I’ll admit it, right away; I used to surf craiglist like crazy, and not just a tiny part of it. I surfed the personals, especially those that didn’t apply to me. m4m is especially intriguing, and then especially those that post short sharp blurbs, sometimes consisting of less than a sentence, and attached is a giant .jpg of their penis, made horrific by its closeup detail, zoomed in, sometimes grainy, rarely with body attached, and almost never with a face. This must work... right?... because people haven’t stopped doing it. It amuses me to think of two bodyless penises meeting up for a drink. Knocking on doors, sticking through holes. And they would recognize each other immediately.

m4m may be the most prolific section, but the personals in general never have a blank day. Women who bemoan the lack of a lesbian ‘scene’, who want to find one, but don’t really want to start one. Men who longwindedly list the requirements for an ideal ad respondent - my favorite ones are the ones who list clearly intellectual/habitual/ emotional bullet points, then at the end sign off with a warning: no pic, no response. My favorite of those favorites, because that’s a surprisingly big subsection, is those in which the poster does not include a photo. People who admit to being lonely, even people who beg, shyly bring up depression, past lost loves, the cruel bare walls of their apartments. On the other side of it, people who shun craigslist, shun the people who use it – these are the people who will invariably start their ads with ‘I would normally never do something like this, but...’ or ‘my friends dared me to...’ – and then act throughout like they couldn’t care less whether someone responds. That or they act like they’re expecting so many responses that they’ll have to screen them.

All these people, lounging in their boxes somewhere, thousands of other people in their little boxes within less than a square mile, probably less than half a square mile, and they’re typing these pleas onto a screen in order to try and entice the right person into the fresh air. Why do we have so much trouble with this? Humanity teems, seethes, around us, and we shun it, try to leave buffer seats on the bus and the train, keep our eyes studiously averted from people we pass on the street... we actively do these things!

I see this, I do this, I write about this as if it’s far removed from me, but it isn’t, and though I can’t explain it, it’s knee-jerk. You’re walking along a fairly empty sidewalk in the afternoon, alone. In the distance, you see someone walking alone as well, in the opposite direction as you. You’re getting closer. You think, when is the right moment to acknowledge this person? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Less? Maybe four? You obsess over it, fail to come up with an acceptable norm... how should you put your face? Toothy smiles, close mouthed smile? Words, no words?... and you decide, fuck it, I’ll just look at the ground as if some extremely fascinating caterpillar is crawling along in the shrubbery beside me, and keep looking until they have passed. Then there are no bizarre social decisions to make. But, oh, wait. Wait. Is this person a different race than me? Shit, because now... if I don’t acknowledge them, they might think I’m racist! Am I racist? If I weren’t racist, I wouldn’t have even thought about their race, would I have? I would have just registered them as just another human being... right? Shit.

And maybe they’re ugly, and if I don’t look at them, they’ll think I’m averting my eyes to be kind. Or maybe they’re drop-dead gorgeous and if I look at them they’ll think I’m checking them out, hitting on them, flirting with them, ogling them, and they’ll think I’m some sort of rapist.

Racist, rapist – all the terrible things it’s so easy to be wrongly perceived as when you pass a stranger on the sidewalk!

So, as a compromise, and as a safeguard, you pass the person and you make that tight little anus of a smile that every normal American makes in this situation, a barely perceptible upturn of the lips, although ‘upturn’ may be a generous word for the kind of grimacing that I’ve seen go on. (I called it the ‘bule smile’ in Indonesia, because Indonesians don’t do it.) The other person does the same. pass, and you think, ‘was that awkward? That was awkward.

You shiver yourself free of this feeling and are suddenly overcome with a crushing loneliness. And you go home and write an ad. People, please, please, people. Strangers, even. So long as you’re people. I’ll be nonchalant, I’ll pretend I don’t need you, I’ll pretend this is frivolous. I’ll make up engagements, time constraints, an inflated schedule. “Oh, I can only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of dance class.” “Oh, weekends are tight for me, usually I’ve got friends coming up to the city.” You have nothing, actually, but you can’t admit that, or this stranger that you’ve managed to entice from their box might think you’re pathetic and reject you.

When people like this meet other people like this, how does anything at all of substance bubble to the surface? You can’t mix nothing and nothing and get something. There are probably a couple of dates to be spent making fun of society. But society can’t be made fun of forever. (Okay, it can. But bitterness can’t be sustained as attractive for that long, I don’t think.) And if either person were the type to subvert the dominant paradigm, no matter how likely it is that that person is the type to use phrases like ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ in everyday conversation, they’d be out subverting it, and not in a bland, safe-meeting-place coffeehouse talking about it. And not in their house using craigslist to try and find subverting partners either.

