blakspring

When it rains it pours, and all of a sudden I’m getting last minute tickets to Flogging Molly (thanks Jersey!), invites to movie screenings and off-Broadway plays and library conferences, friends who I’ve been meaning to call contacting me as if they got my telepathic hellos to arrange meet-ups, and working extra hours at the public libraries.  Which is probably why I woke up Friday morning with a sore throat, stuffed-up ears, and aches all over.

And in the midst of all this I am trying to avoid a stalker.  OK, I’m probably definitely being dramatic but let me describe two incidents and you tell me it ain’t creepy.

In the apartment above me live an older couple, their daughter, and her teenage son.  Though I don’t know them very well, they seem nice enough and we always exchange pleasantries.  The older couple also have a son who lived with them years back but no longer does and I’d never met him.  In the last two or three weeks I noticed a man coming and going from their apartment.  I assumed he was the son visiting his parents and we would say polite hellos to each other.

Tuesday night, while I was at the Flogging Molly show, padre was in my apartment with the carpenter putting some finishing touches on my closet, when the doorbell rang.  Padre went to the door and it was the son.  Padre was surprised and asked the son if he rang the doorbell.  The son said yes, so padre asked if he meant to ring it, thinking he pushed the wrong bell accidentally.  The son replied that he rang it on purpose because, “I’m lonely and wanted to meet your daughter.”  My dad was so taken aback that he only managed to say that I wasn’t home.  Later he was fuming to madre about the incident, and I heard it all third-hand from Little Sister.

The next night I was coming home about 11:00 PM when I thought I saw the son standing outside, a few houses down, talking on his cell phone.  Inside the house, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.  I had a few things I needed to do on my laptop before going to bed, so I settled in on the couch and enjoyed the silence.  Twenty minutes later I heard a light knocking on my door.  My first reaction was to answer it, thinking it was Little Sister, but then I realized that she always knocks loudly and calls my name.  So instead I just froze and thought of Alfred Hitchcock films.  There was complete silence and after about 30 seconds there was another light knock on the door.  I started to text “Please tell me you’re knocking on my apartment door” to Little Sister.  Since I am the world’s slowest texter, I only got about half-way through when I heard footsteps walking away, going up the stairs, and then walking directly above me.  Hmmmm, I wonder who it could have been?

I called Little Sister and told her the story.  She was totally creeped out too, “especially since he’s married and has a kid.”  WHAT?  Apparently he has a kid with an ex-wife, and is now married with a new child in the Southwest.  He can’t find work there so came to NYC to look for work while his family stayed behind.  Yeah dude, I really want to get to know you.  The kicker is that when Madre called to complain, he denied that it was him.  Really dude?  Because your elderly parents who are probably asleep by 10:00 decided to knock on my door?  Or maybe your sister came home early from her night shift and wanted to hang out with me?  Or maybe your 14-year-old nephew needed homework help?

I haven’t seen him since but I’m not looking forward to what will surely be an awkward moment.

So I’m back in NYC, about to be snowed on again, and missing the warm evenings on the beaches of Costa Rica.  I need a few more days to sort through my photos but in the meantime I figured I’d entertain you all with the story of my reality show audition.

As many of you guessed correctly, the reality show was The Amazing Race.  I have watched that show since season one and it was always my dream to be on it.  D and I always watched together; it was one of the few shows we both loved.  We had talked about applying but given how easily stressed I get under pressure, and that D’s usual reaction to my stress was some sort of anger/irritation, our participation in the show would have banged the last nail into the coffin of our marriage.

I actually have not watched TAR in the last year and a half because it had been “our” show and it was just very weird and kind of sad watching by myself.  But a few weeks ago as I was channel surfing, an announcement came on that there would be a casting call in Yonkers the following Thursday.

