Day 2, part 1: Good thing the whole car rental thing worked out after all.

(I’m back!  It has been in my Gmail Tasks to write the second post of my trip, which now occurred a good 2.5 months ago, for about 2 months.  I kept changing the due date, and finally relegated it to “No due date,” and now I’m pretty much only doing this so I can get the satisfaction of clicking the “Done” box.)

We got into Puntarenas late on that first day.  The sun sets at around 6:30 PM during this time of year in Costa Rica, so at around 7PM we found ourselves trundling down a long street punctuated by a few stoplights in the pouring rain.  We had reserved at a hotel called Michael’s Surfside, which I found by pulling up a Google Map of Puntarenas and searching block by block for hotels that had an Internet presence.  Michael’s Surfside has an awesome website that apparently I designed on my AOL homepage in 1995, and would only — “only” — cost us $28 each per night.  (I sarcastically use quotation marks because it turns out that this was far and away the MOST we would pay for lodging on the entire trip).  If you click through to the pictures and patiently scroll down, you’ll see that we stayed in room #3, even though we actually booked room #5 at a cheaper rate.

What can I say about Puntarenas?  A few things — one, upon finding out that we were planning on making it a part of our stay (this includes the guy who rented us the car, a family friend who had been to Costa Rica before, and a made-up third person to lend some credence to this argument) said something along the lines of “Huh, Puntarenas.  That place is really…real.”  I think what “real” translated to in this case “no Chili’s” – it was definitely not really set up for tourists (aside from all the hotels, I suppose) but that wasn’t working against it, in my opinion.  To the contrary, as we wandered down the strip overlooking the beach, we passed dive after dive with Ticos doing karaoke, sitting under straw huts with their friends, laughing, couples holding hands and wandering out onto the dark beach.  I never saw the strip during the daytime, but at night it had the feeling of a local strip unplagued by vendors selling beach towels with “That’s What She Said” printed on them, or Clemson University seniors drinking warm beer out of plastic funnels.  It was nice.  Which was pretty much in stark contrast to what our guidebooks would have had us believe.  Lonely Planet, the book we used almost exclusively and actually informed our trip quite marvelously, managed to somewhat gracefully hide its disdain:

Port cities all over the world have a reputation for polluted waters, seedy environs and slow decay, which is pretty much a good way to sum up Costa Rica’s gateway to the Pacific….While few travelers are keen to spend any more of their time heret han it takes to get on and off the boat, stopping through here is something of a necessary evil en route to greener pastures and bluer seas….There’s no shortage of accommodations in Puntarenas, though like in most port cities the world over, finding a secure place that doesn’t charge by the hour isn’t always an easy proposition. However, we have tried to list places that we would be comfortable bringing our own mother to, so you can sleep easy knowing that there won’t be any unwanted midnight visitors.

I mean…if the litmus test for our choice of lodging was my own mother’s approval, then I would have spent a week at Club Med Costa Rica.  Also, I’m pretty sure that prostitutes don’t just show up at your by-the-hour motel room without you, say, offering to pay them, but I understand the sentiment.  Far more hilarious was the description from Fodor’s, a guidebook we quickly discarded once we realized that it was written for travelers who want to experience anything foreign as little as possible:

Puntarenas could easily be relegated to what you see from your car as you roll through town.  Unless you’re waiting to catch the ferry, there’s really no reason to stay in Puntarenas. Parts of its urban beach look almost like a Dumpster. How this stretch of shoreline got a Blue Flag for cleanliness is a mystery.

Stacked up next to the reality of Puntarenas — unassuming fishing/port town that had PLENTY of nightlife provided you could muddle through a few words of Spanish — these descriptions got me thinking what guidebooks in other countries write about places like Bushwick or the Bronx, or even Hartford.  You can’t really capture the multidimensionality of a place with a few paragraphs aimed at the lowest common denominator of tourist, so I guess if a place even has a dangerous feel or reputation, that’s what it becomes in print.  I also kind of have a perpetual boner for weird, off the beaten path places (both while vacationing and at home), so I think I was more charmed by Puntarenas than maybe it deserved.  Who cares!  I bought a 6 pack of Imperial (Costa Rica’s national beer) for about $7 in a bodega and went back to my hotel to sleep.  It could have been any night in Greenpoint in 2007.

