Sorry for the scatter. It might get better. It might get worse.

It's human nature to crave routine, and I suppose I can make the excuse that it's human nature to crave flush toilets, but a good debater could probably talk me down from that. I miss my cat, and sushi, of course, and the neighborly feeling of everyone speaking English, and even the daily incessant flow of internet information, even though that's what spoiled me. What do I do now to distract myself? I sleep. It's easy. It's hot, but not hot like you expect. You sweat, but it cools you. You breathe perfectly. What it feels like is exactly your own body temperature, and your body welcomes it. How can I explain it better? I can't.

On my east wall there is an unfinished mural of a red squid and a blue fish. The rest is done with pencil lines, and geckos trace them with their bellies when they wiggle up. My windows frame Papua New Guinea, which contains all the clouds in the world at any given moment, and throughout the day they advance, growing taller and grayer, until sunset at 5:30. They frame the bay, and two islands, and papaya trees and banana trees and cats, which I already think of exclusively as kucing, because it's such a perfect word for a cat, and dirt roads with chickens pecking their way along them and everyone on scooters and everyone singing gospel karaoke and everyone staring, staring, staring at me all the time. 'Mister, Mister!' they call at Nick and I, because women and men both are 'Mister'. The roosters here only crow at dawn, unlike any roosters I've heard before (or probably will ever hear). They leave out the last doodle-doo.

Yesterday we took first a taksi, and then a ojek (motorcycle taxi) down to a beach with black sands a few miles west of here. The ocean is fed with a smattering of tiny waterfalls and rivers rolling down from the village above, which is in turn scattered with traditional Papuan houses and children who, when you express curiosity or bemusement at a new fruit tree, climb it with sticks, bang the fruit out, and hand
it to you. Of course, you can't understand what they tell you it is, but you get home and crack it and it's (can you guess?) a cashew.

One river is filled with little waterfalls and we are taken to one where they've built a little dam out of rocks beneath. We stretch out in a shallow pool - 3 feet, maybe - and let the waterfall give us the shower that we can't take at home. (Showers at home consist of a bucket and a squeaky faucet.) All I can keep thinking is that if we were in the States there's no way you would ever be able to find a space in the waterfall pool.

We relax and we slowly get hungry and we pick our way down the river until it empties out at the ocean, where naked Papuan children run shrieking and barefoot across the rocks and their older relatives fish and dive. We have Tupperware stir-fry lunches of rice noodles, chicken, green beans, spinach, bean sprouts, garlic, and sea salt, and we sit next to the shore and let ourselves be knocked around by the waves.

In a way, it's paradise, and in another, I want to go home. I didn't know it until I knocked my head on the too-low ceiling, carrying some genmaicha up to my balcony, and burst into floods of completely irrational tears that lasted the better part of an hour. My dreams are a gumbo made with everything and everyone from home, but with Indonesian words thrown in as seasoning. I dreamed I was in the shower, bathing-suited, with every friend I have from home, and my mom was calling up the stairs 'Brownies are ready!' and, oh, brownies.

Wade, from Missouri, says he still dreams about biscuits and gravy, and he's been here two years. I expect I won't easily forget sushi. I expect I won't easily forget too much.