Pride pictures

...and the internet is magically fixed, so here are the promised pictures (sooner than anticipated! Even I, the world's slowest blogger, sometimes manage to deliver). In reality, I was too busy having a blast to bother capturing the full, colorful spectrum of the Pride Parade, but here are a few random shots.

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Pride!!

This post is a bit late in coming, but with our internet down at home and all the people who could potentially fix it out of communications range for a week, things have been a bit chaotic. But anyway. Enough excuses.

This weekend, I was privileged enough to experience my first New York LGBT Pride. Actually, it was my first Pride experience anywhere, as the queer scene in Wisconsin isn't exactly something that captivates the attention of large numbers of people. I could fill up pages upon pages with exuberant, exultant adjectives to convey how much I loved it, but suffice it to say: it was FABULOUS.

Although the culminating Pride Parade in Manhattan took place last Sunday, Pride technically goes on for a month, with festivities and local festivals in the other boroughs building up through all of June. Since Memorial Day weekend, it's been impossible to walk 3 feet in the West Village (historically the gayest part of the city and also the end point of the parade) without tripping over a rainbow flag, a table full of pride paraphernalia, or someone handing out leaflets for a drag show. Pride in NYC is a big, big deal. Given that I attend a church that is a tremendous champion of LGBT rights, and that organizes more pride events than even the biggest enthusiast could possibly keep track of (and also that I've been volunteering with a church-run program that provides a safe space, arts workshops, and a weekly meal to 30-60 LGBT 13-21 year-olds, many of them homeless), it was impossible for me not to get sucked in.

So it was that I found myself parading down 5th Avenue on Sunday, alongside a surprising number of fellow New York Episcopalians (and a rather spectacular float), decked out in rainbow-themed attire and rocking out to the Lady Gaga that deafened the entire city all day. For a truly eye-opening experience, I recommend doing all these things alongside a dozen priests in collar (a good number of them women), and watching the facial expressions of the onlookers as they try to figure out how a clerical collar and a pride flag fit together. It was both surprising and incredibly encouraging, how many people cheered us on as we walked by. It is so urgent that our society start shaking off the belief that Christianity and homosexuality are irreconcilable, and I was deliriously happy to be able to do a very small something to contribute to that process of disbelieving.

After walking from 38th to Christopher St. (30-odd blocks) in 90 degree heat, I spent the rest of the day rejoicing in the glorious truth that proud, gay Episcopalians really know how to have a feast - pretty sure I ate 3 full meals between the hours of 4 and 6 pm. Turns out they're also incredible singers, as I discovered while losing half my body weight in sweat at St. Luke's Pride Evensong (turns out wearing vestments in an un-airconditioned building is miserable enough to make even me less enthusiastic than usual about acolyting). Good thing there was more amazing food afterwards - I really needed meals 4 and 5 after that.

I'm so very glad that I'll be living a mere 90-minute train ride away from all this fabulousness next year, because I would be rather put-out if this were to be a one time only experience. Pride 2011, here I come!

Pictures to follow as soon as I can get my laptop to a place with fast enough internet.

Yup, you knew it was coming!

Here it is, finally: the post about soccer. I know you were all wondering where it was.

Anyone who has spent 5 minutes in my presence over the past week and a half, followed me on facebook, or who knows the slightest bit about me, really, can affirm that the World Cup has taken possession of me completely. It's a good thing the Weltmeisterschaft only happens every 4 years, because we're talking dangerous levels of enthusiasm here. I pore over my bracket. I read match analyses in every minute of my spare time. I have soccer anxiety nightmares. And, of course, I live for the minutes spent glued to the TV - or, in less fortunate circumstances, the computer or the phone - when I can glut myself on the irresistible action, the waxing and waning of each team's stardom, the scandal, the gossip, the glory. It goes without saying that all this enthusiasm is multiplied by infinity when it's Germany that's on the screen.

Having blessedly been in Europe during the 2006 World Cup and the 2008 European Championship, I've really missed the evolution of the American soccer scene. Whether because the sport really has become more popular or because I live in New York, city of both soccer-crazed immigrants and wannabe-cosmopolitan yuppies who think following football is cutting edge (or perhaps both?) I can't say exactly, but it is gloriously apparent that the beautiful game has finally made it big in the US of A. And, while I still can't really bring myself to root for the US national team (though I will sheepishly admit that they're starting to gain my favor - now that they're not playing Germany in the round of 16!), I couldn't be happier about this transformation.

