This morning I did not have any adventures planned, yet I got up early anyway. This whole trip I have been getting up before 8 a.m., on my own. I suppose it’s probably largely due to the fact that we have been going to sleep somewhat early (11 p.m. or so).

Doc went diving in the morning, along with Brett, Kurt, and Megan. I think that he’s really enjoying it. The divemasters have cancelled the trips to Blue Hole and Glover’s Reef, so all the divers are just staying on the barrier reef this week, which I guess is still probably pretty damn cool. I puttered around this morning taking pictures, and then took the laptop to the lobby so I could upload some of my photos to flickr.

Even though I technically have an internet connection while here, I haven’t really been using it as much as I thought I would have. I mean, I know I’ve mentioned getting online for three or four days now, but when you compare it to my normal online schedule (averaging about 70 hours per week, I would say, between work and home), it’s nothing. The connection is slower than molasses in January, but I don’t know that that is necessarily a factor. I have not missed TV at all, I have not once had the urge to make a phone call, and I also haven’t wanted to listen to any music on my iPod. It’s weird how my nearly-total disconnect from the fast-paced hurry hurry world of my normal life, where I constantly attempt to absorb as much audiovisual information as possible, happened so quickly and easily.

Maybe that means that when the apocalypse comes, I will survive because I adapt well, and society will value me because I have skills that don’t require electricity.

Speaking of activities that don’t require electricity, later in the morning I sat in a beach chair in the shade of a palm tree and watched for Doc coming home from sea.

Once he arrived safely back on land, we ate lunch (I had a mini pizza with bacon… WAY too much bacon, and y’all know about how much bacon it would have to be for me to say something like that).

At 2 p.m. we hopped in a van and drove several miles out to a spot on the Sittee River, where we disembarked and got into canoes and kayaks. The kayaks were not the kind where you basically enclose your lower half inside the boat, and if you tip over you’d better hope you can right yourself quickly; these much less scary “sit-on-top” kayaks were very flat plastic boats with flat areas to sit on, seat backs to hold you in place, and little grooves for your feet. The canoes looked much safer, but we were told that the kayaks, despite their smallness and flatness, were actually more stable. So Doc and I decided to be adventurous and climbed into a blue kayak.

Which immediately started to fill with water. We were both horrorstricken by how fucking enormous we must be that we could sink a kayak between the two of us. We were both on the verge of scrambling back out onto the dock, but they told us that they were actually SUPPOSED to partially fill with water — that’s just how these kayaks worked. We were not entirely convinced, because there didn’t seem like there was much kayak to fill before the damn boat was completely underwater. But we decided to give it a go. So we paddled down the river, with a few inches of dirty parasite-filled tropical river water sloshing around our legs, feet, and unmentionables.

Not that I was paranoid about, you know, parasites and my nether regions. Not at all.

We paddled down a short stretch of river, shaded by graceful tall trees and under a nice little bridge that I was almost too tall to fit under — Doc paddling for power, and me using mine to steer. And then we emerged onto a very large pond, in full tropical sunlight. The temperature zoomed up into the high 90s, and I started to sweat. As far as we could see down the river, there was no shade at all. I began to think that this was all a Very Bad Idea; it was miserably hot and still and we only had a little bit of water between the two of us, and I had no clue how far we had to go before we reached the pickup site.

I began having flashbacks to the day that we canoed down the Brazos river for six hours in 100-plus degree heat, with only one gallon of water for four people (us plus Ginger and Kathryn, I think). The river was so low that we had to walk our canoes through the shallows for much of the time, and poor Doc had a screamer of a cluster headache and was getting badly sunburnt.

So I was having all these visceral memories of the Canoe Trip From Hell, and my mood plunged. I wanted to get this stupid adventure over with as quickly as possible, and so I attempted to paddle more quickly so we could get ahead of the pack and zoom on ahead. Doc was much calmer (probably actually enjoying himself!) and kept telling me that I didn’t need to paddle so quickly, or at all, and basically to just stop and look around a little. I kept thinking, snakes, mosquitos, heat, sunburn, headache; I was miserable.

Then, around the next bend, we saw it: a rain squall coming up the river, headed right for us! It was wonderful. We got soaking wet, and the temperature dropped. My mood immediately improved. I began to slow my frantic paddling and enjoy looking at the huge orange iguanas in the trees and on the banks, the turtles, birds, and various other wildlife. Kathryn even saw a crocodile. Luckily I did not, nor did I see any water snakes.

After about two hours, we reached a little dock near where the river emptied into the Caribbean Sea, and we hauled our canoes up to the trailer, got into the van, and went back to Hamanasi.

