On the road again

Our lovely car Smeagol, a.k.a. The Miracle Machine, a.k.a. The Mystery Mobile, at our camp site outside Aoraki Mt. Cook. One week into the camp-a-thon road trip and life is good, my friend.

The art of waiting

Take a moment to refer back to my list of goals, specifically the item known as “practice free-spiritedness.” If you’d like to, you can also take a moment to mentally assess, on a scale of 1 to 10, just how free spirited you believe me to be. If you’ve spent time with me in a time-sensitive situation (catching a plane, getting the last bus home, or showing up to a movie in time to see the previews) then you’re probably more likely to rate me at the low end, somewhere between “trying hard to play it cool but exhibiting some pretty questionable facial tics” and “your nail biting is getting fairly annoying for everyone around you.”

Week two in New Zealand: I have unexpectedly found myself in just such a time-sensitive situation. Tommy and I arrived in Christchurch a week ago, met up with our two lovely traveling companions, Devon and Ross (www.devonitelyrossome.com), whom I lured to us with the promise that we had a car. And I really thought that we did. My generous friend Juliette had already offered me her car for the duration of our stay in New Zealand. But I was about to be blindsided by one of those big scary words (like “mortgage” or “tire pressure”) whose meaning I have been so studiously avoiding learning for years: insurance. One of those grown-up Achilles’ heels.

For days we only know that Tommy and I still need to be added as drivers on the insurance policy and so the car isn’t ready for us. Then for a few more days, complete loss of communication. Radio silence. Devon and Ross have now paid for several nights at a hostel, and my guilt-o-meter is rising steadily. We start kicking around the idea of just buying a car to speed things along. We visit the backpacker’s car market, and it’s like leaving an animal shelter without a puppy: cars parked everywhere, their owners seemingly living out of them, waiting every day to swarm the few buyers who come in and to beg them to please buy their cars so they can make their flights home. I have a very un-free-spirited vision of us at the other end of our trip when we need to resell the car and we move in with these people, who might still be here for all I know, drinking 40s and heating soup on the radiators of their sad station wagons.

Then yesterday a moment of hope: we make contact with Juliette’s mom and things seem to be moving forward. But alas…the insurance company isn’t sure that they want to add two non-residents to the policy, sensing the potential for an international-scale hit-and-run. We have to look into finding a different insurance company, but in the meantime there’s nothing much that I can do. Just wait and see.

Based on the “free spirit” number you gave me at the beginning of this post, you might now have a pretty accurate idea of just how well I’ve been handling these developments. The answer is: “not entirely gracefully.” I’m surrounded by truly, beautifully easy-going people. Devon says that this is the way things are supposed to go this week. It’s meant to be. She’s some sort of a zen master. A river can flow through a straw, if only the straw points itself downriver. That kind of thing.

I say: another glass of wine, please.

“Que sera, sera” is a mentality that’s a lot easier to embrace when things are going your way. Or when there are steps you can take to herd things your way. But it turns out that free spiritedness under fire is going to be something I actually have to practice. Like exercising. Which for me means that the first couple of repetitions might be a wee bit painful - they might even involve some dramatic groaning/curling into fetal positions and whimpering.

So here’s the exercise for these next few days. Yoga, gardening, writing in cafes, reading Rumi, taking walks. I am missing my Routeburn track reservations, but I am loving life. Insurance is a river and I am a straw, baby. Yeah.

Thanks for waiting with me.

The bright side of life

I've been feeling lately that I owe a profound apology to any loyal readers still out there continuing to put up with my lazy posting. Friends who have started blogs recently have already put me completely to shame with their punctuality and reliability. Speaking of which, if you'd like a more constant correspondent from New Zealand, you can check out Tommy's blog for updates as well.

Reliable blogging may in fact end up being put on Tommy's list of delegated responsibilities. It's one of the nice things about having a travel partner - the opportunity to share the load and play to each other's strengths (or, in my case, obsessive-compulsive tendencies). For example, my list of responsibilities currently involves keeping track of all paperwork, making budgets that are promptly blown on Wellington's cornucopia of vegan cupcakes, and secretly making plans behind Tommy's back. Tommy's list of responsibilities includes having a positive attitude.

