The violence of summer

“Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things? We should be whispering all the time.”

-Magnetic Fields, 100.000 Fireflies

The couple that lives downstairs from me is infiltrating the rest of my life, both waking and asleep. They continue to have yelling matches, throwing competitions, and God-knows what other forms of violence at any hour of the day or night. On Saturday morning, they woke me up at 8. Monday morning I got a 4am wake-up call. But it could be two in the afternoon for all they care.

I’m somewhere past the point of this being about my annoyance with their total lack of concern for the people around them. I’m becoming worried that one or both of them is going to get hurt, and I don’t just mean emotionally. I heard her yell “you can’t even throw things right!” one time. And this weekend there was a hallway shout out about a knife. There’s also a lot of swearing involved. Don’t ask me why they don’t just break up, because I wonder that ALL the time.

Because of them, I’ve become sensitive to the other violence around me, on the streets, everywhere. Sunday night, as I walked out of Eduardo’s Italian Restaurant, I saw someone shove a drunk young man so that he toppled into the street, like a pile of newspapers. “Are we joking?” I said, shocked. I couldn’t help but say it out loud. The two girls standing with the pusher guy giggled and made weak disapproving comments. They all thought it was hilarious.

Earlier that day in Carre Saint Louis, the bums were swarming over the beautiful ladies, serenading them and otherwise trying to start up conversations. The man in the photo with Amy was so beat up, his knee was protruding at a strange angle. I think he was missing his front teeth. He was trying to play guitar with her, but he would lose his train of thought in the middle of a sentence and somehow seemed to require her to do or say what he wanted. To me, he seemed to have the exact sense of self-centered entitlement that drunk men at bars and dance clubs have. As though all women should be available to listen to them and dance with them, because that’s what they want, and if the woman isn’t interested, she’s a bitch. Amy seemed alright with him, though. Sometimes I'm too protective.


“There’s a plane flying over my head, so you may not be able to hear everything I’m saying right now”, the man said to Amy. I wanted to point out to him that it was flying over all our heads, not just his.

Is it clear that I don’t think of aggressiveness exclusively in physical terms? People who invade your space and expect things from you make me feel just as threatened. Loud people. People who leave anonymous personal insults on blogs. People who accuse you. People who make underhanded comments. People who break your heart and then act like they had nothing to do with it. People who become instantly defensive and retaliatory.

I definitely acknowledge having acted in the all the above ways at times. If you think I make your life difficult now, you should have met me when I was 16. I have my own history of violence, and I guess that made me more reactive than others. I learned to protect myself (and others) in my own way, but I suppose the fear is latent in me, that somehow, someday, the violence will come back and I’ll be powerless against it. The downstairs couple is reminding me of that constantly, in a very uncomfortable way. I'm no hippie; I believe violence has a place in fiction and in real life, but I was sort of hoping that we could all do our best to try to make it easy instead of hard.

Impatient re: Patience

I can feel the earth begin to move
I hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day
I hear my song begin to say
Kiss me where the sun don't shine
The past was yours
But the future's mine
You're all out of time

-She Bangs the Drums, Stone Roses

I have never been a patient person. Somewhere along the way it became very obvious to me that there is no reason on earth why I shouldn’t have what I want when I want it. It’s not that I was particularly spoiled. On the contrary, I have just spent a lot of my time being frustrated, I guess. I never got to disappear in a pool of coloured plastic balls (still a fantasy); I never got one of those plastic cars with the yellow plastic roof I wanted; my mother wouldn’t buy me a black leather mini-skirt no matter how much I promised that I would *only* wear it for Halloween (yeah, right); a gazillion people have passed by my life for varying amounts of time and I never got what I wanted from them. Kind of sucks.

So sometime during my university years I did a little reading on Buddhism, and that seemed like an interesting way to calm those urges. And sometime after those years, I took up yoga and that seemed to calm me down a lot. A man who read my birth chart recommended I “sweat” (yoga being an acceptable method) and live by the sea. I haven’t managed the second yet.

My dad says I’m too rigid; that I expect people to be a certain way (ie exactly how I want them to be) and if they’re not I don’t bend. I probably got mad when he said that. My brother and I have chatted about how demanding we are with others, particularly the people we date. We laugh about how ridiculously picky and hopeless we are. I sometimes wonder which of us is really worse. I have certain un-stated quotas of how much attention has to be paid to me (re: answer my emails, call me, make me feel like a priority). My brother is so stern that if someone, say, cuts him off in traffic, he’ll follow the car and somehow –don’t ask me how- he’ll try to “teach them their lesson”. I have a list of people I wish I could teach a lesson to. It keeps growing too.

Today, for instance, I’m blaming my impatience partially on my downstairs neighbours. They’re new, and I’ll bet they have woken me up 50% of the nights they’ve been living below me. They’re either fighting or having sex, usually one followed by the other (and not in the order you’d expect, either). The walls in my apartment are so thin, I can quote parts of their arguments and I can say for a fact that when they screw, it’s over faster than when they argue. Whenever they wake me, I begin drafting a letter in my head that I’ll slip under their door to “teach them a lesson”.

I’m impatient at work when my deadline is coming up and other parts of the project are behind. I try to calm down that anxiety by rationalizing that it can still get done on time… that venting will not help… that it’s not anyone in particular’s fault.

But no matter how much rationalizing and slow breathing I do, no matter how much I control my impulse to throw a huge fit, I can't stop the impatience inside. I’m impatient with people who block the sidewalk and walk too slow. I’m impatient with people who actually drag their feet when they walk. I’m impatient with people who decide it’s time to count their coins when they get to the cash. I’m impatient with people who hold the elevator for other people who are taking forever. I’m impatient with people who can’t make up their minds when it’s time to. I’m impatient with small dogs. I’m impatient with people who don’t get back to me. I’m impatient with friends who obsess about anything that’s not interesting to me. I’m impatient with cashiers and servers who “ignore” me (that’s how I see it anyway). I’m impatient with the week, because it’s not the weekend. I’m impatient with websites where I can’t find the answers to my questions. I’m impatient with people who tell me what’s wrong with me. I’m impatient with strangers’ babies who make a lot of noise for no reason. I'm impatient with people who yell, honk or play the car radio really loud. I’m impatient with noise in general.

Regular yoga, reminding myself that people are not obliged to behave in the Isabel-approved way (but wouldn’t that be great?) and some forms of mental distraction are helpful. But like U2 said, some days are better than others. Sometimes I am just sooo tired of being patient, and that’s when I know it counts the most.

The Personal and The Pointless

You know what I really love? A nice looong conversation about nothing. In other words, a lot about me, some about you, and in between stuff about the world in general. Nothing too controversial; just The Personal and The Pointless.

I just spent a nice little while chewing my busy friend Sarah’s ear off on the phone. I’m glad. Busy people don’t get their ears chewed off often enough.

I was confessing to Sarah how it *still* bothers me to get a Feedreader update of Steve’s blog with a picture of Tom and his post-me girlfriend Lucy on it. Luckily… luckily, the picture is so obscure you can’t see anything but still. There is that CRUNCH in my stomach as soon as I even see his name. “Is this gonna be about the T word?” Sarah asked.

I’ve taken every measure I can to eliminate Tom from my very existence; something I’ve never done with anyone before. I blocked him on messenger, I blocked his email, I deleted all links and references to his blog… I even (regretfully) stopped reading a blog he followed me onto. Now I’ve (unfortunately) deleted Steve’s blog from my Feedreader. I feel immature and unright. This is silly. And it makes it really obvious to me that I am a tiny little person who can’t even get over a stupid breakup.

Yet Sarah says she’s still bothered by a breakup that happened two years ago. And she named some other people who still get upset over their over-6-months-ago breakups. “Really?” I asked incredulously. It made me feel sad –for them- but reassured –for me- to know that I’m not the only loony who gets punched in the stomach every time I am faced with the fact that this person continues to exist.

I KNOW, it’s silly. Immature. Unbecoming. What can I do? I guess I got over other stuff, eventually, therefore I’ll get over this. It’s miserable to be soft, but if you want me to be honest and not too modest, I’m proud that I can be soft these days. Hardcore never did me any favours.
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Si algo hecho de menos de vivir momentos apestosos como éste en Chile es ese vuelco medio sentimental, medio “significativo”, que se le dan a este tipo de cosas allá. Cierto, muchas veces preferí dejar eso de lado e ir al grano sin tanto tralalá, pero a veces, bueno, me gustaría poder tener la oportunidad de rechazar los mimos. Qué gusto me daría, por ejemplo, darle tres mil vueltas con las expertas: Vero, Bárbara, Tere, y ultra maestra de la conversación Pointless, Mariana Ibáñez. Jeje.

Here Comes The Fear Again

...when you're no longer searching for beauty and love; just some kind of life with the edges taken off... -Pulp, The Fear

I've been thinking about fear a lot lately, which should not be confused with me actually being frightened. It's more like the fear you live with, or rather the one that keeps you from living. I think it's on my mind because of this book I've been reading (I'm a slow reader. I've said that before.). A woman's self psychoanalysis from the 70s: My Mother Myself. Yes, go ahead and laugh, I might as well be reading Our Bodies, Ourselves. But I love to listen to what people talk about in therapy, and this is so it.

Without going too much into what the book says, I can just say that it talks a lot about this deep-rooted, passed-down-over-generations fear that women carry (the book is about women and since I am one, I don't mind unapologetically leaving the men out of this). Basically, it's what keeps you tied to all the safe decisions, instead of the ones that truly grip you. The way I like to put it is, You know what you'd rather be doing, so why aren't you doing it?

Sometimes you don't even know what you'd rather be doing. Or, to be more precise, you've kept yourself so nicely distracted -with work, boys, television- that you don't even get the chance to sit with yourself for 5 lonely minutes a day to think about what it is that you'd rather be doing. Evasion. Blame it on the Fear.

When I started paying close attention to the lives of much older people I know, I realized that you don't necessarily, automatically, get a wake-up call. People can *actually* go through life without ever finding their... thing. No one will ever make you grow up. There is no magic birthday number. I find that immensely chilling, because being stagnant is probably one of my greatest fears. I'm, like, pathologically afraid of never growing up. (Ok, not really, it's for emphasis, right?) So what keeps us little, stuck, not going forward? Fear, dude. Fear. The secret fear that your parents won't approve; that people won't like you; that everyone will know that you tried and failed; that you'll be poor forever; that you'll never find anyone to love/you again; that you'll get fat; that it'll hurt forever.

As usual, it seems easier for me to find examples of this Fear overrunning other lives than my own. Or I could say I know exactly where it affects me most, but I distract myself nicely by worrying about other people, poor them.

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PS Listen to CBC Radio 3, back online or via weekly podcast. It's great for hearing great Canadian bands you'd never heard about before. And then download them. And then when they come to town, go see them live and buy their CDs. Yay!

*Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwarren/