updatez yo

September 2^nd, 2010 – 4:10 p.m.

As I was typing out the date for this blog entry, my initial instinct was to write “August” instead of “September”. It’s crazy how time flies. I can’t believe that I’ve been here a whole month. Conversely, being in Irvine – in the midst of my normal routine – work at Peet’s, going to school, socializing… those things feel incredibly far away. I like where I am now. I am finally settled in. I love it here.

Liz and I went into town today. We had to get geared up in our ponchos. When we left at 5:30, it was still dark outside and raining heavily. The hike down to the river wasn’t bad; however, once we got there, chaos ensued. It was over waist deep on me and incredibly fast. It had thundered and rained all night, and the state of the river was proof. It was muddy and impossible to see where the smooth stepping rocks were. I decided to go barefoot. I knew that the tops of my boots wouldn’t come close to clearing the river’s surface. So, I eventually had to crawl across the river bed on the tops of the smoother rocks. The water was still up to my back – I had to keep my laptop dry. It was in my backpack. I knew the current was strong because even Liz had trouble crossing. We both made it though. I was soaked from chest down. Luckily, I brought a small towel and a change of shoes, so I wouldn’t have to slosh all day in my boots.

The bus ride was unusually crowded. It could have been that the farmer’s market was that day, I’m not entirely sure.

We got into town and stopped at the bread shop. I had a roast beef sandwich for breakfast. It hadn’t even cleared 7 a.m. and I was already feeling carnivorous. My body thanked me for the protein, but protested heavily later. It’s strange when you get accustomed to living without something you used to have all the time. The meat and dairy in this sandwich totally fucked with my stomach. Regardless, it was delicious and worth it. I needed the energy.

Liz and I stopped for coffee before heading to the internet café. It was so nice just to sit and enjoy a cup of joe – like old times. It lead us to a lot of reminiscing about work. I miss living in coffee shops and having a secret posse of friends and intellectuals who frequent our favorite hangouts. It’s funny – I could have gone to any Peet’s in Irvine or Tustin at any given time and hung out with someone I cared about.

Anyway, grocery shopping was fun. Absolut mandarin was on sale. 7,000 colones for a bottle. A steal! (Not really.) I had to get it. I’m going to make some amazing cocktails tonight. After Liz and I got home, we hung out for awhile and decided to work out at our yoga platform. The yoga platform is this crazy wooden deck that  stands separately about an acre up from the farm house. It has a thatched roof covered with banana leaves and is completely open otherwise. This is where we do our routine. There is also an amazing bench made entirely of branches that sits at the back of it – I put on music and we are good to go. The view overlooks the whole valley. Today, we saw a flock of toucans above us in one of the taller trees. Liz abruptly informed me by exclaiming “Toucans!” and reached out to touch my shoulder. She, instead, accidentally cupped my breast. I almost died laughing. The birds were magical  – almost as magical as the instant I caught Liz groping me by “accident”.  The toucans were a shiny oil-slick black with large red-and-yellow banana beaks. They also had little flecks of white beneath their eyes. They were beautiful! We also saw a flock of parakeets fly by. Liz got a better look at them than I did, but they were a bright neon green with pink around their beaks and on their chests. It was seriously like seeing something from a dream – or a textbook illustration – come to life.

My workout playlist was shamefully awesome. Some of the all-stars present at the event included Kanye, Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, Nine Inch Nails, and Common. Terrifying, I know. I enjoyed every minute of it. So, we were in the middle of sweating out our routine when gold digger by Kanye West came on. It is such a guilty pleasure. Anyway, we both immediately stopped what we were doing, grabbed the sides of the platform, and started getting low. We were dancing with each other –grinding rather – when we heard “hola!” uttered behind us. There was Wilburth, one of the local part-time workers, on top of his horse. He was smiling and laughing at us. We were mortified, but we couldn’t stop giggling rambunctiously. Liz was wearing only a sports bra and short shorts – I’m fairly certain that my bra was hanging out of my tank top. Classy. He asked us how town was (I had left him a note earlier) and we told him it was good. He let me know his work hours for the day and then said he’d see us later. As embarrassed as we were, I think it kind of brought us closer to him in a strange way. The language barrier between him and I has been difficult, but he’s been patient. Since he saw us just being people instead of struggling to communicate, it felt like a kind of relief.

