Globalization for your head, from Cuba to Cambodia

Can you think of a better movie for the barbershop TVs than Edward Scissorhands? I couldn’t, but then again, in the heat of Santiago de Cuba, and with the gummybear feeling in my bones after two days of food poisoning, I wasn’t up to much in the way of active thought. I was just happy to sit in the classic chrome barbershop chair and let the dude chop off the hair that had been holding in heat like a hammam for my noggin.

Lydia was more reluctant. “You can’t get your hair cut in Cuba!” she had initially prohibited. She’d enjoyed the story of my previous Cuban barbershop visit, but didn’t love the cut itself. “He gave you The Haircut!”

When she met me, I was fresh off a The Haircut in Malaysia, and it was sufficient, as were later iterations from Peru and Venezuela, but her standards had been raised in a teeming and clattering market in Phnom Penh.

This lady was on to something, mid-afternoon in Phnom Penh

It was Day One in Cambodia, we had been up since the jetlaggy hour of 4:00 AM, and sweat was rapidly soaking through my store of T-shirts. We were hiding from the sun and seeking the Cambodian in one of the labyrinthine markets that crop up like callicks throughout the developing world. They are sometimes a good place to buy items, usually a good place to buy food, and always a good place to be among the locals living their normal lives. I’ve slurped soup and sampled sandals in these markets, but I couldn’t remember ever getting a haircut in one.

Not a lot of English here

One of the ways you can tell whether a market is for tourists or locals is if anyone speaks English. In this bustling corner of snapping scissors and dripping dye, no one spoke a word. Good for authenticity, bad for communication. In short, it was exactly the sort of place where I always get The Haircut, inevitable when your request is articulated in fingers held close together while pointing to the sides, then a little farther apart when pointing to the top.

I don’t mind The Haircut. I do mind Feeling Like My Head Is A Long-Burned Candle. So I took a seat, pointed, measured, and sat still for the scissors. He cut. He tilted. He bobbed and weaved. Floated like a butterfly and snipped like a….barber. Flat razor for the neck hair, always appreciated, then he was done. In the Mekong-hazed mirror I saw...a slightly different haircut!

Somehow we'd gotten to be friends, with all our smiling
and faltering attempts at communication

It had a little spiky zone towards the front! Variety! Nice! Lydia, with her more assessing eye, informed me that the whole thing was more shaped and well done. That’s extra bonus; the only criterion for me was shorter.

So in the Cuban chair, watching Johnny Depp produce topiary, and feeling hair tickle my ears on its way to the floor, I was already satisfied. When I presented the finished product to Lydia she squinted for a moment. “He cut everything the same amount shorter...so he basically returned you to the same cut you got in Cambodia, minus the front flip flair thingy. I like it.”

It was a Cambo-Cuban haircut, multicultural coiffure, globalization for the cabeza, but I was just happy to let the heat stream up less impeded.

It's not all bad for Maritza

I am supremely grateful for the privilege to write a few things for Altruvistas, the ethical travel company that facilitated my first Cuba and Venezuela trips, but sakes alive, this one from Peru (click here) is twice as depressing as I realized. I knew it was a bit heavy, but ay carumba. Let me tell you about later that day…

Yes, Maritza’s childhood has been brutal. She prowls around a room with an energy too much like a shark, too little like a child, but when she laughs, all that falls away, obliterated in the giggles of a seven year old. And her younger brother may have come to Casa Generacion barely able to speak, making sounds more than words, but after a few months of loving support in the house, he rushed up to me with a slew of questions, a couple answers, and an array of observations. Including:

“Señor Tim, we’re going to the beach now, and you can come too.”

These kids may come from harsh places, but they are still kids, as full of exuberance and enthusiasm as any, and the two young volunteers working that morning were happy to have another pair of hands to help out. Partway to the beach, surrounded by an electron haze of running children, I realized Maritza wasn’t wearing shoes and the pavement was burning her feet. Her brother ran up, kicked off his flip-flops for her, and held his little arms up to me.

Excellent problem solving. Beautiful sibling love. Happy kids, happy me. She slipped on the shoes and he began a stream of consciousness monologue that I could decipher just enough to find hilarious. Maritza walked beside us, corroborating or disputing his stories in turns.

