Rain and Questions

This is a rainy Halloween, with fat drops trickling down the windows of a big restored mansion. Nathaniel and I are still in Puerto Varas--we're watching over a bed and breakfast that is owned by my fifth grade teacher's high-school best friend. Right now "watching over" means reading Vonnegut in the common-space and waiting for guests. Also, thinking about questions.

Lately, you see, I've been faced with questions that are very difficult to answer. Here is a list:

(1) What did you study? ("Religion and Neuroscience" doesn't translate well into Spanish, and it also doesn't make very much sense.)
(2) What are you going to do with your education? (I either get quiet and awkward or say that I want to become a cat because felines in general seem to be enlightened.)
(3) What is your occupation? (This is often encountered when we have to check in places--Nathaniel and I share terrified eye-contact and freeze. Last time we wrote "itinerant vegetable worker.")
(4) What did you do to deserve this profound freedom? (I ask myself this one, and then struggle to remind myself that, in Tibetan, the word "guilt" doesn't exist.)
(5) Are we just walking non sequiturs? (Nathaniel just asked me that now, over his copy of The Grapes of Wrath. I kinda like it.)

This list is by no means comprehensive. In other news, Chile's only astronaut lives upstairs. Apparently he won some contest, so he got launched up above the stratosphere and gets to take part in the pilot project for a space-tourism agency. He may even go to the moon, and he's one of the happiest people I've ever met.

And I think that this Halloween is going to be pretty quiet. Although the holiday has certainly taken hold here in Chile, Nathaniel and I are going to stay at the guest house and protect it from marauding hooligans (read: we are lazy and might wear some silly hats). It's funny to compare this Halloween to my last, when I bade a confused Indian tailor to made me a sugar-glider suit: