Turtles and Dutch People are Awesome...and other scary tales of learning Spanish

I've been trying to complete a little sculpture about fear and learning. The sculpture began taking form on my trip in Mexico. As much of my thinking happens, it is taking shape by writing about it, tearing up the writing, and then gluing it back together. After my time in Latin America, I have thought a lot about what it means to be foreign, in every sense of the word, and to be different and try to learn.
Prior to this trip, I had spent two years of grad school thinking and practicing to be an art teacher-straddling the worlds of "teacher" and "student" and thinking about power and privilege and access to information. Going to Mexico put me firmly back in the role of student, in an unknown territory, with many privileges voluntarily stripped from me. I lived the paradox of having the means and privilege to travel across borders but to also be totally paralyzed and infantilized by the newness around me and a language I didn't speak. How do I wash my clothes? How do I ask for medicine at the drug store? How do I explain who I am and what I'm doing there? To be a learner is to be a foreigner and it requires courage, patience, the ability to be alone for a long time, and self-love.
My goal -to learn Spanish- was met largely through one-one-one intensive courses with tutors who only spoke Spanish with me.  As I've recounted before, learning a new language can be magical: the new sounds coming out of my mouth, the strangers who became friends in a new language with me, or hearing a new common phrase click in my head as I walked down the road. But learning, of course, can be excruciatingly painful and lonely. I recall towards the end of my trip, I was really trying to blast through the Intermediate Spanish plateau that so many learners struggle to surpass. So much information was coming at me during one class and instead of seeing it as a fault of the teacher, or for speaking up for myself or asking to change course, I started blaming myself. That abyss between student knowledge and teacher understanding of their student is amplified in a language learning setting. An easy example: The teacher explains in Spanish what homework I should do, then I go and do something else and return with the wrong assignment. I really thought I understood. How many times do we think someone is not listening to us when really it was just interpreted differently? During one class, I felt so upset with myself that I hadn't figured out a conjugation and, according to my own goals, I was way behind. I fought back tears while the teacher talked even more loudly at me trying to shout the pronunciations and concepts into my skull. (Increased volume does not increase clarity and understanding, just my adrenaline.) Despite being an adult who chose to be in that room and was paying for it, I felt like a 13 year old who wanted to cuss him out and leave the room. I felt this strange hostility bubbling up when he asked me questions I couldn't answer. Stop exposing my ignorance, maestro! In that moment, I learned to be a more compassionate teacher and swore to never forget that feeling of being lost and isolated. I try to imagine that feeling when the power reverses and someone else "just isn't getting it" when I explain something seventeen times over. That's the feeling of being lost at sea without touching and seeing the bottom of the ocean but laughing at the turtle under your belly....that is the feeling I'm trying to  squeeze into the little boxes of my sculpture so I never forget.

I say all this not because I want you to know how brave I am or how well I can take money out of an ATM machine in a foreign country. I say this because it has become more and more clear to me that we live in a culture of fear and taking a step out of our country, our comfort zones, our language, our circles, our expected "career paths" is a radical counter-action to fear. It is an attempt at love and imagination. When I think about my unplanned trip to Mexico with no return ticket, the word trust keeps coming up...and imagination. I couldn't have done this trip without imagination. I joked with others, "Am I crazy for doing this?" because intense use of your imagination feels unsound, unreasonable. It was unreasonable because I didn't need reason; I needed imagination. And curiosity. And trust. There was no reason to trust the taxi driver who made the sign of the cross and kissed his hand before accelerating wildly out of the airport and into the tangle of Mexico City. There was no reason to trust the chef on the street and follow him home on the subway. (Okay, that was a little crazy.) There was no reason to trust my naive, Anglo-brain, riding into the mountains without proper footwear and not nearly enough Dramamine. There was no reason to trust that my backpack stowed under the bus would be there in the morning. There was no reason that I should jump out of a boat in the ocean, a mile off shore with a turtle and a man I met on the beach. (I did trust the advice of a few Dutch people about which building to stamp my passport at the Guatemalan border. Now that was reasonable.) To leave the familiar and to move somewhere by yourself requires imagination...which is why I think artists are always traveling. We tend to imagine another way and another world. It's a feminist act as well. When men or women go outside of our usual network, our usually defenses, I believe we're actually respecting our hardy individual strengths and trusting our intuitive feminist selves.
So many people have asked me, "Weren't you scared traveling alone?" They usually are referencing sensational crime stories they hear on the news or have distorted notions of foreigners as all being dangerous criminals preying on young American women. I also think what they're really saying is "I'm afraid of doing that myself." I try to respond: Life is just as scary when you stay in one place, in one confined box, and don't use your imagination. Or I make a less eloquent response exaggerating the crime rates in Rogers Park. Whatever you take away from this, turtles and Dutch people are awesome and Rogers Park is a perfectly fine place to live.

