Mexico, 2008

This is quite a bit to read, so if you make it through, I’ll be quite impressed, and rather grateful, to be honest.

I’m sitting in my completely cluttered apartment, listening to Malvinda Reynolds’ self-righteous yet piercing folk song “Little Boxes,” and contemplating what exactly to write. The first two weeks after high school teaching have ended have been interesting, to say the least. I spent June 22-June 28 in Ensenada, Mexico, in a yearly house building trip. Rather than respond politely or most likely, flippantly, when asked how that was, I thought I’d also try to answer that here. So let’s begin, shall we?

Mexico- how was it?

hard. good. nothing. everything. clever. overwhelming. anticlimactic.

My Spanish is weaker than I remember, and my self-consciousness is considerably higher. As usual, I was witty and delightful and wondrous and droll and amusing. And honest, broken, resentful, moody, and easily hurt. And I felt every one of those things when in Mexico.

First of all, I suck at building things. My mind is clever, agile in fit shape. Mentally–I’m an athlete at the height of his game, in peak form. Physically, I’ve spent so much of my life rejecting physical strength and external masculinity that I feel my keen, graceful mind is entombed in a prison of solid doughy flesh, self conscious in the vet en beenderen of my body. My hands are clumsy and unsure.

On some levels I feel like I’m seven again, running windsprints in a parking lot for my coach-father, who looked longingly at the physical prowess of other men’s sons in order to push back the weight of his own mortality. I don’t know if he ever realized that every whistle blow, exasperated sigh, open-handed slap to the face, unsolicited comparison taught me to hate my body and shy away from the halting efforts of my flesh in favor of the consistent victories my mind afforded.

This week I cut rebar, nail-gunned plywood, shinnied up ladders, and–most significantly–made concrete.

No trip to Mexico for me is complete without some mothereffing digging. This time, I spent two days in front of a wheelbarrow, shoveling contents into its greedy innards, the rusted and flaky red paint stretching like the aged skin of some infirm dragon. The golden proportions were all that mattered in my mind: ten scoops of sand/gravel, three scoops of CEMEX cement (seriously, what company DOESN’T end in ‘-Mex’ in this country?), and copious amounts of water, literally obtained from a ten gallon drum in front of the half-built homestead.
Scrape. Scrape. Shovel. Pour. Slop. Repeat.

Once in the wheelbarrow, pull the sand-ment-agua mixture toward you with a shovel while a partner does the same opposite you. Eventually, you’ll make a circle, mixing and churning and scraping and pulling and mulling and making. There is nothing else to do.

My racing mind, already disgusted by the slow pace of my sweaty, gelatinous flesh, races ahead, arching far above the baking Baja dust roads and soaring, phoenix-like in the rush of clear azure spaces above. It soon, however, runs out of words to say, puns to make, bills to remember to pay, defenses to maintain, and crashes, Icarus-style, to earth, having burnt through all the mental chatter within the first sixty minutes.

Then the fun begins. Then the darkness, the obscuridad, seeps to the surface like an oil spell. Long buried shame. Remembered mistakes. Continued self-doubt and self-loathing. The voice rise around me, like silent snakes, and stealthily whispered perfumed poisons into my ears.

You are fat and ugly and disgusting, they hiss, silkily.

You are defective. No one will ever love one such as you. There is nothing masculine, nothing beautiful, nothing of value about you. Give up now, you stupid, fat fool.

These barbed words, filled with the venom of doubt and loathing, are obscenely attractive. Somewhere far away, I stop shoveling. My breath stops in my chest as I allow for a second the poison to sink in. I feel strangely cold under the baking, oppressive Mexican heat of midday.

“Are you alright?” Tiffany asks, noting my shovel paused in mid-concrete pull, ending our circular motion.

“Of course not. I’m against the war,” I joke back weakly, and resume working.

The serpents still circle my ears, hissing, “You’re the reason she tried to kill herself, you’ll never find peace, vote for John McCain this fall,” and other equally ridiculous, foolish statements.

Concrete was the major moment for me in Mexico this week; two days of mixing, pulling, digging, searching for sand grains, checking fo rmoisture, hoping that the correct shade of ugly olive green emerges in my cracked dragon basket of a wheelbarrow.

