lindsayliveshere.org

Once bitten: or, why it pays to share your onion rings

When you are bitten by something unknown in a foreign country, there’s really little to stop you from thinking: This is it. This is how I die. And then if you don’t die, well. You had a nice little existential interlude, didn’t you?

I had one such interlude a couple weeks ago, and sometimes in my sleep now, I brush at my left shoulder blade thinking something’s there. The culprit, a centipede — which, frankly, sounds like the least harmful creature to ever try to kill you, but so it goes.

Me and Janelle in Kampot, a sleepy town on the river. I was half-awake around 7am in our cabin on the water, just thinking. As much as I would like to be able to report that my mental state was bliss and peace-infused while Janelle was visiting, it was not. She and I have “different travel styles” which means that she goes for 30-minute walks with a sun umbrella and three liters of water, while I have devolved into a dirty slum camper with no patience for transport slower than 30 miles per hour.

I can really spool out a laundry list of worries when given the space, so I just free-associated from there: love and money and art, just for good measure.

Then I glanced through the netting at the gorgeous hilly landscape outside and decided: Girl. Shuddup. Be happy. You are in an amazing place. You have friends, family and your health. (You always underestimate the importance of one’s health!) Let’s take a moment and just stretch and then fall back to sleep in this beautiful setting. You. Are. Lucky.

Not three seconds later, a pinprick. Ok, probably just a red ant. Those bites fade fast, but this got worse, radiating more and more. So I thrashed aside the mosquito net , launched out of bed and flipped over my pillow. I didn’t have my glasses on so all I saw was a dark curvy shape affixed to the underside.

Snake, scorpion, Jesus only knows. I woke up Janelle, who roused immediately to my aid.

With her night retainer still in and eyes half-open, she started calling out instructions, cruise-director style: Put on clothes. Don’t panic. Find your shoes. We’ll go to the front desk.

Tank top askew, shorts pulled too high, flip-flops half-on, I walked with her down the dirt path to the guesthouse cafe. Janelle began to explain in slow English, since hell if I knew how to say any of this in Khmer, and before I knew what was happening, a small cluster of white people was at my side. I can’t really explain it any other way. All of a sudden, a small cluster of white people, as though I were being checked by four doctors at once.

Turns out, I was being checked out by four doctors at once. They were tropical medicine doctors traveling through Cambodia. I recognized them from the night before, at dinner. We’d given them our extra order of onion rings.

They huddled briefly and then turned to me again. One of them explained he’d been bitten by a baby centipede earlier that week. “Hurt like hell,” he said, describing how the pain had radiated over one entire side of his body. “The big ones are really deadly. But we think yours was a baby. You’ll be ok.”

One of the doctors told me to take an antihistamine and some pain medicine, and ice it. And so I sat down to a riverside breakfast with a bag of ice melting against my shoulder, thinking, again, that I was lucky.

At the end of the pier, meeting Janelle again

Janelle and I have been friends since middle school. It’s a long, long journey to now. She’s also the one who first took me to Cambodia last year, against my will, and didn’t even say “I told you so” when I loved it immediately.

Yesterday we went to a seaside town together and ate lunch next to a wind-tossed sea; giggling about stupid things, per usual. Here she walks out to the end of the pier and finds me.

kampot_kep_janelle 043

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Someday, wishes

Someday I’ll write a short story about the English lesson I gave tonight to the Khmer man who waited till we were halfway through the Monkey’s Paw to tell me about his ex-English teacher. We’d just gotten to the part in the story where we learn that a man has died wishing on the cursed paw.

“You know, my ex-English teacher is died.” he said.
“Is dead,” I corrected, mechanically, too mechanically for the word but it had to be corrected.
“Yes, she is dead. She died of sickness. Can we say that?”
“We would maybe say, ‘she got sick and then she died.’”
“Yes, these books are hers. She gave them to me.”

I looked down at the little stack of adapted classics, made simple for learning readers: Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and the one he held, the one about the family that makes wishes on a cursed monkey’s paw brought back from India — wishing for things like money and a fast car never gets you anywhere, is the moral. Or at least so I gather, based on chapters 1-3.