After that, a breeze blew through the platform. I closed my eyes, lifted my arms, and began to pretend to meditate.  Then, Liz started navigating my poses through the most amazing yoga instructor voice ever. I thought she was reciting this from somewhere, but no. She was just pulling it out of her ass. Incredible. Then, I decided it would be a good idea to show her some yoga poses that I remembered from the class I took before I left. This ended with both of us on the ground doing the “happy baby,” laughing hysterically, and completely unable to get up. I almost pissed myself after Liz suggested that it should be the name of a sex position.

Same day – 7:17 p.m.

I am trashed. Liz and I have been listening to music and singing at the top of our lungs. Berkeley would pose the following question – If two gringa girls are wailing in the rainforest, do the trees hate them? Well, maybe it wouldn’t be that sentence verbatim. For the evening, I have lost any semblance of eloquence I previously had.  Regardless, I made an epic badass playlist. It is so schizophrenic. Here are some of the random bands that emerged (in alphabetical order of course): aerosmith, afro man, air supply, al green, america, arcade fire, aretha franklin, bb king & muddy waters, the beach boys, the beastie boys, the beatles, billy idol, billy joel (the two most important billys in the history of music), the black keys, black sabbath, blink 182, blue oyster cult, bob dylan, bob marley, boston, britney spears, cake, cash and dylan, cat stevens, christina aguilera, the clash, coldplay, the cranberries, creedence clearwater revival, dashboard confessional, dave matthews, david bowie, the doors, the eagles, ella fitzgerald, elton john, fiona apple, the flaming lips, foreigner, frank sinatra, gnarls barkley, ghetto boys, goo goo dolls, heart, jefferson airplane, the kooks, the kinks, led zeppelin (DUH!), lily allen, ludacris, mamas and the papas, manu chao, marvin gaye, nancy sinatra, the nails, the pixies, the police, the ramones, rod stewart, the rolling stones…. AND IT IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS! This is the most self-indulgent playlist I’ve ever made. It doesn’t help that I’m completely hammered right now. I don’t know how I’m forming coherent sentences.

Right now: I am singing (screaming) along to black sabbath while liz is reading nabokov and petting the cat (that isn’t a euphemism this time – just wait until we’re in bed together). life, quite honestly, doesn’t get much better. I just misspelled the word better and I wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for spell check. I don’t know how hemingway did it. He wrote drunk all the time and he never had spell check. To be fair, it isn’t for my lack of expertise – I am just physically impaired at the moment. My fingers keep tripping upon each other. My favorite quote by hemingway: “Write drunk, edit sober.” I don’t care that he was a misogynist or that his writing was overrated most of the time. I still love hemingway. I’m just glad I grew out of him being one of my favorite authors. There is only so much you can get out of brevity – there is a certain artifice to embellished prose. Hemingway is the favorite author of people who read occasionally but don’t actually love literature.

Unless you like being caught. In a boat. In the rain. With a scotch. And your sorrow. And your many women. And a shotgun. And sparse unclear dialogue.

“I’d rather not,” she said.

“But, it would be better.”

“How?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

OH GOD. A GIGANTIC moth just landed on my finger. I just thought I’d share. It disrupted me from having to write this ridiculously meager dialogue in emulation of hemingway. I’m not a chauvinist, so it isn’t cute anymore.

On an unrelated but fundamentally related note, Liz has been making a joke related to anal sex about everything. I crack up every time. (haha! CRACK up? GET IT?!?) See the following example. This occurred in the middle of a tear-jerking, heart-wrenching intimate conversation:

“I’ve never had a friend who I feel I could share all aspects of my life with – Even anal.” –  Liz Proctor.

