Awkwardly Neighborly

I guess I'm not very neighborly.

Well, that's not entirely true. I want to be neighborly. I like the idea of being neighborly, but it doesn't come naturally for me.

I don't think it's because I'm an asshole. I mean, I don't think I'm an asshole.
I think it's because I'm so nice that I don't want to infringe upon other people's privacy. Okay, truth be told, I don't like people infringing upon mine.

Neighbors, for me, have always been people you sort of look through, with your eyes semi-glazed over. If they are good neighbors, they look at you with the same semi-glazed over look. They don't look at you, directly with accusative curiosity that says, "Holy shit, I totally heard you two going at it last night, you dirty little slut" or "Clean up your kitchen you friggin slobs" (my neighbors can actually see inside my kitchen here. Whatever, shut up, I don't care if you think it's sick that I forgot to put my cheese away, mkay?)

I've never felt compelled to get to know my neighbors or get involved in their lives in any way. The likelihood of the sudden conversion from really nice dude that lives next door into goddamn snoopy asshole has always been too high to warrant the risk involved in interaction.

In my neighborhood growing up, of course, I knew the neighborhood kids (we had a trampoline which made our house a powerful magnet for booger-nosed kids), but I never knew any of the adult's names, not even the next door neighbors or those living directly across the street (after living there for six years). My mom and step dad didn't either. I guess we were sort of quiet folk who kept to ourselves and I learned to be non-neighborly by watching my parents non-neighborliness (okay, total anti-social parents). In fact, on our block, the neighbors would have block parties for the 4th of July and Halloween but the cut-off point was our house and they would fence their little block party off with that plastic tape stuff just before reaching our yard. Fucking assholes. I didn't want to go to your stupid potluck anyway what with all your happy neighborly chatting and mutual babysitting and cup-of-sugar borrowing.

So, you see, it takes great effort on my behalf to be neighborly with my new friendly neighbor due to the trauma of having been rejected for neighborly potlucks.

She's lovely, really she is. She's a good looking and friendly young-ish Norwegian engineer with excellent English and Spanish and she seems like she has a really interesting story to tell. Her only flaw seems to be her proximity to me. And by proximity I mean from my couch, her head is about 8 feet from my head directly in front of me staring at me (or at least it feels like she's staring at me). A car can barely go down the street I live on without scraping itself up and when I open my curtains (which are totally necessary for dancing to Ring of Fire in my underwear and freaking my husband the fuck out as to how the hell he ended up with me), I see her. Right there. Sitting on her terrace. ALL THE DAMN TIME. She is there as I type this. If I need to scratch my butt right now she's gonna see it. Hello. Um. Hi.

It's her right. That terrace is hers. It's not her fault that our houses are positioned in such a way that when she is sitting there sipping her tea she is staring directly into my living room and dammit, are those underwear on my living room floor? How did those get there? Uh, hi.

Up until recently, it was no big deal, just shut the curtains and adios amigos. But Luisito, having the neighborly spirit that he has, often goes out to the balcony to have a smoke and so they have begun chatting and he has begun pestering me to go and be neighborly to the poor new neighbor that doesn't know anyone and doesn't have any friends.

And so I did. And I should be thankful to have such a wonderful neighbor.

But now, my problem is that when I want to prance around in my underwear, or dance to Ring of Fire at will, especially at night, or eat a meal without being scrutinized, I feel I have to first close the shutters, which is always extremely awkward for me because she's always RIGHT THERE. I always feel like I'm accusing her of being nosy just by the act of closing my own fucking shutters. Which means, that I usually leave them open to avoid the awkwardness of it all and cut out the Ring of Fire underwear dancing ritual and in fact, I've started picking crap up and putting the cheese away.

But leaving the shutters open has created further awkwardness. It's like I can feel the weird dilemma between us of the shutting and/or leaving of the curtains and shutters open.

Sometimes I wait until she runs in to go to the bathroom or something and then when she comes back she finds my closed shutters. And I have no idea if she's relieved I shut them or if she thinks I'm a total rude bitch.

Okay, I'm a weird un-neighborly neighbor, and aren't you glad we don't live next door to each other? I guess I might come across as unfriendly. Even though I like you.

It's just that this place makes me claustrophobic.

