I'm moving!

One week from today I will be boarding a plane to Mexico! I will go from merely a blogger, to a travel blogger and as such I have found a new site for my blog that I feel is a bit more appropriate. I sincerely hope that you will come with me!

From now on you can find me here: http://vagabunda.posterous.com

I've named it Vagabundeando. It’s Spanish for what essentially translates to “vagabonding” or wandering. I’ll be trying to update this as often as possible and you’ll be able to find journal entries, full sized photos, audio clips and videos from the trip.

Please please please, come along with me!

Wisco to Chicago to Miami

Hello again! There is a significant gap in postings but we're going to just move past that. Great!

Wisconsin was absolutely gorgeous and Quinn's family was incredibly nice to me. When we got there it was still kinda chilly and rainy and not so fun, but by the time we left it was hot and humid and absolutely everything was green and gorgeous.

While we were there one of our projects was to build Quinn's mom a couple raised beds for vegetable gardening. We had never done this before but we figured it out alright.

Well, Quinn figured it out. I helped with the fence design and shoveling dirt and handing over tools. There are a couple of things we would do differently but overall they seem to do the job superbly.
It's pretty amazing how much everything grew in just a month and a half!

Instead of just going straight from Wisconsin to Miami, we decided to fly via Chicago and hang out for a couple days. We stayed with friends who showed us a fantastic time and frankly, spoiled us rotten.



I encourage you to click the photo above to see the full image as well as numerous others on my Flickr page.
It turns out Chicago has some amazing restaurants (no really, AMAZING) and they're all into the local food movement trend which made the whole experience even better.

XXV

A couple days ago I looked at my phone and was caught by surprise at the date. May 20th. My birthday would be coming in 4 days. I think this may be the only time in my life that I was caught off guard by my own birthday. So many things have been happening.

In two days I will be 25. Twenty Five. One quarter of a century. XXV.

And I have no plans. Which! I'm not terribly upset about, but normally I am the kind of person who throws a big party. Last year two of my other friends shared the same birthday with me so the three of us had a big party. We ate food and drank and then we played capture the flag in the street with the added twist of water balloons. My team won!

It was a good time had by all!

This year will most definitely be different. Perhaps that is a good thing.

I have a very strange (read: boring) form of synesthesia in which I assign personalities to numbers. I have always done this, and never realized until a couple years ago that nobody else does and furthermore, there is a term for this odd thing I do.

The number 2 has always had a sheepish personality. A meek man, shy and complacent. The number 5 has always been named "Rita" and had a boisterous, loud, slightly obnoxious personality. She also tends to look down her belly at just about every other number except for 8 and 9 (nine because he's royalty and eight because he's rich and just as loud and boisterous as her). Yes I know I'm very strange. The two numbers together is kinda like the old Jack Sprat rhyme, "Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, so betwixt the two of them they licked the platter clean".
So perhaps the age of a 25 is the age of finding balance?
Maybe this is the year where the extremes of my personality even out and congeal into a nice even pie?
My personal favorite is pumpkin. Not too sweet, with just a bit of spice. Mmmm...

Goodbye L.A., Hello WI!

Aaannnd.... We’re gone!
I’ve sold off all my stuff except for that which meant more than money to me and said my goodbyes to Los Angeles. It’s really happening!

I had many good times in Los Angeles and a ton of personal growth. However, there is something I don’t like about L.A. that I can’t quite put my finger on. I think it may have something to do with the way I see people change after moving here. We all change, but I don’t want to change in the way that I see people change in L.A. so I think it’s best that I leave this city of angels behind me. I don’t know yet if I’ll miss Los Angeles, but I will look back on the memories fondly for the most part and I’ll always appreciate the lessons I learned there and the growth I went through.

Quinn, Lucy and I bored a plane on May 7th and rode it out to Milwaukee, Wisconsin!
Quinn’s parents live about an hour outside of Milwaukee which I consider to be the country, but apparently they do not. Tomato/tomato, I suppose!

I think if you combined all the grass that Lucy has ever seen in her entire life it would still fall short of all the grass she is seeing now. She’s quickly become obsessed with gophers and squirrels. I think she’s having trouble understanding how the gophers keep disappearing by the time she gets to them.


Spring in Wisconsin is not quite as warm as I would have hoped but it’s certainly pretty.

From now until July 1st we’ll be planning the details of the initial leg of our trip, emailing farms, finalizing this and that, etc. We’ve only been here a week but we’ve already got Mexico and Belize all figured out.

Hopefully I’ll have some other stuff to talk about in the next two months! Oh, small town livin’!

