Wildflower in the Wind

What Happend in Vegas

2011-04-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been to Vegas?
Let me describe it to you. People will tell you that Vegas is like Disneyland for adults, but the thing is, Vegas only looks like Disneyland for adults. Like Disneyland, everything looks a bit fake; it’s all too pristine and oddly disproportionate. Like Disneyland, people walk around in costume and there are rides, and bright lights and loud noises. Like Disneyland, you can explore different worlds: The Venetian, Excalibur, Ceasars Palace, Treasure Island! (Interestingly, there is also a Treasure Island in Disneyland.) And adults get just as excited about going to Vegas as kids do about going to Disneyland. So yes, Vegas is like a Disneyland for adults. But that’s not what it is. Vegas is a giant pit where people go with stacks of money, preferably big bills, and then they throw those stacks of money into the pit and watch the bills flutter down to join their brethren.

So when a friend called a few weeks ago to ask if I wanted to go to Vegas I said yes, yes I do. I figured, I was unemployed, I'd go to Vegas and make money! Because, here’s the thing: I thought that if you were wily enough (and few are), you could find your way into the pit and grab armfuls of cash to bring home with you. And of course, I assumed I was one of the blessed few.

I was wrong.

Once decided, I had to plan. As you know, I made myself a list of things that I assumed happened during every trip to Vegas, so I knew to pack only the essentials: a zebra striped dress, two pairs of high heels, a bathing suit for the daytime, a pillowcase (for the dimes I would win), something blue (for the wedding), sneakers (for the chase). I never did locate the Acapulco shirts and I ended up deciding against the fedora. I didn’t even bring anything to sleep in because I assumed that no one ever slept in Vegas ever and that hotel rooms were just a formality.

By some miracle, I wore pants and a sweater on the plane because it turned out to be a solid 60 degrees in Vegas, with a chance of showers, for the entire time I was there.

Sadly, wearing that sweater was the best real luck I had all weekend.

***

I knew that luck wasn’t on my side before I even got on the plane.

I will be the first to admit that I have a time management problem. But, with a 2:30pm flight, I’d given myself plenty of time to catch the bus to the airport. And yet, somehow, I still managed to miss the bus downtown to the airport bus. I tried to walk and ended up having to book it in 80 degree weather. By the time I found the bus stop, I was blistered, dripping in sweat and too late. So I had to take a cab. And that, right there, was the first place I lost money.

But I got to the airport on time! I checked in and joined the line for security. 1:50 pm. Perfect. My flight was scheduled to leave at 2:25. Perfect. Then I looked up at the departure board. Those angry flashing red letters read LAS VEGAS - 2:15: NOW BOARDING. Shit! SHITSHITSHIT! When had they pushed the departure up? Shit! I panicked for another 10 minutes before calling over a security guard and asking him what to do. “Will Southwest keep the door open until 2:15? Do you think I’ll make it?” He basically told me to start asking people if I could go in front of them. Most people responded kindly to "MY PLANE IS BOARDING!" A few people did not. But either way, I jumped the line, raced through security, sprinted to my gate, fumbled for my boarding pass and shoved it into the hands of the man standing at the (thankfully) still-open door. The guy took one look at my ticket and he goes “No, you're over at THAT gate.” Confused, but convinced I had no time to argue, I ran over to THAT gate and looked at the sign: El Paso - 2:25. Wrong. I’m not going to El Paso, I’m going to Vegas. So I ran back and said "NO! I'm going to Vegas!" and he looked at me and said, "Obviously you have a layover in El Paso because your ticket says you're going to El Paso." I look down. So it does. That’s right. Damn.

The topper? My flight was delayed and we didn’t end up boarding until 2:40. I slumped down in a seat, trying to hide from anyone walking by who I'd cut in front of in the security line.

NOT a good start.

But despite all this I made it to Vegas, hoping beyond hope that I’d just run through my allotment of bad luck.

We were based in Excalibur: a GIANT toy castle filled with slot machines. Well, to be fair, there are other things besides slots, but I had a bit of tunnel vision. I don't know if you know, but I LOVE the slots – it’s almost a problem. I find that I did not blog about my disastrous experience with slot machines at a casino in Costa Rica. Probably because I was embarrassed about it. I ended up losing twice what everyone else did. I mean, when all was said and done, with the exchange rate and everything, it was really only seven dollars. But still, the memory of sitting in the blue glow of the video slot machine and mindlessly feeing it money, not even really seeing the screen in front of me, well, it’s shameful.

So it was a familiar feeling when I walked into Excalibur and my fingers started itching. “Just one sec guys, I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna be over here for a minute. Just at this slot machine here… Just for a minute.”

Inevitably that “minute” stretched for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

But that comes later.

That first night, after getting all dolled up (gotta look good for Lady Luck, right?), our little posse hit the casino floor in full Oceans 11 slow motion. Our game of choice? Craps. Well, I shouldn’t say “our” game of choice, because my game of choice was quite different.

See, someone told me that so many people lose in Vegas because they win a bit on the machines and then try to parlay that on the tables and end up losing big. With that in mind, I formulated my plan: I’d play it safe. I’d bide my time on the slot machines waiting to hit big money and then never play big on the tables. Also, I figured on beginners luck. I just always assumed that I’d be that person who casually drops a quarter into the machine on the way out the door and wins the jackpot.

So we devoted the night to wandering from casino to casino, collecting chips and free drinks and I spent the entire night sneaking off to play the slots.

Disaster struck sometime around 3am. After hours of walking around in heels and feeding on nothing but free booze, I wandered off, unsupervised. My feet were hurting so I sat myself at a video roulette machine. All-too-aware that there was no one around, I suspected this would be the perfect time to win big. Nearly alone in a giant hotel, just me and the machine. The tension was palpable and you would almost hear the showdown music whistling in the background while tumbleweeds danced.

Instead of finding myself suddenly in possession of thousands of dollars, I just sat there, feeding that stupid machine money, entirely unaware that I was placing $5 bets each time. In the space of 5 minutes, I’d lost all the cash I had with me. And believe you me, it was far more than $7.

Depressed, disheartened and defeated, I returned to the group, head hanging low and proceeded to mope until we returned to the room a half an hour later. And that’s the story of how I wasn’t allowed on the slots by myself for the rest of the weekend.

The next day, dawned surprisingly bright. After only a few hours of sleep we took to the streets of Vegas. I wore hangover sunglasses, but only for effect; I was feeling surprisingly light and chipper. Our little tour took us into a few different hotels, and to a few different craps tables and a few more slot machines to which I a few more dollars.

The good thing about getting up and out late, is that there is not much daylight to burn before it’s nighttime again and the adventure rages on in full force. Over margaritas and chips we planned. A review of the list revealed that, the night before, we had achieved not a single thing on it. Everything was left for that last night. Oh what a night it was going to be! On the way home, it appeared that my luck was turning. Someone cried “tiger!” and I wheeled around, beside myself with excitement and joy. Already we were going to cross something awesome off the list! But it was a cruel trick – I didn't find a live tiger, resplendent and roaring; I found giant stuffed tiger with a somewhat squished face.

And sadly, that's as close as I got to anything on the list.

I’ll skip over the last night, mostly because my memory does. I tried to take a power nap at about 1am and failed. Which I realized when I woke suddenly at 10am in that "too-little-too-late" frenzy, still in my dress from the night before, face smeared with makeup and the beginnings of the worst hangover I’ve ever had. Which, really is just how it should be after a night in Vegas, ammIright?bAnd while I didn’t cross anything off my list, I did get to enjoy my very own classic Vegas moment a la The Hangover: a trip down an unfamiliar memory lane looking through the pictures from the night before. My favorite is a picture of me hugging someone in a penguin costume. Why there was a penguin at Excalibur, I’ll probably never know.

On the way home, I lost $10 more dollars at the airport slots.

And you know what? It was totally worth it. All the money hurled into the Vegas pit, the hangover, the complete and total lack of showgirl headdresses, it was all totally worth it to get to spend three days with good friends. Plus, it was valuable reconnaissance. Because next time? Oh, Vegas better watch out for next time. If this weekend was legendary, next time can only be absolutely EPIC.

Everybody knows what happens in Vegas

2011-04-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

I am vexed.

This is because I leave for Las Vegas in less than 24 hours and I can’t find a single Hawaiian shirt and I seem to have misplaced my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I have never been to Las Vegas. All I know of Sin City, I’ve learned from popular culture. So I am pretty confident I know what this weekend has in store for me: it will involve a giant white whale of a Cadillac, a live tiger, a plot to take down a casino, three double cherries and a bucket full of dimes, at some point someone must get married by an Elvis impersonator, and I’m sure I’ll end up donning a C.S.I. jumpsuit. If I’m lucky I may even get to be chased through a casino kitchen by some sausage-fingered, neck-less hulk of a security guard who will then threaten to break my knuckles or something. And of course there will be Sinatra. That goes without saying. (Perhaps I should also bring a fedora.)

One thing is for sure, if I go the entire weekend without finding myself in possession of a showgirl’s headdress, then the whole thing will have been a bust.

SXSW for Dummies and Newbies

2011-03-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

I’m sure you’re probably still reading my last post on SXSW and so are probably SO STOKED for next SXSW. Maybe you’re already making plans, I don’t know, I’m not you. Or maybe you’re over it already; SXSW was so two weeks ago. But before the bloom is completely off the rose, I’d like to take the opportunity to share with you some hard-earned tips for surviving SXSW in its current incarnation. (And I won’t lie to you, mostly I want to post this now so that I can link back to it next year…)

Think of it as a sort of beginners guide to SXSW: for beginners, by beginners (I’m no jaded veteran, this was my first SXSW and I’ll be the first to tell you how incredible and how daunting it is)

The usual recommendations? They apply.
Drink Water – I mean, let’s be logical here. You’ll be walking around, standing around, in the sun, drinking. You will get dehydrated. Not all venues will let you bring in a water bottle, but you have access to water everywhere. Take advantage of that access.

Use Sunscreen – Protect your snow-white winter skin, the sun is damn unforgiving. Don’t let sunburn ruin your week-long bacchanalia. And this applies to performers too. You know who you are. I saw you; you were lobster red and looked REALLY uncomfortable.

Stock up on Food – I don’t care if you live here or if you’re renting or at a hotel. Make sure you stockpile good, healthy food before SXSW begins. While there is a TON of free food during SXSW, tacos and beer aren’t going to sustain you for a whole week, you’re not going to want to take a break to go to the store, and you’re going to need all the energy you can get. Eat your veggies. On a similar note,

Take Your Vitamins/Meds – vitamin B, iron, vitamin C, midol, whatever. Know what you need and take it. Got a headache? Take aspirin, A.S.A.P. Heartburn? Find some Tums. Don’t try to play through the pain, it’s not worth it. Take care of your body and it’ll take care of you (or at least you’ll have less of a chance of collapsing from exhaustion and missing something awesome).

Have a Bike – Seriously, if you are anywhere within biking distance of downtown, have a bike. Parking is near-impossible and, while public transportation rocks, biking gives you more control over where you go and when. Plus it makes travel time faster and gives your tired tootsies a much needed rest.

Be Comfortable – I don’t really care what this means to you. If being comfortable means wearing loose clothes that you can move in, wear those. If being comfortable means looking awesome, do that. If you will be most comfortable in running shoes, wear them. If you’ll just feel better wearing sandals, wear sandals. You know you. You’ll be out for most of the day so if you are wearing something that doesn’t make you happy, you’ll spend more time thinking about how much you hate what you are wearing than you do enjoying the moment.

Get Up Early – I found this impossible, but then again, I can’t wake up before 11 on a normal day. But SO MUCH good stuff goes on before 1pm during SXSW, like panels (if you have a badge or can get around security) or day parties with free bloody marys and/or mimosas. If you’ve got a badge* you can chill out on beanbag chairs in the convention center in dimly lit rooms listening to bands perform. If you haven’t got a badge, you can chill out on benches in dimly lit bars listening to bands perform. Plus: day drinking. And I’ll tell you a secret: the best part of the fun is shuffling around in sunglasses, hung-over as hell, just like all of the other rock stars.

Wear Sunglasses – See above. Plus, all the cool kids are doing it.

Have an iProduct – or some sort of a smart phone. Besides being the way of the world, constantly being connected to the internet means you’ll be one of the first to know about secret shows, surprise performers, sudden parties and free food via email and twitter updates, PLUS you’ll be able to locate any venue or R.S.V.P. to any day party whenever you want to. If you needed more convincing, there’s an app for that. It allows you to search for bands by genre, check the official schedule and make your own schedule, so you’ll never end up at the wrong show or, you know, lost. Just try not to lose your iProduct.

Take a Nap – Absolutely crucial. You don’t actually have to nap, but you are going to need a break and if you don’t take this into account you may end up taking said break without meaning to. You may take your break wherever you want, whether this means heading back to home base, or passing out in a dark corner of a bar, one of the lounges, or against a tree in the park. Heck, you don’t even have to sleep if you don’t want to. Sometimes just finding a bar without a show or party going on, sitting on the fringes and having a drink in peace is enough to recharge your battery. Because honey, it’s gonna be a long night.

Don’t forget the Eastside – I have a feeling that out-of-towners and beginners tend to miss out on the Eastside. I know I almost did. There is just so much to do around the Convention Center and on 6th street, and I’m talking a mind-boggling amount of things to do and places to go, that making it ALL the way over on the other side of I-35 (it’s not really that far) can be daunting. But there is just as much to do on the Eastside and more of it is free. Plus, because there are far fewer official events, there’s a more laid-back feel and less pressure to see this band or that band. It felt more like an endless summer and less like a week-and-a-half-long event.

Be Flexible – You can think of SXSW as one of those choose your own adventure books. Are you going to make a detailed itinerary or wing it? Is it all about the shows for you or are they more of an excuse to escape normal life and party like there’s no tomorrow for a week and a half? Obviously, there are going to be things that you’re going to want to do and see, but the bottom line is, you’re going to have to be flexible. Because SXSW isn’t like any other festival. It isn’t a giant concert; it’s a giant clusterfuck. It doesn’t span three days and three or even eight stages in a giant field. It spans a week and a half, an entire city and includes an overwhelming number of performers. There is absolutely no way to exactly control your experience. You don’t know, your two favorite bands could be scheduled at the same time on opposite sides of the city. So I found it was better to just let go, drift and enjoy the experience.
If there is a show that you absolutely have to see or you’ll just die, get there an hour early. Sure, you’ll spend an hour standing in line when you could be living it up elsewhere, but the venues are small and reach capacity quickly. If you have to see this band, you stand a much better chance if you’re first in line than if you show up 5 minutes after the set has started (when you will be S.O.L.). But the good news is that many bands play multiple shows. And don’t forget the day shows. I missed out on a few bands because I couldn’t make their night shows and couldn’t get up in time to catch them during the day.
Obviously, it’s your adventure. I’m not you. I can’t tell you how to best figure out what to do with your time. For my part? I found that the way to enjoy SXSW was to forget about seeing bands I knew or loved. If I ended up at their show, great, awesome. But if not, I know I’d be willing to pay to see them at some other time. Instead, I went through the WHOLE schedule and made a list of bands that I thought looked interesting or that were playing at venues, where they were playing and at what times. That way, if I ever ended up without something to do, I’d be able find something close and interesting that I knew I’d enjoy. And if I didn’t make it to their shows, it wasn’t the end of the world and at least I’d found new music to listen to. But for the most part, I tried to not stress about the shows. I tried instead to focus on just existing in SXSW, that fascinating drunken world unto itself. I focused on surviving. Aaaaand sometimes I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

*(NOTE - Badges vs. wristbands vs. nothing: There are pros and cons for each. Badges give you priority for shows, access to panels and lounges in the Convention Center and other such perks, but they’re expensive and I have a feeling you can end up skipping the free stuff because you have the badge and want your money’s worth. On the flip side, you could just not buy anything, miss out on the big-name bands in small venues, but instead focus on the (often free) fringe and unofficial events which are just as awesome, if not more so. And then wristbands are right in the middle there, because they cost less than badges you only get second priority and it can be frustrating when you pay for a wristband, but still can’t get into a show because the venue has reached capacity and badges get priority. Also, wristbands don’t get you into the lounges and panels.)

As Excruciatingly Long as SXSW

2011-03-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

The day after the South By South West Music, Film and Interactive Festival (or, as we cool kids refer to it, SXSW) is kind of like a holiday. It’s the day when all the performers and speakers pack up with relief and everybody who worked the event sobs with relief and everyone who attended secretly sighs with relief because they can finally put the bottle of tequila back on the shelf. And it’s when everybody can finally sleep for more than 3 hours.
For me, (and I don’t know about everyone else,) it was kind of like the day after Halloween, except instead of gorging myself on candy, I skipped around the internet listening to all of my new favorite bands like a 6 year-old hyped up on pixie sticks and milky way bars. I decided it should be a three-day weekend to celebrate and so took Monday off. But I can do that because I’m unemployed. So no worries. Tuesday I made “happy end of sxsw” cupcakes. I am milking this holiday (like all other holidays) for all it’s worth.

And truth be told, we all deserve to relax, even those of us who spent the entire time partying. SXSW was a stretch of 10 days in which I survived on nothing but free hummus and tortilla chips, occasional bowls of oatmeal or trailer tacos and, of course, plenty of gin and tonics. I have 27 new mystery bruises and 4 or 5 scratches of which I have no memory of receiving. More than once I had to stumble home to collapse with exhaustion and/or dehydration for an hour before getting up and going out again. I got food poisoning, I cried, I got lost. Twice, I thought my bikes had been stolen. I had things thrown at me (specifically a Monster). And I wasn’t even in the worst of it, my SXSW wasn’t the bacchanalia that it probably could have been, if only I’d tried harder...

Some Austin natives might disagree (the festival has kinda sold out, gone mainstream. Check it out. ) but for me? Oh, it was all worth it.

Why? Allow me to tell you. (and hold on to your seats kids, it was a long week, it’s probably gonna be a longer post.)

So it’s almost cliché, but have you ever been to a concert in an old abandoned warehouse? A rave perhaps? I haven’t. But let me tell you, it is incredible. Walking into the abandoned power plant for a Diplo concert on one of the first nights, it hit me: the absolute magnitude of awesomeness that is SXSW. The power plant sits just outside the city center and is usually properly melancholy in the manner one expects of abandoned power plants. But that night it was like jumping into a LED display, a technicolored reality laced with adrenaline; even the air was throbbing and jostling. I remember it stilted, like it would be in a movie, flashes of people, so. many. people. all crushed together, teeming with life, pumping fists in the air and thrashing around, drowning in the music. It makes you feel like a part of something so Big and so Alive, so Real.

When I think of SXSW, I think music. But when I think of lots of things, I think of music. But for many people, SXSW is all about film and tech. Did you know that Twitter was launched at SXSW? I didn’t. I mean, even the Blogger dashboard is talking about SXSW. So anyways, the first half of the festival was ALL about film and tech, so it was naturally all about Things to Do: events, giveaways, sponsored parties with free food, meet-and-greets, and general networking opportunities. I mean really, that’s what people are there for; the networking. (I didn’t really network, unless you count pestering hard-working bartenders about whether or not their establishments might be hiring after the festival.) Music seemed inconsequential, or accidental.

I mean, we would stumble in to concerts that were half finished, or leave half way through. Long lines weren’t worth the wait, even if Prince did show up that one time after we left the line. And more often than not, if we made a concerted effort to see certain acts, we usually ended up somewhere else.

We did see Michael Cera and even that was an accident. I don’t remember why we ended up in the bar where his band was playing; but the point is, we all looked up and went “Huh. That skinny kid up there looks a bit like Michael Cera, doesn’t he?” Well, all except for me, because, of course, I know everything. “That IS Michael Cera, it HAS to be.” Then the guy standing in front of us turned around and said “yea, it is.” (But his eyes said “shut up, some of us are trying to listen to music.”)

***I’d like to take a moment during this transition to discuss something very serious.
This year, St. Patty’s day and SXSW coincided. Two reasons to party in the streets and drink heavily? Not a problem. Herein lays the problem: After making my way downtown, visions of Magners dancing in my head, I tripped up the stairs (as in skipped. Please, it was far too early to be stumbling, even on St. Pats) to the nearest pub I was stunned, STUNNED to see that there was a $15 cover charge at the door.
Now, my love for Ireland is well documented. As is my love for pubs. I’ve BEEN to Ireland, I’ve BEEN in Irish pubs. Let me be perfectly clear, a cover charge for a pub on St. Patrick’s Day is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. It’s contrary to the whole spirit of the holiday. It makes me cranky. Also I couldn’t find any Magners. So that made me cranky too. But really? A cover charge? Just to enter the pub? That’s just purely offensive. ***

Music eclipsed film and tech on the 15th, and oh baby, from there on in was like mainlining music. It was like living the Doppler Effect: before you could out of earshot of one act, you’d find yourself immersed in another. It was everywhere. Bands in the streets, bands playing in bars; just walking down the streets, you could just pause and listen to a song or two on your way.

Everywhere.

The problem with mainlining, is sometimes you can end up in the hospital. Fact of life. Have you ever been to a Strokes concert? They’re fun, energetic. I’d say peppy, but mostly just for spite. They played at one of the free outdoor concerts at Auditorium Shores. Luke Rathborne opened, I stood up near the front and he was fantastic. Here’s the thing about the Strokes that I forgot. They burst onto the scene back when my peers and I was 14 or 16. They were great. They’re still great, but their core constituency is still 14-16. Fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, but let me tell you, you don’t want to accidentally end up ANYWHERE close to the front at a Strokes concert. While whassisface is standing up there with a leather jacket and sunglasses on a night when it’s 80 degrees outside, you’re down in the pit with a bunch of teenagers and they are trying to kill you. They are trying their best to crush you to death and blow out your ear drums with high-pitched screams. Does that make me sound old? I don’t care. Do you know what it’s like to feel like you are going to die by teenager crushing? Absolutely terrifying. That’s how it feels. You’ll find yourself hoping beyond hope that security will kick you out if you crowd surf your way to the front because it may be your only chance of escape and survival.

Don’t worry, I escaped. There were riots after the concert. There were a lot of riots at SXSW. People tore down the fences and stole from the vendors. I bolted through what may or may not have been a new, hooligan-created exit and managed to get away before the police called a state of emergency. You see, I was late to The Kills concert, the only concert of the whole festival that I absolutely HAD to see. When I got there and saw the line stretching back from the door, I panicked. And when the doorman walked down the line and told us all that the chances of getting in were slim to none, I started to cry. I mean, not really of course, I just furiously blinked back tears. I was stunned, like a deer in the headlights and I stood there anyways, dwelling. Good thing I did too because 15 or 20 minutes later the line moved and I made it in for the last few songs of their set! Oh, I was SO happy, I almost cried again.
Then something seemed off. Here’s the thing, though I’ve tried three times to see the Kills, I’ve failed each time. So I’m not 100% sure what they look like live. It wasn’t until the set was over that I realized that I’d been in the wrong room and hadn’t been watching the Kills at all, and they hadn’t sorta changed their sound. I’d have cried again (no I wouldn’t) but She Keeps Bees are fucking AWESOME.

She Keeps Bees

And I’ll tell you a secret. Those are the moments that made SXSW worth it. The serendipity of stumping on a band you’d never heard of that was incredible and perfect and became your new favorite band.

Like when, one morning, I was browsing through the schedule and decided I liked the name of the band Fang Island. Long story short, I ended up standing outside their concert along with other intrepid fans, unable to get in but still able to hear the music. Like true, die-hard fans, right? (Except let’s be honest, true die-hard fans probably would have shown up an hour and a half before the show and waited to make sure they got inside and up front.)

Or how wandering aimlessly down 6th street one night, I heard something that fit my mood, slid into a bar and watched the second half of Stella Rose’s set. The drummer was wedged in the back, shirtless, dripping sweat and thrashing like Animal from the Muppets. The bassist was this little blonde pixie of a girl who was dressed like Olivia Newton John in the last scene of Grease, except minus the stilettos which somehow made the whole outfit sweet and who spent the entire show high-fiving the audience. The lead guitarist and singer wore Buddy Holly glasses and joked around like he was everybody’s best friend, but in a sincere kind of way. And in fact, you ended up feeling like you DID know the band, like they WERE your best friends and you found yourself pulling for them, wanting to see them do well, wanting them to succeed.

Or this one afternoon when I was wandering between outdoor shows in bar yards on the Eastside and stopped for lunch at a trailer park. I chatted with the guys at the juice trailer, I ordered French fries from a school bus and questioned the guy at hot dog stand about boiled peanuts. That’s about when I realized that I’d been totally digging the band playing in the next lot. And that’s how I found that I liked TV Girl generally and their song On Land specifically.

Trailer Park Lunchtime

You know how, on the last day of vacation, even if you’re absolutely exhausted, you feel like you have to cram everything that you did and didn’t do in? Yea, that was my Saturday night. Besides great music, I danced, I sprinted across the city to catch this band or that band, I met great people and made new friends, I ate fantastic late-night Vietnamese tacos (you thought Korean BBQ tacos were awesome? Yea, just you wait). And then when it was all over, I found that someone had locked their bike to mine with a U lock. After a solid 20 minutes trying to pick the lock with my bobby pins (because I can do things like that) I was rescued by a friendly pedi-cab driver. We rolled over the South 1st bridge at 3:30am with the reflections of the street lamps dancing on the water, and there was not a soul around. It felt like city was asleep for the first time in weeks and it was such pure relief.

Sunday couldn’t have been more perfect for a hungover holiday, couldn't have been a more perfect end. The sky was grey, not too bright, the warm Austin air coddled and everyone and everything moved slowly. In the late afternoon I made moves to a local coffeehouse and met a friend to see a recommended band. We lounged on a bench against the fence under palm trees and crossed strings of garden lights and listened to The Steelwells, and were lulled into a calm and harmonious peace.

The Steelwells

Another "lost" generation

2011-03-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Sometimes people ask me why I moved to Austin. Sometimes I answer “Why not?” and leave it at that. Some other times I launch into an explanation of how I’ve really been living in the Bay Area my entire life and how I needed a change and how Austin has a great music scene, etc., etc. Then people usually respond by mentioning that they are hearing more and more about how so many people are flooding into Austin these days.

I usually don’t say anything after that, but I’ll let you in on a secret: that is the real reason I moved here. It’s always uncool to admit to being a follower, especially in a culture that so encourages children to be individuals and cherish their unique idiosyncrasies, but the simple fact is that I moved here because everyone else is moving here.

I could throw out clichés about how Austin is a city like no other but that would be trite and boring. And wrong. It’s not unlike any other. In fact, it’s actually very like other cities. Sure, drinks are cheaper here and the weather is hotter and for some reason I can’t seem to adapt to the driving style here, but sometimes I forget that I’ve left San Francisco or parts of LA or Portland or parts of New York. That’s the thing, Austin is a trendy city, just like all those other trendy cities, it just happens to have existed fewer years in the role.
The one defining difference I can see is the unashamed hipster status of this fine city. (Though, like any good hipster, Austin would categorically deny any accusations of the sort, and I’m sure a majority of the natives rightfully disapprove of the label as well.) The last time I visited Austin, a friend of mine made an anti-hipster comment and another friend turned and replied with “Get over yourself! Of course you’re a little bit of a hipster, we’re all a little bit hipster. You’re in Austin, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a little bit of a hipster.” And how true it is. In Austin there’s a lot of bike riding, green-living, vegan-eating, thrift-store-shopping, artsy-fartsy, politically-progressive, creative intelligent types. Oh, and everyone smokes American Spirits. Just sayin’.
Of course, the word “hipster” is a bit of dirty word in the same way that the Beats of the 50’s probably hated being called beatniks because it was a mainstream label for their very anti-mainstream aesthetic. Not everyone here wears tight pants and a permanent look of superiority and boredom, nor does everyone obsess over appearing studiedly indifferent to their cherished individuality. But individuality is incredibly important here in Austin and it’s actually truly genuine.

Possibly too important. There’s a post over on Hipstercrite that is filled with absolutely delicious ennui. An Austin transplant (as most of us apparently are), she begins to realize that she is “losing [her] individuality in a competition for who was the most unique.” She points out that our generation has the luxury of an overwhelming array of options, and not just in the supermarket. We were raised to believe that we can be anything we want to be, go anywhere we want to go, be with anyone we want to be with. But I think it goes even deeper. Beyond just being raised to believe that we do anything we wanted to, we also live in a culture where we can change that anything whenever we want. Don’t like your major? Change it. Don’t like your job? Quit and do something else. Don’t like your career? Switch. Don’t like your location? Move, it’s easy to do. Don’t like your partner? Get a divorce/separate/break up.
Worse still, many of us young people weren’t brought up with the bootstrap mentality that our grandparents and to some extent, our parents were. Occasionally the message “you can be whoever you want to be” would end with “if you try hard enough,” but more often than not, it didn’t. Or we just got bored and stopped listening half way through. My own mother tried so hard to teach me the importance of hard work and the concept of starting from the bottom and working your way to the top. But I know that I never believed her. I actually remember listening to her one day and thinking “yeah yeah. That's not gonna happen. If I can be anything I want to be, why would I ever choose to fetch coffee as an intern if what I really want to do is be a CEO?” Sure, logically we know that you have to start somewhere, but let’s be honest with ourselves, how many of us believe that this doesn’t really apply to us?

So what with the sensory overload and self-entitled assumption in the place of ambition, we wind up lost in the aisles of the grocery store, trying to figure out which of the thousand types of soap to buy before deciding to buy the one everyone else buys. After all, if everyone else is buying it, at the very least, it must not be bad.

We move to the hip new place because that’s where the opportunities are. That’s where it’s new and exciting and fast enough that we can maybe jump into the surge and skip a few rungs on the ladder to the top. I mean, how many people moved to New York in the early 1900s to become millionaires? How many people moved to LA in the mid-to-late 1900s to become famous? When you’re young and still believe that you can easily achieve your dreams, you want to be where the streets are paved with gold. Sure, most of us end up treading water, but it is a comfort to be surrounded by other people of this lost generation who are also treading water. After all, if they all chose that brand of soap, that city to live in, they can’t all be wrong. (Talk about a mixed bag of metaphors, huh?)

I’ll let you in on another part of my secret. That’s not the whole reason I moved here either. Sure, I want to pick up chunks of gold in the gravel at my feet just as much as the next kid. But it’s not so much that I moved here with the same mentality, it’s that I moved here because of the mentality. I moved here because we’re all moving here. Ariel and I have something in common. We both want to be where the people are. And I’m completely unashamed of that because people (and I don’t know if you know this) are incredibly interesting.

No plot and all together too much self-analyzation

2011-02-23T10:28:00.001-08:00

I have always liked to do things in such a way that they become Things. I have liked to do things so that they are commemorative, by starting them beginning of a month, or on the hour. I like special dates. 1.11.11 was a fun day, I really wanted to Start Something then. But then I didn't. Each of my 8 piercings commemorates a time, date or event in my life when Things changed. I have liked to make Things into Symbols. Symbols of re-birth or a new beginning or a peaceful end to this phase of my life or that stage of growing up. I like clean slates and I think I try to create them for myself at every possible turn.

In a way, it worked. I mean, I travel so much and have moved around enough, that I can find enough clean slates to make myself happy. Which, of course, means plenty of new places to go and things to see to keep me excited about and writing about.

But lately I've had the hardest time keeping up with myself and all my OCD rules. I stopped blogging when I came back from traveling because I didn't really feel like there was anything interesting to write about. I was back in Berkeley, slogging through my last year of college and too buried in the immature preoccupations of my age group to feel like I had anything in me but whining and pseudo-existential crises (after all, I was submerged in academia, an overdose of high-brow theoretical thinking was bound to happen, and I think the whining comes with the territory as well).
I could have pontificated on the concept of graduating and truly entering a new stage of my life, but I wasn't really finished with my degree, so the only thing I produce on the subject was a weak quip on my bastard graduation (that is, my illegitimate graduation ceremony... I went through the song and dance, but I wasn't really done).
Then I was back in San Francisco. I was having a blast, but San Francisco is home for me. It doesn't feel new or exciting. Once in a while I'd get inspired by some experience at the bar to share it with the world, but never really got around to it.

But more important than my antipathy in the face of gracing the world with my mental ramblings, I pretty much stopped writing full stop. I didn't write in my journal, I wasn't feverishly typing out the weak skeletons of a short story idea, I even quit pretending that I'd eventually be able to write a song if I just practiced enough to get through the initial stage of crap lyrics that some bands try to pawn off on us as legitimate.

