A view from the beach at midnight

Happy New Year.

I got a Christmas tree...

Christmas on Guam

Say what you will about Guam, people here do not fuck around when it comes to Christmas.

(to be continued)

Dreaming of the first tree

I had a dream last night that Barack Obama was a singing fighter pilot -- who crashed his jet in the desert, no less -- and who tried to find out who all his political enemies were, a la Nixonian political scheming, by fingerprinting money, which would somehow lead him to understand who was voting against him.

There was also a farmer's market, and some kind of Cthulu-like squiddy stuffed animal, but the rest of the details escape me.

The night before last I dreamed about being taken hostage by what I can only assume was a Russian SWAT team, in a warehouse full of tourists that doubled as an amusement park ride, and there was a train and some railroad tracks, and a waterfall, or some wine glasses, and maybe Brad Pitt.

The railroad tracks I had seen before -- when I dreamed that I held up a bakery(?) with a purloined gun, only to immediately regret the decision and decide that I should cast the weapon into a reservoir, which had train tracks and a station inconveniently placed where the bottomless fathoms (perfect for swallowing guns) should have been.

I bring this up not because my dreams are particularly interesting -- although, I mean, they are fairly original -- but because they seem to stay with me more and more. And sleep, which has always dominated my waking life more than it probably should, seems to have commandeered yet more of my life of late.

And my dreams, which seemed to be nothing but a collection of anxieties and phobias, seem to be, for the first time, almost illuminating.

The other night, I had the most amazing dream ever -- about the First Tree.

I knew it was the First Tree as soon as I saw it, even though I can't remember ever having heard or seen of the First Tree before.

It wasn't particularly exciting looking.

It was just a tree -- stubby and sort of shabby and old, like one of those malnourished trees in an abandoned plot of land surrounded by parking lots and strip malls somewhere.

And it was, indeed, in a stark field, standing all alone.

But, I recognized it, and I was so excited to show my friends and family this magical tree -- it was a secret I didn't know existed until I saw it.

So I ran off to bring people to it, only to be distracted by dreamlike nuisances -- political activists I knew in a former life who selling meat products in the snow, etc.

When I got back, the tree was, of course, gone.

It hadn't been chopped down or defaced, it simply returned to the time from whence it came, being a time-traveling tree, that comes and goes from age to age, and thus, even more impressive than I had first imagined.

I think in my dream I assumed it was some sort of god, whose semi-consciousness dated back to the beginning of time.

Since waking up, I can't help but look for the first tree whenever I am alone in a field (which is actually kind of often these days).

On a ferry on a gray day

I need a boat, or, at least, to be on one more often.

I was lucky enough to take a boat out to Cocos Island today, surprisingly enough, as part of my job.

There were many lovely parts about the day -- singing school children, freed wildlife, bird songs and jungle and happy biologists.

But I think the best part might have been the moon, and the waves, and the island across the horizon.

It made me want the freedom of a boat, or to be a pirate or a seafarer of some sort.

But, I can't really envision a future in which I have a boat, seeing as I can barely handle a car. And piracy is probably limited to my fantasies of past lives, and/or those movies that I swear I do not watch on repeat.

So maybe I should ride the ferry a lot.

Election season in however many words this is

I think they finally took down the campaign headquarters (blurrily pictured above) of the former gubernatorial democratic candidates, which, decorated with trimphant banners and complete with a giant sign wishing the heretofore unsuccessful candidate a happy birthday, seemed a macabre reminder of the ravages of electoral disappointment.

Barring any successful court challenges, it seems like the election season has mercifully come to an end.

I'm not actually sure what happened during any of it -- or what was accomplished. Most of it exists as flashes in the back of my brain -- like a war wound I have yet to forget, am too traumatized to remember.

In the states it seemed like everyone was in this hysterical tea-party-induced frenzy, either because you think the election of these salt-of-the-earth middle Americans with limited political knowledge but ample political resentment signals the end of the world, or because you are actually a salt-of-the-earth middle American thinking that the Tea Party is the next Revolution (but not the communist kind).

At least that's what it seemed like from 7000-11,000 miles across the Pacific.

Here the election season was no less frenzied, or absent of political hijinks, or media manipulation, or any of the grandstanding/righteous indignaton of any campaign season.

But, it was my first election viewed from the vantage of on-the-ground reporting, and one with enough colorful detail for at least one blog entry.

Such as, you ask?

Well, for one thing -- there's the wave. (Again, pictured blurrily above).

