Playing a game the Australians call 'Fruit Salad' in class. What do we call it? I've never heard a name. Someone's in the middle, and they say something, and everyone who agrees has to swap chairs. "I am wearing a headscarf," says one of the two girls wearing one, and the other groans in good natured embarrassment, but gets up to take her place in the middle, and a second later trips over her feet and goes down. In the scuffle between each statement, the Muslims are easy to pick out; they're the ones that appear to have to physically pick themselves up from their chairs, the ones that won't fight for the last chair, the ones that close their eyes in the gap from action where the person in the middle struggles to find their English. They are all so hungry that they're physically unable to coordinate.

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and, for Muslims, that means fasting all day: from dusk 'til dawn, no food, not even any water. One of the teachers is Muslim: this means teaching four hours of classes with nothing to fuel her, and yet she bears it without complaint; indeed, I had no idea until I see her running back from the market as night falls with some lumpia and a green coconut cake, staring into the black plastic market bag as if it held a million dollars in gold. She tears into it, and before she can fully get down her first mouthful, Wade interrupts. "Ani, what tastes better, the food or the water?"
"Oh, the water," she mumbles indistinctly, her mouth full.

Everywhere, outside and in, people are sinking down in chairs or on curbs or on the ground and closing their eyes, this time not out of exhaustion, but out of ecstasy. Their mouths and their minds are full of the special food that is on sale only for Buka Puasa; the chicken and vegetable egg rolls, the mochi with coconut and molasses, the burnt sugar green coconut rolls, the samosa-like pastries with potatoes and chilies. If they were me and the food were mashed potatoes, the streets would be awash with tears. It is close, though. It gets quieter. People are too overwhelmed to make conversation. As the moon becomes visible over the farthest mountain, Angkasa, the shouts of the market die down and the whistles of the parking attendants seem outrageous, out of place. Motorcycles spit and rumble in the distance. The women and men who spread their blankets in the street to sell their chilies, tomatoes, bananas, papayas, tofu, eggs, chickens, coconuts, lychees, sambal kacang paste, grilled fish, leeks, oranges ,and salaks, their knit Papuan independence purses and mats and bags, their woven flip flops, all start gesturing silently to their wares instead of shouting about them, feeling awkward all of a sudden about disturbing the immediate quiet. Expectant lines curl up behind the Buka Puasa food stands - silent not because of sensations, but because of the anticipation. Soon, they too will be part of the overwhelmed silent periphery.

Periphery because most Papuans are not Muslim. 80% or more of them are not. But that 20% is enough to create a subtle bend at dusk on weekdays. I don't know that most people notice it. Parking attendants continue to shriek on their whistles, pull motorcycle's backsides out into the slight lulls in traffic, and collect their Rp. 500 unspoken, unofficial fee. Students continue to lie on the floor, slapping the ground to practice for this card game that they play. The phones still ring and the electricity still flickers on and off and children still chorus 'Hi, Mister-Mister!' at me on the street. But I' m staring around me at those with their eyes closed and their jaws working and I'm trying to feel their amazement. I feel like I would be stealing if I were successful, but I am never successful. How could I be? To not eat or drink every day for a month? What must it feel like to break something like that?

Here's one for the culture-clash experiences file:

I was coming out of the girls' bathroom at school and Nick was coming in, a tiny four-year-old girl in tow. "Actually," he said to me, breaking off, 'will you help her use the toilet?"
"No," I said, automatically and immediately.
"Come on," he begged, "will you? If you don't, I have to, and I think... I think it's better if you do."

It's not that Indonesian four year olds don't know how to use the toilet. They do. But the toilets in Indonesia are formed completely differently than Western toilets, and the school, for some reason, employs Western style toilets. Indonesian bathrooms consist of a slightly raised mesa, maybe 10 cm off the ground, with what we call a toilet seat embedded directly into the tile. You squat over it with your feet on the rim, level with the ground, and go. There's no flush; instead, there is a bucket or some kind of reservoir that is filled with water, and you dip a little ladle in, and pour three or four of them in until it 'flushes'.

