 tropicalia Tropicalia. by Betty Rocker  Why did I
move to Puerto Rico? I ask myself this question a few times a day.
Sometimes I ask with my head in my hands, my thumbs pressing against
my eyes. Occasionally it’s with my head cocked to one side like
a confused puppy, and every once in a while the question accosts me
out of nowhere as I’m happily walking down the street.It’s silly that I keep asking myself, because I know the reasons. I was bored in my yuppie-path, corporate whore life in San Francisco, working for the dot com man. I used to like it but like all new, fun companies it was gradually becoming less fun and more corporate, plus a lot of the people that I liked there left or were laid off. But beyond that, I honestly wasn’t feeling fulfilled. The work was OK and lord knows it paid well but it wasn’t my life’s dream or anything. I felt a bit complacent, so I decided to do something different and challenging, something that made me face my fears. An "old flame", I guess you could say, called me up. Come live here in Puerto Rico, he said. We’ll find you a job and an apartment and you can go to art school. The offer was at the same time so easy and so challenging. Easy because it was all set up, ready to wear, but challenging because I had wanted to learn Spanish, sort out my relationship with him, and go to art school for so long but had lacked the cojones to do it. It was a pretty enchanting mixture so after incredible amounts of deliberation I decided to do it. It seemed that Puerto Rico would be an ideal place to take a break and grow for a while, achieve things that I’ve always wanted to do and not have to worry about following some bullshit linear progression of the way my life is supposed to unfold. It’s a good place for it because it’s very small and I have good connections, so getting set up doing the things I want to do is easy. It’s also very cheap here, in terms of both cost of living and the cost of education, so I don’t have to kill myself working a full time job and trying to study. I keep getting this rainforest image of Puerto Rico, this productive, fertile land that fosters growth. It seems you can come here, plant some roots and the sun and the soil and the water and the ocean soothe you, force new shoots, and smooth out the brown spots like some kind of magical tonic till you are the perfect specimen you’ve always wanted to be. So here I am. I’ve been here for 2 weeks, but I haven’t written anything yet because I’ve been culture shocked and depressed out of my mind for most of it. I have panicky moments when I feel like I can’t do it; I can’t learn Spanish, I can’t go to art school, I can’t work things out with my old boyfriend. Actually, to call them moments of panic isn’t exactly accurate, it’s more like there’s a whitewash of calm over a wall of panic that peers through its veneer every once in a while. These moments of panic sometimes get exacerbated when I have one of those little inter-cultural hiccups that invariably occur when you’re in another country, but then those are also some of the most stimulating rewards of travelling. This place is so strange. I keep saying that this island is basically a big exclusive clique that’s impossible to break into, because everybody knows everybody by at least three different routes. When two Puerto Ricans meet up they start playing six degrees of separation with each other until they’ve found four or five ways they are connected, and if you aren’t in that system it’s difficult to meet people. That and they have their own secret language that is neither english nor spanish. Forcing them to speak english is cumbersome and won’t win you any fans, but they don’t let you speak spanish with them because well, frankly their english is usually better than your spanish. And then you wonder if you really even want to learn spanish here because it’s so riddled with anglicisms that it probably isn’t going to fly if you go to say Spain or Chile or what have you. The people are intriguing, though. In some ways they are very friendly. They have such strong family ties that they are used to constantly knowing what’s going on in a number of different people’s lives. My mother would call it being "enmeshed", which is just a fancy psychiatric term for being all up in other people’s business all the time. But it’s a little disconcerting to be talking to the mailman and get cross examined on why you’re here, what you’re doing, how you know the people you are staying with, and when you fumble with some vague explanation like "oh, we used to go out, and now I’m back," he won’t just let sleeping dogs lie but instead will question, "what do you mean you’re ‘back’" and you have to give him a rundown of your entire gruesome, tangled lovelife. And then there are people like the lady pictured, who seems to basically spend her days stomping around the sidewalk outside her house helping people park. Oh no, she’s not panhandling or anything like that. I think she just has too much time on her hands and you know, hangs out and helps people park. Another problem the American traveler will face is the whole horita, mañana attitude that you’ve probably heard about. Things move on their own timeline here and you better just get used to it, son, because bitching about it or trying to change it is only going to lead to an awkward interchange with more mitigating promises that are meant to soothe you far more than they are meant to be kept. It gets a bit frustrating when you really, really want your own place before classes start but the realtor keeps making appointments to sign the lease and then not showing up for them, because the owner writes up the lease herself and she hasn’t done that yet. One exception of this laid back attitude is anytime anybody gets in a car. Then normally laid back people turn into psychotic screaming resentful hell devils. Forget using your turn signal to change lanes, because they will not let anybody change lanes in front of them and will speed up if they even sense that you might be thinking about changing lanes. We’ve missed many an exit on the highway because of this neurotic behavior. Sometimes they don’t like people in other lanes to pass them, so they’ll take up two lanes. I don’t know where the race is to, but the second they get in their cars they’re trying to get somewhere, and faster than everyone else on the island. I swear to god, it reminds me of this motorcycle racing video game I used to play called Road Rash. Half the point of the game was to get to the finish line but the other half was just beating up on the other players by kicking, punching, chaining or clubbing them. So you never know which attitude you are going to get, the laidback whatever whenever attitude or the now now now fast food mentality. Even the pool rules are like that here, slop counts until you get to the eight ball and then they get all anal and you have to put the eight ball in the same pocket you put your last ball in. I ran into the fast food mentality the other day, when I took my cell phone in to get my voicemail fixed. I told the lady my phone number but she screwed it up by one digit because she didn’t understand my English too well, so she called the wrong number and hung up. I proceeded to get literally 8 more phone calls that day from those people asking me why I had called them. I mean it’s pretty obvious what happened, because my phone number was one digit off from theirs, but they couldn’t put two and two together. They were really nasty the first time they called back so I sort of hung up on them, finally that night at around 12 AM, seven hours after I had called them I broke down and told them what happened with the voicemail and they seem to have accepted that explanation. So living here is like dealing with a person with a split personality, and you’re never sure which personality you are going to get. Either way people are extremely assertive, whether expressing interest and curiosity or impatience and anal retentiveness. I’m desperately trying to find my place in this whole mess and learn the language, but at the moment I feel pretty incapable of doing so. Classes start this week (!) and I hope that will help, or at the very least make or break me and put me out of this intolerable cultural purgatory. Should be interesting… check back soon. |
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