Falling asleep and itching:

As I was failing to fall asleep in the dry motionless heat of my room, hugging a blanket because I at least have to be hugging one if I cannot be under one, I was thinking about how everyone (or perhaps just me, projecting) never remembers the precise moment of falling asleep. It could be painful, or intense, or hallucinogenic in a different way than dreams or nightmares, or uncomfortable or beautiful or anything at all, and we would never know to seek it or avoid it (not that we would have a choice). Trying to grasp and hold that moment would, of course, end in wrenching awake again, or, more likely, not be possible in a state so near sleep. No willpower in drowsiness; no remembrance.

Pondering this, necessarily pushing myself farther from sleep, another thought shoved its way in, along with a fierce itch on my left calf, the one fenced off from my other leg's foot's toes by a wall of hugged blanket. Instead of scratching, I thought. I thought: look 'itch' up on Wikipedia tomorrow because what, exactly, is an itch? And why in the world would scratching help if it's internal? (Wikipedia was no help. Direct quote: "An itch (Latin: pruritus) is a sensation felt on an area of skin that makes a person or animal want to scratch it." What?)

Things happen to me that I don't feel, don't remember, and don't understand.

This is meant to be a travel journal, I know, but it can't possibly be one yet. Nobody wants to hear about trips to the strip mall to buy sprays with exactly 30% concentrations of DEET, or adventures at Best Buy getting computer adapters, or the woes of trying to sell extremely specialized musical equipment on craigslist.

There was more to this, but I have to go do all the things I just mentioned. I was going to say something about falling asleep and itching. Maybe I will say something about falling asleep and itching later.

Look at this journal. I this, I that, I think that I noticed that I was looking around and I wrote that I saw that I was walking downtown and I realized that I always start my sentences with 'I'. Every post, 'I's galore, not to mention the starting sentence, which always starts with - what? - 'I'.

I am sick of I.

[ ] write best when [ ] am in love, or otherwise enchanted, with someone. When [ ] am enchanted with something; the contours of a thought or an animal or a cliff furred with jungle, [ ] find it best kept within my head and the moment for fear of ruining it later with awkwardly placed words. It has, though, never occurred to [is 'me' okay? it seems to be: good] that writing down the details of people and their encounters and the oddities could be anything but perfectly okay, if not the only acceptable thing to do.

Right now, everyone is just bland enough to warrant a complain about how bland they are. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing individual, even, but as a society, we are tiring me out just by being the same as [ ] am. [ ] think [ ] am ready to be an outsider.

I have a wet-butt-from-bikeriding-in-the-rain that always just, no matter how you cut it, ends up looking a whole lot more like a wet-butt-from-peeing-in-the-pants. I wonder if, during the monsoon season in Indonesia, wet-butt-from-bikeriding-in-the-rain is a widespread phenomenon, so common that no one gives a second look, or suspects anything other than what it is; maybe it is acceptable to walk into staff meetings like that, or to give presentations. Or maybe (horrors!) everyone is so accustomed to unceasing rain that anybody who hasn't learned how to properly deal with things like wet-butt-from-bikeriding-in-the-rain is shunned and socially spit upon, judged ten times as severely, even treated like it is common knowledge that this particular wet butt is actually of the wet-butt-from-peeing-in-the-pants contingent. Gulp.

I don't know what my blood type is! Do most people know what their blood types are? Is it supposed to be knee-jerk knowledge or something, like your Social Security number or your screen name or whether or not you are allergic to penicillin? Apparently you find out when you donate blood, but every time I donate blood I am told that my iron count sucks and they don't want my dirty, stinking blood anyway (sort of; at least, you know, the gist is true). I'm not sure I want to be in an Indonesian hospital needing a transfusion and having no idea of either a) what blood I need to receive in order not to die, and b) how to communicate this or anything else in Indonesian.

There are a few websites, though, that are helping me learn the language. I won't be one of those people who travels (or moves, in my case) to wherever strikes their fancy and then expects the locals to know English, becoming very cross if they don't. Especially one of those people who likes to 'get away from it all' to the remotest place possible, and expects the same. Guess what? Your idyllic, removed little getaway is probably so peaceful and perfect in part because they probably doesn't have any giant English schools. Learn the local language. You chose to go there; now speak as the Romans speak and whatnot.

