[DISPATCH] healing my inner SZA
on limit-experiences, delusional romantics and creating OÍSTE
My Own Uncanny Valley
On New Year’s Eve — twenty-four blissful hours after I was spit on and impressively robbed in Bogotá — Lorenzo stood in the doorway and taught me about limit-experiences. I was half asleep and he was half sure but the conversation began with Theatron, the largest gay club in Latin America. On information from a traumatized colleague, we’d previously learned that we could possibly witness men receive oral pleasure in one of the club’s sixteen rooms. Obviously, this led us to a discussion wherein we discussed an anthropological study to conduct throughout the night as we waited to welcome the new year. At one point, Lorenzo said something along the lines of: “I’m only going out with you for a night of limit-experiences.” From what I understood1, a limit-experience is a moment wherein the scope of reality, i.e. things you consider experienceable, exceeds the limit. French philosopher Georges Bataille first theorized this idea before it became commonly associated with Michel Focault and his succinct summarization as: “The point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” It’s a dissociation of sorts, wherein we are separated from the self in a confrontation of what is real. Of course, depending on the lives they lead, a limit-experience for one may not be a limit-experience to another. Being the little gremlins we are, Lorenzo and I contemplated whether watching a stranger in the throes of pleasure would elevate to the status of limit-experience for us as it did for our aforementioned colleague. Regardless, we stepped out with goals of identifying and cataloging everything we came across.
Save my midnight kiss and chatting with a tipsy Carol for several hours after the club, the night was a bust. Still, and maybe I’m impressionable, I spent the rest of the month having limit-experience after limit-experience. On a Sunday, I danced until sunrise, a 12-hour marathon aided by whisky, aguardiente, rum, cerveza and compliments. I willingly returned to my town’s highest peak on two boiled eggs and a still-ailing left foot, this time scaling the steep front instead of going around the back. This route is apparently one that can be done in 30 minutes and my town hosts a couples’ race every January. I did it in four hours, stopping to chat with pine cones every ten minutes. One of my third graders played me a recorder version of Bad Bunny’s “Después de la Playa” as I drank a tinto on his grandmother’s strawberry farm and stared at the half moon. On a different bender, I left the house in the afternoon and didn’t return until three in the morning only to leave again an hour later and march in the band as they raised our town to attend the annual cow fair. (When recounting this in my journal, I wrote: “Tomé un tinto con aguardiente a las siete de la mañana. Sentí que nací solo para tener este momento.”) Under a cloudless sky — an extreme rarity — I wished on a falling star. I scared a calf so much it fell ten feet into a river. I watched a Colombian with dwarfism Crip walk in a Yoda costume. I won a pool of 12,000 pesos after a hundred intense hands, waiting for an exact 21, only to lose it all the next day. Hungover, I watched the Avatar sequel in 4D and almost fell out of my seat dodging an arrow. I watched a star explode into a supernova. Yesterday, students returned to school, taller and more concrete, visions of the past. My fifth graders transitioned into sixth graders without becoming them, retaining their choral refrain of “sí, señora” and earnest excitement because they’d not yet learned that only losers care about school. I met the man who engineers the fireworks in my town and he told me about his life, a tale that unlocked mysteries of my town I hadn’t realized I wanted to uncover. I fell into discovery again and again, each time not believing it possible.
Going (SZA) Mode
January was a month of several people telling me I’m a romantic (derogatory). Supporting remarks: delusional, an indulgent idealist, blind — both as a SZA reference and genuine belief — and permissive. I waded through these observations with a pinch of salt until I was put to the test. On a slow Sunday, my host mother, a Pisces, told me a story about an old flame that returned in search of her after twenty-two years of distance. He spent an hour knocking on every door on her street. When he finally found her, she was cleaning the house. He swept her into his arms. In the middle of imagining this Oscar-worthy reunion, my heart swelling as the first notes of Joe Hisaishi’s “You’re In Love” began, I turned over to find my host sister, a Virgo, rolling her eyes. And there it was. Irrevocable proof that not everyone dreams about a whirlwind romance, the storybook wedding and the happily-ever-after featuring four children, lush gardens and a humid bathroom in which to grow psilocybin.
The truth is, my incurable obsession with love is my favorite part about myself. I fucking love love. It’s the reason I stuck by Ariana Grande when her tanning habits became suspicious (also, “Tattooed Heart”). It’s the reason I adore feral girls. It’s the reason I stan Beyoncé with her Scorpio moon and Libra Venus ass. It’s the reason I still cry when the curtain comes down at the end of Moulin Rouge even though I’ve seen it a hundred times. What can a cynical world reasonably expect from someone whose first adult novel was Pride & Prejudice? For God’s sake, I took a fourth-year level course analyzing the Brontë sisters’ literature as a freshman. Call it a fault, call it insanity, but I’m a dreamer. Still, as much as I love romance and romanticism and my impractical romanticization of everyday occurrences, a distantly logical part of me completely understands I can’t be a hot girl on the move working toward my future as a Pulitzer-Prize winning author and director if I’m hung up in the void. I felt compelled to seek judgment from an authority higher than the high councils. (Sorry, Vic, but you’re the earth-bound next best thing. Also, happy birthday! I love you!) After my first dusk-to-dawn bender of the month, I learned that one of my host cousins reads tarot and requested a consult. (Admittedly, I dodged said consultation for two weeks because being blind is not so bad!)
