RobOnGuam.com

Up North

Living on a Quasi-Permanent Vacation

In trying to describe the shape of daily life on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I finally came up with “up north.”

This won’t mean much of anything, necessarily, to those who aren’t from Michigan, but for those who are, you know exactly what this means. “Up north” is where you go on vacation, where all the normal rules that govern your daily life get suspended. If you live elsewhere, you have your own version of “up north,” but you certainly have one.

My apartment reminds me a bit of the cottage that my family rented up north in Greenbush, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Huron and where my kinfolk are from. I have to light the stove with a match, and I pay for my gas separately, which is hooked up outside the house itself; this is normal practice up north. Every time I walk in the house, I take off my zories and walk barefoot, the way everybody does here. I hang all of my clothes on the clothesline to dry; I haven’t even hooked up a dryer for my laundry room, as I see no need. I have no carpeting, as indeed nobody does on Guam, as the first typhoon passing through would make very short work of it. Instead, my floors are tile, very cool to the feet. I sweep my floors a great deal, as I did as a kid up north to keep the sand from the beach from being traipsed in.

Ah, yes, the beach. Guam especially reminds me of up north because of the huge body of water always lurking on the horizon—what one Michigan writer referred to eloquently as “the thin blue line of summer.” Always seeing water on the horizon is exactly like being up north, even if here the horizon is framed by palm and coconut trees. As a kid, we would get excited when Lake Huron finally appeared on the horizon, even when we knew, year after year, exactly when we would see it out the right side of the car. Same here: I see the Pacific Ocean when I pull into the UOG parking lot and the Philippine Sea as I commute home, down the hill to Hagåtña, with Tumon Bay spreading out before me, and every time I see it, I have that certain pleasant jolt that one gets seeing how the land ends, then the water ends, and wondering what’s out there beyond it.

In all sorts of ways, the rules of life that govern living elsewhere are suspended here. People dress casually to the point of lackadaisical, and there really isn’t anywhere you could go on island where you’d be turned away for wearing zories. People have a casual relationship with time, too; it doesn’t seem to matter much, as if you were on permanent vacation and had no real responsibilities. Though here you do, of course, and it can be frustrating to deal with what it affectionately known as “island time.” Most people just accept it as a matter of course. Things begin late and end late. Oh well.

I think that these are the appeals of living in the place like this: it’s as if you’re kind of on a permanent vacation. The texture of your life feels like a vacation, even if it’s not. At the very least, lots of things that you get very upset about Stateside don’t matter nearly as much here. I don’t mean to suggest that islanders are layabouts; there are some enormously savvy businesspeople on island as well as serious up-and-comers, and things do get done. But the kind of frantic frenzy of trying to accomplish too much in one day that I see in some of my friends—and for some reason, my New York friends leap to mind—is a mindset that feels very far away here. To its credit, Guam does not multi-task.

There is of course a flip side to this. More on that later. 

Summer

My To-Do List

For those of you who thought that professors took summers off: my list of things I'd like to accomplish. Most of them I will. Maybe.

1) Finish article on Donne's Holy Sonnets. Submit to Claude, retired 17th-century scholar, for comments. Submit to journal.

2) Finish draft of article on Merry Wives of Windsor. Send copy to Judy for comments. Create abstract from it to submit to Renaissance Society of America conference. 

3) Write article on Michael Zadoorian's Second Hand, a great Detroit novel, for possible inclusion in anthology.

4) Write article about my academic job experience -- how I actually ended up getting one, that is. For inclusion in proposed book to be edited by my colleague and cooler-than-cool guy, Chris Schreiner.

5) Write a couple of book reviews for Guahan magazine on Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran. (Go get them and read them. Now. They're that good.) This is one of the community service projects that I sort of fell into.

6) Swim a lot.

7) Order tickets to Korea and make arrangements to stay in a yogwan. That's a little hotel like a Japanese ryokan. If that doesn't help you, that's a traditional country inn. Like a B&B, kind of, except without the second "B" (as in "breakfast"). I'm not sure I can afford Bali this summer, so I can look at Christmas.

8) Talk to Chris about a panel for a humanities conference in Honolulu. Organize it, submit a proposal, then panic about having to write something for it. We're looking at doing a panel about teaching in the Pacific/Rim.

9) Set up class and professional website. (Watch for it, folks! It will have pix of me in all my aloha shirt glory.) Write syllabi for fall classes, create reading lists for spirng classes. Start reading for classes.

