Archive Page 9

A Totally Normal Pre-Departure Freak-Out

Published September 19, 2011 Expatify , Moving , Saying Goodbye 8 Comments
Tags: , ,

So. It was bound to happen: I had my first pre-departure freak-out today.

Actually, I’m kind of still having it, in the midst of it, as I’m writing this. I’m sitting here, on one of the most goddamn beautiful days we’ve had in a shitty/foggy anti-summer, surrounded by trash bags filled with the various components that compose my life. I’m nauseous and hazy feeling and I can’t really cry anymore and I don’t know what to do with myself. So I’m writing a blog post about how I had a freak-out, and I’m writing about it in the past tense, because it’s easier to pretend it’s over and done with, passed like a nasty little storm cloud on an otherwise perfect, Indian Summer day.

It started with money. It always starts with money. There isn’t enough of it. Not ever and especially now. Maybe if I had a trust fund or a nest egg or a looming inheritance, but I’ve got none of that. I’ve got about half the money I wanted to have, and it’s entirely possible that I’ll land in Phnom Penh with only a couple hundred bucks to my name.

Yes, far less capable people with far fewer skills than I have landed in a similar situation and done just fine. (This is what I keep telling myself at least.) But I’ve always had a job, always had a reliable source of income, and I’m about to give that up for a very long time.

I keep recounting, obsessively adding sums and subtracting costs, best-cases and worst-cases and most-probable projections. They’re all fucked, I decided this morning. And I’m fucked with them.

And then I got to thinking about all there is to do. It’s a lot. Moving out of an apartment, going to the dump, going to the Goodwill, dismantling a life. There’s tons of people to see, appointments to keep, loose ends to tie up—disputes over medical bills to resolve and a car to sell. There’s goodbyes to orchestrate, a wedding to go to.

I don’t want to do any of it.

I want to cancel everything and curl up on my soggy-soft mattress, thin old sheets over blood stains, and stare out the window and do fucking none of it. I want to be Vicodin-floaty, detached, numb, not here.

But that’s the addict in me, who always wants to escape. And I don’t think that addict will ever go away, just kind of live inside me, flare up sometimes—times like this—but usually just more subdued, in the corner, a quiet but insistent whisper.

Of course, I know I’m going to do it all, take care of it. And of course I won’t be dropped on my ass and of course I’ll find a way to scrape together enough money and be okay. Of course it’s normal, I suppose, to freak out a bit before a huge transition—I’d be a little suspect if I didn’t freak out. Of course the sadness and the anxiety and the feeling, not of panic but of monumental, mind-wracking, gut-wrenching worry, in the face of a big blank unknown—of course all this is totally normal, right?

Right?

My Memory Lane Is Littered With Poems

Published September 9, 2011 Expatify , Moving , Poetry , Punk , Subculture 1 Comment

So I’ve started up on the going-through-boxes bit of moving: digging up, spreading out, wrenching off dusty lids and getting elbow-deep in scraps of memories—you know, the “ugh” of the to-do list. Not so much because it’s tedious and time-consuming, but more because of what it opens, draws you back into—old mix tapes and yellowed papers and skinny sheets of photo negatives, the cluttered corners of your own life.

So I brew a phat cup of coffee and put on a song that seems fitting (even if it’s just the shitty YouTube version) and let the confetti of my life explode across the bedroom floor.

It’s a kind of Memory Lane without street patterns or building numbers (and so in that way, kind of like Phnom Penh itself)—just a hodgepodge of unordered relics and artifacts. Memories are one thing, because you can distort them, whether you mean to or not; you can warp them over time, into what you want them to be or need them to be. The actual physical crap you accumulate is more like the facts—the hard, plastic facts, an old bedside clock covered in stickers—of what your life is and has been. If an autobiography is the facts, and a memoir is the memories (and thus inherently flawed, and those flaws often telling us more than the facts), then my room and my life have turned into an explosion of upturned facts, mini-autobiographies presented non-sequentially, with just a dusty trail of memory to string together any narrative meaning.

