Nicaragua: They Tell Me It's Not Malaria

When I'm looking for sound medical advice, I generally turn to the nearest person wearing neither shoes nor shirt, in this case Jeff from Brisbane. Using a distressing paucity of indecipherable Australian slang, Jeff informs me that the island's mosquitoes carry neither malaria nor dengue, a small comfort after my night of compulsively shivering and sweating - two symptoms I felt certain meant I had malaria. And, the thing of it was, I wasn't that upset. Until devoted partner disabused me of the notion, I had thought malaria was one of those things you got once and I was quite pleased to be using up my one time - to say nothing of the automatic immunity to sickle-cell anemia. Devoted partner finds it charming when I conflate sciencey things in a most Mrs. Malaprop way. Or at least I tell myself that he does.

I'm not going to lie: this was not one of our better vacations, and the would-be malaria was merely a small part of the reason why. The pictures from the last post? Someone took them in the location we were, but they sure as shit didn't take them in June. We had a little bit of weather. Every day. Now I'm one of those knows-how-to-use-the-internet-to-discover-such-nuggets-as-the-weather-at-my-destination so I knew there would be rain. But the internet told me there would be about an hour of rain a day which led me to think, not unwisely, that this would be rain of the tropical variety: sudden, in the afternoon, giving way to sun as quickly as the sun had given way to a shower.

Not so.

Had it not been for the discovery that every location in the Greater Caribbean (including Baja and Myrtle Beach) was experiencing the selfsame weather last week, this story might have turned out differently because we would have fled the deluge. But stuck with the inevitability of poor weather, we toughed it out. Until the not-malaria hit. Then we were less tough. I was particularly less tough. My not-toughness lasted several days and the aftermath was that my right ear was unable to equalize on land much less underwater. This made diving not on the agenda.

So back to my room, decorated by the team that brought you pretty much every Soviet-era interrogation cell, to lie on the bed and moan a little. There was some diving done, and some sharks seen - a plus - but, and I'm all for benefits of the doubt, it seems we had chosen a poor season to dive as the visibility on nearly every site was closer to soup than I would have liked. Lots and lots and lots of plankton sex.

I had about a day and a half of non-malarial entertainment, hampered only by the searing pain I experienced as I forced myself underwater, convinced that I was just being a sissy and that merely taking a long time to equalize underwater would be sufficient to forestall any ruptured eardrums. And, seeing as I emerged exactly zero times bleeding from the ears, I'm going to say that was a usable theory (until, say, something unexpected happens and I start blogging from the waiting room of the Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor). After that, I was struck by the more common form of ailment one encounters in southern countries.

That's right, the tail end of our vacation was spent, for me, at least, both prone and prone to rushing to the ladies room. In defense of the truly spectacular drugs one can get once the FDA isn't sniffing around, whatever it was I took (in Spanish, couldn't tell you) worked almost immediately. Would that the chemist had been opened when the trouble started and that I hadn't had to wait out a night of pretty spectacular discomfort for his shop to open in the morning. Once the "outgoing mail" issue had been settled, I was free to clutch my bloated gut and speculate on what we would name the alien baby I was sure was on its way to joining our family. I have decided (because I believe he is still on the way) to name him: Windsock.

So, yes, there will be details of a non-medical sort, because we did manage to have some fun while away, and there will be pictures as well (rainy, plankton-sex-soaked pictures), but right now I am preoccupied with what color Windsock's room should be and if I am really up to eating the heels of bread in my bag. Please don't feel the need to be extra nice to me for I know in my heart of hearts exactly how much responsibility I bear for carting us off to a third-world island no one had ever heard of with spotty electricity, no hot water, and at the start of the rainy season, no less. Next time I'll listen to the part of my brain that says things like, "Hawaii, swimming pool, cabana boy."

Where You Can Shove Your Namaste

Day four of hour-long morning workouts saw yoga on the schedule. Now I have said my fair share of anti-yoga things, mostly motivated by the two tragically uncomfortable sessions I participated in during college, but day 4 was yoga day so yoga I would do. After all, I did an hour of plyometrics and was fairly certain nothing could be more crippling than that.

Wrong.

So, while I don't know if I ever called yoga practitioners pussies, I may have thought it, and I would like to humbly take that back. I am the pussy. Now we may have started out on the wrong foot when I discovered that the yoga workout is 90 minutes long, not 60, prompting me to do some calculations about train time and shower time and teeth brushing time, but I am trying to be really game about moving my fat ass in productive ways, so I signed on. The nice man on the screen said some nice stuff about clearing my mind and focusing on the now and then proceeded to ask me to contort my body in ways it had a) never been contorted in before and b) frankly was unable to contort in. How was I supposed to clear my mind while agonizing over the fact that I cannot wrap my right arm underneath my lunged right leg to then hold onto my left hand which was crossed behind my back. I can't even get close. It was that move that did me in. After only thirty minutes I collapsed on my yoga mat and had a good cry.

Yes, I cried during yoga this morning.

A nice, self-pitying cry. Because I am about as flexible as my 95-year-old grandmother. Because I ate bread yesterday and the scale jumped alarmingly (yes, I know, weighing one's self every day is counter-productive, but very difficult to not do). Because I tried to do something and couldn't.

