The unexamined life.

When I was at Reed College, there was a girl in my year named Eira. Eira was a very bright girl who finished her thesis on Nabokov weeks before the deadline and had already been accepted into her PhD program by graduation. For unknown reasons (I never knew her well) we are facebook friends.

I mention this becuase last week her status read: "Took one of my Reed profs to lunch. Geeked out about Lolita, Neuromancer, narratology. I feel sorry for people who don't know what they want to do in life."

After perusing facebook and reading my emails, it was time to go to the beach. I loaded my surfboard and got into the back of a pickup truck for the bumpy ride down to Playa Hermosa. It is still almost entirely undeveloped and was apparently where they filmed a season of Survivor. A mind-bendingly gorgeous spot.

After arriving at the beach we had an hour or so to kill while waiting for the tide to come in, so I hopped in a hammock and settled in with a book. But after a few minutes I could feel a physical surge of anxiety in my gut. I couldn't concentrate on my book, couldn't relax, couldn't sit still.
I don't know what I want to do in life. 

It probably didn't help that the characters in the Saul Bellow novel I'm reading are all impossibly intelligent, intense, quirky and far more interesting than I will ever be. And they all know what they want to do in life. So I was sitting in a hammock on a remote beach in Nicaragua, supposedly relaxing before an afternoon of surfing, but all I was doing was experiencing a kind of existential terror. What was I doing there? I wasn't accomplishing anything, I needed to go do something, something important and interesting to ward off the possibility that I will never know what I want to be when I grow up. 

This is what an existential crisis looks like.

But I think that perhaps, at least for right now, it is no sin to lead an unexamined life. To have no ambitions or plans or goals. I'm not here to learn anything. I'm certainly not here to "find myself" or anything so cliche as that. And if I'm going to figure anything out, it's not going to be while relaxing at the beach. Beach time is not Big Question time. Beaches are for playing and drinking beers and hedonism and tans. If I wanted an angsty soul-searching journey to discover my passion, I would have gone to Paris. It seems like the type of place that would be good for that. 


In conclusion, fuck you, Eira. And go find yourself a beach.

Enferma.

Good gods, but I've been sick! It started the day I traveled to Nicaragua. Up at 5AM, two buses, a ferry, a third bus, two border crossings and a gypsy cab and I finally arrived in San Juan del Sur exhausted, racked with fever and at the end of my endurance. The first hostel I went to was all booked up. I then came to the Hospedaje Elizabeth, where a friendly, bustling woman told me to go on upstairs and pick a room. I left my stuff in the one that had a real mattress instead of just a thin pad and went back down to pay. The woman had quoted me C$150 Córdobas, or about $7.50. But she wasn't there when I got back down, and I was left with two young women who I think were her daughters. They told me no, it was C$220. I tried to argue, but to no avail. I was so tired and sick I would have paid anything just to be able to go to sleep.

I had already been sore from surfing, but now it felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat to my body. I paid and headed back up. I started to cry as I walked up the stairs. I got to my room, sat down on the bed with the stained sheets. I tried to turn on the fan, but found out there was no electricity and cried some more. Presently the landlady knocked. She said that yes, I had been overcharged, she was so sorry, and gave me correct change. She was obviously puzzled about why I was so upset, but I didn't have then energy to try and explain.

This is pretty much all I've seen of Nicaragua so far.

After she left, I fell facedown on the bed and passed out. All that afternoon and night I had strange, hallucinatory half-waking dreams. It's quite windy here and there was what sounded like a major wind storm going on outside. At first I thought I was at the bottom of the ocean and there were huge waves breaking above me. I eventually, and with some effort, figured out that I was in fact on land, and I was hearing wind, not waves. The roof is simply sheets of corrugated metal nailed onto wood frames, and the hospedaje is actually three or four smaller buildings lashed together with this roofing and a mishmash of homemade stairs and flooring into one(ish) larger structure. When the wind blows, everything shifts and creaks and groans, and the trees rub and thump. It sounded like large creatures roughhousing and tumbling about, trying to pry up the sheets of metal to find a way in.

I don't remember much of the next 24 hours, except lying in bed, sweating and moaning and drooling. My throat was (is) so painful I couldn't swallow. It had swollen up as though I had swallowed a bee's nest and is still now covered in spots of white goo (I know you wanted to know that). While I shook like a leaf from the chills all the first night, I found myself slumped under the trickle of cold water that passes for a shower at 3AM the next night, heat coming in waves off my skin.

I still feel pretty shitty, but I'm lucid now at least. My fever broke on the third day and the pharmacy gave me a grab bag of pills which I take by the handful: some ibuprofen, some antibiotics, some Guatemalan version of NyQuil. One thing to say about the Nicaraguan pharmacists: they aren't afraid to throw drugs at a problem! I got the feeling they would give just about anything I asked for.