The next morning we rose, showered, dressed, and headed to the ferry.  The whole point of coming through Puntarenas at all was that it was the fastest and best way for us to get to the Nicoya Peninsula, where all the beaches are located.  We got some coffee to go and got into the long line of cars to board the ferry, which would take us to Paquera.  I sat in the car and applied sunscreen while Kate went to get our tickets ($19 total for 2 adults and 1 car).  I sat there and sipped my coffee, feeling mounting excitement as I realized what was happening.  We were in Costa Rica for realsies.  It was 7 AM and about 90 degrees already, but the coffee was strong and delicious.  (I was more impressed with Costa Rican coffee than Kate was, I think.  In general, I seemed to be more impressed with most stuff than she was, though that may be because I have lower standards, or maybe I was just more willing to be impressed by things.)  Careful observation in the car line, and later on the ferry, when we sat on deck and ate meat pastries and Sour Patch Kids, revealed that we were almost universally surrounded by locals, not tourists.  It seemed that the guidebooks were right about Puntarenas being a local-known town that offered access to the beaches via ferry, an easy day trip for a family of Ticos to make on a weekend (we made our crossing on a Sunday).  And the entire operation was run in a very non-American fashion, meaning that there was little to no organization of anything.  The ferry was scheduled to depart at 7:30 AM; in actuality, we sat in the port until 9:20.  The crossing took about an hour and a half, and then another 30 minutes to get the car off the ferry, as the parking lot below deck pretty much turned into a Mario Kart race course, with no one directing traffic or making sure pedestrians didn’t get run down, etc.

waiting to leave

pulling into Paquera

Here was the reason we rented a 4×4: the drive from Paquera to Playa Naranjo.  The entire way was unpaved and we climbed and descended hundreds of feet in succession.  We made a few wrong turns right at the beginning and ended up deep in the jungle rolling noisily past people’s straw thatched houses with colorful laundry strung up on ropes knotted between trees out front.  Even when we righted ourselves and confirmed that we were on the right track (via a very rudimentary, very satisfying exchange of words with a roadside bodega operator: “Con permiso, señor, queremos ir a Playa Naranjo?” and he nodded curtly and pointed in the direction we were already driving…eeeeek! Thank you, high school Spanish!), even then, we were so overwhelmed by the not-Hartford, not-med school, not-anything but vacation right now, that the hills and the 20 mph and crackling, defective stereo could not flag our spirts, not even a little bit.  This was my first experience really USING 4-wheel drive, and it was fucking FUN.

pretty typical

an addition to the screwing of nature

cows on the road. it happens.

We got to Playa Naranjo with no fanfare other than the road becoming paved, and headed towards Nicoya, where we planned to stop for lunch.  But then we got to Nicoya and weren’t really hungry and were doing well on time, so we decided to stop in Santa Cruz instead.  But once we got to Santa Cruz, we were so close to Playa Tamarindo (our goal for the day) that we just kept going.  We stopped at a roadside bodega to buy fresh pineapple and soda (Coca-Cola, made with real sugar, and Coke Light, this country’s version of Diet Coke, which was gross and tasted nothing like the familiar and comforting aspartame I hold so near and dear).

every single "Super" along the road had an Imperial sign. literally every single one.

super!

kate with cokes

According to Google maps, we drove 145 km that day (from Paquera to Tamarindo, not counting the time our car spent on the ferry).  It was an amazing drive, and a really great REAL start to the vacation.  Kate and I have been friends for the better part of a year, but we had never spent any significant time alone together, let alone in a foreign country navigating all sorts of surprises.  It was a trial-by-fire introduction to how we would travel together and so far, so good — she was happy to navigate and play DJ (and did both really well), and I was far happier being a driver than a carsick passenger.  Still, we were definitely ready to get out of that car and do just about anything else…which we did, and which is better left for next time.  I realize this is a kind of boring entry, not more than a list of things we did, but I promise it’s a means to an end.  And that end includes:

• lots and lots and lots of filthy, attractive surfers!
• a RIDICULOUS sunburn!
• a guy actually yelling at me in protest when I put my hair into a ponytail in a disgusting, awesome night club!
• a bar named Suck My Cocktail and the guy from Jersey we met there!
• and much more!

Travel, Day 2

Day 1: The Story of the Girl Who Drove Around Costa Rica Without a License, and other Terrifying Tales of Idiocy

To say that I planned my trip to Costa Rica is a bit of an overstatement.  Yes, we bought our tickets ahead of time…after deciding on Costa Rica for some unknown reason.  Part of it for me was that my boyfriend was in the middle of a 6 week trip through South America with his brother, and I felt competitive.  Mostly, Kate & I knew that we wanted to lay around on a beach somewhere after our boards, but after talking about it for a while, we also realized that we wanted to go somewhere we could jump off cliffs into water (something we actually did not do, looking back).  Enough time has passed since then that I honestly can’t tell you why we chose Costa Rica.  But we did, and we found decent rates on StudentUniverse (actually, it cost me the same amount to fly from NYC to San Jose as it will for me to fly from Hartford to Portland, OR in August), and we figured all the other details would fall into place later.

And they did, kind of.  We rented a car in advance, we booked our first night’s hotel in advance…aaaaand that’s about it.  Up until we got on the plane on June 25, our itinerary was essentially: 1) land at SJO airport 2) meet car rental guy 3) get on the road to Puntarenas, where we had a hotel booked 4) take the ferry to Nicoya Peninsula the next morning 5) ???.  It wasn’t concerning.  Kate and I both took our USMLE Step 1 boards on Friday, June 24, finishing at around 4:30 PM.  By 10 PM we were at my parents’ house.  By 5 AM the next morning we were up and headed to Laguardia.  The night before I’d checked and double checked my bag for efficiency.  I prided myself on how little I’d packed for this trip, a feat for a person who has been known to bring 2 different pairs of boots — leather platform, not leather hiking — on a summer camping trip.  I’d fit everything in Ryan’s badass hiking backpack and felt super awesome about myself.  I decided to bring my iPhone, figuring I could use it as a computer to get WiFi, should we encounter any (more on that later), and to leave my driver’s license at home, since it would just be another thing I could lose.  I was so proud of myself.

