too much to say

I think this is probably a bad idea, blogging while I'm still on vacation. It's like writing a restaurant review before you've had dessert.

This trip was probably the best decision I've ever made. And I made it happen, all of it! I feel powerful.

On Thursday I drove up to Cape Reinga. This vacation has changed my relationship to cars forever....mostly, in that I'm no longer scared of them. Am I finally a real grownup? I remember I finally felt like a regular kid when I got over my fear of bikes at age 9 and ended up loving them. I'm nothing if not consistent. Strange that I never saw the connection between my fear of cars and my fear of bikes until now. Oh, speaking of bikes, the kid that got me to be brave enough to ride mine was named Jillian Lewis, who I just found out is on Project Runway. Jeez, how many of my high school class mates are going to end up on reality television!? If I were not me, I'd think I was making this shit up.

Right, Cape Reinga. Yeah, that was beautiful and powerful, but it was the beach 3 km to the east that changed my life forever. See I was feeling really hot and tired from the long drive and was like, Damn, I can't get back in the car yet, I'm sweaty and my back hurts. So I stopped at this bay for a quick swim. Before I knew it, I was being pulled out to sea! Every frantic stroke I made for the shore, I lost 2 strokes to the current. This surfer girl was watching me and yelled, Are you alright? I was too out of breath to answer. Fortunately I then remembered a lesson my 11th grade physics teacher taught me, which was to never expend energy swimming against the current, use 100% of your energy to swim in a favorable perpendicular direction. So I gave up trying to get back to the beach and made for some rocks I felt pretty confident I could make in time. The rocks had all this seaweed growing off them that I used like Rapunzel's suitor to pull myself up on, reassuring the worried surfer girl. I staggered over the rocks in pure adrenalin shock (I couldn't feel at the time what the rocks were doing to my poor bleeding feet, adrenalin is an amazing numbing agent) and collapsed in a water-filled hollow for the next half hour, thinking about nothing. On the way out of the beach I saw the warning sign (so why were all those other people swimming there! damn.) which said, "Caution should be exercised when swimming on this beach. Drownings have occurred." The owner of the place I'm staying at told me there are lots of problems with beaches up here, even the supposedly safe ones, and that he teaches all his kids to never try and swim against the current but to follow it out and around until someone can rescue them, that panicking is what causes the drownings since the water is so warm up here. Good advice.

I've done lots of stuff on my vacation other than almost drown, maybe I'll update this later. Tommorow I swim with dolphins! I miss you all though. I love the end of Joe's last blog entry that mentions the problem with traveling - all the missing that occurs. Back and forth, forever!

Enjoy your fabulous parties on NYE everyone.

Critical eyes

Again it happens! Ben and his 2 petite lady friends were all aghast at my vacation plans. They looked on in disbelief when I said I would be spending Christmas alone. Then I mentioned I'd be staying in Kerikeri and one of them said, "It gets even worse!" They were torn between being sure I was gonna get raped in a rural area and that I would be horribly bored and lonely. Is this thing really that bad? I'm actually starting to get amused by the hyped-up responses.

Maybe I'm a big weirdo and my dream vacation aligns with very few others? These girls were quite young so I'd expect it from them, but Ben? I guess me and Ben bounce off each other in overly negative ways, we're both a bit critical of reality and sometimes it doesn't work well together. I notice we both like to surround ourselves with happy excitable people . This reminds me of when Rob in Japan decided we couldn't hang out because we were too similar in how we could so easily get upset by the world. I like to think I'm slightly less prone to depression than him, but I see what he was saying now. At the time it hurt my feelings terribly, as I had decided he was the one I had the most in common with there. I was probably right, but Miranda and Marny with their adventurous positive personalities were much healthier for me to be around.

Pyuh, why does knowing who is good for me not make it any easier to avoid those who are bad for me?

All that aside, it was fantastic to hang out with the small girl Ben small girl trio and watch Bjorn Again last night (ABBA cover band). My voice is sore today. Oh, what am I saying, me and Ben get along great together! We're big cheese heads.

Just kidding about the farts Joe, I almost never notice them. I just wanted to stick something wry in between all the lovey-dovey crap that was going into that paragraph. I have to edit my posts sometimes so they make me less nauseated when I review them.

My blood is your blood

There's a lot going on right now. I'm abandoning a lot of things as I go, trying to make my life simpler again. It's a neverending battle isn't it. Because possessions and people and activities attract more of the same, like magnetic filings. I'm wandering around like that guy with the magnetized beard and fro, when what I most desire is to be Mr. Clean.

I realize now how important the initial purpose of this vacation has become (to relax), and how I'd unintentionally made it too complicated. It's easy to get all hyped up when you read tourism literature, but that stuff is not even remotely important.