At the beach, the kids splashed in immediately. Little brother took a turn in the floating dragon-thing that they’d carried down, and one of the older boys showed me how close he could come to a handstand. I was watching him tumble over when I felt a small hand tug my finger. I looked down and found Maritza, looking up at me, eyes bright and serious. In her hand she held a small piece of a shell, which she placed in my palm. I thanked her and admired the pretty pink color, and she wandered away.

Little brother had passed off the dragon floater, and joined two other kids to dig one of the pointless and delightful pits that filled my childhood hours on the beach as well. I was considering joining them when I felt another tug on my hand. Maritza was back with another shell. Together we admired the purple hue, and this time she smiled after I thanked her.

She continued bringing shells to show me, which I was careful to only drop back in the sand when she wasn’t looking. We played for a couple hours before I helped the volunteers herd the horde back to the house, and I was sorry to say goodbye to them a few days later. But it was time to move on, with admiration for the work the people of Casa Generacion are doing, and one little piece of shell in my pocket to remind me of a child’s smile.

Happy equinox, whatever your climate

Che and I were both baking in Havana

I seem to have fallen out of Nature. When they built my apartment a hundred years ago, they didn’t bother with niceties like insulation, and my toes remember cold winter days when they fantasized about thick socks and soft slippers. But my armpits are mindful of the recent relentless drip of summer’s sunshine sweat, when shade was salvation and water the only goal that mattered. Such is the thermal chaos when you hop from the (relative) chill of California winter to the motivated baking of the Cuban sun, which doesn’t believe tall tales of winter cold.

Hot metal in the streets of Santiago de Cuba

We were sweating in Havana when they told us that in our next destination, Santiago de Cuba, “It’s twice as hot as here.” This was not unwelcome news, since I would happily spend the rest of my life in shorts and flip flops, but a few hours taught us that it’s not a good idea to walk around too long in the sun in Santiago. Your first reminder is the wooziness.

Santiago is…

In Santiago we…

In the narrow streets of homicidal drivers and Caribbean splendor were...too many things to tell of right now, there will be time for that. But today I’m looking at the orchid that erupted on my kitchen counter while we were gone, the birds paired up in the water of Lake Merritt, and the confident warmth of a sun that’s coming back into its strength. Today is the equinox, transition point between winter and spring, and nature needs no customs agent (thank goddess). Spring has already opened the drapes, and after the hardest winter of my life thus far, I am ready to greet it with open arms.

Cuba is a place of endless stories, and I’ll try to pick a few (I promise they won’t all involve my armpit sweat), but today I am happy where I am, focused on now, loving this moment. There’s a certain preschooler (who we missed every day abroad) practicing his letters to my left, a cup of tea in front of me, and a window open to spring’s flirtation on the right, so with a grin and a toast I greet you: happy spring, my friends!

The good, bad, and ugly of what I've learned in 500 posts

I spent more time in Europe than anticipated...

“In June of 2008 it suddenly bothered me that most of my food was better traveled than I was. So I bought a one-way ticket to Europe.” That’s how I started my first blog, five years ago. Since then I’ve put a lot of words on here, in a number of places, across a slew of subjects. Sometimes it feels like I’m continuously looking backward two days to find out where my life’s path is taking me, often reflected in these vagabond posts, of which there are now 500.

My goodness. I have blogged a ream.

It seems logical to mark the milestone with an entry into the fine tradition of “How to Blog” posts, but for two things:

1. Others have already done so, remarkably well; and

2. 

   This week was an average Sunday in Havana

   My expertise on the subject is as fuzzy and unreliable as the hummus I forgot to dispose of before flying to Cuba two weeks ago. (Flying home to a clean shower last night was a delight, opening the fridge this morning to the chromatic and olfactory melange, not so much.)

So instead I’m going to offer a little “The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly” post of what I’ve learned, and what I wish I could go back five years and warn myself about. And since this is my very own little digital kingdom, I’m going to do it in reverse order. So, to 2010 me, or any other beginning blogger:

The Ugly: some of your posts are going to suck. Sometimes you’ll know it, and sometimes it will surprise you, just how poorly received your words will be. My recent query as to the implications of an ancient preoccupation with certain aspects of the female body stands out in my mind. I found the conversation interesting, and was curious what readers might have to say about it. But one of the things I’ve learned about blogging is that few people are willing to read more than a pagelength post. This burns my soul and dictates my text. So I cut out the intricacies of the question, and in so doing, misrepresented the opinions of both myself and my partner and occluded the entire point of the post. L was less than enthusiastic about it, and my mother sat me down on a bench a week later and asked how she had managed to create a 30-something year old man with an adolescent preoccupation with boobs.

