Paternalist Government

Thinking again about the nationality issue, about what it means to be a nation and not know it, or to know it but not be allowed to state it.



And I am thinking about the paternalist behaviour so evident in so much of our government, and in so much of our lives.

Like the student proficiency tests they give in public schools each yeaor. If we pass with flying colors, the Department of Education will receive less money from the federal government, because we don't need it anymore... So the tests are prepared, specifically, to highlight how stupid our students are. And every year they show up stupider than the year before. So there is a sense of hopelessness in students and teachers alike, knowing that there is no way they can get better. No matter how hard they work, they can't get ahead of the game. And all because we expect daddy state to make it all better, to send us some money and make the problems dissapear. And we sell for money today whatever dignity we had , whatever amount of pride we could earned, whatever amount of achievements we could have worked for. But Daddy State pays us to be stupid, and we take teh money, and become stupid.

In all fairness, they don't make us take the money. This is a local scheme made by corrupt local politicians. But it would not work if there was no big State willing to cover for our shortcomings. It turns us into parasites.

Also, there is the issue of the " political sweet potatoes", the local phrase describing a certain kind of cretin that gets a job in the government in payment for his or her involvement in the campaign of the party in power. They literally get paid to do nothing, so they can scratch their asses for a few years and pretend to work. Before the mass layoffs, it was a common feature to see a group of, say, road repair workers, two of which were workin and five were supervising. You don't see that anymore. But the leeches weren't fired,oh no! They have to work now that the real workers were laid off. There is no one left to pull their weight.

And also, the human reproduction specialists, those bitches that throw kid after kid to the world, not caring at all about how she will feed them, since the welfare will cover it. And daddy state will feed the little monsters, and she will get her nails done every week with what the babies' daddies give her for child support.

So there again, the notion that someone else has to deal with your shortcomings, that someone else need to take care of the things you don't want to take care about. Th e sense of entitlement, of deserving to be given things just because...

And I know such things, also happen in the USA. Maybe they have different names, but this rot is hardly exclusive to us. But Puerto Rico is such a concentrated country. Everything here happens with a certain intensity.



And I wish there were no older cousin to receive our hand-me-downs from, so that we could use new clothing for once, paid with our own money and earned by our own work.

Holy Shit, a whole month without posting!

No wonder I felt like I really ought to come around.

Family news, there are two new babies in the family and one of them is mine.

Not the one of the human variety, thank the goddesses in their mercy.

That one belongs to one cousin who totally screwed up with the wrong sort of guy and ended up pregnant.

But babies are a blessing in whatever fashion they choose to come so welcome to the family, little Dylan.

My cousin called me the other day to ask if I would like to be Dylan's godmother. Of course I would!!!! I would be his fairy godmother, and would spoil him like the cute, cute little monster he is.

Except, I got out of the Catholic religion at about 14, so I never made it to the Confirmation, so I can't.

Would it be exceedingly hypocritical of me if I took a confirmation in a religion I don't believe anymore, just for the sake of being a fairy godmother?

Had to tell my cousin to call my eldest sister and ask her. She too got out of the Catholic religion a long time ago, but she had sense enough to get Confirmed.

And regarding my baby, I went to the West side of the island to meet tiny Dylan and see how my cousin was doing and if she needed anything I could provide her. (A User's Manual, maybe?) While we were there, her mother-in-law came by and dropped a bag with a tiny, tiny orphan kitteh. Husband and I decided to try and raise it. It was so small that one of its eyes was still closed, and the nails were out all the time.

The cat behind her is my husband. ;-)

Back then she was also too little to know what gender she was, so we discussed a few options.

If it had been a boy, I would have called it Gateau Mocha, which means coffee cake, and sounds like "gato", cat in Spanish. Loved the pun, totally intended.

But turned out it was a girl, so her name is Tira Misu. Remains in the candy theme, and incorporates the name Misu, which is the standart name for a cat around here. And when I say standard, I mean it is practically obligatory. You would never call a dog Misu, and if you say the name Misu, everyone knows you have a cat.

Here she is, just one week after.

I don't have any more recent photos, but she is now in full battle mode, using us as stairs for the places she can't reach, playing with Kojiro, and all around being a crazy kitteh.

Crazy thing is, instead of thinking less about Simba, I am thinking more about him.

Nationalistic Rant

There is a topic that obsesses me lately, but in a minor way has been part of me since I had use of reason and it will probably haunt me forever. I suppose the problem could be the same for all Puerto Ricans, but I don’t see a national dialogue going on. Or, if there is such a dialogue, it is taking all the wrong ways about it, asking all the wrong questions.

I mean the problem of the National Identity.

I hear the argument: “We are not a Nation!” “We are, too!”

I hear them discuss whether the official governmental language should be English or Spanish.

