What do you do?: 22 de enero de 2015

A question I would like to ask all young people is “What do you do when you like someone?” What do you do, specifically? Do you ask them a question about their past, or something more surface level first? Or do you get nervous around them and avoid them? It’s not necessarily a question relating to sexual attraction, but rather any type of attraction to or curiosity about a person. I think this is a very personal question. I feel the answer opens the doors to another’s perception. What do I do? What do other people imagine me doing? It may depend entirely on the other person, if you’re a mirror. 

I have met another genius teacher, this time with knowledge I feel I need to acquire. A cultured person, with a spacious, art-filled room, big windows open onto stained cement walls. A humid sun smothers everything with her heated bosom. The lights are off, the music on. We are having class, in a way. Ariadna is formally introducing me to The Beatles, who for me were a vague entity with poppy tinny voices in some songs and a psychedelic “flashero” style in others.

Before it felt too cliché, too advertised, like when you first really like a song on the radio and after the 1,345,868th time you hear it you hate it. But I realized I had never even listened to one Beatles album all the way through, and their first few albums are all sickly poppy beats drenched in a Beach Boys vibe, not my taste, and that was all I ever heard on the radio.

Anyway, what a history! It’s an intense evolution of music by one small group of people. I’m in the process of listening to all their albums, it’s going to take awhile. 

Sometimes I think one of my personalities is girl that’s “on the spectrum,” she’s always trying to take the wheel. I have a theory that I’ve got, like, eight personalities, at least, and they’re all driving this big bus together. I haven’t figured out all of them, but I know one of them is her. Second is me with my cat’s head, third is man-girl, fourth is totally on drugs, and that’s all I have now.

Anyway, sometimes I feel other people feeling uncomfortable around me, and I look inside the bus, and it’s her, the one on the spectrum, and she’s so fucking funny, but she makes me feel like other people think I’m uncomfortable when I actually feel very comfortable. Anything that I do that makes you uncomfortable is your perception of my uncomfortability, (I knowwww it’s not a word but it makes so much sense, no?) But it’s your uncomfortability as well.

And I just fucking wish that people would remember that everything they see in others is a seed sown in themselves first. You see reflections of your own emotions in everyone else, you can’t assume they feel any certain way you think they do, maybe they just have the same body-tic you use, but with a different feeling attached to it.

So an example of why I feel “on the spectrum”: I am that kid in the classroom that cannot sit still, but I’m listening, I’m absorbed, if it’s interesting. But I have to be allowed the freedom to enter and exit my own world at all moments. I can’t follow your rules, I have to be allowed to wander off alone, to start dancing, to begin to laugh out loud at some random spurt of thought in my private mind.

To write instead of joining the conversation. That doesn’t fit well in a classroom setting. But it’s perfect for the patio of the hostel. I join conversations randomly, leave without finishing a sentence, speak Spanish to people that don’t speak Spanish, chase the cat around in the grass, make faces at people I haven’t met yet. I can’t help it, I just let it run free. And it’s nice to be around people that let it happen.

A good Samaritan gave me weed yesterday, best day ever, so I ran to Parque Sarmiento, up the huge flight of stairs that always has a ton of runners. I stopped to stretch in a corner alone, set apart from a group of guys doing stretches and sit-ups. I could feel their masculine energy pushing me inward, and I think in order to be a powerful woman I need to learn to push back with my own feminism, my own more delicate energy, fuerte de otra manera.

But also, now that I think about it, I don’t really need to push back, just keep from caving in. Es equilibrio otra vez, hay que aprender eso. A group of people started a stretching circle close to me, and I became part of it without really trying, still doing my own thing. That’s when I began to feel a bit “on the spectrum,” because I imagined myself as part of that group, officially, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to follow anyone’s lead but my own. While they changed positions I stayed in one for two minutes, feeling it fully, feeling that good hurt. 

If I had been one of them, would they have said something? Something about how I need to participate more, share more, spend more time outside of my own head? I dunno, but I think that if so, I prefer to resist group participation if I can’t let the girl on the spectrum drive. I just think maybe it’s more comfortable to do things that others find “awkward,” and be perceived as a bit oblivious to social cues, or rules, than sacrifice the inner abstract world.