Maybe I just need to knock it off and be nice to people.

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MuthaF%@ckin' Roundabouts, or how I got tricked by a civil servant

Well, folks, looks like I'm Spain's bitch again.

No, scratch that.

I'm Spain's leather-clad, gagged-yet-whimpering little gimpy bitch. That's much more accurate.

Remember in my last post how I told you that I was a horrible driver? Well, that was a slight exaggeration. Besides a few parking tickets, I have an impeccable driving record (Mexico notwithstanding). While under observation (i.e.when I'm taking the driver's test I just forked out 400 euros to take), I drive with the precision of the popemobile chauffeur trying to make a U-turn in the middle of a pro-choice parade.

That fact (belief, ridiculous notion, whatever) stands in stark contrast to the fact that I failed my practical drivers exam within the first 30 seconds of driving. No exaggeration. Just a big 'ole fuck you for your effort.

See, here in Spain, the point in any exam, be it a University exam, a state civil servant exam, or a driving exam is never to actually test your aptitude. It is always, always, always, to see who is sly enough to overcome the sleight of hand and utter trickery thrown one's way. Learning processes in these contexts only exist insofar as they enlighten on how to skillfully manage the cunning and art of deception employed by the examiners and exam writers.

So I show up to the car school at the butt crack of dawn to meet my group that I'm supposed to caravan with to the DMV. There are three of us all together; me, it being my first time taking the exam, another girl, it being her 3rd time taking the exam, and still another it being her 4th time taking the exam. I was feelin' all shades of hopeful at this point, as you can imagine. These two are nervous as hell, with good reason, so I agree to take the exam first.

We arrive to the DMV to meet our state examiner. He looks like a dick and barely mumbles, "buenos dias" before he's demanding we sign all kinds of forms.

Finally we are ready and I position myself in the driver's seat.

Deep breath.

Adjust seat first.

Adjust mirrors next.

Fasten seat belt, yo.

Await instructions.

"Ma'am, please go straight until we reach the roundabout," the examiner says.

My heart is kind of pounding, because, fuck, I hate roundabouts and feel like I'm gonna get sideswiped by every other car going round. But there isn't much traffic and hell, I've been driving for 16 years. There's no need to worry.

As we slowly approach the roundabout the examiner says, "Please take the second exit out of the roundabout". Sweet, I'm already in the right lane, so no worries of side swipage. I cruise along passed the first exit, counting mentally, "One Mississippi..." and then I see the next exit "Two Mississippi!" I signal, of course, with my blinker, 'cause I am ON that shit and I take the second exit as per the muthafuckin instructions.

"Stop the car. You have just entered a street that is closed due to construction. You have failed the exam. You have just been made Spain's little bitch"

(okay, I made up that last line).

We back up to look at the sign and I see this:

Honestly, have I completely lost it, or does that look like a closed road to you, what with the two blue arrows and the rails that have been removed so that cars can pass, and the cars actually passing??????

The examiner proceeds to tell me that I should have ignored his instructions to take the second exit and in fact should have taken the third exit and that by following his instructions, I had disregarded a vertical sign prohibiting entrance.

The other two people taking the tests also failed again.

As soon as Spain has had enough of my money, or as soon as I learned all of the possible tricks that can be thrown my way, like the examiner telling me to do things that are apparently illegal, but that don't look illegal to anyone with full use of their faculties, I will have a driver's license.

Round two is next Wednesday. I might instigate a mosh pit if I don't pass.

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This place is driving me insane

I've been an idiot all these years.

I didn't realize that never driving a car over here has influenced my sense of freedom and has made me feel trapped amidst this cobblestone and these walls on all sides and the rot iron always, always hovering over me. No sunsets, no air, no views of any kind, just a maze of tiny madness.



While it can be beautiful, over time it can suffocate you, especially if you grew up with this as a reference for how space is supposed to be organized:



I used to sort of take pride in not using a car or needing one. It can be more time-consuming to take a car somewhere than it is to just put on some comfortable shoes and walk there. It also keeps your ass from looking like ricotta cheese (they don't have cottage cheese over here, so my ass can only look like cottage cheese in America; here it's a smoother ricotta which obviously isn't as bad).

