My Walkabout

Back in the Saddle Again: Florence to Coos Bay

2011-07-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

My first day back to riding started from Honeyman State Park where I camped in the hiker-biker sites with two other bikers. One was Gary- an older man of about 75 who had so much to say that asking a question felt like a big commitment but he had some pretty interesting travels under his belt. He rode from Ohio and had probably, at one point of another, toured across every part of the US.

The other camper was John- a big guy from Berkeley with a beer belly and a mountain man beard and paniers home-made out of white buckets, lots of screws and tape and big orange reflector strips. We each had a beer and chatted until it got too dark to see and then I went to sleep, or at least tried- giddy insomnia.

The next morning, I headed out down 101, passed a huge group of riders, stopped in a park for a picnic lunch and a few hours in, John came up riding next to me- chatted for a bit and then zoomed off. I thought I was making decent time but he and his flip flops and baseball cap left me in the dust! I spent my 60 miles alone singing Amarillo by Morning in my head and streaming an ongoing french commentary of everything I passed and awkward translations of all the street signs.

I rode through North Bend- to get there, I had to cross a bridge and press a little "biker on roadway" button beforehand, slowing the cars to an unbearable 30 mph on my account. The little logging town smelled like Christmas trees but as far as I could see, that was the only good thing about it. It was the only place along the trip where I got yelled at to get off the road and where cars seemed to very adamantly drive uncomfortably close to me. Eventually I made it- exhausted after 60 miles- to Sunset Bay State Park where there was in fact, a beautiful sunset over the crescent of water perfectly framed between two wooded cliffs.

The crowd that night was Mike- a CU Denver prof of literature who was on the final stretch of a tour from Denver, up to Canada, across to the coast and down to San Francisco. His pedometer just clicked 3000. DavidandPaula where a couple from North Carolina who rolled in all gear and gravity. Both were very chatty. While David prompted everyone for their life stories, Paula compared stats and mileage, experience, stories and equipment with us- her perceived competition. "Hey that's a great little stove you've got there. How do you like that? Is that from REI? Uh huh uh huh ya we've got a similar one. It might be the next years model, I'm not sure. But that ones working out for you?" ...Um I'm boiling water! Of course it's working out for me!
And then there was James- the self-proclaimed autistic bum who had found a way to skip between campsites, pay the hiker-biker $5 a night and, subsisting entirely in clif bars, managed to spend his whole summer camping on the Oregon coast. Not bad.

2011-07-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

My first, exalted glance of the Oregon coast. And this only represents ONE of the senses.

2011-07-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

So much to tell, so little time. I'm hoping for reception tonight. But until then- traveling alone is the best way to go. Meeting great people, total freedom, great conversations with myself. And plus, the car that I thumbed down today could only fit one. More to come....

2011-07-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Right above Coos Bay

Eugene

2011-07-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

I spent last night in Eugene with Ariel. Staying with her in her bro-filled college house felt more like roughing it than any of the camping I've done so far. We made dinner last night which involved digging through piles of dishes and trash to get to a cutting board or pan. Consistent, the dinner came out really well. I fell asleep on the couch to a roo Eugene is grungy. But cute. The river running through town is gorgeous and there's a grocery market two blocks away from her house- Sundance- that is so fantastic, friendly and hippy-wonderful that just that market alone made me consider transferring schools. Well that and the righteously awesome urban agriculture program they have. Ariel and I walked around the farm on campus yesterday- dipping into greenhouses and picking raspberries. Everything grows here. I think I'll move. I chose between 10 different options of bulk peanut butter at Sundance and got a little jar for my trip. Off to the coast tonight- finally! My rideshare flaked on me twice but is now coming through. And off on the road again tomorrow morning.

2011-07-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

Not a bad way to tour a city.

2011-07-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Tyler is in Eugene for the summer. We went to middle school together and reconnected last year. Look at that river!!

2011-07-18T16:53:00.001-07:00

Ariel's house and roommates in Eugene.

2011-07-18T16:30:00.001-07:00

Cool tree in Corvallis. They don't make em like this in Colorado

Trust Anyway

2011-07-18T14:11:00.001-07:00

I really value the concept of trust. It's so important I think to hand some control over to the world. We have such limited control anyway, people who try so hard to manage everything that goes on around them end up just driving themselves crazy. So why even try. Take care of the things that are within your power and leave the rest alone.

The metaphor that makes the most sense to me is getting wiped out by a wave. If you've ever been taken out by a wave, you know that the ocean is much more powerful than you are and trying to fight it is futile and will only exhaust you. So give in, enjoy the ride and soon enough- although it feels like forever- you'll be jettisoned up to the surface again. I've gotten into a lot of ridiculous situations where relaxing and waiting it out has saved me- almost losing all of my bags the first night I got to Kenya, alone, at night and exhausted. Getting off busses into cities not being able to speak any of the language and somehow trying to meet up with a friend who I have no contact with and it somehow all just... working out.

When I was in Seattle, the day before loading up my bike and heading off, I was in a cafe with Kevin- our table covered with maps, pens, and coffees- I went to the bathroom and glancing up on the wall- the only thing written on the wall, in perfect handwriting, exactly at my eye level- was a little carving that said "Trust Anyway". I love that. Despite all odds, again and again, just trust. What else can you do? So I assume that's a pretty good theme for this trip, this summer of adventure and unexpected waking into situations that no one could have planned.

But I've always put my trust into the world, the general flow of things, rarely having to trust and count on other people. I've always managed to float between the cracks unnoticed, plan things so as to only have to rely on myself. Now, however, setting out to camp and cycle alone, I have to put a lot of trust in other people. Trusting that the guy whose giving me a ride to the coast is, in fact, just giving me a ride to the coast. And trusting that, when camping alone at night, I'll be fine. I am a very trusting person and don't consider things like this "risky" but it is interesting to, every once in a while, consider how vulnerable I actually am. And remember how much of social interactions are a bit of a contract. A trusting agreement that no one will cross any boundaries... but it would be so easy to and in that situation, I would be utterly powerless. Hmm.
I'm still going to the coast and I still plan on camping alone- I'm actually really looking forward to it. But it's just an interesting new dimension to traveling. As a little girl with braids and a plastic painted ukulele sticking out of her paniers- teetering on the shoulder of Hwy 101.

Recouping in Portland

2011-07-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Kevin and I got very conveniently swept up from that Bar and Grill and got a ride the rest of the 25 miles to Portland. So out of the 200 or so miles from Seattle to Portland, we did 175 of them. Not bad. The roads getting into Portland would have been hectic and confusing anyway, especially after that day. Jodie, our very accommodating host, took us out to dinner after showers, to this great brew pub on Hawthorne where I ran into a barista from my favorite coffee shop in Boulder. Bizarre.

The next day, Kevin and I wandered around aimlessly and eventually got to talking about how, although as friends we get along great, in terms of traveling/living, were maybe not as compatible as we hoped. I like my vegetables cut in big chunks, he likes them small and neatly diced. When annoyed, I get quiet and direct, he gets jittery. Which pisses me off. Which makes him submissive and overly-accommodating. Which pisses me off more. When he's in a bad mood, he wants a hug. When I'm in a bad mood, I don't want to be touched. So building and stewing, we both admitted that traveling together was a huge expenditure of social energy for both of us- energy that we dont necessarily have to spare after riding 50 miles and problem solving, fixing chains, getting lost and unlost and riding alongside hectic traffic with bad knees all day. So we toyed with the idea of parting ways. For a leg of the trip at least.

Thinking of what I WOULD do if we did decide to go different directions, I called Vicki and Joel- old family friends who live in Corvallis. Vicki picked up and said it would be great to have me. Not just that but is it possible I could get there before 5 on Saturday because Joel is playing percussion in a Latin band that night, opening for Bobby McFerrin. Umm... Yes!!
So I scrounged for a ride on craigslist- mid Costa Rican fusion, food cart meal on park benches- and emailed as many people as I could, not to hear back from them until this morning. I'm getting picked up at 2. Perfect! Crazy how these things play out.

So Kevin is in a sensory deprivation saline float tank at some hole-in-the-wall we stumbled upon last night, and I'm at my temporary sanctuary- a great cafe down the street with lots of varied sitting options and free refills, waiting for the bike shop to open up so I can get my derailer tweaked.
The funny thing is I feel settled having this plan but it only takes account for the next 2 days or so and after that, I have no idea what I'm going to do. Time stretches out at times like this and knowing where I'll be sleeping any given night is a luxury. Amidst the rises and falls (I definitely had a fall yesterday- a "why am I here? This is stupid. I want to be home, watch Love Actually and make dinner with my mom. Fuck this" moment), I love this type of traveling. And in Portland, equipped with a wallet and a rain jacket, what's the worst that could happen really? Although thats not a challenge.

2011-07-15T11:04:00.001-07:00

I'm in Portland for the weekend. I LOVE this place and am enjoying the immaculately played-out stereotypes. Reminiscent of Boulder but... more so.

2011-07-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

The general attitude of the day, perfectly summed up in this picture. Fuck this.

2011-07-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Broken chain

Day 6. Kalama to Portland

2011-07-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day that I can safely say was a total fucking disaster.
The only thing more fun than putting on spandex on a rainy morning is putting on wet spandex on a rainy morning. Head out along a frontage road and turned into the mountains when the road dead ended. The road lead through although not TOO steep, relentless, never-ending mountains which- because of bad knees and low morale, were mostly walked. A valiant effort by Kevin to get back up and tough out the ride resulted in a broken chain which he was able to fix as I forced water and food on him. More relentless hills and unsympathetic trucks. Turns out we made a wrong turn which lead us even deeper into these totally demoralizing awful mountains. Each time we hit a summit, the road would descend for maybe a minute before heading back up. I didn't know it was possible to form such bad associations with such beautiful hills but I fucking hate those goddamn mountains. A truck passed by mid-desperation and we put our thumbs out desperately- to get a ride or at least ask where the hell we were. The truck passed right by and after laughing in disbelief, Kevin and I spent the next ten minutes concocting all the awful things we wanted to do to that dickhole. I'd shove my campi derailer straight up his ass. That got some laughs out of us which quickly ended as we turned yet another corner to find yet another snake of road heading straight up. We were completely resigned into walking by this point and, trying to be positive, I pulled my phone out to take a picture because the crest of the mountains, through a thin layer of trees and off into a white sheet of clouded sky really was beautiful. My bike slipped and in order to catch it, I dropped my phone and the screen shattered. Fuckin great. Although at that point it was just resentfully humorous and I took that fucking picture anyway.
No descent could have made up for all of that, although it tried. The scenery would have been gorgeous if we didn't completely hate the world at this point. We had gone maybe 15 miles in 3 hours. Maybe less. All up. In the midst of the deserted mountain road down, we passed two adorable boys with a lemonade stand. I laughed at the serendipity (the mountains were completely deserted, it was a ridiculous place to have a lemonade stand and then there was us, probably desperately in need of lemonade but way too resetful to resign into enjoyment that easily). Kevin bombed passed them and I followed.
Once we got down to the frontage road again, we stopped at the first place we could find- Fat Moose Bar and Grill, where we're still holed up. Kevin's friend in Portland who we're staying with tonight offered a ride. Thank god. That means laundry, a shower and a nap is in my very near future, yes!

Day 6. Lewis and Clark to Kalama

2011-07-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

It wasnt raining this morning, which made life so much easier. Lots of cows and rivers on the route through farms. The hills here and there rocked my raspy throat and lungs. It started to rain about 20 miles in and then, when it started to really pour, the hill we just crested lead straight to a burger joint featuring not only elk burgers- we were starving- but also decent coffee, an overhang for the bikes, dangerously comfortable bench seats and lots of people happy to give directions and advice. We figured out our campsite for the night from a cab driver and someone living in Vancouver gave us his card if we need anything. Might take him up on that. Great day today. The rest day was needed. The shoulder that I strained a few months ago climbing, is hurting a little bit but hopefully it won't get to be a problem. The stretch from Castle Rock- where we had those life saving burgers- to Kelso was shitty- rainy and along a pretty busy road, plopping us into a very bike-unfriendly city where the awning of a Safeway served as a welcomed respite. I raided the bulk bins for a budget snack. On the last stretch to our campsite in Kalama, it poured but felt surprisingly good and it stopped right as we got to the campsite.

Nothing is muted when you're traveling or post-excerice and especially not when they're combined. Senses are wide open and average things are incredible. Despite or maybe because of the fact that we've been lugging around 30 pounds of weight each, sleeping without mats, showering only when acutely necessary- my body feels fantastic and I'm so happy. There's this nice point of traveling at which you get into the groove of simplicity and everything mellows out- when the brain finally starts to slow down. Lovely. It's so easy to not get caught up thibking about the future when you know so little of it.

And there's a beautiful full moon tonight- go check it out!

2011-07-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm building a really nice collection of my little tent in insanely beautiful places. Also, this tent is so awesome- last night, we assembled it, 0 to 60, in... one minute!! Hell fucking yes! With the rainfly and some rainfly-related disagreements, it took 3 minutes.

2011-07-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

2011-07-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

Day 4 Centralia to Lewis and Clark old growth forest

2011-07-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

Kevin and I left this morning after stocking up on oatmeal and fruit from the continental breakfast at the hotel we begrudgingly paid for. The ride was hilly and hills, I found, are a lot harder with an extra 30 pounds on the bike. It felt great to work a little harder though. It was so quiet riding through the hills, amplifying the sound of my derailer clicking away above the mellow farmland, the smell of rain and fresh cut grass. The clouds socked us in in a way that held everything in place and muted every movement and noise around us. We picnicked next to a creek in the beginning of the old growth forest and later found a campsite deep in it, everything dripping with moss and dew. It rained in the kind of way where water was just held in the air, clinging onto things without falling.

Today, day 5 I guess, we decided to stay here for the day. It rained in the morning so we made breakfast and coffee in a little rain shed up the road, over maps and a tiny magnetic chess set. Kevin's knee is not so good and my cold is in the stage where blowing my nose is like kicking off a siphon and I'm running out of things to blow it in. So we hitch-hiked to a town nearby with an old bumbly guy who insisted on giving us a very complete tour of everything in the one-block town before letting us out in front of a cafe, the only place in town that sells anything not deep fried. Lovin the country music. My goal for the night is to write a country song on the uke. Seriously, how hard could it be? I got that twang down!

