Mourning

I lost my first cat three months ago. It was a short but expensive and arduous process of googling everything possible (I'm an excellent googler) related to her illness/es, authorizing baffling tests and surgeries and medications, and the highs and lows of believing she would ultimately recover until the moment I woke up and discovered her body stiff next to me in the bed. She was a pet but she was my first real up close, personally responsible experience with death, and it was traumatic.

Grief is such an apt word for the feeling; it literally sounds how it feels. We buried her in my parents' backyard on Long Island and put a little wooden handwritten marker over it. The feeling of loss, emptiness and regret the last time I looked at her before closing the box still pops up in my head every now and then. In the supermarket I dread the pet aisle. It's been three months and we've left all of her cat towers and food bowls exactly where they always had been. Her medication is in the back of the cabinet, but I know it's there. I think of it less often now but I don't forget.

Guilt is a major factor, and self-recrimination. How I would have done things differently. I try not to dwell but it's impossible. I can't look at photos of the last trip we took before she got sick because they make me feel so selfish and irresponsible, because if I hadn't taken that trip, she would still be alive. I genuinely miss her, her posture, her chirps when I came home, her sighs.

The grief and sense of loss were also accompanied by a grim reminder of our own mortality. I feel much more aware of the fact that I am just an animal, and it's funny how you forget – all your trivial anxieties and ambitions and fears pale in the sense of scale of how many animals since the beginning of time have lived and died. I've always been fascinated by history, and now every time I see something from the past all I can think is that the person who wrote or painted or built this is dead. I'll be dead. Everyone I know will die and the earth will keep churning along and creating new animals and people who will also forget that they will die...until they do, or someone they love does. There's something that feels so unfair and uncompromising about this, but also in a small way, like a kind of cosmic justice. I don't think I'm morbidly depressed but I can see the appeal in existentialism. It does take a lot of the self-imposed pressure a person could feel when they consider that they are basically a genetic lottery of competitive, life producing cells. We're all a bunch of statistics, similar to the story of how predator birds will have two babies knowing one will have to die because they can only care for one, but that the odds for survival are increased with two. Many of us will have to be thrown away before our time. If you don't reproduce, are you a waste?

On the bright side, it's encouraged me to see a doctor and get on blood pressure medication.

Traveling

I love every place I've been.

I loved camping as a kid. My family didn't have a lot of money and we would go cabin camping often. I loved sleeping in an itchy sleeping bag on a hard cot for some reason. The novelty of something different was so exciting. Sometimes we would sleep in a tent in our backyard, and I loved that too.

I love Rome. A giant city with the entirety of its history in every stone. I loved Florence, the squares, the coffee, the food. I loved Bologna, its quiet and everyday volume, free of tourists. I loved the soft pasta, and the lilting language. I even loved Venice, even though they hung a hideous billboard of Kate Moss over the basilica. I loved Sorrento, nobody could not love Sorrento, riding a scooter at night over the cliffs and feeling the wind on your face and the twinkling cruise ship lights in the water. I loved Capri, the pizza, the water. The pizza in Capri was so good that when I took my first bite I was shocked. I love Italy.

I love Ollantaytambo. I loved the rustic, woody smelling hotel we stayed in attached to the train station. I loved the creak on the floorboards as you walked and the funny looking flowers in the garden. I loved trying to spot the faces of the gods in the mountains. I loved Cusco and the hawkers, the rooftop restaurants, their odd obsession with pizza. I loved the little mummified girl who lived her entire life only to be sacrificed. I loved the painful reverence they built their cathedrals with, in this colonial style that was so alien to them. I loved Arequipa, its palm trees, having breakfast on the roof. I loved the avocado sandwich I had in the airport hotel in Lima. I love Peru.

