Well... I'm here again... waiting. It's just like me to put something like this off until a week before it's due. In a way, that really is plenty of time, because I crank out 2,000 words in an hour or two when I really feel it. The problem is that I don't get to determine when that's going to happen.
This thing, this entry that I keep talking about, is for a travel writing scholarship that sends you to Singapore to update the Rough Guides travel book for the city, to Bali to spend a week in the jungle with the locals and trekking around the volcanoes, and then to Malaysia to run around with a chef trying all kinds of food. It pays for your travel, your mentors at each stop, your hotels... I want this. And that in itself is causing me this stupid crisis of confidence. I read the winning and top ten entries from their scholarship contest last year. They're all so smooth and put together. Every single one of them I read sounded like they were written by people who travel alone, all the time. They're confident, good at navigating around, know how to avoid trouble, and how to stay calm.
That is totally not me. I may have traveled a lot compared to some people... but I'm constantly a mess when I do it. I can't sleep on planes, and jet leg kicks my ass. I actually almost never sleep well, even in my own house when it's quiet and I'm tired. Much less in the middle of a roaring city that never quiets, or gets dark. My stomach is tough enough around here, and I love spicy food, but I am uber sensitive to the foreign stuff. If I get low on calories, I don't function right. My information processing slows down. I'm super thin, and have no reserves, really, so I have to be very careful to keep at least a small amount of food in my system at all times, or I'll get nauseous, or black out. Hard thing to do when you're on buses all day, or in a little town and everything is closed, which happens. I'm nervous and shy. All the friends I've ever made travelling I made because I brought an outgoing person with me. Sheryl, who would just start telling jokes on quiet bus rides to make things lively, Lauren whom everyone loves and gravitates to, even without her trying, Jen who is afraid of nothing and no one, and Josh who says hello to EVERY single person we walk by, without fail, no matter how shady they look.
All of that being the case, the only thing I really have going for me is that I don't complain. I try to make the best out of every glitch in the plans. Which is also sometimes dumb, because if you're so hungry you're about to black out, even if finding food is inconvenient or will slow things down... you should probably say something. It's my stubborn streak. I refuse to be a baby.
But none of the writers they liked last year sound like me. I am scared half the time. I get lost. I am forgetful. And I remember what it was like my first time out of the country, around people like the ones who wrote for the contest last year. I wanted to fit in with them so badly. To develop that keen awareness that appears casual and immovable. To never have to ask questions, but always be able to just... figure shit out on your own. And I don't think I've ever lost that desire, or gotten much better at being a traveler. Nor do I think I am what that contest is looking for.
Gah. I know I shouldn't be talking myself out of this. In fact, maybe I can spin it to them that what they really need is a nervous, skinny little white girl to write for them, specifically because if I can do it, anyone can do it. Because I'm not some professional, who makes readers feel like they have to be cut from some kind of tough leather to have experiences like the ones I have. What the hell, huh? Who are those people anyway? How many of them are there out there, that make the shit look so easy? Is that really a representative sample of the population? Wouldn't MORE people go running out to see the world if it didn't sound like it was only made for a few of us? Because it isn't. It doesn't have to be expensive, and it's something everyone should do. Sigh. What the hell do I have to lose.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
A muddy Cambodian adventure
I have to finish this submission thing and I don't fucking know how to do it. Every time I look at what I've already written, I get stumped. Writer's block, or whatever this is, is SO annoying. In fact, I can't even think how I'm supposed to edit what I already have, to make it into what I need it to be for this thing. It's supposed to be about an experience you had while travelling that changed your life.
The two that immediately come to mind both took place in Cambodia, within 5 days of my first venture ever out of the U.S. One of them showed me the absolute absurdity in having a typical American sense of entitlement, and the other one... the one I'm trying to write about... showed me that the things people of the world have done before, have shaped the lives of the people I meet right now. And the things we as a people choose to do now, will affect everyone that comes after us. And it sounds like a simple enough statement. You say, "yeah, yeah, I get that. That's obvious." But it's a completely different thing to be FACED with it. When you know that you've randomly been born into the top of the food chain, and this person who is looking you in the eyes got a much shorter end of the stick, and you both know in this moment, where each of you lies on that spectrum and how incredibly far apart those two points really are. It rattled me for a very long time.
