even the hurricane won't stop me!

October 30th, 2010

I’m sitting here in the hotel and no one else is awake.

I’m not sure if being a habitual morning person is a gift or a curse. Despite the bottle of rum we passed back and forth last night, I still couldn’t sleep in past 5:15. Maybe part of it was the sounds of the city –  the percussion bump of bass, the bassoon truck engines screaming past my open window, the hum of buzzing motorcycles like the crescendo of a string section,  sirens wailing and abrasive like cymbal crashes.

It’s a different piece (peace?) that is played here in the city. I don’t mind it.

We went to Dominical yesterday. It’s a south-sitting beach on the Pacific side of Costa Rica. It’s definitely a tourist town – the gravel main street is flanked by quaint looking bodegas and loud signs in English boasting “Good Prices” and “Hamburgers” and “Surf boards for Rent”. It was a spur of the moment decision. We barely caught the bus in time. It was definitely at least fifteen people over capacity. I had to stand the first twenty minutes. My hands were braced carefully on the overhead bars as we weaved in and out on the mountain roads. My breath mingled with the stale heat and all I could taste was exhaust and the sweat of 60 other passengers.  Six balanced one foot on a seat back and did an elaborate yoga pose for a large portion of the way there. It was incredible. I can only imagine what Ticos must think of us sometimes.

We finally arrived after about an hour. I could tell we were getting closer when the roadside billboards switched from Spanish to only English. All advertisements about real estate – “Own Your Own Piece of Paradise”. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disgusted. The monopolization of the beachside real estate here is basically 21^st century entrepreneurial colonialism. Once I got to the beach though, all of my irritation fell away. I forgot about the loudly talking tourists wandering the streets with their surfboards and beer cans. I had no right to judge; after all, I am one of them. Maybe not as loquacious or conspicuous, but I still am gringa. I don’t belong here anymore than they do. It’s just strange seeing tourists. Where I live, even in the city, we’re always the only Americans. 

The sand was dark and soft. The water was unbelievably warm. Kelly dove in head first. I didn’t plan well, but my lack of swimsuit didn’t stop me from going in after him. I stripped down into my underwear (it was obviously NOT swimsuit-like in the least. I mean, I doubt that they sell matching black and pink lace bikinis. It was a finely orchestrated swimulacrum.) Regardless, I tossed away my reservations and ran into the surf. I reached Kelly, and out of nowhere, he pushed me under right as a massive wave came crashing over our heads.

“Swimming means no part of you stays dry” was his aphorism for the moment.  He brought it up later on the bus ride home. I think it’s fair to say that it has reflected his mentality of being here. Why do something if you’re not going to put everything into it? I could get pseudo-Nietzschean here and talk about amor fati or some other relevantly vague abstraction that Nietzsche liked to go on about. But, I won’t. Back to Kelly – I’m impressed at how many risks he’s taking – at how fast he is adjusting. He’s picking up Spanish too.  It’s especially cute when he drinks. He’ll only speak in Spanish.

“Yo quiero un besito,” he’ll say imploringly.

So I kiss him.

“Uno mas.”

This goes on for awhile. It’s too cute for me to put a stop to it.

It’s funny, we’re here in paradise and all we can think about is where we’re travelling to next. He’s going to accompany me on my quest – 25 countries by the time I’m 25. It could be that I’ve gorged myself on Borges lately, but I really want to go to Argentina. He might look for a teaching job there. We’ll see.

Seeing the ocean was liberating. It almost made me miss  California. If I closed my eyes in just the right way – if I imagined that the water was colder – the sand was more coarse – the air tasted more like pollution – it was Huntington beach. Then, I’d open my eyes completely, and any remnants of that other place just vanished. I turned back to the coast. The chocolate-and-caramel brown of the  sand disappeared into tangles of dense rainforest foliage. I blinked as I noticed a large iguana shimmy up a palm tree and several exotic birds dance through the sky.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. 

November 1st, 2010

Yesterday was Halloween. It was different than any Halloween I’d ever had before. Yesterday would have been Liz’s brother’s 21^st birthday. His favorite breakfast was oatmeal. Liz made a giant pot in the morning with cinnamon, ground nutmeg, and freshly picked bananas.  She also bought a baby tree to plant on his birthday. It’s going to take about 10 years, but after it matures it will yield delicious mangoes. I felt really honored to be involved. All four of us took turns digging. It’s been raining almost nonstop since we planted it.

It’s strange. It doesn’t even feel like fall. Time is suspended here.  It doesn’t even feel like Halloween happened.  I can only imagine the raucous parties and scantily-clad women dancing up a storm back home. Halloween is a microcosm of every day social interaction – women put on masks or excessive layers of makeup to hide their true faces. Yet, they simultaneously reveal their bodies. What cultivated this excessive necessity of self-objectification?  

I didn’t used to consider myself a feminist. Maybe I was just afraid of the implications. Like all of my other shortcomings, I will unjustly blame it on Mormonism. In the past, whenever I have been objectified – whenever my ideas haven’t been taken seriously,  I have almost felt deserving of it. In arguments, I would retreat easily if I participated in them at all. I still feel unconfident and awkward when I’m trying to explicate a complicated idea. That’s why I enjoy hiding behind words. These syllables compose my mask. I’m at a safe distance, no one can directly chide me for my malformed sentences. I remember being young (no greater than six or seven) and reading something. A periodical? Maybe a newspaper or a book that I couldn’t have possibly understood. Upon my juvenile reading of this adult text, I came to a sort of conclusion. I unearthed some ancient truth that was probably trite common knowledge among adults, but one that seemed arcane and apocryphal to my naïve eyes. I’m sure my face glimmered with excitement and my cheeks flushed and I started to talk quickly. (I can imagine this reaction – I still have it when I learn something new.) Whatever this revelation was, I told my father (interrupting his television show, my first mistake). Then, he laughed condescendingly and (incorrectly) corrected me. He called me stupid. Or, maybe he just ignored me all together. I’m not sure which patronizing response occurred in this instance, because all three of them were common. I’d still pick any of the aforementioned three above his usual poison.

