- My room is on the second floor of the hotel I’ve been living in for almost six years. I often get up in the middle of the night (it’s 3:30 a.m. right now) to sit on my balcony, drink coffee, think, and listen. Typical sounds one might hear from my perch at this time: water cascading over the edge of the poolside below, a symphony of frogs and crickets just beyond the thicket of banana trees across the road, on certain days of the month, ritual chanting rises from temples on the horizon, and on this special morning, two drunk guys, each playing reels at full volume, conversing over the discordant noise as it ricochets through the courtyard.
- I’ve started attending a Pilates class on Mondays. It’s held in a studio with walls made entirely of glass. In keeping with the massiveness of my gym, there’s a mural-like image spanning the height and width of the studio, featuring the very large head of a stern-looking Wayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, along with the words “YES YOU CAN”, in blue and black. I’m fairly certain Mr. Rock is not sponsoring my gym, but his likeness has been painted with the kind of Mona Lisa eyes that are, somehow, continuously staring into your soul. No matter what reformer machine you happen to be on, or which pretzel pose you find yourself in, you cannot escape his gaze, which is clearly one of gym-bro judgement. This reminds me – I really need to start that gym I’ve been dreaming about, where the light is flattering, the colors are warm, the wall art features ladies of all sizes, and men are only allowed attendance when accompanied by a woman.
- Tummy down on a yoga mat, my nose is six inches from a deep crack in the cement. At the same time, I’m gazing from a great height through the airplane window of my reading glasses, where the crack appears as a deep ravine running through unforgiving desert lands. Such bold adventurers, the troops of tiny ants, so often caravanning through, must be to traverse the great terrain of my bedroom floor.
- I killed the highway of ants running in and out of my shower, with an Empire State Building-sized can of bug spray, while I was peeing.
Sometimes I wonder if humans look like ants to Mother Nature. - I can’t stop saying “to be honest”. I guess it’s a new thing I’m trying out: honesty. Was I previously a liar?
- While diving down ancestral rabbit holes with M, I learned of a little Russian village named Huck, which consisted mostly of German immigrants. Many of whom, at the turn of the twentieth century, traveled to the distant lands of the largely unsettled middle America and set up shop in an obscure little podunk town. My great-grandparents were among these twice-immigrant Germans, and apparently, this Germans-from-Russia-living-in-Lincoln-Nebraska community was (and is?) a whole thing. I spent 34 years there; how did I not know this? (Kind of ironic that I now live in Bali, where a large Russian community has been forming ever since the war with Ukraine began.)
I also learned that my great x13 grandfather on my mother’s side was a Puritan from England who sailed on over to America around the time of the Mayflower, had a hand in founding a few colonial towns, fathered way too many children, and likely murdered a 15-year-old servant boy (not to mention, got away with it).
Reading about this felt like being consumed by an enthralling novel that also happened to be my family history. I now have a new mission to do something sensational before my life ends, so that when my descendants are clicking through ancestry.com, they don’t see my name and skip right over it as I did with so many of my predecessors. But instead, jump up from their research, eyes wide with historical gossip, and exclaim to the closest human either something truly heinous or fantastically heroic about me. - There’s a lot of time to think when you’re sitting on the back of a scooter, being chauffeured between the coastline and the interior of Bali. There are frangipani flowers peppering the pavement to be turned into offerings later, deities carved in sandy stone, ornate temples made of black lava rock. Bustling villages bursting at the seams with heart and grit, edged with vast rice fields glowing green in the sunlight, morphing into hills, climbing and plunging, and hinting at jungle.
I’d like to say I was thinking about all that, focused on where I was, during today’s drive. But I wasn’t. Mostly, I was thinking about where I’ve been and how I got here.
More specifically, I was thinking about where my ancestors have been. The distant lands they hail from, and the incomprehensible number of seemingly random decisions, serendipitous moments, and strokes of luck that were necessary for me to be born in the middle of America. What immense challenges and hardships must have been overcome, with just the right combination of people surviving and reproducing, for me to even be alive and sitting on the back of this scooter in Bali. - It’s easy to entertain the delusion that I’m floating an island unto myself when I’m zoomed in, as I normally am, on my own life. It’s also quite hard to deny the interconnectedness of my existence when looking at the little bubbles representing my ancestors, expanding exponentially outward into a tree made of family.
- Bali has held me during some of the most challenging years of my life. I love it. But I often feel like I don’t belong here. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t tried to belong, or if I haven’t tried because I don’t belong. To riddle that out, though, is an exercise in futility, because my daughter does belong in Bali and so does my cat. My two soul mates. More than I feel like I don’t belong here, I know that I belong with them. And so, here becomes where I belong by default. I wonder if that’s how my German ancestors felt when they migrated to Russia and then again to America? Like they didn’t necessarily belong where they were, but they did belong to the people they were there with.
- One of the more annoying features of my German-ness is the whiskers that increasingly grow out of my face. I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling around for them with my fingertips and standing in front of my bathroom mirror wrestling them out with tweezers.
I’m not the only one in my family to bear this curse. Aunt S used to come to my salon, where I would be quietly horrified as I smeared wax down her chin and neck, over her persistently wiry whiskers. I was in my mid-20s at the time and had sprouted a couple of baby chin hairs myself, but my situation was not as dire as hers, so it was easy to distance myself from the future that sat before me. I could never tend to my facial hair the way she does, though, as that would require letting my whiskers grow long enough for the wax to grab onto. No thank you.
I wish I could be like the cute waitress at the beach warung, who shamelessly rocks a large mole with a lush forest of witchy black hairs sprouting forth from it. But, alas, I am not. I often think I’ll get my whiskers lasered off as soon as it makes financial sense to do so. But then, I wonder, what would I do with all my free time? - Twenty-four hours of dungeon-ing around, streaming non-stop Harry Potter, mashing potatoes and bananas into near-drinkable slop for M, who’s just had all four wisdom teeth removed. She said her tongue feels like it’s on backwards.
Obviously, i’m german
O