The Shape of My Fears

Last night when I got home I was alone and so I checked all the usual places for monsters in my house. The basement, the main floor shower, the upstairs shower, etc.

I found nothing, and so I crawled into bed with my dog and drifted off to ... and right before sleeping I realized that I didn't look under the bed.

OH GOD.

So I started thinking "what should I be scared of?" and the only thing that came up was the fish/guy from the movie the Shape of Water.

And then I laughed because that is not even sort of scary! And then I went to sleep.

And it's a good gosh darn thing my brain didn't go here:

You Can't Take Me Anywhere

I've been flying back-and-forth to Warroad MN to visit my parents on the Marvin Windows corporate propeller plane since May. It's fun and I feel fancy every time and I love getting there in an hour and 15 minutes vs driving 6.5 hours.

Last month and for the first time I got to ride their jet. No propellers. Leather buttery seats. Fancy fancy. Oh man it goes fast! The same exact trip takes 45 minutes. But let me tell you the take off is terrifying. I have never felt such speed in my entire life and I have ridden the fastest train on earth (Shanghai Maglev China). Anyway it goes one million miles an hour and you go straight up. STRAIGHT up. Seriously. When we got up to cruising altitude I turned to the woman next to me and asked her "are we in space?". I was seated across from her children (this jet had a four-seat-face-each-other-thing) and they giggled the entire time and that was the only reason I didn't bawl my eyes out from sheer terror.

But that's not the point of my story. The point of my story is that when I first got in the jet I noticed that same woman in the very very back of the plane with one of her kids. She looked like she was confused and didn't know if she wanted to sit way back there with him and I am nosey and so I already knew from eavesdropping that she was traveling with her husband, two little boys and giant pregnant belly (which was filled with twins as I was to find out later). So I stuck my nose in even further and offered to take the way back so she could sit in the four seat thing with her whole family. I smugly went to take my hero's position all the way in the back. (Seat change explained below). I am SUCH a good person. Ask anyone. I couldn't find the seat belt though? I searched and searched.

Then a man came and sat right across from me and we were sitting so close to each other that our knees were intertwined. Face-to-face. I was like, "oh man I hope I like this guy because this is AWK.WARD." He had a book which was a good sign just in case. But his seat for sure had a seat belt. I stood to look better for my seat belt, which meant he had to stand too to let me look and turn around and stuff. Finally it dawned on me that the seat was probably flipped down and I needed to flip it up to find the seat belt.

NOPE. TOILET.

My 15 Hours in Kenya

On the way from Seychelles to Mozambique, I had an overnight layover in Nairobi, Kenya. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to leave the airport because of visa requirements. Sarah's friend from Nairobi was traveling and so she couldn't host me, and so I sent out a couchsurfing request just in case. The woman who responded told me that I could just pay $25 for a "transit visa" and leave the airport no problem.

However, she couldn't host me either because although she lived close to the airport, traffic is so bad that it would have taken me two hours to get to her place and two hours to get back to the airport and there goes my good nights' sleep. 

SO -- I had no plan except plan B: Sleep in the airport. I have done this. It is no fun. 

On the little bus that takes you from the airplane to the airport I met Jackie, the nicest person in the whole world. She told me that I absolutely had to get to the game park and then physically walked me through customs, (VIP line - she's a diplomat), and then waited for me to go to the bathroom which included brushing my teeth and washing my face, brought me out of the airport, arranged for a taxi service to take me to the game park, then to a famous restaurant called "Carnivore" (think Fogo de Chao) and then back to a hotel near the airport and THEN in the morning from the hotel to the airport. I keep forgetting to email her a thank you note. This reminds me I GOTTA DO THAT.

Everything went pretty swell, except traffic IS really bad and so we got to the game park 10 minutes too late and they wouldn't let me in, no matter how hard I told them that I was from Minnesota and we don't have elephants there and I only had one night and all I got was a mean mean lady saying "it is impossible."

So my poor driver just took me to an animal orphanage instead, and that was really really fun because there were lots of cute kids there and we played and played.

And my driver taught me how to speak Swahili...the important parts anyways:

Jambo - hello

Mishkuru kutana nawewe - nice to meet you

Asante - thank you

Tuko salama - we are ok

Kwaheri - goodbye

Tafhadali - excuse me

Sina pesa - I don't have any money

I am in this picture -- can you find me?

Check this out. The older boy was running back and forth and the lions were copying him! I about died at how cute and awesome it was and then his little brother and I got involved and the driver took a video. Pretty cool.

 KENYA!!!

Adventure

When I arrived to Mahe Island in the Seychelles, it was 8am. I got my car, grinded the gears, stalled and hit the windshield wipers instead of the blinkers in front of the man. We laughed and I set off to find my Airbnb. I dumped my stuff, took a shower, put on a fresh pair of undies and hit the road.

