Creepy One Liners

I have started to measure my life in dentist appointments.  Allow me to explain: As soon as you finish one appointment they immediatly ask you to schedule your next one, as if there is a possibility you will be shopping around for another dentist in the next 10 minutes.  I always think “sure, why not, I’ll schedule another one…it is so far away I wont even remember it anyway”.  So I oblige them and make an appointment for 6 months from now thinking the whole time “wow, that is so far away, I wonder what I will be doing then, and what will have happened”.  Then I promptly forget the appointment. I usually try and make if for a date i will remember, like Bastille Day, or 1/23, or something nifty like that but…it never works. I am usually tempted to just tell them to surprise me and pick whatever date makes their wheels spin cause I am just gonna forget the damn thing anyway…

Until they send those god dammed reminder post cards, you know, those ones with the creepy little one liner on the front like “We hope you didn’t forget us…because we didn’t forget you!”. It is around those times that I remember my last visit and the one before that and how much time has passed since then.  I go in sit in the chair and then go through the whole thing again and then another 6 months goes by and I have another dentist appointment.

Today was no different.  (Side note: yes I know I am 21, but I honestly really dont like the dentist, I do not enjoy any part of it, not when the lady asks me if I floss my teeth and I respond that I don’t and she looks at me like I have run over her pet gerrbil named Hal, or the irritatingly small tubes of toothpaste they taunt you with at the end). I thought about last time I was in that chair, thinking about how the next time I came into the office I was going to be done with New Zealand, and how weird that will feel.  My next appointment is in March 2010.  At first I thought, wow March, and then it hit me 20 fucking 10.  That is the year I graduate, that is a month from my 22nd birthday.  I am going to be so old next time I go to the dentist. I will in the middle of my LAST semester in college. Somehow that gives me a fair amount of physical pain to think about.  What the FUCK am I going to do after college?

Long story short: I don’t like going to the dentist.

I JUST got used to winter in June

I am in London. And not in Auckland.  Also, I almost cried over some New Zealand butter they gave me on the flight from the UAE to London. Butter.  Jeesh, I need to get a grip.  But I miss New Zealand. A lot.

But London is awesome, it is summer here, so that sort of threw me for a bit, seeing as I JUST got used to it being winter in June.

I am more than slightly psyched that I got all my bags here though, I was SO over the limit, and with only taking out about 3kgs for Liv to send me I got through, and totally skipped out on having my carry on weighed…which was really really heavy…

So now my job is to get over jetlag, which seems to be going swimmingly, excpet for the part when I woke up at 4. Oh traveling, I have missed you.

Here I am.

I honestly never thought it would get to this point.  The night before I leave New Zealand after a year.  I don’t think it has really set in yet.  The past few weeks I have been going to all of the little places in New Zealand that I did not want to miss, Cape Reinga, One Tree Hill, Bay of Islands, Queenstown.

Cape Reinga has been on my list since I got here.  I don’t know what it is about lighthouses that really do it for me, but they do, they always look so majestic and proud.  Liv and I drove up from her house in Paihia and saw the sun set behind the Cape Reinga (for those of you who dont know, it is the Northern most point of New Zealand) lighthouse.  We stuffed the car full of a mattress and many pillows and blankets, slept in the car at a campsite nearby and then woke up early to see the sunrise the next morning.  While this may seem crazy, it was comepletely worth it. Seeing the sun rise creep over where the Tasman and Pacific oceans meet. It is definitly one of the most striking sunrises I have seen.

After getting back to Paihia and eating some of Liv’s Dad’s excellent cooking, picking up her sister from swim coaching and seeing how locals live in an extremely tourist driven town we drove back down the Auckland (sans speeding ticket…and I finally figured out/Liv showed me how to use the prepay ticket station on the toll road).   And…well…here I am, the day before, thinking about all the things I need to pack up, the last minute things I need to do, the people I need to say goodbye to and the places I want to see one last time.

Leaving New Zealand has made me start thinking about this past year.  It is amazing how fast time moves when you have something to mark it, when you can look back at what has happened and really get a sense of time passing, of things changing.  A year ago today I was in Israel, in the last few days of the dig, probably getting nostaligic about how much I was going to miss all the people I met (which I did/do) and thinking about what would lay ahead for me in New Zealand.  I have seen some pretty amazing things in the past year, climbed a lot of mountains and cliffs, seen some stunning sunrises, and met some truly amazing people.  How am I going to slot myself back into my old life?

I think the answer to that is actually: I am not.  There is no way to just go back to the way that I was before I came here, before I traveled around and really felt like I was living my life and doing things that had been on my “list”. I crossed a few things off, and added a few more. But I just have to remind myself that change is good, growth is good, and if I keep telling myself that maybe I will not get too upset when I board the plane tomorrow.  Maybe I will just remember that there is always an opportunity for new growth (which is conveinently what my new tattoo symbolizes).  So, here goes nothing.  On to England for a few days and then back to the good ole US of A to finish my last year of university.

I still don’t know how I am going to leave.