Last weekend I went to the Island of Silver. Jokes have it that maybe the silver is the treasure Sir Francis Drake buried there when he visited it, or maybe it is the whitewash of Doverian guano that cakes the outside cliffs of the island. My guess is the latter.

I asked my students this week: What is it like to know that thousands of tourists the whole world wide come to visit your country for one reason only: a plastic-looking bird with crazy caffeinated eyes that at one time must have toured Willy Wonka’s factory and eaten the forsaken gum? That’s right, folks. The blue-footed booby. Let us reflect for a second on how this creature must have earned its name. A booby. In case you’re wondering, that is not Spanish for “beautiful” or “exotic” or anything of the like.

Our guide was particularly prone to make ill-advised jokes with no timing or humor about various Isla objects, and his favorite seemed to be some sort of joke about creating a stuffed animal booby. “Instead of a teddy bear, you’d have a teddy booby.” For a second, I thought that he was making a weak stab at the teddy-negligee connection before deciding that was just a little too complex for his broken English. His Spanish jokes were slightly better, but only just slightly.

Back to the question. My students looked at me puzzled. I asked them if they felt like dipping their feet in Kool-aid. Or if they were male, learning how to deposit sticks at the feets of their loved ones whenever some feelings were hurt. Or if they were female, how to tilt their head back and open their beaks wide. My students did tilt their heads and look at me like I was, indeed, some wacko who had no comprehension of their country whatsoever. I didn’t feel like correcting them.

As for my mother, I do feel that her journey was made complete by having seen this one particular type of bird that seemed to enjoy sitting in irritable twosomes right in the center of dusty scratched out openings with encircling shit to keep the insects from eating their eggs. As for me, I was rather nervous about their eyes, and felt that they couldn’t possibly be real, but were instead part of some economic planning on the part of high-ranking robotics engineers within the Ecuadorian government’s tourist brigade. Clever, that.

All in all, it was an enjoyable trip though. I was coming down with the “my vacation is ending” blues, but I did enjoy the humpback whales breaching on the trip over to the island, as well as the promised 30-minute snorkeling that we had to beat out of our uninterested guide. There is always something irrefutable about hopping in cool water and looking at coral that doesn’t quite look like coral, and fish that flash bright colored.

On a related note, after the whole Visa-fine debacle, I have decided that I just can’t afford to go to the Galapagos. It just pressed my budget a little too tight and I’m panicking about Chicago and the fact that I have no job lined up to float me through the whole “need to eat” thing. But it seems a shame to leave Ecuador with such a disappointment on my back, so I decided that I will instead take that extra day’s vacation and do Something Else Valuable instead. In particular, the isla trip made me decide that I could instead sign up for a 5-day dive-training course, and do a few dives on the coast somewhere around here. So, we’ll see how that goes…

I asked my sister the other day if I was always so uptight, and she said yes, and I started wondering why I spend my life being so freaked out all the time and running from one wound-up state of affairs to another. I also realized that whenever my life is lacking in the stress department, I usually find a way to supplement it. Stress Supplement Pills. Life too boring? Go to your local hippie store, or perhaps a nearby S/M shop. Part of me thinks that I’m going to have to do something about This, or I’m going to have a heart attack by the time I’m forty. The other part of me points out that my blood pressure is fine, and maybe I just, in the end, after the scream, thrive on feeling life squeezing the little bitses out of me. (Within reason: I will never ask to repeat the end of my MA career).

So, the isla trip was the end of my journeying with mother and A. Remarkably, they made it back from all their solita driving without a ding or a car-jacking or any of the above, and now my mother is back home, and according to Chuck, going out and getting drunk with her friends and gossiping (I heard some really wonderful gossip, by the way. It made my day to get such good news. But then it was tempered by some saddening gossip about friends.) A, on the other hand, stayed around, but ran off to the NE of Ecuador mumbling about kayaking on jungle rivers and the such like. I will pretend that I don’t extremely dislike her. Extremely.

I, on the other hand, felt Very Pissy and decided to go back to the coast by myself, and that is how the weekend has continued. I have ended up at two hostels with no other people around, which is probably good because I am laden with student papers to grade and am feeling extraordinarily apathetic about grading them. People would be a little too cheerful and such. But I am feeling more relaxed and centered again. I took a walk into Montanita along the beach and found a mess of lovely shells, covered the hole to a sand crab and tried to wait until it dug itself out (either I’m impatient or I asphyxiated it, because I was disappointed), chatted it up with several people…

boy, folks, I really didn’t think it was going to happen this time, after 3 years away from Spanish, but I’m actually understanding almost everything that is said to me, or am able to ask for a rephrasing. My spoken Spanish is still pretty shoddy when I’m thinking about it, but it’s getting great when I’m not thinking about it… suave, bebe, suave…

bought some postcards, talked with Chuck and Nattie Gahn, who is back from the Vietnam/Laos sojourn, and then hoofed it back to sit in a hammock, grade, play pool by myself, and feel halfway between pleased to have a whole large space to myself and lonely for all these people I haven’t seen in ages and probably won’t see for ages more.

Some last thoughts before I leave:

When A and Mum were traveling in their car by themselves, they came upon a group of kids with a rope stretched out across the road. The kids would lift the rope and demand a toll for the crossing. Apparently Mum was cooing over how cute and precocious they were, whereas A was noting that the kids were also cursing them out. Sounds like future government workers to me…

The Military Man who stymied my plea to escape the poorly announced change in fine-system had pictures on his wall of himself parachuting, marching in formation (legs up high), and shooting at a range. Very Impressive. I felt the temperature of my eyeballs drop to below freezing and realized that if he looked at me, really looked at me, I could take him. I also thought for awhile on how appropriate it is for me, Little White Girl, to be facing such Visa-crap. Karmic balancing out the face of the world. All the little extra fines I get, the higher cab fares, the constant construction in my house, the honking of the cabbies fifty times a morning because I look wealthy enough to pay for their gas, the Evil Copy Center Woes—really they are just a start on the type of atonement that Brits and Americans are going to have to pay for centuries of lifetimes… It starts placing the difficulties of my illegal-students in California into perspective.

But I also have to remind myself that as soon as I get out of Guayaquil, the folks of Ecuador have been nothing but kind and generous to me, particularly spiritually. And my students are mostly lovely little imps. Mostly.

By the way, they caught me on the whole blog thing… asked me if I was planning on posting the poems I had them write. (I had fun on that quiz… they had to correctly capitalize and denote with quotation-marks/underline an imaginary poem title I gave them: what would you think of me if i stole your ugly little cat with the incessant yowls? Then, for extra credit, I told them they could write a six-line poem to go with the title. I was expecting some sarcasm, but received less that I thought I deserved.) I was, of course, planning on posting any good ones, but as soon as they asked me, I realized shame-facedly that it was not very Responsible Teacher Behavior on my part, and really they should post their own poems… so, alas, I will be a good girl from here on out.

…although… I told the maid, Lola, that I had written about her on my blog, just to see what she would say, which was not much of anything. I then told her that I should take her picture to also put on the blog, to which she also did not say too much. But the next day, she informed me very very seriously that she would be ready for a picture on Sunday. So… Who the hell knows what people think about Sharing Lives and Words? Pleased sometimes I guess to know that someone is seeing them, at least from one perspective…