Wow. Someone should ban me from writing right now. Don’t drink and write. It sucks though for the following reason: I made several rules for this blog, the main one being that I wouldn’t revise anything. I wanted it to be as organic and unconstructed as possible. (Well, I am on an organic farm – HEY-OOOH!) If I find typos and grammatical errors later (which, of course , don’t exist – I am the most pedantic, pretentious, well-read bitch you’ll ever meet) I leave them. Probably the most painful experience of my life. Yeah, did you see that last one? That was an INCOMPLETE SENTENCE. I can break the rules because I make the rules.

I just went outside to pee and remembered, as I was squatting, that I’m in a rainforest. I basically couldn’t be happier with my life right now. I am ripped. I live in the jungle. I hack away with a machete by day – I read endlessly by midday – I write and drink by night. Liz, the only person on the face of the earth who could put up with me for six months, is here. My boyfriend has a goddamn plane ticket and passport to be here in a month. If I were to look at this moment of my life from the vantage point of a year ago, I couldn’t even conceptualize it as being real. I’m one fucking happy camper.

Anyway, enough of my drunken narcissism. I’m going to go read some philosophy and listen to bob dylan and fucking be a pretentious hippy while I’m inebriated. You need a better image to envision my situation? Well, I will most certainly be naked, gnawing on organic vegetables, and relishing in the regrowth of my leg hair. PURA VIDA, BITCHES!

On a side note: Liz knows every word to the song “Fighter” by Christina Aguilera. Oh, the things you learn in captivity.

September 3^rd,2010 – 6:45 p.m.

So, I originally wrote this next entry as an academic paper (but not for a class…just for fun). It had sources cited, correct formatting, and it wasn’t in first person. It was pleasantly dense, fervently impenetrable, and pedantic ad infinitum. I decided since I was posting it here, I had to revamp it to make it more entertaining. Many of the arguments, however, are still the same. My main inspirations for creating this were the writings of Adorno, Dufourmantelle, Derrida, Zizek, Marx, and Baudrillard. Oh and also (mainly) a conversation I had with my mother. I couldn’t see straight for two days after she told me that she started reading the “philosophy” of Deepak Chopra. She then said that she thought it was amazing how you could “change your very DNA by just thinking positive,” [sic]. Anyway. Enough.

I hate self-help books. I detest “how-to” guides claiming to map out the way to spiritual enlightenment. Any manual that peddles “fast-and-easy secrets” to wealth, love, heath, or happiness is only geared toward morally and intellectually defective human beings. This genre’s arbitrary self-granted  title as modern “philosophy” or “metaphysics” is a complete misnomer. Philosophy finds its etymological history in the love of wisdom. True philosophy is self-declared as the science of being. It simultaneously and conversely imagines spiritual education as its vocation while righting itself into a logic of propositions. Philosophy spent centuries competing with science for the right to produce objective knowledge of the world. Regrettably, philosophy became out-dated in its attempt to comprehend the laws that govern the world – in trying to determine what animates the human soul. In the face of the hard sciences, philosophy became regarded as a pedantic and clandestine discipline; therefore, completely ignored within the realm of “common” knowledge. It still lingers on the periphery of human understanding and is barely kept alive by interminably inquisitive individuals. Philosophy, from its very origins, has represented the ceaseless contemplation of the mind in exile. Although the popularity of the classics is waning, many of the modern books scattered amidst the “philosophy” section are far from being adequate successors. Gleaming airbrushed images of overly contented authors grace the glossy covers of their brightly bound books. Their bleached out smiles and assertive postures beckon the weary wanderer to open them and discover the secrets within. They project empty promises of affluence, of vitality, of endless contentment. Superficially, the aim of these books does not seem far from that of philosophical tradition. They beg to provide dialogues on meaning – on the recognition of truth – all self-directed; just as contemplation should be expanded through the circular motion of discourse. These shelves, however, are laden with vacuous simulacra that are merely marketed as meaningful. The sole secret to wealth hidden within this relatively new genre – popularized by Phil Mcgraw, Oprah, and others – is revealed through their promotion of “self-help” literature as a fundamental necessity. These books consist purely of generalized thoughts and pithy mantras aimed at the complete commodification of self-directed “well being”. Needless to say, I absolutely abhor pop philosophy; especially Deepak Chopra.