I was so goddamn proud of myself and apparently didn’t have the obvious thought that you’re probably having right now, namely, “Wait, but didn’t you just say that, like, literally the ONLY thing you planned in advance was a car rental?”  Yes.  I myself realized this somewhere over North Carolina, which sent me into a silent frenzy, scouring our guidebooks for info on car rental policies (both of them said very clearly in no uncertain terms  that a license from my country of origin would be required, and also that I could have my car confiscated and have myself thrown in Costa Rican prison to rot for months with little assistance from the US consulate).  We landed in Miami and I did various freakout things such as 1) repeatedly tell Kate that I was fine and was not freaking out 2) call my parents and ask them to photograph my license and email me pictures (this turned out to be genius) 3) drink a margarita really quickly 4) start planning a trip around Costa Rica where we took buses everywhere.

Here’s the thing: Kate had her valid driver’s license with her.  Here’s the other thing: Kate doesn’t drive stick, and pretty much only manual transmission 4×4′s are available in Costa Rica (at least the only kind our rental company offered).  We were in a situation where we had a valid driver who didn’t know how to operate the vehicle and a non-valid driver who had been looking forward to driving around dirt roads in 2nd gear for weeks now.  We decided to do the rational and mature thing: completely avoid the topic until the car rental guy brought it up, and then act like total idiot girls once he did.  Even still, there was a brief, horrifying moment where it seemed like they weren’t going to rent to us at all, in which case we really would have been SOL and stranded in San Jose, the dirty and dangerous capital city in which we had booked ZERO time.  Instead, they graciously accepted my credit card and advised me of the speed limits and road rules, and told me that if I should get pulled over for any reason, I should start to cry on the spot (for the record, I am very good at this), tell the cop that I’d had my purse, containing my license, stolen in San Jose, and then offer him a bribe.  This, paired with the fact that I am a dumb, blue-eyed, sunburned gringa, would probably be enough to keep me out of Costa Rican jail.

It never came to that (spoiler alert), but driving was nerve-wracking enough to make us wonder a few times.  The speed limits in Costa Rica are ridiculously low – the road we took from San Jose to Puntarenas that first afternoon/evening had a maximum speed of 60 kph (about 37 miles per hour), and for the most part, people followed it.   Even the major highways were usually 1 lane per direction, with an occasional 2nd lane for merging or exiting.  The most hair-raising thing happened the further we got from the capitol, which is that people walk and ride their bikes, usually without any sort of reflective material, on the highway…in the wrong direction.  It started to rain, and then to pour, and then to torrentially downpour as we were pulling into Puntarenas, where we somehow found our hotel based on a vague Google map recollection in my head.  We parked in a secure lot, which was a huge relief, since at this point I pretty much assumed anything that could go wrong with the car would, and also that literally every person we met, including the woman who changed our money at the airport (enormous mistake, more on that in another post), told us never to leave anything in the car, EVER.  We entered our eccentrically painted room and  collapsed almost as abruptly as I’m ending this post.  It was real.  This was all happening!

Hello, am I still in your feed reader?

So let me dispense with preamble and tell you that I am now a 3rd year medical student (the interesting kind); I took a whirlwind crazy awesome trip to Costa Rica last week and figured it was a great excuse to bully myself back into blogging; my boyfriend of 4.5 years is moving to Los Angeles (3000+ miles away from our current home) in 12 days, so there’s lots of emotion to be dumped every which way; and I’ll probably be something of a single mother for half the summer.  And thus…blogging!

Summer rules!

My friend’s blog! It’s the BEST!

Summer Rules!

This is all wrong.

Not like we didn’t know this was going to happen, but MAN! The best part of the Ramona books was how ordinary and relatable (in the BEST way) she and her family were. She smashed an egg on her forehead – and it was raw! She tried to get her dad to quit smoking (NOSMO KING). You could tell that her family was struggling a little bit financially. Beezus hated being called “pizza face” because she was sensitive about her acne. Something tells me Selena Gomez has never known a world without Proactiv.

Or maybe I’m just old and cranky about the things I love and think should never change.

