lilmissnever

I went silent, didn't I? I wrote almost nothing at all in the month of March. March was eaten by travel. I made trips to Stockholm and Toronto, with a brief stopover in Iceland--just long enough for me to lose my wallet. In a few weeks, I will leave for Hong Kong, Beijing, and the Dominican Republic. And in the time I have had between trips, I have been awfully quiet. I am trying to catch up on sleep.

Stockholm is Europe on the "easy" setting. It's flat and clean. Everyone speaks English. It has picturesque museums and opera houses and official architecture, second-hand clothing stores and adorable little design boutiques, coffee shops and book stores. I see a lot of coffee shops, because although it is sunny, it is -15 degrees C outside. There is a little bit of snow on the ground, but even in this frigid weather, signs point to Spring. Everyone is ready for the cold to be over.

I deployed my warmest coat, a 70's vintage leather trenchcoat with a great big fur collar. The combination of the trenchcoat and my enormous sunglasses caused my hostess to mistake me for the Italian panelist. My glamor was short-lived. Having shed my outer layers, I sat on a panel full of important, official cybersecurity people in suits while sporting knee-high industrial boots and a black hoodie. It was an easy room, a crowd of people who wanted to like me. I scored easy points defending anonymity and cryptography against a law-enforcement opposition whose argument essentially boiled down to, "but...child porn!"

I met a Pirate Party representative in the European Parliament and endless people from the Swedish State Department. I met some very sweet Internet freedom types from nearby Uppsala. I may have gotten a bit tipsy with an Irish guy from Index on Censorship and spent a little too much time discussing the finer points of British comedy. The glamorous Italian co-panelist and I got along like a house on fire and the event organizer declared that we were in love. I fell asleep in my tiny European hotel room with my boots on.

In the morning, I got on a train with my hangover and a copy of Anna Karenin and took off through the snowy suburbs to the airport.

Icelandair is really quite pleasant, as airlines go, even if it is not on Star Alliance and does not bring me the precious, precious airline miles that are the lifeblood of the professional traveler. My trip to Toronto took me through Reykjavik, where the airport featured enormous posters displaying Facts About Iceland (in English). Did you know that Iceland has an enormous number of volcanos? Or that some alarming percentage of the population believes in elves?

Icelandair is really quite pleasant until you get off the plane and discover that a wheel is missing from your luggage (the same wheel you had repaired after it was torn off in Istanbul) and you can't find your wallet. Did you know that Icelandair covers all kinds of accidental damage to your luggage, but it does not cover damage to wheels or handles? Did you know that Icelandair employees were unable to locate my wallet anywhere inside of the airplane? Did you know that the currency exchange at Toronto's Pearson airport will not exchange Swedish krona for Canadian dollars? Fortunately I had (barely) enough Euros and Brazilian reals at the bottom of my bag to pay for a bus ticket into Toronto proper, followed by a short cab ride to my hotel. J was sweet enough to wire me enough money to get through the next ten days.

The conference at the University of Toronto combined some of the best and worst aspects of the Carmen San Diego job. In some ways, going to conferences means meeting other professional conference goers, drinking heavily with them, and gossiping about your mutual acquaintances. You see the same talks and people talking about the same projects. You see people going around in tedious circles about the same problems. Everyone fights over funding. Everyone overuses the term "cyber." New activists show up and I terrify them when I talk about security and privacy. Activists that have heard me talk about security and privacy show up and demonstrate that they haven't really learned anything as a result of my talking to them. I despair. I eat late night Korean barbecue in a variety of hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I take goofy photos from the top of the CN tower. I wander around Kensington Market and promise myself that I will finally read that Cory Doctorow novel which is set there. I go out to a fancy dinner at Georges. Record store employees roll their eyes at the mention of the Canadian Music Festival. I buy J a Venetian cookbook with an octopus on the cover. I stay up very late writing blog posts for work while everyone else is out carousing.

I come back to ess eff and kiss J. He tells me stories about SXSW and we make decisions about Bunker 3, which will not be ready until the fourth week of May. I have seen the world and I have never been so tired.