I've done a lot of girly activities this week, which is really helping my nerves. The moment this week that probably helped the most though was on Monday, when I was feeling the most dire, and Clodagh gave me a nice long hug. She had spent the previous week attending a breathing seminar, one of those things that strips away all pretense and gets to the core of being alive. The way she talks about it changing her life reminds me of Leila's experience in that silent meditation retreat she did last year. Only in Leila's case, it sounded severely spiritual, with transending the material plane and hallucinating and maybe temporary psychosis. Clodagh was exuding calm and zen out of her pores though. It's amazing how we can pick up on that sort of thing when we get attuned to it. I wouldn't have noticed it as much probably if she hadn't been like, feel my calm, absorb the zen. And I was like aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh. A nice deep sigh.

In stressful situations, I find there are 2 ways I can go successfully. I can A) go with the stress and be a maniac getting things done (buy everyone xmas presents, micromanage my vacation, stick to a diet, stock my fridge, pay my bills, clean my room, do my laundry) or B) pair my list down to only important things (which is usually nothing) and relax. The third option is the one that usually ends up happening, where I abandon most stuff in frustration but it still floats as a failed list in my mind. Both the stress and the inefficiency combine into sad human being, who finally relaxes when it's too late to do anything. I know compromise is lauded as a golden ideal in modern society, but lately I'm fed up with it. All or none (like Dr Bronner says)! Down with boring partial satisfaction and small disappointments! Only big success and failure allowed, fierce intensity or infantile basic existence. Am I right or what?

I like how Brenda hasn't been attempting to return to "the real world" since giving birth. She's totally psyched about her baby and doesn't even feel like leaving her room. She hasn't walked out her front gate in 2 weeks. That sounds incredible, I hope I find my own babies that fascinating!

Anywhoo, it was good to see everyone last night. The talented Sarah played the piano, Kris brought her beautiful elephant pillow that she made in her latest bout of craftiness (inspired by our trip to the craft fair last weekend), Clodagh lay on the couch in her zen cocoon, I was extremely happy to see Francisco (phew!), if Joe farted at all, then it must not have smelled at all, dinner was delicious pork, rice, salad and Butler's chocolate, and I felt calm. It was good to see Allen. My friends looked good. Joe gave me the best hug upon arrival. Kris spread the good word about this hippy plastic cup device she was wearing instead of tampons (you can reuse it for a decade!). Suddenly the tampon I personally was wearing felt dry and inadequate. Hmmmm. Oh, and we watched Clark and Michael on The Internet. You can watch it too.

Christmas dayz

Tuesday:
Oh, the walk this weekend. Just amazing. Maybe you're like me, and you really like nature and hiking? But you're not as into being-gross-and-dirty-and-eating-dried-foods-all-week-and-sleeping-on-the-ground as you pretend to be? Then the Tora Coastal Walk is for you. We didn't have to carry anything, we had hot showers and delicious food waiting for us everywhere we went, and our beers were already cold in the fridge at each location. I liked the parts of the hike that went through forest the best of course. The pasture bits were very crappy. I mean, they were covered in crap. Just astronomical amounts of the stuff. It was fun herding the sheep as we walked along though. They're very easy to manipulate. The views from the pastureland were the best since it was so open (especially when we crested a hill and could finally see the ocean, mostly since that meant we were close to the end :) ), but in my opinion nothing is better than weaving through trees on a narrow forest path, with brief and surprising glimpses of spectacular views.

Good moments from the trip:

All of us ladies decided to go down and swim in the river. There were a few sheep lined up on a distant hilltop silently staring at us, like sheep do, as we splashed around and made a lot of noise in the cold water

Taking a shower the second day in an outhouse that had a window at head level looking down at the ocean. The cool ocean breeze blowing on my face combined excellently with the hot shower water raining down.

Seeing other people take showers through that same window (observing people while they are blissfully off in their own shower world is surprisingly intimate, even when you can't see below their necks)

Seeing Kris solve a puzzle within 20 minutes that me and then Ken had been trying and failing to solve for hours.

Discovering that the various Emersons beers I brought out were some of the best beers I've had in my life (especially the APA and Emersons 95)

Hearing Jeanne talk about how she and Ken first started dating

Getting to know Moira

The date pudding

Jumping on the trampoline in the rain (this is one of those things I worry about my mom reading :) )

Clodagh doing my hair

Watching Francisco valiantly lose the battle against nature

Sitting on the couch outside in perfect weather, reading trashy magazines and watching the pig pee over and over again.

Ken's excitement about the pig

Slowly feeling my face relax and my body de-stress as I slowed down to rural pace

Waking up Sunday morning just before dawn after an afternoon and night of heavy rain to see the world clear and still and beautiful.

