Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: E 15-20 knots

We’re still camped out on the boat today. Nappy comes back tomorrow, and I’m more excited than I’m letting on. It always feels a little bit like a carnival when he flies back in--we get to go to the airport and see everyone, he brings back presents and tools for the house, and we almost always end up at Blackjack’s for a celebratory chicken snack. It’ll be especially great tomorrow, because we’ve been cooped up at the Pittstown end of the island, afraid to go anywhere because of our ghastly ordeal with the flat tires.

Three flat tires on one day is a little much, even for us. It makes sense, given the condition of the roads out here. It’s always the ultimate irony for me that in places where people have absolutely no needs for four-wheel drive, say, taking an hour to commute five miles in Miami, people drive Hummers, and on foreign rutted dirt roads, people drive tiny little four-cylinder compact Nissan Sunnys. The same thing always occurred to me in Thailand, when we would try to manhandle little Japanese trucks straight up the side of mountains, on eroded dirt that was more creekbed than road.

So I’m looking forward to tomorrow and trying not to give in to the depression that seems to be lurking around my corner. I’m not sure what is--maybe just a hormonal cycle, maybe feeling directionless right now, or maybe feeling so far away and out of touch with our families. I don’t know. I spent most of the morning composing a bitter and lonely email to my sister, with whom I haven’t spoken in about three months. Her daughter turns two in a week. My cousin gets married this weekend. All these events are just flowing by without me, carried away by the tide.

It's driving me crazy that I haven't been able to talk to my family in forever. Literally, crazy. I love Karl to death, but we're going insane with only each other in the universe, and a ten square foot universe at that, with no entertainment of any sort other than our ancient formerly-out-of-a-car CD player that only plays a quarter of our CDs (all from the early nineties) and the computer, which we rarely have enough electricity for. I'm destroying my consciousness with books, like I've always done, ever since I was a little girl.

I read my family’s various blogs every time I get a chance--in fact I think I've read every post since January--but now that I've figured out how to download things to my computer so I can read them offline, I can't post gushing blog comments. They never even know that I’m reading or how much I love what they write. Even when I do post a blog comment, I always end up writing what should really be an email. It’s bizarre that in this alienated world we keep in touch via exhibitionism, what blogging really is. Our correspondence is public, self-conscious art.

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