When I first started getting press releases and/or doing interviews in which people casually mentioned they would be doing "the wave" I thought, huh, that's weird.

But, I nonetheless dutifully reported that this would be an event that people could experience during their afternoon commute home -- imagining groups of school children lined up in stadium seats, standing up and down to mimic the rollicking of an ocean wave.

What else could it be?

In fact, the wave is just that. It's people standing along the side of the road, often during and in rush hour traffic, waving frantically with signs -- in support of political candidates, against cancer, to raise money for good causes, or raise awareness about social ills.

It kind of took me a while to realize that this is a pillar of Guam society -- and that it was a critical campaigning tool.
In the final days before the election, the corners of downtown Hagatna were sort of like a scene from a 1980s film about dueling street performers -- with opposing camps on adjacent corners, holding signs, waving flags, blaring their own doctored versions of popular songs with not-quite rhyming customized lyrics that prominently dropped the names of the candidates here and there.

There were also seemingly non-partisan songs, like "Under the Boardwalk" that also somehow had been commandered for use in the war betwixt the stereos, although I've never figured out exactly why.

Post-election, I was sure the wave would be retired for at least a little while -- but it turns out the post-win wave is apparently an important part of keeping your profile in the minds of voters.

And then, of couse, there's the motorcade.

I'm not sure if it makes more or less sense to enlist hundreds of cars and trucks (and some vehicles in beween) to drive around for hours blaring songs and waving campaign-themed flare on an island that really only has one main road, which runs in a loop around an island, as opposed to say, in on a midwestern highway, or a crowded New York street.

To my knowledge, neither place has tried it.

But, I have to say, having spent much of one long afternoon following a particular motorcade around -- it is a truly unique experience.

People deck their cars out like they are going to the prom -- granted, a partisan prom in which attendees where billboards and plaster every square foot of themselves with bumper stickers -- and ride around in an enthusiastic, yet mostly well organized caravan.

If you aren't stuck in traffic for hours as the slowly moving line of cars makes its way along one- or two-lane roadways, or tries to all turn left at the same traffic light, it seems like a joyful experience.

People listen to radios loudly, all at the same time -- honk.

It's like a parade, but you know, without the walking. Or like tailgating, in a moving car.

Perhaps the most prominent feature of the election, and one that will provde, no doubt, to out last at least a few campaign promises, are the signs.

On houses, in front yards, on public easements, along roadsides, on buildings, on cars (see above), in windows, on other signs -- these things are literally everywhere.

During the election the warring signs played a no-less prominent role than the omniprescent TV commercials, and near-ubiquitous newspaper and radio ads.
The candidates running for the executive branch seemed to waste no time in pasting their faces all over the island.

With 30 candidates running for 15 senate seats, the sides of the roads were getting particularly crowded in the elections final days.

Even those running for less prominent offices, and, in fact, non-competitive offices, seemed to find it necessary to stop traffic occasionally to erect a sign on the roadside.
And of course, there were the glossy, incredibly well produced, but no less irritating campaign signs of the gubernatorial candidates, whose sleek marketing paraphernalia have been gracing the sides of buildings for as long as I can remember.

Now that the election is over, I fear that many will end up fading, rotting, becoming ironic reminders of elections past, long before anyone bothers removing them.

Unless of course the candidate knows they will have to run for office again in a few years. In that case, they will no doubt salvage the best of their signs, so they can put them up again, two years from now.

The true cliches I am learning to live with

All politics is local -- or something. Is that the phrase?

What I've been doing for the past week/month

I was going to write something about the last week's local election. But I'm currently too tired, so here's a photo gallery of campaigning from election day -- which pretty much captures the essence of what I would say anyway.

I'll write more when I can form a coherent sentence.

Stupid things worth noting.

This deeply offended and amused many of my colleagues today. Pretty much everything is hilarious/wrong/offensive/hilarious.

"A Chamorro would definitely say that her accident was a result of disturbing the Taotaomon'a for destroying the Banyan Tree."

"That's exactly what I was thinking."

Also, as someone who has bigger spiders living on my light poles, I have to say these people are morons.

anniversaries

I was going to write something about my one-year anniversary in Guam. But I never finished the entry.

This is as far as I got:

Something about New York, about missing it, about time passing, about being far away, about the time you can't get back.

Things I learned about the solar system today

I decided for absolutely no reason at all to research the solar system today.

I think it occurred to me while reading a story about Mars -- the fourth planet from the sun (apparently) -- that I couldn't actually name the other two planets between earth and the sun.