Concrete is where my mind was silenced and the shit floated to the top. I thought today, maybe, just maybe, that’s what Jesus felt during his forty days in the desert.

If so, How did you stand it?
What did you see?
How good did it feel to reach that solemn, transcendent calm post-experience?

Construction is hard for me as it is such a very masculine activity and I am so terrified of my own masculinity, of the power of my maleness.
I reject it, often burying it like the wretched servant did with the talent his owner gave him, leaving the unsolicited burden under layers of moist earth far from light and air and truth. Every nail, hammer, plank, Cemex© bag, wrench, skillsaw, tar paper, ladder, wheelbarrow dug into the dark parts of the garden, through loam and silt and even scratching through sticky, indifferent clay to the masculinity cloistered within.

And I did not like this digging, unasked and undesired, into the soil of my heart. But it happened anyway.

Each day in Mexico we woke up at 7 am, got to work a little after 8 am, built things until 4:30pm, then headed back to the church to hold a Vacation Bible School (VBS), an entertaining, instructional, and outreach program to the children of the dusty streets.

The VBS part is always easier. It’s entertaining, human, simple, relational, easy.

I gambol, trip, fall, slip, grimace, and grin. The children laugh. They are entertained.
Children are almost as easy to fool as adults, if you’re a born performer and have two and a half decades of smoke and mirrors under your belt.

Yet, after eight hours of house construction, performing for, loving on, playing with street children is a very real chore. Team members’ words infuriate me where usually no offense would exist. Weariness bleeds into guilt as I silently, desperately plead with God for it to be seven o’clock so the madness can end and I can zone out over dinner.

In a rare self-righteous moment, I try desperately to see Christ in the faces of those children. Especially in the eyes of those who haven’t yet learned to lie, bluff, or be ‘okay.’ I love seeing those who aren’t yet faking normalcy, as we must, to be come adults and not suicides or husks. So I scrape the tattered walls of my ‘empty heart cup‘ (as Ms. Brooks would put it) for love for these children and find mainly pottery flakes and chipped paint.

I pray, haltingly, cynically for the means and hope to love them, myself, Jesus, you. I mouth, help me overcome my unbelief, my cynical exoskeleton, my broken soul, my ‘intelligent’ indifference, and learn to see with new eyes.
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Luke 11:34-35.

Um, right, I’ll get on that, Jesus.

Matrimony

What else has happened these past few weeks? Every freaking one is getting matrimonial!

On 6/17, my fellow teacher, Paul, married his longtime partner, Pete, in one of the first same-sex ceremonies in San Diego. After nearly twenty years together, they wanted to b e recognized by the state. It was tender, loving, and beautiful. On 6/19, I helped my friend Ryan get an engagement ring for his (now) fiancee. They so deeply love each other, it’s amazing, and beautiful and challenging. I was mildly envious.

On 6/21, two of my favourite friends, Rob and Jimiliz, got married.
I was the best man. Let me preface by saying that I hate weddings. (I did tell Rob this when he asked me, and he didn’t back down, weirdo). Ik haat hen.

But this one was different. They deeply love each other, yes, but they also love God. And that love splashes back and loves each of us around them, challenging us to care, love, and serve. They care for other people deeply. They care for dignity. They care for rights. They care that God’s love can be seen deeply in others, in a radiant, radically inclusive community. I want that. I want to love God enough to bring him glory and in turn learn how to love any woman crazy enough to have me. I want to draw others into a community that radically loves and changes and inspires because Jesus gives me hope and meaning. That’s what I want. I found, to my surprise, for the first time, actually wanting this. I, who had hidden my thoughts, and feeligns and fear s far away underneath a facade of clever togetherness, wanted to be able to love in this way. That rocked me.

That was what came to mind when Mario, pastor of the local church that we worked for in Ensenada, asked me while driving his dusty truck through the winding, gutted dirt roads of Ensenada hillside slums, ¿Está casado ya? ¿Por qué no?

