What's it Worth?

I'm sitting and sniveling in my best girl-friend's bed in San Francisco, preparing for my 11 hour flight back to France. I am sick, true to form: I manage to be heroically resilient against cold and flu until a flight shows up within the 24 hour range. -Then I'm seemingly set upon by throat-seizing microbes. I was sick on the way over and it looks like I'll be sick on the way back.

But this isn't what I want to complain out. I want to complain that I'm on the verge of devastated because this week is the last week my significant other has to find and secure a vineyard on the West coast for his 6 month internship arriving this summer. If he doesn't manage, he'll have to get one in France. Meaning, if I want to stay with him, I may have to move to a smaller town, miss my brother's wedding and Christmas with the family yet again to lead a moderately lonely life abroad. -Especially if I only get to see my guy on weekends.

Naturally, I'm apprehensive about staying by his side. Yes, I love France, but I'll have to fight the visa battle again and endure our shared social life which honestly, makes me cringe. I don't really enjoy his wine student contemporaries and facing another 6 months of choosing between late nights with them or staying home lonely depresses me.

But I love him. Do I somehow go home and enjoy the 4 months we have together, then when the internship starts, pack up with a straight face and leave? Go to the states, or Hawaii with my family, and plot out a new future without him? Or do I figure love is worth everything, which I'm beginning to think it is, and stay?

p.s: if you haven't all ready, please remember to Fight for the Phoque, and send a message to the Canadian prime minister.

Doin' it Distance

I am in love. I mean, crazily deeply in love. I can be jumping and undulating in the gym's "body-jam" class and still, he's the predominant thing on my mind. But like usual, my opening lines aren't what I actually want to talk about.

Yesterday I was trying to have the ever helpful but very frustrating savior of many long distance relationships, Skype-sex. The challenge in this is that my childhood bed is situated squarely under a picture window which also happens to be at the top of the stairs to my family's porch. So the first vision anyone has, human, alien, serial killer, etc, when coming to the house is my helpless form on the bed.

So there I was. Strewn naked below this dangerous window and in the throws of distance love-making when my parents decide to have a lawn-ornament-themed argument on the deck. TMI and I were both trying to bring it on home, so to speak, and I had to suddenly dash under the blankets as either parent stomped by the window 4 or 5 times and bickered in the yard. I got the impression dad was heading up to the garage so I got up to make sure my bedroom door was closed... but he's coming back down! I hit the dirt and slither under my bed until I hear that he has passed. I assume the position with my computer. Mom bursts in and I snatch the covers over my naked body. (Pink and purple tie-dye dildo left uncovered on the edge of the bed.) "Will you hurry up so I can talk to you?!" She yells.

..I think I've had just about enough of visiting the family. Oh private French apartment.. oh weekends spent naked in noisy passionate sex-a-thons.. Did I know how good I had it? Why did I leave again??

p.s: if you haven't all ready, please remember to Fight for the Phoque, and send a message to the Canadian prime minister.

H, for Getting Hitched

Anyone who's been reading this blog for more than a few months will remember Harry, my irrational romance obsession in the weeks before I met my current squeeze and love of my life. The hippy in me says that if I'd never fallen for Harry and insisted on going out with him late in the night, I never would have met TMI, so the whole mess was fate, but that's another story.

The breaking news is that Harry's girlfriend just recently posted on Facebook a photo of her hand, newly adorned with a diamond ring. Well don't that just beat all. No, I'm not crushed, just jealous that she's wearing one and I'm not. What is it with 20-something girls and getting engaged anyway! For the record I'm in no hurry to be married, I just want to be intended; there's a big difference here. One is sexy, young, involves a diamond, and the other involves adulthood, feeling old, and housework. (In my young mind, anyway.)

So how has my mature and rational self handled this jealousy, one might ask? I bought a faux diamond and used the pretense that I was wearing it as creep repellant for a woman traveling alone, (which I am, after all) and also a young lady un-escorted by her boyfriend to clubs and bars. Whatever. I'm not too old for imaginary playing house, I guess.

p.s: if you haven't all ready, please remember to Fight for the Phoque, and send a message to the Canadian prime minister.

Call off the Hunt

It's that time of year again, and "I Fight for the Phoque" takes on a more pressing meaning. Right now, new born furry fluffy baby white seals are playing and nursing on the ice flows of Eastern Canada. But in just a few weeks, their playful sounds will turn into agonizing cries as they are clubbed to death by commercial fishermen to sell their fur for fashion.

