itsthemusicpeople:

I basically wanted to get these messages across when selling Seuss to UWS ‘rents. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time, I was met with silence. #LifeOfAnActivistBookSeller

(via mknmv)

I caught an 8 am train to Chennai by myself this morning to attend a conference on international development. I’ve been really excited to do something on my own. Part of me just wanted to see if I could do it, the other part wanted to separate myself from the developing drama the rest of the group was having while trying to make their weekend plans. Mostly, I just wanted to have some freedom and be on my own time. I’m getting sick of having a structured, contrived Indian experience that ends each day in a mall food court. 

I was proud of myself for negotiating a fair rate for my auto driver to take me from the train station. Trying to negotiate is stupid, I’m literally being nickel’d and dime’d, 10 rupees is worth about 20 cents, but I’m so disrespected here as a women that I have to be assertive and prove to these people that I’m not dumb. It’s really difficult being a woman here, no one respects me and that’s something I’ve never had to deal with before. The auto drivers might as well be laughing in my face every time I demand a fair price.

After checking into the YWCA, my professor arranged for a student to pick me up for the conference. She sent Anbu, who’s name means love; everyone’s name means something here. He was this tall goofy Indian kid with trendy glasses. He told me he came on his bike and hoped I didn’t mind. I didn’t, of course, but I was worried about how I was going to stay on the back of this motorcycle without holding onto this kid. That wasn’t an option because any sort of physical contact between sexes is culturally unacceptable, especially with someone you’ve just met. I held onto some sort of plastic piece on the back of the bike and hoped for the best. 

The ride was pretty awesome, I got to see Chennai in a way I couldn’t when trying to look out of rickshaws with exhaust constantly blown in my face. The city didn’t seem as ugly as it did when I was there a week earlier. Anbu drove like everyone else in India though: fast, too close to others. He took turns and made stops so quickly that he had to put his feet down to physically turn the bike or to keep us from running into whatever vehicle was in front of us. Somehow, he was able to carry on a conversation throughout our drive. I answered whatever questions he asked but struggled to keep the America in me from screaming for a helmet. While I was concerned for my safety, I must admit the Bay of Bengal seemed much more enchanting than it did on my first trip to the beach and think I was actually attracted to Anbu because he almost killed me a few times on his bike. That was short lived though, once we got to the conference I got a good look at him and realized he was the Indian version of my ex-boyfriend. I avoided him for the rest of the weekend. 

5/8/10

We went to all of the mental health “rehab” facilities today that are a part of the Richmond Fellowship Society (the college that has organized our program in Bangalore). We started at Chetana, which is actually the building we’re staying in. As soon as we walked in, this woman, most likely schizophrenic, walked up to Lindsey and said “OHH, you’re SO fair!” Lindsey was looking at her like “wtf, how do you know I’m fair”, but the woman was referring to her skin color. “Fair skin is soo beautiful, we think it’s beautiful here” At this point one of the employees cut in and literally said “please don’t start”. 

I actually started playing this really insensitive game while we were doing our visits where I tried to guess who was a patient and who was an employee. It was much harder to tell than you would think. All of the people there seemed a bit off, I guess it goes back to that idea of “compensating” where you have to adjust to survive in your environment; working with crazy people makes you a little crazy. Chetana is just a day care center so patients come to do group activities during the day but we also visited a half way home and a long term home for the mentally ill. When we went to the long term stay home there was a women who had her face painted like a geisha, but she looked like death. She was standing at the gate as we pulled up and made us nervous to even walk into the building. After we went inside the geisha kept tryiing to sell us scarves that she knit, she was really persistent. 

When we returned to our dorm we were “surprised” with the gift of having our tour bus to take us to dinner that night. Instant Karma caught up with me for my “guess who’s crazy game” because the van broke down 20 minutes into our trip. I was really disappointed because I had been refering to the bus as “the van that can” but it couldn’t.  We waited on the side of the road for at least an hour for a new bus to come. My group spent most of that hour watching what we thought was a hermaphrodite dog (it was really just a female dog with awful hemorrhoids) trying to cross the busy intersection. Afton, of course, started crying about it. 

