OnBlueUnderCanvas

Just eight months ago we visited San Diego for the first time. I thought it was a nice place for a vacation because of its touristy façade and slammin’ beach scene, but I quickly dismissed it as a place to call home.

Now with a midwest winter fast approaching, the SoCal lifestyle is feeling irresistibly appealing. I mentioned the idea of moving to my mom. “Ooh, you know that San Diego is rated one of the best places to live in the country,” she said. Mm yeah. No surprise. SoCal is blessed with two of the most basic requirements for happiness: sun and surf. I declare need of the former; Kirk, the latter.

In truth, I love the Midwest. It’s where I’m from. My family and Kirk’s family are from Wisconsin and Michigan, respectively. I understand the culture here. I subconsciously plan to raise (at least for a good portion of the time) my eventual children here. My ties to this place are everlasting.

What I love most about the Midwest are its four seasons. Summer is so marvelous with its hot days and mildly cool nights. Nothing beats relaxing on a lake, floating on a inner-tube next to (of course) a boat, with a Bell’s Oberon in hand. The richness of Fall is next to none. Intense yellows, oranges and reds gracing every tree, majestically yielding to the season’s end. Winter is serenely beautiful in its own right – and here’s where the Midwest loses its charm – but it is so damn cold. And dark. Forced to retreat into a little box (house) every winter and shivering because heating the box costs so much, it  just gets me down. By the time Spring is slated to arrive, it can’t hurry in fast enough. Usually I grit my teeth and bear Winter because I know doing so will condition me to appreciate the warm months so much more. But, that psychological trick isn’t going to get me through the season of awful wet and cold every year for the rest of my life. I want a break. I want a year or two in SoCal. Or as Kirk notes, ‘we wanna get the hell outta dodge.’

This noble desire to chase down the ideal climate is all well and good, but there are a handful of downsides. First off: moving costs. Cross-country relocation is expensive, usually requiring a U-Haul, loads of gas, multiple restaurant stops, temporary housing, new furniture and restocking of household supplies.

Secondly, we would again be leaving family and friends. The upside is we actually have a handful of friends already living in San Diego that we could hang out with. No doubt they’d also prove to be invaluable guides to the area.

Thirdly: jobs. Neither of us are tied here by a great job. The movie gigs we had this summer were fun, but were so infrequent they can’t be trusted. Michigan’s economy isn’t the greatest for getting a job at the present, and we’ve already spent time in one of the only Midwestern cities that’s still booming – Chicago. Kirk and I have both applied to a few jobs in San Diego, and we’ve each heard back from an interested company. Neither position, however, is a sure bet as of now.

The cards are on the table. Ohh what to do, what to do? What do you think we should do?

The world is only as big as what you know.

Once you’ve seen a new place, the map you remember in elementary school changes.  Pink, orange, green or yellow – no longer just odd shapes – states and countries explode into paintings of life.  Each one becomes a new realm in your mind’s eye.

After I came back from Costa Rica, my world doubled in size. My ideology exploded.  Sure I have traveled before, but not to anywhere so vastly different from the United States.  

When I mull over how I’ve spent my years, my travels are giant speed bumps on the road of my memory.  From them I can conjure up so much detail and color, energy and emotion.  I can recall distinctly how I felt while hiking in Noosa, Australia when ocean waves hit the cliff on which Kirk stood, the froth spaying his feet. In Abel Tasman, New Zealand, I reminisce about eating at a seaside restaurant with my parents, my dad laughing out loud at the ridiculously large bowl of green-lipped mussels served to us.  On our gondola ride in Venice, Italy, I’ll never forget my grandmother asking the gondalier to serenade us through the canals – he did, and succeeded beautifully. In Costa Rica, I smile thinking of the happy seven and eight-year-old girls performing a dance routine to a Latin Top 40 song blaring from a boom box, striking charismatic poses at the finale. When journeying down memory lane, I shift down real slow, absorbing every sensation-filled detail.

Here in Chicago, there is a job that makes money, a space to live, a short drive to see family.  Great public transportation and a beautiful lakeshore, more restaurants than cornstalks in Kansas, enough nightlife for the professional socialite.  All in all, what has become for me, in the past year, a rather conventional lifestyle.  Why go?

Convention is not a routine experience maker.

