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One of the things that I never expected with this blog is that people wind up here because they Googled the strangest things.  Recently someone Googled “roatan honduras sexual massage” and found me.  How the heck does that work.  How far down the list of things that mention “roatan honduras” and also “sexual massage” am I?  Because although I mentioned Roatan once, I don’t remember having a sexual massage there.  Or talking about sexual massages in general.  Not that I’m against sexual massages.  I just haven’t discussed them here (why is that I wonder).

Someone found my Margarita Mix post by googling “he liked my boobs”.  I can understand why someone would say that expression.  “Why did that guy stop to talk to you?”  “I don’t know, maybe he liked my boobs?”  But why would you Google that.  I mean, you Google “boobs”, not “he liked my boobs”.  Don’t you?  Someone got to the same post by Googling “Seth jdate”.  So now I’m wondering if some woman on jdate was trying to find out stuff about her potential date and stumbled across my post.  Or if some guy named Seth was looking to see if there’s anything negative about him from his jdate experience.  I’m pretty sure the guy from my story is married, so probably not him Googling, but who knows.

I understand the people who Google “janet blank josh”.  That makes sense.  I can think of reasons that would get Googled, most of them egocentric, but all probably about right.  I’m probably the only Janet Blank with a Josh husband.  Though there are more Janet Blank’s than you’d think out there, so you never know.

One of my most favorite has been Googled twice in the last two days — www.janteblank.com.  Don’t bother clicking on that link, by the way.  It doesn’t go anywhere.  That’s because, for all the Janet Blank’s in the world, I don’t think there are any Jante Blanks.  None that I know of.  None that I found on Google.  Now go learn to type and to find websites without using Google, Mom.

There are so many ways in which Sudoku mirrors life.  This is not because of the amount of my life spent on Sudoku.  Actually, that might have something to do with it.  Regardless, there are also other reasons.

Ever since I first became aware of Sudoku I found that I maxed out at a certain level of difficulty.  I could easily do the Monday and Tuesday puzzles (Washington Post increases difficulty through the week with Monday being easy and Sunday being the sort of thing that keeps you in your pajamas with a pencil until lunch), but by Wednesday I was struggling.  Then Wednesday became easier.  Eventually I added Thursday and there I stayed.  Three days of the week still out of reach.  Months rolled by and I made no progress.  I became convinced that I was missing something cognitive.  I searched on-line for “sudoku solving tips”.  I eavesdropped on a conversation between a young guy with a Sudoku book and a middle-aged woman who was asking him for pointers.  I wanted to learn, but everything I heard echoed my own techniques and methods, or was inferior to them.  I have formulated and stick by the following rules:

1) Don’t guess.  Guessing is cheating.  If you guess and stumble on the answer you have not learned anything, and next time you might not get so lucky.

2) First, think on what is impossible, not what is possible.  It’s a lot easier to figure out a square if there are less possibilities.  Figuring out what is impossible narrows the field.  If the 3 has to be in one of two spots in a box, are they in the same row?  If so, you can eliminate the 3 throughout the rest of the row.

3) Think of what goes together.  If the 2 and 6 are the only options in two boxes of the same thing (column, row or box), then they can’t be options anywhere else in that thing.  This is another aspect of the impossibility rule, but it’s such a significant sub-part that it deserves its own step.

4) Go Zen.  Look at the big picture.  What are you missing?  What are you seeing?  Is there anything so glaringly obvious that you’re not processing the information?  Integrate the total picture in order to see the parts.

Turns out these were the only rules I needed.  What I was missing was a true respect for Rule #4.  I was seeing trees and missing forests.  The answers and the tools to find them were there the whole time I just didn’t know how to use either.  How Dorothy of me.  Now I solve everything, no exceptions.  I keep searching for more Sudoku thinking there’s a puzzle out there that can get me, but I’m wrong.  Well, so far anyway.  Now that I’m 34, mid-thirties officially, the fun gets even funnier.  Lots of tools acquired.  More interesting ways to use them.  I’m excited.

And by the way, if anyone has seen my luggage, please let me know where it is.  It visited Chicago.  Sadly, I did not.  I have been meaning to get out to Chicago.  With my luggage.  I feel it needs an escort.  United sent it on a solo mission and it has yet to return.  They asked me if there was anything distinctive inside, and I really didn’t want to say “my wedding jewelry” as I felt that would make it get far more lost.  It’s supposed to arrive by 6.  Wish me luck.