I love Reykjavik, how you never have to lock your house or car door because there's no crime. I loved the sliced hard boiled eggs in every sandwich. I loved how there were no trees, because the Vikings cut them all down for fuel and light, and how when Iceland started to try and propagate trees again they planted them in weird lines and squares. I loved the spotlessly clean gas stations and hobbit homes built into hills. I loved spotting tiny white fluffs of sheep, and all the different kinds of stones and rocks that were once lava. I loved the glacier lagoon so much, when I saw Vatnajökull I almost cried. I love Iceland.

I love Bogotá, its sprawling, dusty energy. I loved that malls are in their heyday there. I loved bandeja paisa, the "country platter" that literally was supposed to sustain you for an entire day. I loved having so much avocado and how shiny my hair became. I loved that they have a museum devoted to gold and the thousands of years we have been obsessed with it. I loved Medellín's progressive approach to city planning and ecological conservation, and I loved the exotic, jurassic greenery of the foliage that surrounded it. I loved ajiaco and mojarra and the street stalls. I loved the isolation of isla Barú, the medieval architecture of Cartagena, and the friendliness of the locals I met in the tattoo shop. I love Colombia.

I love Honolulu, how everyone there is the most American Asian person I've ever seen. I love the touristy surf culture. I loved how pervasive east and southeast Asian culture/cuisine is. I loved the low humidity and blinding sun. I loved loco moco, the mash up of so many different things into something so new but so familiar. I loved Kauai's Napali coast, the canyons, the chickens. I loved bicycling along the coast line and feeling the sun march its way across the sky so you eventually got evenly tanned all over. I love Hawaii.

There's more but I'll stop here, because I'd go on forever. I need to travel again. I'll miss my cats and home when I do.

In Cold Blood

Right now I'm rewatching In Cold Blood, the film about Truman Capote's novel on the murders of a innocent ranching family. I haven't read the novel and don't know if it would be possible (emotionally) for me to, but I understand the controversy around the subject matter all while I'm reminded what a superb story it is. Truman Capote was right. Nobody wants "monsters" humanized, and it was an incredible risk and artistic achievement to attempt it. If someone murdered someone from my family or a loved one I would want blood, immediately. But the power of our shaky social contract, where if you violate the code of the tribe and are rightfully expelled, is still as surprising to me as  the power of chemistry in connecting on some level with each other. It's also a testament to our skill as storytellers, how we can weave this simplicity into our real-life, complex situations, where we can reduce someone who might have been a victim of abuse their entire lives to an inhuman monster to maintain our own narratives of the "right" way to be passing time. Our own experiences are never as linear as any "story" until after the fact. Or maybe it is so simple as that, and we make it overly complicated?

Anyway, I like the movie. It makes me feel empathy that I didn't feel before, and I think that's an important feeling to be capable of having.

Colorado!

We're going to Colorado for the first time!

I absolutely love Kayak's explore function. It's great if you have a budget/schedule preference, but not a location preference for your next trip. As far as I know, it's the only travel site that offers something like that. And as a freelancer, whose life is mostly determined in two to three month blocks of time, it's a wonderful way to find new places to travel to.

I used to be prejudiced against traveling within America when I worked full-time. With only ten days off per year, it seemed kind of like a waste for some reason, beyond taking long weekends here and there upstate or to beaches. We broke that streak with our last trip to Hawaii, which was probably more of an easing into American travel considering it's a zillion miles away and a tropical country, so now I feel ready for this.

Know Thyself

With Oscar season around the corner, I've been trying to catch up on all the top picks for Best Picture.
My favorites are Birdman and Whiplash. These two deal with similar themes – the path that you go down to acquire some kind of skill, talent, or recognition; the sacrifices and challenges that go along with any kind of success with it; and how to cope during moments of real or even perceived loss of that. I think anybody in a competitive, creative field can identify particularly well with these stories. The self-doubt, the soaring highs when you succeed, and the crippling lows when you fail, and how quickly they can appear or even coincide.