I don’t think I’m oblivious, and maybe someone that really is on the spectrum is, I don’t know, I don’t know anything about that, to be honest. I’m making sweeping generalizations everywhere. But I know I’m not oblivious. I’m hyper-aware, hyper-sensitive to every action anyone makes, and what kind of clues it creates about what is in his mind. But as a psychological experiment that I am consciously starting from this moment forward, I’m going to let that girl drive, I like her a lot. And when I read their minds I’m going to release my hold right after, forget any shadow of importance lingering around other people’s perspectives.

After smoking yesterday I realized I feel I am a person that has a hard time battling the high. I smoke and everything just moves to the right one step, so that the world becomes this new, tilted dimension, my mind altered in the same way, so that learning to navigate becomes a challenge again. I’m a new being, prepared to explore my environment, learn from it with fresh senses.

Stimulation is surprising, overwhelming, almost frightening. And that’s what I look for, that bubbling, boiling, butterfly feeling of fear in the stomach. It’s like you smoke, and then for some reason you have to talk to someone that has a weird vibe, and suddenly it’s exaggerated into something very scary. I love that feeling, I learn so much from that feeling. I learn about my own compulsions and assumptions and intuitions and emotional reactions. They feel so strong, ripped from under the rug, a sudden light snapped on in the midst of darkness. There’s almost no time to prepare oneself. But you can’t avoid it, and upon later reflection there’s always something to be learned.

I love being able to manage the high, get used to the uncomfortability. You can use it to your advantage, it magnifies the sixth sense. Use it to see social relationships emerge from seeds you didn’t know were planted, from something you thought could happen but didn’t know if it was real or not. You could have assumed wrongly, judged too soon, created something that was never there.

I love surfing the energy waves, finding patterns the mind creates, feeling a crucial instinct manifest itself in a new way. Weed always pulls out a hidden string of personal experiences that I’ve got to recognize as important, as meaningful. This string is multicolored and multi-functional. I can see it sewn into the faces of foreign men as they stare at me, feel it keeping my muscles together as they bounce and jiggle while I’m running.

I was a deer in a past life, a bird in a near future. A cat now, with a real cat as a mirror, a reflective agile muse, my personality exaggerated in her shy bounces. My magic fuzzball is a powerful sage, and I a willing apprentice, ready to mimic, psychologically masturbate to, watch quietly whilst taking notes. I feel her watching me as I write this, I know she is somewhere and the next moment she has silently slipped away, an assassin built of smoke, a midget warrior with a bell. A soft, invisible ninja with yellow eyes of some alchemical substance that no longer exists. She hides inside my mind, between tall grasses and behind leathery foliage. She sees me coming before I know I’ve left.

I told Ariadna last night after she asked me, “¿De qué te gusta hablar?” that in reality it doesn’t matter to me, I have no fucking clue what I want to talk about. What I want more than anything is an original conversation, something totally random and interesting and fueled by an intelligent, efficient mind. I want to talk to people a lot smarter and more cultured than myself.

I want to learn something from every conversation I have, and I’m realizing now that I am lazy. I want someone else to start the conversation because I’m too scatter-brained to focus on using my initiative, on coming up with a topic, on phrasing the question right. I’m also too in my own mind to respond honestly to anyone if they don’t seem to approach me in a genuine manner, thoughtfully, honestly. I’m a mirror and I want to reflect positivity.

I’m bored with the superficiality lining many of the conversations going on around me. It’s like no one is asking the right questions, the questions that matter. It’s like why don’t we figure out what we want to know about someone, and ask them straight up? Why do we murk about in the number of family members they have and how long they’ve been traveling? I guess maybe there’s so many people traveling when I live in a hostel that now I don’t even care where they’re going next or where they’ve been. I’m not going to remember that five minutes later. What I want to know is deeper, but I’m still working on a strategy to ease it out from random strangers.