And you start to wonder, from an anthropological standpoint, what your life would look like to someone, if all they had to look at were your possessions. (I think there was actually an MTV dating show with that as the premise, and I’m embarrassed that I know that.) But this is more than just your possessions—the things you’ve saved. They tell a kind of story, it seems, about you, one that you probably couldn’t tell yourself—one that you’re probably only vaguely aware exists.

Old fake ID, never once used to drink, only to get into shows.

Sketch by an old ex-boyfriend, found in a notepad

Show flier, and about 100 old Gilman cards. #scenecred

Second print piece I ever published, in August 2000.

New Kids On The Block newsletter I self-published back in the 2nd grade. Note the rub-on letters. #scenecred

45-page novella I wrote in the 4th grade, about little girls who had a secret club.

Mountain o' notebooks, zines, poems, etc.

And I think if you looked at it, without knowing me, you’d think, “Holy shit, this girl loves to write.” Cause that’s what I thought—surprised by it, startled like an animal in the lights of it, the reams of evidence—which I guess goes to show you how little you can know yourself. Like I’d forgotten, you know, how much writing has always been with me: the poetry and the zines and the pseudo-chapter books and the stories I dictated to my dad before I even knew how to write, that he transcribed for me and I somehow saved, in a dusty old box all these years later.

It’s kind of astounding, the sheer volume, and that some of the lines strike me as good. Really good. As in, “Holy shit, I wrote that!” It’s been a curious experience, like viewing my life from the outside, and it’s caused me to ask myself: Why? Where does this all come from? And the truth is, I couldn’t tell you why I write, where this need in me comes from, anymore than I can tell you why I travel. I’ve read great essays on these topics, even tried to write a few myself, but in my most honest of moments, I have to admit that I have no idea why, except that there’s that thing in me “that will not be still.”

So I guess you could say that digging out all this crap has helped to remind me of who I am, the fact of who I am (which might be different from what I tell myself)—that I didn’t just make this up, that I really have always wanted to write. And more than that: I’ve always written. Funny, that I’d have needed all this evidence to remind me.

But then there’s reality, which is that you can’t hang on to everything, save all these Xeroxs and yellow legal pads and notebooks that you really only ever go through when you move. It’s too much to possibly ever read, and besides, I’m trying to avoid the whole storage unit thing. So I set up two piles, the larger of which goes into the recycling bin, and I sift through and save the gems and take my own little stroll through Memory Lane.

The Final Countdown

Published September 4, 2011 Expatify , Moving , Saying Goodbye 3 Comments
Tags: ,

I fly out one month from today. So I’ve been running around my apartment doing Gob-like magic moves, singing this song:

But, to be real, it’s funny how the imminent move has shifted my perspective. It’s changed my focus on what’s important, and how I want to spend my time. There’s lots I should be doing—sending pitches and queries, putting my furniture up on Craigslist, working six days a week and stockpiling money. There’s plenty of What Ifs I should be stressing on, that I really ought to be stressing on.

But having a tangible ending in sight has done the opposite: it’s zapped me into the present. It’s made me think about what’s important, forced me to think about how I want to spend this time—this precious, short time—before I leave.

And my main focus isn’t on all the shit I have to do (which is a lot) or trying to manage all the unknowns (which are a lot), but on how I can best enjoy this last month, how I can best soak in this little life I’ve had here. Today, it was by sleeping late, eating an enormous Fenton’s sundae with friends, rereading a book I love. And by dancing around to this ridiculous song…

Phnom Penh Timelapse

Published August 24, 2011 Cambodia , Expatify , Moving , Phnom Penh , Photography , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture 4 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

A Phnom Penh friend posted this video on Facebook. I’ve watched it a few times through; amidst the deluge of moving anxiety dreams and before-I-go to-do’s, it’s been a nice way to pause—a kind of moment of stillness, a stand-in for the meditation I’ve been entirely too busy to do.

So of course it’s a terribly idealized depiction of the city. (“What did they did with all the rubbish?” one person commented.) But I have to say that there were moments there that kind of felt like this—riding in a tuk-tuk at night, when the city was still, half-asleep with a cool breeze off the river, and it felt magical and precious and like home in a way you couldn’t quite explain.