I like wearing masks. I like celebrating holidays that completely overturn social order. On the other 364 days each year, It’s taboo to hide one’s face. It’s awkward and frowned upon to appear in public donning an identity-eschewing costume. Yet, in truth, this is what we all do – every day. Our impoverished souls can be measured by the luxury and opulence of our holidays.

Depending on where you met me, my costume looks a little different. If you met me in high school, I wore the mask of an awkward, quiet, confused girl who didn’t have many friends  save a handful of other precocious miscreants. My favorite accessories were my violin case – my collected works of William Shakespeare – my unending wardrobe of goth-inspired bondage pants or plaid skirts or band tees. If you met me at Peet’s, I was lively and happy and jovial and I didn’t try so hard to prove myself all the time. Yet, if anyone brought up philosophy or literature, I threw down. I don’t know why my costume has changed so drastically over the years, because I don’t think I’m all that different than I was. I’ll give myself this: I know a little more, I’m slightly more responsible, and I don’t take things so seriously.

My question is this: what comes next? I’m finding out more about myself here than I ever thought I could. What costume do I wear now? I’ve stripped away the layers that I used to have in place. I used to hide beneath them. I used to protect myself.

It doesn’t matter how  small I get, I will always feel like that big girl who everyone enjoyed but no one loved. The “token”. I was always the girl that other girls kept around to make them look better. I was always the girl who guys would come to for advice, or companionship, or help with their French homework, or even attention;  however, this same girl was the girl whom they would never consider. These strange truths have turned out to be fleeting and inconsequential. None of them matter anymore. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that I’m in a loving relationship, that I’m active and I almost feel at home in my body, that I’m actually not as grotesque as I was making myself out to be. I am the person whom I always dreamt of being – I am the person whom I never thought I would be. Maybe only time will tell.

This is supposed to be about Costa Rica. I should stop interjecting with personal diarrhea.

November 3rd, 2010

It’s been raining nonstop for four days. Hurricanes are a dime a dozen here. It’s starting to get to me. I don’t mind when it trickles in the afternoon following a morning of indulgent heat. This, though, is  a little excessive. I am not inclined to work out as hard when my running shoes are soaked through and my clothes are dripping wet. Even standing outside for 10 minutes makes me look like I jumped in a swimming pool.

On the bright side, I’ve been able to make a little money. I’ve been playing heads up hold’em with Kelly almost every day. I’m up 2000 colones, but yesterday I was up four. He almost always beats me at chess, I almost always beat him at poker. I’ll take it. Although, yesterday was strange. I got him in checkmate and he won back some of his money. Haha.

It’s simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying that I have no idea where I’m going to go once I arrive in California. All of my possessions can be carried on my back (35 books, a guitar, and several scattered outfits). I have no place to live, no transportation – I sold everything and moved out of my apartment before coming here. Kelly and I have talked about every state, every city, every country imaginable. This is the frightening truth of it: all of these lofty pipe dreams have morphed into astonishingly real possibilities.

When we get back, we’re definitely going to make our rounds in Orange County, but I refuse to settle there again.

We are seriously considering going to Sri Lanka next year. I’d have to work for a couple months to save up, but I’m already thirsting for round two. I figure going to a completely unfamiliar place outside the comfort of Romance and Indo-European languages is leveling up from novice to bat shit crazy.

I want to move to San Francisco for a few months to work. Get a place in the city. Enjoy having a flushing toilet and hot water for awhile. Another thing: I don’t ever want to drive a car again.

Our friend Six is going to camp out on bureau of land management land for a few months. You can camp for free if you move your tent every 14 days. He’s going to build a geodome and have a nomadic library in the desert. He’s even setting up a twitter with his coordinates so people can find the library. He invited us to camp with him. I’d actually love to spend a couple of weeks in the eastern Mojave – living off critical theory and beef jerky . After I gave Liz a decent haircut with a machete, he said that I should join the nomads and sell haircuts out of the back of his pickup truck. We’d be near the old nuclear testing sites – I thought I could advertise with signs like “These Haircuts are the BOMB!” I’d even make a cheesy website with animated GIFs of exploding H-bombs and enough comic sans to kill a kitten.

We also have been talking about driving across the US and spending some time on the east coast. I want to see all contiguous 48 states. I’ve only been to 8 I think. I love the Midwest – tourist trap towns, diners, miles and miles of desert or plains or mountains. And the SOUTH! I’ve never been to the south.

More crazy ideas: There’s a three mast sailing ship built by hand in the style of a seventeenth century HMS from the British Navy – it’s docked in Boston and sailing to Maine next year. I want to convince Kelly to join the crew for a couple weeks. You get free room and board in exchange for working, and you get to learn how to sail. The best part: this was discovered on craigslist rideshare.

And then there’s Argentina. If we went there, it would be for at least a year. Kelly would get a teaching job, I’d become a dishwasher or cab driver or maybe a courtesan,  and we could take weekend trips to anywhere in South America.

(I really want to take Kelly to Europe – he’s never been. That will have to happen in a few years, though. I’ve been a twice and we both agreed that the next place we go should be somewhere completely foreign to both of us. Plus, Europe is a little expensive.)

So, friends. I need to start determining my next course. If you were bat shit crazy and irresponsible like me, what would you do? Think of it this way: if you had cut all of your ties at home, and you had the freedom to roam anywhere on the face of the earth and do anything you wanted, what would you do? I am open to any ideas/suggestions/tongue lashings/whatever.