And let me tell you, I never really appreciated before how useful it can be to put someone else in charge of your positive attitude. I'll illustrate with an anecdote. A week ago, visiting Tongariro National Park, Tommy and I decided to attempt the Tongariro Alpine Crossing (they added the "Alpine" a year ago to dissuade foolhardy hikers - read, us - from taking it lightly) in weather that the locals descibed as "absolute shit." Despite the increasing numbers of hikers warning us to turn back as we journeyed upward, and despite the complete saturation of our clothing and the total depletion of my limited muscle strength, we kept on keeping on all the way to the topmost volcanic ridge of Mount Doom, where we truly began to appreciate the meaning of "high velocity winds." Picture, if you will, a thin ridge of volcanic rock, Tommy trying to convince me to keep walking, and me hunched over in downward dog, clinging to the ground to keep from falling over, snot literally being ripped out of my nose by the wind, wondering if this falls under the heading of "poor life decisions." This is a spectacularly good moment to have delegated your positive attitude. With Tommy in charge of finding silver linings (I bet this would be a really terrific view in the sun!), I was free to continue muttering my stream of expletives and imagining the headlines of tomorrow's paper: "Delusional Americans Blown Off Volcano on Second Day of Vacation."

The rest of week one has been slightly less intense, though equally invigorating. Wellington's vegetarian cafes are pleasantly munching away at my bank account (with my full and enthusiastic consent), the hole in the ozone layer is chipping away at my pasty Michigan-winter skin, and so far the "ugly island" continues to impress with gorgeous green hills, turquoise beaches, and surreal volcanic valleys. Tomorrow we're off to the South Island and Christchurch, where we will be enjoying the hospitality of yet another incredibly gracious friend. I'll try to be more worthy of your readership with more attentive blogging. Cheers, mates.

Dangerous business

Over the last month I have been amassing my camping gear, plowing through guide books, sending out emails to generous friends and friends of friends down under, booking bus tickets and backcountry hut passes, and now the time has finally come: New Zealand ho, my friends. A friend, a tent, a backpack, a car, the mountains and farms of Middle Earth, and me.

I'm going to do my best to keep this blog periodically updated with photos, stories, and the status of my (decreasing) personal hygiene and (correspondingly increasing) rugged awesomeness. For now I can tell you that current plans include a mixture of hiking and fruit-picking, a good deal of sleeping outdoors, and hopefully a swift and meteoric rise in my physical fitness. High on my to-do list: sky dive, see a whale, and stalk the film crew of The Hobbit. Grander goals? If pressed, I might admit the following: I want to get some experience with agriculture, write about food, practice free-spiritedness, practice spiritedness, and do at least one thing that's so beautiful to me that it doesn't need a reason for anyone else.

Thanks to you all for your continued interest and enthusiasm. I love having people to listen to my stories.

P.S. If you got the allusion in the title of this post, ten points. You're officially as nerdy as I am. For the rest of you more well-adjusted readers: remember what Bilbo used to say. "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

For More Information

Life here in Boulder is busily hurrying along: just five weeks left before I pack up my classically Colorado Subaru and head back to Michigan for the holidays. But in case you were all wondering how I'm carrying on, I thought I would provide you with a (slightly late) half-time show. The highlights so far...

1. I have a new, second job at the Boulder Book Store, only one of the most fabulous independent book stores I have ever set eyes on. You can read a write-up of my experiences at "rep night" in Avalanche magazine here.

2. The GREs are officially over! That is, barring an absolutely disastrous score on the subject test...so cross your fingers. I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I've never spent so much time preparing for such arbitrary (and meaningless) exams. Although I did learn several important facts, including (a) someone should really find smarter writers to work for sparknotes and (b) eighth-grade math is harder than you remember.

