The Five Month Mark

It's been five months since we've been back in the USA. Twenty gloriously lazy weeks. We've walked and shopped and driven around the state, basking in the seasons, the language, the people, and the ease of being home. I have taken countless baths, slept late, gone to Target, the bookstore, the downtown shops. We have furnished, nested, and rested, sitting back to admire our work. It's entirely cozy, warm and happy, this home we have created.

I have been quietly waiting to act. And now it's time. I have everything. And so I must do something. I must write. dance. study. These are the things I love to do, that make me feel most like myself. I can be lazy and afraid. Both failure and success make me queasy. But I want to be more, find a vocation, be recognized, help, change or improve or impact a life, with my limited skills and ambitions. I need to try. I just have to begin. It's Action-time.

Here I go.

Tourist Season

I like tourists. With their maps and uncynical clothing, they are a collective I sincerely admire. Anthony Bourdain exhorts us in his travel network show tag phrase to be a "traveler" instead of a "tourist". And we all are meant to slap disdainy fives with the lanky snark archbishop about ugly Americans on tourbuses. But I say, fuck that line and fuck Tony Bourdain. Fuck the Mainers who scoff at New Yorkers and fuck New Yorkers who loathe their unsophisticated country cousins.

A tourist arrives with an earnest perspective; she loves her surroundings because they are different and fleeting, experienced for a few hours, days, weeks at most. She attempts to absorb her surroundings, compare what us unknown to sights, sounds and behaviors from the life she knows so well. A tourist doesn't try to be authentic, which I think is ultimately much more admirable. A tourist is an outsider and knows it. A tourist just wants to have fun, go home with a few souvenirs and pictures to prove that she was there.

And that's all I really want from life anyway. I'm a tourist here myself.

Food as Fetish, Cipher

I like eating. So do you. Everyone does it everyday. Which makes it easy to write about, easy to relate to. We may have different ideas about what's good, what's comfort, what's elegant, appropriate or healthy. But we each have associations, traditions, memories, and connotations with and of food. Food is more than nutrition, we all can agree. There's something extra, subtle, beyond the basics. A dietician may talk about building blocks and proteins, even the somewhat dated pyramid, which we all recall from placemats and lunchrooms. But we eat for pleasure rather than fuel, for better or worse. Whether you're a bedridden French writer or a zaftig blue monster, cookies make you think and feel. Memories mingle with very present happiness. You can remember things past and be here now while devouring an Oreo, especially one dunked in milk. Eating is an act of participation in the universe. I eat, therefore I am.

However, food for me is not an art. It has no aura, though it may possess soul.

I am not an expert, authority or professional. I approach my dinner as a bemused dilettante, with a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm. I don't claim any loftier aspirations than to eat well, whatever that means to me at the time. I am as much a pawn of zeitgeist as any woman of my age, eduation, and inclination. Farmer's market, quinoa, artisanal, local, sustainable, etc. I can't help it. I do what is pleasing and what I am told, mostly. Though there's also within me the need to rebel, to eat Kraft mac and cheese when I'm exhorted to never accept anything processed or Monsanto-made. I didn't go to culinary shool. I don't grow a garden. I only eat organic when I remember. I'm ambivalent about bacon and plan to try more brussel sprouts and kale. I am on the perpiphery of food culture. A tourist here, not pretending to know more than I do, but simply professing to know what I like, trying to improve my tastes, techniques and expand my sphere of experience as I am able.

I write about food because I am lazy. I would prefer to write about astrophysics or NGOs or medieval literature. But those subjects might require some research.

Re-Launched

I finally have the distance and perspective to write what I need about the four year sojourn to Mexico. I am so happy to be home, but was riddled with anxiety surrounding the move back. The last year there was just so hellish. And I am finally feeling ready to talk about it all.

I am beginning again. I have a new outlook, a new outline. I think it could be funny as well as inspiring. I hope someone wants to read it. But I have been desperate to write, so it would be really self-sabotaging to dedicate my efforts on another project when there's this.

I hope this inspiration lasts. fingers crossed.

Standard Time

Blue-gray light outside the bay windows at 3:30 in the afternoon. We've reset to standard time and the early darkening could quickly become depressing. We're lighting candles and drinking tea to feel warmth and keep light in the living room.

The secret is, this is exactly what I ardently wanted, during the season of north-formed storms in Yucatan. It was ugly, the threatening ocean rose closer. I felt cast out of civilization and the comforting culture of autumn in America.

There is a cozy consumerism and reassuring collective response to changing weather, shorter days, and impending classic holidays, my birthday included, that I longed for and could not create in the creepy tropical transition of November in Chelem.

I like that the buoy light is radiating warm on the yellow dollhouse table, next the the striped chair, on the Oriental rug, in the apartment I have always wanted. All of my surroundings are exactly as they should be. I am so contented to be home.

As Opposed to Ordinary Time

This is something new. A place to practice. To write every day. Nothing premeditated. But why do it in public? Because I am vain. and lazy. I want praise. But not pressure. And this format has become familiar. It's passive-aggressive. If you have found me, tell me how you got here.

I am here because my typing, paid-blogging job is endlessly dull. I'm bored of the internet at large and need a break from writing marketing not very well disguised as opinion. I want to write but need a purpose, a blue exercise book, a live diary of private thoughts.

I just turned 32. I moved to Portland, Maine four months ago from Mexico. I like being married to my husband. I am much less unahppy than I used to be. I am waiting to see what happens next. I am becoming a teacher of Nia; being a student has been fulfilling. I move and read and observe.

thanks for reading.