Anthropology: 2, Love: 0

I love my job. I get to learn new things, almost everyday. Things that no one knew yet. And then I get to tell other people by writing about them. That’s pretty awesome. And what makes it even more awesome is that the things I learn are about people: about their history, their current context, what they do, what they think, what they feel, and hopefully, why all of that is true. A lot of my job is just hanging out with people. Sometimes they are fascinating. Sometimes they are terribly boring. But there is always a story to tell. And I get to be the one to tell it. I get to travel to amazing places: the highest national capital in the world, the driest desert in the world. Sometimes the places are impoverished and it’s both hard to watch people suffer, and hard to live there myself. But in the end, it always feels worth it, especially if I can help relieve some of the suffering through my work.

But there’s something that’s not worth it. As of last night, I am single. My job requires movement. And that’s not good for relationships. This is the second time (a conservative estimate, a few other situations could count if I were assessing very liberally) anthropology has snatched a relationship away from me. The first time, I was so excited to spend a year doing dissertation fieldwork, but that kept me from making a commitment to a person who wanted and deserved someone who could promise they wouldn’t run away to South America for the long haul. In the end, that’s exactly what I did, and though I still deeply love and admire that person, we both know it wouldn’t have worked. The second, and more recent circumstance involved me falling madly in love with a person who lived where I researched. He was endlessly giving of assistance with research and with simply being an emotional support for someone living in a foreign country under difficult circumstances. But when I left the field site to move to the national capital for a year of analysis and writing, the distance was too much. With me planning to eventually return to the US, and him firmly rooted in his small city, we just didn’t have a workable future.

And I sit here, questioning, is it all worth it? I wouldn’t say that “settling down” is in my plans for the near future, but I would relish the opportunity to build a life with a person who I love and inspires me. I crave the kind of security that comes with knowing exactly how your head fits on their shoulder and exactly the joke that person is going to make when something goes wrong. And I wonder, is it impossible to have both? To have a partner and thrive as an anthropologist. I look at my fellow postdocs across the office, both of whom are bright young stars in their fields. Both of whom have partners. Partners who have followed them on their journey, and no doubt have at least a little sacrificed their own dreams for that of their partner. And both of my colleagues are men. Now of course, I know plenty of women who are anthropologists and have life long partnerships, but I wonder if being a woman makes it a bit harder, particularly in a context like Latin America.

In falling in love with this field, and in sacrificing so much to attempt to succeed as a scholar, have I all but given up my rights to love? I know that I am selfish. Is it possible that there is a person out there who could give up just enough to follow me on (or wait for me during) my anthropological adventures, yet is still invested enough in their own passion that they inspire me as well? The outlook is not bright, but I remain hopeful. Just as the academic job market is not bright, but I remain hopeful. Hopefully, at least one will eventually work out.

la lista de musica 2014

Once again, it's time for my top 10 songs of 2014. This year, I don't think a single one is actually from 2014. But these were the soundtrack to my year.

Extra Special Mention

Usually the extra special mention is from a live event, but this year, my only live song is in spot #10 below. This was a song that became important to my research and is just downright funny!

10. 

I paid about 3x as much as I should have to see this band play in Brixton. I wondered if it was ill advised until they closed with this song, and we all sang along. For the past, present, and beyond...

9. 

Good for walking through London to or from work. Good for reminding me that there's a point to all this (hopefully!)

8. 

This has long been a favorite of mine. But it was especially important to remember the sentiment this year. And in that moment, when I stood in the middle of a Paris apartment and it started playing, everything felt destined. Shortly thereafter it all went to shit, but hey, at least for that moment everything felt right. 

7. 

I'm not sure I even listened to this song that much this year. But it was something I needed to remind myself. There were some pretty dark days in there. Singing this helped. 

6. 

Sometimes it was too loud to write, or even think with all the construction going on in my little shack in Hospicio. I'd put this on, turn it up as loud as possible, and my fingers would fly. It's probably at least 90% responsible for my timely completion of a book chapter (if not more). 

5. 

Perhaps a perfect soundtrack to the depression.

4.

And now for something a little lighter. Y'all know I love me some PITBULL!!!! And this is a pretty damn good ass-shakin' tune.

3. 

I'm not sure if I truly believe it, but the song brought me some comfort. And it's a good one for driving in the desert moonlight.

2. 

It's a good one for reminiscing about an earthquake. And it certainly got it's fair share of play afterwards. 

1.

