lindsayliveshere.org

Cold day, warm brownies: another happy island

I’ve been writing about days filled with islands and sun. They’d have seemed like a vacation if they hadn’t been so fraught with uncertainty. When living someplace familiar (and possibly chilly), it’s easy to forget that your anchors are your buoys. Friends, family, the indelible bond between you and that sidewalk. I’ve been visiting Chicago, on and off, over the past few months since returning to the U. S. of A., and my favorite days have been the simple ones.

Like with Eliina and baby Alice.

Eliina is a friend I’ve known since we were 17, both brand-new transplants to the venerable Northwestern University. Gathered for an all-dorm meeting, 100 of us kids squeezed into the cinderblock basement lounge, crowded on blue polyester couches or seated knees-to-chin on the cold linoleum floor. The session leader instructed us to find a partner and interview each other. I’m sure there was some sort of awkward shuffle of who-will-pick-me, but all I remember is that Eliina and I somehow paired up. She looked like such a cool chick, punky short blonde hair and an eyebrow ring.

One mandatory question was: Weirdest fact about you. Eep – I felt simultaneously completely alien and totally non-descript, a kid from a farm town outside Buffalo, New York. Eliina had a cool fact. Of course she did. She’d played the sousaphone in the marching band. Me? All I could think of was the twenty pounds of candy that my parents had sent me away to college with, now the only thing stuffed in the drawers of my particle-board desk. “I’m addicted to chocolate…?” I said.

Then we had to introduce our partners to the entire group — It’s a testament to the extreme nerdiness of our dorm that no one laughed at either of our weird facts. And Eliina and I became fast friends. We lived together all through college in the dorm and then afterwards in an apartment with friends. Later, when I was thinking of moving to Chicago after two disorienting years in D.C., she sent postcards. Highly persuasive postcards. Maybe twenty of them, one after the other, so that shuffled in with student loan invoices and credit card offers, I started getting photos of the Chicago skyline and her notes on the back that all amounted to: “Get over here. Be with us.”

So I went. And this city has been the best place I could ever hope to spend so much of my short life. Now she’s married to an artist and has a sweet, tiny Alice baby. But we are still total nerds. On one lazy weekday, with the rest of the world working silly JOBS and making batches of DOLLARS we decided to bake a batch of brownies and watch the movie Adventures in Babysitting.

It’s a Chicago movie, which is partially why we picked it. But also Elisabeth Shue is a total badass. There are gang fights, a tow truck driver with a hook for a hand, sewer rats and singing the blues. (“Ain’t nobody leave this place without sangin’ the blues…”) We knew all the best lines already, so it was the perfect backdrop by which to catch up and watch Alice gurgle and scootch on her back across the shiny wood floor. (She’s already rubbed a bald patch on the back of her tiny milk-scented head. I can only imagine how awesome she’s going to feel when she can transport herself facing forward. )

So, brownies. From scratch, which Eliina whipped up such with mechanical speed that before I could take my eyes from wiggly giggly Alice, the batter bowl was ready for licking.

–

The only thing better than half-watching Adventures in Babysitting with a dear friend  is adding slightly undercooked brownies, right from the oven. (Really key for a still-recovering chocolate addict.) And the only thing better than that is washing them down with fizzy cocktails of wheat ale and a splash of blood-orange juice. And the only thing better than that? Narrating a fake advice column starring the characters in the movie.

Dear Ms. Manners,
What is the proper etiquette for escaping from murderous car thieves? If you accidentally scrape rust into one of their coffee cups whilst traversing an overhead steel beam, must you stop and apologize?

And the only thing better than that is doing the whole thing again, getting to the end of the movie, pressing “Play” and reaching for another brownie. Because the first time we missed a bunch of stuff. There was, as always, more.

Part four: Always sit at the bar

Sometimes sitting at the bar in an unfamiliar place is the best idea. Total strangers have become great friends this way. Florian, who gave me crash-courses in sociology and dive bars over good beer at Simon’s. Lauren, who cheered me up when the only thing I could eat was coconut soup at Setsara. Scoddy, who’s become a treasured pen pal ever since a glass of red wine at Equinox. And, my friend Kompheak.

—

After failing at learning to ride a moto, I go to the town dock and board a boat to the island. They’re bigger than canoes but similarly shaped. Tippy, weather-beaten little things, in calm blue water.

Hiring a ride involves several boat captains writing numbers and phrases on the back of a white square of paper and passing it amongst themselves. But soon you’re holding that white square of paper, hunkered down next to backpackers and tourists going your way, as the boat  coasts over semi-choppy waves. Half an hour later, it lurches to a halt near the brown-sugar shore lined with sleepy coconut trees.  A handful of other tourists play cards at picnic tables and read in hammocks. Opposite of a party beach.

I will read this book. I will pad in bare feet on this perfect shore and find a string hammock hanging between two coconut trees. I will reserve a room at some bungalow, where I will sleep in peace and wake up to the sunrise. Unless being alone begins to truly freak me out, in which case I will go home immediately.

—

Beach bungalows, little one-room shacks with thatched roofs and no running water, are the lodging of choice for this island. They’re arranged in clusters of four or five, each cluster managed by a different family. I’ve visited nearly every establishment, pacing the sandy beach, messenger bag over one shoulder, and there aren’t any rooms open, none at all.