3. I have my ticket for New Zealand! I'll be leaving January 27th and returning on May 23. The terrific Tommy Gordon, for those of you who know him, will be accompanying me, and we have big plans to live out of a car and work on farms for five months, interrupted by backpacking trips and visits to friends down under. More on those plans as I actually formulate any.

4. I posted a poem of mine on my writing blog, a little ditty inspired by yoga, the texture of Ethiopian flatbread, and a subtle feeling of self-conscious whiteness. I continue to delight in so many aspects of Boulder life - yoga, vegetarian cuisine, great cafes and independent businesses, and especially the mountains - but I'm also trying to suss out how I feel about the way we Westerners encounter, interact with, and appropriate other cultures, in which area Boulder is a fascinating study of hippie-meets-yuppie-meets-bro-meets-immigrant-meets-me. Anyway, check out the poem if that sort of thing floats your boat (or if you're just a terribly supportive friend).

Ras Kassa's Halloween

Happy Roommates

Our House, Occaisonally Blanketed in Snow

White People Like...Living in Boulder

This update brought to you in part by Stuff White People Like, and, of course, by readers like you. Feel free to keep track of your score as you go along.

Stuff White People Like About Boulder

5. Farmer's Markets: If you've spent more than a half an hour with me in the past couple of months, you've probably heard me evangelize for local produce. I'm currently deep in the foodie thrall of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Marion Nestle and I love to tell anyone who will listen all about it.

15. Yoga: I think it's good for the ego every once in a while to do something for which you have no absolutely natural aptitude. Our first days in yoga class were hysterically humbling. Instructor: "Now cartwheel forward into chatarunga, exhale chatarunga dandasana, inhale into urdhva mukha svansana, meeting in adho mukha svasana, downward dog." Meanwhile my roommate Emma and I are looking around like "which leg do I lunge with for sleeping pigeon?" I absolutely love it. Today I managed to get into my first inversion (crow pose), which I held for all of .2 seconds. Namaste.

20. Being An Expert on YOUR Culture:

Voila! My uniform at my new job serving Ethiopian food at Ras Kassa's restaurant. I'm now officially working at the pretty much the only diverse work place in Boulder (diversity being another thing white people like), reporting to a tiny little Ethiopian woman named Tsehay who calls me either her daughter or "the midget." If ever I'm moving around too quickly to fix a drink or take out an order, someone is guaranteed to grab my hand and say "Lauren...how are you? Come eat" and hand-feed me some flatbread. It's good being the baby.

32. Vegan/Vegetarianism: My lovely new roommate here in Boulder is a vegan, so I've been adding some fun new recipes to my repertoire. Are you interested in making some fabulous vegan bread? I thought you might be...

2 cups nondairy milk mixed with 2 teaspoons white distilled vinegar (this makes "buttermilk")
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 grains (I used my hot cereal with some millet)
2 tablespoons Earth Balance

Oven at 425. Mix the milk and vinegar and let it sit. Mix the dry stuff, add the butter and rub it in until it looks like bread crumbs. Stir in the milk until the dough is nice and sticky, then knead it about 10 times and put it in a lightly greased bread pan or cake pan. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Delicious.

43. Plays: I'm currently volunteering as a house manager/set builder/costumer/extra for the Upstart Crow theatre company. We're about to start work on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

53. Dogs: Here are some of the dogs I've considered adopting in the past couple of days: Cookie, Fruity Pebbles, and Rocky.

81. Graduate School: the 280 dollars I just signed over to ETS will bear me witness on this one. I am now officially in the process of preparing for graduate school. Someday. Probably entering in the fall of 2011. For those of you who haven't heard my plans, I'm thinking about doing a PhD in literature, hopefully focusing on drama and theatrical performance. (See number 43.) And while getting ready for the GREs (especially the wretched subject test) has been a fairly tedious process, I'm actually experiencing a sizable excitement about going back to school. And not just because that means I can finally get a dog. (See number 53.)

115. Promising to Learn a New Language: The Mexicans in the kitchen at Ras Kassa's are teaching me about a word of Spanish a night. I say "muchos gracias" when I bring them my dishes and Rodrigo always responds "This is Spanish, senorita!" Rodrigo's pretty generous.

