You´re . . . different.

"My one friend back home is different. She just has a different perspective on everything. She´s like you." Jenna casually dropped this as we were sitting on my patio with rum and cokes awaiting the New Year. Paraguayans celebrate midnight at home on New Year´s, and then go out and party from about 1am to 8am. She, Elmer, and I were making a midnight dinner and setting off screaming bottle rockets, pre-gaming before the party. So she´d just hit me with 2 bits of info: 1) That I was different than anyone else, and 2) That I was different just like at least one other person.





"Wait, wait," I said, "What exactly do you mean by different?" "Oh, please," Elmer piped up, "Like you didn´t know." So not only had everyone else reached a silent concensus, but it should also be obvious to me? I´ll admit, this wasn´t the first time I´d heard this. My ex-roommate Chandra had once told me, "You´re just different. It´s like, there´s EVERYONE else. . . and then there´s you." But then, as now, there was no further explanation into HOW exactly I was different, and it bugged me. ´ It´s not as though I haven´t felt a bit different. I spent my entire adolescence thinking exactly that, but it was more a yearning to fit in and not exactly understanding why I never seemed to be able to do or say the right things. It was always being just outside the circle of people who´d figured out the correct way to be and were real friends, while I was just sort of around. Then at some point around college I realized that everyone felt like they didn´t fit in, and everyone felt different from other people. Alienation is practically a right of passage. If everyone has this feeling of being different, though, it makes us even more alike than we might already appear. It was with this epiphany that I dropped the self-alienating walls I´d put up (read: I don´t want to be part of their stupid group anyway.), and happily moved on. But here I was being told that in fact I WAS different, different in a way that was more odd than everyone else´s different and also painfully obvious. "But how, specifically?" I asked, trying to get a handle on the whole thing. "I don´t know," Jenna answered. "You just see things differently. Everything has a twist. It´s like that thing with the ants. . ." When she and Elmer had arrived earlier that day, I´d shown them to my room to put down their stuff. Jenna noticed the ant super-highway, always in rush hour, running floor to ceiling in the corner by my bed, and the busy ruta being constructed around the edge of the floor on all four walls. "Looks like you´ve got quite an ant problem," she´d said, after complimenting the general decor. "I wouldn´t really call it a problem," I answered, nonchalantly, "We live harmoniously." "If I had ants like that in my room, it would never occur to me not to kill them," she explained that night, "And you live harmoniously with them. Just. . .different. Like that." I could kind of see what she meant. What actually happens is that I lay in my bed and watch them. Earlier that day I´d noticed that when ants pass each other, they both stop for a second and do this antennae-waving greeting thing before continuing on their way. At first it looks like their very hurried, but then I realized that it could be a casual stroll when you have six legs. That got me thinking about the movie Waking Life, and how there´s this one scene where the main guy is walking down to the subway station and starts to pass this girl, but she stops him and asks to do that again because she doesn´t want to miss an opportunity to really see someone as a person instead of just a meaningless body passed on the street. She says she wants to be fully present and not just rotely living her life, finishing with, "I don´t want to be an ant, you know?" So I´m watching these ants and seeing that they are nothing if not fully present in the moment, never missing an opportunity to bond with another ant on that super-highway. And I wondered if they talk in ant language about how humans are the examples of how not to be; antennae waving signifying "I want to know you to the fullest extent possible" and saying, "I don´t want to be a human, you know?" But these sorts of thoughts I considered pretty normal, especially in the Peace Corps, where people have more free time than they´ve had since being toddlers. We do things like learn how to make wine or ginger beer in our kitchens (use a condom to seal the bottle and when it stops filling with air, it´s ready), or perhaps you´ve seen, "Why I joined the Peace Corps" on Youtube (if not, here´s the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZIVZ1463c ; Worth a watch). This is how we roll. I let it drop, but a couple days later, as we were painting her house together, Melissa, unprovoked, said the same thing. "You´re. . .different." (always with that dot dot dot). She agreed with Jenna´s different perspective explanation and added that I managed to find the silver lining in everything. "Well that´s good," I said. So then it got me thinking. If 3 of my close friends in as many days have told me that I´m...different, maybe there´s something to this. So I called Paulette. "Would you consider me different?" I asked. "Different? No. Why? You think you´re special?" (and that, in a nutshell, is why I love Paulette). Then she followed it with, "Well, maybe you´re different in that you don´t suck like most people..." (ok, so another reason to like her) "...but I think you´re different in the same way I am, like there´s less bullshit ego stuff with you." So then I was thinking that if I was so very different, it was in the same way as Jenna´s friend and Paulette, and that reminded me of another story Jenna had told us about her cousins that categorize everyone they know. For example, there is a type they call an Mmm,yehhss-er, which means an outdated hippy who wears long denim skirts and has a long braid down her back and answers questions with a very nasally "mmm, yehhss". The prototype for this category is their neighbor, and she and her friends are the group. This type of person exists in the world, they insist, and there´s more than one of them, so that justifies a category. Jenna´s dad is an "Oh,yeah-er", which is a dad who is always taking his kids to do fun stuff, like ski trips, and apparently says "Oh, Yeah" a lot. So maybe my type of person should be a category, I think, and it should be based on some tagline I say all the time. It took me all of 5 seconds to name my new category, as it is a phrase always on the tip of my tongue. I am an "Itiswhatitis-er". Paulette´s going to be very upset when she finds out this is the category name - she had a bournout ex-boyfriend who said it all the time, too, and it drives her crazy - but oh, well, it is what it is. Since coming to Paraguay, I´ve changed quite a bit, so it´s possible that now I am an "esloquées-ita" ("Es lo qué es" means it is what it is in Spanish), because I technically use that version more often now, but iguál, no más. There was definitely a time in my life when I was a "righton-er", and while that is of course still a factor, I feel I´ve moved on. If we´re naming a whole category of human being her, it´s gotta be "itiswhatitis-er". I´m not sure what to do now with my new categorization. Do we all trade emails and talk about things that are what they are? Form a club? Should we have a secret handshake? Do we have to invite Paulette´s burnout ex-boyfriend? When it´s all said and done, nothing has actually changed, and I´m not so sure it should be a goal to categorize one´s uniqueness, reducing an especially twisted world view to one line, making myself of caricature of...myself. I mentally fumbled with this for a moment, watching my ants, until I remembered that (now, officially) I don´t have to try to figure it out. There is no solution. It is what it is.