The flame tree

Not to be confused with the native and almost extinct fire tree, this is one of the many flame trees growing around the island.

According to wikipedia, the knower of all things, they are native to Madagascar, but grow well in tropical locations around the world.

I noticed them because they are often barren, making me wonder if all the island trees had been stricken by some terrible disease, or if Guam experienced a tropical autumn I was unaware of.

Not so, someone explained, they just bloom after it rains and then immediately drop all their leaves.

Also, they are pretty:

because I have always been fond of institutions of higher learning...

I visited the campus of the University of Guam today.

I've been there before, but I was extremely late for what felt like a very important appointment to photograph Japanese dolls the last time, so I forgot to take pictures.

Today, I was in a little bit less of a hurry.

The campus is surprisingly far from the downtown centers of activity and commerce. It sits on a cliff on the far west side of the island, I think -- I can't really tell direction on the island.

Not having gone to like, an actual school where people learned useful things (non-useful things, however, abounded) I think I've always felt like the most valuable aspects of institutions of higher learning tend to be the aesthetic appeal of the architecture and/or sculptures, and the availability of places to lie on one's back and look at the sky, leaves of trees, etc.

By those standards I would say UOG definitely gets a pass, plus bonus points for the view of the ocean.

Hagatna at night

I took this tonight from the top of the hill at Saint Vincent's friary. It's a view of Hagatna and Agana Bay -- you can see Two Lovers' Point way off in the distance, and in the very far left corner, that building that says "DNA" is the building where I work.

a summary

My friend Judi (hi Judi) found me on skype today, and we had a long conversation in which she enthusiastically peppered me with questions about my life on Guam.

As I have thus failed to provide any thrilling accounts about my daily life here, I thought I would indulge Judi (who may be the only person who finds this interesting) with a summary of my time here to date.

So, I live in a pretty normal apartment complex (above).

My favorite thing about it, besides being a place I can sleep and afford the rent is the plumeria trees outside my building. (below) I didn't know anything about plumeria until I wikipedia'd it about five seconds ago, but, apparently, they are indigenous to tropical and sub-tropical areas of the Americas, have spread to tropical locales all around the world, including Hawaii where they are used to make leis, and are poisonous.























My apartment is a fairly normal suburban unit - I have carpeting, an air conditioner and a place to hook up a washer and dryer, if I were ever able to afford one. (Not likely).
















I also have a really awesome veranda, or something, that I never use due to the fact that it seems, of late, to have been colonized by a couple of reproducing spiders. But the view, when I enjoy it, is a lovely scenescape of jungle and a few wayward chickens who seem to have moved in.
















My kitchen (below), however, feels like a palace. I have more counter space than I could have ever dreamed of in New York, a stove and more cabinets than dishes, which makes the fact that I don't have a dishwasher tolerable, as I don't own very much stuff to wash.
















I still spend a very large amount of time baking (see below), because it is pretty much all I have to do in my apartment, as I have yet to invest in furniture (also below).








































I do have a bed now, however, compliments of a very nice guy I work with, who gave me a mattress he had in storage. It kind of didn't occur to how weird that sounded, that I had a random co-worker with a mattress in storage until just this instant. But then, this guy lives in a shack in a jungle, being one of those free-spirited world travelers who eschew all things material (including, I hope, the internet).

At any rate, yes, all the worldly possessions I have are stacked delicately on a few cardboard boxes I have left over from my purchase of kitchenware in my mostly empty living room. I'm sure at some point I will get furniture, but right now it seems like less of a priority than say, buying a plane ticket to Thailand to see my little sister.
















Oh, and also, making car payments, as I am now the proud owner of a mostly working Toyota Echo, which I have to drive to work in downtown Hagatna (below).































And yes, I realize that is mostly a picture of a parking lot, but it is also, incidentally, downtown Hagatna.

feasts and saints...

I took this photo last week during the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the annual procession in front of the Hagatna cathedral-basilica.

All the villages in Guam have catholic feast days to honor their patron saints.

In this case, thousands of people show up outside the Hagatna cathedral (downstairs from where I work) and walk the statue of Santa Marian Kamalen, the patron saint of the island, around a circular route of a few city blocks, while singing songs and reciting rosaries (or something like that, my understanding of Catholic traditions is particularly lacking.)

It seems that the statue is a stand in for the Virgin Mary, and the fiesta marks the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season for Catholics (pretty much everyone).

Local legend says that the statue of the saint, which is this somewhat small wooden figure adorned with real human hair (it's donated, apparently), floated onto the shores of the island on the back of two candle-wielding crabs, sometime during the Spanish-forced conversion of the all the local inhabitants to Catholicism. This is, apparently, just one of several origin stories related to where the statue came from, according to the above very helpful link from my new favorite Guam history and culture encyclopedia, Guampedia.

In any case, the statue seems to originate from the Philippines, and could have sunk with a Spanish galleon off of the coast of Merizo, where it was supposedly found three hundred years ago.

Being somewhat fond of ritual, with my undoubtedly misguided proclivity for mystical thinking, I was intrigued by the event, and lingered along the edges of it for a little while listening.

As I bopped between crowds of families huddled under umbrellas in the half-rain of mid-afternoon, I found myself reminded of my life in New York, running around at protests between armies of puppet-wielding anarchists, liberal moms and dads pushing strollers, moaists in jaunty caps and those guys who always seem to wear the same orange anti-torture t-shirts.