It’s good to be reminded of that, even if the moments were fleeting and only one side of what it felt like to be there, live there—good because the move is getting close and I’m starting to stress.

I’ve been waking up unrested, unsettled from tangles of intense dreams, catastrophes that prohibit me moving: car accidents, robberies, deaths, pregnancy. In my waking mind, I don’t feel that worried, am still consumed with the day-to-day’s of a life that doesn’t feel like it’s ending. Except that I’ve started to stress about money. Money’s an easy thing to stress about—it’s measurable, tangible, far easier to stress about than the big blank horizon of unknowns.

“You’re still so young,” a friend told me over dinner. “Even if you go out there and it all falls through, and you have to come back and start over in a year, you still won’t be 30 yet.”

“I know,” I replied, nodding. I’d given myself the same rationalization.

“But,” she smiled, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

I sighed. “Me neither. And that’s what really scares me.”

The Keeper, Yuba River Character Study

Published August 19, 2011 Abandoned Places , California , Northern California , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Subculture , USA 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Didn't take a picture of The Keeper. Though he apparently doesn't mind. So here's a Flickr photo instead

He stood like a masthead on the wooden deck and yowled at the river.

His shirt flapped open in the breeze. The stomach was hard, muscles like little knots and skin tough as old leather. Cargo pants and sandals, not-quite-Birkenstocks. Eyes as spooky-clear and sharp as the river water, blazing from behind a scraggle of hair: shoulder-length gray and a light-socket beard that seemed reminiscent of those old miner photos, made you wonder if he wasn’t the descendant of some wayward band of them, a man born into the wrong era, or the last living vestige of an era that’s dying, been dying, might already be dead.

“He’s a dyin bread, for sure,” Alicia said as we tromped over the dirt path, stepping sideways so our worn old sneakers wouldn’t skid us into patches of poison oak. “Like a real-life troll gate keeper.”

Backpacks and coolers and limp plastic flotation devices—we were rolling 22-deep, a smattering of tattoos and a trail of cigarette smoke rode up from Oakland for an annual camping trip.

I could glimpse the river from the path: slick green between these flat, broad boulders, like a long line of really crooked molars. It was hot—Northern California hot, which isn’t really that hot—and each spot I saw along that Yuba River looked perfect, picturesque, a postcard of Sierra-Foothills pristine.

“The best spot is further down,” Chummy called back. “But we gotta to pay The Keeper.” And he smiled at the joke and people called out “Keeee-per” and we laughed.

“It’s the OG dude,” they’d explained, “that’s got one of the best swimming spots on the river on his property. There’s a fence and shit, a sign telling you you’re on private property, but you keep walking down and you get to this shack he built down there, where he lives and is always kinda hanging out. And you give him a couple beers or some weed or something, and listen to him talk for awhile, and he lets you pass.”

“I once took a photo of him,” Matt had said, “that I was gonna mail him, to some PO Box he’s got somewhere. I never did,” shrugged, “but he wrote the address down on one of those discharge papers they give you in jail—you know, we’re they’ve written down everything you have in your pockets and shit. It was all like: ‘$1.17 in change, a bus ticket, a pint of gin…’ Homeboy’d just gotten out of the drunk tank like the night before.”

“That guy is cool as shit,” Moe’d added, grinning. “The Keeper.”

And we tromped and skidded down, and sure enough: a wooden shack and the sharp glare off a tin roof and a gang of chickens clucking and a grizzlied old man standing in a semi-squat hollering at it all.

It seemed like a continuous stream of somewhat-intelligible drunk babble that we’d happened to walk in on—I could imagine him going on and on, with or without an audience, talking to himself and the chickens and the rocks and the river that didn’t ever stop flowing either.

“See that there,” pointed to a little fenced-in patch of green, “I call that My Feeble Attempt To Grow Something,” and yowled in laughter. A rooster yodeled back, as though in response. “Here you can hear the roosters crow all day long, yep. I been here, watching this tryin to grow—” pointed at the green again “—and haven’t left in damn near three weeks. Just had some people passin through to give me a few beers and some LSD from time to time and that’s all I need to live, you know what I’m sayin?”

