That'll be the day...

Ever since I abandoned my mission to appear more latina (i.e. gave up on trying to have black hair and am back to the blond), people seem to take great joy in addressing me as (or yelling at me from passing cars) - "Macha". I figured it had something to do with being a gringa, but never really bothered to investigate, as there are quite a few comments that I receive in the streets that I am fairly sure I am better off not knowing the meaning of. Last week someone explained to me that Macha means "blond". I originally thought that maybe the word was taken from a similar one: Mancha, which means a spot or a stain, because my hair is quite a few shades of blond at the moment. However, this morning, a fellow meditator Felix corrected my faulty thinking by explaining the historical root of the word. When American films first started being shown in Costa Rica, many of them were action films starring John Wayne. As the character John Wayne is obviously soooooo macho in all of his roles (and happens to have lighter hair), the slang term for blond then became macho, which in it's feminine form would be macha, which would be me. La Macha. I am not quite sure which association is worse - blond like John Wayne or blond like Paris Hilton..