“Is this the English teacher who slept all the time?” I asked him. I’d heard about his past English teachers.

He laughed but then turned serious again. “No, no, this is a different one. She died of … depression. We think.”

My stomach flipped at the way that he equated sickness with depression — When Kompheak had arrived at our lesson tonight, I was smoking a cigarette, which I never do, and he laughed at me immediately. You can buy cigarettes off a restaurant menu here, so I’d purchased a pack of Marlboro Lights and it’d arrived on a plate, and I was burning through my first one.

“What’s your problem?” he’d asked.

I’d told him that could be considered impolite, and maybe he should ask, “Are you ok?” And then I’d said I was just feeling really useless. Like, why am I here, again? Like, why be here when you have loved ones so far, people who close phone conversations with “I love you” because they just do; they mean it, they’ve known you forever, or at least since you were 18, and they could use a little support and you’re just… gone. Useless.

I was a total ray of sunshine.

As the lesson progressed we read more in The Monkey’s Paw and we got to the part where the family makes their first, naive, cursed wishes. Kompheak put the book down and looked at me seriously. “And what do YOU wish for?”

I made some joke about needing a good night’s sleep but silently rattled them off in my head. Yes, I want to be in Chicago and in Cambodia, I want to get out of this city for more adventures, I want Sunday brunch at Over Easy on Damen, I want to lay in Winnemac Park with Lisa, I want to support myself with writing and to get my own moto and ride it all through the countryside and to be there for the birth of my friend’s first baby and to never say the wrong thing at the wrong time and to know what to do with these next years of my life. Those things. Not in that order. Silently.

And someday I’ll put it all together, I’ll write it down and really capture it, the feeling of holding the book of an English teacher who died of depression while reading about the curse of making too many wishes.

Saved by the same song over & over

Sometimes I listen to the same song over and over; maybe fifteen or twenty times in a sitting.

I wish I could remember what song I listened to at the kitchen table in Silver Spring, Maryland when I was 23, with a plate of under-cooked brownies, pressing the same plastic button on the boom box when the track ended. The combination of chords somehow dovetailed with the gaps in my brain. Whatever it was, it carried me to the next breath, the next bite of chocolate, the next digital minute on the microwave clock. I’d been up all night and the sun was rising over the half-suburban partial-wasteland, washing over lawns and bushes chainsawed into submission, sneaking through the slats of our dusty plastic blinds, unwelcome rays, brassy as the cheap handles on the veneered cabinets. I watched the light without wonder, another bite of brownie, sometimes resting my flushed cheek on the cool formica table. Listening one more time.

I never know what song will save me. Once it was singing Like A Rolling Stone with Casey and the windows down, after the grad school fair that we hated. Long ago there was the “I Want You to Want Me” cover by Letters to Cleo that somehow stopped the pounding in my ears when I lived alone in Cincinnati for a summer. I danced barefoot on the carpet between reading chapters of Ender’s Game aloud to myself. Sometimes terrible music helps just fine. A Hanson CD was in the car I borrowed from my parents to drive from DC to New York at night in blinding rain, and I listened to the same song over and over, the one track that somehow had whatever chords numbed the fear long enough for me to see between the raindrops. In an airport I listened to Devon Sproule, unsleeping but exhausted, laying on the vinyl seats and waiting for the storms to stop. In high school it was REM, Nightswimming; the time signature calmed my heartbeat. When I first moved to Chicago I listened to some Bright Eyes song five times a day on scuffed and windy train platforms, on a CD walkman with the batteries taped in the back.

Now I’m remembering music. For months I haven’t listened to much here — my mp3s are on a computer in Chicago that’s been cold for months, and it’s rare to hear Western music unless you’re in an expat bar or something. But it’s back in my life. A guitar lesson in the park just before the rains came; new songs from JP in my inbox, Max’s playlist on a sunny afternoon, my big headphones on my ears again. I’m feeling voracious, with a gap in my ribs, needing to play the same songs over and over.

The same pressure

We left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. The night was muggy, and all around me I felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. Whenever I thought of time in Puerto Rico, I was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. Every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes — and if I watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three or four notches would startle me when it came.

– Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

The limits of my vocabulary and a really particular flavor of fireworks

There’s a special kind of anxiety laced with wonder and ending in surrender that I associate with both my time here in Cambodia and the DIY fourth of July fireworks in Chicago’s Winnemac Park. It’s pretty cliché to compare any feeling to “fireworks” but I can’t describe it any other way — a really particular flavor of fireworks. You walk through the darkness with rockets popping from all the plates of the baseball diamonds. Homemade. Unpredictable. Light it and run. Spark-flowers bloom and rain down right over your head; bangs and booms; thick smoke tinted pink and green with each new blast; any footstep could send an empty bottle rattling down the path. A breath-long silence feels like a dead hush. You want to run away and never leave all at once, and soon your mind calms, detaches – floating high on that last rocket. Everything looks perfect from far away. Then you slip across the border of the park, and a few blocks later it’s just another night. You’re not sure it really happened though you still hear the blasts.

I don’t know what this hybrid feeling is officially called, but like happiness or anger, it comes in gradations. Small things. The everday. Like one morning I thought I was getting so used to everything until I saw a guy on the back of a motorbike wearing the bottom half of a Mickey Mouse costume holding a Mickey head under one arm and a Minnie head under the other. Or like how I met a monk on a bus and he invited me to the monastery for a tour, but when I got there he took me to his tiny cubicle room decorated with posters like a college dorm and saffron silk robes slung the way I sling my laundry, and he said I was beautiful and he wanted to be the wife of an American. Or like how one otherwise lazy morning with Colin we ran downstairs to chat with a busload of kids wearing things like papier-mâché deer heads, and I befriended a tiny girl wearing long black witch fingernails, just before they performed a beautiful dance in the center of the Vietnamese restaurant; they’d already hit the photocopy shop. Or like the time I woke up on the bare wooden deck of a fishing boat with a shark hook next to my left ankle and (floating high on that last rocket) dropped right back to sleep.

Sometimes every worry, every prediction, leads to the same place — a question mark in the sky, a bang and a dead hush. A few blocks past the border of the park you still smell smoke but sniff the shoulder of your t-shirt and shrug.

Girl, sea

In April, most of Phnom Penh headed to the countryside as businesses and schools closed for a national holiday, Khmer New Year. I went along on a rented fishing boat to remote islands in the Gulf of Thailand and camped for five days in the woods.

I asked for this, to get a little jolt of the storybook pirate life. And, so it seems, sometimes you get what you ask for.

I have stories from this trip, but for now:

maggie and milly and molly and may
by e.e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

For all my people between things right now; you know who you are

I am terrible at locks. Part of growing up seems to be creating work-arounds for one’s weaknesses, so I created this one: If you hand me a new key, I will test it five times in front of you to feel the tension of the pins and get the intricacies of the turn.

Doors, in general, hate me. Recently I walked into a party and spotted someone I’d dated but hadn’t quite smoothed things with. I tried to slip back out again — everyone looked distracted by beer pong — but I couldn’t open the door. I started pulling on the knob, slowly, playing it cool, then straight-up yanking, until a friend came over and gently unlatched it.

Note: The “door routine” is a classic slapstick comedy trope. See also: Laurel and Hardy.

This issue started young. I was locked out of my uncle’s wedding when I was four years old, the flower girl, and last in the procession. A relative closed the church door on me (I understand. I was really short.) My mother found me a few minutes later, crying in my poufy white dress like I’d been locked out for days.

Once I was locked out of a monastery. Although I’m not religious this way anymore, that year I was trying to be a Catholic and went with a student group to a bucolic Wisconsin lakeside retreat; rolling green lawns, old stone masonry; plus that night, we were supposed to see a meteor shower.

For me the retreat was a minor personal fuck-up parade. I wasn’t as familiar with the routines as everyone else and did things like reciting the priest’s lines when asked to read part of the service. That night everyone went out to see stars as a group, but I slept right through it. When I woke up at 5am and realized what I’d done, I decided to go outside alone. I tossed back the covers, got myself downstairs, pushed open the door and padded barefoot on the hushed, dewy lawn.

