All smiles today. Sitting here at Stir Crazy, the local coffee shop I like in my temporary neighborhood. Cool vibe, outside seating w/ plugs to jack into, and a damn cute young lady working the counter who agrees with me that, as Android smartphone owners, we're clearly outnumbered by the overwhelming number of Mac fanboys in this place. No joke. Every single person in here the other day was rockin' an Apple laptop. Marketing and Los Angeles. Match made in heaven. Anyway, yea, like to come here w/ Mac (that'd be my DOG, not a computer), order the bottomless iced coffee for $2.50, grab a table outside, plug in, jump on WiFi, and handle what I need to handle. The fact that the password for the network is "surfyourballsoff" just seals the deal.
Jumped on Facebook this morning and saw that Dan, one of my partners in the biosand project I'm trying to put together, is headed back to Haiti come May. At first this came as a bit of a surprise, given I'm projecting we'll kick off our own project come June or July, but after talking to him, I came up with what is, in all likelihood, an even better idea.
Instead of going straight from LA to Nicaragua (I've basically honed in on Nicaragua as the spot to make this project happen), I'll instead head back to Haiti for a few months in the summer. Dan will be there, and I imagine Max (our other partner) will also come, and James (the fourth and final partner, and one my best friends from Haiti who is Haitian and living / working in Leogane) will already be there. All of the key players will be in the same place. The biosand project I helped start for All Hands in Leogane will still be running, so I can check in on my baby and see how she's doing, and, perhaps more importantly, Max and Dan can spend time working that project to get a lot more familiar with all things biosand filter, given that'll be our next stop after Haiti. James already knows a lot - he was the one who helped me set it up to begin with. And hell, I'm sure by the time I get back the project will have evolved and I'll be able to learn a lot more as well. Win-win for everyone.
It makes sense, and besides, I really do miss my friends in Haiti. It'd be great to see them all again, and to spend some time back in the place that really cemented in me the desire to make this work my career. And I have no doubt that Nicaragua isn't going to be easy, but I think we'll be a lot better prepared for it after spending a few months in Leogane at the peak of Haitian summer, sweating like mad, getting our hands dirty again. I almost want to book my flight to touchdown on the Port-au-Prince runway July 1st. That's the day I landed in Haiti last year. Seems appropriate.
Life eh? Has a funny way of constantly wriggling around on you. It's like one of those toys that some of you may remember from back in the day - the long tube-like squishy plastic things filled with water or some sort of liquid that rolled in on themselves and were downright impossible to hold onto. Right when you thought you had it, it'd slip out of your grip. You'd scramble to try and catch it before it hit the ground, and you very rarely pulled it off. And yet, that was the fun of it. If you could just hold the damn thing, you'd get bored pretty quickly, and probably end up throwing it at someone, a water balloon of sorts. At least that's what I'd do. Right at my brother's face. But I digress... I guess what I'm trying to say is life is unpredictable. That scares the shit out of a lot of people, but for me, I find there's a lot of fun to be had in uncertainty. If I could just hold life and direct it to unfold exactly as I desired, I'm sure I'd get bored of it. I want life to wriggle out of my grasp. Trying to catch it again is such a huge part of being alive.
On that note, time to rock out to my favorite song as of late. Won't you join me?
And hell, while we're at it, have a few more:
Suffice to say, Pretty Lights rocks.
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