tramits

so I’ve decided to start again now that I have in fact expatriated. the distant humming of auld lange syne filters in, through the background....

maybe we can dare to call this a career choice: self alienation via geography. it's a great way to keep occupied, and if you are sincere and austere enough, let's just say.... pursue your bliss and the money will follow.

i’m in spain, in the dry and forgotten mini-metropolis of madrid, and the apostrophe is in a whole other place on the keyboard. been here about two weeks and have spent a rather salient part of them doing what there is no word for in english: tramits. tramits, of course: the transliteration of the spanish for tramites, which is sort of verb-noun combo (yo tramito, tu tramitas, vosotros tramitais, etc.) for the doing of bureaucracy.

the doing of bureaucracy in Spain, let’s call it tramitting, is kind of creepy. i have stepped outside the matrix, but into the machine. machine, like, a way old version of the matrix where you still use buttons and switches and EVERYthing is manual.

i am, with some local help, doing tramits to get legal -- the idea is to eventually obtain the ephemeral european passport, and along with it the realization of my hopelessly naive dreams of socialized healthcare, subsidized education and smoking in elevators.

anyway... spain is a bureaucracy factory. there are lots of ministries here.

today --- well, I’m not exactly sure where we went today. I had to basically get a stamped certification that in fact I have never paid taxes in Spain and I own nothing. (that is, if you DON’T have something, you still have to stamp the nothing. take note.) this particular ministry was gigantic with this retro-modern yellowing marble, and there were all these waiting zones, zone A, zone B, zone F... You take a number (like at Baskin-Robbins or the DMV, my only other reference points for “waiting,”) and there are red numbers and they tell you which counter to go to. ah, but first you must know where to take a number, for which you need to go to the information desk to ask, where you take a number. then you go and take a number to be able to get the form that you need to fill out to solicit whatever certificate you came for, for which you also take a number. by the time we got to the point where we knew where we were going and had the form et cetera, the number we got was about 76 numbers before ours, so we went down the bar and got a coffee. but first (I’m not kidding,) we had to pay for the coffee and get a number to pick it up.

i kept making anguished faces and wringing my hands, really quite innocently, not mockingly – I mean, is this not the twilight zone? the strangest part is that this doesn’t seem all that strange to anybody; that there’s like this intuitive sense of where you go to ask for what and what kind of stamps you need and who can give them; also with the bureaucrats - you ask them a question that falls outside their tiny little charted knowledge-world, they will then send you to zone C, where you will take another number...

beñat says not to laugh, this is a sign that everything’s not privatized. well, benat is also sort of half jokingly but then half seriously a stalinist. i've got to say, in 2005 in the first world being a stalinist is really so out it's in. or maybe he's a maoist. i mean, i'm american, no intuition about radical lefist classifications, either, but I sort of suspect he can't really be categorized ... anyway, he's often commenting that we need to burn down or exterminate X or Y. he also advocates very sincerely a world where people do not eat or sleep. he has hair-tearingly frustrating and convincing arguments for all this stuff; as a career self-alien i can announce here (and who's reading, anyway?) that i'm in love with him, despite myself, he's a pain in the ass, but, god, who knows why these things happen. that's right, friends, a scorched earth romance.

anyway, more about my maoist boyfriend - and why?- later. right now it's all about the europe - why? thing.
i am pretty self-conscious about being here, though maybe not as self-conscious or in the same way as my parents, who have to articulate it more than i do at their various neighborhood soirees and to pious, target-frequenter midwest relatives.
the part that concerns me the most is that i'm going to get the nose-job syndrome with european citizenship ---- you know, you think after the nosejob, once you're "pretty," everything's going to be great. but then... you went through it, there's no turning back, and you're still a geek, just now a phony gentile geek.

maybe i'm headed towards being a phony gentile crusty leftist european with my ankle caught in between the gnashing, rusty cogs of socialist bureaucracy, shamelessly wandering around some beach resort in sandals with socks (with one foot hopelessly mangled from the cogs) with absolutely no idea why i left a place where bagels can be readily obtained.

though i'd like to think my ambitions are a little bit sexier than that: what I'm hoping is to really articulate for myself time, food, gender, . i mean, all that stuff that actually is... happening in and around me.
second up is to work on, or rather, create a political conscience, maybe even an activist one (that ideally, at the core, doesn't make me want to throw up).

maybe the truth is I'm attracted to a manual matrix, where you can still see some of the exposed wires.

i am so absolutely overwhelmed by being an american, god. it's going to take me a long time to get untangled. can anyone forgive me for taking a break?

more to come....