Socks in a Bag

From the age of 6 until about 11, I danced in the Sheila Tully School of Irish Dance.  (Apparently there is a website now.) We had the laced up leather soft shoes, the ornate celtic designs on dresses, and the night before a feis--the name for the dance competitions--we slept with curlers in our hair. Ouch. (Apparently, the girls wear wigs now.) I cannot find any pictures from this time in my life. A true tragedy.

Vintage two-toned Umbro Shorts

I remember all of our "practices" in the basement of my Catholic school. We practiced in our Umbro gym shorts, over-sized t-shirts, athletic white socks, and criss-cross-laced-dance shoes. I remember Sheila Tully--Herself--making that distinctly satisfying 'click-click' of a tape into the cassette player and pressing the play button, the distorted accordion sounds would blare, our promenading and hops in rhythmic unison...Doting mothers would stand in the hall chatting while their daughters worked on jigs, two hand reels, hornpipes, and if you were an older girl, the hard shoe dances, too.

Once, when we were lined up in formation with one toe pointed out, Sheila Tully, herself, walked down the line and stopped in front of my toes, "No socks today?" I shook my head no and my face went flush. My mother was not doting in the background during Irish dance class to see this embarrassment and she was certainly not keeping track of my socks. If I wanted to dance with socks, I would have to be the one putting the socks in my bag.

So here I am now, 20 years later, putting socks in a bag. This time I am not going to an Irish feis. I'm heading to Rio to perform in Carnival! My mother is not here to help me pack my socks either. Instead, I am packing for a trip because of everything she taught me. She taught me to do things for myself and to go after what I want. It's her absence, once again, that has shaped her influence on me. A year before my mom passed away, I remember her telling me that she wanted to go to some community dance event at a summer festival. She always wished she danced more. She didn't care if she was the only one over 60. I never had a chance to take her there. But I am taking her spirit with me on this specific journey to Brazil, with enough sunblock for the both of us.

When I told my Aunt Mary about this amazing trip down to Rio de Janeiro to dance with Samba schools, she told me, "You know, your mother always lived through you and all of your adventures. She would have done all the things you are doing if she could."

Last week, I was volunteering at a concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music, the miraculous organization that is helping send a group of us down to Rio. At that concert, I heard this song and it described the feeling of my mom and leaving on this trip. "My mother, she once told me, you you gotta be as bright as you can...my suitcase, it once told me, you gotta be as light as you can."

Two Hands, One Mind

As I was giving instruction at the front of class the other day, an 8th grade boy sitting right in front of me began to crash around the contents of the pencil bin. While continuing to make noise, he put up his other hand, looked regretfully at me, and apologized for the other side of his body. Who can't relate to those opposing actions that jumble inside of us simultaneously? Who hasn't had opposing forces battle within us? Who hasn't wanted to do one thing, but still did the other thing?
 It reminds me of that psychology study where a man whose corpus callosum (the connecting tissue between the two brains) had malfunctioned and he watched as one hand buttoned his shirt while the other hand worked to unbutton his shirt at the same time.

So, what I want to know is, which hand wins?

Dear Lisa Frank, What Skills Do Middle Schoolers Need?

 As I am preparing to teach a class called "Middle School Skills" to a group of incoming 6th graders on Monday, I started digging for memorabilia from my own middle school years to try and channel the feelings of that time of life. (I've been told I am permanently 13 years old so this wasn't a big stretch.) I came across this amazing letter that dropped me right back into the hallway... carrying heavy text books, trapper keepers (those things were so awesome, a foreshadowing of my love of bookmaking and paper arts perhaps?), and erasable pens, wearing rolled plaid skirts with oxford shirts tucked in 'just enough', and perpetually denying that you had a crush on someone. And as you will see in the letter, I was declining offers to smoke Pixy Sticks. Allow me to explain. Remember those candy paper sticks filled with flavored sugar called Pixy Sticks? We'd go to Helen's corner store and buy the sugar candy and then we'd walk to the park, pound back the stick of sugar, (then some of us) would light the hollow paper wrapper at one end, and pretend to smoke it. I kind of feel like I'm going to get in trouble with someone for telling you this. But it happened. I saw it. I was too chicken to say yes but felt pretty cool to be asked. UGH! Now that is getting at the complex, socially awkward heart of middle school.