When you walk, you stop along the way and you buy your baguette, your cigarettes, and you have a cup of espresso in a teeny tiny cup and then you say buenos dias to a construction worker...oops wait a second, I think I just confused my reality with a Mentos commercial. I actually really do all of those things, except for say buenos dias to construction workers*, as a general rule, because I'm nice, but not that fucking nice and believe me, Spanish construction workers do not need another reason to catcall.

My point is, I don't use a car -- I walk, and I'm all European 'n' shit, okay? And I thought it was cool at one point and now I'm sick of it and I want my Nissan pick up truck back, and no I'm not gonna help you move your shit.

When I go home I drive everywhere and I derive unusual levels of pleasure from the experience. I roll the window down, I blast the music, I swerve in and out of lanes like an asshole and generally drive like it's my last day alive and I give every driver within a ten mile radius reason to consider road rage as a viable option for dealing with me even though I'm on vacation and I'm not even remotely in a hurry and I stop at five conveniently organized places of business with gigantic parking spots close to the entrance where I can piss all my money away and then get a Starbucks and do my banking through easy drive-thru windows that just make my life exemplary in terms of time-management and then get Taco Bell on the way home. (That run-on sentence was meant to make you feel like you were on a Phoenix freeway and you didn't know what the fuck was gonna happen next, because someone like me just made your life flash before your eyes).

I miss that life. I hated it at one point, and thought it was lame and socially isolating and dispiriting but right now I would trade a day of dicking around sipping Espresso out of ridiculously small cups for running errands in a giant hurry in a traffic jam in America any day.

You just never know what you'll miss when you leave home.

(No, your eyes do not deceive you. That is, in fact, corn dog pizza. I don't really miss it, I'm just making a point, okay?)

Well, it seems so easy then, Blues, just get your Spanish driver's license. How bad can it be, you speak Spanish, right? Get your license and drive off into the Spanish plains, where the rain apparently falls gently.

Right, but unfortunately, this isn't America where the worst part of getting your driver's license is having to mingle with the masses at the Department of Motor Vehicles for an hour or two and getting yelled at and humiliated by some disgruntled civil servant because you failed to fill out your form correctly.

Luisito got his drivers license in Arizona. It cost him $25 and about 3 hours of his precious time (one hour to study the little booklet and two hours of waiting in lines and taking tests). I was with him from start to finish and it felt like one gigantic fucking inconvenience to my day at the time. But now, if I could, I would hang out all day at the DMV; I would camp there for two days and then invite all of the masses over to my house for a potluck if that meant I could get a Spanish drivers license at the end of it all.

Here in Spain you can't just go to the DMV and take the test. Only privately owned driving schools can sign people up for the tests (European socialism, my ass). So, you have to enroll at one of these blood-sucking-ass-boning driving schools, complete their curriculum (which amounts to no less than 20 hours of theoretical classes at a cost of 100 euros), then pay 40 euros per practical driving lesson, and of course, since the school has to sign you up for the test, it's really only when they say you are ready (i.e. have sucked you for every last penny) that you can take the test. Oh, then you have to pay the 80 euros written test fee and the 20 euros medical exam fee, then the 100 euros practical exam fee.

I will be lucky if I walk away from this thing for under 400 euros, and that's if I pass my practical exam (I'm told it's rare that they pass you the first time you take the exam, and I have a hunch that this is because the car schools are in questionable collaboration with the state examiners and both make a killing by failing people).

Who would have thought you'd have to climb mafia ropes to get your damn drivers license? Welcome to my world where up is down and down is up and you don't get what you want when you want it, because this ain't Kansas anymore and you are now at the mercy of Spanish bureaucracy and when they decide I have paid them enough money, they will allow me to drive in their country.

I just passed my written exam, which actually did take quite a bit of studying. Signs are easier to read in the states because they are designed assuming that everyone speaks English. Here the signs do not. Why don't you take this little quiz and see if you understand what the signs mean. In a matter of time and a whole lot of patience with this system, this will be me:



*I don't really buy cigarettes either, I'm still cigarette free, going on two months now. You might be able to tell that I'm still a bit irritable.

Streets / Callejuelas by SamwiseGamgee69 from Flickr

Big Yellow Dot by phxpma from Flickr

Corndog Pizza by lason from Flickr

Chevy Chase caught in the roudabout from Youtube

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