It’s making me itch. Not the mosquitos, just the uncertainty. Should I go back to the mainland? Maybe even back to the city?

Then I get to the last set of huts. A Khmer family is sleeping on straw mats in one open-air shack, chickens running around out front. They send a teenager out to see what I might want, and the angels sing: one room left. It will be ready in about half an hour, some Australian woman is getting ready to leave. For $5, paradise. Yes, I say, and sign my name with a Bic pen on a blank white piece of paper. He signs his name too. With this seemingly nonsensical contract complete, the room is mine. Last one on the island.

To celebrate this feat, I order a beer, a nice golden glass mug with a big cylindrical ice cube in it. I’m sipping and reading my book. Then, down the end of the bar, I hear laughter. It’s the kind of chuckling that’s equal parts glee and mockery. Laughing with you, not at you, but… kind of at you. I turn to the right and there’s a young Khmer man with a laptop open sitting at the other end of the bar, grinning like the damn Chesire Cat.

“How was the moto lesson?” he asks.

Oh, great. How the hell….

But I set down my mug of beer and look at him. He doesn’t look so, so harmless. In a dress shirt and khakis, he appears to be telecommuting. Also, let’s be honest, I’m bored already, and I’ve only been alone for five minutes.

I ask how he knows, and — turns out — he’d been sitting at the cafe when I’d pushed aside my coffee and first embarked on Operation Rent a Moto.

So I tell him the truth. It didn’t go so well, I explain, and give him the play-by-play. The Australian woman is taking her sweet time vacating my bungalow, so we keep talking. Before long I slide myself and my beer down to the other end of the bar. He’s the only beach-goer with a laptop, so I ask what he’s working on. He’s writing a play. He runs an experimental theater company.

Funny coincidence, I tell him, but: me too.

—

So that’s it. That’s Kompheak, fluent in French, born in Cambodia, grins like the Cheshire Cat, and is the country’s only experimental playwright. On the spot he hired me to tutor him in English — my first paying job in Cambodia. Later he taught me to ride a dirt bike on a weedy lot that ran along the Mekong, with an audience of chickens. I met his friends, who invited me to camp with them a few months later on another crazy trip. I got invitations to Khmer/French puppet shows — sing-song children’s stories and veiled critiques of government corruption, paper puppets dancing in lace and shadow.

One day he explained what he believes about writing.

-To be a writer you must analyze everything like a…. [French word for surgeon]

- Surgeon?

- The doctor who cuts.

-Surgeon?

-Yes.  But you cut with the heart.

—

He writes dark plays, things about the poor and about injustice. I’m floored. We drink lots of Pastis, a French liquor that tastes like licorice. I teach him prepositions, and we read the English newspaper slowly. In his ESL workbook, there is always dialogue of people trying to talk over the phone but who can’t quite understand each other. Linda makes phone calls from the pay phone but George isn’t home and she has to leave a message with his confused sister. Or Linda runs out of quarters. Or George is half-deaf. It took me ages before I realized this was practice in repeating oneself to clarify information. Practice in saying, “What?” “I’m sorry, can you say that again?” “I don’t understand.”

I test out my French, which is worse than his English. On really rainy days he sends me texts, “It’s raining in my heart.” A French phrase, perfect for a tortured writer. He tells me about the ghosts that haunt his parents’ farm.

We spend a lot of time practicing, “What?” “I’m sorry, can you say that again?” “I don’t understand.” But I love these twists of language, how teaching English is like picking locks but with prepositions. And I learn the fastest way to somewhere good on a red-dust day: Follow the road that leads to the sea. Just sit, just wait. Turn when you hear laughter.

Scratching pennies on an aquamarine afternoon

I woke up today with a weird phrase in my head, maybe planted there by the self-help gods that leave kisses under your pillow, an Oprah-style tooth fairy. “Happiness is a choice.”

—

There is a balance. The give, the take, the wallow, the leap, the edge and the ledge and the space between breaths. For me the balance is often between making meaning out of things and just plain noticing things. Awake-like. If I search too hard for meaning, analyze too hard, meaning just scratches away, like the desperate scrape of a penny on a Lotto ticket that bores right through the paper. Time to easy up, slugger. Put the scratching pennies away.

—

I woke up one night with the image of a favorite essay in my mind. The fuzzy Xerox-of-a-Xerox typeface, and my professor’s cramped script in one corner. Cruising Blues, Robert Pirsig. I referenced it here about ten years ago, almost to the day. Which is weird. I read it a little differently now. It’s about people who spent years saving up for sailboats so that they could spend their days sailing around the world, only to find they’d rather be home after all. They liked “real” life. Ten years ago I thought those people were idiots but now find myself understanding their predicament.

—

The give, the take, the wallow, the leap. Choice. It’s nice to have options, to look into your many open doors and see the sky flying through them, the birds chirping and flitting in their non-committal ways. It is also annoying as hell. Because pretty soon, you can’t keep five feet in five doors, and all your friends are wondering what your address is. They want to send cards.

