Mexico City was too macho for me to hit the bars alone at night, and I’m scared of mariachis, so I caught up on the movies instead. For a few dollars I passed each evening as respectably as any spinster-governess, and got the fix I’d missed since July.

At Gangs of New York, I restrained myself from clocking the gentleman behind me, who spent three hours elaborating loudly on his explanation that in Ireland the Protestants and Catholics had always been at war over transubstantiation, and that Martin Scorcese felt deeply about this due to his Irish background. But the story was enough to carry me, and I was transported when the peasant women getting off the coffin ships in Chelsea muttered Hail Marys in Irish.

S&eacute do bheatha Mhuire
At&aacute a l&aacuten do ghr&aacutesta
T&aacute an Tiarna leat
Agus is beannaithe th&uacute idir mn&aacute

I hadn’t heard this prayer since primary school, and it was eerie to hear it my first night in Mexico, the first country I’ve been to more Catholic than my own.

At Chicago, I wanted to stand and cheer at the opening performance of All That Jazz. I would have watched it five times in a row, not least for Catherine Zeta-Jones’ stylish bob. And I would have watched it again in place of any of Ren&eacutee Zellwegger’s numbers, just because I was plagued by The Hamster Dance whenever she appeared.

I was interested in Two Weeks Notice because the production had closed downtown Brooklyn for a month last year. One night I spoke to a Teamster who was waiting in his truck for the big love scene by the bridge to finish. It was an okay job, he said. Sandra Bullock was pretty nice. In Mexico, I wanted to see her wander around Coney Island and Brooklyn Heights onscreen, and maybe glimpse Smith Street. As far as I could judge through a pounding headache, the film was a perfectly competent chick flick, with some chemistry between the stars and a script that someone had put through a few drafts. The romantic comedy algorithm functioned smoothly. Unfortunately, I had to leave halfway through due to sudden altitude sickness, which is what happens when you fly from sea-level to Mexico City. It wasn’t intended as a film critique, though I’m sure those who heard me barfing in the garbage can outside the cinema door wondered.
   ´Must be pregnant,’ whispered the ushers, while I heaved.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding made me wish I’d timed my altitude sickness better. This is the biggest-grossing romantic comedy of all time? Bigger than Pretty Woman? I am horrified. It was storyboarded on an Etch-a-Sketch, has a stick figure for a leading man, and almost every single scene was done better in some other movie (including in The Frickin’ Mirror Has Two Faces). People. Please. Don’t rent this bollocks. Get Monsoon Wedding instead. Or even Moonstruck, if you must have broad, hyphenated-American humor. This level of artistic achievement should be stuck on a fridge with an alphabet magnet. It should not turn into the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time. I wish Rita Wilson had blown the production money on several Humvees and another Chanel suit.

Frida was cinematic redemption, by comparison. I saw it the day I visited the Frida Kahlo Museum and the studio she shared with Diego Rivera (actually, two studios joined by a footbridge, which is the best professional/romantic set up I’ve seen since Woody Allen and Mia Farrow bought apartments facing each other across Central Park). It was well-acted and beautiful to look at. Looking back, now that I’ve seen Mexican schoolgirls, even the school scenes were convincing, though at the time I laughed out loud at Salma Hayek’s overripeness.

Mexico is as movie-mad as it book-mad. In Puebla, I found an independent film caf&eacute, with a selection of titles for rent and sale that was extraordinary in a smallish town. In the evenings they showed art films for the price of a coffee. The owner was a middle-aged woman in a sun-dress, and her staff were true buffs. She had been running it for eighteen years.

   ‘I think it’s the only place like this in the country. It’s not a business, you know. It’s very difficult to get the tapes. The people support it as best they can, and Puebla has a good artistic community. Still, I know that every time I show a movie for free, that’s another one that won’t be rented. But what can I do? It’s a love affair, the cine del autor. ‘

She shrugged. The caf&eacute seats were director’s chairs, and they had hand-stencilled the names of the greats. I sat in Fellini’s chair and watched Train de Vie, a French movie with Spanish subtitles (a bad one, unfortunately, of that unsettling genre, Holocaust slapstick). At the end, when I was saying goodbye, the owner came over again.

