exasperation

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Deny thyself, take up the cross, follow me, blah blah blah....

God, there are so many ideas make a lot of sense in theory, and even in practice, but come into fierce conflict with...ME. Me and my selfishness. God I am selfish. I never realized how selfish I was. Please don't write me emails saying, "wow Cami, you're a really nice person; you don't need to be so hard on yourself." It's not about that. I never knew what poverty was until I left America and came to India. In the same way, I never knew what selfishness was until I came here. That doesn't mean that India has some special breed of less-selfish people who taught me how to be less selfish. Indeed, I am still very selfish. So are Indian people. But what India has been able to do for me is...not give a damn about me. I am a small, small person with my own set of special needs and cultural values and special beliefs, and India has taken a big crap on all of that. I know I needed it and I still need it, but this really sucks. I am tired of everyone insulting me and mocking me and criticizing me and hating me and not encouraging me in any way whatsoever. I am used to having a somewhat gratifying life, and it sucks to be thrust into this life that is really not gratifying at all. And I think it's good and natural, actually. I think a lot of people make the mistake that life is SUPPOSED to be gratifying, satisfying, rewarding, happy, and easy. Well, I'm here to say that I don't agree with that idea. Life is educational, yes. Life is interesting. Life is emotional, and long. But it's not easy. Any time your life is easy and rewarding and happy, you can just know that a lot of time and effort and contrivance went into the creation of that particularly smug and cozy emotion. That's not the way it is. Take a look at the bare dirt earth, and then glance upwards at a sparkling glass city skyscraper, and think about what a long fall it is to where we started from. Little by little we have been making "progress," seperating ourselves from our roots with little improvements and advancements, and suddenly we've found ourselves on the summit of a mountain. The problem is, we're never going to be able to remember how to get down. We've been happily sitting on this mountaintop for so long, we don't even remember where we came from, or how to get back to that place should a crisis occur.

I really am tired of people insulting me, though! What is that? What is it with this week and people insulting me? Everyone, from children to staff to near-strangers has something rude to say to me. Here are a few examples:

*your nose is big
*your hair looks like it's been chewed by a rat
*you're lazy
*your room is dirty (rather true)
*your voice is nasal
*you don't sing well
*you don't know how to wash your clothes, cook anything, or do anything
*you don't know how to use a gardening hoe to cut long grass

Okay, I don't remember all of them, but it's a general idea. Maybe all of it is true, maybe it's not; that's not the point. What is the point? The point is that I feel hurt and insulted and belittled, and that is an indication of my pride. My pride is being taken to the slaughterhouse. Did I mention that this sucks a lot? But like I said, it's good for me. I am a spoiled brat. In America, there's nothing so easy as feeling cool for no reason. I can just jump into my car, roll all the windows down, turn up my radio full-blast and drive around my neighborhood. Instant coolness. Why? No reason. I'm just cool. Driving is cool, music is cool, wind is cool, and the combination of all these things is ultra-cool. I have no such delusions of coolness in India. I eat rice every day. Can I trick myself into believing I'm cool because of this? Am I cool because I washed the dirt off my feet when I came home? Am I cool for saying the rosary with everyone else, as I do every single night? I am not. I am not cool. I am not feeling cool. God I miss feeling cool. You know what else makes a person feel cool? Rap music. And it's cool to like sushi, and Thai food. There is nothing to feel cool about here. There is nothing to identify myself with; and even if there was, there would be nobody to appreciate my "coolness," because there's nobody here.

Do you know what's gross? There is really no sewage system here. The "sewage pipe" is a giant, open gutter--like a big concrete trough. These troughs flank both sides of every road. Sewage, which is crudely directed from toilets into these troughs, must then be swept through the troughs with stiff whisk brooms. In this way, you can at least partially sweep the sewage out of "your" trough and into the open public trough. This job, in our house, is held by Pinkey Baido. The baidos work so hard it's not even funny. When they get a spare minute they basically just collapse into a chair and fall asleep sitting up, but they hardly ever get a spare minute. Cooking from scratch for forty people, cleaning the entire house with a rag and a whisk broom, walking the children to school, buying giant (heavy) propane cylinders and then bringing them home in a rickshaw, buying vegetables in the hot dusty marketplace, washing the childrens' clothes by hand, ironing everything, sweeping sewage through the sewage trough, dusting the furniture, making tea, waiting on guests who come to visit, cooking for guests who come to visit, gardening, sewing, washing the kitchen, and pretty much everything else that needs to be done. Right. And I'm the guitar teacher. Very useful.

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