I found I had hours of reasons and stories and examples and cynicism, and bitterness, starting with my parents own spectacular failure in the marital department to my most recent experience in dating in a girl who tried to use me as her life preserver to keep from sinking into the back depths of her own soul. Instead, I just looked at him and said, Hay mucho que puedo decir, pero yo sé que tengo que esperar algún tipo de respuesta.

There’s been a lot to learn.

I leave for Illinois in a little over a month. God help me.
How am I feeling?:: contemplative
What’s playing?:: Malvina Reynolds – Little Boxes

 

Dress Rehearsals and Mexican Fires

“This is life. There is no dress rehearsal.”
–Georgia Lass, Dead Like Me

What a whirlwind it’s been lately.

I didn’t really think that I had time or inclination to write, but I’ve been on such an extended emotional roller coaster it only seemed fitting to type some thoughts out while I could still make them really known.

The past two weeks have been an absolute blur. School ended on June 20th, and yet I had no time to process, as I had houseguests over the weekend, and a very special wedding to attend. While the ending of school came and went with out much ability for me to process no longer being a first year teacher, the other events hit even harder–I adjusted to seeing and hosting very dear friends that I rarely have the opportunity to visit with now as they live in San Francisco, and I went to Mo and Jason’s wedding where I was moved by how much they love each other and horrified by the absolute foulness of people I once ignorantly believed were my friends–but whom instead chose to cast me in the role of a villain that I simply never was.

After an intense drive up and down to and from Los Angeles, I hosted friends for another day, then dropped them off at the airport a mere hour and a half before getting picked up at 7 am to go to Ensenada, Mexico, where I spent a week ostensibly building homes (and ignoring stressors and the very real hurt of false friends). Having gone last year, I thought I had some semblance of an idea of what to expect. No, I had no clue for what I’d see, feel, touch, experience. I was picked up by my friends Will and Stephanie, two college sophomores with a huge amount of heart and energy that I’d known for some time back in L.A. (Steph in particular–we’ve been friends for a decade), and groggily crossed the border, singing songs and listening to bad pop music on occasion from my iPod.

We did several things in Mexico; first and foremost, we built a house for a family in the local church we were working with. Valeria, her husband, and her three daughters (Sonia, Miriam, and Sara), who were gracious, loving, and very kind. When we arrived there was just a large concrete foundation poured. In the remaining five days, we built walls, separated the house into three rooms, installed windows, electricity, lighting, drywall, papered and plywooded the walls, put a roof on, sealed it, built and installed doors, textured, primed and finally painted the walls, and did finishing touches. In short, in five days with some definite Divine help, we created a casa straight out of the polvo. Weird.

When we weren’t doing that, we as a team of 16 odd folks visited families in need of prayer, prepared a children’s service, shared with church members, helped a local family in building a squatter home on a hillside from garage doors, watched a drug raid on a nearby home, laughed at me as I was confused with Lenny Kravitz by local children who wanted my autograph, and worked to crazy exhaustion.

When in Mexico, i tend to adopt a different name, Timoteo. I use it mainly because it is cumbersome to explain in Spanish why your name is “T.J.” Do you call it T.J. in Spanish–like “Tay Jota”? or do you simply Spanify the existing name (“Tishe”). And don’t get me started on my real name (“Tyrone”? “Tiron”?). Timoteo removes those obstacles. I chose it three years ago, when I was looking for an easier name in Mexico City. I couldn’t choose between the young headstrong leader, Timothy, or the incredibly loyal yet tragically doubtful Thomas (Tomas). I personally feel Tomas would’ve worked better, but I was being optimistic at the time. And I tried to remember more of who Timothy was, and how he, like me, had a strong Christian mother and grandmother, and a very confusing upbringing with his less than Christian dad, his cultural differences, and his attempts to understand the world around him. So Timoteo I was. Indeed.