You can't tell this letter was addressed to me because my avatar (I didn't know what this word meant then) in junior high was Martha. I have no idea why. We also addressed letters to each other with our personal symbols so that if a teacher caught us they would have to figure out who was the "shooting yin yang star" and who was "martha a.k.a. squiggle line with dots."
I also don't know who wrote me this letter. The symbol system worked!!! I must have lost my ability to decode our pseudonyms when I turned into an adult! I have narrowed it down to about 3 friends from middle school who I am all still in contact with regularly, or at least on Facebook. (Hi guys! Which one of you wrote this? Are boys still putting your belongings in inappropriate places?) If you went to grade school with me, you can probably figure out who is who in the body of this letter. I hope there is enough distance from junior high now to share this. Ha! I'll let you all interpret the rest of this gem of a letter. But I'm still left to wonder, what skills do middle schoolers need? Are you there, Lisa Frank? It's me, Martha.

50 yards from Crazy

At the end of May, I rented a yurt in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This was to be a business trip to work on things. I left on a Monday morning, grabbing antihistamine and one last iced coffee in Skokie before getting on the highway. After hours with my thoughts driving across what would be Governor Walker's Wisconsin, I found myself at the edge of Lake Superior in a remote old growth forest where the signs are amazingly still in English. I found no one around except a man and his dog several hundred yards away at another campsite.

This would be my home for 3 nights: a round wooden frame hut with a canvas skin. Inside were bunk beds and a table and chairs. The yurt had plastic windows looking out from a tangle of branches at Lake Superior's shore.  I stayed there by myself with no electricity, sleeping with heat from a woodstove (it got into the 30s at night), and all the food I would need packed in tupperware. I made instant coffee on a miniature propane camping stove. My diet consisted mostly of bananas,  pre-cooked pasta, rice and beans, a jar and half of peanut butter, and an enormous bar of dark chocolate.

 In the stillness that was my circular hut above the waves,  I watched the energy of the peanut butter turn directly into lines on paper and rocks. Peanut butter turns almost directly into words here with little interference from myself. I tried letting art happen like freckles. The yurt started working its winding spell turning around my thoughts. With no other people or any electronic source of sound to drown me out, I belted out fake opera singing all day long at the little table and chair. At one point, I could have sworn I achieved throat singing. Perhaps this two toned sound in my throat is only possible when no one is in earshot of it circulating round and round in my corner-less yurt universe.  I've decided that all of these uninhibited aural and visual experiences I had should be attributed to the intoxication that can only come from isolation.

No one told me that I've been 50 yards from crazy all this time. Just put at least a 50 yard radius between me and any other human and I dip down into my own universe. I can't think of a time in my life I've been at least 50 yards away from other humans, strangers or not, for an extended amount of time.  It became completely dark around 10pm each night but I continued to work on the floor next to the woodstove, a modest heat source that was occasionally fueled by bad-drawing-kindling. The flies would flitter and dart around the plastic walls of the Eveready 6 volt battery lantern making it look like a candlelit room. Spiders and other things with legs would meander across my drawings.
With no electricity to recharge devices, I used 3 different cameras until they ran out of power. I worked at documenting everything as if I were a spy on myself. In between naps and long hikes, I found a distinctive slab of rock about a quarter mile away from my yurt at the shore of the lake. I ended up embedding my endless pages of torn up handwriting onto this rock...as you do.  I worked all afternoon on my second day adhering the paper to the rock. I made several trips back to observe this installation I'm calling "Rock Written." On the day I left the yurt, I took one last walk to my writing on the rock. While looking closely at how the paper was holding up to the wind and the waves, I noticed fresh cigarette ash resting in a crevice next to the paper. Was I being watched from the trees? Who was here?!?! Does someone know I was singing all day? Did someone have a moment with my writing this morning before I came back? Did they sit inside the paper circle? Were they just passing by and flicked their ashes on my rock? Did it blow in from some mysterious ship sailing by? I left the writing on the rock to decompose and drove home to Chicago that Thursday afternoon.  Since then, I've been staring at these photos on my computer trying to decide if what I made was remarkable or not. I've also been wondering about the choice and act of being alone and the feeling of being alone. Was I really in isolation for 4 days and is that rock still holding my words?

