Pyramids, Part II

Our next destination was Pachacamac, a site with sixteen pyramids that was about forty minutes away. Monica drove us through several towns on the outskirts of Lima. This part of Peru is perpetually overcast, but we were blessed with sunshine for most of our trip despite an unfortunate weather forecast that promised rain everyday. Rain in Lima is just a brief sprinkling and then it goes back to being gray and arid. A truck in front of us sprayed water on the grass along the highway.

The stretches of sand all of a sudden turned into multitudes of rainbow shacks built one on top of the other, shantytowns comparable to the favelas in Brazil. I took a lot of pictures of them, but it's hard to convey the magnitude of these metropolises and how suddenly they would crop up.

When we arrived at Pachacamac, there was a little lawn where llamas and alpacas grazed. I imagine they were employed there as nature's cuddliest lawnmowers. I stepped over the barriers and attempted to approach the alpaca, but I was stopped by the woman in the ticket booth. I had a wish to embrace an alpaca while I was in Peru and my wish was not fulfilled.

Snow white angel.

There was a market outside of the museum with vendors selling baskets, jewelry, and handbags. One man was whittling a gourd with a pocketknife. He sold intricately carved gourds that were hollowed out into boxes. Some of them were birds with beads rattling inside them, little maracas. We considered buying some gourd boxes, but worried that they would be damaged in our suitcases. The artist was quick to interject. He picked up one of his creations, smashed it on the pavement, and then presented it to us unharmed, demonstrating the indestructible nature of his folk art product. We bought three of his indestructible gourds. (One gourd is in my apartment next to a Wandering Jew, filled with white chocolate Lindt truffles. The second is Upstate on a bookshelf with dozens of polished mineral eggs and a Lord of the Rings elven sword. There is also an owl-shaped maraca gourd on a sailboat somewhere off the coast of California.)

We walked through the collection of artifacts in the museum. The ceramic figures on display had cartoonish facial expressions. The Incas made jewelry and other decorations out of bright pink shells that were more valuable to them than gold.

Pre-Columbian statement necklace.

Knotted ropes that seemed to be necklaces were mounted on the walls, but Monica pointed out that they were actually writing. For a moment, this blew my mind. What messages were being communicated through the particular arrangement of knots on a rope? Upon closer inspection of the nearby description of the artifacts, it was a sort of bill for products and services.

When our guide was ready, we drove to the first of the ruins. Our guide, a Peruvian woman with very angular features, wore a beige outfit and a beige adventuring hat. She coordinated perfectly with the sand. We drove from one ruin to the next. In the car, Dave and I ravenously devoured a package of salty corn kernels and juicy peaches. Lunch is the main-event-meal in Peru and we had not had ours yet.

The first ruin was a pre-Incan palace where a community of beautiful women made crafts for the earth god Pachacamac. The most beautiful of the beautiful women - they could not have any moles - were happily sacrificed to the earth god.

There were a total of sixteen pyramids at this site, created by different cultures because the region kept changing hands and changing religions. The largest was The Temple of the Sun, an enormous beige fortress built by the Incas that was once painted with bright murals. We ascended the path to the temple, which is still being excavated.

Walking around the temple, you could see the shantytowns in the desert, an oasis of grass, and two islands standing in the ocean. Those islands have a myth: The big island is a beautiful princess who was too proud to marry anyone. The little island is her baby. A mischievous god impregnated her with a piece of fruit filled with his seed and then humiliated her in front of the other gods. She flung herself and her baby into the ocean.

Click here for even more pyramids.

Pyramids, Part I

Our first adventure in Lima was a quest for Incan ruins. Dave and I set out early in the morning with our friends Monica and Moniquita and drove to a pyramid called Huallamarca, nestled in the middle of the historical, old-money houses of the San Isidro district. The dusty archaeological site rose up in the middle of the city, right across from a bank and a small parking lot.

There weren't any guides at this archaeological site, so a security guard escorted us through the museum and pyramid in exchange for a small tip. There was an entire room devoted to the importance of gourds, with gourd bowls, urns, and masks.

So excited.

In the next room, we found an Incan mummy excavated from the pyramid. She was hunched over, like she was cowering in fear of the icy breath of death.

The glamorous afterlife.

