the state is scary as hell. The rest of the state has facilitators training social service providers who pepper their presentations with the words “retarded” and “gay” and trainees who think said facilitator is awesome and hilarious. The rest of the state makes it so that my future place of employment has to make us sign a list of rules that include “no discharging of firearms when in the presence of clients.” The rest of the state has masters level social workers who say things like “I’m not gonna keep paying taxes for those illegals who just get everything scott-free” and “well, my white kids keep getting passed up for jobs, and that hurts them. What about reverse discrimination?” amidst vigorous nods and murmurs of assent. The rest of the state is vigilante justice and hopeless corruption and you’re-not-from-around-here and border drama (but not like Arizona) and unbelievably isolated ruralness and economic depression. It is beautiful though.

Shitty iphone picture of the moon and our little tree in the front yard.

These are our neighbors. They are llamas. I totally see llamas every day on my way to wherever. They are crazy-looking but quiet and polite.

One bizarre thing about Santa Fe, though, is that people who trace their ancestry back to Spain like 400 years ago (via the colonizers) still consider themselves to be Spanish and are really into it. There’s a lot of totally un-self-conscious colonizer worship here that takes many forms, including yearly, celebrated parades and reenactments of Great Moments in Colonizing History which is so weird cause there’s such a large and visible Native American population, and you just wouldn’t think that shit would fly. But it does. All over the place. These families that trace their ancestry to Spanish colonizers are super powerful and control everything in the city, and since it’s the capital, they control the state too. You start to recognize names and hear about scandals and consequences that occur in the government when one of them is crossed.

Anyway, now lots of things have changed since I wrote that post.  We moved (we have a hot tub now), I started work, I got my driver’s license. We’ve been here for four months now. Much to write soon. And pictures. PS Happy Nationalism, gun powder, and long weekend day!

Live together, die alone, ascend to heaven together via the Interfaith Church of Sideways and Pendulums

That’s a lot of text. People are going to have to get really long Lost t-shirts now.

I  mean to be writing about Santa Fe and New Mexico, but I feel like I have to write about Lost if I’m going to write the day after the series finale was aired.  New Mexico will always (I mean never) be timely, so I can get back to it at any time. Right now I’m adrift in the Lost zeitgeist and I need to respond appropriately

Anyway, be spoiler alerted, if somehow, you haven’t seen the finale yet.

I really liked it. A lot. Not entirely immediately. Immediately afterwards I just felt the neck-pain and exhaustion that comes with sitting in a room full of people I don’t know at all or that well, and sensing I’m the only one crying (silently) like 8 times, and pushing with all my might not to let it come out in sobs and thus tolerating a 2-hour (no commercials) long thunderstorm in my throat.

Also I felt confused because I thought there would be more questions answered and so that was my frame of mind going into it, and I had trouble letting go of that. Even when Christian Shephard–awesome that Kate called that out–told us (via Jack) to let go of that.

But so many hours later, the emotional resonance remains and the frustration/confusion of the unanswered questions has faded. I think a lot of what really appealed to people about lost was the socialness around it (the focus on relationships and characters in the show, of course, but also the group viewings, the fan clusters and their wiki pages, the collective conversations and theorizings) and so it was probably more important to more people to deal with the emotional/relational issues in the finale than the mysteries, and having unanswered questions still gives people stuff to throw around together.  (Also I’m reading rumors about a Ben Linus spin-off, sparked by the fact that he didn’t enter the Church of Our Favorite Dead People – speaking of which, what about Walt and Michael and Mr. Eko? Are Black people not allowed in heaven if they’re not Rose?)

I think the fact/way that they dealt with the characters all being dead kind of helped us with the mourning process as well, despite the heavy-handed Christ0-Buddhistness. Maybe our collective culture wants to have some heavy-handed Christo-Buddhistness once in a while.

Anyway, it felt good. It felt cathartic. It was funny and irreverent and self-aware when it needed to be. It was well-paced and well-written. It was just overall an excellent piece of tv-ery.

And so you were able to forgive the silliness of the giant carrot/penis/cork that turns Evil on and off and baptizes people with fire and water.  And the bullshitness that is Sayyid and Shannon awakening with each other. And a lot of other stupid things (Like all of season 6).  TV is stupid.  But for TV, Lost was one excellent show and it clearly hit a lot of people where and when they needed it. It was important, it was a phenomenon, it brought people together in a pretty divisive time, and even though it was obsessed with black and white and good and evil, it was all about complexity and nuance. In general.

