When I got off my plane in Minneapolis today, I checked the flight monitor for the status of my flight to Gone West. (This is what they say to do, right, "Check the status of your flight on a flight monitor."? Yes, right.) I followed the alphabet to my city name, and when I saw, "Gone West - delayed," I felt a jolt of homecoming. Not about the delayed part, although that is becoming a familiar sight (and it was only 30 min), but about the Gone West part. Oh, I thought, Gone West. I'm going home.
31 December 2009
30 December 2009
30 Dec 09
We've been cleaning out the basement 'round my parents' place. Well. Trying. We spent an hour on it last night, okay? One entire hour, which ended when my dad started picking up random boxes and shoving things in my direction for my decision-making while I was trying to sort through other boxes, upon which I started (mentally) shrieking and flapping my arms and running in little circles. My ADHD couldn't handle it. So I proposed that we all give up and play cards, which we did.
I threw away many things that have sentimental value. Fine, everything has sentimental value to me, but I threw away quite a few of those things. One of the things I pulled out of a box was a little silvery bag filled with beaded stars. The wire running through the stars was rusty and they didn't sparkle anymore, so I ended up throwing them away, but it was hard.
When I moved to Rwanda 7+ years ago, my family sent wrapped Christmas presents with me. I woke up on Christmas Day, 2002, alone in a hotel in Kigali. I went to church at the tent church (where I made the mistake of giving my phone number to a couple of students, including one guy who proceeded to call me incessantly from a variety of numbers asking to meet me until I forced him to tell me what he wanted and he said he loved me and I yelled at him and told him I would change my phone number if he ever called me again. Keep in mind that I had met him ONCE. I think I gave him, and about four girls, a ride back to the university.).
Then I drove back to Kibuye alone. It was a beautiful sunny day in Rwanda, and I had only driven to Kibuye alone a few times. I still had to guess at the turn in Gitarama.
At home, in my house surrounded by pines, I decorated for Christmas with some pine branches and candles. I made a little Advent wreath. And then I called my family and opened the presents they had sent alone in my little house while they stood in a crowded dining room surrounded by noise. One of the presents I opened, wrapped months before in Michigan, was the little bag of beaded stars.
I wasn't lonely. Isn't that strange? I think if I spent Christmas alone now, I would be lonely. But I wasn't lonely that Christmas in Rwanda, the only Christmas I have ever spent away from my family.
I threw the stars away, last night, because it's just gross to hold on to rusty bits of metal, but there is a big part of me that wanted to keep them, forever. Cleaning, I happened upon so many things that I had forgotten, so many stories almost lost. I found scraps of paper that told of moments I had forgotten - a receipt on which I wrote while sitting on a pier in the Hudson River in New York, a carbon copy of an order on which I wrote while in a meeting in Rwanda. On one paper, I narrated the happenings at T. and M.'s house in Kibuye, one Sunday afternoon.
It scares me how the stories get lost. My stories, yes, but even more it scares me how the stories of my ancestors get lost. So many of them are already gone.
I threw away many things that have sentimental value. Fine, everything has sentimental value to me, but I threw away quite a few of those things. One of the things I pulled out of a box was a little silvery bag filled with beaded stars. The wire running through the stars was rusty and they didn't sparkle anymore, so I ended up throwing them away, but it was hard.
When I moved to Rwanda 7+ years ago, my family sent wrapped Christmas presents with me. I woke up on Christmas Day, 2002, alone in a hotel in Kigali. I went to church at the tent church (where I made the mistake of giving my phone number to a couple of students, including one guy who proceeded to call me incessantly from a variety of numbers asking to meet me until I forced him to tell me what he wanted and he said he loved me and I yelled at him and told him I would change my phone number if he ever called me again. Keep in mind that I had met him ONCE. I think I gave him, and about four girls, a ride back to the university.).
Then I drove back to Kibuye alone. It was a beautiful sunny day in Rwanda, and I had only driven to Kibuye alone a few times. I still had to guess at the turn in Gitarama.
At home, in my house surrounded by pines, I decorated for Christmas with some pine branches and candles. I made a little Advent wreath. And then I called my family and opened the presents they had sent alone in my little house while they stood in a crowded dining room surrounded by noise. One of the presents I opened, wrapped months before in Michigan, was the little bag of beaded stars.
I wasn't lonely. Isn't that strange? I think if I spent Christmas alone now, I would be lonely. But I wasn't lonely that Christmas in Rwanda, the only Christmas I have ever spent away from my family.
I threw the stars away, last night, because it's just gross to hold on to rusty bits of metal, but there is a big part of me that wanted to keep them, forever. Cleaning, I happened upon so many things that I had forgotten, so many stories almost lost. I found scraps of paper that told of moments I had forgotten - a receipt on which I wrote while sitting on a pier in the Hudson River in New York, a carbon copy of an order on which I wrote while in a meeting in Rwanda. On one paper, I narrated the happenings at T. and M.'s house in Kibuye, one Sunday afternoon.
It scares me how the stories get lost. My stories, yes, but even more it scares me how the stories of my ancestors get lost. So many of them are already gone.
29 December 2009
getting somewhere
When I talked to my mom on Wednesday, she mentioned the weather problems in the Midwest and worried about my flights that night. “Oh,” I said, “I’ve never had too many problems. It will be fine.”
23 December 2009
impossible
I have to leave for the airport in 101 minutes. I hope I don't leave my apartment in too appalling a condition, but given that I am sitting on the couch writing a blog post, things don't look too good.
My brain is having trouble accepting the fact that I worked today and now I'm going to get on a plane without sleeping between work and plane. I keep looking over at my bed and thinking of how nice it will be to crawl into it and sleep. Except that I won't get to do that for 8 nights. And tonight is going to be just 5 hours long on two different planes. I am not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, except that I have already taken so much time off work for Vietnam and Michigan and just, you know, wanting to take a day off work, that I couldn't afford to take any more time off and I wanted to spend as much time with my family as possible. Right now, it feels totally impossible. How can I get on a train to the airport instead of going to bed?
My brain is having trouble accepting the fact that I worked today and now I'm going to get on a plane without sleeping between work and plane. I keep looking over at my bed and thinking of how nice it will be to crawl into it and sleep. Except that I won't get to do that for 8 nights. And tonight is going to be just 5 hours long on two different planes. I am not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, except that I have already taken so much time off work for Vietnam and Michigan and just, you know, wanting to take a day off work, that I couldn't afford to take any more time off and I wanted to spend as much time with my family as possible. Right now, it feels totally impossible. How can I get on a train to the airport instead of going to bed?