For anyone not familiar with TAR, it starts off with eleven teams of two people who basically travel to various countries, performing crazy stunts and tasks, and racing for the finish line.  Every team that has won in the past was either two guys or a guy and a girl, usually in their twenties or early thirties.  So having the right partner is essential to playing a good game.  I immediately grabbed the phone and called sometime-commenter Ron Russo, and yelled into the phone, “Oh my God, I am totally freaking out right now.  The Amazing Race is having a casting call next week.  Do you want to try out?”.  Ron Russo will make a really good teammate for me because:

1. his immediate response was, “yeah, let’s do it”.
2. very little fazes or upsets him, which is great because when I’m having a panic attack because we can’t find a seashell in a hay bale or my donkey is refusing to move along the road he will totally chill me out
3. he has an amazing sense of direction, can read a map like nobody’s business, and I’m convinced that there is a little GPS implanted in his brain
4. he can draw a map of the NYC subway system with every single station marked correctly
5. OK, maybe that’s not a skill that will help us in the game but it’s still pretty cool
6. he’s totally willing to take on any challenge that involves weird food that will gross me out

We each filled out a 12-page questionnaire and made a three-minute video showing why we should be on TAR.  I don’t know if the video quite explains why we should be on it considering it involves me playing a didgeridoo and Ron Russo spinning around while wearing a Cambodian peasant straw hat, but we’re trying to market ourselves as”highly competent weirdos”.  We made the video as a backup in case everybody and their mama showed up and all we had time for was dropping off our application.

The casting call itself was a letdown.  There were probably about 300 people who showed up and we were somewhere towards the first half of those people.  I was expecting it to be more like American Idol, thinking that we would get to talk to people from the show, answer questions and let our personalities shine, and then make the video.  Instead, we handed our applications to one of the staff, then stood in front of the camera and had two minutes to say and do whatever we wanted.  And let me tell you people, it is way harder to be interesting and charming and brilliant in front of a professional camera with blinding lights and no sense of time than to be at home with a timer running.

I’m not really happy with the video we made at the casting call.  We were both nervous and hadn’t really rehearsed what we were going to say so we ended up rushing through it, probably using only about a minute of the two minutes that we had.  We did include the home-video in our application, though the chance of anyone actually bothering to watch it is probably pretty slim.  Still, just the facts that I finally did something that I had thought about doing for so many years was thrilling.  Obviously it would be a dream come true to be picked but even if we don’t at least I’ll know that I tried.  And there’s always next season.

So I’ve got a few minutes to do a quick recap of my four days in Costa Rica so far:

• San Jose is nothing special and we got out as fast as we could, though not before we spotted a lady of the night in red ruffled undies
• when I went to open the door to our room in San Jose (after midnight, since we got in late), I found two people sleeping, one of whom was startled awake by a stranger entering her room in the dead of night
• our real room was 2  1/2, yeah as in two and a half
• took the local public bus to La Fortuna, which took 2 hours longer than expected and broke down half way but I guess that’s what you get for $2.00
• have been having rather rainy weather so unable to see lava flowing down the volcano but enjoyed an evening in the hotsprings, with giant slides
• took a boat trip on the Rio Frio and saw anazing animals including caymans, lizards, sloths, turtles, tiny bats, many species of birds, and two species of monkeys
• glad to report that I was not atacked by the monkeys
• arrived in Santa Elena today and went ziplining through the cloud forest canopy.  never felt more alive in my life, flying hundreds of feet through the air at high speeds, seeing the lush green below
• tomorrow it’s on to hanging bridges and a night walk through the cloud forest to see creepy crawlies
• and then it’s BEACH TIME

Yeah, so good to get away from the snow.