New More City Curriculum

While at the National Art Education Association Conference in New York City last week, something didn't feel right. Maybe it's because I've spent the better part of this past year traveling and working solo and too many familiar faces in one place felt foreign.
Many sessions felt like how a professor at the University of Michigan once described modern lectures: "a pointless loop of information moving from one computer to another without it ever passing through anyone's brain." This wasn't always the case, of course, but I found my curriculum (so to speak) elsewhere, often just riding the subway and getting lost. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love public transportation. That, along with public libraries, is the reason I still believe in humanity. Museums are pretty okay, too. I found my curriculum when I left the claustrophobic conference and walked from Times Square, through Central Park, and finally to The Met. There, I was greeted by a 500 year old Bishop holding a book and looking eerily understanding of my predicament. He totally gets it.
The week in NYC allowed me time to visit the MoMA to see 'good' but probably overrated Cindy Sherman hoopla and then I was able to see what I'm sensing is an overwhelmingly UNDERrated retrospective of another (!) woman artist showing at the same time: Sanja Ivecovic's "Sweet Violence." How timely for International Women's Day. Both women have been making work about gender since the 1970s and I regret to inform you that it is still "fresh."
I finally visited Printed Matter and even 192 Books across the street in Chelsea. And then I visited the Center for Book Arts. All places were inspiring us to hold objects in our hands and think about other human beings.

Aaron Cohick/New Lights Press, The New Manifesto of the New Lights Press, 2009, showing at Center for the Book Arts.

 What was not inspiring us to think about others was the hyper-commercialized convention I was supposed to be at that encouraged me to make a free Mehndi Art Glove. Ta-da! You understand Indian Art and its relation to latex! If, as an outsider to the field, I picked up the cover of the convention booklet and read this, I would want to cut art education from schools, too.

 

I did get to see hidden gems of thoughtfulness at the conference (however achingly under-attended), and presented a bit on my own work with other great researchers and educators. I learned about Task Parties from artist Oliver Herring and got to visit with a former teacher, Doug Beube, at his studio in Brooklyn. His new book is a must for anyone interested in books and art.

Phew, that was a lot of reading. Now, let's all return to our respective screens.

Spirit-"less" Airlines

New Orleans Marks and Remarks

During a weekend party, I met a couple who were trying to find a ride to New Orleans. Before realizing what was happening, all of the party-goers had publicly agreed on our behalf that I should offer my car and we should head South. So we did. Within 24 hours, two strangers, soon to be "friends for life", were at my door with road trip groceries in reusable bags identical to my road trip groceries in reusable bags. It was the beginning of a series of signs that us hardy souls were meant to be hurdling down to the swamplands of Louisiana prepared to sleep on yoga mats in a friend's shotgun house. It also helped that we were ready to don costumes at a moment's notice.  We drove the 17 hours from Chicago to New Orleans through the night, getting to know one another. The whole brassy trip - from music in the streets, to drinks on balconies, to strolls through the cemeteries - confirmed once again that whenever possible, just say yes. Above is a strategically obscured page of markings I created while on the trip. Below is a famous tomb full of markings. The people, the music, the architecture, and yes, even the smell. Gosh-wow, I just love New Orleans.

