Rambling without direction.

Oh, hello there, May. Are you already here again? That happened fast. Season is, in all true definitions and understandings, over. Another crazy year under my belt. Another ten BVI stamps in the passport and another departing staff full of people whom I will probably not ever see again. I think I've gotten good at goodbyes. Practice makes perfect, I suppose, but I never wanted to be good at goodbyes.
I don't know that I would consider myself a nomad, though I have always regarded the word romantically and wish it could pass as my own classification. I'm just lost and then found, generally in succession. Over and over and over again. I stay somewhere until I'm unhappy and then I leave. I'm not a hobo; I'm just logical. And portable. I also happen to like living in places where most people only get to vacation. I don't really understand why everybody doesn't live this way. Why on Earth would you live somewhere mundane when you don't have to? When there are a million places so beautiful that they make you wish you never had to blink? It's true, I tend to love in fairly expensive spots. It works for me, since being broke seems to be my most natural state. I can see how that would not work for everyone.
It can also be exhausting to live this way. You spend a few months gearing up. Preparing and planning and scheduling and trying your very best to get ready for the tazmanian devil that is a throng of pasty, hurried tourists. Then you're in the cloud, just trying not to get hit by the suntan lotion bottles and tiny paper umbrellas that fly off the frenzied mass. The frenzy lasts a few lucrative months longer than you would like it to. And then...then it's like you were going 95 on the highway and saw a cop. Slam the brakes. Slow the hell down. Try your best to act like nothing happened. And then, before you know it, you're prepping again. There is barely time to catch your breath.
So I guess I can understand why people wouldn't want this life. But I still do.

Cheers to the Past

It's amazing what a good chat with the past can do for a person. It makes you see the years for the small bits of world that they are. Here I am living my life like the last five years are the only ones I have had. True enough, I consider these five to be the most awake of my twenty six. But it would be an injustice to treat the first twenty one like a long nap. I did live then, too. I had fun. I made friends and mistakes. I laughed and loved and felt.
I call it my past life and I tell it like it's a story. But I think it's time to give due credit to my pre-Never Never land existence.
If I could sit down for a while with my twenty year old self, I would kick my ass into gear. I'd say, "Get out of your house, stop drinking so much beer and open your effing eyes. Have fun while you're here, because you won't be here for much longer." I would also mention that neon nail polish would eventually have a drastic effect on my happiness level and that I should hang in there and not bitch too much, since I would eventually land under palm trees. But maybe that would be crossing that weird butterfly effect line and I would change the course of my life, ending up on the street trying to sell my soul or working in a KFC somewhere, miserable. Anyway.
I wish I had looked around a bit more then. I may have felt like a zombie most of the time, but I wasn't. The people around me weren't, either. I owe my past an apology, I think. I probably owe that to the people who still float around inside the memories of everything I so harshly rejected.
I am sorry that I ran so fast. I am sorry that I gave no thought to leaving. I fell into a quicksand world where no one asks about who you used to be. I needed to start over, which is exactly what I did. But a goodbye was in order and in my rush towards the ocean I forgot to look back at the mountains.
Let's not get confused. Running was what I needed to do. I have argued to people that I was never really running from anything. I was running toward something. Pursuit, not escape. Which, it seems, is both the blue truth and an utter lie.
But if the pursuit is the truth, then I won. I did it. I can not name what I was looking for and I can not tell anyone for sure what it was I found, but I came out breathing more deeply than the shallow Colorado air ever would have allowed.
As has been said a million times and a million ways, if the past hadn't been what it was, the present wouldn't be what it is. So, cheers. To screwy, mixed up, angsty past selves. To the life I really did live then. To the people I knew before I was me. I finally feel like I can say thank you to the life I had for bringing me to the one I'm living now.

Just live.

I wrote this one a while ago, which becomes apparent. And I was feeling a little more bitter about life than I am right now, perhaps. At least, that's how I read it. Regardless, I like it. Ignore the bitterness and get on with it...

At some point, this all ends. The vines that peek over the side of the tent like they're trying to pull off a long glance. Like kids that climb Red Rocks to watch a show; Not really supposed to be there, but not exactly looking to leave. The sun hitting the driftwood that sits on my front porch. Sitting above and inside the trees. Strapless sundresses and tan lines three days before Christmas. It ends someday.
I spend too much time thinking about the past. Blowing kisses to ghosts. Wondering if it will ever again be like it was. Hoping at once that it will and that it won't.
I spend too much time thinking about the future. Questioning, rightfully, the sustainability of the life I am currently living. It's not sustainable, I know, and I dedicate far too much time to what might happen when the sand stops falling.
Live, Jamie. Live now. Look at your beautiful friends and your beautiful home and your days off filled to the brim with warm sun and deep breaths and just live. Once. Try it once.

If you were to be me for this exact moment, your life would look like this: You would be drinking a grapefruit/pellegrino spritzer, listening to the new Backstreet Boys single on Pandora (Um, why didn't anyone tell me Backstreet was back? And why am I allowing Pandora to subject me to them?), admiring your new orange Ray Bans, which you're fairly sure will end up being your life partner, and you would be thinking a great deal about how you should be doing much more productive things than writing in your ridiculous blog. And then you would chuckle a bit, shrug your shoulders, say "Oh, Jamie..." and go back to writing. Also, you would have had Kix for dinner. Right outta the box. What is my life? Seriously.
I think I'm going to stay here for another season. Oooohhh, it took me about five full minutes and multiple backspaces and repeat typing to get that one out. The thing is, Maho will only be Maho for one more year. Even if the Trust comes through. Even if it actually manages to stay open somehow. It will not be run the same way...It can't be, really. As much time as I have spent here and as much as I have gone through walking around these creaky boardwalks, it would feel like a great injustice to leave for its last breathing season. Plus, that gives me one more year to really figure out what's next. My goodness, will I miss this place when it truly is no longer an option. Like an awesome ex-boyfriend who always still sorta had a thing for you and then goes and gets married. Suddenly, something you have always sweetly regarded as an option of sorts can no longer be that. Such is the inevitable fate of Maho Bay. To me, anyway.
Do you think Facebook ever realizes that the people it suggests you should be friends with might be people you have tried to avoid for years? They need to put more thought into this.
I feel very scattered today. I haven't been able to concentrate on a single thing since I crawled out of bed this morning. Cleaning my room would help, probably, but I rarely find that cleaning my room is the thing I would most like to be doing. I can always come up with something far more important or interesting. Like Kix or The Backstreet Boys.

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.