January 2018

I admire people with hustle

- by Alyson Shane

It's tough to get up every AM and bust your ass to feed yourself.

Too many people in North America rest on easy desk jobs where you show up, punch some buttons on your keyboard, take federally mandated breaks and a 30-45 minute lunch hour and go home knowing that every two weeks or so money will just show up in your bank account like magic.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Which is why I'm a little bit obsessed with the banana bread guy here in Caye Caulker where we're staying.

Dude gets up every morning and bakes banana bread and other tasty goodies fires on a big, tall white chefs hat and apron and bikes around the island yelling

TASTE BELIZE

FRESH BAKED BANANA BREAD

and if he sees you then oh boy

he'll turn his bike around and ride up next to you

"hey, sweetie" he'll say "you wanna buy some fresh baked banana bread?"

and if you don't, which I often don't because we're usually full of lobster or conch or fry jacks he'll say "okay, I'll catch you later. I'll find you when you're hungry."

and he'll ride off on his big metal cruiser bike to talk to the next group of people walking up the street, or sitting at a table, or lying on the beach and yell

TASTE BELIZE

FRESH BAKED BANANA BREAD

at them until someone finally caves and buys a slice of the damn banana bread already.

Then in the evening he takes his boat back to the North Island where he lives and you can see him ferrying people back and forth in-between banana bread pickups in exchange for gas money and a small fee.

Dude is hustling 24/7 and has no problem literally yelling at you until you cave to the sheer force of his will, which I love because people in North America are so timid and polite. We say oh sorry and oh thanks and please will you do this?

and we sit in cubicles being quiet and keeping our heads down and hoping that nobody notices us unless we do something spectacular but even then we say "oh it's no big deal" and we downplay things because heaven forbid we stand out or offend someone.

But down here in Belize that's not an option for most people, so instead you make money the best way you know how:

by making things yourself and harassing people until they buy them from you like the banana bread guy does.

Honestly though I just want to know how the he keeps that chefs hat so clean and white all the time.

Tags: Hustle Belize

 

I had a teacher from Haiti once

- by Alyson Shane

My homeroom teacher in high school was Mr. Ismé, and he was one of the smartest and weirdest people I've ever met.

He spoke fluent Latin and spent most lunch hours tutoring this one older student just because she wanted to learn.

He was passionate as hell about teaching and would get super fired up during Social Studies and was way into French grammar which of course nobody liked.

He would walk around during tests or exams and steal people's pencils or white-outs off their desks, just to mess with you. Other times he'd sit behind his desk and play with toy cars, making "vroom!" sounds and crashing them into each other.

He drove this weird little Ford Pinto everywhere and we teased him mercilessly about it.

He was always super jacked about whatever he was teaching us. He was one of those teachers who you knew really cared about the impact he was making on his students.

I was in French Immersion, and every year Mr. Ismé organized these huge trips to take Grade 11 classes to Quebec City, and the Grade 12 classes on a trip to France.

All of the students in his class would go on these big, fun trips to see historic French sights and practice the language and generally have an amazing time making memories that would last a lifetime (I didn't get to go because my parents are small-minded and refused to let me fundraise; I'll never forgive them for it if I'm being honest.)

Mr. Ismé would tell us these outrageous stories about Haiti and his family there, and we never knew whether or not to believe because this all went down in the days before you could fact-check every single thing someone said.

He told us that he fled a violent dictatorship which I later learned was true, and once a year he would skip the lecture for the day and we'd spend the class assembling care packages as part of the Hearts for Haiti program.

He loved you if you tried hard but would give you guff 24/7 if you slacked off, which was what I did because I was pretty fucked-up at the time.

He was one of the first teachers to tell me "you're smarter than this and you aren't trying hard enough" which I later realized was true. One time after I put some real effort into a book report about Lord of the Flies he pulled me aside and said he was proud of me and I cried in the bathroom afterward because I didn't hear that a lot growing up.

High school was a shitty time for me personally and looking back I feel like I missed out on an opportunity to get to know a really interesting person with a unique background and perspective.

I've always regretted not making the most of that opportunity to be honest.

So yesterday when I heard that Donald Trump called Haiti a "shithole country" I thought of Mr. Ismé.

I thought of all the weird lectures. His purple dress shirts with big collars. His unusual accent and how it got stronger when he yelled at you. How he spent time every year getting students involved in creating care packages to send to kids in his home country. Still giving a damn after all that time.

I wondered how he felt to know that someone who has never had to work for anything in their life can completely disregard the hard work and efforts being done by Haitians at home and abroad to make their country better.

But then I remembered that Mr. Ismé didn't give a damn about what anyone thought, anyway.


 

I need a dang haircut

- by Alyson Shane


Y'know when you've been putting something off for so long and you just keep procrastinating even though you know you need to just deal with it? That's me and this haircut.

Here's why:

I have my wavy hair keratin straightened about once a year and I'm trying to time it so I get my hair treated right before we go to Belize since I don't want to be dealing with some frizzy, annoying hair situation while we're down there. So it makes sense to get a haircut and the treatment done at the same time, right?

Total sense.

Except all these weird little things have popped up that have prevented me from booking it. I remember at the wrong hours; the line is busy when I call and I forget to call back; dumb shit like that.

You know how it is. We've all done this little song and dance before.

I'm not much for new year's resolutions but I've decided to commit to not procrastinating so much moving forward. Putting off dumb stuff just causes stress to pile up and if there's one thing I want to be in 2018 it's

more calm.

Earlier we were watching the final episode of BSG and I found myself doing my usual mental gymnastics where I hop from one worry to the next like a frog jumping from one big lily pad to another. I was trying to pay attention to all the flashbacks and emotional moments in the show and instead I kept getting lost in whatever I was worrying about, and I thought to myself:

stop, this is stupid.

I'm not thinking about how nice it is to relax with my partner. Not reflecting on the great night I had last night. I'm worrying about a bunch of stuff, none of which I can do anything about on New Year's Day, and letting it get in the way of actually enjoying my downtime.

I think I had one of those moments of clarity where it's like someone mentally bitchslapped you and things suddenly seem clear and make sense.

Because I realized that one of the reasons I've been feeling to tense and worrying so much is that I have all these small to-dos floating around that don't have a time, place, or action assigned to it in order to resolve them.

The more stuff piles up, the more overwhelmed I feel by all of it, and it gets to the point where I can't even focus on one of the best science fiction shows out there because I'm having a silent stress-out over on the couch over who knows what. My business. My clients. My personal life. Whatever.

So tomorrow I'm calling to book the dang haircut.

Cheers to the new year.