I enjoy dressing up. I enjoy it a lot. So when the Mysterious Workplace learned that we had been given an award, based partially on my work, I was pleased to be part of the two-person crew tasked with attending the black tie dinner and awards ceremony. "I am forgoing both bustle and corset," I announced as my co-worker made arrangements to rent a tuxedo. "For me, this is practically Casual Friday." Then I went about my business for the rest of the week and did not give it another thought.

This was a mistake. Mistakes were made. They weren't even new mistakes. I'd had this same problem when I suddenly needed something white to wear to the All World's Fair, only to recall that every white thing that I own is under filthy plastic tarps at Bunker 3. I had this problem when I needed a costume for my Saturday night aerial performance and I realized I had not seen the cardboard box labeled "Leotards and tights" since mid-December. Now I was scrambling around my blah-plex with one hour to put together an outfit for a black-tie gala, using only the load of laundry I had taken with me from Bunker 3 at the beginning of January.

"You have no gown, no pumps, and no pantyhose. All of your accessories are in a sealed box half a mile away. We have hidden the jewelry that you wear every day. You have no hair drier and no evening purse. Your nails are chipped and you could use a haircut. Time begins now."

Sometimes you have to do it all with makeup. Lipstick. Eyeliner. Hairspray. Something that could pass for a cocktail dress. Opaque black tights. Fluevog boots. Leather jacket. The effect was more "cocktail hour" than "black tie award ceremony," but I found it acceptable given the challenging nature of this assignment. If this was a reality show, I would not win the Dodge Durango, but I would not be told to pack up my knives/mascara/digital civil liberties and go.

My cornea has a defect.

This is what the cornea specialist announced after my sixth visit to an eye doctor since the beginning of the year. It probably started during the surgery to re-attach my retina, when the surgeon nicked my cornea, and it's never quite healed properly since then. The optometrist thought it was just dry eyes. Then the next optometrist thought that it was keratitis--inflammation of the cornea caused by overwearing my contact lenses. She prescribed antibiotics and steroids. But after after weeks of sporadic pain and only marginal improvement, she sent me to a cornea specialist, who announced that I essentially have an open wound on the surface of my eye, which starts to heal during the day, then worsens when my cornea rubs up against my eyelid while I'm sleeping. She prescribed an ointment for my eye at night, told me to keep taking the antibiotic but not the steroid, and told me to come back for a follow-up the next day. And the day after. And Monday.

By Monday I will have made no less than nine visits to eye doctors since the start of 2013. The medical literature charitably describes my condition as one causing "moderate to intense pain." For the last week, I have experienced a sensation that is not unlike being moderate-to-intensely stabbed in the eye. Opiates left over from my retinal detachment surgery are the only thing that even begins to cut through the pain, and they leave me too woozy to write blog posts about MLATS or PowerPoint presentations about Syrian malware. I cannot drive to the aerial gym or run 5k. I can barely sort my laundry in the blahplex. I like to think of myself as tough, but I am not tough enough for this. Pain--persistent days-long pain--is exhausting.

I do not worry about scarring or ulcers or whether or not I will get my vision back. I wait for the pain to subside. I go to doctor's appointments. I try to do work while sitting on my couch very late at night. I wonder what people do who do not have medical insurance or flexible work schedules or leftover opiates. I am thankful that J goes to meetings with the financial planner and stops by the house to check the contractors' progress on the remodeling. I am glad that it is not my job to talk to all of our neighbors when it turns out that the contractors have been jackhammering out our concrete floor for the last two days and that a piece of concrete has gone through our downstairs neighbor's ceiling. I am lucky because there is enough slack in my life to absorb the pull of so many emergencies. I just wish it wasn't necessary.

Last week Carmen San Diego was in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for a two-day event organized by the State Department to help activists and journalists find ways in which to report on corruption, violence, and crime. Violence is in plentiful supply in Tegucigalpa. Honduras is currently the murder capital of the world and its capital, Tegucigalpa, is not quite the murder capital of Honduras, but it's awfully close. Tegucigalpa also features the world's most dangerous airport, due to its exceptionally short runway and its proximity to big pointy mountains. Driving me to the hotel, one of the organizers cheerfully pointed to the a spot on the side of the road, "This is where the wreckage landed when that plane crashed last year."

