I opened Natalie Goldberg’s “Wild Mind” to this page:

Write about towns and cities you have passed through and places you stayed in a week or less.  Write about a car trip.  Go.  Write about trains. Go.  Write about a hotel you stayed in. Go. Make up twenty of your own travel topics.  Explore different dimensions of your travels.

Well, I thought, there it is.  Could there be any more fitting page to open on a Sunday afternoon when I’m stuck for writing inspiration?

So I opened up the ol’ Word and sat down to get started.

But as usual, and as Goldberg insists is natural and healthy, once the fingers starting pounding the keys it wasn’t travel or road trips or trains that snagged my interest but something I hadn’t even known my brain was fretting over: writing itself.  I believe in Goldberg’s assertion that we have these ideas stewing in us all the time despite how blocked or empty we may feel and we just need to begin writing something, anything, for them to emerge.  Then, it may take one or two lines or several pages before suddenly that energy starts to hum and you’re typing frantically and trying to get it out.  You’ve burrowed into something you wanted to say and you’re no longer worried about coming up with the next careful sentence, but rather scrambling to get the vitality of that discovered purpose onto the page.

Maybe you could start from any point in the universe – a Parisian café or a Chinese train or the bougainvilla’s delicate branches suspended in the courtyard, and you’d eventually wind up at some hot center where you were bound to end up anyway, you’d eventually end up in Cincinnati Ohio or asking yourself why you ended a particular relationship because that is where you needed to go.

It’s comforting to think that, because it’s comforting to think that writing is as much about getting things out as it is about creating them.

But of course, to get things out, you first need to allow things in; you can’t simply spew and spew and spew words and ideas without stepping back to absorb the world, without yanking your voracious meaning-making mind back from its slobbery pit bull ventures into the universe and making it sit without searching, without expectation.

Where am I going with this?  On Friday I hit a spell of writer’s block.  But unlike other times, it wasn’t painful.  It didn’t seem like failure or frustration or the frantic sputtering feeling of a spark struggling to ignite and puttering out each time.  It was instead a certain parchedness sitting in front of the computer.  Typing felt like scraping at a scratchy throat in the desert.

So I wanted to do something radical on Friday morning.  I wanted to have coffee with Jorge in bed.  On Saturdays and Sundays, we always have coffee together, sometimes on the tiny balcony outside crammed in with the dog and all the plants, sometimes in the airy, cool downstairs, sometimes at Nuevo Mundo between its two white walls of heat, getting uber-caffinated and planning epic voyages across Central Asia.  But during the week, I have my coffee planted firmly in front of the computer, writing, working.  Head bowed dutifully towards Progress.  The great irony of this is that I’ve never held a 9-5 Monday-Friday job in my life (barring the four months I taught in Japan, in which the 8-6 job experience, complete with subway commute, lunch hour, et all, fascinated me as one of the most exotic foreign realities I’d entered) and certainly never wanted to have regular, stuffy fixed hours.  And now that I work independently, and could in theory binge on three days of work and then veg with cold Bohemias on the patio reading novels, I am single-mindedly dedicated to putting in the hours Monday through Friday, nine to five.

We fear losing the we qualities we value most, our independence or our solitude or our wildness, and ambition is one of the things I prize most about myself.  It is a thread running brightly and clearly from age four Sarah correcting her mom’s friends on the distinction between the “floor” and the “ground” (outside it’s the ground, thank you very much) and the waking-up-at-six-to-write-and-run Sarah of today.  But sometimes ambition in its most driving and penetrating and relentless form just doesn’t jive with the creative life (or really, perhaps, with any life). Writing – and any art, if I can be allowed to extrapolate a little– requires periods of détente.  It can be torturous to give in to these because it’s hard to know exactly when you need to pull back and stop writing and when you’re simply avoiding getting to something, and ambition nibbles constantly at you saying c’mon, c’mon now, stop wasting time.

But detente is crucial.  It’s when inspiration suddenly sparks in the flat waiting bed of coals you prepare the rest of the time with reading and regular writing and focused concentration.  I have found this to be almost invariably true.  I get most of my ideas for stories and essays when I’m walking the dog at 5 o’clock, almost hypnotized by the light.  Something occurs to me as I’m staring absentmindedly at a peeling blue wall.  Then for the rest of the walk the idea grows into a hopeful green shoot and finally I become excited about it and I know I’ll sit down the next morning with a cup of coffee and start working it out.

I left you hanging, although you might’ve forgotten by now, with what I wanted to do on Friday morning: have a cup of coffee with Jorge in bed.  I wanted that escape from the stifling parcity of creative inspiration, from the dry dragging feeling in front of the computer.  Wanted some down time to talk and chill and feel that light Oaxacan air come wafting in through the side door to the balcony.

But I didn’t cave in – or rather, as I’d say after the fact, didn’t obey my instinct.  Whether this is a noble and promising sign of dedication to craft or a demonstration of blind ambitious ignorance could be a subject of debate, but I’ve come down firmly on the side of the latter.  Yes, writers need to write, every day, for hours, and they need to fight all the choky fear in their throats and the sense of stagnancy and pointlessness and spinning in place and just fucking do it.  But at some point, doggedness turns dull and stale.  At some point, you’ve got to know when to back off and stop throwing so much out at the world, stop churning more and more words and more and more ideas and more and more of yourself out into the universe in order to retreat and take a little in; to listen to and absorb the world instead of flinging yourself into it over and over.