In place of the traditional tarot, my cousin uses oracle cards which derive from Abrahamic religious beliefs and feature angels and archangels from Christianity, Catholicism and Judaism. These oracle cards don’t follow standard guidelines and can be interpreted with more liberty. To pull the cards, she utilizes a complicated ritual that involved me telling her my birthday along the birthday of anyone I asked a question about, closing my eyes and uncrossing my legs and hands, zeroing my thoughts in on the question at hand and repeatedly choosing a number between one and three at random for several minutes. This process produced about nine to twelve cards for each question.
I won’t share her entire interpretation with you, partly because it was in Spanish and partly because there are some new subscribers here that I don’t know like that, but I will share a few decisive conclusions:
She pulled the Angel of Temptation in every one of my answers, reminding me of something I’ve known and ignored since I was 16. The flesh will either have its way or fail you. I’m still young enough to prefer the first.
I have an abundance of options at my fingertips. Why settle? In a similar vein, I have grand things waiting for me. The more I work for myself, the more the universe will reward me.
The Angel of Secrets warns me that actions speak louder than words.
El amor no me debe transformar en una tóxica.
The doors I’ve closed are waiting to be opened and the longer I leave them locked the worse the wear on my foundation.
Love lends itself to everyone.
I will always be cursed with tests. To suffer is to find strength.
My mission in life should concern others, especially in the sense of aid and being a guide to all those lost.
There’s always a source of light to find.
When I asked what I should focus on throughout my time in Colombia, she suggested I create a blog to share my travel stories and devote all of my energy toward it. How perfect.
Keeping Up With OÍSTE
A girl boss can never really retire. It’s a passion, not a profession. So, after several months of brainstorming and planning and needling, I’m ecstatic to announce that Lorenzo and I published the first issue of OÍSTE early this morning!
For those who haven't been following the development of our small project, the original iteration of OÍSTE was created in 2013 as a way to share stories about Colombia with friends and family. Even with all of its contributors and sources of support, it unfortunately didn’t survive the pandemic. Lorenzo and I found out about its existence as a defunct publication last summer and immediately began considering whether we could revive it. Throwaway comments and theoretical essays turned into meetings with bigwigs which turned into town halls which turned into one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever been a part of.
In our mission statement, I describe OÍSTE as a multi-dimensional “space to be transparent about our experiences and learn from one another.” With that in mind, I wrote a piece about navigating Colombia as a Black woman and while it wasn’t the cathartic experience I hoped for, soliciting and reading stories from others fulfilled me immensely. Victoria and David shared their thoughts and feelings about being left behind in training towns with hard-earned optimism. Savannah wrote about struggling with unrealistic Colombian beauty experiences and perfectly nailed the frustrations of trying to find clothes here as a size 12. Lorenzo wrote about the time we woke up early and observed the winter solstice — along with the Muisca sociocultural context surrounding it — an experience that still stands as the most surreal I’ve had in Colombia and inspired my new favorite essay. Most importantly, the biggest achievement of this issue goes to Maida for making running interesting to me.
As co-editors, Lorenzo and I spent a little over 25 hours — spread out over a week of daily sessions — on revising this issue alone. This excludes the time spent wearing different hats as we built our style guide, sourced and chased branding materials, outlined visions and goals, networked, promoted and did other abstract things I can’t translate into words. Even though we don’t get along, I absolutely love working with Lorenzo: our editorial tendencies are almost always in sync, he enriches my vocabulary, and, most importantly, forces me to build skills of diplomacy. My favorite thing about him is that he’s always considering the next story and knows how to pull pieces from people based on their interests. Even if we end up killing each other, I loved every moment of it, Chantilly.
If you come to dispatches to home hoping for genuine travel blogging and are constantly disappointed by neurotic interpretations of said stories rather than narrative retellings, I recommend you subscribe to OÍSTE. (I dead ass learned more about Colombia editing this first issue than I have in the past nine months.) If you read dispatches to home and find yourself considering whether you might want to do what I do, I recommend you subscribe to OÍSTE. (Not everyone is as romantic as I am.) If you at all love or care for me, I recommend you subscribe to OÍSTE. (Unironically, it would mean the world to me.)
Enero en Fotos
This dispatch is deliciously lean because I have alternated between many brains throughout January and my writer one has, unfortunately, short circuited. Instead, please indulge in these photos.
This month’s movie: James Cameron, Avatar: The Way of Water
This month’s most played record: the more bearable half of SZA’s SOS, specifically “Snooze” and “Blind” (side note, SZA should rap more!)
This month's quote(s):
“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives” and
“She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through ... What was a gate, anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before” and
“‘That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.’ What is the ‘freight?’ he wondered. What is the ‘groove?’” and
“You try again. You fail better” and
“There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.”
— Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
This month’s playlist:
xoxo,
that white bitch with the bob from Scarface
When I told Lorenzo I was writing about limit-experiences for this month’s newsletter, he was insistent that I tell you that he didn’t do a good job in explaining them to me. I think he did wonderfully.
i love your writing so so so much! it’s so nice to hear about your travels and life, and i’m looking forward to binge reading the rest & oiste 🫶🏽
“I was half asleep and he was half sure”… it’s the little things and the big ones too. so glad the band woke you up for the cow festival also.