eggs and chickens, etc

I inhale smoke and breathe out words, do you understand? Both of these, they speed my mind up, and in turn, this keeps my body moving. 

I've written a bit about the separation between my mind and body, but I think I feel it the most right now. What is it, to believe that it is up to your brain to keep your body healthy, to take care of this vessel that demands so much care, and in so many ways? 

Me and everyone else, do we breathe exactly the same? This morning on the radio I hear that eggs are, according to the American Heart Association, actually not that bad a source of cholesterol, and that if you really enjoy eating them, you should have one egg a day. I do not like eating eggs very much, but I do care about my cholesterol. I typically keep the same one or two cartons, have continued this habit throughout the variation of avian flu that took eggs from a dollar a dozen to somewhere around eight dollars. What is it, to choose not to eat eggs, to not hear about things like the national baby formula shortage, until people have already started to write publicly about it? I don't know; I can only eat eggs scrambled and tossed with vegetables and hot sauce. 

Haiti, in the news a few weeks ago, they decided to stop importing eggs from the Dominican Republic, and the DR government was furious. What a slap in the face, from one country to the other, to refuse to eat such a valuable source of protein. And from the country, one of the only in the world, to bring cholera back from the dead, to keep international naval vessels at sea, gangleaders poised at the docks and ready to shoot, the way they shoot at their own government. What does it mean, to be dying, and yet to insist on holding on to one's independence? Does that inspire a sort of quiet dignity? Or a loud kind? 

I think sometimes, I guess more often when I was living in a studio apartment, about visiting my friend's family in Ethiopia. How in the middle of the day we would chop onions and boil water over a tiny bowl of coals, chopping them as they turned from black to red to gray and black again. How the biggest pots rested in the kitchen, which shrunk like a cave into the walls, separated from the bed by a curtain, the fridge door bumping into the blankets when you opened it. How we scooped water out of a big blue drum into a tiny kiddie pool with a skinny white and pink bar of soap. How we washed our hands before every meal, how I held a live chicken in my hands, and then a dead one, and then a live one again. How it wasn't the first time I had ever done that. I don't get to talk about these things enough, I don't think. Do you understand? 

Anyway, the reason I think about these things is because when I used to live in my studio apartment, with the water that flowed straight out of the tap and which I could rinse all in my mouth and swallow, and the city where I didn't have to be afraid that if I ate some salad I might have to spend the night throwing up in the outhouse (the hole in the ground), the one I was afraid of for how it showcased how differently I had been raised and how weak I was to the whims of my body when I went near it. And in that studio apartment that cost $1650 a month I wondered how many people I could fit in at any one time, how many things I own that could be made into a bed. I wondered how foreign to home a place like that might feel to the people who welcomed me, the brownest white person they might ever see (outside of the old white people in khaki, you know the kind.) People can get used to all kinds of things, and how many of those things would we decide to get used to if we had the choice? 

It's easy for me to say out loud how willing I would be to shower only in cold water if I were living in a country like the Dominican Republic, where it is warm every day and the sun shines and I could use my Spanish until I feel like I could start learning Haitian Creole. I wonder what the reality might look like. Sometimes people ask me how I would find the people I am looking for when I got there, how I would get to the community of people with lost identity, the ones in another country who I can use to mirror my own experience of feeling lonesome and without place. It's a fair question--would I do what I always do, which is to walk through the streets and stop places for drinks and have conversations with people that reveals the level of honesty I am willing to reveal to anyone who will listen, insisting in all the language I know that this world isn't designed for a person like me, who, I don't know, wants to live in and on and between lines? Would I post flyers in the universities in Santo Domingo asking people to come talk to me, to fill out surveys asking them to boil down their experiences into quantifiable social science methodologies? Would I count them like eggs in a dozen, would I take pictures with them and post them on social media, would I speak to them in their own language, acting as if I understood the words it took me textbooks and practice to learn? 

I don't know. The thing about my research is that it is so synonymous with my lived experience that it's difficult to understand where the book might start and my feelings might end. I'm not afraid of eliminating my own words, but I am afraid of misrepresentation, and I am afraid of not being understood. And I am a little tired of explaining, at least the kind of explaining that requires so much distillation. Can a place like Santo Domingo, like Port au Prince, a border made of a river with rocks and sticks and mud, care about a person like me? Is there room there? These are the things that worry me. What is it like to take birds and eggs and to fly them through the air, taking from one place and leaving in another? 

Sometimes I suppose I do realize that there will always be things we don't know, that we can never know. It's difficult for me to believe that everyone doesn't feel like lots of different pieces, like many different kinds of whole. These are the things that are important to me, these are the things that bond me to other people. 

The thing about having such big ideas is that you very quickly realize how there will never be enough time to realize them all, and so you start consolidating, start looking for patterns between them that might melt them into each other, one dream swallowed up into another. 

What did the guys in college, the ones who eat like, a dozen eggs a day, do during the egg shortage? Did they eat something vegan instead, or some other sort of protein? A person like that, is one egg a day, the way the AHA recommends, enough? Those guys, who had previously have afforded to never shop at the dollar store, but who told their friends they heard on the radio that if you go to the dollar store you could probably find several cartons of eggs for under thirty dollars? They make eggs distilled into cartons, you know. Or those little cups you put in the microwave, spoon out like pudding or pasta with the steam swirling all around your face, melted with the gases in your stomach. 

I'm fortunate, I guess, that I've never really liked eggs very much, or seafood, or those other commodities that require you to look into the source of things because shortages are always just around the corner for the way the environment affects the economy and the economy affects the environment. Sometimes I feed my dog an egg, when I run out of dog food and the store isn't open. She likes it, but it isn't her favorite, the way she prefers boiled chicken and rice. Do you understand what I mean? 

Anyway. I think about Haiti and the Dominican Republic all the time, though I have never been, though these places have never known me. It's only because I settled into the idea I originally designed for the Fulbright I applied for but didn't get. It's only because I fell in love with the idea of additional, challengingly different representation of the identity phenomena of my own life. It's only because I took the time to research. It's only because, it's only because. 

How do we discover the things that we do? I think about this a lot, especially when I think about the ways in which knowledge of certain, particular things have been revealed to me, how I have sought them out when I discover I want to know more. If I could go back in time (and I wasn't allowed to do things the same), I would be a marine biologist. I would find an entirely new sort of heartbreak, wouldn't stutter to explain why snorkeling on Maui made me effortlessly more sad than it did to snorkel on the big island. I've never seen a whale close up, though I've wanted to desperately for so long, have been on so many whale watching tours, listening to white tourists throw up into bags next to me. I suppose if you don't know me too well, you wouldn't necessarily know that I risk seasickness for the ocean, take things to ease my anxiety for an unpromised view of just how big nature might be if we let it.