   ‘When you go back to New York, say hello to Woody Allen for us. Maybe in Michael’s bar on Monday nights. They might hate him the United States, but in Puebla we still love him like Chaplin.’

An admirable decision. Except I don’t know the English for empanada (‘embreaded’?). And each time local tarts (no, not empanadas, silly) address Theroux with a ‘Hey, Mister!’, I am jolted out of Mexico, and plonked in 1930s MGM Brooklyn.

So unless you can send me suggestions to replace taco, mariachi, ceviche, and tamale, you’ll have to put up with my hard-won Spanish on this site.

Have you ever sat in silence for ten days?

Have you ever voluntarily submitted to a regime that demanded by way of a 4 a.m. gong that you crawl off your straw mat, grab a flashlight, and stumble to communal showers down a jungle path frequented by king cobras?Welcome to Buddha Bootcamp, Wat Kow Tahm, Thailand.

‘Shower’ is a loose term in a forest monastery. This was a series of wooden cubicles outfitted with a concrete trough from which we scooped water over shivering bodies. Said showers housed three large lizards, and on a good day we didn’t have to clean up iguana guano before starting. No yelping in the dark, either—there was a vow of silence to uphold.

At 4.45 we reported to the meditation hall. Men sat on the left of the hall, women on the right. We started with an hour of sitting meditation, followed by yoga, then a talk by either Steve or Rosemary, the husband-and-wife teachers.

Breakfast at 7 was eaten in silence, each mouthful chewed mindfully unless we were distracted by the kittens. Afterwards, we joined a line to wash our individual cup, plate, and spoon and return them to our place in the rack. Then an hour of working meditation, which could mean mindfully cleaning toilets, sweeping, or chopping vegetables. More meditation from 9 to 11, then a vegetarian lunch followed by a break for laundry or sleep.

From 1 pm to 5.30, we sat, we stood, we walked, endlessly. For walking meditation, we each picked a short track drawn in the gravel outside, then paced with as much attention as we could manage. Rosemary and Steve instructed us to note silently each movement of our feet as we walked. Inevitably, we slowed down like malfunctioning robots. Our familiar movements were new and strange.
   Lifting…moving…placing…’
People frowned with concentration. Lips moved silently. Sometimes we stumbled, unable to cope with the challenge of putting one foot in front of the other. Beginner’s feet.

After a silent dinner, we sat for an hour, stood for an hour, and then the teachers gave a final talk before allowing us to crawl back to our dorms by torchlight at 8.15. The first few nights, I lay awake fretting about having to get up at four.

The only time we spoke was during three brief personal interviews with the teachers. My voice sounded as rusty and unfamiliar to me as an old answering machine tape. All other communication was by notes, which could not be passed directly to to other students, but were given to designated assistants to be passed along as necessary. We were not allowed to make eye contact, or smile at one another. Stern notices were everywhere:
   ‘No talking.’
   ‘No going to the look-out point after dark.’
   ‘No stretching exercises in front of the large reclining Buddha.’

A silent retreat, it turns out, is not silent at all. My mind had a lot to say about its new conditions, during meditation and even in vivid, disturbing dreams at night. Everyone else, naturally, seemed to be fine, but I sat there, lonely and fidgety, with a voluble silent commentary I couldn’t switch off. The tone of the regulations bothered me. I felt reprimanded for transgressions I hadn’t managed to commit yet. I wanted to be the best little meditator at Wat Kow Tahm, but I felt like a naughty convent girl. I started to wonder when I could gracefully leave. I couldn’t sit on the floor for sixteen hours a day, let alone in serene silence. Jesus. Buddha.

Steve and Rosemary had creepy, soothing voices. In the early, restless days, I found particular phrases maddening, and muttered at their tendency to start subject-free sentences with a gerund, Fox News-style:
   ‘Experiencing the to-ouch of your feet on the ground.’