Silly little things make adventure for me. I don't need to jump out of planes or go bungee jumping to feel like I'm alive. Give me a car with the steering wheel on the right and the stick shift on the left and I'm "having an adventure".

The roads here are NARROW. They are two lanes, but each lane is only the exact width of your tiny car and every time you pass oncoming traffic you close your eyes and hope for the best. When the bus comes it's especially terrifying. They go a million miles an hour and they are halfway in your lane. Also everybody and their brother just walks on the edge of the road and so you have to avoid the people walking too. There is no "not paying attention" here.

Little kids in school uniforms walk with old ladies going to work. Old men stand of the sides of the road and I wonder if they have anywhere to go. Young men stand at the sides of the road and big trucks come and pick them up for today's work. Dogs are in no hurry at all to cross the road and you almost hit them and they don't even care. Birds don't fly away when you're coming at them...they just keep running on their little feet and it look like their hands are tied behind their backs and you don't think they'll make it but they always do.

I saw a man with one arm carrying a bag of produce. I saw a man with two arms who had one of them all the way in his pants and scratched and scratched and kept scratching even after I passed. I saw a little girl returning home with the bread her mom sent her to the store to get. And I kept driving. I stopped and took long walks on the beach, had breakfast, and took pictures. At some point and without warning the road went down to one lane. Still two-way traffic of course, but only one lane. I was still under the impression that the road circled the island and so I kept on. The road winded up up up and then down down down. I kept it in first gear on the ups because they were so steep and prayed I wouldn't stall or see another car. No such luck. And somehow we found enough space to let each other by. At some points the road was bordered by a cliff jutting up the mountain on one side and dropping off to the ocean below on the other without benefit of guard rails. At other times, there was only a raised lane with dropoffs on either side. It reminded me of a game I play when I'm driving fast on a highway back home. I imagine that there is only my lane high up in the air and nothing on either side but death. How fast could I drive then? In real life I might be able to go 60 or 70 mph and never once leave my lane, but once you play my game and take that same lane and raise it high into the sky I bet you would go SO SLOW. And it's true. That's exactly what you would do, you coward.

 

It was pretty scary and I started to think that maybe I should turn around and I might have, too, if there had been any such place to do so. And then the road came to an end. Just like that. A man sat on a chair next to a locked gate and watched me grind and stall and try to turn around. And then I had to go back the other way, this time so glad that the mountain was on my left and I could hug it instead of the ocean drop off when it came time to pass cars again.

Later I looked at a map, because the best time to consult one is AFTER your road trip, right? And it said right there that the road ends. Adventure!

 

 

 

Photo Shoot - Starring ME!

Last summer, my ol' pal Brent asked me to participate in a photography project. 

I really can't believe I haven't yet linked to his post about it, since it's all about my favorite subject (ME ME ME). Well, here you go. Original link here at his blog, The Speckled Record. He writes about lots of things, including his previous work for the Peace Corps and currently at the American Refugee Commission...and that one time when he made me hold hands with a bunch of strangers on a whim:

If you have a friend who you know loves meeting new people, a ‘yes’ person, a friend who will disregard decorum for a good story, and if this friend is meeting you for a Thursday afternoon happy hour, then I suggest you scrap your bar chatting plans for something else entirely.

My friend, Kady Hexum, is easily one of the most outgoing people on the planet. And earlier this summer I suggested that we change our happy hour plans and meet near a park. There we would introduce ourselves to strangers so that I could take pictures of her holding hands with them. What you are looking at now are the results.

It isn’t actually too hard to ask people to hold hands with your friend. It helps that Kady is beautiful, kind, and can make almost anyone laugh (see first photo). Most people were totally down. We asked around 20 folks, and only one person said no. I mean, I think he said no.  He slurred something in a fake accent, gave us the crazy eyes, and speed-walked away. (Note: this is an excellent way to get rid of people on the street.)

Most people smiled, mentioned something about their artist family member, and asked me where to stand.

You really ought to check out Kady’s blog. She’s hysterical. The perfect kind of friend to drag along into perfectly uncomfortable afternoons.

The Evolution of an Appendectomy, Volume 5

Where were we?

Yah. Escaping the confusing Emergency Room in Tiny Town Wisconsin and speeding back to Minneapolis without hitting a deer.

I was worried about the three-hour trip. When my morphine ran out a few times in the ER, it was painful. Bad. So I asked the nurse to shoot me up the minute before we left and asked what I should do if I started to feel pain in the car.

"Well, you're not allowed to eat or drink anything before surgery, so I can give you a Vicodin...but..."

"But what?"

"You can't eat or drink anything."

"So how am I gonna?...Where does it...?"

Her face got serious. She handed me a glove, the pill and some lubricant.

"...OH."

Never forget. 