As Annie Dillard wrote, (and there is no writing or life concept that cannot, I believe, be surmised in the work of Annie Dillard) in seeing – and I interpret her concept of seeing here not only as observing life on a Virginia farm but as pursuing any creative goal – you become a hollow bone through which the world passes and echoes.  You have to prepare for that hollowness, just like you have to prepare for meditation; you have to be physically and intellectually open to it.  And that means knowing when to have the cup of coffee with Jorge in bed and knowing when to get down to the grind of writing at the same time in the same place.

So I didn’t have the coffee, and I produced a few spare paragraphs that lacked depth or character, and then I started to get it.  So I backed off, did some other work and then spent the whole day Saturday reading MFK Fisher’s “The Art of Eating”, allowing myself long bouts of Twitter indulgence and a lazy walk with coffee and the dog through downtown.  Finally late Sunday afternoon I opened up “Wild Mind” and began writing, and out came this essay circling back to that Friday cup of coffee.

What’s the point?  The point is that there is the craft of writing, and it has to be practiced over and over and over like any craft, running or painting or photography.  But I think, also, that the more you write or the more you practice a craft, the more you realize that finding the balance and the inspiration necessary to practice the craft is just as important as the act of practicing.

There are many things to be juggled here.  Yes, you need to familiarize yourself with the flow and feel of words.  But you also need to know when to pull back, when to let go for a bit of the need to produce and progress, rein your ego and ambition in, and be that hollow bone that inspiration whistles through.  It may not always work; sometimes the détente you hope will be blessed by inspiration just ends up being a long afternoon of wandering aimlessly through a foreign city.  And sometimes you may be wrong – sometimes you’ll have an idea in you that simply needs to be worked out, and you don’t want to do it, so you take lots of breaks.  I have done that many times.  But I think this time was different – I think it was a part of me saying stop!  Retreat!  And listening to that, as I saw only after I didn’t listen, means temporarily saving your writing from the endless prosaic swirling of ego.

Plus, I speculate from the philosophical toadstool from which I see the world, no matter how much ambition and how much dedication and how much focus you have in whatever career or goal you’re aiming for in life, you need to be able to step back and have a cup of coffee in bed from time to time.  Otherwise, it’s all the same, just more grinding forward motion with no strange interruptions, no unexpected flavors, no sweet morning kisses.

Mexican artists come to Oaxaca to idle, pontificate and get lavishly drunk.  Admirers gather around them in obsequious eddies, asking hopeful questions to which the artists respond with one of two postures : an arm thrown around the asker’s shoulder in mock commiseration, or a flippant dismissal via shrug.  The artists opine in grand swoops until their words wither into slurs, they give little shakes of their heads, and their disciples scramble frantically in their notebooks to distract themselves from any hint of uncertainty.

The artists who come here, who build their elaborate but subtle and ergonomic mansions in the artists’ enclave of San Agustin Etla, or who drop down from Mexico City or elsewhere up north for a brief taller, seem to follow a similar pattern.  They are mostly men in their late fifties or older.  They are folkloric in a paradigmatic more than an individual way.  They lash at life with the lazy swipes of mythologized, tired tigers.  They bask in their status the way one of these tigers might bask in a bubble bath, simultaneously sardonic, glorious, and resigned.

There is not much, if any, criticism of these idols.  You would think with this being Mexico and all, rather revolutionary and prone to fits of upheaval, that an artist on hour three of a mumbly rant, who puncutates his uneven orations with a sudden, definitive statement along the lines of “art is beautiful” would be laughed and shouted off the stage, and his googly-eyed following would turn cynical and festive, rising up to declare that they’re through with this awestruck fawning and are heading out to dance, and take pictures of shoes or telephone wires or whatever they damn well please, thank you very much.

But no, no, this does not happen.  At the art openings, the book presentations, the movie screenings, everyone puts on their somber gaze of artistic pretention, sitting through whatever speeches or black and white films in grave contemplation with perhaps a scribble or two, formulating the most tedious, guy-with-the-beret-in-the-coffee shop philosophical dilemmas with which to busy themselves over copitas de mezcal.  There is no logic to these philosophical dilemmas, a huevo (a Mexican expression I adore meaning “forcibly, definitively.”)  Instead, the goal is to say something like, “but the camera is a bit like…a cloud, isn’t it?” and then, with a quirky half-smile, gaze off at the brightly painted wall and take a sip of potent liquor.  Your companion will respond with an, “orale, orale,” (wow, wow) and take a corresponding sip with a subtle, wry grin, and then you both will feel yourselves floating on an intellectual artistic plane high above the rest of the city’s dull trudging inhabitants.  ‘Tis glorious.

Yes, so this is what goes down here when there’s, say, the closing of a taller or the unveiling of a new exhibit at a museum.  But I’ve never seen it in such dramatic form as I did a few months ago, at the grand finale of a photography taller given by one of the Mexican Greats in photography, an Artist of Much Importance whose air magnetized everyone around him into grave nods and nervous fits of laughter.  Jorge took his taller, with the aim of getting a foot in the door of Mexico’s most important magazine of documentary photography.  He might’ve succeeded if I hadn’t sabotaged it all with my stance on laughter, which essentially amounted to telling the man he was full of shit.  Then he attempted to buy me a few cups of mezcal, we argued about the U.S government, and he failed to convince a now bitter Jorge and myself to go dancing.  The end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  It started upstairs at Comala, a bar we frequent enough that the waiters know the dog and no longer bring us menus.  The upstairs area is an L of two narrow connected rooms, which that night were lined with the recently printed photos from this artist’s workshop.  People lingered on benches and stood in tight little circles, drinking beer and mezcal.  It was your average party following your average taller with your average participants: young creatively inclined types in torn tights and exaggerated eye makeup, sultry and bored; a fresa or two several shades whiter than everyone else wearing skinny jeans and flats, middle-aged businessmen looking for some artistic outlet for their boredom; some fixtures of the local art or journalism scene doing yet another workshop; and because of the significance of the particular photographer giving this workshop, a few more important characters from the Oaxacan artist community, doing some hob-knobbing with the big shots to maintain their solid footing as Important Characters From The Oaxacan Artist Community.