—

The edge and the ledge and the space between breaths. Everything’s a balance except wonder. There’s always wonder.  In the laugh of E’s baby Alice, in the icicle melting off the gutter, in the one cherry tomato petrified and hanging on the vine. In the paint chips at the hardware store, where you collect the brightest ones, just  to stare at. Chip number 7201. And 7943. And HC-50.  And you overhear: “I’m playing with yellows in the bedroom… this one’s too green.” And you can’t imagine TOO GREEN or why everything’s not always the 7675 of an aquamarine afternoon.

But scratch too hard on a paint chip, and it scrapes right through the paper.

Part Three: The fastest way to nowhere

Part one, part two. This is part three.

The tuk-tuk chugs up a long hill to a scrubby patch of lawn with a handful of motos in various states of repair. It reminds me of the small town where I grew up  – sometimes, when you’re fixing a few things at once, just leave ‘em all out on the lawn. My driver negotiates the rental cost for the moto but first, he says, they need to see if I can actually drive it. A short test, if you will.

I am not totally sure I can, in fact, drive this thing. See also: long-legged klutz who, when falling, looks like a “swan dying”. But I am definitely going to try. Rubber! Meet road! So I select the hot pink Honda, fully automatic, the easiest, most cream-puff vehicle on the planet. Women in Phnom Penh drive these in heels while carrying a baby under one arm and a little purse-dog under the other.

One of the Khmer men gives me the keys, shows me how to start it and directs me to drive up and down the long street, circling back around the median. On goes the helmet. In goes the key. It turns. The engine starts! It revs! It dies.

We try again.

It starts! It revs! It dies.

Finally we switch me to another moto. And by now I am so freakin’ positive that I can ride this machine, I take off with a magnificent zoom. It is SUPER EASY! ALL YOU DO IS SLIGHTLY TURN THE RIGHT HANDLE AND RIDE LIKE A FAST FAST BUNNY. OR A FAST FAST SWAN. By the time I reach the roundabout where the bus stop was, I see that I’ve left the rental shack too far behind. So I swerve back around and back up the long hill, ALMOST skidding into the grass but definitely not skidding.

They are waving their arms.

They are incredulous.

No no no! They are crying. You can not rent! Too fast. TOO FAST!

And so that is how I didn’t rent a moto that day.

—

This seems like a total loser way to start off an independent journey. And I definitely can’t go back to that cafe and risk those stupid guys laughing at me. I just want to get back on the bus and go home. But there is no bus for hours. So I ask the tuk-tuk driver to take me to the main dock. Lorna the British Insta-Friend said I could negotiate a boat over to Rabbit Island for five dollars. I don’t actually know how to “negotiate a boat” yet but that is what I will do. Then I will be totally, totally alone.

Next post: the island.

Part Two: On the empty street that leads to the sea

Part one is here. This is part two.

In my head, I’m telling this as a funny story, like it’s the Edgewater Lounge and it’s time for another PBR. But even though it’s sort of funny, it’s sort of more. It was the first time on this journey that I struck out with completely blind trust. I didn’t actually want to sit by myself all weekend on a deserted island. Secretly I hoped for magic. I was a miner panning for gold, a high five from the general cosmos and maybe a visit from the tooth fairy.  If the tooth fairy could bring you some pals and didn’t actually require compensation in teeth.

It is, still, kind of a funny story.

—

The bus drops me off at a weatherbeaten statue, on an empty street that leads to the sea. In the distance, water laps at the rocky shore. It’s both eerie and beautiful, the same quiet I’ve felt in a dark theater after the audience goes home, a gaping vaccuum where the chaos was but an energy that lingers. This was a busy French resort town, back in the country’s heyday, and now it’s practically deserted.

I’ve traveled light. A small messenger bag, sundress and sandals. I will get a cup of coffee at that cafe by the water and collect my thoughts, figure out what’s next. I walk slowly down the long road to the sea, settle down at a bamboo table and order a syrupy Khmer coffee from the laminated menu.

The coffee arrives, black as tar, and I shovel in sugar from the little jar. Then a tuk-tuk driver approaches, because this cafe, apparently, is also the major depot for tuk-tuks. By “major depot” I mean that there are two. I don’t need a tuk-tuk, I say, I am going to rent a moto. He can help me rent one, he says. He knows just the place.

From a few tables over, I hear chuckles and laughter. A few young Khmer men leaning back in their bamboo chairs, overhearing this and thinking it’s the funniest idea ever. So that, of course, seals it. I will definitely be renting a moto. I put aside the coffee and we are on our way.

Next post: Born to ride.

The lost art of navigating on a red-dust day

Let’s celebrate the calendar flip with one of my favorite stories, how I met Kompheak. Although I got back to the US a couple months ago, I still have a backlog of Cambodia stories because I need an inordinate amount of time to think about things. Kompheak himself once pointed this out in his dead-pan manner and hybrid Khmer-French accent, “You theenk a lawt. Too mahch.” Then he poured me a drink.

—

I was lost. Losty lost, on a bus pointed south but maybe the wrong bus. A red-dust day in the midst of dry season. But I was going to do this. I was.

1) I was going to travel alone.

You might be thinking: Wasn’t your whole trip to Cambodia… alone? But from minute one in Phnom Penh, I was part of a family of 32 young women who asked, constantly, where I was going, whether I had eaten and if not recently, when would I next eat? I slept in a room with three other girls, bottom bunk. Not. Alone.