I think... that I have to start it over. Maybe that's what I'll do this weekend. If it will WORK. It's so annoying when I sit here and wait for it and it never comes.
So, in an effort to get myself going, I'm going to tell the other story. The one I'm not writing about to send to World Nomads. Some of my friends already know this one, but I am hoping it will help me... get moving.
It was May in 2008, and in Southeast Asia that means ITSFUCKINGHOOOOTTTTTTTT. Seriously. It was like 90 degrees with 100% humidity and I am pretty sure I'm not exaggerating those numbers at all. Accomplishing even the most minor tasks while in that kind of crushing, wet heat, when you just came in on a 13 hour plane ride from Alaska, is WAY harder than it should be.
We had just taken the scariest bus ride of my life (so far) from Bangkok, Thailand to the Cambodian border. We thought it would be a bright idea to sit up front so we could see the countryside on our way, and that turned out to be really stupid. Because you might think you're going to be looking at the countryside, but what you're actually doing is cringing as far left, right or back as you can, as this giant bus full of people, in which you are seated right behind the windshield, careens down a fucking narrow, chopped up road that constitutes a highway, evading head on collisions with cars, bikes, motorcycles carrying three and four people and your occasional chicken, other buses, cows and trees, by mere inches. Except when it fails to miss one of them. Like the unfortunate man riding his bicycle, who got too close to the road. And... the driver didn't even stop. He sort of slowed down momentarily, looking in the rearview to see if the guy he'd just hit was able to move, and once satisfied that he hadn't killed him, floored it again and went on.
I was trying to stifle quiet giggles by this point, because I was jet-lagged to beat hell, delirious, tired, and... had just been a part of a hit and run. Very few people on the bus seemed concerned. It was so completely surreal to me that I just... started laughing.
Upon reaching the border we then had to go about the task of getting a bus from there to Siem Reap, which is the city right outside of the ruins of Angkor Wat. We'd heard rumors that the only airline that operated a flight between Bangkok and Siem Reap paid the Cambodian government not to maintain this road at all, so that horror stories of the journey would cause people to pay three and four hundred dollars for the flight. Which... for a backpacker and for such a short distance is ludicrous. We'd heard those rumors, but that just seemed so incredibly far-fetched that we didn't really pay attention. After all... how could they get away with that? (Silly Americans).
Finding a bus to take this journey was sketchy. I was wandering around in shock. Not only did almost no one there speak English, the alphabet wasn't even in letters. The signs were totally indecipherable. The streets were alternately thick with red dust, or swamped in mud. Half the people flagging us down trying to sell us bus tickets were scam artists. The SMELL of... garbage, shit, and spices, was almost choking me. My backpack wasn't more than 30 pounds, but in 100 degree heat at mid-day, it was making navigating these street and trying not to get hit by buses (obviously a real fear) much much harder. It was the most soaked with sweat I had ever been.
When we did finally find a legit bus company, and paid the equivalent of something like 5 bucks to take the trip, it didn't get much better. The bus was probably new in the U.S. in the 70's. It was held together by questionable welds and duct tape. The shocks had been beaten into non-existence. Every bump we hit on that road (which was flat at absolutely no point during the trip) reverberated straight up your spine if you were unfortunate enough to be caught sitting on your tailbone. The seats, even though each person on the bus had two to themselves, were not big enough to lay down on, though I tried, and whatever padding had been in them 30-something years ago was flattened into the plastic. There was no A/C so, naturally, you'd want to have the windows down to get a breeze of some kind. But every time you put one of them down, you were pretty quickly either soaked in rain (it was the wet season after all) or by viscous red mud flying up from one of the puddles hit by a passing car.
So, basically we were sitting inside a bouncing oven. For 5 hours. I am running on little to no sleep in the past 72 hours. I got no sleep on the plane at all the night we flew into Bangkok, and was kept awake the following night by the screaming Thai prostitute outside of our hotel room door at 2:00am, apparently trying to collect from the guy next door. I am very low on calories, but feel too nauseous to eat, and I am sweating my little ASS off. I'm watching the Cambodian country go by in disbelief. That I am there, and that I am seeing what I'm seeing. I suddenly realize things that I have, that this place obviously does not, which should have been obvious to me before. No one here picks up the garbage and takes it away so I don't have to smell or see it. It rots in the streets. Little kids are playing in puddles or flooded ditches that are muddy at their cleanest, and containing all kinds of things you don't want to think about otherwise. People live in shacks on stilts if they have money, or they rebuild their houses every time it floods otherwise. And by houses, I mean huts. Or plywood and sheet metal conglomerations held together with wire or rope or odd screws.
