Adios Estados Unidos, hola Costa Rica. Also, brrr

**Disclaimer** This was written as an e-mail, and not edited. Also, I was cold when I wrote it. And cracked out from lack of sleep and culture shock **/Disclaimer**

Apparently rainy season in Costa Rica means the fact that the building where I'm living is half outdoors equals it's freaking cold. Look at me, 6 hours in a Spanish-speaking country and my syntax has gone down the shitter. Not the toilet paper, though! You're not allowed to flush that.

Really, what I'm doing right now is putting off taking a shower, since I have to be up at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow for orientation-y things, and it's so cold now that I really don't want to get all naked and wet.

Anyway, I'm bored. They don't actually have us doing anything until tomorrow, so I sat and talked to the girl who's been down here for two months, she's pretty cool. I hope I continue to like her. She's 21, taking a semester off before she graduates in the spring from some tiny college near Boston. She's funny, and she has the entire series of Friends on DVD with her, which I will be borrowing, since I only brought 1 disc of the Simpsons and a few random movies. The other woman must be in her 60s or so, but she seems like she's lived a cool life. She did 2 stints in the peace corps out of college, and this is like her retirement celebration.

I think I'm the only one here who doesn't speak a whole lot of Spanish, which is unnerving. At dinner, the cook sat down with us and was talking to the girl (Laura) and I got lost, and Laura would occasionally translate and occasionally not, and the cook (Sylvia) would sometimes look directly at me while talking, and I could only understand like every 8th word of what she said, and I felt dumb. Although I did understand that breakfast is between 6:30 and 7:15 (like I said, ass crack).

Okay, I need to bathe now, I've been awake for way too long. I can't even do the math with the time difference. I'm pretty sure it's been 70 bajillion hours since I've slept. So, shower, freeze, sleep, see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully an immediate and miraculous grasp of Spanish.Wish me luck!

My internal dialogue right now:

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

In other news, no...no, I can't actually think of any other news. Other than I am probably the worst packer ever, and despite my constant worrying that I'm going to end up down there having forgotten all my underwear, I am more than likely going to end up down there having forgotten all my underwear AND socks.

Pray for me.

My cat is staging a hostile takeover of my bed. Which is either less weird or weirder than it sounds.

I like sleep. It's one of my favorite things to do. My parents' cat, Boo, is trying to make me sad by destroying one of my favorite things. My parents think it's retaliation for bringing her two lovely new friends to play with. I think she's just a bitch.

This is a very crudely drawn representation of my preferred sleeping arrangement:

As you can see (ish), I sleep on one side of the bed and use the other side as a very comfy shelf. The white thing in the middle is the pile of pillows my knee requires for an agony-free sleep, since I secretly have the joints of an 80 year old man. Don't tell anyone.

Since moving home, every evening when I enter my room, I see this:

That little black spot would be the previously-unknown-to-be-evil Boo. Right where I would like to be sleeping.

Still, fine, cat in bed, whatever, right? I'm big, she's small, I can move her to another bedroom. So I do. Repeatedly, since she inevitably shows back up. I've never really been one to sleep with the door shut, but when I'm eventually forced out of extreme annoyance to close it, it doesn't always take.

So small cat in bed again. Only now she's angry, because maybe one of my cats has followed her in, or maybe the stupid dog started barking at her when she left whatever room I put her in.

Out of what I have determined to be unbridled hate, she starts clawing at the bed. Which is a very cat thing to do, but when she keeps edging closer and closer to any exposed part of my body, I get nervous, and I move her away.

She always comes back.

Eventually, I give up on getting her out of my bed, and she momentarily pauses her evil clawing, I assume in order to lull me into a false sense of security so that I can fall asleep. At which point, my life becomes a horrible chess match, with me trying to sleep where I like on my bed, and her trying to make me miserable because she can.

Which looks something like

[No, I am not that skinny, wobbly, or bald. Bear with me here, I can't take pictures of this]

Only I move around a lot in the hour or two it takes me to get to sleep, and Boo doesn't like that. So she growls and whines and scratches and shifts, and eventually, I wake up more like this:

The slow shift towards the wrong side of the bed continues all night, with my knocking things on the floor, which--get this--SHE THEN PEES ON. So if I want to keep from having to wash a shirt or pair of pants every day, I have to make sure to not actually knock anything on the floor.

Long story short, it tends to end like this:

With me, sleeping on top of (or under) whatever crap has piled up on top of my bed. And, if you will, note the conspicuous lack of cat.

That's right, most mornings she gets bored with this, and wanders off to torment someone else in the family. And pee on stuff we leave on the floor.

Long story short: if you're ever in my house, don't put anything that resembles clothing on the floor, and don't make eye contact with the evil cat. I have yet to confirm this, but she may eat your soul.

A brief eulogy for blogs past

As the wise men of Semisonic once said, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. Wise, right? (I'm not entirely certain they were all men, or that whoever wrote the song was male, or that there was more than one of them, and it wasn't some shit like 5 for Fighting, which is totally just one guy...but I'm not about to wikipedia it. Maybe later.)

My good friend Crispy noted (in a comment, which is something you all have the capability to do, ahem), and I hope you would by now have noticed, I have a new blog. “New” naturally connotes the existence of “old” blog(s). These most certainly also existed, for however short a time.

I’d like to take a brief yet verbose moment to remember them, in order that we all may swiftly forget them.

First, there were blogs at school. “Post thoughts on weekly reading here!” “Grouply discuss your deep thoughts with each other!” “Pretend to know what you and others are talking about!” “Try not to accidentally type quotes from the episode of Deadliest Catch you and your roommate are watching while you’re doing this!”