I loved them, but after many weeks of this, I was headed to the seaside town of Kep. I could already feel the silence, sweet as a hammock in the breeze. If I ever got there.

And 2) I was going to learn to drive a moto. Which would be called a “scooter” in the U.S. but is definitely a moto in Cambodia.

For more than a year, since my first-ever visit to Asia, I’ve wanted this. Promised myself. Psyched myself up for a tough learning curve. See, I’m a long-legged klutz who not only trips over stuff randomly but, when falling, has been described as “a swan dying”. (My own father said this.) But I believe you can learn to do pretty much anything if you start small enough and try hard enough. So I will learn a moto in the mostly empty town of Kep and circle the hills. And someday I will zoom through the beautiful spaghetti of Phnom Penh’s misnumbered streets.

This was my chance. Yes. Rubber, meet road.

—

My grand plan to travel Super Alone goes sideways immediately. First, I meet Lorna. She’s a British teacher at a Phnom Penh university, and we gab for three hours from adjoining seats, sharing fresh pineapple on a stick, juice dripping onto our bare knees. We are insta-friends. She tells me I am not lost, and she points out my stop in Kep.

But now. Now I will be totally alone.

Next post: The moto lesson.

Cambodia post: The most convenient things

I’m home in Buffalo. Christmas is happening. Lots of shopping. And the very last bits of culture shock are revealing themselves.

Walked into a Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Looked around.

Jaw dropped.

Said something like: “Whoa, MOM, there are so many shiny THINGS in here.”

And walked around like a four year-old looking at the shiny toasters, walls lined with gadgets for no discernible purpose, and gadgets with space-age purposes like the thing that makes soda out of ANYTHING, and… and… fancy china patterns and picture frames and a million things. So convenient! Anything you want you can have! For your bed or your bath or your beyond!

At home again, I began to muse about all the super-convenient things about living in Phnom Penh.

There are many, many many problems. See also: it’s a developing country. But just because there a bunch of real, important issues, it doesn’t mean some things aren’t  strangely convenient for the expat. Posterity demands a list.

So. Off the top of my head:

-Transportation is plentiful. So plentiful you barely have to think the word “tuk-tuk” or “moto” and bam: You have a ride to anywhere.

-Maybe you’d like to go to a tropical beach for the weekend. That will cost you $6 and take four hours on an air-conditioned coach bus. (Bring headphones to drown out the overhead karaoke music.)

-Everything is in cash. No need to budget or use silly debit cards. Spend what you actually possess.

-Need a coconut water? That will be 25 cents, on any corner. From a coconut. (Take THAT, tiny boxed coconut water in the fridge at the Bikram studio.)

-At any given point in the day, you can find any of your friends in one of four cafes.

-Maybe you’d like to learn more about international human rights. Well, you’re in luck, as one of the world’s most important human rights tribunals is happening right now and… look, there’s someone working on the case. Eating a banana nut muffin. Ask her what’s going on.

-Pairs of shoes you really really need? One. And you can get them custom-made.

-Would you like a new apartment? Sure. Here’s one. It’s furnished. For $200 a month.

-If you can’t find the kind of shop you need, you’re probably just on the wrong street. For example, one whole block is devoted to guitars. Another to mattresses. Another to electric fans.

But my very favorite non-essential convenient thing is getting your hair washed, for a dollar, in a market or a salon. In an often-sweltering city, where hot water showers ain’t so common, it feels like a huge luxury.

These places are beautiful jewel boxes of human interaction, with shampoo and a blow dryer and a cup of tea. Walk in, mime washing your hair, sit down in a chair. Face the mirror. The smiling woman and maybe her daughter or niece or cousin are there to pour shampoo on your dry head and lather it into a tower of soap. You are, in fact, a shampoo commercial now. Then, a rinse under the sink and a blow-dry in front of the mirror. Read a Khmer magazine. Have two girls attack your long hair with flat irons. Wonder if they should be in school. Is it a weekday? Oh lord. Make small talk in broken Khmer. Smiles back and forth. You’re beautiful! They say. No you’re beautiful! You argue back. It’s a debate, full of giggles, until you can make your way out the front door again.

Walk out into the hot-hot heat.

Hope there’s no rain.

That would be so inconvenient.

Favorite mugs and the best things I never wrote about being home

I have a thing about mugs. I really, really love well-made mugs and am ashamed/proud to admit that I will go out of my way to frequent a particular cafe if it has the best mugs. Must be heavy but not too heavy, preferably handmade, and must fit well into the curves of my palms for maximum cupping on a cold day.

I have two favorite mugs. One is stoneware pottery, stolen from a coffee shop and given to me as a gift. The other is an earthy green ceramic mug that I bought at a yard sale in Arlington, Virginia from a neighbor when I was 22.

I saw mug #2 at my old workplace when I was in Chicago, picked out of a cupboard by someone (Hi Tif!) and drunk from as though it were a normal part of everyday drinkware at the theater. Which it is.

But I stared at it. Stunned. Literally open-jawed. “That’s my mug…”

And I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Not like, possessive. More like, “how did that get there?” Like running into an ex on the train or unexpectedly walking by a place you used to live. I just couldn’t process that while I had left the day-to-day of this place, my mug had continued to have a totally separate life. It didn’t belong to me anymore; it belonged to a different me from a former life and now it would have its own trajectory.

