Boring Life Things

I recently expressed my appreciation for Michael Underwood to Michael Underwood. I'm about to do it here, too. If you know Michael, you know he's a great guy. An enthusiastic talker. An active listener. Very intelligent, but still humble and quite funny. I appreciated Michael's friendship for 4 years at Willamette, but have grown to appreciate it even more while living in Malaysia.

You see, time zones are a thing and people have schedules and need to sleep sometimes, so it can be a challenge to talk to friends as often as I would like to. That means when I get a chance to talk with friends, there always seems to be an unspoken expectation to speak of Dramatic Life Things. Death, moving cities, existential life crises, your most recent heartbreak, the 50 ways to leave your lover, the meaning of life, etc. While those topics are important and I am more than willing to discuss them (and I promise this post is not to complain about talking about such things with you. I enjoy talking about those things with you!), there is still the strange expectation to only have deep conversations after days of playing phone tag. It's as if we think we owe it to modern technology to have a life altering conversation every time we talk to someone on a different continent in a different time zone.

I explained this to Michael the other day, and I told him I appreciate that he ignores this expectation. Talking on the phone with Michael makes me feel normal which is something I usually wouldn't really want to feel but it's nice to feel while I'm an outsider in my current community. The opportunity to talk about Boring Life Things like the joys of eating an entire loaf of good bread, bowel movements, my internal rice vs. noodle debate, etc. is refreshing. To this, Michael paraphrased something someone famous once said (I don't know who, let me know if you do):

We have the tendency to brush aside the little, unimportant things in life. Yet, what makes life meaningful is the constellation of seemingly meaningless things that add up and define our relationships, homes, careers, hobbies, everything.

In our conversation about appreciating Boring Life Things, we reached a conclusion that I would categorize as a Dramatic Life Thing. And it's so true. Our best friendships are those that celebrate and ponder all things on the spectrum of Life Things. Our lives are consequences of the innumerable tiny choices, interactions, and other instances that add up and define us. I want to get better at celebrating those little things and I recognize it's probably all my fault that it feels like there is an expectation for long distance phone calls to consist of only Dramatic Life Things. Either way, I've been Lonely here with a capital L, so feel free to call or message me and tell me about your Boring Life Things. Dramatic Life Things are also welcome. Let's catch up about it all, friends. I miss you.

P.S. While this is an appreciation post written specifically about Michael, I also want to say thank you to all my friends from home who have gone out of their way to keep in touch or even just check in every once and a while. You know who you are and you seriously rock!

Shout out to Michael and all my other lovely friends
who are down to talk about Boring Life Things!

Don't try this at home

A few weeks ago, my parents hopped on a flight in Abu Dhabi and met me in Kuala Lumpur. We did city stuff (visited temples, ate tapas, went to rooftop bars, and slept in our friends' pristine air-conditioned ant-free condo) and then flew in a propeller plane to Gunung Mulu National Park in my state of Sarawak on Malaysian Borneo. At Mulu, we saw millions of bats exit Deer Cave, one of the largest caves in the world, in seemingly choreographed spirals and lines. Then, we boarded a bamboo raft and motored through the jungle before hiking 9km to Camp 5, the base camp for Mulu's most famous hike, the Pinnacles. The Pinnacles hike is less than 5km round trip, but it is so insanely steep that it took us 8 hours to complete! We scrambled up and down ladders and used mangled vines and branches as handholds to pull ourselves up the steep rocks. My parents and I agree the hike was one of the most challenging hikes of our lives, and we ain't wimps. We were sore but happy. I am very glad to have parents who are up for adventures like that. 

After Mulu, my dad had to go back to work, but my mom got to come to my town to visit my school and share my bed bug free bed with me and some ants (you win some, you lose some... I'll take a few ants over bed bugs any day). My students adored her and still ask, "Miss, where is your mom?". It meant so much to have her visit and see my version of Malaysia, which is impossible to share with just photos and stories.

Their whole visit was a reminder of how much cooler my parents are than I am, so I compiled a list of the crazy/terrifying things they did as young parents that nowadays would warrant a call to the office of child protective services. I think some of these things really explain why I am the way I am. Whether or not you like the way I turned out, I do not recommend trying these at home (or in the wild). That said, I love my parents and I am super proud to be their daughter, and despite the somewhat questionable decisions they made, I think they did an alright job of raising me. But still, don't try these things with your own kids.