It was lovely, if a bit cloudy, and mostly I sat on a little boulder by the lake stewing about all the crap in my head — graduating soon, no job, so much to do, why had I gone away for a weekend again? Especially a weekend of botching things? Soon I headed back to the abbey door, happy to sleep a few more hours before breakfast. But it was locked. Wouldn’t budge. Shut tight. For real. And so I experienced one of the most frustrating and enlightening hours of my life.

I’d come on this retreat because I just couldn’t fathom the chaos of almost-graduation, the knowledge that everyone and everything I’d known for the past four years was about to change because of a firm date on the academic calendar. The lack of control staggered me. But there in that doorway, huddled in a too-thin sweater, waiting for someone to wake and let me in, I was viscerally experiencing a gap between one landing place and another. All I could do was sit there in the pre-morning chill, and the suspension of options suspended my thoughts, too. Everything went as calm and still as the lake.

I remember that silence, that stillness. In such stuck places our mission shrinks. Deadlines, to-do lists, expectations and tasks; it’s all so complicated until… until your task is just to wait. And so many of the people I care about are waiting right now. Between diagnoses, between grief and okay, between new-love and comfortable-love, between wanting to leave our world and being okay with staying, between jobs, between a silent, painted room and a room with a baby, between here, between there, in the doorway.

Here in Cambodia it feels like I am always between. Other than the dorm, I sleep wherever. Your spare room, a double bed in a guesthouse split with friends (bonding!). Most recently I went on a five-day fishing/camping trip, so we can also add: “hammock in jungle” and “bare wooden deck of a fishing boat”. In restaurants I know what I am ordering only 60 percent of the time. Before I bite into a fruit, I must ask which parts are edible. At least four times a day I jump on the back of a motorbike that winds through traffic shuffling itself faster than a deck of cards. It’s overwhelming, sometimes, and there are days when my friend Kara and I sit facing each other at the coffee shop and repeat the following exchange:

–What are we doing here.
–WHAT are we doing.
–What are we DOING here?
–What.

But there are good points about hitting gaps in safety every other minute.

I love those motorbike rides. My roommate sometimes drives us to get ice cream and chicken sandwiches at the Song Tra Ice Cream on Norodom Boulevard, and last time she thought of a vocab question, en route. She hollered over her shoulder, in the midst of zooming traffic: “What’s the difference between stupid and crazy?”

I did what teachers shouldn’t do and couldn’t help but laugh.

Crazy, I told her, can be a good thing.

Crazy can mean waking at 5am for a star shower. Crazy can mean getting your ass to Cambodia and living in a dorm with thirty girls. Crazy can mean reconciling yourself to sitting there, near your door, even resting your tired head against it, though not on the side you want, though you don’t know when it will open. Deciding to just exist.

Pull your thin sweater tight over your ribs and curl up in a stone doorway. Watch the mailman come and go. Watch the first streaks of sunrise wash over the dim but lighter sky. And then knock on the window of the kitchen, where someone’s already awake and making oatmeal. You’ll wave. He’ll wave. Be let in.

The fundamentals of dreams, art & work

Last night I dreamed only about my job at the Neos, a position that I am officially leaving so that I can stay here in Cambodia longer. (Bilal wrote this kind post about my departure — and hey, here’s the listing!) It’s been much more than just a job, and I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around moving on.

I first walked into the Neo-Futurarium when I was 18, a freshman at Northwestern. We took a cab from the train and stood in a long, freezing cold line, and I was pretty sure we’d be drive-by shooting victims. This was 1998. I remember everything about that night, climbing the stairs to the second floor, ordering a brownie from one of the cast members, settling into a dark theater and then watching the show’s chaos unfold. Afterwards there was a talk with the cast, and someone said they’d started working there just by volunteering to answer the phones.

Mental note, I thought: Someday, volunteer to answer the phones.

My love was so acute that I interviewed two cast members who were working lame day jobs on my campus, for the school paper. (The basic thrust of the article was: Why are these awesome geniuses pushing papers all day in the Classics department?)