That is just how the Incas buried their dead, curled up in a fetal position inside of giant gourds rather than lying down with crossed arms, like Egyptian pharaohs. Then the bodies were hidden like Easter eggs in pyramids for posterity, with all of their pots and bowls. This particular mummy had signs of a fractured arm that had been healed with advanced Incan medicine. She had been treated for rheumatoid arthritis. I was surprised to see a full head of natural hair crowning her skull.

Incan mummies like Russian nesting dolls full of bones.

Then we all climbed the pyramid to see small excavations on the surface. Tents covered more pear-shaped mummies with startled expressions on their gourd masks. Some of them had shaggy wigs like rag dolls.

From the top, we had a panoramic view of Lima and all of its continuous rumbling construction. Sometimes it seemed like Lima's population was entirely made up of jackhammers. Walking up and down the pyramid, my sneakers went from black to a dusty graphite gray.

I noticed that every archaeological site was guarded by an elderly, skeletal canine with a sweater and a laughable haircut. We saw one at each site, but this guy is my favorite.

Click here to read Pyramids, Part II.

Some Thoughts for 2014

In 2012, I wrote about making babies laugh and becoming more yourself/attractive. In 2013, I wrote about surviving the Mayan apocalypse and feeling pleasantly uncomfortable. Moving on to 2014...

This year, I hope you will wake up every day without hesitation and without any further intervention from your hungry cat. I hope you stop brooding about the future, brooding about the past, and brooding about things that you aren't actually going to do, like become a Chinese acrobat. I hope you accept uncertainty and court just a little bit of danger, because you could be hit by an asteroid at any moment. This year, I hope you don't get hit by an asteroid. Not yet, at least. I hope you pause all of your tumultuous becoming and recognize what an excellent fictional character you would make now, with all of your excellent flaws. I hope a stranger with an accordion serenades you in the subway and that you only have large bills in your pocket when it happens. I hope you are distracted from fledgling friendships long enough to recognize all the splendid people who love you already, and that you have the good sense to bake cookies for these fine people on a semi-regular basis. I hope you always have someone to share your chocolate with and a cat to sleep on your chest.

Vulture

This vulture is waiting for a tourist to die. The death will most likely occur due to natural causes, such as sunstroke, dehydration, food poisoning, hepatitis A, or a reckless bus driver fueled by too much pisco sour. The vulture will have no hand in it. She doesn't care what sort of structural damage is caused by impact with the bus; she doesn't care about the condition of the human carrion's exposed liver when she prods it with her beak. All the tourists look delicious, Australians and Brits and Germans walking in orderly lines to their potential deaths, but the rotund American man in the polo shirt would be ideal. His dark pink flesh could feed her bald children for weeks. The one with the tiny backpack. Yes.

***

There are buses here called "killers." They are red and yellow and green. No one knows when they come and go or what route they will take to get there. There is no formal schedule. The districts in which they stop are listed on the side of the bus in no particular order. This is the only information prospective passengers have to go on. For the leisurely passenger with no attachment to plans or even the prospect of arrival, it is the most cost-effective form of transportation available in the capital and the only form of public transportation at all. One or two soles for a hazardous rollick through the streets of Lima. The buses speed, turn sharply around corners, and infamously careen into neatly parked vehicles. On the bus, women sit wedged between strange grinning men and hug their purses. As the bus jerks onto a side street, questionable characters feel up unsuspecting human ornaments hanging from the overhead bar and probe their jean pockets for change. Just stay at home.

***

A stranded American man hunches under the insurmountable burden of his backpack in the park outside of the Plaza de Armas. Sweat soaks the armpits of his polo shirt and leaves two moist spots over his nipples. The sun colors his face a blooming shade of lobster and he desperately looks around for a street vendor purveying chilled sodas. Crippling nausea seized him just fifteen minutes after he left the restaurant and he couldn't be sure whether it was the desert sun beaming on his face or food poisoning from the disappointing lunch he ordered, which unexpectedly turned out to be octopus. When he saw the word pulpo, he supposed he was ordering something fruity. With terror he wonders if his hepatitis A vaccine was actually making him sick. If he could go back to the hotel and get an antacid and a cold drink, he would feel a hundred times better. He sees a bus coming towards him and "Miraflores" is written in bold letters on its side. He steps into the road, but the bus only seems to be flying faster.