I honestly didn’t realize that the whole reality show thing was going to be such a curiosity.  And I promise that I’ll write a full post with all the details, but not today.  Because today I am going to Costa Rica.  My flight leaves in a few hours and I won’t be back in NYC for ten days.  Costa Rica is a place that I’ve wanted to go to for quite some a while, and Ultra and I decided that now was the time.  We had already been thinking about it last year and even looking into some guided tours, but ever since my solo trekking in Indonesia I’ve gotten back to my wingin’ it, slummin’ it roots.  I talked Ultra into doing it on our own because, even though we won’t see as much as we would with a group, going at our own pace, chilling, and not having to rush through everything will just be much more enjoyable.

I booked a hostel in San Jose for the first night since we will be arriving there about 10 p.m. but after that we have a loose itinerary.  We want to head out to La Fortuna to the Arenal Volcano, next go to the Santa Elena-Monteverde area where the Cloud Forest is, and finally make our way to the West Coast and just relax on the beaches.  Because we have been booked anything in advance we’ll be able to play it by ear and spend an extra night somewhere that we particularly like, or shorten our stay somewhere else.  Our one big splurge was booking a flight from Tamarindo on the West Coast back to San Jose the day before we fly home.  Some things we want to do are ziplining through the trees, doing a suspension bridge tour, seeing all the gorgeous and colorful animals in the rain forest, warming up in the hot springs, and just relaxing by the water.

I’m hoping that after a few days my very very rudimentary Spanish will kick in, kind of like it did in Peru.  For some reason, I mainly remember food vocabulary and can only speak a bit in very simple terms like “me hungry now”.  Ultra’s Spanish is a bit better, though I’m sure we will be speaking English 99% of the time anyway.

GeekHiker had asked me a while back about difficulties with language while traveling, and I’m finally going to answer that question.  I can honestly say that I’ve really never had any problems because English is so common in all corners of the world.  Whether in Japan, Morocco, or Sweden, chances are good that a random stranger on the street will know at least some English and be able to help you.  Even if the first or second person you ask doesn’t speak English, most likely the third person you ask will.  And generally, people are very nice and actually go out of their way to help you.  I’ve had people walk me to my destination even though it was completely out of their way.

The other thing about language and traveling is that where there is money to be made the local people of the country will learn English and probably other languages, enough to get by.  If you need to buy a souvenir or food or find a hostel for the night you’ll have no problem being understood.  Even in smaller towns, anyone that relies on tourist money to make a living knows that the more foreign languages they can speak the more they’ll have the upper hand over their competition.

And when all else fails, and there are no English speakers to be found, do not dismiss the power of miming.  You don’t need to find an English speaker when you have a map and someone can point you in the right direction.  I suspect that there are some universally understood gestures like turning an imaginary steering wheel for transportation or moving your hand to your mouth to show that you’re hungry.  It’s often the silly, half-mimed, half-broken-English conversations that will be the most fun and will give you the most satisfaction when you and this total stranger from another part of the world realize that you can understand each other.

PS - Though I always have ambitious intentions of posting regularly while away, the reality is that it will probably happen rarely, if at all.  And I’ll be catching up on everyone’s lives when I get back.  Cheers.

Not quite sure how all of a sudden it’s almost halfway through February and I haven’t bothered to write anything.  The winter just makes me want to hibernate and even the thought of clicking a mouse makes me tired.  The last ten days seem like a blur of work and home and hating being cold.  Through the blur I recall going out a bit, finally seeing The Road at the movies, doing a day-long Coen brothers marathon, and auditioning for a reality show, but it just feels like I did all this so long ago.  It probably doesn’t help that I completely screwed up my sleep schedule this weekend and have been a bit of a zombie.

And now with this blizzard that started last night I’ve been home for a snow day.  I was able to catch up on my sleep but otherwise have been mostly unproductive.  I shoveled this morning only to look out the window an hour later and find that it looked as if I haven’t shoveled at all.  Then I shoveled with Little Sister in the afternoon and again it is completely covered over.  My arms feel like I’ve been lifting weights (though maybe that’s a good thing because I’ve been neglecting the gym for the last two weeks).  I was tempted to get the sled from the padres basement, even though this contraption is cast iron and wood and probably from the Civil War which means a peg-legged pirate can go faster.  Umm, yeah, that’s probably why I didn’t go sledding.

