Someone once told me the rule for the youngest person you should hook up with is half of your age plus seven. Half of thirty four plus seven is twenty four. Seems like an easy enough rule to follow. Except maybe when you are living on an island full of travelers who are primarily in their early twenties. And you develop an unexplainable crush on a danish one who is twenty one. A crush you have no intention to act on, of course, just a little crush. Until you have a few drinks one wednesday night (wednesday and friday are the big nights on the island) and it becomes clear this is not just a one way crush. And then you feel slightly bad about making out with a twenty one year old until you realize once again, this guy could have his pick of twenty something girls so really, I should be proud. I still wasn’t quite prepared for the sleepover thing though, so I still didn’t have to wake up feeling like a cougar slut. Until saturday morning anyway. Who knew that a day at the beach and a tuna melt were the keys to round two. For which I finally was prepared. And thank god, because I don’t know if younger guys have more energy or are more eager to please or what, but I’m pretty sure the line of the night was “I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this, but you should know that, um, never works for me. So I don’t know who taught you, but you should thank her.”
half your age plus seven…more or less…ok, just less
June 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment
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if you build it, they will come
June 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
First time around, my sister and I weren’t planning to be here for more than a few weeks. So when we looked for an apartment, we didn’t mind packing five girls into a two bedroom place. Except, the sister and I did have to share a bed which we did mind a little bit, but since I was being a good (read: boring) girl, it was only a problem once or twice. This time around, knowing we are staying for two months, we decided to be big spenders ($550/month for a two bedroom apartment!) and find our own place with not only our own beds but even our own rooms! Not a day after we moved in, I was putting that room to good use. Well, not that good a use. We shopped for groceries the day we moved in but neglected to shop for things one might need when hooking up. Which is fine, I’m wasn’t interested in becoming the island’s sluttiest cougar after three days. Though I can’t say I minded the attention of a twenty five year old, even if he is a self admitted slightly neurotic twenty five year old who had been avoiding eye contact for the first few days since I got back because he thought I might be mad at him. Not sure why I would, except there was a time we were flirting and chatting and he gave me the old ‘be back in a minute’ and didn’t make it back. But really? We were at a bar. In Utila. Who cares? I think that’s when I reminded him I wasn’t twenty five and would definitely not get mad about something like that. Gotta love the youngins. Especially the slightly crazy but adorable with a great body ones.
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guess who’s back
June 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
This was the last sentence of the last post I wrote many months ago: “Next week should be detox time, we’re off to Utila to dive so no more binge drinking for a while.” Umm, I could not have been more wrong. We did have a mellow nights when we arrived, reading our diving books, going to sleep early to be ready to dive at 7am etc. Then we realized it’s not that bad to stay up until 2 and still make it to the morning boat. Well, it is, but it’s doable, as long as you plan to nap the next day. Long story short, I fell in love with diving, my sister fell in like with it and we decided to stay here in Utila to become divemasters. We met great people that we were doing our training with, some that we were only doing our drinking with and a few that were blog worthy. But between diving every day, sometimes on the morning and afternoon boats, studying for and taking a bunch of tests, finishing everything else we had to do to become divemasters and spending the time we weren’t doing that stuff at the dive shop hanging out with everyone and being hungover from time to time, blogging was the last thing I had the energy for. Once we finished our training, we left the island for a while to meet the other sister in Peru, spent about 2 1/2 weeks there and another 2 1/2 in Nicaragua on our way back here. Now that we are back, life on the island is a little less hectic. Plenty of time for story telling, and in the short week and a half that we’ve been back, I may have more stories to tell than the first two months here.
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long…and overdue
March 12, 2009 · 1 Comment
It’s been close to a month since I started traveling and I’d like to continue to use the no time to blog excuse but that wouldn’t be 100% accurate. The littlest sister and I are having a blast but there aren’t too many stories worth repeating. After leaving Antigua, we had a one night on, one night off week in San Pedro at Lake Atitlan. We had more than our share of drinks, but there really weren’t any boys worth looking at, even through the beer googles. There were a few that were fun to laugh with and hang out with, but the only two really cute ones we saw we didn’t find until the end of the night after the bars closed and we never saw them again. Until we ran into one of them the other night at La Iguana hostel here in Livingston. It took a few minutes to place him, but when I finally figured it out, I laughed and asked what happened to the girls he was traveling with. He swore up and down he wasn’t traveling with girls and I reminded him about the two dragging him away that night who I was pretty sure hated us because we were talking to their boys. He finally realized, pointed across the room at two girls we met last week in Lanquin and have been hanging out with since. Turns out, they definitely don’t hate us and barely remember that night.