The nice thing about all of this is that my time is my own; I still get up pretty early, but I don't have to be anywhere unless I choose to. I go to the office thrice weekly, even though I don't have to, and work. So far this is working out well; the other days I stay home and read or write from there. (Thank the technology gods for The Laptop Computer.) This list sounds insane, but I already have a good jump on a lot of things, and actually, if you write a page or two a day, you'll get 150 pages of stuff by the end of the summer. Of course, whether or not it's good stuff . . .

At any rate, thus far the summer has been pleasant and productive. The weather's the usual -- bright, sunny, tropical. We're moving into the wet season, so there's more rain in the form of little showerlets that wet everything and then move on.

Keep watching this space for further developments. Nobody will be more curious than I about how much of this I actually accomplish!

Drag

Gowns! Sequins! Miss Northern Marianas!

My friend Len asked me if I wanted to attend something called “Queen of Queens 2005” last week, and I of course agreed. I hadn’t been to a drag show in a long time, and I assume that you, dear reader, may have never been to one, having lived a less dubious life than I. I was very curious to see how drag played in the far west Pacific, and a show with a title like “Queen of Queens” -- well, who could possibly resist?

The pageant was held in the auditorium of the at the SandCastle resort, which is a big dinner theatre attached to one of the Japanese tourist hotels. It may be the nicest theatre on island, though the hotel’s brochures suggest to me that the dinner show sort of cheesy. This isn’t intended as a criticism. There’s an ice-dancing couple and a magician and lots of pretty girls, and I expect it would be like anything you’d see in Las Vegas. (My friends are usually surprised when I tell them that if I were to go to Vegas, the first thing I would do is get tickets to see Wayne Newton, Joey Heatherton, and Siegfried and Roy. The whole point to going to Vegas is to see Vegas-style entertainment. Book me Lola Falana, and I am so there.) The SandCastle seemed a very classy place for a drag show, but I am used to seeing them in smoky, divey bars in Michigan. When I see drag, I don’t expect much -- bad wigs and tacky sequin-clad “ladies” of a “certain age” lip-synching “I Will Survive.” Expect little and you will never be disappointed.

This was very, very different. The ticket price was rather steep, but it included a buffet dinner and an alcoholic drink, some new promotional cocktail called a Hypnotiq, which wasn’t hypnotic, just for the record, but it was tasty in a grown-up, Kool-Aid sort of way. The buffet was extremely simple -- meatballs, salad, pancit, vegetables and dip, and chocolate mousse -- and the theatre itself was quite nice. It is designed for dinner shows, so that tables are oriented toward the stage, and there were a great number of waiters running around, fetching drinks.

I got there early, found our table easily, and sat back to watch people show up. One might think that a drag show would appeal primarily to gay men, but on Guam, all sorts of people turn out for Queen of Queens. Lots of Filipinos and Filipinas were there; my friend Corman was there along the entire staff of his office. (Corman is from Palau and rooted faithfully, and loudly, for Miss Palau.) My colleague Dawn was there with her husband. Lots of media folk were there, not that there are that many media folk on Guam. The whole crowd was not unlike a typical crowd for any theatre production -- some gay men, of course, but lots of others too. It was not at all what I expected.

Nor was the show. A portion of the proceeds were being donated to the Eddie Calvo Cancer Fund, which was something new for me. Eddie Calvo is from one of the patriarch families of Guam--the Calvos own a great number of businesses and may be the wealthiest family on island--and he died recently of cancer, so the family set up a foundation so that cancer patients could be treated on island rather than have to fly to the States or Asia for treatment. A touching video was shown, and people were visibly moved by it, myself included. The Calvo family is held in very high esteem, as indeed it is the richest family on island, and the Queens of Queens people were happy to make a sizeable donation.

The show itself was wonderful in a weird way. The native costume portion was hysterical, as each contestant wore something that made her (him) look like a float in the Rose Bowl parade: not so much native as very vaguely suggestive of where (s)he was from. Miss Puerto Rico appeared to be wearing an enormous conch shell which completely enveloped her, as if she were a pearl. Miss Taiwan wore a pagoda, or, rather, she was a pagoda. Miss Guam came onstage with a full-size palm tree backing her up. All the contestants spent a lot of money and, apparently, tissue paper, putting these get-ups together. (Miss Puerto Rico? Don’t ask. The presence of Miss Zimbabwe was even stranger.)

The evening gown competition was what you might expect: glittery sequins and plenty of ’em. The interview was largely forgettable, though watching Miss Taiwan have a mental meltdown onstage was amusing and/or painful, depending on how well you knew her. Each one was asked a stupid question; typical was something along the lines of “What do you hope to achieve by being named the 2005 Queen of Queens?” One kept hoping that at least one potential Queen was working on the Mideast peace process and would thus have a real answer to this inane question, but each one said something to the effect of “I want everybody to feel pride in who they are, because that’s so, like, real, and that’s what being Queen of Queens is all about.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring on the talent competition.