If there are the means for travel, why not leap at the chance?  Let the world bloom as you run through it, each country on the map sprouting from one flat shape into an entire realm: scenery, language, music, crashing, unforgettable, human, experience.

What’s so great about Australia?  Kangaroos, koalas and kabobs.  The ocean, the reef, the surf.  The Ozzies and their accents, the notion that the whole population is of criminal descent, the idea that it’s all “No worries, mate.”

I don’t plan on turning into an expat anytime soon, of course.  But right now, I would love to ride a few waves, capture some great photos, meet some interesting people, and hopefully hit a few speed bumps along the way.

So I bet you’ve been wondering what kind of roof has been over my head here in Costa Rica . Or more importantly, more details about who I’ve been living with. Or maybe you haven’t. Bygones. I’m gonna tell you anyway.

When Julie first told me about my house parents, Natalia and David, she said they were like the “cool kids” on the block. The hip, young couple in the neighborhood.

Which, in fact, is totally true.

Natalia is twenty-six and David twenty-nine. Once I mentioned how they were my “house mom and dad” and Natalia immediately refuted, “Naaooo! You and me, we’re amigas!” David then cracked a joke about how I needed to ask permission to go hang out with Julie.

Natalia bucks the Tica trend with short, short hair and maybe-she’s-born-with-it makeup. And, she loves playing Guitar Hero. Especially with me.

David has a motorcycle. One of those need-for-speed Honda getups. I have, yes Mom, taken a ride on this thing – and man, did we fly. It was one night when David offered to give me a lift to Julie’s, which is a fifteen minute walk from the house. David said, don’t worry, we go slow. So of course, we scream up and down the hills, zipping through the blocks. I was hanging on by the whites of my knuckles and had molded my feet as best I could around the foot peddles. No sooner than we had started, we arrived at Julie’s front gate with a short skid of the tires. I jumped off the bike and yelled, “David, you said SLOW!” David said something to Julie in Spanish. She says to me, “Lauren, you were going like 40 MPH tops.”

Natalia and David (and me at the present) live in a cozy 2 bed/1 shower house with a combo dining/livingroom. The exclusively tile floors spill out of the front door and mesh into the concrete of the covered garage area. All of which is enclosed by tall fencing and barbed wire. Oh the barbed wire. Just about as easy to find in Costa Rica as a taxi in Manhattan.

Then there’s Rasta.

Oh Rasta, mi amor! (Sorry Kirk.) Rasta is part neighborhood mutt, part family dog. He floats around our street and a little beyond, but seems to be devoted to one of three houses in a tight group: mine, Olga’s across the street, and Candice & Aaron’s. Here’s a map:

Every day after lunch, when the heat is reaching its peak, Rasta comes galloping down the road toward our gate. I let him in, and he wags his big fluffy tail in helicopter motion, longing for a good massage. He’ll sleep on the cool patio tile until I head off for my afternoon shift at the project.

Rasta always gets our leftovers. One day Julie and I were making the trek from my house to hers. Rasta was trotting alongside us. I had a little shortbread cookie in my hand. I broke off a piece and threw it to Rasta, and he proceeded to sniff it – and nothing more. “Rasta!” I said, “I gave you the big half of my favorite cookie, and you don’t even eat it?!”

Apparently, he’s well taken care of by more people than we know, and has quite the refined palate to show for it. He’s a certified heart-stealer.

I gave Rasta a bath on Sunday. I hope he knew it was out of the kindness of my heart…

I don’t think he was amused.

Sometimes late at night I need to go use the wireless internet at the project. The gate is usually locked, so I sit on the ground just outside. The glow of my laptop both reveals and underlines the fact that I’m a gringo with an expensive piece of technology. Perhaps not the most ideal situation. Rasta, however, will accompany me on these not-so covert missions. He sits with me in the dark and I stroke his back with one hand and type with the other.

And the list has begun. The Everything-I’m-Going-To-Miss list.

A couple days ago I caught bits of a National Geographic show about religious cults in the US. It’s such a weird feeling to watch someone else talk with such certainty about an idea that you think is absolutely ludicrous. When the interviewer asked some of the teenage kids if they might have been brainwashed, they erupted into fits of laughter. “Brain-washed?” said one girl, “As in our brains have been washed of our previously unclean thoughts, yes!”

Right now, I’m looking at a quote-of-the-day blackboad at Charmers Cafe. Today’s quote, written in orange chalk is: “Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.” – Germaine Greer