No, dominant paradigm-subverting comes from, when you pass that stranger on the sidewalk, pasting on the most giant smile that your jaw can handle, grabbing their hand, pumping it up and down, and introducing yourself. Maybe inviting them out for a fun-filled day of shopping-cart racing down at the Safeway, or a night of dumpster diving. And even this is a relatively mild paradigm shift – people do have the context to understand you if you do this, even if they will almost always think you’re drunk or on LSD or ectasy – but it happens rarely enough that I can’t believe anyone would expect to find that perfect, quirky, lifesaving person on a network of people who spend all of their time on that network.

That’s what we want, right? For the heavens to somehow align and to find someone who will assimilate us into their full, satisfying, perfect life, and we won’t have to make an effort to build that life ourselves. Because someone leading a full satisfying life will surely, SURELY, be posting ads on craigslist. There are hundreds of people in your city who have everything they want – a wonderful group of friends, enriching hobbies – but just lack that ‘someone special’ to share it with.
There are if you believe all of those qualifying first sentences: ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but...’ Do you believe these sentences? Have you ever looked at the other ‘social’ sections of craigslist? Activities. Community. Events. Nobody’s posting there. Because everyone who already has a community won’t bother with craigslist unless there’s money/publicity to be had. Why would they? Their circle is complete. Their needs are met. And if they’re not, and I’m sure that, sometimes, they’re not, well, then they seek help from their living, breathing social circle. That’s what social circles are for.

And that’s what craigslist is trying to be to people. It’s succeeding, I think, in the sense that people are using it as such. There’s no doubt that there is a new virtual social circle emerging, where online personas can replace proximity of physical bodies, where discussions can be had, discoveries collectively made, without the participants ever having actually met. I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore about that. But are online social circles enough to keep the loneliness that comes from physical isolation at bay? I don’t think so, or else the personals section would be obsolete. Which it most certainly is not.

People who claim to be fulfilled in every other way are still pleading online for contact while ignoring strangers on the street. This is what comes from this bizarre mishmosh of virtual and real contact, where social mores are completely different in each. If you sit next to a stranger on the bus and start talking about how lonely you are, that’s crazy, that’s unacceptable, that’s pathetic. Post it in a personal, though, and it’s fine. Countless sympathetic comments and emails will appear in your inbox. From this perspective, it seems like online contact would be enough... you’re getting responses, feedback, validation. It’s warm and fuzzy, or seems that way, anyway.

But have you noticed that it’s never enough? Angsty 14-year-olds with livejournals who whine about the most mundane things are only encouraged, when given sympathy, to do it more, and seek more, and more, as if sympathy were a drug. It’s expected, that you’ll get frowny faces and emoticon hugs and a virtual outpouring of virtual support. It’s expected.
If you were to whine like that to a stranger on the bus, however, and got the same response? That would be a landmark day. You’d be driven to tears, unable to believe your luck. Fate. Destiny! You’ve met one of those kind strangers you read about in books but never thought existed in real life! Your life has been forever changed!

A comment, though, an email – even if the exact same words were written/uttered – that’s just normal. That’s just online. It doesn’t count. If it did count, online sympathy would be enough. But it’s not.

That’s why people use craigslist. It’s an attempt to use the world with the less threatening, less nerve-wracking social mores, to get a companion in the world where companionship actually feels like it means something. Does that work? Can you really take the easy way out like that? I don’t think so, but I’d welcome argument.

We went to the zoo this past weekend. I have a conflict about zoos. I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals.

Sometimes I write sentences like that and think that it would be stupid to explain them because their meaning is completely obvious. I think this because I've got a thread going in my head, something like background music, and with that thread, it would be impossible not to. But then I look back objectively at 'I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals' and snap back into (out of, actually) context.

What I mean is, I'm not sure if the sum of (1) the joy I get from being able to observe animal behavior, (2) the species who are being saved from extinction by zoo breeding programs, and (3) the awareness of the plight of different species, and by proxy, the earth, given by the plaques, is quite enough to make up for the feeling I get when I see a cheetah pacing a 10x10 enclosure. It's easiest to see with the cheetah - big cats always seem restless, they don't put on even the slightest hint of a happy face. They look as though they have one objective: getting out, and running, and running, and running, and running. It's never as obvious anywhere else, and of course neither I nor anyone else can say what a tiger is feeling even as it paces. The less obvious ones, too... what the lorises think as they creep up and down the same skinny branches over and over. The elephants must know they don't need to hold one another's tails with their trunks to navigate the total distance of a hundred feet, right? Who knows what they know? While we were watching the elephants, some keepers came out with what looked like nightsticks and tapped the elephants' knees. The elephants lay down. They raised their giant feet onto tree stumps. They received treats, put on their necks, and they reached their trunks around to pick them off. Elephants always have what looks like a humongous soppy grin on their faces, with the droopy lower lip and the tuck of the mouth under the trunk. It's hard to imagine them being sad. Maybe they're not.