Sadie opened her bag and handed him a few cold beers.

“Well alright, alright,” The Keeper said, nodding. “You are officially no longer tourists, you are guests, welcome. The only rules are that you bring back your cans and that you remember to come back, cause—” a pause here “—if you didn’t, it’d break my heart.”

“Yessir!”

“Keep coming back, it works!” The Keeper called out and laughed as we shuffled by. “And be careful on the rocks, watch your step—these are the most difficult steps you might take. Twelve steps, my own twelve steps,” and howled again in laughter, a not-quite-crazy kind of laughter that got swallowed by the rocks and the river and passing of the river, as we marched on to our swimming spot.

Book Ends at Book Passage

Published August 14, 2011 Expatify 4 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

Feedback from my workshop with Tim Cahill, featuring a personalized note to Jim Benning (World Hum) #donthatemecauseyouaintme

Brain-fried, bleary-eyed and so tired I feel like I’m on drugs, I’m sitting at my desk with the window open and forcing myself to blog. Partially because I’m going camping tomorrow and won’t be able to for a few days, and partially because I want to capture the excited ideas flapping around my head. But mostly because I can’t justify going to bed while it’s still light out.

I spent the last few days on the greener, cleaner side of bridge in Corte Madera, at the 20th Annual Book Passage Travel and Food Writers and Photographers Conference, AKA “summer camp for travel writers.” AKA “the perfect book end before I launch into the next chapter.”

The conference and the Book Passage bookstore in which it’s held occupy a special place in my heart: it was where Things Began for me. Or at least this blog.

Two years ago, I walked in to the conference, unsure and on a whim. I’d heard about it only the week before; it was expensive but I decided fuck it—it couldn’t hurt. I’d been getting my feet wet in travel writing doing an editorial internship for NileGuide, but was largely feeling lost with it. All I had was this hunch that there was more for me in it, that I loved the two things—writing and travel—not to give it a shot.

I left the conference buzzing with inspiration, and something like a sense of direction, the idea that I wanted to write first-person narrative. It’d been a long time since I’d felt that excited about my own writing. A few weeks later, I started this blog.

I wanted to do the conference a second time for one main reason: to get into Tim Cahill’s workshop.

“If you want to write well,” Spud Hilton told me at an event last year, holding up a copy of Tim’s Hold The Enlightenment, “just buy this book and study it.” I did. I read it like a textbook, scribbling notes on the structure and craft of each piece. I read it in lieu of grad school.

After my experience with Glimpse, I’ve been convinced I need more constructive criticism. I’ve been craving and seeking workshops. So once again, I said fuck it and coughed up the conference fee—it couldn’t hurt.

So I got into the workshop and it was great. I even got a copy of my piece back with notes from Tim (see photo), which I plan to frame (or at least put up on the refrigerator). And everyone in the workshop was great—gracious and respectful and enthusiastic, and there weren’t any big egos bashing about. I think I may have even made a few new friends.

I got a chance to hang out with writers I respect and editors I want to write for and editors I’d like to write for again. I got to drink absurd amounts of coffee and eat surprisingly decent food and sit on the patio beside Mount Tam and talk travel and talk writing and talk bullshit and witness a bizarre sighting involving a Segway. It was all fun and inspiring and motivating and really really great.

But more than anything, being at Book Passage again made me think about how far I’ve come in two years—all that’s changed and all that will change.

It often doesn’t feel like I’m going anywhere with my writing. I send queries I never hear back from, labor for months over the few articles I do get published. But being back there reminded me that, yes, there’s been progress in the last two years. It may not be as fast or dramatic as I’d like, but there’s still slow-but-steady movement in the right direction. Two years ago, I didn’t even have a piece to submit to Tim’s workshop, let alone something that would land me a seat in it.

My life is also different. Two years ago, I was still waiting tables full time; the idea that I could partially support myself freelancing was a far fetch. Let alone the idea that I could, oh say, move out of the city I’ve lived in my whole life and expat myself to Cambodia to work on a book.

