MODERN IFIGENIA

 Well folks, I have been online for a while and have never taken monetizing seriously. In the last few weeks I learned that NOVICA, one of the regular places I shop has a partner program so I decided to apply and I was approved! So going forward I will have lost of links and savings opportunities for you from them. Of course, I make a commission off of your purchases, but if all this does is introduce you to them, I will be very happy. Right now, if you use this link , you can get 15% off items from Mexico through October 15th. 

There was always an internal confidence my dad had that made me proud of him and jealous that I didn't carry. That confidence was borne from him being a man, not any man, but A MAN-a fully grown adult who didn't depend on anyone to meet his needs. Americans only conceptualize of machismo from an American masculinity lens, but machismo is a bit more complex than simply a more extreme version of American masculinity, while machismo does demand that the woman in the household cook the meals, it also demands that if the woman is sick, is not around, or just walked away, a macho can cook a meal and feed himself and his family-a macho doesn't need ANYONE. If clothes aren't laundered a macho would show up to work in clothes he washed and pressed himself, because, again, he doesn't NEED ANYONE, having a wife to do all of the household chores is just a "perk" of being a man. I am not glamorizing this outlook as it is highly toxic and problematic; just as in the U.S...

I think of 2020 as a missing year, a lost year. My friends and I often joke that 2020 just doesn't count. I have internalized that message so much that even my math is affected; between January 2016 and January 2021 there are only four years. But if I am honest with myself 2020 was not lost, it freed me and the people I work for from unnecessary restraints, it gave me the space to prioritize and make a habit of prioritizing my health, and the time to really think about what I actually do and don't need to be happy.  I. HOBBIES: A.  I started 2020 with the goal of picking up pottery. I took courses at my alma matter which was probably the best decision ever, not only did I learn something new, but being so far removed from home meant that there was zero chance of running into work. It was also nice to connect with people on a level other than what I could do for them. Unfortunately, classes had to end, but to be bad at something and for that to be normal and expected ...

To be honest, I forgot this fruit existed. It wasn't until my mom showed up with this baby's bracelet that a bunch of memories resurfaced. We can't really remember its name, but google searches lead me to either kuru, curu, awarra, awara. I am not sure whether those words are Spanish, English, Warao, Arrowak or Carib, but they are a fruit I have never again eaten since leaving Venezuela. This is a fruit for the patient. It tastes delicious-a nutty, fibrous, cashew-ish flavor, but there is little flesh to it, so you have to peel it very delicately, lest you accidentally peel off all of the flesh. It was a fruit that frustrated my instant-gratification self, so only the elders had the patience to feed me this fruit.  It was rarely sold in the markets, so the only time I would have it was when we visited our elders in the more rural/jungle-ish regions outside of the city. I can't even tell you in which direction we went, but the grand aunts and uncles always had lands with...

I woke up this morning to a baby puking on me while smiling unapologetically. For the first time her lack of inhibition worried me. This Mother's Day, I thought I'd be reflecting on being a mother for the first time and jot down some mushy words, instead, I think back to the day I walked in on my mom having greater aspirations for my daughter than she did for me.   My dad raised me to thrive in the world I deserved, my mom raised me to survive in the world I was born into. Needles to say, my dad's parenting was liberating and empowering, my mom's was stifling and suffocating, so of the two parents I always rebelled against HER. She would often say that I was created fighting her given how difficult her pregnancy was with me. She was right, my earliest memories with my mom are of our arguments. We fought like the swords of two warriors: I was driven by a desire to be free and capable, her by fear that I might suffer consequences the patriarchy metes out to misbehaving wo...

 "How do you frustrate a Jew? Place him in an oval and tell him there is a dollar in the corner" ---to my non-anti-semitic mind, this joke didn't make sense-how is lying to someone okay and why would it be unreasonable for them to be annoyed you lied to them? I would come to learn the joke is funny if you already knew that Jews were greedy. In a class of over 20 students, mostly Christian white, this joke made sense. To me, the Indian kid and the Polish kid, it was confusing; to the African American kid, it was obvious.  The man making this joke was not wearing a Klan's hat, he was the very loveable baseball coach at my high school. Everyone liked him, he was a decent man-the respect he received for decent meant that I had to figure out what was wrong with me for not getting the joke, that it was normal to get the joke, and the one African American kid who objected to it must have just misinterpreted what everyone else construed as lighthearted fun. "How do you m...

