So I’m sitting here on Sunday afternoon, trying to rehydrate after a night spent with generous and thirsty alumni from my favorite student organization, eating Spongebob Mac n’ Cheese and watching “Eat, Pray, Love.” Typical.
However, as feelings of restlessness and envy creep their way into my mind while I watch the character of Elizabeth “Liz” Gilbert traipse across the globe learning a new language, discovering herself and finding love, I can’t help but think—as much as I wish it so—this scenario would be impossible for me. Spoiler alert: I’m about to divulge a lot of the plot.
Liz’s Italy: For the first four months of Liz’s journey, she takes Italian lessons and makes new friends. She also enjoys delicious Italian food and gains 15 pounds (but it’s okay because she was underweight from not eating due to prior stress) and comes out looking healthy.
Jaime’s Italy: I’m sure the Italian language is cool but I’m not necessarily worried about learning it, so that already sets me back as I wouldn’t meet with a tutor each week and therefore would not make any friends this way. Left to my own devices in Italy I would likely embrace the freedom of no attachments to anyone in a beautiful country at first.
Fast forward two weeks down the road where I am starting to feel lonely, am 10 pounds heavier and hitting the gelato shop three times a day. I may have mentioned this before, but anything ice cream related is my favorite thing to eat, with cheese coming in at a close second. That being said, Rome should also be prepared.
See, for Liz, it was okay for her to occasionally indulge in Italian cuisine because she eats “portion sizes.” At one point she makes a “delicious” meal for herself consisting of a hard-boiled egg, three stalks of asparagus and some olives. Da fuck?
You have got to be kidding me. Perhaps I have adapted to the mentality of obese America, but I need more than just some heavy appetizers to satiate my hunger.
Next, biding I have not succumbed to heart disease from the plethora of cheesy, carbohydrate-heavy, dairy-based concoctions of this romantic country, I would move on to the second leg of the journey, departing Italy a bloated, heavier and likely more-depressed person as opposed to Liz’s freshly reinvigorated countenance.
Liz’s India: For the next four months Liz goes to an ashram to meditate and come to terms with herself. She gets up at the crack of dawn most days and spends her afternoons learning self-discipline and scrubbing floors on her hands and knees.
Jaime’s India: My visit to the ashram would fail after the first time they asked me to meditate. This has not been medically proven, but sometimes I think I have some form of narcolepsy, as I fall asleep in some of the most inconvenient scenarios possible.
Like during important exams, for instance. In a semi-cognizant stupor I just sit there trying to answer questions as my pencil shoots in various directions off the page each time my head nods to my chin. It’s a miracle I’m passing my classes.
This sleepy setback would only be intensified by the mandatory task of waking up with the sun before meditating. While I realize many people fall asleep when they’re first trying to meditate, a small, narcissistic part of me wants to believe I am actually an exception and have no control whatsoever of when and where I fall asleeeeeeeee—oops. See what I mean? (I’m not joking, I actually fell asleep while writing that. Ah, fate.)
There is also a scene where Liz sits outside all night in meditation and ends up with a bounty of mosquito bites. Given my past history with weird-ass illnesses (read: eye infections), I would likely be hospitalized with malaria or the like within the first hour of this spiritually cleansing experience.
So I would depart India sleep deprived, underfed for my now-expanded stomach and unenlightened. And that occurs only should I survive the mosquitoes.
Liz’s Bali: Liz ends her journey with four months in Bali, which you could also call paradise. She hangs out with an old medicine man that had read her palm years ago and then falls in love with a sexy older Brazilian dude who pampers her and makes love to her in his bungalow. That bitch.
Jaime’s Bali: So here’s the deal, when Liz goes to see said medicine man—Ketut—he doesn’t remember her at first. The whole reason she came back to Bali was because he had predicted she would, and he doesn’t even remember who she is until Liz prods him a bit.
Under normal circumstances I’d be all about refreshing his memory like she was, but let’s keep in mind that at this point my pants are busting at the seams from the Italian pasta and I have been hospitalized with malaria from the mosquitoes in India. Morale is low.
Flustered and feeling like an idiot, the most realistic scenario here involves me politely excusing myself before Ketut can remember me, crying on a side street until the locals start to point at my streaming face and subsequently dropping $50 to make a phone call back home to my mom to cry some more.
This is about the time when I’m supposed to meet some hunky foreign man who promises to love me forever and treat me tenderly. But nay, at this point, given my current state of teary eyes and runny nose, he won’t even give me a second glance and I will proceed to update my Facebook status that I’m coming home early with the desperate hope someone will “Like” it, therefore proving that I’m missed at least somewhere.
Clearly Liz’s journey in “Eat, Pray, Love” is not the right path for me. Let’s just hope when I finally take my own whirlwind adventure I stay away from carb-y countries and get my flu shots first.
Feel like the plot of “Eat, Pray, Love” is a bunch of bologna too? Email Jaime at jbrackeen@wisc.edu and tell her why. Then maybe you guys can play it safe and take a trip to Canada.