I could rhapsodize on and on for pages about how I think soccer has incredible potential to bring people together, especially in countries that have been through collective ordeals and need to rally around something, but I'll spare you that bit of soapboxery. Suffice it to say that soccer has finally become the talking point I've always wanted it to be, especially (and somewhat surprisingly) in the port. Soccer allegiances in New York City (and Newark) are particularly fascinating, because so many people here come from countries that never qualify for the World Cup, or that didn't this time. In the past week, I have had people from Egypt, Colombia, and the Philippines tell me that they're rooting for Germany, and people constantly surprise me when I ask them who they support. What's even more fascinating is the ability of a televised match in our seafarers' lounge to bring together anyone who happens to be in the building (which almost always includes me...) for speculation, gossip, and commiseration, even if only for a few minutes. At first I felt guilty for being a slacker and watching the matches at work (in my defense, I always make sure my ship-visiting is done first...), but then I realized that bonding with seafarers, truckers, and port workers over who can kick a soccer ball best is just a different face of chaplaincy. Which is cool. Really cool.

That said, I'm anything but an effective chaplain when the Mutterland's future is at stake. The poor Russian seamen who were trying to use the internet while the Germany-Ghana match was on this afternoon doubtless thought they were in the room with a complete lunatic. It certainly doesn't help that I've been exposed to Spanish match commentary (for some reason, we don't get ESPN and thus must resort to Univision), which means that my incoherent, trilingual rantings and ravings at the television have become quatri-lingual - to everyone's confusion, most especially my own. They snorted shamelessly when I shrieked at Özil's goal and giggled like schoolgirls each of the (many) times I swore. Anyone who tried to talk to me got waved away with a "for heaven's sake, NOT NOW!" and I may or may not have lied outright to shoo away a seafarer who wanted me to activate his sim card (during a match!? you've got to be kidding!!). But, I mean...everyone has their little obsessions, right?

Okay, I'm done rambling - at least for now :) It's just that I try to blog about what's on my mind to keep things as authentic as possible, and I'd be giving you a pretty damn skewed vision of what life has been like if I didn't at least mention soccer. So - let the games continue! And, more importantly:

LOS GEHT'S, DEUTSCHLAND!!!

Sex, marriage, childbirth...you know, the usual

Today marked the first day of my life as a married woman. JOKE! KIDDING! Well, kind of. Allow me to explain.

I wasn't kidding when I wrote, a few posts back, that the arrival of warm temperatures also heralded an onslaught of bizarre, inappropriate, and utterly exasperating sexual comments from the seafarers. It really is like someone flipped a switch. In the past 3 weeks, I have been hit on by what feels like 80% of the seafarers I've encountered. Did I say it was exasperating? Nay, scratch that. It has been driving me completely and utterly OUT OF MY MIND. To the extent that I dread going to work in the morning because, as I poetically ranted at my program director during a meeting last week, "I just feel like a giant, walking vagina!" (It had been a particularly bad day)

So I caved. While ambling about the East Village yesterday, I did what I should have done 9 months ago, and purchased a fake wedding ring. I'd been holding off for two reasons, really. 1) I didn't actually expect it to work - seeing as most of the perpetrators are, themselves, married men, I hardly thought they'd be deterred by a little piece of metal on my finger. And 2) I object to the idea of publicly broadcasting a false statement about myself to cater to social norms that are outdated, misogynistic, heteronormative, and FALSE. I live in the New York metro area in the 21st century, for Christ's sake! I should be able to function professionally without everyone needing to think there's a man in the background!

But getting up on my feminist soapbox isn't going to do a damn thing to change the fact that I have nearly 2 more months of climbing gangways ahead of me, and that it really would be in everyone's best interest if I made it through without murdering someone out of rage. So I forked over $12 for a plain, silver band, swallowed my pride, and entered the imaginary joys of wedded bliss.

To my utter and complete surprise, it worked.

Not only did it make me excited about going to work to see what would happen (since moving to NY, I've discovered that there's no better way to revive flagging enthusiasm than to pretend my life is a giant anthropology experiment), it deterred all but one of the forty-some seamen I interacted with from telling me I was beautiful, asking to marry me, or scolding me for being too emaciated to bear children (the latter insult, which I endured on 3 separate occasions last week, was really the straw that broke the camel's back)! Amazing!