It’s a pretty small travel world once you get going. Everyone is making essentially the same circuit either north to south or south to north. At first we were only meeting guys that we hope we’ll run into again. We did find one of them again, and will probably catch him again later in Nicaragua, but we aren’t on the same path with our favorite favorite guy at all, so we really wished we could have put him in our pocket and kept him with us. Luckily since then, we’ve managed to pick up some sets of girls along the way. We have the two blonde English girls that we’re about a day or two off schedule of, and we have the Seattle hairstylists that we actually met all the way back in San Pedro on our first night there who we caught up with last week at a place called El Retiro.
And that’s where the party started. El Retiro was a bit like being back in college, with dorms of ten people in a room and a few more youngins than I was used to from Antigua and San Pedro. It was an awesome hostel though on the bank of the river in Lanquin with the cabins spaced out all over and a great restaurant/bar. Which everyone hung out at just about every night because there’s really nothing else to do in that town at night. Two happy hours a night plus a third on saturdays nights for ladies and men dressed in ladies clothing made for some interesting nights. Not so much for me, but for some other people. I just became the matchmaker, which was almost as fun as making out myself. Though I do regret not kissing one of the boys back in Antigua that we only hung out with one day, but had so much fun with. Had I realized the next few weeks would be fun but kissing free, I would have gone for it.
And the party continued here in Livingston at La Iguana. We showed up with the Seattle stylists and a Kiwi we picked up along the way, and they told us they only had a bungalow with a double bed. Turning a negative into a postive, we got a third mattress for the floor and busted out the camping mats and fit all five of us in there. We were dubbed the King and his ladies on the name board and have referred to ourselves as the Palace ever since. Happy hour here is even cheaper than at El Retiro and it’s pretty tough to say no to skittles shots. We started promtly at 6 our first night here and managed to rack up at least 10-12 drinks each. Luckily they have great dinners here and my water bottle is never far away saving me from the hangovers I should have had. I did participate in the giant game of I Never, but at least I’m finally old enough to say no to a challenge involving crack whores. That’s a shot of sambuca that you set on fire, drink, suck the fumes through a straw and snort what’s left. We also planned a wedding that was supposed to happen the next day. There’s a guy that works here that’s a minister and everything, but it turns out no one was moving out of bed the next morning.
The palace did get up and make it through the two hour walk to the 7 Altars, sans bride and groom and wedding though. We didn’t make it the whole way back though, we gave up and took a cab and swore up and down there’d be no hour of happiness for us that night. Until the littlest sister pointed out that the shot special that night was tequila since she knows that’s my weakness. Finally, after dinner and tolerating three beers, with five minutes left in happy hour, I ordered the first round of shots. It was all downhill from there. We had to earn more happy hours ditching clothes, which when you are hanging out in a swimsuit all day anyway makes it seem not that bad. When it did get bad was they handed us tin foil and before we knew it we were wearing tin foil clothes, all to save a whopping 50 cents per drink.
Being too old to regress further back than 21, the third night was pretty mellow. We braved a local comedor for dinner and got back to the hostel at the end of happy hour. Once again, with just enough time to get talked into ‘tasting the rainbow’. A new batch of skittles shots had been made and the sister said she’d do all five and of course what kind of big sister would I be if I let her do it alone. Wasn’t actually that bad, either because the juice added dilutes it just enough or we’ve had so many drinks the past week that I no longer have the tolerance of a fly. Next week should be detox time, we’re off to Utila to dive so no more binge drinking for a while.
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trying (only slightly successfully) to catch up
February 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Typically, when I haven’t written in a while, it’s because nothing interesting has been happening. Now, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Once I finally made my way back to Philly, I spent a week getting last minute stuff together and hanging out with the fam. And after our slight snow delay, the littlest sister and I got on our way and have been in Guatemala for about 10 days. The PG rated details are over at Edger’s Travels. The good stories will remain here. They may not be totally up to date, and I’ll use the excuse that there isn’t always reliable internet access (which is true) but in reality, it’s because there’s either always something more interesting to be doing than sitting down at a computer, or because it’s so darn hard to just do everyday chores in a foreign country. Grocery shopping, getting fresh fruits and veggies at the market, keeping track of a budget while trying to learn the conversion from Quetzales to dollars, etc etc. all take about twice as long here. Right, because there’s also that language barrier thing. Luckily, I knew a little Spanish before, but we also decided to take 8 days of lessons, for 5 hours a day. Also put a bit of a dent in the free time to blog. Hopefully, the next few places will be a bit more mellow. But, that also means there’s likely to be a bit less wi-fi. So I’ll try to store them up on word documents and transfer them over as I have a chance. In the meantime, a brief encounter with a Belgian boy who couldn’t have been more than 24 trying his hardest to get me to do more than make out with him on the street corner, complete with lines like “I’ve wanted to kiss you since the first day I met you” and “Yes, there are all those other girls but I’m not interested in them, they’re too young” will have to suffice.