2011-07-11T10:49:00.001-07:00

Break for 1 of our at least 5 daily meals

2011-07-11T10:46:00.001-07:00

There's something about these shots of open road that gets me

2011-07-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

2011-07-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Day 3

2011-07-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

Elma to Centralia today. It was so gorgeous! Best ride so far. We followed quiet streets though farmlands and meadows. We had a late start and Kevin's knee hurt for the ride so we took it easy. Picnic for lunch in a field of daisies off of the road. We stopped at one point later on where a path cut off from the main road. It was lined with tall grasses and fairy tale flowers and blackberry bushes, leading up through a dark wet forest until it cleared and dipped down into a perfect still meadow of flowers. I was constantly hungry for the whole day. Were going through Gatorade powder at record speeds. Stopped for cherries by the side of the road, Kevin's lip had a run in with a bee and the bee won- that and his knee made for a quiet, stewing ride for a little bit. When we got into Centralia, we headed straight to the nearest cafe which was a starbucks. It was like an oasis of air conditioning and huge arm chairs. I got a large coffee and obviously I don't speak Starbucks because I got a coffee big enough to take a sponge bath in. I could probably have fit my entire head in the cup. It was a little ridiculous. The campsite we were planning to stay at no longer existed and we didn't have a backup plan or any more daylight so we got a hotel room for the night. 35 miles today. I'm itching to do more but Kevin's knee takes precedence. I just hope it passes and doesn't last for the whole trip. It's probably not a bad idea to take it slow though to start. We still two weeks to go and I'm totally sick. Which means that in a few days, Kevin will probably also be totally sick.

Day 2

2011-07-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

I, pre-coffee, scoured maps as Kevin explained thermal dynamics to me. Rode along the water some more until it T-ed with Highway 101. Gorgeous but trafficky. In a little town called Mcreavy, we stumbled upon a county fair and walked around dazed in bike shorts. It's funny passing through Americana as yuppie cyclists, wearing ray-bans, clacking through the supermarket in clip-in shoes, sucking on energy gel. We ended up camping on a lawn in an RV park- all the different forms of "camping" all indiscriminately translate to a little red teepee on maps. But it was actually great. There was another group of cyclists camping there, we were so exhausted from the day that we were thrilled to have a place to cook and sleep, free firewood, a bottle of wine and chili and I was asleep 3 minutes after getting in the tent. It feels so good to be exhausted in that way- like every pore of the body has been flushed out and cleansed. 50 miles

Bike Trip Day 1

2011-07-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since doing a little impromptu bike trip in Holland two summers ago- from Amsterdam to Brussels, I've wanted to do another one. Simply because it is THE best way to travel. It is the perfect pace to go at so that you can see everything, stumble upon local happenings, farmers markets, music festivals, it is so easy to meet people when traveling on bike because everyone wants to know what the hell you're doing, where you're from and everyone is eager to dish out advice which sometimes is helpful. But almost always nice to receive anyway. Also waking up in the morning from some beautiful campsite knowing that all you have to do that day is bike and eat and find another beautiful campsite is so nice. Food tastes amazing when you're doing so much and the constant activity means that you're almost always hungry. Which for me, is the most wonderful thing in the world. Biking along through sprawling countryside lends itself to so many incredible picnic sites. And the whole body exhaustion of being outside all day everyday, cycling for hours and hours usually results in- for me at least- giddy, slap happy enthusiasm which is better than any high you could pay for. So I planned this trip thinking I have to take advantage of a summer during which I don't have a lease or a job. Finding someone to do it with was difficult so I had no idea what was going to happen about 3 weeks ago, when my friend Kevin gave me a call and said he was getting tickets to Seattle with his bike. Perfect. So here I am.

Day 1. Kevin and I woke up way too early after not nearly enough sleep. I had a sore throat, it was drizzling outside, I blinked some fuzzy contacts into my eyes and started packing my bike up. By the time Kevin and I packed, I was very clearly carrying pretty much everything. Pre-coffee nihilism and dread quickly turned into post-coffee adventure mode and unabashed enthusiasm. Kevin and I bonked our loaded bikes down the staircase of the apartment where we stayed the night before and we took off, riding very precariously through Seattle traffic to our bus stop. We sat on the bus cringing as we watched our bikes sway on the front rack. We got to a port and onto a ferry to Bremerton which- right on a gorgeous lake across from Seattle, should have been really cute. But it was not at all. It was in bumfuck nowhere, filled with a bunch of bumfucks and all of the streets we had to turn on were ridiculously steep and unrelenting. After getting lost every turn we made and battling hills for two hours, we estimated to have gone about... 3 miles. Awesome. Only 997 to go. Eventually, we got on a pretty mellow road in between a gorgeous clear lake and an enchanted Jurassic Park forest until we found a campsite surrounding by mossy trees and a creek and little rays of sunlight coming through the trees making the plants look luminescent. We enjoyed trying to start a fire with wet wood for about 2 hours. A very mentally taxing day but a good start. About 25 miles finally covered.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Revisited

2011-01-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

Boulder Colorado is a beautiful city in the American west that represents the tier above "self-actualization" in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The hierarchy is like a board game with psychological merit. It goes a little somethin' like this: every player goes through the game facing and attempting to overcome challenges. Sometimes the challenges can be attributed to the bad role of a die, sometimes they can be attributed to the player's poor strategy. Once a challenge is overcome, the player moves on to face the next one.

It starts simple: shelter, food, safety etc, gets a little more complicated with social belonging, love etc, and then is the tough one: self-actualization. In this level of the game, the player must reflect back upon his life and grapple with his internal struggles in order to eventually reach an acceptance of ones self and a feeling of having fully met ones potential.

Abraham Maslow (right)
is obviously self-actualized.

The glory land, the land of milk and honey, fresh powder, hip cafes, good coffee and miles and miles of flawless mountain blacktop littered with beautiful people on expensive bikes, is Boulder Colorado. The struggle is over, you win, welcome to Boulder, here's your Canondale and pint of Sunshine Wheat.

This tier in the newly revised (par moi) Hierarchy of Needs is that of Indulgence and Frivolity. Having reached self-actualization by the median age of 17 (via hereditary affluence, academic performance, athletic prowess and an extensive role in philanthropy and/or innovative personal projects), Boulder citizens must then grapple with my new 6th tier, the "now what?" tier: Indulgence and Frivolity. This tier is defined by the question: "Having already conquered life, how do I amuse myself until I die?" I don't know the answer to this but, looking around me, I'd have to infer the answer has something to do with iPads, Frye boots, organic food, yoga and this season's "wishful thinking" fatty powder boards. I, presently, am most actively pursuing the WTFPB although I'm happy to settle for last season's in a crunch.

Boulderite Daniel Thorgood (pictured) struggling through the "Being Better than Everyone Else at Something" aspect of the "Indulgence and Frivolity" tier.

These post-paradise, super-modern, hyper-Maslow challenges which the Boulderite faces come in the form of Feats of Unnecessary Badass-ery. Most commonly, these feats involve voluntarily subjecting oneself to potential pain, misery and hardship in order to spice up otherwise trivial pursuits, which are later recounted via facebook status of over Indian food.
Examples of such pursuits:
-grocery shopping on bike through 16 inches of snow and ice + torrential winds
-snowshoeing up a 14er in a blizzard to celebrate Christmas
-a 12 mile trail run on Day 5 of a beet juice and olive oil fast
-etc.

Triathlete Magazine (left) along with Outside, Sunset, Travel, and Trail Runner, shows us how to properly indulge in frivolity in order to reach a level of unimaginable ecstasy unfathomable to Maslow.

Boulder as a case study, interestingly enough, shows us that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is more of a circle than a ladder; once you get to the top, you just start over again. It's like a victory lap. Having never been forced to grapple with challenges such as shelter, safety, security, nourishment etc, Boulder citizens visit these struggles voluntarily as a form of indulgence.

The only other obvious flaw in the Hierarchy is that "sex" is somehow in the first out of five tiers. Although we all know that that's something even wealthy, highly educated lawyers struggle with on a day-to-day basis. Or maybe what Maslow is saying is that you can't be self-actualized if you're not getting laid. I have reason to believe however that Boulder, with its Free Love weekend conventions and overwhelming amount of per capita fitness and beauty, is doing fine in that respect too.

Boulder Colorado: A small town in disguise

2011-01-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

Boulder is a small town. Almost too small. But not quite. It's small enough that by simply living a regular, nonsocial life, involving occasionally venturing out of the house to restock on survival supplies, you're guaranteed a sense of community. And if you happen to frequent a few places, you are guaranteed to get to know your fellow frequenters. I went to a grocery store today to get some food for a dinner party and I knew at least half of the people in the store. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I ran into about 4 people that I knew or recognized from somewhere or another. And the problem is, half the time, I have no idea whether or not I'm good friends with this person or if they were the person cooking dinner who I saw through a window while walking my dog. Which makes for some awkward encounters. ("Do I..? I swear I know you from somewhere! Oh no, that's right, I watched you making lasagna through your window while I was waiting for my dog to finish crapping on your lawn." No bueno in terms of first impressions.) So the lady who gave me recommendations on the fontina cheese at the grocery store looked insanely familiar and it wasn't until I was staring off into space in line to check out, that I realized she was the woman who leaned across a table at a cafe to give me an answer to a crossword puzzle I was working on.

Oh ya, that's another problem. I have a ridiculously good memory for faces and names. And unimportant facts. So, for instance, I happened to remember that this particular lady, the fontina cheese lady, was writing down a text conversation that she was flipping through on her phone, in loopy handwriting in a pink journal. And that at one point, she called her husband to ask about what actor was in some movie. So I feel kind of awkward listening to cheese advice from this person who thinks I'm a stranger but actually I know quite a bit about her. I know that she drinks chai tea with whipped cream, that she has loopy handwriting and she's married, and somewhere, in her house, there's a pink journal with a text conversation scrawled into it. Just by soliciting dairy advice from an innocent employee, I already feel like I'm violating her privacy.

The worst is when I run into someone who was an acquaintance a few years ago but I was never actually friends with. That also happened today. It's winter break so all of the people I went to high school with are back from college and invading my town and my life. I was walking to Red Letter Books today when, in front of me, to my terror, I saw this girl (whose name I won't post because for all I know, she's reading this and once thought that we were great friends even though all we did was have a chemistry lab together once 4 years ago.) who I went to high school with and haven't seen in 3 years. Now this is the kind of person who I have deleted on facebook because not only do I not want to have to read her status updates 4 times a day about how long it's taking for her head cold to go away, but also because her presence was taking up precious cyber space in my cyber consciousness. But even though she too has probably not even had the smallest fleeting thought about me either in the last few years, if we run into each other (which I stealthily but laboriously avoided), we would be expected to pretend like we give a shit about each other. "Oh hi! Oh my god so good to seeee yyyooouuu!! How are you, how's college? Where are you going again? Oh right... And now what are you studying? Riiiggghhtt I remember that.... Coooollll well how's that going?" blah blahblah I don't give a shit. So I lingered outside looking through the sale book rack until she and her friend had thoroughly imbeded themselves in one section of the bookstore. I then very quietly snuck past them to my section and then realized that what I was looking for was actually in their section, I confidently walked in, immediately fixating my eyes on the dewey decimal codes of the books on the wall until I found my book. I even went so far as to appear engrossed in the back cover of Mrs Dalloway until they had cleared the section and I was free to go to checkout- thereby being forced to turn my gaze upward.

Now I'm not introverted. Or creepy. I'm actually really social. I'm one of those people who casually talks to absolutely everyone who crosses their path. But I just really don't like having to pretend that I care about something that I don't. And I'm not heartless either. I'm actually very warm. I'm just.... discerning, I like to say. And I'm usually so lost in my own little world that it requires an entire paradigm shift to genuinely relate to someone I haven't seen or thought about in 3 years.

Okay, so now that I'm done justifying myself, I can continue.

Unlike Los Angeles, where I grew up, you cannot go for a walk in town in Boulder to get some "alone time", a valuable commodity in my life. There's no anonymity in this small of a town.

I wondered, leaving the grocery store, if there would come a point when I recognized every single person in Boulder from one place or another. I guess I'll find out, because I don't plan to leave anytime soon.

July 5th: The Secret Life of Goats

2010-07-29T12:08:00.001-07:00

For anyone who just tuned in, I spent two weeks on a little farm in Big Sur, California- milking goats, making cheese, and spinning honey...

The goats are so fantastic to take out grazing. They're afraid of mountain lions but they trust people so as soon as they leave the safety zone of their barnyard, they follow whatever human is with them. They are animals of routine and femininity. They are each others support team and they prefer pack life to free wandering.

While walking through the forest with the goats, they will stray only far enough to reach some tender branches, which they will all gather around and feast on. Sometimes though, one of the goats will get caught up with a particularly luscious shrubbery and not realize that the pack has moved on. She finishes chewing absent mindedly, looking around blankly as if thinking, "wait, what the hell's going on?" and then, remembering the circumstances, recognition flashes through her eyes, she bows her head and makes a mad a-line dash for the pack, kicking off rocks into an in-flight full-body panic spasm, contorting through trees, mowing over saplings and whizzing an inch from my kneecaps, only settling once she's in the center of the pack. At which point the whole matter is wiped clean from her memory.

The grazing world is a microcosm for all of goat existence. I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on goat society, social norms as well as the occasional pushing of the mold, and the personalities of the five ladies I've been traipsing around the forest with.