The other thing I need to mention about this story is that our drivers can’t really drive our manual transmission busses. While I’ll give them credit for how difficult it must be to drive on poorly maintained roads in crazy traffic, our drivers shouldn’t be stalling in the middle of the road. That being said, we were on our new bus for about 5 minutes before our driver, for reasons completely incomprehensible to me, put the van in reverse and backed up into the person behind us. While we were looking around trying to figure out if we actually hit someone, our driver backed up, again, into the same truck. I think our van was fine but the windshield of the truck behind us was shattered; it’s still unclear whether it was broken in our collision or if the break had been there previously.  Our driver wasn’t phased at all, he kept smiling through the whole ordeal. When the other driver approached his window, he kept smiling and just handing him a wad of cash. The other driver accepted and that was the end of it. That’s how accidents are handled here, I guess.

Today was interesting. It started with a visit to a rural primary care hospital. There, some pervert stood at the back of the building jerking off, hiding but making sure to show his dick to every single one of us. It was disgusting. I never thought I would be so disturbed by some random sicko but it was really gross, we’re on a school trip. John, the only guy on the trip, is a 40 year old psych nurse. He’s out of place here, but he explained the medical term “decompensating”. Apparently that’s what happens when you’re crazy and you can’t adapt to your surroundings. It was pretty disturbing though because the rest of the time he was there he was hiding and peeking at us through windows and around corners.

                The rest of the day made up for that incident. We went to this rural training center for holistic medicine and it was a beautiful place. The woman that runs the center made us tea out of these flowers called “touch me nots”. They’re really great promoters of women’s health, she even has a book published with different holistic treatments made with it. The coolest thing about this flower was the reason it had it’s name, if you touched the leaves they closed and it just looked like a stem. I spent the rest of the afternoon punching flowers. We also went to a small primary school in a village nearby where all the kids called us “American Ladies”. The town was so small and the people so welcoming, that the cows were even friendly. One cow approached my friend Lauren because it wanted it’s head scratched. She has some video of it. I hope I can figure out how to post it.

I came here with the intention of learning to let things go. The first thing I’ve learned to let go is my fear of dying every time I get into a vehicle here. I haven’t, though, stopped fearing we may kill someone else. Traffic is insane here, lane lines are only a suggestion with pedestrians and cows scattered anywhere on the road. All the drivers ride dangerously close to the person in front of them just honking their horns until the other vehicle moves out of the way. I’ve seen so many babies on motorcycles I can’t believe it. I’ve also seen motorcycles with 4 or 5 people on them.

                We use rickshaws as our main mode of transportation. They’re these little 3 wheeled yellow motorized carts with some of the most amusing horn sounds I’ve ever heard. They start like a lawnmower and steer like a four-wheeler. We get ripped off every time we take one because we’re white and we’re starting to get sick of it. Lindsey, my favorite person here, is just completely sick of India so she’s stopped trying to be culturally sensitive. Today, sitting in traffic on our way home from dinner, she leans up and taps our rickshaw driver on the shoulder and says “I really like your rickshaw. It’s the best one I’ve been in.” Total bullshit, the thing was a piece of shit, it didn’t even have a real horn. It had a bike horn attached to the side of the rickshaw. The picture is below. The pollution here is crazy. We get mouthfuls of exhaust sitting in the back of these little go carts. The rides are still fun though. It’s a real experience to have someone driving directly towards you without any indication they’ll give way. It’s also fun because Lindsey sits in the back, sometimes smoking cigarettes off the side, screaming “HONK!! HONK YOUR HORN!” whenever she feels moved to.

                 I think we’re all ready to move on to Bangalore.

Tonight my student guide invited us to her home to see her neighborhood and meet her family. There, for maybe the 10^th time in my life I was told that I resemble a male cousin of hers. They wouldn’t drop it either, her mom kept grabbing my chin and saying something that translated to me as “my son”. Always great to be told I look like a man…

When I first thought about starting a blog I didn’t have the intention of constantly writing about drugs, but this is an account of my real life. It took us 3 days to find weed here, I didn’t even have anything to do with it. Somehow, my friend made an arrangement with her rickshaw driver to meet 2 hours later down the street to buy 10 grams for 2000 rupees (about 40 bucks). It was such a shady transaction, we paid 2000 rupees for about 15 grams of schwagg, we probably got really ripped off but whatever, we were buying something illegal in a foreign country.

