Roar

I think

a good way

to distract your audience

while doing a magic trick

(and I've heard distraction is the key to magic)

would be to yell

"OH MY GOD! A MOUNTAIN LION!"

and point towards the back of the room.

You'd get half the people to turn around

immediately.

The other half

would come around

once the mountain lion

started attacking people.

Then you could do your trick!

Ta-Daaaa!

Adventures in Saipan

Hafa Dai

That means "Hello" in the local tongue. It sounds like "Half a day," and they joke about that becuse people here are...ummm...lazy.

They also really like spam. There are spam barbeques, etc. You can buy "I love spam" t-shirts all over the place. I want one.

Wuall, I had a bit 'o trouble getting into the flow of this email, so it might be a little 'slow.' Don't say I didn't warn ye.

Well, hello there!

and welcome to what would formally be labeled as Robbies' mass travel email.

In this day and age we can call it a blog, and in fact, maybe no one will get mad at me for these
anymore: When I was in Italy I got a ton of angry emails from people who don't like my mass emails.

Some complaints I recieved were:

"they're not personal enough,"
"they're invasive and not even concerned with me,"
"I have sand in my vagina and am deeply offended by many things."

And so on.

But with Blogs, heck, you already asked to read something that isn't directly addressed to you!

Moving on...

I now live on the Island of Saipan. I work at the Pacific Islands Club (PIC), which is a
hotel/resort on the beach near the South Side of the Island.

I work 60 hours a week. This is one of the two sort of hard things to deal with here. We only get one day off a week (I'm on my day off now) and sometimes work up to 12 hours a day.

My technical position is called a "Clubmate." I think I'm the only person who thinks this name is funny. It makes us sound like...ummm...Cabana boys....ummm...I AM NOT A CABANA BOY! (sound of quiet weeping).

What I do:

Anyways...The Clubmates work as Lifeguards all around the resort. We have like 6 huge pools, there are lifeguards at the beach, lifeguards that just have to float around our huge man-made river (by far my favorite shift...floating around is great), etc.

We also have this huge wave machine called Point break, which simulates a gigantic wave that you can ride on like a boogie board thing. When you have a point break shift, you are required to demonstrate for the guests, which means you spend three hours surfing. That's a great shift too. Yesterday some of the other employees taught me how to 360 on the board.

Clubmates also run the Kids Klub (hideously spelled with a second 'k'), where we get a group of 30 kids for the day (so their parents don't have to deal with them) and take them on the water slides, play water basketball with them, etc. It's like the summer camp I worked at last summer, except I can't actually speak to most of the kids (Korean and Japanese kids)
yet.

I'm starting to lean Japanese, but damn I remember this now. Learning languages is a bitch.

They taught me to windsurf in two days, and now I guess I'm qualified to teach windsurfing lessons, 'cause I do a lot of that too.

I also lead snorkeling tours. This is funny 'cause I don't know the names of any of the fish. I just
point at the kind of fish that Nemo was and shout "NEMO!" and the Japanese tourists squeal and take lots of pictures with their very expensive underwater cameras.

...you should see the cameras that the japanese
have. I'd mate with like half of them. (Sorry mom)

I just finished training with a local named Kurt, who is 18. He keeps trying to tell me that sea cucumbers can violently attack you and suck blood out of your leg, but I'm going to remain skeptical on account of the fact that they are called SEA CUCUMBERS. I say if they were
deadly, someone would have given them a different name.

"Look out, Jim!"
"What's that, Ted?"
"It's....(gasp)...it's..."
"What Ted? a Great White Shark? a Parrhana? a Giant Squid!?"
"No Jim! Its...A SEA CUCUMBER!"
"AIEEEEEEEEEgaaaaaaaarrrgle (sound of bloody massacre)

You should see them, too. Like foot-long worms that just lie there. (wow, am I really setting myself up to be attacked by a sea cucumber. I'll let you know)

Ummm...sorry about the sea cucumber digression.

To finish up the job description, ('cause I think I need to move on), I also teach archery lessons,
play ultimate frisbee and basketball and soccer with guests, and wrestle sea cucumbers.

The hotel paid to fly me out here, pay for a hotel room that I live in, pay for three meals a day,
and health insurance. They also pay me 3 dollars an hour. This is the second bummer of the job. I'm going to save most of it (in theory) though.

Oh, I guess a third bummer of the job is that we have to eat dinner at tables with the guests and
interact with them. Yeah, it's in the nicest restraunt in the hotel (it's the most amazing buffet I've ever seen and the food changes every night), but after a 10 hour shift, the last damn thing you want to do is try to make small talk with people that you can barely even really communicate with. The Clubmates (shut up) who have been here a long time can speak Japanese, so it's not so bad for them, but for me Dinner usally constitutes of grunting, smiling, bad jokes in simple english, and break dance-offs, which I usually win.