Lucia is the big mama, about to kid any day now. Her pregnancy shows as she wheezes along, loyally sticking within a few feet of me but hesitant to stray too far from the shed. She is by far the wise one of the bunch. Definitely the only one whose brain activity transcends the day-to-day routine of a dairy goat on Sweet Water Farm. Her mind thinks beyond the goat world of hay, milk, and alfalfa, as she methodically ponders the unknown, the banal existence so many easily fall into, the eternal, the here and the now, and the legacy she may leave behind. Physically, she's easily distinguishable by her thick white collar and quaint, classic gold bell which hangs under her throat and emits the high, proud jingle of authority, leadership and worldly wisdom only clear to her and I. The rest of her goat company frolic in and out of life's daily pleasures, unaware of existence outside of themselves, utterly devoid of perspective. Lucia gazes pensively out of pale black eyes, never shying away from sustained eye contact or any opportunity to connect on a deeper level, humans alongside her intellectually disappointing but indelibly attached goat kin. These bodies we are graced with are of course, but external shells housing a piece of the eternal which Lucia recognizes everywhere and within everything. I get the feeling that Lucia curses her crude hoofs for not allowing her to express herself through the medium of watercolors. She has come to terms with the fact that her wisdom falls amongst furry deaf ears yet she remains hopeful as to the new pure-breed high-producing Sonnen that Charlie the farmer man has promised to bring in come October.

Ange is meek and mild. Sensitive no doubt, but not wise like Lucia. Ange is the milquetoast one of the pack. There's nothing weird about her. She's just your ordinary dairy goat. Her pride, however, lies in this reliable domesticity. Unprompted, she can be counted on for half a gallon of milk morning and evening, her teats hang evenly and she stands patiently until the pail is full, making milking a breeze. Her kid, to whom her initial milk production can be attributed, is long gone on another farm or, but she prefers to not consider this option, slaughtered. Bucks however, as she knows well, are of little use in the dairy world. Every effort in Ange is directed toward progressing the dairy business of the farmer, to which she is loyally devoted. "I did not choose the life of a dairy goat," muses Ange, "but alas, it is the life into which I was born and I shall fulfill my destined role." If things had been up to her, who knows where she would be, what pastures she would be frolicking through, and with which bucks she would be fornicating. Her pride in being the "farmer's pet" as the other goats tease, makes for a constantly tested ego. "This is all I've got," Ange rightly observes, ever the realist. Her value to the farmer, her external attributes and temperate disposition, make for a superficial relationship and at times, she feels taken for granted. In an everlasting effort to bolster her self-esteem, held up by external approval not internal confidence, she is a victim to her ego and she often finds herself comparing herself to her fellow goat ladies and then admonishing herself for doing so. To make it more difficult, Ange is naive to the fact that the existentialist struggles she faces are not unique to herself alone. She attempts to not bog herself down and "go there" by focusing on life's daily pleasures and her valued role in the barn community.

In-depth character analyses of the 3 other goats, Sierra, Heidi and Blanchette, are coming!! Stay tuned. They are stunning items as well. To be continued....

July 4th: No Fireworks in Big Sur! The Mountains are Made of Kindling

2010-07-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

The goats this morning were petulant! Sierra, the new mother goat with two feisty 4 month old girls, kicked my newly sanitized milking pail, tossing hay and poop pellets into an inch of her milk. Charlie the farmer was displeased and aimed a resigned sigh at me, showing me again, proper forearm-hoof blocking technique and I said 'okay'. I poured the milk out and rewashed and resterilized my stainless milking equipment. I wished that I had had some coffee or that coffee was at least in my future. Or that I had gotten a few more hours of sleep the night before.

I lugged my mattress out from the yurt and onto a wooden platform in a clearing nearby and, through my slightly hazy consciousness, gazed up at a sky fuzzy with stars. I focused on one star, and a layer of new stars appeared behind it so I focused on one of those and a new layer appeared behind that. The Milky Way smudged the sky and, an hour later when I woke up to smack mosquitoes off my arm, I saw that all the stars had rotated around me while I was sleeping, like I was on a giant lazy susan spinning slowly around. I woke up at 5 in the morning from a fitful night of sleep and my bitten-up body echoed the buzz of the mosquitoes circling my head and dive-bombing my neck and shoulders. I lugged my mattress back into the yurt to avoid the bugs but, laying between sheets crunchy with dirt, I got equally mutilated indoors.

Resteralizing the milk pail, I just began to discover all of my bites. I pushed back through the goat pen and, crouching down beside Sierra, I got back to work. Another inch of milk in the pail and she kicked it again. I let out a little hopeless wimper and, looking around to see if Charlie was around, picked out the hay pieces and kept on milking. Finally, I finished Sierra and got to work on Ange, whose temper makes milking much easier. Twenty minutes and 50 experimental crouching positions later, Charlie came in to check on me, essentially to see what the hell was taking so damn long. Seeing that the poor goats had long ago run out of food and were now bored and antsy, he relieved me of my duties. Sierra, her head still locked into the feeding trough, was laying down awkwardly, face resting against a clump of alphalpha, snorting.

I stood just outside the opening of the goat shed and watched Charlie milk. I'm 5'7” last time I checked and Charlie is at least a foot shorter than I am. So everything in Charlie's self-built world is slightly smaller than everything in ours. Charlie's world is custom and we all adapt to it upon entrance into Sweetwater Farm. The sinks come up to my pelvis, the mirrors are hung six inches lower than I would hang them and the barely etched out paths through the deeply wooded forest that connect everything- shed to coop, yurt to bathhouse, garden to composting toilet- are custom pruned. Walking to the bathhouse in broad daylight is still a challenge for me. This morning, I got caught up watching my feel trudging uphill through rocks and stumps and I totally missed the low-hanging branch in front of me until it clocked me in the forehead.

So stepping out of the goat shed with a five foot roof, was a relief to be able to stand up straight. Charlie though, was happy as a clam squatting next to his beloved goat.
“This position, I've found, is the most comfortable for milking,” he said, not looking up from his work. Having interns in and out of Sweetwater Farm constantly, Charlie has gotten so used to teaching and preaching that it's hard to break him out of the pattern, even at the dinner table.
“It's the same position that I use to take a shit. It aligns the body. This is the position Asians sit in instead of us with our lounge chairs and I've found, it really is the best for the body. I could sit in this position for hours.” And the milk squirt squirt squirts into the frothing pail.

“See how much more milk I'm getting out with each squirt? It's about twice as much as you're getting. But you'll get it. You're already faster than you were yesterday.”

July 3rd: A Day in the Life at Sweetwater Farm

2010-07-13T00:23:00.000-07:00

Morning goat milking. Kind of a pain- takes forever and is hard on the lower back. A quiet breakfast with Charlie and Elodi, the French-Canadian woofer. She's very sweet. She grew up on a farm in Quebec and has broad shoulders and muscular arms. Not at all the marketable body image most city girls are going for but I think she's gorgeous. She listens quietly and intently as Charlie rants on about how the bible is a load of crap and the biggest scam the world has seen, when the conversation started out with me asking what temperature I have to heat the milk to pasteurize it. A fly fell in it. This breakfast however, was quiet, each of us engrossed in our respective publications of the Sun literary magazine.

Tim West arrived, a very cute and energetic cook from the same camp as where I met Charlie, to plan the menu and arrange a staff for their next gig in August. My younger step sister wouldn't talk to me for two days after having seen us kissing at the camp. I felt really bad. I knew she had a crush on him, even though he's eleven years older than she is which, when you're fifteen, especially an immature fifteen, does make a difference. But he came on to me and I didn't resist. Melodee and I were bra shopping at H&M a few days later when I brought up the matter and, quickening her pace and hoping I'd follow, she skimmed her hand across a lacy lingerie set and said, as if in an afterthought, “You didn't have to DO him though.” We didn't have sex. Not even close. She thought we did and for some reason, for her that was the deal breaker. I assured her, even pinkie promised her, that we didn't “do it”. I threw in one more apology for good measure and our relationship was healed.

I took a fantastic bath in the beautiful bathhouse today, with a view across a few miles of empty rolling hills. The hills part in the middle to reveal a crotch of ocean and the view doesn't stop until the natural horizon, however many hundred miles off. But today there was a fog bank creeping up on us and filling in the split between the mountains with a thick pile of white wet clouds.

Unloaded a truck and lugged some things here and there. Lunch and post lunch sleepy lounging. I laid on the couch with my legs over Tim's lap and the two of us dozed while Charlie assaulted poor innocent Elodi with an exasperated explosion of his thoughts on mass food production, the manipulating arrangement of super markets, and Monsanto lobbyists. As I fell in and out of slow murky sleep, phrases from Charlie's rant worked themselves into my dreams.

After lunch and lounge, garden work! Lots of weeding and watering. Tim strut around with his shirt off, carrying an axe at one point and a pellet gun at another. He shot a rabbit while it was munching in a raised bed and later (after my second shower of the day) showed me how to skin it. Charlie's cat, Minnie Mouse, dug up the head and pelt and Tim (now with a shirt on. Rubber gloves too.) chased him with a hose until the cat dropped the rabbit parts. Tim reburied them. Charlie's garden overlooks hills and hills of beautiful Big Sur forest, white slab rocks jutting out here and there. Dropped the weeds in the chicken run and the lemongrass in Charlie's for tea tonight.

Down near the goat shed, I hung some curd in cheese clothes while Elodi milked. Wrapped some Camemberts in the earth-chilled aging room. “Just like a Christmas present”, said Charlie. Off to dinner. I wonder how Tim will cook the rabbit. Not much to say today- very quiet. But very happy.

July 2nd: Day Two on Charlie's Farm

2010-07-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

I've known Charlie for six years now but have only seen him briefly, here and there, for nine days each year. He's the chef at the hippy dance camp in the Hye Sierras that I go to. I've known that he has a farm up in Big Sur and this year, with more of an interest in farming and less of an interest in spending my whole summer in the metropolis of Los Angeles, I asked him about his farm. Turned out he needed help and turned out I had the next two weeks free. So just like that, here I am, in his guest yurt, half an hour drive from an already sleepy part of highway one into the completely isolated but vibrantly alive hills of Big Sur. His post office box is twenty minutes away.

Before leaving, I riled up my friend Tyler to come along. He and I were planning to go on some sort of adventure and the goat herding and cheese making of Sweetwater Farm seemed like the perfect opportunity. The drive up along the coast was fun but, as soon as we got to the farm, it was obvious that Tyler was not in his element. Im sure it didnt help that Charlie clearly prefers for his farm interns to be girls; young attractive girls.

So Tyler, and the Subaru that brought me up here, left- just 24 hours after arriving. I assured him that I would be fine and would find a ride back to LA before my flight home in two weeks. And I will. I'll get back and I'll make my flight but right now, I have no idea how that will happen. But for me, that's the ultimate freedom. I don't enjoy the uncertainty for the sake of the rush of waking up not knowing where I'll be sleeping that night. It's not a discontent with my original plan. What I like is that it's an open ended deal. A trip that could take me anywhere. My original itinerary is a fall-back plan. And any divergence, an improvement.

My New Soundtrack

2010-05-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

My gap year has instilled in me a false sense of permanence. I feel like I have all the time in the world to do all the things I want to do. Which of course means that, as my year goes on, I am doing less and less. But now it's started to ramp up again with plans, responsibilities and travel dates. So, now- sandwiched into another coach seat off to another adventure- is a perfect place to play catch- up.

The most monumental and important change that has taken place in my life is my recent interest in Country music. Baxter, my brother, was forced to listen to Country by the chef of the restaurant in which he worked. The song that won him over (and eventually me too) was "My Big Green Tractor" by Jason Aldean, whereby, with some close lyrical analysis, "taking a ride on my big green tractor" appears to refer to "having sex".

The biggest challenge for me in accepting Country music was severing the connection I had in my brain between intelligence and musical talent. I had always assumed that the people who make the music I love would also be people who I would like to get to know- people who had a lot in common with me and shared many of my same values.

Having grown up listening to Ani Difranco and The Flaming Lips, this assumption is probably pretty accurate but when Country music enters the picture, things get confusing. Killer guitar riffs and fantastic instrumentation of fiddle, banjo, and mandolin are offset by lyrics like "I want to check you for ticks", "she thinks my tractor's sexy" and the line to one of my favorite songs by Josh Turner in which he muses over a girl's smile by comparing it to "butter beans, cherry pie and an old wheel barrow filled with summer rain".

But already having acquired a taste for bluegrass, in which the musical abilities of the musicians can often overshadow their blind and at times, garish, devotion to Christian dogma, I was able to ease myself into being able to respect and genuinely enjoy the music without expecting to respect and share the extraneous viewpoints of the musicians. (Hopefully the former fans of Tiger Woods will pick up on this important distinction and remind themselves what the man is famous for.)

Now I can even appreciate the very things about Country that initially turned me off of the genre.

1. Most of the songs, if not all, are really simple. There are no elaborate metaphors, no probing questions, no esoteric references. Everything is simple. It's about plowing the field, making fried chicken, how nice a good pair of jeans feels, trying to get a girl to sleep with you, or working hard all week to put beer on the table.

2. Country lacks the smug competition of most other genres. Nobody, in Country, is trying to outdo anyone else or reinvent themselves.

[Just a little side note to emphasize Country music's adamant adherence to tradition:
Hank Williams' son, Hank Williams Jr., was criticized for making music that (within the genre of Country) differed from that of his father. So Jr. wrote a fantastic song called "Family Tradition" basically telling everyone that although he respects his father's name, he's going to make whatever kind of music he damn well wants to. And that settled that. Until HIS son, Hank Williams III diverged in his own musical expression beyond the comfort zone of Country- even becoming the principle member of punk metal bands Assjack and Superjoint Ritual.

To which, his father, Jr., responded with the country song "You Just Don't Use the F Word in Country". After this tactical move on Jr.'s part to publicly denounce his son's divergence, Hank Williams, Jr., and Hank III all got together to record the album "Three Hanks: Men With Broken Hearts", uniting over a topic familiar and relatable to most everyone, which happens as well to be the founding theme of Country music.]

3. Everyone has the utmost respect for the classics- Loretta Lynn, George Strait, Hank Williams- and if any novice wants to pump out a country song of their very own, they can just follow the formula: upbeat guitar intro, simple twangy chorus, quiet low didactic bridge, and then the last three decisive chords and the finishing concordant slide- at which everyone jumps up and starts clapping and whooping because they know that those three chords mean the song is over and now it's their time to jump up and start clapping and whooping.