Wednesday:
I hate when people express doubt about things I'm really excited about. Last night a couple people were really trying to kill my holiday excitement, wondering how on earth I'll possibly fill 8 days of vacation with no company. Oh My God. I'm going to be alone for 8 days. On a beach. Swimming with dolphins. Reading. Surfing sand dunes. Getting massages. How the hell will I survive.

Jesus people. I can't stand some people's standards of fun sometimes. The desperation to have company, any company, to keep busy busy, never stopping because stopping means thinking and thinking means problems. Yuck.

I'm just venting because I was having a perfectly lovely evening at Kazu until this one person started criticizing my vacation choices. I'm spending a lot of money (for me) on this trip, I've been working for a while without a break, this is the one thing I have to look forward to right now, and it's just really shitty to do that to someone. Some of these wetan guys have no concept of what it means to save for something, or that the fact that I was happy and relaxed about spending $60 on dinner last night meant it was a special night, and that I was really excited to see them, that I had carefully planned out how this would be my splurge night for the week and that the other 6 days I'd be cooking pasta and stir fries baby! Having this wonderful dinner and good times with friends as a special memory to hold onto, to chuckle about at work the next day during a particularly tedious run of photocopying. They're just in a different reality from me I guess. We have very different lives. I can't, for example, really appreciate Reza's immigration issues, how he worries about how his Iranian passport will be treated the next time he travels, how intensive the search for bombs will be this time, how he gets finger-printed everywhere he goes, the racism he encountered in Australia. Etc.

I have to pause for a moment here to praise this flat white I'm drinking. Damn. New Zealand coffee. I don't understand how Starbucks stays in business here when there are tiny shops with this kind of product on every street corner. It's like if drugs were suddenly made legal, improving quality, price and safety of transactions, and yet people continued to flock to the sketchy street corner dealers.

I think I've lost the thread here. My coffee cup is empty. This is a depressing moment. It makes me crave the most excellent world of this book I started reading yesterday: Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy. I had been in a rut of only being able to read in short bursts, and it feels good to return to obsession. I'm planning on bringing at least 6 books with me for Christmas so that there will definitely be one or two with similar qualities.

Friday (today):
Feeling good to be alive!

Summer days!

Sunday
Time to clean house again. Feels like a good time for new beginnings, especially now that Brenda and Taisuke's baby has been born!!! Check some pics of him out here. I got to see him when he was only 8 hours old, hopefully I didn't give him any cooties but I just had to touch him. His skin was so soft and fragile. He was an impatient thing, popping out 10 days early, and doesn't have a name yet, so we've been calling him Sancho. Poor kid, I hope they don't delay too long and end up with this sticking for good. I talked to Mom a bit about having babies. Since she had three and raised them pretty healthily/well, I started drilling her for information. Turns out, Parents: A good source of information. Sometimes it's easy to forget in this internet age, when all information is easily accessible, that more traditional routes of information are still available. All the differing opinions out there can be overwhelming, so it's nice to have somewhere stable and reasonable to turn. Dad's always been a good source on religious and scientific matters, Mom for more artistic/literary questions, and I'll add children to her domain now that I find the topic interesting.

Ah! I find it interesting! No going back now. Me and Zoe made a pact on the phone yesterday, that I'm sure Kate will be into too, that whoever has a baby first, one of the other sisters will come and help out for a little while, just show up and start doing the laundry, making dinner, whatever needs to be done, no questions asked. If it turns out help's not needed, that's cool too, but it feels good to have an easy place to turn for basic stuff. Someone who won't care that you look like crap and have been wearing the same sweats for 3 days.

We are going on our extravagant hike next weekend. All meals are included and they move your stuff from cabin to cabin as you journey. I think you arrive at each cabin and all the food is prepared, you just have to pop it in the oven. There are 8 of us in our group, and then a couple random strangers joining the hike. I wonder what they'll think of us.

Monday
I read this interview by some famous, and often intensely disliked, British food critic this morning. He said something like, I have absolutely no sense of humor. Humor is a crutch used by people too dumb to talk about anything else. Comedians however are often intelligent, which is why so many of them grow depressed and kill themselves, performing this simple cheap trick over and over. He said it better than I just did, but you get the point. I laughed a lot at this. I guess I laugh a lot at everything, including 2 girls 1 cup, which I finally saw over the weekend. Could not stop laughing.

I don't think the food critic and I would get along. The article was great because he's one of those clever language users, but if we ever met in person he would tear me to pieces. I already know he hates Americans (thinks we're fat and don't understand irony, but worded his criticism in a way as to show he's aware of the insensible nature of this claim while at the same time implying on top of this that it's still ok to dislike Americans. Told you he's clever), Humor, Jews, and Most Restaurants.

Maybe he's the cleverer, but I seem to find existence more appealing! Suck it, Critic!