I’m just really gonna miss it.

Chitwan

My blog stats show that you are much more interested in sperms than in our absolutely fascinating journey through Nepal, which I understand. But if I could just have your attention for this last post about Nepal… It has a billion pictures of animals and some information about China…

elephant baby snacking

So, before our trip, we had been sent to the US embassy with fake questions and concerns about traveling and trekking around Nepal (the real objective of the mission was to make some friends at the US embassy that would then become Mata’s friends after we invited them over for dinner, and then he would have someone in the embassy to help him get his people visas) so we dutifully  asked to speak to someone about our “security concerns” and in the process learned that there was still Maoist and splinter-group attacks going on in the Terai (the lowlands near India where Chitwan National Park is). The lady who spoke with us and gave us this information had absolutely no interest in becoming friends with us, despite our charming attempts to chat her up. So we left without a friend and with new, real security concerns about going to the Terai.

But of course we went anyway. It wasn’t a high alert or anything.

When we arrived at the bus stop by Chitwan, we were taken by jeep to the Hotel Parkside at the edge of the jungle, from where we would do all of our jungling. We went everywhere by jeep in Chitwan because it’s rugged. At the hotel we met Gopal, who was our very hard-working and somewhat obsequious guide for our jungle activities. He also had x-ray vision and could name bird and animal and plant species in like 80 languages.

Hotel Parkside. It was really nice and weirdly German-influenced in style and it was a great deal. I recommend.

We spent the afternoon reading and basking in the warm, sea-level sun and in the evening we went for a jungle walk, during which Gopal showed us lots of plants with scary self-repairing or curling-up-and-camouflaging or creatively-using-rhino-excrement abilities. I have always been a little afraid of plants because of how they’re alive and super smart and have agency and intention and are totally impossible to read.

Marijuana just grows wild throughout the jungle and nearby village (so we're told), which is convenient cause the following day was Shiva's birthday, which is the one day a year it is totally legal to openly smoke marijuana in Nepal. I was sad that we weren't going to be in Kathmandu for the festivities, but Anne wasn't at all.

here's a strange Southern Nepal jungle tree. I think it does special, interesting things, but I forget what.

Anne in her jungle hat by the river

At night, as part of our program, we were to be driven to Sauraha, the nearby village, to see a cultural program, which consisted of the indigenous-to-the-area Tharu people demonstrating their super intricate and impressive stick dances. I felt really squeamish about the whole idea because I really don’t like to be involved in the indigenous-brown-people-performing-their-impressive-exoticness-for-the-pleasure-and-delight-of-gaping-white-people dynamic, but I was relieved to see that there were lots of gaping Nepali people as well. Including a bunch of pushy, slutty teenagers with iphones. The stick dances were really amazing. Quite a bit more impressive than the Sherpa dance.

village, near the hotel

more village - tharu architecture

On the bus we met Tracy and Luke, an our-age couple from China who had stayed at the same hotel as we did in Pokhara and had consequently been talked into the same Chitwan package and thus were staying at the hotel Parkside as well. One of them was from a big city and one was from a smaller town. We talked about life in our respective Superpowers. I had thought the whole thing about communism was that the government gives you food and housing and healthcare and retirement money and in exchange you don’t get to use facebook (which had always sounded like a pretty amazing deal to me) but it turns out their government doesn’t really provide much for them, and is in fact pretty much as negligent to them as ours is to us. Plus they can’t use facebook (but they can freely use google), which makes me really confused about what communism is. But I guess that’s the nature of living in a superpower – they step all over their own people in their rabid, maniacal bid for world domination, and their denizens get to enjoy having global hegemony, even if they can’t go to the doctor.

Tracy and Luke were cool though. They were a really interesting combination of thoughtful and nationalistic. It was especially interesting (cause it was thorny) to talk to them about Tibet.