Panama

Before I left for Lima, my friend at work brought me a picture of Machu Picchu from a travel brochure. She went there years ago before they regulated the number of visitors and hikers. She stayed in a hotel just outside of the ruins. When she looked out the window of her hotel room, Machu Picchu was right there. In bed she stared wide-eyed out the window thinking, That’s Machu Picchu.

She said, “The best part is when you’re standing on the ruins looking at the Andes all around you and you’re the same person as you were at home. You’re the same person, but you’re standing in the middle of an ancient civilization.”

Today I had this same feeling, but I was still flying over South America. From the plane, Dave and I could see the mounds of vegetation protruding from the ocean, the long fishing boats, and the fog hanging over the water. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I was in Panama. How did this happen?

These are the things I know about Panama. One: There is a certain kind of hat that people in Panama are known for. Two: When I was eight years old, my grandpa had a lady friend visit our house and she was from Panama. He had emphysema, so she may have been one of his nurses. He liked to flirt with them and give them his money. This one was a woman who was about my height – I was small for my age – and she had a baby. The baby looked huge in her tiny arms. I was bewildered that a woman so small could make a baby at all.

We got off the plane. The inside of the airport was humid and we were dressed for frigid New York temperatures.

“We’re in Panama!” I said.

Airports, Dave observed, are just malls that you fly in and out of. While we wandered around looking for our terminal, pretty ladies with stacks of advertisements tried to bully us into sampling Paris Hilton’s perfume. We passed shops purveying the quintessential Panama hats and Rolex watches and duty-free shops selling expensive liquor. Who would buy a Rolex watch on impulse?

“Let’s play the find-the-most-expensive-item-in-the-store game – oh, there it is,” Dave said, indicating a liquor aptly named Louis the Fourteenth. It came in its own locking travel trunk, s it should for $3,400.

“It probably tastes okay,” Dave said.

Dave looked for a lunch that would make up for the sardine tin of pasta he ate on the plane. There were Flying Dogs – apparently what people in Panama call the hot dog – and Quizno’s and McDonalds and Cinnabon. We probably passed five different Cinnabon stands. All Dave wanted was a sandwich.

At the terminal, where the passengers loitered around the desk, bored and waiting to board, the announcement for our flight came. The voice on the loudspeaker told us important information about boarding but did not switch into English. We realized that no one was going to translate anything for us at this point.

I never thought I would ever be in Panama, even for a layover. After graduation I despaired, wondering if my adventuring days were numbered and if I would spend the next twenty years working a number of menial, minimum wage jobs to pay off my education. Sometimes I feel like my brain is turning to the consistency of a deep chowder. As I was listening to this language that might as well be a secret code, my ears perked up. I felt the familiar feeling of the unfamiliar. It occurred to me that I was same person in a different hemisphere.

Essential Poe Facts

Very important facts about Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in the Bronx:

There was no bust of Pallas above the chamber door, I am quite devastated to report.

There is this bust of Poe in the corner of the living room.

It's made of chocolate.

Poe rented the cottage for $100 a year from a farm.

The Bronx used to have farms, as well as forests.

Poe used to drink and play cards with the nearby Jesuit monks. Naughty.

According to the educational video played in a loop in the attic area, the cottage was built with high ceilings in order to conserve heat.

The low ceiling theory doesn't hold up – I nearly leaped over the barriers and lit a fire in the wood stove by rubbing together my dry, dry hands.

Poe had the best writing desk ever. Perhaps it’s a reproduction, but I don’t care. Just look at it.

Poe wrote next to this picture of penguins. You heard it here first.

Virginia Poe passed away in this bedroom.

After Virginia died, Poe wrote a prose poem called Eureka that anticipated the big bang theory.

The Bronx Historical Society volunteer guaranteed that if you read any sentence in Eureka, you will get a headache.

Poe was really, really depressed and thinking about Eternity when he wrote Eureka.

He considered it his magnum opus and submitted himself to death after writing it.

The educational video in the attic said that Poe spent the happiest years of his life there.

Ten minutes later it said they were the most excruciating years of his life. So which one is it?

Probably the latter.

Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.

