Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   brief boogie
Thursday, April 3 2008

setting: Ylang Ylang Beach Resort, a half mile northeast of Montezuma, Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica

This morning at breakfast Gretchen continued complaining about our waiter, the dark carribean guy who is insufficiently friendly. So at one point in frustration I said, "I don't know if you know this, but you're very pushy." It was the wrong thing to say and eventually led Gretchen to grab a napkin and head off to the beach to have herself a cry. I followed after her to ask what was wrong and she accused me of having Asperger's Syndrome (another way of saying I was acting emotionally clueless). After a few false starts I managed to talk my way out of trouble by saying that I'd been frustrated and that she needed to recognize that not everyone in the world is going to automatically like her, and that this didn't reflect badly on her. The important thing in such situations, I stressed, was for her to not try to force friendliness on someone who didn't feel like it.

Because of yesterday's near-fiasco at Isla Tortuga (at least that was how Gretchen seemed to remember it), our goals were extremely modest today, our last full day in Costa Rica. I'd finished reading my trashy book Confessions of a Shopaholic and had moved on to a murder mystery Gretchen had just finished, The Chelsea Girl Murders, which, along the way, presented a surprisingly rich history of the very real Chelsea Hotel (a place I used to walk past on my lunch breaks back when I worked in Chelsea).
Much of this reading happened on the hammocks and recliners at the beach. At some point I fell asleep in one of the hammocks and when I woke up I thought I saw Gretchen wearing a light blue hat. I was only about a dozen feet away and the light was bright and my eyes were in focus, but my brain told me it was Gretchen. "Where'd you get the hat?" I asked, pointing at my head. The woman took off the hat and I could see it wasn't Gretchen at all, but one of the other guests. But even then it took a couple seconds for this fact to sink into my nap-addled mind. Embarassed, I slunk into the hammock and disappeared, saying nothing.
Later as I was going off to look for the actual Gretchen, I saw her coming my way with two boogie boards she'd just rented from the Ylang Ylang tienda. So we went down to the beach and I showed Gretchen how to boogie. (I'd learned how to ride a boogie board back when I lived in San Diego). The tide was at maximum height and the waves were huge, and though we got a few good boogies in, the waves were providing more pain than pleasure. It wasn't long before I was feeling queasy from all the salt water I'd accidentally swallowed. As for Gretchen, the waves were so powerful that they routinely caused both articles of her wardrobe to malfunction in a way that would have been embarrassing had she not been concealed beneath the water. Still, we probably would have continued boogie boarding longer than twenty minutes had it not been for a particularly violent wave that dragged Gretchen's left shoulder across the sand (a granola-like substance comprised mostly of flakes of clam shells), producing a large abrasion wound that bled slightly, particularly where it had tried grind away a mole rising above the plane.
We spent the next several hours at the side of the pool, ordering fruity beverages when happy hour commenced. We had plans to go look for monkeys at sundown but we didn't have to; a tribe of Howler Monkeys came swinging through the trees above the pool. Among its individuals were a few mothers with tiny infants clinging to their bellies. Unlike the White-faced Capuchins, the Howlers stayed high in the trees. But like the Capuchins they foraged their habitat thoroughly and gradually moved on, eventually disappearing entirely. We'd been hearing the eerie cries of Howlers every night and morning since arriving, but this was the first time we'd actually seen some.


The Ylang Ylang pool.


Me reading near the pool.


A Howler Monkey overhead.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080403

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