"Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race"

You know how when you listen to that one song that makes your throat get all gulpy and mesh and swell with your tear ducts and the subcutaneous layers under your face start to feel puffy and goosey somehow and you realize you're almost crying, but you don't know why the hell you're almost crying because you're not sad you're actually really happy but you just think this song in this moment was written for you, which you realize is ridiculous? And you like the song so much that you keep starting it over while you're driving down the road before it even finishes which makes no sense at all and now you're totally losing it? No? Okay maybe it's just me.

Day 3: A song that makes you happy: Mr Blue Sky by ELO



Mr. Blue is due at the end of July. He was made with love, and let's be honest, a shitload of expensive science and the build up to his formation included a lot of torment for a couple that was already dealing with more shit than they should have been.

Luisito and I have been together for 13 years. I remember him telling me at the very beginning that even if we broke up, he still wanted to produce offspring with me because we were meant to mate (in Spanish it sounded really romantic).

When we first got married it wasn't the right time, according to me. I was going back to graduate school and even though every bone in my body wanted to say fuck it, let's make a human, we waited. Luis always always wanted to at any time since the day we got together. After graduate school we moved back to Spain and we thought it would happen soon, very soon. But then I got a new job and my boss announced she was pregnant and would be needing a lot from me to help out while she was away. She was back to work a few months when she announced her pregnancy with her second child. I knew it was wrong for me to let this influence me, but it did and I worried about my employers not taking me being pregnant well. So I continued to insist that we wait while Luisito continued to want children whenever would say yes. And then the problem was that we were still in that shithole and I wanted a real home before we started a family and I didn't picture my life like this and Luisito just pictured his life with me and some kids and nothing else mattered.

And that's when I screwed everything up. I got depressed with my life and lonely and angry and completely withdrew from Luisito for the first time in our 10 years together. I pushed him far away from me and we almost lost each other, and when I think of how close I came to being alone without Mr. Blue and Luisito I feel gutted. When we finally started to patch up and fix our problems, we had to face infertility. The guilt I held for waiting for so long to find that I was no longer fertile was almost more than I could bear.

But that was before and today it's a beautiful new day.

Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long
Where did we go wrong

Hey there Mr. Blue
We're so pleased to be with you
Look around see what you do
Everybody smiles at you

This song will forever be my happy song about my baby Blue. I'll sing it to him in the car, I'll sing it to him while I rock him to sleep. I'll put it on and watch him dance. And I'll never ever take for granted again his Papi who I'm finally seeing happy for the first time in too many years. Today is the day we've waited for.

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I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song


1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

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Don't stop kicking, okay?

I've been meaning to write about you.

Really I have.

Because when you're older you'll probably think I didn't care at all about what was happening to you, that you had now grown to the whopping size of a red bell pepper, that you were now doing somersaults inside me. I had written so passionately about other things, other people I loved, people I barely knew even, but not you. I was even able to write about the lack of you. But not you.

But see, I write when I'm conflicted, troubled, mixed and jumbled up inside and in need of pulling everything into focus somehow, to probe and dissect innards by way of word hunting. With you, I hadn't felt any of these things. Everything had felt just the way it ought to. There had been scaly monsters inside me locking horns like there usually are for other things. I hadn't felt fear or uncertainty or guilt or absolute weakness.

But this week that changed.

This week I remembered how my cousin lost his baby boy five years ago and my stomach sank like a stone inside, you must have felt it too. Tiny Jordan wasn't as tiny as you, but as humans go, he was pretty small at only 18 months. This perfectly healthy boy suddenly lost control over his left eyelid, causing it to droop down and not blink properly. Then it was discovered that he was developing cataracts. To add more worry to his devastated parents, whose baby was going blind, he refused to eat and anything that made its way inside was promptly spat up. The doctors decided to perform an endoscopy. It was an outpatient procedure, but one that required general anesthesia. Little Jordan went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better, but he never woke up again. He was killed by diagnostic medicine.

Those two people managed to pick up the shattered pieces of their family life. I don't know how they did it. Your kicks and somersaults and racing heartbeat confirm to me that I Would. Not. Make. It. I can only assume this process took them years to recover from, if indeed they ever really did. I know that Jordan's older brother Stevie must have suffered too. Stevie was developmentally disabled but he understood things. Stevie is sweet and smart and even then at only 5 years old knew that his parents were hurting. At some point he knew not to ask about Baby Jordan anymore.