But there wasn’t one, as perhaps some of our Queens were not all that talented. Last year’s Queen and her runner-up (2004 Drag Princess. I’m serious) did a scripted comedy routine, “comedy” being used loosely, painful as it was to watch, which gave me an indication of the talent level. It was fabulous in that it was so execrable, not unlike watching the carnage at the scene of a train wreck.

In any event, Miss Guam is our 2005 Queen of Queens, a decision that the judges and members of the audience took very seriously. She actually has duties on island: making a donation to the Red Cross, appearing in charity functions. It was impressed upon me that the women were not gay men in drag, but actually transgendered persons in various stage of transition. Everybody seemed very cool about this, which seemed awfully big of them, when you consider how panic-stricken folks Stateside get when they are confronted with someone who’s somewhere between genders. (Maybe he’ll hit on me! Maybe he won’t! Maybe she’ll hit on me! Et cetera, et cetera.) I has hoped to end this with some kind of profound observation about lgbt people out here, but I can’t; I can’t imagine that gay issues are a non-issue here, but they don’t seem to be a big deal, either. My guess is that when you’re on a small island where everybody knows everybody and your brother comes out, you freak momentarily and then just get on with life. We’re all family here.

So. The Queen of Queens is elected, we’ll be seeing her around island for the next year, and I even knew one of the judges! Small place, big heart. Lots of sequins.

Barbara

Deeply Sad News

The call from Jeremy Tarrant in Detroit certainly had to be bad news, as we normally communicate through the cheaper method of email. And it was: over the weekend, Barbara Jean Madsen had died suddenly.

Barb was one of the singers in Vox, and she, Jeremy, and I were the alto section. Barb was, simply put, a consummate musician. She knew more about early music than most specialists did (and while she was one, in her professional life she was actually a wetlands ecologist), and sang professionally for years at Christ Church, Cranbrook, at the Detroit Cathedral, with Vox, with the New Cranbrook Singers . . . if you have a copy of Vox's CD Josquin and the Lost Generation, listen to the trio in the Graduale, Si ambulem. That's Barb on the top, with that rich, throaty, wonderful sound. Her alto was perfectly suited to early stuff and just glorious; the fact that she read music like the wind was just frosting on the cake. Real altos -- I mean real, natural ones, not sopranos singing in their low range -- are a bit rare, and Barb was one. I could be so in sync with her sound that when we sang together it was unearthly, the way we blended, which is really the point in early music; seamless blend is all, and she, Jeremy, and I could create a sound that would make people sit up and listen. And Barb was funny and fun to boot. When it hit me this morning that I would never get to create that sound with her again, I really lost it.

Barb was on her way to a family reunion on Friday when she called a taxi to take her to the airport. She never made it. Apparently she had a sudden epileptic seizure and died instantly. A very small mercy. I've been getting emails from various folks to let me know the news, and we're all stupidly stunned. I expect that the sadness will hit me hard later, but for now, I think we're all wondering: why Barb? why now? Barb was just a few years older than I, which is to say not old at all.

This posting isn't designed to assuage my grief, as I doubt it could, but it does bear for all of us a message that bears repeating: we have limited time on Earth. If you love someone, tell them. If you need to be in touch with someone, do so. If you have unfinished business with someone, finish it. One of the most moving emails I received was from another Vox and Cathedral singer, Patti Rose, who wrote that she was spending the day Googling old friends and making sure that she was in touch with them, because -- well, you never know. You can't know.

Barbara Jean Madsen. Requiescat in pace.

5K

The Morning Runaround

I’ve taken to running 5K races on island with my friend Lisa, who persuaded me that races would be fun and a good discipline to take up. 5K races, like door prizes, are ubiquitous on island; there’s at least one every weekend, and often several from which to choose. I think people generally choose on the base of the route, how flat or scenic or close to their home it is. Having run a 5K with hills, I can attest to the fact that the flatness of the course really is a consideration.

5k races are so popular, I would guess, because 1) on a tropical island, especially one with a large military presence, people like to be active and/or physically fit, and 2) on an island with relatively poor infrastructure, there’s a real need for organizations to have constant moneymakers. Even with their modest registration fees, 5K races rake in the dough for an number of causes: AIDS, crime prevention, Catholic social services, breast cancer awareness, university clubs, school fundraisers, you name it, and if you don’t, your free t-shirt will do so for you.