So I go into the bathroom with the little girl, who is chattering away in Indonesian, interrupting herself only to point at the odd bathroom accoutrements and look up at me with wide trusting eyes as she asks me questions about them that I can neither understand nor answer. She stands next to the toilet, easily half her height, and looks at me. When making pulling-down-pants motions at her fails to inspire action, I lift her shirt and realize that what I thought were her pants are some kind of elaborate facade for her real pants, which (presumably) lie underneath somewhere, once you can get past the fifteen ribbons and buttons and zippers holding them up. What reason could there possibly be for dressing a four-year-old like that?

Finally, after peeling away all her deceptive clothing layers, she pushes my hand away and starts trying to climb up on top of the toilet. Attemps to get her down only elicit screaming, whining, and the odd spat tidak (no). She wants to stand on the three-foot-high toilet seat and just let loose pee in any random direction, which, from three feet, could end up anywhere, especially after she falls off, and she will: her many pairs of pants are still all bunched up around her ankles, just waiting to get peed on.

So I lift her, struggling and squirming, until she's sitting, more or less, on the toilet seat, but she is so small that if I were to let her go, she would fall in immediately. I am holding this girl suspended an inch above a Western toilet in Indonesia as she tries to pee as fast as she can because it's... weird to have to pee while a tall, scary blond stranger who can't speak your language holds you aloft and your pants drag around on the floor and your mommy is nowhere to be found (come to think of it, where is her mommy?) and there is a button that could whisk you down into a big vortex if this stranger lets go and this stranger didn't even know how to work pants, so how can you trust her holding you above a fucking vortex? and so on...

"Hey, they're playing that song."
And you say that, and there is no follow-up "what song?" because there is only one: THE song. You know, THE song. The only song that exists in marketplaces, in taxis, in the Sip (mall) outside of pirated-CD stores, that is in Indonesian. The rest is '90's music from America, and my 13 year old ears learned to tune that shit out a decade ago, so all I hear is THE song, which most people are playing the majority of the time anyway, maybe to show cultural pride, which is admirable, but still weird, because it sounds shitty-90's-American-producer produced even if it is in Indonesian. I can almost sing it, and if I were to, out loud, it would probably sound just as bizarre as the teenagers in my class who can rap along with MC Hammer, but have no idea what they're talking about, because all they can say in English is 'Ma'am can I go to toilet', 'Reverse', 'Draw 2', 'Draw 4', 'Skip', 'Bye', and 'Britney Spears'. I told a 14-year-old student in one of my higher-level classes that Britney Spears was married, with two children, and she had also gotten really ugly, and he refused to believe it.

There's an exercise I do in all my classes where the students have to come up with classroom rules and punishments for them. By far the best ones have come from my tiny Waystage 2 class: 'You mustn't activate your handphone in class. If you do, you must dance to your handphone music!' 'You are not allowed to speak Indonesian in class. If you do, you must buy KFC for the whole class!'

KFC is the only Western chain restaurant here, and it's really popular and elusive. High-society dining. To have to buy KFC for the whole class would be a major undertaking, and would probably cost me, on my salary, about 6 hours of work. I guess I'd better not speak Indonesian in class. To ensure that I don't, maybe I should just continue not to know how to speak it.

It's drizzling the kind of jungle drizzle that's just enough to slicken the ground, but not quite enough to turn all the red dirt into a full-on mudslide. It is, however, enough to turn the area between my rubber flip-flops and my feet into a sea of orangish paint, impossible to grip. Each step up is a struggle, not only to push myself up the nearly vertical cliff, but to keep my feet in my shoes. There is a Papuan man and his three children going much slower than they otherwise would be, trying to politely make sure that we don't die. The man speaks little English, and when he does speak, I am easily distracted by his bright red teeth and his knife, which he uses to slash plants out of the way as we ascend. Both of his sons, from what I can gather, are named after Bob Marley. His children, running ahead in their bare feet, sing the Sonata in G Minor - honestly, they do. It's extremely incongruous.