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rock me like a hurricane
January 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Aside from packing up the last of my stuff at 5am saturday morning, leaving austin was pretty underwhelming. I had mixed feelings on how much I would or wouldn’t miss it and while I definitely enjoyed my time there, so far it’s out of sight out of mind. Could be because although driving for days by yourself can get old, it also means you are the only one that has to decide what to do. So as I headed out, I decided to go the route that would take me through New Orleans. I still wasn’t sure I’d stay the night, but figured I’d stop for lunch at least. As it got later, it only made sense to stay and besides, who drives out of the way to go through New Orleans for just lunch? So I texted a girl from work who recently moved there for school and thought we’d have dinner, maybe a drink or two.
Someone should have reminded me that there’s a rule in the French Quarter. You can’t have just a drink or two. You must have the obligatory hurricane at Pat O’Briens, two even, meet some boys and act like you are 22 too by following them to the bar with the hand grenades and oh, while you’re at it, throw in an Irish Car Bomb for good measure. I said no to the beer/shot combo for about the second it took for them to twist my arm. When in New Orleans right? The event of the night are fuzzy at best, but there was at least one attempt at the stripper dancing which I think lead to the bruise on my upper arm from someone keeping me from falling over. I could ask the 22 year olds if their younger more resiliant brains recall the events of the evening, because you know were FB friends already, but really, I don’t need to be mocked by kids. I firmly believe the fuzzy memories are a protective mechanism so I don’t have to beat myself up because I’m so embarrassed by the evening.
Before I knew it, it was 4:30 am, I couldn’t drag myself out of the hotel until noon the next day and couldn’t convince myself to get in the car until 2:30, after a stop at the Cafe Du Monde for friend sugary deliciousness, aka biegtnets and some people watching. I considered staying another day, and would have been content to explore the rest of New Orleans if the only fog happening that day had been in my head. But when I wondered over to the river and couldn’t even see if from the bank of it, I decided hungover, alone and crappy weather wouldn’t have made for a fun day. So I figured I’d grab a muffuletta for the road and be on my way. But no, the Central Grocery isn’t open on Sundays. So after going back to the hotel and then remembering I could get a most likely not quite as good one at the place we ate dinner last night, I decided to grab one, because I just couldn’t leave New Orleans without one. Of course, I had to pay $5 to park, then use the ATM at the restaurant which cost another $5 in fees and the sandwich itself was $12. So $20 and few hours on the road later, I enjoyed more meat than one girl should consume in one sitting. And since it was the most expensive sandwich ever, I tried to force myself to eat the second half for dinner but ugh, even I had to just suck it up and let it go at the point. Not to mention, the combo of hangover and olive salad smell was bad enough that if I didn’t ditch it, I might not be able to still say I haven’t ever thrown up. The only time I second guessed that decision was when the EconoLodge that I made the bad decision to stay at in Montgomery AL smelled like Indian food, which made the Muffuletta leftover seem like perfume. But at that point, I could only close my eyes, count backwards in spanish, and get up and on the road hoping monday and Charlotte, NC would be a better day!
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hit the road, jack
January 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
At the end of another assignment, I find myself once again surprised that people are honestly going to miss me. The best way I know how to deal with the end is to be a bit self deprecating about it. Play up the definitely sarcastic, can be negative at times part of my personality to make it seem like it will be a relief that I’ll be leaving. Somehow that seems easier to me. Somewhere inside, I know that isn’t really true. I know that even though the nurses on my floor joke about me being the mean PT, I help them out when I can, I get the patients to do what they need to do and the days are relatively smooth. Sure, I complain at times, but so do they. It’s human nature. And we’re usually complaining about the same things anyway! As for the other therapists, I definitely say what’s on my mind more than most, but as usual with me and my opinions, the rest of them are thinking the same things, they just don’t say it out loud. (This sentence written last night, confirmed after a few drinks at happy hour tonight). When I really look back, I know I’m far from the only negative one. And the supervisor, despite an ongoing difference of opinion on one subject, invited me back after my trip. Despite the fact that they desperately need full time therapists, you don’t invite someone back that wasn’t some type of asset to the department.