120. Taking a Year Off: for frequent readers of this blog, this one requires very little explanation. Although they didn't say "taking three to ten years off," so I'm not sure whether that makes me less white or uber white.

128. Camping: I haven't actually made it to Rocky Mountain for a camping trip yet, but I wanted to end my Boulder update with a little gem from Stuff White People Like:

"Ultimately the best way to escape a camping trip with white people is to say that you have allergies. Since white people and their children are allergic to almost everything, they will understand and ask no further questions. You should not say something like 'looking at history, the instances of my people encountering white people in the woods have not worked out very well for us.'"

I think white people also like irony.

That's all for now from Lake Woebegone, folks. I'm living the hip life.

Here Today

If I had a dollar for every time I've told myself "you should really update your blog" this summer, I'd buy you a big fancy dinner, complete with dessert. But these past months have been by far the fastest of my (admittedly pretty short) life, and - let me tell you - my shameful lack of blog activity is not the only evidence of it. Since returning to the States in May, I've been to L.A., Washington D.C., Outerbanks North Carolina, Clemson South Carolina, the Black Hills, Glacier National Park, Seattle, the Oregon Extension, San Fransisco, Sonoma, Boulder, Ann Arbor, and soon Chicago. I've seen just about all my closest friends who live Stateside, both sets of grandparents, and quite a few uncles, aunts, and cousins. I've spent extensive amounts of time with my dogs. And I've watched three of my best friends get married. (Those things are not in order of priority, as much as you might suspect me of caring more about dogs than weddings.)

All of this has been wonderful, unexpected, and also like a long, slow vice-grip to the heart. Glass is half full: I never in a million years dreamed that at 23 I would have such a long list of meaningful relationships and incredible experiences to make me grateful to the world. Much less did I imagine that I would get so many opportunities to make new memories with old friends. I never thought I would have so many amazing people in my life. Glass is half empty: I also never thought that I would reach a point where I live most of my life without seeing any of those people at all. That most of my "life events" would happen with hardly any of my closest friends or my family there to witness them. And that I would see some of the most important people in my life for only a couple of days or a couple of hours a year.

Most of the time I'm a glass-is-half-full person, as most of you probably know. I like to focus on hope (and please don't turn that into a double entendre...that unintentional pun is my least favorite thing about Hope College), because I don't think much comes out of focusing on despair. But at the transition times in my life, I often experience these moments of loss, of really appreciating how many people and places we will have to mourn in the course of our lives. There are really very few emotions I fear as much as I fear loneliness.

And yet - to swing back into the realm of optimism, perhaps accompanied by eye rolling - I haven't yet found a way to appreciate what something/someone/someplace means to me without losing it. As hard as I try not to take my present for granted, it's my past that really teaches me what and whom and how to value. Who really knew what a terrific show Arrested Development was until it got canceled and all other television failed to live up to its standard? And who knew that Dostoevsky was the greatest author to ever live before he died and couldn't write the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov? (That's a little joke for all of you who hate me for ever recommending it to you.)

I usually don't wax quite so philosophical in these posts, but that's the taste I have on my tongue as I near the end of an incredible summer. I am so grateful for my friends and family. I think maybe some people never get to care about in a lifetime as many people as I've cared about in 23 short years. It's wonderful and awful. And as much as I love them, and as far away from me as they are, I've still got to find the energy to be here, now, wherever I am, ready to throw everything I have into whatever/whoever new comes my way. In a few weeks I will move to Boulder and for four months, that will be home - that place and those people will get inside me and change me and make me a new person and after that, Boulder will be mine forever, but I'll also have yet another place to be homesick for. It's a high price to pay, but also a fair one. More than fair, when I consider how good the good times are.

The accelerating rate of decomposition in my grammatical standards signals that the time has come to draw my reflections to a close. I'll leave you with some photo highlights from my summer so far. Thanks for reading and thanks for being one of those people I'm talking about in this post.

Summer



Weddings

Road Trip


Friends