As a way of life, no- I would not like to live like this. But as a form of music that I can pop into my stereo system whenever I want to- I love it, love it, love it! The fall-back formula is a good one and the stream of amusing lyrics never stops a'comin' in.

Can't Get Them Masaais Outta My Head: Why We Live So Differently

2010-04-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Over the summer of 2009, I spent 5 weeks living with a tribe of Masaais in Kenya. The experience was fantastic but many parts of it were agonizing, isolating, and unbelievably frustrating. Mostly, it brought up a lot of things that make my head spin and are hard to justify or explain...

The only thing that creates conflict in groups, is innovation. We have layers of foundations- things that are givens- rules that everyone follows, a repertoire of tools that everyone uses, words that mean this and not that. We agree on these things, everyone has them, so there's no reason to fight. But as soon as something new is introduced (a new viewpoint, a new concept) everyone must separately decide how to classify this new item, and not everyone will agree.

The most united, steadfast groups of people are those who denounce and reject innovation. The French dont allow the language to change at all. There's even a committee to invent new French words for American inventions. Their language is therefor perfect and untouched and everyone defends it with their lives. The same concept of preservation applied to larger human and cultural development can cause stagnation which can limit a people in their ability to change, adapt and reevaluate according to a changing world.

Is it better to live in peace in a world lacking innovation (kenyan masaais, the avatar people) or one endorsing innovation but subjecting itself to restlessness, discontent and the fracturing of its people?

Does innovation have to inevitably lead to restlessness, discontent, and fracturing? As far as I can see, the only reason why it does, is because of people's inability to approach anything (a situation, a relationship, an object) without a preconceived idea of what it is, what it should be and its purpose. (Look at the clouds and what do you see? Condensed water hanging in the sky?? No- A sheep, a dinosaur, a dolphin!) Seeing things just as they are with no expectations makes for no disappointment and allows us to lose our baggage, our (at times limiting) values, our past experiences, and simply adapt to our surroundings. For Americans, living very comfortable, easy lives where survival is a given and self creation, self actualization is our struggle, preconceptions are limiting. But for the Masaais, where having 'a people' defined by prejudices, classifications and tradition is the only way of surviving, preconceptions are what makes you run away from a sound in the woods- assuming of course that its an elephant and can easily kill you. Maybe it was just another person from your tribe and you didnt need to run away but if you were wrong, the potential outcome is a painful death.

Innovation, for the Masaais, makes no sense and preconception-based preservation becomes first priority. But the delicate balance between nature and man that must be mastered and preserved to survive off the land, only works for both sides of the equation if neither one of them changes. Unfortunately, the land is the one thats changing this time. Hence, now, a dying people who, unable to adapt to their surroundings, are living hundreds of years in the past.

Jonathan vs Jeniffer

2009-10-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

Two months ago I was in Paris, having a very different version of a vacation than I am now. In Paris, I stayed with a friend Jonathan, and his sisters. There could not be a bigger class difference between staying with Jonathan and staying here at Lokusero. And I’m somewhere in between. By American standards, I’m middle class, maybe upper middle class. But when I stayed with Jonathan it was obvious that I was much below the standards of his usual company. I was dressed in clothes that were functionally tasteful but not by any means lavish, extravagant, or high class. He was high class.

Well past midnight one night, drunk until lucid on his own fatigue and desperate desire to let down his bullet proof walls, the image he had been brought up to maintain, we ate takeout pizza and I listened as he complained and dug for answers to a huge number of unanswerable questions. He tossed the half eaten pizza slice down onto the cluttered bare slab of table thrown in the middle of an obviously unused kitchen, in disgust. Judging by the amount of nights he spends at overpriced restaurants- the kind you go to “to be seen”, he explained to me- I’m guessing the crusted plates stacked in the sink were weeks old. “Zis peeza iz sheet”, he morosely proclaimed as if his idealistic hopes in the good of the world rested in that flavorless slice of lukewarm pizza. Secretly, I rejoiced. After all the incredible food I had had in Paris, takeout from “Speedy Rabbit Pizza” was nothing compared to oober American Pizza Hut or Dominoes. I was brimming with patriotic pride.

His life had no meaning, he said. No end goal to strive for. All of his inherent values were rooted in the acquisition of money which, being a millionaire by the age of 22 and having worked for none of it, had already been fulfilled. Ah, what a perfect ice breaker for a late-night conversation over shitty take-out. What a cliché! Straight from the movies. But the US is so beyond melodramatic clichés. As well as in the pizza arena, in terms of cinema, la belle France, with its flaky delicious pastries and impossibly perfected baguette, lags far behind the US. The consciously emulated cliché of the scene (the romantic tragedy of it!) would have been acknowledged and avoided by now in an American kitchen. We’re already onto indy films for god sake! Random and awkward is the new tragic romance and the French are at least several years behind.

All in all, after having successfully reassured myself that France is not better than the US, as all the French seem to believe, I dropped the subject from my mind and fully applied myself to the situation at hand. Which amounted to this: money, the abundance of money, wealth and stature one has not worked for, being brought up through high society values, results in misery. (We’ve all seen Titanic. And doesn’t Kate look beautiful in her suffering? That’s all they can hope for. That beautifully misunderstood misery, the tragedy of which maybe somehow justifies and gives credence to the whole pretty process. The same allure people have to drama. That pathetic boredom of oneself that an audience is needed to justify ones own self worth. And how do you get an audience? By putting on a show.)

Despite Jonathan’s endless reminders of and references to his Italian leather boots, spacious Parisian apartment and bottomless credit card, he was miserable. Money and those beautiful imported boots, which he made sure to heavily let fall on each step so as to reverberate the metronome of his stride in the sleeping Place de Victor Hugo (maybe the ripples would grow and lap up on some distant shore to prove he had been there and done something), that excessive publicized abundance was all that he had. His hastily predetermined self-image lacked the depth of a self-made one. So he was miserable. And lost.

Here, two months later in the Kenyan Maasai community surrounding Lokusero Primary School, self-made is all that they’ve got. People are left to their own devices from the beginning. I sit in my room with Jeniffer, a mother of three who is only a few years older than me. We bead together, neither one of us being able to speak the other’s language. Her three toddlers are wandering around somewhere, sucking on dirt clods, kicking around elephant dung like soccer balls. The closest thing to a toy that they have are little cars made of milk cartons, sticks and the lids to containers of lard, which they tie to a string and let wheel behind them as they walk. At one, three, and five, they are more often than not left to wander, take care of and amuse themselves. And at Lokusero, complete with more than two changes of clothes, I’m as upper class as it gets. One US dollar being equivalent to 80 Kenya shillings, once a week for the five weeks of my stay, I would go to town and buy the following week’s worth of groceries for 5- 10 people as easily as my friend whose impeccable and magazine-decorated house Im staying at now, my last night in Kenya, equipped with armed guards, several maids and set on 15 acres, paid my four hour private taxi ride to her house with a wad of bills and a quick, dismissive, “don’t worry about it- it’s nothing.”

After talking to the headmaster of the school, I learned that sponsoring a kid through secondary school costs about 300 US dollars per year. For most Maasai families, considering the four or five other kids they have to worry about, and that selling cattle, their only source of income, would be relinquishing their only known livelihood, that fee is insurmountable. But for me, an average middle class American, someone who will often make a choice between muffins at a café based on a 50 cent price difference, left the teacher’s office thinking I could sponsor my favorite student through an entire year of secondary school in a matter of a few determined weeks of babysitting.

Many of my friends from the community don’t understand why I decided to spend my time there when I could be in the states, going to movies, taking real showers and eating more than the cabbage and potatoes that I had for lunch and dinner every day of those five weeks. “If I ever ever made it to America”, I heard many people say, “I would throw away my passport and never come back.“ But what’s the better life really? Yes- many of them have never sat on a toilet seat, they have no running water or electricity, and water must be fetched in the morning because by the afternoon the wells and springs are dry. But no one is depressed or anxious, people aren’t jealous of one another, there are no problems with body image, stress or suicide, things that in the US, are commonplace and a regular part of life. Is this really a better life than waking up to roosters, walking through the fresh early morning air into the forest for a bucket of water, cooking over a fire, hours from the closest town but surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of friends and family, spending the day walking around the forest grazing goats and going to sleep when the sun goes down? Their whole lives are right there.

Clinging onto the roof rack of the bus to town, racing down bumpy red dirt roads through open fields of yellowing grasses, elephants and giraffes against a perfect clean blue sky, my friend the bus driver says, “Life in Kenya”, despite the corrupt government, changing world and devastating draught, “is akuna mutata”, no problem.

In western countries, maybe its something about that constant desire to better oneself that set Jonathan into a directionless cycle of depression. Fashion magazines with new styles, new colors for every season, and by the time the magazines get into print, the styles have already changed. News coming out every minute from 20 different sources, if we skip a week of which, were ill-informed and naiive. So everyone’s constantly behind schedule. The world’s moving faster and faster with styles, diet advice, technology. By the time you get a new program for your new shiny white mac, you only have a few months before the operating system changes and you have to update all your software.

Some people feed off of that chaos. They need to be rushing and always need to have a to-do list in progress or else they get antsy. In a lot of ways, I’m that person. I love making lists and crossing things off so I can see on paper that I’ve been productive. I like being efficient and planning out the routes to take in order to conquer as many obstacles and cross as many items as possible off my list. But it’s all a distraction. This way of life based on bouncing from goal to goal, implying that this right now, is not good enough, not where we want to be.

But is the other side of the coin any better? The contentedness that makes people idle and lets them settle for sub-par conditions. Maybe by acknowledging finding this balance as a struggle of mine, I'm one of those people who’s not content. Looking for answers means that I have questions. Does questioning things mean that I’m not happy with it as is? And if we let things go, stop questioning, would we have a shitty government ruled by class division, bribery and corruption like Kenya’s? Would we all be God-fearing Christians like the Masaais who mollified me as we said out tearful goodbyes that if God wished it to be so, we would meet again? “No!” I thought, “If I work my ass off for the next few years, saving every penny and eating in for every meal as you sit idly by, THEN we’ll meet again. And you’ll attribute it not to my hard work but to your constant prayer.”

Westerners- we do things. We make things happen. But why must an underlying discontentedness accompany that? Would we have the motivation to strive for better if we were perfectly happy with the way things are? Is it worth it? Is it worth getting things done, making things happen and moving things forward if we never take the time to enjoy the fruits of our labor?

I read a bible passage that said literally word for word “friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” I asked my friend Nasioki if it actually meant that because I just couldn’t believe to have read that in a book that so many people follow as a set of guidelines for how to live life. I asked if that was correct and he shrugged and said, “Ya, I guess. That’s how it should be at least”, like it was a truth that didn’t quite make sense to him but would eventually be beaten into him. His skepticism, I’m sure, lay as proof that he is a sinner and further propels the fear of God that has stripped him of all solitary thinking and genuine personal beliefs and left in its tracks a worn down, beaten up, quivering believer.

But those same people, who believe that worshipping this land and this moment, is pagan, godless and sacrilegious, are the ones who are the most, using western words, spiritual, zenned-out, and “in the moment” people I’ve ever met. And we modern skeptical scientists plan for spiritual retreats months in advance and, the more “in touch” of us, map out our days with hours blocked out for meditation and yoga classes. None of it makes sense. We’re both all terribly opposite and upside-down, preaching one thing and practicing the exact opposite.

And when it’s put like that, I can step back, look at it all, and laugh, and go enjoy a nice lunch of fresh salads, cheese and crackers on the beautiful veranda of the house I’m staying at in transit from Maasai village to the white, democratic super-productive hippy bubble of Boulder. They’re all bubbles. And I’m in a bath tub watching them all float around, bump into each other, pop and reform. I’m poking at all of them, trying their boundaries, letting myself drift from one to the next, not yet choosing to embody any just one.

And speaking very literally now, no double meanings whatsoever, these last five weeks have saturated my pores in dirt and dust and the bath water is straight up disgusting. It will take many more baths over the next week or so to get fully clean again.

Comin Home

2009-10-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

so czech it out!
I got hassled (you could go as so far as to say bitched out) by the guy at customs in London because I didnt have an eticket for my london denver flight so he gave me a lecture on how I was obviously an inexperienced traveler to go through customs without adequate information on my next ticket (I just had the flight number and times because I switched around the ticket so much with the travel agent and by the time I got that one, I was in kenya and internet sucked), especially after 911, he said!
So I came out from that a little low morale and nervous, especially considering that I was smuggling a bunch of african fruits and tea leaves into several very important countries (dubai, london, and the us). So after a few hours of hanging around the terminal waiting until I could check in (my layover is 7 hours), the guy at the check out counter saw no problem with my limited ticket info, made a phone call as I was tying back the straps of my backpack, and told me I was upgraded to business class, meaning I also had access to the lounge. So now Im in an upper sequestered area of the heathrow airport sipping a cappuccino and helping myself to the numerous complimentary buffets, plus free wifi and a wide assortment of velvet lounge chairs. I am so down with this. AND, on both the flights to dubai and to london, the seat next to me was free. Considering that in the last month and a half Ive had a total of one actual shower, my clothes are the same ones Ive been wearing for the last three months and they too havent been washed by anything but my grubby hands in a bucket of dirty water, Ive been in transit for two full days now and probably smell like ass, I should feel out of place here, amongst dapper looking, immaculately pressed, dressed and shaved (probably not by their own hands either), business men with british accents, but I feel just fine. I think Ill go get meself a glass of wine.

A Frustrated Rant about Love, God and Idle Worship

2009-09-27T03:57:00.000-07:00

Because the women are always busy doing laundry and not knowing how to speak English, and the elders are always perched somewhere in a plastic chair doing nothing but looking noble, my core friends at Lokusero are 20 something year old guys, who watch after their goats here and there, sometimes fix the fence that gets destroyed by elephants in a different place every night, but who mainly like to sit around doing absolutely nothing. And they love to ask me questions about America and they all have their own absurd and ill-logical plan to get to America and come back rich.