When we stop in small towns, people swarm outside the bus selling bottles of water, or fruit. One woman buys what I don't immediately recognize to be the large center bud of a lotus flower. She snaps off the thick stem, holds the bud in her hands, and starts breaking it apart to eat the seeds out of the center of it, each of them the size and shape of a large vitamin, and very white. I watched her for a long time, hoping she'd catch my expression of curiosity and offer me one of these strange, sweet-looking, plant-spawned, white pills, but she never turns my way.
I was right in the middle of both being grateful that the sun was setting so that it would cool off, and apprehensive because the road was getting worse and I could no longer see where we were going, when we started to slow down, and stopped, some distance later, behind a line of vehicles that stretched as far into the darkness as I could see. We all looked at each other, wondering what was going on, and finding no answers. After a half hour or so of sitting there confused and wary, the driver said something in broken English that I took to mean he was leaving to see what the hold up was, and got off the bus.
Even though I don't smoke much when I'm home and in normal situations, times like that one just call for it. I kept getting off the bus to talk to the other people waiting around, to smoke, to stand on the edge of the road and look at the houses nearby, and gradually, when it had been more than 3 hours since I'd seen the bus driver, to pace back and forth to fight panic.
We were in the middle of no where. When I say there were houses nearby, I mean that there was a line of small huts along the road, and nothing else for miles. The bugs were starting to swarm. There were tons of locals that were just as stuck as us, out waiting to see what was happening, and some of them were looking in our direction in ways that I didn't like. I was suddenly very apprehensive about being the only bus load of white tourists anywhere near by, with no bus driver around to ward off bad intentions. Obviously if I'd been somewhere in the states, I'd have started calling around for help to get me out of the situation, or for some update about what was going on... but that wasn't an option. If bad guys had shown up along the road and decided to steal all our packs or take one of us away at gunpoint... no matter how unlikely that was, it was possible... and no one besides my equally pretty, white friend would have even known who I was, or that I was gone. Local 'authorities' would have been no help. Logically, I knew this was far-fetched. But my calorie and sleep deprived brain wasn't listening to logic.
I tried to go in the bus and find a way to contort my body so that I could lay down for a few minutes. It never worked. I got back up. I went back outside. I paced. I sweated. I swatted mosquitoes and remembered that I had forgotten to take my Malaria medication that morning. I went back to my seat and curled my knees up to my chin and tried to slow my heartbeat and my thoughts. It wasn't happening.
"What the fuck is going on? They can't just LEAVE us out here like this! How far are we from any kind of town? No one's phone will work out here. I want to talk to my mom. Someone needs to know where I am. I need to lay down. I'm so exhausted. I need to eat something. I can't get to my backpack because it's buried under the other luggage in the cargo hold. What the fuck can be going on that has cars backed up for miles like this? Where is the fucking driver? What if he doesn't come back for us? I fucking have to get OUT OF HERE. I PAID for this! I... paid...
And that was it. That exact moment, it dawned on me clear and simple. I paid 5 bucks to be on this bus. 5 dollars. And no one within a hundred mile radius of where I am, gives a rat's ass if I am scared, hungry, angry or in any other way uncomfortable. I could either start screaming, which is what I had up until that moment felt like doing, or I could... leave my fate up to the universe. Because whatever sense of entitlement I had brought with me from America, it was not valid currency in this country. I felt suddenly calm. I cooled off. The drunk French woman in the back of the bus nudged me and handed me a plastic 5th of cheap vodka. I smiled, I took a swill, and I realized that all of this would make a great story when I got home, if I ever fucking got home. I thought about what my friends at home were probably doing on a weeknight... getting ready for bed, and another day at work. I decided I'd rather be stuck on a bus in rural Cambodia, dangers be damned.