But beyond even that, all that, my internal life is perhaps what feels the most different—the shift that’s made all the other, more tangible changes possible. When I attended the conference before, I felt awkward and paralyzingly shy; I barely talked to anyone. This year, I kept finding myself chatting and hanging out and genuinely enjoying myself, not feeling that anxious what-are-people-gonna-think-of-me twist in my stomach.

Andrew McCarthy was the keynote speaker on Saturday night, and he said something that made me snap to attention: “I feel like a better version of myself when I travel.”

I used to say the exact same thing. Almost verbatim. Perhaps even on this blog. And I realized in that moment that I don’t feel that way anymore.

Somewhere in the last two years, the chasm between my Home Self and my Travel Self has shrunk. I don’t feel dramatically freer, more open and alive on the road. I don’t feel that curious paradox of being more at home away from home, more comfortable where I fit in the least, less lonely when I travel sola than when I’m sitting in the middle of my own life. There’s less of the longing, the craving, the fantasy and the distance.

Somewhere in the last two years, the two versions of myself have moved closer together—if not becoming one person, becoming almost one person. And holy shit!—I think I might even like that person. Or at least be able to live with her.

Most changes I experience happen gradually, over time, so slowly it takes something external to remind of how it used to be. Attending the Book Passage Conference again was like that: the perfect book end.

I feel like a little bird ready to fly the nest—the carpeted, crisp-shelved, strip-mall nest of Book Passage, past that big green mountain and over an ocean into a whole lotta unknown. And, with the sun finally down and this finally written, I also feel ready to crash out.

Expatifying: Becoming Real and Not Having to Justify

Published August 7, 2011 Expatify , Moving , Saying Goodbye 12 Comments
Tags: ,

So now that it’s all out in the open—now that I’ve told my roommates, my parents, my managers at work and you all—my move to Cambodia has become a helluva a lot more real.

You know, it’s one thing to think it, to talk hushedly about it to your close friends, your confidantes. It’s even one thing to have one-way tickets (yes, plural, more on that later). But when it becomes known, brought up in casual conversation—when I run into people and they say, “Oh, when are you leaving?” or “I heard…”—well, that’s when it feels real.

And the thing I’m most struck by is how damn supportive everyone is.

Part of me wonders if it’s some hair-brained, quick-fix scheme, like applying a shock jumpers to your life: “Now I have purpose; I’m moving to Cambodia!” Part of me wonders if I’m not just isolating, running away, distancing myself from Real Life. (Part of me wonders what the fuck Real Life is anyway.)

It all very well could be. But, as I’ve explained to people, I’ve got a few tangibles to go on…

1. A project
So I went to Phnom Penh to do the Glimpse thing. And now I’ve got the overwhelming feeling that my work there isn’t done. (Imagine me saying that in a super hero cape, it helps.) I want to write a book/memoir/collection of essays, and I’ll have more than enough material to do it. I just need the time, and the immersion.

2. It’s cheap and easy, AKA: I could support myself writing
In Phnom Penh, I could live a comfortably modest lifestyle on $500-600 a month. Which means that, if I hustle and step up my game, I could potentially support myself writing. Which, by the most generous estimates, I’m 5-10 years away from in the Bay Area. If ever.

I’ve wanted to move abroad since my first trip—almost always, I must admit now, in an escapist way, in a way that was a diversion from my life instead of an extension of it. This actually feels like the most realistic manifestation of that fantasy I’ve carried with me.

3. It’s cheap and easy, AKA: Not the Schengen Zone
Them: “Oh, so you really must have fallen in love with Cambodia…”

Me: “Ah, well, I wouldn’t say that exactly…”

We’d all love to live in Paris in the 20s. (See the new Woody Allen movie.) But those days are gone. And the beautiful thing about Cambodia is that there’s no such thing as residency visas, work permits, nada. You show up, get a business visa, pay someone enough money, get a year-long extension. (There’s a bit more to it, but in a nutshell…) I personally haven’t been to other countries where it’s that simple to just show up and live.