But they dont ask me the things that I would expect- about big houses, rich people, movie stars, cars and different food. Instead, they ask about the things that theyre familiar with because thats all they know. So they ask about traditions, ceremonies, female circumcision, marriage, weather (and they always lump the entire US into one overarching question- "Is your country very cold?", which takes a lot of explaining and often maps drawn into the dirt with a stick). Other things they like to ask about: whether we have goats and chickens in our houses and if not, where does meat come from?, what houses are made of ("What do you mean cow dung is not a good insulator??"), and if people have big dogs as pets and if so, can I get them one?
Ive realized how free the US is. In terms of religion, traditions and love mainly.

In the US, people who break traditions are encouraged and thought to be original and cool. Originality and individualism is valued. If someone wants, they can have Thanksgiving in April and everyone has their own tradition for Christmas- some people cook duck, some people order out for chinese, and all of it is more than welcomed. The more original, the more individual, the better. And love. Being able to love who you want, and when you do love, being able to be with that person and if you no longer love each other, being able to split up. Ive never thought higher of divorce than I do now- thats a huge freedom and a huge luxury- the notion of standing up for oneself and being true to one's own desires. Those ideas are unheard of here, especially for women. And the oppression of women- not so much literal, explicit ways (although there's that too: circumcision, early marriage...) but its just so deeply rooted in the culture that its even worse. (Like isnt it better to beat a dog out of spite and anger, trying to make a point by purposely crossing a line, than to beat a dog without thinking twice about it because there is no line to cross?) The guys around here, even the good, new age guys who I hang out with and who oppose female circumcision and who claim to want equality, they dont do shit all day. They sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing, while right in front of them, girls and women are walking to and from water pumps with gallons of water strapped to their hunched over backs, carrying two children, fetching firewood, doing laundry,... The guys cook half the time and take the goats out in the bush for them to graze but that usually ends in a pub stop and stumbling home hours later, but still midday, drunk.

And people still pay dowries for marriage here! Women! Being traded like goods! In exchange for sheep, a cow, some sugar, a few blankets. Marriage here is an agreement between two families- its more of the families choice than the couples. The freedom to date! To love someone and fall out of love, even the freedom for a woman to enjoy sex!

Im becoming thankful for, or at least aware of so many things that I hadnt even considered before. I dont want to say "take for granted" because I think gender equality and loving who you want to love are things that should be granted. So its not a luxury of ours, its them being deprived of a basic necessity of life. The ability to strive for something higher and better as well. To not just settle for the bathroom door that sticks every time one opens or closes it- but to raise one's standards and not just settle for something thats just okay and will be enough to get by. I've always hated (and a big part of me still does) the home improvement mentality, that makes one always think their lives would be better with a dining room of a different color, and a guest room with nicer blinds. But the self- empowerment behind that, the notion that one is in control of his own happiness and comfort, and its he who is responsible for having not gotten that job he only half tried for, of having a house thats messy or a yard thats cluttered.

Here, its not the people who are in control, responsible and able, its God. These people really follow the bible, not as a code of morals, the aesops fables that I see it as, but as literal history that, with enough prayer, is likely to repeat itself. Why dont they see that the people in biblical stories, they didnt follow their traditions, they broke out, they rose up and became leaders and made decisions and did things! They were radicals and they were not always socially excepted and they were not idle. They were empowered.

I went to church last sunday. I was so impressed by their devotion. And their energy and strength. Kids whose voices Id never heard before because theyre the shy kids in class who are incompetent, never understand whats going on, and obviously see no value whatsoever in education, can stand and pace in front of their whole village preaching the word of god and leading prayer and songs, dancing up and down the aisle. And then everyone will collapse into cathartic and emotional prayer asking God for things that they might realize they already have been given if they didnt throw their candy wrappers on the beautiful, massive expanses of untouched land around them (dont they see that THIS is God?? Theyre too busy looking up to the heavens, that they dont see God all around them. And look at this land! If they just looked at it, how is it not clear that the earth must be older that 6000 years- just by actually looking at it!) And school. Theyre the ones who take school for granted as one of their very few tickets out. All of these things- they pray for things to be handed to them accompanied by the booming voice of God, telling them exactly what to do, not realizing that maybe the oppurtunities they turn down every day in waiting for some divine intervention, maybe THATS what God has given. They think progressing and striving for something better means that theyre not content with what God has given. But like a parent, maybe God sets us up for success and then steps back, hoping we'll run with it, instead of sitting at his feet with empty pockets and open hands.

Here's a joke I know: So theres a guy and his town is flooding and the flood has risen so high that hes stranded on his roof and waters are still rising but he's not afraid because he says "God will save me". A boat comes by to rescue him but he turns it down saying, "God will save me". One more rescue boat and then a helicopter come by but he turns them all down saying "God will save me." So then, of course, the flood waters get too high and eventually he drowns. When he gets to heaven, he asks God, "Why didnt you save me?? I prayed and prayed" and God says, "What do you mean? I sent two boats and a helicopter!"

I wish the kids here put as much into their education as they did into their prayer. So heres my little prayer: Im thankful for being empowered, for relying on myself and not others, and certainly not some unattainable, heavenly force. That's just bound to bring about either a massive inferiority complex, some serious disappointment, or the idleness that prevents this community from moving forward.

2009-09-19T03:06:00.000-07:00

2009-09-19T02:31:00.002-07:00

September 5th
Two months since Ive been away from home and counting. I landed in Kenya on the first and am living in a little village hours outside of the first city big enough to have internet. I don’t even know where to begin. Ive been here only five days but already feel so saturated that I barely have anything to say, like when your bladder is so full that when you actually go to the bathroom, you can just get a tiny trickle out. So Ill just start talking in the very formulated, bullet-point mode of organization that completely contradicts how this entire society is run, but may help me regain a small feeling of western control.

-To get to Nanyuki, the town that I am in now, I piled into a dirty van this morning with nothing written on the outside except for “Maximum: 14”. I squeezed into the front seat and was handed a little boy who was to sit on my lap. I gave my money to a man wearing khaki pants and a huge pink down jacket despite the heat. The driver, who cant get enough of the name “Cookie”, was the same cheerful smiling Kenyan who drove me and my friend Dickson to the village on my first night here. On that ride, the van was so packed that after the fifth person piled into the front bench seat, I found myself scooted over until I was straddling the stick shift, every shift of gears establishing a closer relationship between the drivers hand and my inner thighs. But he was oblivious to it anyway, as he jabbered on his cell phone, opened the door while racing down an ill-kept dirt road to check on the underside of the car, and joked in Swahili with the my Maasai warrior friend on the opposite side of me. Today, he had been wearing a heavily beaded and accessorized tan hat that jingled when he walked, and a shirt that said “Everyone has to have something to believe in. Right now, I believe I’ll have a beer”. Before we left, he had to get out of the car and hold people in as he closed the door, similar to how you close a closet door really fast after throwing the last few things in there that there is obviously no room for. An hour later, when everyone piled out of the van to crouch in the shade while the driver opened the hood to replace a few parts that had fallen out along the way, I counted twenty men and women, seven small children, one nursing infant, and one large chicken. Despite the crowded, hot, long and bumpy ride, no one complains. The baby didn’t cry once and the two five year old boys sitting on my lap didn’t utter a sound except to point out to each other the elephants moving past our window. Im not sure what keeps them so quiet, whether it’s a constant mild illness numbing their motivation to complain or fidget, a general acceptance of the way things work, or whether it’s the cultural lack of any desire to work to better itself that has frustrated me since the minute I stepped off the airplane and into an airport lacking any organization whatsoever despite the teeming mass of people who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing or where they were supposed to be going. Either way, the obviously sick boy sitting faintly on the ground with a chicken on his lap and staring into a plastic bag ready ready for him to vomit into, casts shame on every American parent to a whiney kid who throws a hissy fit at the supermarket when his mom wont buy him the flavor of ice cream he wants. “Nzuri?” I asked a woman sitting next to me, who I assumed was his mom. (Is he okay?) She nodded at me confidently, said something to the boy which sounded something like “hey, sit up and stop passing out. You’re scaring the white girl”, repositioned the baby in her lap, and continued to stare out the window.

-My house is a room in a long cement building with a tin roof, separated into rooms with a small area in the front to make a fire and cook, and a room in the back with a table, chair, bed and a window. Light comes from a propane lantern and water comes from a pump 5 minutes away. And for those of us who arent immune to the countless diseases transmitted in the sitting water that feeds the pump, drinking water comes from a bottle. Maybe that explains why people here drink very little water and a tons of tea- which has been boiled and so is safe. But I think the tea isn’t so much for hydration, its more for the spoons and spoons of sugar that they put in each cup. The bathroom is a cement building a few hundred feet away with a hole dug in the ground with no toilet paper. Im not sure if everyone brings their own or if Im the only one who does that.

So much more to say but sitting down in front of a computer for a few hours to write has been pushed to the back of my priority list and has been replaced with beading with my favorite old lady friend Grace who looks ancient but is surprisingly spunky and agile. She speaks about 10 words of English, all of which Im proud to say Ive taught her, and I speak about the same in Maasai. I wonder how old she is but she has no idea. Other things that have replaced computer time: futile attempts to clean my feet, fetching pales of water, drinking tea and staring off into the distance, playing with focusing and unfocusing my eyes, washing laundry, learning swahili, and roasting goats.

Bike Camping in Holland

2009-08-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

My beautiful little bike, totally in her element.

I have a new cousin! Meet Thomas

2009-08-17T18:06:00.000-07:00

Buzzing in Glittery Fairietale Prague Land

2009-08-11T03:24:00.000-07:00

Im in a Starbucks in Prague- loving the free wifi and the English menu. Im super hyped up on caffeine and holding my head trying to figure out tickets to Kenya to teach English at a Primary School. I have very little info about it. Im talking to travel agents, tour guides, and Masaai warriors. I have to make a decision about my ticket by tomorrow and, in a half an hour, Im meeting up with a Czech cousin I havent seen in 10 years in front of a giant statue of a horse, in a city that looks like a toy diorama of Disneyland set up by a 6 year old girl, the buildings painted candy colors, mixed in with 15th century castles with giant statues staring down at the street that seem to say "if you do anything wrong in this city, not only will big brother see, but you will also be damned to hell". Looking at the city skyline, with castles and spires and crazy colors, I half expect to see unicorns flying out of the buildings and little fairies buzzing out of the castle windows like a glittery colorful hallucination. Looking down at the streets, the people look like they were set loose into a play set and are wandering around, all knowing exactly where theyre going and undoubting.
Can you say, overwhelming?

Prague Bus Station

2009-08-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

Not too many people here speak English, but it's certainly encouraged.

Arriving in Policka

2009-08-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

You remember when I said that Paris and London are really not that much different from big cities in the states, there’s just a change in perspective? Well that’s not the case anymore. Policka, a tiny little town 3 ½ hours outside of Prague, is nothing like what I am familiar with.
This morning I woke up at 5.45 in Paris, wrapped up some food for breakfast, packed up my last few things, and headed out to the bus stop a few blocks away, realizing that together, me and my backpack form an independent self contained ecosystem. I took the bus to a metro line, which took me to a shuttle which dropped me off in front of the Orly airport. Finding my flight was no problem. I bought a yogurt which I ended up eating in line for security, I got on my plane, and passed out before we left the tarmac. I woke up as we were preparing for landing and begged the flight could go on for another half hour at least, knowing that I didn’t have much of a plan of what to do after getting off the plane. Speaking “un peu” of a language, I found, is very different than speaking none. But I managed to follow the signs, exchange my euros for Czech crowns, pick up my bag and get onto a shuttle, which very conveniently dropped me right in front of a metro station. I was reassured looking around me to see that nobody else had any idea what was going on either. I took a metro line, transferred to a different one, and then came up out of the station knowing that I had to get on a bus that would, after 3 ½ hours, end up in Policka. But with busses, taxis, and shuttles everywhere, and zero information booths and apparently no one who spoke English, it was a little harder to find than I expected. After 45 minutes of aimless wandering, ridiculous heat, and a 30 pound weight on my back, a jolly old Czech fellow was obliged to point me in the direction of the bus station (which was of course very nearby and obvious), where I bought a ticket and a sandwich and collapsed into a plastic chair for two hours. When I got onto the bus is when I started to look around and notice how different everything was. The bus, first of all, was packed. It was a 3 ½ hour bus ride, and people were packed into every tiny airplane seat and the aisle was filled with people standing. I was just happy to be able to sit down.
The man next to me was going through some serious stress. I don’t know what the deal was but it looked like he was going to blow a gasket and let loose his problems with the world onto the whole bus, starting with me. I would reach down to get a book from my bag and he would heave a massive sigh and look at me like “This is exactly the kind of bullshit Im so sick of with you people”. Across the isle was a lady who seemed to store all of her body fat in her forearms and fingers. Also she had the most incredible, bleached she-man mullet Ive ever seen. Next to her was a tall, skinny teenage boy with big hair who, every time I glanced over, could be seen with a new food item in his hand. He went through a foot long sandwiches, a liter of some in descript green soda, a bag of orange gummy things, and a power bar in about half an hour.
Something about the women here are really different. From what I’ve seen, kids are viewed as pests that must be dealt with in the swiftest way possible, young women are gorgeous until they hit maybe their thirties, at which point they become incredibly wrinkled and aged looking. Realizing this, they try desperately to look young by cutting their hair in ways that are incomprehensible to western eyes, bleaching it blond, and then throwing in a smudge of bright purple or red here and there. My favorite hairstyle so far was sported by a 50 something year old woman and looked like her hair had gone entirely white and the red smear was positioned so it looked like she had been laying with her head resting in a pool of blood. I am not someone who judges people based on “hairstyles” but this has got to say something about the culture. What it does say, I havent figured out yet. For the entire several hour bus ride, very few people actually relaxed, read a book, listened to music, or gazed out of the window like I would expect to see on a long car ride through beautiful lush countryside. Instead, everyone craned their heads to see up the aisle or in between the seats, watching the road in front of them, like it was their teenage son learning to drive and they all had to actively participate to ensure our safe and expedient arrival at our destination. I can’t blame them too much though. The driver clearly did not know how to drive a manual but was faced with the task anyway. He noticeable improved as the drive went on.
So this went on for a few hours. I read some David Sedaris, listened to some music, and dozed off a few times. Then we got to Policka. I got off the train, and realized I had no idea where I was, no grasp on the local language, and all of my knowledge of my accommodations rested with my friend Martin, who was somewhere in the town but we hadn’t actually talked about a way to meet up. So I choked down a slowly rising lump in my throat, and finding that nobody spoke English or expressed the least desire to help me, I began to wander. Eventually I wandered into the middle of town where the skateboard race Martin is competing in was taking place but it looked like everything was winding down and, to my dismay, he was not one of the lingering few. With no plan in my mind, a pounding headache, and very little cognitive activity, I continued my wandering until, peering under the dimly lit terrace of a restaurant, I made out a gangly teenager and some curly blond hair, and I prayed it was Martin. He stood up and walked over to me, looking as relieved as I was. He showed me the room, I ditched my bag, grabbed my wallet and went back to dinner with him and his Czech skateboarding buddies, realizing I had seen maybe 3 other women since I got off the bus.
Dinner was delicious, the company was great, and the skateboarding scene is a lot like the skiing scene so I love it and can understand their dude talk. And my favorite part is that nobody here seems to be worried about anything or have “real” lives. They just talk about skateboarding, beer, and how much to tip the cute waitress. I think this place is going to work for me

A Brief Comparison of Power Bars

2009-08-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Before leaving to Europe, I bought a bunch of food bars that I could eat on a train or just on a day when I didn’t want to dish out money for lunch. And I really didn’t need to do that. First off, one of my main priorities here is food. I’d rather cruise around town looking for cool cafes and cute little patisseries than tour the inside of the Notre Dame, which is exactly what Im doing now. So when would I ever choose to eat a cliff bar instead of sitting down with a coffee and a warm broccoli and smoked salmon quiche and a good book? Never. But while I’ve got these bars, I may as well lay out a comparison.