Fast forward. After college, I worked in nonprofit organizations and learned that I loved the hum of getting-things-done for good causes. But I was tired from working in impoverished places. Bone tired, most days. I decided to take some classes at The Neos. I took classes with the same vigor that some people apply to quitting drinking or beating cancer. I was on a mission to revive my little soul.

And it worked. I met a guy named Ian there, whose piece performed on the rooftop of the theater was so powerful that I remember the pacing of those last lines, as the sun set over the neighborhood. With every class I started to uncurl, wrote about what made me itchy and sad and weird. I fell for the place, for everything, down to the painted clouds on the ceiling of the lobby.

I was so glad that I’d studied nonprofit management when, as it turned out, they needed a managing director for their nonprofit theater. I started working there. Working, working working. As fate would have it, I was in fact now working with my old (brilliant) classmate Ian, who’d gotten another staff job there at the exact same time.

For four years, I didn’t want to go anywhere. (Well, except for those times I wanted to run like hell from whatever plague was descending like gnats upon our collective to-do lists.) But when I hit thirty, I experienced… how do you say? A bit of a crisis. There’s so much to do, out in the world. How do you leave a place you love to explore and find more that you could love? Is that possible? Foolish? Borderline insane? My daily life and, in fact, identity had become entwined with a building, a neighborhood, and a group of people, and I feared there was no way I could ever try anything new. I actually had the good fortune to be able to think, “Ok. I’m working my dream job. Every day I walk into the place I’ve wanted to be since I was 18. Where do I go from here?”

My first thought was that I just needed a change of scenery. When I was accepted to this program in Phnom Penh, I thought it could be a temporary glimpse at what else is out there. I was excited about coming for two months, but also aware I might hate it. In the first couple of weeks, more than once I seriously calculated the cost/benefit of jumping on the first plane back to the U.S.

And then, in March, right when I should have been preparing to return, something shifted. I realized I’d stopped freaking out about getting lost, not knowing the language, not having any privacy in the dorm, not knowing anyone at all. I’d met people, found my way, found my tongue. I felt that same feeling of uncurling, relaxing into a slightly new shape that seemed… right. It seemed… me.

And so I am staying longer here, and I can’t be in two places at once. Although – lord, would I like to be.

I’ve learned a lot. A million things. But I want to capture the very, very basics. Top five fundamental lessons from spending every day for more than four years at your favorite nonprofit theater collective:

1) You can be creative and still have your act together. In fact, it’s even easier to be successful if you’re not scattered and Too Creative to Use a Day Planner. Use a day planner. Be ambitious and hard-working. A successful creative career doesn’t just happen. The artists I admire most work tirelessly, and watching them has pushed me to do the same. Art doesn’t have to be a fluffy hobby, even if that’s what your mom thinks it is.

2) Sometimes it seems like the world wants you to fail… disregard. Working in the arts — as an arts manager or an artist — requires hard choices and a lot of bootstrapping. Hustling, all the time, every day, piecing together little gigs that fall through. Personalities clash over intensely beloved projects. You are eating seaweed salad because it’s all you can afford at the sushi place. But just because it sucks, it doesn’t mean you should quit.

3) Be aware of context, and then mess with it. It’s all arbitrary anyway. That flashlight was just a flashlight until by blinking it on and off in darkness during your play you make us feel deep sadness, or belly-shaking laughter. It works, in art. But it also works in life. Bad situations become opportunities if you can re-contextualize them and step back long enough to see things for what they really are. No one’s done x, y, z before because it seems so improbable? Do it first.

4) Learn your quirks and follow their lead. People always say “be yourself” — but I think they mean be comfortable at cocktail parties. Be radically you. Find your weirdest, strangest bits and celebrate them, hold them up to the world, along with a middle finger. Run hard towards what makes you different — it gives everyone else around you the glorious permission to do the same.

5) Take care of each other. Community conquers so much. You lost your job, your kid got sick, your car’s broke down, your bike’s been boosted, your ass is grass. A strong community is the best insurance policy against ending up in the gutter. Find a web of people who have your back and don’t let them down.

It’s this last one that’s been rough. Leaving what I consider to be a crackerjack web of my favorite people ever. And so I guess there’s the sixth lesson, which I am trying to learn now. That if you have the luxury of trying something new, try it. Do it. Learn it. Explore it. Someday there may be more obligations on your plate. Keep learning; keep growing — however you can, however you need, even when it’s scary.