4. This Period Is Ending
I’m old enough now that I can view my adult life in little chunks, 2-5 year periods characterized by where I living/working, who I was dating, how I spent my time. This last little chunk has been really good—living at G, working at B/P, getting my freelancing going (being single). But it’s ending. Like that first crisp autumn breeze, or like that scene in that William Carlos Williams poem when the roots of the flowers buckle down against the icy earth, I can feel the change a’coming.

5. The Calm Certainty
More than anything else, more than any other good reason/justification, the thing I keep coming back to is this feeling I’ve got in my gut. “It just seems like the right move,” I keep hearing myself say.

And goddamn if it’s not the truth.

And goddamn if there aren’t a hundred blogs out there by people who “packed up, sold everything, quit the corporate job, left to travel the world.” In most of them there’s this edge that’s always turned me off—self-congratulatory, which seems like a thin veil for justification. As though they’re trying to explain to all the nay-sayers why they did it.

Which I haven’t had to do at all.

Maybe the nay-sayers are just keeping their mouths shut (which I thank them for). But everyone, everyone, I’ve talked to has been massively supportive. No one’s given me the crazy eye, the you’re-going-WHAT?!?!? eye, nor have they waxed romantic about how exotic and brave it is.

“Congratulations!” “That’s great!” “We’ll miss you, but we’re happy for you.” Or, the one that made me tear up, from my manager, “I have total confidence in your ability to go out there and make it with your writing.” (Jesus.)

I guess you could say I’ve surrounded myself with some quality fucking people, who might know me better and have more confidence in me than I do.

It makes it more bittersweet, but a lot less scary.

Glimpse Goodness, And…

Published August 1, 2011 Expatify 8 Comments
Tags:

Finally, finally, at long last, it’s here!

My Ethical Dilemma piece for the Glimpse Correspondence program went up today on Matador, with accompanying pieces on the editorial process behind the piece published on the Glimpse site.

This piece was a fucking beast. And it changed me. Aside from being the most emotionally difficult, creatively challenging and ultimately rewarding editorial process of my life (university and writing workshops included), the piece humbled me. Through writing it, I realized just how complex and deep the issues I was attempting to grapple with were, how you can’t just waltz in and expect to write about the long-term, inter-generational effects of trauma in, oh say, three months.

When I got the feedback from the first draft, I cried. I was sitting in the room of a cheap wooden guesthouse along the Thai border, where I’d gone to find what was left of the refugee camp my friends’ parents were in, where one of my friends was born.

I was having a righteous little pity party amid the colorful tapestries and elephant-themed decor when Jacob popped up on my Gmail chat. He asked me how it was going and I got honest: it was fucking crummy. We’d all like to hear that we’re brilliant all the time, and even though I knew that expectation was ridiculous, even though Sarah’s comments were professional and polite and—most unsettling—spot-on, it still stung.

Jacob’s a fellow writer who’s been through the editorial wringer as well, and also just a fucking nice guy, so it was good to be able to vent to him. But it was his response that really struck a cord (and I’m paraphrasing here):

It’s hard, you know, to have access, especially for what you’re trying to write about. You’re not Cambodian and you’re not a professor or researcher. So why should people trust you? To do what you’re trying to do would take a long time, way more than a few months.

The statement kind of reset me. It could have been utterly defeating, reason to throw in the towel. But it made me realize that this stuff was far more difficult than I’d given it credit for, and that if I was gonna do it, and do it right, I’d need time. And for my own well-being, need to go slow.

Looking back, that moment was when the seed was planted. I’ve been home for a little over two months now, and I’ve decided that I’m gonna do it—I’m gonna do the project right, gonna give it the time it needs, I’m gonna go back.

I’m packing up, selling my shit, going all in. I’m moving to Phnom Penh.

But in the moment, of course, I didn’t know that that was where any of this was leading. I just knew that, reading my friend’s comments, something shifted in me. I felt a kind of solidity and certainty, a calmness.

I got up off my pity pot, stuffed my ego and started to rewrite the piece. It took several more drafts, but it eventually led to what you’ve got before you now. Enjoy.