So far, Cliff bars are my favorite. Some people think they taste like turds, but really they don’t. They only look like turds. There are actually many very good flavors. The best flavors so far are Peanut Toffee Buzz (that one takes care of the need for both the quiche, AND the coffee) and I think there was a White Chocolate Macadamia Nut (or some combination like that) and that was pretty good too. I also have Mojo bars that are good. Those look a little less like flattened bear poop and don’t have that ambiguous musty power bar taste. They’re more of a fruit and nut concoction but can take on the consistency of peanut brittle, which makes eating them a bit of a struggle. Especially when trying to be subtle about eating while walking through a hushed museum. Also they’re a little bit too sweet for my taste. And the last kind of bar I brought are Odwalla bars. Odwalla makes great smoothies but the bars are not so good. They don’t really taste like anything and are just not that good.
Bottom line, Im focusing on the patisseries and boulangeries. There are these incredible sandwiches, Im really not sure how they make them so good, that are called “jambon buerre” and they’re just exactly that. A small baguette cut in half with butter and ham. And that’s all. No American style, “We have 45 toppings, choose your favorite 15”. No, this is just bread, butter and ham (or salami) and it’s incredible. The bread here really truly is good.

Playing Games

2009-08-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

While I was in Kenya, I thought, this is the way people should be living. Fuck all the little games we play and all the roundabout ways in which people get things done and all the distractions people put in front of themselves everyday to distract from whats real and whats happening now. It always freaks me out how “out of touch” we are living in big cities in little boxes, busying ourselves on weekends by buying stuff and watching movies about other peoples lives so we can forget about our own for a little bit. And you know what really freaks me out? The question “What do you do?” actually meaning “How do you make money?”, like that’s the thing that’s come to define our lives. But in Kenya, so much of it actually, was the same. In simpler terms of course but still, the same. (We were in a region called the Maasai Mara and got to see the beginning of the wildebeest migration). One source of major frustration for me is the games that people play with each other, constantly trying to outdo and impress each other. And in dating, all the little bullshit games people play. And it was the same damn thing with the wildebeest! We stopped in the middle of a herd and watched how they all interacted. They were all mating and the males would claim a territory and defend it to no end, charging and butting heads with any male who came into their little circle, hoping a female would be interested in the property they’ve invested in and mate with them. And there’s this species of birds where, after finding a female, the male will spend weeks building a nest for her. Then she’ll go check it out and if it doesn’t meet up to her expectations, she’ll leave and he’ll build another one. Sometimes, they’ll spend months building nest after nest, each one bigger and more plush than the last one until finally, the lady bird approves, moves in and starts pumping out the eggs. And my favorite was watching the baboons. They were the most manipulative little guys ever! First off, there are classes that are strictly followed. Usually, elders are respected in the group but a younger monkey of a higher class with get priority over an elder of a lower class. Babies are really valued in their society because a mother with a baby will get priority over a group in terms of places to sleep and food and treatment by the other members of the pack. So the baboons will try to steal babies from other mothers so they will get that priority. And males will steal babies to prove to the females that they can take care of it and are responsible and would be a good mate. Its like how women will be attracted to a single guy with a puppy because puppies are a lot of work so he obviously must not be afraid of commitment and responsibility.
Its reassuring to see that all these little games, distractions, society filled with classes and expectations, its not just us.

A Change of Perspective

2009-08-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

On the way to Kenya, me, mom, Ted and the whole fam-damily met up in London for two days. We toured and took pictures and marveled and it was great fun. When you go to a new place, traveling to a different country or even just discovering a new road you’ve never gone down on a walk, there’s an air of mystery about it that makes it a little magical. And that’s the deal with traveling. I think that’s why so many people love to travel. There’s a lot of trouble involved. Here I am, in Paris, everything is in a different language. I can communicate fine but it takes a lot of energy to just go into the grocery store and not see anything youre used to, to ask for directions, getting lost and navigating around a new city, a new culture. And even still, walking around, although a lot is different, a lot is the same too. People go out to eat, people walk to the grocery store, and go to work and come home, and see movies. People live just like I live at home. But here, its magical! And its all so great and envious and beautiful. And one part of that is the unarguable fact that Paris is straight up beautiful. But what about London? It has great fish and chips and cheap Indian food, and I love the constant rain and the funny little phone booths are pretty cool I guess, but really it’s a huge, bustling metropolitan where no one talks to each other and everyone drives like they want to kill everyone else on the road and then themselves. And its only magical for me because Im on vacation and practicing Hedonism and, it turns out, Im really not that bad at it. Im waking up without an alarm and taking the time to stop at the little markets on the side of the street and walk through the parks. And turns out, when I do that in Boulder or LA, its really quite similar. I remember in London, stopping on a bridge to watch the sun set and reflect across the water and thinking, “Wow what a beautiful city” and then immediately afterwards I thought, “That was a stupid thing to say”. In Boulder, the morning after a snowstorm, there’s this incredible silence over the whole city and the sun warms it all up and makes the snow crispy and sparkling and it’s the prettiest damn thing in the world. And in Santa Monica, if you walk down to the beach on a Thursday night, there’s the best impromptu live music on the sand next to the pier and thousands of people picnicking, and the sun sets over the water and it’s always spectacular and it smells all salty and fresh. What’s better than that? The Parisians here, with their patisseries and delicious coffee and perfect baguette crust, They would be jealous.
I do have a point here but I dont know how to say it without it sounding like the moral after an Aesop's fable. So I just hope that it came through. My point is NOT "dont travel" because so far, its been one of the more valuable things Ive done in my life.

My street: Rue de Montessuy

2009-07-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

July 29

2009-07-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

This is the view from where I am sitting right now. Kitchen window.

Yesterday, I woke up in London, tiptoed out of my hostel full of five sleeping girls, two French, two German, one Chinese, and me, climbed two flights of stairs to the bathroom and took a shower down the hall. I got an almond croissant and a banana and got on the bus to St Pancras international for my train to Paris. It was 2 1/2 hours of high-speed, underground, ear popping good fun. My lovely host Sharon met me at the train station with a packet of metro tickets, ample maps in which her apartment on le Rue de Montessuy was circled, and buckets of information about every monument and cobblestone road we passed. Her apartment is great- it’s a studio apartment blocks from the Eiffel Tower and the Seine. I recovered, put down my bags, and then head out to exchange my pounds for euros and see what the French coffee is all about. Expensive. That’s what I found. I understand the French thing about people watching. In Boulder, if you “people watch”, you’re just bound to be bombarded by classmates, teachers, friends of the family, and anyone who work in context but who I’d rather not share my table with. Besides that definite threat to one’s peaceful, cappuccino filled solitude, is the sad fact that, in Boulder, I feel like I already know everyone's story. Or maybe its just that a different culture, different language, clouds these people in mystery that, for me, is intriguing. First of all, I can often only guess what they are saying, which in itself is beautiful because Im not listening to words always, just the sounds of the language. The homeless man who came on to the subway last night for instance, didnt sound to me like a desperate man professing the tragedy of his life and family, rather he was spewing the music of the language.
Here in Paris, even the people watchers are interesting to people watch. It took me at least half an hour to get through a two page chapter in my lovely, fluffy-light travel book, most of the time not actually spent reading but either glancing up to watch a scene play out between two elderly women with deaf husbands and obedient small dogs or just staring blankly at the page, trying desperately to translate everything everyone around me was saying into English.
At home we ate a dinner that, comfortingly enough, comes directly from the cookbook that my dad would write if he ever decided to opt for a career change: pre roasted chicken, brown rice, broccoli and ample soy sauce followed by a cut up peach and some dark chocolate. Then, seeing as though I cant spend the week I have in Paris wandering the streets alone, Sharon brought me down two flights of stairs to introduce me to some friends. The man who answered the door took one look at me, stepped out of his apartment and said to me, “Do we need complete submersion?” “You want to dive in to French culture?”. Terrified, I smiled and nodded, and he, pointing for Sharon to go back upstairs, lead me down another flight of stairs to his son’s apartment where 5 twenty-something year olds sat around a dining room table talking in the kind of French that was so painfully fast, Im not sure I would have recognized it as French in any other set of circumstances. “Michel, David, je present Cookie” and then he shut the door. Without pausing in the fast paced, animated recounting of some story (which was apparently hilarious but, even after having it explained to me with intent, wide-eyed eye contact, leaning in, in slower, annunciated French, I still didn’t get the funny part), Michael pulled up another chair and made a sweeping arm motion towards the table which I interpreted to mean, “I have no idea who you are but sit down and have some ice cream and apple cider with us. We have three flavors.” I have never been more intimidated by five teenagers gathered around a table on a Tuesday night eating ice cream and drinking apple cider.
After introductions, it was established that I would stare at them blankly unless they either slowed down their speech or just spoke in English and that they all, of course, spoke shamefully good English, I was told to go fetch some socks so that the bowling shoes wouldn’t give me blisters, and we headed out the door. There was no better way that I would have rather gotten my first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower at night than while bustling in the opposite direction amid loud, incomprehensible chatter, in the middle of a motley crew of incredibly stereotypical, but in that, so charming, Parisian teenagers, grabbing my arm and emphatically, mockingly asking how it feels to be in la Belle France in the city for lovers. Of course, all of them saw me as their personal English teacher so we traded off: they relaying stories to me in the kind of perfect English that is often hard to come by even in the US, and me stumbling along in French: conversation determined by a limited vocabulary instead of being determined by what I actually wanted to say.
Bowling was great. I’ve never had more fun bowling. These people bowled as if all those 50’s movies that advertise bowling as the number one hip thing to do on a Friday night, just came out last night and they all wanted to get on the bandwagon. So we bowled and they all told me about how Americans can’t dress but besides that, it’s the best country in the world. Thursday were going to the theatre for a comedy show, of which, Im sure I will catch almost nothing. But that’s just fine with me.

July 27 Dont be fooled by the lead in: A recounting of history with very little to do with London

2009-07-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

My quest for the perfect chocolate croissant continues outside of Santa Monica. Sitting in a Starbucks in Piccadilly Circus in London is far from disappointing. I came to a Starbucks, instead of a local café for two reasons: No small local café can survive in this shopping district. Come to think of it, Im not sure if some low budget labor-of-love café could survive anywhere in London, which might be why I havent seen any. Everything is a chain here and the most popular and plentiful cafes are Café Neros, Costa’s and Starbucks. So I went with Starbucks, which brings me to Starbucks’ second draw: free internet. Which actually doesn’t exist. I like a lot of things about London so far but what I don’t like is that free wifi is very hard to come by. But lets focus on what I do like.

I like that its been constantly drizzling rain for the last four days and I like that all the other tourists, which make up 75% of the city, are twice as bumbling, confused, ill-prepared, and just straight up unable to function on a very basic level, as I am. So it makes me feel great and also makes me attract other tourists like a magnet, thinking I am a fountain of information in terms of “Where is Hyde Park Corner?”, “Excuse me, how do I get to Oxford street?” and the more desperate, teary-eyed call of the Japanese tourist, who think that all Caucasians must be locals, “Where I am right now? Please!”. But so far, my chez doevre in terms of giving directions was explaining to two local teenagers what underground line to take to get from the Southbank Centre to the museum of Natural Science.

But back to the chocolate croissant. Not bad. Not great but not bad either. Just a little dense. From what I’ve observed, pastry- wise, in Starbucks, is that everything is on the dense side. Maybe they assume that if you find yourself in a Starbucks, its because you don’t have the time to find a smaller, more personal coffee shop, and you’re an on-the-go kind of person, meaning you probably don’t have time to eat decent food and therefore are looking for the kind of food that your told is good for bringing with when backpacking: small, compact, non-perishable, and packed with calories. When at a café that doesn’t bake its own pastries, I’ve found chocolate croissants are much better than regular croissants, which are usually just a rolled up ball of uncooked dough inside of a slightly browned layer of the same dough. Why don’t more cafés make croissants like Baxter does- smaller but the perfect consistency and flaky? Oh ya, maybe because it takes him an entire day and several packages of butter to make 6 croissants, each of which can sell for no more than two dollars. Still though, I think Baxter’s croissant phase was one of his better. What boy, by the age of 20, has devoted several weeks to the pursuit of baking the perfect croissant? No wonder he and I are brother and sister. Sometimes I forget how similar we are. Even in our ability to obsess. I don’t know what phases I’ve gone through: you’d have to ask someone else, but I remember all of Baxter’s.