Unsurprisingly, posing as a married woman in an international seaport yields some interesting conversations. Literally the second seafarer I spoke to this morning glanced down at my left hand, sighed despairingly, and said: "So you're already married too...I'll never find a wife..." Whereupon I was delighted to be able to nod sympathetically, reassure him that he was still quite young and would surely find the spouse of his dreams when he returned to the Philippines in a month, and all the while maintain an inner ostinato of "Not! My! Problem!" In a very pastoral way, of course :)

Many of them inquired about how many sons I had (seriously? are we living in the freaking middle ages!?), and were very concerned when I informed them I was childless. The dirty old man of a Greek cook who served me lunch (and was also the sole offender who told me I was beautiful) assured me that his beef would, "Make you very healthy! Good for babies!"

My favorite exchange about my marriage status was sneakily sandwiched into a confused discussion about the differences between Catholicism and Anglicanism. A Filipino engineer was inquiring about theological differences between the denominations and, at one point, asked: "Do you have Mary?" (as an aside, that is without any doubt my least favorite religious question to be asked, because I have an instinctive and unfounded aversion for the Virgin that alienates me from Roman and Anglo-Catholics alike) I awkwardly launched into my spiel about diversity of opinion in the Episcopal Church until he interrupted to ask, "No, you personally?" I waffled for a bit, then finally shook my head and said, "no, I'm not really so big on Mary." Whereupon he gasped, pointed to my ring, and said, "but what about your husband!?" Just in case I needed a reminder that my job rarely, if ever, makes any sense.

The ring is and isn't an improvement. It doesn't change the underlying reality that too many of the seafarers see me primarily as a baby-maker; it just shifts the focus. It will, I imagine, necessitate me spinning what threatens to be a dangerously elaborate tale of how I came to be married, who the husband is, when, where, why, etc. But these past few weeks have made me realize that every human being has a breaking point, and that I have reached mine. Not only do I get nothing out of ship-visiting if I'm constantly angry and frustrated; the seafarers certainly get little (if any) benefit from a tantalizingly unavailable chaplain who does nothing but yell at them. The ring, it seems, makes everyone's lives better.

...including yours! Because, if I'm sure of anything, it's that there will be plenty more amusing marriage stories to come. So keep reading!

Telecommunications

One of the biggest components of my job is topping off seafarers' sim cards. Almost all of the mariners have great difficulty understanding the voice prompts on the t-mobile customer service hotline (for which I can't blame them in the least), so it's much easier for everyone involved if I just do it for them. Of course, this means that I have had to learn how to handle cell phones of all shapes, sizes, qualities, and nationalities - which is both harder and more interesting than you might think.

Complication #1: because of our proximity to Newark airport, t-mobile service is ABYSMAL in the port. Finding a signal is usually a complicated game of turning the phone on and off repeatedly and wandering around the ship until you find a magical spot (the last bit is a blatant violation of security protocol, but no one seems to care.). Complication #2: ships are incredibly loud. The volume of the background noise confuses hell out of the system's voice recognition capacity, and I usually have to try several times before it works. Complication #3: veteran seafarers who are aware of the first 2 complications will often times just chuck their phones in front of me, say "top off!" and then leave. Sometimes they'll pay in advance, sometimes not. Sometimes they'll tell me how much money they want me to put on, sometimes not. It's all a bit of a guessing game.

Of course, the biggest complicating factor is that, half the time, the phones are in other languages. I recently had to ask a burly Russian seafarer for help when I inadvertently accessed his picture library and got the screen stuck on an image of a curvy blonde woman wearing nothing but a santa hat. Not awkward at all.

But today, I think, I made the most awkward phone faux-pas of my life in trying to top off the absurdly complicated phone of a Turkish guy. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to get the damn thing to dial - random menu screens in Turkish kept popping up, and I kept on pressing buttons, hoping it would go away. At some point, I gave up and returned to the seafarer for help. He took one look at the screen, gasped in horror, and let loose what was clearly a stream of Turkish invective. Much frantic translation revealed that I had accidentally called his ex-girlfriend. Oops. So much for chaplains making seafarers' lives easier.

Francophone Irony

Apparently, I just can't get a break.

I woke up this morning with an awful sore throat and decided pretty quickly that there was no way I was going to make it to work. After going back to sleep for another 5 hours, I finally made it out of bed and convinced myself to go run some of the errands I ought to have run last week, including picking up some dry cleaning (It is worth pointing out that the dry cleaner is less than a block away from my house. That it has taken me almost a week to go fetch my clothes is indicative of the sorry truth that I have not, in fact, been in Harlem at all between the hours of 7-7 during that period of time. I need a more sustainable schedule.).

I walk in and am greeted by a man I haven't seen there before, who turns out to be the owner. While he's searching for my clothes, he answers his cell phone and begins conversing in French with a Moroccan accent. When he hands me my order, I, in a state of illness-induced delirium, completely inadvertently thank him in French. He promptly hangs up the phone, turns to me, wide-eyed, and...begins telling me his entire life story. In French.

