The beginning, part IV: The boyfriend/El comienzo, parte cuatro: el novio

This can also be subtitled: "I am a complete idiot." But I'll get to that.

I've mentioned my boyfriend, Sam, a few times in previous entries. He's a big part of my story here and in the United States. The planning process for my internship and study abroad took over a year to complete. During that time, Sam went from being supportive but reluctant to being supportive and wanting me to go more than I wanted to go.

Part of my current homesickness is missing Sam. I want him to be here with me. We've discussed settling down outside of the States and he likes the idea. We're together in part for what our future could be like, but I want to be with him right now.

Our relationship progressed pretty quickly once we got together. He said "I love you" to me the night we got together. A week later I knew I was in love with him. That scared the everloving crap out of me. I can't handle being emotionally vulnerable. I was in the shower a few days before New Year's Eve in 2009 when it hit me that I was in love with him, and I cried hysterically because I was terrified of the emotion of love. I wanted to run out of the bathroom and jump out the window.

Then I told him I loved him over dinner at Carl's Jr. Which is actually not the first time I'd expressed the depths of my emotion to someone at Carl's Jr. I told my first boyfriend I loved him at a Carl's Jr. in my hometown when I was 18. It took me two months to realize it. It only took a week with Sam. And most of that week was spent fighting between my emotions and my logic.

My emotions won.

Not too long after the Carl's Jr. dinner, Sam practically lived with me in my apartment on campus. We were together almost every day. The only real time when we spent time apart was the summer, when I moved in with my best friend and her mom. I lived there the last two summers after I had to move out of campus housing. Sam stayed overnight sometimes at my friend's place.

We found an apartment across the street from San Jose State and moved in there with another close friend in July. I love my ridiculously luxurious and spacious apartment in Santo Domingo. Seriously, I could ballroom dance in the entryway. There's a third bedroom and bathroom going unused in our apartment. My only gripe is that the balcony isn't big enough for chairs. I want to sit out there and look at the sea.

But I love my small, quirky, dumpy apartment in San Jose. Even with the tiny bathroom with the leaky shower stall, lack of air conditioning, and crackling (probably lead-laced) paint. I love it because it belongs to my roommate, Sam, and me. I love it because Sam is there.

He is not here and it's making me sad.

I hate that we can't talk as much as I want us to. It got worse this weekend when the power cord for his computer broke. He can't charge and use his laptop now. I ordered a replacement cord from Ebay, but I didn't read the seller's profile. Turns out the cord is shipping from China and it won't arrive in the US until November 1, the latest November 15. I checked for other options on Ebay and they're all around the same price I paid and they also ship from China, so there's nothing I can really do.

Talking via chat and video chat on the internet is our main method of communication. I want to save my phone minutes for when I call my parents, as they don't understand the internet.

So I don't get to talk to my boyfriend for a month.

This is awful.

The beginning, part III: The process/El comienzo, parte tres: el proceso

Originally I envisioned these backstory posts as a fixed number of entries. Like, it would only take four or five of them to wrap up the backstory and we could move on to other things.

Then I realized that my existence here is less of a story than the things that brought me here. That said, I have no idea how many prologue pieces there will be in the future. I'm not limiting myself with a number, whether it be four or four hundred. I'll just tell the stories that need to be told.

Today's story is one that's shorter than the other prologue stories in chronology but longer in content. It's the story of how I had to fight tooth and nail just to come here, and of how I won.

I must warn you. I'm about to be pretty angry and I might drop an F bomb in the upcoming text.

As you've read before, I'm a global studies major at San Jose State. You all know that doing a study abroad semester is required for me to graduate. Apparently, San Jose State's administration does not understand this.

Here's a little backstory belonging to SJSU and their study abroad office. When I did my campus tour and orientation, I asked both times about doing a study abroad, mostly costs. They assured me that I'd get academic credit for going (!) and funding would be covered by my financial aid (!) and costs were about the same as attending university here (!) and everything was ever so great!