Ethiopian Food

I have a list of 24 things I want to do before I turn 24, and that list includes a lot of food adventures. One such food adventure I longed to experience was eating at an Ethiopian restaurant. Dave was my sidekick on this adventure and together we set off to Westchester’s only Ethiopian food restaurant, Lalibela. It was in a little pedestrian shopping strip with brick sidewalks and budding trees.

We found the restaurant in a side street, right next to a People’s Bank. There was a trail of petals through the doorway. “Ooh, they’re trying to seduce us,” I said. These petals were the product of flowering trees and spring winds.

Dave and I took a seat at the window and picked an appetizer to share. Ethiopian dishes are presented lumped on an enormous, crepe-like bread called injera, which tastes like a bit like sourdough bread. It’s made from a grain called kamut that is indigenous to this part of the world. We received our appetizer, an avocado salad, heaped onto some injera. There are no utensils. We ate with our hands, pinching up the meals with torn off strips of injera. It was delicious.

Just when you think you’re jaded to the disorienting nature of faraway cuisines, someone takes away your utensils and bids you use your hands. Yes, there is still magic in the world. Like the first time I used chopsticks.

Next came the entree,  a spread of lentils, cabbage, green beans, and collard greens. One mound of lentils was spicy and the other was buttery and mild. I liked them both, but the spicy one was unsurprisingly my favorite. The lentils and avocado salad were the stars of the whole meal, and the injera was very moist and fluffy like a pancake. I found myself at home later thinking to myself, I wish I had some injera now. Sigh.

Now that I have conquered Ethiopian food, I need to cross of Sri Lankan food off my list next. This adventure will take me well out of Westchester, I am sure.

Massage

Cats give very poor massages, actually.

Dave surprised me with a side-by-side massage to celebrate the fact that we've been together for five years. He refused to tell me where we were going beyond the fact that I should be clean and might want to shave my legs. He also indicated that we would have to have a late lunch afterwards, probably in the form of sushi.

“We’re doing naked yoga, aren't we?” I asked. “Are we pole dancing? I knew it was pole dancing.”

“Yes,” Dave said. "We're doing naked pole dancing yoga."

Whether it shows or not, I was very suspicious that we were going to get massages. As soon as it became clear that the surprise was not food-related, my suspicions took root. But I certainly wasn’t going to make a deduction that ruins the surprise.

“We’re getting coffee enemas, aren't we? I knew we were getting coffee enemas.”

Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that anyone would stay with me for five years. I feel extremely lucky to have found someone who is willing to put up with my nonsense. And my ever-evolving, unconventional eating habits. And the elaborate messes I leave in the kitchen area, caked with turmeric and peanut butter. And the hornet’s nest of notebooks and tea-stained index cards that inevitably covers most surfaces in my home.

“Yes, we're getting coffee enemas,” Dave said.

Dave put on a magnificent hoax the morning we left to do the thing we were going to do. He said we had to stop by his gym to drop off something for a friend. I eyed the spa on the upper level of the building and thought to myself, This is a setup. But I’m not going to say anything.

“Let’s go wait in the doorway,” Dave said.

We went through the doorway and he pressed the button on the elevator. The elevator opened and we went inside.

Rising up several floors, Dave attempted to distract me.

“I thought we were going to wait in the doorway,” I whined.

“The doorway of the gym,” Dave clarified.

We got off at the top floor, which was the spa. As we walked in, the woman at the desk handed Dave a pair of clipboards.

“Where is the gym, Dave? Where is your friend? I don’t see him here.”

The jig was up. As we filled out the clipboards, Dave at long last explained that he had gotten us an hour-long massage in the same room. A massage of that length was inconceivable to me. I had only had two in my life, each ten minutes long and unpleasant in their own special way. The first was at the side of a hot spring in Colorado, performed by a stoned fellow with a blond ponytail and an uncanny resemblance to my poetry professor.

The second was during a benefits fair at work, where the masseuse seemed to be using martial arts on my spine. I kept crying out and the woman from accounting in the chair next to me groaned, “Brittany, why can’t you just relax?”

Dave had thoughtfully arranged for a woman to work with me so that I would be more comfortable. He requested a man, having read that male massage therapists are often discriminated in their line of work. Many women feel more comfortable with another woman and many men don’t want to be touched by a dude.