Ungrounding Your Career

The sublimity of driving home after I subbed in the suburbs.   

Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose

My yoga teacher said today, "Peel away the things that no longer serve you." That immediately meant to me that I should be peeling away the tension in my right hip, and all of the muscles around it. Blasted runner's hips!

 "Car Ride from Bird's Point of View" Graphite on Paper, c. 1989.

I did this while also thinking about all the things I've been purging this past month since I've gotten back from Mexico. This included old clothes, pointless grudges, obsolete grad school binders, and dust collecting on the top edge of hanging picture frames. I also thought about my digital clutter that is still peeling away: useless photos, documents, doubles of almost everything, incorrect formats, mystery articles and forms that I downloaded (in my sleep, maybe?) 

One of the nice things about peeling away what you don't need is unearthing what it is that does serve you...namely, an envelope (analog, not digital) of your childhood drawings that your mother kept.

"Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose" Ink on Paper, c. 1990.

Here is this week's picks from years 7 and 8 of my childhood. These are clearly the years when one has an acute sense of ladies' shoulder pads and a fascination with things in flight.

Awareness of the placement of shoulder seams? Check.
Understanding of knees and elbows? In Artistic development.

You can see through to the other side of the paper a little bit where my mom had dutifully written  "Jean Age 8" and "Jean Age 7".  For the piece I am titling, "Woman in the Wind Who Has Lost Her Nose," I am willing to believe I was onto the next drawing and had forgotten to add the suggestion of a nose. I am also willing to believe that I did not worry myself with things that did not serve me. In this case, it was a nose. The image is better without it. I will take this as a lesson from my 7 year old artist-self: Don't bother with things you don't need, move on to the next project, and just keep drawing out what you see around you.

Like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

Mural on the exterior of a Zapatista school.

How do I sum up a 4 month trip to Latin America and what it's like to be back? Maybe it's like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

 I had some of the best chocolate while traveling in Mexico but I will take Chicago tap water any day over all the chocolate in the world. "What's it like to be back?", I'm asked. I just stammer: "Water, I like water. I drink water here, lots of water...man, it's all about water...the American bathroom experience is an incredible privilege. Water, water everywhere."
I felt the polar extremes of traveling (and incidentally, life) in these past few months. When you're traveling:

-You're either on top of the world (or a mountain) or you want to hide under a bed as far away from the world as possible.
-You either want to use all your new vocabulary words or don't want to say a word.
-You want to know everything about the people around you or want to run away...or at least blend into the crowd and disappear. 
-You can feel terribly lonely or you can desperately crave time to yourself again or both at the same time.
-You can have the best meal of all time and the worst meal of all time.
-You can not think of home for days, swallowed up by another world, or wish you were around anything familiar. Anything...like peanut butter...like that one sweater you didn't pack, or that one friend you couldn't fit in your bag either...or someone who really understands your jokes.
-You can see it all or see absolutely nothing in a damp noisy hostel, sick with Montezuma.
-You can see the kindest most generous side of people or the sickest and coldest side of humanity.
-You can have the best night's sleep looking out at stars in the jungle or you could sleep in an upright bus seat for 18 hours fearing to open your eyes because the Argentinian orthodontist sitting next to you will take it as permission to start talking to you again.
-You could wake up in Guatemala with half your face swollen or...you could not.
-You can feel like an old lady wishing the 20 year old Australians would take the party elsewhere or you could feel 3 years old and not know how to ask for toilet paper.
-You can attend a Mexican wedding on the beach one week, be in a Zapatista community in the mountains of Chiapas the next, and days later be in the Cancun airport tipping with American dollars for a Caesar salad.
 - You can feel completely independent and liberated or you can feel tied down and dependent on strangers and guide books.
Here is some excerpts of writing from my last days in Mexico:
"..After 15+ hours in the autobus from San Cristobal to Chetumal, I finally made it to the town, near the Belize border at 2am.  During the bus ride, I took lifesaving Dramamine for motion sickness and contemplated the stars and palm trees lit by the moon out the window. In my Dramamine-induced state, I tried etching into my mind the grand thoughts and poetic moments that can only happen on a bus in the middle of Mexico doped up on Dramamine. But like my eyeglasses and my sun hat, the transcendent thoughts disappeared into the abyss. I would have gotten too sick trying to write it down on those roads..."

