the toddler with the thorn in her side

Sisters are strange. My sister Christine is completely unlike me. At 9 years younger, she knows how to fix her own hair and owns about 100 bottles of nail polish. That really is no exaggeration. Christine changes her nail color at least once a week. Me? My first pedicure took place here in Guatemala City, at the age of 32.

When I started this blog, Christine responded immediately to my first entry with something like, “While other 5-year-olds were singing along to Raffi, I was listening to Morrissey.” This is true, and while now I might complain that my entire youth was spent babysitting Christine, the truth is that I enjoyed every second of using her as a receptacle for all the music I listened to back then.

Just come to my house sometime and I’ll show you. There is evidence on video of Christine as a toddler modeling swimsuits and large leather jackets, while Depeche Mode’s “Dangerous” played in the background. I have her lip syncing and acting rather lasciviously, especially for a 4 year old, to “Little 15”. There’s also the one of Christine’s eating popcorn at some crazy midnight hour to “Black Celebration”. It is definitely a black moment when you realize as an adult, from old videos, that you didn’t do such a good job of feeding your sister or putting her to bed on time.

I guess Christine learned at a very early age about synthesizers and depression. She just didn’t know it at the time. To her, at the tender age of 5, “The boy with the thorn in his side” was a brilliant dance song, one in which I forced her to shake her hips back and forth while staring upwards to the ceiling and encouraged her to maintain the forlorn expression in her eyes. To think about that on a small child is painful now. If only she would have agreed for me to put the bouquet of dead wild flowers in her back pocket.













“A question of lust”, obviously an inappropriate song for a toddler, was used by Christine to model our father’s wifebeaters. She was adept and amazing at turning one into a jacket from a dress, while wearing it.

“Sometimes” was interpreted by Christine as appropriate background music for an instructional workout video. That particular video includes an entire segment in which we have to watch this Vietnamese baby put on some thick adult leggings. Her tiny hands scrunching those leggings up to her thighs, she stands up at one point and runs in place while Martin sings, “You can’t tell me honestly, you’re happy with what you see, only sometimes…”

Watching those videos now, I have to wonder, was I committing child abuse? I have no idea of the effects that all of this may have had on Christine. Maybe the days that she paints her nails black are when the memories of these things return to her. Maybe her inability to accept hugs from me, her own sister, was brought on by having to answer one too many questions about Morrissey and Martin Gore (see blog entry January 31st): when was Morrissey born, what is Martin’s favorite food, what does Depeche Mode mean by this or that song, etc.

I am sure Christine is reading this now. I am sure she’d like for me also to mention that eventually even our mother took to wearing an almost cut-off Belle & Sebastian shirt as well. The day we saw her in it, I think, was one that reminded us of all the good times we had when Christine was a baby. I just wish I had had my video camera.

a country girl, indoors

Everyone has these ideas of what it’s like to be raised in Texas. Much like my ill-conceived ideas of what it would be like to live in Guatemala (houses made of earth, lack of modern facilities like hot water, flushing toilets, etc.), even other Americans wonder if I might have lived in a small Texas town with a saloon and only 3 stop signs, 1 not even on a paved road. I tell them that I was raised in Houston, where the highways never end and the houses are bigger than Walmart parking lots.

Cowboys, there must be cowboys at least, someone might insist.

Well, there are still cowboys in Texas, but despite my vast collection of acoustic, guitar-laden music, I have never been acquainted with one. For that I am sometimes ashamed.

Just as I am drawn to Jesus-referenced music, I am equally driven to seek out bands that worship horses (Band of Horses), mountains (Iron & Wine), the ocean (Bright Eyes; Okkervil River), North Carolina, South Carolina or any Carolina (M. Ward) or getting shot (Wilco; in their case, I think it’s about getting vaccinations shots, not 50-Cent kind of shot).

