Two weeks that don't quite fit in a blog post

I don’t think I’ve slept in two weeks. Yet at the same time, I’ve somehow managed to spend these last two weeks either living a dream or dreaming about the future. I can’t even begin to explain how wonderful it is to be alive, how strange it is to stop and think about being alive and how beautiful it is to find your life intertwined with the lives of those around you. I’m becoming increasingly aware of being very small and belonging to something much, much bigger.

When certain things happen to you in life, you can react in a couple of different ways: 1) you can ignore them; 2) you can be pissed that the world is out to get you; 3) you can be baffled by them; 4) you can be baffled but also awed by the brilliance of it all and thank God that it is not your role to understand the plot of the universe.

December 5, Monday morning (one day before boarding a plane to Florianopolis, Brazil for a linguistics conference on sign language research): I wake up deaf in one ear. Yes, you heard me right (no pun intended) a conference on SIGN LANGUAGE research. I was not amused.

Highlights from Brazil:
- Spending four days with one of my favorite people in the world, Dan Kelley
- Brazilians not noticing our Anglo accent thus allowing us to pass for native Spanish-speakers
- Living to tell about the bus that broke down climbing the mountains of Florianopolis, the bus that got egged and finally, the bus that nearly rolled backwards off the mountain after it stopped at a construction site and couldn’t start up again because it was packed way beyond capacity
- The smell of burning rubber as the bus squealed its way up that mountain, the screams of Brazilians leading us to believe that this was not actually an everyday experience and that we should, in fact, be terrified
- The sounds of aforementioned bus backfiring all the way down the mountain after we had gotten off at the summit and resolved to walk the however-many-kilometers back to the hostel
- Getting locked out of the pousada at 1:00 a.m. and watching Dan Kelley, certified Alpha Male, scale the wall to heroically open the door, thus saving me the trouble of climbing a cement wall in a skirt and high heels
- Realizing that the key to our room is locked in the office and that we have no way of getting into our room
- Poking around the hostel sketchily in an attempt to find some type of tool with which to dismantle the door to our room
- Deciding it would be a good idea to use of knife to complete said task
- Dan reminding me to hold the knife safely instead of brandishing it over my head in the dark, on the stairwell, still in a skirt and high heels, clearly wishing violence upon the lock to our door
- Skinny Man Dan wiggling through the tall and narrow window of our room
- Certain feminine attributes making it a bit more of a spectacle for me to squeeze through the same window
- Being accepted into the world of linguists by real linguists who sat at our table at the conference dinner and, after discerning that we were not “somebody’s kids,” taking quite a liking to us
- Meeting a southern aristocrat, big-deal linguist and Tibetan Buddhist who just happens to be named “Jeffery Davis.”
- Getting a hug from Jeffrey Davis
- Being deaf in one ear the entire time

Highlights from the following week, Laura comes to Montevideo!:
- Spending a week with another one of my very favorite people, Laura Budzyna
- Consuming an entire barnyard’s worth of asado (barbeque) and a bottle of red wine while it was 100 degrees out
- Sharing our entire semester with each other in one night and neglecting to stop talking even while drifting in and out of various states of consciousness at 5:00 in the morning
- Painting our toes on the Rambla
- Storming Buenos Aires with an energy that could not have possibly lasted any longer than the 48 hours during which we were there
- Exploring a ship that was not actually a pirate ship, but which did not in any way inhibit our pirate photo shoot!
- Being laughed at by sailors as I climbed the ladder to the upper deck in a skirt (when am I not wearing a skirt?)
- A policeman asking me if he could take my picture by the fountain, only to inform me that he’d already done so with his cell phone (Is that legal? Good thing he was a cop…)
- Getting our shopping bag stolen
- Meeting a Mormon couple from Idaho at a Tango class/dinner/show
- Being told by said Mormon couple that we were the best part of their trip to Buenos Aires
- Receiving a large sum of money from the Mormon couple because they liked us and realizing that, oddly, it more than made up for the amount of money we lost by getting our shopping bag stolen
- Essentially living the song “Mr. Jones” at a Gypsy Bar on a Saturday night
- Walking home in the pouring rain
- Dancing and singing at the top of our lungs in the streets of Montevideo
- Hiking up our skirts because wind and sopping wet skirts make walking a bit of a challenge
- Dancing like I’ve never danced before (and that’s saying a lot) to the Spring Break Mix in my apartment
- Dancing to the song “3 a.m.” at exactly 3 a.m.
- Dancing to Like a Prayer (leaving it to the Middkids here to fill in the blanks keeping in mind the five months of repressed energy and very wet clothing)
- Falling asleep to Amelie
- Writing a song about that night
- Spiritual revelations that I cannot begin to describe
- Learning that Laura’s Mom was deaf in one ear
- Saying goodbye to Laura on Sunday and waking up the next morning suddenly able to hear again