At dinner, I wasn’t feeling all that well and I couldn’t eat much. I didn’t even want dessert. This may have been partly due to me feeling extremely uncomfortable because our dinner group had expanded at the last minute to something like 14 people, and the Hamanasi staff was balking at putting together a table that big when we hadn’t let them know ahead of time (and rightly so), and members of our party began moving tables around on their own and insisting that Doc and I not eat dinner by ourselves, which we were attempting to do in an attempt to alleviate the clusterfuck. After nearly a week of social interaction, I also felt like my supply of social energy was running dangerously low at this point. (I am, after all, an introvert and I need lots of alone time.)

Our group had made plans to go out to a little bar in Hopkins Village called King Kassava, to have drinks and hang out with some of the Hamanasi staff and village locals, and up to this point I had planned to go, even though I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to it (me + strangers + alcohol = much awkwardness on my part). However, I realized during dinner that I was becoming more and more anxious about the prospect of going, and after a discussion with Doc, who understood that I was feeling anxious and graciously agreed to do whatever I wanted to do, I told everyone that I wasn’t feeling well and had used up all my social energy for the week. Of course there were protests (”we’ll come back as early as the earliest person wants to come back!” — it never works that way, and I said so) but I held my ground. We came back to the room and watched a movie instead.

I think I made the right decision. Kathryn told me later that I would definitely have been uncomfortable at King Kassava — she very much felt like an outsider there, and if she did, I certainly would have, even more so.

I wonder sometimes if maybe I’m developing an anxiety disorder. I often am terrified at the prospect of going to places where there will be people I don’t know, especially when I don’t know how or if I’ll be able to escape.

If nothing else, at least I followed through with one of my newest goals: that I would NOT complete my open water dives. And I didn’t! Go, me!

Doc and K1 and BB, on the other hand, all got their certifications. I didn’t realize that the lake at Aquarena Springs was only 10 feet deep. I don’t know that I would have been quite as freaked out in water that shallow, but I still think I made the right decision. I’m proud of all of you guys for sticking with it and passing all your tests!

Several people have said some very nice and supportive things to me, trying to get me to feel better about not going through with it. It helps. Thanks, guys. :) Part of me still feels like a big fat whiny baby, though.

The other thing is, if I get to Belize and start kicking my own ass for not getting my certification, I can get certified there. I do like having that option.

The Prius is a fine travelling car. Roomy, quiet, fantastic gas mileage. I freakin’ love that hatchback.

My 1-year-and-2-week-old digital camera ceased functioning after I’d taken only three photos of the divers. I did not drop it or get it wet or anything of the sort. The lens is stuck open and makes a horrid grinding sound whenever I turn the camera on. It grinds for a second, beeps, and shuts itself off. It wasn’t a cheap camera, and I am thoroughly pissed.

One thing about vacation that bothers me is eating out all the time. I get sick of it really fast. I like my own cooking.

Aquarena is kind of an interesting place. It’s sort of a ecological learning center now, but it used to host things like Ralph the Swimming Pig, mermaid shows (Doc tells me there’s a kind of underwater amphitheatre) and glass-bottom boats (that still run), and there’s this awesome looking abandoned cable car station with lines that stretch across the lake to the hills beyond.

More later.

Today was a pretty rotten day. A Project From Hell at work got me stressed out to the point where I was kind of laughing uncontrollably at the futility of it all — and y’all know me, it takes a lot to get me worked up like that — and none of it would have been difficult if we hadn’t had to work through STUPID CONVIO (there, I said it). I won’t bore you with details, so suffice it to say that they specialize in making the simple complex. Also, for whatever reason, I woke up this morning without much patience to begin with, so this project got me on the edge pretty quickly.

By the time I was able to take a quick break late afternoon and meet Doc at the dive shop to pick up our equipment for our upcoming lake dive, I was stretched pretty thin. In the dressing room, attempting to squeeze my (apparently) enormous ass into every rental wetsuit they had in the shop to no avail, I snapped and bawled like a baby.

You should know that I am almost six feet tall and while I’m not exactly “fat,” I do have a decent pear shape to my body. It would seem that I am one-of-a-kind in the diving world, as all wetsuits seem made for short women or thin men. The ladies’ sizes were way too small for me, and the only men’s wetsuit that fit over my butt was an XL, and I could have stored a week’s worth of snacks in the top part of it. The dive shop people didn’t seem to understand that I needed one with a small top and a large bottom. They kept suggesting larger and larger men’s sizes (to get the bottom to fit) or handed me smaller women’s sizes (to get the top part to fit). But never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, after struggling out of breath to get the stupid thing on, zipping my thigh into the zipper, and whacking the funny bone in my elbow on the counter, I just couldn’t take it anymore and broke down.

Doc hugged me and reminded me that I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to. This whole week I have been feeling more and more anxious about our upcoming certification dives, to the point where a little voice in my head has been whispering to me “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this” over and over. It’s supposed to be fun, and I feel nothing but dread thinking about it.

