On ship life

October is almost finished and it’s surreal how we are almost in Halloween. Here on the ship every single opportunity to make a day special is taken, since its extremely monotonous living in such a limited space. Thus, yesterday all the little kids aboard (most sons and daughters of teachers) dressed up and went around the ship asking for candy. My favorite was Lucas, a five year old blond thingy walking covered in cereal boxes, I’m still not completely sure of what his costume was intended to be, but I’m betting he was Cereal Monster, the healthy replacement for Cookie monster, now that the later has been censored and sent to a rehabilitation clinic for his unhealthy habits. This little kid (and his mom) probably saved cereal boxes for weeks until they had enough to make some sort of giant cereal box collage which later Lucas put on. There’s one more twist to this feat, you are not supposed to get food, or anything at all, out of the dinning halls, so they must have smuggled them (OH MY!!) which makes them my heroes, the executive dean scolded me once for incurring in Cheerios contraband. And I tell you this little story because it shows how bored we can get here, yes we do have a lot of homework, but in the lack of cinemas, parks or beaches (I wish they had a net in which we could just jump in and they would drag us in it while we swim at the Red Sea), you gotta get creative…and smuggling cereal to make costume is quite fun.
Another option is the different athletic classes or activities in which I have been involved since the beginning, but may have forgotten to tell you. I’m teaching salsa and flamenco for dummies, is really really fun and although I’m not sure if we’ll be ready dancing-wise for Spain, which is our goal, we do have a great time. It’s been an enlightening experience because I never thought I could teach dance; both because I lacked confidence and because I thought it would bore me to tears to explain the same step four hundreds times. I thought it would be incredibly monotonous. However, it turns out that even if you are repeating the same thing if you want people to get it you’ll obviously will have to come up with different ways of explaining it since the first version wasn’t effective, and in result it involves far more creativity than I had expected. I suppose people who are teachers already knew that, but to me it has been kind of an epiphany, knowing that I could actually teach and still feel challenged in a creative way.
This knowledge has also been highly liberating in a way, because I’m beginning to feel that I don’t need a PhD to be successful or feel self satisfaction, independently of what others may think. I used to have a very structuralized and detailed plan of my life, all heading towards this climax that I wasn’t even sure when it was going to come, but my life had to be a line straight up: everything a step towards something greater, instead of getting more “achieving” more and that also can be a consumerist desire. Now, I think it has become more of an ellipsis, I get the feeling that I could live as happily teaching film semiotics in NYU as flamenco in Kalekshetra Arts Village in a poor south Indian suburb. It’s liberating in a way to know that I have a choice in how to be fulfilled, and in consequence, happy. As a straight A student sometimes I wondered if indeed my As were a conscious choice of me liking knowledge and being responsible or just an egocentricity quest for recognition (social, intellectual, parental to a certain extent) which I had to accomplish because otherwise I would be the drug addict girl prostituting herself next to your building. Sometimes I wondered if there would be a moment when the pressure would stop: you are in elementary school and you gotta get to a nice high school so you better polish that English, then a good university (get your geometry right already), then you need the masters, and then, what’s the point of having a master if you don’t go for a PhD? and then I’m sure it would be getting the permanent job, then the better title, etcetera etcetera until you die in a nice wooden coffin with no organs in because you are so nice and educated that you donated them all. It never stops, there’s always something more that you can attain. It may not be a bank account size race but it is still a race and to realize that I have the option of dropping out of the race without it meaning that I’m a worthless failure it’s highly liberating. I know if by some reason I would ever choose something like that it would set me apart from my social niche and that would be hard, and I probably wont because I do enjoy a lot of that lifestyle, but still it’s highly relieving to know that its not a law, but a social construct, thus it can be deconstructed and reconstructed. I have met so many people who live lives so radically different from mine: housewives, dancers, travel writers, filmmakers, and they are brilliant, happy… self satisfied.