My Costa Rican Adventure, Part 1

I woke up from a shattered nap on the airplane because dawn was breaking onto the Texas plane like a lava flow. There were flat and broken clouds hovering beneath us, and it looked like orange fire was seeping through the cracks in them. It was easy to imagine that I was looking down at the time before the dinosaurs, like in Fantasia.

Then later, I was riding fast through the streets of a strange new city! Colors and dispositions flew by. (It was like the time that my friends and I had maybe an hour to hang out in the Chicago Art Institute. Rather than focus on a few things, we opted to dash through as much as possible and let the works penetrate us as much as they could in a glance. That remains one of the most stimulating hours of my life.) ....But here was beautiful Costa Rica. I saw pastry shops and school children, dogs, and a goat. I read the Spanish signs and realized with glee that I still remembered how to order a cheap beer. Unfortunately, all of that is back there, while I am here in a sleepy resort hotel. It´s been raining cats and dogs since we arrived, but at least this is definitely a great place for some unshattered sleeping.

HISMSV Part 5

The other night, I rented and watched High School Musical, which was filmed in my very own alma mater. For the record, we are not Wildcats. We are Leopards. Anyway, the story unfolds as a wholesome jock and a bookworm collide in their mutual love of singing. They are untrained, they say. Both of these teens are so unbelievably alpha that they must have been created in a laboratory by the Disney scientists (this "laboratory origin" theory seems to be gaining popularity with me...) But really, it was pretty cute, even if the songs were mostly terrible, and I enjoyed seeing them dance around on the auditorium stage where I once blasted Green Day and set the stage lights to chase for the benefit of my fellow second period stage crew buddies. (I wonder what ever happened to those guys. If only we all could have stayed together through the years. How would it be if my stage crew class had bought a house together? We could have fixed it up with gaff tape and dutchman, hurling insults at one another all the while...)

So tonight we set off for sunny Costa Rica, where I hope it will be warmer than effing Seattle.

HISMSV Part 4

Some generous and fancy friends came to Seattle, so there's been some lovely, rich food lately. There was also a parade on the other night, and we all found ourselves caught in the festering crowd that lined the streets. Something weird and charming about this place is that it's a fairly big city, but we are not a classy looking bunch of people. Even the rich people look pretty slouchy when it comes to clothes, and then you have the rest of us: strictly sweatshirts and jeans. We look like small town people, even though we're in this quasi-glamorous harbor town. Anyway, at least it's a classy smelling city. True, no roasting nuts like in New York, but we do have sophisticated espresso smells, perfume cannons tumbling like feathers out of the clothing stores, and the aroma of street filth, which is oddly necessary.

I haven't done much since my return, other than rehearse for the small chapel concert (Claustrophilia!) in September. It's gonna be off the hook.

HISMSV Part 3

I went off the middlemost high dive yesterday. Blind plummet this time, and a brazen but kind-hearted little girl with freckles and a two-piece. Mostly I hung out in the steam room and swam long, slow laps in the pristine outdoor pool with my shadow sliding along beneath me. I can open my eyes a little out there on account of it’s so clean; inside, the water is a human-chemical slurry, but the features are still more fun.

A friend of mine has compiled an enormous mix of songs that seem to have come from everywhere and nowhere- risen spontaneously from the stew of human mediocrity. Wilson Philips, for example, tapped into the teeming Oversoul and gave voice to “Hold On For One More Day,” and now we have it forever as part of our concrete collective knowledge. But the songs, though terrible, have an intoxicating quality. I don’t know if it’s because they’re so familiar or maybe because they were created in a laboratory by music scientists. So there’s been a lot of dancing in a circle with bare feet like the good old Junior High days. Still, I think I need a little Mahler immersion to scrub some of the bubblegum off my brain.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part 2

This time of year, I have to wonder about people’s feet. The footwear of midsummer tends to be flat and unsupportive; we all wear sandals or flip-flops, and I wonder how many arches are aching and how many secret red spots reside in the raw and sockless places under those beaded metallic sidewalk slappers. This is the sun-bloated, mediterranean time and the livin’ is easy. I wonder if our bodies are like bags of sun, filled to brimming in midsummer and slowly draining out in the cold months. People say, in favor of Seattle, that the sunless damp makes it easier to work, and I guess that’s true. Harder to want to live, easier to work. I am having a great time singing, but a hard time learning music. My discipline is shot, but the feeling in my head rings heavenly. Why must there be choices in life? I think it would be great if we all had government issued shoes. Maybe even pinafores and trousers made of astoundingly durable cloth. Hats in summer. The colors would coordinate well and people tend to look elegant in uniforms.

I get to go back to the Kearns swimming complex tomorrow, and I wish I were there already. Last time, I jumped off the lowest of the high dive platforms. My friends went off the higher levels, but I think I was most daring, because most afraid. There were some kids up there, waiting with me for the flag to signal our turn. Kids know how to do that stuff. A little boy said: just don’t look down when you jump, so I didn’t. I looked down as I jumped, and the blue was hurtling at me, dramatic and pleasing. The other thing about strange kids is you can’t balk in front of them. You have to pretend that you are cool and jump off like it’s nothing.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part 1

Summers generally end up the same way for me, year after year. Shoes on the porch (too wet for inside), alarming mosquito welts all over my arms and legs and also superficial wounds inflicted by plants, very light hair, millions of freckles and the same skirt every day. There’s another thing: every summer, wasps attempt to colonize the barbecue grill (which we call “The Groyl,” since it was built by my father, Roy). Usually my first barbecution occurs earlier in the season, so it’s a matter of plucking the little nest off, observing the pulsating life forms therein (deeply thrilling to observe) and hucking it far away into the backyard. This year there was no groyling until today, which is the fourth of July, and I am an American, dammit, and desired a smoky dog. But the nest had the time to grow bigger this year, with as many as six or seven adults nursing the wee ones. It was obviously a family in a house. I felt terrible, but understood profoundly that we were natural enemies, somehow. So I incapacitated them with Pam cooking spray and annihilated them with a blowtorch. Were I a hopeless cynic, I might think this to be a strangely appropriate way of celebrating the Fourth.