See, over a year and a half ago I'd decided that I needed to work on freeing my mind. If I was going to write, I mean REALLY write, I needed to write. Logical, huh? What I mean is that, like writing song lyrics, practice makes perfect. Not every word I put on the page is going to be a diamond. Most of it is going to be coal. And not even substantial hunks of coal, more like spent coal dust. Not that I'm trying to become perfect. It's just that I love words. I love the way they look and the way they sound. They are tinker toys or Legos with infinite combination possibilities. And they MAKE things: ideas, feelings, history, knowledge. I digress, but the point is I love writing. It's what I do. A friend of mine recently responded to my apology for my long-winded stories with "it does take you forever to tell a story. No, it's more like you're writing me a story and then orating it." It was a compliment. At least as far as I'm concerned.

Anyhoozle, I was working on freeing my mind. I stopped writing in my journal on consecutive pages. If I felt like writing two pages ahead, I would. I wrote in patterns and pictures, instead of creating giant left-to-right blocks of words. And that worked for a while. I wrote all the time. It made me feel artsy, and oh-too-cool-for-school.

But eventually I got bored. It was hard work thinking of new ways to free my mind. And every time I opened my journal, I felt like it had to be this big ordeal, I had to have Things to write about or insights into the Things I was writing about. Not to mention a cool new patten in which to write. I had to date everything (you know, in case I die famous and brilliant and they want to publish my journals for the world to benefit from. That's right, I think about that. I'm willing to bet you do too. Don't lie to yourself, you do.).

So I stopped writing in my journal. Sometimes I'd open a Word document out of frustration just to put down some of the stuff that was crowding around in my head. But I would never think of it as legitimate. I didn't date them because they weren't legitimate, they weren't neatly contained in my little black moleskine notebook.
Sometimes at work I'd grab one of those little pads that servers use to take orders down on and jot out an image that I liked, or a feeling that I thought should exist in words or a story idea. I'd take up three or four pages, tear them off and stick them in my back pocket. When I got home they'd end up shoved in my desk or in the pages of one of my notebooks.
Even short phrases I didn't know what to do with. I couldn't write them in my notebook except on the designated page (yes, I felt they had to be organized in my mind-freeing journal) so they'd end up on random pieces of paper and mostly in the notepad on my phone.

And then one day I just shook myself. I decided to that it wasn't worth it. That I DON'T have to organize things into neat little containers. All those random little scribblings are legitimate. They're always fun to read back over and that's what really matters, right? And it isn't worth it to wait for a momentous occasion to start writing again. I moved to Austin almost two weeks ago. I thought that that would be a great time to start writing again. Starting a new phase of my life and all... but I'm sick of trying to find reasons to start things and I'm tired of having to associate Things with Symbols and New Eras. So today, (what day is it again? The dates seem to melt together when one is jobless) randomly on February 23 I've started blogging again.

All this is a very long, drawn-out way of saying "I'm baaaaack!"

Guilty Pleasures

2010-10-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

It's happened to everyone once.

You hear a song on the radio or in a store or on a commercial and it sticks there. Not immediately of course, but a few days later you find yourself humming it, or repeating a line or phrase from that song.
"Huh," you think, "that's kinda catchy. Where did that come from?"
You go about your business, generally unperturbed. A few days later you hear it again. You are unconscious of the fact that you recognize the song until just before the end.
"Hey!" you think, "that was it! That was that song! Huh, catchy song."
Later that day you hear it again. This time you catch on quickly and try to remember specific lines of the song to look up later, to put an artist to the song. But you have a short attention span and there is a lot going on in your life. So, naturally, you forget.
But then you start hearing it on the radio more.
"Ah! This song!" you say to yourself sagely, "I know this song." and you smile smugly while humming along.
And then you're into it. You're into this song. You flip through the radio stations, hoping to hear it again.
"What?" you reply defensively, "I kinda like this song."
Now it's started running through your head at odd points in your day. In fact it's running through your head quite a lot. You still don't know the whole song, but whenever you hear it, you stop immediately, even just to catch the last verse.
"Oh man!" you say aloud in the car, "I love this song!" You get so excited when it randomly pops up in your day. If you have the opportunity, you'll belt along in a halting, stumbling manner because this song GETS you! You've finally figured out enough of the lyrics to know that this is YOUR song. The artist didn't know it, but they wrote a song about you, about your life. It's perfect for whatever it is you're going through right now.
Then you realize that it is popping up in your day more and more. You've heard it three times on the radio this morning, once in Starbucks (or whichever local coffee shop you prefer to patronize) and once in the supermarket. Perhaps you are not, as you had thought, the ultra-hip music lover on the pulse of your generation. It's growing popularity is an uncomfortable reminder that everyone else believes that THIS song is THEIR song and that you are but a member of the flock.

This, naturally, makes you uncomfortable.

Maybe you're riding in the car with friends and one of them is running through the radio stations. You hear your song. "Stopstopstop!" you shout. (You may even slap his or her hand away.) Then you sheepishly try to save face, "I like this song."
But your secret shame won't get the better of you at home. You listen to it over and over on youtube. You are probably responsible for 23% of the page hits. Now you know this song in it's entirety and it still speaks to you. You lip-synch to it alone in your room, releasing all the emotion you believe is necessary for said song and punctuating it with air-punches and meaningful looks in the mirror. You imagine yourself in the music video, or set it as the soundtrack to an event in your life that will probably never happen, no matter how much you wish it would.
Sometimes, when you aren't around a radio, computer or any other listening device, you play it in your head. Because that's how well you know it.

Finally, you're tired of praying that it will come on the radio, tired of having to access youtube to listen to it.
"I don't care!" you boldly declare. "I don't care that it is so popular! It speaks to me! I must have it at my disposal for whenever I want to listen to it! It must be able to set the tone for my life whenever I need it to! This is MY song! I WILL buy it on iTunes! And I don't care if my friends judge me because it's SO mainstream and, frankly, kinda shitty."
So you do. With a perverse pride you click "buy it" (for $1.29!) and watch the barber-shop bar march along while the magic of the internet takes your money and magically replaces it with a song. Like the tooth fairy, similarly painful. Then you watch the little arrow next to "downloading" spin around and around and around.

Then it's done. The song is yours. Yours to have and to keep. You possess it. You double-click...
...and suddenly, it's not the same. It's like the song has lost it's shine. It's still... good, and everything, you just... don't really have the desire to listen to it anymore. Oh well. At least now you own it in case you ever do need to listen to it at a moment's notice. Hah. Like that will ever happen.

And that is the cruel irony of the buying radio pop songs.

All Growed Up

2010-07-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

I have a grown up job. And I love my grown up job.

Bartending is chemistry without the math. It's a creative controlled chaos and an excuse to spend my day chatting with strangers and friends. It's equal parts precision mixing, breezy interaction and cultivated style.
Some mornings I open the bar. Cool San Francisco mornings when the fog hasn't quite rolled back far enough. The streets are busy enough, but inside the bar it's quiet and calm. I like the days that are slow enough to put on the jazz station. Maybe I've been reading too much Dashiell Hammett, but to me that's what a bar should be like in the day time. A little Duke Ellington while I'm polishing the brass beer taps, wiping down the warm lacquered wood, and cutting garnishes for the day. The most steadfast regulars come in the early afternoon, around 3, and that's when I start to put out the bowls of pretzels. I'm almost in tune with their routines. Royal comes in with a magazine, orders an IPA or two and says little. Mary usually comes in with a book for a double of Jameson with a water back and a little conversation. She's easy to talk to and has an easy, infectious laugh. Pat and Mary come in for a bottle of O'Douls non-alcoholic beer and a cosmo (respectively). He looks every inch an Irish fisherman, complete with a round salt-and-pepper beard. Justin comes in for a couple IPAs and, through conversations about travel and world events, reminds me that I majored in economic development to improve the places in the world that most need improvement. Every Friday, like clockwork, old Josef comes in with his two middle-aged sons, Dean and Dev, and I get ready to serve a few rounds of Stella, MGD and Becks. Sometimes they are joined by the rest of the family, a couple of daughters and friends close enough to count as blood, but they always bring the party.

Of course after a few deliciously slow afternoons, I've developed a hankering for a busy night. I can't wait to get into the zone of rush, on a night when everything is going right. Ducking in and out of the bar, slipping through the crowds of people to deliver drinks, or grab clean glassware, spinning glasses and bottles and pouring out a rainbow of colors in to shakers. We ARE the movers and the shakers behind the bar on nights like that, dancing from one end of the bar to the other, working together based on intuition more than communication. And can I help YOU, sir? The blender whirs in the background, seemingly constantly, over the low dim, occasionally relieved by the humming of the refrigerators and the blended margarita machine. Three margaritas, an IPA and an Amber, coming right up! On nights like that, it feels like there are almost as many people lining up around the bar and there are bottles lined up in front of the mirrors and I'm presiding over them expertly, grinning and laughing like a fool, completely high on the pandemonium. Nothing beats the feeling of presenting two perfectly poured pints and a newly shaken jewel of a martini with the crystals dancing on the top of the liquid to an eagerly expectant audience.

And at the end of all that bedlam, at the end of the rush and the running and the occasional stress panics, when the very last regular has staggered out into the night, comes the most peaceful time of the night. If I time it right, I can get most of the bar closed up quickly, everything wiped down, screwed on, and covered up. I turn off the "open" sign and lock the bar doors. Everything is pristine and perfect in a way it can never be when the bar is open. I drag the mats and the trash cans out back into the refreshingly cold night. The chairs go stacked on the tables, their legs sticking boldly up in the air. The music is low and most of the lights are out. Even though mopping and vacuuming lengthens the distance between my weary bones and my warm bed at 2am, I kind of like this part. Wiping away the insanity of a long day. Then I turn out the lights and leave. I love the sound of my footsteps echoing in the foggy streets, disturbing the sounds of night in a city - a shower or the buzz of the blue glow of a tv, the flickering of a street lamp or a confused bird twittering the coming of the sun, yet two hours away, and of course the dim moan of far-off cars, pounding through the night.

And that's why I love bartending.

Best accompanied by an acoustic guitar and harmonica tinted with the blues

2010-06-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get lost in the poetry of living. I get carried away by the bittersweet melancholy of cliche moments or images.
There are always those scenes in movies and books where the characters do something utterly impractical but wonderfully romantic, like driving down to the river to just sit on the roof of the car and stare at the moonlight on the water, or releasing a silk scarf with sentimental value into the wind just to watch it dance away or tying hundreds or ribbons to a tree, just to sit in it and look at the sky. Sometimes moments like these seem contrived, but they're absolutely essential to the emotional fabric of the piece.
And, I think, to life.

A week and a half ago I moved out of one phase of life.
I've been living with the same group of friends, in the same house, for three years. And a week and a half ago, after graduating, we all moved out. I was the last one to leave. Literally, the last person to lock and close the door, coming full circle. (I had, after all, been the first one to get the keys and enter the house on the first day of our lease three years ago.) Pretty much everyone had emptied out the day before, and so I spent the last night sitting alone in an empty room, in an empty house.

And that was just how I wanted to say goodbye.

I know I'm sentimental and a hopeless romantic. And I love to live the cliches. So I wandered around the empty rooms for a while, flipping on lights and staring at the stark white walls and remembering them filled with laughter. Remembering the time we all jumped on the bed in this room, or the time we tried to fit 12 people on the bed in that room, remembering all the nights we crammed into this room and moaned about studying, all the times I'd drag my guitar into this room for a jam session and all the nights I stayed up until all hours in late-night convo in these rooms. When I was abroad for a year, they sent me a video of the giant spider they found in this bathroom. And I loved falling a sleep in the afternoon sun that came through that window...
I'd stare into a room for five minutes or so and ramble on, sniffling a little.
Then, at some point, I remembered that my life is not really a movie nor does it have an audience and all my theatrics were for naught. So I returned to my room.

I sat in the middle of my room, the with the only light on in the house, on the mattress of my dismantled bed with a half eaten box of take-out food and a half-finished rum and coke and played my guitar over the tinny folk-rock coming from my computer.
It was corny and overly nostalgic, but unlike my earlier mooning around the house, it was spontaneous and genuine and perfect.
I'll always remember that night removed from my body. I see it from the upper corner of the room, above the door, looking down on my own back draped in an over-sized t-shirt and dwarfed by the emptiness of the room, with my head tilted back and belting emotion out to fill my little lighted room engulfed by the thick, cool night and the scattered lights of Berkeley and stars like so many diamonds.

The next day I packed up my mattress and guitar and whatever else was left, closed the door, and moved myself into San Francisco.

And here I am.
I realized two things today: first, life is a series of short stories. Even if I'm not traveling, my life is a series of absurd, screwball and occasionally interesting vignettes. Second, if I don't have an outlet for my need to tell stories, I spend far too much time curled up at my window, staring wistfully out at the wood panels of the house next door because I can't see the stars. I will drown in wist.

Which is, of course, all a very characteristic way of saying "I'm baAAaack!"

The Grand Finale

2009-08-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

Bocas del Toro was my final trip here in Costa Rica. The next bus I’ll take (besides the one that takes me back after the internet café today, will take me to San José and eventually to the airport.

(I cannot even express how excited I am to fly again. But I won’t get into that now.)

Ems and I met up on the bus. It’d taken her from San José and picked me up in Guapiles en route to Panamá. And at the lunch stop, eating traditional and delicious almuerzo en hojas (lunch in leaves) that my host mom had made us, savoring the layers of tortillas, spiced mashed potatoes and eggs that had absorbed the flavor of the banana leaves, we agreed that it was shaping up to be an amazing weekend.

Her harrowing tale of her journey, which began waiting in a bar at 2am for a 3am bus was filled with wonderful signs that promised a beautiful weekend as had my much less harrowing tale. (Mine only started at 5:30 and included a nice taxi driver who’d dropped me off at the bus stop on the side of the highway and the ceviche preacher, a guy who sells ceviche (fish soup) at the bus stop and gives away religious pamphlets.

And of course the fact that we’d both made it onto the direct bus was a great sign.

After a good five hours of sleeping, we crossed the Panamanian border and hopped into a taxi with about 12 other people from the bus to the ferry to the Bocas del Toro archipelago. Being the smallest (which in this part of the world, is quite a surprise) or perhaps the blondest (not so much of a surprise), I sat on a pillow in between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. During the hour long drive, the driver started out in stony silence, and ended up flirting in that horribly awkward old man way that was unfortunately less benign than old man flirting usually is.

Ems only laughed at me when I told her about it.

Finally on the main island, we found our hostel fresh with a big common room hung with hammocks and painted tangerine and lime green and littered with travelers.
There was a nice flat screen TV mounted on the wall that often showed re-runs of the Big Bang Theory and Friends and I’ll admit that it made me happy.
Also, it reminded me why I like hostel people so much. We scrounged dinner in the grocery store and made friends over a jenkey tuna salad, a bottle of coke and a bottle of rum. Then trooped out, sadly sans my partner in crime who, after being up for almost 24 hours, needed sleep.

Apparently the nightlife scene in Bocas takes place in hostels. We went to the big one, the famous one that’s famous for its nightlife and I was slightly jealous. It was grungy, to be sure, but you could tell that it was just plain awesome. In fact, a couple of hours into it, I met one of the receptionists that is not only transferring to Berkeley this semester, but is learning how to surf and climb, AND likes good music AND hates bad music (as judged by me).

I’ll admit to being a little apprehensive about returning to Bezerkeley. I mean, I’ve been gone for a year, why wouldn’t I be anxious? So it was lovely to meet someone in the same position.

Soon I was too tired and walked home, even though it was raining. When I got back, there was a group of hostellers sitting up on the top porch listening to music, and the sweet sounds of Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" came drifting down. And it certainly was.

And if I thought that first night was awesome, I had no idea what was in store for the first full day.

I could build this whole thing up, explaining the morning, the early intensity of the sun and the curious lack of butterflies that accompanied the whole thing, but I’d rather not. I’d rather just jump into it.

You know when you build something up to yourself and then worry that it’ll let you down? I’ve been wanting to surf for 9 years.

9 years.

I looked into surf camp in 7th grade, in high school I jealously eyed those few who sometimes showed up with surfboards strapped to the tops of their cars and almost skipped school one day to drive down to Mavericks. My first year of college, I was determined that new beginnings was the perfect place to start things that I’d been wanting to do forever, like surfing and playing guitar. I even subscribed to a sear of Surf Magazine. By the time I got to Ireland, I was frustrated with the fact that I still had barely touched a surfboard and joined the surf club. Yea, like that was going to happen… not only was it cold as anything, but the exchange rate was killer and I couldn’t afford the cover for the trips. So when I got to Costa Rica I became obsessed with surf photography… those who can’t do, right?

So you can imagine the build up that I’ve created.

It was more glorious than I could have possibly imagined. And not just the fact that I, for once, stopped obsessing about the perfect, symbolic grand entrance and just did it.

I thought that paddling out would kill me, but apparently those push ups that I’ve been doing have been paying off.

I spent what felt like five hours trying, figuring out and convincing myself that I wouldn’t hit the coral or the rocks.

See Bocas is pretty much a strictly-expert surfing spot, but there is one beach that is good for beginners, except for the fact that it’s pretty far out and you have to watch out for coral and rocks if you get too close in. It’s safe, but I had to have someone who looked like she knew what she was doing reassure me of this fact.

The only thing that forced me back in after that first attempt was the guilt of hogging the boards we were sharing with two guys from the hostel.

And when I got back in, elated that I’d finally, FINALLY made that first step, I assumed that I wouldn’t be back out that day.

Wrong.

About an hour later I was out there, giving it my all. The phrase that convinced me back out was “It’ll all be worth it if you catch a wave” and it totally was. It’s an amazing feeling that’s as close as I think I’ll ever get to flying. I’ve had something similar once before, I was sitting up on my knees in the bow of the boat up on the lake at the cabin and it was really early in the morning. The water was pure glass and I was looking down into the perfect reflection of the trees that lined the shore racing past and I got a weightless feeling like I was flying. That’s how catching a wave felt, except faster and more exhilarating with clear blue water and white spray crowding my peripheral vision.

Although I caught a few on my knees, I did get to stand up at one point which was… thrilling, to say the least.

Let me tell you, it was every bit as worth the sunburn that stretched across my back and the back of my legs. Two weeks later it’s finally finished peeling. And even when it was burning, and even when it was peeling, I’d check out the damage in the mirror, and just feel proud.

I could have gone home that night and been perfectly happy with the weekend, but it wasn’t even half way done.

That night we went to this hostel/bar called Aqua that has a pool. And by “pool” I mean “a hole cut in the dock that it sat on and a jerry-rigged diving board.” I had a long conversation with an Irish kid who’d just spent four weeks in Haiti working with kids under the protection of the local ruling gang. (After which I felt pathetic describing my days weeding, so I emphasized the machete and the size of the bugs). By the end of the night we were all swimming (and by “we” I’m pretty sure I mean “a bunch of tourists”). My sandals and shirt got stolen, likely by some drunken chick who thought they were hers.

And at the end of the night, the sky would light up with dry lightning even though there were stars peaking through the clouds.

The next day rained.

And we got up late. And got out late. And then couldn’t figure out what to do. My ultimate plan had been to take surfing pictures all day and explore some beaches but there were, apparently, no waves and it just wasn’t a beach day.

So around 2 in the afternoon, Ems and I found ourselves on one of the other islands in the middle of an indigenous village.

It was one of those experiences that is valuable but I hadn’t expected or even really wanted. In the grey light of the rainy day, the whole village looked poorer than it maybe was, something that neither of us really expected. Bocas seems like such a touristy area that we were mildly shocked to find ourselves in a place so… colorless, where kids ran around in their underwear and clothes were hanging in vain on clotheslines and bony dogs skittered away.

The village has a newly formed tourism organization that has organized a forest walk on which they explain the medicinal plants and they have an artesian craft store. If you call ahead, they can prepare a traditional meal and do a traditional dance performance. And so it was wonderful to support a grassroots, community based push to take advantage of the archepelago’s booming tourism industry that also will help boost them out of the poverty and government neglect in which they live.

I feel like I reflect on this surprise with more negativity than my activist heart should, but I think it was just a jarring way to spend a vacation, especially since it was a vacation away from a community that also has a grassroots, community based development association, though albeit is much less poor and neglected. So I apologize for that.

As the sun was setting, we were sitting in Dolphin Bay with our fingers crossed. And although it’d just rained earlier that day, which they generally don’t like, we saw quite a few pairs of dolphins weaving up and down.

***

I took a nap when we got back to the hostel, to be refreshed when we went out that night. I woke up to Ems shouting that there was a group leaving for another hostel right NOW because our hostel was closing it’s common room for the night.

And I was gross. See, I’d napped instead of showering. It was cold and rainy and taking a cold shower was the last thing I’d wanted to do. So, still half asleep, I did my best to make myself less gross: changed the clothes, brushed my teeth and put on deodorant at the same time, and was simultaneously putting my hair in pigtails and screwing the bottle on my bottle of coke with a kick.

We stopped first at Hostel Calypso. After a while, part of the group, including Ems continued on, but I was too deep into my conversation with the Austrian girl, the German girl and her crazy jungle man boyfriend from Ohio and the two Kiwis. Because the night was nice and the music was amazing. I can’t remember what the conversation was about, but I do know that the iPod could have been my own. The Austrian girl, who’d just spent two weeks in Mal País and so loved it like I do, and I looked through the Kiwis’ iPod and took turns exclaiming about how much we loved this band and that band.
I mean, they had an extensive collection of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I know maybe two people who even know about BRMC and they’re a Bay Area band! And the Pogues! And the girl from Austria loves both as well?!? God I love travelers.

So we spent all night listening to good songs that gave me that warm nostalgia. Tom Petty, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin.

Oh and get this. As soon as we’d started in with Janis, me announcing, as I always do, that she was the one what taught me to sing, the speakers ran out of batteries and had to be charged for 20 minutes. So someone turns to me and says “can you sing Mercedez Benz?” Well of course I can! After two renditions of that classic, with everyone joining the last verse, and some assorted chatter, the speakers were juiced up and we continued on with our night of music and conversation. The younger Kiwi came up to me and with baleful, slightly unfocused eyes informed me that I had the best singing voice he’d ever heard. I smiled, but had to fight the urge to pat him on the arm sympathetically. Poor boy was drunk.

Soon I got to wishing that Ems hadn't a bounced. She loves good music and she's got a fantastic voice. I started looking for a good gap in the conversation where I could slip away to drag her back. Then all of a sudden, like she'd read my mind, here comes Ems!

It was a beautiful night, and a beautiful end to a good weekend.

Mal País Theory of Life

2009-08-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

There are some things in life that you know usher in change. They’re not necessarily the cause of said change, but at least they are the catalyst.
I mean, I maintain that it’s a bit cliché, albeit for good reason, to say that studying abroad is a life-changing experience. I think it’s partly because it generally comes right around the time of the transition from teen to adult. I mean, I think most people really grow up in the last few years of college, with or without studying abroad.

This is really just a round about way of saying that my second trip to Mal País helped me distill all this change into my new theory of life. Which is not quite like the numerous Grand Plans that litter the path behind me, but no so unlike them either. (I have been reading way too much Steinbeck.)

I woke up on Saturday morning to start my trek across the country. I’d like to say something poetic like “the sun rose in benediction over that fine day” but I honestly can’t remember what the weather was like.

I do however remember what the journey was like:
6:30 bus from Santa Rosa to Guapiles.
Step off the bus in Guapiles and immediately (literally, no waiting) get on the bus to San José. Get off the bus in San José, walk purposefully towards a taxi that pulls up just as I get to the curb, drops me off at the Puntarenas bus station. See you can either take a direct bus from San Jose to Mal País at 7:30 am or 2:30 pm or you can take the bus to the ferry, and then take another series of buses to get to Mal País. I got into San Jo at 9 and figured that I’d try my chances and not wait around for the direct bus. So the taxi drops me off at the Puntarenas bus station, I buy my ticket for the 10 o clock bus, use the facilties and go to wait the ½ hour until the bus begins loading, but I suppose they load as soon as tickets sell out, because as soon as I stepped up, they started loading. We left 20 minutes early.

Perfect, I’m thinking. I can totally catch the 12:30 ferry. The next one is 1:30, but that’s not too long a wait, and it means I can probably catch the last bus to Mal País at 2:30 from Cobano.

I should have learned long ago not to get cocky like that.

We hit traffic and got into Puntarenas at 12:20. Well, I’m not paying for a taxi for a ferry I probably won’t catch anyways, so I figure I’ll just walk. It’s a nice day, I have a small bag and I figure I have plenty of time. I’m at the shore, which is lined with Tico vacationers and cheap souvenir stalls and food carts. The ferry leaves from the shore, so I figure I’ll follow it up and eventually hit the ferry.

So I walk. About a half an hour later, I see a sign for the ferry, round a corner, and see a ferry. My mind starts racing. Coming or going? Coming or going!?!

The Dos Pinos ice cream man gives me my answer. He tells me that I need to run because the 1 o’clock ferry is leaving and the next one isn’t until 3.

I swore then, but it’s okay, because I’m pretty sure he didn’t speak English. I run. And I get to the ticket booth at 1. And I’m too late.

So I sit down and I start to try and hold back the tears. STUPID! If I’d just taken the taxi, I’d have made it. And now I’m stuck here for another two hours. What the hell am I going to do for three hours?

…I need a drink.

Luckily there is a bar/restaurant across the street, overlooking the ferry dock (so I don’t miss it again). I order a rum and coke and a plate of fries (the first food I’ve eaten since 5:30 am) and continue to try and cork my tears.
The bar and the few tables around it are packed with locals. The rest of the tables in the place are empty, save mine, and two others that host tourists. One group of locals plays cards, and a group of five men joke at the bar. There’s a table with two old men, one who looks more Caribbean than Tico and the other who looks more Tico than anything, who aren’t acknowledging each other. The one is engrossed in an old newspaper and the other is dreaming off out the window.

There are various plastic fish decorating the place, a few beer ads and a distinctively round clock. There is radio music coming from a 5-CD changer stero that sits on top of a NICE sound board and speaker set. One of the men at the bar walks over, drops a coin into the slot machine next to me and succeeds only in producing that distinctively tinkling noise of the turning bells, lemons and bar symbols. This one, I think, was Spider man themed.

It was nice, and helped me pull myself out of a bit of a funk.

Eventually, I caught the 3 o’clock ferry and found myself on the bus to Cobano unsure of the next step. Miraculously I got off at the right stop, as the sky was warming with the promise of sunset. I rolled up my pant legs and tried to ask a woman what my next move should be. I see the sign for the taxi company, but I see no building beneath the sign… So I ask “I know I’ve missed the last bus to Mal País, but…” But she interrupts. No, it’s right there. Literally it pulled up behind the bus I’d just gotten off. Off one, on the other, just like it’d started out today.

Man I love traveling.

I looked out the window until I couldn’t see out anymore and hopped out in front of the hostel Ems and I’d planned to meet at, content that the night was practically over. Probably she was already there.

Turns out it was not and she was not.
The hostel is really funky – it’s called Casa Zen and houses one of the best Thai food places I’ve ever eaten at (and that is the kind of place Mal País is). Sadly, it does not take reservations, and turns out, it was full up.

It’s 6 at night, dark and I have no where to sleep and no idea where Ems is except that she had been at a protest that morning and was hoping that she wouldn’t get arrested like the leaders had been the previous year.

And being the brilliant child I am, I didn’t leave her a note as I wandered off into the night. I walked into the only other hostel I knew, the Backpackers and confronted the guy at the desk.

“Look, I know it’s a long shot in the dark, but do you happen to have two beds available for tonight?”

And he did.

Long story short, I found beds, I found Ems wandering the streets and all was right with the world.

But the thing is, that’s not really the part that prompted the Theory of Life.
Nothing specifically did. I mean, I could give you a run down of the whole weekend, like how we talked over Thai food for like two hours, even though we’d only been apart for two weeks, went out that night with some of the hostel kids (lots of kids from Norway, Israel and Florida), like how we got up early the next morning, out of habit, and ended up walking down the beach to take pictures and ending up trekking for three hours ending up in the middle of nowhere, almost burned to a crisp, thirsty, hungry and pissed off. Or how at that point we decided to trek back on the road and stop at the first place we saw, and how after walking for 45 minutes hadn’t seen any but thankfully got a ride in the back of a pick up with the surfers who’d had to break it to us that we were 3 km away from the hostel and 1 km away from any food. And how delicious that food was and how beautiful it was to spend the rest of the afternoon napping in hammocks amongst reds, oranges and yellows.
I could tell you about how I didn’t get one good picture of a surfer all weekend, but played a ton of pool with a kid from Germany, a kid from Ireland and two guys from Florida.
I could bring up the fact that, save the thai food, we didn’t eat at one of the planned places because we were only there for a Sunday, when everything is closed. But it was amazing anyways.

Basically, it wasn’t the weekend I’d planned, but that was just fine. As I stood on the ferry, watching the retreating landmass that I loved so much, I got the urge to turn back and just stay. Just say “fuck it,” leave the internship and try to find a job waitressing or as the receptionist that they were looking for at the Backpackers, perhaps just until my flight home, perhaps indefinitely. Struggling with a bittersweet melancholy, that was only partially due to that deliciously oppressive heat of the dog days of summer, I watched the sun dancing around on the top of the water and then slanting down through it. It reminded me of the cabin.

I don’t think that I can ever really accurately describe the vibe of Mal País except that it is a community, heavy with ex-pats, that enjoys surfing and yoga and feels intrinsically artistic. It is a place that makes me want to surf and to sit on the beach and write and draw in my notebook and eat food that includes lemon grass and ginger. It’s not the most breath-taking beach in the country, and it definitely doesn’t really feel like a part of Costa Rica at all, but it’s one of those places that I know I’ll go back to.

The last time I had that feeling, that peaceful melancholy that follows an impulse to throw it all away and just stay in a place, and the surety of return, I was sitting on a wall above the sea in San Sebastian. We were waiting to head to the train station to catch the train that would take us back to Paris to catch the flight that would take us home, after two months, to start college and the rest of our lives.

But it was kind of nice this time. Because something about that weekend with people whose attitude towards life I so admired because it blends a profound appreciation for life with a calm and inner peace that I’m not ready to lose myself to but to which I aspire, and also a purely logical “what are you waiting for?” which is actually more of an answer than a question.

Which of course, was exactly the attitude that got me surfing the following weekend in Bocas del Toro

Surprise Post!!

2009-08-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

So I forgot the most important thing I had to do on the internet yesterday, so I'm back again today... which means I can give a quick general update.

In the past two weeks I've been to Mal Pais again, one of my favorite places in the world that prompted a change in attitude about life, which in turn got me up on a surf board the next weekend in Bocas del Toro. Thus I've already fulfilled a couple life's goals: learning to ride a motorcycle and surfing. But I feel as if each of those weekends deserves it's own post, so those'll come later.

But because life moves slower on the finca, I can do that more quickly.
When I got back from Mal Pais, we'd recieved a new volunteer, who will always be referred to as "el muchacho de francia." Come to think of it, I don't think I ever learned his real name.
MK says he reminds her of the clones from Clockwork Orange, only he doesn't talk. As for me, I just could never get the Talking Heads song "psycho killer" out of my head when he was around.
He's just "raro." The entire community was made uneasy about him. I mean this kid had grossly long fingernails and long gross hair and it quickly became apparent that he didn't shower. Or talk. He'd just stand there staring for hours, with a bucket hat and this crazy rain poncho, or ride around on his bike talking to himself. They sent him back before the week was out...

Just around the time that the french girl showed up. They didn't know each other, and she's way less wierd than he is... but a little too eager and intense. She has yet to grasp the pace of life here... that is, slow. There's just so much she wants to do she's trying to organize all this stuff and I just want to continue doing what I've been doing.
Which has set up quite a contrast between us. I actually feel like more a part of the community than she seems to be because I'm living there, as opposed to visiting there. I mean, I've been in this country for seven months, so I don't really feel like I've arrived at another culture in the farm that I'm working to save. But she's arrived here doing volunteer work and has that... distance that so many volunteer workers have. It's like she's not a part of the community, she's visiting it, helping it and so NEEDS to do AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. But I feel more like I'm working, you know? Like I've just moved to another town to work. It doesn't feel new and special and I don't feel that separation from the community. At least not anymore.

See, I have this theory, it takes me exactly half the amount of time I have in a place to overcome the full roller coaster of culture shock. Since I only have six weeks in this place, the culture shock has expired and I'm just... here.
And things feel normal.