There are times in your life when suddenly you look around and you think to yourself, "how the hell did I end up here?". Not in any negative way, just in a very realistic, self-investigative kind of way. Perhaps this is what an out of body experience feels like. My angst ridden 13 year old self has popped her head in from the past and is amazed at how far from her reality this future woman is.

Our lives take us down so many roads, and seemingly inconsequential decisions make up our paths until one day you're riding down Sunset boulevard in fucking Los Angeles, thinking to yourself, "how the hell did I end up here? this is my life? what the fuck is going on?" Like that time you somehow ended up at the Chateau Marmont on Halloween watching Lindsey Lohan dance around drunkenly.

I'm pretty sure that's what this song is all about:



Oh, that David Byrne is a nutty character.

I wrote the first part of this entry when I got home from Hollywood Billiards, still drunk (much editing was needed) after celebrating Quinn's 27th birthday for the 4th night in a row (I love birthdays and firmly believe in birthday weeks).

I can trace my path up to this point in my life all the way back to so many tiny thoughtless "yes!(s)".
When I said "yes" to running off to a hostel in the forest and living in treehouses when I was 18. When I said "yes" to a stranger who asked me if I wanted to go to Ireland. When I said "yes" to living with a friend in Boston. When I said "yes" to a simple movie with a girl I didn't know. When I said "yes" to going to a party that a friend of said girl later invited me to. When I said "yes" to a date with hot man at said party. When I said "yes" to moving across the country with someone I hardly knew. When I said "yes" to walking to Trader Joes with the neighbor guy named Quinn. When I said "yes" to a horrible job that ended up leaving me with a good amount of money and great experience.

When you're young life seems like such a great big span of endlessness stretching out forever. It's as though you'll always be the way you are and have the life you have now. I'm still in this stage in my life but I'm far enough along now to sense that time is moving faster and age is coming on quicker. What my life will look like at 80 is still a blackness and 45 is only a fuzzy image not unlike a Monet painting. Everything between two years from now and 45 is also blackness with an occasional flicker of an image.

And now here we are, getting ready to leap into the adventure of a lifetime. I wouldn't be able to do this without Quinn. Having someone equally crazy enough to sell all their possessions and risk conjuring Malaria just to work on a farm in third world countries, has somehow made it less of a crazy idea.

So Happy Birthday Quinn. I'm exceptionally happy that you exist and are in my life.

Piiiiiiiillllllooow Fiiiiiiight!

Yesterday was International Pillow Fight Day! And it was Epic!



Thousands of people from the L.A. area descended upon Pershing Square to participate in an epic battle of the pillows. It didn't take long for the feathers to fly and by the end the grass was nearly invisible.

The photos are mine but the video was randomly found on youtube.

Mating Season

It's Spring!

In honor of mating season, I would like to rant at you about a trend in our society that I've noticed and have been thinking a lot about. I haven't come up with a catchy term for it so maybe after you read this you can toss some ideas at me.

I've noticed a role reversal in the male/female mating ritual. In nearly every other species men are the ones who have to win over women. Males perform the dance, males flash their pretty colors, males spar over the females.

One of my favorite videos depicting this is from the BBC's Planet Earth. check it out:

If you're super impatient skip to 2:15 to see the best part.

So how did it come to be that women and girls are now poking and prodding and painting and tucking and pinching and sucking and cutting and folding and lasering and chemical peeling and anti-wrinkling and implanting and generally performing all kinds of modifications and/or preening to get the attention of men?
Ladies, where did we go wrong? When did we allow this shift to happen?
Go ahead and google the words "college girl". Now click on images and see what comes up.


Fake hair, fake skin tone, tons of make up, and posed in a sexual stance. A mating dance. These girls are today's human equivalent of that Bird of Paradise in the video above.


I feel like this image says it all.

There's a bar in West Hollywood (one of the few straight bars) called Crown Bar. I went there once with a friend and was dismayed and appalled at what I saw. Not only were the gender roles reversed, but the women were acting like such childish animals I could hardly believe it. They were talking loudly and giggling even louder. They were getting hammered, or at least pretending to get hammered and dancing around like morons, all the while glancing around the room to see which guy was noticing them. They're clothing hardly covered they're bits and pieces and they were slathered with makeup and fake nails and fake hair. And the worst part was that they all looked the same! All these women were trying to out-do each other with the same technique and the men stood around and drooled and bought the women drinks.

I think what I'm trying to say here, the reason I'm writing this, is because all of this makes me sad. I see so many woman playing this game, doing this mating dance, and it only serves to make us all look shallow.

Ladies, let's let the men go back to trying to impress us, shall we? After all, there are more of them than us so it serves that they should be fighting for our attention and not the other way around.

