I love my boyfriend the most when we are hanging out with other people and hate him the most when we've been alone for awhile.

I think it's because I like him better than everyone we know, but I like him less than all the potential and idealized people that exist only in my imagination.

Dear Future Self,

When you look back from your pared down world, and you bitterly think how silly and blind you were to ever complain about 'having' to travel everywhere in the car, stop.

Once or twice or ten times upon a time, you were driving at night and were suddenly struck down by awe that everyone slid around in these little living rooms on wheels, and that you were sliding around with them.

Often, when you were a passenger, you thought about how all the cars on the freeway were self-contained universes and all these universes were 10 feet away from each other, but remained wholly separate unless they threatened to collide.

Riding in someone else's car was like rummaging furtively through their bathroom cabinets. Some people kept changes of clothes in their cars. The cigarettes they couldn't smoke at home. Wrappers from the food that they wouldn't count in their diet journals, if they had them.

Riding with a stranger in a car made you very quickly not be strangers anymore, at least before the plague of texting. Sitting in silence with the world sliding by was awkward. We were wired to think time was passing when we saw forty miles of anything, even road. More time than forty minutes. We traveled forty miles, how could we not have said anything? We used to be on the beach, and now we're in the mountains, so how could we not have said anything at all?

Getting in the car with someone familiar after a long day was a sigh of relief and dozing in the passenger seat with your face pressed against the windshield was even better than doing it on the couch.

Don't worry. I appreciated them.

I had a day yesterday that manages to effortlessly paint a clear picture of life in Orange County without even trying.

So I'm dropping my car off to get an oil change, which is supposed to take two hours. The guy behind the counter is like, 'Will you be waiting here for it?' and I'm all like, 'um, no, I'm going to walk to Mitsuwa' and his face is all like ''walk'?? What is this this 'walk' of which you speak??'

I had passed Mitsuwa roughly three minutes earlier while driving over there, so I figured it was walkable, and that I could use my awesome Japanese market homing skills/ramen-smelling nose to find my way back there in a reasonable amount of time.

Whoops! I guess I forgot I was in Irvine (Costa Mesa really, but close enough)! As I began my journey, I realized two things. One: no sidewalks. Two: stupid landscaping. Walking down the street, I was going up and down these manmade mounds of bright green, overwatered grass, tripping on the tree roots that snaked everywhere without ever actually going underground, and weaving around office park buildings that had their own mazes of bushes meant to be pleasing to the eye, not to be walked through.

I jumped fences. I went through one-way courtyards. I climbed through bushes. I trespassed on more private property than has ever been trespassed upon before. And then I realized that the street was turning. It was curving around and starting to go the other way. THEN I saw a plane landing directly in front of me - the street had done a full 90 degree turn and dead-ended at the airport.

OK, I thought, I really want some unadon right now, and I will not let OfficeParkVille defeat me and my previously impeccable sense of direction. I'm just going to pretend that did not just happen, and go back the other way.

Long story short, half hour later, I'm at Mitsuwa, fighting millions of other lunch-hour-goers for a table, finally getting one (across from a baby who refused to be fed her rice, instead preferring to stare at me unblinkingly for 45 minutes). And immediately getting all prickly memories of my walk erased by my unbelievably delicious $6 unadon/zaru soba combination meal.

Quick question:

What do you do when you move to a new town, meet someone you immediately and effortlessly get along with, subsequently Facebook-stalk them (don't judge!) and discover that their profile picture is a photo of them posing proudly with Ann Coulter?

Each day feels like a mini-lifetime.

I wake up with strands of thought flying away into the ether, disoriented, a little cranky if there's an alarm. I'm not burdened, though, because I forget everything I'm burdened by while I'm sleeping. At the moment I awaken there is no chest pain, no trepidation, no frantic wondering about what the next 70 years will feel like. Just remnants of a nonsense language, a faint desire for nourishment, and random stretches of muscles to make sure they're there, and that they work.

All morning is, is a pleasant haze where I drink tea and think, and have my reading date with the sun - my apartment is situated in such a way that the sun comes in and hits my papasan only between 10 and 11 AM - and prepare myself for the outside world.

As the day stretches on, and I do whatever it is that I do, I start to worry about things. Will I choke on this giant piece of chicken I'm chewing? How best to swallow it? Shouldn't I be doing my pre-political-science-student readings so I'm not the class idiot when school starts? Am I getting sunburnt? I still enjoy myself, but there it is in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce.

