Pilipin

Everybody! Pose like a Chinese schoolgirl!

This post is a continuation of the last--my recent series of lazy rehashing of my journal.

01/27:

My thoughts (especially those I deem worth writing) have slowed. Is this a sign of relaxation? A shift in mindset due to current state and prospective jobs? Or an indication of having processed my anxieties to a point of acceptance?
*
I pass-out to power ballads blasting on a bus between Clark and Manila. When I wake, it's to a dingy city covered in filth, billboards, box buildings, and few green things. During our brief walk to get bi-bim-bop, our senses are assaulted by honking cars, neon, whispering drug dealers, and self-advertising prostitutes.
*

01/28:

Street vendors and hustlers walk the aisles of our bus as we slowly drift through Manila traffic with the coach door open.

Children wearing only underwear sit on our fast-craft pontoon and beg while the sun beats on their tanned skin.
*
Thin beaches. Coves with bangkas. Perfect sunsets. Drunken admissions and mosquito net riggings. 



01/29:

If only you had kiwi green...

Until this sunset moment, I have lacked the energy to recount last night or today. A weakness has fallen upon me; it weighs down heavily on my leg bones and my body's joints. I've had restless leg syndrome for over twelve hours.

After we bar crawl from one palm-roofed shanty to the next, I pass out within minutes of laying myself down on my bed. At 2:45 am, the puking starts. I'm awake for an hour. I know it's food poisoning (echoes of my moment of undergraduate celebrity as a Crime Note in the student paper), but I fear worse (i.e. Dengue Fever). I contemplate hospital and evacuation scenarios; I bemoan how isolated our resort is. Then the sickness worsens. I begin to feel extremely weak--and intense pain. At 5 am, I buy two waters from the clerk opening the front desk. I drink half a bottle too quickly and rush to the bathroom. I wake Ryan and Leah. I fade in and out of consciousness for a few hours, during which time Leah also begins to get sick (and we alternate turns in the bathroom). I'm weak, overheated, cold, achy, boiling, freezing. Shoddy sleep until noon, when Ryan offers to buy me Gatorade and crackers. By 3:30 pm, I've kept down crackers every fifteen minutes. Good sign, but still so weak. I spend thirty minutes walking in the pool to help loosen and activate my legs. I spend another thirty minutes sitting in a hot shower. Now I sit on a chez lounge; I'm thrilled I am recovering quickly, but I will stick to rice and crackers for at least a day (or two).

I'm not going to drink for a while. I suspect a coke-and-rum from Cap'n Gregg's was the culprit.
*
The weakness overcomes me at dinner (of three spoonfuls of rice), and I pass-out by 9 pm. Though I wake at 3 am to stretch and cough, I sleep moderately well until 9 am. I swim, shower, e-mail, and eat crackers.

The cool breeze and bangkas bobbing on low tide waters would have one believe I wasn't violently ill yesterday; the calm juxtaposed with the upset seems illogical. Still, I did lose a day.
*

01/30:

Kind of looking at China

I awake with a stiffness in my lower back--probably a product of a lack of activity over the past few days along with a tension of respecting Ryan's space on our shared bed. I eat a full meal for the first time in almost three days, and we watch headlines about the peaceful protests in Cairo. 

We load into a jeepney with "No Fear" decals, and I think of Papa. The faded scarlet interior is cushioned in the way that mental hospital interiors are cushioned; we wait with some Germans until the jeepney is full enough to justify the driver's departure.
*
Hanging off the back of the jeepney, hanging for life on the turns. Squeezing onto a van to Roxas with Czechs: sixteen people on a twelve person van--I sit on a jump-seat's hinge. Passing farmers tilling swampy fields with water buffalo. A pregnant woman offers a cheap room at her lodge in Roxas.

I think of my sister's advice to have a Kevlar mindset during vacation: Maintaining an awareness to stresses, but temporarily not letting them penetrate the mind--letting them slide-off.

01/31:

An enormous spider, shoddy mosquito net riggings, sweaty sleep. Dirt bikes, tuk-tuks, wind blown palm trees.
*
Borocay greets us with Maria, who helps us secure a room a block off the beach--we have our own beds, thankfully. Vanilla sunsets and icy blue oceans with a regatta of blue-and-red-sailed boats. Mongolian bar-b-q buffet and hazelnut-and-coffee gelato.

Soft sands, cozy clubs and restaurants, lightened stress.    

02/01:

Borocay

I recount some strange and stirring dreams while sitting in a beach-side cafe with a banana-walnut muffin and a passable Americano. A woman with severe skin damage (over tanned, burnt, wrinkled, and skin that looks as brittle as paper) sits; she lights a cigarette despite the strong gusts of comfortable tropical winds--a great ad campaign against smoking.
*
Outstanding mango-melon shake with good Mexican food. We jet ski for thirty minutes of salty wake hitting my face while I hold on like hell with three-to-four-feet of air. A Swedish massage. Casual Italian dinner with a crème brûlée.

02/03:

Bulabog beach and its windy sky full of kites. Villagers and surfers, blue Ray Bans to match my new board shorts. Calypso renditions of The Rolling Stones.