Work on the farm hasn't really changed. We still mostly weed, but on rainy days, instead of sorting beans, we've been re-making picture maps of the functions of the farm. Which I like, because, well, I like drawing.
In the afternoon we've started teaching English to the 4th graders at the school. I could gush all day about that. About how bad of a teacher I am, completley unable to command attention, or explain things concisely, but how it doesn't really matter because they all love the class so much and because MK is a really good teacher and we have so much fun playing all the games that I learned in Spanish class. About the kid who likes to tell us how we should do things, but who is super cute because he loves the class so much. About the quiet kids who are really smart, and about the loud kids. About how we have teams and play games and how excited they get. About how awesome it is to have them all come up and give us hugs goodbye at the end of the day, and how I feel like a rockstar walking around town because their parents greet us with grateful smiles and they shout our names across the plaza.

It's one thing that I know I'm gonna miss when I leave.

That and the clouds.

See, yesterday was the perfect late summer Saturday. A day of break after a week of work and rain, the sun finally came out, glancing hot white off the glossy palm fronds and banana leaves and the clouds raced and danced across the piercing blue sky. While waiting for the bus, I watched a spider make it's web and the butterflies drunkenly refusing each perch they approached, stumbling onto the next one. And the youngest age gang of kids trooped around the plaza, deeply engrossed in their games, the same games and using the same code that we all used to use and that we've mostly forgotten to time. A band held together by nothing but age proximity, where girls aren't "GIRLS" but just another member of the band and where everything can be anything and there is nothing but the present, the moment and the game.

2009-08-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

Gah!!!

no time to post. I know it's been a while. my apologies.
I forgot my memory stick and I have to catch a bus in 9 minutes.
Expect an overload of updates next saturday!

Day 12: (Thursday 23)

2009-07-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday instead of painting we hid in MK’s room and slept. It was fun, kinda like a sleepover.

But today we couldn’t escape it.

The morning started off bad. It’s been a tough week. When I say that I have to get out of here this weekend, I’m not exaggerating. It hasn’t rained during the day all week which means I’ve spend five hours every. single. morning. hunched over in the burning sun, dripping in sweat, swinging the same machete around in the same way. And it hurts all over.

But you know, that which does not kill you…

So today we started out doing the same thing. And then, miracle of miracles! Plans changed! Apparently the director has been teaching his kids to ride a motorcycle. They’re actually almost as numerous as cars here. It’s a practical thing… dirt bikes just work better on dirt roads.

I’ve become rather accustomed to shying away when he comes bounding up. He has an incredible store of energy and never seems to shut up. He’s rather like a born-again agriculturalist. As in he came to organic agriculture later in life and is so passionate that he believes he can convert EVERYONE! He tends to wear a digital watch and I tend to try to catch a glimpse of the time so as to time him. I’m sure he’s talked for more that 15 minutes straight at a time.

This morning was no different. Shoot, he’s on his way, look busy!

But turns out that all he wanted was to invite us to ride around on the motorcycle.

Oh heaven! Check!

It was every bit as magical as I dreamed it would be, flying around on that little dirt bike. It took me about five minutes to learn how to kick start it, put it in gear and to remember what it’s like controlling something with a manual engine. Then it was pure gravy. The bolder I got, the more amazing it was. I figured out how to put it into second and started to take the turns close and low. I’d make the big square of the soccer field a couple of times, zagging through the hillocks, pulling up and roaring past the goal posts. After just two turns of 5 minutes each it felt so natural, so comfortable that it wasn’t novel anymore.

I cheated on my truck.

We painted again today. We decided not to share less with the children this time, so it was less like finger-painting hour at the local kindergarten. Plus we were using rollers.

But even with that, we must have looked like the Keystone Cops or something. A veritable comedy of errors. Without the comedy part. There’s this lack of communication between the two of us, the director and the head of the development association. I still haven’t figured out if it’s because of a lack of Spanish proficiency, or a perceived lack of Spanish proficiency. I mean first it was the base color. We’d discussed it a couple of times and our plans clearly showed that we were going to use a yellow. There are no yellow buildings in the town so we thought it would round out all the blues and greens. Also it’s a color that doesn’t show dirt much. This was pointed out numerous times. But when the paint arrived there was about a quart of yellow instead of a gallon. When we finally get to talk to someone about we find that we’re supposed to try to use as much of the existing paint (light blue and dark blue) which was left over from two other buildings. Then it was the doors. When we painted on Tuesday, we did the doors and windows a light blue. Turns out we have to re-paint the doors black because they need an anti-corrosive paint. This wasn’t communicated at all after any of the three times that I said that we were going to paint the doors light blue.

So we started out frustrated. We tried to paint the bottom half blue and the top half with the quart of yellow we have, but argued about whether or not it was actually a good idea to use the yellow at all, seeing as there was no way it would go all way round. So we had two splotched of yellow painted and the whole thing taped out before we figured that it wasn’t going to work. At all.

So we’ll just paint the whole thing dark blue?

Turns out the dark blue is really more purply. Whatever. Don’t care now. Let’s just get a color down and deal with the thing later. So we start painting in crazy directions and at crazy intervals. Eventually a couple kids start helping and it’s more haphazard (though admittedly less messy). Finally this guy who’d been watching for a while (in a way less creepy way than the young guys usually watch), took the roller from MK and started to paint. Started to paint with perfect lines and an expert evenness and professional speed.

Who is this masked mystery man?!

Well, a professional painter for one… MK’s host mom’s cousin for another.

Lessee. If we started around 12:45, then he probably started helping us around 1:45 or 2. By that time we’d done about half of one wall.

By 4 we’d finished all four walls, detailing on the bottom and light blue detailing around the doors and on the windows.

Our savior even showed us how to clean off the oil-based paint that had splattered us with smurf freckles.

That’s about when the director showed up and informed us that the head of the development association actually had wanted us to use two different colors. Really? NFW! I had no idea!

But alls well that ends well. We sat ourselves up on a lonely wall with a cold Coke and an ice cream and watched the sun slip down towards the horizon, dreaming of coming weekend adventures.

Day 10: (Tuesday, 21)

2009-07-24T11:39:00.002-07:00

MK and I have this joke about the finca being the perfect sight for a horror movie. I mean seriously? It’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s an HOUR bus ride to the nearest city (I was wrong earlier when I said 30 minutes… that was me being optimistic). Every once in a while it storms like there’s literally not going to be a tomorrow. We’re working on this farm with giant man eating bugs and killer plants (you know, more or less), and to top it all off the director who seems to have suspiciously boundless energy and turns up unexpectedly. We’re pretty sure he has a secret laboratory hidden somewhere in the finca. Perhaps under the papaya patch. Perhaps in the large drying house.

And then, as if to confirm this whole horror movie thing, today I was walking around taking pictures of cool things on the farm, you know, frogs, butterflies, pineapples… that kind of thing. And BAM! I fell into water up to my knees. I know that wasn’t there last week because we toured the finca last Monday and I’m almost positive that we came up to the pineapples on their left, exactly where I fell. I mean, if it hadn’t have been me, it would have been really really funny. Tromping along (which apparently tromping is an actual, real word… who knew?) dry and smug in my clever way of slacking, then the next I’m pitched forward flying towards the ground face first, stopped only by the fact that I was knee deep in water.

I squelched back to the entrance to the finca, my left foot making suck-y noises every time I lifted it up. Shlomp shlomp shlomp.

But it was really okay. The rest of the day was filled with puppies, butterflies and sunshine. Literally.

Oh, except when we started to paint the changing rooms today. Our Tom Sawyer bit failed miserably today in the form on roughly a BILLION kids throwing oil-based paint at each other (essentially) and making fun on each other and us in Spanish that they either didn’t think we understood or thought we couldn’t hear. GAH! Now my hands smell of whatever paint-remover They said was okay to use. Whereas yesterday I bowled a kid over by accident, I almost did it on purpose today…

Day 9: (Monday 20)

2009-07-24T11:39:00.001-07:00

I opened up Cannery Row today. The very first pre-chapter asks how you can possible put people and characters and feelings down on paper.

And that really struck a chord because I really feel like I haven’t been doing that quite right here.

I mean, in the first place I have to deal with culture shock. Which is a concept which I didn’t really take seriously at first. I mean, come on, I travel all the time. It’s like, culture shock is like jet lag, right? Something that everyone talks about that doesn’t really affect me? Except that it does. And I’ve come to understand that this year more than I ever thought I would.

It’s tough right now because I’m in this double jeopardy place. I’ve long gotten over my Costa Rica culture shock. I’m comfortable and happy and all of the sudden I uproot myself and relocate to a place that is so different than anyplace I’ve ever stayed for a prolonged period of time. PLUS I have to deal with the knowledge of my impending reverse culture-shock.

I spend a lot of time here while I’m working on the farm, daydreaming about stuff I’ll do when I get back. During those long hot nights when I can’t sleep because the heat is just there, not oppressive necessarily, but sneaky in that it’s almost unnoticeable except for the fact that you can’t sleep. During those long hours in the sun where I do repetitive and physically straining farm tasks. I think about the airport and how excited I am to be in an airport again. I can’t remember the last time I went this long without seeing the inside of an airport. The orderliness, the false cleanliness, the giant windows that flood light and the steady feeling of transience. Everyone coming or going, planes leave, tons of planes, hundreds of planes, experience, novelty and excitement just saturates the air. I can’t wait to be back in an airport. I hope my layover is long. I also think about stuff I want to do in The Bay, Giants games, tea in the fog, Coit tower (though I don’t really know why), Ocean Beach in the evening with the windows rolled down, Haight street… just all my favorite things that I’ve already probably hashed out a million times here.

But the problem with that is, while it helps me power through the culture shock, the ticking off of the days, I miss things too.

I mean, I got exactly what I wanted here. I wanted to start living off the grid in an area that’s not like that 2% of the world I’m used to. I wanted to work hard, like really hard. I wanted to work so that at the end of the day, my body would just hurt and I’d have innumerable mysterious scratches, bruises and pains. I wanted to drag myself up everyday, whether or not I want to, because I’m obligated to.

Because I don’t know what that is like.

And honey, I got what I wanted. I signed up for this, and it ain’t day camp.
And as hard as it is, emotionally and physically, I just have to remember that. And I also have to just look up once in a while from my whining and my frustration and things that go bump in the night, because I’ll see the sunset, just like it did today.

This afternoon, after back-breaking work on the farm which made me dizzy and light headed, MK and I washed the outside of the changing rooms that we’re going to start painting tomorrow. Of course, all the 12 year old boys in eyesight, who are still on vacation and thus have little to do, eventually drifted over. I’m not sure if it was horsing around with the hose or the possibility of recruiting us as two more soccer players that enticed them, but either way, we totally pulled a Tom Sawyer. By the time we finished one wall, they had “finished” the other three. Well enough at least.

So then we played soccer, barefoot in the muddy field. The two resident gringas (literally) alternately played with competitive ferocity and collapsed all over each other in laughter at the absolute horror that is our soccer skills and swore loudly. I got a leetle too excited when I realized that I wasn’t spent after about 5 minutes and ran around like a madman. Then I realized, it’s okay to throw elbows around my compatriot, not so much around 12 year old boys. I definitely bowled one over at one point. He was okay.

So to recap:
Farm work: check
Community development project: check
Bonding with the youth: check
Teach English: check. Oops….

Then somehow another group of kids absconded with our ball, so, game over. I got at least 5 goals. Beat that!

We chatted for a while, then I headed home for dinner. I greeted the few people I knew as I walked by, tried not to seem put-off when I was greeted by people I didn’t know. I could smell the smoke of a campfire coming from my house. My new host mom cooked rice on an open flame today and it was every bit as good as she said it would be. Then I turned around. The sun was setting in the distance. It started as a perfect arc that blushed pink in the periwinkle sky. (Bear with me here for a second; this is going to get really… prose-y). Then it grew warmer and warmer until the arc was lit up with the particular yellowy-orange of a mango. The clouds were low in the sky, threading through the mountains off to the left, smoky and thin like a sumi painting. I always thought the phrase “purple mountain’s majesty” was a little corny, but I discovered tonight that it’s no exaggeration. The jagged mountains in the distance were a deep royal purple against the lush greenery that was lit up orange. And then the opposite side of the sky was blushing in response, having caught the reflection of the breathtaking sunset. And I swear, no joke, there was a faint rainbow off to the right. Just one pillar, one side of the rainbow, fainter than and disappearing into the reflected sunset.

And just down the dirt road, picking its way through the rocks and the puddles that I do my best to avoid when biking to and from work, one of the neighborhood mutts with a hangdog look, lopsided pointy coyote ears and pale blue eyes watched me.

Day 8: (Sunday 19)

2009-07-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

I sneeze like crazy here. I can’t explain it. I think I sneeze at least twice a day. Well, I mean every time I sneeze, I do it twice, so… But already today I’ve sneezed four times. Yesterday I think I sneezed six times.

And don’t even think about making a joke about how I’m probably allergic to work. Because I’m not working today. So there.

Yesterday it we had something like the storm of the century. (Actually, I’m sure it’s pretty commonplace here, but I think the last thing I experienced that was even close was that hurricane in South Carolina. And I was in this house that was almost all glass and I remember the giant windows bending inward.)

The day went pretty well, I took the hour long bus ride to Guapiles to use the internet café. I had to stand for most of it because by the time the bus gets to Santa Rosa (our pueblo), it’s full. About 40 minutes in, it had cleared out a bit. I was leaning up against a seat with two little boys and the littler one crawled up into the lap of the bigger one so that he could see out of the window and they both looked up at me to signal that I could sit down. I wanted to catch the 3 o’clock bus so I only had an hour to work on the internet.

God it’s hot.

Anyway, so then last night it started to rain. Pounding down on the tin roof and leaking through all of the cracks. And then the lightning started. Blinding light exploding into the house. It’s such a literary cliché to say that the lightning flashed a lit up the entire room, but that’s not true. It’s so powerful and intense that you can’t see anything for those split seconds. And then the thunder comes in, gut wrenching and rumbling down to the tips of the toes. I think it lasted at least until the light of the morning, or somewhere around there. I’d know because I was awake for most of it. At some points I literally thought the tin roof may fall in crushing me under it or something. I mean I know that the cement walls would get in the way of that, but man!

But it was all okay, because today is Sunday so I got to sleep in until 9.

And now the power’s out and I’m working on borrowed time… I wonder what’s gonna happen at 6 when it’s dark, except maybe I’ll just go to sleep.

I can smell a fire outside (either for cooking or burning trash). And the dogs barking down the lane. And the geckos singing. And some cicadas too. It’s funny how quickly one can become accustomed with something.

Day 6: (Friday 17)

2009-07-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

My bike broke yesterday. We also discovered that there actually ARE people our age here. They were blasting around last night on motorcycles and big ole trucks.
Gah. I have that ominous feeling that comes with becoming accustomed to a place too fast. Like nothing bad has happened in the past day or two so I’m super on my guard because it’s coming. It probably involves cockroaches. Except today I did have to deal with flying ants. I’ve always hated flying ants. ALWAYS. They’re so gross when they crawl around on the ground and I hate the idea that the can get close to my face without my realizing it.
Yesterday we did more machete weeding. I upset an ants nest at one point and thinking about it gives me hives even now. They all came spilling up from multiple holes in the ground. I refused to work in that particular area for the rest of the day. Then it started to rain and we sorted beans for the rest of the day. Well the rest of the day until lunch at least.
Today, for a change, we sorted beans. All red ones this time. It rained all day practically, on and off. But we got some snacks out of it… Pejibayes (which I hope I’m spelling right and which have the texture of an egg yolk but are oddly reminiscent of an artichoke heart) and guanabana (which is a fiber-y fruit).
MK went back to San Jose today and we said goodbye like a pair of saps. It was like we’d never see her again or something. Lots of “here’s looking at you kid” finger guns and I think I said “well…” about a thousand times.
Talked to my new host mom while America’s Next Top Model in Spanish played in the background. She has 7 kids. 6 boys and a girl, and they’re all out of the house. Her husband died years ago.
Man, this getting up at 5 am thing is really killing me. I napped for three hours today. Three hours. And now it’s only 8:30 and I can’t seem to keep my eye lids open. But five weeks from right now I’ll be back in San Jose, ready to head back home

Day 4: (Wednesday 15) Only 38 more to go!

2009-07-18T13:30:00.002-07:00

Got up late. Sore, with a side of foreboding. Yesterday was hard. I don’t think we realized that we’d have to deal with a second culture shock. This stuff is gonna be hard to get used to.
Out the door around 6:05 got to the finca at around 6:30. It was threatening to rain.
The first order of business was to make the “green tea” which is really just green leaves (lettuce, papaya leaves and two other types of leaves) liquidated and then to drink it. While we were collecting the leaves, the nausea started to set in for the both of us. The green tea helped me a bit, but poor MK was having a hard time of it. I guess we looked so pathetic that we got an easy day. We sat around sorting through beans. Like dried beans for cooking. We separated the good ones from the bad one. For a good three hours. Then Don Julio made us this tea called “Big Man” which is supposed to cure any stomach malady. More like kill it. He kept telling us that it was bitter but, boy!, we had no idea. Grossest stuff. And it stayed in your mouth for the next 20 minutes too, even though we took a spoonful of honey afterwards. (P.S. Mary Poppins lied. A spoonful of sugar does NOT make the medicine go down. It just helps a little.)
So it was a simple morning. Which was good. It’s been quite a transition.
Lunch, nap. Around 1 Don Julio shows up and we go for a bike ride to play billiards? But unfortunately the bar was closed. So we headed back to town and he chatted all the while about how now we’re going to find the head of the Community Development and talk about our afternoon projects and then play volleyball with the kids. Some of us were still tired and sore and gently suggested that a few of us may not make it if we try to cram all that in. So it might be better if we got to rest.
So MK and I sat and talked for the next two and a half hours or so and it was good. Much needed. Not like we hadn’t talked for three hours that morning, but we’re still sorting through this new culture shock, so it was good.
Then we played with the kids. It was really fun, actually, and we found some energy hidden somewhere. I suck at volleyball. I mean really. It’s more a game of “keep away from my face” and I laughed practically the entire time. MKs pretty good. Then more kids showed up and it turned into a giant soccer game. We inched out to the edge of the room and spent the rest of the game watching and getting a feel for the community of kids. It was fun to watch.
It’s closing in on 8:30 now and my eyelids are drooping. I’ve gotta get to sleep if I’m gonna get up tomorrow…
Ugh. Daytime is so much easier than night time. Daytime is when I take a liking to the community and reflect on how living with my new host mom is like living with someone’s grandmother and to marvel at how I’m learning to survive the heat…
Nighttime is when I pray that the mosquito net works and start considering heading back to San Jose for the weekend.
I mean I only have five weekends here… After this one, there’ll only be four. I want to take one of those to go visit Ems in Malpaís (I just love that place) and one to go to Bocas del Toro. That leaves two after this weekend is over. MK goes back every weekend and made a very convincing argument today… I am really going to miss San Jose and if I can spend more time there, that’d be nice… plus I’d get to an internet… I guess we’ll see…

Day 3: (Tuesday 14)

2009-07-18T13:30:00.001-07:00

Will put UP the mosquito net tonight instead of wrapping myself in it. Enough is enough.
Up at 5:15. Finca at 6. 6 AM. 6.
We spent the day giving the pineapple patch a bikini wax. With machetes. Which is to say, I got attacked by a herd of pineapples. No seriously. Even though I had a machete to protect me, you should see my arms, they’re all sliced up.
But let me tell you, that stuff is HARD. Spending 4 hours hunched over, swinging a machete and trying not to hit yourself? And then to move to the baby rice plants and try desperately not to chop them up or step on them with your giant rubber boots? (Though, I have to say, I feel super savage with those boots. They go half way up my calf and I like to tuck my jeans into them so that they balloon out a bit, like a paratrooper or a member of the rebel army. Plus I wear a bandana which always makes it cooler.
As if that weren’t enough, we then milled sugar cane with this double-sided roller thing that took two to work. We squeezed out six or seven sugar canes. Delicious.
I’m not quite sure how we made it back on those rickety bikes. I mean it’s been a while since I’ve hurt that bad. More lunch, ate even less. The “meat” leaves quite a bit to be desired and honestly? I’m finally tired of rice and beans.
And hour and 20 minutes, lunch and a shower later, we met with Don Julio at the bus stop to go to Guapiles to hit the internet café. Bus costs roughly a dollar and takes about 30 minutes. Add an overwhelming heat and two girls who are sore, emotionally as well as physically, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. Well, not disaster I guess. It’s just not the recipe for a fun outing.
Plus I had a splitting headache, so I don’t remember much. I do remember that I got to the internet café and realized I’d forgotten the memory stick with the Finca Log on it. Dumbass.
But I got to chat with momala, (glad to know the fam is home safe) and answer a few (though not all) long overdue emails.
Afterwards we got ice cream, I remembered to buy a fan and we headed home.
Where I set myself up with this little fan attached to the edge of the bed, and the mosquito net all up. I feel like a 9 year old princess in her fort. It’s awesome.
Fingers crossed it’ll be a better sleep tonight.

Day 2: (Monday 13)

2009-07-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

Didn’t sleep last night. Since when is it allowed to be this HOT and HUMID? MK has a fan. I do not. Hmmm.
MK arrived at around 8am. We rode bikes to the farm and received our boots. Toured the finca, sampling the organic goods at the same time. Quite an operation. Everything from rice plants to papaya trees, yucca trees (the yucca are the roots), hearts or palm, aloe verde, lettuce, tomatoes, bananas, butterflies, basil, oregano, and a whole mess of other things. My favorites are the pineapple plants. They’re ground plants that look like giant spider plants or something with a pineapple sticking up jauntily out of the center. There’s a swamp in the back and a room in which to dry plants out for medicinal value. There is also a giant blue bucket that is upended for an ant house? They are the biggest ants I’d ever seen. They should not be housed, they should be squished. I hate ants. Man, I can’t even remember it all…
Returned for lunch, exhausted. Am slowly finding that it wasn’t so much Costa Rican cuisine that I love, as much as it is the cooking of my host mom in San Jose. Which is to say not so much the food I’m getting here. So I guess I don’t feel bad when I can only eat about 1/4th of the thing. It’s so hot here. I can’t imagine anyone eating.
Fell asleep after lunch. Lovely nap.
Returned to the finca at 4 without MK (who was still sleeping when I got to her house) to chat with Don Julio. Boy is that man ever passionate about organic agriculture. And can he ever TALK! That is to say, he never seems to shut up. After a good hour and a half of nodding, I headed home, stopping at MKs to chat for a few hours. She’s got some fancy anti-mosquito stuff. Pills, this thing that plugs into the wall. All I have is two bottles of carcinogenic liquid. I suppose it’s six to one, half dozen the other.
Found a cockroach in the room and had to have my host mom help me remove it. She went for it with her bare hands, grabbed it and tossed it out the back door. Apparently, they don’t live in the house, because there’s no where to hide, but they do sometimes fly in. (Wait, what? Coming soon, The Fuckers Fly? Part of the Costa Rican Cockroach saga) Will probably wrap myself up in the mosquito net tonight.

I don´t wanna work on Maggie's Farm no more

2009-07-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

My parents came to visit Costa Rica almost two weeks ago. A year and a half ago when I came back from two weeks building houses in Honduras, I’d have been willing to bet that my parents would never see Central America. Those would have been great odds. The odds for South America wouldn’t have been so good, but I swear, I’da never thought they’d make it to Central America.
And we had a great time. I finally got to Malpaís which was amazing. All artsy and yoga-y and surf-y with a huge population of Israeli ex-pats. It was a place I just felt like sitting in the sand and drawing designs and arrows and reading talented authors. We probably could have stayed there the whole week, but we moved on. We hit up Monteverde which is kind of an “of course.” Met the host family which was filled with lost-in-translation laughter. Tortuguero and saw tortugas (that is to say, we saw sea turtles giving birth. Which was, well… technically awesome and fascinating, but there’s just something about watching something give birth that always makes me feel like I’m invading privacy). Finally they dropped me off at the next six weeks.
It’s funny watching a woman who has been my friend and cheerleader though all the crazy stuff that I’ve done in the past couple years get a sneak preview instead of the post-game. My mother never gets to see what I do before I do it, she always finds out afterwards. So the mothering kicked in while we bounced around through this one horse town. I sure didn’t help out with my constant brushing off of all her concerns and questions. In traveling I like to take things as they are pitched at me… better chance of hitting one out of the park. But I can understand wanting to know all the basics beforehand.
I mean besides a farm that looks, at least from the entrance, rather ramshackle, and a house that is, how shall I put it, “homey and open,” the town has:
1 soccer field
1 schoolhouse
1 church
1 corner store which is rather not on a corner
1 police house
1 cemetery
1 big community building which is more of a cement floor with a roof.
2 tons of ants
0 pharmacies
0 clinics/hospitals
0 internet cafes

So I’ve started a log. A day-by-day which will be updated roughly weekly when I can find my way to an internet.

Your Sister Wears Botas: One girl’s story of farm life (Part of the “Your Mother Wears Army Boots

Day 1: (Sunday 12)
Family left. Toured village with two 14-year old girls for guides. Tour took, mmm, 15 minutes at most. Not quite what I expected after driving through hours of banana plantations… Not sure why. Dinner was a ridiculous amount of food. Started reading Catcher in the Rye. Cold shower. No surprise there. Careful what you wish for?

Non- Sequitur

2009-06-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking a half an hour out of my never-ending schedule of studying (and by "never-ending" I mean "ends on Thursday, but I probably won't make it...") to share some thoughts and impart some wisdom.
As the semester drags to a close, we're in the process of goodbyes. I'm no good at goodbyes, I always just assume there will be a next time in order to avoid saying goodbye.
But it's weird for me because I'm saying goodbye to my friends, my new family and this city that I've come to love, but I'm not actually going anywhere. Not in the way I'm used to. Things for me are bookended by plane flights. An opportunity for which I'm overwhelmingly grateful.
But I realized today that I've never gone this long without being in an airport. Funny how times change, isn't it? I think a big part of my frequent flights has to do with close family on the other side of the United States. But I seriously haven't gone five months, much less seven months without some quality airport time. And I miss it. I love airports.
When I was flying back from Tennessee a year ago, after the Bonnaroo music festival, I remember walking through the terminals that were just littered with festival-goers. I dropped my duffel and myself outside of a sports bar in which a woman who didn't know who Bob Dylan was sang Knocking on Heaven's Door and the golf tournament played on the small tv and the sun flowed in through the skylights and windows like liquid gold.
When I went to Prague we could only arrive at the airport the night before for a 6am flight. We moved from the gumby chairs of the McDonalds to the floor of the Starbucks before we finally found a place to curl up under coats and hats in the freezing cold Dublin airport where every once in a while a policeman in shiny boots would wake you up to check your passport.
Man, I can't even remember the first time I flew alone...
But I miss airports. I'm probably one of the only people on the planet who loves airports, but I do and I can't wait to be back in one. It's so thrilling.

On a completely unrelated note, I have been having the most disjointed, random memory flashbacks ever. I have no idea where they are coming from. Perhaps it is the weird weather (gorgeous and sunny in the morning, gray and rainy afternoons that are still hot) or maybe it's that I'm almost done with the semester but it's not like the end of any semester I've experienced.

Whatever it is, it's messing with my head, and at a time when I need that particular part of my body the most, it's just not fair.
My host sister cooked apple pie the other day. (They saved me some filling. It was delicious.) The next day I was sitting in the living room eating dinner and watching tv when someone heated up a piece. Suddenly I was at the Dickens Fair with it's eerie orange light and particular smell (a mix of roasting chestnuts, cinnamon and bangers and mash. Mmm.)
I'll be sitting in my room studying when suddenly I'm 9 years old, it's Christmas time and I'm at Fresh Choice with my mom. I remember this day distinctly. We saw someone I knew at Fresh Choice and everyone was dressed up. I also remember the pudding bar.
Or walking to school through the park and suddenly I'm answering a question (or slacking off... either one...) in Physics class, senior year of highschool. It's a gorgeous blue day and I can see trees through the white blinds that are failing to obscure the window.
Or I'll be walking home and feel a light sprinkle of the threatening rain and its Halloween. I can't quite remember which Halloween, but I was definitely young.
Or studying for my exam, and I'm transported to the Bridge School Benefit two years ago.

So weird.

Two more weeks

2009-06-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

It was just one of those days.

I hadn't wanted to admit it this morning, fought through my annoyance at being up early, inability to feel at peace with my clothing, and chronic tardiness (though ironically, our group meeting had been pushed back, so I was actually a half an hour early). I even hit a bright patch in the middle of the day when the sun was out and I got an hour off of class because of some department assessment that, as a foreign exchange student, I did not have to partake in. I strolled around, was thwarted at one ATM but found another, wandered through the "Micro-finance Refugee craft fair," hoping, though failing, to find presents for some friends.
And as the ominous dark clouds rolled in, I headed back into class, only to be reminded of the all-encompassing frustration that comes from not being able to communicate, from having my identity as an intelligent, eloquent person be absolutely stripped away.

It's been raining for the past couple of hours now. Not pouring, not drizzling, just lightly raining. It's the kind of day I became accustomed to in Ireland. A dark day, in which every hour feels like nightfall with a constant, seemingly inconspicuous rain that, even after it stops, still drips and tinks and plops no matter how far inside you may be. The kind of noise that is inconsequential when you are busy and productive but nothing less than a dull roar when you have nothing else to do but stare outside. It was the kind of day without an appetite, the idea of hunger is completely foreign, but once you start eating, you can't seem to want to stop.

The Hours was playing in the dark living room when I came home. I watched it while I ate my lunch, which was appropriately unappetizing. The pork chop was mostly fat, which sat in a rejected pile on the edge of my plate, and the mashed potatoes had lumped and congealed sullenly.

It was a day for funerals. It was a day for cradling your head in your arms and staring at nothing for far too long.

< Insert Dylan Thomas reference Here >

2009-06-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

So as I settle into what I’m fast realizing is finals month (as opposed to the traditional finals week), I feel like it’s almost time to sit back and take stock of my astounding progress in el español. It should be a time for positive encouragement to propel me on to the end of the semester. It should be a time for secret self-congratulations because, after all, I’ve made it through four whole months of classes in a foreign language. I suppose it could be a time for minor stress and anxiety about taking finals and finishing final papers in a foreign language. But it really shouldn’t be a time for plummeting-gut, dry throat panic attacks (which, surprisingly are similar to that feeling I got yesterday after watching an epically intense movie. Perhaps that indicates that my experience here has been epically intense?) that grab hold and shake you like a wooden roller coaster. Picture red and blue spiny demons with claws, fangs and spikes, and giant evil eyes, obviously artistically rendered in a comic book style standing on my chest with their long fingers wrapped around my neck, shaking my head like a giant mosh-pit without the fun. I mean, at least that’s how I picture them…

Sorry. Where was I?

Oh yes. See I have this professor. He’s Haitian and a visiting professor which means that he doesn’t know much about the way things are generally done here. It also means that he speaks with an awesome accent that I can barely understand. He’s imposingly tall with an unnerving way of stalking through the rows of students and occasionally stopping to tower over someone and pose a question that the poor sap he’s standing over feels compelled to answer even though it was posed generally. His emphasis oscillates between deafening and almost inaudible and sometimes I think he’s just talking to himself. It’s generally a fun class. I haven’t the faintest idea what we’re learning about because sometimes we talk about the CARICOM and the OEA (which is apparently the “Organization of American States”) and sometimes we talk about Haiti and voodoo. I can honestly swear that I pay more attention in that class than I did in all of my MCB (molecular and cellular biology) lectures combined during the spring of 2008. And yet I’m always startled bright red when suddenly he’s talking directly to me and we’re talking about the word “hub?” Or he’s really interested in my opinion but for the life of me I can’t figure out what the question was, I’m still taking notes on what he was saying two minutes ago.

And then today he drew a diagram on the board and it all made sense. You see, his diagrams are a general source of mirth for the class. I have attempted to re-create it in Paint and, to fully understand it, you should know that I’m DAMN good with Paint. This is an actual and very reasonable facsimile of the diagram that was scrawled on the whiteboard earlier today.