Guateswella

Despite having read Lonely Planet’s Central America guidebook (albeit from 2004) that "explains" different routes from Mexico to Guatemala, I couldn’t make sense of what one actually does when you get to the border. I was a little murky on how to find transportation once you're actually inside Guatemala as well. I got out of a bus at, oh fudge, what was the name of the Mexican border town?.. Ciudad Chahtemoc? I’m calling it Ciudad WTF. When I got out of the bus, I was in miserable pain because I got dust (and probably bus cooties) in my eyes. I walked half-blind to the baño in the bus station where I was stopped by a woman hosing down the walls and sidewalk outside the bathroom stalls. If my Spanish was good enough, I would have told her to just spray my face down. While in mid-spray (of the walls, not my face) I gave her 5 lousy pesos so I could hopefully clean my eyeball. The stall I found had no seat and I could barely fit my pack through the door and close it behind me. When I turned the corner to find the freestanding sink, I realized that there was no soap and touching the faucet would have probably made me dirtier than cleaner. I opted for just pouring bottled water over my hands and using the reflection in my phone to fix my contact lens. I hated the world for 7 minutes.
When I emerged from the bathroom area behind the bus station lounge, with my eyesight slightly better, I only saw a few Dutch people huddled together under a canopy who had gotten off the same bus as me. There was a taxi stand with about 3 taxis waiting and half a dozen people crossing the road to another building. I must have looked pretty distressed with my bloodshot eyes because one of the Dutch folks, who happened to be the group’s guide, approached me with a "Are you lost, little girl?" -look. He told me that everyone had to walk across the street to another building to stamp our passports. So there I went with bloodshot eyes, and stray dogs at my heels to the other side. Traveling alone across the border might be impressive to some, but if it were not for the Dutch, I might still be in that town fighting over food scraps with the stray dogs. I'm convinced the Dutch know everything. After my passport was stamped,  I found a taxi for the 3 kilometer ride to the Guatemalan border. I proceeded to walk across the border -a yellow dotted line painted on the road- and, by luck, found the unassuming Guatemalan immigration office to stamp my passport again. Ta-da!

Now what do I do? I couldn't make sense of my feelings of doom: was it that I had no Guatemalan cash and no ticket out of the border town? Was it because I was severely dehydrated? I started walking up the road ignoring aggressive money changers on the street. I found what looked like a bank and slipped inside the tiny ATM lobby and jammed my pack in front of the door. I think I may have hugged the ATM machine when it dispensed cash. (Every new country is a new banking adventure.) I then went and had the best fried bananas and beans and cafe con leche of my life. Now that I had cash and fluids in my system, my next task was um... right, go to Antigua or somewhere closer to my friend I was meeting. But how? Surely, a gringa has done this before. I walked back towards the yellow dotted lines (the border) where I heard a few Australians talking...Australians are almost as loud as USAers...almost. Apparently they were just switching shuttles at the border to get to Antigua as well. I made a deal with a 10 year old (in Spanish) to get on the shuttle with them. 200 Quetzales later, with my pack roped onto the hood, I was on my way to Antigua. The next day I found another shuttle to meet my traveler friend in San Pedro for her birthday. It turned out I was the only person to book a shuttle that day to San Pedro. We rode for many hours, taking routes the driver wasn't even sure of because so many landslides (thank you hurricanes) had closed down major roads. I'm proud to report that I did NOT puke at all in Guatemala. (I have a reputation.) Dramamine not only made me feel less seasick, it made me drowsy enough to start up all sorts of Spanish con confidencia with the driver and the hitchhikers we picked up on the side of the road. It is a common practice for drivers to pick up locals on the road to make more money when their tourist shuttles are not full.
After telling half of Guatemala that I would love to dance salsa with them on the bus, I finally arrived at the hippie dippie backpacker town, San Pedro, next to the amazing Lake Atitlan and a few volcanoes, I think. I didn't care, I just let a man on the road lead me to his hostel overlooking the lake. It cost the equivalent of 3 US dollars to stay there, so my sea legs and I agreed.