17 December 2009
cookie monster
S. and I made Christmas cookies on Saturday. It went pretty much like it always does, which is to say that we meant to start at 11 am but I didn't get to her house until 12 and she had gone to the farmers' market and H., her roommate, dropped a crockpot in the sink and sliced her finger open just as I arrived and after S. got back we spent half an hour deciding what to do and an hour and fifteen minutes going to urgent care for stitches and after that we still had to go to the store, which was crowded on a Saturday afternoon, and we forgot a couple of things, so S. had to go back in the store while I sat in the car and frantically crammed roasted red pepper hummus and cracked black pepper triscuits into my mouth because it was 3 by then and I hadn't eaten since breakfast and when we finally got to the K.'s house her mom was about to put other cookies in the oven and by the time we finished six recipes of cookies (five drop, one roll and cut) and I grumpily frosted the last of them with pain shooting through my back from all the leaning over, it was 12 am and freezing rain for the drive home and the frosted cookies weren't even dry yet, so I left them on cookie sheets on top of the C0rvette in the K.'s garage and it took S. until Tuesday to get them back to me because she kept forgetting them places and she texted me earlier that day saying, "I ruined the cookies," but it turned out that they were fine, it was just the way the glaze dried around the sprinkles.
So it was fun.
Now I have a freezer full of cookies that I just literally cannot resist. Trust me, I try. When I talked to A. earlier, she said, "You never have been able to resist the icebox cookies [our old family Christmas cookie recipe], have you?" I have resorted to keeping a cookie tally in my little notebook I carry around, hoping the guilt of marking, oh, ten cookies a day in the tally will slow down my consumption.
It doesn't. Christmas cookies are my nutritional downfall. Delicious white flour and sugar. It's a good thing they exist only three weeks per year.
So it was fun.
Now I have a freezer full of cookies that I just literally cannot resist. Trust me, I try. When I talked to A. earlier, she said, "You never have been able to resist the icebox cookies [our old family Christmas cookie recipe], have you?" I have resorted to keeping a cookie tally in my little notebook I carry around, hoping the guilt of marking, oh, ten cookies a day in the tally will slow down my consumption.
It doesn't. Christmas cookies are my nutritional downfall. Delicious white flour and sugar. It's a good thing they exist only three weeks per year.
14 December 2009
clean
When we got out of the minibus in Phnom Penh, we were instantly surrounded by three or four guys with business cards of various hotels. The four others who had traveled with us had ideas of where they wanted to stay, which is really the only way to avoid the sales pitches, but S. and I were, throughout this trip, totally indecisive.
"Where do you want to stay in Phnom Penh?" one of us would ask, reading the guidebook.
"I don't know," the other would say. "What looks good?"
"Oh," the guidebook reader would respond, "I don't know. They all look fine. Didn't K. say she liked #11?"
"Yes, but she also said it had bedbugs."
"Oh, right. So maybe not that one."
And then we'd drift off and decide nothing.
Undecided, we were perfect targets for the touts. We looked at all the business cards they shoved at us and shrugged, and went with one of them to a guesthouse that advertised itself as having something like, "the longest veranda stretching out into the lake!" We followed the guy into a long wooden hallway over the water. "You know what this hallway screams to me?" I muttered to S. as we walked, "Cockroaches."
The room was mediocre. The floor was covered in the thin linoleum that never feels clean to me and it smelled musty from an air-conditioner used only when the room had guests and the toilet had no seat. S. and I stood in the room, deciding. It took us awhile (see, above: indecisive.) Finally she said, "You clearly don't want to stay here. Let's find something else."
Down the road, at the end of the tourist strip, we found a little family-run place with very little advertising, no business cards, clean cement floors, and a window offering a nice breeze. I was happy.
"You know," S. said, "with all your traveling in Africa, it surprises me that you can be... picky about where you stay." (In my defense, that was the first place I had rejected for cleanliness, mostly because it seemed like a place where I would wake up to cockroaches running over me in the dark. Ew.)
"I don't think being in a developing country means you have to be dirty," I said. "Cambodians don't want to stay in filthy places. Being willing to live in filth is a sort of snobbery of backpackers, because they think it's more authentic, but I bet the hotels that Cambodians stay in are cleaner than that one. My hotels in Africa were all cleaner than that. It's like clothes. Only the backpackers are wearing dirty clothes, not Cambodians."
It's oddly true, all over the world: rich Westerners take pride in being dirty when they travel, as if it makes them more authentic, while people in so many of the countries they visit take pride in being clean.
"Where do you want to stay in Phnom Penh?" one of us would ask, reading the guidebook.
"I don't know," the other would say. "What looks good?"
"Oh," the guidebook reader would respond, "I don't know. They all look fine. Didn't K. say she liked #11?"
"Yes, but she also said it had bedbugs."
"Oh, right. So maybe not that one."
And then we'd drift off and decide nothing.
Undecided, we were perfect targets for the touts. We looked at all the business cards they shoved at us and shrugged, and went with one of them to a guesthouse that advertised itself as having something like, "the longest veranda stretching out into the lake!" We followed the guy into a long wooden hallway over the water. "You know what this hallway screams to me?" I muttered to S. as we walked, "Cockroaches."
The room was mediocre. The floor was covered in the thin linoleum that never feels clean to me and it smelled musty from an air-conditioner used only when the room had guests and the toilet had no seat. S. and I stood in the room, deciding. It took us awhile (see, above: indecisive.) Finally she said, "You clearly don't want to stay here. Let's find something else."
Down the road, at the end of the tourist strip, we found a little family-run place with very little advertising, no business cards, clean cement floors, and a window offering a nice breeze. I was happy.
"You know," S. said, "with all your traveling in Africa, it surprises me that you can be... picky about where you stay." (In my defense, that was the first place I had rejected for cleanliness, mostly because it seemed like a place where I would wake up to cockroaches running over me in the dark. Ew.)
"I don't think being in a developing country means you have to be dirty," I said. "Cambodians don't want to stay in filthy places. Being willing to live in filth is a sort of snobbery of backpackers, because they think it's more authentic, but I bet the hotels that Cambodians stay in are cleaner than that one. My hotels in Africa were all cleaner than that. It's like clothes. Only the backpackers are wearing dirty clothes, not Cambodians."
It's oddly true, all over the world: rich Westerners take pride in being dirty when they travel, as if it makes them more authentic, while people in so many of the countries they visit take pride in being clean.
13 December 2009
border-Phnom Penh
Every once in a while, I accidentally lean my head back too far and pain shoots through my neck and I remember a very long minibus ride through Cambodia and how I was trying to sleep against the window and whenever the minibus hit a pothole, my head flopped around and then I was just drifting into sleep when we hit a huge pothole and my head whipped back too far and it's been hurting ever since.