This one is probably much closer to most of my romantic feelings this year. And seeing it live at the terremoto relief concert was magical in it's ability to make me smile. Oh, Gepe, if only you're weren't such a cultural imperialist asshat.

el fin del año 2014

2014 was a hard year for many reasons. Money was always an issue (despite the fact that I am fully employed in what is basically my dream job). Love was always volatile. Living quarters were less than ideal in both countries I lived in. I was depressed for at least 1/3 of the year.  But this was also the year that I learned that sometimes, in order to maintain emotional stability, one must always remember of life, that "this is an adventure." 

And while it was a year I'd never want to re-live, it's certainly worth remembering. Here were the extremes of it all. 

Best Meal

Mont Bar, Barcelona. The whole family was there, the service was exquisite, the food was tasty, the wine kept flowing, and I even got to wear my fancy new dress.

dessert (and my dress is visible in the background)

Worst Meal

Ramen. Over and over. I had 10s of dollars to my name and no way of cooking other than an electric kettle. So ramen was basically the only thing to rely on. For months. 

Best Party

New Loki La Paz Opening Toga Party. Everyone was there. Everyone was in togas. What's not to love?

"we came, we saw, we bloodbombed"

Worst Party

Goodbye London. No one showed up to the bar. Even the friend that convinced me I must have the party. I cut my losses and went to a house party, which in the end was a good time. 

Best Reunion

Loki Reunion in London. Old friends in new places is the best thing ever. 

the people who changed my life forever

Worst Reunion

I stopped by the Iquique tattoo shop only to find my least favorite South American happened to be in town and was hanging out there. 

Fanciest High Class Moment

Shooting Party, at a place quite reminiscent of Downton Abbey. 

Roughest Low Class Moment

No kitchen. No bathroom. No internet. No power. No money. I kept reminding myself "this is not my life forever."

Best Holiday Celebration

Thanksgiving. We were in London. The oven didn't work. The bottle of bourbon had an anti-theft device still attached. There was no pumpkin or cranberry. But we made the most of it with no-bake cheesecake, butternut squash, trail mix, and the broiler. And it was glorious. 

Worst Holiday Celebration

St. Patrick's Day. It always seems to end up the worst. In 2012 I had my heart broken. In 2013 I gained a stalker. In 2014, I had a baby guiness in the morning in La Paz then flew back to Iquique where I picked up what had fallen in a minor earthquake, finished a paper, and remained totally sober.

Best 24 Hours

Día de La Paz, Masage at Hotel Europa, & Pamelita's Wedding

Worst 24 Hours

That day I thought we broke up.

Best Surprise Place

The Eagle and Child, Oxford England. We randomly wandered in, looking for a good place to write a paper and discovered we were in the very corner where JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis used to write. 

Worst Surprise Place

That apartment that necessitated all the ramen. Did I mention the bathroom shared with an older couple and no hot water?

Best Death Defying Feat

-17 F. Hunkered down with the folks in Heyworth and made an adventure of it. 

it got colder

Worst Death Defying Feat

8.2 Earthquake. I really did think I was going to die. The powerless, waterless, homeless, blocked road aftermath was arguably worse.

"more than 4 thousand people are now living on the street"

aftershocks

Best Fight

Getting what we wanted for our AAA session.

Worst Fight

Santander taking 4 months to finally deny me a bank account. 

Best Encounter with an Animal

"Adopting" La Vaquera.

Worst Encounter with an Animal

Vaquera wasn't in the back seat. It cost us $40.000,00CLP ($80US).

Hardest Goodbye

My last shift in the old Loki bar

Easiest Goodbye

Getting out of Iquique for 4 months

Best "Illegal" Activity

Absinthe in Prague.

Worst "Illegal" Activity

Watching our new friend, Sin (seriously his name) resolve some sort of mafia-style dispute after the Halloween party in Brixton.

Best Student Experience

My dissertation advisor tells a new colleague that I could "hold my own" and don't "need any help," causing said colleague to appologize.

Worst Student Experience

A well respected La Paz luchador asks me about the rumors my old trainer has apparently been spreading.

Best Academic Experience

George Marcus publicly compliments my AAA paper. Also, he has awesome glasses.

Worst Academic Experience

An older academic (who shall remain nameless) continues her history of putting me down by asking how far along I am in grad school.

