Mind Dump

Mind dump, because I’m too spastic to type a real entry today.

• The time/season-disorientation I expected has finally hit. It’s almost Halloween, and my mind is still stuck in June. Very strange.
• Met & chatted with a random Obruni in Cape Coast on Saturday; he’s been overlanding all over West Africa since June. Definitely fueled my ever-changing COS-trip dreams.
• I made biscuits and gravy for breakfast today - with no fridge, no milk, no oven. I am awesome.
• On an unrelated note (really! My food is safe, my water yesterday wasn’t), it’s been an “ORS-tastic” day. Fun.
• It’s amazing how such days have become just another part of living in Africa.
• I’m trying to dry limes, and I think it’s working. YAY!
• I’ve felt very MacGuyver this week: added a spring and latch to my screen door, built a drying rack, and made a bunch of new candleholders with nails and tomato paste tins. All materials cannibalised from rubbish heaps on campus. My housemate is in awe of my hammer+leatherman+recycling skills. I’m changing the world one trash pile at a time!
• My cat eats too much sugar. This is bad for her teeth and my sanity. I can has hyperactivity?!
• Every line of poetry, every awestruck utterance, every attempt at descriptive language, that has ever been meant to describe a starry sky: was written with last night’s sky in mind. It was awesome in the best sense of the word.
• Speaking of hyperactive cats: there’s a gecko on my wall right now, and Yosh is trying to attack it.
• I walked out of every class this week either immensely happy with the world, or completely crushed and disappointed. Very Six Flags.
• More on class drama in a future post. I really do have about 3 half-written entries, so I’m not completely full of you-know-what.
• Photos uploading as I type this - busy day at Cape yesterday.
• I. Love. Maps.
• Long hikes. I’ve been obsessing on them for a while. Originally considered either the LT or possibly the AT as viable post-Ghana options. Now I’m thinking a little more exotic. Too early to plan, you say? Never!
• Obviously, I’ve been doing a lot of travel-dreaming this week.

Really, I’m just killing time until bureaucratic enigmas solve themselves

For the past few weeks I have, semi-successfully, combated the drudgery of existing in a 9-5 window with weekend (or longer) escapes. This last weekend I turned a trail on Mt. Cheaha into an overnight trip. It was my sister’s birthday, and for some reason she decided she wanted to go hiking too. And then my other sister decided the same. I’m still not sure why: this is not exactly within their realm of comfort & familiarity.

It was an… interesting… trip.

The drive was long…

…but the weather was perfect.

Mystical abilities to remain always fashionable extended even to the wilderness.

It was cold; we experimented with a new recipe. There was much rejoicing.

…and ultimately, I think they had a good time, but intuition led me to believe they were happy to make it out of the woods. Call it a hunch.

I thought about deleting that novel of a paragraph, but changed my mind (and exactly how long can I make this title, anyway?)

I’ve been mopey lately, and I’ve finally decided it’s due to a general feeling of unfulfillment. Tonight I went shopping. (Don’t worry, there’s a connecting thread*.) I don’t go shopping very often, and as a general rule try to avoid the experience all together. But for the past few weeks I’ve been desperately missing my Nalgene, which I accidentally abandoned in my favorite fried-rice hole-in-the-wall sometime in June; yes, that is indeed an item one can “desperately miss”. So tonight I finally bought one, and on the way home started thinking.

Four (holy crap, four?!) months ago, I was wrapping up one season and setting out on another - and was dragging through the same blahs. I was tired of work and class being my only outward evidence of worth, and was finding precious little comfort in the pair. It’s a new season, a new semester, a new month - and the routine of life has dumped me in the same place again. School, Work, Family, Life, all proper nouns which have little significance when I remove myself from their influence, yet which I all too easily allow to become my defining factors. I feel temporary. Regardless of where I live, I live out of a trunk, and allow myself satisfaction through lack of permanence. I miss … something… and for a long time, since the last time around, I’ve thought that something was China.

A few months ago, not long after I got there, I went on a hike. It was not my first hike of the trip, nowhere near my last, and far from the longest. It was really not that strenuous at all, yet my lack of concern (focus, preparation, experience) made it by far the most difficult. We started out on a bus, which in that part of the world means much less than it does here. We fishtailed up mountains for a few hours, before hopping out on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, to climb to a vaguely-located village. We found the village rather empty, and my partner decided to hike through the valley, to the next mountain, where there was another village - one we’d visited earlier in the week. It wasn’t that far at all, and a through-hike was better than the up-down-around alternative. But I hadn’t thought ahead. I’d had no breakfast, brought no food, and only one *Nalgene of water. I wasn’t used to the altitude, I hadn’t begun to actually work at this, and I was still woefully out of shape. What should have been a few hours work, four at most, became a six hour slog which brought us barely into the rice fields of the next village. Along the way I managed to dump myself into a creek not once, but three times. We spent a few hours at the village, refilled water bottles, and made the hour-and-change hike up to the Da Lu, big road, where we hitched our way back to town. It was dark when we made it back, and we still had a dinner appointment to make. I was tired, frustrated, and all I wanted was a shower and sleep - yet cultural obligation demanded I sit in a humid, boiling, hotpot restaurant for the next two hours. I get home eventually, where, six flights up, I crash headfirst on the couch. I discover exactly what those creek encounters got me, and my still-damp shoes get tossed to the balcony. All the windows are open, the two balcony doors slid to their widest. The electricity is off, meaning no hot water, but that doesn’t matter. At that moment, as China’s “Windy City” earns its name in grand style, I let the breeze blow the day out of my head. I am aching, I am sore, I am thirsty still. I am dirty and in need of a shower, my feet crack and bleed. I am frustrated at the lack of progress during the day, and the seemingly wasted time. Yet, I slowly realize, I am content. I feel as if the blisters have been earned, and as I remember the encounters of the day - the farmer in his rice field who stopped to help us through to the trail (was he more concerned for us or his field, I wonder?), the traditionally-dressed ladies stopped for lunch under the trees, and the endless glasses of tea at dinner - the day seems long. Unwasted. Fulfilled.

Confession: I don’t miss China. I mean, well, of course I miss China, but it’s a longing for no more or less than the sum total of people, places, and experiences “China” denotes. What I miss most is something that could, in theory, be found here, yet I’m not even sure what it is. What I am sure of is that, whatever that nameless elusive was, I went half-way around the world to find it. I have no doubt I’ll find it again… I just wish I knew what I was looking for now.