The first time I became aware of Baxter’s ability to obsess over and dive into one thing, one passion, was during his goth phase. This was while he was in 7th and 8th grade and began with his obsession over the card game, Magic, which somehow lead to the growing out of his dirty blond, jew-curly hair. I think he thought it made him look like a badass but actually he just looked like a charob having a bad day. This phase most notable involved black fingernails, monotonous rave music, hours, sometimes days, spent isolated in his room (I think I remember him not even leaving his room to walk the 10 paces to the bathroom and therefore, peeing out of his window and onto the especially green patch of the rose plants that lined our front yard), a pair of well-worn tight-fitting red plaid pants, and a knee length khaki trench coat, for which, he proudly bore the name “Trench Coat Boy” amongst his classmates, dubbed to him by a girl who was probably going through a similar phase.

Baxter’s next phase began with the realization that school was not “his thing”, rather, he was beyond school. This phase is what I call his “James Bond phase”. In terms of being socially acceptable, this phase was a vast improvement from “Trench Coat Boy”. However, to my parents’ dismay, it was much more cost demanding. His fashion demands went from anything that was black, to pricey Express dress shirts and aged Italian leather boots. Although his style was based on being Smooooth, JB style, he was still a spazzy 15 year old boy whose limbs extended beyond his spatial awareness. Luckily, he always carried with him a deck of cards which he could whip out and start shuffling whenever awkwardness or humiliation resulted.

Then there was the cycling phase. This was the family favorite, seeing as how constructive it was- and how good he was too. Bax got a beautiful Orbea road bike and trained on the roads all through LA and the velodrome in Carson. He raced in criteriums mainly and always did fairly well. It also changed a lot about him. He cut his hair short, replaced his Italian leather boots (the blisters from which were endured as a sacrifice to fashion- something I’ve never understood) with addidas sandals and his tailor made dress shirts with “velonews” polyester blend tee shirts, and he had a new, surprisingly positive outlook on life, accentuated Im sure by a constant endorphin high.

Unfortunately, his addiction to the buzz of endorphins lead to addictions to the buzz of other chemicals, which costed a bit more and made him unpleasant to be around for the following year, or was it two? He’s admitted to having blank spots in his memory of that year or two as well. The cycling came to a jolting halt and time spent with the girlfriend skyrocketed. Meanwhile, “the family’s” already shaky approval of the girlfriend plummeted. (We wouldn’t let ourselves believe that it was Baxter and it was convenient to have a Girlfriend to blame everything on). He no longer complained about her constant stream of insecurity-calls and text messages and instead ran out of the room every 15 minutes to answer them all in privacy. That phase quickly ended when the girlfriend proved her already apparent incompetence by failing her second driving test by making a left turn without blinkers from the right hand turn lane. I remember my dad sitting Bax down with the basic theme of: “listen, Im on your side and its time to move on”. Eventually he did. It was just another phase. Sadly, for Michelle, the girlfriend, it wasn’t a phase, it was a lifestyle.

And then Bax moved to Colorado. To the cold cold mountains of Colorado to start the working interview for a catering school. And now he has an impressive resume, a salary job as a cook in one of the better restaurants in Boulder, and is moving into his new apartment as we speak. I can’t wait to see pictures. Apparently, it has hard wood floors. What? A bachelor with hard wood floors?! Ya, that’s my bro.

So what’s next? And for me, I have this month of travel still in front of me and lots of thoughts and possibilities for afterwards, so what’s next? For now though, Im happy just thinking about dinner. Its my last night in London, 9:30, and Im mighty hungry.

July 25

2009-07-25T03:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first day in London. My mom and Ted had an 8 hour layover between their flights so they were able to come to London with me and get me situated. We walked around a lot, dipped into a museum of ridiculously bad modern art (the first “exhibit” was a pool floatie raft toy in the shape of some nondescript animal hanging from the ceiling and filled with firewood) and then they left after a lunch in a restaurant in the Royal Albert Hall. It was weird saying bye and knowing that after they got on the plane in an hour, I would know nobody in the country. But a great jazz group started playing in the restaurant so it worked out okay.
My neighborhood is great. It right above Kensington Gardens and there are tons of cafes, restaurants, and road side fruit stands. There are more hotels and hostels than there are flats, which is good because that means everyone is a bumbling tourist, not just me. So I checked into my hostel- my room is half the size of a regular hotel room and with three bunk beds, a cabinet, table and a sink. Its scattered with the clothes, shoes and shampoo bottles of four French girls I still havent met (I think they either had a really late party night and are still out or they got abducted, in which case, Ill be able to root through their boxes of jewelry and facial products once Im sure thats the case). The other girl is a 27 year old Asian girl with the voice of a 12 year old girl who tiptoed into the room last night with a camera in one hand and 3 shopping bags in the other. She’s adorable and very sweet and is unfortunately leaving this morning for Germany. I talked to her a little about our trips and what to do in London and she gave me tips on which “ca-she-drawl” to visit and told me about the bus system in accented, excited speech: “So you get dere berry erry?… I sink its da bus numba seven?… It take you right to da moo-seum?…”
I think today will be a museum day. I also want to catch the hip hop performance of Shakespeare favorites I read about in the paper last night over my 3 pound Soup du Jour: Who says London is the most expensive city in the world?? All the museums are free too.
This morning I raided the hostel fridge and brought a picnic to Hyde Park- a nutella sandwich, a banana, and a yoghurt that turned out to be four months old- a good reminder to check the expiration date in 15 pound/night hostels.

My roommates finally came back to the hostel- theyre three Swiss girls and a Spanish girl who is traveling alone. The Swiss girls are incredible at buying things. I think they are here solely to buy things. Every time Ive come back into the room, there are more things. Today, one of the girls, came back with a new duffel bag to fit all of the stuff she bought. These girls know how to travel.

July 19

2009-07-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’m getting cabin fever. I know we’re camping in the midst of thousands of miles of open land but we can’t do anything or go anywhere alone. Its so difficult to look around me and see just acres, millions of acres of open land, with no humans, nobody, no houses, no roads, and it meets the sky and I follow it up and even in the sky, there’s no planes even. If there is a plane that goes by, the guides can usually tell us who is piloting and where it is going. So I see all that open space but then remember I’m in a car and can’t get out except to go pee a few feet away from the car after checking for lions. And at night, someone must walk with me to my tent because where we’re camping, called Masi Mara, there are leopards in the trees and buffalo who apparently come busting out of the trees charging, and hippo grazing who are surprisingly vicious and despite their bulbous appearance, can run 35 miles an hour. And theirs mouth, when open, can fit a grown man in the fetal position (so thats not a good defense when being charged at by a hippo). So the only possible place to be alone is in my tent. Which is nice and all but right now, there are crickets and tree frogs and all these cool weird sounds that I want to explore and I’m so frustrated with so many things going on in my head and I just want to go outside and walk! And we eat these epicly awesome meals, buffet style, and everything’s delicious, so I always eat plenty but I’m not doing anything physically active because we can’t go anywhere.
My mom and I were itching to go running and Ninian told us that, at the last place we were staying, (Lewa- a rhino conservation) it would be safe. So we woke up early and went down to the lodge in our running shorts and thermals and two rangers drove me, my mom, and Ethan- the only guide willing and able to run- 20 minutes away until we got to a straight away that the rangers deemed relatively safe. The longer and longer we drove the more and more I felt like a moron for all the fuss just to go for a 40 minute run. After much heated debate in Swahili (of which I only picked out the words for Lion, Cheetah, Rhino, Right here…), the rangers decided we had arrived at our running destination. My mom and I got out of the car, exchanged embarrassed guilty glances and hesitantly jogged off. Throughout the run, our guide ran beside us and the truck drove a hundred yards in front. The Boulder, open-space-loving trail runners would have been so jealous. Not everywhere can you see zebras, rhinos and elephants on a run. But it was pretty ridiculous too. On the way back, the rangers stood up, pulled out their binoculars and, after scouring the land, pointing and debating some more in Swahili, the guy in the front seat in camo with the radio and the AK47 decided it would be safer if he ran with us.
It reminded me how much I love running though, so thats good. But I also realized that if I do go back to Kenya (which is the plan) that itll be really hard for me to resist running off into the plains- so I might get trampled by something or gorged.

July 14

2009-07-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day that Im actually kinda scared. At home, I get freaked out just going on a trail run so what did I expect? The guides keep telling us stories of all the stupid things people do on these safaris. Like the girl who spots a lion 100 feet away from her tent and sneaks closer to take pictures of it. As if the car is on tracks and the animals are part of a backdrop and there to amuse us. There’s one person in our camp like that and it pisses me off to no end.
So now were camping in a little clearing in the midst of a rainforesty area. Its beautiful but very full of animals that are much less timid than at our last two camps. Here, the lions come prancing straght through camp- not at all deterred by our presence. The guide, Ninian, gave us ample warning letting us know that 3 campers have been eaten here this year and not to leave your tent at all in the evenings or nights without light and someone walking with you. The tents are set close to each other and each one is equipped with fog horns- “not to be used when the lion is staring at you through the tent netting- just when its got half of your leg in its mouth already“- Ninian’s words. He isn’t very reassuring. Far too honest. On our first flight between camps, we flew in an airplane that wasn’t pressurized and held only 14 people and, as we climbed so as to fly over Mount Kenya, he broke an oxygen deprived silence by feeling for his pulse and asking, “does anybody know their resting heart rate?” But he’s great. He’s just like a little boy who loves to screw around and test the limits. And he’s very untraditional as a guide. He respects the land as much as anyone but he lives in it also- he doesn’t just worship it.
On one outing, we pulled over by a murky river and were checking out some crocodiles. After making animal sounds and screeching at them for a while, they were still not moving so he asked his son to get his slingshot and started chucking rocks at it. Finally, he nailed a croc in the nose and the thing thrashed towards us and slid into the water. And like the crocodile hunter, he turned around beaming at us and said, “Do you guys see how incredibly fast their reflexes are? Beautiful, just beautiful. Okay, lets go find that cheetah.“ He’s obsessed with cats- leopards, cheetah and lions, and he gets really competitive with the other guides- pangs of jealousy when someone else finds a cat before he does.
Today, he was tired of driving during the game drive so he let me take over. He sat on top of the jeep with the kids, rough housing and cracking jokes at my driving and shouting out directions as I navigated around boulders, ditches, and warthog holes, adjusting my mind so as to shift with the left hand and pull to the left when another car passed. And when the rare other car does come down the road, its usually some Kenyan rangers, who wave by putting both their hands in the air, smiling super white teeth and shouting “Jambo!”. Anyway, we found a leopard. I actually spotted it (not Ninian) because I was driving, turned a corner, and almost ran it over. Then we positioned ourselves and watched it sit in a bush- out from the pouring rain- grooming itself, planning its next bold move, as we played cards and he bragged and gave directions to the 2 other cars over radio. He offered to pay us to tell everyone else that actually HE saw the leopard first. On the way back, we drove through the dark, without headlights, off road, back to camp so the rangers wouldn’t catch us out later than whats allowed. I don’t know how he managed to drive back. It was so dark the person riding shotgun had the job of covering up the clock and odometer to reduce to light inside the car.
--okay, I just heard a snorting kinda deal outside the tent- that’s creepy. Fog horn in hand… should I look out the window or not?? Not.--

Henry is another one of our guides. He’s just a badass. He’s done pretty much everything and knows how to do everything. He lived on and tends to a piece of land a million square acres, goes deep sea fishing, has gotten trampled by an African buffalo, both his father and father-in-law have survived lion attacks, and his son was killed by a rhino. He’s a tank and is fearless. Unfortunately, as he leans out of the window making mating sounds to tempt a black rhino the size of 6 refrigerators to charge us, he forgets that we are not quite that fearless. The best part about safari-ing with Henry is his spotter, Galo Galo. He’s a local Kenyan who was a poacher that Henry caught and turned in. He went to jail for a while but right when he got out, Henry gave him a job as a spotter. He sits on the back of Henry’s truck looking for animals and he’s crazy good. We’ll be driving down a bumpy road and 35 miles an hour and Galo will see a gecko hibernating in a tree that we can only see after stopping the car and inspecting the branches with binoculars for five minutes.
Besides the tempting-dangerous-animals-to-show-us-their-stuff thing, Henry’s one of my favorite of all the people here. He’s so genuine and has a lot to say but lacks the urge to impress people with it so he makes for great, interesting but light hearted conversation. And I love watching him when were all talking. He listens intently with furrowed brow and squinted eyes, and usually his fist up to his chin and index finger over his lips. And when he talks looks up like his thinking really hard, and talks slowly so as not to say anything superfluous or unnecessary.

And then there’s Ethan. Ninian described Ethan as the blond guy with the six pack. Both of those things are true but that’s not his only merit. He’s very quiet, focused and somber when were out in a car. You can tell that he passionately loves the land and the animals. He lives in Tanzania and, no matter the circumstances, if Im standing with him, I feel completely safe. But he’s also a total nut. His humor is at the level of my 14 and 16 year old boy cousins (theyre who he mostly hangs out with) and he gets in fits of laughter over the stupidest, barely-coherent dirty jokes.
He can be the most fun but is the most unpredictable too because he has this pensive, secretive side that‘s wretchedly frustrating but incredibly sexy. For some reason, Im always drawn to the quiet brooding type- Ive got to break that tradition. Im not sure what about that is attractive to me- I guess I like to know that other people think- just take time to shut up, think, and look around. The second or third night, I desperately needed to get away from the 11 family members Ive been spending 17 hours a day with, so we went for a walk which, in order to avoid becoming lion prey, turned out to be more like pacing around a few hundred yards from camp. But it was dark and the stars were incredible and it was quiet enough to chill out and rejuvenate. I really do need time to myself to sort things out and reboot and Im glad there’s someone else here who needs that too. Its pretty draining being within 20 feet of at least one other person at all times, 24 hours a day. And its really hard not being able to go for chill-out walks. But Im going to really miss this when I leave. Im going to miss it so much that Ive decided to learn Swahili and come back- for a decent chunk of time.
My Swahili is actually coming along quite nicely. Heres a few words
Jambo- Hello
Karibu- Your welcome or just Welcome
Haribu- How are you
Nzuri- Good, Fine…
Kwaheri- Goodbye
I found a “Useful Swahili” book with little conversations and learned
Watoto wako shambani- The kids are in the garden
Ndizi- Banana (Ndizi hizi- These bananas)
Simba- Lion
Duma- Cheetah
Chewy- Leopard (The Kenyans pronounce it “Lee-oh-pard” because Swahili is completely phonetic. So far, much easier than French where Oiseaux is pronounced “Wa- zoh“)
Hapa- Here
Hoku- There
…and so on
Learning Swahili is my summer project. I think I can get a rough understanding down. And then Im coming back here STAT. Im brainstorming the skills I have that can make me a living here. Ive talked to a few of the locals about it and they mostly say jobs are pretty scarce. A few of them thought the recession was just Kenya.
I think being a nanny would be my best bet.

