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.