Perhaps I should invest in a cafeteria tray.

Now that several days have passed, as well as a nice weekend, I have accepted the state of my database and want to just move forward.  I will be getting a wireless scanner (something that I should have had in the first place) which will make the inventory go faster.  Thanks for all the good wishes and calls for riots and murder; much appreciated

But since I’m feeling better I thought I’d make you guys laugh, or at least drop your jaw from disbelief.  Or maybe everyone already knows about this product and it’s old news.  I don’t think it’s a joke.  Apparently it is Fresh Balls.

And if anyone has actually used the stuff, and wants to admit it, I wanna hear your story.

Imagine you are told that the database you work with and need to function at your job, the database that has about 32,000 items in it, was lost during a server move.

Imagine you actually started crying in front of the IT guy after calculating in your head that it would probably take you at least six years to re-create it from scratch (an optimistic estimate).

Imagine you are later told that there actually is a backup, but it is from just over 2 1/2 years ago which means it is from about 2 months before you started working at your job.

Imagine that in the 2 1/2 years that you worked at your job you had weeded out about 10,000 items from your collection that had been redundant, outdated, in bad condition, or otherwise no longer needed and had added about 2,000 brand-new items.

Imagine that this backup, which is the best IT can do for you, now reflects the the items that were in the database before the major overhaul that you did (working your butt off and practically cloning yourself because you wanted to have the best library ever), so that there is now a 12,000 item discrepancy in your database.

Imagine that the students in your database are now students from 2007 so that the kids who actually are seniors now are freshmen in your database and the rest of the kids don’t exist, while the bulk of your database is students who have long since left the building.

Imagine that your database shows the books that were checked out in 2007 as being checked out now (and all obviously very overdue) while all the books that are currently checked out are either marked as being in or do not even yet exist in your database.

Imagine that the best you can do now is do a full-scale inventory of every single item (did I mention there are 32,000 of them), run reports to see which items come up as not inventoried, and then hand-delete those items out of the database.

imagine you are going through the five stages of grief but acceptance is still a ways off and you’re sort of stuck at the phase where you just bang your head against the desk.

Welcome to my world.

A little while back GeekHiker asked me about how I deal with the language barriers when travelling.  Recently, when I mentioned that I backpacked through Europe after college, he also made a comment that he would’ve travelled after college too if he had the money.  So I figured I can tackle these two topics together.  (And if the post sucks, feel free to blame GH.)

One of the first things you have to understand is that my love for travel is probably part genetic and part coping mechanism.  In high school I dreamed of being a squatter, falling off the grid, and roaming around the world with nothing tying me down to it.  It seemed like the only way to be free.  I never believed that a lot of money is essential for travel but obviously you need some.  I got a job when I was 15 because by then I already conceived of this plan to traipse around Europe’s hostels, and at $4.00-a-week allowance from my parents there was no way to accomplish that.  A few months before graduating college, I bought an open-ended ticket and still had four grand in the bank.

My original plan was to go by myself, but then Ultra said she wanted to go too.  She had money for a plane ticket and not much else, so the four grand for me became two grand for each of us.  We figured we’d have to find a way to make it last, and we did (even had a decent amount left over).  I left NYC at the end of May (skipping my college graduation because I couldn’t wait to get started on the adventure) and returned in mid-October having visited about 15 countries.  We went around with our belongings on our backs and a guidebook in our hand, taking overnight buses, arriving half-asleep at 6:00 AM in places like Amsterdam and Edinburgh, often off the map, trying to find a hostel.  Wherever we could, we crashed on couches of friends and family, usually staying longer than anticipated and finally doing laundry.  Fallafel became the staple of our diet because every city had a Middle Eastern section, with cart food galore.

