In high school, I read a poem about a visit to Auschwitz—and how striking it was that there were children playing nearby and flowers starting to grow where unspeakable things had happened.

I understand that people have their own lives to keep on living, but it felt so strange to have to go about my business like nothing had happened. Seeing people in their shops or talking to their friends and laughing outside their homes seemed so incongruous, so grotesque.

I got a job today. I started volunteering at PAWS; today. I came home and cried and whimpered on Jed.

Taking the elevator down to the basement of our building to get in the car sends my heart into a frenzy and shivers down my spine.

If I was up there and the fire was there, I would have jumped.

Mom, the Palestinians are looking at me funny!

Israel continues with its policy of assassinating suspected Palestinian terrorists. 'Anticipatory self-defense,' they call it. Doesn't self-defense imply that you are under some sort of actual threat, not that you might, at some point, perhaps, fear for your well-being? If I decide the guy who's walking up the street might in the future decide to rob or rape me, I can't just fire a gun in his general direction, no matter what kind of funny looks he might be giving me. If I did and used this sort of defense I'd probably get laughed at. Yet the Israeli attacks seem to elicit nothing more than a disapproving frown and a shake of the head from the U.S—not even when these attacks also take the lives of bystanders. Israel continues to expand its settlements and bulldoze the homes of
Palestinians (who are, make no mistake, a people under harsh colonization and occupation—you’d be angry too under those circumstances), even in areas that are supposed to be under Palestinian control. And when they ask for neutral observers to be sent in, Israel calls it 'one-sided,' and the U.S. wields its veto power in the U.N. about and refuses to go along with it. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

(Please note that I am not saying that it's acceptable to blow yourself up in a restaurant full of people, but the idea of 'anticipatory self-defense' is absolutely ludicrous to me.)

A girl who IRCs on one of the channels I'm on these days is getting kicked out of the country by the INS. She's originally from New Zealand and married a US citizen. She has to stay in NZ until her visa goes through here in the US. That's at least several months. They've been married just over a year.

Jed has been a lot more paranoid about the whole INS deal than me. He's the one that has wanted to make doubly sure that everything is as it should be. Me, I figured we have a lawyer, we have our papers in, we asked our questions, now we just wait. Now I wonder, could this be me?

Unlikely, not for the same reasons anyway. But I suppose there is always the possibility that someone somewhere along the line will screw something up and not leave us with enough time to remedy it. And what would I do then? I can't imagine having to leave for several months, maybe years. There is nothing for me in Chile--there hasn't been for a long while, and some time ago I promised myself I would not go back. I know that a couple of entries back I said that I would have a nice if somewhat discombobulated life should I have to go back, but it's not true. I don't want it to sound like a threat, so I don't like saying it at all, but I know that at this point there is no going back for me.

Could this be me? My heart wrings itself into a knot thinking of it. For her. For myself a bit, because just imagining it feels like someone is cutting a chunk out of my chest. But for her, for her, because she's the one that will be at the airport in two days.

It seems the Bush administration has backed up a bit on at least using the term amnesty and is now considering a "guest worker" program. This might be ok, except that, in general, when people are in a country illegally it is because they don't want to leave (which is what they would otherwise be made to do), and "guest" implies a limited term of stay. What makes these authorities think that people who risk all kinds of things every day in order to stay in a country are going to willingly sign up to be a guest worker, and therefore have to eventually leave, is beyond me.

The Bush White House is considering granting legal status to millions of Mexicans who are living in the country illegally. Part of me thinks good for them if they get it, but part of me has some issues with the proposal. First of all, why just Mexicans? Other than Bush's relationship with
Mexico's Vicente Fox, I can't come up with an answer. Sure Bush is sucking up to the Hispanic vote, but he could do that just as well by passing a measure for a broader group. And yes, I am aware that Mexican nationals make up a large chunk of the illegal immigrant numbers, but, again, it seems to me that passing such an amnesty for all illegal immigrants that meet certain requirements would achieve the same thing. Then there's the more personal issues: I have been in the US since I was thirteen. I don't feel at home anywhere else. All my friends are here; my education, my life, my points of view have little or nothing to do with my country of origin (Chile) anymore. And yet, I have never been legally able to work. I am twenty-two now, and just got a work permit because I happened to marry a US citizen. If it wasn't for that, I would still be forced to go to school, paying several times as much as my classmates, no matter where I lived or for how long I'd been there, ineligible for any kind of loan or financial aid, and prohibited from working unless I had authorization from the school, and then only on campus and part-time. After I finished school, I would have a limited time to find work in the US, otherwise I would be forced to return to a country I haven't lived in for more than ten years, a country that has nothing for me. If I did find a job in the US, my visa would restrict my working only for that one company. If I got laid off or fired, you guessed it, back to Chile it is.