I wonder if this illness would have felt so traumatic if I had gotten sick at home (wherever that may be) with a bowl of soup and a blanket and some Netflix. Probably not. But hey, everything is more exciting in a strange town in a strange country in a place with barely functioning running water and electricity! And damn, if I'm going to sick like that while traveling, it better goddamned well be malaria.

I'm staying about three blocks from the ocean. Maybe soon I'll actually get to see it.

La Pura Vida

Aaaah. Well. Costa Rica? Me gusta.

I'm staying in a little town on the southern end of the Nicoya Peninsula. Well, "town" might be too strong a word. There is a dirt road that runs along the coast with a string of surf shops, hostels, restaurants, and surf shops. There is really not much to do here but go to the beach during the day. Everything tends to shut down quite early, and if I get back to the hostel past 10PM, everything is locked up and dark. But there are parties that go into the wee hours as well, if you know where to look. Basically, it's perfect. I can see how people come here and never leave.

This is the little commercial strip outside of the cafe I'm sitting in.  It is hot and humid here, although not unbearably so. It feels perfect when you are sitting in the shade sipping a cafe frio (sin leche, sin azucar) but it is sweaty and dusty to walk in the sun, especially at midday. But, finally, I am not cold anymore. I can't tell you what a relief that is. I think my aversion to cold has been growing stronger over the years.

This is the balcony outside my room, overlooking the garden. There are all sorts of birds, and huge iguanas, and geckos, and various other critters everywhere.

What else can I say? There's not much to report, really. Besides, thinking is hard here. And it's time to go the the beach.

The City of Angeles

There was a mishap with my debit card which has necessitated a change in plans. So while I should be in Costa Rica already, I am instead still in Los Angeles and am flying out tomorrow. I won't begin to go into the stress and misery that accompanied the destruction of my card and the canceling of the original flight, but now I think it was actually a good thing. I had only given myself two days after returning from DC to get all my affairs in order and go. It felt like a panicked flight away from everything and towards much that was unknown. But I have now had a week in LA to leisurely prepare and I feel much more calm now.

I have discovered that there are many things about Los Angeles that I really enjoy. It is well into spring here, and record rainfall this winter has made the Hollywood hills look green and wild. I spent today walking around, doing errands in shorts and a tank top. There are butterflies in people's gardens and flowers growing out of the sidewalk cracks. It is so bright here and I have to put on sunglasses every time I go outside- a shock to my Oregon acclimatized eyes. I could hear the flocks of feral parrots screeching in the palm trees just off of Wilshire Blvd.

I went biking around Hollywood the other day, and I enjoyed the architecture of the neighborhoods: the more modest houses look bright and cheery with their red-tiled roofs and bougainvillea growing up their sides (just ignore the bars on the windows). The big old LA style manses look stately and dignified. I had lunch at a taco stand on Santa Monica and Vine and found a dive bar just off of Hollywood Blvd with dollar PBRs. I spent a few hours hanging out and talking with the regulars; geeks and tattoo artists.

Later that night some kids from the hostel and I went clubbing. We made a very international group: a girl from Japan, one from Philly, the French girl, the guy from Tunisia who speaks five languages and works as a dancer when he's not working at the hostel, an Italian guy, etc, etc.  We tried to get into Bruce Willis' birthday party at Las Palmas, but were unsuccessful, even though I put on my big dark sunglasses and tried to convince the door guy in my best "Do you know who I am??" tone of voice that we were on the list. We ended up in a huge crowded rooftop nightclub, overlooking the strip and with a view of all the LA lights across the city. On our way back, even though my grandmother lived a few blocks away before she died, and this part of the city is as old and familiar to me as my childhood, I found myself pointing things out along with everyone else. "Oh, look at whose star!" we said to each other, and "Look, it's Jack Nicholson's hand prints!".

The hostel itself is on Crenshaw (the nicer, northern part) on the edge of Korea town. There are few signs in English, but many restaurants. Many kids live here for months at a time and so people get to know each other well.

It might not be much, but it feels quite homey to me right now, and I think I really needed this time here.

Also: I found this poem the other day and liked it very very much.

"One Art"
By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Holy shit, here we go!

I am currently sitting in a hostel in Los Angeles after having flown in from DC last night, and I will be leaving the country on Thursday.

As if I hadn't dismantled my life enough, I will be paring down my stuff even further and selling my bike (by tomorrow!) and then I will fly to San Jose, Costa Rica. And then... well, I will wander about and adventure for two and half months. And apparently I will need a white linen suit. Being an expat sounds terribly romantic.

Washington DC was lovely. I really like it there and I would love to live there one day. Sadly, I simply can't afford it. So I will be going to Miami for law school in the fall. Which is certainly not the worst thing that could happen.


But before Miami, I'm looking forward to finding some smallish beach town where I can live for cheap (probably not Costa Rica though, I may need to find a cheaper country) and I will surf, and sip drinks in a hammock, and befriend the locals, and read lots of books. 

And this is how the DINOFACE is currently looking.  Yeah man, yeah.

I do miss you all sometimes though. But the show must go on!