I know a lot about animal behavior from school, but I don't know this. I felt a lot better about zoos after reading Life of Pi, even though it was a work of fiction. It gave me an excuse, but I knew that it was just an excuse. The truth is, I don't know the truth. I would work in a zoo in a second, even to be the person who shovels hippo poop, because it would give me an opportunity to develop my own observations, and work towards knowing the truth, and using the truth to make better habitats. I always want to jump into the lion cage and pet the lions, and it's almost a drive to make them feel cared for, even though I know that's enormously stupid and not at all the outcome that would result. Lions don't need to be petted to be cared for, but they need something, and if I can channel the ridiculous lion-petting compulsion into something that achieves the effect I'm going for, then I think I'd be satisfied.

We were standing at some kind of bird pond, and one bird, a bird with a giant beak, was swimming in fast circles around this pond as a skinny woman in huge boots threw dead fish at him. He couldn't have cared less about the dead fish; in fact, he seemed like he was trying to dodge them. They sank to the bottom of the pond as he swam faster and faster, and as the woman on the island in the middle tried to hone her aim. It looked more like target practice than like feeding time as the zoo. And she looked angrier and angrier the less and less the bird paid attention to her efforts.

Despite the placing of that anecdote, it wasn't supposed to be representative of anything, or have a moral, or anything like that. I'm just remembering things, and that's what I remember. I remember thinking that despite the bird's disdain, I'd still fight that angry woman for her job. Animals that have great disdain for me only make me fight harder for their affection. That's why I'm a cat person. How is someone supposed to enjoy the challenge of making an animal happy if it's already happy, drooling, bouncing, fetching balls, pooping in people's flowerbeds, and needs nothing from anyone to go on being happy indefinitely? That has nothing to do with the human condition. Being happy despite everything. I can't relate to that.

My job tends, essentially, to involve me sitting very still in an office chair for eight hours monitoring electronic representations of buses and listening to electronic approximations of voices poke unorthodox fun at each other, while random people (real ones, flesh and blood) constantly wander in and out offering me some of their food. My station is always surrounded by things like Hersheys wrappers, lasagna-sauce stained plates, grape stalks, trail mix crumbs, fake nacho cheese, crumbles from raspberry chocolate cake, burrito wrappings. If I could have begun to imagine the opposite of what working in Indonesia was like, this would be second only to being a restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. My current life is a health coach's reverse wet dream. (There must be an actual phrase for that, but that isn't what came to mind.) Sitting still. Stuffing my face. I sort of (wickedly) love it.

Wickedly not because of my cheating on my nonexistent diet or anything, but because I don't like feeling like the stereotypical gluttonous, wasteful American. But there's only so much one can say about that: but I bike, but I recycle, but I never buy new things, but this, but that.

I used to believe these excuses until I had to shower out of a bucket. Now I have the "luxury" of knowing that I could still choose to shower out of a bucket, and save untold gallons of water, but I also know that I won't. I believed these excuses until I had to walk up the street to pick up drums of gasoline and lug them back to the house to hook up to the stove.

How can you blame people for not changing if they can't forcibly feel the difference between what change isn't, and what change actually would be?

But I didn't mean to start writing about this. It's been said, and it's been said, and it's been said.

It is difficult, but necessary, I think, to wake up every day and think, 'How lucky I am to be in a position where I can express inflammatory, dangerous ideas, present theories with the possibility of changing society forever, put forth crazy, outlandish opinions, and the worst thing that could happen to me would be a whole bunch of people telling me I'm an idiot.'

My hope is that that morning incantation is the first step along the road to actually seeking and fleshing out those ideas, theories, and opinions. But one never knows.

You think when you're at the L station about that experiment where they planted the world's best violinist in a subway somewhere, on a train, in an alcove; the details are fuzzy, but it was somewhere where street musicians sit, and nobody bothered to stop and listen to him.

How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…

At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.

He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.

Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.

How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"

The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.

She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.