I knew plenty of people who were here illegally. They worked as waiters or waitresses or some other similar low-paying jobs, got help from charitable organizations and the government when they could swing it. They lived in fear of being deported, but it never happened. I realize that for some people, leaving their country is a matter of life or death (or unbearable living conditions). I don't necessarily oppose an amnesty, but an amnesty alone for just one nationality seems woefully inadequate.  Immigration laws in this country are in dire need of a rehaul—people who try to follow the law find themselves with few if any options. I suppose it's only symptomatic of the state of things that, even to someone like me, who has a nice life here and who would have a nice (though somewhat discombobulated at first) enough life in Chile, sometimes the illegal way just seems easier.

The Talk

I was almost brought to tears when I found out about sex. I was in second grade and it was by accident—I overheard someone else's dirty joke at school. We lived in a rural area, and sure, I'd seen cows and horses going at it, but I'd never related what they were doing to how my siblings and I came to be. Oh sure, I knew that babies spent a good deal of time in the mother's tummy, and I laughed knowingly when other kids were told of cabbages and storks. Me, I knew how things were done. Parents got married and shared a bed and then decided to have children, so they prayed a lot, and next thing you knew there was something growing in mom's belly. The marrying wasn't necessary, I knew, because somewhere I had heard the expression "single mother" and asked my mom how a single woman could get pregnant.

"Well, sometimes," she told me, "if a woman is single and sleeps with a man, then she gets pregnant."

Ah. I was satisfied with this, but what if I shared a bed with my baby brother? That was different, she explained, and left it at that.

So you didn't need to be married, but you had to share a bed. Oh yes, I was wise in the ways of the world.

My first reaction when I heard the joke was shock. Well, maybe animals did it that way, but not us. Well, maybe some people. "Maybe these modern couples," I distinctly remember thinking. Not my parents. The idea sunk in, eventually. I then spent several years pretending I knew nothing of it and uncomfortably awaiting The Talk.

I recently asked a friend how his Talk had gone. He had been a young kid in school, and realized that he got a reaction when he asked where babies came from. Delighted, and much to the despair of his teacher, he started asking just about every day, until finally, distraught, the teacher called his parents and asked them to explain it to him. They walked to his room and sat on the bed with him, and then explained sex to him in what was doubtlessly a nerve-wracking experience, because they forgot to mention the vagina. For some time after this, my friend was convinced the way one became pregnant was through anal sex, and wondered what the purpose of women was. Men already had all the parts required to reproduce; women were just lacking a penis.

Time went by and my classmates started sprouting breasts. Mine had been there for years: two small lumps, looking hopelessly out of place, as if a sculptor had set down two balls of clay while she answered the phone and then completely forgotten about them. The girls and guys were segregated and shown film strips about periods and other puberty mishaps. We were given pads and propaganda by a sanitary napkin company. The girls in my class were elated when, one after the other, they all got their periods. I thought they were insane, and hoped I could get away without it until I was close to eighteen. I wasn't that lucky, but managed to be a couple of years behind nonetheless.

Even then, I never got the talk. After I started getting my period, it became clear it wasn't going to happen. I don't know if my parents decided I was smart enough to figure it out by myself by then, or if they simply put it off too much because they were embarrassed.

Years later, I nearly jumped up and gave my dad a high-five when I saw him surreptitiously putting a box of condoms in a suitcase my mom and him were taking on a weekend getaway.

[Originally posted to the Other INTP List]

Last night, shortly before going to bed, I heard a delighted squeal coming from up the street.

"Oh my GOD!"

I could picture a girl of about my age jumping up and down, horribly excited at something stupid. I could picture dogs all around the neighborhood twisting and squirming in pain as the already high pitch rose higher and higher. She could've just been told that she'd found the cure to cancer, for all I knew. No matter. The cure for cancer was clearly a shallow endeavor if it necessitated such squealing.

"The problem with this neighborhood," said my husband as we were going to bed, "is that you hear all kinds of noises and you can't tell if someone's getting murdered or if they just dropped their mocha."

A couple of days ago, there was screeching of brakes and the unmistakable bang of a car crash at the corner. "Sucks to be that guy," I muttered, not even looking away from the monitor, not skipping a beat in my typing. My husband and his friend went to the window and saw that it didn't look serious and that someone else had called the cops. Later, I was astonished at my lack of caring.