Tif tried to give it back, but I was all caught up in the drama and metaphysics of the thing and insisted that it stay. It felt as though that mug had slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum — and since it’d gone on such a long journey, best to leave it there. Also I have no Chicago cupboards in which to place it and Cambodia is too warm for hot beverages anyway.

—

So I am back in Cambodia.

And there’s a little time-skip happening on this blog, because I didn’t have the chance to write much while I was in the U.S.

Which is a shame, because there are some good unwritten fragments that deserved to be written.

Like this one: About how Oriana called at 9am for a spur-of-the-moment breakfast meetup. When I got to her car, she was in the backseat of her car looking proud and sucking down a coconut water like it was saving her life. She giggled and told me that, back there, she’d managed to swap her skirt for jeans without flashing the neighborhood. She’d also put on a fleece and scarf. It was 70 degrees. (She’d been living in super-hot Costa Rica since March.) I’m FREEZING TOO, I said. Two girls just back from separate tropics.

We scrapped fancy brunch ideas and drove instead to the Golden House on Broadway, with its red vinyl booths and hand-lettered ads for the $4 Bonanza Breakfast, where we drank a million cups of weak coffee and talked about everything.

Oriana is freezing. It is 70 degrees. Also we are indoors.

And these:

• My friend SJY taking me direct from the airport to four city departments in order to unravel the mystery of WTF happened to my car. Highlight: Her saying to a policeman, “She hasn’t had a lot of sleep.”




• Amanda looking for her favorite tree on the Northwestern campus, on a laid-back day that included sunning ourselves on the rocks by the lake and biking on her husband’s recumbent bicycle. She found the tree, she thinks, but realized that since it wasn’t fall yet, she couldn’t recognize it by its purple foliage.




• Watching my Italian grandmother pick a screaming fight with a man half her age and three times her size, in the motor home community/trailer park where she’d hired a neighbor to seal and repaint her front porch. She said the initial price quote was $100. He demanded $180. They both shouted and cursed. Highlight: me calling my dad from the curb and saying, “Uh, Nani’s fighting.”




• Sitting cross-legged on Eliina’s soft carpeted floor, during “tummy time”, which is the alloted time where Alice struggles to turn from her stomach to her back while a jaunty, tinny tune plays from the overhead mobile. It was comic, this juxtaposition of cheerful music and Alice’s in-vain infant  struggles. But more than that, it was rejuvenating to sit there with Eliina in the peace of that room, just her and the baby, us struggling with things bigger than tummy time but maybe cosmically just as funny.




• Caleb and me on the playground at midnight, where he told me that yeah, I didn’t have a condo, but I was making art instead and investing resources in that direction. Let’s call it “a creative condo.”




• The one about where I finally got to see Kirk, just before he left for L.A., a squeaker of a visit where I helped him carry a dresser he’d sold on Craigslist down to a Chinese man waiting in a van. After, we rode the freight elevator extra times for fun and talked about how improv taught us to fail with so much grace and live with such austerity that it’s no wonder we ended up like this.




• Becca sitting me down with a glass of wine and an Excel spreadsheet, and I shielded my eyes from the inevitable train wreck while she mapped out plans A through G for the next three weeks of my life. Yes, A through G. The wine was delicious.




• Sitting on a blanket in the rain with Kate and Joe, waiting for Guster to play, sharing two rain coats between the three of us, and watching the opening act. We all realized the truth: We’re old. The opening band, which shall remain nameless, was adored by the high school and college kids, but all three of us swore we’d already heard it the first time when it was called Better than Ezra. Or maybe not that one, because as Joe said, “Better than Ezra was really good.”




• How I had a ticket for the overnight train from Buffalo to Chicago, and while waiting in the creepy train station at midnight I turned and saw my dad walk in, wearing his work clothes, smiling. He;d left his shift at the plant to see me off. He bought me bottled water and M&Ms from the vending machine, and as I watched him feed in the dollar bills, I felt so proud to have the world’s coolest dad. like when I was eight and he won me a bracelet of rainbow heart-shaped beads at the mini-golf.




• How I drove to see Deanna in Rochester, and she solved my heart easy as a crossword puzzle while we took a walk around the block, and then we went home and listened to her boyfriend’s bluegrass band play in her living room.




• Getting martinis with Kate and Caitlin, where the crazy Italian bartender lady approached us with menus and looked at us sternly: “Do me a favor ladies. Just order what you’re craving. Otherwise it don’t matter what I put in fronna you. You won’t like it.”  Which, also, is life advice.




• The morning I woke up to my sister Christina, wearing a black skirt and yellow shirt, her voice urgent: “If I wear THIS shirt with THIS skirt… will I look like a bee?” No, I said, you won’t. Well, maybe a little.

The one about you. How I ran into you in the CVS while I was buying packing tape and couldn’t believe my luck. . How we had sushi and you still mashed your wasabi paste the same way, the way I’ve mashed mine for years since you taught me. How we saw each other on the sidewalk and decided to get a beer and you said you liked my pigtails. How we talked for hours about how everything sucked except the good parts.