There were quite a few tourist-type people on the ferry from Phu Quoc Island to Ha Tien, and six of us wanted to carry on to cross the border into Cambodia and head to Phnom Penh. The tourist office across the street from the ferry's arrival, er, flooded piece of land said that it would be $15 per person for a bus to Phnom Penh and the bus left at 3 pm, but given that there were 6 of us, we could make up a minibus ourselves and leave right away for the same price. So we did. There were a French/British couple, two British university students who had been volunteering in Vietnam, and S. and me.
We loaded into a nice plush minibus and headed the ten minutes to the border, which at Ha Tien is a large airy cement building with a luggage scanner inside, located on a paved road, and on the Cambodia side is two tiny buildings that you cannot enter with a wooden barrier across the dirt road. (The pavement disappears half-way between the two border posts.) Then we piled into a far less plush minibus (springs sticking up irregularly in the seats made for a veery long 5.5 hour drive to Phnom Penh) and started merrily off down the dirt road, under a clear blue sky, through the perfectly flat brilliant green rice fields. The occasional wooded hill rose at random in the distance.
After an hour or so, the bus stopped to pick someone up. We had paid for a bus to ourselves, but we said nothing, out of politeness and because you never know when someone's brother/sister/cousin/friend/mother/friend-of-a-friend/aunt/nephew/wife/in-law needs a ride. After a while, we picked up another person, and then another, and another, and pretty soon it was clear that 1. we were not getting the bus to ourselves, and 2. most of the original tourist-type people were somewhat cranky about this, as their comfortable sprawled-out space shrunk. I watched what the incoming passengers were paying ($4-ish, less as we got closer to Phnom Penh), and realized that, very possibly, the tourist agency in Vietnam had ripped us off.
The minibus continued to fill. The row facing backwards behind the driver filled up, and we rearranged our legs every-other, trying not to look directly at one another, since it is extremely awkward to stare at a person you do not know when their face is so close to your own and your legs are touching all the way along. Newcomers slid their bags of rice under the seat and one of the two women squished into the passenger seat held a baby. The tourists got crankier. The ride got longer every time we stopped. I got whiplash from the pothole and nearly whimpered at the pain of it, exacerbated by every following pothole. I didn't dare go back to sleep, but I was too tired to stay awake, after getting up at 5 am yet again. (Note: waking up before it was light: another theme of the trip.)
At long last, we got to Phnom Penh and started dropping people off. When everyone was gone but the tourists, we pulled into a petrol station and the driver said, "Here you are."
"Uh... where are we?" we asked. We hadn't the first idea. We had been told in Vietnam that the bus would take us right where we needed to go.
Or, it appeared, not.
"Just out of curiosity," the driver said, (except not quite in perfect English like this; I am taking liberties), "how much did you pay them for this trip?"
Of our $15 each, apparently $10 each got eaten in the 10 minute trip to the Vietnam border and the guy walking us across the border doing nothing, when we had visas and could have managed just fine alone. The driver on the Cambodia side, who drove us 5.5 hours to Phnom Penh, which seems like the biggest task, certainly requiring the most fuel, got $5 for each of us.
And he didn't know Phnom Penh at all, which makes sense because his route is border-city, not within city. We hauled out two different guidebooks for their maps, on neither of which we could find ourselves because we were not yet in the actual city, and after figuring out that we were on a main street that did, further into town, appear on a map (dear Cambodia: thank you, thank you, thank you, for putting the street signs in English letters as well as Khmer), I directed him to the street-o'-tourists using the Rough Guide map (never trust a Lonely Planet map; they are awful). Unfortunately, I did not know how tiny and narrow this street was, so we ended up stuck down it, causing a horrible traffic jam and din of horns and leaving the poor driver to somehow maneuver his minibus out of a barely-one-lane alley.
S. and I tipped him because we felt so bad that he had been forced to drive us all the way to our hotel without being paid adequately by the tourist agency, but I doubt it was enough to make up for his trouble.
There were quite a few tourist-type people on the ferry from Phu Quoc Island to Ha Tien, and six of us wanted to carry on to cross the border into Cambodia and head to Phnom Penh. The tourist office across the street from the ferry's arrival, er, flooded piece of land said that it would be $15 per person for a bus to Phnom Penh and the bus left at 3 pm, but given that there were 6 of us, we could make up a minibus ourselves and leave right away for the same price. So we did. There were a French/British couple, two British university students who had been volunteering in Vietnam, and S. and me.
We loaded into a nice plush minibus and headed the ten minutes to the border, which at Ha Tien is a large airy cement building with a luggage scanner inside, located on a paved road, and on the Cambodia side is two tiny buildings that you cannot enter with a wooden barrier across the dirt road. (The pavement disappears half-way between the two border posts.) Then we piled into a far less plush minibus (springs sticking up irregularly in the seats made for a veery long 5.5 hour drive to Phnom Penh) and started merrily off down the dirt road, under a clear blue sky, through the perfectly flat brilliant green rice fields. The occasional wooded hill rose at random in the distance.
After an hour or so, the bus stopped to pick someone up. We had paid for a bus to ourselves, but we said nothing, out of politeness and because you never know when someone's brother/sister/cousin/friend/mother/friend-of-a-friend/aunt/nephew/wife/in-law needs a ride. After a while, we picked up another person, and then another, and another, and pretty soon it was clear that 1. we were not getting the bus to ourselves, and 2. most of the original tourist-type people were somewhat cranky about this, as their comfortable sprawled-out space shrunk. I watched what the incoming passengers were paying ($4-ish, less as we got closer to Phnom Penh), and realized that, very possibly, the tourist agency in Vietnam had ripped us off.
The minibus continued to fill. The row facing backwards behind the driver filled up, and we rearranged our legs every-other, trying not to look directly at one another, since it is extremely awkward to stare at a person you do not know when their face is so close to your own and your legs are touching all the way along. Newcomers slid their bags of rice under the seat and one of the two women squished into the passenger seat held a baby. The tourists got crankier. The ride got longer every time we stopped. I got whiplash from the pothole and nearly whimpered at the pain of it, exacerbated by every following pothole. I didn't dare go back to sleep, but I was too tired to stay awake, after getting up at 5 am yet again. (Note: waking up before it was light: another theme of the trip.)
At long last, we got to Phnom Penh and started dropping people off. When everyone was gone but the tourists, we pulled into a petrol station and the driver said, "Here you are."
"Uh... where are we?" we asked. We hadn't the first idea. We had been told in Vietnam that the bus would take us right where we needed to go.
Or, it appeared, not.
"Just out of curiosity," the driver said, (except not quite in perfect English like this; I am taking liberties), "how much did you pay them for this trip?"