When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.

The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.

That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.

The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.

The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?

People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?

You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.

Sometimes when I look at the maze of buses in front of me I start seeing them not as dots and arrows and trailing tails, or as frustrating pixels that won't go when I tell them to, or stop when I tell them to, but the road as it is as the driver sees it. At this moment every driver is scanning the road, listening to their bus whine and hiss out its air brakes. The drivers are bouncing in their seats as they speed over potholes and bob to their music. This is all happening right now. HOP 15, who's that, it's P., is about to climb Folsom Hill. This is his reality, leaning over his wheel, spinning it, listening to his gears shifting under his feet. R. on 18 is starting the long quick ascent up Pearl Street, and maybe he's got a crazy passenger, because R. always does, and he has to try and figure out how to respond to this guy's random sputterings of rage as he scans the road, trucks, bikes, the rising sun shining in his rearview. This is his reality. D. on 13. How does his speeding feel to him? I see his tail stretching all the way down 9th, but he's in his bus feeling something else, abandon maybe, or maybe just eagerness to finish his shift, even though it's only 7:20 am, and his foot heavy on the accelerator. This is his reality. All of this, all of these realities, at the same moment.

I lose myself in thoughts of 'this is someone's reality' a lot, and can spend hours with my cheek propped in my hands, thinking, someone is giving birth right now, they're screaming and in the most indescribable pain and they are thinking, this is the most important moment of my life. Somewhere this is happening and it's so all-consuming that everything else is shut out, and I'm sitting here with my face in my hands feeling nothing. Somewhere someone is throwing up, and their throat is seizing, their breath catching on the uptake and heaving, and they're crying out of sheer misery, thinking only, over and over, make it stop make it stop make it stop. And I am sitting here with my face in my hands, feeling nothing.

I listen to hippies say 'everyone is connected' and I think of this and think, no, they're not. We'd be getting twinges all the time, or terror, of pain, of bliss, of shame, we'd see masses of humanity moving, on the streets of New York maybe, and have to push through everyone's issues along with their bodies. It would be unbearable. And I know that it's more complicated than that, collective knowledge and such, all those studies about a handful of people coming up with the exact same unprecedented theory at the exact same time. And also that connected doesn't have to mean tuning into everybody in the world, it can also mean something as simple as talking to someone and being able to feel what they feel based on having the same physical experiences of something emotional. Your throat narrowing, closing up, the resulting tightness in your chest. Something whirling behind your eyes, a clenching at your temples. Anxiety. We share these physical effects and we can put them together into a word, and then we think we feel what someone else feels, though of course we never really know. The corners of your mouth tug upwards and you feel flooded with buoyancy, a feeling not unlike being in water, and we call it happiness and we laugh together. We think we're feeling the same thing, but we don't know. And with happiness, we really don't care. It's obvious that we want to keep it going, and that's enough.

But it still doesn't help me stop being overwhelmed by the six and a half billion people in the world, all having experiences, right now, at this moment, feelings all over the spectrum, most of them more intense that I have ever felt or probably will ever feel, and I think, how can this fit, how can we all fit, not just space-wise, or food-wise, not how can we feed this many people, house this many people, clothe this many people, of course that too, but most of all, how can the world squeeze in so much intensity of emotion without bursting?

The earth's crust could crack and the atmosphere tighten and shoot out of puncture holes in the ozone made by the knives of this anguish, this joy, this drivel, and I think I can honestly say that I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. I would watch it and be relieved that this actually existed, every time I would lose myself for hours thinking about it, it was happening. Everyone was bursting at the seams at the same time and it was too much for the world, just like it was often too much for me.

It was light as day in my room from around some dreamlike middle-of-the-night time to some other dreamlike middle-of-the-night time. I kept forgetting whether or not I was alone and the full, or close to full, moon was slicing across my chest like a knife. My dreams did not take this lightly.

I hadn't been thinking about my angle lately, whether I'm newly anything, because I knew, or thought I knew, that I am not, that it's hard to be new in your home country.

Actually, it isn't, and actually, I don't usually feel that way. More often than not I do feel like I'm in some alien culture, without even trying. Like a few weeks ago I was hanging out by the creek and three hippies were doing interpretive dance in a pool above a crashing waterfall. I was reading a comic book behind someone else who was also reading a comic book, and I kept looking up from my comic book, staring hard at the hippies, and hoping one of them would be washed down the waterfall, or at least submerge himself enough so that his dreadlocks would get wet. Shoes and tubers (the kind drinking beer in inflated truck tires, not the vegetables) kept drifting by them and they kept arching and chanting and spinning and dancing in the rapids. Nobody was even staring at them. Nobody even looked like they thought this was unusual, or also, like me, hoped any of them would fall over the rapids. A couple of people even looked like they were considering joining. But most people just kept having picnics, or reading the newspaper, or fishing for fish, or fishing their children out of the slipstream.