Both main characters were attempting to bend themselves into roles that did not come naturally, and were suffering for it. Trying to carve the lumpy, imperfect you into the version you think you should be, whether it's for career, success, happiness or whatever, is pretty much the definition of ambition. Isn't that what makes greatness? Something about you was lacking before – by determination and sheer willpower, you can have it. It's a catalyst for change, for progress into something better.

I wonder how I would have viewed these ten years ago, when I was dripping with enthusiasm and motivation and hopeful visions of the future. Now that I'm older, I can also see in them characters that don't know themselves, who they are or what their limitations are. They're taking risks beyond what they were capable of, which in America is usually considered a noble and worthy risk to take, unless you fail miserably. But if you think about it, couldn't many people succeed one in a million times if they gave up on everything else and forced themselves day and night at it? 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It just means you worked harder than everyone else, and honestly, I've grown to feel that it's not always worth it anymore. I lived that way for ten years and I was miserable. I stopped and now I'm happier. Life is short.

I find it surprisingly easy to shake off these never-ending analyses nowadays. It's become much simpler. Am I OK, or miserable? OK = continue. Miserable = change something. It's a little sad when I'm reminded of the way I used to be through movies or other people, but I also do not miss it at all. My ghost chasing days might be over for good. I remember always hearing people say "I wasn't happy" when talking about giving up on something, and I used to feel pity for them, because I was happy doing what I loved. Now that I can see how much I lied to myself for so long, everything is much more clear.

Frugal Living

One of the many things that changed once I made the leap from working full-time to freelance was the way I view and use my income. Working full-time, the steady paycheck was nice but living in New York with a New York lifestyle meant I was living paycheck-to-paycheck. Saving was always a challenge, and vacations and other cost-of-living benefits were usually at least partially subsidized by credit card debt. I carried a balance on all five of my credit cards and felt constantly like I was barely treading water. A lot of this was my own fault – I allowed myself to be financially irresponsible because I felt so overworked and drained that I "rewarded" myself with going out, buying new things, and blowing money whenever I felt like it.

The shift into taking more control of my life and finances coincided also with some personal growth where I really tried to take a look at myself and why I was so unhappy. I saw a therapist, I began meditating and tried to get in touch with the sense of self I had lost in the past few years. Not to sound too new-agey, but once the change happened and the thorn was removed, I was able to heal surprisingly fast. I've lost a lot of the desperation I used to feel of constantly never having enough. My income comes much more sporadically, but I've been fortunate enough to pay off all my debt in the past year, and also save much more without the constant desire to buy something or go out to fill the hole I used to feel. I've been able to set personal goals for once beyond taking a vacation in six months, like buying a home or starting my own business, which always seemed completely out of reach.

The first month I wasn't working, I stayed in and ate everything in the house – canned soups, pasta, toast. I renegotiated our cable bill down and began trying to minimize, donating clothing and getting rid of some of the crap that I'd been blindly accumulating. In my spare time, I searched online for more tips on this new lifestyle I was trying to embark on, and discovered the huge community of individuals minimizing and living "frugally," and even on the further end of the spectrum, homesteading or living off the grid.

Being self-sufficient is incredibly addicting! I've fantasized about growing my own food, learning how to create things I need, and waste less. I try to learn new skills in my down time. I go out less often. I repair damaged clothes/shoes instead of tossing and replacing them. I find myself checking the per unit prices when grocery shopping and spending more time comparison shopping. I still slip up from time to time but have lost most of the obsessive compulsion to chase things that I used to have – instead I try and channel that energy into this new and healthier outlet, and I'm so grateful to have found it. I feel much more in control of more aspects of my life, and have less anxiety about the things I can't control. I feel free.

Hawaii!

Still a bit jet-lagged, but back from Hawaii! I haven't gone through all my photos yet, but a few thoughts:

1. Hawaii doesn't have ebola, NYC does – Hawaii 1, NYC 0.
2. Hawaii has as many churches as beaches.
3. Honolulu has a LOT of Japanese tourists.
4. Spam is not meant to be eaten every day.