Of our $15 each, apparently $10 each got eaten in the 10 minute trip to the Vietnam border and the guy walking us across the border doing nothing, when we had visas and could have managed just fine alone. The driver on the Cambodia side, who drove us 5.5 hours to Phnom Penh, which seems like the biggest task, certainly requiring the most fuel, got $5 for each of us.
And he didn't know Phnom Penh at all, which makes sense because his route is border-city, not within city. We hauled out two different guidebooks for their maps, on neither of which we could find ourselves because we were not yet in the actual city, and after figuring out that we were on a main street that did, further into town, appear on a map (dear Cambodia: thank you, thank you, thank you, for putting the street signs in English letters as well as Khmer), I directed him to the street-o'-tourists using the Rough Guide map (never trust a Lonely Planet map; they are awful). Unfortunately, I did not know how tiny and narrow this street was, so we ended up stuck down it, causing a horrible traffic jam and din of horns and leaving the poor driver to somehow maneuver his minibus out of a barely-one-lane alley.
S. and I tipped him because we felt so bad that he had been forced to drive us all the way to our hotel without being paid adequately by the tourist agency, but I doubt it was enough to make up for his trouble.
09 December 2009
overview
Mostly, when people ask me about my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, I say, "The food was amazing." It's always impossible to summarize a trip, long or short, in a few words, but this is true: the food was amazing. In the direst of lost-ness, in the middle of nowhere, at the cheapest of little food stalls, we had quite possibly the most delicious, certainly the most consistently delicious, food I have ever tasted.
We pretty much broke every food rule for traveling. We drank iced coffee with abandon, purchased on the street from a woman who held the ice block in her hand and banged at it with a hammer to create the shards that she put in our glasses. We ate lettuce just as carelessly, at a little table on the side of the road, using it to wrap up bits of lentil crepe that a woman cooked in a wok-like thing over a coal-pot, at a night market on an island, layering it in salad rolls with our fish and noodles. We ate fruit cut open with a machete on a boat on a tributary of the Mekong. We ate ice cream at every opportunity.
If there was nothing else decipherable on the menu, we ordered vegetables and rice in Vietnam, or chicken curry in Cambodia, and every plate of either was delicious. (Except that one time, when we went to an actual expensive restaurant in Siem Reap, where the curry was sickeningly sweet and I found a dead roach cooked into it after I'd eaten half of it. Stick with the street food, I say.)
I learned to eat with chopsticks, finally, tardily. I have avoided chopsticks for years. They hurt my wrist because I cling to them too hard, and I've never been able to pick up small things. Now I can. I can hold them lightly. I can pick up that last grain of rice, should I need to pick it up. I started to understand why people choose them over forks.
That is the overview. The food was amazing, and there were lots of motorbikes. Now, next time, for the stories.
(It's amazingly hard to get back in the habit of even turning on a computer after so long without one. It's good for me not to lose so many hours to the internet - I have a cleaner kitchen and I've gotten exercise every day - but it does not lend itself to writing here.)
We pretty much broke every food rule for traveling. We drank iced coffee with abandon, purchased on the street from a woman who held the ice block in her hand and banged at it with a hammer to create the shards that she put in our glasses. We ate lettuce just as carelessly, at a little table on the side of the road, using it to wrap up bits of lentil crepe that a woman cooked in a wok-like thing over a coal-pot, at a night market on an island, layering it in salad rolls with our fish and noodles. We ate fruit cut open with a machete on a boat on a tributary of the Mekong. We ate ice cream at every opportunity.
If there was nothing else decipherable on the menu, we ordered vegetables and rice in Vietnam, or chicken curry in Cambodia, and every plate of either was delicious. (Except that one time, when we went to an actual expensive restaurant in Siem Reap, where the curry was sickeningly sweet and I found a dead roach cooked into it after I'd eaten half of it. Stick with the street food, I say.)
I learned to eat with chopsticks, finally, tardily. I have avoided chopsticks for years. They hurt my wrist because I cling to them too hard, and I've never been able to pick up small things. Now I can. I can hold them lightly. I can pick up that last grain of rice, should I need to pick it up. I started to understand why people choose them over forks.
That is the overview. The food was amazing, and there were lots of motorbikes. Now, next time, for the stories.
(It's amazingly hard to get back in the habit of even turning on a computer after so long without one. It's good for me not to lose so many hours to the internet - I have a cleaner kitchen and I've gotten exercise every day - but it does not lend itself to writing here.)
07 December 2009
motorbikes
Flying in to Ho Chi Minh City, in the dark, around the edge of a typhoon, I watched the roads down below. I just wanted to figure out on which side of the road the traffic drove, but what I noticed were the singular headlights. Every light down there seemed to be alone. Either every car in this country has a headlight out, I thought, or there are a whole lot of motorbikes in this city.
We marveled, on the ground, at the sheer quantity of motorbikes. It was 1 am, and the streets were still full of them. "There are ten million people in this city," our taxi driver told us, "and five million motorbikes."
By day, when we woke to the noise and bustle of, for me, a whole new continent, we just stared. There really are five million motorbikes in HCMC, and I think we saw all of them. The guide books say just to pick your moment and start walking across the street at a steady pace, and it's really all you can do. You step out into traffic and hope that none of the hundreds of motorbikes rushing through that intersection at that moment runs into you. They flow around you like water. Oddly, there are very few cars, maybe 5 for every 200 motorbikes. The bikes go on and on as far as you can see, each carrying no more than two adults, each adult wearing a little round helmet but the kids, squeezed between them, are usually helmetless. "Maybe," I said, after we found out that there is a law requiring helmets in Vietnam but not in Cambodia, "maybe they give out the tickets to the person not wearing the helmet, and they can't give them to little kids."
In Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, the motorbikes are more crowded. Sometimes there are three or four adults on a bike. To cross the street in Phnom Penh, you wade through the motorbikes, start-stop-start as you see a little gap, instead of the motorbikes flowing around you.
Motorbikes were a bit of a theme of our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.
We marveled, on the ground, at the sheer quantity of motorbikes. It was 1 am, and the streets were still full of them. "There are ten million people in this city," our taxi driver told us, "and five million motorbikes."
By day, when we woke to the noise and bustle of, for me, a whole new continent, we just stared. There really are five million motorbikes in HCMC, and I think we saw all of them. The guide books say just to pick your moment and start walking across the street at a steady pace, and it's really all you can do. You step out into traffic and hope that none of the hundreds of motorbikes rushing through that intersection at that moment runs into you. They flow around you like water. Oddly, there are very few cars, maybe 5 for every 200 motorbikes. The bikes go on and on as far as you can see, each carrying no more than two adults, each adult wearing a little round helmet but the kids, squeezed between them, are usually helmetless. "Maybe," I said, after we found out that there is a law requiring helmets in Vietnam but not in Cambodia, "maybe they give out the tickets to the person not wearing the helmet, and they can't give them to little kids."
In Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, the motorbikes are more crowded. Sometimes there are three or four adults on a bike. To cross the street in Phnom Penh, you wade through the motorbikes, start-stop-start as you see a little gap, instead of the motorbikes flowing around you.
Motorbikes were a bit of a theme of our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.
04 December 2009
back
I have the usual excuse for my disappearance from this space: namely, my computer died. I just brought it in for a little tuneup (okay, a new hard drive) and the next thing I knew the computer geeks were calling me apologizing for the fact that the connection between the computer and the power cord, after dying slowly for a long time, was totally gone, and it would end up being a $300 visit to the computer geek place, to fix a computer that was almost 5.5 years old and would only keep breaking down. That, they said, or I could buy a new computer.
$430 (that I didn't really have) later, I am rationing out my single $100 on which I have to live for the rest of the month. (No Christmas presents for anyone at all. Just forget about them. They are not coming.)
Now, it must be repeated - I know I've said it before - that I become irrationally attached to inanimate objects. It took a week for my new computer to arrive after I ordered it from the D3LL website, and I thought I would be so anxious to have a computer that I would open it and set it up immediately, but instead I opened up the box and then left the computer lying on my counter. Every time I looked at it, I felt vaguely resentful towards it for not being my old 1BM.
At long last, er, two days later, I finally managed to open the new, personality-less machine (it has neither stickers of African flags nor start-up foibles) and start to figure it out. My love for my old laptop was clearly fickle, because my resentment lessens each time the new one starts up in 30 seconds instead of 8 to 10 minutes. I do feel like I am betraying the old one, though. After all, it survived Liberia (barely, with a cracked motherboard) and Southern Sudan (barely, due to the heat), and brought me through law school and the bar exam.
The fact that I have not appeared on the blog in two+ weeks may actually be the only reason I finally booted up this shiny thing today.
$430 (that I didn't really have) later, I am rationing out my single $100 on which I have to live for the rest of the month. (No Christmas presents for anyone at all. Just forget about them. They are not coming.)
Now, it must be repeated - I know I've said it before - that I become irrationally attached to inanimate objects. It took a week for my new computer to arrive after I ordered it from the D3LL website, and I thought I would be so anxious to have a computer that I would open it and set it up immediately, but instead I opened up the box and then left the computer lying on my counter. Every time I looked at it, I felt vaguely resentful towards it for not being my old 1BM.
At long last, er, two days later, I finally managed to open the new, personality-less machine (it has neither stickers of African flags nor start-up foibles) and start to figure it out. My love for my old laptop was clearly fickle, because my resentment lessens each time the new one starts up in 30 seconds instead of 8 to 10 minutes. I do feel like I am betraying the old one, though. After all, it survived Liberia (barely, with a cracked motherboard) and Southern Sudan (barely, due to the heat), and brought me through law school and the bar exam.
The fact that I have not appeared on the blog in two+ weeks may actually be the only reason I finally booted up this shiny thing today.
17 November 2009
i am not even that sick
Did I say that I would be back Sunday or Monday? Uh... I meant that I would be back in the USA on Sunday or Monday, but apparently not that I would be coherent and functional. Between Saturday morning (Vietnam time) and Sunday night (US time), which is about 48 hours, I got a grand total of maybe 7 hours of sleep, 2-3 hours of which were on a plane and so do not count.
I do not do well on little sleep, so in the 48 hours after I got back, I slept for 27 hours. Not that I feel any better. I could sleep another 27, I think.
I have been forbidden to go to work until I can avoid snotting all over everything. "We don't want to get sick!" they said, pushing me out the door.
"It's just a cold!" I protested. "I'm not sick enough to stay home from work! I swear it's not swine flu! I don't have a fever or a cough and it's all from the neck up!" [now pounding on the outside of the door, begging to be let back in] (metaphorically, that is).
"You have plenty of sick leave!" they called through the door. "USE IT."
I'm really not sick enough for sick leave, but apparently, my sick leave is no longer about me.
I do not do well on little sleep, so in the 48 hours after I got back, I slept for 27 hours. Not that I feel any better. I could sleep another 27, I think.
I have been forbidden to go to work until I can avoid snotting all over everything. "We don't want to get sick!" they said, pushing me out the door.
"It's just a cold!" I protested. "I'm not sick enough to stay home from work! I swear it's not swine flu! I don't have a fever or a cough and it's all from the neck up!" [now pounding on the outside of the door, begging to be let back in] (metaphorically, that is).
"You have plenty of sick leave!" they called through the door. "USE IT."
I'm really not sick enough for sick leave, but apparently, my sick leave is no longer about me.
11 November 2009
with a view of palm trees
Ladies and Gentlemen, Vietnam: the first place in memory where I managed to sunburn my hands.
It involved a motorcycle. It's a long story.
In other words, I am still alive and kicking, just racing internetless around Southeast Asia. Actually, there is internet everywhere, but no time, no time. I have beaches to lounge upon and temples to visit. Also, word on the street is that this blog hosting service is blocked in Vietnam. (No, I did not bother to check. I love you all, but I don't love you that much. I was busy. Probably drinking four glasses of iced ca phe sua da every day.)
Now I am in Cambodia, where blogger works just fine. But, again, I have things to do. Things, you know. Like maybe some shopping, and another temple or two.
See you on the other side.
(That would be Sunday or Monday, depending on my level of exhaustion when I step off the plane.)
(Don't worry! I am keeping some journaling on real paper, so hopefully there will be stories to tell here.)
It involved a motorcycle. It's a long story.
In other words, I am still alive and kicking, just racing internetless around Southeast Asia. Actually, there is internet everywhere, but no time, no time. I have beaches to lounge upon and temples to visit. Also, word on the street is that this blog hosting service is blocked in Vietnam. (No, I did not bother to check. I love you all, but I don't love you that much. I was busy. Probably drinking four glasses of iced ca phe sua da every day.)
Now I am in Cambodia, where blogger works just fine. But, again, I have things to do. Things, you know. Like maybe some shopping, and another temple or two.
See you on the other side.
(That would be Sunday or Monday, depending on my level of exhaustion when I step off the plane.)
(Don't worry! I am keeping some journaling on real paper, so hopefully there will be stories to tell here.)