I don’t know where this connectedness comes from. I imagine that most people who like this kind of stuff like to have picnics, go on road trips for fun, camp deep in the woods, hike up and down mountains, basically feel one with nature and their surroundings. I choose to do none of that. The idea of all of those things sounds pleasing to many folks, but in reality, once I am placed in any situation like that, I long for my laptop, Ipod and cortisone creams.










On a roadtrip from Houston to Seattle in 2005, my ex and I drove through supposedly beautiful places like Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Oregon. The wind in Kansas, the mountains of Colorado, the flatness of Wyoming and the rolling dune hills of Oregon, all of these things frightened me nearly to tears. Unintelligible fear overcame me, and all I could do was turn up Jeff Tweedy’s voice in my head to console me. Ironically these countryside backgrounds were the most appropriate for the music coming from my car speakers, but I wanted them gone. I wanted to see storefronts, coffeeshops and people in full-length pants.

I’m writing this entry while sitting in a café in Guatemala City with several SUVs and high end vehicles parked in the parking lot, a group of Korean women near me chatting and enjoying their frappés. Jeff Tweedy sings to me from his more twangy days of Being There, about being “red-eyed and blue”, and all is right with the world.

you gotta have faith

I’ve never been a religious person. My family is Buddhist, but my sister was really the only one who frequented the temple with my grandmother. Growing up, my closest friends were atheists, agnostics or nothing at all. I have mainly dated men dedicated to science rather than to faith, not that the two cannot be married but I have not found an attraction to the latter.

Living in Guatemala, I find myself surrounded by people of faith. Greetings or salutations usually consist of God’s blessing me. My friends’ after work or weekend activities are generally related to some kind of Church activity or retreat. Faith is an integral part of the lives of Guatemalans, but not the way that it is in the United States. Faith here is a relatively private matter, not something to be advertised or to be won over. Here, I don’t have to hide, as I did when I was 12, from the people who visited me weekly to discuss the book they had left for me. That book happened to be the Bible.

No, I have not converted to Christianity. My small core group of friends, my closest American friends today and I still remain as secular as we were in middle school, head-bopping to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”. However I do find myself, here at least, explaining things with “God”. “God’s gift to us” and “God made it that way” have come out of my mouth several times, before I can think about what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. I chalk it up to its being easier that way – rather than explaining some hard science, I can just say it’s God’s gift. The Ipod is God’s gift. Email is God’s gift. Corn and Judy's Nespresso machine are God’s gifts.











Bill Withers's voice, Yo La Tengo’s longevity, Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting, and on and on, those are God’s greatest gifts.

The thing is that I’m not saying these things in jest, there is a part of me that really feels a certain way about that. I am especially connected to songs that just allude to God or to Jesus (Wilco's Jesus, Etc., Neutral Milk Hotel's King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3, Iron & Wine's God Made the Automobile, to name just a few). I doubt these guys are making light of Jesus or God or religion. I believe that they really do feel close enough to God to include him in their songs. How else can one describe the lightness you feel when you are lying on the floor when the first notes of Iron & Wine / Calexico’s “Prison on Route 41” (or anything from that album) come on?

Before I moved to Guatemala in June of 2007, my friend Gita advised me to carry with me and in my luggage, a picture of Saint Christopher and his prayer. Out of a real fear of being hijacked for all of my belongings, I did so. More than anything, I found the words beautiful and comforting.

Dear Glorious Saint, you have inherited a beautiful name, Christbearer, as a result of a wonderful legend that while carrying people across a raging stream you also carried the Child Jesus. Teach us to be true Christbearers to those who do not know Him. Protect all drivers who often transport those who bear Christ within them.

I don’t know that Christ is within me. I imagine people like me never figure that out in their lifetime and I don’t look for that nor do I mind that other people have something that I may never. I don’t have an organized religion that I look to when things aren’t right. I have the sounds of guitar strumming and major key melodies. I have inexplicable lyrics sometimes and carefully layered instrumentation. My faith is in my ears.