Today 10-year-old Stevie is hanging on to his little frail life by a string. His parents, terrified I'm sure by all things medical, took him in to the hospital when he began to lose his balance and his head began to bop from side to side. The doctors wanted to sedate him and perform an MRI. During the MRI, they discovered he had a spot on his brain, which would require further testing, a spinal tap, another MRI, all of which have had unexpected complications and problems breathing, which then required an induced coma and a ventilator. Little Stevie went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better. They are now trying to release him from the coma, by injecting him with medications that are causing him to go into seizures. The doctors do not believe he is not going to make it. They want a complete blood transfusion now and a heart biopsy.

His parents are, were, will twice-forever be, eternally, redundantly broken. They were finally limping around trying to hold each other up, sometimes being too much weight for the other to bear with his or her own limp to manage. They were finally making a life again. I don't think they really ever imagined such a shattering blow would fly out of the god-clouds so unfairly soon, while they were still so fucking injured. I don't think they ever imagined that another one of their boys might lose his life in another rare medical diagnostic tragedy.

In the meantime, you kick. Through my tears over breakfast, you kick. Through the floods of memories that hurricane over me of the childhood I shared with my cousin, the one where he got the shit life of shoes that were too small and a drunk stepfather passed out on the couch and 7-11 hamburgers for dinner, and I got the good life, you kick, kick, kick.

And your kicks remind me that you are living and healthy and safe inside me. And you also remind me of how weak and fragile you are: now, when you are born, when you are 18 months, when you are 10 years old, and probably for the rest of the time we share the world together. Your weakness and fragility translates into my own weakness and fragility. And your little kicks remind me that if all the humans on earth stood in a line and shit-lives and medical fuck ups on tiny loved ones were rationed out based on who deserved them, there's a small chance that I might end up with one, and my cousin definitely, definitely wouldn't.

I love you my little red bell pepper. Please don't stop kicking.

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Puzzling

I'm off soon.

Three whole weeks in the states.

I don't know how steady I'll be on the blogging front. Sometimes when I'm home, I get floods of feeling that I need to put somewhere, but maybe I won't be able to.

I'd organize guest posters, but my guest posting karma is pretty much crap right now, as you may recall.

I've never gone home for this long before to visit.

Three weeks is roughly 6% of the year. Add that to the two weeks that I go home for Christmas and it's roughly 10% of the year. That means that I have 10% of the year to try to find a balance to outweigh the favoritism of self that I give this place – the place that gets 90% of my day to day, that sees 90% of my breathing, 90% of my blinking, 90% of my yawning, 90% of my sighing.

During that short time at home, I get to feel like a puzzle piece that fits perfectly into place. I know I fit when I smell the freshly cut grass in the morning and hear the lawn mower outside my window at 7:00 a.m.; when I wake up in the dark and my feet find the soft carpet below just like they should, instead of the unwelcoming tile floors of Spanish homes, just after realizing that the bed is exactly the height that a bed is supposed to be. I know I fit here because there are garbage disposals that suck the shit out of the kitchen sinks, out of life, instead of getting all clogged up where I have to spend forever picking out tiny pieces of food with a chopstick, never quite getting all the bullshit.

And I think, this is it, babe, this is where I fit so snuggly, see? I nudge him-- this is where everything dovetails, where the tenon finally fucks the mortise. And I see him trying to cram the little uncooperative bits of his puzzle piece onto my part of the puzzle with all his might, bending and folding and partially fucking up his appendages. I see him thinking it must be here where he fits too because he's relieved at finally seeing me comforted by the shape and form of the architecture surrounding us. But he can't make the cardboard edges line up properly; the outgrowths are too big where the holes are too small, and besides, he's a piece of sky with clouds on it and there are clearly no clouds in this sky.

And it sucks something out of me like the garbage disposals I miss to know that where I match up and fit all compact and sheltered like a cubbyhole he does not, where his bits align and contour just right, mine. just. won't. -- try as we might to fit our puzzle pieces into the same surrounding structure.

But by some manufacturing fluke, both of us as pieces fit so perfectly together, like we were certainly meant to dwell in the same part of the jigsaw puzzle, like our fibrous matter belonged attached, unsevered, having always been tethered even before when we were just sheets of paper board smoothed down to be cut with the fretsaw by the puzzle-maker.