Chitwan looks like Africa

The next day was foggy and freakishly cold.  In the morning we had our elephant ride to look at rhinos and other jungle animals. Elephants hide the scent of humans, so the rhinos and other animals won’t hide from you. Also, if they charge, you don’t have to climb a tree, cause you’re already on an elephant.

us in our adventure pants, with our new friends. The mahout got on and off the elephant by walking onto its trunk. The elephant would then lift him up to his back or down to the ground.

Big rhino and baby rhino. They are the weirdest looking things.

more

just baby rhino

spotted deer

monkeys and birds

It was too cloudy and cold for this crocodile to want to be sunbathing, so I thought it was dead, but I was reassured otherwise.

If it had not been a freakishly cold day, then we would have gone to the river and helped bathe the elephants, but today the elephants were too cold to get a bath and I was disappointed. We went on a canoe ride to look at other different animals.

the canoes were each made from the trunk of one tree.

A kingfisher. Like the beer.

I forget what this river is called in Nepal, but it becomes the Ganges when it goes to India. It's not holy in Nepal, though

peacock

This is the biggest bird there. I forget what it is.

elephants gathering wood

Then we drove to the elephant breeding center to play with baby elephants.

As I mentioned, that day is was Shiva's birthday. As per tradition, children block the roads with rope every few yards (or every few feet if you're in kathmandu) and you have to pay them money to remove the rope. Sometimes they drive a hard bargain. They take the money and use it for a big bonfire party later. I did go to the Sauraha version of Shiva's birthday party that night, but it was nothing to write home about, so I won't.

The elephant breeding center is where they train the elephants to help out around the jungle and give safaris. It’s definitely questionable. But they seem to be treated well and they get yummy snacks.

I forget what all is in this elephant treat, but I know it includes molasses

year-old twins

And here’s a video of a baby elephant being super cute.

Well, that concludes our journey through the various regions of Nepal, unless I think of more things later. Thank you for reading.

Pokhara

Alright, back to Nepal. So after Helambu we went back to Kathmandu for a few days and then set off for Pokhara, which is the second biggest city in Nepal and is tucked in the Annapurna mountains (which is part of the Himalayas- everything is part of the Himalayas). The Annapurna trek is the most popular and evidently amazing trek in Nepal, but it’s not possible in the winter. Also, it goes super much higher than the Helambu trek, and we certainly were in no shape to begin to think about attempting it.  You can also get to Everest base camp from Pokhara.

Because of the harrowing, dust and body-filled experience we’d had on the public bus to Helambu, we decided to go with the highly-recommended tourist bus to Pokhara. I was excited at the possibility of having my own seat and not having to wear my mask the whole way. Then, 20 minutes into the 5 hour ride, the toddler sitting directly behind us began a vomitting spree that greatly affected the environment around our seats. So, out came the masks, and we had to wear them the whole way.

Our hotel in Pokhara had the first sit-down toilet of our tenure in Nepal, which was pretty exciting. We arrived in the evening, and it was foggy and kind of drizzly. We took a canoe out on lake phewa tal and visited the temple that rests on an island in the middle of the lake. I sat in the back of the canoe and was the rower-boy because I’m actually significantly stronger than anne, especially in the upper arm area, which is a secret but now you know.

The temple in the lake

Pokhara is much nicer, cleaner, more laid-back, more nature-beautiful, and in general much easier to be in than Kathmandu. It’s also more expensive, (but still extremely affordable). The restaurants and cafes are delicious and comfy and most of them have fireplaces for the cool mountain nights. Our first night there, there was a wild thunderstorm, which was totally seasonally inappropriate and confusing to people, and the next day it rained all day. But we were happy to have a day just drinking tea by the fire and reading and resting as we were starting to feel overloaded with sites and activities and newness.

Rainy morning on lake Phewa Tal

In the evening it cleared up and we walked around in Old Pokhara (which is what New Pokhara looked like before all the trek/tourism dollars) and it was a striking difference.

a street in Old Pokhara

Rainbow over Old Pokhara

Something you’re supposed to do when you’re in Pokhara is take a drive at dawn up to this village called Sarangot from where you can watch the sun rise over the Annapurna mountains, and it is absolutely breathtaking. So we arranged for a taxi to take us up there the next morning at 5, provided the weather was clear. Which it was. The taxi ride was long and windy and stinky and the pre-dawn mountain cold was pretty fierce. After we arrived we walked over to a rock outcropping where there were a bunch of other tourists waiting to see the sunrise and being pushy and getting in each others’ way/pictures. There was a manic German guy standing next to me who kept singing “Here comes the sun, deidel deidel, here comes the sun.” I was cold and grumpy. But the view was amazing when the sun did rise. So here are a bunch of pictures of mountains.

sun rising

Clouds over lake Phewa Tal

daybreak

look, we were really there.