Of course, now that I think more about it, it’s not only my perception of my work self that I could use to take a second look at. Every once in a while, when I’m questioning my choices and wondering if I’m avoiding real life or growing up or whatever, I try to remember how other people see it. Brave, free spirited, adventurous, whatever. The grass may always seem greener, but when push comes to shove, I’m happy with what I’m doing and I know it’s the right thing for me. I just have to remind myself of that a little more often. And as I take off to drive back to Philly, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to both question and validate my choices.
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inspired by a not quite three year old
January 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment
One of the reasons my sister and I decided to wait until February to start our trip was because the neice kept asking us if we were going to come to her birthday party. Granted, she was asking us over the summer with no concept of time but after she asked the third time, how could we not plan to leave in February instead of January. Turns out we needed these last few weeks to save up more money and were also hopeful for a second philly championship, but the point it we picked the date originally to be at her third birthday. So tonight when we were on the phone planning more of the trip and my sister was watching my niece, I could hear her in the background asking when Jillian was going to be on and when they were going to go do Jillian again. Turns out while I’ve been lazy on the couch for two weeks, my sister has been doing the 30 Day Shred once or even twice a day sometimes because the niece is keeping her in line! She says she kind of gets in the way, and tries to put a pillow under her head when she does abs and tried to crawl through her legs when she’s doing standing stuff, but wow, how great that at not quite three years old, she wants to ‘exercise’ with my sister every day! Needless to say, we got off the phone and minutes later the DVD was going.
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at least I can take superbowl parade off the list
January 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment
In sixteen days, the littlest sister and I will be leaving the country for 16 WEEKS. The closest I’ve come to traveling for that long was just about ten years ago, when I was the just out of college kid putting off the real world. I’m sure the parents are proud that I’ve encouraged the littlest sister to do the same. Actually, because they are the some of the coolest people ever, I think they are actually happy that we have this opportunity. Or, I should say, have created this opportunity for ourselves.
That distinction means a lot to me. When I tell someone about my plans, the response is often ‘wow, must be nice’ or ‘I wish I could do that.’ And the thing I want to tell them is that yes, it will be nice and yes, they could do it if they wanted. Because it isn’t as if someone has just handed this to me. I’ve worked hard this past year to make this happen and it does come with sacrifices. Some that I chose to make, some that just kind of crept up on me. Like looking so forward to the future that I’ve been missing a bit of the present. Somewhere between staying in to save money and knowing from the beginning that there would always been an end to Austin, I’ve had one foot out the door for a while. Even more so for the past month. First it was look forward to Christmas in Philly. Then just get back here and get through the last few weeks with a million to do lists.
Get PT licenses so there are options when I get back. Shop for trip. Pack for trip. Get banking, and bills, and taxes in order before trip. Leave things for mom to do while I’m gone. Squeeze in last minute trip to SF. Try not to spend every night on the couch since feeling not quite a hundred percent well for past two weeks. Drive back to Philly, try to stop and see friends on the way. Try not to regret not having time to stop in New Orleans again. Have one week between getting back to Philly and leaving for trip. Spend last weekend there at the niece’s third birthday party. Watch SuperBowl. Hope the Eagles will be one of those teams. Debate between watching NFC championship on my favorite place on the couch or actually getting out of this apartment for one last experience in Austin and watch with other crazy Eagles fans. Bar wins. Eagles don’t. At least now I won’t have to worry about how to fit in that pesky parade between the SuperBowl and a 5:30 am flight out of Newark on the wednesday after.
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hello, my name is Edger and I’m a Friends-aholic
January 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I just watched four episodes in a row. I can come up with a Friends reference for almost every real life moment (hair straightener paranoia). And I know far too many lines by heart (They don’t know that we know that they know. Joey, you can’t tell them. Couldn’t if I wanted to.) Seriously. It’s ridiculous. WW will tell you. It’s no fun to play the Friends version of Scene It with me. I’m not totally alone though. It’s even less fun to play with me and my friend e-beth or my sister. And RR will tell you the good old fashioned board game with me and D is just as bad. Except even she and I were stumped at times because the trivia game questions are MUCH more obscure than the Scene It questions. It’s shocking that I don’t own all of the seasons on dvd. And that I’m still single.
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