(Profe: “Hmm… not sure why this one looks like an “8”…. This one down here, it’s probably Africa because it’s big, yes, Africa is big, and these little lines over here, they look like the Caribbean, right? I suppose these are the Caribbean…” True story.)
You see, we were discussing the 4 major poles of attraction (powers) of the world and then the peripheries. (Yes, that is what I am learning in a foreign language in which I can barely carry on a basic discussion of my day.) Obviously, the labeled blobs are the 4 poles (US, Europe, Asia and the Arabic world, which I can’t for the life of me figure out a better translation of) and all of the specks and lines and un-labeled blobs are periphery countries that are attracted to these poles for different reasons. One hopes.
And even after the rest of the class’s laughter had died down, I was still smothering uncontrollable giggles. Suddenly, it was all absurdly clear. The diagram was, in fact, a diagram of my experience in the class. You see, the labeled blobs represent the main ideas of the day’s lecture which are always written out in the syllabus or made explicit at the beginning of the class. Then there are the things that I assume I can label.
Considering that we are discussing CARICOM today and I’m pretty sure he just said “does not belong” I’m going to assume that we’re talking about Cuba. Sound assumption, if I do say so myself. He’s probably talking about international relations right now. Something about NAFTA? I’ll mark that down with an asterisk so that I remember to look it up later and maybe make a connection. And now I suppose he’s talking about integration again? Hopefully?
And then again there are all the little dots and specks which go straight over my head and I have no hope of understanding. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they are just words and that I’m able to hold onto the big idea blobs. Which is absurd right? It’s downright hilarious. At least, apparently I thought so…
I guess we’ll see… three weeks and counting!

by any other name.

2009-06-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling, the one where even a half hour after the movie has ended and you've found your way out of the darkened theater and out of the taxi or car or bus or what-have-you and into your bed and you STILL can't figure out where your stomach went except that you must have dropped it somewhere along the way because you can feel it tugging at the pit it left behind? The one where your eyes are still clouded on the edges like a black and white photograph because the tears are trying to hide themselves in the shame of cliche and the knowledge that they'd do no justice by falling? And your whole body is sore and there's a dull pain in the back of your head, just above your neck that, if you massage it to lessen the pain flashed images and scenes and snippets of dialogue before your closed eyes?
The movie ended an hour ago and I'm still struggling through it. Granted, Zwartboek or The Black Book or La Lista Negra is a Dutch film and we watched it with Spanish subtitles so that might be partly responsible for my general post-movie exhaustion (which has nothing to do with the current "finals month" exhaustion that I'm experiencing).
But what a movie!
As we walked out, all I could say was "That was such a good movie... except "good" isn't the right word. It wasn't "good," it was amazing? intense? It made an impact...?"
It was probably one of the most amazing war movies I've ever seen, if only because every character spoke their own language. The nazis spoke German, the Dutch spoke Dutch, the Canadians spoke English. There was none of these namby-pamby villains who speak English when no one is looking... Also, the movie was touched up with film noise, specks and distortions so that it looked like they wanted it to look like it was filmed at the time (ish).

But the real point to this story is that I saw a foreign film with Spanish subtitles and understood it. (Never mind that sometimes (read: most times) I can't understand my host sisters when they are talking.) A level of awesome which was only SLIGHTLY mitigated by the fact that Ems and I high-fived each other during the movie every time we remembered that we were watching a foreign film with Spanish subtitles.
Also, it was fun catching Dutch and German words that are similar to English words. Especially the swear words. Subtitles NEVER get that kind of stuff right...

On no occasion

2009-05-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

I feel like this would be a good post for half way though my stay here or about a week before I fly away. But what can you do?
My second host sister arrived today and we all sat around and chatted while she ate her favorite meal (lengua in tomato sauce with rice) with her favorite dessert (coconut ice cream). My host mom laughed and asked me what I'm going to eat when I go home, what food I miss. I laughed a bit and talked about all my favorite restaurants in Berkeley that I miss.

Lucky House Thai for my Pad Thai, Naan and Curry or House of Curries for Vegetable or Lentil curry with basmati rice (the jury's still out on which restaurant is better), Man Puku for sushi even though I really prefer Miatama on College Avenue, right across from my favorite coffee house with the big purple chairs and just down the street from the Safeway, but is too expensive.
Ooh! Speaking of College Ave, La Mediterranee for lunch special with pomegranate chicken and pilaf, and then down the street for dessert at Ici, the most perfect mixture of French ice cream and Italian gelato.
Or cafe Intermezzo where you go to feel healthy, even though the fresh and delicious salads and sandwiches are roughly twice the size of your head.
Or Annie's diner after a post-final party when you all troop down the early morning streets when the light is brighter and things seem deserted and a thick greasy hamburger with home-fries is the most comfortable thing you can think of, besides the sweatshirt you're wearing, sitting in silence in sun-warmed seats by the big windows, watching Telegraph come alive outside.
Or my taco truck which is parked on the Highway side of Ironworks until 5pm when it moves to the entrance side.
Or the Southside Berkeley Top Dog, on a hot summer day for a brat with relish, a bag of Classic Lays potato chips, and a root beer to be eaten leaning against the wall outside in the shafts of afternoon sun, hot dog in one hand, root beer in the other and the chips hanging off the fingers of one hand for easy access.
Or even Jamba Juice, where they know me and call out my order as I walk in: sixteen-orange-berry-blitz-non-dairy-sorbet-substitute-with-an-energy-boost. You know, for a change.
Even the smells of the other places along Telegraph make me smile. The enticing, amazing smell of the Noah's bagels that I used to love. That cheap fast greasy pizza smell that battles between the competing Fat Slice and Blondie's Pizza places. Or even the slight spice of Chipotle that makes me think of nothing more than mid-term season rewards.

And I won't even get started on my favorite grown-up places on Southside and down by fourth street where Mom and I go when she visits me (because OH! the distance between us grows long!) Or the places in Marin that I love, even as they change, because of the memories. (Marin Brewing Company, The Cantina, Left Bank, I'm looking at you) Or the fancy once-in-a-lifetime places that I love for their glamor and elegance and unattainability like El Paseo in Mill Valley or The Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur.

I mean, that's not really what she was asking. I think she wanted to know more the kind of food that I eat there than I can't eat here, and honestly there's not too much. I'm pretty content generally with whatever food is put in front of me (I just ate tongue for lordssake, though she just popped her head in to tell me that there was more if I wanted it and I really don't think I do. It was delicious I just... don't want more right now...). I don't really miss food so much as the feeling of BEING as I return home.

I love airports. Either the thrill of going or the relief of coming. I love the people, I love slumping myself in those horribly uncomfortable chairs and watching the planes take off. I love being alone in airports with everything I really need and some stuff that I really don't in my bag next to me, with my iPod and notebook and myself. I love knowing that I travel, I am a traveler, I DO traveling. It's independent, it's exciting, it's relaxing and thrilling at the same time.
I love getting on airplanes, sometimes pretending I'm someone fabulously famous in a black and white movie walking up the stairs to get on the airplane, sometimes pretending I'm an international jet-setter, sleek and cool.
And of course the lift that you get when your heart drops and the plane takes off.
I'm sure I love being in the air, I just can't stay awake enough to know.
And landing. Landing is always bittersweet. It's about cement and tire marks and little tiny lights on the tarmak instead of clouds and endless blue. It's always about goodbyes, and it's always the same. The same dirty upholstery, the same magazines with the crossword puzzles half-filled out to which I contributed a word or two, the same parting words from the same in-flight crew in essentially the same uniforms, the same white hallway lit with the same square lights and the same flood of relief and coolness that you get when finally burst free into the airport and join the flood of suits and rolling suitcases, loud families on vacation and a couple vagabonds, just like me, waiting for their next adventure.
And I know that 12 weeks from now, tired and weary, I know I'm going to walk out into that amazing San Francisco air which I swear is the purest. Maybe I'll take the airporter home, which is secretly okay because it means I get to prolong my journey. And I know that when I get off that bus in the dark of Marin county, lit up by the lights of the ferry building, my parents will be leaning against the bumper of the red truck, waiting for me. Or maybe they'll be waiting for me at the airport full of silent smiles and wordless hugs because we're all so filled with an inarticulate, but mutually comprehensible emotion. We'll load my bags on to a trolley and load up the car. Either ride will be punctured with occasional sighs and huge grins. And I won't be able to believe just how amazing my hometown is, especially at night.
No matter which way I come about it, I'll eventually end up home, a pot of pasta e fagioli bubbling on the stove and filling the house with the smell of my mother's love and my grandmother's house.
I'm glad that they painted the kitchen a burnt reddish orange because it always makes me feel like I'm in a warm embrace when it's the only room in the house with lights on.
And I'll take down one of those huge soup bowls with the squiggly rim and marvel as they feel clunky and new in my hands. And the special swirly spoons with the design at the top that is reminiscent of a treble clef that Mom bought just for me because I hate big spoons.
And maybe Dad'll show me the new Bourbon he found or their favorite new wine, or make me a hot toddy and we'll chat about the aroma or the flavor, and then we'll all just sit, even though it's late, filling the silence with smiles.
Finally, tired and overwhelmed, I'll crawl into cool sheets and my fluffy duvet with my favorite pillow that I guard jealously (currently it's one I brought home in my arms from Ireland) and fall asleep, excited to wake up to the clear light of the morning through my blue curtains and look around at the childhood that I brought with me through 8 or 9 houses and know that I'm home.

That's what I can't wait to have, first thing, when I go home.

The Particular Merits of Sunday

2009-05-24T19:10:00.001-07:00

Sunday is my favorite day.

I generally can't do homework on Sunday, no matter how hard I try. This is probably because Sunday goes a little like this:

I usually wake up at a deliciously late hour, somewhere between 9:30 and 10:15, with the crisp and enticing light of a clear blue sky shining in through my windows. Its almost always one of those mornings where you realize slowly that you are awake, and then squeeze your eyes shut, hoping to be pulled back into the sweet land of sleep, but then, just as slowly, realize that being awake is actually quite lovely.

This particular morning I rolled over and saw my new poster, proudly displayed on my wall, right next to the hook upon which I hang my bag-not-purse and whichever pair of jeans I an airing out from a recent trip to one of my favorite smoke-filled, green and purple-lit bar where they serve rum and coke in a can. Malpaís played the first ever carbon neutral concert in Costa Rica yesterday afternoon. It was pouring when I left the house, pouring when I got downtown, raining when I met up with friends and drizzling when we FINALLY, after a couple of supermarket pit-stops, reached la Plaza de la Democracia outside the fairy-tale castle-like Museo Nacional.
It had cleared up enough that we stowed our umbrellas in favor of snaking through the crowd for a better view. Thanks to the rain, the crowd was pretty thin and we got almost as close as I was when I saw them during Semana U, way back in March. That day, sitting on the water tank beside the library and watching the crowd that filled the entire square and climbed up walls, seated in tree branches, holding on to drain pipes and hanging off every window, balcony and staircase that they could get to in the surrounding buildings, I remember just looking up at the crystal clear blue sky and being overwhelmed by the music and the emotions of the people who cared about the music just as much as I did, and the perfection of the day. Last night I looked up at the sky as it cleared, relishing the few remaining raindrops, watched the mauve clouds race across the dark blue sky, lit up by the green and blue and purple lights that lit up the Museo Nacional like a stage and the swirling lights that highlighted the musicians on the stage that stood opposite. And every once in a while when the stage lights would turn on the audience you could see, as the night went on, that the population of the Plaza swelled with waves of people, all singing along, whipping bandanas over their heads, enraptured. The concert ran for about four hours and afterward, half the crowd trickled out, and everyone else sat in little groups on stairs, benches, walls and railings, all coming down from a wonderful natural high.

I will never forget the entire crowd chanting these two songs, the musicians leaning out to meet the audience, balanced to topple off the stage and into the loving arms of their fans:
Otro Lugar
Presagio

Ems and I finished the night in one of our favorite bars, where we didn't see any of the friends who we were hoping to see, but did catch a band that self-defined as Manu Chao but was really more Juanes-like, minus the metallic flavor that comes with commercialization.

Needless to say, my Sunday started off with a smile.

The next part of Sunday always involves some sort of delicious meal. My favorite is gallo pinto, the most amazing combination of rice, beans and cilantro, cooked together. Today it included an egg on the side as well. Sometimes it's sausage which tastes oddly like hot dog, but which I've come to love. Twice we've had empanadas, which is essentially a gift of either refried beans or ground beef wrapped lovingly in masa (corn-flour dough?) and fried golden, which, if you eat right off the griddle, drip down your chin and burn your mouth which is totally worth it. Whatever breakfast is, it always seems more flavorful on Sunday mornings, possibly because it follows a delicious sleep or possibly because the kitchen door is open and that lovely blue-sky light is flooding the kitchen.

Sometimes I shower after breakfast on Sundays, sometimes I leave it for later. Eventually I make it back to my bed and pull out my school books. I spread them out deliberately, planning to be incredibly productive so that I can take a break on Monday. But I always turn on my computer to check my email, read my comics and the Sunday Secrets on postsecret.com, provided I have not read them the night before upon my return from a Saturday night adventure. Of course, the internet always leads to chats with various friends. Sunday is always lazy enough to catch up. After this, if there's time, I find my self drawn into some sort of internet pop-news frenzy/Wikipedia vortex/Google "new thing" investigation in which I learn things like the history behind Alexander Dumas' The Three Musketeers, collect images of Art Nouveau which I'm REALLY into right now, discover that American Girl is coming out with a Russian Jewish Immigrant girl whose history, appearance and story were painstakingly researched [nytimes.com] . This portion of Sunday is usually interrupted by lunch because suddenly it's 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon and where is the day going?

Sunday lunch is lovely. In Costa Rica, our big meal is always lunch, which is followed in the evening by a cafecito, or snack with coffee. Sunday lunch is usually quite simple but always fresh and flavorful because my host mom goes to the market on Sunday in the late morning, after a late breakfast. So the avocados are bright green, the vegetables are crisp and the fresca (fresh made fruit juice + sugar + water) is delicious and something wonderful like mango or pineapple. Sunday lunch is with the whole family, because everyone is home; it is, after all, Sunday. And it stretches luxuriously into the afternoon.

Sometimes it's bittersweet. Two of the daughters of my host family study in the United States and one came back last Monday and the next is due Friday. And they're really a close family, teasing each other about this and that. I've said it often, but it amazes me how similar my family and my host family are, so sometimes Sunday lunch is like looking into a memory. Sunday afternoons are always nice times for nostalgic melancholy and reflection as the sky darkens and the smell of rain dances along with the breeze and almost always leads to afternoon skyping with the homestead.

From there, Sunday plods on. If I have no lingering internet duties, I will pull out the guitar and practice a bit before the afternoon rain drowns me out or my hands get sore.

Then I might nap. Que rico (how delicious) is an afternoon nap listening to the lessening rain beating on the tin parts of the roof and against the windows. Or maybe I'll watch a movie or indulge in some online episodes of my favorite TV shows, it is, after all, Sunday and I have all of Monday to do whatever I don't do today. Today I joined my host family to watch Slumdog Millionaire which I loved. The art direction blew me away.

But then it's almost 6 and Sunday is almost gone. Maybe I'll sit for a while and think. Maybe I'll listen to music, maybe I'll head back into the land of the internet. I'll glance once or twice at my forelorn school books, pushed aside long ago and know that they'll stay there until tomorrow.

Somehow it's 8:30 or 9 and time for a cafecito sans the cafe. And then soon I'm too tired to keep my eyes open, exhausted from the day or the week. And just like that, Sunday is over. I curl up under the covers and regret not a minute of my satisfyingly unproductive Sunday

Cosmic messages.

2009-05-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

My Google Anayltics site has installed in me a very particular type of ambition.
And that is an ambition to increase my procrastination allotment by blogging more. Because I like the idea that people read this. It gives me warm fuzzies.

now if only I could think of something to blog about...

You see, I've reached the point in my stay here where it feels normal. I've gotten into the swing of things at school, and it's a familiar swing. Fewer things are new, I have found my "ordinary." Everything feels natural and routine. I've even become accustomed to feeling lost and stupid when I can't understand people.

And as so much ordinary, it has come to feel mundane and uninteresting.

But then, every once in a while, something shakes me up a bit. Like Tuesday. Now, I read my horoscope every day, I am highly and oddly superstitious what with all the knocking on wood, tossing spilled salt over my shoulder and keeping to fortuitous routines, and I believe that I'm a little bit psychic. So it's safe to say that I "go in for that sort of thing."
So Tuesday. Tuesday I was walking across campus and I noticed a man on crutches in faded old jeans who was missing a leg. Later I was walking down a hallway and my attention was arrested by a table lying on its side, missing a leg. Then, as I was walking home through the park that night, having missed the bus, I watched a man playing with his dog under a street light. As I passed, the dog stopped and looked up at me and, illuminated in the streetlight, I could see that it only had three legs.

I walked home seriously freaked out for the first time in a long time. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is not. It's something else. A conspiracy maybe?
Well, whatever the universe is trying to tell me has been lost on me. It should speak to me as it would to a five year old, the same as I expect anyone who speaks to me in Spanish to do.

And the worst part was that my horoscope, which I usually regard as a casual guide to extraordinary happenings, was completely unhelpful.

Entomology 4 Gringas

2009-05-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

I have become like the hunter.

Because in this world, it's all about survival, and in this world, it is self against nature. It is the most timeless theme, man vs. nature, the struggle to conquer or be vanquished. And here in the wild tropics, the theme and the threat are larger than life. So immense is the danger presented by the elements in lands close to the equator, that they have come up with a term that describes the hapless writer's reaction to it: Tropicalization. The sweet siren call of liquid gold sunsets, crystal blue breakers and the saturated green of the rain forest gives way to the cruel extremes of weather and nature. It is a truly perilous journey that I now find myself on, but I can feel myself adapting, out of necessity, out of instinct, out of that clawing, scraping raw desire to live.

Because, after all, it's me against the bugs.

I have developed, through trial and error, methods which limit my interaction with these small enemies. I make sure that as few things as possible cluttering my floor so that my perimeter checks to ferret out corner lurkers and shadow squatters are smooth and quick. I turn lights on before entering rooms and block cracks whenever possible. Luckily the weather has cooled off and I can keep the slatted windows near my ceilings fully closed at all times to limit entry points. I know to look in my sink immediately upon entering the bathroom because there is a centipede that resides in the drain that, unless I'm prepared, tends to startle me (It's actually really funny, he can't quite make it up the sides of the slick sink and so his little legs, of which he really only has 40, work tirelessly to achieve nothing).

My senses have sharpened as well. I know, now, the rustle of the cockroach. I immediately become aware at the slightest buzzing sound. Flies have a particular, familiar buzzing, but there are all manner of new bugs here which I am not familiar with. I can spot an ant on my floor out of the corner of my eye, even though the floor tiles are speckled, and often try to trick me.

I have three different repellent methods of different strengths which I employ to keep bugs out of my bed (which is really the only objective, as I can easily deal with them when I am fully awake during day time): dryer sheets (work well, though not perfectly with mosquitoes), OFF with DEET (work better with mosquitoes), and not showering.

I have learned to live with some, and I think the bigger bugs have come to realize the zero-tolerance policy that is enforced within the confines of my room, and oddly, with cockroaches.

Long have I pondered our repulsion and hatred for cockroaches. To watch one, trapped and still, in a corner during daylight, they aren't threatening or repulsive really. Some are thinner with hard, glowing mahogany shells. Some are fat and striped. All have those long, elegant feelers that gracefully dip and reach. They aren't venomous, and hardly ever bite. We fear spiders because of their danger and their propensity of munch on human flesh. We abhor mosquitoes for their obvious taste for human blood, and also because they make us itch like the dickens. Could the reason we hate cockroaches be solely a societal construction? Could we only hate them because, they eat our trash instead of our flesh and so tend to be found in places that we associate with filth? (Which of course leads to disease-carriers, but so are flies and we don't, generally, shudder at the thought of a fly.) They are big compared to other bugs, but small compared to us. So what exactly is it about these creatures that causes girls to squeal and boys to cringe.
It could be that peculiarly loud skittering sound they make, and ominous indicator of their unseen presence. It could be the sickening sound they make when killed which is too loud to allow their death to pass by casually as it does with so many other bugs. Or it could be the fact that they are FAST little bastards that, the minute they are scared from their disturbed little corner, take off in crazy circles, like a five year-old at the wheel of a Cadillac who can't see the road ahead and who knows WHERE they will end up, except we're all pretty sure it'll be on our bodies somewhere...

And so I'm learning. Learning to stalk, not silently like a jaguar, but with as much scary, ground shaking noise as possibly. Learning to appreciate the smell of roach-killer (as I have become hardened to bug-death by my life among the creatures). Learning to sleep without cocooning myself in my sheets. For the most part...

In other, completely unrelated news: What with the coming of the rains, days here feel like the opposite bend of the season, the one which takes us into the throes of winter. I awoke this morning to the rain, cool and fresh and comforting. And it turned out to be a very good day to listen to The Cure and to delightfully apocalyptic Eastern European romantic music composers.

2009-05-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

Two Thursdays ago the choir changed classrooms and I couldn't find the new one. After 10 minutes of wandering campus, that uncomfortable feeling of obvious unfamiliarity started to take over and after 45 minutes I gave up. I was feeling, once again, like I didn't belong, which was frustrating after nearly a month of feeling at home.

So I gave up and stalked home. I got halfway though the park before I gave up on walking home. I threw myself underneath a tree and gave myself up to star gazing and pleading with the cosmos. The lightning bugs danced around through thick ropes of greenery and the bougainvillea bushes and the warm tropical air was sweat and thick and made me think of nothing more that that classic image of New Orleans. Why, I wondered, did I idolize the bohemian culture, but can't seem to feel like I'm living it? I always seem to end up on this side of socially acceptable and distinctly respectable?

I guess someone was listening, or maybe the stars were lined up correctly, because the next day I ran away with the circus.

Let me back up a bit. You see, there are these street-performers, mostly jugglers, who hang out at stop lights and perform in the cross-walk when the light is red. Ems and I sit at our bus stop, which is about 30 feet from a stoplight, and watch them while discussing the awesomeness of juggling. So imagine our surprise when, after an entire day of running errands we collapsed onto the bus and watched a gaggle of them slide into the seats across the aisle from us. It was even cooler, of course, because one of them had an accordion.
(I would like you to please now paint a mental picture of a band of classic bohemian gypsies mixed with a depression-era circus, to the sound of 1920’s accordion and harmonica music that would fit best in black-and-white Paris (or Amélie), with distinct flavorings of Peter Pan and the Moulin Rouge and completely saturated with that fantastic, although elusive concept of wandering artsy (which can obviously only be described with rather quirky coupling of an verb and an adjective, as opposed to the infinitely more conventional coupling of an adverb and a verb.) That’s essentially how I remember the weekend.)
To continue. So what with the circus sitting next to us on the bus and all, Ems got really excited and tried to convince me that if I talk to them, they’ll play something for us on their cool instruments. Actually, it will probably work better if we say it’s her birthday, NO! It’s MAGGIE’S! Maggie! Talk to them even though you are sitting by the window and trying to scrouch as far away from human interaction as possible because you have just spent 2 hours trying on jeans because the only jeans you brought with you to wear are indecently filled with holes and so now you are immensely tired and hungry.
But eventually Ems gave in and asked them herself, in nervous Spanish, where they were going to “play.” By the stoplight, of course, and do we want to come?
Now, I’m not exactly how this exchange went. I think a lot got lost in translation. I’m not sure if they asked US to come along, or if somehow we thought they did and tagged along anyway. I do know that they asked us what we were doing, and we answered honestly: nothing. And so we got off the bus with them? It was a little awkward at first, just randomly deciding to follow them. I was still carrying a bag with two pairs of jeans in it for cripes sake. When they started to set up under a stoplight, we plopped down and strove to look comfortable and natural by conversing casually. (Even though I spent most of the time suppressing nervous giggles.) Stephan was fiddling around on the accordion and David and César brought out the juggling clubs and promptly lit them on fire. Yes fire. Playing with fire is a funny thing. They’d juggle the clubs between them or they’d take three and balance them into a hat or they play like they were going to light someone on fire, getting the flame too close to this one’s back while he wasn’t paying attention or dangerously close to that one’s dreads while he was talking to us. At one point David extinguished his club in a cup of kerosene and these crazy whorls of white steam/smoke erupted up and out of the cup like an explosion of dry ice. I watched it and wished that I’d randomly brought my camera. He looked up and grinned at me “Wow, huh?” (They say “wow” here, but it sounds different. Like it’s more self-conscious of its English origins. Kind of like how I saw “no bueno”)
The stoplight wasn’t doing much for them because it was Labor Day, and in their words the day for “trabajo para taxistas y maravillosos.” (work for taxi drivers and jugglers.) So they told us they were planning on going to do a show downtown and then head to this bar called La Chicharronera. So we said “okay” and continued to follow them.
We walked all the way to downtown San Jose through the back streets, reciting stories, quips and poetry in between bars of accordion music, ringing doorbells and running and other such forms of goofing off in the streets. At one point we stopped in front of a small art-house theater where a line was waiting to get in. The guys set up a small show, jokingly directing traffic around their fire-clubs and jokes, and passing the hat afterward. Ems and I sat off to the side with that kind of smug thrill that I get from being “with the band” as it were.
At one point I looked around and realized we were walking through my favorite part of the city. It’s also probably the most sketchy part too. It’s one end of what is called the “California District” and it’s so cool. It’s bounded on that far side by railroad tracks and at one point there is an antique locomotive just rusting in its house. There are a few dilapidated buildings with artfully broken windows and overgrown grasses. But most of all there are expanses, like I’m talking multiple city blocks, of pure white wall that has been covered with extraordinary graffiti. Every time we bus or taxi through the area I tell Ems that I want to come back on foot and walk around and take pictures and she always tells me that we can do that as long as it’s during the daytime and in a REALLY BIG group. So imagine my glee at finding myself walking through it at 9 pm with a group of locals. We walked by this bar called Raffa’s which is so small that everyone sits outside on the curb. And they are the coolest people too. They’re all in black and safety pins, or plaid flannel and worn jeans and converse. Totally my kind of people. Further down the California district are other bars and music venues. It’s just really hip.
At Raffa’s we were joined by a group of girls who were friends with our jugglers. We found out later that they are all part of the drama department in the University of Costa Rica, where I go, which ends up saying a lot about them. As in they were really cool. (There are a ton of universities in the area, but UCR has a reputation of being the more artsy-hippie school.)
So we all sat down at the fountain in the very middle of the center of San José and the boys started gathering a crowd around. Teasing, cajoling and pushing people into sitting down, which, because of the clownish way they did it, drew more people. They commenced with their routine fire show, the feats of dexterity, the humorous stories all mixed up with perfect improv when it was appropriate. Like then a soaking wet drunk wandered into the middle of the show and they had to entice him out with a fake phone call from a nearby payphone. Or when they drew a crowd member up and made him take off his backpack and David pretended to walk off with it with exaggerated motions while Jason yelled at him that “that’s not for now, we do that later…” They then told the poor bastard that Stephan was going to walk over him juggling fire, and he had to watch while Stephan did a few practice rounds in which he kept dropping the flaming clubs while his friends shouted encouragement. “Good try! You’re doing great! One more time!” It was really cool to watch people we knew, people we’d been interacting with and hanging out with do this entertaining, professional-quality show which was, to all intents and purposes, impromptu.
Finally, the show was over and we headed to La Chicarronera with the girls, walking down the street, laughing and joking as if we’d been friends for AGES. We grabbed a couple of drinks at La Chica, sat on the low stage upon which, one month earlier, I’d watched some of the most awesome break-dancing, under crazy-colored lights and chatted. When the boys showed up we exchanged card tricks and magic. We finished the night singing “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette and “Zombie” by the Cranberries with our new Tica friends in one of the karaoke bars on La Calle, the row of bars that juts off campus. By the time we got in the taxi at 2am we’d been speaking Spanish for 8 hours straight and forgot to switch back to English as we reveled in our new friends and our awesome day.
And that’s about where we thought it would end. The next day was designated for finding a café and studying. We sat for four hours in this café where they make awesome chai tea and Indian food and the walls are yellow and red and the roof is but an awning. When it started to rain, I got distracted and stared out at San José existing around me and the mist-shrouded mountains rising up around it and thought about how cool it was to be sitting, essentially, outside in the rain, but not being cold and not getting wet, with a hot mug of tea. So like Berkeley and so different.
After four hours of studying we started to walk home. We walked instead of taking the bus even though it was kind of raining because I had absolutely no money on me (as per usual) and didn’t really want to borrow MORE money from Ems. But as we got close to the mall, (and Ems stopped at a street vendor to inquire about crocheted bikinis) we ran into on of the jugglers! It was a little awkward, mostly because of our being caught off guard and thus not being able to speak Spanish with much confidence. But he asked us if we were doing anything that night, and when we said no, he said there was a party at his friend’s place in Heredia and if we wanted to come, we could meet them at Raffa’s at 11. We thanked him but didn’t sound hopeful about it. The night before had been draining and after four hours of studying we just couldn’t conceptualize going out. But as we started to walk home, we started to talk about it. Should we go out to cement our friendship with these guys? Or would that be too creepy-soon? Would we seem too pushy?
Long story short we spent four hours discussing it and waffling. Yes, we’re going. We’re only going if we can get MK to come. We’re going even though MK isn’t. Maggie, I asked four online 8 balls and they all said we should go. Well, I checked my horoscope AND yours and it’s not giving me a clear indication. Ems, I don’t want to go to Raffa’s in a taxi, that’s just too uncool. Ems, I have a bad feeling about this. Maggie, I’ve just called the taxi, be outside in 4 minutes. Crud.
I think I just got nervous. I’d gotten ready to go out, so obviously I was planning on going out, but when I got in the taxi apparently, I looked like I was going to be sick. Raffa’s is one of THE coolest bars in San José. It’s in a dangerous enough neighborhood that the tourist welcome mat, so to speak, isn’t really out. It’s more of a place to go and bump into your friends, which is hard to do if you’re a transient gringo and don’t HAVE friends there. I practically DRAGGED her up to the bar because “I really needed a drink” and then we went and leaned against the wall just outside the door, framed with graffiti, trying to construct some sort of semblance of cool. It was around 11 and we couldn’t see them, so we assumed that they’d left. Oh well. That’s cool. No Heredia party tonight. It’s probably for the best. And as long as we’re here, let’s enjoy ourselves and chat. Blend. Eventually a drunk kid came over and wanted some of my drink. I thought it was funny because he was trying to convince us that he’d never tried a Cuba Libre before. (Here they come in cans, already mixed. It’s genius. And it’s also almost as popular as beer.) Then later he told us it was his favorite drink… Anyway, Ems told him we have swine flu and refused to share and then they started talking about places to go in Costa Rica. At one point she leaned over and hissed “I see them. Right. There. No over, leaning on the fence.” We waited, but the douche walked RIGHT past us into the bar and back out again. At that point we figured it was over. Obviously he’d seen us. Obviously he didn’t want to hang out. Obviously we were being creepy desperate.
So we shook off our new “friend,” bought two more Cuba Libres and decided to make the best of it. After all, we had ended up at a way cool bar. We chose a spot off to the side and chatted for a little while longer. FINALLY Jason came over all “hey! You guys made it!” and we were all “yea! Hey, we thought you’d left.” You know how it is when it’s obvious that everyone is lying? Yea. Then it was established that we were, in fact, still in for the party in Heredia. But first we have to wait for David and César who are doing a fire show at Club Latino Rock for one of the bands that was playing.
We ended up waiting outside Raffas, and Ems ended up talking with some drunk guy. Some drunk guy who turned out to be the sopping wet drunk who had wandered through the show the night before. They chatted about his broken life and sang Frank Sinatra and the Mammas and the Papas. Finally the other guys joined us, char smudges on their white collared shirts and big grins, and we headed off, laughing and joking. It’s good to have friends.
In the end, the party didn’t happen, and when I woke up the next morning to a white sky and the sound of the rain on a Sunday morning. The perfect kind of sleepy day to cap off a whirlwind weekend.