July 8

2009-07-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

Im on a plane from London to Nairobi Kenya. We got the worst seats on the plane. The last row, in the middle, where we cant recline. But the two seats on the row next to us were open so now we have 5 seats for 3 people so it turned out pretty good. Im reading a lot. I watched The Sting and then watched Ted blankly stare at his personal screen for a little bit. And now Im writing. My mom has the two seats by the window. She called us over when the Mediterranean met the top of Africa- what is that- Egypt? It looked incredible. The water faded lighter until you could see the orange sand under the water and then the water tapered off and then there was just the orange sand. Completely flat, no slope down to the water or anything. Like when you take a bath and look down at your body- you whole body is there but at the knees and your neck and your ribs here and there, the water cant cover anymore and your skin is exposed. That’s what it looked like. It was striking. I went back to my seat, unwrapped a foil covered chocolate ball and finished watching the movie.
I felt a little weird just finishing the movie like that but what else do you do? And after a few minutes, the chocolate looked really good to me and the movie started to get interesting again and I could complain about my seat location again, deciding that this is just a vacation and Ill just relax and enjoy it. Its hard to decide whether or not it’s a good idea to delve into that little state of mind that I easily let myself fall into. Where I look around me and everything looks fake and like its coming in on me and theres no way out and I have to get away before it all catches me. But those little moods havent gotten me anywhere before. Im happiest and most inspired and do the most things Im proud of, feel best about myself, when I decide not to go there. And I think sometimes that that happiness is fake and is not genuine (Im obsessed with everything being so damn genuine) but I don’t think that’s the case. We function under a delicate balance- of, I don’t know what. There’s your brain and logic and all that and then there’s physical sensations, and then theres chemicals. And I think sometimes that only the first one is real- that I have to think my way around everything and understand things before I can appreciate them and I don’t think that’s true. Im watching Ted two seats over from me, watching a movie. He hasn’t moved and has a completely blank look on his face and from what I can see, theres nothing happening there. But his brain, I know, is ticking away. (One step ahead of all the twists in the movie- he’s amazing with movies like that. Mysteries with little twists in them and plot details that you have to remember for the grand twist at the end to make sense- I miss all of those all the time. I have to watch those kinds of movies over and over and have someone explain it to me. Most of the time though, I just don’t really care enough.)
So that all- the thinking and the visuals and all the processing- can amuse you for a little bit but that lacks all the balance. The balance from chemicals you get from being physically active and eating the right foods. If my mind starts freaking out and I get depressed, I start thinking about morbid things and the bigger, way too big, picture and lose touch with everything little- all the important things really- and I think that theres something in my mind to figure out and that I have to stay morbid and look at huge pictures of things that I don’t even understand and shouldn’t. But maybe its just that I havent gone on a run in week and havent been eating good food- and its my chemicals not my brain and that’s all just as important. So I brought my running shoes on this trip. Im going to be alone pretty much, for a month after this trip and Ill need all the chemicals I can get to keep me going and strong.
Having said that, lets talk about London. I only got to spend one day there so I got a certain view of it. A tourist view of it- which, as far as Im concerned is a waste of time. Someone said, at breakfast, “We only have one day here so I think we should just see all we can.” Oh god, I thought, this is going to be a waste of a day. I hate sightseeing. I can see the big Ferris Wheel and the guards with the funny hats with 5 seconds on google images and that’s that and guess what- it looks exactly the same in real life! What’s the deal with sightseeing and getting autographs and taking pictures in front of monuments? Is that just to prove it to other people or what? I never understood that. So we all toured around London for the day. And we were quite the motley crew. Eleven Americans traveling together, from ages 10 to 74, waiting in lines, pointing at things, snapping pictures. It was kind of fun in a very touristy kind of way. We got rained off of the top of a double decker tour bus, went to Harrods- the huge department store- and marveled at room after room designated to different designers, and we ate Sheppard’s Pie at an overpriced pub. Then Mom and Ted and I split off and went to Paddington to check out the hostel Ill be staying at in 2 ½ weeks when I come back for a few days.
It was great. It got me so excited. I recognized the shops from google street view. The hostel itself is pretty ghetto. Kind of dank and dark and quiet- I didn’t get to see into the rooms but I got it- it’s a bargain place. The neighborhood is great though. There are cafes everywhere, little street vendors selling produce and fruit, Indian food restaurants with affordable buffets advertised out front and curry that you can smell from half a block away. Its lively but not in the bustling business type way that the other parts of London we looked at are.
Then we got on the tube and made it down to the Thames for dinner at a great little brew pub we found in a super old, cobble stone, relaxed part of town just on the London side of the London bridge. Around the same area is a beautiful cathedral that has been around for a thousand years- literally- which I definitely plan on going to a service in, and the Globe Theatre which I might also go back to. We tubed home and passed out. I understand the underground system. That’s my major accomplishment of the day.

Some observations about London from my one day of bustling about:
1. The women have beautiful shoes. Im used to Boulder women who work out relentlessly- if you don’t have a sport (running, cycling, swimming, all three in one day, rock climbing, kayaking,..) than you don’t fit the Boulder stereotype. The Boulder woman is incredibly fit, motivated, getting up at 6 to get a trail run in before work and then meeting other high strung, in-your-face liberated women for an obnoxiously health conscious overly priced meal to discuss business plans for non profits helping to make Uganda a green country and then back home to maybe get a ride in. So that’s nice and all, but too much of that is a little overwhelming, not to mention intimidating. So it was a refreshing change to see the London girls- chubby legs and no arm muscles, but with beautiful shoes that are worn, through torrential rain, heat and miles of walking, like no big deal. That deserves some respect.
2. Its not just the women. The men also have beautiful shoes. The men are definitely the more feminine of the sexes. I get the impression they spend a decent chunk of every paycheck on hair products, coat jackets and incredibly fashionable footwear and set their alarms a half hour earlier than American men in order to get in a certain amount of time pouting their lips in front of the mirror and deftly matching their outfits to look smooth and clean cut while still achieving a certain air of apathetic aloofness and detachment.
3. Londoners lock their wifi. I wish they didn’t.
4. Heathrow is the slowest airport ever.

Catch Phrase of the Day
The announcement on every stop of our tube ride to town.
“This is a Piccadilly Line service to Cockfosters”. I think you can get a crème for that.

Im expecting things to be very different in Kenya. This morning, talking about what to expect the next two weeks, I learned that we take showers from boiled water put in baggies and then poured over our heads. My massive mess of hair itself is probably a 5 bag job. This will be fun. I hope theres internet here and there. I like contact. I want to skype Baxter and I want to know what happens in the Tour- I am so sorry to be missing the Tour this year.

A little later now. Im in Kenya and checked into the hotel outside of Nairobi. Its very weird. It was a 40 minute ride from the airport and along the way, there were road blocks we had to avoid, a car pulled over in a ditch/sand dune on the side of the road and vans with 20 people in them passing us, the vans coughing up huge bursts of black thick smoke. And here we are. In a beautiful hotel. I have my own room somehow with a kingsize bed, a fireplace, a complimentary mini bar and a bathroom with two sinks and a claw foot bath tub. When I got into the room and the Kenyan man finished giving me the tour, I sat down and cried. Later, out on a deck, I told my mom if felt weird and guilty to me and she said "There are a lot of nice things in the world. Enjoy them." And that didnt make me feel any better. But I looked at everyone elses rooms, set up a wake up call for the morning and skyped with Dana in Santa Monica and Bax in Boulder (he was on a little break from work but still in his chefs coat), and now I feel better. But its late- its one in the morning and we traveled all day. Yesterday ran around a new city like crazy and the day before that, endured another grueling flight. So Im tired. Im going to have some complimentary chips and an orange juice and call it a night- maybe read some Carl Hiaasan- prime airplane reading. Tomorrow, we get on yet another plane for an hour and will be camping for the next 3 days.
Its beautiful here. Still havent seen it in the light but it smells fantastic and it feels like your walking on the real ground with nothing between you and the ground and that makes me feel alright.

July 1

2009-07-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Its the First of July. I said Rapid Rabbit this morning. Rapid Rabbit. My family has always had that tradition- if Rapid Rabbit is the first thing you say in the morning on the first of the month, you will have good luck that month. So I knew I couldn't miss this month.

In 4 days, my mom, step dad, and I get on a plane for London- an 11 hour red eye- thank god it’s a red eye. There we meet up with 8 other members of my stepdads family and 2 days later, all 11 of us load onto a tiny airplane (we'll probably take up half of it. We’ve considered the games to play on board. Bowling, airsoft, waterguns were a go until that damn liquid ban, darts, oh what fun) for an equally grueling flight to Nairobi Kenya where our 5 star, all expenses paid (Thank you Harriet and Bruce!!) safari commences. Two weeks and thousands of dollars of Kenyan manufactured luxury later, we get back on the plane for a few more rounds of shuffle board and some nerf football back to London. And then is the interesting part. The whole family and my mom and stepdad- his name is Ted, let’s just call him that from now on. We are on a first name basis after all- get on their connecting flights back home and I am left at Heathrow, 18 years old, dazed, culture-shocked, alone, Rick Steve guide-book in hand, and nervous.

When I was a little kid, I would look up to 18 year olds and think that they were real adults and had everything figured out. I graduated high school this year and am looking ahead at the month I’ll be spending in Europe alone, and I feel tiny. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know what I’m doing as much as any “real adult” doesn’t know what they’re doing. And I have a feeling that will be my philosophy for the next 50 years or so.
As you see, it was a very important day not to forget to say Rapid Rabbit. So I didn’t. I set myself a reminder on the banner of my phone that I keep charging by my bed. And given the insomnia I’ve been having as the result of

a lingering symptom of a head cold that hit me 4 days ago like a steam shovel, making me incapable of everything but sleep during the day and incapable of everything especially sleep during the night, and
my spinning head ticking questions like a newsreel, (“How long will it take to train from Berlin to Amsterdam?” “Did Misa say she would be in Berlin on the 17th?” “Should I book my nights at a hostel now?” “Oh ya, I forgot to talk to Honza today about Policka.” “Shit. I should probably write that down.”),

I ended up checking my phone 3 times this morning: once at 2:17, once at 5:45, and once at 8:30. All three times I said Rapid Rabbit. Which brings me to this conclusion. Im going to have an incredible trip.

2009-03-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

My friend Hal Mertz has always been a cell phone guy. He used to work at Graffeo coffee in Beverly Hills and I met him when I was small enough that when I came into the store with a twenty and a rehearsed coffee order while my dad circled the block, I had to stand on tip toe to be seen over the counter. He and my dad have always been close and I would hang out at the coffee roasting store for hours on saturdays with him. Until I learned how to work everything and would grind and bag the coffee for the customers. I knew all the catch phrases too. "Its a unique blend of Costa Rican, Columbian and New Guinea" "No, you can't have a soy vanilla latte! Go to Starbucks. We only sell beans."

Hal and my dad, Dana could spend hours talking about gadgets. And Hal had a new phone every other week.
So of course Hal was the perfect person to ask for an old used phone that will work with a sim card in Europe. And he had a whole box of them.

Thats a big deal for me. Not because I couldnt buy a phone myself that will serve the purpose (or just pick through one of those Donate Your Old Phone Here For Starving Children In Africa boxes at Safeway) but because this is the spirit of the whole trip. People helping each other out.

Another thing that's related and that I'm really excited about (but I bet my mom is NOT): couchsurfing.com. Check it out if you haven't already. Basically, if you're traveling in Europe (for instance. This is all hypothetical) and you need a place to stay (still hypothetical) , you can go onto couchsurfing.com (I should be getting paid for this but I bet the aspiring bohemian freeloaders at couchsurfing.com (that's three mentions already) don't have any money to dish out) and you can get in contact with someone (a stranger!) who lives in the area and ask if you can couchsurf there for a night or two- or just be shown around the city. How cool is that? That's what the world needs now. Not love sweet love. But that kind of openness and community (and bravery?). I wrote a college essay about something along those lines. And I got in as an English major!
THERE's something that will drag me back to school after a year of being a bohemian freeloader.
And Ill never get through college as an English major if I don't learn how to stay on topic. So I got a phone that will work in Europe. That's a big logistic step in the right direction fully embodying the spirit of this trip. The next steps I have to work out are transportation and money- a way to be okay still if I get mugged.

2009-03-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

February 11, 2009
Here begins my travel diary.
Because today, I told the travel agent- yes- I want the ticket. Im going this summer to Nairobi for a safari with my mom and step dad and his family. We fly in and out of London and I arranged for my return trip to Denver to be moved back a month. Yes- and month bumming around Europe by myself.
I created a facebook group a while ago- Eurotrip 09- for people who are considering taking a gap year after high school or who are just interested in traveling. I sent everyone a message saying I have a ticket to London this summer and no plans! Within an hour, I'd gotten three replies from people offering up lodging and connections in London.
The cool thing about networking like this is that the deeper you dive in (if you actually get your shit together enough to dive in in the first place) the more doors open up to you, the warmer and more accommodating people become to you, and the more of the world is accessible to you- right now! And how else would I have known that if I hadn't told the travel agent- yes- I want the ticket changed.