so white right now

"hop in and drive" he said, coming around to the passenger side before i could get my bearings, the red light about to turn green in front of us informing my split-second non-decision outside the Old Town trolley station. i hopped off the curb and onto the street, throwing my backpack in the backseat before climbing in behind the wheel.

...i guess if i was getting kidnapped i might as well drive myself there. most likely at gunpoint. death by Craigslist my chosen way out.

i pressed for the clutch that wasn't there, challenged to find the shifter thingy, the automatic transmission unfamiliar in Tony's forest-green 1998 Honda CRV with 148,000 miles on it. the clean, empty interior stank like cigarettes. i kind of liked it.

no doubt in my mind, this car was stolen.

puffy black curls hid beneath his Padres hat. i checked myself out in his mirrored sunglasses, worried he was hiding more than just his eyes behind the lenses. i liked the freckles on his broad nose and wondered how much black he was (maybe half, i decided). i remembered his voice from our phone calls that morning, smooth and logical as we planned our meeting. he didn't sound black.

"i'll pick you up from the station," he had said a few hours earlier. famous last words, i had thought, skeptical.

he looked cool, like someone i'd probably hang out with in Costa Rica.

but this is San Diego, i reminded myself. this is the USA, remember? where the color of your skin is never just the color of your skin. and white girls like me don't often find themselves in the company of half-black men like Tony. it just doesn't happen.
and in San Diego, we just wouldn't have inhabited the same social space - ever - let alone be sharing the same breathing room at arm's length, getting to know one another as strangers becoming friends, flimsy armrests our only visible barrier.

this was the rare occasion where the rules could bend, and we could just be there and be different colors like no big deal. as if being different colors wasn't even a thing.

my brain said be scared, this guy is trying to sell you a stolen car or kidnap you and sell you into the sex trade. my brain said that because it had been conditioned to say that, all those scary stories about Craigslist encounters gone wrong, the nightly news pumping fear through our veins.

but the rest of me thought this guy was pretty damn cool, telling me about his American Indian grandfather sundancing in Wyoming, his cousins in Tucson and his deformed collarbone that never healed right from a skateboarding injury a few years' back. i wanted to be skeptical of this sense of authentic connection i felt with a stranger i was supposed to be afraid of. but as he listened to me talk about my life and work and seemed truly interested, i felt at ease. i felt like we had oceans more in common than the white surfer kid who took me out to sushi last night in Encinitas on what might have been the most boring date of all time. and he didn't even pay for dinner.

in the San Diego i knew, there were no black people. here, my friends were all white. and my days were spent surfing on white sand beaches where other white people sunbathed and frolicked with their families, looking up in varying shades of envy at other white people's million-dollar homes up high on the seaside cliffs. i shopped for groceries at Whole Foods where only white people spend their often-not-so-hard-earned money on fancy organic produce. i drank overpriced red wine at open-air bars talking about riveting subjects like landscape architecture and craft beer with other white people listening to black people music we spoke loud to hear eachother over. i went to yoga and drank wheatgrass and rarely ventured beyond the 10-mile radius of manicured lawns, fancy cars, chic cafes and surf shops dotting the Coast highway.

"god it's white here," i remembered complaining to my mom over the phone.

it was so white here we'd leave the front door open and not even think twice.

so white we'd talk about which juice cleanse gave us the fewest heart palpitations. what we'd do on our next vacation overseas. where we'd do mimosas and bennies at brunch this Sunday.

it was so white here i'd leave my bag with my wallet, car keys and iPhone on the beach when i paddled out for a surf.

so white, even, that it would all still be there when i got back.

so white you forget being white is even a thing.

so white, even, that i felt right at home.

safe. predictable. comfortable.

bored. boring.

or drunk. sometimes being drunk made doing white people things really, really fun.

"so what kind of music do you listen to?" Tony asked as i exited the freeway, nearing 10 minutes into our test-drive kidnapping date. we had already covered where we worked, what we did for fun and whether we "burned trees" or not. (me: USD, surfing, and every now and then; him: self-employed plumber, street-skating, and yes, do you want some.) i laughed into my belly. my brain still wondered where he was taking me and if he had a knife in his pocket.