Lifted from a Moleskin Notebook

2009-04-07T09:05:00.001-07:00

It’s not that I don’t like bus rides. I love them. I love any form of traveling. I absolutely thrill at the feeling of movement, the idea that I’m going somewhere, anywhere, that I’m on the move again. But right now I’m focused solely on the hateful thoughts that I’m cherishing towards the general concept of this particular bus ride.
My whole body hurts. From my ankles to my jaw line everything pains. If it weren’t for the complete and encompassing pain that I’m feeling, I’d probably be thinking back fondly on one of the greatest weekends that I’ve had yet this trip. Montezuma was truly the paradise we expect of Costa Rica – touristy only in it’s prices and extensive display of the English language, but conspicuous in it’s lack of tourist shops and cheesy cheap souvenirs. It was the place that the rugged tourists go. Where you can rent an ATV and feel like you’re a pioneer tourist exploring pristine beaches, but also where the wanderers seem to get stuck (it is at the end of a peninsula, after all), who just stay instead of leaving and mesh with the locals at the one bar and dance around late-night bonfires, surf in the daytime and enjoy it indefinitely. It’s like A place stuck, where time doesn’t really seem to move, even though the days are all spectacularly bookmarked by the blazing transitions of the sun.
So I spent the weekend at the beach. Why, then, am I in complete and total pain? I mean, how could I possibly have gotten so sore? I’ll admit, that first day, I did clamber around on some rocks, tide-pooling and sitting in decidedly emo positions while watching the waves beating themselves senselessly against the rocky out-cropping under my feet. That was wonderful, really. I danced around a lot in the room while we got ready to go out at night... but no more than usual. Oh god, I still have “Come on Eileen” stuck in my head. I should look that up when I get back… Oh it hurts.
Okay, break it down. Ankles: itchy. Bugs. Easy. Explainable. Calves and glutes… Did we, oh that’s right! The hike! On the second day we took this epic hike up to the waterfall. It was probably a good thirty minutes at about a 70 degree incline in like 90 degree weather. Finishing that hike felt good, then at least. Plus we ended up at an amazing oasis. At the top of the hill, past the randomly-placed yet not incongruous, silk-covered jungle gym, there’s a small path of steps that leads through the trees and down onto the rocks of a river. After a small 10 foot drop, the green water pools into a perfect swimming hole, complete with rope-swing, nestled between sheer walls before cascading off a 40 foot drop to a second pool which in turn swells over a final precipice and free-falls magnificently 70+ feet.
It was breath-taking in more ways than one. Right and that explains the bruise that extends up the back of my left leg from just above the hemline to just below the waist line and is currently making any form of sitting simply unbearable. Because, apparently, unless you have “good form,” you’re almost guaranteed to bruise after jumping off a 40 foot waterfall. Ahaha. I thought I had it down too… well, actually, I can remember my thought process perfectly clearly. It went something like: OhmygodIactuallyjumped whatthe****wasIthinking? OhmyTERROR okayAntoniosaidtensemusclesbeforeIhit, tensemuscles whatwasIthinking? HOWcanIbeanyMOREtense? Shootshootshootshoot AHH TILTING! CRUD. *SPLASH* Dominique was so right about the bruising I’m gonna bruise… breathing focus on breathing oh my god are my earrings still all there? None ripped out? Good. Breathe. Breathe. Bathing suit in the right arrangement. Should I turn around and wave? Breathe. Too much effort. Breathe. Ow. Stupid.
I can’t really remember through the sheer multitude of sensation, but I’m pretty sure that provided I had enough time, I was swearing a lot more in my mind.
Ah. In the end it was completely vale la pena (“was worth the pain”).

Okay, that explains my legs. But moving up, the nausea? I guess I’ll just set that down to getting up too early and the lingering effects of a weekend of partying and eating poorly? I’d rather not focus on it right now. Focus on something else, something other than the prospect of hurling all over the bus. Ralphing. I like the word ralphing, but I’m always too afraid to use it… too politically incorrect? Derogatory to people named Ralph? Is it Ralphing or Ralfing? Is it less offensive to Ralph if I don’t capitalize?

But then abs. Why are my abs and shoulders so sore? I can barely lift them above my head. Was I carrying anyone? No… It was Emily’s 21st birthday, but I don’t remember carrying her anywhere. Apparently, flipping back a page or two, I did a lot of air-punching and arm-flailing and running. (Entry starts with the phrase “At 12:32am it’s been Emily’s 21st birthday for 28 minutes, and, accordingly and not surprisingly…” the entry goes on to mention things like birthday suits and bioluminescence. And stars. The stars were magnificent)
I didn’t even dance much salsa, so multiple twirls are no excuse… And I tend to be responsible, so I can’t even make a weak joke about lifting the bottle a few too many times for my poor flimsy arm muscles. No… but then, what DID I do? Yesterday I slept on the beach all day, recovering from the waterfall adventure and woke up feeling I’d just spent a day waterskiing. I mean, I did play around on the rope swing, but that was really just two epic failures that consisted of me dropping off the rope before even clearing the water. Maybe it was that yanking my arms? If that’s true, than man I’m out of shape. It’s been SO LONG since I’ve gone climbing or done any sort of regular excersc… OH! Oh. Ohhhhh! Climbing. So that’s where I’ve felt this feeling before. Climbing. Oh man. And not only did I scramble across rocks on day 1, but then remembered how much I like it and continued to clamber up and around every rock I could find after that. Even after dropping like a stone down 40 feet on day 2, I used all my technique to climb back up (after I stopped shaking and returned to my regular breathing pattern) the sheer 40 foot cliff, scoffing at the slightly easier path more-traveled which involved stair-like footholds. MAN that was a savage climb. Totally made up for my earlier epic failures.
Oh epic failures. Yea, before the epic rope-swing failure (I will ALWAYS be grateful that I fought myself and refrained from bragging about the lifetime I’ve spent on rope swings) I failed on a 10-foot cliff jump. I mean, that jump was closer to the water than a high-dive. Easy, right? Good thing no one was really watching that one either. I was so eager to get in to the water, but still shaking from the 30 minute up-hill hike that my dive left much to be desired. As in, it was more of a face-plant. A chest-flop if you will. My chest was so red after that, I’m surprised it didn’t bruise. OH NO WAIT! IT DID! LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE! That’s why my sternum and jaw are so bruised! It’s not a heart attack, or a result of carrying my camera slung over my shoulder all day or even a broken rib from the water-fall jump. And no wonder no one else who did the 40 foot jump has a bruised jaw… and here I thought it must have been because I stuck my head out too far and smacked my jaw against the glassy surface of the lower swimming hole after my feet and lower body had already pierced said glassy surface and thrown it into general tumult… No. It was from the first botched dive that was almost my excuse for not jumping off the waterfall (if I can’t make a 10 foot jump with out failing spectacularly, how do you expect me to make a 40 foot one without killing myself?).

It all makes sense now! Oh and now it’s a good kind of hurt. No sunburn, no stupidly earned (read: drunkenly-earned) injuries. Everything well earned. And a savage bruise to boot…

Can’t wait to go back.

Waiting for the Rain

2009-03-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in life, a person makes bad decisions. Sometimes in life a person makes good decisions. And most times in life you have no idea which type of decision you are making as you are making it.

This morning, I awoke early to an already-slightly-uncomfortably-warm day. I put on my new favorite shirt and sat for a minute contemplating whether to wear my flip-flops or my Chucks. Flip-flops would keep my feet from getting too hot in this weather, but on the other hand, Chucks are just all-around cooler and closed-toed shoes seem to be the norm around here. My Chucks and I headed out to my favorite breakfast (gallo pinto = rice and beans mixed together) which was made (defying the seemingly-impossible) even more amazing with the addition of avocado.
Leave early for class so as not to rush and sweat, thus ruining the happiness of my favorite shirt. And at the last minute I grab my iPod, thinking, "this is not a good idea." I have no idea why I grabbed my iPod. I don't travel with it anymore because I have a crippling fear of it getting stolen. But with said fear screaming in my head, I left, stringing the headphones underneath the back of my shirt and hiding the earphones in my hair, and my Chucks, Jackie Greene and I all trooped towards campus.

It wasn't until half-way through my second class of the day that the sky opened up and unleashed every ounce of humidity that it ever had or ever will hold with a vengeance.
I was saved from pretending to not be surprised so as not to stick out by the other students who seemed as confused as I was. And the great big peal of thunder. That was pretty obvious and pretty distracting.
For the rest of the class I struggled between a desperate attempt to retain and copy down information, a futile effort to stop my hands from shaking after I forced myself to actually speak up, and occasional vain prayer for the rain to stop.

Which it didn't.

Even though I had to get my picture taken for my ID card right after class. And it was weird because I was absolutely convinced that the sky would clear just as class was letting out. Some times I get the feeling that my life works out like it would in a movie, like the universe and I communicate like old college buddies and it is completely legitimate for me to assume that the rain will magically let up just as I'm stepping outside, "luckily."

But it didn't.

I reached the front of the building to find the usual handful of people milling around and a sheer wall of light grey rain. So I did what I usually do. I changed the song on the soundtrack to my life, and prepared myself for a mad dash between buildings, to shelter-hop half way across campus to the Registry office. Dodging puddles and run-off I made it along the slightly covered walkway from the main entrance to the Social Sciences building to the side entrance of the same building where I stopped short. There were three different covered areas within my sight and all of them were filled with people just... standing. Waiting for the rain to let up.
It was pura vida at it's purest. No one looked angry or stressed or even inconvenienced. They just watched the rain and waited for the hole in which they could continue on to their respective destinations. Some leaned against nearby objects. A few with umbrellas shuttled people between shelters. But mostly people shuffled their feet bemusedly. Occasionally someone would realize that they really should get to class, or would tire of waiting and dart out into the rain. It looked cool, exciting, adventurous. So I secured my bag and made my own dash to the next length of hallway, where I continued, grinning and shaking raindrops out of my hair until the next doorway where I stopped again.
I leaned up against the door jamb and reveled for a while in my ability to be Pura Vida. I could wait here, just like everyone else, as long as it took. Especially because my next dash would be a long one. So it seemed okay to wait.

There's something to be said about acculturation. It's always such an achievement to feel like you've integrated yourself into a culture to the point where you no longer stick out. Where you know the slang, know the habits, know the mannerisms and can pretend like you belong. It's nice when you can feel like maybe, just maybe, people don't automatically write you off as a foreigner. And that's how I felt leaning against that glass door. Like part of the club.

Until I didn't want to anymore.

As I sat and watched the few, the proud and the crazy doing the hundred yard sprint to their various destinations, I remembered that I LIKE sticking out. I like it when I don't blend in, when people notice me. Especially if it's for something that I personally consider cool. And at that moment, just like it would have in the movies, I heard Jackie Greene reminded me, as the song faded out, that "Better stand tall if you’re gonna stand at all/ And if you’re gonna fall, well you might as well fall." So I did. Well, first I started the song over again, and waited for him to sing it again, then I took off sprinting. By the time I reached the concrete wall of the library on other side of the parking lot, where I paused for a moment in the relative shelter offered by a vertical wall to grin up at the sky before I was off again.

And then in that too, I found an odd camaraderie through smiles and glances shared with others who, like me, lacked umbrellas and sense.

When I finally made it to the office of the registry, I was soaked and my make up was running but I couldn't stop grinning (check my ID picture). Rain always gives me an uncontrollable feeling of elation. My Chucks were sopping wet, but I've never been happier to have my iPod. Best. Decision. Ever.

Rock around the Clock

2009-03-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

It figures, of course, that the one time I go abroad and pack light is the one time when I actually would have used all of the other crap that I usually over-pack. Like that polka-dot dress that I brought to Ireland and never wore? Or the denim vest that I only ever wear to punk concerts and 80s nights? Yea, both of those were sorely missed last night.

I’ve found that my best friends tend to be the ones that get ridiculously excited about the same silly things I do, or at least those who can appreciate my excitement, even if they don’t share it. So you can imagine how I felt when we found out that one of our Tico friend’s cousin’s Rockabilly band was playing on Friday night and my friend Dominique goes “I want big teased hair, all up like this.” And I said, (trying desperately to keep the hopeful tone out of my voice) “wait, are we dressing up?” And she looked at me as if I were crazy and said “Of course. Oh! And if you need something to wear, I have that hot pink, high-waisted skirt that I wore the other night and a bunch of other stuff to choose from.”

Flash forward to Friday night. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed and staring forlornly at my closet on the edge of despair. WHERE ARE ALL OF MY CLOTHES??? There’s a grand total of 7 hangers in my closet. The clothes that hang from them are looking limp and sad and had been mentally discarded long ago. All of my jeans are too baggy or “relaxed” to be considered adequate. I pull out my stack of shirts. T-shirt, t-shirt, hippie shirt, t-shirt, too contemporary, too girly, too bright, hippie shirt, too fancy, too flowy, hippie shirt, print, too bright… Eventually I was left with one black wife-beater with “Jack Daniels” stamped across the front which is actually rather perfect and a denim skirt that was too big to even pretend to be a pencil skirt. Pitiful. At least borrowing shoes would be no problem, which is the only thing that kept me from pining for my black heels which I also left at home. (Oh they would have been perfect – peep-toe sling backs) I throw all of my make up into a bag, gel, hairbrush, bobby pins, bandanas and trot out to the waiting taxi, thoroughly displeased with my makeshift outfit and my general lack of preparedness for situations like this. Again, pitiful.

You see, if there’s one thing I do, its costume. My Halloween costumes are always extravagant, varied, and plentiful. I have specific clothes for specific occasions – the red and white striped sweater for the Christmas season, white pants and navy shirts for summers on the Cape, rust colored scarves and sweaters for late autumn academia. Even day – to –day I dress myself according to a mood and a costume. Some days I’m feeling more artsy to I wear off-the shoulder shirts and put my hair up in a clip. Other days I’m feeling tomboyish, so it’s white t-shirts, relaxed jeans and my converse, sometimes pigtails if I’m feeling youthful too. On days in which I’ve got the wanderlust coursing through my veins again and I wear all my cloth and leather bracelets, interesting earrings and hippie shirts. I costume. It’s what I do.

So the idea of not having the ability to put together a satisfactory costume drove me to distraction. I set myself firmly to making it up to myself by making-up my friends perfectly – cat-eyes and red lipstick., victory curls and twists done up in bandanas, flowers and feathers and plastic jewels.
Sitting in the taxi, no one wanted to admit it, but we were all just a little nervous that maybe we went a little too far…
Suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of the California District, in leopard print and high-waisted skirts, just a smidge too vintage to go unnoticed in the sea of punk muttering distractedly that for all they know, we could dress like this every day. Maybe we were just THAT type of person, you know? The Amy Winehouse meets Katy Perry look. Maybe we always look like this, for all they know…

You see, today’s Rockabilly is a revival of 1950’s rock and roll (or of the original rockabilly style) in a modern punk context. It’s the roots movement of punk rock, if you will. The genres, all though distinct, definitely mingle. It’s when punk kids wear bowling shirts and wifebeaters, pompadours instead of Mohawks, and completely un-distressed leather jackets. In the back of my mind I questioned the commitment to rockabilly that we may find in Costa Rica, so I tried my best to make sure the punk part of it was emphasized. Black tank, denim. Black, red and white. Plaid. Converse with floral. Exaggerated cat-eyes. It’s usually fairly easy to blend Rockabilly with Punk and go unnoticed. But the absolute vintage glory of our hair-dos kept us from any sort of blending in. (That and the fact that we were 5 gringas who were not only obvious, but obviously uncertain about where we were).

But stepping inside that bar, when we finally found it, was like stepping back in time, and ceremoniously stepping up on a dais. The place was packed and the crowd was mostly punk, but it was obvious that here, Rockabilly reigned supreme. Greaseres leaned against the walls. The tables were filled with punk kids with a hints of 40’s and 50’s – up-dos, cat-eye glasses, and even some bowling shirts and argyle. We still stuck out, but this time in a rather awe-some way.

And then commenced the night of skanking and twisting. The bands were crazy. The music was fast and boppin’ and at one point the bass player jumped up onto his bass and played crouched over like some sort of cat, ready to spring. By the end of the night, when the surf-rock band had set up their little antenna contraption that makes those alien-like sounds that are so, SO essential to that classic surf-rock sound, the floor was packed and bouncing. I spent most of my time fighting off cramps from twisting too much – fully committed to my persona for the night, I wanted it to look like I always spent the night doing the twist.

At one point Dominique and I pulled away to the bar to grab a drink and catch our breaths, and chatted with our friend, Alvaro, and his cousin, the drummer for the first band. He wore a broad-shouldered black suit with a yellow tie, a fedora and wingtips and had three tattoos of Frank Sinatra on one arm, one of Johnny Cash on the other and the Beatles across his chest (supposedly). Alvaro leaned over the music and shouted “He says you ladies look like pin-up girls!”

In writing it sounds sleazy, and as Dominique later pointed out, anything else would have been. But being compared to a pin-up girl by the drummer of the rockabilly band not only realized my intention and hard work, but absolutely made the night complete. It was the highest compliment we could have possibly been paid.

At 1am we retired to the nearest Taco Bell (yes, Taco Bell) and discussed plans for more Rockabilly adventures, both here and back in the States. And I reveled to once again be getting weird looks for being outlandish, rather than for being gringa.

Caribbean Part 2

2009-03-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

We left for Cahuita at a decent hour the next day. I left my wallet at the bus stop, loosing money for the second time that trip. My losses totaled to 5,935 colones (about 11 dollars), an expired drivers license, a health insurance card, a few odd receipts, the house key to my home in the US, and the bottle opener that I keep attached to my key ring. It was the first time the whole weekend that I’d been glad that I’d forgotten my credit card.
Cahuita was much more what we’d been expecting from the Caribbean. 10 times sleepier. We ate our rice and beans, the napped on the beach during the occasional stretches of sun, and retired earlier. We spent a good portion of the night sitting on the porch of our room surrounded by the warm air and even warmer smell of fresh baked bread, sipping tea from mismatched mugs or dented tin cups, listening to the rain and counting the rare star that made its way through the clouds.
The next day, our final as we decided, we breakfasted on bananas and weaseled our way into the Afro-Caribbean Historical museum, which was ostensibly closed. Old things were arranged in a sensible chaos along wood walls which were painted a bright turquoise and the proprietor, Sankey gave us a brief history/explanation, laced with political digressions, while his cohort chatted with two of the girls with true Caribbean hospitality.
Eventually we thanked him, promising to return and hold him to his promise of live music and ventured back out into the rain to hike through the national park along the seashore. The walk started out well enough, sandy trail, glimpses of the sea and a canopy of lush, vibrant green. The flora was plentiful, but the fauna was scarce, as was expected. We’ve been in Costa Rica for six weeks now, but the closest we’ve ever come to the exciting wildlife are blobs of sloth or monkey in distant trees which we totally would have missed but for our keen-eyed guides.
But here the path is blocked by a river. Shoes off, we ford across, the very picture of intrepid explorers. I waded through with my shoes slung around my neck and my arms held high to protect my camera from non-existent rapids, which was probably a little more dramatic than the crossing deserved, but man, if you’ve gotta ford a river, you might as well ford the hell out of it.
We continued our trek, the forest becoming darker and more tangled with every step. I started humming. Whoop de do. I wanna be like yooOOoo. I wanna WALK like you TALK like you… shoopbedoop! The path becomes muddier. Most of us are still barefoot from the crossing. With each step I take through the thick brown water, I have to force myself to not think about whatever is in the mud that I can’t see. Each time I raise my foot, I expect to see it covered in leeches and each time I put it down, I do it gingerly, expecting to impale myself on some jungle spike. The path has turned away from the water, and all around us is nothing but thick, vine-y jungle. Eventually it becomes so swamped that they have built bridges. By now, half of our party has turned back, leaving just four. I’m the slowest, picking my way not only around the mud as best I can, but also along the bridges, whose boards have bent up at the edges, exposing their corners to unsuspecting feet. After three or four of these bridges, we stop. In the quiet the only thing we can hear is the faint buzzing of any number of insect. Mostly mosquitoes, as we find out seconds later. Apparently even the worst of the REI’s DEET laced bug juice can’t stave off these suckers. We turn back, fleeing to the sanctuary of the beach. And just before we reach the fording river, we see a group of tourists perched on the cement rim of a small, murky pool. Vaguely I recall passing it before and one of us wrote it off as a “pre-Columbian” ruin(ish). Apparently, we were wrong. As they drew their feet out of its bottomless depths, the hikers explained to us that it was a hot spring. And was it ever! I was more than happy to apologize to my feet by immersing them in the warm water that felt and smelled of mineral.
Eventually we reluctantly pulled our feet out and continued on.
“Of course I’d invite Jesus to my dinner party. Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein…”
“It’s so hard. I feel like I’d like alone time with each of the people I want to invite.”
“That’s the thing about the dinner party; you have to think of all aspects of it. How your guests will get along, the direction of the conversation, the food…. You’re a host, it’s a party. These are all considerations.”
“So do you have your five yet, Maggie?”
“Yep. Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Zelda, Oscar Wilde and one of them can bring a friend. I think it would be fantastic night, because they were all really intelligent and they all really liked booze-fueled discussions of literature, music, history, philosophy and the like. Plus, they were all part of the celebrity intelligentsia set, and would probably know other famous people eating at the tables around us and would introduce me. And then we’d all end the night dancing with the waiters and inviting the taxi-cab driver to the after-party. I’m pretty excited about it.”
The close of the day found us slumped against our backpacks and the walls of the bus station, waiting for the 4:30 to take us back to San Jose. We didn’t say much, mostly reviewed pictures or just sat and stared at the puddles that perfectly mirrored our surroundings. Sinking into the bus seats for the 5 hour drive back, I felt like I’d been standing for days. And the gentle rocking of the bus through the dark and the rain seemed a perfect ending to a long and eventful trip.
Oh but it wasn’t over. I never expected the taxi ride back to be anything but more of the same, but I should have known that there would be no sleepy drive ahead of me when the taxi driver suggested 6,000 colones was a reasonable price and Emily pulled me off in a huff. We only had 5.700 on us, and that seemed an outrageous amount for a taxi ride which had never cost us more than 4,000 colones. So when we finally chose a taxi, we were surprised when the meter started increasing rapidly. All our calm was erased as we anxiously watched it pass 2,500 and then 3,000.
“What if we don’t have enough?” I whispered.
“I don’t know man…”
4,000… we’re close to home, but at the rate the fare was going, we may not make it.
“Aquí?” The driver glances into the rearview mirror.
“Sí, sigue 500 metros… y luego… no! Shoot, I’ll get off at the corner. Here! Aquí! Stop!”
“I tumble out of the cab, half a block from my house and frantically trying to relate to the driver that he didn’t have to get out to get my backpack from the trunk. I could get it myself if it would save precious minutes that the meter was running. Hell, I’d do it running behind the taxi if he’d let me…
Finally I watched the taxi continue the 6 blocks up to Emily’s with unease. I’d left the meter at something like 4,900 colones. I kept my fingers crossed.
I found out the next day that Emily, too, had stopped the man at the entrance to her neighborhood. As soon as the meter reached 5,600 she’d yelled at him to stop, in English, the frenzy of the situation having rendered her Spanish-less, and by the time she’d managed to remember how to stop him in Spanish, it’d reached 5,700.
An appropriately exciting ending to an unexpectedly exciting vacation.

Caribbean Part 1

2009-03-09T22:23:00.000-07:00

The notoriously colorful Caribbean was so beautiful that I had to shoot it in black and white. The weather report had been ominous, but we’d ignored that, deciding with the impetuousness of youth to not waste the glorious free week in front of us.
But in spite of grey weather, we trouped intrepidly through. It helped that the Caribbean is rife with adventure, at every turn.
I mean, the moment, the very moment we stepped into the hostel we were recruited for party preparations, even before we’d checked in. Coincidentally, we’d walked in on the day of the biggest party of the year in sleepy little Puerto Viejo. The rager was in honor of the owner of the backpacker’s paradise, Rockin’ J’s, a beachside tangle of mosaics, staircases, tent platforms, hammocks, and gazebos. It was heaven for every backpacker who had once been a kid who dreamed of a Peter Pan-inspired tree house. And it was filled with quintessential backpackers. You know the type, with their clothes collected from around the world, sun-bleached hair, fresh and healthy from so much sun and the great outdoors and a penchant for walking around barefoot. I like to pretend I fit right in, especially since I was accompanied by my very own backpack, but really I’d brought a few too many shirts to truly support the cause.
The drizzly day washed into night over a few games of pool, a game at which I do not suck anymore. The band came out and lit up the darkened hostel with all manner of music and songs that made a San Francisco girl proud (Though, I do believe at one point I shrieked “they’re playing The Dead! I LOVE this song” and I’m pretty sure that the shrill pitch of that shriek thoroughly ruined my carefully crafted flirtation with the boy in the white shirt, a flirtation that consisted wholly of the fact that I told a friend that I thought he was cute, occasional glances in his direction, and nothing else. It’s an art form, and mine resembles a three-year-old’s finger painting.) The dancing was as wild and to cool down, all one needed to do was step out from under the roof and be wrapped in the midnight mist. And at the end of the night, everyone’s respective hammock or tent was close at hand and welcomed its patron’s collapse with open arms.
The next day dawned as groggy as we all were. I took a moody walk down the beach to feed my tortured artistic soul with desolate beach scenes of the supposedly vibrant Caribbean coastline. I like to think that I added something, the lone figure, dressed in blue, picking her way along the reef to the cliffs where the fury of the sea beat against its captor, the shore.
The only downside to our amazing hostel was its pitiful excuse for a kitchen, so lunch was a can of garbanzo beans acquired on our soggy journey down town. We rented bikes, and, just around the time that half of the group decided to go back, the rest of us ventured out in the significantly heavier rain to see if we could reach Manzanillo, a neighboring beach which was rumored to be beautiful. Our epic journey began with the four of us pushing our bikes through ankle-deep mud for two blocks. As we were doing so a van inched by which ended up holding two of our new friends from the night before, Eduardo who has a tattoo of a toadstool and Oscar who is the driver for the tour company the two of them started. They were being thwarted in their attempts at returning to San Jose, and so we stopped with them to go swimming at this little beach just off the road, I mean, after all, we were already soaked. We waded in just to our waists but the currents, angered by the stormy weather, pulled and pushed at our legs. Eventually we continued on, undeterred by the afternoon hour and the daunting distance to Manzanillo. Apparently, I was the only one struggling with the most uncomfortable seat in the world, or at least the only one vocal about it…
Suddenly the forests stretching up around us were filled with deep, threatening grunts. Terrified that we were about to be attacked and by giant Gorillas, I caught up with my friends. In an attempt to pacify my fears, one of the girls tells me “they’re just howler monkeys.” Right. That makes me feel better. Now we’re going to be attacked by howler monkeys that are going to drop down 50 feet from their trees into a ninja circle around us, 200 strong, armed with rocks and feces scowling at us. Scowling howling monkeys. How did this not scare everyone else?
We never made it to Manzanillo. Not because of the monkeys though. By the time we reached the half way point, we were too nervous about night fall to continue. So we turned back and repeated the whole journey, minus the swimming, but with the addition of Disney song sing-a-longs.
The night’s goings on were highly unremarkable, save a jubilant bike ride to the club “downtown” and, as follows, the 2am bike ride back which consisted of the 10 of us weaving through the streets solely to avoid mud-filled pot holes.

Not written at 3am

2009-03-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

It’s 3:30am and my hands are gripping the steering wheel of a white Bronco-type jeep and I’m dodging the potholes along the streets of San Pablo, Costa Rica. How did I get here? That’s exactly what I’ve been asking myself.
We’re briefly lost, but it’s nothing that flipping a quick “u”ie, which sounds far easier than it is, can’t fix. The Spanish version of ABBA’s “Chiquitita” blares harshly from the radio and Emily and I are harmonizing.

“Hey Pedro, so… do la policia usually pull people over a lot at this time of night?”

“No, es casi 4 en la manana, they stop working at around 2am, I think?”

I’ve never felt anything like the simultaneous sensation of relief and disconcertion. Cool, driving in San Jose at night, a place where we regard stop-lights as stop-signs so we don’t idle dangerously long in the middle of a deserted street, when the cops stopped working two hours ago.
I glance over at Pedro, who is the friend of the host-brother of one of my friends and whom I’ve met once before, whose name might actually be Filip, and who is looking much more awake than he was a half hour ago when he gave me his keys as we were all walking out of the McDonalds. It might be because the food and soda was re-energizing, or it might be because some crazy gringa who he’s only met once is now driving his piece of crap car, of which he is apparently very protective. I’m still not sure if he let me drive his car because he was dangerously tired or because in earlier polite conversation I’d mentioned how much I love and miss driving my car.
3:48 am and I know I plan to get up at 7:30am. 3 hours of sleep? Eh. Done it before. How do I get myself into the situations??? Three weeks ago we went out dancing at Castro’s the night before we had to meet our study abroad group at 6am. That night will live on in infamy partly because we haven’t had the nerve to return to Castro’s since then and partly because I was awoken by the sound of my 5:30am taxi honking its horn and only then did I realize I hadn’t packed. Running out in my pjs to tell Emily and the taxi to give me five minutes, literally throwing clothes and such into my bag, forgetting my camera and brushing my teeth outside the bus. And the best part is I wasn’t even the worst of it. I mean, at least I made it to the bus…
But in all honesty, I know how I got myself into this particular situation. It ended up being a mixture of my being too cheap to buy drinks at the dance club, my inability to actually dance salsa which meant that I did very little athletic dancing and was as relatively fresh as I could have been by the end of the night, and my pig-headed competitive side. The night at La Rumba had been fantastic. It’s a larger club than Castros, and it’s in Escazu, the Beverly Hills of San Jose, or so I’m told. The trek up had been long enough to build excitement, and apparently the trip back wasn’t lacking in it either. It’s always nice when your Designated Driver looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and I literally thanked the lucky starts stretching over head as we caravanned to McDonalds after a typical night of dancing and drama-filled gossip that I played Sober Sally. On our way out of the classic post-midnight meal, after Pablo had handed me the keys, I’d gotten into an argument with one of the other Ticos about my driving ability, and of course, that was that.
In the movie version of my life, I’m sure this scene will unfold to either Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” or to Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West,” but the latter is only included because it came on the radio at one point. In reality, all I’m thinking about is how sad I am that I can’t shower off this layer of sweat and caked make-up because I don’t want my host-family to wake-up.
I’d rather not set my alarm clock either, but that same pig-headedness won’t let me let a something as inconsequential as lack of sleep cause me to miss any possible experience in this amazing country

Photos backlog!

2009-03-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

Jaco
Cartago y Heredia
Monteverde y Arenal
Puerto Viejo y Cahuita
Gallo Pinto Festival

Guess who just got back today? Them wild-eyed boys that'd been away...

2009-02-25T06:41:00.000-08:00

I fear I’ve become a bit of a hypochondriac since I’ve been here. I mean, if it’s not one thing, it’s another, am I right?

The first weekend we went to Playa Jacó and I returned with the worst sunburn I’ve ever gotten. Last weekend we journeyed to Santa Maria and San Gerardo de la Dota to fully immerse ourselves in Costa Rican coffee and nature. Although we did get to see a wealth of the famed little bird-men in green waistcoats that they call quetzales, the majority of the group also saw a plethora of bathrooms. That which does not kill you makes you stronger, or so they tell me. At very least, we all came back refreshed and cleaned out.

And then we went to Tamarindo, (here, I’ll throw in a little local slang to hint at how impressively cultured and accultured I’ve become) or Tamagringo as they call it here. Though, I will forever call it Tamarind-ow (man I’m funny). I initially brushed off the smirks of my teachers and host families at the mention of the name. “Oh. Tamarindo. It’s beautiful but… touristy there.” When we rolled into a town plastered with signs in English and more hotels and hostels than could have accommodated the entire tourist industry of Costa Rica, I realized how right they were. And the fact that we rolled 13 deep didn’t allow us to blend even with the other tourists.

But it was still fun. The hostel was one of those classic hostels with that funky “travel-kid” vibe. There common room was literally a giant tent with two walls, one permanent and one fabric. Hammocks and hammock chairs hung off almost every possible pole, and there were even some poles erected for the sole purpose of hanging hammocks. It was all about the bold colors and bohemian ambience. The thirteen of us split up into each of the 8 available rooms, parceled out to groups of Norwegians, Swedes (two separate groups), Israelis, Argentineans, a couple U.S. natives and a Spaniard. It became abundantly clear that if I ever want to stay in a hostel in Costa Rica ever again, I’ll have to get in shape, fast. Travelers are beautiful people in many ways.

We spent our days on the beach, soaking up the sun, failing to do homework, cooling off in the water and watching the surfers in the waves, or as they strutted up and down the beach. Actually, my friends spent the day soaking up the sun, failing to do homework, and cooling off in the water. I spent the day watching the surfers in the waves and strutting up and down the beach through the lens of my camera, watched with a mixture of artistic ecstasy, wild envy and uncontrollable admiration. In fact, in taking pictures, I did everything I could, save maybe a flying tackle, to interact and make friends. In case there was any doubt in your mind, let me inform you that I failed.