A really dumb thing I did yesterday

Ha.  This story actually begins a year ago yesterday, and should be subtitled “Why I Should Never Be Allowed to Own Expensive Things.”  As readers may recall, I was robbed about a year ago right after moving to Hartford.  The thief made off with my purse which contained a whole bunch of expensive stuff that was annoying to replace, including my Verizon phone, and so I took the opportunity to make the switch to AT&T/iPhone 3GS.  As most Apple darlings and technology enthusiasts do, I fell in love with my little handheld robot and treated it as I do all my loved ones, which is to say, I abused it until it cracked.  By May of this year the cosmetic damage to my phone had gotten so bad that a giant grey blemish had spread from the bottom right corner of the screen all the way to the top left, obscuring my view of almost everything on the phone.  So, I put my tail between my legs, slunk into the Apple store at the Westfarms Mall in Farmington, CT, and asked how much it would be replace my model (expecting to pay about $200).

Much to my delight, the Genius Bar guy said something along the lines of “Well, this isn’t covered by your warranty, but I see you have Applecare and also I don’t give a shit, so here’s a new phone for free.”  It was a miraculous do-over, one of those things that only happens in annoying stories like this one and never actually to you.  It was great!  To my credit, I really did my best to treat this phone with utmost reverence.  It only fell on the floor once, and that was from the pocket of my hoodie to the floor when I bent over to retrieve a beer from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.  The screen remained gorgeous and unscratched, let alone cracked, I kept it in its bike messenger pocket or special purse pocket at all times, and generally vowed to keep this new, once-in-a-lifetime miracle phone safe.

This fairytale lasted for just under a month, harshly culminating in a tragic accident involving whiskey, a crowded karaoke bar bathroom, and a toilet.  My phone’s little water damage indicators glowed hot pink despite keeping it in rice for 36 hours and diligently waiting for it to dry, and so I brought my deceased second chance to the Apple store (SoHo, this time) and batted my eyelashes to no avail at a very large, very disinterested Apple Genius, who told me that they would be happy to replace my 3GS for $210.48, or I could wait until Thursday, when I’d be eligible to upgrade to the iPhone 4 for the same price.

Well.  I squared my jaw and prepared to be phoneless for 5 days, and in a way, it was glorious.  The first night, a Saturday, I was out in Williamsburg with Ryan and some friends, and at some point when the sun was starting to go down and the bar starting to fill up, I felt a wash of exhilaration and relief.  I was phoneless, cut off from everyone.  No one could reach me.  I was beholden to no one.  I didn’t have to worry about emails from the hospital IRB or my mom, no phone calls from people who wanted to meet up here or there.  I was untethered!  It was awesome!

Okay, so two days later it sucked and I was ready to have my electronic appendage screwed back on.  I realize how ridiculous I sound writing this out, and going 5 days without my iPhone showed me that it just might be good for me to back off on the technology addiction a little bit, but more on that later.  Ryan and I drove out to a party the other night in unfamiliar territory with directions transcribed from Google maps, and at the first hint that we might be a little bit lost (as it turns out, we weren’t) I started having palpitations about not being able to access satellite directions on my phone and worrying that there was nowhere to pull over and ask for directions from a human (and if you know me, you know that I absolutely DETEST asking people for directions/help in general.)  Anyway, my plan was to get up at 6:30AM on Thursday and get to the Westfarms Mall Apple store by 6:45 to get in line for the iPhone.  I figured it would be a little busy, and so I brought the most recent New Yorker and a book.  I did not eat breakfast or make coffee, figuring I’d suffer an hour a little groggy and hungry but it would be worth it in the end because I’d have a phone again.  And not just any phone!

The first sign that I was gravely, gravely mistaken was the parking lot.  I drove up to the parking lot I always use, the one right near the Apple store, which is tucked away in the back and is almost always completely empty.  On this morning  at 6:45AM, it was packed.  There was not a spot in sight.  This obviously should have tipped me off right away, but I actually thought “huh, I guess a lot of people come to work early” and didn’t think too much of it.  The next sign that should have been a giant warning bell were the news vans.  Three local CT stations had vans parked right by the entrance to the mall.  I eased open the double glass doors and the low buzz of voices escalated into a dull roar as I made my way down the hallway.  It was — well, what was it?  It was amazing chaos.  Hundreds of people, maybe even close to a thousand, were haphazardly organized into two lines, one for preorders (more on this in a minute) and one for first-come, first-serveders, like me.  I scanned for the back of the second line, and I watched it trail off down the mall corridor past numerous high end retail clothing stores.  I couldn’t see the back.

Before I go any further, I want to say a couple of things.  First, yes, I absolutely deserve ridicule for the experience I was about to undergo.  Had I known at the outset just how long this whole ordeal was going to take, I never would have stuck around even at this point.  I would have found a way to manage without a phone for a few more days (I had to work Friday and Monday and was sure the weekends would be even worse – though I was probably wrong about that), and not put myself through the ludicrous charade that was to ensue.  But I did anyway, and in that regard, I’m really no better than any of the other 900 iPhone customers that showed up that day.  My second point, however, is the one way in which I can still haughtily turn my nose up at my fellow standers, the one difference I could actually quantify, and that is this: I had no phone.  I’m not saying this justifies my behavior entirely, but at least I wasn’t grumbling and griping through the day about how long this wait was while I had a perfectly good iPhone in my hand.  Ryan has said to me before that he believes New Yorkers will stand in line for anything, be it a bar, brunch, or Broadway tickets.  It’s not just New Yorkers — it’s anyone who believes in the mystique of materialism.