So standing in the dressing room, Doc’s arms around me and tears streaming down my face, I pulled it together and made a choice. I stopped struggling with the neoprene, put my clothes back on, and had them cancel my equipment rental. I’m still going along for the ride, but I’ll snorkel or sit on the boat instead.

Rationally I think I made the right decision: if I’m feeling this much anxiety about it, then it’s probably not something I should do. But at the same time, this was a personal challenge for me, something I am afraid of that I was going to work to overcome… and I gave up. I feel embarrassed and ashamed because I declared to everyone that I was going to do this! I was going to face my phobia head-on and overcome it! I am strong! I can do anything! And I gave up, I failed. I have to eat my words, and tell people that no, I didn’t go diving, I gave up and didn’t follow through with my plans and goals.

I don’t think anyone’s going to bust my chops for it. But I’m sure beating myself up about it. I can’t help it.

How do you deal with it when you realize that you’ve set too lofty a goal for yourself, or that you’re just lazy and can’t follow through with things that might be harder than normal?

It’s insanely crazy, 100 feet deep. I think if we’d done our dive training here, maybe I would have liked it more…

This amazing and beautiful thing is called “Blue Hole.” It’s a diving spot near Belize, where we are headed in a couple of months. It looks like a meteor crater in the ocean, but actually it’s a limestone sinkhole that is the opening to a system of Ice Age caves. The place we’re going offers a trip out to Blue Hole to dive, but it’s way too advanced for us.

Plus, it’s just scary looking!

Yesterday we completed our coursework, took our final exam (Doc and I passed with a 98 and 94), and finished up our 5 confined water dives.

I’m still not sure how I feel about scuba, overall. Right now I’m giving it two thumbs sideways.

We started off the morning by meeting K1 and B for breakfast at the pancake house, and I’m glad I made myself eat something at 7:45 a.m. because our instructor declined to give us a lunch break (I know, what the hell?!). We didn’t get anything else to eat until 5 p.m., after being in the pool for 6-1/2 hours with no food or water. We were so hungry that we stopped at the first place within eyeshot: a Long John Silver’s. Oh, the irony of eating fish after learning to dive. OK, maybe that’s not actually irony, but it’s something. Note to self: LJS on a completely empty stomach will make you sick later. Don’t do it.

I am much more comfortable with breathing underwater now, though I’m still not 100% convinced that I will always suck in air when I take a breath. A couple of the skill tests involved our instructor turning off our air tanks while at the bottom of the pool. He looked directly at me the whole time he was explaining what would happen, which I think is called the “Look Directly At The Most Panicked Person And Speak In Soothing Tones” technique.

The constant going down/coming back up is hard on my ears. I think I’m clearing them OK, but I also think that the tail end of the head/chest cold that I had was making it more difficult than it should have been. Anyway, they kind of ache today. My jaw hurts from holding in the regulator, which wants to float up towards the surface, and the chlorine and salt makes my eyes feel raw, especially because I wear my contact lenses while under. The tank air dries out and hurts my throat after a while — it’s very cold and has no moisture at all.

Also, I become very clumsy underwater. During one exercise, we had to completely remove our BCD (buoyancy control device; it’s the inflatable weighted jacket divers wear that also holds all your hoses and accessories close to your body) while at the bottom of the pool, and then put it back on. I had a real hard time with that one. The instructor showed us, and he remained kneeling perfectly on the bottom of the pool the whole time. When I tried it, I floated up to near the top while struggling to get it off (oh shit! I’m near the top! What if my lungs explode? What do I do now?? Okay, exhale…. but now I have to inhale and I’m rising again! And my jacket is sinking! Okay, I’ll let go of it so I can try to get myself back down to the bottom… but the regulator is still in my mouth so now the jacket is dangling from my mouth… shit, I’m going to fail this skill for sure…). Finally I got myself somewhere near the bottom of the pool again and managed to get back into the jacket, but it took me forever to find the buckle that goes around my waist. I kept grabbing at straps, none of which were the right ones. And I’m sure that I was floating all over the place the entire time. Strangely, he didn’t make me do it over again.

I forgot to mention, the first thing that we did on Saturday when we got into the pool was a surprise swim test. We had to swim 200 yards without stopping (I’m not sure how many of us actually were able to do that without fudging the “no stopping” rule) and then to stay for 10 minutes in the deep end (float or tread water) without touching the sides of the pool. I’m amazed I managed to complete the test, especially since I don’t float very well (my legs sink, I cannot keep them up at the surface without trying hard).

The hardest thing to master seems to be how to control your position in the water (up or down) using your breathing. You let air out of your BCD jacket in order to begin the descent, but you don’t put air in to go back up; you swim up using your fins for power, and let more air out of your jacket as you go up if needed so that it doesn’t expand and send you rocketing for the surface. You control your movement up or down with your swim fins and by how deep a breath you take. They actually have a whole “continuing ed” class on buoyancy control.

