TheTragic End of FiFi Land...

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Trip Start Dec 26, 2004 Trip End Jan 12, 2005

  Tucson, Arizona
Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Okay, so most children have imaginary friends. I, on the other, more creative hand, had an imaginary land. Fi Fi Land. Oh, it was beautiful. I would sit outside and conjure it up in my head for hours, "Olivia, you need to clean your room,"..."Sorry Mom, I'm in Fi Fi land, I'll be back in a couple hours, you should probably just go ahead and get someone else on that." Yeah, that's me in a nutshell. So, as I grew up, so did the island. I created a governement, a currency, a national anthem.... Fast forward, I'm now 21 and living in downtown Chicago for the summer. On a first date kind of thing, beautiful evening, champagne flowing, strolling through an outdoor photography exhibit in Grant Park. Come upon a photo that leaps out, grabs hold of me, and rocks me to my inner core. Fi Fi Land! It was the exact image that had been dwelling in my head since I was old enough to see color. I anxiously read the inscription... Phi Phi Le, Thailand. Are you fucking kidding me? I recently learned the correct pronunciation of the island but it's still Fi Fi Land to me. I had to go there. And I was Dec. 27th. And the biggest natural disaster since Courtney Love had to go and happen. I know I know thousands of people are dead, I can't play woe is me but come on....my childhood dream, demolished. What am I suppossed to do now. I was going there to scuba dive in the waters of my inner soul, shroom within the concaves of my deepest thoughts, toast with my best friends the beauty of growth. Fuckin tsunami. So now that I was not able to confront my childhood in order to move forward with my adult life, into the "REAL" world, i'm stuck in some sort of pseudolife, not college, not real, just fuzziness. Anyway, we made the best of it I think and I still have my plane ticket so who knows?

Here's a much abridged version of my New Year's vacation if you care to read on...

So we woke up the morning we were supposed to go (extremely hungover and excitedly looking forward to a 22 hour flight in which to sleep through, things got a little crazy after we left dinner!) and our phones were blowing up, people I haven't spoken to in years were crawling out of the woodwork, urging us not to go. We called the airline, they said our flight wasn't canceled but strongly advised us not to get on, and to top it all off, the images of Phuket they keep showing on the news, the one where the huge wave takes out the cute little bungalows on the beach, yeah, that's basically where we had reservations to stay for New Years Eve. So, for an obscene amount of reasons we stayed. However, our dear friend Erin didn't get the memo somehow and got on the damn plane. We called her a hundred times over, paged her at LAX, then had to go to the Chinese Embassy in LA to try to intercept her during her 5 hour layover n Shanghai. They were less the enthused to say the least. Seeing as the death count of innocent peole was reaching 150,000, our little 23 year old adult that willingly boarded a plane was in no way their concern. So we stayed up, and up, and called, and called, and consoled her mother, and apologized, and tried every posible way to get contact before she got to Bangkok. To no avail. Found out later, she had her headphones on during her layover and didn't hear the page. Great. Finally, she called. From the hotel in Bangkok. "Hey, ya'll (in her oh so cute southern drawl), where are ya?" Anyway, agonizingly long story short, she made the best of it, spent New Years with 4 coal minners from Canada (and their "mistresses") and made it back to LA on the 2nd. As for us, we were stuck with a looming sensation of guilt and a couple hundred bucks in our pocket. So, we did what anyone would do, we went to Vegas. It was great. (cheap champagne, 9 am 5star gourmet meals with the U of A basketball team, becoming lesbians, almost getting married, bruised knees...you know, typical Vegas). Back to LA to get Erin, red carpet aired out, trumpets blaring, confetti everywhere. We went out with random guy we met in Europe to a really cute piano/karoke bar in the Valley. Rented a car, went to Laughlin (oh, you haven't heard of it, that's cause you're not 80 years old), had a blast (by blast I mean, all you can eat buffets any time, day or night, sweatpants, movie marathons, massages, and live bands singing techno music with a banjo). We recreated New Year's for Erin, good times, might have given a couple fossils heart attacks though. Back to Vegas, porn convention, late night pool rendevous, same old same old. And back to the Ol Pueblo. Herein lies the problem...

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Still in Vegas....

Yep.