He rolls over in bed, prostrates himself on his stomach and his shoulder presses against the mattress and he extends his arm with the palm of his hand facing up, finding the place it wants to find, cupping over the fleshiest part of me as I lay face up. This is my cue to place my hand on the small of his back and let sleep wash over me again.

It's as if we originated from the same cellulose pulp derived from the same wood, from the same tree, as the same organism, to later be disjointed and scattered unfound inside a box of a thousand imposters.

So we stay as two perfectly fitted pieces reserved to the side of the card table. We go together. It's just not really clear where exactly we go.


See you soon.

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This is me. There's a freak show going on in my brain.

I spend a lot of time walking the streets, people watching.

I watch people, okay?

I'm a Peeping Tom that's just right there in the open, walking to work. I'm Blues, butt watcher, boob leerer, clothing critic.

I'll dissect your fashion statement in a millisecond in my mind.

My gaze used to favor the young and beautiful, the slender, the sleek, the strong, the dolled-up. My eyes preferred the ones subconsciously offering breeding services to members of the opposite sex through impressive and accentuated hip to waist ratios, through strong family-protecting arms, through voluptuous baby-feedable breasts highlighted by the appropriate push-up equipment, through clothing displaying a certain level of social status and ability to financially support offspring. My glance lingered upon those that fit the very precise and limited beauty mould that our culture has decided deserves a double take.

Pretty people, yup.

But lately, I find that my eyes linger over the motherly.

I see women, their pouchy abdomens attesting to the children they have carried. I see their less than perky boobs that finally became entirely utilitarian, after years of oblique glances stolen, peripheral staring, and a lot of fuss. They have finally passed the phase of alimentary purposefulness. I see some of them in their mom jeans that highlight what happens to the female bodies...afterwards. And I know they would never trade their children for their old bodies.

I see a young mother extend an arm backwards, pinky jutted out while she looks sternly at a small child walking behind her, encouraging the child to take her hand. I hear the child say, "Mamá" and the woman answers, "Que?", exasperated, as if tired of all the questions. And I wonder, does she take it for granted in that moment? Being a mom?

I canvas their faces for proof of age. Are they older than me? Are they younger than me? Maybe they are older but have just had some work done. Shit, she must be old. I wonder what kind of wrinkle cream she uses. She can't be younger, is she??? Fuck, she's younger. Did they have to get fertility treatment? Did they adopt? Or did they try to get pregnant on their honeymoon and wham bam, it worked?

I look at Luisito and I think...what if? What if we can't, babe? Okay, so we adopt, we know this, but I wanted you and me, you know, we wanted...we wanted to do this. I wanted the baby to have your eyelashes and your nose and your thighs. Can we swing this if we can't? Can we deal with this level of disappointment? If we add this to everything we've been through will there be a giant surplus of bullshite? Will we implode?

And I feel a fear in my belly, a fear that my assumption of being able to snap my fingers and have children whenever I wanted might be being challenged. With every period now, I think, Hmmm. Okay, I guess not this month. No biggie.

"How long did it take you to get pregnant?" I quiz my sister, my sister in law, my friends.

"Oh a few months."

"We just stopped taking birth control to see what would happen."

But I feel menstrual pain like I never have before. The last time it kept me up the whole night. My periods are irregular now and fucked up and long. Things....they don't feel right.

"Acude inmediatamente al ginecologo". Go immediately to the gynecologist, my general practitioner told me, not knowing he was gonna scare the bloody life out of me by saying it with such urgency.

So I went to the gynecologist the next day and with clammy ass hands and trembling legs, and trying to act all, "No this ain't weird that my junk is all up in the air, yo. No, not at ALL. I'm cool", I mounted the handy stir-ups and offered my crotch up to the lovely phallic probe of truth, all the while chanting to myself:

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

Ooof. This isn't supposed to hurt. I'm not supposed to be freakin' THE. FUCK. OUT. right now.

The doctor stared at the ultrasound and informed me that all my junk looked perfectamente normal.

Oh yeah, doc? Well, then why did you schedule me for a pelvic MRI? Then why did you make me do all those blood tests that made my arms go numb and my blood pressure drop and my lips turn blue?

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

I can't find the words to express the anxiety I'm feeling. Truth be told, I have serious issues with hypochondria, and anything medical-related makes me want to either faint or barf, but I can't shake this. Because I don't know that I can deal with more disappointment (centered around myself) right now. And I'm just fucking scared that something is wrong with me.

