Ups and Down

In the midst of a complicated personal week, there are some good things.

1) The nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate. We are in for a long bumpy high stakes ride, but he has made it this far and my I am proud of him and proud of us.

2) In the domestic violence shelter where I give workshops on parenting, the social worker told me that she heard one of the mother´s I have worked with for over a year announcing to her son that she knew he was waiting for her to hit him, but she wasn´t going to. No matter what he said to her or how he behaved she was not going to hit him. She was patient, cool, and firm and the social worker thought that the workshops I have done played a role in giving her other options besides threats.

So. That´s the good stuff. The bad stuff is: waiting interminably to hear about jobs, interpersonal stuff gone all awry, conflicts of personal space, punctuality, cultural differences, feeling like a third wheel all the time here, a sensation that people in couples, people in love are just more entendible to everyone in a place like Cuenca, realizing that my way of being generous and open and available to everyone is in certain ways just another strategy to meet people to find friends, and not so generous after all. Here is trips me up especially, because it isn´t returned in the way I expect it, I get hurt and angry, and then everything is a mess.