PassPort: Baltimore
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You were destroyed last night,
but today you can be remade.
Pick up the pieces,
and if they don’t fit,
make new ones.
It’s a hard puzzle,
but that’s the difference
between making life
and traveling towards death.
Hi all! I took my very first “big-kid” vacation recently. I spent from May 27th to June 5th in Peru exploring ruins, meeting the locals and the llamas, and traversing the Amazon! This vacation was possible due to my dad’s eldest sister (my Auntie) who has promised all of her nieces and nephews that when they graduate from high school and college, she will do a trip with them anywhere in the world as long as you pay for your own transportation (and souvenirs).
If you’re wondering why Peru, it’s more like why not. I was not looking for a vacation to sit back and drink on some beach. I can do that at home, thanks. I was looking for adventure and something very different than where I’m from. More than that, I wanted inspiring landscapes. I hiked up breathtaking mountains that went into the cloud forest and ended in ancient Incan ruins. I stepped, suspended, across the canopy of the Amazon rain forest and paddled close to the Amazonian river beds.
I tried to take as many pictures as possible and jot down some thoughts and experiences in between adventures with my new familia. Honestly, there wasn’t much time. We were always doing, resting, eating, or on our way to our next destination.
May 27th I traveled from Boston, MA; to Miami, FL; and finally to Lima, Peru. I met with Auntie in Miami and we flew to Lima together.
I noticed a very big change in air quality after touching down in Lima and Auntie complained that her eyes felt very red. We’d been sneezing and coughing and she figured that this was because of the bad air on the plane. While waiting for our baggage, a Peruvian woman overheard us talking and said it was the pollution. She explained she had permanent eye problems due to the air quality, which she said was caused by coal mining (the word mining escaped her for a moment while speaking in English). Looking online post trip, it does sound like Lima’s air pollution issue is pretty well known and has more to do with vehicle fuel emissions, but is due to a host of factors. I notice I’m a tad stuffed up the first day visiting New York City, so I was pretty sneezy in Lima.
A sign let us know who to follow to a van to drive us to the Miraflores neighborhood.
Lima is littered with cell phone billboard advertisements. Stray dogs wander the streets in a surprising number, taring into garbage left out for pickup. Police cars watch over the city everywhere. On the way to Hotel Antigua Miraflores I counted stray dogs and police cars, seeing which would come out as the victor in population. Our driver mentioned that Miraflores was one hundred percent secure. By the time we reached the hotel, the number of police cars were in the lead, but the dogs overtook them very quickly as the trip progressed.
The hotel was very fancy, but missing window screens which are apparently not something used in all cultures. We had a big room on the top floor. The top floor was unexpectedly in the open air. One moment we were in a hotel going up stairs, the next we were on an outside patio with doors to various rooms. We were in the far corner. The room had three beds, one king and two twins. The wooden furniture seemed antique, dark stained and elegant. There was jewelry on sale in the lobby and a small open air courtyard on the first floor with a fountain and a flowering citrus tree. Large terracotta vessels dot every bit of landscape. Two computers with desks allowed internet access, but as someone who has a job spent using computers, I wanted to spend my vacation off them.
We didn’t get settled in until about two in the morning since our flight had been delayed. We were set to meet in the lobby at nine-thirty in the morning. We were hungry before bed but too tired to care. I ate my last Cliff bar to make sure I could sleep.
So, my blog’s birthday came and went not too long ago. I didn’t mark its passing because I’ve been a flake about writing, which I’m sure makes orphan kittens cry.
If I believed in New Years resolutions, posting more on the blog again would be a good one. I know this is an issue a lot of writers in general struggle with. There are many tricks of the trade to deal with it. Blogging itself is really a trick to get you to write more. So, what’s trick to make you blog? Where will this trickiness all end?
The tricks to get oneself to wake up in the morning, the tricks to make oneself exercise, the tricks to get oneself out the door on time, conserve gas, eat right, get more done at work, stay organized, stay in touch with people, stay working on art…
I have several drafts of posts in my little WordPress CMS thingie. Keeping drafts might be the key to this. I don’t usually have enough time to write a post from beginning to end or edit to where I’m happy. Often I’m not even sure if it’s a post that ‘works’ for me. Being a draft takes the pressure off a bit. It allows random things so when you sit down to post, really all you have to do is sit down to edit something. That’s certainly not something I always feel like jumping up and doing, and sometimes I want to edit a piece of writing 6,000 times before putting it out there.
Compulsive editing is a big issue I have with longer story writing. I tend to want to reread what I’ve written so far before I go on to write more. If I reread I want to edit. This leads to me spending that time reserved for writing doing edits instead.
To work out compulsive editing I’ve been trying to write before rereads. If it doesn’t fit exactly right because I didn’t remember all of the details of the story so far, or what I decided to name a few characters, that can be worked out during editing time. We’re trying to make writing time for writing. What a concept.
It’s easier to write for me right now since I’m on vacation and doubly since I’m traveling. Many of my distractions are at home and in its place are inspirations as I’m exposed to what I don’t normally see every day. I think people tend to block things out as they get used to them. Most of our life then becomes routine, and thus blocked out. How does one maintain wonder and inspiration as their days are a series of blocks one doesn’t remember independently or distinguish from one another? Sometimes when a week of work goes by, and I try to remember the individual days and what happened, I come up pretty scarce.
It’s important to break your routine as uncomfortable as it is. Life churns and bubbles much more brilliantly even if the resulting boiling chaos can throw us off kilter.
So I’ll do my best to throw the kilter off and battle blog flakes, and let me know if any of you out there have the secret key to this business. I’d be interested to hear how other people deal with these things.
