Grooming

Today we skipped our tropical forest adventures for a trip into Liberia, the capital of the world, according to Ronny (pictured above with former assistant, Peter), our beloved pirate taxi driver and surrogate Costa Rican father. That looks like a run-on sentence, but I digress. We did a massive shopping trip and then everyone was kind enough to wait around for me to get my hair cut, which was a blast. Something about living in the forest makes you stop caring about your appearance. Probably because your appearance deteriorates rapidly under these extreme conditions. Bug bites, spider bites, lizard bites, the occasional human bite, and the scratching. My God, the scratching is intense and often completely unconscious. I'll wake up the middle of the night, clawing my legs like the girl from the Exorcist. I know it scabs and scars, I know it just makes everything worse, but I just can't help it! Anyway, living with crooked bangs and scarred, scabby appendages takes its toll after awhile. Even the most adventurous, hard-ass women need a little beauty in their lives from time to time. Pretty much I just wanted someone to run their fingers through my hair. My family is heavily into contact and I definitely go into withdrawal when I am far away like this. Luckily Meg is snugly (I cannot believe that is how that is correctly spelled, but that's what google is telling me) and we can groom each other. It'd be nice to get the monkeys in on the grooming session, but they play a little too rough for my tastes. Sometimes I feel bad for the infants, who get pinned down WWF style by juvenile females who want to "practice" their mothering skills. Much like the way certain girls may have dressed their cats in doll clothes when they were younger, these juvenile females don't realize they are inflicting pain. Yet they jerk the little baby heads around with enough torsion to pop open a champagne bottle. The infants, wide-eyed and helpless, must submit to this rough grooming until the juvys lose interest or their mothers come along to rescue them. I prefer the gentle touch of human hands, but perhaps I could enlist these females to help scratch my bites. Now that, would be immensely satisfying.

 My fresh haircut. Taking pictures of yourself is more challenging than the hipsters on facebook would make it seem. I just couldn't seem to get it right, but this expression best encompasses my general state of being: joy, interest, surprise, and of course, confusion.