We spent our nights pulling teeth, I mean we spend our nights gathering the entire group of 13 together to hit one of the 3 bars/clubs that we could find. If someone could explain to me how a town has close to 20 hostels and only 3 bars, I’d be much obliged. We also spent our nights slapping away mosquitoes.

That’s right. We come to the third plague: mosquitoes. When a few of our group started to complain the first night, my lack of bites became conspicuous and I determinedly kept my mouth shut. If I didn’t say out loud that I had no bug bites, they wouldn’t hear and attempt to over-correct for their error. I failed again, offhandedly mentioning it the next day. And oh the next night…

Heavily perfumed in mosquito repellant, we trouped out again the next night. It wasn’t so bad inside the club. Even when they started to play house music (or techno?) that would last until the end of the night and I started dividing my time between the smoky, muggy balcony and the over-air-conditioned inundation of electronica and flashing lights, never quite able to decide which was the lesser of the evils, I had few problems with mosquitoes.

Eventually the rest of the group gave into the musical frustration that I’d been experiencing all night and we stalked out. After a quick stop at Subway we were waylaid in my quest to return to my bed by our Israeli roommates. As pleasantries and stories were exchanged, I sat on the edge of a planter box and laid back to look up at the stars. I sat up suddenly and turned to search for the cause of the sudden pricking on the back of my hands. Pointy grass? I felt panic rising. They were itching. My hands were itching. Oh my God. Haven’t I already had enough itching this trip? Dermatitis, sunburn, mosquito bites. What now? Oh my God I must be allergic to something. Oh my God they’re forming bumps. There are bumps on my hands that itch. They’re hives! They must be! They’re going to spread all the way up my arms! Ohmygodohmygodoh… I glanced back at the planter box and caught sight of an ant making his way through the grass. Ants. As calmly as I could I went over to one of our group. “Hey, Dominique, do I have any ants on my back?” I asked while frantically combing my fingers through my hair. “No.” Good. “Cuz my hands itch like crazy and I think they bit me.” One of the other girls looked over. “You should probably go wash them. Did you already have those mosquito bites?”
“Those aren’t mosquito bites!” I wailed.

Long story short, 10 minutes later, it was like the whole thing didn’t happen, except for this new found terror of tiny creatures. I’m not afraid of bugs that can’t bite me. Cockroaches are gross, but they aren’t going to kill me. But unknown tiny crawling creatures now scare the shit out of me. I mean I was in the shower this morning and what turned out to be my toothpaste dropped from the shower shelf and I literally jumped about two inches to the right. I mean I think both my feel left the ground.

And wouldn’t you know it, just as I was writing this, a giant ant crawled along the edge of the bed. And although I hate killing bugs, as of late I’ve become a regular hardened murderer. I killed one yesterday, a tiny one earlier today and mercilessly beat at this one. He escaped with his life, and I won’t be able to get to sleep tonight. How can I with that behemoth on the loose?

I guess this Pura Vida life has gotten to me. I can’t stress about being on time or school (not that I really did before), so to the fill the void I’ve started stressing about bugs. Productive.

February can suck it.

2009-02-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

So I've been meaning to post, but life has been so crazy here; you know, here, in Pura Vida Costa Rica, life has been hectic.
And it's all been fantastic.

So I've never really thought of myself as the "beachy" type, you know? My beaches aren't Southern California beaches, and the culture that gathers at the beach is so different. I love going to Ocean Beach in San Fracisco in my jeans and sweatshirt to walk along the water or picnic or play frisbee and take pictures, or even just to sit and people watch. Rarely do I go in a bathing suit. I mean, it happens occasionally in the summer time, but in college, when I started hanging out with kids from San Diego and LA, I realized just how different our beaches are. They are "beachy." When they go to the beach, it's always and often and they have their routine down. For me, it's just exciting to go. So not growing up the sterotypical California beach girl, I guess I never thought I would be the type for tropical adventures either. I never yearned for Hawaii, never thought of the Carribbean.

...And yet, somehow I ended up spending a semester in Costa Rica...

And so far, it's been the best decision I've made. In two short weeks, (that somehow feel so much longer) the name Costa Rica has even taken on a different meaning for me. I feel that in the US it's entirely synonomous with vacation. I don't know if I ever really took it seriously until I got here.
It's an interesting experience to live in a country that is viewed as completley temporary due to it's vacation destination status. And its interesting to watch Costa Rica struggle to promote it's eco-friendly aspects to seperate itself from the rest of the summer hot spots. I'm failing to articulate it right now, but I'm sure as the months roll on, I'll be able to better describe how much MORE Costa Rica is, and how much the name has come to mean to me.
I just already feel so at home.

Last weekend we went to the beach for the first time since our arrival. We chose Playa Jacó as our first destination - the nationally renowned "ugly beach." Thank god we started there, because it was so beautiful, that I'm almost scared to see what the more amazing beaches are like. But I think it's good that we started low, that allows us to build with the least amount of potential disappointment.
It was every cliche, but also so much more.
We walked up to the hotel which was essentially a row of rooms attatched to an outdoor bar where, even at 10 in the morning, the old farts were already out drinking and leering, their occasional tropical shirts never enough to hide the sunburnt leather they passed off as skin, and their fake Spanish worsened only by their ugly American accents.
But drop the bags and hit the white sand beach. Palm trees swaying and the sky was bluer than ever. The water stretched out crystal clear and the waves crashed in brilliant explosions of white. And after a day and a half soaking up the sun and enjoying the warm water, we became brilliant explosions of red.

It was hot during the day and warm at night. The kind of weather where you only want to wear white cotton and flipflops. The kind of weather where a popsicle or ice water is the equivalent to a gift from God. The kind of weather where you think to yourself, "And to think, it's FEBRUARY." And then you think "Haha! February can suck it!"

Yea. And it gets better. At nightfall we wandered downtown and into some sort of fair or festival. A maze of booths were set up in the square where artisans displayed their handiwork, urging you earnestly to purcase their many wares. In the background a guy plucked and tuned a guitar on a half-lit stage. The bounce-house on the perimeter did little to keep the kids from racing around underfoot, and everywhere it was warm.

After a quick drink in the park that too some of us back to highschool days, we ended up at the "grand opening" of a local club. And lets just say, we are TOTALLY responsible for all future sucess. We literally got the party started and danced the night away. We found out later that it was not, in fact, the grand opening and had actually been popular for a long time. This somewhat diminishes our claim to their success.

Long story short: Great weekend. Beautiful Beach. I finally understand why cliches are cliches. Also, I have finally started to peel. Just in time for this weekend!!! (Don't worry, we're going coffee tasting? I'm hoping there won't be much sunburning involved...)

As I'm feeling chatty

2009-02-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

My Spanish has progressed from that of a two-year old: "something? I want... something? It's yellow. With something?" to that of a curious 6-year old: "It's... what is it again? What is that? Oh. Okay. Yes. Oh! It's SO PRETTY! Very very pretty!" But I can understand most of what is said to me now, which is, of course, a very big step forward.

But I still can't express myself to the full extent of my mental faculties, which is frustrating. Especially as the amount of concentration I spend on my Spanish has made my english deteriorate rapidly. I find myself unable to think of English words, or muddling my grammar. It's ridiculous.

This becomes increasingly difficult in especially important situations, such as hospitals. I had to go to the hospital yesterday because I was itching all over. Terrified that I may, once again, be Typhoid Mary, I rushed myself to the hospital. On the verge of tears, I looked helplessly around until the lady at the front desk brought me to the emergency room (which makes the whole thing sound way more desperate and intense than it was). The Costa Rican health system is amazing. Socialist medicine, they say, means waiting for hours. I beg to differ. I had brought a book with me, anticipating a long wait, but I never so much as found my page before I was called in to be assessed and diagnosed. And even though my doctor spoke Spanish, I still found myself struggling to communicate. There were literally points when I couldn't remember if I was speaking in English or in Spanish. But all's well that ends well and I walked out of there, the proud new owner of contact dermatitis medication. (Note to self: in the future, be careful what you wish for. On the way to the hospital I just kept thinking "As long as it's not scabies, as long as it's not scabies. I'll take ANYTHING but scabies. I hope it's something else...)

On the way back from my excursion, I developed my newest conspiracy theory involving Spanish-speaking sports radio stations. I fully believe that they are nothing but fake announcements and that taxi drivers tune to them to intimidate non-Spanish speaking customers. Pretty sure the station I listened to today was just a series of random, unconnected statements, related calmly but loudly and with too much emphasis on the vowels. "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, la universidaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad de Costa Ricaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" "Da Sabanilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllla!!!!!!" "Todas las personAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASssssssssssssss!" "HOLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

It's damn cold here. The kind of cold where, back home, I would have turned the thermostat up and curled up in front of a heating vent. There is no heat here, and my whole host family keeps mentioning how cold it is, and how strange it is. That's right, that's what I thought. When I came here I expected gorgeous, rain-free days that allowed me to wear shorts or skirts everyday. This is supposed to be the tropics people! Imagine, cold in February! It should hace calor!

But today's constant light drizzle gave unto us the most epic rainbow I've ever seen in my life. It was a full and vibrant arc where the colors repeated. And you could see a larger, though very faint second rainbow starting off to its left. It was so beautiful that it made us all think of Lucky Charms.

The following is only relevant if you think of it in terms of cultural dissemination and its consequences

2009-02-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

So for some reason completely unknown to me, I got the masochistic urge to listen to some old Good Charlotte songs today. And I sit here, literally baffled, both aforementioned urge and by the music itself.
I've never been a Good Charlotte fan, so I may be a bit biased. By the time they became popular, pop-punk rock was SO passé for me. Not only was I morally opposed to the hypocrisy of a chart-topping bad ripping on the rich and famous, but I generally couldn't understand emo bands due to my happy childhood.

But although I watched their youtube videos today with a light scowl plastered on my face, it was scowl of confusion and perplexity, much like the one I often imagine anthropologists to wear when analyzing more troubling aspects of human societies.

I mean, granted, I'm four to six years removed from their general fan base, but I never remember ever seeing such angst in my peer group, so many skater-kids tattooed and garbed in black and bandannas, such frivolous use of eyeliner and blatant disregard for the "recommended use" instructions on the back of the hair gel bottle.

Actually, I'd like to retract that last statement. I know there are TONS of kids in high schools and middle schools across the nation that express their natural teenage rebellion by challenging the social norms of the previous generation in such a manner. What I never remember seeing among my peer group was a group of 30 year-olds who dressed and acted like they were still angsty teenagers.

I mean, come on! What motivates a 25-year old man to wake up in the morning and write a song about how much he hates being in high school and how much he loves pissing off adults. Actually, I'm sure if I were still in high school at 25, I'd also hate it and the adults who thrive where I have not.

I suppose I just can't understand why they want to remember and re-live that particular blend of bitter rebellion and self-deprecating humor that boarders on self-loathing that is essential to teenage misfits, especially when it was half a lifetime in their past.

But the only thing that really bothers me is how the ---- I know all of the lyrics.

I don't think Kansas is on the radar anymore Toto...

2009-01-31T17:38:00.001-08:00

So I knew that living in Costa Rica was going to be "different" but I didn't realize just how different it was going to be until I saw a cockroach in my bathroom. (Which, upon reflection, I think those guys get a bad rap. I mean they don't really DO anything except maybe be gross - they don't bite, they won't kill you - they're just big. I think it's all societal conditioning that makes us hate cockroaches so much. But in reality, we're just jealous that they would survive a nuclear holocaust and we, sadly, would not.

***

If you've ever read David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day," you've read a pretty accurate description of what it's like learning a language in a foreign country. Basically, he's describing the group of us on this study abroad program. I'm sure I muddle up the language quite nicely, mixing present-tense verbs into past-tense narrations when I can't remember how to conjugate in the imperfect, or assigning the wrong gender to certain words. (Like things have genders. HA!)

But my favorite part is how brilliantly I manage to screw up the simple act of listening. I mean, it's not really that hard. In fact, it is so natural that to NOT listen to someone is difficult.
Unless you are me. I can sit and listen to someone speaking to me, and, while still comprehending that they are speaking Spanish at me, I can fully stop listening to anything but the general sound of that person speaking Spanish.
When asked a question, I generally tend to answer a completely different one.
When not asked a question, I'll answer one anyway.
When asked to do something, I nod my head yes, just the same as I do for everything else, and continue to not do whatever I was asked to do.
I have had entire conversations that were wrong. Yes, a wrong conversation. How can a conversation be "wrong," you ask? Well, when you use the wrong word, the whole thing is out of context and goes completely to pot. My host sister and I discussed driving last night, and the whole time I was assuming that we were talking about concerts.

Then there's fun in being outside a conversation. Listening in to try and glean more Spanish experience will only take you so far, especially when you have those magpie tendencies: "Ooh! I just heard the word 'matrimonio!' I know that that means! They are talking about marriage! I've found the track again!" But by the time my brain has comprehended that I comprehend, the conversation has moved on to motor oil and I have to start the whole process over again.

The best is when you are asked a ridiculously easy question by someone with a strong accent, and have to ask them to repeat it five or six times before someone else answers for you.
"Qweuishtmne?"
"What?"
"Qeisdnbuege?"
"Again?"
"Quesognei?"
"She's 20 years old."
Ah. They were asking how old I am. Great.

The conversations that I end up having with my host sister or my host mother that actually last longer than six sentences, are always inane. I spent probably 15 minutes last night explaining 'ravioli' to a pair of girls who probably knew what I was talking about considering they knew what "cannoli" and "lasagna" are, but were most likely humoring me.

And yet... it doesn't feel too different from home...

They say that within two weeks my Spanish will have gotten ridiculously better. I've been here two days, but it feels like two weeks already. Does that count?

Ah, inspiration, there you are.

2009-01-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

So I'm traveling again. Which means I'm blogging with purpose again (as opposed to slapping some random rant up here in an attempt to please you, my loyal readers.)

Well, let's just hope it's coherent.

My flight last night was at 11:45 pm. I slept(ish) for most of it, though I was in the middle seat so it was mostly in a hunched over sort of position. Very uncomfortable. I had to haul it in the Miami airport on what the agent had called "a five minute walk" it was not. It was much more like a 30 minute hike. I mean, what with the weights I was carrying and the awkward way they forced me to hustle, I think I got more of a work out than I do when I work out with my mom. And that's saying something.

I've never flown over the Gulf of Mexico before, and let me tell you, it was breathtaking. There is this rainbow sheen reflecting off the crystalline blue water underneath a few puffy white clouds.

At least it was breathtaking, until I fell asleep again. I just can't seem to stay awake in transit unless I'm the one driving.

So after a gorgeous descent into the lush green of the rainforested country, and a lively talk with my cab driver, I'm sitting in the lobby of the Marriott, hungry, tired and oddly detached.

I mean, it's unreal how beautiful it is here. The hotel is painted that adobe reddish brown and there is a pool tiled in deep blue outside wrought iron gates and surrounded by lush green palms and bright pink flowers. The light in here, thrown form wrought iron chandeliers is yellow and adds to the warmth already provided by the hearty wood beaming and wood floors.

I have a feeling that San Jose is going to present itself as a peculiar set of contrasts. Perhaps I'll think this over more in the Hooters across the street. I may just have a hankering for some hot wings.

But this feeling of detachment is odd. I can speak Spanish, pretty well, actually, but I still feel like I'm intruding. It was fine talking one-on-one with the taxi driver, but sitting here in the lobby, surrounded by a very large Spanish/English language speaking family, I feel isolated. I can understand them, but I don't know if they assume that I can or if they assume that I can't. So I've taken up my natural post as observer.

That's it. No more for me. I can't think. I want to take a nap.

Hasta la proxima vez.

Spitzbuben. Always.

2009-01-26T21:41:00.000-08:00

The best thing about spontaneous trips is that, due to their immediate nature, you don't have to deal with the three days before you leave. The three long, agonizing days prior to departure are the worst part about traveling.

They are the days when you should be packing. You should be preparing, but you still have time left, so you can easily put it off. You have so much to take care of, so many ends to tie up, so much to do and to get... but you still have three days to do it in. It's too far away to excite the butterflies in your stomach, but too close to ignore. You can't start any big new projects because you won't be able to finish them, but you've probably finished any projects you were working on; after all, you know that you're leaving soon.

So what do you do?

Well, knowing you, you probably watch tv. You probably pull out your bags with every good intention of packing, and you probably stare at them for prolonged periods of time in a battle of the wills. Looser has to pack. (Luckily, you manage to beat the luggage for a good long time, and they remain sadly unpacked.) You probably think about going to see the places that you cherish and you know you'll miss when you're gone. You may go see them, you may not. You probably spend long periods of time staring out the window and call it "preparing yourself mentally."

Unless you don't. You don't because you're one of those people who actually does pack three days before leaving. But that doesn't save you from those 3 ultimate days. Because even if you're all packed, especially if you're already packed, you have that much more time to worry about what you forgot. That much more time to re-pack. To add clothes, to subtract clothes, to re-organize. To research the up-to-the-minute weather to make SURE you've got the correct clothing. Which really only ends up stressing you out for three days, instead of 6 hours.

Me? I'm making spitzbuben.

As always.

It's been a while...

2009-01-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

As trite a statement as it may be, life is full of ups and downs.
(I searched for a good famous person quote about that for about 5 minutes but then I got bored, so you will have to make do with the cliche.)

It amuses me that in retrospect, things either seem much better than they were, or the distance and big picture allows you to see that things were actually much worse than you let yourself believe.

I tend to be tenaciously optimistic, but lately things have been piling up and the blues have come around again. I like to think its mostly dealing with culture-shock, reverse culture-shock and my various medical conditions that have got me down.

So instead of going with my mom on our uphill hike today, I turned and jogged along the flat path. It was nice to let my defeat pound out beneath my feet and feel the glow of the orange afternoon sun as it slung low in the sky. This spring weather has given me the greatest gift of seeing and experiencing my favorite place during my favorite time of year. It's when the skies are so clear and blue that the grass seems crisper, glossier and greener and when the mixture of warmth and coolness in the air feels just like drinking ice water.

And as I powered up the hill towards the end, I was most excited to see my oak tree. You see, when we first moved to the house we're in now, I was in high school. Since I was in 6th grade, we'd been uprooted searching for and then building the nest that my parents had always dreamed of. Not to mention the three or four times we had moved before I entered 1st grade. So I guess I was feeling adrift. I desperately wanted a place, all my own to feel attached to, and wandered up into the hills to find it. And I certainly did.

I remember the first day I found that tree. It was one of those early summer days where everything is held out in sharp relief. I wandered purposefully off the path and was confronted with this massive oak tree. Not only did it provide a vast amount of much needed shade, and not only were its branches perfectly big enough to nap on without falling off, but it was perched perfectly towards the top of the hill to afford a magnificent view of the San Francisco Bay Area.

That tree was where I went to be alone. It was the place I truly felt connected with nature and my surroundings. It was where I lay, five feet above the ground and day dreamed about adventures, first loves and the future. I literally imagined coming back to that very spot as the years passed and the tree and I grew, and lying on that same giant branch and remembering fondly those daydream days in high school.

It was the first place my mind flashed to when people asked me to recall my favorite place in the world. I may have already told you about it.

So today I eagerly rounded the corner and played mountain goat up the side of the hill and as I reached the top I looked around at the unfamiliar landscape in confusion. Then the realization came crashing down on me that the tree had fallen. Five of it's magnificent seven branches had cracked from the trunk, leaving only two, low hanging branches surviving. Instead of a grand canopy, the highest point of the tree is now a severed limb that sticks up in the air, blackened and splintered.

I cried under the shelter of the branches that interlocked as they fell until I heard passersby approaching, whereupon I stared dumbly out across the bay for another while.

And unbidden, the first verse and chorus of a song I used to sing when I was in youth chorus, lo those many years ago, started in my head, and on my lips:

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming,
When the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning,
I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

Which seemed to me, suddenly, metaphoric. The Bay Area has this strange hold on me, it's like a comfort blanket. I know what I want to do in life and I know that to do it, I need to go. But it's so much easier and so comfortable to just stay right here where I'm safe and relaxed. It's especially hard to tear myself away now, when I'm navigating a slightly difficult time.

I need to let go and go because I have the rest of my life to be here

As as to that? I leave for Costa Rica in 13 days. I'll be there for 7 months - the longest I will have stayed in one place since I was a junior in high school.

(The song from above is called "Homeward Bound." It's written by Marta Keene. The entire song is as follows:
In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming,
When the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning,
I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you're missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return.
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end.
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing,
I’ll be homeward bound again.)

Better Late?

2008-12-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on the airplane coming back from Ireland. I thought I should get it up and book end the trip a little before posting anything else. Although, I had been awake for over 48 hours at that point and I have little to no memory of what I wrote, so I apologize in advance.

I saw a falling star last Saturday.

In transit:

The same way that I never let myself get excited about a trip until I see the place out of the airplane window, I found myself not really realizing that I was leaving Ireland until I watched it fade out of sight through the window of my first flight today. I probably won’t ever really realize how I feel about leaving; I’ll just mope around for a couple of days, never admitting to myself that I’m actually sad.

I sat in the Heathrow airport for a couple of hours today, fighting self-induced narcolepsy and trying to piece together my emotions. I really didn’t think I was going to cry last night. As much fun as I had in Ireland, I never really felt attached to it. I’ve left my heart in many places, San Francisco, Paris, San Sebastian, Honduras, but I don’t think Ireland it one of them. I did however, as I realized painfully last night, give little bits of it away to people I met there.

Cork isn’t a beautiful city. It’s not quaint and it doesn’t have quite the number of hints towards its humble beginning as Dublin does. Maybe Cork didn’t have humble beginnings; maybe it’s always been a port town which comes with all the cold, non-nostalgic trappings of business. But as I wandered aimlessly through the city in the past few days, I saw it as more a part of Ireland than I have at anytime during the past three months. On Sunday night I went for a walk down by the water. I followed the path to the left out of the city center and when I reached the end I started down the highway that stretches out of Cork to who-knows-where. And then I kept walking down the road, almost oblivious to the cars rushing by with purpose and direction. But suddenly Cork was connected with Ireland, connected with the countryside where culture (not “Culture”) thrives pure without as much of the pollution of international communication.

And then it grew dark and I turned around and walked back as the ice formed on the ground beneath my feet.

The next day I wandered on the other side of the river, up in the Shandon area, looking for the hostel that Laurel and I stayed at two years ago, and the Cork-experience I’d had during our stay. The steep hill of Shandon, the discount stores and dim-lit bars all framed in doorways and window panes coated with shiny, sticky paint with hand-lettered signs across the top, was more like an Ireland I had seen before, more like the Ireland I’d expected. And after sitting outside the hostel for a while in the same spot where Laurel and I had taken pictures two years ago, next to the same graffiti mural that I'd watched grow, I descended back into the bustling center of fashion and metropolitan life that is Cork’s City Center.

“Hey, smile and enjoy it! You know, merry Christmas and all that.”

We’ve all been talking for the past week about how sad it’s going to be to say goodbye and how we’re really going to live it up for the last week of out lives in Ireland. We’ve been going out every night to hear music or to visit our favorite bars and to spend as much time with our new-found friends as we can.

And I realized for the first time, the niche we’d each carved out for ourselves. From the bar where my Sacramento friend sits in with the live music every Sunday night, to the bouncer who knows us at the bar we always end up at, to the people I can expect to find in every place we frequent.

So last night, I carefully parceled out my time to make sure that I got to see every friend who I truly valued. I rushed out of the birthday apartment-party where I ate and laughed, then shouted apologies and promises to return when the bars closed, as I raced to catch the bus which had just passed. I jumped into a taxi with some people I didn’t know and arrived in town with two hours left to say goodbye to everyone else, all of whom I knew would show up at the Brogue sooner or later.

I’ll never forget bumping into one of my roommates by the bathrooms and have her embrace me and look up with teary eyes and tell me that I was one of the best roommates she could have hoped for and how she was going to miss me.

And that’s when I realized just how hard it was going to be to leave the people, friends, I’d made. Saying goodbye to the people I truly valued as friends was easy because I know I’ll make an effort to keep in touch, because somehow I just don’t believe that we are really saying goodbye forever, believe that we’ll meet again someday. Saying goodbye to the three Irish friends I’d made was more shocking than difficult because it was as I said goodbye to them and realized how grateful I was that they had happened to be at the Brogue that night, and I'd happened to run into them and been able to say goodbye, and I realized that I actually had Irish friends to say goodbye to. But again, people I plan to keep in touch with, and who I will definitely visit again when I get back to Cork. Because I will of course be back. (I may not have left my heart there, but it’s still become a part of who I am. It may not have been my favorite place, it may not have lived up to my expectations, but it is my Irish hometown.)

The hardest part about saying goodbye last night was the people who I never will see again. Ever. The people who I was friends with, but more casually. Not the people who I would seek out, but the people who I’d been brought together with because of our shared American identity. And it was made all the more sappy and emotional because that particular group of friends was PLASTERED and therefore not capable of softening the harsh reality of goodbye.

Maybe the reason why I’ve been having such a hard time finding the tears, even with the exhaustion brought on by a total of three hours of sleep within the last 48 hours, is because I don't really plan on loosing people I should be crying for. I mean, I can’t right? Because the people I’d cry for are the ones I’ve given little bits of my heart to, and I’ll never loose those little bits of heart.

Hold on to your hats Folks, 'cuz this one's gonna be a Doozy!

2008-12-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here with an empty can of Coke on my left and an empty bag of "crazy sour" Skittles on my right.

And my hands are already shaking.

Back in freshman year, back when I was a double major in PACS and Art (oh those naive days of old), I convinced myself that a bottle of Coca-Cola and a bag of Skittles made me think more creatively. So every night that I had to work on some big art project I'd head down to the vending machines at like 11:30 pm (of course) and return with a frosty bottle of Coke and a half-eaten bag of Skittles. (What? I was on the 8th floor. That's a long elevator ride; it's necessary to dig into the provisions.) I'd sit with my sketchbook dwarfing my lap and sketch and plan and think.

Remember how I said that I've convinced myself that black tea doesn't have caffeine? I did the same with Coca-Cola. I told myself that it was my coffee substitute. Because I refuse to become a coffee zombie like the rest of you crazy kids.

I have no art project idea due tomorrow, not even a paper. I just needed a little pick-me-up.
But whatever the reason, the results are right here. I can promise you only one thing: this post will probably be too long to be readable, too convoluted and tangential to be followed and too excited to be interesting.

That said. Onward and upward.

So here's the problem with Ireland: when the fire alarm goes off, and I SWEAR it wasn't me this time, you not only have to go outside, but you have to suit up. I may have mentioned this before, but I had NO IDEA what I was talking about. It used to be, you have to put on a jacket then the alarm goes off. Now it's a coat, and make sure you're wearing pants, not shorts, put on your shoes, not flip-flops and bring an umbrella and hat. Make sure you have your keys and probably some money, because it'll be a while before the fire-trucks come, so you may need provisions from the vending machine.

Here's the other thing: it will take so long for the fire-trucks to come that the building would have burned down, were it not for the constant rain that this country boasts. I mean, if it's not actually, legitimately, 100% raining, it's misty enough to be considered rain, and everything, including building and flame would be enveloped in a layer of condensation enough to slow the burn.

Can you tell the weather has been SUCKING here for the past couple of days?
I mean, I'm in the South and we usually have drier weather (comparatively) around this time of year. We've had some gorgeous days. But since Monday it has rained most days and since Wednesday this thick mist has covered Cork. I wake up every morning thinking it's fog, or, you know, snow (which it doesn't here), but it's not. It's wispier than fog, and more depressing at the same time. You know that everything outside is soaking wet, and there's not a single drop of clean, pure, fresh, delicious rain to make it worth it.

So I've been inside. Doing "work." Well, trying to at least. Yesterday I did work. I also listened to music with a friend for a while. Today I wallowed.

Yes, wallowed. That's what three days of this does to a girl. That and exhaustion from the "final week festivities," pressure of work, end of the semester blues, anxiety and anticipation for going home and a little bit of heartbreak. You know, because I'm leaving and everything. Oh! and of course hormones. I'm a girl, I get to blame EVERYTHING on hormones if I so choose. It's my prerogative. (Wow, that word is totally not spelled the way I thought it was spelled. That just looks weird.)

So I've been wallowing. Last night I waited 45 minutes to find a taxi at the end of the night, started to cry because I was so cold I thought I was going to loose my toes, and today I wallowed. (Somehow those two relate, I'm sure of it. Or else, I just wanted to find a way to work my near-frostbite experience into this post.)

ugh. Just see what sugar gets you? I leave this blog post for ONE MINUTE and I totally lost track of what I was going to say. Lets see... weather sucks... Oh!

I'm looking forward to going home. I know that Berkeley and San Francisco aren't REALLY tinted the sepia-and-rose color they seem to be in my memory. I know that I'm not headed back to those days in the early summer where the sun cuts through a blue and green world that stands in Technicolor-sharp relief. Those days where every blade of grass is visible and you can see every detail in the fluffy white clouds meandering across the sky. Those days when everything is slower and everyone is smiling. The macramé, braids, flip-flops and daisies are everywhere and you feel like the hippie children's children who sit in parks with guitars and finish their text messages with "peace" have the right idea about the world. You can feel the heat emanating off the sidewalks and frozen treats are always on the mind. In cities where a wide variety of ethnic food seduces passersby on every corner, lunch means eating take-out on some grassy knoll. Those days when the only thing that seems really important in life is to do something ridiculously poetic, like piling into some tiny car made back in '83 with no AC and road-tripping to music played through iPod speakers, or walking along the railroad tracks, picking dandelions and kicking pebbles until you see where it takes you, or playing baseball in the streets and heading down to the local playground at dusk just to feel nostalgic, or hiking up to Sunset on Mt. Tam and sitting in the grass watching the entire bay flush orange. Days that should have a soundtrack featuring Creedence Clearwater, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan.

I know it's not that time of year. It's not Summertime when everything from the grass to the sun is golden. But that's the Bay Area I love the best. I mean, to someone who is still a part of our nations school system, Summer = Freedom. And I know that the summer I just described is NOT the summer that we always see, but there are glorious stretches of time when this is my existence. And this is what I really miss.

But I get nostalgic for that time of year EVERY year. Last year, in April, when I was ready for summer to start, I started craving lemonade and Southern Rock and sitting outside in the sun. I even made a play-list for it.

So I know I'm not going back to the image of SF and Berkeley that is conjured in the minds of all when those cities are mentioned. But I do get to go back to MY holidays.

Don't get me wrong, the holidays here are fantastic. Being a Catholic country that does not celebrate Thanksgiving, the Christmas trees started popping up the day after Halloween like acne on pre-teen the minute he or she hits puberty. Maybe not the DAY after Halloween. The lights are beautiful; the cobblestone streets that are open only to the foot traffic of the patrons of the myriad shops and boutiques of Cork City are almost canopied with light displays. Every bar is wrapped in Christmas garlands and Christmas lights. I'm sure they'll sprinkle the glitter in the streets any day now.

But I'm looking forward to the giant Christmas tree in Union Square with all the Christmas displays in the department store windows and watching everyone bundled up in fake fur like it's really, truly cold. I'm looking forward to the Pottery Barn-and-Restoration Hardware decorations that festoon the marketplaces of Marin County. I'm looking forward to the start atop Christmas Tree Hill (That's still there, right? Did it catch fire last year, or am I just crazy?). And of course I'm looking forward to my own house, where my family appreciates my fanatic holiday spirit.
Where everything will be red and green and gold, right down to the candles on the table. Where the glorious tree which stands in front of windows and mirrors the stars outside during the night. The house smells like Christmas from the mulling spices forever brewing in the kitchen and the fresh garlands that my mother strings around the house. It's always warm because there's usually a fire in the fireplace and soft strains of lullaby-like Christmas carols drift through the living room. I can't wait for the bows and the wrapping and the ornaments, whose bright colors and geometric have this great, classic and old feeling instead of the cold "modern" feeling Ikea-flavored geometric designs tend to have.

Oop! And hello sugar crash. Now I'm bored and sleepy. So much for a frenzy of research tonight! At least I won't be up until 2 am bouncing off the walls.

what to do when the weather is this crappy

2008-12-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

I have a knack for discovering things that have already come, hit peak popularity and gone.
I mean, have you heard of this band "The Who?" They're amazing! And this chick Dorothy Parker, she's a fantastic writer, you should really read some of her stuff; she does a lot of reviews of books and plays and such.