On Friday morning, I was part of a small group that woke up early to help on the second house. At 7:30 in the morning, we had been working for nearly an hour, and the marine layer settled heavy over us in our dusty hillside, the damp, cool air, coating us like a blanket, chilling and protecting us from the sun’s devastating rays later. Banda music played softly, and the sound of hammer and nails clinking interrupted the peaceful morning. Softly, in the distance, from our dusty hilltop, we could see the first wisps of grayish black smoke a few blocks away from a house. We thought people were burning trash, until we realized the house itself was on fire. I, along with three other guys, dropped everything and ran full tilt to the burning home. I tripped and ate it on the way, skinning knees and cursing under my breath in two languages. But I rose and we huffed over to the burning home. Soon the street was abuzz with people. Buckets proliferated, jugs and hoses and bowls carried water. I found myself doing everything from filling buckets to throwing water directly on the minor inferno, turning the smouldering pyrotechnics soon into a charred, ashy mess. Fortunately no one was hurt, but half of the family’s meager property was gone, absolutely devastated. We trudged back to build the ramshackle home we were helping with while the remainder of the team continued on the larger home.

When we last gave the keys to Valeria, she wept, we wept, the children wept, I think even God might’ve gotten misty. It was bizarre to see something that we, so messed up and broken, and little, were able to do completely out of our own power. It was a total trip.

Coming back was another story. Jon, one of the leaders at my old church in L.A. drove the truck carryign me and all the luggage. After dropping me off in San Diego, he promptly broke down in Del Mar, 20 minutes north. I then picked him up, took him in for the night, and then eventually drove him and the luggage BACK to L.A. before driving back down to SD that night–we were waiting for the SD body shop to finish his car. So I felt I was completely unable to process, as I had a houseguest
and was unable to separate myself from those responsibilities for the moment and really just sit and run through my emotions.

When Jon left on Tuesday (which was sad, as I enjoy him), I sat in my car and had a good cry for everything. For the friends who mistreated me in Los Angeles and treated me like crap for something i DIDN’T EVEN DO, for the immense poverty and injustice in Mexico, for all of my weaknesses, for my failings as a friend, for the first year of school ending, for the fact that I am a long way from being ‘whole” or happy with my lot in life, from the awkwardness of actually seeing God work in peoples lives–including my own. From not having had time to process, I cried four times on Tuesday, did laundry, drank coffee, lay on my floor, and thanked God for life.

My Fourth of July was my second one here in San Diego, and the first one where I felt like I was part of a ‘real’ community; my local community group/small group got together in a cool family’s house, and barbecued, hung out, and got to know each other better. It was surreal. Absolutely surreal. And I loved it. It was weird to feel love coming from a strange group of people coming better, a mission that’s been happening directly for a year now in North Park, and for awhile in San Diego in Ethnos, and forever in humanity with God. I dont’ know, understand, or comprehend the idea that I’m loved by God ultimately or fully, and I am puzzled at my chronic inability to live for myself. Terrified of ending up like my dad, I chuck my fully formed and articulated personality and needs anytime someone is remotely distressed, selfishly setting myself up for disaster, potential resentment, and frustration–I don’t know how to stop living for other people.

These past two weeks I’ve been a bit lost in feelings and emotions–unable to tell which were mine or belonging to others. It’s been hard to tell who I was in the midst of it all.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes,
I’ve made a lot of mistakes
You came to take us–all things go, all things go.
To recreate us–all things grow, all things grow.
We had our mind set–all things no, all things no
You had to find it—all things go, all things go.

I started watching a quirky show on SciFi yesterday called “Dead Like Me.” Intrigued, i bought the whole first season yesterday. I love it. The basic plot is that a select group of people after death are stuck being grim reapers, collecting souls and ferrying them to the other side. There’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of sadness, a lot of poignancy, and a lot of confusion. I see hearts and minds reaching out, dying to be loved, and trying their damnedest.

The quote from the top of the page came from the last episode. The week before the main character died, her mother told her that life wasn’t a dress rehearsal, that it waits for no one, and that there is life to be lived. And I am terrified by the fact that life exists out there, waiting to be savored and enjoyed, not just on the terms of others, but really on my own. I’m growing, I’m learning, and I’m terrified. And I’m trying to find myself at a point where I can forgive the terrible betrayal and hurt of former friends, although i’m not there yet.

And I’m getting more whole, hopefully–bit by bit.

Paz, mis amigos.