thefutureisred

Homeless & Loving It: 2011 Presents Its First Challenge

Only four days into 2011 and absurdity abounds.

We had to move out of the house we'd been renting last Wednesday, and the new house is still a bit on hold due to a series of complications, so just before new year's day, we were, essentially, homeless.

Then Ani and Maxi, two friends of ours took us in. Then Mary, another good friend, invited us to her place for New Year's dinner. Then Dennis, a.k.a Victor -- because apparently Argentines simply cannot understand the name Dennis -- traded a website for his hotel in exchange for giving us a place to live for the next two weeks.

Dennis is fantastic in so many ways. Obviously, because he's given us a place to call home, but also because he walks around all day long in his bikini bathing suit and loves to chat about anything, but especially his girlfriends.

I feel like I'm in some made for TV movie. Something funny, not the cheesy sort of crap you find too often on the Lifetime network. Something you'd find maybe on HBO, you know, creative but allows nudity and obscenity. Keeping that in mind, imagine the scene that followed when we found a bat flying around our room late last night.

The hotel, Campo de Esperanza, is just a little way down the road from our last place, but there is so much more wild life here. Perhaps because of it's proximity to the river?

Mani loves the new place. This photo shows him hunting for a family of cats that lives in the the trees behind the house. Truly, he has not a chance of actually catching them. In spite of his almost fifty pound heft, he's a puppy at heart and the white mama cat easily intimidates him.

Yes, that about sums up life right about now. Am I frustrated? Yes. Am I grateful? Absolutely. The sheer number of people who have helped us most definitely takes the edge off our uncertainty.

Besides, this isn't the first time we've been homeless. It's just the first time that we've done it with a dog and a couch.

Give Me Butterfly Wings: I Needed A Big Blog Break

Photo by e3000               

Sometimes death teaches more about life than what's on my computer.

After almost four months without a word from me, it's time to answer those gentle nudges of "Where are you?" What's going on with your blog?" I've been getting.

First, again, thank you for asking. I am grateful and, as they say, humbled that not only do people actually read this little red thing of mine, but even notice when it's gone. 

But it needed to be. It has become abundantly clear that I needed to focus on my non-blog life. 

The Catalyst

Or should I say catalysts, because it's rarely just one thing that causes change in our lives.

This past July while in New York, we learned from a friend of ours in Bocas del Toro that our old landlord Cher, a really lovely woman, had been murdered. By a serial killer. It almost sounds like a joke, but clearly, it's not funny. Not in the least.

Then, when I got back to Argentina after Burning Man, I learned that another friend of ours from Salta, Diego, had also been murdered. I don't really understand what happened. Apart from some vague intimations about it being a gay-related crime, that the murderer was an exotic dancer.... Quite frankly, that's when I stopped listening. Those details aren't the core of the matter. It is more that a really decent person is now dead for no reason at all.

It really fucks with a girl's head, you know?

I Wanted To Blog, I Really Did But...

I stopped writing soon after I heard about Cher's murder. Since then, the idea of writing about what was going on in my head just felt wrong, but to write about something else seemed forced and a waste of my time. I’d rather paint with Lila or hang with Noah or do something altogether different.

So that's what I did.

I Don't Want To Be Too Late For What's Most Important

With all the traveling, running around, trying to develop programs, meeting people and posting, I felt I never had time for anything. My life too often felt like a massive unfinished to-do list and I was always working to reach a constantly moving horizon.

If I continued like that, I would miss out on my real world. So I had to let go of the online world for a while.

My hits were at an all time high when I stopped writing, and I’ve watched them fall, fall fall, as well as watched how my connections with many of the people I know online have faded. That has been hard to see.

But I had intended give Diego a call and get together sometime, soon. By the time I got around to it, I was too late. I don't want to say the same about Lila or Noah or the other people who are most important to me. I want to be truly present in their lives and mine.

Making A Commitment To Real Life & Community

This week, Noah and I will sign the papers to buy a house here in Salta. It will be our home, yes, but it will also be a community center for traveling artists, writers and teachers. (And will be filmed for an upcoming episode of House Hunters International. We're even flying to NY in February to do some filming there.)