30 October 2009
ready early
This has never before happened in the history of being me: I am ready to go. I could be out of this apartment and on the train to the airport in five minutes. My flight, however, is not until tomorrow. Which is a bit of a problem, actually. One would think that being ready in advance would be terribly convenient, but in fact it's annoying. I would rather be scrambling right up until I'm late to the airport. It gives me less time to think.
I have so little sense of what Vietnam will be like that I have trouble believing that I will actually get there. I felt this same way about Kenya, almost ten years ago. I just could not imagine what Kenya might be like. I could not picture myself there. Now it is Vietnam, but ten years on I am slightly more accustomed to plopping down in utterly new places. I am almost more accustomed to being on my own in a new country than I am at being picked up at the airport. Mostly in Africa and Central America, of course, but surely the self-sufficiency is translatable.
I still can't imagine it, even though it will be real in 36 hours.
Meanwhile, I sit here twiddling my thumbs, worrying, fretting. I could make some effort to get out of the apartment - I sent off one text message that has not resulted in plans - but it's hard to imagine what I might do 14 hours before I'm due at the airport. I have already all-but-fully packed. I have cleaned. I have made the phone calls I've been putting off. I have answered the emails. I have downloaded the pictures. I have charged the electronics. What more is there?
Remind me never to be ready for a trip early ever again. It's not worth it. It's just a license for nerves.
I have so little sense of what Vietnam will be like that I have trouble believing that I will actually get there. I felt this same way about Kenya, almost ten years ago. I just could not imagine what Kenya might be like. I could not picture myself there. Now it is Vietnam, but ten years on I am slightly more accustomed to plopping down in utterly new places. I am almost more accustomed to being on my own in a new country than I am at being picked up at the airport. Mostly in Africa and Central America, of course, but surely the self-sufficiency is translatable.
I still can't imagine it, even though it will be real in 36 hours.
Meanwhile, I sit here twiddling my thumbs, worrying, fretting. I could make some effort to get out of the apartment - I sent off one text message that has not resulted in plans - but it's hard to imagine what I might do 14 hours before I'm due at the airport. I have already all-but-fully packed. I have cleaned. I have made the phone calls I've been putting off. I have answered the emails. I have downloaded the pictures. I have charged the electronics. What more is there?
Remind me never to be ready for a trip early ever again. It's not worth it. It's just a license for nerves.
28 October 2009
SAD/home
I had forgotten about this, how beyond the months of summer sunshine lie even more months of dark and cold, how everything is fine until the day when the darkness and rain and cold suddenly matter, how the gloom makes everything wrong all in a moment. I had forgotten how I have to stay ahead of it, how I should be using the happy light long before the moment when I am overwhelmed.
I should have known it was coming when I looked for a last-minute plane ticket to Michigan and had to wait a day because I was overwhelmed. I should have known when the hotel reservations in Vietnam overwhelmed me. I should have known when I tried to plan one outing this week before I leave for Vietnam and was, yes, overwhelmed. I thought I could get through, though, until Vietnam, where the sun and warmth will restore my energy. I was wrong. You have to catch these things before they take over, and I did not.
I was fine in Michigan last weekend. I flew over the Rockies as the sun rose, and showed up at my sister's work in the middle of her shift. She was so surprised at my presence on the wrong side of the country that she was almost angry. She pushed my parents and I out the door so she could work. We meandered over to a coffee shop on campus, the campus where they attended university and so did I, and we stared out at the rain, exclaiming again and again over the fact that I was in Michigan. I was there, really, for my Oma's birthday party, and I surprised her, too. I held my little niece for the first time, and propped her on the table between Oma and me, three of four generations all in a bundle.
"I go on Friday," I caught myself saying, last week, "and I come home on Tuesday." Home, it seems, is now Gone West.
It's hard to live in one place when so many of the people you love are in another. Sometimes it feels all wrong to leave them, but it also feels, arriving here in Gone West, like I'm coming home.
I should have known it was coming when I looked for a last-minute plane ticket to Michigan and had to wait a day because I was overwhelmed. I should have known when the hotel reservations in Vietnam overwhelmed me. I should have known when I tried to plan one outing this week before I leave for Vietnam and was, yes, overwhelmed. I thought I could get through, though, until Vietnam, where the sun and warmth will restore my energy. I was wrong. You have to catch these things before they take over, and I did not.
I was fine in Michigan last weekend. I flew over the Rockies as the sun rose, and showed up at my sister's work in the middle of her shift. She was so surprised at my presence on the wrong side of the country that she was almost angry. She pushed my parents and I out the door so she could work. We meandered over to a coffee shop on campus, the campus where they attended university and so did I, and we stared out at the rain, exclaiming again and again over the fact that I was in Michigan. I was there, really, for my Oma's birthday party, and I surprised her, too. I held my little niece for the first time, and propped her on the table between Oma and me, three of four generations all in a bundle.
"I go on Friday," I caught myself saying, last week, "and I come home on Tuesday." Home, it seems, is now Gone West.
It's hard to live in one place when so many of the people you love are in another. Sometimes it feels all wrong to leave them, but it also feels, arriving here in Gone West, like I'm coming home.
22 October 2009
just a moment
I pretend to be this worldly world traveler, but the truth is that I keep going back to the places I know and love: Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Northern Europe. There are entire swaths of the world - Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Republics, any Pacific Islands, to which I have never been and which, to be quite truthful, are so unfamiliar to me that I am a little afraid to try them. I only seem intrepid to ya'll because Africa feels like home.
I have a departure for Vietnam and Cambodia scheduled for a week from Saturday, and I didn't realize exactly how paralyzing the whole new continent concept was until S. and I started talking about hotels and I had to turn it over to her to figure out. If it were Africa or Latin America, I would have no hesitation about my ability to choose a decent hotel out of a guidebook or off a website. I just have no confidence in my ability to choose a place in Vietnam. I looked at the photos and panicked because help this does not look like an African hotel I would choose at all, do we have to pick this one? (Answer: no. There are plenty of other hotels from which to choose. Only the variety overwhelmed me, too.) Fortunately, S. has it handled. She is the one who actually has possession of the guidebook, actually. And I did all the work for the visas, so I don't feel too bad about hyperventilating/procrastinating until she took over the hotel reservations for the first two nights.
Nine days it is.
I have a departure for Vietnam and Cambodia scheduled for a week from Saturday, and I didn't realize exactly how paralyzing the whole new continent concept was until S. and I started talking about hotels and I had to turn it over to her to figure out. If it were Africa or Latin America, I would have no hesitation about my ability to choose a decent hotel out of a guidebook or off a website. I just have no confidence in my ability to choose a place in Vietnam. I looked at the photos and panicked because help this does not look like an African hotel I would choose at all, do we have to pick this one? (Answer: no. There are plenty of other hotels from which to choose. Only the variety overwhelmed me, too.) Fortunately, S. has it handled. She is the one who actually has possession of the guidebook, actually. And I did all the work for the visas, so I don't feel too bad about hyperventilating/procrastinating until she took over the hotel reservations for the first two nights.
