Dug out

This rock should be whole. Of that, I am fairly certain. The fact that it is sitting on my living room table in various pieces does not exactly sit well with me.

But then, I have these compulsions that are, even to me, inexplicable.

For example, while walking my dogs on the beach, I spent half an hour digging with bare hands and a rusty piece of rebar to uncement a piece of shiny marbled rock that I thought looked interesting.

Embedded just below the sand, which was mostly covered with the detritus of coral and rusting oil pipelines, this weird thing that most closely resembled a turtleback popped out.

And before I knew it I was seeking the corners with my hands, trying to find the edges and the bottom. To what end, I had no idea. 

I sort of felt like Indiana Jones, uncovering that snake-ridden Egyptian tomb in order to beat the Nazis to the lost ark. 

Again, these things aren't particularly well thought through.

But surprisingly I found the edges, and even more surprisingly, the whole thing was light enough to carry -- at least to a coconut tree where I could return with my car to pick it up.

But the more I touched it, the more in flaked apart. First a few sharp corners sheared away along the side, then as I hauled it up to said coconut tree it broke in half. On the return trip fire ants had their way with it. And I think it broke a final time in my apartment.

I sort of feel bad for the rock, which must be volcanic, and really had no business being on a coral beach anyway.

I can't help feeling like maybe there are things that should not be dug out. Then again, the pieces will make nice book ends.

A series of stupid ideas

It's that moment when you're knee-deep in water, missing a shoe, with two terrified soaked dog-paddling animals next to you in the dark, and are about a 1/4 mile from shore that you realize something has gone awry.

Not death-threateningly awry, just, that perhaps things had not gone according to plan, if you had a plan, which you clearly didn't.

And by you, I mean me, because really, no one else does these kinds of stupid things. Except Heidi, but we are genetically predisposed in that way.

So yes, I decided in the middle of the night to take my dogs to a secluded beach, populated at that time only by a few straggling divers making their way inland with flashlights and air tanks strapped to their backs.

This, however, was not the extent of my bad ideas.

The tide was exceptionally low, and not having a long beach on which to walk my dogs, I thought it would be an opportune moment to explore what was on the other side of this really big cliffline that I assumed was only like, a few feet long.

Because clearly my sense of geography is entirely warped, as I have gazed at this particular cliff line from afar, and apparently not noticed that it is large enough to support an entire hotel, and also hundreds of feet from the closest shore.

Yah!

And, as you can imagine, as I waded by dogs around the side of the cliff, expecting at some point to find beach, I was disappointed only to find more and more cliff, and water of varying depths, but which seemed to generally get deeper as we continued.

Also there was coral, which hurt and ate my shoe.

Like many a doomed explorer before me, however, I decided we had to go on.

So on we trudged, Rusty in my arms, Paz desperately swimming beside me, too far away from the previous shore and hundreds and hundreds (really it was a long way) of feet to the sandy beach.

I mean, the trip wasn't going to kill us. But it was dark, and I did lose my shoe.

Many minutes later, upon arrival at the beach everything was great.

Rusty immediately peed on something; Paz rolled around.

Except for the fact that I was soaked and my car was on the other side of the cliffline, and only accessible by either a trek back through the water, or a trek through an unlit gravel road cutting through menacing (even in the daytime) jungle -- and also an eco-adventure park -- things were looking up.

I decided to walk around on the beach for a while, because certainly, at some point, someone will return my phone calls and drive me back to my car without the possibility of meeting taotaomo'na, or like, other fun jungle-dwelling creature on the dark road.

Flash forward like an hour later, after exhausting all attempts to be rescued via cellphone, and walking up and down the beach a few times, I meandered begrudgingly in the general direction of my car, which was at the end of the Tumon strip, past the last brightly lit hotel, down a dark road that turned into an even darker gravel road leading to a concrete lot where my car was parked.

I only made it so far as the last hotel, however, before it started raining, and also simultaneously my phone died.

This is the point at which you're like, wow, either I'm going to sit under an awning of the Nikko hotel chapel all night, or I'm going to ask that nice-looking Japanese security guard who probably won't rape me to give me a ride back to my car.

Squid that is octopus

After watching many a horrifying YouTube video on how to dismember squid before throwing it in hot oil, I decided to go ahead and try to eat this squid, which turns out is actually octopus.

Apparently squids have those pointy heads and short little tentacles. Who knew?

The result is above.

I tried a few bites timidly. It sort of tastes like a mixture of crab and a tire.

I think I overcooked it.

My first squid

I have a dead squid in my refrigerator.

It was given to me by a guy named Mike at Tagachang beach.

He waded across the shallow reef with a spear slung over his back and dozen squishy dead squids hanging down to his knees.

It was sort of hard to avoid conversation.

I was the only one on the beach, sitting in a few inches of warm water, with my dogs frolicking in the sand and my soaking dress billowing around me.

He had squids.

He made his way over to me -- squids and all -- and told me about how he hunted the cephalopods by poking his spear into tiny holes in the ocean floor.

Apparently it's better hunting in high tide -- but the tide was low.

Being a vegetarian, I felt very bad for the squids. Although I eat fish, I have avoided squid since I mistakenly ate calamari on a school trip to a French restaurant during my year abroad.

They have little heads, and eyes, and are smart -- relatively, for sea creatures.

But when someone offers you a squid, it's sort of hard to say no.

So Mike, the squid hunter, disentangled a medium-sized squid from his hook, cleaned the ink sac, and gave me directions on how to cook it (put in boiling water for a few minutes on each side, cut off the head, don't eat the teeth).

It seemed easy enough, and for a moment, I thought -- maybe I'll try squid.

Today, seeing it float around in a bowl of ice water in my fridge, staring up at me with glazed eyes and frozen tentacles, I am not so sure.