I had several phone interviews with the InteRDom admissions coordinators, starting in February. As I got closer to actually going to the D.R., I was asked to pay the program fees or provide financial aid documentation, because they were willing to wait until I got my financial aid disbursement. I went to SJSU's financial aid office to ask if I could get my financial aid early because this was a special case.

I was referred to a specialist and given an appointment for another day. In the meantime, they told me to speak to the study abroad office to see if they could help me.

Here's something that you must understand about SJSU. Everyone who works for the university administration is a mind-numbing combination of rude, unhelpful, or stupid. I get that there's no money in the budget and thus services aren't always available, but I wasn't aware that it required money to prevent people from acting like unkempt dolts.

As you probably surmised, I got no help at the study abroad office. They never heard of InteRDom. They asked me why I wasn't going through the CSU-affiliated, pre-packaged study abroad programs. Well, duh, because InteRDom is amazing and I found it and I want to, so there.

This was my downfall.

I went to my appointment with the specialist at the financial aid office. She was the queen of the dolts: rude, unhelpful, AND stupid. I laid it out for her: my advisor had explained to me how the study abroad financing works. You register for a special 11-unit course to do the study abroad to get your aid, and 99% of the time, you'll have at least one more class to take while you're abroad. In our case, it's Global Studies 189, the global experience requirement. Thus you're over 12 units, full time status, and you're good to go for the financial aid.

She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I told her I was signed up for two classes totaling six units at UNIBE, that were already approved for transfer to SJSU, and I was going to have GLST 189 as well. She refused to accept that those classes in the DR would count for anything, then told me that I wouldn't get financial aid because I wasn't a full time student.

Hold up. Taking nine units plus doing an extensive research project isn't being a full time student?

I said exactly that to her. God help me, I tried my best to keep my innate bitchery in check, even as this woman pissed me off something fierce. But she tried her best to ruin my life. Here's how she did that.

She accused me of wanting to exploit federal financial aid funding and alluded to me stealing that money by not having units at SJSU while I was abroad.

In the name of OH HELL NO, flipping tables, and all that is holy...

I got mad. I didn't yell. I didn't scream. I did tell her, firmly, that this was required of me for graduation and I worked my ass off to make InteRDom pick me. I applied for (and won) scholarships that would only pay for part of it. And that other little thing. What was it?

IT WAS REQUIRED OF ME FOR GRADUATION

She held her snooty ass attitude and her position, so I finally left. Yes, I stormed out. I just could not continue talking to that rancid woman as long as she was trying to accuse me of dishonesty and thievery.

I'm still furious about it now. My hands are shaking thinking about how much I hate her.

I spent about a day and a half mired in despair. I felt like that was it. I had nothing left to try. I wasn't going to the Dominican Republic after all. It takes an awful lot to make me consider admitting defeat. SJSU managed to do this to me several times over the summer. Just wait, there's more of these stories to come.

That night, I couldn't sleep because I was too exhausted from crying and swallowing my urge to take a baseball bat into the financial aid office and swing for the fences. So I went looking around for classes I could take while abroad to make up 12 units.

I went to my advisor the next day, armed with a plan: I would take GLST 189, an online class (technology and civilization, the class I have right now), and two individual studies courses. He got on the horn immediately with the chairs of the history department and the journalism department to explain what was up: the university was trying their damndest to ruin my life, and we needed to come up with an extra six units of credit for me to get my financial aid while I was abroad.

Thank Jesus, Buddah, Allah, and Oprah that they both agreed. My Dominican history class here counts for History 180 and my journalism work plus my current events class counts as Mass Comm 180.

I need to make this abundantly clear. I have 12 units at SJSU, plus six units here, plus this research project. So that's 18 units of credit and 10-20 hours a week of work.

And somehow that doesn't make me a full time student.

I registered for those classes. I got my financial aid. And now I'm here. But that's not enough to show that I had won. That was just slaying the dragon by stabbing it in the neck and then checking your hair in the reflection of the dull eye of the repugnant beast you just killed.

InteRDom also required me to have a doctor's note saying I was healthy to travel abroad. The health center at school offers these services...but if you're going to some place that has bad things like tetanus, you need to have your vaccines up to date before going.