Something that I can’t figure out is what the point of diving is if you are blind. Seriously, our instructor teaches divers with all kinds of physical handicaps, including blindness. If you can’t see anything underwater, why do it? For the challenge, maybe?

Our next step is to go down to Aquarena Springs in December and do our open-water dives, which consist of four dives over a two-day period. I really didn’t have any fun this past weekend, so I hope that the open-water ones at least have something interesting to look at down there. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Last night as I was trying to get to sleep, my brain started down the dangerous road of “what ifs”: Hey, stupid, you know that just because you’re somewhat comfortable at 14 feet deep does not mean that you won’t panic when you’re 60 feet down. Do you KNOW how far down that is? It’s going to be dark! What if you panic and bolt for the surface? Your lungs will collapse and you will die! Think about how much water is pressing down on top of you when you’re that far down! What if something bites you? What if Doc is out of reach and you’re scared? What if you can’t control your buoyancy, or if you forget to check your gauges and go too deep or don’t have enough air??

It’s hard to shut off a brain that wants to dwell on all the horrible things that absolutely won’t, but just might, happen.

Today, for the first time in my life, I breathed underwater.

It was terrifying.

I am taking scuba lessons, along with Doc, K1, and B, in preparation for our vacation in Belize in a few months. Sunny beaches, tropical drinks, lots of hot vacation sex, seafood, rainforests, hiking, snorkeling… and scuba diving. Belize is supposed to be one of the best diving spots in the world (fishies! coral reefs! crystal clear water! something called, dear god, “Blue Hole!”), and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d probably end up regretting it if I go there and don’t know how to dive.

Here’s the kicker: I’m scared to death to actually do it.

I have always had regular nightmares about being trapped underwater, usually in swimming pools; sometimes when I can’t hold my breath any longer and am about to pass out, I breathe in water and I choke, and sometimes I can actually breathe underwater, which doesn’t make sense and also doesn’t make it any less scary. When I’m not dreaming, I usually do fine in swimming pools and the ocean, so I don’t have a water phobia or anything of that nature.

After a lot of consideration, the thought of swimming with the fishes and coral reefs just slightly outweighed my completely unreasonable fear, so I told K1 that if she took lessons, so would I. B was kind enough to do all the research, and so now Doc and I each own a mask, snorkel, fins and wetsuit boots, know the names of all the equipment bits and pieces, and can use an incredibly complicated dive chart table thingy.

We watched a 3 hour DVD and answered a whole bunch of quiz questions this past week (K1 and I both experienced heart-pounding apprehension just watching the video), had classroom sessions last night and this morning, and this afternoon we got into the pool and learned how to use our equipment. Our first challenge was to breathe through the regulator (the thing you stick in your mouth that supplies your air), close our eyes, and go underwater for two minutes. It took everything I had not to panic when I first went under, but I screwed up my courage and took that first breath… and holy shit, I got air.

It got a little easier after that, but our instructor kept adding levels of complication to our tasks: use a mask, take the regulator out of your mouth and put it back in while underwater, clear water out of your mask, pretend you are out of air and use your scuba-buddy’s alternate air source to breathe while you both ascend to the surface, equalize the pressure in your ears. I found that I wasn’t enjoying myself at all because I was too busy worrying about remembering everything (breathe! equalize! let air in or out of the BCD!) to even look around while underwater.

The “golden rule” of scuba is to never hold your breath. I have learned a lot about pressure and air expansion and now understand all the horrifying things that can happen to your lungs if you are holding your breath while ascending (by the by, a lung doesn’t actually “explode” but instead somehow “collapses”). I’m doing mostly okay with the no-breath-holding thing, although I did catch myself doing it a few times. Practice, practice.

Our instructor is a nice enough guy; incredibly chatty (our first 3 hour classroom session could have been done in 1, easily) and makes lots of not-so-funny jokes, but he’s very at ease in the pool and a good leader. Plus, he’s the only one who really knows what he’s doing so I’m going to hang on his every underwater hand sign!

Tomorrow we will do 3 more dives in the pool, each with more and more levels of complication. Hopefully the basic stuff like breathing will start to become routine and I won’t have to think about it anymore.

So: I have not enjoyed scuba so far, and I am not sure if I will warm up to it. I think Kathryn feels basically the same as I do. Doc and B, on the other hand, are having a lot of fun and they both seem to feel much more at home underwater than K1 and me. One day of training remains, and then four “open-water” dives that we actually do at a lake in order to gain our official certification. I’ve accepted the fact that scuba just may not be for me, and that’s OK.

Whatever happens, I’m pretty proud of myself for trying.