white girl problems: part 1

the transition back to life in Costa Rica hasn’t felt as smooth this time around. not least because i left my heart in San Diego. 

but also because i left a lot of other parts of me there, too. it turns out i’m discovering this whole slew of identity crises coming at me all at once in this interim phase between being there and being here. the no-man’s-land of transitioning from one reality into another where you don’t feel grounded in either because you don’t quite know who to be or how to be in one or the other. unsettled. incomplete. 

yep, white girl problems. this time, of the lizard-like variety.

see what i mean? it doesn’t make any sense.

i got back on a Monday after nearly four months away, working as a writer, living as a lover, and settling into SoCal sunshine. without my noticing, it had grown comfortable, being there. my heart barely reacted to the once anxiety-ridden commutes down the 5 in morning traffic; now i’d be eating my breakfast banana, curling my eyelashes and talking on the flip-phone on speaker in my cleavage, switching lanes like no big deal. i’d stopped missing bugs. i’d remember to bring a sweater to work and take sunny phone-call breaks instead of freezing my skin off in the office’s centrally controlled air conditioning 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. i’d suit up in 4 millimeters of neoprene and paddle out into 2-foot slop with a smile on my face instead of grimacing at the frigid, swell-less thought and going back to sleep. i’d stopped writing poems about the sensationalized fear-driven news programming i had no choice but to watch from the treadmill; now i’d just try to keep up with the closed captioning as my eyes bounced in rhythm with my worn-out sneakers, forgetting to judge all the things i hated about living in the USA. i’d gained 5 pounds of consumer culture on my hips and thighs. and i didn’t really care. i was my gringa self in all of her glory. and i kinda liked her. other people seemed to like her, too.  

“he’s like a chameleon.” years ago, i overheard a friend criticize someone he knew for a unique character flaw. “it’s like he changes his personal identity depending on the company he’s with or the scenario he’s in.” hmmm, i thought. that sounded familiar. but i didn’t think it was such a bad thing. i actually thought it was admirable, perhaps the embodiment of an evolved, ego-less being, who makes himself at home in any given situation by adapting to the circumstances. an acceptance of the subjective interrelationship between self and society. that image of the chameleon has stayed with me as i go about my wanderings, adjusting to my realities as my environment dictates. so far, it’s been easy-breezy and excitingly unpredictable. my colors often felt beautiful.     

the guitar orchestra of the University of Costa Rica serenaded us in the crowded aisle of the Jet Blue sky just before landing in San Jose. my mom waited for me longer than usual outside the airport as i fumbled to fabricate a return-ticket i hadn’t booked to satisfy Costa Rica’s now apparently well-enforced entry requirements. my foreign-feeling Spanish was unconvincing; luckily, my phony travel documents and grumpy gringa demeanor passed the test. mom and i drove home like chatty girlfriends, no beats skipped. i hugged my dad and kissed our AmaTierra family hello, catching up on life and death. i unpacked and re-packed and gave myself a pedicure and wrote in my diary and crawled into bed. i couldn’t wait to sleep. i was happy to be home. other people seemed happy, too.

but rainy season smelled uncomfortably damp on my pillow. and i didn’t quite accept the tiny spiders and their flimsy webs behind my bed frame. the cicadas wouldn’t shut the fuck up. i sort of missed the borrowed air mattress on the floor in someone else’s spare bedroom. and i really missed the man who slept on it with me.

on a Tuesday, i slipped back into life as it was as if i’d never left. making up for lost time and fulfilling work obligations i’d been sidelining by taking the job in San Diego. now i had to show i was committed to being a part of the UPEACE campus community, finding myself nearly on board with embracing my fate as full-time doctoral student, making myself worthy of the extravagant $700 a month stipend they were paying me to stay on top of deadlines and exist within reach. i read and wrote and met with smart, experienced academics who gave me tips and told me my project was too ambitious and used big words like epistemology, which from now on i will commit to memory and try to use in a sentence like ‘duh, of course i know what epistemology means, and omg aren’t you an idiot because you don’t.’ i was working on becoming my intellectual smarty-pants student self again.