And there they are. The noteworthy moments of 2014. May 2015 be better, more productive, more enjoyable, more economically stable, less stressful, and less dangerous. But even if it gets worse, I'll remember that "this is an adventure." And in the end, I got to live in 2 different countries (Chile & England), and visit six more (Bolivia, Peru, Spain, France, Czech Republic, and United States), seeing at least a dozen old friends in new places. That's a pretty good track record!

an auto-ethnographic memoir of the ways social media has changed (almost) absolutely nothing

In 2003, I graduated from college and moved to New York. Well, Jersey City, New Jersey to be exact. But I worked in Chelsea. For this small town girl, it was the illusion of “living the dream,” but I was too poor and too depressed that my top-10 University degree was not helping me do anything worthwhile with my life.

Yes, 2003, as you will recall, was pre-Facebook. When I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast that October, I had already begun to migrate away from Friendster and towards Myspace. It would not be until late 2005 when I would, under pressure from co-workers, open a Facebook account.

In 2003, I was employed as a librarian at a boutique architecture firm on 22^nd Street, right around the corner from a Barnes and Noble where people like Betty White and David Sedaris regularly did public readings. The only thing I liked about my job was that it sounded fancy and I once ran into Austin Scarlet (from Project Runway season 1) in the building’s elevator. But really being the “librarian” meant that I opened mail, filed catalogues, and eventually learned to master the art of using Excel as a payroll system. The “boutique” firm did not usually design cool restaurants or private homes. Most of our business came from the hospital sector.

I quickly found that the actual amount of work I needed to do in an eight hour day probably amounted to about 90 minutes. But I had the internet. I read the New York Times website cover to cover (or whatever the appropriate term would be), back in the days when there was no pay structure. I wrote on the billboard site for all of the Discovery Channel shows I watched with my roommate at night. I wrote emails back and forth to said roommate who worked downtown for a large credit card company. We usually averaged about 70 emails a day. Then we started using gchat instead and we lost count. I was obsessed with this website called Flavor Pill which essentially posted free and low-cost arts related events around the city. Every week they had a short 200 word essay contest to win tickets to some sort of film premiere or art opening. I won about every other month, which is a testament to the time I spent crafting these essays, rather than any innate writing talent. And by 3:00 when it seemed I had exhausted all other alternatives, I resigned myself to Myspace. I searched for new music there. I commented on friend’s latest picture uploads. Of course back in those days, people uploaded pictures at the tune of 5 a month. I even met new people. I don’t remember how exactly. Probably through groups one could join. I met a professor of anthropology from Florida who ended up guiding me through the graduate school admissions process a few years later. I also remember essentially planning a lunch date with a woman who worked a few blocks away, but I canceled at the last minute and just went to the Whole Foods salad bar 3 blocks away. I even started this here blog while working there.

Today, I read an NPR article that reminded me of those days. The days when my nokia phone worked just fine. When the internet was a waste of time, but I needed a way to waste time. When I lived a twelve hour car trip from my family and my best friend had just taken off to backpack in Australia for a year. I had no land line, so I called my mother using my cell phone, usually on Sunday afternoons. My roommate and I had internet at home, with Ethernet cables running between our bedrooms (Who needed wifi? Who needed internet in the living room or kitchen? I had my fill of internet at work). My boyfriend did not have internet at home, but he did have a giant television with 200 channels. The article laments, like so many, that “We Are Just Not HereAnymore.”

I offer my story here as an example of what the article gets wrong. In 2003, I spent at least 6½ hours of my eight hour work day, mentally not there. And social networking at it’s early stage was my last resort for ways to waste time at work. I’d then ride the train home, listening to my new mp3 player, reading a book, and barely making eye contact with anyone. Once home I would make dinner and watch tv with my roommate. We were physically in the same room, but our interaction was minimal. We found it so funny that this was our usual mode of existence that we hung a painting of us sitting on the futon staring at the TV (pictured above). On nights that I spent with my then boyfriend, I was often driven crazy by his obsession with television. He often spoke exclusively in quotes from whatever Bravo TV show was hip at the moment. In the morning, if we took the train to work together I was often deeply offended because rather than talk to me while we rode, he preferred to wear his headphones and listen to the news on his pocket radio (maybe I should have known it wouldn’t last). In those days, I paid rent on an apartment in Jersey City, and received paychecks from an architecture firm in Manhattan, but I didn’t live there. I lived through the phone calls to my mom and sister. I lived through the monthly emails sent by my best friend in Australia. And occasionally, when we’d all get together for a backyard barbeque, Sparks, and a rousing game of paper telephone, I lived with my friends. But we did not have rousing, meaningful conversation. We’d watch tv and comment, and generally drunkenly make fun of each other. The adventures would end up retold in my roommate’s livejournal. Photos would be shared via Photobucket or Snapfish. The stories might end up condensed into inside jokes about a hairy rock in the bathtub or what happens after bazooka, but they were not worthy of literary inscription.