There are countless worthy causes in the world. But among them, I find the painful and terrifying deaths of these defenseless new-comers to life one of the most upsetting and unjust. Fight for the Phoque! And tell the Canadian Prime Minister to please, as we ask every year, CALL OFF THE HUNT.

Choose Your Classes Wisely

I may only be home for three weeks, but I've made it my business to shave off the extra five pounds of cheese, croissants, bread butter and bacon I put on it France while I'm here. This means: exercise classes with my mom! Zumba! Body Jam! Spin Class! And several other mildly entertaining and vastly embarrassing endeavors in which you shake and shimmy surrounded by 60 something year old saggy women in hot pink sports bras. This was suiting me all right, actually, and combined with lunch at the health food store buffet every day, I've all ready lost two of the five.

Yesterday, however, I got the afternoon schedule wrong and ended up in body combat: Surrounded by scary, screaming, jumping, flying and kicking muscly sweaty Hawaiian guys. The instructor was the muscly-ist and loudest of all; the sweat was fountaining off him as he instructed us to kill imaginary pirates and ninjas with elbow jabs, back kicks, and the most common, knee-to-face plants. I lasted 45 minutes of the hour class before I felt like I'd burst an artery in my brain. Today I feel like I've been hit by a bus. But now I have ROCK HARD PIRATE KILLING ABS YYYEEEEAAAHHHH!!!!

You Say Tomato and I Say Tomahto, lets call the whole thing off

He finished it in a day. HE devoured it. And here I am trudging through it critically like moving through a mud pit in a wedding gown. Can we love each other but not love the same things? How eager we are to say “you're the one,” "you are my other half,” and “we are made for each other,” but if humans have learned anything from the drunken state of love isn’t it that it is completely lacking in any kind of verisimilitude? Ruled by a blinding and overwhelming human desire to be needed; to be loved? So much so in fact, that anyone, (anyone suitably attractive and willing to feed you an “I love you” on a regular basis can be transformed under your rosy outlook into a soul mate? Into “the one?” I remember personally being completely convinced that someone absolutely inside-and-out-wrong for me was exactly what I wanted in a mate. -Until I was somehow and thankfully shaken out of it.

My past experiences have left me tirelessly suspicious of love. Yes: for the past 9 months I have been engulfed in complete mutual obsession. Wild jealousy, monumental sexual passion, and such sincere joy and elation just from the presence, touch, and intimacy with another person that I can’t POSSIBLY expect to be thinking straight. Is liking the same authors important? Is just liking literature enough? The same music? Food? Fashion? Social lifestyle?? What are the essentials and what are the trivials that tell a person if they’ve found the one or if they just want to believe that they’ve found the one?

Every day I tell myself (and we tell each other) that we’re made for one another. That we want to be together for the rest of our lives. My expectations are thus enormous and being let down in even the smallest way stings like a fresh cut and makes me want to cry; call the whole thing off.

Do our likes and dislikes delineate the success of our relationship?

You Ain't Nevah Had Sushi..

..Until you've had Hawaiian sushi. Teri chicken, water cress, and avocado roll. Article 1 of important things to do while home is now completed.

Acclimating

6am and I'm wide awake, which means that I'm critically jet-lagged. I've been a 10am and beyond sleeper all my life, so this up before the dawn business is nothing to sneeze at.

How bizarre it is to be back in paradise. The re-entry especially. When I paced through Honolulu Airport in my red French ankle boots I don't think I could have looked (or felt) any less like a local. Just the sight of the colorful tropical foliage in the airport courtyards stirred a sharp, nostalgic sensation all throughout me, but it was an uncomfortable, kind of unfriendly one; though it was tugging at memories of my childhood playing around in the Hawaiian underbrush.

Yesterday was my first naked Skype session. Oh glorious technology. TMI and I, despite the better part of the globe between us, had the leisure to lie around naked in bed together for 2 hours this tropical morning and last French night. We even tried Skype sex, but let's face it, the technology isn't quiite where it needs to be for that to be particularly fulfilling. All the same, I walked with a new lightness in my step that's been vacant since I left French soil. God I never knew that I could love so deeply. -And that's saying something because I'm a dramatic wacko.