Besides being embarrassing, this also makes it sort of hard to get a mental picture of the space in which our planet exists.

As I find it very hard to pay attention to anything that I cannot immediately picture, I did a very brief google search, and ended up on this incredibly useful website, clearly intended for people who had not yet taken 5th grade science class. (So, me, basically).

While reading the entry on Venus, I discovered this:

"On June 8 2004, Venus passed directly between the Earth and the Sun, appearing as a large black dot travelling across the Sun's disk. This event is known as a "transit of Venus" and is very rare: the last one was in 1882, the next one is in 2012 but after than you'll have to wait until 2117. While no longer of great scientific importance as it was in the past, this event was the impetus for a major journey for many amateur astronomers."

I tried to remember what I was doing in June 2004 when this happened, but nothing immediately came to mind. Thus, I consulted my voluminous library of journals, which detail fairly accurately day-to-day mood since I was about 13.

Shockingly, there seems to be a complete lack of entries from May to August 2004, which I can assume was due entirely to the fact that I alternately spent most of that time in a park somewhere making out with a loafing Strandite and then crying about him while on public transportation. That, or I just lost that journal, which is entirely possible.

But, good news. It turns out that I will get a spectacularly clear view of the next transit of Venus, if, for example, in 2012 I happen to be living on an island in the Pacific ocean, just south of Japan and east of the Philippines.

Also, on a side note, I was assured by this very rational and down-to-earth website that the occurrence of this rare astronomical phenomenon has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the world maybe possibly ending in 2012.

Totally, totally reassured.

Above and below

The view of Apra Harbor and the (oil-burning) Piti power plant, from the sky and sea.

Pictures of flowers

I found this spot the other day along the corner of a World War II memorial site in Asan.

Someone had propped up a wicker bench against a lone palm tree, presumably to facilitate gazing into the blue horizon while writing pensive thoughts in one's journal.

I took an immediate liking to the place, if for no other reason than the surrounding low bushes and tall reeds made the whole place seem like it had been transplanted from a New England coastline.

It sort of made me want to reenact scenes from Anne of Green Gables -- but since was lacking an early 20th century dress with puffed sleeves, I instead decided to take pictures of flowers.

in the company of journalists

I have spent a long time in my life trying to be this thing called a journalist.

But I don't think I really felt like one -- really -- until I found myself sitting in the back of a windowless Navy plane, wearing a "VIP" helmet and ear muffs to protect against the roaring of the engine, surrounded by a dozen members of the local press corps (and some guys from Al Jazeera who made us all look hopelessly amateurish) on our way to dutifully take notes on a guided tour of an impressively managed press tour of an aircraft carrier.

During the whirlwind 5-hour trip, I was herded about by bemused shipmen -- who made a point of addressing me (the only chick on the tour) as "ma'am" -- was pushed ever so gently out of the way of the hot exhaust of jets taking off on the flight deck, might have walked into the wing of a (parked) airplane while taking pictures in the hanger bay, asked ponderous questions of conveniently knowledgeable and on-message crew members who happened to be hanging out in all the places where we were doing interviews, and was not-so-gently chastised by an annoyed PAO for asking impertinent questions of the admiral.

I'm not really sure why this particularly experience solidified my identification with a profession I have technically been doing for a while.

Maybe it's because it represents everything I swore I would never do -- as a young, idealistic (and most importantly, unemployed) aspiring journalist so many years ago.

Maybe it was because by the end, after all the oohing an ahhing and running around to ask questions and take pictures while frantically wondering what the story was, all I wanted to do was run back to my office to meet my deadline.

Or maybe it was the fact that after it was over, I yawned through a split-second take-off that launched our airplane into the air at hundreds of miles an hour, slept most of the ride home, and noted that most of my colleagues were less concerned about their stories than the fact that they hadn't gotten a chance to eat lunch.

Ha. This is the worst journalism story ever.

A thousand little sarahs

It has been a while since I last saw Sarah, my favorite maverick spider.

Her tenure as matron of my light pole seems to have ended a few weeks ago.

I began to suspect something was awry when I saw her curled in her web, no longer repairing it diligently like she had been.

Every day she had rewoven the web exactly as it had been before wind and rain had blown large holes in it almost nightly.

She also caught things, and, as far as I could tell, wrapped them up in little pouches for safe keeping.

And then a funny thing happened. One of them burst open, and out came thousands of little Sarahs, attached to long strings that caught the wind.