The one about how grateful I felt, every single minute, in a way I haven’t before, for time. As in, the dimension. The fact that time exists. The way you’d feel grateful for gravity if you’d just come back from bouncing too long on the moon. Appreciating the present with the fierce longing that usually flavors nostalgia. I ate time. Revelled in it. Loved it so hard I’m surprised I didn’t wear a hole in it. Or maybe I did. Maybe I wore a hole in it, and time and space are related, right? — so maybe that’s how I got here, which is back to the other side of the planet. And my mugs, well, they’re still in Chicago, beloved as ever.

Slowly from here

I am not so good with change.

When I was 20 and newly home from a semester abroad, my sister Christina followed me while I wandered the supermarket, baffled by the dozens of shampoo choices. At the checkout, at last clutching a bottle of Pantene, I’d reached into my pocket to find only Icelandic kroner. Christina had been so shocked at my disorientation: “But you’re FROM here.”

This time was a little bit better, because the transition was buffered first by a long layover in Seoul, Korea with Kendra. We schemed about her becoming famous as a Korean model, and I marveled at the orderly traffic. Then a flight delay meant 9 hours in Seattle. On the spur of the moment, and thanks to Facebook, I met up with James and Elana, who I last saw on a Cambodian beach. At a brew pub near the water we tasted a dozen craft beers and remembered our time on a different coast, when Elana and I made James pull the legs off the fresh shrimp for us.

Then, Patrick in D.C. After nonstop travel, and a more frenetic pace in Cambodia, everything seemed so, so calm. Also: Every bridge seemed huge, every song on the radio was glorious. People said “bless you” when I sneezed. People said the word “awesome”. I could overhear conversations. Things were strange. Patrick was patient.

Now I am in Charleston, SC, with Christina. Lunches at food trucks, evenings on the beach. Lots of down time. Lots of patience. Slowly I’m remembering what it’s like to be from here.

Burning lists in the ancient temple of your new old heart

So I’ve got this list. Some people call it a life list or a bucket list. Mine has mostly been stuff I must learn, as in: Spanish, guitar*, Israeli street fighting, skateboarding, riding a motorcycle, swimming, etc. I was so in love with this list. I pictured the woman who knew all the stuff on this list, who could slice you to bits with her bare fists and then play you a Joni Mitchell song.

I am done coveting this list.

Last weekend I went to Kampong Cham. It’s a town that is not really on any tourist’s to-do list, a town that I’d never given any thought to. J-P suggested it, and it was his birthday, and so I said fine. We took a dusty 3-hour bus ride through the rolling countryside, snacked on Pringles and cashews, and I braced myself for a chilled-out stretch of dull nothingness.

Kampong Cham is actually a tiny little wonderland. First, there are ponies. Magic mini horses with tassles high on their heads, that look like the sweetest little ponies every girl ever wanted in her backyard on Christmas. Second, there are houses on tall, tall stilts, houses so high that if you fell off your front porch you would die — or maybe, because you are in a lovely place, sprout paper wings. They are made of ramshackle weathered planks but with exquisite magenta lace curtains blowing in the breeze over the Mekong. Third, you can rent a motorbike and rumble around this countryside, down rutted paths, on an island where everyone you pass says HELLO. To get there you and your motorbike must take a ferry full of other villagers and their motorbikes, and their cows. Fourth, there is a temple called Wat Nokor. It is very old. It is the oldest thing I have ever seen, from the 11th century. I have been to Angkor Wat, but that was full of enough tourists that it never felt real. This felt real. Quiet, ancient stone worn round into new shapes, rolled socks stacked in a forgotten drawer.

And then within these walls, a new temple. A bright and colorful temple with fluttering flags and gleaming gold and, there, on the floor, monks napping on mats inside. They were napping! We found monks napping in a new ancient temple!

There is the line from Italian writer Carlo Levi: “The future has an ancient heart.”

But it is also true that the past enshrines a new soul. And maybe – just maybe – it’s not on your list. You won’t know what it is. You won’t know if it’s Chile on a Harley or Kampong Cham on a moto. You won’t know if it’s swim lessons at the gym or learning to swim by jumping off a boat in the Gulf of Thailand. Shelve Spanish. Swear in Quebecois. Keep it simple. Sit cross-legged on a straw mat with a mug of Nescafe. Call your parents. Search for ice at every roadside stand — mime “cold” to people who’ve never seen winter. Ride a ferry next to a cow. Try not to worry when it begins to pee.

The purpose of a real bucket list is to capture things you want to do before you die (which, most people assume, is a while away). Mine was never a real bucket list at all. The list felt urgent. If only I could start checking things off, I’d be so much tougher and more worthy. (Of what? Who knows.) Here is what I failed to remember: you can’t know what will shape you, make you, save you, break you. Your heart cannot be cauterized on command. And in fact, it’s braver to see that you are imperfect, and be okay with it, and go forward anyway. Tiptoe past the ancient walls. Roar down the unmarked path through the endless field. See what you find. Write it down. In a list.

–
*Ok, I still want to learn to play guitar.

No alarms and no surprises

My alarm clock talks to me. It’s a cell phone, a warhorse Nokia that you can throw against a wall and it flies apart into pieces that you can reassemble in your sleep. My roommate and most of the city has the same one. A tiny British dominatrix lives inside mine. Or, more accurately, the factory settings made the alarm clock a tiny dominatrix Mary Poppins, and I never bothered to change it. She tells me in a stern voice: “It’s time to get up. The time is now SIX AY-EHM. It’s time to get up.”