Bus survival pose with mustard yellow hoodie.

"I ate practically nothing except leftover lime-flavored peanuts, corn nuts, and Mexican cookies the whole ride...mostly because of the lack of meat-less options at the bus stops. A few hours in, the bus got some sort of rock or debris stuck in the back wheel. We didn't move for hours while it was repaired, since we were hours from any other bus to pick us up. I didn't bother to look at the time. I just stared at the moon or closed my eyes. At some points, military officials shined flashlights in our eyes while marching down the bus aisle with guns strapped to their chests. I think this happened a couple times at various checkpoints. Things blur..."
"...I got to Chetumal so late, I assumed I would not see my friend I was planning to meet. As I usually do when I get to a foreign town without a plan, I ran into some Dutch travellers. I shared a cab with the family going to a nice hotel. By nice, I mean the bed had bed sheets! The hotel where my friend was staying the next night was either not accepting guests at that hour or did not have any vacancies. I just understood “no, you can’t now” in the receptionist’s Spanish. My blasted Spanish. I’m not sure I’d do better in English at that hour though. I went to the other hotel with the Dutch family and I paid for a rather expensive room. It was easy to rationalize the expense considering that in the week before I had been living for nothing while sleeping in a cinema...I crashed immediately in my new fancy room with a mini fridge and hair dryer and television I would never use. I had not had anything to eat. Sometimes sleeping is easier than finding food..." 
"...the next morning I got a hold of my friend using the correct string of mysterious numbers to make a Skype connection to a Mexican cell phone. I walked around the block to her hotel room. Exhausted but happy to see a familiar face, we walked towards the water, to see the Atlantic side of things, later the duty free zone at the Belizan border, and then I was off to an overnight bus again to catch a morning flight out of Cancun..."
My last exhausting days of the trip made my arrival in Chicago that much sweeter.
The first person I talked to in the United States was, of course, a customs agent. Our conversation went something like this:

Customs Agent: [Looking incredulously at my list of countries I've visited] What were you doing in Guatemala?
Me: [Envisioning insects biting my face] Umm, beh, uhhh, well, traveling?
-Customs: [Furling his brow] So how long were you in Mexico?
-Me: Since September.
-Customs: [Furling brow more dramatically] What were you doing?
Me: [Private panic about what I've been doing with my life.] Well, just, uh, studying Spanish.
Customs: [Eyebrows relax] Oh, you're a student. So what brings you here today?
Me: Well, I have a connecting flight to Chicago. I'm going home.
Customs: Yeah, but why today?
Me: [Existential crisis...yes, why am I back today? Why not next week or tomorrow?] Well, umm, I have to work now.
Customs: [Eyebrows start furling again] but you said you were a student.
Me: Well, I was but now I have to work. I'm finished being a student. And it's time to work.

This is a google image for "furled brow" but also resembles the customs agent.

Customs: [Stares incredulously again for a long moment with my passport and looks tired] Welcome home.

So here I am at home. My Chicago accent is back in full force and people laugh at my jokes again. And yes, it's definitely time to work...and visit friends...and absentmindedly eavesdrop on Spanish conversations in the grocery store...and eat peanut butter...and take hot showers...and listen to Pandora...and drink large glasses of sweet, delicious Chicago tap water.