The day was gorgeous. We had a huge breakfast at Elegant View restaurant (I would definitely recommend it) and decided to cross the lake to climb to the top of the world peace pagoda, which was donated (and built?) by the Japanese as a beautiful place to meditate and concentrate on world peace. Which Anne took very seriously. I dont’ know why Japan chose Nepal as the place in which to locate this monument. Nepal doesn’t really pick fights with the world. Maybe this is why.

There was a boaters’ union so you couldn’t get across the lake for less than 350 rupees. Which is cool.

me and my nosering crossing the lake

World Peace Buddha

There were several class trips up at the Pagoda, and we got to hang out with lots of curious teenagers who shared their chips with us.

Some view from the peace pagoda

more view

We tried to hike back down on a different route that would take us around the lake and got completely lost. We had lots of entrepreneurial kids volunteer to guide us back to town for a fee. Every adult and child alike that we passed asked us for money and chocolate, even as they sat in front of their large house with their finery on. We passed a goat herd who, not having heard my “Namaste,” tried to school me about manners.

It was a beautiful walk though, lots of rocky terrain and then bright green rice paddy ridges and green forests.

some baby goats

That evening we ate dinner at the Lemon Tree (I’d also definitely recommend) and I finally had the delicious Palak Paneer I’d been craving and unsuccessfully chasing since my arrival in Nepal. Before bed we made arrangements with our smooth and highly persuasive hotel manager guy for a package to the Chitwan jungle in the humid lowlands by the Indian border for the next three days.

Sperms

It is a blustery, snowy, 35 degree April 23rd here in Santa Fe, and the remnants of last night’s random snowstorm still on the ground combined with today’s amazing howling winds and intermittent precipitation are totally colluding with my desire to stay inside all day and mope about my sad job situation.

The backyard during the snowstorm yesterday evening

When you feel hopeless about jobs, you pretty quickly start focusing on having a baby. So I have been using this inside day to scour the internet for sperm and advice. (By the way, since homophobia is going to die with our parents’ generation and thus free up resources and motivation to make same-sex couples’ lives cooler,  I predict that in The Future you will be able to download synthetic sperm and print it out –cause in The Future you can download and print out anything– and then your lesbian partner can like scrape her cheek cells or something and smear it on the synthetic sperm and then you can insemnate it and have a baby that is both of your genes and also insurance will pay for it. Mark my words. You heard it here first.)

Everything is so much better in the future, and we should be so jealous of them. Which we are. Which is why we are obsessed with imagining dystopian societies cause we can’t bear how much better they are going to have it than we did.

But I digress. So, in the present you have to order the sperm to be shipped to you in ice or something. Unless you use a friend. But today I just wanted to browse sperm donor strangers. And I learned a lot about myself in the process.

First you have to make sure you are using sperm banks that are cool with lesbians. Then you have to think about where geographically you want to pull from. What seems to be the largest, most comprehensive sperm bank that is nice to lesbians is in California. That works for us because then it will be more like Anne than if we used East Coast sperm.

So, for this particular sperm bank, for each donor you get to know basic physical description (hair, eyes, skin tone), hobbies, talents/propensities, education level, major, ethnic background, blood type, height, weight, religion, whether anyone else has gotten pregnant with that sperm, and what celebrities the donor resembles-which is really fun. You can read some short answers they wrote about why they donated sperm and what their personality is like and what they would say to the recipient and the child. You can also read a few sentences of the sperm bank staff’s impressions of the guy. They definitely have certain favorites. If you pay money, you can see a baby photo of the donor, hear an audio interview, read a more detailed profile, and see personality test results.  It’s $75 for that.

