so there's no realy reason for this except procrastination

Abuse

Door slamming, I remember the sound, the screams, clutching the golden, golden knob to close it, shoving clothes, stuffed animals under crevice between wood and floor, pushing chairs, our tearful selves against it, but he charged in anyway.

            I don’t remember what followed.

Eyes flashing, I remember the horrid blue gleam, running away into a barricaded room, afraid of dying, burying hiding under laundry suffocating from the force of my own lungs beating pounding choking on teardrops, screaming voice “You can’t leave until you forgive me.”

            I don’t remember what followed.

She tells me, what she remembers, he hit and denied, hit and denied and laughed when we cried and said we were beautiful, but stupid inside and bit, ruptured pride and screamed and broke things but always

denied.

            I don’t remember.

but the silence speaks larger than the echoes

Its nice to know I make a difference sometimes

I'm not the kind of person that does things a certain way because it would be easier that way, or because that's how everyone else does things. The things I do I do because I think they're right, or so as to prevent myself from having regrets. Its not the way that's easy, or that makes the most friends, but its not boring either. And every once in awhile I find it instantaneously rewarding. 

For example, Monday this week, I went out for Tapas with some friends to avoid studying. So here's the group: Paco (best buddy in Spain) Juanma (his ASSHOLE boyfriend) Mery (Italian girl) and Ernesto (cuban guy). Why is Juanma an asshole? Juanma is the type of person that thinks its perfectly okay and acceptable to take out his anger and frustration on other people (whether through insulting them or, in the case of his boyfriend, hitting them) , and takes pleasure in making other people feel worse.  Anywho, we're sitting at a table and Paco starts tickling Juanma. J takes out his lighter and burns Paco's finger. I've seen him do likewise things before to Paco, but this time, I COMPLETELY FLIP. 

Me: WHAT THE C*** DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?? You can't just do that, that's F***** UP!!!
Juanma starts waving the flaming lighter in my direction, trying to intimidate me like he likes intimidating everyone to make himself feel potent (which in my opinion is a pretty sick way to treat people you supposedly care about).  I stick my upraised middle finger straight in his face.  Twice. If it weren't for the fact that I think violence is the sickest and most putrid way to settle disputes I probably would have slapped him. 

He's obviously not used to that kind of reaction. What does he do? The turd TURNS AWAY FROM ME and starts using his "oh pity me" voice to MERY and says, "but....he was tickling me!"  

oh that totally TOTALLY was underhanded and manipulative and PISSED THE CRAP out of me and I sputtered something very ingrammatical that was meant to be "Oh, as if THAT'S a good excuse for pulling out your goddamn lighter and BURNING THE FINGER OF THE PERSON WHO LOVES YOU MOST IN THIS WORLD" but it came out "AS IF THERE'S A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO!!" 

Mery tried calming me by saying, "Katalina, you have to understand these spanish." That made me twitch and I inadvertently knocked over my glass (which was luckily empty) and if I recall correctly, I think I said, "I don't want to." 

There was tension and awkwardness for a bit. I would like to think its because they knew I was right, and ashamed that it took the one who'd been in that group for the least amount of time, and even worse the one who could least speak the language, to speak up against it. 

Unfortunately here the story takes a nasty turn. Paco took up trying to smooth things over by making cheerful comments, smiling, the kind of things people do when they want to smooth things over and pretend nothing happened. I smiled back and I can tell you that was one of the sickest feelings I have ever experienced. It felt like with that smile, I erased the truth and importance of what I'd just said. In retrospect, I think I did it partly because I'm used to the "go with the flow" attitude that all the study abroad advisors say one must take when experiencing life in a different country, but the other part of me, sadly enough, did it because I didn't know what else to do. If I EVER find myself in a similar situation again in the states, I will NEVER AGAIN erase my words with a smile. 

My promises to myself keep getting harder to keep. First there was the preschool promise: to never be like those other girls who were mean and didn't let you play with them. (that was quite easy, and constantly reinforced throughout elementary school.) Then I guess the next would be: "Don't let others have a good reason to insult you." (they can have all the bad reasons they want, just as long as they're without foundation." Somewhere in High school there was: "Do not let yourself become cynical: there are good people and good things in this world too, and in being cynical you only add to the bad." Senior year of high school: "Given: there are many kinds of love, and you therefore love more people than you have grown up believing you do: action: tell those you love that you love them, no matter what kind of love it is, and even if you know they will not say they love you back." Sophmore year in college: "You can do things and later regret them, but don't take inactions that you will regret". Winter break of this year visiting France: "Never give up." and now "no erasing your words with smiles".....One of these days I'm going to have to add "stand up for yourself, too, not just others," but I think one promise is enough for today. 

hm. wow lots of information. ah well. I suppose I don't really care if someone I don't know reads this because they don't know me and I don't care about their judgement anyway. And those who know me probably already have their opinion made. And these are things I think even when its not two or three or whatever time it is in the morning.

oh right back to the title I think that even though I felt sick after smiling, Juanma seems nicer now. Its possible that he's only that way to my face, but I do think that telling him he can't just burn people when he's angry, and not backing down when he tried to intimidate me had an affect on him. Quite possible that's never happened before. And that's why I wanted to say, its nice to know that sometimes taking the not-easy route has its rewards. (Plus I've been wanting to yell at him all semester, and now that I finally did it, I can say that I've completed one of my promises--I can't regret inaction now).  

justice is not very comforting

Well, I finally sent in that complaint form about my host family last semester. It was hard to do, because I basically had to call up a bunch of unpleasant memories to write it. By the time it was done, I was jittering with anxiety. 