Nine days it is.
21 October 2009
days of fall
On sunny days, the little golden leaves in the park twinkle as they flutter down like weightless golden coins.
On rainy days, the rain pounds the sodden yellow maple leaves into the pavement, so they are never crisp underfoot as autumn leaves should be.
The sun rises later and sets earlier, but now that I feel safe in this city, it doesn't matter quite as much. I can drag myself out, fearlessly, into the night. I still have energy enough, unlike last November. I am counting on this trip to Vietnam and Cambodia to provide me with sunshine to last the winter. I am going to sit back with my face to the sun as much as I can, storing it up.
On rainy days, the rain pounds the sodden yellow maple leaves into the pavement, so they are never crisp underfoot as autumn leaves should be.
The sun rises later and sets earlier, but now that I feel safe in this city, it doesn't matter quite as much. I can drag myself out, fearlessly, into the night. I still have energy enough, unlike last November. I am counting on this trip to Vietnam and Cambodia to provide me with sunshine to last the winter. I am going to sit back with my face to the sun as much as I can, storing it up.
18 October 2009
dead pumkins
When I was three, while we were in the US waiting for my baby brother to be born, we had pumpkins carved for Halloween out on the porch. Some bigger boys in the neighborhood came by and smashed them on the road. I was terrified of the dead pumpkins in the road. I could barely stand to drive past them, let alone walk anywhere near them. I remember the horror I felt back then, because I knew that the pumpkins had been alive, with thoughts and feelings, and now they were dead and broken. Even long after the pieces of the pumpkin were gone, I could feel their presence in the middle of the road.
I don't remember when I stopped believing that pumpkins were alive, or that my stuffed animals had feelings and would be hurt if I didn't sleep with every one of them on my bed, taking turns snuggling each one. Somewhere along the way, though, in the last 27 years, I did stop. Inanimate objects are just objects now, and now, when I see the broken pieces of a pumpkin on the road, it is just orange rind, not the remains of a dear friend.
I don't remember when I stopped believing that pumpkins were alive, or that my stuffed animals had feelings and would be hurt if I didn't sleep with every one of them on my bed, taking turns snuggling each one. Somewhere along the way, though, in the last 27 years, I did stop. Inanimate objects are just objects now, and now, when I see the broken pieces of a pumpkin on the road, it is just orange rind, not the remains of a dear friend.
17 October 2009
*crickets*
One of my screensaver pictures froze for a minute as I tried to go back to my rambling about the internet. It was a photo of my tent, with the flaps open, in Rumbek, in Southern Sudan, as I was on my way out of the country. I took that photo out of sheer relief at being in a place with 24-hour electricity and an en-suite bathroom. My suitcases are on the floor, and there is a round-frame mosquito net hanging from the ceiling.
I really prefer mosquito nets that come sewn in rectangles. Beds, after all, are rectangular, and when you have a circular mosquito net, it's always stretched at an angle to reach the edges of the bed and your face is pressed up against the netting because it comes so low by that point. A rectangular mosquito net can just fall straight around the edges of the bed. But I think the circular ones use less fabric, and thus are cheaper.
Looking at that picture, though, I suddenly remembered how at night, lying in the dark all cozy in that tent, I kept hearing these strange noises. Clicking noises, almost. I finally turned on the light (24-hour electricity!) to investigate, and found the tent full of crickets, hopping vigorously to and fro. Toing and froing, they were. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. I know not where they came from or what they were doing, but my tent was full of crickets hopping in the dark.
I really prefer mosquito nets that come sewn in rectangles. Beds, after all, are rectangular, and when you have a circular mosquito net, it's always stretched at an angle to reach the edges of the bed and your face is pressed up against the netting because it comes so low by that point. A rectangular mosquito net can just fall straight around the edges of the bed. But I think the circular ones use less fabric, and thus are cheaper.
Looking at that picture, though, I suddenly remembered how at night, lying in the dark all cozy in that tent, I kept hearing these strange noises. Clicking noises, almost. I finally turned on the light (24-hour electricity!) to investigate, and found the tent full of crickets, hopping vigorously to and fro. Toing and froing, they were. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. I know not where they came from or what they were doing, but my tent was full of crickets hopping in the dark.
16 October 2009
another home
If you have lived in the same place your entire life, I imagine that things just feel familiar: the cool fall air, the hot summer breeze, the smell after the rain. I have moved around so much, maybe too much, that all those things feel familiar, yes, but they feel familiar some place else. I stand on the street corner and feel a breeze that feels just like Nairobi. The crisp smell of a morning will always feel like the Netherlands to me. The light smokey hint of a wood fire in the evening feels like every place that cooks on fires: Liberia, and Rwanda, and Honduras, and Sudan. Sometimes I feel like I walk around in a swirl of all the places I've ever been.
I've been thinking a lot lately about when I first moved to Gone West. As I walked to the store in the dark last night, I thought about my cautiousness when I first moved here. Back then, I would never have walked to that store after dark, because I didn't like the bus stop there. The groups of teenagers made me nervous. Now I smile at the way they pummel one another as they wait for the bus. Nothing has changed about them, of course. It is only me. I felt new and uncertain here, 20 months ago, and now I feel at home.
It was the night air, last night, that felt like East Africa, as I stood on that corner waiting for the light to change. It was the temperature, or the smell, or the texture of it.
For so long, I moved because that is who I was. I don't think I even realized that I had a choice. I wanted to go home, to the other half of my life, and that's how I could get there. My stomach used to sink, in college and law school, at the thought of staying in Michigan or in New York. (What effect the being in school had on that, I cannot say.) The first place that felt like home to me after we left Liberia in 1990 was Rwanda. It was the first place where I did not find myself thinking, "I wish I could go home." I was home. I didn't even look up at jet trails, hoping to travel. I was content to stay.
I'm approaching my third winter here in Gone West and the thought of moving is almost repellent. Apparently I am a nester, when given the chance. I miss the places I've lived before. I miss them in my senses and my soul, but right now I'm so relieved every day to come home to my tiny little space. I find comfort in walking to the tea place on weekend afternoons. I crave the coffee shop where they know me by name and know which drink I want in hot weather and cold. I like my walk on the street with the beautiful houses. It feel comfortable here, and familiar.
Now it's the thought of moving that makes my stomach sink. Not even the twirling leaves emptying the trees or the prospect of another long dark winter can drive me away. If I'm willing to put up with cold rain wind dark for the sake of a place, if I'm even willing to ignore the blasts of memory and the longing for those other wonderful places, then it must be true love. I must be home.