We walked all day long, seeing museums, churches, monuments, bridges and chilled in plazas and squares.  In the evening we would often collapse.  It wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t Paris Hilton, we weren’t clubbing or having drinks every night but we were laughing our asses off.  And it was freakin’ memorable.  In Prague, our “hostel” was in a school on an island in the Vltava River.  The gym had been filled with loads of bunkbeds and one night an American guy hovered over my bed as I was drifting off to sleep and drunkely called me a bloody bloke, in a bad British accent.  I told him to shut up, turned over, and went to sleep.  In Budapest a drunk older Polish guy kept coming into our room and looking very confused.  In Berlin, our hostel was a giant circus tent where you laid out your sleeping bag wherever there was room.  I woke up early one morning to find the sleeping bag next to me gyrating.  I guess the nerdy boy who occupied it got lucky.  We also happened to be in Berlin on the weekend of the Love Parade.  Thousands of club kids trek to Germany every year for this crazy parade/rave and we stumbled across it.  Kinda like how we stumbled across the Pope in Paris.  He had been saying mass at Notre Dame and we saw him through the throngs, riding in the Popemobile.

In Dublin we were expecting to stay with our friend’s brother Daragh who we never met.  It turned out he was between residences at the time so we all stayed with a family that he knew.  The mother lived by herself in the basement after her husband, who was a conductor in an orchestra and had a penchant for cross-dressing, ran off with one of the violinists.  Her kids lived upstairs.  There was a punk rock daughter who was 90% blind, watched TV through a jeweler’s loop, and had a shaved head except for ten skinny braids that reached her butt.  Her brother was a skinny nerd with a red nose; Ultra is convinced he rearranged out underwear as it was drying.  There was a dog named Tess who reeked so much that you smelled her before she walked into a room.  The neighbors had a parrot that imitated Tess’s bark.  The Chinese take-out was the best I ever had in my life and we ate it every day for two weeks, after which Daragh always wanted to hit the pub.  One night he was so drunk that he let me pour candle wax on his bellybutton and rip the hairs out.  He said he wondered at work the next day why his belly was stinging and had a red splotch.  Ultra used to tease him and sing, Daragh has a girl’s name Daragh has a girl’s name.  One day he almost left her in a sheep meadow because he was so annoyed.  When the three of us finally got the boot from Casa Nutty, we went to the suburbs to stay with Daragh’s parents.  One evening he showed us the video of his sister’s crazy Vegas wedding, Elvis impersenator, strung-out maid of honor, and all.  We had to promise that we’d never tell his parents that he showed it to us.  Yeah, good times.

Whoa, I seem to have veered slightly off course.  I guess my point is that you don’t need a lot of money to travel.  You just won’t be staying in a luxury suite and eating lobster every night.  You might instead be eating fish-n-chips in a park talking to a half-crazy hobo.  As for dealing with the language barriers, I think I’ll save it for another post because this one is already out of control…

Thank you my blogosphere peeps for letting me be so self-indulgent last week.  I think that the mini break-down was probably a long time coming due to certain thoughts nagging at me, not sleeping enough was providing fuel for the fire, and a few issues with the padres were enough to set it off.  I’m still not sleeping enough though I don’t know if that will ever change.  But I’m feeling better now, and the weather has somewhat brightened and certainly warmed up a bit, which is a huge relief.

This week I had another spurt of home-making energy and I bought a TV, TV stand, DVD player, and microwave.  It was weird buying these things by myself for myself because the only time I’d ever done these “grown-up” things was in 1999 when D and I were making a home together.  But since I pretty much left everything with him when we parted, I am still slowly acquiring the commodities that make modern life livable.  To make it less overwhelming I’d started with the basic things like pots and pans and a bedsheet and a shower curtain, but I am finally at the stage where I can indulge myself.