                We didn’t have any papers so we ripped out the back page of the bible in my room. I had rationalized it by thinking “why is there a bible here in the first place, everyone here is Hindu”. Then I remembered the C in YWCA stands for Christian. Good thing I don’t believe in hell. Here’s a picture of my bud and crazy large bible joint. 

Today was the first day of our program. Our professor, Shantha is this really awesome, bossy, strong-willed Indian woman, and  on the way to Madras School of Social Work she was asking everyone what they really wanted to do while they were here. The first girl said it had always been a dream of hers to pick a mango out of a tree and, of course, Shantha said she’d make it happen. The rest of us just wanted to get kahtis and things like that. Then, there was one girl, my roommate Monique, who said she really wanted to see a monkey while we were here and Shantha promised that too. While there are monkeys in India, I don’t know why this girl thought monkeys would be hanging around in the trees in a city of *** million people. I’m not saying it’s a dumb request, I’m just saying Shantha shouldn’t have been promising she’d see one hanging out in Chennai.  Right after she said it, I asked our student guide Maha if there were really wild monkeys hanging around the city and she didn’t want to directly say my professor was wrong so she said, logically,  that sometimes they see one but it’s not very likely that we’ll see one while we’re there. 

So we do everything that was scheduled for the program that day which included visiting a primary school in a slum where, to my surprise, some little boys already had silly bandz. We leave the slums around 5 and everyone is jet-lagged and hungry getting onto the bus for our hour ride back to the YWCA.. On the way back Shantha asks if we want snacks and just has the driver pull over and let us hop out so we can find snacks on the street. Once we’re all back Shantha gets the genius idea that we’ll stop and eat our snacks on the beach because someone had said earlier that they wanted to go to the beach.  I may have been the only one that was frustrated that Shantha didn’t seem to realize we didn’t mean we wanted to go THAT day. So we stopped to eat our snacks on the beach. Being at the Bay of Bengal is pretty sweet, but the beach is covered in people and trash. Shantha kept asking me why I didn’t want to put my feed in the water. Somehow we ended up an attraction on the beach for this group of guys from Northern India traveling around the country to pray at a bunch of different temples. They had spent their day praying at temple then headed to the beach at night where the highlight was taking endless numbers of pictures with every single person in my group. They asked every single one of us what country we were from, then what state. Usually everyone asks if we’re from California or New York, but the best guess I got was a shorter guy who asked if I was from Alaska. 

As we’re standing around waiting to leave, we get to fulfill another wish, we see a gypsy girl with her pet monkey on a fucking leash. I haven’t seen anyone as excited as Monique in a really long time, She runs right up to the girl and wants to pet the monkey.  I was in shock that we actually saw a fucking monkey, on our FIRST day in Chennai, but you can’t forget about gypsies when you’re in another country.  Anyway, I thought this thing was gross, I can’t tell if it had a little Mohawk haircut or if it was just sort of balding. It looked dirty and like it may not have been feed regularly, but Monique got a picture with it. It was such a fucking commotion for at least 15 minutes with kids from my group crowding around this gross thing to take it’s picture and then all the North Indians crowding around them to take their picture. The little gypsy girl was trapped in the middle of it so my friend and I figured we should give her some money for her time. The problem was I couldn’t get close enough to her to slip her a coin, but when I did her sick little monkey kept trying to grope me. I was sort of O.K. with this at first but it was sort of pulling my skirt down trying to climb up me and then I noticed it’s nasty little red boner. I kept trying to get it off me but, like a monkey, it kept hanging on my arm. Then the thing tried to fucking bite me; never again will I think monkeys are cute.  Then, Shantha took us to Pizza Hut.

This was my  first day in India.