I took a break from writing this post for a while and came back deciding not to give a play-by-play recap of the day, because that’s boring and kind of reductive, as you probably already know how this story goes.  Instead, I’ll try to explain that when I got there at 6:45, at the back of the line, I read this week’s New Yorker cover to cover, and when I poked my head up again, we’d moved a good 50 yards.  The Apple employees came by and urged us to leave, telling us we wouldn’t get phones, but I didn’t buy it; I have a boyfriend who used to work for Apple, and I know the tricks and vagary they truck out in the face of impatient customers.  By 11 AM, 4 hours after I’d arrived, I was three-quarters of the way to the front of the line.  They were taking 2 pre-order customers for every 1 regular line customer, and as the morning rush had died down, more of us were getting through.  I was buoyant.  I’d made the right decision to stay.  I’d be out of here by 2 PM, at the very latest, enough time to meet Ryan and Dash to go to the Connecticut Science Center, as planned.  The Apple employees were great to us.  They came by every 10 minutes or less with baskets of granola bars, candy, chips; carts of coffee and water bottles; at 11 AM they brought us pizza, all free of charge.  They smiled at us, urged us that what we were doing was noble, clapped and cheered every time one of our line made it into the store.

But then, things started to go awry.  The noon hour brought scores of pre-order customers on their lunch breaks, and our line’s progress slowed.  By 3 PM, they were taking 15 pre-order customers to 1 regular line customer, and that continued all the way until 9 PM, when the stored technically was supposed to close.  Apple employees ominously grilled us about how many phones we each wanted and what size, warning the back of line (where I was and remained all day) that we still couldn’t count on phones.  They begged us to put our names on priority lists, or to wait until July 14 when we could have iPhones shipped to our houses.  People who had brought their children (WHY WOULD YOU BRING YOUR CHILDREN) started to grow irritated as their kids realized this was not going to be over even remotely soon.  It was nearing 1 PM and we hadn’t moved.  I wanted to leave — but there were only 80 people ahead of me!  As soon as the lunch rush was over, we’d be moving again in no time, and I’d be out of there by 4 PM, 5 at the very latest, no problem.

I think you probably know how this story ends: I limped out of the Westfarms Mall, clutching my 16GB iPhone 4, at 10:33 PM, 16 hours after I’d optimistically burst through those same glass doors.  At some point, I got to the place in line where I told myself that I had been waiting this long, and I was already this close, that I would not go home until they told me there were no phones left.  I had made friends — “friends” — with the people surrounding me in line:  a college student, Steve, with a heavy Boston accent who was adding a line to his existing iPhone account in order to accommodate the new model; Mandy, an R.A. at a local college who, as I learned, had lupus and whose mom came by at around 7 PM with Burger King chicken nuggets for all of us (she and Steve immediately became Facebook friends, and she confided to me when he left the line to go have a cigarette outside, that she thought it would be really romantic to tell a story about meeting her future boyfriend in line for the new iPhone.)  There was a Chinese woman — I never learned her name — who was in line to buy the new phone not for herself but for her brother in China, for $600, to ship overseas, because that was her duty as an older sister (she was 44 and had a family and children of her own).  There was Bangs (not her real name) who got out of line every 15 minutes to complain to the concierge that she’d been there for 12+ hours (as if the rest of us hadn’t!); there was another girl who’d gotten in line at 6:45 with me and had to leave at 4:15 (still hours from when we’d get phones) because she was being honored by the city of Hartford for being the first college graduate from her family (a double major in sociology and women’s studies, she was planning on getting her master’s in social work and hoping to work for the the same shelter that several of her relatives had spent years in).  And me – I talked to these perfect strangers about my life as a medical student, as a stepmother.  I felt strangely comfortable sharing details about my life, knowing that they would go no further than this stagnant line.  We joked that we were family now, that we’d reunite with t-shirts for the iPhone 5 release.  We took a picture at the end, weary-eyed yet exhilarated, smiles of pure joy and genuine exhaustion.

Was it worth it?  Holding the iPhone, which is absolutely sleek and gorgeous, delicate and pristine, I have to say — no, it was not worth it.  This piece of metal and glass was not worth the 16 hours of my life I gave up, not worth missing out on an afternoon with Dash and Ryan, not worth exacerbating my chronic back pain and constipating my system with meals of Sunchips and Butterfingers.  Was it worth the experience, the random connections forged during the wait? Perhaps — I’m always a sucker for the anthropology of a situation, and this was no different.  Getting to perform myself, and experience other people’s performances, for an entire day and part of a night, was admittedly a great deal of fun; not something I’d want to do again, and not something I’m necessarily glad I’ve done, but something that I have been thinking about all day today, for better or for worse.  (Relatedly, I took Dash to the mall today to buy him some new sandals, and it was almost traumatic walking the corridor where I’d stood the day before.  I think I’ll be happy not to set foot in a mall for a long, long time.)