 

So far, we’ve formed connections with local universities and non-profit organizations. We plan to use the internet and social media as a tool to connect students between countries, allowing them to share their work with each other as well as with bring in international artists, writers and photographers, travelers and educators.

The goal of our program, though, goes beyond a creative exchange to an initiative to teach English, keep students in school and ultimately improve their economic prospects by connecting them with an international community.

We just finished our first semester working with 12 year olds at the experimental high school that is a part of the Universidad Nacional de Salta (la UNSa). Next year, we’ll work with the same group of students, incorporate online and gallery exhibitions of art and photography and are working to begin teaching at the two local universities of Salta.

Does This Mean We Will Be In Salta Forever?

It is unsettling to think of being settled. It is overwhelming, too, to commit to one place after being on the move for almost five years.

The underlying assumption of our program is that since it is based on the people, the needs and the soul of Salta, it will not need us permanently to continue growing. We are here until our work here is finished;then we will move on. 

Paper Mache Butterfly Wings and Walks By the River

Along the way of designing the project, I stopped to design paper mache butterfly wings with Lila. We picked dandelions by the side of the river flowing near our house. I stepped away from the to-do long enough to start weekly belly dancing classes with a really fabulous teacher. Someone who will be teaching as part of our community center.

And maybe, just maybe, I've learned a bit to accept that the most important thing I want to realize in this life of mine is how to be patient and not be too attached to any one outcome, because the bottom line is you never know what happens next.

Hey, Future Is Red! Where've Ya Been?

 

Yes, I realize it's been well over a month since my last post. That last post, the one about bulls in the main square of Meynes, said nothing about my sudden disappearance from blogging and from social media for that matter and I've been asked, "Where did you go? What's going on?"

First, I want to say thank you for even asking. The fact that enough people read this blog to care means a lot to me.

This last month, I've been mostly offline traveling and spending time with family. We arrived back in Salta Friday, began a new education project yesterday. I haven't talked much about this project because so many details are up in the air, but soon I'll have something more definitive to say. For now, I can tell you that it was fantastic to be back in the classroom. The students we have are amazing, and I'm really excited for the future of our program.

Tomorrow I leave for Burning Man. You can check out an article I wrote for Craig and Linda of Indietravelpodcast on ten steps to prepare yourself for this amazing event. They'll be publishing a Burning Man packing list in the next few days as well.

I'll be away two weeks, the longest I've ever been away from Lila, and I am feeling apprehensive about it.

In the meantime, I'm still writing and editing at Matador Life where Nick Rowlands and Candice Walsh have been keeping things running at times I'm offline. And I'm working with Simon from Neverending Voyage to rework this blog. I began The Future Is Red over three years ago and much has changed since then. I'd like what I post here to better reflect our new home in Salta and the new work we'll be doing here.

It's been overwhelmingly busy, and I often remind myself of my Five Rules of Banishing Chaos. Mostly of the second step.

It will all eventually get done.

But it's also made me realize, I can't do everything. I'm going to have to make choices. And while we now seem to have a sense of stability we haven't had since we left New York, I feel like now is a time of amazing change.

Earthquakes in Argentina & Chile: No News, Rumor and Tremors In Salta

I was offline and out hiking by the river in Cafayate as aftershocks hit an already badly hit Chile, tsunami fears rose and fell in California and the entire world braced for more.

I heard only word-of-mouth reports from other hikers. One person described how the streets of Salta split, cracked and houses were falling in. I thought the story sounded weird, considering we were in Salta at the time the earthquake hit and didn’t feel a thing. That’s when I was told there had been a second, a much worse one.  Another we met on the path asked if we'd also felt the ground shake or had rocks fall on us.

But we were two hours out on Rio Colorado, so we did the only thing we could do and kept walking.

Even when I was finally able to connect, I was able check the flood of e-mails asking about our well being (Thank you for that!), but still no concrete information about what actually happened. Many things went through my head on the ride home last night.

How lucky we were to be away when (if) such a horrible earthquake hit. It was possible we would return home to find our house in some deep fissure in the earth, but really, who cares if we have us?

It also reminded me how I felt during 9-11. I had a feeling of complete calm, maybe a better word for it is numbness. Maybe that's just my way of freaking out.

I remember the stories reported that day as well. Tanks were rolling through the streets of Brooklyn. Martial law had taken over in NYC, and the sound of sirens and smell of smoke underscored the seeming truth of those rumors.

I thought about 9/12, when Noah and I visited our friend Ali uptown, and how difficult it had been to get home that night. The subway stopped, and we found ourselves midtown east, right next to the Empire State building. Word of mouth news arrived  from all sides. West side trains weren’t running because of a bomb threat in Penn Station. Grand Central shut because of another one.  We decided to walk downtown toward home, when we bumped into a crowd of people moving quickly in the opposite direction.

One shouted out, “You can’t go that way. The police closed the street. There’s a bomb about to blow in the Empire State building.” As she spoke, the people around her moved faster, went from trot to panicked run. I swear, I looked up and in my mind for one split second, I actually saw that New York boxy layer cake landmark explode in spark and fire. First instinct screamed “Run!”.

That is what panic can do.

What would my sprinting off fearfully do? Nothing. If anything, panic makes people unable to take care of themselves.

I’ve always been proud of the fact I was able to quell my own panic in that situation. Then Noah, another random man on the street and I stopped the runners and managed to calm everyone down enough to determine that nothing they’d heard could be verified. Random street man mumbled something under his breath about tourists, amateurs.

 I thought about Haiti and how a 7.0 earthquake there wreaked such devastation, whereas a 6.6 in Salta sent out ripples of rumor, but nothing concrete in Cafayate. Many factors determine the deadliness of natural disasters. Do they occur deep in the ground? What type of rock are they built on? How solid is building code?

I wondered if perhaps building codes been better in Haiti, the damage would have been mitigated. While it doesn't help to wonder what if and should, perhaps putting some of the money currently earmarked for Haiti toward creating a system of more solid, earthquake resistant construction would be worthwhile.

I remembered Noah telling me years ago, when he worked in hazards mitigation for Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, how three and four story buildings tended to be more badly damaged than, say, sky scrapers or one story houses, perhaps not as solidly built.

I thought about hospitals and school collapsing in Haiti and imagined they  are more likely to be in the category of the medium sized buildings that are most susceptible.

I asked Noah if, like hurricanes, there is an earthquake season. He said no. Earthquakes are notoriously difficult to predict. Prediction is based on history and geology. If you live by volcanoes, fault lines, near mountains formed by tectonic plates smashing together, there’s a greater chance of additional seismic activity. If your town has never before experienced it, chances are you won’t any time soon.

I marveled at how one of the very few days I’m entirely offline, this.

I assumed the reports we heard in Cafayate were probably some odd mixture of the news coming from Chile, information about the actual earthquake in Salta and fear, but we had no reason to believe what turned out to be horrid exaggeration was true.

As I caught a first glimpse of Salta glowing in the distance around 1am, I figured that seeing electricity was a good sign. There were no police on the roads, no obvious destruction, certainly not of the scale described in Cafayate.  At home, everything sat in the same place it had this morning. We put a sleeping Lila in bed. Internet was out, but that’s nothing new.

I connected for a little while this morning, but it cut again before I had a chance to read the news. As I write this, I still have little idea what’s going on in the world outside our house.

Photos by Goddard Space Center Photo and Video Blog and Morrissey.

A Brief (I Hope) Haitus

Noah and I have been out of commission since last week. Sick with some kind of flu that has had both of us flat in bed for days watching Star Trek.

Lila is Ok. So in the interest of good health and sanity, I won't be posting my usual Monday blog entry. A winner for the First Day of School Give Away has been chosen, and I'll be announcing that as soon as we're all well.

In the meantime, a question for all of you. I'm working on a redesign of the site and would love to know what you think. What parts of the blog do you like, would you want to see more. And what things would you like to see change?

So yes, see you on the other side of this virus.