I don't have health insurance and I had to pay out of pocket for every vaccine I needed. And I needed five: TB, Tdap, tetanus, flu, and something else I forgot. It was over $300 for all the vax and I'm terminally poor. I had very little money over the summer because I only work part time.

Panic button all over again.

Prior to all of this mess, I had won the College of Social Sciences Dean's scholarship for studying abroad. They refused to tell me when they'd disburse that money. So I had to call in another favor to get the department to give me at least part of it to cover my medical costs.

That one was approved with much less drama and murderous intent. That was like walking away with the prize after I kicked the disgusting dragon in the head on the way out.

Sometimes I can look back at the things in my life that got me all riled up and think "oh how silly that was of me." I'm still legitimately angry over that whole circus that lasted over a semester. And my only crime was aiming for my dream internship. Now that I think about it, I need the scars to remind me of how I got here, and how to fight in the future.

About a month before I left, I played Lupe Fiasco's "The Show Goes On" practically on repeat. I felt like he wrote that song just for me and what I was going through. It's a song about struggling to succeed, never giving up despite all the shit you have to slog through, and above all, never letting the sons of bitches keep you down. There's a particular lyric where he talks about giving up everything, even starting a world war for the ghetto kids he's rapping for.

I really took that to heart. I'm far from the only one who's getting screwed by San Jose State. I needed to win and go to the Dominican Republic to show those who get left behind by the school that this is not their ultimate fate. It was what got me through the darkest of the dark times; thinking that I couldn't give up because it was all for them. I could no longer believe in myself, so instead I believed in them.

I would sit on the seventh floor of the library and look out at the panoramic view of downtown San Jose listening to that song over and over with tears pouring down my face. In the days before I left, and I'm talking literally days before, I still couldn't believe that I did it and I was going after all.

I have to go back to SJSU in December. I have four more semesters until graduation--that is, if the school remains at its usual state of crappy affairs. If it gets any worse, I might have to push back my grad date. Having to work a little harder and wait a little longer to graduate doesn't upset me as much as thinking of suffering at the hands of the uncaring and incompetent university administration any longer than I have to.

I hate San Jose State and if I had any options to transfer elsewhere or take classes at another school, I would do it right away. My major isn't offered at most colleges, plus my life is in San Jose now. I live there. I work there. I love the city, and I love my teachers. The university can go directly to hell, however.

So I need an effective coping strategy for that, when I return. I'm open to suggestions.

The beginning, part II: The objective/El comienzo, parte dos: El objetivo

When I started the series of background posts, I said I would write them on days where nothing new happened. Today, I defined the focus of my investigative reporting and my eventual final paper: the sociological aspects of baseball in the Dominican Republic, focusing on six areas (economics, business, race and gender, law, media, and education).


That's an enormous step forward for me. Plus, it dovetails perfectly into this blog post. Part II of the backstory involves why I'm studying baseball and why I'm doing it in the Dominican Republic.


I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. I was born and raised a baseball fan and I embraced the San Francisco Giants right away. Later on, I came to appreciate the Oakland Athletics. It's all Bay Area love as far as I'm concerned. I don't subscribe to the non-rivalry between the two teams. I see no need for inferiority complexes or stadium debates between fans, either.


My dream job growing up was to be a sportswriter. I made that happen. Until recently, I worked for San Francisco Dugout, an online magazine that covered the Giants minor league system from top to bottom. I was there for nearly seven years and that's where I learned everything I know. 


We enjoyed a strong relationship with most of the media personnel among the Giants' minor league affiliates, including the Advanced-A San Jose Giants. If you'll allow me an extended metaphor, I had a sort of sportswriting residency in San Jose. I did the majority of my work in San Jose over my seven years with SF Dugout.


SF Dugout job helped me get a gig writing the California League notebooks for minorleaguebaseball.com, which was my first real paying job in the business. I've been doing that since 2009 and it's allowed me to open up to a new style of writing. I write stories about up-and-coming prospects, players with interesting stories, and whatever else is worth reading about in the Cal League.


