coherently.orangey.worries

     Ever gone somewhere with someone and gotten separated? How do you find them? Call, ask where they are, walk towards them until you see each other, most likely. But coherently.orangey.worries - 3 words, changes all that. That’s where I am right now, literally.

     I was reading the letters to the editor in The Economist and someone wrote that the archaic address system used in rural France could be replaced by what3words. I had heard of this before, but didn’t look into it at all, I didn’t understand the potential usefulness.
     What is it? An app that’s mapped every place on the Earth into unique, 3 x 3 meter squares. The uniqueness is that every three meter square, in the world, is identified by 3 words. Where I am right now is coherently.orangey.worries. There are some useful components to this - when we lived in Arlington, VA, our apartment had an entrance that was separate from the actual address. 1220 N. Fillmore takes you to a side of the building where there is no entrance. But wipes.metals.flies takes you right to the entrance, where we could buzz you up. When we lived on Saipan, there were no street addresses. You used landmarks to give directions. One of my favorites was the breadfruit tree in the middle of the street - and yes, they built a street that branched out on either side of a breadfruit tree. To get to where we lived in As-teo? strung.outshines.predictive would take you right to our front door. Get lost from family or friends in a large event? What3words will tell them where you are. They can put the three words in the app, tap on navigate to and they’ll find you. My daughter could have used this when she got lost on Khao San Road in Bangkok to find the Internet cafe I was in way back in Internet cafe days. What3words is used in Mongolia for postal deliveries because they have such a nomadic population. Delivery drivers use it in Nigeria. Technology. I’m a fan. What are your 3 words?

Hopeful much?

     We're hardwired to hope. We all hope for different things and plan for all the things we want out of life.  We make those plans because we are hopeful that we don't get sick, that a tragic accident doesn't happen, after we go to school there is a good job waiting for us and we find someone to love and someone to love us in return. If we didn't have hope, we wouldn't plan too much for the future. I listened to a podcast a while ago that asked the question if you knew when you were going to die, how would that affect how you lived? My answer is it would affect how I saved (either squander it all or save more), how I ate (bacon three times a day or muesli for breakfast and salad for lunch), really, it would change everything. But I don't know the answer to that question. So I have hope and I plan.
     Iron Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." And we've all been punched in the face before because well, life. Sometimes, those punches can knock you down and it takes a long, long time to get up, find that hope and start planning again. Life kind of forces you to put one foot in front of the other because the day after you get punched in the face, the mf sun comes up again. Not cool sun, not cool. Sometimes those steps may seem to shuffle along for a few seasons before you find the spring in your step. I haven't been punched in the face for a while (metaphorically), and that's a good thing.
     All of those punches, the face hits, the body shots and the glancing blows form the emotional scars we all carry around with us and hopefully (there's that hope and change again) as we get older, those punches become love taps and all the hope and planning, muesli and salad eating, saving and exercising pay off in the long run.
     Because I'm a hopeful mf, I'm still planning and looking forward to spending time with my daughter and brother on Maui, time with Gwyne, family and friends, near and far as I try to solve the retirement formula. How about you - what are you planning for?
   
 

Majuro

     A quick hour flight from Kwajalein to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands and suddenly, you are in the Marshall Islands. I just spent  3 1/2 days there and a lot of memories of living in Micronesia (Saipan) and living on an outer island in the Marshall Islands (Kili) came flooding back.
     A few days in Majuro gave me plenty of time to ponder what’s next for me. Three+ days may not seem excessive, but the NTA hotspots didn’t reach my room, so I was alone with my thoughts for most of the time with no internet access. As a JOMO’s JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), this wasn’t a problem for me, but I did miss the internet.
     I wandered around the downtown area, and in and out of what are now primarily Chinese owned stores. The produce section reminded me of the selections available when we first moved to Saipan in 1989 - cabbage and potatoes were staples, with a touch of mold thrown in for free. I don’t recall much outside produce available at all in Majuro in the 80’s. And on Kili? Fruit and vegetables consisted of canned USDA pears, that I had on oatmeal, most every day, for a year. Most every day, because we ran out of food sometimes. I have an aversion to pears to this day stemming from that extraordinarily repetitive experience.