There they were.  I arrived, got myself a beer, examined the photos, chatted.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  The standard cocktail party conversations about Japanese customs or Oaxacan plant life.  People eventually started to trickle away: the young hipsters to smoke pot, the artists and businessmen to take the beer-drinking to another level.   A small circle of Oaxacan insiders, the important types, and several handfuls of artists and hangers-on lingered about.  We were some of them.  Jorge was in networking-mode, and I was in tolerate-it-and-don’t-say-anything-stupid-mode.

There was more beer, chatting.  Then a clumsy collective push towards the mezcaleria next door.  “Vamos!” the star photographer would shout, with the sturdy bravado of a general, and everyone would scurry in confused circles, looking ahead, looking back, until the photographer would get swept into another conversation and we’d all end up loitering and feigning nonchalance, “what, go?  Really, when?  Where?”

This process took about fifteen minutes until by some miracle we were all gathered in front of the main door, downstairs, in one of those befuddled hordes typical of high school field trips, waiting for a little direction.  The photographer shepherd finally appeared and stormed out the door towards the neighboring mezcalaria, and we all left Comala and humbly poured in behind him until everyone was elbow to elbow in the murky green and black cave of the mezcal shop, where bottles seemed to gurgle like exotic fish.  There was room in that grotto for about ten people comfortably; we must’ve been upwards of twenty.  Some people sat on benches, some stood, edging to be nearer to the star.  And he did put on a performance.  He was very well aware of his stature and at the same time slightly contemptuous of it, mocking his wide-eyed followers and their attempts to woo him.

“Amigos!” he cried once he’d received the first swifter of mezcal, “la camera, la camera.”  Everyone raised their glasses in a toast and then the frenzy of philosophizing began.

“Don’t you think,” some young, eager artista offered up, “that the camera changes, um, our perception of reality so that it becomes, oh, difficult to determine…”

“Ay niño,” the photographer cut him off with a slice of arm through air, “the camera does so many things, doesn’t’ it.  Ay, ay?”

“Si!” conceded the niño, his great aesthetic point stamped out like a match.  He let it go, though, admitting to himself that it never really deserved to flourish.  One cowed, but so many more aching to contribute.

After he’d grown bored with the far side of the room, the photographer edged slightly towards the door and ended up catty corner to me, Jorge and a few of our friends.   There, he hooked up with the very nice owner of a popsicle company.  The most successful Oaxacan popsicle company, in fact (there are many).  He was there with his wife, both of them pale-skinned, wealthy, kind, accommodating.  They nodded indulgently as the photographer grinned, weaved, ranted, and drank.  At some point, he engaged Jorge in a bit of conversation about laughter.

“La risa!” It came out with that particular definitiveness of the French, who can say with absolute intellectual certainty– “c’est la vie” or “elles sont comme ça, les femmes” or “ça, c’est Mexique” as if they can just summarize life or Mexico or women in an abrupt aphorism. There is nothing left to do but nod and ponder; the person speaking has just brought the gate crashing down on whatever whimpering ambiguous contribution you might’ve made to the conversation.  So the popsicle company guy and his wife nodded, smiled.

I was bored.

“La risa doesn’t necessarily indicate happiness,” I said.

“Que?” the photographer leaned in towards me, close.

“Que?” It took him a moment to gather that I was speaking to him.

“La risa isn’t always an indication of happiness,” I repeated.  I had absolutely no stake in a relationship with this man, and no care in the world what he thought of me, so why not.

“What are you saying?  What is she saying?”  he asked his captive audience with a grand populist gesture.

“La risa doesn’t always mean happiness.  There are so many types of risa.  In Asia they mean nervousness, a lot of the time, especially if you’re taking photos.  They can mean anger, or bitterness, or cynicism.  You know.  There isn’t just risa, ya, and it’s happy and that’s it.”

“Muy interesante,” he said, stroking his beard, even though it wasn’t, not at all, and it made me wince the following morning and probably would have made him wince, too, had he not been drunk and riding those pseudo-intellectual waves of pseudo-banter in which we all just sort of slosh around making nihilistic masturbatory poetry to be captured on napkins and later destroyed.

A “debate” unfolded.  He somehow managed to defend la risa as an expression of pure, unadulterated happiness, with mumblings about el pueblo mexicano, and I held strong to my interpretation of la risa as an emotion of varied motives and expressions, of which happiness was only one.  Yes.  To even dignify it with a summary far, far overestimates the actual drunken ramble of the thing, which outdid stoned 3 a.m. debates in dorm rooms in degrees of pointlessness and tedium.

At one point, following another, “muy interesante, muy interesante,” the photographer ushered me up to the bar where he promptly ordered three mezcales and then realized he had no money.

“Want to buy me a drink?” he asked slyly, ducking in towards me flirtatiously.

“Are you fucking kidding me?  No.”

“Damn.”

Financial reality killed la risa temporarily, as the photographer scrambled into the rather disappointingly grounded world of hard cash in an attempt to find his assistant.  He shouted through cupped hands at the mezcalaria and out the door.  The assistant didn’t materialize.

The dream of mezcal died.  We meandered back to the other side of the room, as if we’d simply needed a quick visit to the bar to take our dreamy back-n-forth to another level.  It was now more than obvious that this was yet another perk of the artist’s opium den that is Oaxaca.  The adoring nymphs.  I pathetically felt like one.  Laugher?  Why yes, artist man, I think it is the balm of el pueblo.  Should you buy me a mezcal?  Delighted.