People get confused about what morals actually are.  Really, people get confused and think things are morals that I do not think are morals.  The example that has come up infinite numbers of times in my life is sex.  Sex, or lack thereof, is not a moral.  Virginity is not a moral.  There are things about sex and the decision whether to have sex that are morals.  For example, respect for yourself and others is a moral.  So is honesty.  Blowing some guy in the back corner of the VIP room is a decision.

Sometime in 2000 I first realized how much I disagreed with a lot of people on this issue.  I should probably have realized it before that, but I didn’t.  I knew a guy in law school who broke up with a girl because she had slept with “too many” guys.  Mind you, he had slept with more women than she had men, but he reasoned that she was younger and if she kept up the same pace she would exceed his numbers.  My first and only reaction was “so?”  What exactly would happen if a woman had more sexual partners than her man?  He said that a high number showed poor morals on her part.  Remember that at that moment his number was higher.  I remained confused.

In 2000 I first registered with JDate.  There was a chat room and I entered, not really knowing what I would find.  Generally I found a lot of people who wanted to talk about sex.  There were guys who would obsess about boobs and their penis size.  No one hesitated to ask the most intimate questions, especially because of the beautiful shield of anonymity.  One of the issues that came up was number of previous partners.  Several of the guys who said they had been with 20 or so women also said they wanted to marry a virgin.  Huh?  Why on earth would you demand what you can’t offer?  They said it would show how good her morals are.  Huh?  Sex isn’t a moral, it’s a decision.  I was still young enough to try to win my argument on this point with boneheads.  Eventually I gave up, but the reasoning goes something like this.  An adult woman can make her own decisions.

Any woman deciding whether to have sex with a potential partner is presented with several philosophies - those of her faith, her family and her culture - and her own impulses which may or may not be contradictory.  She can integrate all of those ideas and make a decision.  A choice (and for this piece we shall only deal with situations in which there is a choice).  She can look at a potential partner and say “I want to have sex with him tonight, and do not care if I never speak with him again.”  Or she can say “I do not want to have sex with that man.  I would like to wait for marriage, and as I am still unmarried I shall refrain.”  This is analytical.  There’s a decision tree.  Fuckable guy - yes or no?  Am I horny - yes or no?  Is he married or committed to someone else?  Am I?  Do I have access to convenient birth control?   Is the decision to have intercourse consistent with my self-image?  Will I be happy about this tomorrow?  And I’m sorry, but being drunk does not negate an active decision.  If you chose to get so drunk that you lost all sense of reason, that counts as a decision.  By the way, so does “letting” a man convince you to be intimate when you had already told yourself that’s not what you wanted.  As a matter of fact, that would be both you and the guy violating morals - the morals of self-respect and respect for others - respectively.

Anyone who wants to judge me can go right ahead.  I’m comfortable with who I am and with my choices.  I’m in a committed marriage with a loving husband.  The sex I had before I met Josh is a part of who I am and what brought me to him.  The sex I have now is my reward for having good morals, knowing myself, and respecting my partners.  One day before my 34th birthday I can say that the last 33 years were well spent.

I have so much to say about the honeymoon that it’s hard to organize into entries.  I’m really glad we waited a few months.  The weather was perfect, and we already have our stride going as a married couple.  We’ve been married for five months and all my issues with the permanency of marriage got ironed out pretty quickly because they were about theoretical marriage and not my marriage in particular.  There’s a lot of pressure to be romantic on a honeymoon, and I think we did our version of romantic pretty well.  Our version is good food, time together, and trips to archaeological sites.  It works for us.

As I mentioned, we started in New Orleans.  Our first night there we walked around on Bourbon Street and went to Harrah’s.  The next morning we walked around the French Quarter for a few hours.  In the afternoon we went on a walking tour of the Garden District with a very informative guide.  Hearing the history was good, and walking around such a beautiful area was even better.  The tour left us off at Commander’s Palace, so we decided to go in and look at the menu.  They had a reservation available for 9PM so we took it.  We’re definitely glad for that choice as it turned out to be the best meal of the trip.  We had this grand plan to take a cab back to the French Quarter afterwards so that we could get Hurricanes at Pat O’s.  Afterall, it was Saturday night in New Orleans and we had a hotel on Bourbon Street.  Instead we had a glass of wine each with dinner, and passed out in our hotel hoping that the street musicians didn’t start playing again in the middle of the night.  We slept in and got ready for the cruise.