Despite the somewhat different objectives, it seemed that at least on a surface level, the two kinds of events, one a gut-wrenching yell of opposition against forces too large to be embodied by a single person, the other a call and response of soft hymns repeated back in old tongues and newer ones to venerate the icons of a God too large to comprehend, were achieving a similar effect.

In New York, when I was still new to the whole protest scene, before I knew exactly what it was I was protesting or how exactly the aims of the demonstration would achieve the ideals I had set forth to realize, I rationalized my participation by realizing the greater good, generally, that can be achieved by putting people in a space together, to commuicate, share and organize.

I liked that protests made people walk -- and made businesses shut their doors, out of both lack of patronage and perhaps a healthy fear of rioting. I liked that I talked to people I would never have talked to before, and that streets and lampposts and garbage cans and corners, when used as vantage points and lounge chairs, took on a significance they lost when simply passed by the tsunami of daily traffic.

Even as other, more concrete motives drew me further into my work with grassroots media and activist organizations, I think it was that larger idea that motivated me to continue.

While listening to crowd sing Catholic songs on the streets together last week, I got that same feeling I got during the best moments of protest.

On island where so few people walk anywhere anymore, even the effort of making a trip of a few blocks on foot seems to be a revelation. And, instead of the sidewalk in front of the cathedral being filled with a handful of Japanese tourists undocking at scheduled times of the day, there were people gathered together, families, long lines of school girls in matching blue uniforms, current and former choir boys, some still clutching their own miniature saint replicas well into middle age, people with heads bowed, people repeating prayers or talking, people waiting impatiently in lines to march.

And instead of the silence of the humid empty air, I heard something older, something deeper -- a communal cry recalling a shared space beyond K-marts and car dealerships and empty streets.

Or, well, I think anyway. I'm new here.

'People of Guam You're Still the One'

I pass by this sign every day on my way home -- it's located at the mouth of the road to my apartment complex.

I'm told that it's a leftover from one of the last governor's races -- which one I am unsure. Although, I guess there are a limited number of options since it's from sometime in the last decade.

At any rate, I haven't been on Guam long enough to figure out exactly the ways in which this is ironic.

Still, next year is an election year, so I expect I will shortly.

the things we pack...

I got a box -- six actually -- in the mail this week, belatedly from New York.

My boyfriend (whom I love and appreciate deeply for all the hard work he did packing) sent these boxes a few days before he finally got out of our apartment in Brooklyn.

Some had been hastily packed by me -- others by him.

For my part, what I decided to send, versus what got left was always going to be a bit of an arbitrary process. Some of it depended solely on what fit in the box; other stuff made it through simply because I didn't want it to get thrown away or end up languishing at a box at our respective parents house.

Still, having spent more than a month away from the things that I decided I needed enough to send them across 7,000 miles of ocean, I couldn't help but be a little shocked by the ill-fitting pieces of my life, as I unraveled them on the floor of my empty apartment.

There was an odd assortment of clothes, some long-missed, like my favorite blue dress, a purchase from a midwestern department store that always made me feel pretty, during the most dull and most Important of moments, a pair of well-worn pajama pants that are too hot for Guam anyway, a stained frilly shirt I am not sure what to do with, underwear, which is always useful. Others were less missed than aspirational: fancy shirts that I never quite had the heart to where while working office jobs in New York, which I will no doubt have use of in Guam, a vintage green 1970s top that I meant to put back in the Goodwill from whence it came, but did not.

There's my pair of laced up leather boots, which I really meant to throw out because who needs winter boots in Guam, but they remind me too much of Xena Warrior Princess, and days spent wearing torn stockings and inappropriate skirts to temp jobs to be able to do it.

There were books -- things I'd read (the book on SDS organizing in the 1960s, something on the philosophy of morality, a tarot book), things I haven't read (Mark Twain, Hunter S. Thompson, that really long book on racism that I've been meaning to get to) and things I will probably never read but wanted them with me no less (Ulyssess, a zine on anarchist organizing, an analysis of sexuality in Emma Goldman's writing -- I tried on that one, I did.)

I found the self-published 70s book on herbs (thanks Maxine) called "Let Herbs Do It", right next to the self-published 70s book on actual doing it found years ago on the dollar rack of the Strand (thanks Keith).

And lest any of us forget my propensity for self-reflection, there were the host of journals I have kept -- or at least the ones I have carried around with me -- in different notebooks, and in different hands as I have gotten older.

I found a blank notebook of Strand paper, which I used to lift injudiciously from the front desk when I worked there, the King Arthur baking sheet I got for my birthday this year (thanks again Maxine), which is much lighter than the actual King Arthur baking book that I had to excise from my luggage before coming here, and which I hope to be reunited with at some point.

And there were all sorts of papers in enevelopes -- collected over the years in lieu of journal entries, because, well, I'm prolific where these things are concerned. My favorite collection is a manilla envelope labeled: 'Shitty Corporate Temping 2004-2006', which is awesomely specific as far as titles go.

It's not like I've actually forgotten any of this stuff. It's all mine. It all shuffles around in the back of my head the way all the things we own do.

Now that I have it though, I feel compelled to do something with it, or add to it, and it makes me think of everything else I have left behind. And it occurs to me that it might have been easier had it all stayed in a box somewhere.

But then, things have a way of finding their way back to us, I think, until we are ready to let them go.