(For now, of course. For now.)
I've been thinking a lot lately about when I first moved to Gone West. As I walked to the store in the dark last night, I thought about my cautiousness when I first moved here. Back then, I would never have walked to that store after dark, because I didn't like the bus stop there. The groups of teenagers made me nervous. Now I smile at the way they pummel one another as they wait for the bus. Nothing has changed about them, of course. It is only me. I felt new and uncertain here, 20 months ago, and now I feel at home.
It was the night air, last night, that felt like East Africa, as I stood on that corner waiting for the light to change. It was the temperature, or the smell, or the texture of it.
For so long, I moved because that is who I was. I don't think I even realized that I had a choice. I wanted to go home, to the other half of my life, and that's how I could get there. My stomach used to sink, in college and law school, at the thought of staying in Michigan or in New York. (What effect the being in school had on that, I cannot say.) The first place that felt like home to me after we left Liberia in 1990 was Rwanda. It was the first place where I did not find myself thinking, "I wish I could go home." I was home. I didn't even look up at jet trails, hoping to travel. I was content to stay.
I'm approaching my third winter here in Gone West and the thought of moving is almost repellent. Apparently I am a nester, when given the chance. I miss the places I've lived before. I miss them in my senses and my soul, but right now I'm so relieved every day to come home to my tiny little space. I find comfort in walking to the tea place on weekend afternoons. I crave the coffee shop where they know me by name and know which drink I want in hot weather and cold. I like my walk on the street with the beautiful houses. It feel comfortable here, and familiar.
Now it's the thought of moving that makes my stomach sink. Not even the twirling leaves emptying the trees or the prospect of another long dark winter can drive me away. If I'm willing to put up with cold rain wind dark for the sake of a place, if I'm even willing to ignore the blasts of memory and the longing for those other wonderful places, then it must be true love. I must be home.
(For now, of course. For now.)
12 October 2009
random materialism
I live in a place where it rains more than half the year. I also have to dress up for work. I also cannot stand walking in heels. The combination of these factors is bad, very, very bad. I have nothing to wear when I walk to the library on my lunch hour. Sneakers look stupid with skirts, and also get soaked through easily. Flats turn into little pools of water in which your frigid feet reside. Rainboots, while ostensibly the best option, don't have a lot of in-shoe support, plus it doesn't necessarily rain all day every day, and so you risk looking stooopid wearing rainboots in the sunshine.
It hit me a few weeks ago that what I need is boots. Dress boots. The kind I can wear with a skirt at work and that will keep my legs warm. I think everyone else figured this out long ago, but I am slow that way. So, I set out looking for boots.
My normal method of looking for things to purchase is to spend several days frantically looking in every store I can find, then get annoyed and slow down, but keep going into new stores hoping to find the item, and then to give up if I haven't found it, with occasional reversions to frantic searching when I think of it. Along the way, I collect opinions about the perfect item for which I am searching. In this case, boots.
By the end of my search, I was categorically rejecting boots for high heels, clunkiness, no heels, slouchiness, looseness, cheapness, buckles, pointiness, uncomfortableness, expensiveness, and having rims around the edge. Let's just say: I had opinions.
I did the same thing with jeans a few weeks ago. My Aunt Lisa actually sent me a birthday card involving jeans, which totally cracked me up, because she clearly has an inkling of how ridiculous I can get about jeans. Suffice it to say that I very nearly threw a temper tantrum in the gap, where they have discontinued my reliable Essential style of jeans in favor of a whole set of LOW-RISE travesties and SKINNY-LEGGED absurdities. The staff alleged that they held WORKSHOPS to determine how the new jeans should be cut, and I can only say that apparently their WORKSHOPS were made up of EIGHTY-FIVE POUND THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS, because they are the only people who have the remotest chance of not having a muffin top in and being stuffed like a donut into those stupid, idiotic low-rise, painfully-tight jeans.
Not that I was bitter at all.
Unfortunately for the gap, though, the loss of any sense of decency (FABRIC) in their pants has made it unnecessary for me to ever enter their store again. Too bad!
I have a few opinions about jeans, too, I guess. Happily, I found the world's most perfect pair of jeans at @nthropologie and they lost a button so I got them a percentage off and sewed the button back on and they are perfect perfect perfect. And I got a pair of boots on sale at @erosoles, and they are comfortable and cozy and basically perfect perfect perfect as well.
So, now, um, anyone have any idea where I can find a black v-neck wrap sweater? I've been on a quest for one of those for quite some time.
It hit me a few weeks ago that what I need is boots. Dress boots. The kind I can wear with a skirt at work and that will keep my legs warm. I think everyone else figured this out long ago, but I am slow that way. So, I set out looking for boots.
My normal method of looking for things to purchase is to spend several days frantically looking in every store I can find, then get annoyed and slow down, but keep going into new stores hoping to find the item, and then to give up if I haven't found it, with occasional reversions to frantic searching when I think of it. Along the way, I collect opinions about the perfect item for which I am searching. In this case, boots.
By the end of my search, I was categorically rejecting boots for high heels, clunkiness, no heels, slouchiness, looseness, cheapness, buckles, pointiness, uncomfortableness, expensiveness, and having rims around the edge. Let's just say: I had opinions.
I did the same thing with jeans a few weeks ago. My Aunt Lisa actually sent me a birthday card involving jeans, which totally cracked me up, because she clearly has an inkling of how ridiculous I can get about jeans. Suffice it to say that I very nearly threw a temper tantrum in the gap, where they have discontinued my reliable Essential style of jeans in favor of a whole set of LOW-RISE travesties and SKINNY-LEGGED absurdities. The staff alleged that they held WORKSHOPS to determine how the new jeans should be cut, and I can only say that apparently their WORKSHOPS were made up of EIGHTY-FIVE POUND THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS, because they are the only people who have the remotest chance of not having a muffin top in and being stuffed like a donut into those stupid, idiotic low-rise, painfully-tight jeans.
Not that I was bitter at all.
Unfortunately for the gap, though, the loss of any sense of decency (FABRIC) in their pants has made it unnecessary for me to ever enter their store again. Too bad!
I have a few opinions about jeans, too, I guess. Happily, I found the world's most perfect pair of jeans at @nthropologie and they lost a button so I got them a percentage off and sewed the button back on and they are perfect perfect perfect. And I got a pair of boots on sale at @erosoles, and they are comfortable and cozy and basically perfect perfect perfect as well.
So, now, um, anyone have any idea where I can find a black v-neck wrap sweater? I've been on a quest for one of those for quite some time.
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