I was savoring some sushi and feeling sad about turning down our initial teaching-in-Japan offer; I was also feeling strange. (Everything that I was doing or eating or feeling started with an 's'! You never realize these things at the time...) I've always felt I could crave sushi even when in a coma. Other people crave cookies, or hamburgers or chips or Mars Bars or coffee or any number of other things I could do without forever... and I crave sushi. Specifically. It's an expensive habit. Sometimes I even crave specific pieces of fish, or (even!) just the taste of soy sauce with gobs and gobs of wasabi. Being a vegetarian would be no problem for me if things that lived in the sea didn't count as animals, but they do and so I'm not.

(Aren't food cravings linked to ancestral lands, and the fat of them, what they lack and so on? If so, what possible reason could my largely Ukrainian blood have for firmly demanding fish prepared in the Japanese style? Somehow I'm doubting very much that the Black Sea is crawling with hamachi, anago, shake, toro, etc.)

In any case, I was eating and my body felt split in two; my mouth and heart and stomach and eyes blooming and beating and filling deliciously and closing in ecstasy, and my limbs slumping in weakness. A tetanus shot reaction. My mind, cloudy, mourned the loss of the possibility of walking a block from my door and finding phenomenal sushi for a reasonable price. I kept forcing it to reconsider. Hey, could one live in a large house overlooking the ocean and the mountains in Japan - for free? Hey, now, come on. Could one enjoy summery weather year-round? No... I don't think so. Plus, who wants to teach 30-hour contact weeks? Nobody.. that's who. Who wants to be forced to buy a car and have expensive health insurance and live in a 10x10 box on top of thousands of other people living in 10x10 boxes? NOBODY, that's who. SUSHI IS NOT WORTH THESE THINGS.

Oh, but it's so hard to believe that when you're eating an unagi-wrapped salmon, tobiko, and cucumber roll spread with nitsume. Or simply cut fresh hamachi.

Please, Indonesia: have good fish. You are an island nation. This isn't too much to ask, is it?

I hear that in flying from Chicago to Tokyo you pass over the North Pole. It's odd how we don't think of things as far away in terms of north and south; when we hear how long it takes to fly to New Zealand (random tidbit my head won't get rid of for some reason: Chicago/NZ is the farthest a passenger plane can fly nonstop) we just spin the globe, trace our finger, puzzle at how the distance doesn't really seem that much farther than to Europe... but we forget that the earth is a sphere and a sphere is just as round from top to bottom. Use a string. The shortest route to Tokyo is OVER the Earth.

The shortest route from Los Angeles to Taipei, Taiwan (my first stop) flies over Alaska. Having never flown over the Pacific, I was looking forward to seeing a lot of this (coral reefs, looking like shining circles, reflective crooked rings - I didn't know these existed, scattered everywhere in the southern Pacific, until I got myself addicted to dragging myself around the Earth on Google maps) but I will be more likely to be seeing miles and miles of cold, dark blue. Although we will be flying in the middle of the night, and I probably won't be seeing miles and miles or anything except the insides of my own eyelids. The sun will beat us - barely.

Flying back from England in 2003 on my birthday, I celebrated six times. My birthday hour - 12:03 PM - kept happening and happening and happening. A pretzel an hour. More ice in my ginger ale. What time is it? Noon again? Bring me a butterscotch sundae.

This time I will age a day as I pass over an invisible line drawn through the water, and coral reefs and fish and, perhaps, fishermen. If I die in Indonesia at the age of 122 years and 165 days, will I have legitimately beat out Jeanne Calment for the title of oldest person ever?

Is there a CDC traveler's advisory page, or something like it, for Indonesians planning on traveling to the Americas? If so, is it filled with tons of ominous-looking vaccination recommendations color-coded for your convenience and with both a list of terrifying possible outcomes to the diseases AND terrifying posssible side effects of the vaccines?!

Is our continent coated with red ink on every page of disease-risk-area manuals? I realize that I am getting ridiculous here.