We found the family because we decided to just get on our bike and ride until we dead ended near the jungle. When we dead ended, they were just coming around the corner, saying something about a beach. "Can we follow you?" Nick asked. The man nodded vigorously, though I'm fairly sure he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Let me just say that if this were a hiking trail in the United States, it would be illegal to hike it. There are times when the grade gets so steep that it is necessary to climb on all fours. There are areas where a drop of over 2000 feet is an inch away from the trail, which is often, as I said before, paintlike in consistency. One slip and you would fall, straight down, impeded only by the occasional spiky-leaved plant, into, if you were lucky, rock outcroppings, but if you were unlucky, the rushing river that runs through the bottom of the canyon and would break your fall only long enough for you to catch your breath before it would then plunge you over the edge of one of its countless waterfalls, which are all at least twenty feet tall.

The final descent to the beach might as well be made on your ass for all the time I spent falling down. But then you're there. It's a tiny bay, but far west of the bigger Jayapura bay, so it's completely clean, and fed by a mountain stream, so marginally cooler, too. It's only accessible by the path from hell, so the only people there are people who live around there, people who get their food from the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately the bay is also inhabited by sea urchins, and so now is the last joint of my middle finger and the middle of the bridge of my foot.

During the time I'm not trying madly to think of a lesson plan for 8 5-year-olds who like only to singsong laki-laki-perempuan (boy-girl) songs at each other from across the room while halfheartedly doing their color-by-number worksheets and kicking each other in the butt, I am reading the Onion's Volume 15 archives (October 2003 - November 2004, roughly). How this got the teachers' house in Indonesia along with mostly Charles Dickens and Arthur C. Clarke, I have no idea. But as a result, when I'm not dreaming about teaching, I dream in Onion headlines:

Inside:
Girl Brags About Perfect Health, Gets Food Poisoning
see page 4B

Boy Yells at Girl For Holding On Too Tightly To Motorcycle, Crashes Into Pickup
see page 6C

News In Brief:
EFL Student Asks Teacher If Pregnant
Jayapura - Unaware of the connotations that go along with such a question, local EFL student K.P., 15, asked his teacher Wednesday if she was pregnant. When given the gracious opportunity to save face by his teacher asking 'Why? Do I look pregnant?' he didn't seize the opportunity and say 'No! Of course not! I was just kidding.' but instead responded 'Yes.' The teacher was unavailable for comment as she is believed to be frantically in the process of becoming anorexic.

And so forth.
Lately, I am happier, with a few lapses allowed for when I realize I won't taste anything other than what I have been tasting for the next 11 months, food-wise and human-wise. But mostly it's okay. Biking is nice for that. It's beautiful here, really beautiful, and you can't tell from inside a low-ceilinged taxi with 90's music blasting bass and stuffed with sweating men and girls with their hijabs hitting you in the face, and you definitely can't tell from the heart of downtown, which just smells like motorcycle exhaust and looks like the cutouts from the cliffs are about to crumble down onto the Hotel Yasmin. But from a bike, you can see everything. You can see it panoramically. A beautiful day in a car feels like a beautiful day wasted, but on a bike, you're out in it, and you can go out of the city, up into the hills and out past the airport, to Sentani, to waterfalls and cooler jungle and thatched houses. You can bring a picnic and while you're eating it, you won't be surrounded by people with camera phones demanding that you sit on their pay-bench.
The other thing that contributes to my being happier is we found a raw-fish market about ten minutes from our house (previously, we could only buy cooked fish, and then only tuna, and then only cooked boringly), where there is a long strip of tables filled with freshly caught fish of every type, and you point to your fish and the man who caught it takes it back to a chopping block, guts it, and chops it into steaks, then gives you all of it in a bag (along with the head, in case you want to make soup). People around Dok9 have not grown used to us, as the people in Dok5, where we live, have, so while we buy fish, people point and stare and whoop at the 'bule' (foreigners, roughly, but a little more derogatory). But it's worth it. Tonight, we will have fish, corn, and mashed potatoes (!!!!) for dinner. Maybe this time I won't even cry when the mashed potatoes hit me.

If I lost heart and hopped a plane back, would you accept me?

I don't know, everyone. The whole country. You. Whoever 'you' are. Me, too. Everyone.