Sometimes I transferred the mental energy that would have powered a wind-farm to my Vipassana Romance. A V.R., Rosemary explained on Day Two, was a documented phenomenon on these Vipassana, or Insight, retreats, where the meditator developed a crush on a fellow student. Without knowing as much as a name or nationality, they spent hours and days planning long, blissful lives together. Sometimes they planned fantasy weddings, children’s names. Sometimes they did, in fact, get married after the retreat.

It beats meditating. There was a tall, slim, brown-haired boy conveniently in my line of vision, and by following him to his labeled dishrack I worked out that his name was Eric. To learn this I had spent three mealbreaks narrowing it down between two possible shelves when he was too quick for me. I further deduced that he was American—this theory was supported by his Teva sandals—Canadian, or, worst-case, French. (British men have not been named Eric since Orwell’s time. He didn’t look German.) Once or twice I caught him glancing at me during the walking meditation, and took this as happy proof of mutual regard. I didn’t realize everybody watched me through the walking meditation, since my special task was to ring the meal bell that ended the session. My relationship with Eric kept me happy for several days, unaware that the sweet-faced girl beside me was his new wife. But he was a serviceable V.R. distraction—and we all had one.

By Day Four, I had adapted to the silence and had even experienced fleeting moments of peace. According to Vipassana Buddhist teachings, peace is not something to strive for, to get. This is very difficult for ambitious western minds to grasp. Rather, peace is there all along, if only we could understand, accept, and let go of all the emotional accessories we tote. The theory is manageable, but it’s very hard to do. Rosemary and Steve guided us through meditation practices that we repeated over and over. We meditated on our own dead and decaying bodies, in order to understand what was truly important. We listed and gave thanks for our blessings (I felt like John Boy Walton). We practised meditations of love and compassion for ourselves, for those we loved, for acquaintances, and finally, in a sort of graduation exercise, for our enemies. We thought about karma, and the causes of unsatisfactoriness in our lives. We meditated on sympathetic joy for others and ourselves. Sometimes we just followed the in and out breath to develop concentration. (I usually devoted those periods to picking a city for Eric and me, or examining my feet.)

It was hard bloody work. But the fleeting moments of peace and joy were worth gallons of iguana guano and sand-filled 4 a.m. eyes. Those states passed, of course, though we tried to cling to them. Still, simply learning how to observe and train the mind, even with the clumsiest results, made the whole retreat worthwhile. I couldn’t have absorbed these lessons from a book and every day I felt more grateful to Steve and Rosemary, who had given up pensions and health insurance to teach us for free.

By the ninth day, I felt deep affection for people I’d never spoken to, whose faces I’d only ever seen in the mask-like composure of meditation (and I don’t mean Eric, whom by now I had long since spared the burden of my lasting happiness). We knew only the barest details about the other meditators, guessed from how they looked or perhaps gleaned from a quick chat the night before the retreat. Our imaginations took over. I found myself wondering what people would look like if they laughed. I was touched by the bravery of these mute friends, who had sat day after day and tried.

There was Bill, immensely tall, who rang the wake-up and meal bells with fizzy energy, and made us smile by skipping down the steep hill to our last silent lunch, six feet six and dressed in canary yellow. There was Sarah, whose back clearly hurt, but who propped herself up against the wall and never missed a session. There was Dave, who wore t-shirts with messages on them and gave me the print fix I craved during our walking meditations. There was Ciara, my age and my unlikely compatriot. Since when do Irish women spend their vacations cross-legged on Thai hilltops? She told me afterwards that when she’d first done this retreat, five years before, one guy had worn a Coca-Cola t-shirt on the walking meditations, and when silence was finally lifted there was a unanimous decision to go into town for a Coke. The root of suffering is desire.

At lunchtime on the last day of the retreat, Steve and Rosemary announced a two-hour reprieve from the silence, so we could meet one another before catching planes and moving on. It would start that evening, at 5 pm. We looked around, unsure, and peace evaporated as we started planning who to talk to and what to say. My mind whizzed all afternoon. Finally Rosemary smiled and told us we would start by each saying our name and nationality. I sniffled during this recitation as if I were a cast member in the last performance of Up With People.
   ´Dominic. Sheffield, England.’
    ‘Jill. New York, United States.’
    ‘Ulli. Germany.’
    ‘Eric. Quebec, Canada.’
    ´Tina. Australia.’