The races always begin at 6:00 am, registration and warm-ups at 5:15 or 5:30. This might seem to you like an ungodly hour to be doing anything, especially anything involving any exertion more strenuous than yawning. It is. On the other hand, it would be too hot to run any other time of the day, and one does get the benefit of running to often spectacular sunrises. And people do drag themselves out of bed to run: the biggest race I ran had well over 1000 runners, and on average there’s 200 to 300.

I’ve noticed that there are various types of islanders who race consistently. First, of course, are the extremely buff military guys, with their flattop haircuts and tight t-shirts covering tight muscles. They turn out in force (no pun intended) for races and tend to race fast and well -- all that discipline and civic-mindedness, from which Guam benefits immensely. (Oddly enough, I don’t see many military women running, or perhaps they’re not as identifiable in that they’re not required to have buzzcuts.) Second would be the serious local runners. There are lots of native Guamanians who love to run, and live on an island well suited for it; track and field programs are big in island high schools, in part, I would think, because track and field is a cheap sport to run, comparatively speaking. Third would be the pipsqueak kids from aforementioned local schools and clubs who are as fast as lightning. They show me and Lisa up consistently without even breaking a sweat. Fourth would be the nice church members from one of the Catholic parishes who run as a group and view each race as kind of an outing, not unlike the coffee and donut hour following service. Many of them are older and walk a lot of the course, but they are dedicated and delightful. Fifth would be the perfectly made-up and beautifully coiffed Korean ladies who show up in their totally coordinated running togs and, for some reason, don’t seem to sweat at all. Sixth would be folks like Lisa and me, who just enjoy running and each other’s company.

Lisa and I have noticed that often, while we run, we are the only ones talking. Lisa and I treat a run as a kind of social gathering -- we don’t have lots of time to visit, what with my job and Lisa with her family -- so we chat merrily away while we run, which I am sure cuts our time down, but we don’t care. Everybody else around us seems enormously intent on running and improving their times. Actually, we have always improved our times, too, though this isn’t saying much; we ran out first 5K in about 45 minutes, which means of course that we walked a good chunk of it. Our goal is a 10-minute mile by the end of the year, which, in all honesty, isn’t very fast, but if we can break 30 minutes by the end of 2005, we will be happy. I am down to 36 minutes, Lisa down to about 37. But obviously we are not terribly serious about our progress.

The real runners of course would scoff at us, as well they should. When a course backtracks on itself, we see the runners way out in front of the pack returning toward us, running so grimly and seriously that we feel that it can’t be fun for them at all. (We, on the other hand, are talking merrily; at our first race, we had a really lively discussion about what constitutes good architecture, and this somehow morphed into a lively discussion of our favorite restaurant meals, which in turn made us very hungry.) Real runners can run a 5K in less than 20 minutes, sometimes as fast as 16 or 17 minutes. Occasionally one of the race winners will be an eight-year-old about as tall as my waist, who must run faster than the wind and seem pretty nonchalant about the whole deal. Those of you who run, of course, are aware of the classes in which one runs: junior division, senior division, et cetera, et cetera, and further divided by gender. By virtue of my age, I am classed in what is the “master’s division,” though the only thing that I have seemed to have mastered is to how to follow up a race with a leisurely coffee hour at Hava Java.

All races conclude with door prizes, and awfully good ones at that, which is why everybody stays for the entire drawing process. You would, too, if you could win free airline tickets to Hong Kong. And there is the awarding of ribbons for all the race classes, which I don’t pay attention to a great deal, as I will never actually win one; but I do like to see if my friend Liz’s husband Ken wins one in my division, and he usually does, as he is a serious runner. There is also some kind of food for the racers: bananas, orange slices, yogurt, bottled water, and juice drinks full of electrolytes. Sometimes there are pastries, which everybody gobbles down, sort of defeating the healthy purpose of running in the first place. Finally, everybody gets a t-shirt with the logo of the run on it to show all your friends how virtuous you were, getting up at 4:30 to go run somewhere. I am developing a large collection of these, and you see them on everybody all over the island.

Running is a good sport in that it requires very little in terms of equipment, and there really isn’t a lot to learn. Well, I had better amend that: there may be a great deal to learn, but I haven’t learned it. I just run, as indeed I expect most people who aren’t serious about it do. It seems to me that running magazines (and fitness magazines in general) have that basic editorial problem: there aren’t enough developments in the sport to really warrant a new issue every month. I mean, really -- has running changed all that much since the time of the Greek marathons? Don’t you still put one leg in front of the other and, well, run? Perhaps it has -- there may be all kinds of aerodynamic developments in one’s stride, and runner’s catalogs certainly make a great deal out of the technological breakthrough of running shorts made of that new miracle wicking fabric Speedulon or Dacrodash or Thermozip, but that needn’t concern me. I am only in it for the t-shirt, but I expect you probably knew that already.