So then you do a search and you get to make up and specify your ideal child by choosing the physical traits and interests you want in a donor. Which is so weird. So I went to town demanding curly hair, and disqualifying anyone too tall and fat (mostly because I don’t want to birth that), and anyone with fiery red hair. (I would be scared of a fiery red-headed child even though some of the best adults I know are red heads.) I still got a bajillion results. All races and ethnicities. Then I remembered that theoretically we might want an open donor, which means the child can contact him when the child is 18. That might be important for the child. So I took off all my filters (even red heads) and searched just for open donors. Only 33 total. Now the races are predominantly caucasian and east asian. Now it gets even stranger and randomer.  I favorited one because he has blue eyes and light brown hair and German ancestry like Anne. I favorited some people cause they were said to look like actors from Lost (Daniel Dae Kim and Mathew Fox, respectively). I rejected anyone over 6’3″ and/or 211 pounds because I thought the birth would be harder. I favorited people from cooler countries that we would have to go to cause we want the kid to be connected to their heritage. Anyone from Vietnam gets favorited. Not so much Austria.

Before I started reading people’s answers to why they chose to donate sperm, I figured I would be most likely to favor the honest ones who said they wanted money. But after reading a billion super earnest young men write about how they want to help a couple’s dream come true, I was offended when a young man of German and Irish descent didn’t bother to lie, and I didn’t favorite him. In the question about what the donor would want to tell the recipients/future child, everyone wrote that the parents should be good and loving, and the kids should follow their dreams and be open-minded, etc. One guy wrote “you will probably need braces.” I double favorited him.

I had to reject people who used bad grammar and just couldn’t really write, if they said English was their first language. Even if they didn’t wear corrective lenses and were good at playing musical instruments and were super athletic, which were usually strong pluses. I just feel much more strongly than I thought I would that I want my kid to have verbally smart genes. Which might already make me a bad mother.

I rejected anyone who was Jewish because I want to avoid possible inbreeding and have as much genetic variation as possible. I also rejected the one Mormon, since the whole point of an open donor is that the kid can contact him, and pretty much the Mormons’ sole claim to fame in recent history is being singularly obsessed with hating gay people, so I think using a Mormon donor would set up my raised-by-lesbians child to be too hurt. But actually, I’m surprised Mormons are allowed to donate sperm. I also tried to scan for potential homophobia or support in people’s answers to why they donated sperm, especially if they said they were Christian (I wanted to help infertile couples create a family which is God’s will for us all vs. I want to help anyone who wants a child be able to have a child and also I need money). I sort of irrationally decided that people who identify as Catholic aren’t as likely to be possibly actively homophobic.

So, yeah, choosing a donor is an inherently bizarre and interesting process and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it as the process continues. I suggest you all start trolling the internet for sperm for us when you’re just bored at work or whatever, and maybe you’ll find us the best donor. If you do you get to be god parent.

My Spring Break in New York City (2010 woooooo!)

Oh my goodness, where do I walk?

So, I had spent a month in Santa Fe when I went back home for a recharging, Pesadic snuggle in the respective bosoms of my family and my city. There was brisket. And vibrance and youth. I was scared to buy the ticket because I was afraid it was going to be too wound-reopening. Then I realize the wound had never closed, so that was no longer a concern. Then I also got over some kind of hump and actually started enjoying Santa Fe (cause of time and cause I knew I was leaving).

There were things I missed about Santa Fe while I was in New York. There was also things I felt super wistful and appreciative of about New York while I was in New York. I know you shouldn’t compare New York and anything else, especially a rural desert mountain town because it’s comparing apples and something tiny and not very nutritious. So, this isn’t a comparison but rather a mere list of some relative strengths and weaknesses that I was (re) struck by on my trip.

Space – Santa Fe has it and New York doesn’t. I missed not having to navigate through a bajillion people going in a mazillion directions. And not having to be on top of people and in their conversations at restaurants and coffee shops. Especially in Tribeca. I really didn’t want to have to hear what people were saying in Tribeca. Speaking of which,

Douchebags- New York has them and Santa Fe really doesn’t seem to. Maybe because New York has all of them. I really had forgotten what a pestilence they were, and because of the space issue discussed above, you really have to be quite intimate with them, and I was looking forward to not being around that anymore. I think in general I would choose needy, socially inept new-agey old ladies over douchebags as a Most Obnoxious Population That You Have To Deal With Every Day And That Seems To Have Some Kind of Hegemony.

