El Pack-o, El surpasso, elle Paso, Mexico

I don't think that I would have foreseen college coming at all, even the night before, months ago, so I can't quite tell you how I've ended up here or what I'm even doing. On Monday morning, I boarded a plane at DC National, that was destined hurtling towards Houston, which laid over to El Paso. Once again, I can't quite explain how these things work. The liaisons, the bridging, the transference, the progression of terminal conveyer belts, runway axels, time, Wendy's checkout lines, all escape me in a way that is possible if I had never even had them in the first place. With spontaneity, I commissioned enthusiasm and decided to spend my spring break at the Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, a safe house and shelter for undocumented migrants.
Perhaps I've grown in myriad flutters throughout my teenage years, pulsed by the hot breath of hormones, slapped and chopped by the fear of finality and terror of commencement; and in Paris, alone, I felt self, and probed self, and bathed my hands in the amorphous, ubiquitous ooze of it, and saw life in its shuddering intervals; and I know that there will always be important things for me to do. I'll feel what I have to, and I'll say what is true and important, but I will never do what I need to do unless I understand that it is part of my growth.
I love books too often and often fear investing myself in their whole pursuit. I love music and often listen statically through a CD that I later gravitationally stumble into. I love people and I often look past them, or trace their approachings with glances of exhilarating radioactivity. I let experiences wash over me, but too often I derobe, and am dry in the face of the forward sun.
I love to write, but too often write.

My past month at Middlebury has been a blind sampling of the city on the hill, the American exceptionalist dream, and self-perceived nightmare of privilege. I have been blissful, and wrenched, pried, confused, excited, placid, flacid, tacit, and then there have been days where the world has exploded on my plate. And the propped buildings ahead, and the sprawling bust of the naked hills, and the autocratic sky have been a messy, belting, giggling morning dirge, a meal for me, a day. Everything has been beautiful, every morning a grin, some a smile. People exist as people, and they value things, and so do I. I feel in interaction with people. I even make quesadillas with steak in them.

So I decided El Paso was my appeal to the world that I have neglected for a lot too long. I was raised with an obsession for community and networking. I was raised with a romance and sacrament for cultural development and big ideas. I was taught to love things and know about them, and then to know things and know about those. If I can fault my mother and father for anything, it's for not propagating a blind consuming guilt about my privilege. I've been spoiled, and I realize that. My self-awareness makes no difference in the fact that I'm spoiled, but it makes it easier to come to terms with. And I do not understand the implications of my childhood environment, or worth, or whatever. I've just lived up till now- conditioned with my likes, dislikes, interests, disinterests, character, and sense of comfort. It has been really wonderful. And something has commanded me to change, and live dynamically, and work towards a sense of homeostasis, or perpetual motion, or connection with the outside world.

I make this assertion often that the human condition (if that makes any sense at all) is narcissism. And that what commands our actions, and searches for relationships with people and things and ideas, and motives, is a dream of self-sustaining approval. I think everyone experiences this to some effect, but I am aware of it, so in this post at least, it is mine.

So this trip to El Paso began an important idea to me, and became important. I left for it comfortably. Cascading down the eastern seaboard to the capital, tucked in beds and mats in between, and transferred on flights towards the boundary of Americanism. The border itself, as you land, appears obviously. Mountains, which herald divide, tear out from the ground straight to age, and the deserts are veined with irrigation, plotted with houses and inground pools, and then shrubs crawling with dying breaths towards gated wells, truncated by a chapel, stretched into obscurity down a long dirt road, beating as a figment even in its corporal actuality. The geography was noted, and I won't forget its power, its distinct information that this is a different land.