One-Night Travel Stands and The End of Next Trip-itis

Published July 23, 2011 Dirty Tricks , Trip Planning 7 Comments
Tags:

Evidence

People have been asking me.

You know someone long enough, you know their patterns. And people who know me—for example, my dad, this morning, leaning back in a chair and giving me that long-view, that what-are-you-doing-with-your-life look—will ask me, “So, where’s the next trip?”

And god-damn if I don’t shock us both by shrugging my shoulders and replying, “I don’t know.”

For the past six years, I’ve been constantly planning The Next Trip. I’ve heard other chronic travelers say that they’ve caught themselves planning their next trip while on a trip. I’m afraid I’m one step worse: I plan trips before I even take the next trip: the Next Next Trip, and the one after that. My brain is like a Netflix cue of destinations: a constant adding, shuffling and reordering of an insurmountable list one will never actually make it through, but will happily spend their lives trying to.

But since returning home from my last trip, I haven’t been experiencing the same hamster-wheeling of obsessive planning/flight-price checking/guidebook-browsing/logistic-izing. The thought of another trip is, admittedly, exhausting. I’d have to get shifts covered at work. I’d have to scrimp and save. Sure, I’d get those exhilarating moments of wonder and awe and newness, the head-rush of travel addicts, and I love that, will always love that, I think.

But somewhere underneath that, it feels like it’d be more of the same, the travel equivalent of a one-night stand. Sure, it’d have its exciting moments, but in the end it’d be just another go-round: see some shit, learn some new phrases, reaffirm how bizarre and beautiful the world is and how little I can ever really know of it. And come home. Broke.

I’ve realized: I want something deeper.

It’s startling, something like a die-hard bachelor suddenly discovering that he wants a relationship. Where the hell is this coming from? I ask. Am I getting soft in my old age? And more importantly, more deeply unsettling: Why isn’t this thing that I always chased, that I based my life around chasing, suddenly so much less appealing?—as though the things that fulfill us are static, never change, don’t evolve the way we do.

I don’t have answers to these questions. Just to the one, the “where’s next?”, and my answer is “I don’t know.”

I suppose it’s symptomatic of the whole late-20s, Saturn-return thing (don’t laugh, that shit is no joke): the end of one phase, the beginning of another, the looking for What’s Next. But it’s shaken my whole idea of myself, the identity I’ve constructed over the last few years. Who would I be if I wasn’t The Traveler? What would I do with my brain if I wasn’t constantly chewing on the Next Trip?

Sometimes I meditate. (Don’t laugh, that shit is no joke.) I’m crummy at it: I set my timer for 10 minutes and try to listen to my breath, but mostly I just chase the chatter of my thoughts; I’m lucky if I get 20 solid seconds of thoughtlessness.

Mostly I ask for guidance (from what?), then try to just listen (to what?). They say the answers come. They say that if we feel an urgency to act, it’s our will, and that if we feel a calm certainty, it’s our Higher Power’s (fine, laugh).

I don’t have answers to any questions. Just a big giant “I don’t know.”

Going Native: The Anti-Irony of Khmer Glamour Photos

Published July 11, 2011 Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Female Travel , Offbeat , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia 7 Comments
Tags: , , ,

I sat once in a cafe in Tangier, Morocco. Some famous man-filled cafe where Western writers used to pen masterpieces, or cruise for ass, or trip out on then-exotic drugs, or most likely some combination of the three. It was popular with tourists—in the way that that Hemingway bar in Havana is popular—and with well-heeled locals. I was the only female, Western or otherwise, in the joint.

I watched as a man strode in—large, burly, brusque. He may or may not have had a white beard—I remember something about white hair, though his head was most definitely adorned with some scarf. He had that expat look of permanent sunburn and wizened self-satisfaction; he wore a long, flowing robe of ethnic print and carried a thick wooden staff. Two younger men, one with a notebook, another with a video camera and a microphone, followed as he walked purposefully over to what I assumed to be his regular table.