The point is, maybe we’re not “here.” But if we are not now, we never were. People have been interacting with people in other places since the beginnings of modern humans’ existence. They have been preoccupied with what’s going on “over there” with “those people” for 200,000 years.  To think that new forms of technology are creating supposes there is some prior, “more authentic” form of communication we’ve left behind. But that simply did not exist. We are still human. We still communicate with other humans in the mode of our time…from cave painting to Snapchat, these modes help us share information with people close and far, for now or later. So let’s stop lamenting the social ills that everyone seems to want to find to be emerging from social media and get on with the usual business of being social with those in our immediate vicinity and those far outside of it.

el fin del año 2013

Years are made up of 365 days. Most are mundane. Most are uneventful. And sometimes that’s wonderful. Honestly, most of the days of 2013 were pretty terrible. In October, I wrote, 

It was a pretty shit year emotionally. I left a city that i love. I finished a dissertation, but that means I spent a lot of hours in a tiny room with a computer and not much else. I left another city that i love. I got a job, but that has meant starting from scratch in a new city where I know no one and that's been pretty emotionally draining as well. I hope next year feels like it reaps the rewards of all the crappiness of this one.

The last 2 months have been better, but we're still not in the clear. Nonetheless, at the end of the year, I’d like to remember the highs and lows, the moments of triumph and the moments of defeat. Because that’s the spice of it all, right? (See Bests and Worsts of 2012 & 2011).

Best Meal

Cosmos Club Foundation Grant Recipient Dinner (though I did get mistaken for my professor’s wife rather than an award recipient multiple times)

Worst Meal

My English Pub lasagna that was 2 hours late on Halloween, thereby fully thwarting my plans with Miley Cyrus

Best Party

My despedida from La Paz in July. I ended up tied to a chair on a table, and was fed shots.

Worst Party

When I finished writing my dissertation I called everyone I knew in DC and invited them over. 4 people showed up.

Best 24 hours

Sorrata, la gruta, mi mejor amigo, pelis, and good sleep

Worst 24 hours

Being stuck in San Salvador

Best Teaching Experience

Prof B sent me an email: “Got a good shout out for you in my theory class today. One student--Rebecca with long blond hair--was pretty much the only person who would speak about Geertz. I finally asked her about it and she said she read it in your 110 class. Word.”

Worst Teaching Experience

I asked my “Sex Gender Culture” class students to do a creative final project. I got a few insightful films and narrative stories. And a slew of high-school level collages of cut up magazine images of women’s bodies.

Best Student Experience

Hearing the bagpipes at graduation and feeling like I really had entered “the realm of the anointed”

Worst Student Experience

My lucha trainer getting mad when I didn’t get moves right after not practicing for a year

Best triumph

Getting a University College London/Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile postdoc

Worst Defeat

Not getting the Universitat von Amsterdam postdoc I really really wanted

Best gift received

Cute wooden luchadores from a committee member

Worst gift received

A shot of zambuca from DJ Inside

Best chance encounter

JC in my new fieldsite

Worst chance encounter

The Moroccan’s return to La Paz

Best Holiday

Thanksgivikah. Both because it’ll never happen again, and because it was a great time.

Worst Holiday

St. Pats. 2^nd year in a row. Can’t we just retire it already?

Best Paper I wrote

JLACA article which is FINALLY published

Worst Paper I wrote

Last minute AAA paper (but at least I did it at the beach)

Best “illegal” activity

Tie between sneaking wine into a movie theater and wheat pasting election posters around the fieldsite

Worst “illegal” activity

Getting locked inside and hushed when the La Paz alcalde came to the illegal bar I was patronizing

Best Surprise

My sister coming home for Christmas

Worst Surprise

Having to take a road test to replace a lost driver’s license

Best completed project

My dissertation

Worst uncompleted project

Any number of articles I started writing and never finished

Best encounter with an animal

Accidentally adopting 4 fish

Worst encounter with an animal

The cat who lives in my local Chilean bar who clawed up my pants

Best Fight

Lady Blade’s entrance in the Benefit for Kids with Cancer

Worst Fight

The Pepsi Can incident

Best new experience

Spa days at Hotel Europa

Worst New Experience

The newness of northern Chile (fortunately, the less new it is, the better it gets)

Here’s to the Bests of 2014 being even better and the worsts being, at the very least, funnier!