An ebullient friend of Danny swooped us from baggage claim and brought us to the Annunciation House, where we were introduced to the lot of volunteers, old and new, and we were given a tour. It was all remarkable, and yet I walked through it as though it were vacant, despite the smiling faces that terrified me in their powerful presence. I walked about with other faces in mind, and an obsession with disconnect. A need to understand things other than my haze in the desert, but a command to stumble lost in my own confusion. And a view I won't forget. At dinner we pray in a circle and sit. Once again I speak a different language, but this for now is okay. The guests have cooked with food that would otherwise be unemployed, and wasted, deported to dumpsters, deposed penitentiaries. And the guests begin their silent ritual. They seize their diagnostic dishes in the long light of the big country’s unrelenting grace: light, power, emptiness, a lack of focus, a sparce miseducated misguidance, fell behind the mountains, searching for a lost mother’s womb. And the barometric sparkling of the mountain seam of lights at the end of the night is the living vein that flings determination in some direction, bereft, longing somethingly. But for dinner they eat, and adjust the forks of the children- they serve eachother, and are solicited by volunteers to sign up for future shifts of cooking and cleaning. After dinner we take care of children in the Annunciation main office while the house members and volunteers have their weekly house meeting. The children are out of control and are programmed to smash everything. I make eye contact with the children as they dribble on me. On their chins, down their pant legs, from their cavernous teeth, sprays of saliva escape like a morse code plea. And they are beautiful. They hit each other and scream like any children, and in this pressurized blistered haven on the brink of America, they bond in ways that I will never understand.

The next morning, after a heretical dent of sleep, I wake up exhausted. Danny, Alan, and I rouse, eat, shower and proceed to Annunciation, where Alan, Amanda (a volunteer who occupied Danny's vacancy), and I sorted through an enormous heap of donated clothing. This clothing, donated from a slew of proponents of Annunciation, is sorted, folded, and offered to guests- who can upon their arrival and in increments of both time and necessity, select their wardrobes from the basement outlet. It is a hub of irony for an American, this wonderland of outdated, esoteric cuts of cloth, and because of that, is easy to rebuff. Much of the clothing smells of the most recent wearer, and various skorts, tank tops, mini skirts, blazers and mittens arrive gnarled and ravaged by the previous owners and means of transportation. Clothing that is indecent or unwearable (by shelter standards), is donated to Candlelighters, a NFP chain of thrift stores that funnels all earnings to foundations of cancer research. However, after a night of looking down at the playing children, with their standardly programmed stranger danger fear, recapturing two siblings in Buzz and Spidey shirts, and Raina, in a green jumper lapeled with a daisy, I began to picture shopping mothers, merchantesses of images of their childrens' youths, illustrators of a family portrait. It was no longer ironic clothing, it was what it was. Danny told me that once a black bag was donated to the shelter with empty pill bottles and trash in it. Families cannot wear that. Childhood wardrobes exist to solipsize your family in a world free from needles, guns and grass. Amanda, Alan and I hummed to soft rock while this all simply tip-toed in my peripheral psyche. I sniffed the clothing and whittled away at the astronomical pile toppling to the ceiling.

We spent the afternoon in the beginnings of contempaintion. Prep for the next day's job of office upkeep, we whittled away at irregularities in insulation and roofing, induced coats of paints, and listened to Shakira. At night, it was Alan's birthday. At Casa Viedes, the apartment that houses mostly women and families, Naomi and Alan had their joint birthday party. It seemed to be engineered a lot more for Naomi, as ", Alan" received a totally separate sign from "HAPPY BIRTHDAY NAOMI!," but it was authentic, and wonderful. There was a buffet, crepe paper, and two cakes- one was flavored pineapple, with a swirled ALAN, and one was funfetti with cherry icing, flowered in the corners with strawberries, with a peppy NAOMI. Dinner commenced in a piñata maming, during which I projected the tail of the donkey into an elderly woman, and then a dance symoposium, where I looked generally ridiculous.

Yesterday was overwrought with touches and touch-ups, hustling with frames of beds on our backs for the establishment of a new apartment, a dinner at the Tap- burritos and nachos!- and a ritualistic creasing and crating of invitations to a Voices of the Voiceless gala. In a blur, I was transformed after a nap into new ideas, where I hiccuped in repose till morning dawned in me.

Alan and I made a date for Americanized breakfast today. We found the only hip, exploitable coffee joint in the city, "The Percolator," and took in the surroundings over iced coffees. Then a ramble towards the far west of the city, where Alan's hair was cut. We spoke of French, of James Dean, of Alan's new French James Deanity, and then a day on shift at the Annunciation House.