Tegucigalpa is the first place I've ever been to where I was actively discouraged from leaving the hotel. Do not go out alone at night. Do not go out alone during the day. If you must leave the hotel, take a taxi there and back. Have the bellhop hail your taxi. Do not try to hail a taxi yourself, because the driver might rob you. He may shoot you as well. Conference-goers were herded into vans for every outing--a reception at the Ambassador's residence, dinner with what appeared to be the Honduran equivalent of the Rotary Club. At night, I hear protests outside of the hotel. Government buildings are spaced far apart so that protests do not turn into riots.

The activists are young. Hardly anyone who takes the time to corner me and ask me about privacy and security is over twenty. They dream of leaving Honduras. One college student tells me that commuting from home to school is like being under occupation. He has to pass through three different security checkpoints, all run by private security firms. No one trusts the police to stop crime. A blogger who reports on drug trafficking in Juarez, Mexico, whispers me that this is the most violent place she has ever been to. I take her opinion very seriously.

Training the activists is an intense experience. The workshop is structured in a way that requires me to talk non-stop for hours at a time, followed by hours of very careful listening and note-taking. I had hoped to get other work done while I was in Honduras. This hope was foolish. The activists' privacy and security problems are interesting. Most Hondurans do not have computers or Internet access, but nearly all of them have cell phones, which they use to access Facebook or WhatsApp. The majority of them have Blackberries, because Blackberry messaging is cheaper than texting. Finding secure ways for activists to use these tools to report on crime and corruption on a potentially hostile network is challenging. Many of the problems around reporting on corruption and crime, such as the fear of retaliation, do not have good technical solutions. We talk about privacy nihilism.

I return to the Mysterious Workplace to discover that I've been given a raise. Raises are almost unheard of at the Mysterious Workplace, where we are given a regular 5% "cost of living adjustment" every year and told sternly to be happy our salaries are going up at all. The cost of living in ess eff has, in fact, gone up considerably more than 5% in the last year. With the end of the payroll tax holiday, a 5% adjustment just barely covers our increased tax liability. My raise is well-timed and I feel loved and supported by my Mysterious Employer. It has been a very good year for my career. I have given talks at important institutions. I have been on television a lot. My projects have been well-received. I have heard myself referred to as a "rock star," possibly for the first time ever in a serious professional setting. The other day one of the attorneys asked me if I still wanted to go to law school. I laughed.

It is a good time to be Carmen San Diego, even in the murder capital of the world.

This is not my life. I can tell because I seem to be living in a beige Mission Bay blahplex and driving a Chevy Impala. This is a temporary state of affairs. J and I are living in the only corporate housing we could find that would take our cats while Bunker 3 is being remodeled. And the Impala is a rental that I'm driving while my Golf is at the body shop, having survived an encounter with a delivery truck, just a little worse for wear. Like most rental cars, the Impala is an automatic, so I feel as if I'm not doing enough when I drive. The car is huge and slow and I will be relieved when I return it later this week.

After my three-month gym hiatus, my body feels a little like this rental car. Large. Unwieldy. Difficult to park. Donning my gown for the Edwardian Ball, all sixteen yards of red silk taffeta I'd had crafted into a five-piece ensemble back in 2009 (was it 2009?), I notice that the waist still fits but the bust is a bit...tight. I go to the ball displaying considerably more heaving bosom than had been present in the original design. I cannot find the modesty panel for my corset, which would have hidden my squished back, because everything I own is in boxes at Bunker 3. I cannot find the box that contains my accessories, and even if I did, it is now hidden behind acres of protective plastic. I compensate by booking an appointment with my hairdresser, who cunningly arranges my hair into an enormous Edwardian pouf, nearly as large as my bustle.

At the aerial gym, my body is a rental car. Sluggish. Impossible to steer. In need of refurbishment. On my first day back at the advanced aerial class, I could not complete a single sequence--not even the warm-up. I may have left a few minutes early, while everyone worked on transitions. I may have cried in the bathroom. I may have gotten into my car, hit the steering wheel and screamed.

