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.