Almost immediately after this, the bus driver came back. He told us that the road was out ahead of us, and that we'd have to walk from the bus past this spot, and that we'd be picked up and taken the rest of the way to Siem Reap from there. I caught myself almost thinking, "You're telling me I have to walk through the mud in my flip flops, carrying my pack, in the pitch dark... for how long?" But instead, I asked my new French friend for another pull off of her bottle, and shouldered my stuff. Remarkably, I had been smart enough to pack my headlamp in the most accessible pocket of my pack. And so ended up leading about half of the 16 of us from my bus on this trek down the road to Siem Reap.
My shoes were almost sucked off my feet every other step, the mud was so thick and so deep. The backs of my flip flops were flinging it into my hair and all down my back whenever I extracted a foot from the goo. All of us almost fell several times, and one of us actually did. We thought it was funnier than he did. We walked for a long, long time. I was so grateful to be off of that bus and moving that I didn't mind. As we got closer to the spot where "the road was out" the truth became quite clear to us. The company who'd sold us this bus ride absolutely must have known this road was impassible. It was a ten foot wide section, that stretched the entire width of the road, that was "out". The Cambodians were taking turns pushing their old Toyota Camrys (because that was what almost everyone drove) off one side of the road and back up onto the other. Six or eight of them would push while one steered, their pants rolled up to their knees, barefoot, and howling with laughter at themselves, their predicament, and especially at us, as we tromped by them looking like shit run over twice.
After we'd finally clambered back up onto the Siem Reap side of the road, the vehicle that was to pick us up appeared, and I started laughing all over again. It was an old Toyota Tacoma. And there were 16 of us and our bags to fit into it. I still don't know how we made that work. Packs went on the floor of the truck bed. Four people went in the cab with the driver, a few people sat on top, and the rest of us squeezed into the bed, in what resulted as a disorganized pile of head, knees, legs and elbows, sticking out at all angles, as that poor little truck took off down the road.
By the time we got to our hostel, I was so bruised up I couldn't walk right. But I had made it, and the ordeal was over. I felt liberated. I had faced panic, however silly it may have seemed from the outside, and I had talked myself out of it. I held it together. I contributed to my unlikely team of expedition companions. No one had been there to help me, or to take over responsibility for me, the small, cute girl, like I was so used to at home. I laughed and told jokes when I could have made everyone miserable. And every time I ever end up in a situation that I can't control and that I hate, I remember arriving in Siem Reap with my hair full of mud and a spirit full of defiant, joyful triumph.
All of that was probably poorly composed, and I'm too tired now to read it over. But at least I feel like I worked toward something tonight instead of being lazy. And I'll be damned if I can't wait for the chance to go get lost in wild, tragic, beautiful Cambodia again soon.
The two that immediately come to mind both took place in Cambodia, within 5 days of my first venture ever out of the U.S. One of them showed me the absolute absurdity in having a typical American sense of entitlement, and the other one... the one I'm trying to write about... showed me that the things people of the world have done before, have shaped the lives of the people I meet right now. And the things we as a people choose to do now, will affect everyone that comes after us. And it sounds like a simple enough statement. You say, "yeah, yeah, I get that. That's obvious." But it's a completely different thing to be FACED with it. When you know that you've randomly been born into the top of the food chain, and this person who is looking you in the eyes got a much shorter end of the stick, and you both know in this moment, where each of you lies on that spectrum and how incredibly far apart those two points really are. It rattled me for a very long time.
I think... that I have to start it over. Maybe that's what I'll do this weekend. If it will WORK. It's so annoying when I sit here and wait for it and it never comes.
So, in an effort to get myself going, I'm going to tell the other story. The one I'm not writing about to send to World Nomads. Some of my friends already know this one, but I am hoping it will help me... get moving.
It was May in 2008, and in Southeast Asia that means ITSFUCKINGHOOOOTTTTTTTT. Seriously. It was like 90 degrees with 100% humidity and I am pretty sure I'm not exaggerating those numbers at all. Accomplishing even the most minor tasks while in that kind of crushing, wet heat, when you just came in on a 13 hour plane ride from Alaska, is WAY harder than it should be.