All the teachers are sick. All of them except me. Since we've been here, I've accidentally swallowed a mouthful of tap water (when brushing my teeth, I just defaulted to the... well, the default) eaten sugar with ants in it, poured a pile of what I thought was salt into my palm and ate it, only to discover that it was MSG (something important to know, actually: they often have MSG as a table seasoning here - they sell it in bags in the market along with salt and sugar) and that there was no place to spit it out, stepped in untold amounts of bird shit (with flip-flops on, but still), eaten an entire bar of Swiss chocolate in five minutes after not having eaten any chocolate at all for three weeks, peeled fruit with dirty hands and then eaten it (there's no soap at the school, so you just have to make do with water), had to use a bathroom every day that 3 and 4 year old Early Learners pee all over, had seven teachers coughing in my face for four hours for a week, eaten food out of a kitchen that the following thing happened in yesterday - a gigantic cockroach was scurrying around the communal cabinet, acting very agitated, and suddenly a rat darted out from a hole somewhere deep within the wall and pounced on the cockroach and ate it - and, I'm sure, more disgusting things that I can't think of because, out of necessity, they have become rote. And it's creepy: I feel extremely, extremely, extremely healthy. Everyone else is languishing in the heat, but I feel like I'm sweating out all my toxins, whatever those may be, every time I move, and it's ceased feeling unnatural to be sweating all the time. My skin, too, is suddenly perfect. It's either that my malaria medication is also often prescribed as an acne medication (which is true) or that the tropical air is good for me or maybe both, but I look entirely different to myself when I look in the mirror. Tan, kind of, but not in a skin-cancery tanning-booth Florida way; skinnier, true, but not like I'm wasting away - more like I'm not eating hot dogs and potato chips and, instead, am spending all my time tensing my muscles holding on to a motorcycle and praying for my life as Nick attempts to shift into fourth while flying down a 10% grade on the left side of the road with a sheer drop on one side and disco-taxies on the other as cars and bikes are braking ahead for the red light that the city, cunningly, has placed directly after a steep turn.
I guess the main point to take away from all this is this: if I don't die while I'm here, I will return healthy and strong and awesome. But both options are equally plausible.

It was nine at night and I was sitting cross-legged on the tile floor drawing my stuffed frog and my stuffed monkey hanging magnetically on the metal doorknob and I was hungry, but more than that, I was just acutely missing having access to giant grocery stores and restaurants from all over the world. I was missing the diversity of Boulder (I know, I know: !!!!!!, but it's true, despite the fact that Boulder is the least diverse place ever) and Nick came padding up the stairs holding a bowl full of stir-fried spiced brown rice, broccoli, carrots, and tempeh with a little side scoop of cheesy mashed potatoes. We were fighting, so he handed it to me silently and retreated. I took a forkful of something without even looking - everything's the same, so why differentiate? - and as the mashed potatoes hit my tongue, the flavor flooded, hit, and spread with such intensity that I started bawling my eyes out.

Sometimes when I'm hit with something that strong I simply freeze and my surroundings completely fade. I was sitting on a hard floor in Jayapura, halfway around the world from everything I'm used to and up until now have taken for granted, with storm clouds surrounding me, holding a brown pencil and a green pencil and a bowl of mashed potatoes, and crying, but my brain was reeling so intensely that I felt like I was in a black hole.

My stomach grumbled a long, low note of protest, shell-shocked from the complete unfamiliarity, but it was overruled immediately and almost on autopilot I kept dipping in my fork until my senses were drenched (as was my lap, from my tears) and my plate was empty, and if anyone had been looking... but nobody had been.

In my black hole I thought back to that afternoon, when I, finally, caved to pressure and bought a bar of Swiss dark chocolate with cashews. I unwrapped it right there in the street, the inner wrapping gold, like a Golden Ticket (Willy Wonka) and took a bite, and my mind became, suddenly, confused halves of one whole. My eyes were sending my mind images of a torn street with holes and open sewers and a crowd of brightly colored umbrellas protecting the lighter-skinned women from the sun (light skin is unbelievably prized here, to a ridiculous degree - it's nearly impossible to find a simple bar of soap that isn't called 'White Beauty' or doesn't have the byline '... with whitening papaya extracts!) and machines tearing chunks out of towering jungled cliffs and markets with falling down roofs and everyone dripping, dripping, dripping with sweat - and my mouth was sending images of heaven. I didn't cry - it, for some reason, was nowhere near as intense as cheesy mashed potatoes - but it was still a surreal experience.

