Sunglasses Always Fit

This is National Novel Writing Month. Or NANOWRIMO, as cool bloggers refer to it. I’m more like, “isn’t this month reserved for growing out your facial hair and eating turkey and football?” But I guess there is more to life than all that. Someone should tell the lumberjack-looking fellows that start slumming around this time of year. Instead, bloggers are taking back the November to say – get thees to thy typewriters! And if you wish, with thousands of other people, you can try cranking out 50,000 words this month to be an official part of the officially crazy clan.

I don’ t have time for that nonsense. So….

Of COURSE I’m doing it!

Except this adventure o’ mine won’t be a traditional novel writing novel. One of my goals before I am dragged kicking and screaming with wailing and gnashing of teeth gracefully enter my thirties in a few short years is to have a book published.

And I thought to myself….

“Self, you have quite a bit of material from your teaching stories….however, it would be really easy to decode who you were referring to in each passage….and frankly no mother wants to read about you pent-up desires to pinch her child….so….lets keep that one under wraps until we move out of the country and they can’t find you, ay?”

And I kicked at the ground and scoffed in agreement and ate a donut. Powdered. Delicious. Followed it with some leftover Whoppers. And a Diet Coke, because I’m watching my calories.

The other event in my life that I have much to say about is traveling. Specifically the months I spent trolling Central and South America. The good times and the bad decisions are pretty well documented in words and on film, and I want to compile them, edit them for language and content and the errors that ensue when one is typing on a foreign keyboard, sunburnt, dehydrated, eating only beans and plantains and malaria meds, and slightly under the influence because one has been rained in on a tiny island for eight days straight, and therefore has nothing better to do than drink cervesa and learn how to gamble with Honduran money. Hypothetically speaking.

So the adventure begins…tomorrow! I will be adding pictures to the fun, and those of you that were with me during the initial journey can relive the moments, complete with the revisions and additions of things I can add freely, now that I am not paying by the minute to sit in a sweltering cafe with spotty internet connection.

I may occasionally break to write up the most recent fascinating nothings that happen to me.

So here is the first “blog” I posted…complete with a picture of the innocent I was pre-journey.

Now That You’re a Miserable Working Adult, What are you Gonna do?

I’m gonna travel the world! Yup! I’m quitting my jobs and peacing out to find some peace.

A month from now, I will waking up in Peten, Guatemala, in a Mayan household, learning Spanish in the mornings and volunteering with rainforest conservation efforts in the afternoon. Heck to the YES! Although I’ve loved the last few years here in Santa Barbara, and honestly wouldn’t trade a thing, I’m very excited to be fulfilling a huge dream of mine and traveling Central America for a few months. I think it’s as good a way as any to face a quarterlife crisis and hopefully when I return to the States, I’ll have a better idea of me, of the world, and my place in it, and be able to make some decisions about the rest of my life.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, I’ll be backpacking with two of my girlfriends, Dana and Natasha, for about four or five months through Central America and then Peru. I’ve bought the backpack (which i like to wear around the house sometimes because it has a seatbelt and is very comfy and orange) a wind/water/tropical disease proof jacket (northface, because I’m white, and when white people wear northface, you know they’re on vacation. if you’re not familiar with this truth, visit stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. amazing) and I have buckled under pressure and got some Tevas.

!!! Yeah. Tevas. I know that they’re going to be very useful on my trip, as they are waterproof and very comfortable, but I can’t believe I’ll be wearing shoes that VELCRO.

I promise to never wear them with socks.

Stay tuned for more adventures!