Last year I joined the A's blog on ESPN.com's Sweet Spot network, Baseballin' on a Budget. You can read that blog here: http://baseballinonabudget.com/ I don't write often, but I cover the A's minor league system all by myself. It was the best way for me to learn about a new organization and I have enjoyed my time there quite a bit.


This August the guys at Bay City Ball, the Giants blog on Sweet Spot, brought me on board to handle their minor league stuff. Here we are: http://www.baycityball.com/


So this journalism thing isn't new to me. Or so I thought.


I came here through InteRDom, an internship program sponsored by the Dominican government that brings students to the D.R. to develop brilliant minds in a global society. We're here to show the world that the D.R. has more to offer than tourism. So what the hell am I doing here, telling stories about one of the few things that everyone knows about this place?


I still feel like my dream job hasn't arrived. I want to write about baseball and get paid well enough to support myself and my family, which right now is just me and my boyfriend Sam. While I've worked hard enough to earn such a job in the business, it's not my time yet.


So, rather than wait around for my time, I decided to enrich myself, challenge myself, and learn something new. I'm here in the D.R. to learn about how baseball works here. I know how it works in the States. I want to know more than just what I can read in a box score. I want to know the stories of the people in it and the stories of the people who love it just as much as I do.


I also followed a lifelong dream of studying abroad and writing in another language. I've always been fascinated by cultures and languages and societies other than my own. For a while I had a boner for Japanese culture. A few years of Japanese language classes and too much money spent on English translations of manga volumes, I let that go. I retained an appreciation for geisha culture, but that's about it.


I knew that to hang onto the allure of cultural studies, I needed to get serious about it. I made a career objective to become fluent in Spanish and to understand the Latin American perspective as best as I could. After all, Latin Americans are the largest non-American group in MLB and those numbers are even higher in the minors, which is my forte. Dominicans by far make up the largest section of the Latin American baseball population, and the LA population makes up more than half of the total in the minors.


I also know I'm not a finished product as a writer and a journalist. I came here to learn a different style of writing. All my professors say my academic writing is strong, but I've been dinged more than a few times for writing too tersely or too matter-of-factly, "like a journalist," in the words of my favorite polisci professor. I'd give the guy more crap for saying that, but he knows me pretty well and he knows I'm a journalist.


My articles here will be no more than 500 words. I'm the kind of writer who hates word counts. Not because I can't fill a page. It's because I can't shut up. 500 words to write about Epy Guerrero's contributions and impact on MLB? I'm tearing my hair out just thinking about how to condense that to 500 words. I could easily go 1500-2000 words on such a subject.


Part of learning to be a good writer is to write concisely, I suppose. I've just never been asked to do it.


When it came time to decide where to go for my study abroad semester, I had some difficulties. I could have gone to Puerto Rico and studied at UPR as an exchange student, focusing on voting rights and congressional representation for the US territory. I could have gone to Nicaragua to study in Managua and write a book about Dennis Martinez (you know, the first and only pitcher born outside of the US to throw a perfect game). I could have gone to Mexico and gotten capped or sold into slavery and forced to work as a coke mule. I kid. Not really. 


I didn't know the D.R. was an option.


That was until my advisor looked me in the eye and said, "why aren't you going to the Dominican Republic?" He asked me like I'd just told him the sky was green. The answer was so obvious to him. It wasn't to me. Before we found InteRDom through one of his contacts, I was getting ready to spend a year of my life in Puerto Rico.


And no offense to PR, or Nicaragua, or even to Mexico. Everything I'm doing here in Santo Domingo just makes sense. I'm so glad I never settled for one of the other options, even though it was a bitch and a half to get here.

But that, mis amigos, is another story for another day.


Thursday I'm visiting the Mirabal sisters museum, a memorial to a group of sisters who stood up to Rafael Trujillo in the 1950s and 1960s. Trujillo is the D.R.'s greatest monster and he definitely ranks up there among the biggest bastards in history. More pictures will come from that trip. 