I don’t like having a lot of possessions because it feels like a burden.  There’s still a part of me that wants to be able to clear out and fall off the grid with minimal effort.  Not that I’m planning a geat escape anytime soon, but I feel weighed down by stuff.  D had always liked stuff, especially electronics and gadgets (and the Belgian waffle maker that he went on and on about until I got it for his birthday which he used all of three times before deciding that Belgian waffles tasted better at the diner and the very large contraption ended up collecting dust and taking up space) which made me claustrophobic.  So I weighed the decision to get a TV very carefully, finally deciding that I missed watching movies on a large screen.

My other worry is that I tend to be a TV addict.  When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of the stuff.  The padres monitored what and how much I watched so I had to get sneaky.  Being a latch-key kid made it easier and I vaguely recall going through a soap opera phase in 5th grade - more proof that TV is evil.  (It wasn’t until many years later that madre told me that she knew I was watching on the sly because the TV would be warm when she came home from work.)  It got a bit worse when the padres got cable TV when I was about 17 or so.  All those years withD we never had cable, except for one month when he ordered it because of an upcoming UFC fight.  For the first two weeks we vegged on the futon watching Rock Of Love marathons and other brain rotters.  Finally there was no other option but to go cold turkey and we cancelled the damn thing.

So I think I will forgo cable for now.  The public library has a never-ending supply of DVDs and The Office and The Biggest Loser are on NBC.  Score!

(I totally stole borrowed the title ,with slight modification, from The Coconut Diaries.)

My original plan was to write something at work yesterday or today, but as I’ve been doing actual work at work, that never happened.  I did, however, manage to think about what I would write.  I had some ideas about a year-in-review (even if it is getting close to mid-January).  I wanted to write about certain aspects of travelling.   I debated whether I was ready to write about some more personal things that had been on my mind.  Also, I wanted to have all this done by 10:30 PM so that I could finally get to bed at a decent hour since I start work at 7:30 AM.  (Clearly this part has not happened as it is now way after midnight and I am not even in my pajamas yet, though my eyes are stinging and my lids are getting heavy).

All these grand ambitious schemes completely failed because a very strange thing happened.  I started crying.  Big fat tears came rolling down my cheeks, my shoulders started to shake, and I had to sit on the floor and just let it happen.  And the whole time that this is happening I am feeling guilty because, honestly, nothing tragic has happened.  So many people around the world are dealing with pain and suffering that I cannot even imagine, but here I am with my head between my knees like a little baby.

When I finally got my shit together enough to turn the deluge into a trickle, I tried to figure out what was going on in my head.  I’ve concluded that it’s some combination of lack of sleep, confusion about certain things in my life, and issues I am having with the padres.  (If I dig even deeper maybe I’d find something about not having properly mourned the end of my marriage or not having taken risks that I dreamed about years ago, but I’m not ready for that much head-shrinking just yet.)

Then I verbally slapped myself and forced myself to think about how blessed I am.  And I do realize that I am, so please don’t think me ungrateful.  Not only do I have a job but one that I love.  I’ve got some amazing friends and the best sister ever.  The padres love me and mean well.  I’ve got my health, my Monday night volleyball, my passport which is like a gateway to sanity for me.  And of course I got you blogosphere peeps who always crack me up with funny comments and your own adventures.

Maybe I just needed to get something out of me.  I know in the morning I’ll feel ok, though I’d feel even better if it was about 40 degrees warmer outside.  Maybe I just need one of those light-therapy contraptions that the kids in Siberia stand in front of.  (I swear, I saw a photo of that years ago.  It was a black-and-white shot from the ’50s or something and these scrawny Russian kids in white undies were standing in front of a huge square light.  I’ve never been able to forget it.)  Yeah, it’s probably a case of the winter blues because I truly am happiest and most comfortable in my skin during spring and summer when I can feel a warm wind on my bare arms.

But at least I’m not in North Dakota where they can probably blow bubbles that shatter like glass when they hit the ground, because then my tears would freeze on my face and I would be one sad mess.