Oh and the "aren't I so adorably clueless?" technique is most definitely not cute. Cut it out.

Dogs

A friend of mine went out of town this weekend and I watched her dog.
When Lucy and Lily weren't playing loudly they slept so cutely.




Lily was fascinated by the 4th floor view.








The sound of the camera startled her awake.

Shipping Container Home

I want to live in a glass house. I don't mean to say that I want to live exposed to the world or unable to throw stones (I occasionally enjoy a bit of stone throwing). I mean I literally want to live in a house made of glass. Specifically, a house made solely of windows, like this one:How cool is that?

Actually, in an ideal situation, the above building would be a bit more well built, and would serve as my art studio with an add-on divided by a thick plastic curtain for my greenhouse in which I would grow a vast array of rare and beautiful plants that either serve a medicinal purpose, or have gorgeous flowers. I can so clearly picture myself in this place. In one room or the other, going between garden lady covered in dirt and smelling of earth and crazy artist lady covered in a multitude of paints and smelling of paste.
My landscape outside my windows jumps back and forth in my mind from beautiful northern California forest on a hill...
...to lush tropical jungle dotted with fruit trees and a mere 10 minute walk from the ocean (perhaps the Gulf of Mexico?).

So, where would I actually live, you ask? Well, in a converted shipping container of course! No, I'm completely serious. One day, not too long ago, Quinn and I stumbled across a man's blog about how he had an idea to solve his problem of needing a live/work space in various places around the world for relatively short periods of time, ie a year or so. He came up with the idea of converting a shipping container. The idea is, shipping containers are easily and cheaply shipped all around the world. It's the standard for import/export. If you have anything in your home that came from China or Thailand etc, there is a 99% chance it made it's journey to you by shipping container. They are all built standard in order be stacked on ships, or placed on semis quickly and easily. AND they come with hardwood floors! This takes mobile home living WORLDWIDE! Oh, and the possibilities for modification of these things is endless.




When we did more research on this concept we came to understand that they've become a kind of sustainable housing trend over the past few years. People have done some crazy shit with these shipping containers.








You can do all kinds of things with these containers! You can stack them on top of each other for a two story home, you can stack them side by side and connect them with hallways, or even tear down whole sides and stick two together for a double wide, or replace a wall with glass! The possibilities are mindbogglingly endless!

However, for the time being our plan is relatively simple. We want one container that we can fold back up and ship anywhere in the world. We'll roam around looking for cheap land to rent, and then ship our container, unfold it, and voila! Home sweet home! When we've tired of this lifestyle and want to settle in a bit more, we'll find a nice plot of land someplace and plop our container down and perhaps add a couple more, as well as my window-made art studio/greenhouse.

But even the first part of this plan is far off in the distance, and we're just young enough that we wholeheartedly (or foolhardily, you decide) believe that we can make this dream come true for ourselves. Part of the reason we're doing the farming in foreign countries thing is to learn how to grow our own food so that someday we can live primarily off our own land and maybe trade our produce or flowers for chocolate and wine.

Magic City

We spent a week in Miami, my home town.

Miami, is apparently referred to as The Magic City on occasion. Which is odd because in my 18 years of growing up there I had never heard that. Quinn picked up on this, and continued to say things like, "ahh Magic City", or "It's good to be in the Magic City", all week solely because it bugged me (which is ridiculous anyway, so who could blame him). Despite this minor annoyance, we had a pretty nice time. Consult the evidence below for confirmation on this point.


Sunrise on a plane.

How handsome is this guy?

Having grown up very close to the beach, I have to say that sandy feet are my favorite kind of feet to have.

A friend of mine from high school, Alice Motes, (the kind of friend that was at my 16th birthday party and whom I just hung out with three days ago all the way out here in L.A.) grew up on an orchid farm.
Motes Orchids is one of the leaders in Vanda growing and hybridization. They even won some sort of world cup of orchids, or something like that.
The farm is utterly mind blowing (and the Motes' have epic 4th of July parties that I very much miss attending).

You should check out Mary Motes' blog over at Not Just Orchids. She means it, her blog is not just about orchids and it's one of the most interesting blogs out there (and it doesn't even have photos! *Gasp*)

The Motes' also have quite a jungle of a yard aside from the orchids.

This is Melissa and Quinn at Robert Is Here, a fruit stand right outside of the Everglades. Melissa is my wife and would-be life partner if it weren't for the fact that the thought of each other's vaginas makes us both cringe. But I just might love this woman more than any other person on the planet.

This is the Robert Is Here emu.

We rolled through the Everglades......with the sun on our faces......and the wind in our hair.

The tiniest airplant.

P.S. Does anyone know how I could make these photos appear bigger?