Infrastructure – New York has sidewalks. And bike lanes. And greenways. And bike traffic lights. The ft. greene route to the manhattan bridge is now a veritable bike playland. It was such a pleasure to ride a bike again in New York (except the Brooklyn bridge part where tourists insist on walking in your lane and trying to kill or maim you and themselves – but I was mellower about it this time because I wasn’t on my way to or from work). Santa Fe has..a slab of paved bike trail that goes about 2 miles and has cyclists crossing the middle of a 6 lane highway with no traffic light. Which is almost more insulting than if they hadn’t even bothered.

Quality of crazy people – New York has a lot of crazy people. New Mexico has a lot of crazy people. But New York’s crazy people are so much more high functioning because just existing there on the day-to-day is so incredibly difficult and full of complex navigations and interactions that you have to keep your crazy on somewhat of a leash just out of necessity. Not so here.  Not at all.

Young people that look like me and share my culture – New York has them, Santa Fe doesn’t. Though, I do have to say there are enough people here from the East Coast (even though they’re old) that they have influenced the culture somewhat in that directness and conciseness in communication are very highly valued. I dont’ see that so much in other parts of the Southwest and definitely not in the West Coast. Anyway, that feels familiar and comfortable, but otherwise it’s a really strange and alien culture and I don’t see myself reflected very much, and that hit me hard when I was back in New York and surrounded by me-s. On the other hand, there’s a million sides to everyone and there are some ways I can relate to folks and to myself here that have maybe been a little dormant for the past…well, since adolescence.

Mice poop in your sheets and roaches in your stove – Not here. But we do have mountain lions and rattlesnakes. (But New York has cougars too… Oh! I’m hilarious!)

Public displays of violence – I don’t know if I was just frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I had to witness a lot of violence during my tenure in New York and including on this trip. This time I was on bleeker waiting to cross 6th ave when some guy decided to repeatedly punch some other guy in the face in the middle of the intersection  for a full traffic light cycle until the guy finally broke free and made his way to the curb. Traffic just resumed as normal because all those hundreds of people are used to seeing people stumbling onto sidewalks with their bloody, pulpy faces. In Santa Fe people beat each other up indoors. And in general, there’s just less going on that could be traumatizing or re-traumatizing to random passers-by.

Oxygen -It felt so good and decadent to breathe at sea level.

Friendliness – I think New Yorkers are kind, in general, and willing to be helpful. But they are super busy and their lives are completely full and they are not looking to add anything to them, usually. Santa Feans, on the other hand, appear to be much more open to making new friends and connections –probably because they are so bored and understimulated, and the result is a lot of friendliness and  people who are really excited and interested in talking to you, which feels good and is not creepy. Usually.

Here's what it looks like on the way too and from the coffee shop.

This is Janie. Our dog while we live at the King of Santa Fe's house. She's expectant. But she's 14 and deaf and so a lot less annoying than she could be.

Anyway, it was really wonderful and refreshing to see everyone and to be in that environment again. It was hard to come back here and still be jobless. But I’m finding ways to fill my days. And there may be some job soon.

Alright, I’m gonna work on finishing the Nepal posts now.

Helambu part 3 (everything else)

Ok, the Nepal posts need to come rapid-fire now. It’s already over a month since we came back. And next week I’m coming home (!!) so I probably won’t get to post then.

So here goes:

The day after the Ama Yangri episode, we went to the Dharma Center that Mata helped establish and that Mata’s brother now runs. They sponsor monks from around the country to come sequester themselves and study and meditate and pray for a period of 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days.  They can’t leave the buildings, which are arranged in a square around a courtyard so that no one can see them, but they can still spend time outside in sunlight. It’s very secretive and mysterious. There are a small group of folks who work full time at the dharma center. The environment was really good and healthy and there was a good balance between work and play. I would love to spend some time volunteering up there some day.

Dharma Center buildings and courtyard. Even the people who bring the monks food arent' allowed to see them. They leave it outside the door.

That thing drank so much, so voraciously, it walked the line between scary and adorable. Like so many things.

Anne loooooved the dharma center

Helping out with the vegetable chopping and having some lady time. Anne's off farming with the mens.

Here's that yak again.

