Episode XIII: In Which Caprice Is Blended With Virtuosity

Have a bike now. I rode for an hour on the road adjacent to the ocean, stopped my bike, and jumped off a pier with my snorkle and mask on. Swam for about forty minutes, biked into the capital, picked up lunch, then headed over to the radio station to chill with M. while she threw down some hot tracks on the weekly radio show (it's good even when I'm not on).

Christmas was supposedly a few days ago, but I didn't believe the hype. It was 85 with tropical thunderstorms.

I was talking with M. the other day about being young. You know, when we come back to America we'll be a little older but still feeling very young. One of my favorite memories from this past year was taking a day off from work to drive into West Virginia to go snowboarding--random weekday, no one there, rode for about ten hours.

"There were all brimming over with the exuberance that youth so urgently needs to expend that even when it is unhappy or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of age than to the mood of the day, it can never let pass an opportunity to jump or to slide without interrupting and interspersing even the slowest walk--as Chopin his most melancholy phrase--with graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with virtuosity."
-Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

Episode XII: The Ones and Twos

I had an hour on the island's AM station last Friday. It's the only station on the island. Every Friday, one of my friends or I (we rotate, there's nine of us) play music and pretend that we know how to speak the local language. Here are the songs I played:
"Sweet Home Chicago" Robert Johnson
"Thunder on the Mountain" Bob Dylan
"Don't Wait Too Long" Madeleine Peyroux
"Daddy Sang Bass" Johnny Cash
"Let It Ride" Ryan Adams
"California Stars" Billy Bragg and Wilco
"One After 909" The Beatles (Let It Be... Naked version)
"Idlewild Blue (Don'tchu Worry 'Bout Me)" Outkast
"Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key" Billy Bragg and Wilco
"At the Beach" The Avett Brothers
"Sweet Virginia" The Rolling Stones
"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" Bob Dylan
"Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart" Whiskeytown (Strangers Almanac version)
"2,000 Miles" Coldplay
"Up From Under" The Wallflowers

An hour or so before the show started, I realized the station here is on the internet. I didn't have time to email everone I knew, but I did have enough time to post a message on a board some of my friends and I use. So three of my good friends listened to me do a little radio show on the other side of the world. It was fun.

If you want the link to listen next time I'm minding the ones and twos here (about two or three months from now), email me so I can get it to you. I take requests as long as it's a song or artist I have access to here. It was strange to play "2,000 Miles"--didn't fully hit me until then how far away I am. The song is about how hard it is to miss someone at Christmas time when the two of you are 2,000 miles apart. Excluding the one friend I have also living abroad, I would have to go 5,000 miles to find someone I've known longer than three months.

Here is a picture of me playing Duck Hunt in a good ol' friend's apartment. It is a strange picture to me because I am wearing jeans in it. I think I remember jeans.

Episode XI: I Have Worries to Give to the Sea

Being away is what it is, but I am happy. Worries creep up sometimes, but I find some place to put them. Here are some happy pictures:


sometimes I just get so excited!!


the footbridge back to the deck where I had Thanksgiving dinner and hang out sometimes


me throwing a rock a couple months ago (explanation of the pants and collared shirt on the beach: I had to wear pants and a collared shirt while I was still in training)


with our language teacher a couple months ago

Episode X: If You Still Love Rock and Roll

I ran for my college cross country and track and field teams. After hard workouts some of the team would head to the ice bath (or cold pool, whatever), a big metal tub of water. We would dump huge coolers full of ice into the water and then put our legs in. The first time I stuck my legs in it hurt. After two minutes, I had to look down to be certain needles weren't jutting out the sides of the tank into my legs. However, the next time it didn't hurt as bad. By the third time, my legs just went numb after the first couple minutes.

The two times I have left America to live somewhere else, I have felt a bit of pain. Some might call it a breakdown. It isn't the travel that does it, it's the wrenching away of everything I know.

This last time I left I did so with a gaggle of other Americans. So it wasn't until we all went our seperate ways that the bit of pain hit. Breakdown isn't the right word. I break apart, split open, and everything in me pours out and I don't know anything anymore. Nothing, you know, it's just all gone. A disarming pain strikes, carving out any final scraps of comfort that might be left in me somewhere. Then, (and it always surprises me how quickly this happens) it doesn't hurt anymore.

This is where I stop being able to descibe the experience of travelling. You don't become a different person. Maybe it's that you begin to discover personal qualities you didn't know existed, but that doesn't quite explain it either. I don't know.

Here is what I know: You breakdown, you crack up, you lose your sense of self, but then you gain a new sense of self. And the comforting aspect of this process is that the little qualities you had are still there. I may relate to loneliness differently, I may relate to God differently, I may have a different sense of injustice, maybe I've changed or grown--but I still love rock and roll.

Here is a picture of me and J.M. in the Village this past February.