I'm sorry, I'm losing my train of writing. I had everything written out in different (better) form in my notebook at home, and then I left my notebook at home. It's difficult to reproduce a feeling like that in words at any time, but especially at a time when it's not even close. I ate oatmeal for breakfast. I'm eating rice and vegetables for lunch. I weigh much less than I should. I will probably weigh still less in the future. Blah, blah, blah. But we have a motorcycle now, and if we can stop fighting long enough to agree on a place to go, we can go anywhere we want. And if we can go anywhere we want, that means I can sit on Black Sands beach again, letting the ocean kick my ass and forgetting everything else.

I woke up this morning with the sudden, sickening awareness that I couldn't remember which side of my body my heart was on. The realization paralyzed me briefly, and I stared at the blue curtains pulled tight across de-molding towels and pajama pants, at the magnetic monkey and frog clinging to each other and to the doorknob, as I wildly tried to think, to remember. I wanted to put my hand to my chest and feel, but my hand wouldn't move, so I had to lay there, on my back, as quietly as I could and listen. My chest was strangely silent. The room, too, was strangely silent; it had rained all night and the combination of the pounding on the tin roof, the rumbling of the fan switching on and off with the power outages, and the gurgling of the roosters' strangled crows made the sudden silence feel especially alien. In the distance, a ship's horn blew a long low note across the bay. My heart fluttered, skipped, and began again.

I'm sitting outside the police station, having just been fingerprinted for the second time. Every finger - twice - plus the palm and the print of all four non-thumb fingers together, like a stamp, at the bottom. It's standard procedure for foreign residents. I'm sitting out by the drainage canals, writing this by hand, peeling a salak, and tossing the peels into the canal by my feet. My shoes are off, but from a distance, even the distance from my eyes to my feet without my contact lenses, it looks like I'm wearing white flip flops. My tan lines are that deeply etched by now, or is it the lines of dirt? A skinny black and white cat comes wandering through the outdoor hallways. I am still quashing my urge to unconditionally love every cat that I see, to rush them and scratch their necks. Cats aren't like that here. They're not treated like that. A cat wouldn't know what to do with my hand other than bite it.

The internet is fast today! This page loaded in only two minutes! This is made slightly ironic by this little lying bubble that keeps popping up in the far right corner telling me that since I haven't downloaded any spyware scan tools, my internet speed is decreased by 39%. I guess from now on, when choosing a computer, I should look for one with that bubble, which is probably there to fool people - although it's in English, so out of Jayapura's 200,000-odd people, it's only fooling about 10.

Honestly, about 10. I read on the internet somewhere before I got here that there were 4 expats in the city, and they were all ex-missionaries. I saw one today while waiting for the taksi. I stared, like everyone else. It's a reflex. He stared back at me. The Indonesians around us stared at us staring at each other. One dropped a lychee. It rolled into the street, was immediately squashed by a motorbike.

I floated at Base G on Sunday, like I wanted. We've been 'there' once before, on a rainy Saturday with an especially swindling taksi driver, who, as it turned out, didn't take us to Base G at all, even though that's where he said we were. He turned off the main road at a church, bounced down a dirt road past a bunch of warring roosters and staring Papuan children, and then past all of that to a still more bumpy completely deserted road, staying there for about ten minutes before he finally let us out in front of a gigantic expanse of shallow coral. Then he demanded 20,000rp. There was nobody around. I was going to just throw him the actual fare, 4,000, and get out - that's what the other teachers do when they're overcharged - but then Nick opened his wallet, showing for all the world to see that we had just changed a bunch of money at the bank.