on the weekend, i flailed around in head-high waves i hadn’t seen in months, wobbly on a board i had left behind, hoping my shiny new locally-shaped custom thruster would be awaiting my return. it wasn’t. i dutifully showed up late, post-surf, to the Pura Vida No-Pro, an annual volunteer beach day event for orphan kids, trying to make myself useful and force small talk among the sea of like-minded acquaintances brimming with charity, the three-to-one volunteer-to-orphan ratio slightly uncomfortable for all of us. my social anxiety felt impossible to bear, so instead of getting day-drunk and shining it on for another few hours, i slipped out and took off. i couldn’t fake another smile.

i went back to work on Monday, sitting at my desk making to-do lists and wasting time on facebook for a week. the roosters’ 5am daily alarm-clock cluck-fest was not cute; sleepless on the other side of the window, i plotted their cock-a-doodle-demise in some form of stew. somehow, i eked out a final draft of my dissertation proposal, pretending i cared which methodology made the most sense for my research project i wasn’t convinced i even wanted to do. skype-ing with my new long-distance non-boyfriend brought temporary relief, followed by bursts of reality that we live in separate countries for the more-than-foreseeable future.

and now it was Thanksgiving, and it was lovely and i played daughter to my parents and girlfriend to my soul-sisters who i love but who i didn’t feel quite at home with just yet.

it wasn’t them.

it was me.

and that was really fucking annoying. why can’t i just jump back in like i’ve always done? change my chameleon skin to adapt to the colors of my new and familiar surroundings? why was i missing a place i had been ready to leave and people i had only just begun to know? why didn’t i feel at home at home? alone time in a cave for a month wouldn’t even be enough to get my shit sorted. because how do you feel whole when parts of you aren’t where they should be? when certain layers aren’t flaking off as fast as you want them to, and new-old skins aren’t regenerating like they used to.

on Friday morning, i went to my new transpersonal psychologist for a free intro session. i whined about my white girl problems for a long half-hour. she put them into perspective in a simple instant: “you can be everything everyone wants you to be. or you can be you. it’s like that saying, ‘everyone loves you, except for you’. her message resonated with my creeping sense of new-found obligation that didn’t sit well with my ‘live your soul purpose by living the life you want’ philosophy. she asked me what i thought i needed to live my ideal life in this moment. i cried when i told her i just needed space to be me. that sounded easy enough.

but that wasn’t the whole problem. i didn’t just need alone time to process and quit my gringa reality in exchange for the person i am in my Costa Rican environment. that felt like a denial of parts of myself i actually liked and came to identify with. but i wasn’t sure if those parts were actually parts of me or just colors i wore to adapt to the cultural circumstances around me. and which of the good parts of my Costa Rica self had i denied in the process of accommodating my USA reality? how much of my gringa self was actually me? how much of my Costa Rica self?

unsure who to be in the space i thought i needed to be me again, alone time started to look like more of the problem than a strategy toward a solution.   

because how does the chameleon know what color to be when he’s all by himself?

…reptilian angst my existential crisis. 

flow: a gift of feeling

three drops? that's it? you have got to be kidding me. i just came off a week-long colon cleanse, i haven't eaten sugar, wheat or dairy in nearly a month, and i'm fermenting enough kombucha in my kitchen to eradicate cancer in a two-mile radius. how on earth could this be happening? discouraged, frustrated, and now a little more than concerned, i didn't bother flushing. not that anyone would have noticed.

what started as slight water retention and a feeling that i couldn't quite relieve myself fully, had now become serious and i couldn't pee at all. my urine test had come back 'completely normal' with no sign of infection, so technically (in Western medicine mumbo jumbo) there was nothing wrong with me. right. tell that to my throbbing kidneys and swollen bladder kicking and screaming for someone to open the fucking floodgates.

once i told her my pee test was inconclusive, the pharmacist denied me any medication and told me i had a 'serious medical condition' and needed to go see the doctor. i pleaded with her to let me try the anti-bacterial elixir that might do the trick if i had a bladder infection, and she finally relented. she told me to take one packet and that if i didn't start feeling relief in an hour, i should go straight to the clinic. come on pee-pee potion, let's make magic; mama don't wanna spend the night on dialysis in the creepy clinic.

earlier in the day i had sought refuge in my chakra workbook, hoping a more holistic understanding of what's going on in my bod might shed some light on the subject (or at least provide some quality bathroom reading while i sat chest-over-thighs praying for a miracle). Kathy Pike, author of Pathways to a Radiant Self: A Journey of Growth and Discovery with the Chakras, identifies the second chakra, svadhisthana, as the energy center corresponding with the lower abdomen, the fluids of the body, the bladder, kidneys, sexual and reproductive organs, and the lymphatic system. if the second chakra is blocked or out of balance, these are the areas of the body where we will experience pain or other physical symptoms. Earmarking the pages with my toes, I was all ears.