He leaned back in a posture of pontification, began what I imagined to be a long soliloquy, in French, on Moroccan culture and the changes therein over the last decades, as observed by his keen eye. The guy with the notebook nodded and scribbled. I watched the camera man look around at all the Moroccans in the cafe, wearing t-shirts and jeans, then back over at the burly old dude before his camera, his attire some approximation of those sepia-hued photographs old explorers and anthropologists took, that are now sold as postcards.

Our eyes met briefly. I smiled; the camera man looked embarrassed. I chuckled, imagined we were having the same thought:

My God—he’s gone native.

There are few things funnier to me than people taking themselves too seriously. Travelers/expats who over-identify with their adoptive countries provide endless amusement while on the road. So when I saw the pointed fingers and fake-gold-gleam of Khmer glamour photos, I knew it had to do it—my own chance to Go Native, as it were.

To clarify, this isn’t some chintzy gimmick produced for tourists; this is a Cambodian—nay, Southeast Asian—phenomenon. People dress up, get a pound of foundation and fake eyelashes slapped on, squeeze into gaudy garb and let themselves be molded into ridiculous poses, to be later Photoshopped several skin tones lighter and superimposed in front of illustrious sights like Angkor Wat, or the parlor of a well-to-do person’s house (a fireplace and Persian carpet are key). People do it for their wedding, for their coming-of-age, as family photos—it’s not uncommon to see a large framed print hanging in someone’s home.

It is, in short, the Khmer version of cheesy K-Mart photos. It’s is legit, authentic inauthenticity.

I hadn’t noticed the photography studios sprinkled around town until someone pointed them out. The sun-bleached signs of smiling couples, the window displays of sequined gowns—they’d faded into the visual static of Phnom Penh storefronts. Until I decided to get my own.

Khmer glamour photos are something of a rite of passage for Phnom Penh expats, especially the females. So I rounded up a posse, walked into the first decent-looking studio we passed on Monivong, and made an appointment to be turned into an Apsara princess.

At two o’clock on a sweltering Sunday, five of us clamored up the back stairs of a photography studio to the dressing room. It looked like the backstage of an Asian cabaret, make-up and sequins and traditional costumes stacked to the rafters.

There was only one girl doing hair and make-up; at about thirty minutes each, we ended up being there for a loooong time. My friends chose the $10, more modestly ridiculous options; I opted for the $15 Apsara extraordinaire, which included more fanciful skirt folds, extra fake-gold bangles, even a wig. Behold the transformation:

I'd never worn fake eyelashes before.

Looking sufficiently like a drag queen.

Through the mirror

Fancy folds

I went to Cambodia and all I got was this mullet

Lock and load.

A couple days later, I went back to the studio to pick up my prints—three prints were included in the $15 price. I thought of the dude I’d seen, years ago, in the cafe in Tangier. The difference, I decided, was humor. And self-awareness: I was doing it as a joke, a statement on the ridiculousness of myself in the Khmer cultural context and how I, at 5’10” and a riddling of tattoos, will never, ever blend in with or a be a part of that culture. The photos were tangible evidence of the chasm between worlds.

I smiled and laughed out loud and thanked the ladies again.

I went to meet a few other friends for dinner at the Chinese Noodle Restaurant. I took out my prints and they laughed—it was ridiculous, right?

I noticed the waitress peering over our shoulders. I felt suddenly self-conscious—would she be offended? Would the joke translate?

To my relief, the waitress smiled, a chipped tooth and deep lines. Then she reached over and took one of the photos in her hand, examined it more closely. “Very beautiful,” and she looked up at me with a kind of sincerity that made me blush.

This was not the reaction I’d expected. I felt somehow more embarrassed.

The waitress proceeded to pass my prints along to the other tables in the restaurant, all the women smiling and nodding and murmuring their approval. The women’s eyes glanced over at me and it was a kind of warmth I felt, maternal and accepting and utterly devoid of the snarky irony with which I’d walked into the photography studio with.

They didn’t think it was funny, and they weren’t offended. They thought it was beautiful.

I hung my head. “I’m an asshole,” I announced. Then, looking up and grinning, “But at least I’m a beautiful asshole.”

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

Join 458 other subscribers

Buy This Sh#t

Categories