Where are you going? Where have you been?

Somewhere way back when this was my blog space. After sitting on the bookcase for more than a month, pinched between a ragged copy of Cien Años de Soledad and a new stack of NCAA tournament brackets, Suburban Macondo is getting dusted off and is starting anew. Let the inane blathering resume.

As most of you know, the past five weeks or so have been pretty tricky for me and Brooke. It started off great; my ex-room partner Greg swung down to Venezuela in the midst of his waiter/adventure-traveler life cycle, and off we went to Angel Falls and Canaima National Park. After seeing some stunning natural treasures and meeting some characters along the way—including Juan Carlos, the tour-package-selling, Chávez-loving, shady manager of Posada Don Carlos in Puerto La Cruz, our jumping-off point for Canaima—we were about to head to the eastern coast when I got the e-mail from Fulbright: Even though I had gone to the Embassy to explain my shift in projects, and even though they’d seemed extremely supportive, they wanted a more in-depth proposal. And they wanted me to have an adviser at the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida. And they wanted everything in a week.

So I went home and took care of it all. I beefed up the proposal, got an adviser and sent it in the day it was due. No problems. We enjoyed more Andean sights with Greg, including some hot springs up in the páramo and the beautiful hamlet of Los Nevados, and when he left I was primed to start my new project.

Then the second e-mail came. No more funding. No more Fulbright. No more.

***

I didn’t really know what to do. I took care of everything quickly (resigning from the program, telling them how I felt the grants were mishandled, looking for new opportunities), and last week now seems like a blur. It’s better that way. The harder it is to see the details—the harder it is to recall quickly the slights and misunderstandings—the easier it is to forget. And that’s fine by me.

Now I am starting to get sense of my life once again. Cuba in June is becoming a more likely possibility by the day, and although Fulbright now won’t pay for us to stay in a swanky hotel, we’re still heading to Colombia in a couple weeks for 12 days. Let’s be honest: If the guerillas were to take back over in Bogotá, Bush would be talking about the axis of evil of Cuba, Colombia and Venezuela. And we get to hit them all in a matter of weeks.

Aside from looking forward to traveling (we’ll also be heading to Ecuador and Peru during the summer to meet up with my buddy Doug, who recently nearly died after a terrible vomiting/diarrhea bout in his Quechuan village in the Peruvian highlands), I feel like I’m finally honing in on what it is I want out of this place. For the longest time, the grant hung over my head. Since the project I proposed wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped, I had this sense of dread about everything else I was doing, as if I shouldn’t be doing any of it. It’s hard to work that way, let alone be creative.

Now, I have none of that guilt. I began private Spanish classes today to shore up pronunciation and improve my fluency. My teacher is wonderful and has the coolest name I’ve ever heard: Her father, who is an artist but used to be a torero, as in bullfighter, worked on a farm when he was a child and used to lead cows through a nearby valley to their pasture; every day his pants would get wet from the damp morning grass, and to remember a small part of childhood that still made him smile, he named his daughter Rocío del Valle, or Dew of the Valley. She goes by Rocío. Dew.

Inspired by Greg’s insatiable desire to take on new physical challenges, I also joined a pool here in Mérida. It’s funny. I worked as a lifeguard for five years and never really enjoyed swimming laps. I still don’t. I don’t like wearing goggles, I don’t like the way my lungs feel while swimming, and I don’t like feeling like I’m out of shape, which I invariably do while chugging back in forth in a pool. But this pool, and the way I chose it, is typical of my experience in Venezuela. Our friend Katty swims at one of the university pools but told me she was switching to this private pool because it’d be cleaner. Not wanting to swim in a cesspool, and not wanting to have to take an STD test to be able to swim in the ULA pool (by the way, science people: can you transmit an STD in a chlorinated pool? I don’t think so, but maybe that means the pool is so dirty and unchlorinated that anything’s possible. Go in for a workout, come out with the clap.), I went down to the Colegio de Ingenieros and signed up at their pool. Two things: First of all, it’s about 12 yards long, maybe 15 at the most, and secondly, it’s right next to the airport. So for a lazy bum like myself, it’s great. I can rest a ton (that’s like 40 turns in a 500-meter swim) and look at airplanes landing whenever I get bored. Even funnier about the selection of the dinky swimming hole is that the other ULA pool is Olympic-sized. Think about it: 41 laps for a 500, or 10 laps for a 500. I think I’d drown in the Olympic-sized pool during Lap 2. Or at least have contracted chlamydia by Lap 4.

Finally, I’m writing again. It had to happen sometime, and now that the rest of the b.s. is cleared from my mind, I’m ready to move on and work again. The next step after Venezuela isn’t guaranteed and is totally unknown—maybe working at a Costa Rican ecotourism center teaching an after-school conservation program to local kids, maybe working on the book while Brooke acts an artistic liaison (doing whatever artistic liaisons do) to a Central American community of indigenous women. Maybe the States are in the picture, too, but only if we can find the right Latino community with which to work. Hear that, Carrboro? Ah, but that seems far off now. I think I like the distance.