It comes back. It comes back. When I came to class the following week, I'd made some progress. I could do a straight-arm straddle up. I could do beats. I agreed to do a tiny part in a performance at the end of February. I signed up for beginning aerial hoop classes. It is good to spend some time as a beginner on a new apparatus instead of feeling angry and limited on rope and tissu. I can feel the callouses building up on my palms.

I do not like this stranger's life, this awkward transition. I want my house and my car and my pretty clothes and my strength and my body back. I know that this is temporary, but I wish that it did not have to happen all at once. I do not want to drive my ugly car to the blahplex by the CalTrain station, where I live out of a suitcase full of clothes that don't quite fit.

It will pass. It will pass. But I'd be happy if it passed a little faster.

In case there was ever any doubt that the Jardim Botânico is worthwhile to visit, I present this panorama as Exhibit A:



I am not a person whose first instinct is to take photographs while traveling, but it's a little bit easier now that my cell phone comes with a tolerably-good camera. I have photos of orchids in the botanical garden and the view from the gondolas on top of Pão de Açúcar and sketchy favela electrical wiring. After being cooped up for days in a hotel in ultra-posh Leblon, my co-workers and I were keen to see any part of Rio that had not been carefully groomed to the specifications of rich American tourists.

M had seen Elite Squad, which is about the BOPE in Rio, the crazily violent SWAT teams that go into favelas, extract hostages, and perform "counter-terrorism" operations. Their motto, charmingly translated, is "Knife to the skull." I had seen Urbanized by Gary Hustwit and read Planet of Slums, which both use Rio's favelas as an excuse to meditate on ad-hoc architecture in urban communities. In short, we were completely unqualified to say anything about favelas, but at least we were curious.

American tourists with only a few stock phrases of Portuguese are discouraged from wandering Rio's poorest neighborhoods unescorted. M found a company that gives favela tours, which caused R and I to wring our hands over whether or not we were engaging in Well-Meaning White Person Tourism that did not respect the dignity of the locals or contribute money to their economy. And while the two of us grappled with our privilege, M booked the tour and informed us that the guide would be picking us up in front if the hotel at 9:30 am.

Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, houses a population of almost 70,000. It's a maze of five and six-story concrete and cinder block buildings, constructed floor-by-floor, sprawling up a hillside. The official government buildings stand out, because they have clearly been built all at once, from consistent materials: a school, a hospital, the public housing the government moves you to if they demolish your house because it is unsafe. Our tour guide is French. "Zat ees why I speak with zees beautiful accent," he tells us. He is worried that we have all seen "Elite Squad" and we believe that the favelas are slums full of criminals who exchange heavy gunfire at all hours. In anticipation of the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio, the government has spent the last couple of years "pacifying" the favelas, a process that involves months of army occupation. About one-third of the favelas have been pacified in this manner, including Rocinha. This means we can take pictures.

On a rooftop, a girl in a pink leotard performs the beginning of the Level 5 floor routine for competitive gymnastics. There must be a gymnastics club somewhere in Rocinha. The guide tells me that there are no less than three samba schools, which practice all year round and perform during Carnival.

A car idles on the corner, blasting music. The tour guide explains to us that this is baile funk, the music of the people of the favela. Someone asks what they are singing about, to which he says "Mostly, zey are singing about sex and the apology of crime." Our tour guide's observations are supported by Wikipedia, which says, "Funk Carioca lyrics are often criticized due to their violent and sexually explicit, as well as misogynistic content," and "The glamorization of criminality in the favelas is also frequently viewed as another negative consequence of funk carioca."

Because it is Sunday, the guide takes us to an open-air market, with its fruit stalls and fish vendors, live chickens, and unrefrigerated meats. I see tube socks and underwear. We eat pastels, big envelopes of deep-fiend dough surrounding unspecified meat, and sugar cane juice. We eat açaí ice cream, which tastes a little like chocolate and a little like blueberries. The guide takes us to a school, which is closed for the weekend. Basic schooling is free, but getting into state-funded college requires students to pass rigorous exams. Everyone who can afford to do so, sends their children to private schools. The tour guide shows us Rocinha's only playground--a sad little courtyard with a solitary slide. R and M buy souvenirs--colorful bowls made of newspaper.