People always mention that case of a girl who was murdered within earshot of all the neighbors. In New York, wasn't it? Nobody did anything about it—they ignored it, it was Someone Else's Problem. But this, of course, is New York, don't you see. People there are jaded and soulless in New York. New York is a Big City, with alleys and grime and public transportation. People get murdered by their neighbor's window there all the time. It's a risk you take, you see, when you live in New York. In fact, they probably make you murder a couple of people of your own before you're allowed into the city. No, we are different. What kind of a person just sits by and says "Sucks to be that guy" without even looking away from what they're doing when they hear a noise that clearly indicates someone's in trouble? Only a New Yorker.

Because of our proximity to the frat houses we get all kinds of odd noises. Someone screaming about burritos, less-than-sober renderings of George Michael songs, grunting, squealing. If I'm woken up by them, I mumble curses and go back to sleep. If it was death-squealing, death-grunting (death-George Michael?), I would shoot up from the bed and run, no, fly to the phone and save someone's life, I tell myself before falling back asleep.

[Originally posted to the Other INTP List]

I have been thinking about money a lot lately. I'm 22 and I've never had a job. I actually have a perfectly good excuse for this: I've been living away from my native country (Chile) since I was 13. I couldn't work in the US because of my visa, and later, in Argentina, I wasn't old enough. When I did reach the legal working age for the country, I moved back to the US on a student visa. This, however, seems like just an excuse and not really a reason. I could have worked after my first year as a student, part time, had I managed to be lucky enough to snag one of the part-time, on-campus jobs (these were gone quickly to the many other students, international and US-born). But, of course, I didn't.

I should receive a work authorization from INS any day now. I'd like to think that, so far, I haven't held a job (an every-day, all-day job), because I couldn't, not because I was just lazy. I couldn't legally work. I couldn't physically get out of bed (arthritis). I was too busy plotting ways of killing myself. I dread the day I get the authorization. It could be that I am, after all, just that lazy.

I recently did a website for my chastity belt friend. He owns a company that runs one of the more visited sites on the subject. A job offer has been dangled on and off, seriously and jokingly, for a while. Just think, I could tell my parents that I work for the adult industry.

I was browsing through the UW jobs page the other night, and saw an opening for 'Animal Technician.' It involved taking care of 'nonhuman primates'--shuffling cages about, feeding, monitoring, etc. It sounded interesting—I’d get to water monkeys for a living!

In reality, my first real job will probably be dismal office or computer stuff. When I was a young kid, I made money by drawing pictures of whichever anime characters were popular at the moment and selling them to my classmates. When we moved to the US, my mother printed out some flyers at Kinko's and started cleaning houses, a deeply humiliating experience for her. My dad, after finishing his MBA, got a cushy job with that great evil corporation, Wal-Mart, that moved us to a whole-floor, five-bathroom, $3000+/mo apartment in an upper class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. My dad quickly became disenchanted with the company, and now works for the LDS Church in Chile, training people, helping small business owners, and organizing workers into unions. Chile's unemployment rate is anywhere from 15 to 20 percent.

One sultry summer night, I took the service elevator (Heaven forbid The Help use the same elevator as The Rest Of Us) up as far as it would go, and then took the stairs, hoping to get to the rooftop to watch the stars. At the top, I found two small rooms, smaller than a third of our living room, door open, one, perhaps two windows. This was where our doorman and his family lived.

The poorest person I've ever met was the man who worked at the dump in the quaint, tourist-friendly, largely German town I lived in in the south of Chile when I was eight years old. He lived at the dump with his two daughters, in a shack of plastic, cardboard, and plywood, in the neverending stench of our rotting waste and the sticky black smoke of burning trash.

If I had to work to survive, if my next meal didn't magically appear or my bank account didn't quietly fill up with the loan money I get at the beginning of the month, I might be too tired to feel guilty one night and forget about it the next.

I spent a ridiculous amount today, without a second thought, on a wind chime.

In which she has delusions of grandeur.

I wondered today whether my previous entry had been too knee-jerk. Couldn't it be, after all, that the question had been meant in a perfectly nice way? But there is no way to tell—no context, no introduction, no nothing. No email address to respond to privately. Just a demand for information. Who asks this kind of stuff, anyway? That's when it dawned on me—I am a celebrity. There is no other explanation. Celebrities scurry from place to place as people shout questions like that. I have arrived.

Would you buy my merchandise?