I just found it an interesting question

“Please, no more posts about breasts!” she entreated. I do so hope this doesn’t count as another. And I also hope that in the future, I don’t create the exact opposite message of the one I intended to convey. Because doing so is just plain Ugly.

The Bad. Your posts have a lifespan of about three hours. All the newcomers you’re going to get will arrive within the first 30 seconds, as you top the “Recently posted” sandpile, followed by the devout and precious souls who actually read the blogs they Follow. In the case of an Ugly post, this is a blessing, but when you’ve spent time writing something, wanting people to read it, and it expires before you finish your burrito… That’s Bad.

The Good. The people who will read. You’ll be aware of some of them, others will surprise you down the line, and some will be entirely hidden, but a precious few, you’ll get to know a little bit. This community of other writers, readers, travelers, photographers, cooks, poets, and marvelous humans is the best part about blogging. Maybe it’s different for more popular bloggers, but whenever I see a name from my modest cadre of regulars in a “____ liked your post” email, it always makes me smile. I appreciate the one-timers too, but knowing that someone has been interested enough to come back again is a nice little e-friendship. I have yet to actually meet any of these people in the real world, which would be great, but just knowing they’re out there is...Good.

(slideshow over images from over the years at the vagabondurges.com version, here)

Loving you for who you are, on FeelGood Friday

I was all set to tell you about the gains against female genital mutilation (didn’t see that one coming, did you?) but paused (which sounds so much loftier than ‘procrastinated’) on my way over here to watch the LoveHasNoLabels.com video that’s making the rounds right now. I knew what it was from the thumbnail, but the urge to...’pause’...is hard to resist. I’m glad I watched it.

See, a couple weeks ago, I read a friend’s words that she is apparently...um...no longer gay? That she no longer dates women, but gets from god “whatever I was trying to get via sex with women.”

I devoutly respect everyone’s authority over their own sexuality and choices, but the prospect, the fear, all in my perspective, of someone who is naturally (by a divine being or not) homosexual, choosing to just….not do that...anymore? It breaks my heart.

For a long time I hid from the parts of myself that I didn’t like, and the things that scared me at a deep level. Even that much internal discord was tearing me apart. I can’t describe the waves of relief that come in the moments when I can love all of myself. I can’t imagine what it would be like for a person to...move away...from the way they are fundamentally designed to find love.

My immediate response was to tell her that if her god says she’s wrong to love women, wrong for feeling love for whomever she feels it, then she needs to get a new god. But it’s not my place to tell someone else what to worship. It’s not my place to say she’s wrong, or that she should do anything differently. But the fear that she’s been pressured to move away from her access to love because the sex is “infertile”? I alternate between rage and sorrow.

It’s weighed on me for the last two weeks. But in the 3:20 of that video, I felt that weight easing. I am still concerned for my friend, a woman of great intellectual, spiritual, and emotional intelligence, but seeing these other people loving who they love without guilt or fear or shame…

I FeelGood. I hope you do too.

To all the people who accept who they are, I thank you, love you, and salute you.

May gods bless the benevolent imposters

Because these guys knoooow.
It's not that I just need a photo. No.

(I didn't intend to ever post this, it was more a word-spasm, with the intent of playing with translation, but I need to leave for the airport in 23 minutes and I'm only 70% through this burrito, so, here you go!)

May gods bless the benevolent imposters

They say the feeling grows

unexpected

at potency’s increase, so the inner doubt of inadequacy.

Unexpected.

From the audience it’s easier to assume the successful sit on thrones of arrogance,

but they tell us they’re folding chairs of self-doubt.

So should we say that all imposters are winners merely awaiting their championships?

No, because some really are what they fear to be.

Some of whom, win.

And take their seats on stage.