"For all the good it did me, I coulda shoved it up my hind-end." -Hal

Most Hilarious Craigslist Text Ever and a Narrow Escape from Being a Silenced Lamb

So I'll make this short story as long as possible, as per usual.

I'm trying to work more from home. I don't really have an ideal situation at the moment, though some may call it that...

Laptop desk? Cereal? Coffee? Check. Check. Check. Fancy Business? Check one million.

The thing is, I am trying to be a fancy business lady and so working in bed, though it has it's benefits (see photo caption above), it isn't a long-term solution. I do have an office, but I also have the world's baddest back -- so my adorable yet hella-uncomfortable little school desk just won't do:

I decided that a corner desk would maximize the little baby office that I have -- and I even created a Pinterest account so I could get "inspiration" for tiny office spaces and stuff like they have in this one really appealed to me:

Isn't that just fantastic? I don't have those stairs of course, but you get the idea.

ANYWAY. I went on Overstock.com and bought a white corner desk from them for $225 that would fit the dimensions of the tiny room. But a week-and-a-half later I realized that my desk wasn't here and then I tracked it on UPS and found that it was damaged in transit. I chatted a customer service rep and they told me that they were out of stock now, sorry. Full refund. Thank you Overstock.com.

So I went on Craigslist and found this little cutie for $95:

Except my office is only 91" long. So I texted the seller:

"Is this desk easily trimmable? And are you the kind of person who has the tools and goes around cutting desks?" and they said yes! 

And then we arranged for pickup, etc. During the conversation, I got the single most hilarious text I have ever gotten from an exchange on Craigslist. Here it is:

"GARAGE IS OPEN AND SAW IS READY."




Of course I responded as you see in the blue above, and thus began a hilarious text exchange regarding my demise:

Don't worry, he didn't kill me. And neither did his adorable daughter.

Instead, he cut 3" off the end of my desk and while we waited gave me and my neighbor Matt (aka bodyguard aka muscles-of-the-operation aka SUCKER) beers and refunded me $30 because I didn't take the chairs and then we all became best friends.

And look at my cute new little office, primed and ready for some fancy business:

Work in progress guys, I still gotta get that staircase installed.

All's well that ends well, am I right, Dad?

Stress on Vacation

 

Toilets are pretty advanced in Japan, as I've mentioned before. They will sing to you, they will wash your butt, or your front-butt, if you prefer, and sometimes they are a video game and you win if you hit the right targets with enough force.

 

But sometimes they are just downright practical, like the one pictured here. In order to save water and space, I think. The sink is attached and only activates itself when you flush. Which, for the anxious Minnesotan(!) only creates the following stresses:

 

1) hurry!

2) is the water dirty?!

3) hurry!

4) like, is it recycled poop-water?

5) it's attached to the toilet...

6) HURRY!!

 

 

Why is life so hard sometimes?

 

Camel Trek

Summer and I spent the better part of four days traveling from Goa to Rajasthan, India for the sole purpose of going on a desert camel trek. We braved trains and buses and creepy starers and even a few mean people to get here. And it was worth it. We took a jeep ride out into the desert at 6:30am where we had a campfire breakfast and then saddled up and rode off into the sand. We saw villages and people and more sand and in general had a nice relaxing time. It was so weird staring at the butt of the camel in front of me, because they truly looked like a CGI thing on some Star Wars movie. They have two knees! One bends forward and the other back. Their leg makes a 'Z' shape when they lay down. And it's so scary when they get up and down! You have to get on them while they're laying down and then hold on for dear life while they stand up.

Walking them on into a village.

Desert Bill Murray.

He wouldn't let me use my left hand or eye either, DAD.

 

I must have said out loud posted as my Facebook status several times that I hadn't been sick in India for 28 days and the devil must have heard me because I got sick. Real sick. While I was supposed to be enjoying a camp out under the stars, I moaned and groaned until I fell asleep without any dinner and woke up at 6am because I had to barf. So I army crawled out of my sleep mat and barfed six inches from my pillow. Then I covered the barf with a little sand and stuck a stick in it so's I would remember where the barf was, and then army crawled back into my mat and fell asleep again until 8am, when I had to get up and go to the bathroom. I barfed again into a tree. Then I went back to bed and here's a picture of round three, taken by my best pal Summer:

Notice the stick. That other thing is my tissue. I burned it, like a good little camper.

 

I would like to remember the trip differently though, like as the time I actually had some fun with animals. (The trick was to imagine I was just riding a horse.) Still terrified, for sure, but a tiny bit less now:

 

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I Love Animals

Everybody knows I'm an "animal person". I'm super comfortable around animals for sure. I fact, I trust them implicitly to never do me any harm whatsoever. That's why I always insist on being near them at every opportunity. Especially the big, unpredictable kind that can stomp you to death...

Totally and completely comfortable.

(There was hair on that elephant.)

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