"Orange is the symbolic color of the second chakra and the element is water.... [it] provides you the space to explore your ability to feel and understand your emotions, your ability to flow in life.... A balanced second chakra in the human body will reflect a person who is in touch with his/her feelings and a person who has the ability to flow in all aspects of his/her life."

"The tears, the fluids of your body, release and flow as the emotions are expressed and the energy is shifted. Being in touch with and expressing your emotions is a key aspect of the natural flow of your being.... Unrecognized emotions and feelings can cause tidal waves and hurricanes in your inner being as they swell and you resist them. This pattern creates a situation in which you may isolate yourself repeatedly from your feelings or people who ignite these feelings, until the force behind the motions becomes unmanageable, like an inner tsunami. Leaving the tsunami untamed allows its power to grow and grow. The resulting dynamic is an inner struggle and frustration that requires an enormous amount of energy to control, and keep at bay, on a continual basis. This energy turns back into the body and the soul creating a deadening of the spirit that may result in sickness or disease.... These emotions are waiting to be released. The resistance to releasing the emotions can often feel bigger than the emotion itself. If you resist, you stop the flow of your life energy."

so if i was reading this right, i had been resisting feeling and releasing my emotions to the extent that my second chakra was so blocked that i literally could not flow.

as a surfer and a writer, flow is obviously something i care about, and i had to admit that both had been feeling a bit off in the past few weeks. i hadn't had much desire to surf, and when i did, i'd felt overwhelmed by panic and anxiety, freaking myself out and falling all over the place. my writing was equally sloppy and it took hours to create mediocre paragraphs that should have taken minutes. aware of this, and now drawing a cognitive connection to the flow-feelings relationship, its ability to manifest in the very ailments i was experiencing, and the need to 'feel my feelings' as the way to unblock my second chakra, somehow i became hopeful that if only i could get a grasp on some deep feelings i had been resisting, i would be able to flow, in all senses of the word. i didn't know what that meant, but i was determined to find out.

i started by identifying present feelings - frustration, fear and anger related to my health concerns and a new sense of conviction that i was going to beat this thing no matter what. in my chakra book, it says that the ocean and movement of the body can help get things flowing again, so lucky for me i'm living beachfront and the swell was peaking today. i paddled out with a vengeance, now on a surf-warrior mission to get my flow back. besides, i'd be damned if my last surf session on earth before dying of kidney failure was anything short of spectacular. i paddled into my first wave with a full-on sense of purpose, standing up fast and pumping down the line, surprised at my renewed fearlessness and lack of hesitation in overhead surf. second wave, same deal. cool and confident, celebrating feeling like me again, splashing off the top and putting some extra oomph in my bottom turn. i'm back.

i came in stoked, a feeling i hadn't felt in a while, to be honest, despite surfing frequently in decent conditions. maybe that means things are starting to shift, that i'm getting back into the flow. i hurried into the bathroom to try my luck. i sat there for a minute, straining uncomfortably... fruitlessly.

fuck. i guess it's not quite so simple. feel my feelings - but how? and what feelings? one thing i refused to acknowledge was unfortunately glaring me in the face, and i finally let it enter my mind once i had reached this low point of exhausting all other possibilities: i had been dreaming about him again despite my best intentions not to, waking up grumpy almost a month now after telling him i thought it best we stop communicating, again. oh god, anything but feel those feelings for the thousandth time. i had put those feelings in a box and thrown away the key, remember? long gone and buried forever. and i was so over it that i wasn't about to let svadhisthana make me dig those skeletons up again.             