[Insert dramatic Law & Order theme music here.]

Jump to the next morning in the hostel where I wake to blood on my hands and face and intense itching everywhere. I remember waking up once in the middle of the night, thinking there was a mosquito after me, but just writing it off in my head as paranoia. The pictures of my face, of course, suggest this was more than a hungry mosquito. After showing my swollen, weeping (my pours were literally weeping) face to my fellow traveler friends at breakfast, it was concluded that perhaps I had a severe allergic reaction to a bedbug. It was also suggested that I hightail it out of this dodgy hostel. Despite my shape-shifting face, I could still hear my inner-bargain-ista voice saying, "But, it's such a good price for a night's stay!" But I came to my swollen senses and made the accommodations upgrade of the century... oh, and disinfected everything I owned! I did find what looked to be a bedbug...in my hair!... walking down the street to the laundromat.
My next job was to try and treat my face. I'm not sure I would have trusted myself if I happened upon myself in the road. I was plain scary-looking.  I walked into a few "farmacias" in the small town.  I soon discovered my options for treatment lay under a glass counter among scattered blister packs of unidentifiable pills. The women behind the counter sent a small boy crawling under the counter to retrieve various pills for me to inspect. I may have fared better with ecstasy from a well-organized rave. I instead only agreed to purchase calomine lotion (never before opened) and continued feeding myself antihistamine pills that I had stashed from the U.S. I can't tell you how difficult it was to do all of this with fluids dripping out of my forehead...not to mention my lack of depth perception since my right eye was not opening at this point. I stumbled back to the hotel to watch episodes of The Daily Show on my computer and impulsively research bug bites on the internet for 9 hours straight. At some point, a botfly rumor started on Facebook. Unless it has already hatched and flown away (the rumor and the botfly), I don't believe I ever had a botfly in my system. I'm happy to report that my face has returned to its original form save for a little redness! But I'm still a bit haunted by the unsettling comments made by an English guy at my hotel: "I would hate if that happened to me. What if your face stays like that forever?"
Friggin English.

May I conclude this rant with a sincere appreciation for the absolute beauty and warm kindness I experienced in Guatemala. I'd like to think that my blog's readership can influence the tourist economies of small Latin American countries. If that is actually the case, please please visit beautiful Guatemala. It's "swell". But really, the people are amazing. Just be careful of its healthy eco-system!
As I write this post, I have made it back across the border. Despite (or perhaps because of) my monstrous appearance, I could still talk a bus operator down in price in Spanish with one eye and a swollen face to get out of Guatemala. I'm particularly entertained to know that the New Zealand girls I was traveling with thought I was winking at them to play along with me while I was bargaining...when in fact, my eye was just not opening. These past couples days I have traveled back through Chiapas, and am now enjoying the wonders and colors of Oaxaca. I may or may not still be dehydrated.

Liz Becoming

My friend, Liz, who is featured in the portrait, had much to say about the original painting. This seems to be true of anyone who has their portrait painted. It was time for this painting to evolve and I documented its metamorphosis. Hopefully Liz will have new things to say about the painting now.

I also thought moving frames and fancy audio might bring you closer to the painting. Most people probably aren't reading this though and have already hit 'play.'