We had just taken the scariest bus ride of my life (so far) from Bangkok, Thailand to the Cambodian border. We thought it would be a bright idea to sit up front so we could see the countryside on our way, and that turned out to be really stupid. Because you might think you're going to be looking at the countryside, but what you're actually doing is cringing as far left, right or back as you can, as this giant bus full of people, in which you are seated right behind the windshield, careens down a fucking narrow, chopped up road that constitutes a highway, evading head on collisions with cars, bikes, motorcycles carrying three and four people and your occasional chicken, other buses, cows and trees, by mere inches. Except when it fails to miss one of them. Like the unfortunate man riding his bicycle, who got too close to the road. And... the driver didn't even stop. He sort of slowed down momentarily, looking in the rearview to see if the guy he'd just hit was able to move, and once satisfied that he hadn't killed him, floored it again and went on.
I was trying to stifle quiet giggles by this point, because I was jet-lagged to beat hell, delirious, tired, and... had just been a part of a hit and run. Very few people on the bus seemed concerned. It was so completely surreal to me that I just... started laughing.
Upon reaching the border we then had to go about the task of getting a bus from there to Siem Reap, which is the city right outside of the ruins of Angkor Wat. We'd heard rumors that the only airline that operated a flight between Bangkok and Siem Reap paid the Cambodian government not to maintain this road at all, so that horror stories of the journey would cause people to pay three and four hundred dollars for the flight. Which... for a backpacker and for such a short distance is ludicrous. We'd heard those rumors, but that just seemed so incredibly far-fetched that we didn't really pay attention. After all... how could they get away with that? (Silly Americans).
Finding a bus to take this journey was sketchy. I was wandering around in shock. Not only did almost no one there speak English, the alphabet wasn't even in letters. The signs were totally indecipherable. The streets were alternately thick with red dust, or swamped in mud. Half the people flagging us down trying to sell us bus tickets were scam artists. The SMELL of... garbage, shit, and spices, was almost choking me. My backpack wasn't more than 30 pounds, but in 100 degree heat at mid-day, it was making navigating these street and trying not to get hit by buses (obviously a real fear) much much harder. It was the most soaked with sweat I had ever been.
When we did finally find a legit bus company, and paid the equivalent of something like 5 bucks to take the trip, it didn't get much better. The bus was probably new in the U.S. in the 70's. It was held together by questionable welds and duct tape. The shocks had been beaten into non-existence. Every bump we hit on that road (which was flat at absolutely no point during the trip) reverberated straight up your spine if you were unfortunate enough to be caught sitting on your tailbone. The seats, even though each person on the bus had two to themselves, were not big enough to lay down on, though I tried, and whatever padding had been in them 30-something years ago was flattened into the plastic. There was no A/C so, naturally, you'd want to have the windows down to get a breeze of some kind. But every time you put one of them down, you were pretty quickly either soaked in rain (it was the wet season after all) or by viscous red mud flying up from one of the puddles hit by a passing car.
So, basically we were sitting inside a bouncing oven. For 5 hours. I am running on little to no sleep in the past 72 hours. I got no sleep on the plane at all the night we flew into Bangkok, and was kept awake the following night by the screaming Thai prostitute outside of our hotel room door at 2:00am, apparently trying to collect from the guy next door. I am very low on calories, but feel too nauseous to eat, and I am sweating my little ASS off. I'm watching the Cambodian country go by in disbelief. That I am there, and that I am seeing what I'm seeing. I suddenly realize things that I have, that this place obviously does not, which should have been obvious to me before. No one here picks up the garbage and takes it away so I don't have to smell or see it. It rots in the streets. Little kids are playing in puddles or flooded ditches that are muddy at their cleanest, and containing all kinds of things you don't want to think about otherwise. People live in shacks on stilts if they have money, or they rebuild their houses every time it floods otherwise. And by houses, I mean huts. Or plywood and sheet metal conglomerations held together with wire or rope or odd screws.
When we stop in small towns, people swarm outside the bus selling bottles of water, or fruit. One woman buys what I don't immediately recognize to be the large center bud of a lotus flower. She snaps off the thick stem, holds the bud in her hands, and starts breaking it apart to eat the seeds out of the center of it, each of them the size and shape of a large vitamin, and very white. I watched her for a long time, hoping she'd catch my expression of curiosity and offer me one of these strange, sweet-looking, plant-spawned, white pills, but she never turns my way.
I was right in the middle of both being grateful that the sun was setting so that it would cool off, and apprehensive because the road was getting worse and I could no longer see where we were going, when we started to slow down, and stopped, some distance later, behind a line of vehicles that stretched as far into the darkness as I could see. We all looked at each other, wondering what was going on, and finding no answers. After a half hour or so of sitting there confused and wary, the driver said something in broken English that I took to mean he was leaving to see what the hold up was, and got off the bus.