And that thought, there among the folding chairs on the daise,

that vestigial wondering if they’re meritorious or not,

accidentally admitted to the party, despite their lack of qualifications,

that is what keeps them from being the thing we assume them to be.

And, accidentally, saving their souls.

So god bless the benevolent imposters,

whose numbers cloak and protect the real things.

Of Monkeys and Banks

In my third Feelgood Friday post I said I wanted “to go right up into the horrors of the world today and find beauty in them” but last week I really enjoyed the bunnies. Is there another recent news story that involves serious issues for the human race and cuddly animals?

Why yes, yes there is.

Deforestation! Now there’s a dire issue. Expanses of essential forest are disappearing, worsening climate change, robbing all of us of the advantageous (medical) secrets undiscovered in the verdant depths, depriving us of our natural heritage, and threatening extinction of an unknowable number of species with just as much right to exist on the planet as we do. 

You didn't know they get along?

Including...baby chimpanzees! Cute, cuddly, big-eyed and fuzzy-headed baby chimpanzees. And tigers, for crying out loud! As if we have enough of those to spare.

Videos like this one are pretty damn shocking. And it’s all for 1%er corporate profit from producing disposable packaging. Paper and pulp. Since we need more junk mail, redundant print-outs, and packaging.

But what can we really do against corporate titans? Sign a petition? Scoff! Go for it Greenpeace, but we all know banks are impervious to morality. (Unless they happen to be in Iceland, the one country with the ethical cajones to actually hold its bankers accountable.)

And yet, after less than three weeks, Santander bank decided not to continue funding the deforestation. It turns out that even a massive bank pays attention nowadays when 167,513 people sign a petition, 14,788 send emails to the CEO, hundred pick up the phone, people visit branches to speak their consciences, and the video gets shared 100,000 times. Or perhaps they’re just an abnormally human company. That’s theoretically possible.

One bank pulling their funding may not be enough to persuade a company like April to find a better way, but it sends a powerful message that perhaps rapacious business-as-usual isn’t going to be so as-usual for long.

What would you like to know about Cuban women?

The classic cars of Cuba are obvious. Music jumps into your ear from every angle. Lavish colors surround you, blending with the heat into a chromatic and caloric smoothie of multisensory stimulation from which there is no escape, and none you’d want anyway.

It took me a little longer to notice something else quintessentially Cuban. The women. Well, no, I noticed the Cuban women immediately. Believe me. What took me longer to notice was the absence of…how do I say this...pseudo-women? Because in America, they’re everywhere. They’re in every magazine, every commercial, every billboard. They peer down and out at you with unnaturally long limbs, enlarged eyes, and preposterously skinny waistlines. The photoshopped American misinformation of what a woman looks like.

They don’t have that in Cuba. Not yet. (God I hope they never do. What an achievement that would be!)

Growing up in American male privilege, I was only aware of the toxicity of this ubiquitous visual violence when it reflected in the anorexia of this friend, or the bulimia of that one, then once I paid attention, in the harried self-esteem of just about every female I knew, under assault from an early age.

What age? When does this marketing nonsense begin to wound? How does that work? How does it feel, what does it do? And in a place like Cuba, protected from the malignance of an advertising strategy based on convincing women that they’re not good enough (unless they buy this product to “fix” themselves!), how is growing into a woman different? What is it like to be raised without Barbie, without Twiggy, without the wasp-waists of Disney princesses?

These are questions I wondered about, but was helpless to ask. I couldn’t just walk up to a cubana and ask “In my country women are pressured to despise themselves, what’s it like here?” So for me it was just a matter of stifled conjecture. But here’s the thing: Lydia has a master’s degree in American Studies with a focus on gender and popular culture. Basically, a master’s in exactly this stuff. She could actually investigate it, in a more meaningful way.

So that’s what we’re going to do. Starting on Thursday.

Americans still can’t go to Cuba as tourists, but with her degree in one hand and my let’s-call-it-a-career as a writer/journalist in the other, her brain in our head and my Spanish-speaking tongue in the mouth, we qualify under the journalist (or would it be the researcher?) category. So we’re going.

Are you interested in what we find? She already has a set of questions that we hope to ask an assortment of Cuban women (perhaps men too?) but I’m curious: what would you ask? What would you want to know about the influence of media on women’s body image?