Anyway, it wasn't Base G - it was cool and beautiful and quiet and full of curious villagers hiding in their houses and peeking out the windows - but it wasn't Base G. We didn't know this until Sunday, when another driver let us out someplace completely foreign, saying 'Base G, Base G'. This turned out actually to be Base G, but we thought the other place was Base G and that this cab driver was playing a prank on us, so, arguing, we followed the forming crowd towards what we worked out to be northeast, arguing more as the road got hotter and bicyclists drove by in the opposite direction with ice cream carts trailing behind them, until finally the road dipped and suddenly there were big arches and screaming naked splashing children, and bakso (meatball soup) carts and rujek (sliced fruit, cucumber, and peanut/chili sauce) carts and mie (noodle) carts and a crazy drunk New Guinean man who set his sights on us from the moment we walked in. This was Base G.

The drunk crazy New Guinean had a mullet, and the back part of his mullet was braided into two long messy braids that ran halfway down his back. He latched onto us at the rujek stand, introducing first himself and then everyone who walked by as his best friend, all of whom would take care of us and be our tour guides and be our friends and make sure nobody cheated us and help us find the least rocky places on the beach and prepare log benches for us to sit on as we ate our rujek. The fact that nobody paid attention to him should have been our first clue, but we sat down on the nearest bench he indicated, as he stood in front of us, repeatedly telling us that the mountains across the bay were Papua New Guinea, singing 'America the Beautiful', and assuring us that he could find us a perfect hotel. For a half an hour. And then he told us that we needed to pay him 100,000rp for sitting on 'his' log bench.

This may have been, and will continue to be, the only time when we will have been saved by locals with cameraphones, but as we jumped off the log bench (without paying) and began making our way across the beach, families everywhere nervously jumped up, approached us, and mimed taking a picture. If we nodded, and we did, because we wanted, at that moment, to be surrounded, everyone in the person's family would come over and act like we were all best friends until the camera flashed, then be suddenly struck with debilitating shyness and run away.

After everyone on the beach, it seemed, had been our best friend for five seconds apiece, we were able to fade comfortably away onto a shady log on the south side of the beach. The tide was rising faster than I've ever seen it. The moon, too, was quickly rising. 'Hey, you think anyone would mind if I got naked?' Nick asked me. So I didn't have to see the answer to that question (yes, everyone would mind; nobody even wears swimsuits here: they just swim in their clothes) I jumped in the ocean, which was hot, completely clear, and filled with wonders like sea snakes and bright blue starfish. Often, swimming here is more like visiting an aquarium than swimming. You walk through the water, which never gets much above your waist, because the waves all break way far out at the reef, and the whole time you can see your feet displacing entire ecosystems. Schools of fish dart around rocks and settle mere feet away, only to have to dart again as you keep walking. The sea snakes contract to 1/8 of their original size if the water around them is disturbed. This happens every time a wave comes in, every two seconds or so. As the tide comes up, more water is able to make it over the reef and the waves get bigger, almost to the point of being able to bodysurf (if you don't mind being dashed upon the rocks at the shore when you're dragged in).

I have been drawing a lot. Because of our electrical crisis (the 'converter' we bought in the states fried my speakers immediately upon being plugged in, so I'm not about to plug my camera or my computer or my iPod in and risk the same fate) I can't take pictures, so I have to make them instead. I thought I'd be angry, but it's kind of nice - I'm not a great artist by any means, but I can depict what I see to a certain degree. When I get home and show photos, they'll all be in blurry pastel. There's one of Base G that shows a terribly colored palm tree - I need to learn my greens and yellows - but shows the water and coastline exactly how it is. I'll have to pick and choose from each picture what to show people it's like. Maybe there'll be one full picture by the end.

Daniel, the teacher who's leaving tomorrow, summarizes his year here like this: 'It's blurry.'
I can see that. How many days have passed? I've been counting, but lately I've been forgetting. There are the laundry-by-hand days, the days with so many classes that there's no time to think, the internet days, the hot days with umbrellas, the rainy days with umbrellas, the guilty days where I realize how many people I haven't yet emailed, the days soaked with color and fruit, the days soaked with regret that I chose Jayapura, the days where I assure myself that I'll be stronger at the end. They come in equal numbers.