10 crazy things my parents did while raising me (kind of in order from infancy to now): 

1) Went backcountry skiing with me in a front pack starting when I was 14 days old. I repeat, 14 DAYS OLD. 
2) They didn't want their newborn to get in the way of their climbing trips, so they tied my car seat to their climbing top rope system and belayed me up the rock face.
3) Bungee strapped my helmet to the back of the baby seat on the bicycle because I was too young to be able to hold my head up with the weight of the helmet.

4) Attached a leash to my car seat and towed me along frozen lakes as they ice skated. I assume they took the appropriate safety measures and bungeed my head down to prevent whiplash for this...

5) Bicycled around the perimeter of the Big Island of Hawaii with me and my brother in a Burley trailer when we were just 3 and 1.

6) Camped on a bear trail (the only flat part of the beach) on Shuyak Island and awoke to a Kodiak brown bear curiously pawing at the tent right above where my head was. I was about 4 when this happened.

7) Stuffed me and my brother in the center hatch of one of the kayaks my dad custom built for forced family fun. The center hatch is lower sitting than the other 2 hatches so when we were on the water in stormy weather, Danny and I would get swamped with cold sea water. I also remember being dive bombed by an eagle on one of these outings. As I type this, I am realizing that kayaking with toddlers and kayaking with toddlers in stormy weather could count as their own items on this list...

8) Moved to Guatemala for a year when I was 10 and my brother was 8 years old. In Guatemala we did all sorts of stupid things, like climb active volcanoes and go sailing in a potential drug smuggling region of the Caribbean, but one particularly memorable dangerous daily activity was commuting to school on the handle bars of my dad's bike while my brother and I took turns riding our other bicycle. Before we acquired the aforementioned bike, my dad would bring us to school with one of us on the handlebars and the other on the cross bar of the bike.
9) Went gill netting or on trips in our small skiff and routinely ended up drifting in the open ocean while my dad fixed a broken motor. Once, we were stranded on a the back side of Woody Island on April Fool's Day and it took a while to convince a friend to come rescue us because they thought my parents were pulling their leg! 

10) It is hard to pick a specific 10th item for the list, because there are so many viable options. So here is a list of possibilities: Backpacking through southern Utah with infant Anelise, white water rafting trips with toddlers, my dad's infamous "short"cuts, or generally raising me and my brother in Kodiak. 

With my parents at the Pinnacles at
Mulu National Park, Sarawak, Malaysia.

My aunt Teresa, uncle Rick, and my parents being risky parents

Wild Roads

It's been a while since I've posted. I'm working on some longer/more reflective pieces that I'll post soon, and I've been crazy busy wrapping up final projects for my Fulbright grant (only 40 days left). In the mean time, I thought I'd share some of the music that has been consistent in my life for a long while, but especially since living in Malaysia. Songs that empower me, remind me of loved ones, make me dance like a lunatic, calm me down, or take me to another place when times are rough. I never skip them when they come on. I just turn them up and reflect/sing/get emotional/dream. You can find these and more songs of a similar vein on my Spotify playlist titled, "Wild Roads". I find it kind of funny now that I've compiled a real playlist of these songs that most of the tunes are travel or home themed.

In no particular order, here are 14 (really tried to narrow it down to 10 but I couldn't. Not sorry.) songs I love:

I Know What I Know - Paul Simon
I'll Fly Away - Gillian Welch
Alaska - Maggie Rogers
Wide Open Spaces - Dixie Chicks
In Spite of Ourselves - John Prine
What I'm Doing Here - Lake Street Dive
America - First Aid Kit
Take Me Home - Free the Honey
Have You Ever - Brandi Carlile
Old Pine - Ben Howard
Never In My Wildest Dreams - Dan Auerbach
I'm on Fire - The Staves
Back O'er Oregon - The Weather Machine
Wild Roads - Ella Grace

The view from Mt. Rinjani in Indonesia
which I climbed a few weeks ago.