The evening brings bigger worries: do I want to be with this person for the rest of my life? Is this chest pain going to end up being a heart attack? Do I honestly believe that I am capable of standing up in front of a classroom of students? And I go to bed tense, achy, hyperaware of my positioning under the covers and the pace of my breathing and everything else. I want to recap, so I'm talkative, but I'm irritable, so no one wants to talk to me.

And when I fall asleep, you may as well have hit the power-off/reset button.

That's the great savior of my biological/psychological makeup. The reset button. I sleep like a rock no matter what's worrying me and my dreams are mostly unrelated to reality. I'm not even myself in dreams. Even that dream I had where there had been a zombie apocalypse and I was living under an underpass in L.A. with three videogame quality animal friends from Animal Crossing who may have had dubious intentions - even that dream didn't feel like a nightmare. It was sort of fun, scavenging for leftover food and sleeping on a ripped mattress with one eye open and one hand clutching a knife. Same with the dream about tubing down a way overswollen Boulder creek with only a leaky, lopsided tube.

I wake up and everything is fuzzy and innocent and new.

Today at lunchtime I sat on the shady edge of a massive corporate park just outside the north edge of John Wayne airport, eating a goat cheese-prosciutto-asparus quesadilla, drinking a coconut juice, and watching the airplanes land.

Nobody else even looked up when these monsters roared deafeningly overhead, but it was something I couldn't look away from. Their tiny little wheels attached to their screaming enormous winged bodies reminded me of birds, but not for the normal reasons. Birds are just big fat bodies on itsy-bitsy stilts, or comically small wheels in this case. I don't know. It still seemed momentous to me every time one landed gently and in accordance with runway boundaries.

Every time I've gotten into a plane since, I don't know, around 2007, just post-Indonesia, my heart races at 130+ bpm while my throat closes up and my stomach rolls and this lasts the whole flight, which cannot in any way be healthy. My best and brightest logic cannot win this war against the physiological. So sitting around watching multitudes of planes land safely probably will not help me, but I'm spellbound by them anyway. To me it's like this.

Spending time at very rich people's homes forces me to (uncomfortably) wonder what I would be like if I were to somehow become rich. It usually happens in the same stages:

1. Shock and disgust at how many useless knick-knacks person has; righteous anger about how money could be better spent feeding the hungry/propping up charities/making poorer people happy in some way/etc.

2. Tiny little rogue thought creeps in about how I would probably be about to identify with the person better if person spent knick-knack money on travels around the world or on ridiculously pricey restaurants or gourmet food instead.

3. Realization that this is a double standard emerges. Guilt occurs. Value-questioning occurs.

4. Try to identify with the person by pretending their knick-knacks are slices of raw fish or green chile tamales or BBQ pulled pork.

5. Inability to complete analogy because of difficulty perspective-swapping.

6. Repeat.

Eventually I just force myself to stop thinking about it and content myself with platitudes about every person having the right to spend their own money in whichever way they see fit, which I don't really believe but whatever, I'm at a party. And then I enjoy their amenities and become a hypocrite but try not to do it outwardly because I am trying to socialize lightly. And I go home massively exhausted.

Because we could, yesterday we stood on a sandy stretch with the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak blowing by behind us, and in front of us, pelicans divebombing like screwdrivers into the water to catch fish. It was goosebump-raisingly cold, but that didn't stop families in bikinis and board shorts from dragging their boogie boards into the tide. Neither did the fact that the waves were breaking five feet from shore.

We had sandwiches: one of two recipes for sandwich that I'll willingly make and eat. As follows:

Sourdough bread, toasted

Brie

Ham

Spinach

Red Onion

Fig Jam

Mayo (optional)

Arrange in desired percentages and enjoy. For me it's nearly all Brie, spinach and fig jam, but that's okay because Dan likes his giant pile of meat slathered with Kewpie mayo, so it works out evenly in the end.

So we ate those and some mandarins that tasted like perfume and some triple ginger snaps from Trader Joes and then I wandered down to the water. I put my feet in and let the waves crash and foam that wonderful white foam around my ankles. Whenever I see those yards of white foam snapping around me, I always want to put my face in. I think it's good for my skin, despite having no evidence, empirical or otherwise, to support this hypothesis. Maybe back in middle school I read it in Seventeen magazine or something and internalized it without internalizing the source. I don't know. I do the same thing with the foaming jets in hot tubs.

While I was wandering around I found a baby crab no bigger than my fingernails. I resisted the urge to pop it in my mouth like popcorn, but in order to do that I had to travel forward in time and forcefully imagine eating the Japanese-style grilled mackerel and pickled cucumbers that we later cooked for dinner on our very own brand new community grill: