monKEY business

Beaker the monkey is awesome.
She is a simakobu mentawai island monkey and kind of my best friend.
But she just totally ate my computer keyboard... MNO and P... but she didn't get the 'O' off and i can still type 'Oh' well..

she basically spelled the hard part of the alphabet so i'm not that mad at her... anymore.

my dad used to go on the road a lot when i was a kid... he would go sing in all different parts of the world and be gone for a really long time... so i guess he would record himself talking and singing to my sisters and i and my mom would play it for us when he was gone before we fell asleep at night...
(i would also climb up onto his sink to smell his little brown round bottle of cologne and remember what he smelled like.)
i love my dad.

anyways - he recorded himself singing the alphabet to my sister when she was little and sang
ABCDEFGHIJK...LMNOP....LMNOP...LMNOP... QRSTUVWXYZ
(so she could practice that L M N O P part slowly and correctly)

well... she ended up thinking that is how the alphabet went for a long time.

pretty cute.

so is this monkey. i wasn't even really mad from the time i came out of the kitchen and she squealed and flew across the room fully knowing she was being naughty. (although i am typing pretty slowly which is annoying...)

i sort of feel like my computer is broken or screwed up every couple weeks.
and last year, as soon as i got to the island my blackberry just died completely and then miraculously healed itself as soon as i got back to america.

my mom just emailed me yesterday and said "How lovely not to have to be attached to your blackberry and the little red light. It is another time zone - a natural one. Those computers zap us into computer time and out of nature time. It is jarring and unhealthy. I am so glad you are getting to experience the " natural world" this way."

i really think its a sign i am not supposed to use electronics out here.

instead, i try to live more like cahn (the island's caveman/stone artist)...

the whole philosophy out here does quite cater to this lifestyle of detatchment to electronics. a new rule was just instated "NO CELL PHONES IN THE BAR"
i love it here so much.

i have totally embraced this new role of mermaid hostess on the island. i really want to get a shiny green mermaid tail and swim up when guests arrive. (ainsley's amazing idea...)

i went out diving with john e. the other day and at first i was just snorkeling but then i ended up ditching the mask and just holding my breath free-diving down along the reef, which was so spectacularly beautiful and much more of a meditation to just do it holding my breath. i was teaching myself how to flip in and out of the water like a mermaid would...
ya. its a tough life.

my friend dan from pacific palisades is here right now as a guest. it's been really fun and i feel like i've been drunk for a week.
oh. i have.

ha.

the other day we went out surfing after a particularly long night of tequila drinking until 5am.... birdie and i had sat on the bar and spilled souls while listening to punk rock and cashing the cuervo bottles i had brought back from padang.
after about two hours of sleep we were rolling off the boat and into the water to take dan out for a surf session... i grabbed on to the leggie of birdie, and birdie held on to the leggie jonas our boat driver who proceeded to tow our lifeless bodies collapsed on our boards into the surf.
it was actually a really fun day and i realized how much of my fear is in my head.
because that morning i was definitely masih mabuk "still drunk" and not scared at all...
but i only lasted a few hours before returning to the island and finding a comfy nap zone and passing out.

that night i went on board the charter boat called "pelagic" that my friend nutty runs. (yuko is his pregnant fiancee)... to give some of his guests massages and partake in a few gin and tonics... which by the way had ZERO carbonation.
i'm pretty sure the guys were just giving me glasses of gin.
but it ended up pretty fun and i actually met some nice people including an australian guy with bright blue eyes that i actually kinda liked... not weird that there was an australian with blue eyes - there are about 100 per square inch of ocean out here... i mean that i got flirty.

just today i was on the boat "D'Bora" today talking to my girlfriend Jackie who does massage on there and we were talking about how we both chose to be completely unavailable to ALL the guys out here. it's like a 100 to 1 ratio... guys to single girls, so it's best just to have an "absolutely not policy" - though if i do live here forever and ever (which i can seriously see this happening) - i will need to import a boyfriend one day.

in the meantime i am so happy just existing with my buddies and laughing the nights away with gin and tonics and continuing to learn from my gurus and island hosts jonh and ainz, who seem to teach me things daily without even trying... and, of course, going on little itty bitty mini adventures...

like yesterday, our guest dan, birdie, jonas, and me went into the village "pokorajet" just to show dan and to climb up a hill and look out over the bay.
it was so unreal. i had never been up there and just couldnt believe how much i fully live in avatar.


we took some awesome photos with the villagers... including the millions of kids wielding machetes and running around doing karate with me and screaming back the english words i teach them.

i <3 the village so so much... and i am getting better at the language. it's really amazing to be able to understand whats going on (unless of course they are speaking bahasa mentawai in which case i have no idea what is going on)

we had a bit of a culture shift from that to dinner spent on the "Indies Trader IV" with the owner of the boat and an assortment of new friends, including the owners of Reef and Quicksilver and the captain who was a big time surfer back in the day.
Did i mention this boat is insane.
it's like a floating 5 star hotel with a helicopter landing pad on the roof and wine cellar and everything and anything you could want.
Ainz and i were FREEZING because we got wet on the canoe going over to the boat at sunset and then there was air conditioning on so full blast...
We ended up putting our clothes in the tumble dryer (i almost forgot those things existed) and wore big fluffy bathrobes at the dinner table.
it was pretty awesome.

i sat on the helipad for a long time with the captain, my new friend erik... from up so high i could just barely make out the island through the fog in front of us...

i felt so blessed, as i seem to feel daily... i sat up there in the lap of luxury realizing how much i prefer the island, but how nice it was to be wearing this teddy bear bathrobe anyways even though the night was winding down and we'd be heading out soon...

it's not easy being a woman out here and ainsley has been my teacher and inspiration - living out here in boy-land for so many years. she blows my mind. i sat up there just staring out into the black night and the ocean shimmering under the lights of the giant boat, giving thanks for ainsley and her spirit and the opportunity to live with her in this paradise she has created... and bam there she was climbing up the ladder to the helipad.

everything is written in the language of signs and symbols here. like the omens in "The Alchemist"
but where they had Umim and Thumim and camels and desert
we have a coral reef, a jungle, turquoise waves and a computer eating monkey.

like i said... i'm not mad.
i'm absurdly lucky.