Lately they have even dragged our flag into it, since different parties and ideologies use different kinds of blue for the triangle part. ( Just for the record, I am squarely on the side of light blue. The flag was created and used by the Nationalistic Movement long before the rest of the country appropriated it. Also for the record, I think the argument is stupid. Three versions of the same flag were used in conjunction for decades, and most of the public never even noticed.)

So , you can see, there is a national dialogue going on. But they are discussing the wrong things. Or at least, they are not addressing my concerns.

Not that they should, you know. I am only one (admittedly weird) citizen. But I don’t think that I am so unique that I am alone in wondering about the part of me that is “Puerto Rican” and what it means to be one, of what is entailed in my identification with this land and its people, with this mongrel blood, with this convoluted history.

And possibly the topic is just too large, as I am having trouble organizing my thoughts to convey my meaning….

But possibly, too, it is not quite large enough, since I keep on finding parts that add to the size of the puzzle, leaving as many empty parts as it had before.

Let me see if I can explain…

GOLDEN AGE

There is a phenomenon in folklore and literature called The Golden Age.

It refers to a distant past (purely mythical or with some factual base) that embodies the most cherished values of a nation.

Often it is a land in disorder in which a hero can grow and seek to make orderly. It is a landscape filled with perils, that threatens with death or worse, should the hero fail. It is an era that allow men and women to test their mettle and show their true character. It allows them to fail miserably, or emerge victorious, in virtue of their own efforts.

Examples that come easily to mind are : Arthurian England, cowboy Wild West, and the Japanese feudal (Samurai) age.

In our literature, they use the Jibaro mountain men in a similar fashion, but I doubt the relevance of the symbol in this context.

The Jibaro, for those of you who are not Puerto Rican, is the native mountain man, our Hillbilly so to speak. Descendant of Taino (Eyeri) Indians escaped to the mountains, the escaped black population they harbored, and the white men who raped or kept mistresses among the lower classes, they became field laborers in the plantations. Theirs was a meager, dirty existence. Their children suffered from anemia and parasites.

Hardly a heroic image, don’t you think?

Mind you, I realize that things were not all peaches and cream in the Wild West, feudal Japan, or Medieval England. They surely had their own share of thugs, diseases, and mysery. But they have been polished by age into a sheen. Stories have turned these places and eras into what they never were. And these stories shape the national consiousness in a way that cannot be measured. They transmit a sense of land, of identity, of pride.

This cannot happen with the Jibaro. The very essence of a Jibaro story is that of a victim of circumstance, a virtuous, honest, hard-working people, trapped by hunger and ignorance into back-breaking labor. (In Bagazo, one of the most famous stories about Jibaro, the lead character is booted out of his job in the sugarcane plantation because he is old and not as efficient as he used to be. He confronts his boss, and the white man shoots him. And he dies, he ends up describing himself as “bagazo” the fibrous remains of sugarcane after all the juice has been pressed out.)

And they can not be reworked into something different, because they are historically recent. Their ragged clothes cannot be fashioned into armor. The Jibaro is too permeated by the smell of defeat, of resignation, to ever be useful as a national symbol.

But it keeps on being used that way, and that seriously pisses me off!

What kind of a nation chooses for itself such symbols? Why identify ourselves with an ox, a workhorse, a whipped dog? What do we see in ourselves that we accept such symbols? Don’t we aspire to more?

I want stories about warriors fighting to make a better world. I want us to identify ourselves with the pitirre bird, a little bird so territorial that it will fight dogs, large animals, and even guaraguao hawks, in defense of its nest. Now, THERE is an image!!!!

This picture was taken by my husband. It is a very young pitirre that fell down from its nest. And still you can see the spirit. “What are you looking at?” Heh!

More appropriate to the task of being a national symbol are the times immediately after the first contact between Spaniards and Taino (Eyeri). Right there, there’s narrative gold. Two sides locked in conflict over a land, both sides convinced of the justice of their cause. A hardly idyllic age that has the potential to drag into the sunlight the heroes and the monsters that inhabit the hearts of men.

Why hasn’t it been used??

I suppose it is not a mythology agreeable to any of our past or present governments. It stinks to high heaven of Nationalism, and that, simply, will not do.

But we don’t have literature like that. Or at least, I have not found it, and I am a fairly prolific reader. I have searched for this literature. The nearest I have read that resembles what I envision is El Ultimo Sonido del Caracol by Tina Casanova, which is excellent and I would recommend it to everyone, but is so obscure that even if you Google the title, you will get only 3 correct hits. It is about our Taino (Eyeri) heritage and how it endures and lives in us.

I will stop for now. I am not finished, but I need some time to organize my thoughts into coherence.

Paro Nacional en Puerto Rico- UPR

So, the governor went ahead and performed the mass layoffs.

