Day after Tomorrow

I think Lizzie got the better trip haircut.

You be the judge:

It's layerriffic but makes me vaguely irritated. Like I want to jump into the shower and start over again. But then I'd come out wet and the same silly person I was when I got in.

Our email server at school went down on Saturday and I haven't been able to get into my personal folders, where I stored all the emails specific to the Philippines. So I could never make the master list of "things to take" -- that means that Lizzie and I will get on the plane early on Sunday morning and there's a 5% chance that we'll be forgetting to take something with us that we'll need. (I posted this and then noticed that I'd already written about this technology nightmare in the last entry. See? I can't remember what I've said from one post to the next. This means the brain is FULL. Or the attention is short.)

What's an adventure without uncertainty? Is it even an adventure?

Nana Peterson has asked us to take lots of lots of photos while we're over there, and you can bet that we'll comply. KC asked me to give a slide show when we get back. "I don't know," I said, "I loved my grandmother dearly but she gave slide shows of her trips and I remember wanting to kill myself during them." So while I can't promise a slide show, I can promise some sort of to-do when we get back, maybe a Day of the Dead blow out.

KC just returned from Canada. It took her 24 hours longer to get home than she'd anticipated because of travel snafus. I'm crossing my fingers and toes that this luck is not universal. Lizzie and I will leave early on Sunday morning, May 31, and should arrive in the Philippines at 10:30 PM on Monday, June 1. That's barring any Bermuda triangle action.

Starting tomorrow, I am going to pretend to be Ms. Calm and Collected. Maybe seeming will become being.

(Concluding question: Can one be Calm and Collected whilst wearing the dreaded travel fanny pack?)

I Agree with Lizzie

I'm really scared about the trip now. I got it into my head last night that if I made a master list of all the stuff we'd need to take with us (the important documents we'll need to get the visa, and the application materials for Lizzie's school), I'd have something of a handle on it and that clenched fist feeling in my stomach would unclench for a bit.

I've saved all the emails with the lists of things we'll need on them in a special folder. But wouldn't you know it? There's a "significant problem" on the server at school that holds the email program--so email's been down since Saturday. Now it's Monday and I feel like a floundering woman in deep sea water, cut off from those lists, unable to get control of her life.

This panic is ridiculous. I know that. But knowing and feeling are two different things.

I could try to reconstruct the lists from memory (I've done that, anyway) but the problem is that I don't trust my memory. All this trip preparation, this anxiety, has fuddled me up. I made dinner on Saturday. In the process, I opened a can. Twenty minutes later, I needed to open another but couldn't find the opener. I looked in every single drawer and cupboard, cursing myself for the lapse in attention. I called Dave in on the case, a pair of fresh eyes. Finally, I opened the drawer under the telephone, the one where we throw the checkbook and ledger, pens, bits of paper, receipts. And there it was, of course--the last possible place it could have been.

I feel like one of those painfully pathetic women wandering the streets, wringing their hands, going "uh uh uh" as they roll their eyes skyward, expecting it to fall on them momentarily.

In the meantime, we keep having parties with our friends, eating and drinking together, taking scads of pictures to commemorate the occasions, reassuring ourselves that this is not good-bye, we have plenty of time together, and anyway, it's not like we're not going to see each other again soon for another Sunday night dinner, or at church, or walking down the hallways at school. All this anxiety and hilarity--we're riding a pendulum, speeding from fear to exhilaration and back again in minutes.


This, too, shall pass. In a week, we'll be in Manila, breathing a different kind of air, faced with a new set of challenges, joys, and puzzlements. For all I know, we won't have regular or reliable access to the internet, and email outages will have to be handled with smiling aplomb, the sort of "go with the flow" shoulder shrugs we needed to perfect, years and years ago, when we lived in Mexico and the power went out regularly, right in the middle of our favorite soap opera.

18 days and counting: Phew

The other day, I got an email from the woman who runs the exchange program on the UP end. She tells me that, indeed, despite the late hour of our arrival in Manila, a man named Norberto (who goes by BoBot) will meet us with a sign. We should wait for him in the airport lobby if we don't find him right away. He'll take us to our apartment, where they will be alerted to our arrival.

Phew. It's nice to know that they are prepared for our arrival. The next day, she writes me, I should try to show up in their offices, where they will get the paperwork going for our visas. In order to get those visas, we need 10 passport sized photos each (10? what are they going to do with that many? I picture a strange trading game, like Pokemon cards), Lizzie's birth certificate, and 9,000 pesos, which I figured out is about 180 dollars.

I better make a master list of all the things we'll need while we're there. We'll need all those photographs, and the birth certificate, and Lizzie's baptismal certificate (for the Catholic girls' school), and all kinds of cash for those fees, and towels, and comfy shoes, and Deet anti-mosquito spray, and tampons (I read somewhere that they're not the rage in the PI), and light clothing that's not shorts (because shorts are off the acceptable list; when I lived in Mexico City, a clueless tourist always stood out in his or her shorts, and I don't want to look like the clueless tourist that of course I am), and little gifts for the support staff...

Whenever I try to wrap my mind around this list I get dizzy. And disgruntled. (Are there people who are gruntled? Where can I find them?)

"You'll do okay in the Philippines," Cynch said on Monday, as we left dinner at Little Tokyo and headed out into the cool, clear evening. "You've got the right attitude. Take it as it comes. Go with the flow."

Inside, I'm a roiling mess of anxiety. My hamsters are running at 100 mph on their creaky wheels, spinning my eyeballs in their sockets. On the outside, I pretend to be a go with the flow cool customer, ready for action, hot for adventure.

"So," I asked Lizzie, driving back from her pre-trip visit to the orthdontist (looks like braces when we get back), "how do you feel about going to the Philippines today?" I thought I'd caught a look of momentary and complete panic on her face when the orthodontist said something about the fun of the long trip to the Philippines.

"Excited?" she said, after a beat.

We know the right answers. It's living them that may be a challenge.