Doing It Wrong

Punta Arenas, Chile

After three days without internet I regained service to find zero messages waiting for me.

The sink at my hostel in Puerto Natales was at about knee height. So to wash my dishes I had to bend over like a nu metal guitarist.

I spent three minutes in the hostel bathroom trying to unlock the door. After the first couple minutes I started knocking and shouting disculpe! I was about to call the front desk when I realized it was the wrong door.

I was thinking about a trip I took around the United States as a 22-year-old after an ill-fated romance had blown up in my face. On that occasion I had countless conversations with strangers about my problems. They would share their problems with me, and we related in a shared struggle kind of way.

It's hard to have those kind of conversations with world travelers. Everybody just wants to talk about how beautiful the world is and how lucky we are.

I kept forgetting to call my sister on her birthday. Finally I set an alarm and was able to get ahold of her. I'm terrible at remembering to call on birthdays and holidays. Maybe it's subconscious.

After my sister talked to me, she called my dad. And after my dad talked to my sister, he sent me a youtube video of the ship my step-grandpa sailed on during World War II. I imagine he was quite drunk at the time.

I arrived at the Punta Arenas airport only to find that I had purchased a flight for the wrong week. So I bought a chicken sandwich and found an AirBnB for the night.

The AirBnB was a room in a tall apartment building in downtown Punta Arenas. The host disappeared after I arrived and I never saw her again.

I went out to a karaoke bar and drank three $5 beers. There I started reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, which - turns out - is outrageously racist. Not much of a plot either.