I often write about my experiences as an immigrant; a series of moments of flux and transition, amusement and discord, complete openness and heavy walls. There is very little that is fixed. As I grow older though, the notion of "home" becomes stronger and stronger, increasingly fixed and solid in some ways but geographically unstable and dispersed. As I grow older and older my pangs of homesickness are sharper-every once in a while I sit and can't stop myself from yearning for people and places that have nothing to do with each other. I now understand that stare my mom has when she is enjoying a very fresh and ripe fruit-she is here eating the fruit, but she is also "there" enjoying it. When I was young it would get on my nerves to see her disappear, but now, I respect her brief moment of meditation on time,  place and belonging. So when I say I am homesick-its not in quite the same way people who are born and raised in the same place speak of homesickness...

This month is Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States. We are in the middle of a pandemic under an administration that loves corrupted institutions, and living with the most brazen police impunity I have ever seen in my life. As someone who is generally opinionated, I have been speechless. feeling trapped by my two worlds-its not that I don't have opinions or words, its that my two worlds collided so seamlessly that I am ALL, AT ONCE. There is no language I command I can use to articulate how I feel and what I think. It is the first time in the United States I simultaneously feel completely FOREIGN and completely AMERICAN; completely IGNORANT and INCOMPETENT, and completely EXPERT and CAPABLE. I feel so foreign because this moment is not about me; it is about the people who physically built this country still not having a seat at the table. I feel so American because it is about how my separation from "whiteness" brings me closer to their very American plight...

I have been hesitant to share this thought. In some ways it reveals my naivete about past relationships, fears I have of future ones and weakness in relationships all around, However, I have had so many similar conversations with women of all ages, that I thought I would just publicize the idea however underdeveloped, because there is a young woman out there making a life decision right now and may be making the same mistake women have been making for millenia.  The idea first came when I told my aunt that I felt weird not being angry at my ex-husband. Everyone wanted me to hate him, but to me he was a "good man" and I couldn't hate him, to which she quickly replied that was the problem. I asked her to explain further. She said something to the effect of: "Look around, we are surrounded by bad men, now I know you love your uncles and cousins, but would you want to date any of them?" I briefly thought about it-the uncle who chased his wife with a machete for...

Many years ago I was teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies course and the class was stuck on the concept of objectification. After trying unsuccessfully to explain and getting ready to call it quits, a Chicano student raised his hand to help and very clearly and concisely defined the term, providing clarity to his classmates. At the end of the class I congratulated him on doing a good job and asked him how he understood it so well. He responded with something to the effect of "I am Texan, in Texas people like me are referred to as 'hands'; we are either 'good hands' or 'bad hands', but just 'hands'. If we are not 'hands', we either don't exist or are a threat to growers. We are never fully people." It was my first time hearing the term "hands" to refer to agricultural workers. I would later hear it when a grower was upset that one of his "good hands" was participating in a lawsuit for unpaid wages. ...

For the first 40 years of my life I hated you. As a young child I hated that you were neither fast nor strong, as a teenager I blamed you for not having the flexibility that could get me into Julliard, as I lifted weights, I was angry you were not strong enough and as I became a lawyer I hated you for being the kind of body that helped me be a good lawyer.  I didn't just hate you for my reasons; I also brought in people into my life that dumped their own self hate onto you and I agreed with them. You were blamed for their alcoholism, their inability to have an erection, and for holding erections for far too long, for their sex addictions, for their premature ejaculations and for their general unhappiness, what is worse; my hate for you was so strong, I could never fully trust anyone who loved you. But then last year I was in an accident. It would have killed anyone who had a different body than you. The insurance assessor assumed the owner of my car had died and my chiropr...

Historic marker and courthouse where the Scottsboro Trials were conducted I came to the United States as an overachieving teenager. I spent my first summer trying to catch up on all that was American History. I knew I would get along in Math and Sciences, but social studies and history would be what would take me from teacher's pet to just meh. I read voraciously. My concerns over history are obvious; I would be behind my classmates by years. Social Studies was a different beast. My country was known for its corruption, and the U.S. was known for the integrity of its institutions. American institutions were so strong and incorruptible, it gave the entire country free reign to advise and intervene in the governance of other countries, whether or not by invitation. I was excited to learn about this way, maybe I could figure out how to take it home one day. I read every word on every page in every textbook;  I thought books in the U.S were laid out the way ours were. In th...

Over the last few months I have seen several viral racist incidents where self-proclaimed white progressive liberals seemed to hijack a moment to engage with their fellow white progressive liberal peers in a form of enlightenment pissing contest, but where they did nothing to elevate people of color or address the racism. Furthermore, they seem to use these moments to generate some amount of goodwill so that they can turn to tear down a person or community of color. This plays out often enough that I am starting to see a pattern. 1. White person does something racist (which anyone with a brain knows is racist and doesn't even need some in depth analysis-let's use racist lawyer , for example) 2. Self-proclaimed white progressive liberal spends all energy spreading that video and going on about the racism of the racist actor, implying heightened understanding of racial injustices in society 3. This incident is so far removed from the outraged progressive liberal that there is n...