The beginning, Part I: The woman/El comienzo, parte uno: la mujer

Nothing eventful happened today. I had history class again. We got a new student, a Dominican-American from New York (quel surprise). There was a rainstorm. Standard procedure in the DR.

These days where nothing new happens are the perfect days to write about the backstory of how I made it to the DR. Believe it or not, I choose the titles of my posts carefully for two reasons. One, because I have a Spanish translation for each one, and two, because I fancy myself a witty and sharp writer.

I chose not to lump these posts under the prologue tag. These stories are more than a set-up. They're their own chapters.

Part I of the beginning concerns who I  am, because my personality, experiences, and background have had the strongest influence on my decision to come to the DR.

I'm a first generation college student and I can claim half of a Mexican-American heritage. That's not so uncommon, but it's celebrated around my school. Apparently it's a big deal when Hispanics go to college.

I have put myself through school from day one. I mentioned that I'm 29 and I'm still in undergrad. I started   community college when I was 20 and I worked full time. I attended classes at night while working in an office doing clerical work. I also supported my grandmother from 2000-2009, when she passed away.

I didn't always take school seriously. I screwed around the first two years of CC and cut classes. I never really thought I would make it past the first few years, so I just gave up.

I went into college as a broadcast journalism major and I was hellbent on changing the world, one baseball broadcast at a time. I was going to be a play-by-play announcer. I was going to represent women in the business and crush all the men.

As you can see, none of these things happened. I fell out of love with broadcasting and I focused on writing. I got a few opportunities to write about sports on the internet, back before blogs and e-zines were a big deal like they are now. Por ejemplo, there was a cute boy I flirted with in my English class, about a year and a half before I transferred to San Jose State. One of our conversations went like this:

Cute Boy: You're a good writer.
Me: Thanks, I write for SFDugout.com.
Cute Boy: Wait a website?
Me: Yeah.
Cute Boy: That's nothing. Websites aren't real.
Me: :|

Cute boy was no longer cute after that.

Writing for those websites, "real" or not, made me realize that I had to do something. I had to stop screwing around and finish school if I wanted to be a writer. So I got my shit together, went to class, and transferred to San Jose State in the Fall of 2009, a few months after my grandmother passed away.

My grandmother's passing was a monumental shift in my life. I admit that I wasn't the model granddaughter/caretaker for her. I let the stresses of working 10 hours a day, attending classes a few nights a week, and building a journalism career boil over and I took it out on her often. Once she got really sick, our relationship basically fell apart.

Then she died and I suddenly had nowhere to go. We lost our house. I was a few months away from knowing if I was accepted to San Jose State. I lived with friends for about six months that summer and prepared myself for what was next.

I started San Jose State as a junior three years ago, where I am a global studies major and a journalism/Spanish minor. I like to joke that I picked GS at SJSU because it has no transfer requirements or prerequisite classes. What really drew me to the program was that it offered a wide open course of study and let me control what I wanted from my degree. I wanted to see more than what was in front of me. I wanted to learn about the world and be a part of something bigger.

There goes the idealist college student crap. I started this college exercise thinking I could change the world. Now that I'm in my third year of my studies at SJSU, with six years of CC behind me, eight years of taking care of someone else, and 29 years of struggling to make it, I'm focused on getting paid.

They tell me that international students have a career edge. I bought into it. That's part of the reason why I'm here in the DR. I really do enjoy living in a new culture and seeing the world but every day I'm here is a day I hope I can come back to the US, graduate, get into a good grad program, and make a good life with my intellect and hard work.

My grandmother was by biggest fan. She always supported me and was so proud of me when I got good grades, when I was first published on the web, and when I made strides in my journalism career. She's been gone for two years and I miss her all the time. There are times when I wish I could talk to her and share the last two years of my life with her, but I know I had to let her go to focus on my own life. Otherwise none of this would be happening.

It took me four years to get to the Dominican Republic, from the day I sent my application to San Jose State to today. Long stories take a long time to write.

Tomorrow is my first class meeting of Analysis of Current Dominican Issues. Potential for more school stories.