Even though I don't smoke much when I'm home and in normal situations, times like that one just call for it. I kept getting off the bus to talk to the other people waiting around, to smoke, to stand on the edge of the road and look at the houses nearby, and gradually, when it had been more than 3 hours since I'd seen the bus driver, to pace back and forth to fight panic.
We were in the middle of no where. When I say there were houses nearby, I mean that there was a line of small huts along the road, and nothing else for miles. The bugs were starting to swarm. There were tons of locals that were just as stuck as us, out waiting to see what was happening, and some of them were looking in our direction in ways that I didn't like. I was suddenly very apprehensive about being the only bus load of white tourists anywhere near by, with no bus driver around to ward off bad intentions. Obviously if I'd been somewhere in the states, I'd have started calling around for help to get me out of the situation, or for some update about what was going on... but that wasn't an option. If bad guys had shown up along the road and decided to steal all our packs or take one of us away at gunpoint... no matter how unlikely that was, it was possible... and no one besides my equally pretty, white friend would have even known who I was, or that I was gone. Local 'authorities' would have been no help. Logically, I knew this was far-fetched. But my calorie and sleep deprived brain wasn't listening to logic.
I tried to go in the bus and find a way to contort my body so that I could lay down for a few minutes. It never worked. I got back up. I went back outside. I paced. I sweated. I swatted mosquitoes and remembered that I had forgotten to take my Malaria medication that morning. I went back to my seat and curled my knees up to my chin and tried to slow my heartbeat and my thoughts. It wasn't happening.
"What the fuck is going on? They can't just LEAVE us out here like this! How far are we from any kind of town? No one's phone will work out here. I want to talk to my mom. Someone needs to know where I am. I need to lay down. I'm so exhausted. I need to eat something. I can't get to my backpack because it's buried under the other luggage in the cargo hold. What the fuck can be going on that has cars backed up for miles like this? Where is the fucking driver? What if he doesn't come back for us? I fucking have to get OUT OF HERE. I PAID for this! I... paid...
And that was it. That exact moment, it dawned on me clear and simple. I paid 5 bucks to be on this bus. 5 dollars. And no one within a hundred mile radius of where I am, gives a rat's ass if I am scared, hungry, angry or in any other way uncomfortable. I could either start screaming, which is what I had up until that moment felt like doing, or I could... leave my fate up to the universe. Because whatever sense of entitlement I had brought with me from America, it was not valid currency in this country. I felt suddenly calm. I cooled off. The drunk French woman in the back of the bus nudged me and handed me a plastic 5th of cheap vodka. I smiled, I took a swill, and I realized that all of this would make a great story when I got home, if I ever fucking got home. I thought about what my friends at home were probably doing on a weeknight... getting ready for bed, and another day at work. I decided I'd rather be stuck on a bus in rural Cambodia, dangers be damned.
Almost immediately after this, the bus driver came back. He told us that the road was out ahead of us, and that we'd have to walk from the bus past this spot, and that we'd be picked up and taken the rest of the way to Siem Reap from there. I caught myself almost thinking, "You're telling me I have to walk through the mud in my flip flops, carrying my pack, in the pitch dark... for how long?" But instead, I asked my new French friend for another pull off of her bottle, and shouldered my stuff. Remarkably, I had been smart enough to pack my headlamp in the most accessible pocket of my pack. And so ended up leading about half of the 16 of us from my bus on this trek down the road to Siem Reap.
My shoes were almost sucked off my feet every other step, the mud was so thick and so deep. The backs of my flip flops were flinging it into my hair and all down my back whenever I extracted a foot from the goo. All of us almost fell several times, and one of us actually did. We thought it was funnier than he did. We walked for a long, long time. I was so grateful to be off of that bus and moving that I didn't mind. As we got closer to the spot where "the road was out" the truth became quite clear to us. The company who'd sold us this bus ride absolutely must have known this road was impassible. It was a ten foot wide section, that stretched the entire width of the road, that was "out". The Cambodians were taking turns pushing their old Toyota Camrys (because that was what almost everyone drove) off one side of the road and back up onto the other. Six or eight of them would push while one steered, their pants rolled up to their knees, barefoot, and howling with laughter at themselves, their predicament, and especially at us, as we tromped by them looking like shit run over twice.