Bird lessons in two parts

An exercise in my students’ workbook posed the following problem:

Carrier pigeons are ______________ (still/use) in some countries today.

They were all having trouble with this until I realized they didn’t know what a carrier pigeon was. So I tried to explain.

Afterwards, they all wanted to know which countries still use carrier pigeons. I had to say I didn’t know. And they said the girl looked a lot like me, because of the skirt.
***

Big news: I was asked to extend my residency here by two months, and I accepted. This is something I would prefer to write individually to every person in my life, but I’ve put off saying anything here long enough. If you keep reading, you’ll note that I ain’t back in Chicago, and you’ll put two and two together.

I love it here. I’m doing good work (other than my somewhat shoddy explanation of carrier pigeons). But this choice creates more choices. I’ve been so torn up about the entire thing that yesterday I felt compelled to visit an otherwordly adjudicating body. I always feel more balanced after visiting a church or a temple, no matter the religion. (For further spirit-lifting, I changed into my favorite extra-soft sky-blue t-shirt.)

At the city’s biggest temple, Wat Phnom, I expected peace and repose, a walk around the gardens and then maybe staring at Buddha while kneeling on a straw mat. I’d sit in the back, like I always did in Catholic church, and pretend to know the drill. But instead the whole place was under construction and any available straw mat was already packed with kneelers. No blending, not today.

I kept walking, amongst incense burning here and there, plates of bananas and pink dragon fruit set out as offerings… I wandered up and down the stone steps, thinkng I’d have to stop soon before someone asked me to explain all this circular pacing. Then on the roof I found a young woman holding a bamboo cage full of beautiful birds, the size of tiny sparrows but irridescent — inky blue and glossy green.

I knew you could set birds free up here but had always dismissed it as a weird touristy scam. Now, this morning, I really wanted to do it. Drug-deal style, I pressed a dollar into her palm and was expecting just one bird, but maybe got the special — in an unbroken motion she pressed two live birds into mine.

I thought they’d alight on my wrist like in Cinderella, but instead they stayed docile and felt warm, hamster-sized in my fist. I thought of birthday candles neglected and dripping onto cake and panicked: I’ll crush them! I should make a wish or something! I heard myself say: “I don’t know what to do!” — meaning, how do I release them? Just open my fingers? But really, that was the best prayer, the closest to the truth. The woman’s eyes met mine as we both giggled — her (probably) at me, and me at the thrill as they burst from my hand and soared off.

Unexpected precious things, or: why I should have packed more dimes

In new places, certain things become oddly, weirdly precious just because of sheer context. Three things that have recently increased their value dramatically:

`1) Drugstores. Specifically, the drugstore on street 178 near the river. It’s like Tiffany’s was to Holly Golightly. Calms me down right away. No bigger than the convenience store of an average gas station but with the clean, white modern interior of the ship on 2001: A Space Odyssey. So many neat, orderly products with readable labels. Hair bands and Milano cookies, mosquito repellant and shampoo. Air-conditioned and cool in there; white floors and walls, and the cashiers dress in starched high-collared dresses like flight attendants. They greet you with hands pressed together in a traditional welcome. Sunscreen costs ten dollars, but I don’t even care. If I am nearby, I just go in to walk around and fondle the deodorants.

2) Pringles. Never ate them in the U.S. … but they are the best food ever, here. First of all, they come in indestructible cardboard tubes. Second, no crumbs. Eat them anywhere without fear of getting grease crumbles on your only t-shirt. Third? Salty. In hot places it’s good to drink water, but you’ll still pass out unless you’ve also got some salt. A big stack of Pringles is also so neutral-tasting, it can be breakfast, lunch or dinner.