"oh, you know," i said, feigning non-chalance as we pulled into the Walmart parking lot. "i get into a little bit of everything depending on how i'm feeling. usually reggae, or dancehall if i'm out, or anything with a good beat. or i can get into some folky stuff. my parents are old hippies so it's kind of in my blood." he nodded, smiling in his smooth, cool little way.

i noticed my heart had slowed to steady as i pulled into a tight spot in the crowded lot, purposely in plain sight of the shopping center surveillance cameras. just in case. because my brain wouldn't let me not be scared.

a blazing purple low-rider drove past us real slow, beats blaring hot. held-back dreadlocks laid back with a cigarette out the window, staring at me from the passenger seat; soft hair extensions and gorgeous, full lips tapped her neon acrylics on the steering wheel, looking hard. a mom and her daughter walked by speaking Spanish. i hoped they'd think i was mexican. that they wouldn't listen long enough to realize i was just a little white girl, lost in the 'hood.

i had no idea where i was. but this did not feel like San Diego.

not my San Diego, anyway.

"holy shit," i said to myself, coming to terms with my surroundings. "i am so white right now."

i was terrified, my sense of security threatened by difference, everything i was taught to fear playing out in a storybook of news headlines with me as the victim in the you-name-it social tragedy of the hour.

yet, to be honest, i was also a little excited. i was starring in my own accidental adventure, surviving kidnapping car-buying in the multi-racial Walmart parking lot in non-white San Diego. this was some real-ass shit in the heat of broad daylight.

definitely not boring.
not even a little bit drunk.

popping the hood, Tony asked me what my ethnicity was, "if i didn't mind telling him." i was flattered he didn't just leave it at 'white', believing that meant he probably thought i was Latina or something. i fake-examined the engine, pretending to know what i was looking for.

"well my heritage is Eastern European," but my parents are American. thank god he didn't know that meant Jewish.

as Tony pulled the dipstick out of its little hole-thingy, assuring me the oil was clean (like i would have known the difference), our conversation was cut short. our time together neared its end.

"hey Tony!" i heard from across the parking lot, my brain identifying the voice as definitely male and probably mexican. i looked toward the spot where the voice was coming from, a corner near some bushes, a brown-skinned man in baggy pants and a wife-beater tanktop, his car mostly hidden from plain sight. he may or may not have been wearing a bandana.

"pull the car over here, Tony! i've got another customer who wants to buy the car," he said, accent thick.

for some reason, Tony didn't respond. and my inner alarm went off. i walked around to the side where my backpack was, survival mode my saving grace.  

Tony acted natural. of course he did. he was just their pick-up guy, said my brain. he's the cool and collected one, the unsuspecting frontman. and now he knows everything about me. where i work, where i live, where i surf. because he made me feel comfortable enough to be myself and not be afraid.

"come on, Tony," the guy insisted, waving at us. i looked again. there were three of them now, standing in a row in front of a dark blue sedan near the bushes. three little gangster-looking dudes, looking more than ready to tag-team the shit out of me, steal my bag and identity before smuggling me over the border into some shady drugs-and-guns-for-sex dealings in Tijuana.

"so, what do you think?" Tony said, still ignoring the guys behind him. he meant about the car. i grabbed my backpack and shook his hand abruptly.

"it was really nice to meet you," i spoke in a hurry. "but i'm really sketched out right now and i think i'm gonna go." he didn't argue. because what's there to say, really.

"okay," i heard him say after me, when i was halfway across the parking lot, bee-lining it to the Walmart women's bathroom. i didn't have to pee.

hiding out in the strangest of escapes, a place i'd otherwise never be caught dead inside, i washed my sweaty palms in the automatic sink, my face looking pale, wholly convinced i just narrowly escaped the end of my life as i knew it.

i stared into my own eyes as they welled up in self-disappointment, wanting to believe it was my divinely guided intuition, and not my socially ingrained fear-of-other that made me run that day. but seeing myself clearly now, i couldn't see any clear distinction between the two. did my survival instinct kick in because i was truly in danger? or did my fearfully conditioned brain simply choose racism over reason? i'm not sure i'll ever know the answer to that question.

because it only takes a short trolley ride to take the girl out of the white. but it's gonna take a hell of a lot more than that to take the white out of the girl.  

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.