With the spiders no more than glowing specs under the light of lamp, the sight was almost beautiful.

Soon after the first batch hatched, however, Sarah seemed to lose interest in her web. And then the second batch came, and she seemed to do nothing more than hang out all day.

And then she stopped moving.

That was sort of when I became concerned. She didn't curl up, exactly, she just sort of laid there, if spiders can lay, listlessly.

And then one day she was gone.

After that, one more batch of spider babies came forth. And presumably most of them caught a wind and left. I thought perhaps one or two would hang out in the light pole, to reweave Sarahs web. But none have yet.

There's just one remnant stuck in the corner now. But, every day I check it to see if there are any repairs.

And maybe when someone new takes it up I will be equally touched and creeped out, once again. At any rate, I will probably still be fascinated.

Perhaps this explains why Charlotte's Web was my favorite book when I was younger. I don't know.

the unfixable house

There are some places we go knowing that we do not belong there -- and even in doing so, expect that our presence will be enlightening in some way.

There's a house, on a hill, overlooking a would-be-ritzy condominium complex inhabited by military families with a monthly stipend to kill on a good view, a deeply scarred bay that will someday be the site of an upscale gated community, and a tumbling cliffside facing east across the expanse of deep, unending blue ocean.

The house supposedly belonged to the late former governor of Guam, who killed himself amid a dramatic corruption scandal by shooting himself in the middle of downtown traffic, chained to a statue with a note plied to his chest.

Sometime before or after the former governor's untimely end -- it's not clear to me which -- construction on the hilltop mansion stopped.

Local lore claims, as it often does, that the house is haunted.

So, like many a wayward high schooler before me, I decided that visiting the place would be a really good idea.
















I started thinking that it was less of a good idea when I had to tramp defenseless through the overgrown jungle brush, up a winding cement path, past heaps of seemingly still usable construction materials abandoned in the wilderness, to face a half-finished and prolifically tagged two-story residence, that looked more like it housed very real, and possibly unfriendly, squatters.

















Everything about the place -- from the feeling that multiple generations of teenagers must have used this as a creepy/romantic place to make out, to the pervading sense of decay -- was unnerving.























With an impressive number of wasps nests dappling the ceiling, trees roots and branches invading every open space, and a strange, unidentifiable white gnat-like fly, almost as imperceptible as the air, hanging about the myriad puddles and pools of standing water, the natural world seemed to know it was in charge here -- and relish it almost sadistically.
































The masterful ambitions of the architect, however, could be seen in the design. Beautiful bay windows opened on three sides out to the west, giving as clear a view the setting sun dropping below the green horizon as could be imagined.

















The open-air staircases were often built directly into the coral bedrock, and led around sharp corners to reveal and almost Gothic quality to the architecture.

For a moment as I hastily navigated my way out I was sure I would be lost amid the graffitied walls, and wondered if the maze-like quality of the staircases and sharp right angles would prove to be the secret death trap lurking in the place.


Details like columns designed in the shape of Latte stones -- hinting at the of the former governor's recently finished pet project -- underscored the pathos of the place.




At the top, the roof become a second, perfectly flat patio from which a 360-degree view of the island could be seen.



Despite the views and the architectural detail, the place did have a bit of haunted quality to it. The aggressive quality of some of the spray-painted images -- for example, a naked woman with bloody hand prints on them -- seemed to hint at something darker than just teenage angst.






Malevolence isn't really the right word -- although there was plenty of scary-enough graffiti to assert, if one was inclined, that the place hosted a kind of bad vibe that brought out the worst in adolescent taggers.

But with it came the feeling of disappointment from things left unfinished -- and from the feeling crushed hope that can interrupt even the most ostentatious of plans.

This house, designed as the centerpiece of a familial dynasty, etched into the very stone of the island, now lays rusting, breaking apart -- not rotting as much as dissolving.

Here on Guam the elements have a particularly dramatic power to dismantle from the inside -- and even the most hardy of building materials. Stone crumbles to reveal the rebar skeleton, already rusting and disintegrating.

Walking around I got a sense not of ghosts and evil spirits, but of irreconcilable disappointment, and a hurried abandonment that can only come with the impulse to forget.

There was clearly no intention to rebuild -- and no way really, to make the thing that someone once had envisioned sitting on top the hill.

I suspect this house will forever be unfinished.