My complaint´s been processed. The girl (Liz) who was living there this semester has been quickly moved out. It was ugly. The host mum was yelling at her, trying to guilt trip her, basically being a bitch. The program directors were not very nice to her either, pulling manipulative tactics, guilt trips. They showed up to move her out at an awkward hour of the night, without having told her aforehand that they were going to move her out. It seemed the higher-ups had a "discussion" with the program director that did NOT go over well, and he was taking it out on Liz. The program directors don´t seem to be aware of my email. Black clouds of drama loom on the horizon.

My ex-host mom has been removed from the business. Not just fired; she is not allowed to host any more students that go to the school I go to. 

There are several emotions plummeting through me at this current moment. 

Firstly, there´s an anxious and sickly churning in my stomach, a worry for this coming semester. I don´t like antagonizing people, but I don´t like putting up with bullshit either; I did what I had to do and that may have made things more difficult for myself. Who knows what the program directors are going to be like now--at least I know the higher-ups are receptive to my complaints, though. Its a good thing the hard-vs-easy distinction isn´t quite as important as the wright-vs-wrong distinction. And at least, I like a challenge. 

Secondly, I´m frustrated that I hadn´t thought of doing that earlier. Yay, its great that I helped future generations of study abroad students escape the clutches of psycho-host mom, but how does that help me? (insert self-interest: damn econ class, I can´t think of anything without inserting econ terminology anymore!) What if I´d had the foresight to complain to the higher ups earlier? How would my study abroad experience have improved? Could I have avoided the last month of sheer hell? Or was it necessary for me to suffer to write as good a complaint, so that other people have a better time?

Thirdly, I´m feeling very powerful. I´ve never gotten anyone fired before. My words are all the sudden much more important than capable of proving whether or not Shakespeare meant for Hamlet to be a role model or a dunce--they really can shift reality.

Fourthly, as a writing major and a language fanatic, I´m very pleased with my persuasive writing ability. WOOT!

missage

Today, while procrastinating on finishing my essay for my "imagenes de las mujeres en la literatura espa~nola" class, I was looking through my old emails at my xanga subscription digests from bygone ages. (I just figured out how to read in binary, and I was looking for one message a friend sent me a few years ago and refused to tell me what it meant. Now I can decode it! sweet victories.) ....Yes, there are still a few digests from my highschool days collecting dust in my inbox.

I smirked at some of the quizes whose pictures had dissappeared due to having been removed from whichever photo-hosting site in which they used to reside, smiled at those pictures that still remained. I laughed at the cute poems and photos of people, computer-generated hexcode images, complaints from people from back in the day.

It made me realize I really miss my friends from high school. I mean, I knew before that I missed them, but it helped put it into a blatant contrast.

I miss LGHS, I miss SFHS. I miss UCSD, too, but I feel like most of my real friends I left behind when I packed my bags for the dorms.

I had a dream the other day in which I was walking around the perimeter of my elementary school in the autumn, with fiery amber-red leaves falling from the trees, coating the sidewalks, draping my view with a vibrant sepia, the color of faded photographs. I crossed paths with a short friend from LGHS, who although is not a child, has always been associated in my head with childhood and youth, due to her short stature, playfulness, and childlike manner of speaking. In my dream, she asked me, "why did you leave us?"

Its dreams like that that make me wonder what the fuck I'm doing here in Spain. Obviously, I'm staying for the rest of the year; I'm excited about living in a dorm, away from the hellish host fam, and making my spanish skills uber-sweet. But still. We're trained to think that exploring the world is a good thing to do, that it makes us deeper persons, but I feel that after a certain point, one's experience of new cultures and ideas is saturated, and starts spreading thin. More than ever, I feel drawn to staying in one place, and exploring the personalities and customs of the people who are already close to me, the people I already care about, rather than consistently push forward and explore things that are "new and exciting".

I have a lot of webjournals. Xanga, Myspace, Livejournal, Blogspot, Facebook...While I was happy when I only had Xanga, and joked about the people who had fifteen zillion different journals, I eventually did collect several, as there were different people I could reach with each one. Xanga is for my high school friends. I'm inclined to post this to one of my other journals, because there are definitely some people from UCSD who I am missing like the hole of a doughnut, but I also miss the daily rants, the coloquial, physical presence of these friends. I wonder if when we're all done with college, we'll all be living in relatively the same area--I doubt it. I find this depressing; that school, careers, individual motivations do not help us to select our communities, rather, to separate us from the people and friendships we love. I shrink from the example of my parents, whose closest friends have never been a part of my life--only a glimmer in the eye with the pronunciation of the name, the occasional christmastime letter, laced with photos of unfamiliar faces. Always unfamilar faces. And while the idea of exploration and new adventures is tantilizing, and the posibility of regret for being locked into one place due to attachments repugnant, I always seem to find that the adventure is never as exciting nor as gratifying as the smile or hug from a friend I love.  

There are many things I could do with my future. For the most part, I have no idea what I want to do as a profession. Sometimes I can't even figure out what I like to do as a hobby, and I find myself resorting to discovering myself through understanding things that I do not like, that I do not want. And the one thing that I know I do not want in my future is a lifetime of unfamiliar faces.

I wonder if anyone else has an emotional attachment to their xanga anymore.

damn foreign TAs...