Celebration health

I am in the emergency room of the hospital of Celebration. I contracted some kind of horrible disease during my trip last week and have been feverish with chills and cramps and bleeding for the past five days. Today I gave up the fight and took myself to a walk-in clinic in Kissimmee and they kicked me out and told me to go to the ER. This hospital is funny - it's really theme-y in a very Disney way. I've been moved out of the room with the hospital bed and am now in an observation room with a sodium chloride drip in my arm and House Hunters on TV while my blood samples are analyzed.

i might be dying

my food poisoning hit on my red-eye flight from LAX to MCO. i spent the duration of the flight vomiting repeatedly - once i couldn't stand up in time and ended up throwing up into the airplane blanket and then wrapping it into a ball and throwing the blanket away in the bathroom. i alternated between chills and sweats and flailed about, often knocking into the person sitting next to me. i was literally going to ask the stewardess if she would let me sit somewhere in the back because i was feeling so ill but then i saw that the plane would land in 30 minutes and i toughed it out. today my stomach has been in knots and now i have a fever?

Dry time

I think the main difference between the United States and Taiwan is that in Taiwan your blankets always smell like mold and in the US they do not

sheep year

As we hiked through my ma’s hometown yesterday fresh off the bus and laden with heavy bags full of clothes for ourselves and vitamins to give away, I asked her if coming back to NanFang Ao makes her miss her childhood. She said, ‘不會! (NO!) It’s not such a great place!!!” 

It’s been three years since my last visit. Many things are different. Chinese New Year used to be a grand event - red ribbon and lanterns festooning the streets and traditional cakes and snacks sold in every stand by the road. Every night leading up to the new year you could hear firecrackers going off outside, loud and startling like gunfire being opened again and again. Now it seems you would hardly know that there’s any cause for celebration. I’m told that people are less interested in going home for the holiday and nowadays prefer to go on vacation instead. The biggest change is that my grandpa no longer recognizes me. He asked ma who I was and whether I had ever come here before. She showed him the baby picture of me that hangs in the house and said that I am that baby, and he pointed at the picture and said but this one is small, and pointed at me, and this one is big. He sits in a reverie and then occasionally bubbles up with stories that never happened, like how my aunt is trying to become an OB-GYN but no one will hire her because she is so small, or how there is a bank across the street that has so much money it’s all over the floor and no one knows about it, how his uncles are all alive and well into their 100s, and how he was once hit by a car and left for dead in a cave but a child found him and noticed that his finger was moving and took him to the hospital. 

There is an Indonesian girl in her early 20s who lives in the house. She comes from a very big family with little money and was sent abroad to work and support the family. She’s already worked here for three years as my grandpa’s caretaker and is planning to work here for three more before going home and getting married. This is the first time I’ve met her and she’s extremely sweet, has learned a little bit of Chinese in her time here, and I can’t imagine working as hard as she does. At 6am she is up cleaning the house and the rest of the day she spends every moment by my grandpa’s side, helping him walk, brush his teeth, and eat and sleeping in a bed by his at night. I feel a sense of guilt and estrangement to see someone else taking care of my grandpa while I either watch or am absent.   

There is also a rambunctious lady called A-su who originally comes from the south but married into this area and comes by every day to cook and help take care of the house. Yesterday she took me on a tour around town in her rickety old car that smells like mold and has one of the passenger-side windows held in place with mailing tape. She dropped me off in front of a friend’s store and told me to go in and pick whatever snacks I wanted while she parked the car. I went in and it was a store full of dried and canned fish. She told me about how she once found a very large hermit crab and kept it as a pet and showed me the beach where she would let it take walks once a week. It lived on fruit for about 6 months and then suddenly died. At the harbor she showed me what kind of fishing boat she and her husband used to own, before his health began to decline and he passed away. She says when her son was recently married they slaughtered 15 pigs for the event but that she was too scared to watch and didn’t go over until it was all done. In the evening she came back from checking on her grandson, running up the stairs and declaring it was time for us to drink and set out cans of Taiwan Beer. This morning she took me to pick up chickens from her classmate (I later found out they met in her weekly fortune telling class). Her classmate is an artist who lives in a nearby town and brews drinking vinegar in thousands of large ceramic jugs in the yard and her husband has a few hundred free-range chickens that he raises. The classmate had a headscarf on because, A-su told me, she had a fight with her husband and shaved off all her hair and moved to a monastery for a few months.  

German party

'Every year, a local artist would put on a crazy party called “Bimbotown” in one of the warehouses in the Spinnereistrasse neighborhood of Leipzig. The party was crawling with machines that this artist made — giant metallic worms slithering across the ceiling, bar stools that would eject their occupants at the push of a button from across the warehouse, couches that caved in and dumped you into a secret room, beds that could be driven around the party and through the walls.'

tour guide

cathy and willy were in orlando this past weekend celebrating their fifth anniversary of dating. i met up with them yesterday for a fun-filled day crammed with as much of the entertainment florida has to offer as possible. we started off the morning with a trip to lake eola in downtown, where we ambled through the farmer's market and took pictures with swans by the lake shore. afterwards, we went to gatorland, where we saw probably thousands of alligators and were perched upon by parakeets and saw wild egrets rotate their three blue eggs in their nests. then it was off to disney, where we first stopped at animal kingdom and watched the lion king show and looked at baby gorillas and animatronic dinosaurs. then we went to epcot and rode the agriculture ride and the weird dinosaur ride and walked around the entire world showcase. then the day wasn't over yet because we still had to go to hoop dee doo for a wild western dinner of unlimited ribs, fried chicken, cornbread, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, beans, corn, strawberry shortcake, sangria, and beer. after that i delivered my lovebirds back to their hotel and then took myself home to the swamp. i don't think i've ever done so much in a day.

7/11

this is kind of what my home life is like 

critters

I should be voted most likely to be distracted while driving because I can't not look at the deer and cows by the road. Today I saw a little fawn next to two deer grown-ups on my drive home from work. Bobert has been telling me about how there are otters that live near his apartment and today he saw one dart by on his way home and he jumped out of his car and followed it into the bushes, tearing his pants on thorns along the way. He said although he couldn't see it he could hear where it was splish splashing and now he knows where they live.

jammies

i want to do a photo series of all my friends in their jammies before going to bed. everyone is so wonderfully unstyled and fluffy, amorphous and flowing and harmless.