Where is the curve, anyway?

Ohhh, goodness, here it comes again. I can feel it rising to my surface like a million pin pricks. Not painful yet. Not aching. Not intense in any real way, but certainly not willing to be ignored. It's restlessness. Dissatisfaction with the level of comfort that I have reached. It's wanderlust in its raw form; the very feeling which got me here and then got me out of here....the first time. I don't want this. Stagnant is stagnant, even if it occurs in the most perfect place I have ever lived.
I am looking at plane tickets right now. Round trip. Two friends whom I have known for pretty much as long as I have known anybody are getting married in June, and I am flying home (I use the term loosely) to celebrate with them. To walk into their new, expanding world for a minute and retreat slowly back into my ever-contracting one. I never know if I'm behind the curve or in front of it.
There is something to be said for living in a place where every day is essentially the same. You have no choice but to live for today, as there doesn't seem to be a rear-view mirror to look into or a future to contemplate. You have to figure out how to be happy rightthissecond because the second after that will be a spitting, glaring image of the last one. That said, I am tired of my days melting into one another.
A friend of mine recently commented on how nice it is to have so much free time here. No dishes to wash. No groceries to shop for. We even get to skip the drive to and from work, which takes up much more time than you may realize. She said that it's great to work and to live and only those two things. I nodded, and thought to myself, "What? No!" The best way to live is to have days teeming with beautiful to-dos. The seams at dawn and at dusk shredded with energy and fullness. No room to spare. And absolutely no time that could ever be called "free." Of course, this is all from my current state of excuseless boredom. The grass is always greener, isn't it, and begging to be explored?

rainy days and bacon feet

So, let me tell you about Sundays. I work on Sundays, as I don't have a three day weekend worked into the 35 hours a week that my salary says I should work. I COULD have a three day weekend, but Maho doesn't quite work like that. So, I work on Sundays. There is nothing to do on Sundays. Every vendor or distributor or random human whom I do business with is off on Sundays. Every single one. So, any call I make will be made to voicemail. Any e-mail will be responded to tomorrow, when the masses return to their 9-5 jobs. Miss Emily works the counter this particular morning, which means the store looks awesome and is running perfectly without my constant supervision. Basically, I have nothing to do on Sundays except get paid to sit at my desk and surf the internet. I peruse the cyber world looking for cool t-shirt designs or touristy tropical knick knacks. I hate Sundays and I question the logic of Maho Bay sometimes...
In short, I'm bored. In other news, I have a tiny, jagged bit of glass in the heel of my foot right at the moment. It is inhibiting my ability to run (my genius brain figured out how to beat 5am Jamie. Drumroll, please….run in the afternoon! What a concept.) In my net-surfing stupor, I have looked up a variety of home remedies for splinters, glass shards and the like. The most popular and sworn by method seems to be putting a piece of bacon fat over it and then covering that with a band-aid. Apparently the fat draws the sucker right out. I have my doubts, but I'm willing to give it a shot, as I don't love digging around inside my appendages with sewing needles or tweezers. I guess I’m just worried about the critters that might be involved once I secure the scent of their wildest dreams to my foot. I’ll let you know how it goes.
It is a rainy, rainy island day. Strange for January. It’s been rainy for a while now, but as my manager curtly pointed out, “With all the earthquakes and hurricanes going on, I’m not going to bitch much about the fact that it’s raining a little bit more than it usually does this time of year.” Good call. Besides, I love a good rainy day. With my laundry done, my room clean and my toenails painted, I have nothing to do when I go home except sit. Read. Do crossword puzzles. Interesting, the kind of chill that is reached with no choice.
My sister just brought in a tiny branch full of mini-air plants. She said “I thought you would like these.” She’s right. I have the best sister ever.
Ugh, I need to get out of this office. Time to go eat junk food and affix pork to my heel.
Yum.

I'm in a fight with my running shoes right now. The funny thing is, we both have the same argument. They want to be used. They miss the road and the sand and they miss the way this island feels at 6 in the morning. I, too miss the road. And the sand. And I miss how the island feels at 6am way more than those stubborn shoes could ever understand.
Come to think of it, maybe it's not the shoes I should be angry at. It could just be my sleeping self, content to close her eyes to the awesomeness that is the early morning Caribbean. The one who groans when that wretched alarm clock goes off at 5:00 and moves barely the bits of herself required to change the alarm time to 7:00. That's right. Asleep enough to only manage a groan, but passionate enough about being asleep to stretch her fingers more than just "snooze."
I would never hire a personal trainer. The thought of paying someone to tell me what to do (in some cases, shout at me what to do) is laughable. In my day to day life, someone has to be able to pay me before they can try and accomplish such a frustrating task, thank you very much. But maybe I could stand to have more than the non-threatening beep of my cell phone alarm clock telling me to wake up and get off my lazy butt at 5:00am. What I need is the 7 year old version of Alley, my kid sister, on Christmas morning. I need that every day. There is no way any human could possibly sleep through the kind of noise she was able to produce on that particular morning. I probably shouldn't limit that to humans. If I remember correctly, whatever variety of dogs, cats, hamsters, fish and birds we housed at the time were no more immune to the shrieking wake-up call of a little girl waiting to open gifts than any of us were. Oh, tiny Alley. I will invent a time machine and bring you to 2010 just for your incredible 5am lung power. And then maybe I'll be able to stick to that already-forgotten resolution to run at least most mornings. Maybe.