Thousands and thousands of i-am-kicking-you-outta-here letters in one day.

Then an egg flies, smashes innocently behind its target. But the attitude of the egg thrower was applauded throughout the land. It lifted our morale. Even those of us who still have a job felt righteous anger at the way all this has been done. I think we all wish the egg had hit the governor on his head, and that we were the throwers.

And then, today, the people went to the streets to stage a mass demonstration. All well and cool, I am behind them 100%.

But I am so fucking pissed with the students of the UPR( Universidad de Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras campus).

They feel the need to stage a protest or strike every goddamn semester. EVERY SEMESTER. It seems like a rite of passage; kids newly out of their parents house and supervision stretch the bound of their freedom for the first time. But they have to be so stuuupid about it I feel ashamed sometimes in their stead.

Like now. They went to the protest to add their numbers and help the laid-off.And they act so stupid and take the chance to commit many kinds of petty crimes, that they detract rather than add to the merit of the main protest. I saw some of them throwing empty beer bottles against a building facade. There was some tire burning. Many walls now sport graffitti they did not have yesterday: "Socialism or death!"

Like, seriosly? Is that a threat? Are you saying YOU chose to die over living under capitalism, or that you want ME to die for your economic preference?

Sometimes I despair over the levels of sheer stupidity and irresponsability that grace the halls and classrooms on this, the best university on the island.

Anyways, my husband is over there right now, working in the university. He slept only 2 hours last night, and has been working for more than 24 hours now. And I won't be seeing him soon, it seems, because the students went into overtime-stupid and decided that though the demonstration had ended (for the adults were tired already and had responsabilities at home) they were not tired at all and were ready for some mayhem. So they headed for the University.

To break some more bottles and spray paint slogans on all available surfaces, no doubt. I tell you, this happens all semesters. We know the drill.

The campus guard was ready, and with the police they resisted the students. There were rocks thrown. Eggs, of course. There was violence, and for a second there it looked pretty bad.

My husband called to tell me he would be staying in campus today. He remains on call.

Labor Woes - Cont.

It is escalating.
I get this pressure in my chest sometimes, as if I had forgotten to breathe for a long time.
And maybe I have. Sometimes I stop breathing when I feel particularly upset.
I don’t know what to do! I cannot play this game!
And it pisses me off because for the first time I felt well in a job. People were nice, there is a nice “rapport” with my coworkers. They tease each other in a harmless way, and there is a sense that you can count on them to help.
And I remember when I was working at Hell Hotel. It was a nightmare; pure, unadulterated misery. My boss hated me and made no effort to conceal it. He took every opportunity to demean me. I was in anguish everyday, because I really, really was afraid of going to work.
When finally my contract expired and they did not renovate it, it hurt economically and I cried all the way home. But it gave me such an enormous sense of relief that I know, positively, that I should have been gone from there long before that.
And this guy is turning this job now and poisoning it for me.
(I suppose I better name him; I cannot keep on calling him “that guy”. I could use his office nickname of The Cookie Monster, earned for his eating habits. But what he really reminds me of is a Vogon, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So from now on, he will be known as Mr. Vogon.)
Stupid things will set him off, and keep him in a dark mood for days, and I know Mr. Vogon is plotting against me as he plots against so many people in here.
Yesterday I was at the company building very early in the morning. I am always the first there, and everybody knows it. I live by my husbands schedule, which means I am at work at 6, even though work starts at 8. They practically open the building for me!
And I was on my cubicle working on an assignment for college. It was 6:30 or so. I was very concentrated on what I was doing; I did not hear Mr. Vogon coming until he slapped the wall very hard to scare me. And scare me he did. Pissed me off, because I almost had the perfect idea to convey a meaning in my translation, and he had made me forget it!
Mr. Vogon said: “Wow! You must get up very early! You get here before I do!”
And I said: “Yes, I do.” I was trying to remember the way that sentence was supposed to go and I had no time for pleasantries.
And he got pissed, and said: “You want me gone! OK, Ill go!” He turned and left He did not speak to me for the rest of the day, but I caught him giving me dirty looks whenever I turned.
And then, today, after I sent him some documents he had requested to his e-mail, he tells me to print those documents and give them to the temp that is working for him now. I ask if I could forward the e-mail to her, so she can print them herself, (as this is what they hired her for and I did not have time to do this right now). He went into a hissy fit, and said : “I will print them myself, then!”, and stomped off my cubicle.
And I’m like, it’s not that big of a deal! You want me to print them? I can print them! I just think that since it’s her job to do this thing, she should do this thing, and their project should not affect in any way my regular functions.


But I am not truly sorry it worked like that.

I am anxious, worried and just plain scared.

I know he will use this in his war against me.

Yet, I want him to understand that he is not my boss and I am not his assistant.