Most notably, to me, anyway, is this: I have avoided my iPhone today.  I have not fawned over it the same way that I did my 3GS when I first got it. I have touched it gingerly, nervously, worried that if any harm befalls it (and let’s be honest, it eventually will) all my adventuring will have been for nothing.  I have learned a lesson that I did not intend to learn, certainly not when I showed up to the store yesterday at 7 AM, and which I ardently fought at 8PM when I was within 20 people of the getting this grail in my hands.  I believe the exhilaration of glorious freedom that came with being forced to part with my tether to the world has morphed — firmly, tellingly — into a sort of cautious distance from that same link.  I stood there, I waited, and it was my choice.  But in the end, it was more than time that I parted with in exchange.

The Rainstorm

One year ago today, Ryan and I moved to Hartford.  This year went by so quickly and so achingly slowly at the same time – the old cliche.  I wrote this thing for school, back in April, and it seems appropriate to put it here, today:

April was holding back.  Aside from a teasing 3 days of mid-70 degree weather around the month’s ides, it had been a cold and cloudy month.  I kept the tops of my feet covered, eyed my spring coat resignedly and my winter coat suspiciously – 6 days after the mini heat wave I had to pull my pepper and tomato sprouts inside on account of a frost warning.  It was Connecticut April, ranging in temperament from fickle to schizophrenic, a month where three days of bathing suit temperatures punctuated by an Earth Day blizzard wouldn’t be met with more than a sigh, eye roll, and some guaranteed morning weather banter.

But suddenly, on the last day of April, the hesitation was lost, and a new month was ushered in on the coattails of the most beautiful days of 2010.  Sunny, breezy, alive – this past weekend, everyone, it seems, abandoned their books and turned their faces to the sun, remembering for a moment what it was like to be unencumbered by the responsibilities of perpetual cramming even for a few hours.  May’s first Monday dawned, and with it thick, pungent rain, the kind of spring rain that isn’t accompanied by much of a temperature drop but has such a distinct smell, that of dirt and new leaves and hot cement, the kind of smell that has inserted itself into snapshots of your life in the past, that yanks memories from dusty corners of your mind so violently that you get a visceral shock, so fast that you’re flooded with details before it even begins to sting.

June was hard.  By 9pm on June 8, 2009, we sat in a daze on our new third floor porch, watching fireflies lazily blink on and off in the still darkness.  The day had begun in the lower east side of Manhattan, where we’d put 7 years worth of his belongings into the truck, later joined in southern Connecticut by the sparse possessions I’d clung to over my many and various moves over the same interval.  Up and down stairs, eleventh hour abandonment of a couch that just was not going to make it through our comically proportioned front entrance, clusters of weary furniture in the center of a new, strange living room – all these stresses started to evaporate as we sat on the porch with gin and tonics in paper cups, and a soothing, quiet rain began to fall.

It rained for 25 days straight after that.  It rained so hard and so constantly that at first it was a joke, an excuse to grumble at how much we hated central Connecticut, and a motivator to put together our apartment, pick out paint colors, build shelves, hang pictures, devise long-term schemes.  Then it kept raining so hard that we furrowed our brows in between good-natured laughter, that leaks started to spring up at the corners of windows, then in the center of the kitchen, then from behind the tiling in the bathroom.  And then it kept raining so hard that all the water started to overflow from our eyes, that the two sunflowers (my favorite flower) my mom had given me for my birthday dropped their faces from the sky as if they had given up hope.  It was still raining.  I couldn’t ride my bike.  He couldn’t find work.  School seemed so exciting and so distant – I forced myself to enjoy the fantasy in small spurts, like squirreling away Easter candy so it would last until summer’s advent.

The rain eventually stopped, though I don’t remember that date, or how I felt, or what that smell was like.  The imprint instead, as I recalled forcefully, breathtakingly this afternoon as I stepped out of my apartment into a hallway permeated by the smell of recent rainfall and lingering humidity, was a feeling of resilience slowly eroded by the unrelenting stream of water, a metaphor annoying paired with the reality of those early summer weeks.  Inhaling deeply as I stood on my landing, I felt combinations of emotions I’d really not felt since those first weird, difficult days: the exhilaration of independence and tangible progress, tempered by an environment over which I had no control.  I remembered – vividly, inexplicably – my old sunflowers: they never recovered from those weeks of rain, never managed to straighten their stalks again, until slowly, agonizingly, single yellow petals fell one after another, like a perfectly executed maudlin cliché.

The opening act of medical school was full of nervous excitement, the promise of stimulating challenges, the very beginnings of a medical education beginning to unfold, stretched toward the warm, welcoming sun.  The promises of guidance: over and over we heard the analogy of a medical curriculum as a fire hose, where only small sips were prudent.  We were encouraged to maintain balance, balance, balance, an aphorism I have repeated so many times to myself and others that I don’t even know what it means anymore.  I have spent a year thinking about this metaphor, and I can finally say with confidence that it is wrong, it is impossible.  Medical school is not a fire hose; it is not a discrete stream at which you can stand and observe and choose to lean in and delicately sip.  Medical school is not an extrinsic water source, one which you can avoid, one which you can passively observe, one which you can stand apart from.

