life is good

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yes, beirut. lebanon. and a little bit of istanbul just for shits.  maybe even literally b/c my stomach hasn’t quite recovered from haiti yet. anyway. beirut.

a completely self-indulgent internship: photography. which i realize has nothing to do with economic development, but which i also absolutely love doing. and i’m good at. and the editor of the daily star in lebanon agrees. and i have been hired. i leave in a few hours.

if my writing’s as good he says he’ll consider publishing. i’ve never written journalism-style before, but i think i can do it. well.

i am the luckiest little brown girl this side of the mideast. and i’m extremely excited. see also: mildly terrified. they’re giving me a lot of responsibility based on a few photogs my friend submitted for me. without me knowing. i didn’t even apply. until after the editor had said that he’d seen my photos and to send a resume, etc.

holy moly man the things i get into. i am a lucky lucky one. and i am petrified i’ll mess this up. but even if i do this will be an amazing experience. valuable maybe, is a safer adjective to use there.  

let’s not even get into what mr p thinks of this. of me and my behavior right now. i of course have his blessing b/c i would not go without it. but i am certainly not his favorite little one lately. i should go start packing.  

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 so hopefully this’ll be a quick post, because if i don’t fall asleep soon tomorrow’s gonna suck. but i have a feeling it’s gonna be a long night. actually that’s another thing i’m doing tomorrow, is seeing some sleep specialist.. which i’m kinda sketched out about. but anyway.

 i guess my detox ended officially about 5 seconds ago. i poured myself a glass of reisling. not b/c i want it, but in a last-ditch effort to make myself fall asleep.

sad? schwhatever. if it works i won’t be sad at all.

 

so my last night in haiti was intense. since no white tourists in their right minds go to haiti, it’s just haitian elite playing around. mildly sickening, but i’m not gonna lie. i had fun with them. first i made fun of them, but after they offered bottle after bottle of aged rum, i accepted them as decent people. our last night in Haiti was  spent away from the hospital, and included the King of Nepal’s nephew, Steve Green’s daughter, some ambassadors, and i don’t even know who else. i just know at one point i was in a pool with about 20 naked people, 6 or 7 of which were having sex, discussing my future plans in study abroad with a 30-year-old italian woman. (one of the 6 or 7).

i stayed sober for most of this fiasco, which may have been a mixed blessing.

“To be honest, I didn’t care for most of the crowd that night. They all seemed kind 
of plastic and superficial, even though it was kinda cool they were 
from all over the world.

nonetheless, I had a great  time, partly because it was kind of a surreal, once-in-a-lifetime,
situation, living the lifestyle of the rich and famous”..a lifestyle i would never. ever. want for myself.

you’d get bored with your fake friends, too much sex and too many drugs. not for me.

 

anyway.

 

alright so i’ve rambled all my thoughts into a journal and i’m set now. just need to figure out a way to beirut.

bonne nuit.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 so. i guess it’s relatively early. i fell asleep around 8pm, so i guess i’m done for the night. why not ramble.

i think in a little bit i’ll look up frequent flier miles to istanbul. not b/c i have a strong enough desire or much justifaction for going to visit istanbul, but because…i’m just curious, if ending up in lebanon for a little while could happen. this doens’t mean that if it’s possible that i’m gonna try to go…just that it’d be interesting to see…if maybe there is a way.

 

there so isn’t. anyway.

 

i’m out of nyc at least until my next interview next week. and i’m so happy to be getting away. hazardous. i love nyc though.

 

i hate not living anywhere. on the one hand, it’s nice to know i have so many friends who are willing to put me up here and there. on the other hand, everything’s scattered and i don’t live anywhere and it stresses me out. i want to leave my toothbrush in the bathroom. dirty laundry in a basket. etc etc wah wah wah.

 

i charge my phone in restaurants, i use NYPL for internet access and borders to relax and do some reading, i use sephora to fix my face-situation in the morning, and other than that i walk and wander. and it’s not bad at all. i also haven’t started real work yet. and won’t until next week.

i like it. it’s resourceful. capable. and only a little bit disheveled. i’m gonna go. i really wanted sleep. sleep makes everything soo very much better. and i’d like to have an early day tomorrow. we’ll see how this one goes..

i wish i were back in haiti. i’m going to china in a few weeks. holy moly.   

 

 

 

 

  

1: idk how to format this blog. paragraphs and spaces aren’t working for me. but i don’t care right now. 2: since when am i such a little girl. i got upset over some completely unimportant comment and freaked out at guy about it. a week after the fact. the lbg i know and love would spill her beer on a girl acting the way i did. i’ve gone soft.

hey again. so i just wrote about a ten-page post. literally the longest thing i’ve written in a really freakin long time. and then the wireless went out and it all got deleted when i hit send. so i’m mildly pissed and not re-writing it. but maybe tomorrow i will. . alright i’m gonna go spend some quality time with my friend. if i can convince her that i’m tb-free. , I’m at A’s now. With some reisling. Doing some laying. See also: completely content. . and Idk what’s going on in nyc right now, but there were police everywhere today and the subway was shut down for half of manhattan b/c of an ‘investigation’ on 72nd. Then I walked E to 41st and there were police everywhere. A’s sister said she saw the same thing. We have no idea what’s going on here, but bloomberg’s giving out sketchy speeches about how nothing’s going on and to not worry. I’m gonna take his advice. Anyway. . I finally watched city of God the other night and it was absolutely amazing. . so i talked to mr p. a few days ago and randomly slipped in all of the things i was thinking about for summer. it went something like this: ‘i got accepted as a bartender, i could work as a temp, i could go to LA with E, or, u know, beirut, idk’. the connection was really bad, but he didn’t seem to care either way. he was like, ‘why don’t u just do what you want’. but i don’t think he realizes that any of it involves his frequent flier miles or that i have absolutely no money. . Since then I looked around though, just to check, and the cheapest tickets to beirut are over $1600. So that’s out. very very far out. idk what I was thinking. . language barrier anxiety makes me worry for china, but i think there’s gonna be a lot more english-speaking than i need where i’ll be. . so calling my cell from lebanon works. i called tmobile and they said it shows up as an in-country call. sweet. killer. . friday was my free day. it is technically friday. and i have to deal with visa chaos and probably shower and keep a phone-date and then it’s dinner w. some friends and then out for another friend’s 22nd. but there will be no drunken steph. not only b/c i feel like i need hydration and don’t feel like drinking, but also b/c it’s really expensive and me and my friends made a deal that we wouldn’t pay for more than 1 drink. so it really depends on how man sleazy guys are out tomorrow night. honestly though i want to take friday off. saturday’s a big freaking day. and a long one. interviews and trainings and looking business casual. etc. . and i do miss him too. and idk why i didn’t see this coming, but i do. and it sucks. and idk what’s gonna happen over the next months, but being thousands of miles away is not working for me. alright i’m just gonna finish writing about whatever it was i was writing about later - too lazy to re-type it all. (ali’s cruise, pics, whatnot..-i can’t tell anymore what i’ve already written and what’s gotten deleted..) . i hate wireless.