I am not there to satisfy Mr. Vogon’s needs, nor is he there to satisfy mine.

I can help with stuff, just as I help those I can, but I am not here to do his work for him.
I am not here to keep him happy and contented. I am here to do a job, and if his stuff interfere with mine, his stuff will have to take a hike.

I had hoped this temp worker would keep him distracted and away from me. It does not seem to be working out.
And anyways, I ended up printing those document, just because the temp asked nicely. I was handling the phone lines, writing an e-mail, preparing a quotation and searching part numbers, yet I printed those documents and explained them to the girl, because she was polite.

Labor Woes

I am worried.

There is a situation at work that I don’t feel emotionally prepared for. It engages my want-to-escape mode. Most of my co-workers have dealt with it, but some have been fired because of the depredations and malicious rumors created by an older colleague.

This guy has been working in the company since forever. He is firmly entrenched in his position, and has actually been ready to retire for years. Yet he remains.

I entered the company as a temp to help him on a special project. Two weeks turned into two years and counting, and eventually I turned into a regular employee.

The thing is, this guy likes to have someone to boss around, and since I was hired to be just that, he feels entitled to make me do his stuff. He introduces me to people as his “assistant”. Good goddess! The Managers of the company don’t have assistants!

Every chance he gets, he makes a mention of how “he hired me”.

And, no, he didn’t!

The company temp-hired me to help him out in a special project; then real-hired me to work in something else, unrelated to him.

Now, I don’t have the time to do his work for him. I am not paid to make copies for him, or to redact his correspondence, or to simply listen to the stupid sexist jokes he tells. (How do you say “virgin” in German? Gudentight! Got it? Good and tight!)
And he is taking this badly. He feels I am being disrespectful.

He has complained to my boss (who knows him already, so he isn’t taking it too seriously) and to the boss of my boss (who doesn’t, so he might be doing some damage.)

I tend to not complain to my boss, because I feel that being manager must be at times a bit like being a schoolteacher. “Miss! He is pulling my hair!”

He must be beyond tired of listening to complains from both costumers and employees. I try not to add to his blood pressure. I really like my manager. I have had some really horrid bosses in the past, and I appreciate what a luxury it is to actually like your boss.

And there is the thing about the sexual harassment.

They tell me that he has caused three girls before me to be fired. All the three had in common was that they did not respond to his sexual innuendos.

So three girls before me lost their jobs to this idiot because they did not document his behavior.

But he has sent me e-mails asking me out. I remember last October, as I was working on the geisha costume, he was quite insistent on taking me out for lunch. He kept telling me that my costume was pretty sexy (Ummm… not.). And once, he went as far as telling me that he thought I was gorgeous or something like that. I maneuvered and mentioned my dear, dear husband. (Have I mentioned that I love him very much?) Then he went all weepy, and said that now that he was old, no one found him attractive. I mentioned his wife. That particular conversation, I printed and showed it to a coworker and to my husband.

Coworker said to use it against him.

Husband said to tolerate it; it was inoffensive.

I should have listened to her.

I quickly went through my e-mails yesterday, after one incident when he went all belligerent on me, and searched for my own harassing history.
FUUUUUUDGE!

I don’t have proof. I lost the e-mails when I closed my temporary outside e-mail account in favor of the permanent company one. I don’t even remember what the address was, so I can’t have it reopened. I have no proof!

And now I have lost it! Goddamit!!!

Damn all these e-mail changes!

Now he has been attacking me behind my back. I have been warned by sympathetic coworkers. And I feel like a sitting duck, unable to respond, defenseless and vulnerable.

I am not made for this! My personality makes it hard for me to engage in workplace guerrilla warfare. All this intriguing behind people’s backs, all these conspiracies.

Psychopomp

I learned a new word today, and I want to share it. The word is Psychopomp.

I was googling for the correct spelling of the term puer aeternus, since the lead character in one of the novels I am writing is just that, and I wanted to see what the archetype entailed.

The Puer Aeternus is an eternal boy, the boy that refuses to grow. In mythology, he can be a boy god, such as Cupid, or an irresponsible youth, such as Dionysus. In real life, it is used in relation to men such as Michael Jackson (with his Peter Pan fixation)

Then somewhere, I read that Peter Pan is both puer aeternus and psychopomp, so I had to know...

Googling the new word led me to a whole lot of sites about a song sung by... blah, blah, blah. Who cares?

Now, the classic reference is to a guide to the world of death. The boatman. The voice at the end of the tunnel. Death on a white horse, in the Tarot card.

The psychopomp, while not actively bringing death, keeps the keys of both worlds, the great beyond and the here-and-now. He is the Master of Two worlds. And in this sense, it is potentially a great possible mentor for the main character.

Interesting.

This does not apply to the character I was googling for, but it fits another, and it made me happy. I love to learn new words.