The boat itself is kind of overwhelming.  Josh said it’s one of the smaller boats he’s been on, but really anything that can safely keep 3,000 including crew afloat is going to be pretty large.  We went on the Norwegian Spirit which is a nine year old boat, so it was nice but it showed a bit of wear.  Overall I was happy there.  My frustration with wanting to see more of a country than I can in 7 hours remains, but the flip-side is that on a cruise the getting there is part of the reason to be there, as opposed to just being a means to an end.

We didn’t get to Guatemala.  We were both pretty disappointed in that.  We still got to see Honduras, Belize and Mexico.  I’ve never been to those countries, or even to that part of the world, so everything felt brand-new.  In Honduras we docked in Roatan, which is an island off of the mainland.  Because we skipped Guatemala we had more time in Roatan than planned, but it was the place with the least to do.  We took our time getting out in the morning.  When we got ashore we were mobbed by cab drivers looking to take us around the island.  For $40 we hired Raoul for three hours.  Between his English and Josh’s Spanish we got along pretty well.  The Hondurans who live there are mostly in shacks, and the foreigners who come in to scuba dive and vacation live in gorgeous condos.  There are some mansions going up on the beach that reminded me of those on the coast in Florida, and a school building that made me want to cry.  Every time we bought something I said to Josh “I don’t care if they rip us off - just leave dollars in this country”.  We went into an internet cafe and got an hour of internet time for $2.  On the ship it was 75 cents a minute.

Next we went to Belize.  We’ll have to go back there sometime soon.  We signed up for a tour to Xuantunich, a Maya ruin right on the Guatemala border.  The drive was about two hours in each direction and well worth it.  There was, once again, the mix of mansions and shanties, but here we saw more growth potential.  Two minority groups I didn’t expect were Asians (in particular Taiwanese) and Amish.  There were Chinese restaurants and Asian groceries just like we’d see at home.  The Amish were in horse drawn carts on the side of the road.  Apparently the locals love them because they’ve brought advanced farming and cattle rearing methods to the area, and lowered the price of home building by improving the materials that are locally available.  I don’t know why I was surprised that Belize was a melting pot.  Maybe that’s my ignorance showing.  Anyway, the present day development of their national identity as a 25 year old independent country was as interesting to me as the Maya.  And the Maya are fascinating.  This particular ruin is just a huge pyramid with surrounding residences and temples in the middle of the jungle.  There is no road access - you have to hike up a foot path to get there.  I was too scared to go all the way up to the top.  It had rained the night before and the limestone rock was still damp.  Combined with my unsure footing and the lack of surrounding medical support staff I figured it was asking for trouble.   I went far enough up to see the carvings and told Josh to take good pictures of the rest.  Afterwards they took us to a “typical Belizean lunch” of stewed chicken, rice and beans, potato salad and plantains (washed down by a Diet Coke).  The drive back to the boat was quick and we were able to steal a few minutes of shopping in the tourist village before leaving.

Mexico was the hottest day of the trip.  It was about 90 degrees clear skies, so the sun was brutal.  I don’t do well in direct sunlight, but we had tickets to the ruins at Tulum so I put on a big hat and lots of sunscreen, and off we went.  This was a way more touristy experience.  First they took us to a souvenir shop for half an hour.  There were free tequila shots available, but as it was 10AM we decided to pass.  Then we got back on the road to the site.  It’s enormous.  We went on December 21st, the winter solstice.  At sunrise on that day every year the sun lines up with the main building so as to peak through the central window of the temple and create a spectacular glow.  We weren’t there for 6AM, but at least we saw pictures.  There were other spots aligned for the other solar events of the year throughout the complex.  It’s an extensive site with wonderful spirituality.  Unfortunately we were there with about 7,000 other people, or at least that’s what it looked like.  There were tour buses lining the parking lot and people in every corner.  We did manage to have a good time there though, and the area was quite beautiful.

There’s so much more I could say.  I’ll have to do another entry later about the time on the boat, and about bonding with Josh.  I will say that I’m extremely spoiled by having that much time together.  It’s hard to leave each other in the morning.  I guess that’s how a honeymoon should make you feel.  Meanwhile, until I can write more, here are the pictures:

Honeymoon Pictures