Bands and books and such I'm sure you can forgive me for, but my proudest moments are when I discover a TV show and proceed to gush about it as if I'm the first one who has ever seen it; even though it went off the air two years ago.

I did it with Friends, That 70's show, recently with Weeds and now with Veronica Mars. I get this "new-convert" obsession thing going on where it's all I can talk about, all I want to watch, I sing the theme song all the time... you get the picture.

Unfortunately everyone else has already been through the honeymoon stage and is over it, and "don't really want to hear it, Maggie!"

Ah well, at least when I get into a show that's already been on the air for a few years, or has even gone off the air, I get to spend my "brain -break" time during finals week watching them. I don't even have to wait a week to see what happens next!

Seriously. If I were the head of advertising for a company that caters mostly to college-students, I would double my ad sales to online hosting sites during finals times. Everyone is on those sites, like Megavideo.com or Sidereel.com, free-tvshows.com, and my personal favorite, actually, I won't release that one in case the secret government anti-internet pirate squad sees this and takes it down. That would be devastating. But even the legal ones, like nbc.com or I think tbs.com streams in HD too. all those sites are gold-mines. I KNOW I'm not the only college student who does this. (Proof? I've got your proof! We're all on the same IP address in this dorm building and so megavideo, which tracks the IP address and keeps a record of the number of minutes towards the limit that have been used per day. So I'll turn my computer on in the morning to watch "The Office" and I'll get a message saying "you have already watched 1,792 minutes of Megavideo today, please wait 134 minutes or sign up for unlimited use!" I have NOT watched 1,792 minutes of TV already today, thank you very much!)

In other news: 2 Performances, 1 Final and 1 Final paper down, 2 Final papers to go! (and they're the shorter ones!!!)

Read All About It

2008-12-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

I love the smell of newspapers. The newsprint itself has such a distinct smell, kind of fresh, but muted, not a sharp fresh like air or grass. It's warm but not musty. The ink, too, adds a whole different layer of smell - dark and almost licorice-like, but with a bamboo flavor.

I walked into one of the practice rooms this morning and immediately smelled the newspaper. It was all the way across the room, sitting on the windowsill in the sun. The sun has a curious way of augmenting the smell of newspaper and deepening its warmth. The newspaper itself was similar to the Wall Street Journal, but with more color. But the paper size and font were about the same. It just made me think of home and Sunday mornings when the newspapers get spread out on almost every surface of the house: coffee table, dining table, kitchen chairs, bathroom floor, my parents' bed.

Maybe my parents are fighting a loosing battle, single-handedly trying to save the print newspaper buisness, but then again, these are the same people who brought me up to cherish the smell of old books, not just for their comfort and that nostalgic feeling that comes from old books, but for their possibilities.

So all the newspapers are scattered around the house, and they all have that particular intensified smell from the sun or even just from the morning bustle. There's colors and pictures and words. Glorious words! The beauty of the way the letters are formed with their lines and curves within their orderly phalanx of words and sentences. The history and familiarity they hold, that has just become a part of our knowing. I mean, it is so easy to identify a piece of newsprint even in a tornado of mixed media art. And that scrap of newsprint, by virtue of the fact that it is publishes, tells about the past and hints to us the distant past. The Golden Age of print and newspapers and news: Hollywood, World Wars, Depressions. The days when news was big and bold and black and white, instead of mimicking those days with fonts and layouts shining out from the blue glow of a television or a computer screen.

I realized this morning that I haven't picked up an Irish newspaper in the three months since I've been here. I got a free copy of "The Star" which is much like "US Weekly" only on newsprint. Leafed through that a couple of times. Considered making a collage with it. But other than that, I've had no connection with newspapers in all my time in Ireland. I haven't even gotten chips wrapped in it.

I guess what I'm trying to say, in a way too poetically convoluted manner is, I'm looking forward to going home in a week. I'm looking forward to the comforting smell of newspapers that is my home, my history and, in many ways, my family history and possibly my own future. I'm looking forward to returning to a place that is the past, has already been published. Of course my family and my home will continue to grow and change, but it is the nest of my childhood and will always be tied to my past in that way.
I've loved Ireland, but I'm not ready to settle down here, it's too fast and new to feel comfortably like a home. And therein lies the irony: we all come to Ireland to see a land tied intricately to its past, our past and our ancestors and especially its ancient traditions and lore. But we forget that parts of Ireland are every bit as modernized as any other country, and those that aren't, are getting there. I took a bus tour around the Burren in Western Ireland (Clare County) and although we passed through little villages with corner pubs, the roads were paved and the outlying houses were more like cookie-cutter tract housing than I'd ever have expected. I haven't found the Ireland that Yeats immortalized, poised on the boundary between our world and faerie. I don't know if you can. Maybe someday I'll finally make it up to Donegal, Sligo and Mayo, and we'll find out.

But for now, in the Ireland I know? You won't find men in tweed hats drinking pints of Guinness in the middle of the morning hidden behind an oversized newspaper. The men are there, certainly, and friendly as all get-out, but there are plasma-screen TVs in all the bars.

The Trouble with Blogging

2008-12-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

I swear I meant to work on my paper tonight, I tried. I have the document open and everything, the only problem is, I've got my blog voice on. That, and I watched some TV on my computer while I was eating a late dinner so instead of the academically flavored writing that should be, like this:

"Although jazz was to one day be called the Great American Art form, it had humble beginnings in the folk-steeped culture of the deep South, which would have been possible, had it not been for centuries of isolation of the African-American culture."

(which, I should mention, took me 20 minutes to get intelligent-sounding), it's all coming out sarcastic and witty.

"To the earliest jazz musicians, back when jazz wasn't even called "jazz," wasn't even called "jass," there was no internal impetus of this "great art form" that urged it to move forward; more or less, it was just a sound that, for one reason or another, was 'hot' enough to make some money."

Ugh. It's just so convoluted and informal. There are too many appositives, too many slang terms in quotes, and it's just way too long. I mean, we all know how much I enjoy my lengthy sentences, but there is a time and a place for everything. Plus, there's just something a little... smirky about my blog writing, as in, I'm usually smirking while I write it.

I guess I'll just have to study for my exam tomorrow instead.
Dealing with the Irish school system is just so difficult! How am I supposed to know what to expect from an exam or what is expected in a paper? Ugh, the trials of being me, am I right?

Mid-Essay, Final Exam and an overusage of parentheses

2008-12-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

I have two things I'd like to discuss today (although the only thing I REALLY should be discussing is either the intricacies of jazz harmonics or the development of jazz in a historical context.)

The first is my insistence on admiring the fashion of high school girls on TV shows and movies from the late 90s. I mean, I guess it's not entirely a bad thing, but I'd really like to end the cycle of psuedo vintage graphic tees and pigtails or, you know, anything that resembles a belly shirt (especially if it's crocheted.) I mean, a couple of nights ago I went out in purple tights, black boots, a black skirt and layered purple and black tank tops. Oh, with a vest and pigtails. It was like the Hot Topic girl from 7th grade grew up just enough to loose the chokers, black nail polish and chunky goth boots. But just barely.

Okay, so on the whole, it wasn't a bad outfit. A little "twilight-loving-school-girl" but that may have just been my paranoia. It's the IDEA behind the thing that bothers me. It's the fact that I watch an episode of Veronica Mars or one of those horrible teen dramedy movies that we all secretly hate-to-love (and not the other way around) and see the protagonist and think "Ohmigaw! She is so cool! Maybe if I dress like her I can be cool too and maybe then the cool kids will want me to sit at their table and eat lunch with them!" (So... the last part there about the cool kids was a bit of an exaggeration... maybe those movies/shows are pulling me in more than I think...)

Let's not beat around the bush here. There are certain merits to a college girl dressing in that laid-back "I still wear a lot of the same stuff I did in high school, but now it's ironic and artsy, plus I get that cool vintage/thrift vibe." I can do that, I get it. I like it.

My problem here is the fact that I still seem to think that TVs high school girls wear the coolest clothes. I saw an episode of What Not To Wear once about a girl who had this same problem, except she had graduated college already. I fear I am doomed to go down the same path.

I mean look at me; I'm half-way through my junior year of college. I'll be graduating in a year and a half (God willing). I'm studying abroad and living out and away and on my own. I don't want to be in high school anymore, when everything was easy and safe and right there, and I called my mom "mother" when we weren't speaking because it was SO much more formal and thus stinging.

And yet I still secretly want to emulate the cool kids on TV (well, at least the edgy, angry ones I think are cool...)

So I've been thinking, and I've decided that this phenomenon is one of two things: a natural human tendency of sorts, something about media manipulation and stuff like that (if my brain weren't so fried, this would be a much clearer statement. OR it's an early mid-life crisis.

I think it is the latter. Thus I will be requiring a fast, well-oiled corvette (preferably a vintage stingray) and a fast, well-oiled boy-toy.

Man, I meant for that all to be a lot more thought provoking and philosophical. It looks like it's reads "whiny." Sorry guys. I guess my brain's too fried.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to listening to the music of my youth and continue to avoid studying.

Ciao!

What happens in a diet of meat and potatoes

2008-12-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

So as I sit here, watching TV on my computer, eating ridiculous amounts of pasta and working on my 9-pager, all I can think about is food. Now, this could be hormonal (the standard fall back), it could be due to matters of the heart (le sigh, and yes mom, I did recycle that phrasing from our earlier conversation), or you know, boredom.
I mean, I literally sat at my computer for about an hour thinking about a bowl full of pasta. But it didn't stop there. I mean, I stopped eating pasta for a month here, so it's just about the only thing in the house that I haven't ODed on yet, so it's conceivable that I was fantasizing about it.

I mean, peanut butter? We were over it before I made peanut butter cookies for Thanksgiving and I'm still over it.

Cornflakes and jam (because I can't drink milk)? Meh, we had a fling for a day or two, but that's all it was. There's really no substance there.

Oatmeal? I was into it for a while, but either I just can't take the sweet or I make it with peanut butter, and, well, we've already been down that path.

Apples? I'm just not that into them. I mean, they're nice and all, but they're not really interesting. And there again with the peanut butter.

Bananas? Same story with the peanut butter (any wonder why I'm so turned off by peanut butter now? obviously we saw to much of each other). Also, the banana peels here have this sickly, yet faint green/brown tint which squicks me a little.

Soup? I mean, there are a couple of cans in the cupboard, but I'm just not really into cans.

Quinoa is too high maintenance and time-consuming. I usually really like hamburgers but the ones I recently bought taste a little artificial. Eggs are good, but my most recent batch of hardboileds was a disaster (yes, that is correct. I cannot hard-boil an egg) and we don't have any ketchup to spice up scrambleds. Nuts are too boring and I'm too picky about dried fruit to brave the mixed bag in our

And salads aren't a meal. Period. End of story.

But it wasn't snack food I was really focused on. (Ooh, mashed potatoes would be DELICIOUS right now. Geeze I sound pregnant.) No, I was nostalgic for REAL food

Like the crab dinner we always have Christmas eve. With the lemonaise and the gluten free bread which used to be sourdough bread and champagne flutes of Martinelli's.
Or a really good, meaty bolognese sauce on thick spaghetti, the kind of sauce that it rich with tomato and loaded with spices and meat and yet still light and slightly sweet.
Or my favorite pad thai, which I can just visualize. And taste, I can literally taste it. Thin rice noodles, moderately spicy sauce with the little bits of egg and green onions. Oh and the lime! I adore the lime.
Also, hot dogs. Like good, old fashioned hot dogs with relish and ketchup. Where the skin is tight and sweaty and not hard and boiled like the one I had at Eddie Rockets (a.k.a. Irish Johnny Rockets) last week.
I would linger happily on the thought of tacos, but the lack of Mexican food here is so devastating that I can't even bring myself to think about it, the spicy and the sabor. Oh, even the word Mexican food makes my mouth water and I'm not even imagining the flavors or anything.
And I can't even remember what sorbet tastes like. (Don't get me wrong, Italian sorbetto is heavenly, but sometimes Haagen Daz raspberry sorbet is just all I really want.)

(My God, throw in some pickles and it's like a pregnant lady's dream...)

Thankfully, it's now 1:45 am and I'm too tired to make more pasta. Because as good as it is, it's not filling the void inside. I mean the one that was created when I was ripped away from the exquisite culinary delights of my family's kitchen, my grandmother's kitchen, and of course, sunny California.

hmm... if we have any salsa left maybe I'll have scrambled eggs for breakfast... I wish we had ketchup.

It's Christmas TIIIIME in the city!

2008-12-03T06:57:00.001-08:00

So it's paper-writing season which means I'll be updating this blog daily... if not hourly due to extreme boredom. I must warn you, the content will likely be inane, but at least your daily dose of Maggie will be more regular.

I went to a Christmas party last night. Why they held a Christmas party on December 2nd, I don't know. I mean, we're not even close to the 12 days of Christmas.

Anyway, it was 7 euro to get in, but I think Lady Luck had her arm slung drunkenly around my shoulder last night because man! what a night! The girl at the door didn't have change for 20 euro so she gave me 15 euro back. So then I approach the bar to redeem my entrance ticket for a free vodka something. I don't like vodka, so I decided to get it cut with Sprite (works best. and if you add grenadine it's like Shirley Temple's all grown up.) I guess Lady Luck hiccuped a little because the bartender heard "Sprite" and gave me... a Sprite. With nothing else. I know there was nothing else because he felt bad and gave me two Sprites. So I started out the evening double fisting Sprites. Merry Christmas, ah to me.
Luckily, one of my other friends felt bad and bought me a rum and coke. He is now my best friend, and my ultimate plan for my last few weeks here is running smoothly.

But it was a good party. I mean there were decorations, snacks, Santa hats, plenty of Ho-Ho-'Hoes, and a giant blow-up Santa who was somehow walked around and gave out Jell-o shots. That Mariah Carey song about "All I want for Christmas is You" came on twice, along with a Grease medley and numerous Michael Jackson songs. What more could you ask for?

As the bar closed down and we supported my friend out the door, the general consensus was to head to The Classic for the rest of the night. The Classic is a club. I'm not really into clubs. I wanted to go to The Brogue, just like every other night and sit in familiar dinginess, listen to hard rock and metal, and scan the crowd for cute boys.
But everyone was on their way into The Classic. So the new Maggie (who is really the old Maggie who has just gotten her groove back) decided to just go to the Brogue anyway, and as I sauntered down the street with two friends who had (luckily) been turned away at the door (for alleged drunkenness), Lady Luck and I clinked martini glasses.
The rest of the crew eventually saw the light and ended up at the Brogue as well, and thanks to myself and my imperceptible comrade of fortune, we snagged the couch seats (which are not as bouncy and cushy as the purple velvet makes them appear as I unfortunately found out by flinging myself upon it). And the night was fantastic. And at the end of it, I found 2 euro which is similar to finding 5 dollars. No joke.

Oh, and to those of you who have been following my personal life on more conversational terms, essentially, I went back last night. (Codespeak that I'm sure even the Navajo Windtalkers couldn't crack.)

For now, it's back to the grindstone. Back to the paper writing and the reading. Back to dealing with the University of California Public School system. Back to faxing and searching, emailing and planning. And tonight when I go out, I'll lean myself up against the bar and when the bartender asks "What'll it be Miss?" I'll sigh and say "Smitty," "Smitty," I'll say, "gimme something to dull the pain of dealing with the bureaucratic filth that invades our souls, minds and hearts and slowly chips away at our resolve and destroys our desire to rise above and to choose until we've become nothing more than zombies, molded like all the others and all those who came before to follow and act with no resistance and to allow the cycle of oppression and subjugation to continue in this Orwellian world. Hm? Oh, sorry. I'll take a rum and coke. And if you make it Old Jamaica, I won't say no."

Paper-writing Procrastinating Time!

2008-12-02T05:20:00.000-08:00

Lets talk about wishes.

About 6 months ago, during my lunch break from summer school, I walked myself down to the little Brazilian food stall on University street. I don't remember what I ate (except that it was DAMN good) but I do remember that the owner pulled out a green ribbon from the large jar of ribbons and said something about three knots and three wishes and let it fall off on its own. I think, his accent was a little hard to understand. But I did. I made three wishes and I tied three knots. I wore it around proudly, it fit me. Green is my favorite color and I really liked how it looked sitting there on my wrist. I wondered when, if ever it would fall off; it seemed really sturdy. But for the past two months it has been fraying. Part of it has rolled, so it's no longer flat against my wrist. And a knot may have come out a while ago, I can't tell.

Long story short, the thing came off this morning in the shower. I tried to untangle it and lay it flat on my wrist as is my wont, and it came off smoothly. I stared at it for a few seconds. It's gone. No longer on my wrist. Wishes freed to the universe and ready to come true. There's a little white band on the top of my wrist where it used to sit.

So now I don't know what will happen. I mean, if I think about it, the timing is perfect and conditions are just so that my three wishes could come true. But we'll see.

Uh oh Hueston.

2008-12-01T13:04:00.000-08:00

We have a problem.

I was watching Weeds today (yes, watching Weeds and not doing my homework. I know, I know) and I realized that I was reading the English subtitles when characters spoke in Spanish. So then I tried not reading them (easy enough, the Japanese subtitles from the bootleg copy I was watching covered them up anyway) but I couldn't understand the Spanish. Could. Not.

And I'm leaving for Costa Rica in a month and a half.

~~Non e bene~~ No es bueno.

Also, I just found dried pasta in my skirt. I'm disgraceful.

In other news, today I begin my countdown to my next 14 hour flight (can I get alcohol on the flight before it leaves International waters? must look these things up), and start wrapping up the schoolwork here that I don't even feel like I started. 16 days left, and suddenly it's not enough time. Of course I've been making the most of it; I've been going out more to meet people, I've been walking around the city more, I've been traveling around Ireland more.

I went to Galway last weekend and couldn't have picked a better weekend. The weather was gorgeous and deceiving, much like a gold-digging socialite. It was blue and clear and the clouds were puffy and white. The air was crisp and clean and bit like friggin frostbite. I'm pretty sure the temperature was about equivalent to that at which they cryogenically freeze people.
My face looks oddly puffy in most of the pictures but I'm sure that is my body attempting to compensate for its exposure to the elements.

I stayed with a friend of mine in his super high security dormitory buildings. It took all my secret agent skill to get in each night. Trust me. I can't really divulge details because it's all super top-secret stuff, but sufficed to say, I'm part ninja.

His mom and her friend were also staying for the weekend, and as much as I protested that I needn't be a burden, he insisted that I act as barrier and or distraction. But it was a good arrangement, slightly awkward, but good. I got to pretend that I had people visiting me because we did all the visiting things: went out to find traditional music, ate out in pubs (and spent considerably more money on food than I had intended) and took a tour bus around the area. Actually, that last part was fantastic. I really wanted to see the Burren, it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in Ireland, but I wasn't sure how I was going to do just taking the local buses between towns. The tour bus fixed this problem and had the added educational advantage. So we saw hills and caves, fields and rocks, old broken castles and ancient ring forts. The guide pointed out the famine walls which are stone walls and roads built all over the hills that have absolutely no purpose save job creation during the famine. We stopped at the Cliffs of Moher (if you think you don't know what I'm talking about, you're wrong. They're way famous, see for yourself:)

actually, the lighting sucks. Sorry about that, I was more interested in the clouds than the actual cliffs which were unfortunately disappointing. Or maybe I was too cold to appreciate them...

Also in Galway I collected more evidence that I can visit any city, even one as small as Galway, and stumble on a really cool, dark and edgy bar that has live gigs. Literally stumble. But no matter where I live, I will never, ever be able to find that venue. I mean, there's got to be some in Cork here, I'm pretty sure I've been told about them, and yet, all I can seem to find are the same small, packed pubs and a scattering of clubs. Same with Berkeley (although that may have something to do with the whole 21 and over rule...)

But really, Galway city is beautiful. It's got this great artsy feeling that comes from somewhere, I don't know where. Maybe it's the colors of the buildings and the cobblestones. Maybe it's the fact that all the shops, restaurants and pubs are small and close together. Maybe it's simply that the city is small and on the water. Whatever it is, it was a fantastic city to walk around in, like we did on Sunday. There was a little craft mart where I almost emptied my wallet, except I only had two euro in cash for the bus ride from the Cork bus station to my apartment. We walked down by the water where everything was picturesque, and not only thanks to the shocking blue sky that we were graced with that day.

Then finally, I climbed back on the (thankfully) heated Bus Eireann for a long and entirely unproductive 4 hour ride home. And just think! Next week I get to take an 8 hour one! yipee!!

ETA: P.s. It is so friggin cold here that not only can I see my breath, but it has its own shadow. Yes. This I discovered when I locked myself out of my room (note: not my apartment. I was in my apartment, and thus wasn't wearing shoes, sweatshirt or coat) and had to stand outside the warden's office for 10 minutes. Just be thankful I'm still alive.

"Whoa ohh ohhh! Your Sex is on Fire!!!"

2008-11-27T19:10:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is, by name at least, the day that we spend giving thanks. Generally it is the day that, before we eat a ridiculous amount of food, we force ourselves to mumble something on the spot and/or cliche about what we are thankful for. I feel like rarely does one get a chance to suddenly understand how thankful they are.

But for me, man, this year has been the greatest Thanksgiving ever. Not only was the spirit of Thanksgiving out in full show because I'm abroad, but I actually had a moment of true Thankfulness.

If you ever get to study abroad, do it in the fall because that's when Thanksgiving is. Something about Americans celebrating an American holiday brings out a rejuvenated sense of thankfulness and patriotism. It's a true coming together and the spirit of sharing saturates the air.

I headed down to the coolest, most traditionally Irish bar that we have in Cork, which we had rented out for our Thanksgiving. I had a good time. I had some friends there who I ate with and chatted with, I met some Irish Thanksgiving newbies, and then I headed out to my second thanksgiving.

It was halfway through this second Thanksgiving dinner, where I was surrounded by kids from all over, Ireland, Italy, Spain, America, that I actually had a moment of clarity and true thanks. It may sound cheesy, but it's true.
One of the girls had a seizure and collapsed on the floor. No one was really sure what was happening but we acted as fast as we could, got her on her side, called the ambulance and her parents (who were luckily in town). When she finally came to we got her legs elevated and she began to talk her way through the shocked silence. She's on medication for a tooth infection. She has one of those hole things in her trachea. Seizures were a common occurrence for her when she was younger (talking a couple hundred) and she wears one of those bracelets that has her emergency medical information on it. She won't be able to walk for the next 13 hours because of the seizure. And she went on.

I don't. I don't have any of that. Having food allergies sucks and having random and currently unattributed stomach pain sucks harder. But I don't get seizures that demobilize my legs for 12 hours. There is no hole in my body that should not be there. I don't have to wear my medical information around my neck. I haven't had an ambulance called so many times that I know the procedure.

And in that moment, sitting slightly uncomfortably on the couch, I realized what I'm really thankful for: to be alive and to be able to appreciate being thankful. My relatively good state of health. Friends and family who I can celebrate with and whose company I can enjoy.

I'm thankful for two Thanksgivings. I'm thankful for guitars and international students and four hours of jam sessions. I'm thankful for friends who I can laugh with. I'm thankful for friends with whom I can sit quietly and not feel awkward. I'm thankful for friends who I enjoy being with when I'm sober even if they are not. I'm thankful for An Brogue. I'm thankful for Italians who dragged me out on the dance floor. I'm thankful for kismet meetings of other fantastic friends. I'm thankful for way cute bar backs who end up at An Brogue. I'm thankful for friends who will stalk said bar backs with me in awkward, embarrassing 12-year-old ways. I'm thankful for drunk Irish flattery from drunk Irish friends. I'm thankful that I tend to like flame and lighters. I'm thankful for memorable moments like when way cute bar-backs try to burn the pants crotch of one of the drunk Irish friends, you know, as a joke. I'm grateful that the drunk Irish friend did not, in fact drop trou and burn off all his nether-hair as he was possibly threatening to do? I'm thankful for small music celebrities and I'm thankful for my paparazzi skill with a camera. I'm thankful for impromptu rap sessions in the street.

I'm thankful that I'm in Ireland and I'm thankful that I finally. Finally. wish I could stay longer.

2008-11-25T17:36:00.000-08:00

Oh how I love Tuesday nights.

Every week I look forward to Tuesday night. Monday nights are the worst because I know that there are only a few hours until I have to get through Tuesday. Sunday nights are pretty bad too because I've got Monday and Tuesday ahead of me. But Tuesday nights are amazing.

Tuesday nights are the start of my weekend. My only class on Wednesday is at 4:00 so I can stay up as late as I please. Tuesday nights are rocking around here. There's the whole excitement of getting ready and the stream of neon lights as we parade between bars. But sometimes I stay in. I stay in my pajamas and eat way too much sweet stuff and watch TV on my computer and fall asleep with a smug smirk on my face because I know I'm not going to wake up with a massive hangover.

***

I have three weeks left here. I spent the first month hitting the big bars and clubs with my roommates. I spent the second month traveling and/or sick. And then I found it - with my weeks dwindling away I discovered the campus bars and the people who haunt them on the right nights. Thursday nights is open mic nite at the New Bar. It's all chrome and mahogany and geometric with a finely polished bar, tall bar stools and cute bartenders. The lights are dim and yellow and the crowd is just too cool for wherever they happen to be. The musicians all know each other and gather toward the front, packed into a few booths and the small tables. Everyone else just relaxes with a pint and carries on their conversations between songs.

The Old Bar is the perfect foil to the New Bar. The stools are mismatched and upholstered with what looks like the couch of a 97 year old spinster. The bar looks more like a diner counter than a bar and the wooden parquet floor is perfectly worn away everywhere except underneath the raised stage where it gleams. It's louder and rowdier even though the same people are there. The lights are full and harsh and the speakers look like they could have been attached to the ceiling with duct tape.

The Live Music Society (who knew there was one of those? Not me obviously...) had their annual songwriter's contest semi-finals there tonight and a friend of mine was playing. And it was fantastic. It was fantastic to have so many different styles thrown at me in one night. It was fantastic to be surrounded by this group of people who all loved the music and all knew each other and all yelled out their support. It was fantastic to sit and listen to some really talented musicians pour their hearts out through a microphone. It was fantastic to finally get blown away by my friend's music (it was the first gig of his that I've been too... oops.) and it was fantastic to listen to him play one of the sweetest songs while sitting next to the girl I'm pretty sure he wrote it for/about.

And it was nice that I could do that for free and then come back and enjoy my quiet, indulgent Tuesday night. After all, gotta rest up for Wednesday and Thursday (which will, of course, start at the New Bar).

2008-11-24T14:50:00.000-08:00

All I want right now is to see a shooting star. I know exactly what my wish would be.

But you don't really see stars here. Not the real ones at least, I'm sure there are many around here who have drunkenly or otherwise ended up on the wrong side of an inanimate object or, you know, fist and been rewarded with twinkling lights.
No, it's too cloudy. With this unpredictable weather, it's not unusual to start the day sunny, watch the clouds roll in, and then sprint from the hail and end up watching the sunset through scattered showers.

Occasionally you can see the stars here, but they are too faint and too uncommon to ever encourage hope for a shooting star. They aren't wishing stars; consider yourself lucky just to have seen them. That's wish fulfillment enough.

But if I could, I'd wish to be lying on a rooftop on a balmy evening watching a meteor shower; and enjoying but not fully appreciating how lucky I'd be to see such a wealth of light.

...and maybe a bag of jellybeans. Man, I would give my first born child for some of those. I seriously can't find good candy here. The ONLY non-chocolate candy is gummy-based or skittles which don't even taste like real skittles.
le sigh.

2008-11-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

I pretend black tea isn't caffeine.

I pretend it isn't caffeine and then drink it after dinner as a distraction (or just to look cool) while I am typing away at my computer. Sometimes I'm doing actual work. An hour an a half later I'm still typing away, swept up in what I tend to believe is a great fantastic creative brainstorm. Or I've been blessed with a brief period of intense productivity, so I make lists and I plan and I budget. And I get excited about what I'm going to do the next day when I wake up. I'll clean my room, I'll get started on that paper, I'll walk myself downtown to pick up a few things, I'll DO things. There are papers busily strewn about my desk and the feeling of accomplishment floods my veins carried along by the adrenaline. I decide that I will start working out more, eating better. I find heavy things and do arm exercises at my desk while I am planning and working and typing.

And it's exhilarating because the caffeine doesn't even cross my mind. Black tea isn't caffeine, so why would it have any effect on me?

And then I wake up the next day groggy and without the slightest idea as to why I chose to stay up until two o'clock planning and designing the Christmas cards I want to give my roommates before I leave.

But I have to pretend because if I don't, I'll start drinking tea in the morning to get that sense of accomplishment early in the day. And then I'll have to move on to coffee to get the buzz, and then espresso. Green tea is a gateway drug, kids. It leads to black tea which just leads to a whole mess of problems.

Good thing caffine doesn't affect me, right?

Man could I use some sugar right about now...

Come i Romani

2008-11-19T15:06:00.000-08:00

I know I promised (crossed my heart and hoped to die) a post two days ago, but I've made it up to you at the end of the post.

Our last day in Rome was one of those days that you need on vacation, one of those literal-in-every-sense-of-the-word vacation days. The ones where you stroll and enjoy and let yourself become as much of a part of that particular place as possible. It's the day that you get to distance yourself from the other tourists still caught up in all the wonder and bustle and delude yourself into thinking that you are less of a tourist. You feel that you've been living in the place for long enough to be a part of it, you've seen, you've figured it out, you've tried it, you remember it. You have a history with the place that allows you to feel at home. And because you are home, you don't need to be a tourist, you can enjoy what life is like for those who do live there, and you get to experience the place more intimately.

So with none of the haste to see that had woken us at the crack of dawn for the past two days, we got up late, ate late and got ready with leisure.
We sauntered through the Borghese gardens, which the guide book said were like Central Park, but in reality, they were much more Luxembourg-esque. And in the off-season, half of the people there were just Romans, jogging, walking their dogs, studying, reading, being. Then we made our way back through the tangled maze of monuments that had been the frenzy of the previous two days, picking the streets more wisely and somewhat correctly.

We asked and received directions in Italian to the piazza called Campo di Fiori where we sat by the fountain and watched the daily market break down while we ate our fashionable late lunch.
As the day drew to a close we found ourselves winding through the twisted fauna and laundry-line covered lanes of Trastevere, the old neighborhood, up to the summit of Giancolo hill to watch the sun set on Rome.
After a hearty dinner and my long-awaited, very Italian after dinner cappuccino (with extra sugar) we headed out on a night walk back through the heart of Rome. Of course, some of us were rather more wired than others...
We passed back through Campo di Fiori at night and watched the cobblestones, swept clean of the morning's fruit leaves and bits of packing boxes, fill with Roman youth doing their dance of interaction. We passed by the Pantheon, no longer packed with tourists and completely devoid of protesters. We walked by the Trevi fountain, as beautifully lit as any post card would depict it. And with a final quick and hopeful glance at the Spanish Steps, we turned back to the hostel, ending our short-but-sweet Roman Holiday. (And yes, I did try to channel Audrey Hepburn from Roman Holiday by being fabulous on the Spanish Steps.)

A couple of years ago I met a traveler in a bar who told me that the best time to see Rome is in the winter time when the crowds and the leaves have both gone.
I really couldn't have agreed with him more because Rome in the winter is gorgeous. And seeing the crowds in November, I couldn't imagine what the crowds of the summer must be like.
The similarities between Rome and Paris are obvious, but the differences are, I think, more striking. Rome to me will always be a stoic city with tears streaming down its face, and I believe that being there in the winter really brought that out. I mean, it is an ancient city with a tumultuous history and the evidence is obvious. Even the buildings look like they are crying. They are more obviously old and the water damage over the years looks like tear tracks. Many of the buildings are painted those warm reds and oranges that just scream "Italy!" But so many more have that same cold paleness of ivory, like the ancient statues that dot the city like a pox. I mean it's a city that's built on history, literally and coexists with buildings that were broken thousands of years ago. Archaeologists and historians tell us we are so lucky to have history preserved for us, and for that Rome has become famous. But for me, those ruins are really just broken buildings that were never repaired.
Don't get me wrong, Rome is an amazing city, and it's obvious from the outset. It's bustling with life and people. It is truly Italian, with it's food and it's people (especially the little old ladies who still wear their knee-length skirts with nylons and orthopedic shoes like my great-grandmother did), it's little restaurants and it's old neighborhood. It's truly modern, with it's bustling commercial and financial centers, and it's upscale neighborhoods with houses that are villas in their own right. It's truly on the edge and forward-thinking with it's recent past and current political situations that have called the university students into the streets to care and to act.
But at the same time, it will always be sad, because it will always have the fallen ivory statues and columns of a great civilization that crumbled.