Chopra has made an extremely successful living as an endocrinologist-turned-spiritual guru. He has written about the relationship between quantum physics and healing. He has speculated openly and freely about the origins of life on earth. My personal favorite: Chopra has argued that a strategic move towards establishing peace in the middle east would be to open a branch of Disneyland. I don’t even need to invoke Baudrillard’s description of Disneyland to make the ridiculousness of this statement apparent. As a non sequitur, If you’re interested in some fantastically nihilistic post-modern Marxist theory– consult Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. Anyway, Chopra is described on the cover of his latest book as “India’s greatest living writer and ambassador of culture.” I am not an expert on Indian literature, but I can easily imagine that there are many living Indian authors who have far more merit and credibility than he does. Jhumpa Lahiri, anyone? Quite frankly, Chopra is a 21^st century charlatan – he has turned metaphysical “cures” and paths to “enlightenment” into commodities. He does this by parading under the guise of being a “philosopher.” He projects the image of an enlightened, exotic, eastern “metaphysician” who dazzles the ignorant west with his seemingly “inspired” and “mystical” ideas. Honestly, I’m offended.

As I said previously, philosophy originally represented a furtive and cerebral field of discourse vehemently opposed to maintaining the status quo. Now that “metaphysics” have gone mainstream, they merely affirm of commodity relations rather than critiquing or transcending them. Works like Chopra’s sell empty forms of pseudo-individualization. Authors like Chopra essentially achieve what traditional organized religion could not: the complete internalization of domination. These books claiming to sell “enlightenment” merely provide a distortion of consciousness. This obstruction of reality conceals material conditions ad infinitum.

This inane phenomena, however, goes far beyond being demonstrably irrational. The irrationality at work here is not necessarily a force functioning outside the range of rationality. Here, I would understand this imagined “rationality” as the social means for legitimating the contradictions of the contemporary societal system. The “irrationality” of Chopra’s works and similar “mystical” phenomena, and the routine “rationality” of modern society, coincide insofar as they both serve the same social function: the justification and legitimation of the status quo. Fundamentally, the important matter here is how rationality and irrationality coincide. There is a crucial and obvious pattern – the interaction of rational and irrational forces in modern mass movements.

These books keep getting published en masse because they are popular. There is a vast market for them. I can rant as much as I want, but when it comes down to it, they will continue to amass millions of dollars purely from the gullibility of the general public.

Wait, nope, I take it all back. I am becoming a self-help guru. Since misery is unending, and gullibility is ubiquitous, I am going to capitalize on both.

Went to Costa Rica – Found Enlightenment. Here’s a Map! by Jessica Henry. Available wherever books are sold. Only $29.95 for the deluxe hardbound edition with accompanying audio CDs. It even includes a four-foot, fold-out, glossy poster of me naked lying in chicken shit.

As a final note: If you’re looking for spiritual enlightenment, don’t waste your money on self help books. Just take LSD.

September 4^th, 2010 – 3:44 p.m.

As I’m writing this, Liz is making Korean potato pancakes. She is in the kitchen, wearing a thong, listening to Nelly – dancing and singing along to every word. This woman has changed my life. She is a bronze goddess.