Someday someone may replace it, or wrangle with the ghosts of the past to rebuild, but I cannot see that task being taken on lightly. And it seems like even the most brazen-hearted, on an island so small, and so prone to remembering everything, would shudder at the thought of building on top of this place.

There are things that cannot be repaired, the place seemed to be saying.

And I agreed. And then left, quickly.

Oh spider, my spider

This totally terrifying spider has decided to take up residence on the light pole right outside my apartment complex (right above my car) -- which puts her at about eye level when I make it to the third level of my stairwell.

It's about 30 feet up -- and every time I walk up and down the stairs I can see her clinging precariously to her web as it waves back and forth in the wind and rain -- or using her really long spider claw things to catch bugs and wrap them up in, you know, webs of evil.

I don't know quite what to make of the whole thing -- as I certainly am not used to rooting for mosquitos (if anything is spider food, it's mosquitos). I can't help feeling like she's quietly preparing for some kind of full-on invasion. Which, I guess, now that I'm thinking about it, is pretty much what all insects (and other creatures) do -- they just make more of themselves.

At any rate, because of her maverick decision to make her home 30 feet in the air, below the omnipresent glow of a yellow beam, I named her Sarah.

Things sisters do

Being a girl is occasionally a very weird thing.

And by a girl I, of course, mean being an independent and self-reliant women.

And by weird, I mean that as an independent and self-reliant women, I sometimes find myself in the strange position of doing things that one could define as "girl stuff."

I say this having spent half my life railing against the injustices of the male-dominated world.

I say this as someone who has, for as long as I can remember, scoffed at soap operas, ignored rituals like pedicures and trips to the hair salon (except for when my mom takes me to the fancy one in Lincoln) and vehemently rejected the oodles of products peddled to reinforce female insecurities about themselves.

I say this being one of this women who hates most everything that's made for women -- and who has otherwise chosen to believe that most (if not all) of it is simply the product of misguided corporate dicks deciding what it is that women want, so they can sell it to them.

But, after spending three months with my little sister, who stopped off in Guam before heading home from Thailand, I can only conclude that there's some sort of chemical reaction that happens when you get into a room with another girl and you know that there are no guys around to make fun of you.

During Heidi's stay I found myself doing all sorts of unconscious and uncharacteristically girly things.

Like, for example, going shopping for a book only to emerge from the mall(ish) shopping area with the same pair of impractical shoes, in different sizes. Or, you know, going to K-Mart in the middle of the night to buy ingredients for chocolate chips cookies, and then giving up on baking half-way through so you can eat the chocolate chip cooking dough raw.

Or making elaborate, multi-ingredient, multicultural dishes and then taking pictures of them.






























Or simultaneously humming the Poirot theme song, because we'd spent nearly every night watching episodes of PBS Mysteries that you have stacked up in your Netflix queue.

Or pretending like we weren't going to cry while talking about that really sad episode of Futurama where the dog waits for Fry on the corner for a millennium.

Melting things, and then eating them with ice cream seems also to be something that happened more frequently in each others presence.




















Or going to the animal shelter to in-no-way-whatsoever adopt a dog, and then adopting the most ticky worm-infested emotional manipulative (and adorable) dog on the planet.
















I would blame this on some kind of familial defect, except that the women in my family tend to be of the self-contained temperament, more likely to calmly cynical, perhaps bordering on bitchy, than hysterically sentimental.

I am, or was, to some degree, the exception to this rule (except for the bitchy part). But my emotional outbursts have usually been relegated to melodramatically prostrating myself, launching into political tirades, or running in the rain to throw myself up against some poor, unsuspecting boy whose steely heart I was wooing (you know who you are).

While neither Heidi nor I seemed predisposed to this type of behavior, together, however, it only took us minutes before we started eating chocolate and drinking wine, while watching above-said Poirot, only to find ourselves moments later trying on dresses in front of a mirror and surreptitiously comparing waist and boob sizes.

Which, again, is weird.

deep holes

One of the strangest things on Guam is the presence of the mundane so near the improbably sublime.

Like, for example, this gnarly tree on the grounds of the Hilton (Guam Resort & Spa) in Tumon -- the Japanese-tourist playground alternately forested with ostentatious hotels, kitschy dining establishments with flavorless and forgettable food, seedy bars and x-rated massage parlors.

Also on the grounds of the Hilton, this deep and surprisingly accessible hole, which lurks just at the top of the hotel's grounds along Pale San Vitores road.

You can't tell from these rather blurry photos just how deep it is, but it's actually quite unnerving when you're standing on the edge of it looking in.