The kids here are cool. Tonight's the full moon party/beer pong tournament. They tell me I'll get better at working hung over.

Ummm...I'm getting scuba cerified for 180 bucks here, and we're going to do some deep cave dives one we all get checked out. the island is as tropical as you can imagine. Sort of generically, actually. The ocean sparkles, people smile a lot, there's too much reggae music and drinks with little umbrellas in them. I haven't worn anything heavier than a long sleeved shirt since I got here, and even that was hot. I tried to put on one of my sweatshirts once, but had to take it off immediately...because it was infested with sea cucumbers.

That's all I can think of for now. Sorry if this blog was a little 'slow,' I've been speaking a lot of
"ME TEACH ARCHERY NOW" english these last few days, and I think it's affecting my ability to write (Speaking of archery, I'm getting all good at that, too. Man am i learning some useless skills out here)...

Peace

Tokyo Skies

You can't see

The legendary flashingneon

skyscrapers of Tokyo

from here.

Below lies a field a spiderweb of lights.

Ebbing and flowing.

Just like any you can see

from high above

in the United States.

But as I strain

for something below

anything, really

I notice a lonely road

separated from the rest of the suburbs

by an expanse of black

and there's just one car on it now

one set of headlights

going

somewhere.

Who's in that car?

A guy?

A girl?

A car full of friends?

Someone coming from a party where they embarrassed themselves in front of the guyslashgirl that they've been harboring a crush for for well years?

A trio returning from a concert oh let's say two girls and a guy and the guy and one of the girls are dating but the second girl secretly love the guy but tells everybody including herself too that they're just friends and that's all she wants (in Japanese, of course).

Is it hard for the driver to see 'cause they've been crying too hard?

Laughing too hard?

Too drunk?

Too stoned?

Or is it just a normal drive home from a job that is performed some same way every day and the drive is so routine that the driver will forget it as soon as they reach their destination?

How are they/he/she dressed?

How do Japanese kids dress, anyways?

The hipsters?

The nerds?

The gangsters?

The these categories even relevant?

Is there any way that these people this person in that car down there has any idea that a tiny person in a window seat

(no i lied I'm in the aisle I want that window seat so I can see better)

in a tiny place

thousands of feet

above has thought

so very much

about them?

Has anybody passing over me, when I'm behind two (2) headlights by myself on a lonely road

ever thought about wondered about

me?

I hope so.

Jam

And now, a digression on 'jam:' that I just thought of while writing my away message:

When I'm older and bearded and in a jam band with Noah, it's occurred to me that we should only have rehersals in our pajamas. Secondly, we should have a bunch of songs about how good smuckers' jam is. Specifically, about how when you're making a pie and you have to get a lot of jam in there, you know, like jam it down and stuff.

This means We'll have a jam jam jam jam.

Solsbury Hill

This is the sort of song that needs to be playing already in the background of a near perfect night oh there needs to be four people in a car not a new car no but and older car a loved car with a name and at least one of the four people in the car needs to be smoking a cigarette quiety and no one is speaking but that feeling of overbearing content is speaking instead oh let's say these four just finished running madly through an amusement park or dancing across the ground at a concert not a hard rock concert but something with dance and groove where more people were smiling than not anyways back to the car the car sails up through a freeway overpass, and just as the song reaches a minute and fifteen seconds you know when the drums roll down and the bass drops yeah that part anyways right then the car starts down the overpass and the driver punches the car into fifth gear not trying to time it with the music but it is perfect then the night and no one realizes it but everybody can feel it then.

I'm drinking wine out of a plastic cup with skulls around it.

I feel like I should blog. This is probably because I should be applying to grad schools or working on my fucking writing that's been unfinished for so long and here I have the house to myself and a computer and a little blinking cursor and sure I feel creative but damn not in a way where I want to move myself towards my future.

Thank god for myspace.

Who reads these blogs, anyways?

Two stories.

A) I was talking to a little girl at the camp I work at oh no not as Robin but as Baloo about a dream she has, where she just falls and falls and is scared until she realizes that she's going to fall forever and then just sort of starts to enjoy the ride and starts doing flips and laughing and really enjoying herself but it's at this point that she wakes up.

B) Last night Noah and I were talking about this amazing flaming lips show we saw a few days ago, and specifically how good the song, 'Do you Realize," is. There's this lyric,

Do you realize that everyone you know, some day will die?
Instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast, it's hard to make the good things last, you realize that the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

...Which would be so over-the-top and bombastic from almost any other artist, it's the sort of thought you'd have on Mushrooms and decide that's the way that everyone should live their lives and then wake up and think, yeah, well, ok, and go back to the way you were living before.

But from the Flaming Lips?

It's amazing.

I think these two stories are related.

But I've had a lot to drink.





And the faders move
And the music dies
As we pass over
On the arc of time