After we'd finally clambered back up onto the Siem Reap side of the road, the vehicle that was to pick us up appeared, and I started laughing all over again. It was an old Toyota Tacoma. And there were 16 of us and our bags to fit into it. I still don't know how we made that work. Packs went on the floor of the truck bed. Four people went in the cab with the driver, a few people sat on top, and the rest of us squeezed into the bed, in what resulted as a disorganized pile of head, knees, legs and elbows, sticking out at all angles, as that poor little truck took off down the road.
By the time we got to our hostel, I was so bruised up I couldn't walk right. But I had made it, and the ordeal was over. I felt liberated. I had faced panic, however silly it may have seemed from the outside, and I had talked myself out of it. I held it together. I contributed to my unlikely team of expedition companions. No one had been there to help me, or to take over responsibility for me, the small, cute girl, like I was so used to at home. I laughed and told jokes when I could have made everyone miserable. And every time I ever end up in a situation that I can't control and that I hate, I remember arriving in Siem Reap with my hair full of mud and a spirit full of defiant, joyful triumph.
All of that was probably poorly composed, and I'm too tired now to read it over. But at least I feel like I worked toward something tonight instead of being lazy. And I'll be damned if I can't wait for the chance to go get lost in wild, tragic, beautiful Cambodia again soon.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Knots in my kite strings
Ever since they found Samantha Koenig's body in that lake, I haven't had anything to write.
I wrote about it that night. It was long, and covered a lot of ground and a lot of history. About the boy who'd had the locker next to me that was murdered 10 years ago, about how my youth and Samantha's weren't that different from each others, and about how scared and desperately sad it made me to think about what her last hours must have been like.
I wrote that long long blurb, I cried, I personalized the whole experience too much. And when I read back over it, I thought to myself, "You cannot publish this. This is too emotional."
I haven't even had the urge to write anything down since then. Maybe that doesn't seem like a long time to go without writing, to anyone else, but for me it's just odd. I look around and see something at least once a day that would make a good story. Not been happening though. I need to finish an entry for another contest. One that will actually be judged by writers, not just... something I have to blast all over the internet to gather votes. This one is way more important and I feel way less motivated.
So, basically I'm sitting here doing what I've been taught to do when nothing comes to mind. It's like anything really. You have to put in the work. And for creative brained people, sometimes that just means making yourself available to being inspired. Like... if I sit here long enough, the muse is eventually going to take pity on me and float down from her puffy little cloud drifting over the islands of French Polynesia (because that's where I'd fucking be if I was an ethereal being, existing wherever and in whatever form I wanted), and she'll land on my shoulders and something brilliant will start spewing from my imagination and my fingertips.
....still not feeling it.
Umm... I just saw a post made by a friend of mine, who one year ago today was married to the stranger from the Netherlands that she had met shortly beforehand while travelling around in New York City.
It was one of the most beautiful weddings I've ever seen, really. Definitely the most genuine and wonderful shotgun wedding, by far. Thrown together in a matter of days, but with a turnout that most certainly demonstrated a lot of love for April and Eddy. He got down on his knees in front of her and kissed her belly, and promised to love and protect her and their unborn child until he died. American sensibilities about reservation and tradition and modesty either meant nothing to this sweet Dutch man, or did, and he was so lost in the moment that he couldn't have cared less what anyone thought, who was watching them. It broke my heart in like 10 different ways.
I had just gotten back from Michigan hours before this wedding. And only days before that, had returned with Josh from Costa Rica. I was jet-lagged, devastated, hopeful, uncertain and blissed out, all at once. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know that it would be only a matter of weeks before I broke down on the phone with him and said that my heart couldn't bear the strain of a long-distance relationship ever again, before he cut me off and asked me not to say anything more. Or that he would call me back the next morning to tell me that he'd be at the airport in Anchorage the following Monday. Or that we'd be together a year later... getting ready to move into a house on wheels and run off to seek our fortunes far away from my comfortable cocoon in Alaska.
We never decided to be in a relationship. He never really asked if he could move into my house. Our kite strings crossed, twisted round each other, and now we're headed off into the wind. All of this in a year... it's been a wild ride.