I shut down my half of the risa conversation, the money ran out, the photographer grew bored, we milled about, everyone’s intellectual aspirations petering out like deer trails in the woods.  Someone paid, and we were out in the street, now rowdy, half the crew trying to keep the night alive and the other half thoroughly, gratefully resigned to its death.  The latter half left, spiraling off in various directions down cobblestone alleys and narrow streets.  The remaining few, the photographer, the popsicle baron and his wife, a few fans and artists and Jorge and I, hovered and moved like a gelatinous mass towards El Central, the one and only Oaxacan club.  The photographer slurred something about George Bush and got started on losestadosunidos.

“Los estados unidos.”  He said it like he was spitting out a rock. It was another one of those definitive noun-drops, as if just plunking the noun down was enough to triumphantly define its essence and shine awe on the speaker.

He waited, but everyone was too drunk to nod, so he continued.

“You think you run the world, don’t you, you really think you –“

I cut him off.

“I don’t think anything.  I am not the United States.  Maybe you’re too drunk to be able to distinguish the two, but I don’t think I’d make the mistake of calling you Mexico.  Don’t blame me for my country’s sins.  I’m sure you didn’t vote for Calderon or Ulises – I didn’t vote for George Bush.”

He backpedaled frantically.  “Yes, perdon, perdon,” he said gravely, but I was tired.  Over it.  Through with the anthropological experiment of the Oaxacan art world for the evening.  The photographer mentioned something about my writing, something about dancing, and then Jorge cut it all off and we went home.  Later in the week, I’d see him walking, and we’d both stop and look at each other…and then keep walking.

I remember in the 6^th grade my friend Ellen told me defiantly that she didn’t want to read interviews with her favorite celebrities because it was always disappointing to find out what they were really like.  This came as a massive shock to me, who devoured interviews with Julia Roberts as if they were serums that would make me, too, gorgeous and witty and flirty like the Julia of, say, “I Love Trouble.”  I couldn’t get enough.  I wanted to get closer and closer and closer, to know everything.  Ellen was more cautious and cynical.  She knew that eventually Julia would say something inane or insulting and the bubble would burst, and then she wouldn’t be able to enjoy Julia worship with the same purity.

Nothing Julia said disappointed, but probably because I never got close enough, and because Entertainment Weekly has never been anything less than a toadying rag.  I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Julia got mad once and threw a potato at a photographer, but that thirdhand gossip wasn’t enough to tear her down in my esteem.  Besides, she probably had a good reason for it.  So she lived on in the floaty idyllic realm of idols until I was old enough to not care anymore.

But I think all my time in Oaxaca has destroyed the Julia Robertses of this era for me.  Maybe it’s simply because these artists are not my idols, and if I really aspired to their careers or projects or lifestyles I’d feel differently.  Maybe if it were Annie Dillard or Peter Hessler or Azar Nafisi getting drunk off of mezcal and talking about laughter I’d be listening in rapture.

Or maybe it’s just not about them, the Oaxacan artists.  Maybe it’s just what the art world breeds here.  For all I know, it could be what the art world breeds everywhere, but since this is my only case study I suppose I’ll have to heap all the blame and analysis on Oaxaca.  Here there’s so much of that empty intellectual circling in which artists pat each other monotonously on the back, engaging in mutually ingratiating exercises of pseudo-poetic stimulation.  There’s so much worship of Art and Artists as blanket concepts that protect anyone lurking under them, as if they are concepts vast and grand enough to leave anyone who claims loyalty to them shimmering with golden realizations.

I think there is much to be learned from the people we admire.  But I think there is perhaps just as much to be learned from the fact that they are people; flawed, interesting, complex human beings, and that what we do with our lives is as valid as what they do with their lives.  There is a balance between respect and admiration for idols and the confidence and faith that we can also challenge and question them, honestly and without fear.

Otherwise, right, it’s all mutual artistic masturbation, art in and of itself as some elevated noble mission in whatever form, the artist as some noble elevated character no matter his or her work or intentions.

Or maybe the Oaxacan artists have it right, and I just can’t play the game because I don’t believe in it enough.  It’s a way of being and interacting run by codes I don’t understand – I am analytical and logical at heart, and I want sturdy Reason standing behind my arguments (she can raise an eyebrow at times, or wink, but she should be present).  There’s a reasonless, freewheeling aspect of art world that I would call nonsense, and perhaps the artists would call, well, art.  There’s an exclusionary pretension that says we’re the blessed tigers in the bathtub, so let’s splash each other with bubbly suds.  Poof, poof, poof.  There’s also a groveling need for conformity that says let’s talk of cinema and bicycles, and make sure to pause in the right places and show just the right amount of flippancy.

In the meantime I’ll keep playing the gringa on the outskirts, seen by all with thinly veiled pity as the bumbling extranjera who just thinks its all just so so cool.  Just bubbling with excitement to get in on this world of gasp, gulp, ART.

“Really?  You’re an ARTIST?!  Wow.  So…what do you think is the meaning of poetry?”

There are seeds buried in the plain of childhood which later bloom into the pathways one takes in life.  One such seed took root during the weekends I spent with my mom in Cincinnati, Ohio; a fact I didn’t realize until many years later when I started sniffing my way like a hound down all those pathways.  Then I came back to goetta and eggs, to surly waitresses and diners, to scrappy indie movie theaters and heavy mugs of hazelnut coffee, to the hills plunging into the jumbled maze of Cincinnati and to my Mom, elegant with her soft hazel hair and her doe eyes in her thirties, caught in a beauty she did not quite know what to do with which she seemed to be both pulling back from and marveling at, ghost-like and unsure.