We go back to our respective hotel rooms and start downloading carioca funk tracks. I feel that we have all learned something on this excursion--mostly about sex and the apology of crime.

I suppose there is some benefit to writing here, because I can look back and see that this time last year I was happy. I said I could kiss 2011, didn't I? I said I could kiss it with tongue. And January 2012 Me hoped that January 2013 Me would feel the same way. And that's funny, because in the long run, optimists are always always wrong.

It's not that bad. I got my dream job in 2012. I traveled all over the world. I became a regular talking head on television news. I did research that I was proud of. I was quoted on the front page of a Very Serious Newspaper. I spent a week-and-a-half training aerial circus arts on a tropical island. It made me better. I bought a house. My eye exploded. I spent a week lying face-down and immobile. I spent a month half blind. I got out of shape. I moved into my house. I threw a party on New Year's Eve.

We did not throw a lot of big parties in Bunker 2. It was a little smaller than the Concrete Bunker, a little more out of the way, a little more sedate. We had neighbors who did not appreciate drunken escapees from the Folsom Street Fair running down the hall or leaving their cigarette butts all over their nice roof deck. The Concrete Bunker was a that place where we ran a nightclub. Bunker 2 was that place where we had half a dozen people over for movies and cocktails. I looked around Bunker 3 at midnight and I saw videos being projected on the wall and heard music playing on J's jury-rigged sound system. My guests decimated the bar like so many booze locusts, systematically reducing the number of boxes marked "liquor" stacked in the bedroom from five to two. My floors were sticky. I found plastic cups in every corner. And I was happy. Bunker 3 marks a return to proper form. Perhaps next year, J and I will rig a balloon drop from our cavernous ceilings. It's been a while since I've started the year by picking up the corpses of hundreds of burst balloons from my living room floor--long enough that I am willing to do it again.

Running the party means being too busy to ever quite get drunk. A girl cried on my shoulder. There was puke on the couch. The occasional guest taxed my never-abundant supply of charity and patience. I wrestled with the trash while wearing my opera gown. I had to send R home with the bartender because there was already someone passed out on my sofa. I saw my very first aerial teacher and small contingent of my co-workers and the Greek acrobat I met in the Dominican Republic. I went to bed before dawn, too tired to think about what I want more of and what will be different in 2013. And when I woke up in the new year and my things away in boxes (my things will be in boxes for months to come) and didn't make any resolutions at all.

I've become one of those people who takes pictures with my phone when I travel and posts those pictures to social media sites. This is a problem because now I take photos instead of composing witty blog posts in my head. I fear that I will get out of the habit of writing because I am too busy taking panoramic shots of the Jardim Botânico.

Whenever I despair about my non-reactive pupil, or the weight that I have put on because I was unable to work out for several months, the many months of training I have ahead of me in order to get back to performing on rope or tissu, the vagaries of home ownership, or the myriad frustrations of a remodeling project that has taken six months to even get started, I remember that the Mysterious Workplace sends me to Rio de Janeniro just before Christmas--which is the height of summer in Brazil. One of the Great Corporate Overlords had given money to my Mysterious Workplace to put together a conference on state-sponsored surveillance with activists from all over Latin America and it was decreed that we should meet in Rio. So while it rained ceaselessly in ess eff for weeks, I spent that time in a slightly shabby hotel with an incredible view in Rio's swankiest district, Leblon. I delivered a talk on state-sponsored malware, ran a workshop, and occasionally assisted my poor frazzled co-workers, who were in charge of coordinating this thing.

The utility of these conferences is not entirely clear to me. On one hand, I am relatively new to the world of international Internet activism, and it is good for me to meet the other players in the space in person. People are more likely to send you gossip or collaborate with you on a project if they have seen you speak, or they've gone drinking with you until the sun came up. On the other hand, International Internet Activist Land has a culture of professional conference-going--people whose lives seem to consist of nothing but travel from one junket to the next. Those people seem to be under tremendous pressure to produce something concrete at these conferences--documents, announcements, petitions, open letters--in order to justify their bloated travel expenses. The work that comes out of these conferences is not always the best use of our time. I have not quite learned how to maximize useful connection-making time while minimizing the time I spend bogged down in the redline edits of some collective statement I am uncertain we should be making in the first place. More research is needed. I will consult with my boss, who appears to have mastered this skill with aplomb.