I wasn’t very good at those. This is mainly because I get overwhelmed by technology that’s still in developmental stages, as my college’s blog system inevitably was. I also didn’t really like anyone in any of my classes and therefore wasn’t inclined to care what they thought.

Needless to say, my participation in these was minimal at best.

Next, there was my post-graduate life-recapping How to Be a Tempestuous Bitch. This one started out well enough, as an inappropriate overshare of my life and relationships. It crashed and burned when I ended up in a relationship that could delicately be described as “rocky.”

In reality, it could be described as the most passive-aggressiveness-laden, emotionally abusive relationship I have ever been anywhere near (and hopefully the only one). Eventually, I realized how embarrassing it was to publicly chronicle my descent into Lifetime movie-esque drama; I stopped updating the blog, and recently deleted it altogether.

A year later, I was in a much better place mentally and was preparing to be in a much better place physically. Ms Anthropy’s Philanthropy was born.

And then died.

I was narrating my short road trip and planned to narrate my path leading to Costa Rica. No one seemed to care what was going on, as no one was commenting on anything or acknowledging the existence of the blog in any way. So I stopped updating, since I like to at least pretend other people are reading what I’m writing, and that was difficult without any proof. (I've since been made aware of the "stats" feature of blogger, so I can now see how many people actually visit my page. This does not excuse you from not leaving comments. If you don't leave a comment, at least tell a friend about me, so that I can squeal with delight when the number goes from "2" to "3" when I hit refresh.)

Anyway, all those things fizzled out, and then I had lunch with my dear friend Smells, who was in town doing some wedding planning, and whose name is not actually Smells. Among other things that happened that day (not the least of which was lunch at Tony’s. Mmm), Smells introduced me to a hilarious blog-comic-hybrid called Hyperbole and a Half. You will notice a link to your right. Go there. I’ll link it here, too, for good measure.

It’s basically the funniest thing I’ve ever encountered. If you can read a single post without cracking a smile, you are inhuman. If you can make it through the “party” post without crying from laughter, you are literally a zombie and can therefore be excused since it doesn’t have much to do with brains.

Allie, the artful and ADHD-addled mind behind the blog just tells stories about her life of unemployment in Montana. And she makes her living doing this! And almost nothing else!

As nothing else is what I have been doing an awful lot of lately, I was inspired to actually get my shit together enough to write a little bit about life in general. A few days after this new-found impetus, I was driving home from the gym listening to a mix CD I had made by picking songs that had fun names or were less than 4 minutes long.

And that, my friends, is the birth of Taking the Long Way.

The Beepening.

There is something in my parents' house that is desperate for attention. Once an hour, every hour, something...somewhere...beeps.

It’s been this way for a while, and for approximately 30 seconds every hour, I’m driven to near madness by it.

I then promptly forget. Fifty-nine and a half minutes of every hour are blissfully beep-free.

Right after college graduation (2 years ago, for those of you keeping track), during my previous period of unemployment (more on that fun lifestyle later, I have a lot to say), I would wake up around noon and get to TV-watching. At 1:02, I would hear a beep, be confused, resolve to remember to go looking for the source at 2:02, then forget.

Until 2:02, of course, when the cycle would start again.

From May until September 2008, when I finally got a job, this happened daily. Hourly. Like clockwork. Shoddy clockwork, it turned out.

When I moved back this past July, I was horrified (momentarily, but repeatedly) to find that the beeping was STILL HAPPENING. Only whatever it is seems to be running slow. In July, it would beep at 16 past the hour; a few weeks ago it started beeping at 17 past.

Over time, I’ve grown more conscious of it, which is the opposite of what I feel should be happening. I think the mystery of it is what’s keeping it in the forefront of my mind. That and having nothing else to focus on (other than my impending pregnancy (see previous post)).

I finally remembered to point The Beeping out to my parents, who never seemed to notice it (something about all of the loud noises they produce when they’re home from work means it’s background noise for a few hours).

One day, my dad and I were standing in the kitchen. I looked at the clock to see something:16. Struck by the realization that I could catch it in the act, I attempted to get my dad’s attention. Unfortunately, I mumble, and he doesn’t seem able to hear whatever frequency my voice is, so it took a little while for me to get the message across.

“The Beeping. It’s about to happen.” Very ominous, I thought.

“What’s that?” He was standing approximately three feet from me. This went on much longer than necessary.

“The Beeping! It happens at 17 after.”

“Oh right, the beeping. Where’d you say it was coming from?”

Aha. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? The hunt being very sporadic in nature (I tend to get distracted by something shiny after a minute or so), I had never really narrowed it down. If I’m standing in the kitchen, it sounds like it’s coming from the laundry room. If I’m standing in a different area of the kitchen, it sounds like it’s coming from the basement. If I’m in the family room, it sounds like it’s coming from the kitchen.

Dad picked basement, I stayed upstairs. We decided it’s coming from the storage area in the basement. His guess was a smoke detector or something. Maybe The Beep means whatever it is is low on battery. But it’s been beeping for TWO. YEARS. If that beep meant “low battery,” it seems to be confused in addition to very annoying and persistent.

Either way, the short attention span seems to run in the family, since that’s as far as we got. This was several weeks ago, and once an hour, every hour, I’m filled with a lust for mystery, determined to go Sherlock Holmes on The Beeping’s ass.

Then a dog wants to come inside or I see a commercial for something that looks delicious or I have to pee, and the beeping is forgotten. For example, I’m finishing this up at 12 past, and I guarantee by the time 17 comes around, I’ll be making oatmeal.

So in a way I guess I still win. But one day, by some bizarre coincidence, I’ll find a hammer at exactly 16 past the hour. I’ll be positioned at the bottom of the basement stairs. And shit will go down.