And that's probably why Rome is best in winter. Because with fewer people, and the crisper air and the paler sky and the bare trees, you can see that sadness in sharper relief. And that melancholy beauty is what sets Rome apart.

and so I give you:

I'm sorry, what?

2008-11-18T04:23:00.001-08:00

So I promise to write a flowery, poetic and inspired (and probably rather purple) post later today about Rome, my last day there and my general thoughts and ponderings on the city. Cross my heart and hope to die.

But just a few things before I leave for class:
I have had the hardest time understanding Irish accents in the past couple of days. I mean, my professors are all perfectly understandable. Maybe it has something to do with lecturing and the lifestyle of the academia and all... but everyone else has just been ridiculously difficult.
Maybe it's because I'm having actual conversations with actual Irish youth for the first time in the two months I've been here (honestly, it's like I'm living in Little America up in here...), maybe it's because I just got back from Rome where it took me three days to get a handle on the language again and now I'm phasing back out of Italian/English and into Irish/English.

But whatever it is, it's ridiculous. I mean, do you realize how much longer a conversation is when you have to say "Wait, I'm sorry, what?" after every other sentence? Or how hard it is to keep the continuity when, after asking "what?" three times I still can't understand the statement and so just nod vaguely and smile.

Then again, I could just be distracted and hard of hearing because I'm pretty sure I had a similar conversation with a girl from Minnesota yesterday.

...hmm... maybe there's a bit of a hitch in my master plan of listening to loud music while I'm young and then taking advantage of the advanced hearing technology that will develop by the time I get old...

A-gitazioni Happened on the Way to the Forum...

2008-11-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today was supposed to be all about ancient history. We started at the Colosseum and pretended we were the emperor deciding Russel Crowe's fate (maybe next time he'll think twice before throwing a phone at a helpless hotel clerk.) We hit the Forum and walked down the streets like triumphant heroes returning with the spoils of a war that oppressed and destroyed hundreds of cultures. We stood by the Rostrum and pondered jumping the rails to stand up and repeat history: "Friends, Romans, Countrymen... Lend me your ears!" (as if it hasn't been repeated enough...)
We wandered Palatine hill, the site of the Imperial Palace which we decided would be a right cozy home. I've always thought a throne room would be the perfect addition to any house I have.
And then it was onto the Pantheon, which I think had some sort of governmental use, but is really just famous for it's dome.

But we got waylaid by modern history.

See, in Italy, the government is trying to cut funding to schools which means something like half the universities will be shut down, the rest will be more expensive, more croweded and employ fewer teachers. So the students are protesting. En Masse.

Alana was telling me about some of the smaller demonstrations in Perugia and how some bigger ones are televised. En Route to the Colosseum we saw a few groups of students marching with signs and said "oh, how awesome! I love it when people care!"

And then we saw more. While touring the haunts of the ancients, we would occasionally look down and see the gathering of youth grow bigger. And then we could hear them.

And they marched. They marched up the streets in exactly the direction we were headed (the Pantheon) - much to my delight.

"Come on! Let's join in!!!"

I literally took every opportunity I could to pull us into the throng. "No really, I'm almost positive that they're headed to the Pantheon..."

Alana didn't believe me so we ended up trying to avoid the crowds and find lunch. We ended up finding a Pizza and Kebab place, however it was across the stream of protesters.
"Come on! We'll go up a couple of blocks and then march with them and slowly make our way across the street."
So we ate kebabs packed into this tiny place with about 20 Italian students all jostling for a mid-protest boost.

Later we tried to avoid the crowds again by having gelato by the Trevi fountain.

But in the end, we really wanted to see the Pantheon. And luckily for me, it was the site of one of their demonstrations\sit-ins. Oh I was in heaven. Amidst all these people who cared so much about their education and their rights that they were filling the streets with passion. Facing the lines of riot cops with shields and helmets. (Which is scary. I mean, I know my Italian history. I know what happened in the 70s. Those lines of cops were ominous.)

So that was today. We finished off with another nap and another thrifty dinner and gelato (again.)

Tomorrow: Living Roman.

Ciao Roma!!!

2008-11-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

So I plan to write a long and poetic post about Rome when I return to Cork. But for now, we'll just get the dailies out of the way.

I arrived Wednesday night, the night of Alana's birthday and we had a right grand party. We found our way to the Trastavere for dinner in a quaint little place down some alley. After a 325 mL bottle of wine, Roman artichokes, veal and a brownie, we were warm and giggly on the way back to the hostel. Which, by the way is a very awesome hostel indeed.

Thursday we did the Vatican partly to avoid weekend crowds and partly because it was raining. If the Vatican itself doesn't strike the fear of God in you, imagine being there amidst thunder and lightning and torrential rain. And then imagine emerging to the clouds opening up to a dynamic and Renaissance sky ready to frame a descending angel or two. Yea.
We walked through the museum and sat in awe in the Sistine Chapel, Sprinted through the rain for a quick lunch break at a small pizzeria, and then returned to spend an hour dwarfed by the Basilica which is the most amazing dichotemy of GIANT and yet intimate-feeling.

We both agreed that dinner needed to be Chinese. Why? you ask. Why would we crave Chinese in Rome, one of the very centers of Italian cuisine? Well, for one, I can eat more Chinese food than I can Italian food, for another, Alana lives in Italy and gets this all the time and finally, you just can't explain cravings. Also, a sit down, two course Chinese meal for 7 euro each? Quite fine, thank you very much!! Plus they gave us these little key chain-y things instead of fortune cookies!!!

And today, forecast: hopefully not rainy. Docket? ruins and the ancient Romans. The Colosseum, the Forum, The Pantheon etc.
Avanti!!!

2008-11-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

To put all of that previous babbling behind us, to distract you from my own political musings and public hashing-out of my own thoughts and to celebrate this historic moment in history, this is for you:

Maya Angelou

I've watch people on TV sobbing with joy at Obama's election, I've heard that his speech brought many to tears, but I've never imagined myself crying because of politics. Ms. Angelou drew the first tear from my eye, not only with her amazing, eloquent and powerful words, but also with the entirety of her personal history and national importance. It shouldn't be shocking that her words in conversation carry as much emotion and meaning as any poem, she is a great American writer.

And I am fully and completely inspired by her.

Unfortunatley, the floodgate have been opened and I start sobbing like a baby every time I read something about "a new chapter in history" or "a monumental and historical event" or "a long awaited change." I mean, something JUST. HAPPENED. Just now, and even the cynic in me is helpless to it's overwhelming historical significance. This is going to be in the history books, not just 20 years from now, but hundreds of years from now.

Someone please get me a tissue.

Let's get political (yes, I do believe that I am the first person EVER to make that play on words, thankyouverymuch!)

2008-11-05T07:27:00.000-08:00

Apparently, We actually Can.

And I have some thoughts on this (as per usual).
I've been reading articles all morning about the way that this election has brought people together. They are saying that in line to vote people had a very "we" mentality vs. a "me" mentality (Link
And apparently voter turnout was ridiculously high. (I heard that in Connecticut, it was almost 98% turnout!)
Wasn't it just a few years ago that turnout was almost at an all-time low?

So what is going on with our country? I mean, as far as I can tell, this election was so deeply divided between red and blue, it could have been gang warfare. I mean seriously, I'm sure wearing a certain color tie has become, in the grown-up world, pretty much the same as wearing the wrong color bandanna. I know that around here, if you support McCain, getting bitch-slapped is the least of your worries.

I think I have to believe that this transcendence and this complete and utter obsession with politics that our country has shown is the result of a deep, aching need for a change. I mean a real change. Something that will turn our country around, something that will bring us out of financial crisis, something that will end the sickening stalemate of stupidity that we call a war, something that will end the distrust of the government, of our protectors, that has seeped into all pores and corners of our nation.

And honestly? I think either candidate would have brought about that change. They are both moderate enough and both understand the current situation of the people of the United States well enough to publicly address their needs and make the changes that need to be made. But this wasn't an issue-election the way the last two elections were. I mean, I don't follow politics like I should, but the issues really fell into the background. I have no idea where Obama stands on abortion. I don't know what McCain thinks of illegal immigration. But I do know that they both have what it takes to regain international credibility and respect for the United States. And that's what I think really mattered in this election, and I also think that's why there was such a sudden interest and... passion, for the political "now" of our country.

I hate to say it, because it sounds cynical, but we were voting for a figurehead, and that's a lot easier for people to understand than the issues. Just look at why so many people voted for Bush - he seemed like a guy you could sit down and have a beer with. Well, thankfully we realized that running a country like you're drunk is no way to deal with the lives of millions of people. Just look at who we could vote for this year - two heroes. I mean, serious heroes. McCain is a war hero, and just by running Obama became a hero to every minority group in the country, and I'm including women here. And it's obvious in the way they talk.

And that's why I think people could transcend party lines while in the midst of a deeply divided election - because either way it would end up the change that we all needed.
That's also why I think voter-turnout was high, especially with that problem group - the youth, people knew they were taking part in something big, something historical and at the same time were still aware of the importance of participating as one person in a divided election.

So we're finally fully aware of out right and responsibility to vote as US citizens. We finally care about what's going on in our world. We finally have a leader who is inspiring and welcomed with open arms by the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY. (Seriously, I was looking at the latest Reuter's headlines, it's all "Leaders of Europe hail Obama victory" "Asia offers warm welcome to Obama")

So what happens now?
I mean we've put so much into this election, where is it all going to go? They tell me that I missed the most amazing night in Berkeley since the 60's. (I told them to stop making me jealous, that wasn't fair.) Apparently there were so many people on telegraph that cars were trapped, people were crowd surfing and fireworks were going off. From my early-morning sources, I hear that Santa Cruz was similar. Well, fantastic! I'm so happy to see my nation celebrating a political victory. But where is all that energy going to go?

The world is not going to change over night. We have not been magically transported back into the era of political fervor that was the 60's, activism doesn't work the same way today. I mean, Obama doesn't become president tomorrow. He's not going to have the troops out of Iraq for his inauguration party. And the economy is not going to miraculously recover as part of the celebration. It's going to take a lot of work. The dark days are still ahead of us, and I think many people don't really understand this. I think we've all been dazzled by the idea of change, that we're still seeing stars. But those are going to fade, and fade fast, and we'll be left with the same sights we had before.

Yea. It's going to take a long time. I support Obama for many reasons, my primary reason is, in fact his inexperience. He has the intelligence to surround himself with more experienced people, but hopefully some of that naivety will help pull us out of the same system that we have been dealing with for years. The world is changing, we need to too.

But there are a lot of other reasons that he scares me. Even before being elected president, he had the highest guard of any president in the history of the United States. He is a black president in a country where there still is racism, not matter how hard we pretend it's not there. I'm thankful that he chose Joe Biden as his running mate because there is a very real chance that Obama could get killed. Also, I worry for what is going to how public opinion of him is going to change when the stars fade out of our eyes. We expect great things, amazing things. We anticipate a period of drastic change and rapid regeneration of the dead limbs of our society. It's not going to happen like that and when it doesn't, I worry that people will blame Obama. I mean, society doesn't understand how politics works, society judges by what we see in the media and we judge by whatever is happening in the moment. We can't know what is going on behind the scenes. Will we become complacent and bored again? Or is this really a change?

Yes We Did, but what will we do now?

I, for one, am going to go have a margarita. Happy cinco de noviembre everyone!!!
(Do you have any idea what the "mexican food" is like here? We had to get together a celebration to cook and remember. Though... no one else is from California, right? So when I said "tacos" they went "ground beef!" and I went "oy..." I'll just have to continue dreaming about my steak tacos with onions and cilantro for another month and a half.)

Karma is a bitch.

2008-11-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

So all today I was like "hey loosers in America, I'm going to see the new James Bond movie because it's already out here! Oh wait, you can't see it until November 22? That sucks! Haha!"
I mean I would seek people out, like, just to taunt them. (Sorry Dad, Malcolm)
And then a friend of mine is like "oh! you're going to see the Bond movie? I'm going with a bunch of friends at 6:45. Meet you there?"
And I'm like psyched to go with a big group.
But when I met with my friend she was all "Hey, so Burn After Reading starts at 9:30, ready?"
And I was like "Wait, not Bond?"
And she goes "Oh my god! You wanted to see the Bond movie!? Oh my god, I got confused, sorry!"
And then I'm all "That's okay." Because I generally avoid conflict.

So we get down to the theater at 9. There's a 9:15 showing of the Bond movie, but I don't say anything, right? Because she wants to see Burn After Reading.
But we couldn't have switched anyhow because I guess all the Bond tickets sold out while we were in line or something I guess? Because the man announced it. Whatever.

So then we buy our tickets, and I get really excited for a soda and candy, except by the time I get through the candy line I've finished my soda. Great. Plus, the candy sucked.
So now I feel sick because of all the sugar?

PLUS! Burn After Reading? Like, SO not a comedy. I mean it's the Coen brothers right, so I should have known, like. I mean we just sat there for like 5 minutes afterward going "What?... I mean, what? ... wait, that was SO not a comedy!"

I mean, it wasn't bad or anything. I mean, it's the Coen brothers so it's brilliant. But. I mean. But.

So there. So I didn't see the Bond movie yet. So you can all go off and buy your bootleg copies of it and be all "Oh Maggie, guess what? We saw the Bond movie without you again! It was fantastic! Oh my god, I want to tell you about this part where... Oh! I shouldn't! But it's SOOO GOOD!!!"

Oh there is hate oozing out of my pores right now.

Karma? You're on my list.

OH! EXCEPT! EXCEPT! I FORGOT!!!!
Watching John Malcovich say (pardon my language) "fuck" was probably the highlight of my week. Just something about the way he says it, the way his face moves and contorts is just genius!

Things to Know

2008-10-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

So you wanna study in Ireland? Well, there are two things you need to know if you are an American thinking of studying in, moving to or even just visiting Ireland.

1) Every foreign girl is hoping to live the movie P.S. I Love You. She is on the look out for a charming Irish musician who will steal her heart and sweep her off her feet for deep and passionate (if short-lived) true love.
2) Every foreign boy is hoping to live the song "Galway Girl" and get knocked completely senseless by a lithe, enchanting Irish girl.

And I knew right then,
As I gave her a twirl
That I'd lost my heart to a Galway Girl.

Adieu, Adieu, To you and you and you

2008-10-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

And so fair readers, I bid you adeiu.
I thought perhaps my last brush of death on this trip would be my run-in with a pregnant horse. Alas, I was wrong.

For today is the first day of the Halloween weekend, and I, frail and sick, fear that I may not survive.

For the past week I have been basking in the excuse of being sick - sleeping in, staying in my pyjamas (I'll spell it whichever way I want to thank you very much), watching movies. And although I don't deny that the sick part has been absolutely horrible, the results have been glorious.

But today, today it all ends. Today I must sally forth. I have woken early, far earlier than I have since last Saturday, to prepare myself. I join my friends in town in exactly an hour to go shopping for costume accoutrement, and by the time we return, I will have less than 8 hours to create, prepare, dress and go.

For this is the start of the Halloween weekend! And it shall be a grand weekend! Pre-Halloween parties, the night itself and then post-Halloween parties. 3 full nights of revelry and mischief, oh how I love the Halloween season.

But I weep for the loss of a more innocent time. A time when I went to sleep at 9 pm and woke at noon. A time when afternoon naps were plentiful and sweet. Yes, I mourn the loss of last week (literally), and the peace I found then. But my mourning SHALL NOT! Shall NOT! hinder my Halloween activities! I SHALL celebrate with all due excitement.

and so, fair readers, from Here, go I. And with luck and through miracles, I shall survive, even in my weakened and fragile state. And with that luck and through those miracles, I shall come out victorious and return to you, my fair and gentle readers.

Thus, I bid you adieu.

On the Social and Cultural importance of Slut-O-Ween

2008-10-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

An Introduction:

"Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (Irish pronunciation: [ˈsˠaunʲ]; from the Old Irish samain).^[1] The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes ^[2] regarded as the "Celtic New Year".^[3] Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them."

Thank you Wikipedia.

For some, Halloween is a time of revelry, a time of imagination, of sugary reward, fantastic costumes and of harmless trickery. For others it is a time of pint-sized monsters terrorizing perfectly peaceful neighborhoods, forced generosity and an overabundance of mis-used eggs.

And then there are those for whom Halloween is a golden opportunity to unleash amply assisted décolletage and generally show some - a lot - of leg.
It is for these, these intrepid, these courageous, some may say shameless, masses, that the powers that be have coined the term "Slut-o-Ween." (Personally, I believe that said powers were scraping the barrel a bit with that one. I mean, did no one throw out "Hoochie-ween?" Because "slut-o-ween" sounds like "slut-machine" which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Halloween.)

Slut-O-Ween. The time of year when feminists, mothers and the traditionalists come together and take up arms against the sinful, evil and carnal display of flesh, crying out in dismay at the racks of costumes for women which all seem to have been misplaced from the little girl's section and been re-labled with the word "sexy." The time of year when the spirits of the dreams of every middle-aged pervert, whose "gentleman's magazines" are anything but (n/p), manifest themselves in high heels. The time of year when there is more twisting of the word "trick" than there has been since 1936. The time of year when we question the sexualization of the next generation's prostitots and when we discuss the limits and constraints on female sexuality in society.

But are we missing the point? Does Slut-o-Ween serve a bigger and more important purpose than to open the arena of discussion on social topics that we'd all just rather avoid during the rest of the year? I say yes, yes! Yes with raised arms and a heroic and faraway look in my eyes!

Don't get me wrong. I don't advocate slut-o-ween for my own selfish purposes. I am not one of those brave saviors who strut about in their heels and tiny armor. I am far too much of a perfectionist with my costumes to wear high heels if it is not perfectly authentic. (One year, as the waitress on the American Graffiti poster, I wore roller-skates. Ginger Rodgers may have done everything Fred Astaire did, except in heels, but she never tried to go trick-or-treating in roller-skates. Let me tell you.) In fact, I usually look down upon the armies of Slut-o-Ween with disdain, because it's really not original if you and every other girl out on Halloween is dressed like a hooker.

(You'd think I've also dressed as Mother Theresa one year, from the way I'm preaching, but in fact, I have not.)

But this year, I was forced to re-think this judgment. Fear not Gentle Reader, for I am not attempting to defend said women for selfish reasons; I am not becoming one of them. However, my experience abroad has, as is to be expected, broadened my horizons. It began with a logical explanation for the short skirts and high heels, and then morphed (with the help of the web of wikipedia) to a completley new perspective and respect on and for Slut-o-Ween.

See, what I could never understand back home was the pressure that the nightclub scene puts on women. In most clubs, you get turned away for not wearing appropriate (read: high, pointy and painful) shoes. And once you've transitioned to the club scene, you've obviously left the trick-or-treating scene. The modern purpose of one's costume is no longer to impress generous neighbors into giving you more candy. The modern purpose of one's costume is to continue to celebrate a holiday intended for all, not just children, while simultaneously impressing the bouncers to let one into the club. So here where I start to think that maybe we can see Slut-o-Ween, not as an excuse to dress risque, but as a coming together of normal going-out attire and the spirit and celebration of Halloween.

And then here's where I really start thinking. If the modern purpose of a Halloween costume involves inappropriate clothes in appropriate settings, then what was the traditional purpose of the Halloween costume again?
Aha! Thanks to wikipedia we learn that it is to "mimic and placate the evil spirits."
Well then. Are not the armies of hoochie-ween doing just that? Embodying the sinful, evil and carnal spirits? And if these are some of the most dangerous spirits threatening our youth today, are not these women taking up the front line on Halloween, protecting young girls and teaching them to defend themselves against capture by the true evil spirits? I, for one, believe that they are doing such a fine and accurate job of mimicking said spirits, that the rest of us needn't worry.
With such mighty warriors roaming the streets of every city that celebrates Halloween, I believe I shall feel quite safe on Hallowe'en night when the boundary between this, our world, and that of the underworld fades away.

For the record, I plan on dressing as a shark one night and the Absinthe Fairy the next night. Because, among a large group of American teenagers who are, shall we say, overexcited at the prospect of easy access to the fabled green liquor, I should think that the Green Fairy will really need some placating. And I will be more than happy to fight the good fight (especially if it's an excuse to not drink the stuff. I hate licorice.)
Plus, I'm really excited to dress up like a fairy again...

Flashes of Understanding

2008-10-21T03:28:00.000-07:00

I have, lately in my life, been feeling disappointed by the big choices I have made. Not in any life-shattering way, but to be sure, there is a general aura of quiet disappointment. It's been elusive and hard to define and has left me questioning my happiness and the way in which I define the same.
But today I have had, as I often do, a sudden moment of understanding. Apparently, W.B. Yeats and myself are two of the same.

As Seamus Deane once said of the great poet: “Yeats began his career by inventing an Ireland amenable to his imagination. He ended by finding an Ireland recalcitrant to it.”

And thus is the lonely, disappointing life of an idealist.
I chose to go to UC Berkeley because I expected to find people full of life and passion who, upon their soap boxes and through their academic endeavors, would call the world to arms, would demand change actively and daily, and would live their lives as fully as possible in every way. I thought I would jump readily into a fight, a surge of change and start making the difference in the world that I wish for. I was so convinced of this, my own invention, that I vowed to go to Berkeley or no other and closed my mind to any other possibilities.
Though I have found a place at Cal and a love for the city of Berkeley, the second half of my first year was strangely depressing. Instead of political fervor and world shaking movements I found a conservative campus that was fully permeated with an competitive obsession with one-up-man academics. I found flailing and floundering movements that lacked logic, direction and the ability to succeed. I failed to find myself among those who were more passionate and more experienced than myself who would take me under their tutelage. And, thus disappointed, I gave up.
I set my sights and hopes on studying abroad. On Ireland. Or, as I have found, on the poetic and literary image of Ireland. The Ireland that I know through the literary revivalists of the turn of the century. The image of Ireland created by nationalists who sought to revive their beloved country and raise her up to be worshiped. The Ireland of mysticism, spirituality, nature and countryside, heroes, and music. The image that was preserved and fiercely guarded by immigrants to protect themselves from the harsh reality of a new country and the troubles of living. The image they passed down to their children which was augmented and enforced by the enchanting music and literature that came from those on the island who also wished to escape raw reality.
And so, wandering pilgrim searching for fulfillment of an ideal, I arrived in Ireland, hoping to find that image of Ireland that is still perpetuated in movies and music today by national pride and patriotic love of the Irish and Irish immigrant descendants alike. Hoping to finally live that dream ideal I've been searching for since the innocent and sweet light of my idyllic childhood was pulled from my by the hands of time.
And I arrived. I arrived in a city. I live in a dorm. I am surrounded by Americans who came looking to drink. I see construction and modernization out my window and wake to it each morning. The only aspects of this city which I expected and hoped for are unappreciated and unnoticed by all, the Irish and the foreign students alike. Who notices the river Lee, eddying beneath the great, sturdy stone bridge and surrounded by blackberry bushes? Who appreciates the sound of footsteps echoing along the painted tile floor of the old church in which I study Irish music? Who wants to admire the old stone buildings up on the hill, smudged with lichen and set in a bed of old growth trees and moss? Who, in a modern world and in a country that has recently pulled itself, literally by its bootstraps, up from poverty, wants to be forever associated with an image of rural, simple and superstitious life?

So I, the ever idealistic wanderer, was dealt a double blow - culture shock/homesickness (which is normal for all) and a disillusionment that crushed my last hope for an idyllic life. But acceptance is the first step to recovery. And I am beginning to pick up the pieces with a new understanding.
My love of travel stems from the security in spending short periods of time in a place. I mean, if I never spend more than a week in one place, I will always be in the awestruck honeymoon stage and will never have to accept the brutal reality that has always disappointed me. But I can't always be on the move. I can be as active as I want, but at some point, I have to face reality, I can't keep running forever hoping that by the time I stop, I will have gained the knowledge and experience to deal with the feeling of being jaded. Which is impossible, of course.

And so today, I see Ireland with new eyes. It is not what I expected, it is not what I hoped for. But at the same time, I know I am lucky (which also tends to happen). Although I am not living every part of my life here the way I expected, I can still find it. The one aspect of Irish society which is true to my imagination is the music. That expected love of traditional music, and the image of the twisting lilting strains twining themselves around the bottles and out the door of small pubs is true. It can be found, even in this modern city in which I live. That, is exactly what I pictured and wanted. So it's lucky I came here to study Irish music, huh?

Yesterday, I arrived back in Cork and for the first time in a month, I felt at home. Not just in my room where all my stuff embraces me daily, and not just in my apartment with its places and things I know and understand by now. I feel at home in the city. It's not yet a comfortable home, but it was the only feeling of belonging than I've had so far. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed here, all I can think about is the places and things I love back home. I have a mental list of things I want to do when I get home. But last night when I sat down to write it out (I was in a list writing mood), I couldn't quite think of any. I mean, of course there are places I'd like to go, and things I'd like to do, but the yearning that I'd felt for them earlier was gone. I've ceased longing to go home and have started longing to become a part of this city and this country and to make the most of my time here.

Is this just part of the cycle of culture shock? Is it Mercury coming out of retrograde and FINALLY letting me live my life again? I don't know. I don't care. But if you want to come visit me in the next two months, I'd love to show you around my current home.
(My Ireland. The River Lee, Cork City and the hills beyond.)

(I bet I can use some of that for my final English essay on the literature of Modern Ireland..."We're all searching for that ideal identity...")

Praha pirahnas.

2008-10-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

Oh Prague.

How do I begin?

We started our journey on Wednesday afternoon to arrive at the Dublin airport at 11 pm for a 7 am flight because the first bus into the Dublin airport is at 7 am. And let me tell you, the phrase "this is a security warning. Do not leave your bags unattended. Unattended bags will be seized and may be destroyed" will haunt my dreams.

The Dublin airport at night is like a battlefield littered with the bodies of the casualties of inefficient planning and/or transportation systems. And in the true anarchical style of a battlefield, the hierarchy of comfy sleeping spots is based on time and experience. Though, it does depress me to see a 50+ year old man who is so used to traveling for business that he knows to bring a sleeping bag with him to the airport so he can hang his coat and shoes over the back of the chair that he has staked out since 9 pm. And the victorious authority stomps through the field in their garish vests and Doc Martins demanding passports of the huddled masses who are only desperate for sleep. And those Starbucks workers who can weasel bits of power for themselves abuse it and lord it over us lowly homeless. I mean, since when does he get to decide that everyone has to wake up at 4 am?

By the time we could check in and go through security, I almost understood the stupidity of whoever tried to bring the half-full bottle of Jack Daniels that was sitting on top of the security x-ray machine. I mean really, did they think they could get that through? And yet, and yet...

By the time our plane took off for Prague, we had been traveling for 12 hours, and had slept for a sporadic 3. Little did we know that this would be a pattern for the weekend.

Day 1 was spent checking into our quintessential YOUTH hostel, getting our bearings, eating and napping.
Night 1 consisted of learning the extent of the quintessentialness of said YOUTH hostel which put on a pub crawl. Imagine a group of youth travelers, mostly Australian and American (including Canadian) carousing through the streets of Prague under the direction of the hostel's management, who were of the exact same mind. Let's just say that the description of what the pub crawl's cost included the word "unlimited."

And oh the stars did converge and conspire against me that night.
Mostly, I blame Absinthe, which is a fascination for many, even a "jaded" bartender like myself who hates licorice and only tasted it for the shock value.

For Prague, I can say this: considering how absolutely awful I felt the next day, and I'm talking full-day recovery feeling sick, tired, mortified (the last mainly when I realized how much the taxi driver had charged me/ripped me off) and just generally shitty, I still loved Prague.

We spent Day 2 seeing the city, and literally traveling. We walked. A lot.
The girls I traveled with were all nice, but I do believe that a big part of the experience depends on who you are with. Lets put it this way: without any self-pity, I was always the one on the far side of the picture. We were all just different kinds of people and travel differently. We saw everything on the Prague to-do list, but it was in a markedly different way than I would have under other circumstances. For example, I'm not big on shopping and spending money, but we stopped at -literally- every store that sold pashminas. By the end of the 2nd day we knew which stores had the cheapest ones. And by the end of our last day there, the shopkeepers were saying "oh! back again?!" I mean, between 6 girls we bought 59 pashminas. (I did not buy 59 pashminas, I bought significantly less. I didn't even buy the average 9.83 pashminas. But I did contribute to the number...) An experience I never thought I'd have, but I did. And it was fun.

But it was fantastic traveling in Prague with them because they have friends studying in Prague, and as a group we had a fantastic time going out at night.
Prague nightlife is amazing, even when you decide that it's going to be significantly more tame than your first night there was. I think at one point the plan was to stay up to see the sunrise over the Charles Bridge on Sunday night, but we accidentally almost did that on Saturday night instead when one girl (who had to leave a day early) looked at her watch and went "hey, guys, can we go now? It's like 5 am, and I have to be at the airport in 2 hours."

We never actually saw the sunrise in Prague, that'll be on my list for next time I'm in Prague (because I am definitely going back.)

On our final day, we realized that we'd already covered all the big Prague things: the castle, the cathedral, a couple of old famous squares, the Charles bridge, the big tower, eaten a sausage from a sausage cart, bought pashminas, etc. All that was left was the Jewish cemetery (which was closed because it was Sunday), a little craft market and the Communist museum. Which, by the way, the Communist museum, though fascinating, seemed to be sending mixed messages to my sleep-deprived brain. Pro-communist propaganda from back in the day sat alongside descriptions and explanations that had a very blatantly anti-communist slant. But the poster was of one of those nesting dolls, except it has fangs, which is just awesome!

Dinner was... well, hilarious. First we went to this place where the waiter was so outright rude and hostile, that we got up an left right after he took our order. But then we ended up in it's polar opposite where all the wait staff joked with us and teased us in a friendly way, calling us their "angels" and bringing us complementary appetizers. At one point I asked for ketchup for my fries and they brought me mustard, which I meekly accepted until one of the other girls, called the waiter over and asked for the "red one." So he brought over Tabasco sauce. Finally, with most of the wait staff and some of the kitchen staff poking their heads around the corner and trying to stifle giggles, he triumphantly brought over a dinner plate with a small dollop of ketchup in the middle. Oh they were so nice.

It was interesting going to a country that I knew next to nothing about (except that it is "an amazing city" which everyone seems to have to say when they refer to Prague). I had few expectations, and had no idea what I wanted to see. But with everything bad that happened, over spending, horrible hangovers, I still loved Prague. I still had a fantastic time. And I want to go back. Well, really I need to go back now that I know what I really want to do and see and how I want to experience the city. It was an amazing city.

And coming from me? That's saying something.

green monster

2008-10-10T03:22:00.000-07:00

So I woke up with a red streak on my arm and one of my fingernails and thought "OH my god! I'm bleeding! Where? Where?"
And then I realized it was just pasta sauce from my late-night second dinner a few hours ago.

Silly girl.

I found out a further disadvantage that comes with a dairy intolerance: it's called aftershock. Allow me to elaborate.
I went on a pub crawl last night with one of my roommate's and her friend. Fantastic girls, so nice. Well, after Bullmers, they were all feeling full and so decided to do a couple of shots instead. So they asked the bartender to make us a shot of something awesome but sweet. With no tequila. Alright fine. So he pours peach schnapps into shot glasses and then starts to float Baileys on top. I can't drink Baileys because of the dairy. Oh, okay. So he turns around and grabs this other bottle and pours out this clear, electric green shot. It looked like liquid green jell-o. Yum, right? (well. actually, I don't really like Jell-o, but eh.) 1 - 2 - 3 and down! Whoo! Strong! Oh my god. it's licorice flavored. I hate licorice. UGH! Aah! Usch! The bartender grins. "Strong, eh?" Um yea. Strong and gross. But I just smile "jeeze, strong!?! That was ridiculous!"

you know when you give a dog peanut butter and he sits there sticking his tongue to the roof of his mouth and then pulling it off repeatedly? That was me for the next 15 minutes trying to get that god-awful taste out of my mouth. There is definitely a reason that it's called "aftershock."

And to think the other girls got peach schnapps and Baileys.

it is, indeed a cruel world.