3) American coins. A handful of loose change made its way into my messenger bag before I left, and this week I found it and dumped it on my desk. I do this all the time at home, periodically leave squirrely piles of change around, along with candy wrappers and old receipts. But here there are no coins, all currency is paper. And Sarina saw the little pile of pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters this morning. “Lindsay, you can use these to buy some things in the U.S.?” Yes, I said, but only very small things. “Can I have one?” Sure, I said. I displayed one of each coin in my palm and she looked each over before choosing the dime. She inspected it carefully and stumbled a bit as she read it. “Lie-berty?” Liberty, I said. “What this mean?” Freedom, I said. “One … deem?” Dime, I said, and explained it was the type of coin. She held it in her palm and smiled in admiration, the way I’d regard a sweet ladybug. “I will put this on my bag,” she said. “I will keep it forever and it make me think of you.” So… I started wishing I’d brought more change with me.

Easy as eating a banana on the peel of the Earth

It’s been a hard week. One of those weeks when (think, think back to summer, people!) everything feels too hot, you are always far from water, there is no shady side of the street. But here, in no particular order, is a list of what helped:

1) Your voice. You? You, all of you, the one who answered my phone call, and your voice sounded like jam on new bread and your laugh reminded me of pennies dropping into a fountain. I’ve become a great lover of voices, being so far away from faces.

2) An elephant. I’m on the back of a motorbike — black night, sleepy and distracted, knowing not to really fall asleep because I’d fall right off… and then, calm-as-you-please, I see an elephant just walkin’ in the middle of traffic, led by a man with a rope and a long stick. (For reference: Elephants and a one-bedroom U-Haul box truck are similar in size.)

3) A quick swim. When things got quite stressful, I walked with all speed to the Blue Lime hotel, through the hushed, fancy lobby and out into the tropical garden that surrounds a clear blue pool. I shed my dress onto a deck chair and jumped in, in my underwear.

4) Teaching English. We learned the phrase “easy as pie”. First I had to explain what a pie was. And then I had to actually chomp my teeth onto my tongue to keep from smiling while my student practiced with big, serious eyes. “Easy ass pie? Is it asssss pie? Or azzzz?” I explained: definitely more of a “z” sound. And then I learned this. In Khmer there’s a similar expression, but it’s “easy as eating a banana.”

5) Learning French. I have a couple of French-speaking pals here who are teaching me French bit by bit, revitalizing what I learned in high school. We talked about the earthquake in Japan, and I learned that, speaking of pies and bananas, in France you don’t say the earth’s crust, you say “the peel”.

Thankful

I used to write poems. I don’t so much anymore, but I used to write juicy, angsty poems to the beats in my head. Now, sometimes, I write tiny ones, or silly ones. But here’s one I just found from an old blog post that I wrote right after studying in Denmark, and I feel it still, ten years later.

thankful —
there’s a word i can’t
pin down.
like creeley said: “god shed his grace on thee–
how abstract is that fucking fact.”
how do you say,
in any language,
may i never forget
what i hated to learn.
thank you for this pain,
thank you for this day.

A continual sense of action

He was one of those men with a gamey taste in excitement. For such fellows the quieter social pleasures are not enough. Neither do the ordinary problems of living suffice to meet their gluttony for drama. Only a way of life which gives them a continual sense of action can keep them in good running order. If they can’t find it, they degenerate into great lovers or some other form of artificially compensated nonsense.

— John Myers Myers on Doc Holliday

(Dear Mr. Myers Myers: This condition happens to women, too, apparently. I’m not interested in packing a six-shooter and playing crooked card games. I just want to be a storybook pirate like Pippi Longstocking.)

Blonde as hell

I just looked in the mirror on my camping compass and realized: I’m kind of gold-ish blonde these days. It must be all the sunshine.

Well.

Wait.

I’m stuck in this mentality. “It must be all the…” I don’t know what it is.

Maybe there’s a lemon tree sprouting in my thyroid. Maybe the geckos are giving me a dye job in my sleep; all beauty-parlor foil and brushes. Maybe there’s a gene that’s recessive until you hit Southeast Asia, and then it rattles to life like an old Honda. Maybe instead of inducing allergies, the pollen from fuschia flowers punks out the color-producing elves living in my follicles and gets everyone drunk on mezcal.

Yeah, that. My Chicago roommate Sean e-mailed me the song of the day today: Carmella (Beth Orton, Four Tet Remix).