In ordinary circumstances, I would have been delighted at the opportunity to speak French. As it was, I couldn't help but be a bit exasperated: I spend all day, every day, trying to convince reticent Filipino men that I can function in a pastoral capacity if they wish to avail themselves of it, to very little success. I take a freaking sick day and the first random man I meet decides that the French-speaking girl who walks into his dry cleaning shop in her pajamas is The Chosen One to listen to and solve all his family problems. What irony.

After half an hour, I finally manage to extricate myself from the conversation. He bids me adieu with strict instructions to come back to chat as often as I like. I sure wasn't about to tell him that I live less than a block away and have to walk past his store to get virtually anywhere. But on the plus side...I made a new friend?

I kind of hope I don't need anything else dry cleaned before August.

Ship Visiting Gone Wrong

It has been perpetually interesting, going through this service year and noting how my experiences compare with my expectations. For the most part, they scarcely line up at all: Harlem is nothing like I imagined it, living in community has yielded joys and challenges that are vastly different from the ones I foresaw, and - let's face it - nothing could have prepared me for the randomness and insanity of my job at the port.

One of the most thought-provoking reality/expectation disconnects has been how cushy my job seems in comparison to my housemates'. While they contend with hostile nursing home patients, maddeningly bureaucratic institutions, and screaming children all day long, I (for the most part, it seems) spend my days hanging out with my awesome clergy coworkers and getting myself invited to lunch on ships. Yes, of course that's painting an awfully optimistic picture. But it often seems to me that I should be encountering more institutionalized prejudice, dealing with more truly ugly situations, getting pushed more violently out of my comfort zone...you know?

In many ways, what I'm running into is simply what happens when a young white woman from the Wisconsin suburbs gets plunked in the middle of a totally different reality. Of course it's not exactly what I expected. But even within the port, it seems like I somehow go on all the easy ships while my coworkers have to deal with all the messiness and drama. My colleagues each have an arsenal of harrowing ship-visiting stories, many of them involving injuries and illnesses that went untreated for weeks and even months because the shipping companies were too cheap to provide transportation to a hospital or the necessary guards to accompany the hostile, alien seafarers.

Until yesterday, these stories were simply that: stories, tales that had nothing to do with my day-to-day comings and goings. But then I met Justado, and my outlook on the entire shipping industry was transformed in a flash. Justado is (well, was) a deck fitter on a container ship with what is, in the grand scheme of things, a company that takes comparatively good care of its seafarers. While crossing the mid-Atlantic, there was an explosion on deck, and Justado couldn't get out of the way in time. He suffered 3 broken bones in his hand and severe burns extending from his fingers to his upper arm. The ship was 3 days away from land when the accident occurred. That's 3 days with no medical attention and, worse, no painkillers. I know full well that there are far too many Americans with inadequate health care, but this brand of institutional negligence goes far, far beyond what anyone living in a modern, Western country can imagine enduring themselves.

When I saw him, he was getting ready to be flown home to the Philippines (7 months before his contract was due to end, which is an enormous financial burden on his family), despite the fact that his doctors wanted to keep him at the hospital for observation for another 2 days. The shipping company wanted him off their hands (and off of foreign soil, due to visa restrictions) as soon as possible, never mind the dangers to his health and his livelihood. For my part, I can safely say that I have never seen a human being in such visibly excruciating pain, nor have I seen a seafarer in such emotional distress.

After I had done my (highly inexpert) best to deal with the situation and returned to the office, I indignantly asked my coworkers just how badly a seafarer would have to be injured before the company would consider airlifting him out. My question was met first with blank stares, then with a chilling response: "Oh, sweetie, we've had crews come in where someone has died while crossing an ocean, and they've had to empty their freezer to store the cadaver." If someone were critically ill on a passenger ship, they would receive immediate medical attention. If an American merchant mariner were critically injured, they would be airlifted out by the military in a heartbeat. But if a Filipino man so much as dares to get himself hurt on the job, well, that's just too bad for him. He's got to suck it up and wait until the next port, and hope that someone will take pity on him and drive him to the nearest doctor.

It is rare for me to get on my soapbox about seafarers' rights, but this? This is just unconscienable. Much as I fervently wish that the whole incident had never occurred, I'm oddly grateful that I was the one who, by total coincidence, wound up visiting Justado's ship. My current state of outrage at the shipping company higher-ups makes me believe in the importance of what I'm doing with renewed commitment and enthusiasm.