defeated and deflated (unfortunately only figuratively), i drank the pharmacy elixir of life and started watching Silver Linings Playbook to take my mind off not peeing and not feeling. I sipped my parsley tea, dosed myself with homemade herbal tincture, and wrapped a bright orange scarf around my second chakra to try and get things moving. maybe if i mix their medicine with my own, something is bound to do the trick. i was enthralled in the flick and hadn't thought much about my bladder until the halfway point when i realized i still hadn't peed and i was past the fateful 1-hour mark after taking the medication. i took a deep breath and stuck it out, promising myself i'd drive to the clinic as soon as the movie ended. i couldn't just leave and never find out if he gets back with his cheater wife or falls for the crazy awesome dancer chick. with no untimely potty breaks (my own 'silver lining', perhaps), i watched it through to the end, content to learn he picks the gloomy crazy one and they live happily ever after in all of their dysfunctional real-ness.

then i cried for an hour.

then i wrote this in a stream of consciousness:

still trying to fill the gap you left. with whatever i possibly can. getting skinny, getting fat. spending savings on undetectable illnesses my body has created to remind me how resentful i am, how damaged this whole relationship has left me. for the person i loved with everything to tell me he won't even try to make it work after everything i've given and forgiven. every ounce of soul - for what? all my dreams are coming true. where are you? and is it really you i miss, or is it me? faking it with a broken smile, a romantic fling, a hard heart to hide the holes. is it that i really think it'll work this time or that i just can't get over not even trying? are you the jouissance of my heart's insatiable desire, a fantasy i created and perpetuated in my addictive imagination? are you content to be? or are you everything i've dreamed, live in the flesh, just taking your time to sort it all out? are you content not to be? unwavering in your indecision, i imagine we'll never know. and i'll just be here living, waiting for the day i stop caring which way your heart will go.

then i got up, walked to the bathroom, and flowed for a full 9-mississippi.  
...and counting.

so happy 30th to a man (or figment of my fantasy) who breaks my heart by doing absolutely nothing.     

coastal development & anthropology of surfing: university field course in Costa Rica

teamed up with Dr. Bro, expert environmental anthropologist-slash-formidably mustached lifelong surfer, we took on a crew of fifteen of UGA’s brightest minds, the kids they pay to stay in-state instead of going Ivy League, offering them the chance to explore Costa Rica’s Guanacaste coastline, learning to surf and studying the relationships between surfing, tourism and development in one of the world’s leading surf tourism destinations. the following are highlights from the course.

1. Marco, Jose and Choco keep it real

after pulling a few teeth, the guys at Choco’s Surf School finally agreed to sit with us on the beach and share about their experiences as surfers growing up in the now bustling tourist town of Samara. they told stories of having to hide their boards on the beach so dad wouldn’t take them away as punishment for not going to class; the days when it was nearly impossible to get a board so they’d take turns on the ones that gringos and family members had gifted them; and how they would never trade surfing for anything on earth. Marco and Jose agreed that Choco‘s classic surf style was the best, with all the kids in town trying to copy his moves – after all, now in his 40’s, he’s one of the original cats from the pioneering generation of Costa Rican surfing. and he kills it on longboard in the national surf circuit.

they reminisced about the old days before tourists starting showing up in Samara, expressing nostalgia for the past, yet acknowledging how tourism had provided them with a legitimate livelihood as the foremost surf school in town. their way of giving back to the community is through using profits to support local kids in surfing and helping keep the beach clean. and they agreed that the only way to protect Samara from ‘becoming another Tamarindo’ is for the community to be organized against foreign interests and the easily-bought municipal government. through his high-fashion mirrored sunglasses – so hot right now -- Marco shared a funny story about how the municipality had sold the soccer field in town to a foreign resort developer, but since his grandfather had gifted that piece of land to the community, they had to battle with the government to revoke the property title already given to the gringo. in the end, they were successful and the soccer field is still a soccer field, an important cultural landmark in Samara and local mainstay in any Costa Rican town.

gracias chicos, por vivir la pura vida y por compartirla con nosotros. nos vemos en mayo!  