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Luisito, bloggies; Bloggies, Luisito

Oh, I'm sorry. How rude of me.

You haven't been properly introduced, have you?

Bloggies, this is Luisito.

Luisito, meet the bloggies.

Luisito and I met at a bar called La Carboneria where I used to hang out as a study abroad student in the Spring of 1998. People laugh when I tell them that here, because it's just so typical. La Carboneria can be a magnet for tourists, but locals like it too. Of course we met there. Of course we did, where else?

The first time I met him we were standing in front of this piano:

(I have no idea who the dude in the picture is)

It was a cozy little place, that bar.

There was never a cover charge and there was always live flamenco; real, hard, it's-an-acquired-taste flamenco, not the watered-down touristy version. You could smoke hash and nobody cared, and that we did. There was cheap wine to be drunk and people watching to be done, and oh, much Spanish to be learned.

I met Luisito through his younger brother, who, truth be told, I had a mad crush on but who kept telling me, "my brother plays guitar, you know. He's a wonderful guitar player...my brother this and my brother that..." And then one day he dragged this famous brother to the bar to meet me. Luisito walked in with his messy hair and his wrinkly Pearl Jam t-shirt.

That night he jokingly asked me to marry him. I jokingly said yes. I internally tried to reconcile the fact that I liked Pearl Jam with the fact that I thought I was too cool to like Pearl Jam.

Fast forward five years to 2003 and we were not-so-jokingly married, and the fact that I used to have a crush on my brother-in-law had become just bizarre.

Luisito is messy; he has messy hair. A lot of times he has a stained shirt, and his pants are all scuffed up on the bottom and fuck, why is he wearing those shoes? Where did he find them? I thought I threw them out. He has a slight unibrow that, on grounds of not giving a shit, he refuses to groom. He has relatively small hands that are perfect for a small-breasted woman. He has strong arms and not a lot of hair - but the hair on his chest forms a perfect Iberian Peninsula. He's not tall and thin like his brothers nor does he wear perfectly laundered clothes made in Italy like they do, but he is the most handsome of anyone in his family. He inherited the best of his mother and father's features, melded into a beautiful face; his mothers large brown Moorish eyes and perfect nose, his fathers large lips, while his brothers did not inherit such harmonious combinations, rather getting their father's enormous nose and small eyes and their mother's crooked teeth.

But, see, all I've done is describe a container.

Today we drove home from his hometown where we were visiting over the weekend and during the ride home Luisito spoke to me about containers and contents of containers and the sharing of the contents of containers.

He said that there are artists that are containers; for example musical groups that have the look, the demo where every track is perfectly executed. The marketability is there, the technical know-how has been made available, the money has been spent to churn out something likeable.

But you're not allowed to open the container.

You're not allowed to take away the sound technicians, the photographers, the just-so-care-free looking attire to see what is left. You are not allowed to remove what is money-driven, fame-driven or just plain driven by desperation for acceptance. The containers are tip-fucking-top, but there is no going deep and pulling out what's inside them.

The reason why you are not allowed to open the container is not usually because there is nothing in there, or because what is in there is rotting cabbage that has been left in the fridge for two weeks that could have been good but nothing was done with it.

Usually you are not allowed to open the container because of a lack of generosity. Maybe the containers don't know how to share their contents.

There are some artists, musicians, writers, whatever, that never hold back on any piece. They never say, "I don't want to run out of material, so I'm going to save this idea for my next piece, my next painting, my next post, my next album." There are those that put everything they fucking have within their soul because they know that creativity is not finite, but rather it expands when it's used with the whole heart. I don't know if this is the same as genius or if it takes this generosity for a genius to make themselves known.

So, my friends, meet Luisito. He's a slightly roughed up tupperware container, with a fucking five star gourmet dinner inside. And I'll lick the tupperware clean, because he's willing to give away all the contents anytime anyone opens his container. He doesn't save a morsel for himself, within himself. In every single thing he does, in every song he writes, in every project he works on, in every meal he makes, in every other human or animal he relates to, he pulls his whole heart out and just hands it to anyone and doesn't want any of it for himself.

He's never once held back.

Someday I want to say that I got to the point where I did the same.

I'm still learning, honey.

Eventoblog054 by JuanJaen from Flickr.
Eventoblog 081 by Juan Jaen from Flickr.
Luisito by Blues 2008.
Luisito and Blues circa 1998.

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