Sorry about the string of identical posts. You have no idea what I just went through to try and delete the extraneous ones. At first it was going okay, though slow, but at the fifth try the page conked out halfway through and suddenly began displaying a mix of HTML and - I'm not kidding - pictures of naked women. The computers here are all rife with viruses, but... is there some kind of virus that surreptitiously hides porn in the HTML of blogger pages, only to be seen when page loading fails? When I publish this, will there be a bottle blond in a lavender chemise looking seductively at you, one finger stretching the band of her G-string, between this word and this one? I must know if this happens.

I am in a kind of bipolar daze at this stage in my trip. Is two weeks early for the bipolar stage? Is there even a bipolar stage in culture shock? I am seized by manic energy, especially when I come to this internet cafe, and I sit and finger the piano notes to the bad music that is always playing in an attempt to diffuse it so I can think, but it only revs me up more, and there are all these '404 page not found' errors, and Google admonishes me in the form of telling me my internet connection is too slow for the standard view, which, yes, okay, just get on with it, and by the time...

Here's the thing. This is not what I feel like at almost any other time. I am gripped with melancholy in the late hours of the night, or, not melancholy exactly, but a sense of emptiness, and it can't be filled with gado-gado or men leering, leering constantly, or with mango trees, even, or with my housemates, my fellow teachers, their initial friendliness and the dropoff, later, as they realize I am nothing special. It's hard to try and be something special, to sell myself as anything other than someone who just likes quiet and a good variety of books after the long hours straining my voice so nineteen apathetic teenagers can hear me. It's hard to keep up appearances. I'm in my pajamas halfway through a Saturday, furiously reading Crime and Punishment, as it pours rain on the scattered tin roofs above and below our own tin roof, and everyone else sprawls on the cushions in the hallway, shrieking with laughter, or if not that, somber and intense, and they have this; they've been stuck in Wamena with no tent or food together, been lost below towering cliffs on Black Sands beach together, had pitch black evenings under one of many electrical outages together. We - they and I - have nothing. And with two of them leaving next week, they don't care to start having anything, or building towards having anything.

It's hard even to write this. I look at my students' bowed heads when they're working on a project I've given them and I get wild bursts of 'What the fuck is going on? How did I get here? Who are these people?' My voice is quiet and nobody can hear me, of course, as I somehow totally failed to anticipate, so I have to raise my voice to what is, to me, screaming, and the tone - what must the tone sound like? - I am their teacher, but... I don't feel it, and do they feel it? Is this confusion I read, or defiance? They can't tell me. They are meant to be learning a language from me, and I can't correctly articulate a sentence. I can't correctly articulate a feeling, not even in writing. Not lately.

How I feel is not how I appear, even more so than usual. I have one person I see 24 hours a day, one person to whom I can confide everything, whom I ask for comfort, with whom I chose to share this entire year - and I feel most of the time like I never want to see him again. He... I could fill pages and pages with the little things he does that irritate me, and I'm sure he could fill the same amount of pages with those things about me, and I'm not sure if I've been driven insane by the sudden responsibility of 40-something students and 13 lesson plans per week and no variety of food and no variety of company and the immense irriation will, therefore, pass, or... that for the remaining 351 days I will feel constantly like I want to implode.

Tomorrow I hope to go to Base G beach and float among the coral for awhile. Last time we went, a Papuan villager and her three sisters played Frisbee with me, and by the end they were all more skillful than I was. There are things like this, of course, that, while they are happening, more than make up for everything else. But then we get in the cab and the driver's eyes light up at the prospect of asking more than the going price and us not having the language tools to protest, and, sure enough, we get home and he asks for 20,000rp instead of 4,000rp. Drivers keep doing this. Every day. I wonder every day, too, as I walk from Brasco Station to school, maybe a mile over rough stone sidewalks with oddly placed holes: when will people get used to me? There are horns honking and shouts and stares and people actually whirling around to look at me as I pass. There are conversations I can't make out, frustration on every face in the market if I don't stop. I'm not exaggerating. Nobody looks even remotely like me. Nobody is blond, nobody over 5'6". But if, every day, I walk past the same people, and every night, I walk the other way going home, wouldn't you expect that they would grow weary of me?

What I want is to be ignored. I suddenly want to live alone.