After blowing my nose and breathing normally for a moment, I sobered up. This morning was a bit of a failure. But next week on yoga day, I will attempt to start where I stopped today and see if I can't do at least the next 30 minutes of the workout. Because you know how I loathe defeat. 30 minutes of failyoga is better than 0 minutes of failyoga. Eating grapes today instead of bread is a positive thing as well (and they are good grapes that I will be replenishing after work chez Whole Foods). A lifetime of sloth might, just might, take a little time to fix. And while the other workouts were challenging, they involved things my body was accustomed to doing, which is why I could do them, albeit with a lot of grunting and bitch noises thrown in (you know EXACTLY the noises I mean). Ever since kiddie gymnastics class fail as a five year old, the Yelena has studiously avoided the kind of movement yoga encourages.

So I will work on it.

(seethes slightly more quietly)

I Love A Parade

No, that's not quite right. I hate parades. And unlike many of the things I hate for no good reason, this hate is easily traceable to a series of childhood traumas. I grew up in Manhattan in the 80s on the parade route. Parades in New York went across 86th Street and down 5th Avenue. I lived on 86th street. So approximately 10 times a year there would be many many many people on my doorstep and lots of sis boom bah. The parades, for the most part, all ran together in my mind, with two obvious exceptions. The loud ones. The scary ones. The not-good-for-children ones.

I speak, obviously, of the St. Patrick's Day parade and the Puerto Rican Day parade. And as much gets said about the Puerto Rican Day parade and its ills, as one who was there, year after year, it was the less bad of the two for one very important reason: climate. The Puerto Rican Day parade is in June, a month of sunshine and happiness and a desire for cookouts. Which can happily take place in Central Park. Many parade revelers would assemble in the park and in the parade viewing streets near the park so that they could revel in a sunshiny manner. St. Patrick's Day is in March. Today in fact (fancy that). People do not traditionally barbecue in March. Which is sad because the barbecued food could absorb a tremendous amount of the free-flowing alcohol.

So on years when the school holiday did not coincide with the parade, I walked home from school dodging green vomit in my earlier years, and friendly hands in my later ones. Something I was reminded of this morning on the train which was packed with the soon-to-be-handsy.

Now, the appearance of some comely lads, both fine and brave, in their dress blues mitigated my painful flashbacks some, and this picture sent by devoted partner helped some more, but I don't have a lot of fond parade memories (sorry to my dad who took me a number of times to see the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the only major parade that didn't come by our block).

But as part of my attempt at zen introspection, I tried to examine what it was about parades that set me off. I am a well-known avoider of crowds. I don't like them. They are highly inefficient. And they make me slightly (very) violent-like.

But that's not quite right either. I simply loved the souks in Morocco, and they were stuffed to the gills with people, many of whom were aggressively trying to sell me carpets. Similarly, my biggest regret of our trip to Egypt was not getting quality time in the Khan-el-Khalili market in Cairo, another place full up with people. And, truth be told, the ordered chaos of subway travel has always been my preferred method of transport, both here and abroad. I am deeply suspicious of metropolitan areas that don't have subways.

Yet the flip side of this is that when we look to travel in this hemisphere, I seek out the least traveled places; the we're-the-only-ones-here places. So now I think I might be a racist: American crowds (when not on subways) are ill-mannered, drunk, grabassy, loud talkers who inspire violence in me, whereas foreign crowds are ok because it's part of their culture? Crap, I don't want that to be me. That's very jingoistic (oh, forgive these poor people their crowds, they know not what they do). Still, I can't deny that foreign crowds irk me less than domestic ones.

So, I'll attempt to rationalize this ickiness away: I only encounter foreign crowds when on vacation, a period of time characterized by relaxitude and smiliness. Is that helping? Ok, how about this: Americans (again, excepting, for the most part riders of the NY subway) aren't really good at crowds. We're a country that kept expanding so that we would be less crowded. Aside from events or trips to Cancun, we don't congregate overmuch (see also MegaChurches, but those are self-selecting crowds). We're unaccustomed to sheer human volume and, as such, don't know the rules of engagement. It's why our crowds are ineffectually shove-y whereas the shoviness in a place like Mumbai (so I hear) is purposeful and generally without malice. We are a nation that shoves maliciously (I know I do). My experiences with foreign crowds have generally demonstrated a well-rehearsed algorithm of movement. A frenetic ballet, it you will. Anyone who has ever spent 60 seconds at the St. Patrick's Day Parade knows that the drunk jumble is anything but balletic.

Am I off the hook yet?

I know there's a stereotype of the American Abroad, but a lot of times it's not inaccurate. We do have a tendency to talk loudly and, probably given the paltry number of vacation days we get, we become exasperated quickly if the requisite amount of ease and relaxation we anticipated on our holiday isn't forthcoming. And yet, let's be fair, I'm not signing up for a trip to Oktoberfest or the World Cup anytime soon, so foreign country people, you're not in the clear either.

So, I'm going to feel bad about myself for a little bit while I try to make these rationalizations hold water. If you have anything that could help, please don't hesitate to contribute; as The Big Chill taught me: rationalizations are better than sex.