“I guess I would feel more comfortable with a woman. Should I tell them about my plankton allergy? I feel like that could be important.”

The lines of communication had been crossed. As we waited in a dim room, me in a robe that was too long and Dave flip-flops that seemed too small, I accepted the firm, meaty handshake of someone who appeared to be a body builder. Dave was approached by a kind-looking woman with gray hair. He whispered something to her about wanting to switch. They all turned to me and asked if I would prefer to switch. Now that I had actually met a male massage therapist, I would have felt terrible switching. I didn't want to participate in unfair social constructs. I went with the body builder.

The actual massage was far more relaxing than my previous experiences. Not that I’m very good at relaxing. I’m not. Every once in a while I caught myself clenching my teeth or unconsciously tensing up my shoulders. Once I was genuinely worried that the massage therapist was trying to knock me out with pressure points on my temples, much like a ninja. Some of the places he focused on made my back and neck so uncomfortable that I started to laugh.

“Are you ticklish on your neck?” he asked.

“Yes. I mean, no. I was uncomfortable and that made me laugh. Never mind,” I said.

Laughing is my first reaction to almost everything. It is my first reaction to something funny and my first reaction to something stupid and my first reaction to absurdity and my first reaction when someone falls out of a window. It is not always appropriate, but sometimes it happens anyways. I once laughed on the phone when a friend told me her grandmother had passed away. I didn't think it was funny at all.

At the end we went to our locker rooms. It was nice to not to feel all of my cracks and cricks when I moved. I changed into my pedestrian clothing and met Dave in the entrance where he stood by a rack of fragrant lotions and massage oils. I opened one of the oils with nostrils ready and it erupted all over my face.

As I said before, I am extremely lucky to have found someone who is willing to put up with my nonsense.

How to Travel

Buy a ticket. Book a room in a hostel that you will share with a sleep apnea-afflicted Canadian girl. Wake up early. Drink caffeinated beverages. Pack ample antacids and remember your toothbrush. Bring water. Fill your pockets with granola bars. Always bring more than you think you can eat.

Go to the station. Get in line. Wait for your bus. Leave your bag on the sidewalk. Wince as it’s heaved into the luggage compartment with little delicacy. Agonize over your fragile electronics.

Choose your neighbor carefully. Hit your head on the ceiling of the bus. Avoid looking at the time to suspend disappointment. Expect to arrive at least an hour late. Play the same album on your iPod on repeat. Eat on the bus. Read on the bus. Peer over the headrest in front of you and giggle at Fifty Shades of Gray. Stretch frequently and insufficiently. Remember to hydrate.

Sleep on the bus. Press your cheek against the window. Let your ear drop to your shoulder. Ball your coat up like a sad, useless pillow. Get a U-shaped pillow - everyone has a U-shaped pillow, why don’t you have U-shaped pillow? Take notes from other passengers on how to sleep on a bus – with your knees to your chest, with your head on an empty seat, with your feet on the handrail, with your mouth open wide. Everybody’s doing it.

Wake up on a bus. You still have three hours left.

Locate the bathroom on the lower level. Secure the lock on the bathroom door. Hold on tight both hands to minimize trauma to the spine because the bus is currently careening down a highway. Use the hand sanitizer. Yes, that's as clean as you’re going to get. Eat your granola bars. Share your granola bars. Make new friends on the bus.

Arrive at your destination. Cringe as your bag collides with the soiled pavement. Check your electronics for critical damage. Choke down the last of your Pepto-Bismol. Enter a new city. You will have adventures here.

Thoughts for 2013

We survived the Mayan Apocalypse. So now what?

This year, I hope you make yourself very uncomfortable and enjoy perpetual stomach butterflies. I hope that in making yourself uncomfortable you meet delightful strangers and eat peculiar desserts. I hope your cats make the conscious decision to use the toilet like civilized people and relieve you of the duty of scooping clumps from their litter box. I hope that someone gives you a gift for no reason at all and that this gift is not a PedEgg. I hope there is a scented candle that smells like chocolate chip cookies, and that you are given a prototype of this candle to test its functionality. I hope you notice little details that fall into the background of your life, like the plumy swirls in your teacup and people with interesting faces. I hope that everything changes for the better and you feel more like yourself.