I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if I can make a job out of this writing thing. I don't know what stresses our relationship will suffer by entering into this unorthodox lifestyle. I will miss my mom and dad, and my friends. At times it will be overwhelming. We'll crab at each other. It's inevitable with two "strong personalities" in a confined space. I am vaguely aware of all of these things, but none of them scares me enough not to leap in feet first.
I want to see the world, and I don't want to be away from that boy. Really, there was never any other choice.
I suppose... I'll sit down and wait for Ms. Muse another day, because she's obviously busy watching the sunset or something. Sorry for wasting ten minutes of your day for no real reason. Just know that I'm sending my love out over the intertubes, to whoever this reaches. When you approach a cliffside, over a beautiful expanse of ocean... jump in with both feet.
I wrote about it that night. It was long, and covered a lot of ground and a lot of history. About the boy who'd had the locker next to me that was murdered 10 years ago, about how my youth and Samantha's weren't that different from each others, and about how scared and desperately sad it made me to think about what her last hours must have been like.
I wrote that long long blurb, I cried, I personalized the whole experience too much. And when I read back over it, I thought to myself, "You cannot publish this. This is too emotional."
I haven't even had the urge to write anything down since then. Maybe that doesn't seem like a long time to go without writing, to anyone else, but for me it's just odd. I look around and see something at least once a day that would make a good story. Not been happening though. I need to finish an entry for another contest. One that will actually be judged by writers, not just... something I have to blast all over the internet to gather votes. This one is way more important and I feel way less motivated.
So, basically I'm sitting here doing what I've been taught to do when nothing comes to mind. It's like anything really. You have to put in the work. And for creative brained people, sometimes that just means making yourself available to being inspired. Like... if I sit here long enough, the muse is eventually going to take pity on me and float down from her puffy little cloud drifting over the islands of French Polynesia (because that's where I'd fucking be if I was an ethereal being, existing wherever and in whatever form I wanted), and she'll land on my shoulders and something brilliant will start spewing from my imagination and my fingertips.
....still not feeling it.
Umm... I just saw a post made by a friend of mine, who one year ago today was married to the stranger from the Netherlands that she had met shortly beforehand while travelling around in New York City.
It was one of the most beautiful weddings I've ever seen, really. Definitely the most genuine and wonderful shotgun wedding, by far. Thrown together in a matter of days, but with a turnout that most certainly demonstrated a lot of love for April and Eddy. He got down on his knees in front of her and kissed her belly, and promised to love and protect her and their unborn child until he died. American sensibilities about reservation and tradition and modesty either meant nothing to this sweet Dutch man, or did, and he was so lost in the moment that he couldn't have cared less what anyone thought, who was watching them. It broke my heart in like 10 different ways.
I had just gotten back from Michigan hours before this wedding. And only days before that, had returned with Josh from Costa Rica. I was jet-lagged, devastated, hopeful, uncertain and blissed out, all at once. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know that it would be only a matter of weeks before I broke down on the phone with him and said that my heart couldn't bear the strain of a long-distance relationship ever again, before he cut me off and asked me not to say anything more. Or that he would call me back the next morning to tell me that he'd be at the airport in Anchorage the following Monday. Or that we'd be together a year later... getting ready to move into a house on wheels and run off to seek our fortunes far away from my comfortable cocoon in Alaska.
We never decided to be in a relationship. He never really asked if he could move into my house. Our kite strings crossed, twisted round each other, and now we're headed off into the wind. All of this in a year... it's been a wild ride.
I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if I can make a job out of this writing thing. I don't know what stresses our relationship will suffer by entering into this unorthodox lifestyle. I will miss my mom and dad, and my friends. At times it will be overwhelming. We'll crab at each other. It's inevitable with two "strong personalities" in a confined space. I am vaguely aware of all of these things, but none of them scares me enough not to leap in feet first.
I want to see the world, and I don't want to be away from that boy. Really, there was never any other choice.
I suppose... I'll sit down and wait for Ms. Muse another day, because she's obviously busy watching the sunset or something. Sorry for wasting ten minutes of your day for no real reason. Just know that I'm sending my love out over the intertubes, to whoever this reaches. When you approach a cliffside, over a beautiful expanse of ocean... jump in with both feet.
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