This is not my first talking alarm. When I was very small, my mom and dad got each of us kids talking alarm clocks for Christmas. Mine was something stupid, but my sister’s was the best one. A rooster. It said: “Wow, yeah, hey baby wake up, come on and dance with me” in an Elvis-like croon. Ms. Nokia is not so kind or groovy.

When I woke up this morning for an early meeting, I hated my tiny British dominatrix. Ms. Nokia, I thought, you can go right to hell. I did not sleep last night; I imagined centipedes with Doberman heads attacking me from the corner of the ceiling, chained around their miniature necks and snapping at my nose. GO THE FUCK AWAY.

But Ms. Nokia did not go the fuck away. She persisted. It’s time to get up….

FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS.

I hit snooze, and I swear to GOD she was supposed to give me ten minutes and, this time, she gave me two.

WHO HAS TIME TO SNOOZE IN THE SPACE OF TWO MINUTES. I AM STILL IMAGINING THE BLEEPING CENTIPEDE/DOBERMAN ATTACK.

I was drifting in and out of consciousness, but I swear Ms. Nokia then scolded me thusly, a long rant in British English about how I should do laundry and sweep the floor and wear your helmet and button your lip and ignore liars with shiny teeth and plan my future and show self-respect and give up on assholes and stop drinking so much coffee. Drink. Tea. You will be fine. You will be fine. It’s time to get up.  The time is now SIX THURTY-AY-EHM.

So I threw her against the wall. Got out of bed. Re-assembled the pieces.

Moments, grasping

JP, who is French Canadian and thus has all kinds of quirky words for things, calls them “grasping moments”. It’s when you don’t have a camera, but you really freaking wish you did, because something amazing is happening. So you just decide that you have to remember it, and you concentrate with all your might.

Recently:

–Sitting in the hair salon with Rachel and Nimol, staring in the mirror at hair sudsed high on top of my head, with glittering jewel-toned Khmer wedding dresses on a rack in the background.

–Riding on a motorbike with Panha on the back and Rina on the front, arms looped around each other, Panha saying she is so lucky because she gets to hold us both.

–Huddled in a wool blanket in a shelter on a mountaintop, eating rice and drinking wine. The next morning, posing for a fashion shoot for KeoK’Jay, on the spur of the moment and standing barefoot on a dirt path in a pretty dress.

–Listening to new music at the cafe, with rain pouring down outside during a power outage.

–Sharing mango salsa on our balcony with a half-circle of compatriots, comparing English accents.

–Sitting on the lazy wooden platform of a river with Panha’s entire family, eating fried chicken and jackfruit and tiny snails. Her sweet grandmother tied a red bracelet around my wrist.

–Stomping like crazy to the tunes of a bluegrass band in an old French colonial house being converted to a music school.

–Eating ice cream with the girls straight from the container and watching The Tourist dubbed in Khmer and subtitled in English.

–Walking home with Colin and two orders of fried noodles from a street vendor. Both, apparently, for me.

–Being told the followng two best-ever compliments. First, from a student. “You correct my dream.” What? Looks in dictionary. Is sure she’s right about the phrase and repeats it. “I correct your dream?” Yes, she says. She used to want to be a food stylist but now she wants to be a teacher like me. Second, from my American friend Becky, as we’re eating ice cream sundaes at the Blue Pumpkin, and I’m rocking shabby chic in a head scarf because mostly I’m just shabby. “You really have a Paris-between-the-wars look going on.”

–Falling asleep and being woken by Marady climbing into bed with me so that I can help with her English homework.

There are more, lots more. With you and you and you. I wrote them somewhere, if not here.

Rina once drove me to the candy-colored amusement park at sunset, parked her moto in the gravel next to a carnival game and won me a crystal mug with the balloon toss. I didn’t have my camera, so she just started shouting, TAKE A PICTURE! And she clicked an imaginary shutter.

I’ll just have to remember it.

This one’s for Brechjte, or: the time we tried to play Go Fish on a fishing boat

My friend Brechjte is a Dutch woman with stars tattooed on the backs of her arms, who listens to punk music, and, with her mad legal skills, will drill the bejeesus out of you for violating the human rights of the marginalized.

We first met when I was new to Cambodia and had taken the bus alone for $4 to the coast. I didn’t know anything to do in town and was about to spend the evening staring at the ants parading across my motel bedspread. Then I had an idea. I texted a friend to see if he’d gone to the coast, too.

No, he said, but don’t hesitate to contact Brechjte. I am not the kind of person who texts total strangers to say hello, but like I said. Death-by-boredom loomed, and the ants were converging upon my Pringles crumbs in alarming numbers, and I was starting to get the spins from being in air-conditioning on a gorgeous starry night. So I texted her. She and two other girls were bumming around the beach with cocktails, listening to live music and generally riffing on topics such as pancakes, ska music and Paris. Certainly, I’d come to the right place, regardless of the fact that we ended the night exterminating the fist-sized spiders from their bungalow with a two-by-four.