2. turtle world wars

it’s no doubt off-putting when you first hear about a coastal community whose livelihood relies on its national monopoly over the legal distribution of Olive Ridley turtle eggs sold at farmers’ markets throughout Costa Rica. but after we visited the Asociacion de Desarrollo Integral de Ostional (ADIO), watched their informative documentary on a flat screen set up in the Community Director’s backyard (talk about field study!) and had a chance to ask a ton of clarifying questions (all the while drooling over the nonstop perfect barrels on the beach behind us), that creepy feeling about shady dealings in turtle eggs subsided as we gained a clear understanding of ADIO’s work in turtle conservation. for the past thirty years, they’ve teamed up with biologists to protect a 7km stretch of coastline from animal predators and illegal turtle egg poaching, utilizing 900 meters of those 7km for the collection of turtle eggs once every month over the course of three days. the entire community gets involved in the collection process, recognizing that conservation ensures their livelihood, creating a “symbiotic relationship between the turtles and the community,” as Gilbert Rojas explained to us on his back patio. “we help the turtles and the turtles help us.” lead biologist Rodrigo Morera assured us that the eggs extracted from the shoreline represent less than 1 per cent of the total eggs laid each year, and that this past year, nearly half-a-million adult female Olive Ridleys shored themselves to lay their eggs, the highest number recorded in the history of the arribada, the three-day period when the turtles take over the beach every month to lay eggs: an indisputable success story in turtle conservation.

while no one is getting rich from the sale of the turtle eggs, there are tangible benefits incentivizing community involvement and support for the project. each month, community members are entitled to their share of turtle eggs for household consumption, plus a small salary paid equally to everyone involved in the project – the Director receives the same number of eggs and the same pay as the egg collectors, and leftover funds support community projects and social services. With the profits from the sale of the eggs, Ostional now has a community center and functional medical clinic, and members receive health benefits, paid maternity leave and cash incentives for kids to stay in school. where the municipal government may still be unable to provide for the townspeople, ADIO has filled important gaps for social wellbeing: community-driven development in action.  

Despite criticism from other foreign and government-subsidized turtle conservation projects who hate on ADIO for profiting off turtle eggs, it’s clear that their initiatives are serving mutual benefit for both turtle and human, undoubtedly inspiring sustainable development practices across the globe, and it is indeed at least partially because of the profit motive that their conservation efforts have been so successful. And when haters like the foreign scientists at the Leatherback turtle reserve of the Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas, whose nearly 25 year government-funded project to save the Leatherback turtles has been nothing short of a failure (read: current adult female leatherback population diminishing rapidly, down to below 20 total, despite – or potentially as a result of – conservation efforts), the proof is in the (egg?) pudding.

more haters in their midst: ADIO faces real threats outside the turtle nerd world, and we were shocked to learn that Gilbert and his wife narrowly escaped death last year when their house was burnt down in the middle of the night while they were sleeping inside. “they destroyed our transport vehicle, too,” he confided in me as we said goodbye. i asked him if he knew who it was; he raised his brow and looked up at me – of course he knew who it was. “the government?” i questioned, aware of local corruption by means of vigilante injustice. “yeah, in cahoots with the poachers. they’d rather we didn’t exist here.” speechless, i gave him a hug in solidarity, promising we’d be back in May to keep supporting the project.  

i waited to tell the students until we got back on the bus; we learned firsthand it’s not all pura vida when you’re dealing in turtles.

3. changing perspectives

one of the students, admittedly outside his comfort zone, shares with the group that the course and activities have expanded his horizons, provoking him to think about things he otherwise wouldn’t, particularly tourism and development’s impact on local communities and cultures. “i’m not one of those guys you can easily make feel guilty about something i didn’t do,” he said in slow southern. “i’m not gonna feel bad for the Holocaust just because i’m German, but i will admit that coming here and talking to people has changed the way i think about a few things, especially about our role as tourists in developing countries.” knowing that he is one of our most conservative students on the course, this was a sweetly satisfying victory indeed. because that’s all we want, really, and the foundation for why we do what we do: sharing realities to open horizons and potentially shift thought patterns and ways of being toward greater sustainability and social harmony. i’m sure i was grinning like an idiot.

another validating verbatim testimonial: “although i was vaguely aware of some of the issues we talked about, the trip brought them to the forefront of my mind. even though it was such a short trip, i feel like i have a much broader perspective on things--ecotourism, market economics, community activism, foreign vs. local ownership and investment, etc. i loved learning how to surf, and i definitely plan continuing to learn sometime in the future. what resonated most personally with me was when we talked to Javier in the dessert shop near Playa Negra. he talked about living a simpler life and being more fulfilled not in spite of but rather because of it. he was always smiling and seemed to just radiate positive energy. he looked so youthful and happy that i was genuinely shocked when he said he was about to turn 43. i'm glad i was sitting on that side of the table and was able to have a more in depth conversation with him, because it definitely made me rethink the way I live my life.”  he’s right, too, Javier is rad, and embodies so much of what the surfer lifestyle is all about – finding your happiness in nature and the simple things in life, being open to every adventure, and living your dreams one wave at a time.