No, medical school is a downpour, a torrential onslaught, water coming from so far up in the sky that you can’t possibly expect to dart between the hard, fast drops, that you can’t stem the tide, that you can’t step aside and choose how much of your face to get wet while still expecting to gain a true understanding of all of this water.  You can shelter yourself, all right, you can seal yourself away from the water, put out collecting buckets, venture out every once in a while hoping not to get drenched.  You can stay dry, you can stay warm, but this is a passive approach to your medical education.  You can sip from buckets of motionless water and absorb the functional components, take in the material, and develop a working knowledge.  But if you do it this way, I don’t think you can really understand what it is you’re doing.

Instead, you have to close your eyes and step into that rainstorm.  Feel the shock as your clothes are instantly soaked through, creating a second skin.  Understand that you’re going to be wet for a long, long time; understand that at times you’re going to be really cold, that at times you’re going to wish you could just shut yourself back up inside where it’s warm and dry and where you know the boundaries of your four walls.  Understand that sometimes you are going to retreat back into that shelter, but after a while leaks will spring through those walls; they always do.  Understand that it will be very hard, impossible even, to get some people to come out into the rain with you.  They will beg you to come in.  They will help you find pots and pans and stick under the leaks, insist that this is enough for now.  They will comment on your drooping petals, they will express concern at the fact that you are standing outside in the pouring rain with your eyes closed, shoulders hunched, silent.  Understand that you are choosing to put a window between you and those people, and sometimes that window gets so streaked with streaming water that it will be hard for them to see out, and you to see in (if you are even looking).  Understand that sometimes, when the rain lets up a little, there might not be everyone looking back out at you.  Understand that sometimes balance means giving something up on both sides of that window.  Understand that sometimes you will want to turn your face up to the rain and scream and cry, and that it’s okay to do that, even if just to hear the sound of your own voice pushing back against the relentless pitter-patting-slap of the rain against every surface.  Understand all this, and then open your eyes.

I don’t know exactly when I opened mine, but I do know what I saw once I did.  Dry, weak yellow petals pooled at my feet: the blog I used to diligently write, weekend trips to New York City, lazy Saturday mornings with nothing better to do than fill with crossword puzzles, a weekly schedule of TV shows I used to watch (no one here knows how much I love TV!), and the outer shell of a relationship, an almost unrecognizable chrysalis that I’d been taking for granted for so long.  A house, battered by the torrents of water, roof full of holes, blurring the lines between my school life and the rest of my life.  My posture:  unconfident, stooped, bearing the weights of my world, some real and some imagined, exaggerated.  My world, my life, me – I’m shocked at how much I’ve changed over the past year, and for so long it’s been so easy to characterize all that change as for the worse.

But looking around, using all my senses, I’ve noticed other things, much more promising, exciting things.  The feel of the rain is so grating, offensive at times, that it was easy for me to forget that I love the water, welcome the rain.  That rich, verdant smell that I love so much is all around me, all the time; the strong, constant sound is a comfort.  The taste of it, unfiltered, straight from the sky, straight from the source – there’s so much for me, a vessel perpetually searching to be filled, to absorb and contain; that is to say, even through all the stress and hardship, I’ve never once stopped loving the material or regretted my decision to come to medical school.  After a month of literal rain at the beginning of the summer, I was prepared for the briefer thundershowers in the following year; I knew to put out the Tupperware before leaving for school in the morning so I wouldn’t have a pool of dirty water on the kitchen floor, the result of hours of leaks into an empty house.  In the same way, I now know what it feels like to be constantly assaulted with material to learn and memorize; I know where to put collecting pots and where to let the water just run off undisturbed.

I can see more clearly now, even through the rain.  Once I stopped gazing at my feet, focusing my eyes and energy downward, there was so much to see.  Quiet, tentative friendships, fostered by the same rain that beats us down, grew and blossomed, stuck their roots straight downward and took hold.  I came to medical school truly thinking I had found all my closest friends in undergrad and in my post-graduate years in New York, and while I still think that’s largely true, I’ve been unexpectedly floored by at least a handful of friendships I’ve made here, and in one case, I’ve found a friend without whom I truly would not be as happy as if I’d never met her.  My relationship has changed.  My relationship is utterly different from a year ago when we moved to Hartford.  My relationship is a creature I don’t recognize, but it is a creature with a firm, robust heartbeat, a creature that can weather literally anything from here on out, even if that weather won’t be this particular rainstorm.