24 New Things

During winter, it is not uncommon for me to slip into periods of hibernation. In this respect, I am not unlike a bear or my spirit animal, the squirrel. The month of December seemed to go by rather quickly and I suspect that it is because I spent exactly half of it sleeping. Multiple alarms rang daily, cats kneaded, and a small globular cactus was slipped under my pillow to no avail. Nothing could rouse me to consciousness.

When I awoke from my Odinsleep, stretching my atrophic limbs, I looked at the clock and was alarmed by how much time I had wasted. The entire month seemed to have gone by without me. There was so much I had planned to do. I started taking Vitamin D supplements, convinced that seasonal depression and a lack of sunlight must be partially to blame. Then I discovered that they contained trans fats and stopped taking the Vitamin D supplements. I began to research Vitamin D phototherapy.

Since I am mostly motivated by some balance of new adventures and creative mischief, I can’t go on equally dividing my time between my job and my pillow. It will not do.

My friend Sara (whose blog you can find here) compiles a list of things she wants to do before her next birthday every year. I've read several other lists on a number of other blogs and I decided to create a list of 24 new things to do before my 24^th birthday. I will reproduce it here, for purposes of accountability.

24 New Things

1. Get a driver’s license

2. Compile a collection of short stories

3. Go to a new country

4. Try Ethiopian food

5. Try Sri Lankan food

6. Eat at Dirt Candy

7. Go to a raw food restaurant

8. Drink traditionally prepared matcha tea, with the froth and whatnot

9. Take a belly dancing class

10. Make sushi

11. Get a henna tattoo

12. Go to Philadelphia

13. Spend a day reading children’s books in a bookstore or library

14. Learn to play a song on my children’s accordion

15. Make a carnivorous plant terrarium from a tank

16. Write handwritten letters to people I don’t talk to often

17. Sew a dress

18. Learn to give a proper back massage

19. Read a graphic novel

20. Make lip balm from scratch

21. Watch Pulp Fiction

22. Spend a night in candlelight when the power is on

23. Go to the Museum of Sex (I already have the tickets)

24. Go to a community swap

Story Slam!

Reading in front of people makes me feel like I’m going to asphyxiate. It’s almost as bad as giving improvisational speeches. I hope I never have to be a best man. In spite of all this, I treasure a masochistic enjoyment of reading to crowds of highly critical strangers and all of the minor seizures that come with it. 

Over the weekend I did it for the first time in two years and it was thrilling, much like running away from an explosion in slightly tattered formal wear.

When the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins advertised a story slam at the Stonewall Inn to benefit the Al Forney Center, I wanted to be part of it. Dave and I went into the city, got some excellent falafel, and joined in on the story slamming festivities.

The storytellers shared novel bits, creative essays, and short stories and I learned about Norwegian food and bikram yoga and New Jersey. In the tradition of American television, there were three judges who critiqued each piece and gave gratuitous fashion advise.

I wish I talked to more people rather than clinging to my table and my Dave – next time, perhaps, I will give myself a quota. (i.e., Today I will talk to five strangers no matter how sweaty it makes my palms.) I did get the chance to speak to Ian and Kimberly Ann from Gigantic Sequins and they were very kind and welcoming even though I was the only person in the room (save Dave) that they didn’t know.

When my turn came up, I read this story that I posted on my blog last year. (Dave, always incredibly supportive, let me read it to him a hundred times on the subway.) The spotlight blinded me from seeing any crowd in front of me at all, which was perhaps why I didn't begin the reading with my customary asthma attack. At the end, I was at the mercy of the three judges.

“I have to admit, I was skeptical when you came onstage. I mean, orange and sea foam? Not many people can pull that one off, and yet here you are, pulling it off – well, not really, but your writing redeems you,” said the judge with the mustache.

After the readings, I was picked to be one of the three finalists by the judges. As a finalist, I received two tickets to the Museum of Sex and an egg shaped sex toy that was very much made for a man. Our fates were left up to the audience, who applauded loudly to choose a finalist. It was a close call, but in the end, I won.

At this point I was too excited to act like a human. I was a blushy mess, unable to accept the prize gracefully. I kept kissing Dave on the cheeks, and when another reader tried to kiss me on the cheek I thought he was trying to whisper something in my ear. Note to everyone: Never try to kiss me on the cheek, there is no telling how I will interpret your body language.