4. challenging climate change solutions

“but what if i don’t want to compost or make biodiesel in my backyard or do all the things i’m supposed to do to save the planet? what if I’m just not willing to do that?” this honest question -- posed to professor, biodiesel guru and environmental news blogger, Ryan King, whose talk on Safari Surf School’s new biofuel project in Playa Guiones sparked controversy when it digressed into theories of global change science and the destruction of energy infrastructure as green anarchy’s valiant means of protest -- brought existing tensions to light as students reflected on their own roles in climate change and what they could possibly do about it. in a world preaching ‘be the change you wish you to see’, it takes courage to admit you’re not willing to act locally while thinking globally, reminding the environmental movement that it’s still quite an uphill battle, perhaps requiring adjustments in rhetoric and strategy to appeal to those who, quite frankly, might not be rolling up their sleeves and starting the next community garden. we hope they get on board, and they very well might, most likely out of necessity rather than inspired motivation to the save the world; but when these kinds of challenges emerge, we need compassion and real answers, not defensive quips that further alienate those questioning our solutions. how else will we move from preaching to the choir to actually achieving our critical mass?

(un)coincidentally, on the last day of the course, another student’s shirt had written on it in bold block letters: ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. i smiled at the perfect irony and felt en eerie sense of closure as i watched those words bounce through the security checkpoint before disappearing into airport anonymity.

5. the full-circle fallout: embodying that which i despise

two days after the course, feeling pretty damn good about myself that i might have contributed to greater awareness among a group of in-the-know students, i awoke to find this message waiting for me in my facebook inbox:

“what a bad person you are! left my brother hanging! what it's really wrong with you Americans that can insult humble hard working people and simply walk away like nothing! don't you ever get near me! i am tired of dishonest people! be responsible!"

my (apparently now former) friend was referring to an incident where i had reserved 7 longboards from his brother in Avellanas only to have to cancel an hour beforehand when all of the students decided they were tired and didn’t want to surf. understandably, dude was pissed, and i had no clue how to play it. should i have paid him for the boards we didn’t use with money that wasn’t mine for a service that wasn’t rendered? maybe. instead, i apologized profusely and told him it was out of my hands, and that we still wanted to rent boards the next day and that it would be cool if he wanted to charge us extra for what he might have lost in income from the day before. he wasn’t having it, and wasn’t about to reserve boards again without a deposit for a flaky gringa who very well might cancel again at the last minute. i totally understood and told him i’d call the next day if we were going to rent boards. we ended up renting elsewhere to avoid the drama, especially since it was super windy and not that many of the students wanted to surf anyway. i invited him and the other surf instructors to join us for lunch, but got no response. it was probably received as a slap in the face, a pathetic consolation prize for being out the $160 bucks he’d been counting on.

i still don’t know if i did the right thing, but i can’t go back in time and change it, and it still bothers me thinking about it. especially the part about being grouped with ‘you Americans who insult humble hardworking people and simply walk away like nothing”. that part cuts like a knife, since i’ve really worked hard to never embody that image i so despise. in fact, i spent a lot of time in the course itself talking about ownership and how we as gringos have fucked a lot of things up here as tourists and ex-pat surfers trying to live the dream. so being perceived as one of ‘those Americans’ still makes me cringe in my bones, since i’ve always seen myself as one of the good guys trying hard to support local biz and find my niche within the existing community with as little negative impact as possible. but maybe that’s my own naively impossible dream and looking myself in the mirror through the hard words of someone i respect makes it all the more difficult to believe. is there no such thing as ‘a good gringo’? or is it just that so many gringos have given us a bad name that when we make a human mistake or a difficult judgment call in a sticky situation, we’re all grouped together and written off as ‘you Americans doing X thing wrong’? how do we live in the narrow confines of a box like that?

either way, tensions are no doubt rising in the tico-gringo dynamics of puravidalandia, and the surfer community is no exception.  i have a feeling it’s going to get hotter before it gets cool again, but in that scenario, i hope i can still be one of the good guys, even if i never succeed in wiping the gringa stamp off my forehead.