All the positive outlook that’s come out of this suffering and difficult growth does not overshadow the fact that I have dropped so many petals this year.  My whole adult life I’ve been excited by the idea of change, embraced opportunities to remake myself, devote my energy to a new pursuit (a relationship, a career, a geographical location).  Medical school has challenged me to put my money where my mouth is in this regard, stripping away so much of what I considered my identity that at times I’ve felt completely unhinged.  I have been a sunflower for so long, been so comfortable with the way my inward perceptions of self matched my outward projections of personality, capability, and levels of vulnerability, that I forgot the most important thing about becoming a doctor, and that is that if I expect my patients to listen and learn, then I have to be willing – and learn how – to do that myself.  I’m scared, I’m scared – all I can see right now is what I’m losing and what I’m giving up, how quickly I’m changing and how quickly I must continue to adapt because I’m still so very far from maturity.  But I’m starting to realize that the best pieces necessary to create this version of me aren’t the ones that are being lost.  They’re the ones that are waiting just below the surface, silent and strong, waiting to push through, up and out into the nourishing rain.

Hello again.

Yeah, so I started medical school on August 20, and my last blog post was on August 20.  Hmmm.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  To me, they’re nothing more than ways of creating stress by imposing artificial milestones or time frames.  Someone I know who went through AA told me that they’re actually encouraged not to pick big, important days like New Year’s Day or Christmas Day or whatever as a quit date for drinking or smoking cigarettes because that adds a lot more pressure to the event of quitting, like you’re going to let down an entire cadre of people, or the next time New Year’s rolls around, if you’ve relapsed, it’s very easy to feel exponentially bad about it, or hang on to your presumed failure  because it’s already an established important day.  Anyway, this is a long-winded, defensive way of saying that I do not resolve to write on this blog again, but that it’s been a really, really hard semester for me, and in a lot of ways I’ve been unhappy, and I think at least part of that unhappiness has stemmed from me not giving myself any space for creative muckery, in forms written or otherwise.  So, here’s to the pursuit of happiness!  Excuse me, happyness.  Haplynest.

I’ve devoured issues of the New Yorker this break, something I haven’t done also since August 20 (see above, reasons for misery) and have really, really enjoyed reading things that don’t relate to which holes in the skull the cranial nerves come out of.  Atul Gawande wrote a really great article comparing the health care debacle to the organized farming debacle of the early 1900s (you know, the famous farming debacle!).  There’s been a lot of space devoted to how horrible this past decade has been as well.  And I hadn’t really stopped to think about it, but it’s really true.  It’s hard to see that you’re in a deepening shithole when you’re actually in the shithole, but when you stop to actually consider for a second, MAN.  There’s this quote from Rebecca Mead’s “The Talk of the Town” article entited “The decade with no name”:

Given all that has emerged in the past ten years, the failure to invent a satisfactory name for the period seems overdetermined—a reflection of our sense that the so-called aughts were not all they ought to have been, and were so much less than they promised to be. With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/04/100104taco_talk_mead#ixzz0bIiZukQj

Wow, thanks, New Yorker, for automatically putting that link in there.  The robots always know.

We’re obsessed with naming and quantifying.  All the radio stations both here and in Olympia and Portland where I was for Christmas are playing the top 1000 songs of the decade.  VH1 has some permutation of their packaged nostalgia where we’re counting down the most outrageous things that happened this decade, or the Top 100 Stupidest Things Celebrities Ever Said since 2001.  It’s like we need to constantly remind ourselves that these things happened in order to fully process that passage of time.  Or maybe it’s some attempt at finding something for our collective cultural consciousness (CCC) to rally around, so we don’t feel quite so alone (a.k.a. the basis of all religion).  Or that these moments or artificial landmarks in the past 10 years are also ways into our own complex memories, so that when we hear, for example, Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” we’re reminded of what we were doing the first time we heard that song, like an awesome car trip, or first kiss, or getting high and eating an entire box of clementines, or in my case, doing a photoshoot in college while wearing a crazy dress screen-printed with Salvador Dali paintings.  I hate year-end (or decade-end) lists because they seem weird and arbitrary to me, and also because the idea of making them stresses me out, but I’m always impressed by people who commit to making them.  Why this need to list, quantify, and obsessively remember, even when we want to forget (i.e. Top 10 Lists of Worst Things Ever)?  I’ll get back to you in January – that’s when I start learning about braaaaaains.

I do, however, have a reason for living in 2010, at least until the spring:

So hopefully I’ll be around here more often, if for nothing else than my own sanity.  No resolutions, though.  Happy new year!

Vel vien (one more)

Thanks for the comments and messages about the last song.  In Latvian we say “Liels paldies!” which means “Big thank you!”  Can you tell I love singing it?

Here’s one more that I recorded last night, entitled “It Ka Briedis.”  Another one from my childhood, another one that I wish I had the sheet music to so I could add the tenor part.

Some early evening Latvian singing

Recently, spurred by increased curiosity at what my crazy awesome Macbook can actually do, as well as severe Maza Nometne nostalgia and missing my annual trip to Alksnitisville, I recorded myself singing one of my favorite old Latvian songs in two-part harmony.  It’s not very clean in terms of recording, as I only did a single take on each track, but I think you get the general idea.  The song is entitled “Mans Patverums.” Enjoy!