I go back to my own eager blue eyes and my spinning mind, hungry with the need to figure out how the world worked so I could explain it to the clueless adults around me.  I scoured my Mom and her Cincinnati world with particular fascination.  She belonged to the real world of adults, not the parent world of adults, and she was the closest I could get to that wider adult world.  At “home,” in Columbus, there were no R movies, no Oreos (only when camping – a fact which could spur another exploratory essay about the roots of my current love for the smell of tents and summer mornings in the woods), no leaving of unwanted carrots on one’s plate, and certainly no cans of Sour Cream And Onion Pringles washed down with peach spritzers, the “meal” I long associated with adult freedom in Cincinnati.

My mom lived on a street called Fairview Avenue, which was a sort of false dead end.  Instead of coming to a definitive stop, it horseshoed around at an overlook which was obscured by fluffy green broccoli trees in summer but in winter became a classic Midwestern vista, an industrial city puffing beneath a gray sky, edged by a curving line of river.  After the horseshoe the street met a cross street that plummeted downhill towards downtown.  So it was a dead end with an escape route.  Cincinnati city buses used to come and linger for awhile at the overlook.  The bus drivers smoked cigarettes with their elbows resting on the metal guardrails.  I used to sneak glances at them out of the corner of my eyes, riding in circles on my purple bike with the purple streamers and the purple bell.  (When I was five or six, my mom and I once stayed up until three in the morning, a virtually incomprehensible hour at that age and one that made me feel as if I’d ventured into a tenuous netherworld, painting my room a dark lilac purple).

The Columbus-Cincinnati distinction was edged out little by little as I grew older.  My parents divorced when I was one, but lived in the same city until I was four.  Then, my dad, stepmom, younger brother and I moved to the countryside in Indiana, to a sprawling farm of forests and fields where we were free to gallop and roam around the land.  I loved it there, and declared myself depressed with weighty certainty when we left.  The shuffling back and forth to Cincy began in Indiana, but really took hold when we moved to Columbus, Ohio when I was nine.  I was moving to that increasingly aware in-between stage, not as perceptive as a teenager but not so inured to the swirling of the adult world as a five or six year old.  That was when Cincinnati became more than where-mom-lived; it became a center of exploration, of travel into hipster thirty-something Cincinnati and along the inchoate edge of adulthood.

In Columbus, I had my stable household, my community, my dos and don’ts.  There was my 9-year old place and the limits and norms of that place.  Cincinnati was something else entirely.  Cincinnati – and I conjure it up as that final subtle descent on I-75 when the car felt like it was picking up momentum, being magnetized and drawn towards the distant bristling city with its green clumps of trees and faint gauzy skyline– was open terrain.  I didn’t have a set role there.  I wasn’t “a kid” and my Mom was a different kind of mom, a mom without the normative expectations of kid life.  My mom used to say it was my weekend vacation, coming down and staying with her.  It was more than a vacation –it was the first time I traveled.  Those weekends were my anticipatory ventures into adulthood and into the distinct, compelling state of awareness that comes with travel.

My mom was the center of this world, and I viewed her not only as a mom but as a Katherine Hepburn-esque idol, beautiful, graceful, always thinking about something relevant and meaningful, always carefully searching for a thought in a book or through the panes of a window in winter.  Her cheekbones, high and delicate and giving her a certain innocence, would rise when she was interested in something, and her laugh was incredulous in a sweet, genuine way.  Her house was dotted with wry and defiant statements about the female body or one’s outlook on life.  They were clipped from magazines or newspapers and stuck on doors and windows, where they acquired age and a certain worn fondness, old truths in the back of her mind that ceased to be mantras and became an inextricable part of the fabric of her worldview.

The walls of the Fairview house were graced with scarves and necklaces.  My mom collected both, although collect might not be the right word.  She accumulated both in a casual, undirected way, the way snow accumulates gently in drifts over time.  She wasn’t greedy or materialistic, lusting always after more exotic and exclusive stuff.  She simply loved scarves and they seemed to breeze into her life, gifts from the men interested in her or things she picked up here or there.  I own many of them now ; she gives them to me when I visit her.  Now they are the worn magazine mantras taped to the walls; she no longer wears them.  They have become part of the framework of an old self, one she began to move away from many years ago.  She gives them away with a touch of regret, remembering how they hung in the Fairview house, its smell, its loneliness, the searching self that lingered there.  They still smell like her, the softness of very subtle perfume, cloves, old books, dark wooden drawers opened after long spells of abandonment.

The necklaces were more lively.  I could never manage to wear them as I could wear the scarves and to this day can rarely pull off jewelry.  I loved exploring them tongue-in-cheek, though, putting on elaborate pseudo-Shakespearean plays with my friend Claire in slip dresses and heavy necklaces with metal teardrops and intricate clasps.  I ran my fingers through them, enjoying the clinking and chiming as they intertwined and shimmered.

If Mom was the center of Cincinnati and its greatest mystery and idol, the Fairview house was its soul.  It was the bohemian gathering place, the City Lights of Cincy, although only my Mom and I gathered there.  She let me write on the walls with pencil, first simple graffiti, then what I imagined as poems.  The graphite words against a pale peach wall were one of my first aesthetic pleasures.

The stairs creaked.  The floor creaked.  It was impossible to wake up in that house without waking someone else up, so mom was always forced to wake up to my absurdly bright self at 6.a.m ready and hopping for the day.  She eased into it with a mug of tea or coffee and I read Babysitter’s Club books and plotted our “agenda,” a word she always hated.