Feels like, looks like Micronesia/the Marshall Islands

     I had lunch at the hospital in Majuro with friends and remembered my experience there when it was brand new back in 1987. I was playing basketball on Kili, came down on my ankle the wrong way from my 6 inch vertical leap and it hurt like the devil. They first tried a banana stalk poultice, which is kind of the panacea of all outer island cures and that didn’t work. Then they tried bitbit, which is a type of Marshallese healing massage. That didn’t work either and I’m certain they heard my scream on the other end of the island. I thought my ankle was broken, got on the next plane and somehow got myself to the hospital. There were two young women there who argued about who was going to take care of me and ended up playing janke (rock, paper, scissors) and the loser had to do the intake. She was surprised and more than a little embarrassed when I asked her in Marshallese why the loser had to take care of me, shouldn’t that have been the winner? They x-rayed my ankle, said it wasn’t broken/fractured, it was just a very bad sprain and I needed crutches. But they didn’t have any at the brand new hospital and they suggested I go to Mon Robert and buy a broom and break off the bottom. So that’s what I did and used it as a cane/crutch.
     And there I was, 30+ years later, strolling down memory lane, passing by the court house where I got my marriage license and ambling along the aisles of the same store I bought a broom in to use as a crutch/cane. It was there, probably in the broom aisle, that I had an epiphany. I’m a planner and I don’t have much of a plan for what happens after January 4th, when I leave Kwajalein. I’ve planned for all these years to get to retirement, but not so much for what to do when I get there. I thought I had a lot of life’s answers squared away, but the scale suddenly feels weighted with more questions than answers. I’ve got until about April 2020 loosely penciled in, but that’s about it. For me, the next chapter in life starts off with: I don't know how this story is going to end, but it’s been a hell of an interesting ride so far.

     

Countdown. Again. And side hustles.

     Here we go again. Another countdown, another go at retirement. I think it’s the 4th time I’ve tried to retire. There have been so many failures, it's hard to count. This work gig started out as a 4 month commitment, which turned into 7 months. I’m going to try to make it stick because it would be embarrassing to be a 5 time loser. For one, I’m almost 60. I’m tired of pulling these all day-ers. When you are nearly 60, afternoon delight is the indescribable feeling of putting in ear plugs, pulling the sleep mask on and taking a sweet, sweet nap.
     I’ve thought a lot about how you occupy your time in retirement - reading, writing, continuous learning, exercise, impulsive off season travel and maybe a side hustle or two. Because I'll be retired (again) I guess they'll just be hustles. One of my very favorite side hustles was growing papayas when we lived in Saipan. I had a good six years of abject failure. I did have one year of a few freak seedless, incredibly tasty papayas, but it was total crap shoot. Mostly I'd end up with wild papayas or useless males. Throw in the tropical storms and typhoons, which occurred with frightening regularity, and trying to grow anything there is a labor of love. Then I went to a papaya seminar at the University of Guam (yes, such a thing existed) and learned all of the papaya secrets, and no, I'm not going to tell you. But the next season was, as they say in Saipan farming jargon, jackpot. All of the papayas were either female or hermaphrodite (translation: they all had fruit). The fruit was uniform in size, texture and taste.

     There's my daughter with some of the papayas, and yes, they were all like that. I was a hero. The old farmers in my village came to me and asked me for papaya growing advice. I gave them the same bullshit answers they used to give me when I asked them for their secrets: pick out the blackest seeds. Put them in water, then only plant the ones that sink. Or plant only the ones that float. Only take seeds from the bottom half of the papaya. And they ended up with wild papayas or males.
     The family we lived with? They got all the secrets. And suddenly, just like the prized betel nut that grew in As-teo, it looked like it was a very special place for papayas as well. Just the sweet water and soil, I guess.  They gave me a chunk of land to grow more papayas on, which I cleared with a machete. I was a few years younger then. I could do whatever I wanted to do with the papayas, the caveat was when it was fiesta time, I would donate whatever I had on hand so they could make papaya coco (pickled papaya) for fiesta. And what I wanted to do was eat a lot of papaya and sell some to the high end hotels - that was my side hustle.
     And that papaya growing at one fiesta led to one of my more embarrassing moments in Saipan. Every village had a fiesta to honor their patron Saint. We lived close to the Shrine of Santa Lourdes, and you guessed it, she was our Saint. If you are part of a village in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, you participate in the fiesta. You contribute food, money and/or your time preparing the food. I had graduated from the grunt work of peeling garlic and cutting onion to contributing papaya and cooking food - this year, I was helping fry chicken with some guy I didn't know named Ramon who was dressed in ratty Army fatigues. We made small talk for a while, then got around to asking what we did on island, I told him I was a teacher at San Vicente Elementary School, he said he worked at the Court. I asked him what he did there and he said he was a judge. And then it hit me. Ahhhhhh. I had been frying chicken with Supreme Court Justice Ramon Villagomez. Doh.
     Retirement? Like Bill Clinton said, I have more yesterdays than tomorrow’s, so starting January 4, 2020, I’ll be trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, this time with a bit more urgency.