Afterwards, the burden of silence hung in the air for a few moments. We shyly turned to our neighbors. Then my German roommate bounded across the hall and hugged me.
   ‘Derv, thank you, thank you, thank you for being such a good roommate! You are a very quiet person. Some of those people are so loud! Thank you for being my roommate! And for leaving the candies on my pillow when I was so so hungry!’
We all laughed, too loudly, and I was giddy, an extrovert again and hot-faced with excitement. Jill from New York joined our group.
   ‘Oh my God, I made up a story for every one of you. You,’ she said, pointing to me, ‘were a ballet dancer from the West Coast. But then you said Ireland, and that’s all wrong.’

We were weepy and giggly. We queued up for a dinner we didn’t eat. We thanked each other for small things—for ringing bells nicely, for always wearing cheerful clothes, for sweeping the paths so well. We stared, amazed, at each other’s faces, statues come to life with brand-new smiles and expressions. We swapped stories of discouragement:
   ‘But you looked so serene! I thought I was the only one…’
   ‘Oh my God, Day Four was torture…’
   ‘Who was the woman who kept pounding the floorboards at 4 am?’
   ‘What happened to Lola? Did she leave? Is it true she was claustrophobic and couldn’t stand the dorms?’

Going back into the silence that evening was difficult. It was hard not to smile and make eye-contact; I felt rude and abrupt. My mind buzzed with questions I’d forgotten to ask and people I still wanted to meet. But we settled quickly, with ten days of training behind us to help us note each passing state. Distracted, distracted…twitchy, twitchy…desiring, desiring…planning, planning….

The retreat ended next morning. Our final lunch together had a kind of Buddhist desperation, a fervent wish to cram as much warmth into these final hours as possible. We junked all our non-grasping and clung to each other, planning to meet up in beach bungalows and finally share a beer.

Creakily, we pampered tourists figured out what work needed to be done to break camp—no cheap Southeast Asian labor here. We hand-washed 60 rough blankets at the well, took down all the signs that had smoothed our silent path, scrubbed the toilets, swept the meditation halls, rolled the mats. The work was humbling. Over the months so many people had cooked, cleaned, and washed for me, and I had accepted without question that this was how it should be. I had the dollars, they had the time.

The Wat´s finances are rickety. One meditator paid Steve and Rosemary’s medical bills; another had paid to build a new block of toilets. We were asked to donate for laundry buckets, for vitamins tablets, for printing costs, living expenses, whatever we could spare. Again, this was an adjustment. We are used to being told the price of a service, not figuring out what is needed and giving voluntarily.

After the retreat, the world seemed freshly washed and every face had some beauty and a story I wanted to hear. I left aside my books and notebooks. On the street, people indulged my permanent smile with their own. A group of ten of us staked out a small beach resort on the other end of the island and practiced being kind and thoughtful towards each other as if it were a new language. We stopped and thought about the grammar of generosity. Often I slipped into my careless native tongue. We got up at dawn to sit in meditation on the beach, a solemn line of cross-legged falangs that made the locals smirk. We didn’t mind. We had just had a sneak preview of the news Warren Zevon delivered from his deathbed a few weeks back: it’s all about realizing just how good each sandwich is supposed to taste.

The retreat bliss persisted for a few weeks, even through Bangkok (lifting…moving…placing). Then I got back to New York, which is in the running (with many contenders) for World Dukkha Capital these days. Orange terror alert. War protests. Taxes. Two feet of snow. Divorce lawyers. New York storage. A decimated brokerage account. My equanimity crumbled, my permasmile subsided. Still, I managed to get through a month of it on the downhill coast from the hilltop monastery. And as I looked at the other worn, tight faces on the subway, I wondered, in a religiously confused sort of way: can a Buddhist be excommunicated for being evangelical?

After four weeks of silence, the task of updating this website has become as intimidating as starting a new one. The new entry should be Momentous, a reward or at least an explanation for patient friends who have dropped by week after week to see the same tired title.