Okay so i’m at NYPL, ny public library, (pronounced ‘nipple’), and it sucks. i miss having a library that isn’t really just a tourist attraction in disguise. anyway, i have 15 minutes left on this computer, which freezes, so this may be like a half-post. i get a lot of bored-workday emails from my friends who have internships right now, b/c they do no work at their jobs. so that night i called lebanon: i was at a bar with some of the cast of the entourage, which is apparently a famous tv show, which i’ve never heard of. i just recognized the main guy b/c he’s been in films. and is also extremely attractive. we were at this bar, mercer bar, which is one of the more expensive places for me in nyc, b/c these guys who run some huge law firm that i had also not heard of, decided to walk in and just buy it for the night. they brought me and my friends b/c their friends were really weird. and boring. - at least that’s my guess. and they bought the club. i didn’t know you could just buy a club for a night - but it was great. we got the dj to play whatever we wanted, these guys decided who got in - which was actually pretty sleazy, and all the drinks for everyone there were free for the rest of the night. which ended for me and E by around midnight. b/c of this whole open bar situation, we were done pretty early. also didn’t really feel like drinking that night, but couldn’t resist that whole random situation. mostly we were just sick of the ppl there, b/c free drinks and music is great and all, but when you’re surrounded by assholes it loses appeal faster. so we left and some of our friends stayed and apparently saw vince vaughn who had a whole entourage of his own after we left. i’m not into the whole chasing famous ppl and hanging out with rich losers scene, but i’m not gonna lie, i looked around and was like, damn. how did we end up in this situation. we started out at art bar just splitting a bottle of wine w/ a few friends b/c everything was too expensive. and then moved on to free champagne at mercer. it was nice. so enough about that. it really was more exciting at the time, and i’m pretty sure the champagne helped w/ that. it was a great night, but i hate going out right now. i’d rather lay, my friends are too much effort when drunk (minus E), and it just feels so unhealthy. my friends here are hazardous ppl. i love them to death, but the things they do.. anyway. sorry to ramble on but they’ve been driving me crazy a bit (again, minus E), since i got home. and i can’t complain to any of them so i’m rambling to you. blog. but life here is still quite good. i locked myself out of my apt this morning, and my roomates are both away in arizona on business trips til monday. which is cool i’m staying w/ a friend until then, it’s just funny b/c the ppl downstairs hate me and won’t give me the spare key. partly b/c i already borrowed and lost the spare key. - (in my defense E lost it, but i gave it to her knowing that she’s probably the only person worse than me to give a key to). anyway. so i have another interview on saturday, but i got the job i applied for. i applied for 4 different positions and got my last choice, but when i can’t commit for 6 months/a year, and can’t train for 6 weeks, i’ve gotta take what i can get. still i’m gonna ask again in the interview on saturday if i could do both positions. what i’m doing right now is great and i’m really excited for it - plus you get free food w/ this position, but my first choice involved sort of creative writing for the business and i want to see if there’s any way i can be involved w/ that too..even if i can just meet the ppl in that dept and learn more about the project or something. i feel like there’s gonna be 2 things repeated in every post for the next few weeks: 1 - that beirut seems amazing, and 2 - that it’s freakin cold here. and it is, in case i left that out of this one, it’s freezing. alright well i’ve got 1 minute left on this compute session, but i’ll continue my rambles tonight from A’s computer.

so i just wrote this huge long post and it got deleted b/c the wireless went out. which soon becomes the story of my internet life. i can’t really write right now b/c i’ve got to go redo my application. i left my first one in a bar last night. before i had had anything to drink, so i can’t even blame it on that. also ev’s dragging me out of the apt to go eat. so usually drunk dials aren’t a bad experience for me. i’m a really happy drunk, so it usually just involves me calling up someone, sometimes really randomly, and telling them why they’re amazing. except it is a a problem if i’m calling lebanon. that’s an expensive drunk dial. worth it for entertainment purposes. but that can’t happen. ever again. alright she’s sitting behind me sighing. i’m gonna go, but i’ll find a computer later and write a whole lot more. about last night. which was hilarious. beirut still sounds a little bit more exciting.

so i haven’t had real internet access in a while. i keep going on random 3-day trips here and there so idk when i will. i’m still mildly jobless and probably will be until i stop constantly leaving town. i’ve been mooching. it’s been lovely. i’m interviewing with a temp agency in the city next week though and i start my volunteer work in the nyc next wednesday, so the laziness will have to end. it’s sooo cold here. technically i guess it’s in the 90s, but i’m still freezing. anyway. i put up the haiti pics on facebook. i’m gonna go back and edit the bad ones out, -just wanted to get them up for people. alright i gotta go give mama chuang her computer back. sorry if this is a really boring post - i was on that 6am wake-up schedule for a while, which was great. but after a week with ev my sleep schedule’s back to being really messed up. or nonexistent. we slept from 7am to noon today. i don’t know how she lives like this. but then i don’t really understand how i’m still alive sometimes. anyway. i had a lot of little realizations after haiti. not in a good way either. i was in ithaca yesterday listening to a girl whine about the design of her ruby/diamond ring. normally, even on an non-moralixtic/righteous day this type of conversation would make me want to vomit, but this tine i just couldn’t stop thinking about how that is one of the last things in the world that matters. it’s things like that. - just feeling a little moralistic/righteous right now. and definitely appreciating running water/clean drinking water quite a bit. still sickly though. but eh. -nowhere near as bad as at HAS. that one was a doozy.