Thus, I left the story slam with Museum of Sex tickets, a men’s sex toy, one hundred dollars, and a whole lot of love for Gigantic Sequins. (This is hardly surprising. A gerbil with an automatic hand gun is featured on the cover of the most recent issue.) I think every once in a while I have to do something that makes me feel uncomfortable.

Check out Ian's pictures from the event here.

Boston Highlights

When we arrived at the station in Boston, my stomach growled and my head ached from whacking my head on the low overhang above the Megabus seats (something every Megabus passenger experiences at one time or another). Dave was sniffling from allergies and drowsy from napping in awkward positions over the sound of the archetypal crying infant on a bus. Yet in spite of waiting for an hour behind a sign on the sidewalk that read “Bostof,” we arrived at the intended destination.

Our trip was short – if it hadn't been, we would have been stuck in Boston through the duration of the hurricane. I certainly would not have complained.

Our first night, we went looking for some spectacular clam chowder. Quincy Market was all lit up like a Christmas tree. I described it to Dave as an endless food court with better food.

We found a little seafood restaurant called Boston Chowda and Dave ordered a bread bowl full of clam chowder. Dave decided it was the best clam chowder ever. Clam chowder makes me reminisce about a restaurant I used to go to with my Grandpa where bloated exotic fish blow kisses at you from behind an enormous glass tank as you slurp your soup.

A big sopping mess of chowder.

Dave and I resisted a multitude of candy coated brownies under glass cases and continued to the North End, the Italian neighborhood of Boston.

The main street was bustling, crowded with travelers, accordion players, and a clown twisting balloon animals. We were lucky to find a seat in a twenties-style café called Cafe Vittoria. Dave ordered a cappuccino with a frothy chocolate surface and I savored a square of tiramisu. Beyond the vintage signs and curling gold chairs a football game played in the background, confusing the ambience.

On our way back to the hotel that night we stopped to browse costumes and thrift shop clothes at the Garment District. The costumes were almost cleaned out but for a few mascot heads, fairy wings, and top hats. You could still get any size, shape, and color of fishnet tights you can imagine, but otherwise the Halloween hurricane had already come and gone. Savvy ladies dug through racks of vintage prom dresses and 70s skirts to construct Jackie O and Esmeralda costumes. Sequestered in a musty dressing room with a bulging stack of garments, I found the ideal sweater for a Cheshire cat costume. Halloween may have been derailed, but next year I’ll just need a pair of furry ears.

The second day was another food adventure. The Boston Vegetarian Food Festival deserved its own post, you can read about it here.

We walked to Boston Commons and the public garden. As we crossed Boston Commons we passed a man in a Dalmatian costume with three dogs in T-shirts. A one-man-band performed in the public garden, some amalgamation of a guitar, harmonica, drums set, trumpet, and a washboard. Dave fed the ducks in the pond some leftover cracker samples from the vegetarian fest, starting a feeding frenzy. We have more pictures of ducks eating crackers than anything else.

Dave photographed random strangers, perfecting the art of creeping around with a camera.

That night we went to Harvard Square for our next adventure. Our hotel was next to the MIT campus and as we walked around we assumed that every person our age must be someone brilliant studying quantum physics and neuroscience. It was much the same around Harvard, even with everyone dressed up as video game and Adventure Time characters.

We got a latte in the Harvard Coop, which turned out to be a poorly masked Starbucks within a poorly masked Barnes and Noble. In its defense, the coop really did contain real students quietly reading textbooks and looking rather tired.

We found a little shop with an impressive chocolate collection and I stumbled upon something I thought I would only see again in the Czech Republic – Mozart Kugeln. I bought two little pistachio truffles to be enjoyed on the ride home and reveled in Prague nostalgia.

I expected Harvard Square to be filled with shops and restaurants with names that allude to literature and the periodic table. In this I was not disappointed.

Science.

Dave and I had dinner in a bar called Grendel’s Den. Inside, Harvard students in costumes and funny hats drank beer in the reddish glow of the table lamps.

Dave had a steak with a Greek salad, prettily proportioned on the plate. I ordered Peruvian quinoa and got my first taste of chayote squash smothered in warm white cheese - easily my favorite meal in Boston.