Sorry. I’m in New York. I’m sick in the racking-cough, whole-body-aching way that’s inevitable after flying for 36 hours from the tropics to Manhattan in February. I’m taking seven subway rides a day in the urban equivalent of Chicken Bus travel, and fellow passengers are noting my phlegmy convulsions with the same distaste I recently had for shitting ducks in the opposite seat.

But I’m ba-ack.

It’s a year ago this week since I started to write here.

Someone had sent me a link to Caterina’s site, and I learned there were people out there that I would want to have a cup of coffee with. This woman’s voice was like that of my favorite email friends, and here she was publishing for the hell of it. Then Paul Ford of Ftrain became my web-writing hero, and I forced him to become real-life friends with me on the strength of being a Brooklyn neighbor. I started to carry a notebook to jot my own scraps of books and subway conversations. Late in the office one night, I set up a Blogger account and sent a trial letter to myself.

Blogger took the friction out of writing: there was no pressure to produce paper-quality material in this disposable medium. No one expected a Harper’s essay, because no one expected anything. I liked having yet another outlet to chat in and I found these daily snippets suited my attention span. Matthew Arnold said the Irish excelled at lyric poetry because we lacked the concentration for the novel form.

My shy experiment was aimed mostly at the people who were already email friends, though I didn’t tell them it was here for a month or two. Then more people stopped by, and I got to know some who linked or wrote. Some I even met in three dimensions. I got back in touch with old friends who live far away, and I sparked a few to start their own sites. This site has been a home of sorts now that I have no fixed address, and the daily ramblings have mounted up into a personal history. I feel well-rewarded for a small effort.

So thank you for visiting. I’m glad you’re here.

I would live all my life in nonchalence and insouciance, were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
— Ogden Nash

I’m a sucker for this kind of lofty marketing, and I bought three Moleskine notebooks before I left New York. Two large squared and one small ruled. That was the store’s entire stock, so I ordered two more online to be delivered to London to pick up on my way. These notebooks are perfect, you see. The binding opens completely flat. The pages are lightweight enough for travel but substantial enough that ink doesn’t bleed through. There’s an accordion pocket in the back for cards and clippings, and a ribbon placeholder. A built-in elastic band holds the sturdy covers closed in my backpack. Inside, there’s space for a name and address and a proposed reward if returned to the owner. I taped a poem to the back flap and a note from my friend Paul Ford to the front flap. On the second-last page I keep a running list of things I’m seeing for the first time: water buffalo, spirit houses, pufferfish, fried cockroaches… On the last page, I write the names of books I read on this trip.

I’ve always been a greedy, lazy reader. I used to buy stacks of books and I flew through them, skipping whole sentences and paragraphs in a race to the end (and was easily distracted by the next book before I got there.) My bookshelves, more than my brain, were the real repository, since I could always go back some day and give each book the attention it deserved. I was particular about reading—I hated to borrow, and I disliked hardcovers that were heavy on the subway, or very old second-hand books that smelled musty.

Now, though, each book represents a half of pound of paper that I have to lug around. Before I left, I worried about what to do with finished books. I knew I couldn’t ship everything home, even if I had one. Max suggested that if I were really bothered, I could tear out and keep the title page of each book before trading or selling it. But I can’t bring myself to collect scalps in this way. Instead, my reading habits have changed. I read more slowly, knowing I own each book for just a short time. I savor sentences. I copy whole chunks into my fancy notebook, and when I’m finished, I trade two-for-one to get the next book. Now that I earn each book in a way I never did before, I’m grateful. This Moleskine notebook, my $17 confidante, the analog laptop that holds a draft of everything I post here, has become my library and my home.

The cost of Internet access is ruinous here on Koh Tao, where I’m learning to dive, so my updates are longhand for now until I transcribe them in Bangkok next week. Be patient. Much wittering about underwater splendors to come.

In the meantime, here’s my favorite email sign-off of the week. It’s from Michael, who mocked me at Vindigo, and (blessedly) mocks me still. But only when I need it.