“Why do we have to have an agenda?” she’d say, half-laughing.  “Why can’t we just see how things go, you know?”

“Well, what are we going to do,” I said, ever practical.  “It’s a plan, not an agenda.  Think of it as a plan.”

My plan would always consist of 8,921 things to do, and after about ten of them my Mom would say, “Enough!  Get me home!”  She’d unwind with a book and I’d eat white cheddar cheez-its in the bathtub, feeling as if I were at the very summit of a traveler’s hedonism.

The agenda is one of the graspable threads I can trace from my early traveling self to the constant restless traveler I’ve become.  I can trace it from Cincinnati to afternoons in Madison coffee shop gardens, sitting outside in the heavy pressing humidity next to an air conditioner puffing cold dead air inside, pouring over guidebooks to Patagonia.  The agenda was and is a route carved through relentless, exhilarating possibility.  I can trace it, too, to Borneo and plotting a route across the island by land, to Jorge saying, “really, can’t we just sit on this beach for a day or two?” as I planned how we’d hitchhike and trek and weave our way on buses through the jungle.

But beyond the concreteness of the agenda the sensory experiences and, more importantly, the stimulating exploration of other places and people and scents and spaces, intoxicated me and created a lasting hunger for travel.  I craved that constant awareness of place and experience, in which every detail counts, everything is valid and interesting and you are simply a consciousness wandering through it trying to be as present as you possibly can.

We would go to Findlay market, where I trailed my mom as she greeted the vendors, who flirted with her and offered lumpy pink grapefruits in weathered hands.  They had red faces, and they were pushy in a friendly way.  She’d demure and recoil, laugh, banter lightly with them, look down at me.  We’d end up buying a grapefruit.  Then we’d wander – the place reeked of animal flesh and cheese and old shoes that had been vigorously sweated in.  In comparison to the tamed existence of schools and parks in Columbus, this was the height of exoticism.  We bought Chinese shoes at a small store that seemed impossibly vertical.  It was only a few feet wide, but the shelves reached jack-and-the-beanstalk style to the heavens.  They were crammed with rough-edged white boxes of shoes.  We measured my progress over the months and years – 36, 37, 38.  I’d always get the ones with the red roses woven on the front in coarse, shiny thread, and mom would get the plain ones, simple black on the outside and white on the inside.  The padding sound they made was strangely satisfying, as if it answered some urge for subtle aesthetic definitiveness.  We’d always get a baguette, gouda cheese, and the-mustard-with-the-seeds-in-it: that grainy, tangy Dijon mustard.  I could eat it by the spoonful, rolling the beady seeds around on my tongue with pleasure.  Mom would cut wedges of baguette and top them with a heap of mustard and a slice of gouda, and we’d sit at the kitchen table not talking, half-smiling.

Cincinnati was a place where I could shed the established me of school and home, of friends and soccer and violin, and be something wilder.  Wilder in the sense that I wasn’t so reined in by an identity linked to established conventions (“You are nine years old and a student at Grandview Heights Elementary School.”)  In Cincinnati I felt like an untethered traveler, running her hand along the hippie fabrics on Ludlow Avenue and taking afternoon strolls through Burnett Woods.  I could eat waffles with strawberries and whipped cream in the morning and people-watch, idolizing the way the twenty-somethings at the hipster bakery flirted and strutted, I could float on my pink inner tube in the cavernous silence of the pool downtown, and pad around the alien and thrilling YMCA full of boisterous, loud, sweaty men and exotic women who wore disco-colored spandex and ponytails on the tops of their heads. I could read my Babysitter’s Club books in a pew at Latin Mass downtown while my Mom absorbed the atmosphere of a church she could no longer solemnly subscribe to, but longed for the way we long for the scents and places of childhood.  These were tendrils of me snaking off towards my adulthood.

This is what travel does – it lets your identity off its leashes, frees it from attachment to one particular place and one particular way of being and being seen while also, simultaneously, making it more potent.  This process – the simultaneous unleashing and strengthening of identity – began in Cincinnati, and has continued in South America, in the South Indian Sea, in Japan, in Oaxaca.

They say, write where you want to be.  I could write pages upon pages about Cincinnati, clawing my way back to those first voyages when I discovered the myriad little thrills of travel.  Foreign mustard, anonymity with a book and a journal in a distant coffee shop.  The Fairview house with the sayings in pencil on the stairs, the chilly attic full of silk dresses.  It has taken me five years of travel to realize that it began there, that was the birth of the insatiable wanderlust and the fount of all ensuing nostalgia.

Nostalgia, of course, is at its strongest where there’s a palpable sense of loss.  Such is the case with Cincinnati.  I grew up.  Adulthood, the glowing sphere I saw around my mom, turned out to be heavier than I thought, more for her than for me.  Just as traveling eventually will lead you into the weightier realities of place, the poverty and the resentment and the politics, so growing up leads you into the rising-falling terrain of adulthood.  The older I got, the more I could see that the lurking corners of those coffee shops, the cold winter light in the kitchen, the closed off, condensed smell of old warm wood in the attic, the scarves and necklaces, the words on the wall, were shot through with loneliness.  There was a lot of loneliness in those years; that was the undertone of adulthood that I did not pick up on.  I can see it now in the way mom concentrated when she wrote in her journal at times, and the way she looked out the window over a mug of coffee or lost her train of thought.  A few years ago she moved away from the Cincinnati I knew on Fairview Avenue.  Cincinnati changed; after the riots of 2001, which imposed a curfew on our old neighborhood, the city began a “renovation” plan that included bringing in bland-faced chain stores and demolishing the diners and used bookstores we’d gone to for years.