We both were feeling kind of lethargic today. We got up early – I went back to bed until 8:30. When I woke up the second time, Liz had already weeded and watered the upper garden. She is superwoman. Then we sat around and read for awhile. Finally, we decided to work out. Liz went on her crazy run while I did my reps and sprinted up a few hills. Enough mundane details – we have both been craving terrible food for days. I haven’t had anything processed in about a month. Last night, we even spent an hour going into details of our personal platonic ideals of the “perfect” hamburger. It was pathetic but also awesome. Well today, to assuage my craving, I decided to make onion rings from scratcg. I figured – we have vegetable oil, flower, onions, eggs, how hard can It be? So, I half-improvised a recipe. I put flower, baking soda, salt, pepper, a little corn meal, and powdered milk in the batter. I didn’t have the tub of “dripping fat” that southerncooking.com had suggested, so I substituted nice and wholesome (HA!) vegetable oil. They were SO GOOD. We also made a new “secret sauce” – Tabasco and soy sauce mixed together. So goddamn delicious. I also made some perfect cocktails from Absolut mandarin with orange and carrot juice. I’m decently buzzed at this point. I still can’t believe I live here. It is surreal just looking out the window.

Yesterday was just as awesome as today. Liz and I hiked down to the river with two empty notebooks and a box of wine. We shared stories for hours! It’s amazing how there is always more that you can learn about someone – regardless of how close you are to them. The best part of the day: she taught me how to skip rocks! She used to go on camping trips with her dad and brothers as a kid every summer, and they would have contests. I had no idea that she was so good at it. Needless to say, I still have a lot of improving to do. I got a couple of them to skip twice, but Liz said her record is 13. After seeing her technique, I believe it. Do not fret: one day, the padowan will surpass the jedi master. I think I’m going to post a “How-to” guide for skipping rocks one of these days – complete with pictures. People need to know! The hike back was SO WET. (Get your minds out of the gutter, children!) I was absolutely drenched two miles later. I also couldn’t tell what was sweat and what was rainwater. I definitely did feel refreshed after though. Somehow, Liz STILL beat me even though she was wearing muddy sandals and I had boots on. So brutal. I have a feeling her high school cross-country days will never leave her. She is perma-fit. It’s okay, being around someone who is incredibly in shape is just more motivation for me to push myself harder. So about those onion rings…

September 7th, 2010 – 8:13 a.m.

Liz and I woke up early today and worked in the greenhouse for awhile. I definitely want to have a nice garden when I “grow up”. It’s really satisfying to see seeds that I have nourished grow and develop into full plants. The eggplants are doing particularly well, and today I transplanted a brandywine tomato seedling. Hopefully it will yield some tomatoes within the next couple weeks. I’ve also become a little obsessed with composting. We have a giant “worm hotel” – these guys really are the shit. They decompose all of our kitchen and garden waste and turn it into rich earth. Add this dark soil to any plant and it will flourish. We even grind up our eggshells and place them near the roots of the plants for added calcium. It’s amazing how everything here is cyclical – nothing is wasted, everything has a purpose. The chickens hatch the eggs which we eat. We then use the shells to nourish the plants that we also eat. We then save the waste from the vegetables to add to compost. Some of the waste, like banana peels, can be fed to the chicken and horses. It’s really liberating learning about ways to escape the whole “consumerist” lifestyle of excess. Meals here are infinitely smaller than in the U.S.;  however, they are so rich with nutrients and vitamins that I never feel like I’m malnourished. They are also completely pesticide free. I wish more people realized how easy it was to incorporate sustainable ways of living into their own lives. Adding weekly kitchen waste to a compost pile, and then starting a small organic vegetable garden would be a fantastic starting point. You can save seeds from anything you eat and replant them. Liz just planted 20 or 30 bell pepper seeds that we saved from dinner the other night.

Now, we’re listening to Abbey Road and Liz is making hash browns. They smell fantastic. It’s a relatively cool morning. The mist is still settled in the hills and the sun is slowly beginning to peek through. The sky looks like light shining through vellum – tranquil but hazy. I love mornings like this. I love the cold heaviness of the humidity. An act as simple as breathing becomes indescribably refreshing.