So, the plan, for the next day was for Mata to walk with us to the next village, Milamchim-gaon, but then he got “sick” and wanted to rest an extra day in Tarkegyang, but oh, hey, his relative, who is really needing some american sponsorship/money happens to be free to take us to melamchim so just go on ahead with him, and let me tell you a few stories about how foreign nationals fell in love with guides while trekking and got married, Dracknie, do you have a boyfriend?

We decided not to explicitly tell Mata about the nature of our relationship, not really for any reason except that when it came up (like if one of us was asked if we had a boyfriend) we were always in a group of people, and when we were alone with him, it never really came up and it didn’t feel like the kind of thing that it was so necessary to disclose that you would bring it up out of nowhere.

Anyway, we were suspicious and bemused by the leaving us with the relative, but when we did re-meet up with Mata the next day, he was more pale and sniffly so maybe he had actually been sick.

There was a lot of bridge-crossing in the next few days. Some of them were pretty scary if you have any height fear. That's anne's jungle hat

Barley is grown along the mountainside. It's fire-roasted and ground to make tzampa, which is a delicious and nutritious oatmeal type thing that you pour tibetan tea on and eat in the morning. It also renders tibetan (yak butter) tea not only palatable but kind of good.

We passed a totally unexpected rural clinic between Melamchim and Thimbu ( I think) and we met some great nurses. Anne super wants to volunteer there at some point.

So, without Mata we were so much more vulnerable to people demanding money from us. For example, when we went with our guide (Yamjo, Mata’s relative) to see the monastery at Melamchim-gaon, an adolescent lad smelling of alcohol hung out while we looked around the monastery, and then said he was from the youth club, which is in charge of the upkeep of the monastery, and we now have to pay him 500 rupees ($8) cause we looked at it.  We’d seen a million monasteries and never had to pay before. We looked to Yamjo and he helpfully reiterated that this guy would like us to pay him 500 rupees cause we looked at the monastery. Anne said we should just do it, because if we make a scene we’ll embarass Yamjo who has lots of relatives in melamchim. I handed over the money but felt betrayed by yamjo and weirdly furious. I know that in the scheme of things we have a lot more money than this kid does, or, at least a lot more access to money, and what’s 8 bucks to me, but something about being cheated and lied to (which happened so many times in the course of the trip) just makes me so upset and unable to see the bigger picture. I think I would have parted with the money much more easily if the kid had been like, “look, you don’t need to pay anything, but I would appreciate a donation, some of which will go to the upkeep of the monastery and some of which I’ll probably spend on alcohol and cigarettes, to be honest, but there’s not a lot of opportunity here and it’s hard seeing these tourists with all this opportunity come by cause it’s really not fair. I didn’t ask to be born in a small rural village in Nepal anymore than you asked to be born into a middle class family in the US.” That’s what that kid should be saying. The monastery was especially nice, so maybe some of the money does go there.

arriving at melamchimgaon

here's melamchim from above. It's smaller and more spread out than Tarkegyang

The next morning we walked from Melamchimgaon to Milarepa’s cave (milarepa is a very famous, powerful tibetan monk who  could fly as well as do other very powerful monk things), where we met up with Mata again and continued on to Thimbu. We spent the night in Thimbu (actually a little bit away from the village cause Mata wanted to stay in a Buddhist-run lodge, and we were getting lower towards the Kathmandu valley, so not everyone was buddhist/tibetan anymore). There we met Dr. Julia, a volunteer doctor from England, who filled us in on the seedy underbelly of Nepali life and culture and the kinds of things she encountered in her practice. She seemed wary and exhausted. In the morning we took a 6am bus back to Kathmandu, and it was only 4 1/2 hours this time (but no less scary). Quisang had amazing momos waiting for us.

This was the porter. He carried that on his head.

One of the scarier bridges we had to cross

Outside Milarepa's cave

Summer flowers were coming out in winter, and other climate change things were happening that were freaking people out.

Tea break at a tea house on the way to Thimbu

There were lots of waterfalls in helambu

Tzampa mill

I’m at a cafe in Santa Fe and there are people with long strands of turquoise talking about sound vibrations and color vibrations and healing and then someone else chimed in that they’re an art therapist and more vibrations and healing talk and then someone broke out a sound -vibration-making instrument… I need to get away from this synesthesia orgy before something gets on my clothes.