Clifton now is a university district like one you’d find in the center of any Big Ten campus, college sweatshirts and cheap bars offering liters of Bud, dull, dime-a-dozen coffee shops with lamps and plants, Chipotles and Potbellys.  Ludlow Avenue remains the same – there is a coffee shop there that reminds me of my first forays into Cincinnati, of the time when it still felt wild.  There, you can sit at a rickety table in a dark corner sipping coffee and looking at haphazard postcards taped to the walls.  There, that old fire of travel sparks up in me again, and I remember how it all began.

It started as it usually does, with a man leaning out of a truck shouting, “HEY BABY!!” and laughing with the satisfaction of a baboon gnawing on a piece of rotten fruit.

The machismo funk.  If I’d had a semi-automatic weapon, there would have been Kill Billish gratification of a type that would deter any slightly overweight, education-deprived and cologne-soaked lout from ever cooing at a passing woman ever again.  The images that go through my head in these moments of harassment approach horror movie heights in graphic detail.  Then they pass and la di da what a pretty evening sky and how ‘bout a double americano and oh-look-at-the-light-on-the-colonial buildings. The afternoon is a soft gentle thing, all buttery light on peeling turquoise and maroon walls, all whispering trees, all mountains echoing in the distance.

And yet somewhere within the serenity a raging ball of fire spews violent fantasies of writhing, screaming machos pinned under a dog’s clenched jaws.  Sometimes I fall into that fire, and chase a man at full speed with my German Shepherd until said man screams in fear or gets backed up against a wall.  But I rarely do this anymore, for two reasons:

1) It is dangerous.  For as much as I fight the Mexico-is-scary standard in the media, Mexico can be a little scary.  Not because drug lords are going to come lob off your head, but because if you throw a mango at someone’s face he might know someone who knows someone or he might be a government official — they love them some good harassin’ — or he might just get generally pissed and decide to act on that, none of which are good things.

2) It ruins a perfectly good day.  You’re walking along with the dog, letting yourself get sucked into your dreamy writerly fantasies in the midst of another peach sunset, saying, ay que bonito, ay que tranquilo, and then WHAM some loser with a plastic cup full of cheap beer is keeling out the window of a beat-up car barking at you.  You go from quaintly blissful expat to insult-hurling psychopath in 2.5 seconds.  Then, it’s hard to go back.  The whole afternoon is permeated with men-need-to-be-exquisitely-tortured-until-they-scream vibes.  It’s not fun.  It doesn’t generate good karma, shall we say.

But what to do.  This is the central dilemma of traveling, the hub where all roads of expat life eventually lead. Do you roll with cultural relativism, looking straight ahead unperturbed as a man weaves towards you whispering “hola guerita como estas?” an inch and a half from your face, or do you indulge in a little cultural give n’ take, roaring “wanna meet my dog, sucka?!?”

So this might be a slightly dramatized version, but it contains the basic elements of an essential foreigner conflict: the wanting to belong, to accept the local culture, the knowing that to force your beliefs, desires, and needs upon it is wrestling with that old imperialist beast (not to mention, oftentimes, isolating and frustrating yourself) and yet the wondering why certain things — the blatant harassement of women, for example – should be protected in the name of “culture.”  Why is culture so often the providence of lecherous old men?  So, if I live here and participate in the culture, why shouldn’t I fight against something that I believe is universally, unequivocally wrong?

I have gone in circles on this debate so many times that I end up weary with a pulsing headache wondering if maybe we should just move to Canada.  I have written about it endlessly and tried to come to so many pat conclusions, all of which sit sticky and false on my tongue.  The failed essays pile up flat and unfulfilling in the “writing in progress” folder on the desktop.

No patented response or attitude is satisfying enough, and none encapsulates the complex back-and-forth emotions that flare up when machismo crashes into my daily life.  Sometimes I’ve told myself to ignore it, to accept it as part of this place, and I feel queasy the whole time but slightly more peaceful.  Other times I’ve tried and speak out against it in non-violent, non-fruit-throwing ways, and I feel strong and empowered but also jittery and tense for a day afterwards (i.e., the time I walked up to the truck full of men hissing at me and said, “Would you do that to your sister?  I don’t think so.  Please, don’t insult me.”  And they stopped.  But the mix of emotions following that was more upsetting than positive.  And not every truck full of men would respond with silence).  These issues lie in an intensely foggy gray zone; the kind of pixilated fog you need to paw your way through, the kind that never seems to end.

Yesterday, though, I think I might’ve briefly punctured the fog.  I began to think about the machismo problem differently.  Not as a question of righteousness and justice vs. imperialism and dominance, of culturally appropriate behavior for an insider vs. an outsider, but rather as a question of personal growth and sanity.

Fighting machismo on the street, lashing out, creates so much negative energy it sucks the rest of my life into a black hole of fear, anger, and frustration.  Each encounter with machismo taints the rest of the day, leaving streaky gray trails through my mood.  A 30-second encounter that I find insulting and maddening becomes a full day of stress.  Karmically, this does not beckon good things.  It means I’m expelling a helluva lot more negative energy than positive energy, and Oaxaca looks meaner, uglier, dirtier.

So yesterday, slumped Thinker-style on the edge of a stone fountain in the Llano park, thinking about how I’d narrowly escaped that spell of negative energy again post hey-baby, I could see the desire to live here, the genuine enjoyment and appreciation of it, peeking through the cloud of macho fury.  And beyond the right or wrong of it, whether I believe machismo is a force to be taken down or something I have no right to question, is the nature of my presence in this city and whether it becomes a swirling void of resentment or something more hopeful, something more compassionate.  More simply, how can I live here and stay not only sane but also tolerant and openhearted?