Months later, we all ended up on the same adventure, a five-day trip to the remote islands off the coast of Cambodia. It was cool like this: At the time, I was reading a book about Ewan McGregor’s round-the-world motorcycle trip, and when I looked up from the book at the crystal-clear waters as our boat steamed towards a deserted island I thought: Ewan McGregor would be jealous of us right now. Hell, I am jealous of me right now.

But it was also scary. For example, there were spiny sea urchins. Swimming with sneakers on. Sleeping in hammocks suspended above sharp rocks. And wacking through thick jungle just to get to breakfast. Most notably, there were hornets, a whole nest of them that descended upon our group with fury while we tried to set up camp, and a mad dash down a rocky path to the sea that will forever be replayable in my memory.

But, except when attacked by insane hornets, Brechjte projects calm. She says things with such simple certainty that they sound like ancient koans:

“Today we fish.”

“So we go.”

And there were some tense moments in which to be calm.

Mini-story:

After dinner one night, we’re sitting on the deck of the fishing boat, lit by a dim overhead light, sipping rum and lukewarm juice. The guys are teaching us a new card game, which I am already losing. I watch a giant cockroach climb in and out of a loafer then disappear through the floorboards.

Suddenly a few dozen Khmer soldiers show up on the dock where we’re anchored, drinking what is clearly not the first of their beers. Tension crackles — uncertainty over whether this means trouble or not. We’re not technically supposed to be camping on this island. Last night the Khmer skippers of our fishing boat said they’d been threatened.

The four guys on our trip stand up, ready to make friends and keep peace even though we’re all tired. Brechjte, Karen and I whisper back and forth that we’ll stay on the boat and give the guys a better excuse to head home early: Gotta tend to the womenfolk.

But how do we look too occupied to join the party? I suggest the simplest card game ever: Go Fish. Easy to play under duress.

Except that after I start to deal, I realize I don’t remember the rules at all. Brechtje’s from Holland, and Karen’s from the Phillipines, so they’ve never played it. We veer into a gin rummy-Go Fish hybrid with a discard pile. They are patient.

Finally Brechjte looks at her hand and just says, “Different game, yeah?

We reshuffle. Karen starts teaching us a game that requires her to sit on one of the cards. And pretty soon the uncertainty dims, and the only thing that feels urgent is going back to camp to get sleep. With the light from our boat, I see Balazs, being loud and diplomatic simultaneously. He dashes around refilling cups. Jungleman strikes the same calm, alert pose that he watches the campfire with, his tattoo’s scrolls curling over one shoulder. Archi nods and smiles, bright-eyed and breezy as a Kennedy. Alex sits cross-legged and straight-backed but with his blonde, curly head drooping, as though valiantly trying to stay awake in math class.

With the guys on the dock, and Brechjte and Karen on deck with me — I adore everyone a little harder. I’m not much for competitive card games, but I am an absolute sucker for team spirit.

–

Anyway, Brechjte’s leaving town soon. And it’s hard because expats transition in and out of town often. But I also know it’s a unique waystation for people I’d never meet otherwise. People who are off to new adventures. It’s ok. Everything’s ok. So we go.

This place might give me dysentery but I really need the acoustics

There are two kinds of crowded places. Yesterday I was sipping iced coffee with sweet milk in the most aesthetically plain cafe, as decorated as a vacant shop in a suburban mall. Last time they served me fried rice full of bone shards.

But it’s the good kind of crowded. It moves  like a busy diner — quick quick, chop chop, no nonsense, shutyerface, it’s comin’. Also, there is wit. The wait staff was really amused that I’d showed up and asked for coffee. I was so, so tall! They all took turns comparing their heights to mine, laughing and wisecracking. And then they brought me noodle soup and an iced coffee with sweet milk.

Bad kind of crowded? The theme parks of Orlando, Florida. We went to Disney World the summer I was 13, the summer of frizzy hair and braces. I just wanted to eat ice cream in the hotel and watch Saved by the Bell, and I hated Cinderalla for her silky-smooth tresses. Thankfully the Universal Studios tour was marginally more tolerable, and it is here that I learned of the crowd walla.

According to our guides, the “crowd walla” is the background noise you hear in restaurants while the main characters in a television show are talking. It’s not real dialogue. It’s people pretending to eat and saying the same stuff over and over so it seems like they are talking. Although actual Hollywood may not really do this, our guides said they were all saying “peas and carrots peas and carrots” over and over. We, the visitors to this portion of the park, practiced doing a crowd walla for an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Peas and carrots, peas and carrots.

Yesterday in the cafe when I looked around and realized where I was, there was absolutely no reason for me to be there. Yeah, I really need to eat. And this place was cheap and close to where I live. But it also had absolutely nothing to suggest it as superior to any of the million places around it. Instead I was drawn in by its hive-ness. Businessmen chatting and reading the paper, teenagers slouching on their motos out front and throwing tiny green fruits at each other, waiters and waitresses rolling their eyes and calling orders across the room. It had a killer crowd walla.

What is it about this; this background hum that seems necessary for me to think? I can write better; like maybe I’m pulling words from the air and putting them together, recycling old vibrations into new language. Maybe it’s just less lonely, and more lonely, all at once. Maybe it’s the ability to exist as a loose electron orbiting an otherwise strong force, and watch without watching, and listen without listening. Peas and carrots, peas and carrots.