In the meantime, Rio has miles and miles of pristine white beaches, and people who will bring you coconuts and caprainas while you are lounging on them. Rio has all-night samba clubs and favelas sprawled across hillsides next to mansions, vying for the view. It has mountains shrouded in mist and tucans and orchids in the trees and people trying endlessly to get me to eat steak. If I must negotiate the Byzantine interpersonal politics of international Internet activism, I am glad that I can do so in Brazil. It is a fine place to be Carmen San Diego.

Remember this summer, when J and I bought a warehouse loft in SOMA? At long last, we have moved into it. Bunker 2 is dead. Long live Bunker 3. You may ask yourself why on Earth it has taken us this long to move half a dozen blocks. And I would be happy to answer that question as soon as I stop hitting my head against this wall.

Remember when I thought that we might begin construction as soon as we had the keys? And we might be done by September? Or maybe October? Or perhaps, if things went terribly wrong, November? Those were the halcyon days, before it took a month just to get drawings of the plans for our unit from the architect, not to mention two months of haggling with the architect, the plumber, and our downstairs neighbor to establish that we would not be able to build a second bathroom. It was before the HOA took more than a month to approve the final plans and the city took a couple of weeks to issue permits. It is December, my eye-rolling readers, and construction has not even begun.

Technically, construction was slated to begin last week, but J (in his infinite wisdom) pointed out that there would be just enough time to demolish everything before work stopped for two weeks while everyone celebrated the Winter holidays, so we might as well move the starting date to the beginning of January. Then, as if to add a cherry on top of my Dislocation Sundae, the contractor announced that there was no way we would have a working toilet over the entire course of our three-month remodeling project, which means that J and I will need to find temporary housing through the month of March.

My life is in boxes. These boxes are unlikely to be unpacked before Spring 2013. I am doing my best to think of this as an adventure. I have spent a significant chunk of 2012 living out of a suitcase. Now I will live out of a suitcase for three months. I will not get angry when the box marked "Shoes" contains every pair of shoes I can recollect owning except for the pair that match my go-go dancing costume. I will not despair over my inability to locate the box that contains all of my jewelry and hair accessories. It is not the end of the world if I can only find one corset. I will take this opportunity to focus on what I really need to get by from day to day. I will cast off superfluous books and clothes and knick-knacks. I will get rid of every piece of art I have not framed. And when the time comes to move back into Bunker 3, I will nest--I will nest so hard, I will drop anchor.

I am a little bit afraid to go to the gym and see how much of my skill and strength and flexibility I've really lost.

Total number of days it took me to face my fear: 5.

Current status of fear: fully justified.

Current status of arms: T-rex. Please send new shoulders.

There is good news--I still have most of my flexibility. After 2.5 months of minimal stretching, I have a pretty good arch and reasonable splits. I took my time warming up. I did a few climbs. I tried out some moves to see if I had still had them. My arm strength is shot. I cannot do more than a few pull-ups. I could not do even one proper straight-arm straddle-up. I could not even do more than a few bent-arm straddle-ups in row.

I climbed and I stretched. I told my sad story to a couple of classmates that I hadn't seen in a few months. I watched my former classmates practice their acts for an upcoming show that I will not be in. I stretched and watched them do choreography we all learned together in September.

After an hour-and-a-half I gave up. And when C yelled across the gym, "Are you going home already?" I did not suggest that she do something violent and biologically improbable to herself. She didn't know any better. I hugged my first teacher, E, who has brought herself back from injury more times than I can count.

I got in my car and I sat there in the parking lot and I hit the steering wheel and I screamed and screamed and screamed.

I am lucky that I am not in Tunisia and I was able to do this now instead of starting in January. Who knows how weak I might have gotten by January? It is best that I am doing it now and not putting it off. But it does not feel that way right now. Mostly, it feels like my shoulders are going to fall off.