There are those cycles again, the cycles of cultural adjustment, and ultimately passing through these cycles over and over again you try to come out if not necessarily cleaner and prettier, if not shiny white and new, softer and more affectionately worn, more accommodating to the curves of a place.  And the idea is to do this graciously, without stirring up huge drifts of excess frustration and bitterness.

The point here isn’t that machismo isn’t worth the time or effort to combat, or that it should simply be ignored.  The point is that it’s one of those massive cultural differences that challenges my assumptions about myself, my relationship with Oaxaca, and my growth as a traveler and a person, and that beyond the larger social-cultural debates about cultural relativism and imperialism I have to learn how to deal with it on a personal level.  At some point, every long-term traveler and expat will have to deal with some issue like this and come to confront it on her own terms in order to avoid easy hatred and stereotyping and resentment.  She will have to find some way to crawl through it and learn something about herself and her culture in the process.  So this is what I have come to see with machismo : the struggle is no longer about the epic rightness or wrongness of machismo, it’s about how I deal with it, and how I can live in Oaxaca and not suffer constant bouts of suffocating anger.

Yesterday in the Llano it became clear that what drives me most insane about machismo isn’t necessarily that imbeciles insult me with their dumb come-ons, or that occasionally some freak scares me by shouting from a van, but that I have so much difficulty controlling myself when it happens.  That my emotions burst forth like the tongue of the dragon and it takes a mammoth amount of restraint to reign them in.  And this happens over and over until I finally dread going outside because I fear those feelings.

So, I thought, how about framing machismo in different terms.  How about framing it so that it is an opportunity for me to learn how to control that anger, and those flashes of emotion, which ultimately do little but sabotage days or weeks?  Not simply on the machismo front, but in general – I tend to be a slightly — ahem — fiery person.  And machismo throws some white gas on that fire.  But so much of the time the anger I feel in these or other situations does little more than open a big chasm of negativity I fall into and then need to spend days climbing edgily out of.

What if I think : ignoring these displays of machismo isn’t about justice or relativism anymore, it’s about being in control of myself.  And ironically, the struggle becomes a sort of gift.  The pearl offered up by the oyster of murky cultural difference.  Instead of seeing it as a sign of weakness, I can see turning away from macho posturing as a sign of control and empowerment. The ability to not lose control, endanger myself and torpedo the day’s potential becomes strengthening instead of debilitating.

This is not to say, ever, that harassment of women is OK or should simply be ignored, or that machismo really isn’t that big of a deal.  Every woman will deal with it differently because tragically, so many women have to deal with it, and most of them deal with it in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine and that can’t be easily resolved by a simple psychological battle with oneself.  I am fortunate enough to have to deal with machismo on a fairly superficial level, and to be able to sit on park benches stewing over appropriate philosophical/intellectual responses.

But that doesn’t change the fact that living here, I have to adopt a machismo strategy, and ultimately, my way of dealing with machismo has come down to a way of dealing with myself : my righteous, furious, fiercely just, madly emotional and strong self.  Instead of thinking of machismo as a threat, pressing down on my identity and stifling it, I want to think of it as a new and distinct challenge to my strength: challenging me to walk straight with my head held high not giving a shit in the world whatever the guys in the backs of trucks are shouting.  I saw a Mexican woman do this the other day and was impressed by her strength: some greasy turd with a gardening tool was shouting at her, more and more insistently, and she had her chin pointed straight up and out and did not move an inch from her self-assured march forward.  Yes.  That is an image of empowerment, too, not one that I would have ever conceived of within the confines of my own head and my own culture, but one I have come to believe in out of a search for how to be, here.

In Japan, two incredible women friends with decades of experience living overseas laid the smack down on my posture toward machismo (which at the time was an unequivocal it’s wrong and I’m going to fight it as best I can).  “You’re so American,” they said, half lovingly and half disdainfully, “you’re so righteous and you really think you can and should change the world.  Deal with it.  Mexican women will ultimately fight it when they are ready, and you can help, but you can’t decide when.”

Fair enough.  So the battle now is for control of myself, for the ability to speak out against machismo in its many forms in writing and with friends, but also to live my daily life without constantly getting dominated by my own anger, without letting it shape Oaxaca in its image.

Yesterday in the park I got caught looking up at a mango tree.  It was a huge, soaring mango tree, one of those rainforest trees that so towers above scurrying things on the ground that it seems to exist in a time and place apart.  Mangos shimmered like plump beads on its top, hundreds of feet above the plaza.  The wind made them shiver each time it drifted by.  I saw this because I had been able to escape that furious circle of should-I-fight-back-or-should-I-not, because I had been able to keep on walking after being yelled at and look past it to everything else that keeps me in Mexico, and because that ability to control myself gave me the chance to exhale and to get a sense of vision and empowerment back.  It was the ability to look at a mango tree instead of stewing in cultural discomfort and vitriol.  It may not be politically correct, it may not be ideal, but it felt right.  It felt like one of those adjustments an expat makes living in a place, shifting a little here and there, until she finally figures out the right posture.  This is how I fit, here.  This is how I can make it work.  And even if I don’t get the temporary relief of seeing the splat of a mango on a macho face, I get the greater satisfaction of living a daily life that isn’t slowly corroded by frustration, of inhabiting an expanding empowered space instead of an angry, contracting one.  It is one of those ongoing battles we wage in daily life, to keep grinding and gnawing our way through to a place where we can find just a little more compassion, just a little more hope, just a little more patience, to go on creating good things.