My body aches when I wake: a combination of my usual morning stiffness and wear from yesterday's Thai-yoga massage: "It was like she dismantled me, piece-by-piece, before shaking all the pieces out like drying sheets. Then she reassembled me slowly and gently to make sure there were not wrinkles."

Lamb roganjosh and mint-chocolate-chip gelato.
*
I spend time considering my personal and professional goals and priorities for next year. With this quiet time, I can logically reason about my options. My decision comes down to a conflict: location and culture versus reputation and experience. Which pair do I want more?
*
That shiatsu was intense, painful; yet, somehow, I fell asleep. It was like Reggie the Filipino masseuse hit some magic "sleep" buttons.

Puka Beah's waves; motor-scooting through thatch villages with giggling children and crowing roosters.

I sense that clarity people achieve when distanced temporarily from their regular lives: my anxieties dissolve with perspective.  

02/05:

Windsurfing with an instructor with poor communication skills; teaching myself how to rotate the axis for speed. E-mails from Papa encourage loyalty to self, pursuit of balance.
*
Rice fields with palm trees and low flying white cranes. Women seek shelter from the rain under tarp awnings that extend from steel roofing; the women sell nuts and dried fruit from tightly woven wicker baskets.
*
At a random bus stop, a man makes a request: "Will you tell Obama that his friend, me, says 'Hi'?"
*
The black beach of Roxas eerily stretches on with people playing in a distant mist. Oysters for a US nickle.

On a tricycle/tuk-tuk, the wind blows away my stress from a long bus ride. I have a moment of realizing my adventure and my youth. I'm doin' alright by myself. 

02/07:

Mini-bowling with dirty balls and a toothless score-keeper. Feeling oddly ready for a return to routine.
*
A rough six-hour pump boat ride leaves us drained.

02/08:

Soakin' it up

Our pump boat cruises by the tropical cliffs of Ticao Island. An anger brews as fellow passengers throw their trash and cigarette ash into the wind: The refuse flies into the ocean if not into my arms.
*
I resolve to eat bananas--I have not eaten one for two decades because of some forgotten sickness. 
*
Palm frond roofs with puka shells hanging on strings. An attractive blond reads Tom Woolf while I wait for my mango-banana shake and watch a late-afternoon sun glisten off the ocean in a blinding radiance. This seems like another worthwhile retreat.
*
I force myself to take an hour to do nothing but watch the sunset and enjoy a San Miguel. I think of impossible romances--impossible for now, though I must pay respect to others as much as life's unpredictable twists. I return to the moment's spectrum of pastels.

After the power at the resort cuts, I head to the restaurant--where a generator allows me to write while sitting in a cushioned chair. I read of Siddhartha rediscovering "Om" at the riverside while I listen to the ocean gently lap at the shore. 


The quietness and simplicity of this beach-side resort reminds me of the hostel in Corfu. 
* 

02/09:

After an hour of whale shark watching, all I've seen is an overweight Welsh couple making-out and a false alarm. I am enjoying the blues of the nearly textureless ocean and the peripherally-clouded sky. Smoke billows from a volcano beyond the palm forest. A flying fish skips across the surface of the water; the only way to spot it is to track the splashes of each skip. I wonder if perception, in general, isn't like that: the only way to perceive our lives it to track moments as they are passing or as they have already passed--we never fully grasp the present, though we have a sense of life's trajectory that allows our mind to delude itself into believing it perceives and experiences contemporaneously.
*
In our fourth and bonus hour, we spot a few whale sharks. The confusion and clusterfuck of sharing the shark with other snorkelers and other boats makes it more difficult to spot the world's largest fish than one would think. But the swimmers' fins part, and a dark mass with white dots swims to me. Past me. At maybe thirty-feet-long, it's enough to cause a minor panic in my chest before it starts to dive out of sight. I cannot blame the fish for being so evasive, what with the boat noise and the bombardment of strange-legged people-fish chasing them. Still, the fish's mouth (as wide as I am tall) and simultaneous lack of interest in me is indescribably humbling
*

End of the Earth

One draining nap, one restorative mango-banana shake, and one reservation at the local dive shop. One San Miguel, one layer of sunscreen, one deck chair, one schooner, and one setting sun.
*

02/10:

Dolphins leap ten-to-twenty-feet out of the water, a pod of at least thirty; Ryan has trouble equalizing on the first dive, jelly fish, picturesque cliffs and caves, wariness of a grumpy dive master; ridiculously strong dive current, rope burn from the leash attached to the hook that is keeping me from being taken away with the tide; first banana in twenty years.
*
The world ends somewhere on a horizon that blends sky and water in a calm and flawless white.  

02/12:

My last day of vacation is [already/finally] here. I mentally prepare for my reintegration into my Shenzhen routine, and I read the last five weeks worth of writing.

Books, Music, Movies, T.V.: Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Food Rules by Michael Pollan. Beowulf. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. Night Falls Over Kortedala by Jens Lekman, "Rosa Parks" by Outkast, "Eple" by Royksopp, "She Moves She" by FourTet. Edward Scissorhands. As Good As It Gets. Wall-E. The Fall. Finding Nemo. Inglorious Basterds. Biodome. "Portlandia."