I went to Mexico with my best friend and deliberately did not read any cautionary medical websites. No, actually, I think I just forgot to. And I was covered in mosquito bites and humidly seeping wounds from brushes with sharp edges that wouldn't have even bled in Colorado's climate. This is extremely passive sentence structure - and you know what? I acted extremely passively to Mexico's environment. Nothing happened. I didn't feel well for a few days, but it didn't stop me from doing, oh, anything that we did. I didn't become encephalitic or go into a coma or have - what's that thing? - pulmonary edema. It was August and rainy and buggy as hell and we didn't wear repellent and trekked around in the jungle and saw breathtaking sunsets and got rained on and hit on by Mexicans, and not hit on by even more, nicer, Mexicans, and ate food from roadside travelling carts and guess what? It was GOOD. The roadside carts and everything else. We ate bean quesadillas and listened to the cart man talk about his upbrinding in Chiapas in careful, patient Spanish. I had to pee and it was raining. It was perfect.

I look around my room now with the eye of someone who soon needs to fit all their belongings into one duffel bag, and it (my room) appears and looms before me like a giant, papery metallic plastic sharp-edged inanimate-object-orgy. Why do I own a mug that says 'Time for Campbell's Soup' when I HATE Campbells Soup - was, in fact, brought up to hate it, to prefer at least Progresso but preferably Grandma's nightly concoction? What are two printers doing facing each other across twelve feet of cluttered floor, neither of them connected to anything else except the dust gathering on the rug? And, two words: hair chopsticks. A few more words, actually: Hawaiian Ginger Solid Yellow Perfume Chunk.

There is a large box attached to my speakers - is it a subwoofer or just a large box that I can carelessly disconnect with no ill effects? What, exactly, are gauchos? Why are none of my clothes in the dresser? Because the dresser is broken! But I still own it. It still takes up an entire corner of my room. I am typing on a fancy desk. It is not my desk. It became mine when its previous owner was too lazy to take it. But now it is my responsibility. It and it's foldy-out drawers that I don't use, and it's retractable writing surface that is jammed and useless even if I were to use it, which I wouldn't. My point is, I OWN STUFF, and I don't want to. I need my computer, sort of, and cloth to cover my nakedness. I need food, and either a roof or some Deet-drenched mosquito netting, either way. What would happen if suddenly I didn't have my old tahini-smelling ugly orange-striped work shirt, or found myself without Cooling Cream Eyecolor, or became lacking in sets of multicolored paper clips? I'm sure I don't have to answer that question for you.

I've got to get rid of all my tank tops, halter tops, short skirts, and bikinis; and on the other side of it all my sweaters, jackets, hats, gloves, boots, and scarves. Soon I will be a regular T-shirted flowy-skirted wonder. I do wonder, though: I wonder whether warm rain feels as good everywhere as it does in southern Mexico.

I keep dreaming of landing the propeller plane myself. Tumbling out and seeing chickens everywhere, chickens who will calmly and perfectly explain to me the value of the rupiah. I've seen the airport in my dreams. It is always giant and metal with slow elevators, things written in Chinese, and Subway chains everywhere - I know this is not the case, but this is what I dream anyway. I dream about a nine-computer room instead of the nine-bedroom house that it is purported to be. I dream that I can't find the ocean. That is the most reoccurring theme of all: that I can't find the ocean. The ocean has been a lie. We are landlocked. Often, we are in suburbia. My American brain is revolting. The American part of me is rearing only the ugliest parts of its head.

It is angry that I suppress it, that I don't eat at Subway, don't appreciate giant modern airports, and do know exactly where things are on maps. It must feed, and it feeds on dreams.

Since we are at less than a month now from our departure date, things are getting (regrettably) more real. Real enough to start this blog. Real enough to have a burning left shoulder from the hepatitis A/typhoid shots, and a burning brain from the nurse's warnings: Japanese encephalitis, malaria. Rabies. Dengue fever. How many shots can a shoulder take? How many diseases can my language center hold? Enough, I'm sure, for me to be even more hypochondriacal than usual - another American brain's ugly-part-rearing festival. Native Indonesians deal. I can deal. We're all the same human. We're all the same human.

But the nurse - Nurse 'my friend had diarrhea so bad she called me bawling, long-distance, so you'd better buy a diarrhea kit', Nurse 'rabies is 100% fatal and I knew a guy who was just sitting on the beach and this dog came up and bit him on the butt', Nurse 'Encephalitis makes you retarded' - okay! Okay! Shoot me up. There are dormant diseases made from preserved dead rat and pig brain in my muscles right now - right now as I type this! - but I suppose... no, I can't say it's okay, because it's not, but it's the more preferable option, I suppose.