Old men are always thanking me for my warmth. I don’t know what in the hell gives  people the impression that I’m warm but it happened again on the plane. The old man sitting next to me was making friendly conversation. He asked where I was from and when I told him I was from Ohio he started telling me how good the University football team was there like I didn’t already know. He was asking me about my trip and told me about his kids, normal plane conversation, but then he started telling me he wanted to show me India. He kept saying he wanted to take me for a long ride, I don’t know what that means in India, but in the US it’s an invitation to be raped and killed. I tried to ignore it, thinking he was just a nice old man and I was just misinterpreting his intentions, but while I was trying to watch Dexter he kept leaning over to say things to me through my headphones. He guessed my astrological sign which kinda freaked me out and that’s when he started in with the warmth bullshit. He, like all other old men who flirt with me, thanked me for being so kind to an old man. I wasn’t even being that nice, I just kept nodding when he spoke to me, I couldn’t even understand half of what he said. Luckily, he fell asleep for the 2^nd half of the flight but right before we got off the plane he offered to be my driver again and said “you try everything in life once, so why not this old man” as he gave me his business card (he sells surf apparel?). I don’t think that can be misinterpreted, that old man was a perv.

                I should also mention that on my first flight, I slept the entire time but somehow fell asleep on top of a piece of chocolate and it, of course, melted all over my butt so it looked like I shit myself while I was sleeping. Thank God I had another pair of pants in my bag but it left a spot on the seat so who knows what the flight attendants thought after the flight.

I think the effects of my trip to India began before I left Ohio. I must say  I’m really proud of myself for how well I handled myself  during my last minute dash to get all of my shit together. As usual, I fucked around with my friends and left all of the logistics of leaving until the day of my flight but for the first time in my life, I didn’t freak out. I’m notorious for my last minute breakdowns because I never leave myself enough time to do everything I need to. This was no different, I had to do laundry, buy necessary India gear, pack, send a package to my friend in the marines, go to the eye doctor and visit my grandmother all before going to the airport at 6. Why would I schedule an eye appointment the day I’m supposed to leave the country? Because I’m not responsible enough to have gone before the last possible time.

                I realize how much I’ve grown as a person this past year because through all of this I remained incredibly calm. I did feel my familiar anxiety creep up when I, at 5pm, finally stopped by my grandmas. My grandma never stresses me out, but as she gets older, I worry more about her because I know that she’s sad about all of the people that she’s loved slipping away to various illness and age. The knots in my chest started as she was complaining about the Southwest nurses taking care of her brother and I noticed it was already 5:15 and I knew I had a half hour drive to my mom’s not including all the bullshit traffic I’d have to deal with driving through the Greater Parma area (the Greater Parma area is what my friend refers to the entire area south of I-480 to Rt 82, from I-71 to I-77). I didn’t want to interrupt her story because I know that just saying it out loud would make her feel better but she tells stories like I do and she wasn’t anywhere near the end. I don’t remember what time I finally left but I know she was glad I came and I was glad I went, the tension in my chest released a bit as I drove down the street and packed a bowl at the first red light. I smoked while driving down W 130^th listening to Michael Stanley’s All Request Rush Hour. That’s when the most incredible thing happen, I got to all the godawfulbullshit traffic at the 82 intersection and didn’t even care. I was so fucking high and all I cared about was how beautiful the trees were, thankful that Strongsville hadn’t ruined all nature with shopping centers. I didn’t care what time I got to the airport; I wasn’t afraid of missing my flight. I still had to eat and shower, it was fine. The only thing that disappointed me was that I couldn’t finish my bowl in my neighborhood as I had planned because my mom turned into the development right behind me and followed me home.

                I finally left for the airport at 6:30, it was fine. To my benefit, I learned my flight was delayed upon arriving there. Then, because I was still in Cleveland after all, my flight was delayed more and more until it became too late to make my connection at Dulles. I calmly went to talk to an airline representative and within 20 minutes had a completely new itinerary departing at 4 the next day. I’m still amazed that when I didn’t lose it about running out of time the universe just gave me an entire day. I really believe I was rewarded for staying level headed and composed (something I struggle with). Some cosmic force allotted me the time to do the tasks I hadn’t finished, like sending the package to my friend and buying silly bandz to give to Indian children. Best of all, the universe gave me time to finish my bowl.