In reference to the Aziz Ansari situation THEM: "They are angry at her for not being the kind of woman we are, the women who own our sexuality, the women who are assertive in our boundaries, the women who enjoy sex so we communicate our needs, pleasures and distastes very clearly; but we are the bad girls, the women men don't marry, the women who teach men how to be good lovers to their wives and "good girl" partners, the women who accepted the second choice of womanhood: Choice 1. Be Madonna, motherly nurturer and free of sexuality and in exchange you will have someone obligated to care for you for the rest of your life or Choice 2: Be the Whore, own your sexuality and all the life it brings with it, but forgo respectability and life partners" ME: This is the best semester to teach the chapter on the Madonna/Whore dichotomy.

I have been fortunate to have traveled several parts of the world. While on my trips, magazines aimed at tourists would indicate that most people in that country lived on less than $5.00 a day.  I saw that number many times and eventually learned that about 2.1 billion people on earth live on less than $3.10 cents a day. In the U.S. most people living on Food Stamps live on less than $5.00 per day. For 2017 I tried to stand in solidarity with the people in the world who lived on less than $5.00 per day. For three days of each week, I would make sure that my electricity and food would not add up to more than $5.00 per day. Electricity was the only utility for which I could measure daily usage; including things like mortgage or car payment would burst that $5.00 per day goal immediately so I did not include them The year started strongly. It turned out that to live on $5.00 or less per day, it helps to prepare your food, and preparing your food requires three things, transpor...

So there has been another mass shooting, and the pro-gun-control folks are already talking gun-control measures and the anti-gun control folks are talking mental health, defense of self, family and country. I am tired of this conversation. In light of what happened in Charlottesville earlier this year, and to Philando Castile last year, I know that these are just delusions of grandeur chatter from the pro-gun group. Chat of primarily weak men relying on guns to help them feel masculine, a masculinity that is lazy, toxic and wouldn't be masculine in any other part of the world. I am not a violent person, have shot a rifle once in my lifetime, have no need to have a gun, but it would be nice to know that these gun-rights people, when debating policies that affect the common good,  would actually be sincere and walk their talk when they have to. But they are fundamentally weak people, with their guns serving as a mask of masculinity they are trying desperately to belong to. I ca...

I was raised far away from "government" in Venezuela. What that meant is that government employees, including law enforcement, could act with impunity because there was no one to report to and there was no one supervising. Growing up "impunidad" was a word you heard all the time, don't talk to the police because they can can act with "impunidad." Impunidad: Impunity- without consequence. Knowing that powerful people could behave with impunity meant that you always avoided them, in most places it is a great honor to have a powerful person in your home or place of business; where I grew up it made you walk on eggshells until they left. When I moved to the U.S. nothing brought more relief than knowing you could trust those who worked for government. If they didn't do their job, there was someone to report to and there were consequences enough times that I didn't have to worry about that word following me around "impunity." You could ca...

Every day I look out of my back door and stare at two beautiful Pine trees. Those who don't know their histories see two well-formed plants that cast shadows, clean air and house neighborhood critters. I, on the other hand, see missed opportunities. Only after looking at what was lost among those trees could I begin to conceptualize how much good has been removed from the human experience due to trauma. I bought my home in 2006 and can assure you that the two Pine trees were planted and transplanted at the same time; they were nurtured (or not) by me in the same amounts. Both trees grew at the same pace for about nine years. Over a year ago there was a huge snow storm that toppled the Pine tree on the left. I tied it back up hoping it wouldn't die. Sure enough, the Pine tree was resilient and survived. In fact, if you were to look at it today you would not know that it once fell over and looks like a model Pine tree. People often see survivors of trauma after they have ...

I remember being a young adult and cramming into a van with 26 other people: this van was designed to hold only nine. Had I been wealthier, I could have gotten on a nicer and safer bus, but I was not wealthy and had to get home ASAP. I hated my country for things like that and loved America because America had nice buses, no overcrowded bus. I had been on American buses and trains while on vacation and they felt glamorous compared to what I had to get on on a regular basis. Years later, I would move to America. I would depend on public transportation to get to work, school and leisure. I lived at the border between a wealthy area and modest one, lucky enough to have been assigned to the wealthier neighborhood's school system. It turns out, PT in America was not that glamorous. The fleets were nicer, but the routes and expense couldn't get me to where I WANTED to be. They were good enough to get me to where OTHERS wanted me to be. I have since moved around and lived all ov...

I didn't know I was fat until I came to the U.S. Up to that point, if clothes didn't look good on me, it was because the tailor didn't know what they were doing....after that point, my body has always been wrong for not being able to fit into clothes.