I dont’ know, I feel sad and uncomfortable around new age people because it feels like they’re looking for all this intimacy and connection, but don’t have the social skills to get it through normal channels so they need to hang out defensively in other realms. Although, actually, I’m the one who’s sitting alone in a corner while they have a great old vibration-loving time in a group.

Alright. More Nepal later. Only two more Nepal posts, I think.

Ama Yangri-What I learned about trekking (Helambu pt 2)

1. It’s not a good idea to climb straight up from 9,200 feet to 12,500 feet on your second day at high altitudes. You need more than a night to acclimate to 9,000 feet, and above 12,000 the air is distinctly lacking in oxygen. These are acute mountain sickness zones. When your sherpa host encourages you to climb up to visit and pay homage to the extremely powerful goddess (“lady god”) Ama Yangri  at her shrine at 12,500 feet, he might not realize that this may be difficult for you because he was born and raised at high altitudes.

2. If you are going to attempt this anyway without acclimatizing first, don’t drink coffee in the morning. Dehydration contributes to altitude sickness. If you absolutely need to drink coffee, drink just enough and drink lots of water to compensate. Not a good idea: four cups and no water– just for example.

Here's some mountain plants

3. Make sure you communicate about who is bringing the water. If you realize, less than a quarter of the way up, that you each thought the other was bringing water, and it turns out you only have half a liter for three of you, turn back. Having apples and oranges is not the same as having water.

This is the view from the yak house, which is about a third of the way up

This is the yak house

4. If you don’t turn back because you think having apples and oranges is good enough and anyway it’s really cold out, how could you dehydrate in this weather? then you need to be on the lookout for signs of acute mountain sickness so that you can descend when you need to. They include: dizzyness, significant difficulty breathing, even at rest, sleepiness, confusion, and irritability. If you have EVERY ONE OF THEM, you might want to descend. You may feel as if you would give your first born child or your eggs or anything in the world, ANYTHING to just lie down and sleep right where you are, just for a minute. Don’t do it.

the clouds are coming in

5. If you’re too proud and stupid to descend despite your obvious symptoms and discomfort, and instead you keep ascending, you might find yourself just randomly bursting into tears, suddenly and with no accompanying emotions. Here is NOT how you should interpret this event: The fact that I am still producing tears means that I am hydrated enough to continue, and so I shall.

Above the treeline. Anne's having trouble breathing but feeling triumphant

This is when I lost it. Anne decided to document.

6. If you make it to the top, especially without water, be happy and proud of yourself (even though you’re an idiot). But remember that you still have to make it back down, which sucks almost as much cause it’s all uneven rock-stepping. Also, it gets warmer as you descend so you’ll sweat more, losing even more precious hydration.

we made it. Mata was very happy as he felt it was extremely important that we pay her homage because she is so powerful.

Here she is. Ama Yangri

Anne helped Mata hang some prayer flags for extra super special triple luck

7. If you pass a mountain spring and your microbe-obsessed physician assistant wife tries to stop you from drinking from it cause she’s afraid of giardia, override her. Only you know how awful you feel and how much that water will help and you can just take a pill if you get giardia and you’ll be fine.

there it is.

It got really misty on the way down. It reminded me of fantasy-Japan

8. Maybe  you did listen to her and decide not to drink cause she’s a doctor and also she was very insistent. At this point if, about half an hour outside of the village, you feel that your skull is exploding and you are going to vomit and you just can’t move anymore and you collapse and your host runs down ahead of you to send someone back up to bring you water, and it’s getting dark, lying in a ball clutching your head and trying as hard as you can not to vomit while you wait what feels like way too long for your water savior is actually the worst thing you can do. If you have any energy left at all, no matter how much it hurts, it’s better to keep descending. Losing altitude will make you feel better and knowing you’re bringing yourself to water instead of waiting for someone you’ve never met to run up a mountain and find you, helps you feel less helpless and more energized. When you finally meet up with water, drink slowly.

Dry, oxygen-less plants. That's probably also what I looked like.

9. When you get back to the lodge, drink hot water with ginger slices in it. Eat dinner if you can and take a hot bucket bath. You will be completely better within two hours. Be so impressed with your body and what it can do. Now apologize to it. Adjust your trekking plan so that you’re not doing anything like that again without acclimatizing first.

I think I can