And to answer your question, Dearest Readerperson, no, I will not lose weight before I get married. In fact, I am under the strictest of diets just to assure that my weight will stay right where it is. I've already got the dress, after all, If I started losing weight it might not fit right. And my fiancé might not want to marry me after all. He did propose to me while on my current weight, and he might feel disappointed and deceived should I shrink by our wedding day. I realize that this might be shocking (how could anyone be so shallow, you ask), but you never know—better be on the safe side. Oh, if you only knew what a great responsibility hangs over my shoulders. All kinds of things hinge on my wedding weight. If I lose any weight, the place where we intend on getting married would have to be completely rearranged; feng shui, subtle changes in the Earth's gravitational pull, all that. Bridesmaids and attendants would have to change their own weights to compensate, creating a chain reaction that would reach the outermost corners of the land. No, Dear Reader, it is not meant to be that I should lose weight. Not for myself, but for the good of humanity. I will accept, then, my fate, and become the first overweight woman ever to get married.

Your invitation, by the way, is in the mail.

Dear Anesly

A Frequent Reader (sc-24-165-88-67.socal.rr.com) asks:

Are you gonna loose weight before you get married?


Dear Frequent Reader,

Please get back to me after consulting a dictionary.

I'm an orange moon

[or not]

It is 4:46 AM. Civilized people are asleep, and I am too lazy to use initials.

Jeremy got sick of Evergreen and decided to give the UW a try, so he came and spent a few days at the apartment while he found a place to live. Even though we weren't very close friends in high school, I always felt like he 'got' a lot about me—and more so after we'd both left the LDS church. It was nice.

His mom called and spoke to me to get my address to mail some things for him, and she wanted to know if my last name was still the same. I was somewhat confused. 'Well,' she said after a pause, 'I guess no point in changing your last name before you get married.'

'I'm not changing my last name after getting married.'

'Oh. Ooooh.' Long pause. 'Anyway...'

When she called later and spoke to Jeremy, she asked him if the boy I was marrying was mormon (though I'm fairly sure she knew he isn't, and that I don't go to church anymore, and all that—but of course I could be wrong). Fine mormons we'd be, living together. I suppose my parents aren't the only ones who have fits of denial and hope a nice mormon boy will set me back on the straight and narrow.

I also told my parents I wasn't planning on changing my name. Actually, because I'm a big chicken, I told my parents that I was thinking of not changing my name. They both seemed somewhat upset, specially my dad. Men, he told me, love us a lot and will do a lot of things for us and put up with a lot of things for us, but some things are very important. But if Jed thinks having the same last name is very important and he's unable to tell me about it when we're planning on getting married, we have a problem, I argued. Take the American name, insisted my dad, you'll have a lot less problems, people will treat you better. Nonsense, I told them, there are people in Chile who are of European descent and there are people in the US who are of Hispanic descent and have been there for generations and generations and they simply are Chilean and American, respectively. But while I argued with them, I hated knowing that in some ways my dad was right; some people won't ever accept someone who doesn't quite fit their idea of what an American should be, and changing my last name might make some things smoother for me. But I can't agree to that, and I console myself with the thought that this'll weed such people out.

Then my mom joined in. I could just do what they do down there, she suggested. Now, I should explain. I have four names, as is customary in Chile. My first name, my middle name, my father's last name, and my mother's last name. My mother's maiden name was [removed], but when she got married she became [removed]. The idea is that when you get married you drop your mother's last name and add your husband's instead.
But I can't—no, I don't want to do that. I tried explaining to them that I wouldn't just drop either of their last names.

My dad sighed.

My mom told me she could see where I was coming from.

I don't even want to imagine what it's gonna be like when they realize that the closest thing to grandchildren they're gonna get from me are my cats.

It's gotten harder and harder to write these updates, though I'm not sure why. Three major things have happened since I last wrote, almost two months ago: I moved, I cut my wrists a bit, and I got engaged.

I live a couple of blocks away from the University of Washington now, which is a really nice change; I can walk just about everywhere, and even if I can't, drives are much shorter. I love the apartment and CJ and I have had a really nice time here, though it would be nice if RF lived a bit closer.

I felt horrible one day, I don't remember exactly what triggered it, but I took a sharp blade to my wrists and score and cut them a bit. I don't know if I was actually trying to kill myself; I felt curious, for the most part. At any rate, I felt very guilty about it and told my doctor & therapist. They both were somewhat freaked out; my doctor put me on a new dosage of antidepressants which has made me incredibly tired and sleepy all the time, as well as terribly terribly forgetful.

CJ and I are getting married March 3.

I don't know if I'll be able to keep writing this anymore. I don't know—maybe something will happen that'll shine a light onto whatever it is that is wrong with me.