When one of them did finally go over the rapids (he was attempting to hoist his partner in the air a la ballet, and slipped with his bare foot on a mossy rock) and came up sputtering, dreadlocks in disarray, attempting to make it graceful by raising a curved wrist and inclining his head, no one even applauded. What crazy kind of alien town do I live in?

I told this to Chell in a loud bar with this minutes-long guitar riff echoing in my head and after that he started shouting in German.

"It's a foreign country if I do this!!" is how he preceded it.

"You can write about this," he said.

"Not since we've talked about me writing it."

"Why not?"

"I can't write about us talking about me writing something. Especially since now I've said I can't write it since we talked about writing it. That's way too meta. I'd have to shoot myself in the face."

"Shoot yourself in the face?"

"Yeah. For being pretentious."

Well, we all know what has to happen now.

In a whirlwind of aimless research, starting at the NPR story of 'My Lobotomy' and spiraling through wikipedia's psychiatric treatment entries, shock treatment and Thorazine and with a brief tangential foray into UFO's, I finished up, somehow, at the entry for 'jamais vu' and realized with a start that there's a name for the feeling that I often deliberately try to induce.

Often my life can take on a whole different meaning if I pretend I'm looking at it from a younger self's point of view. Often (perhaps too often to be healthy) I stop what I'm doing and try to forget everything I know as a 23 year old; where I live, what I've done, who I love, etc., and try to see if it would be possible to figure out these things by the clues in my day-to-day life. I'm like a phantom 18-year-old ghost detective (and actually my ghost age changes depends on the things I'd like thrown into a new light; if I want to forget I live in Colorado I have to be under 18, if I want to look at romance differently I generally go back to 14 or 15, if I want to think about music at all it's even more, 9 or 10) using every sense to figure out who I am now.

Basically I pretend I've been thrust into my current environment suddenly from that younger age and forced to begin living as if I know what's going on. Where, in the world, literally, am I? What part of the country does this mountain range look like it belongs in? These street names, do I recognize them? Does the air feel dry, do I smell the ocean, are there locusts buzzing, or trains in the distance? Is my jaw aching like it does when I'm stressed and I pop it in and out? Where am I headed, am I headed there on foot or on a bicycle? Am I hurrying, am I checking my watch, am I wearing a watch, do I have a tremor of excitement in my gut, are my muscles sore?

Since I've been playing this bizarre mind game my whole life, I've noticed that technology makes the chase much less challenging. The list of names, clear as day, on my phone, in my email contact list, an online journal I can call up from anywhere, or, especially, a profile on Facebook or something similar that lists my 'essentials'. My social vitals. Everything I'm trying to dig up from mystery, it's there, in column form, on some screen somewhere.

Technology is killing my induced jamais vu. I try to not recognize something I already know, but it forces me to recognize it. That eerie feeling is muted now, my life in a harsh single perspective. Funny how even though I could create countless complex identities if I wanted to, I would immediately come to recognize each and every one of them.

I was reading somewhere, probably not in a scholarly journal or anything, but somewhere nonetheless, about how people are unhappier when they perceive they have more choices. People stuck in a virtually unchangeable situation will generally simply accept it as a fact of life and move about within those parameters, while people who have all the choices in the world tend to flail around within them, get increasingly stressed out about having made the wrong choice, and end up depressed.

Immediately my mind jumped to Indonesia and how much less anxious I was when I realized that I was in a place where the dangers to my life were tenfold. At the time I couldn't explain this. Everywhere I looked there were things that might kill me. Me driving a motorcycle I'd just learned to drive, in the rain, with no visor on my helmet, practically blinded and flying down a 10% grade with a drop to the ocean on one side and crazy motorcyclists shouting 'BULEBULEBULEBULE!' on the other, Nick at my back, me probably angry and yelling at him over my shoulder. Bird flu closing in from all sides, first found only on Java, then on Bali, creeping over the string of islands slowly, hitting Papua in December, until finally, one week before I left, someone dying from it in Jayapura, in the section Dok VIII, minutes away from where I lived. Malaria buzzing around the perimeter of my mosquito net every night, and sometimes inside it when Nick or I flailed in our sleep and knocked the net askew. That pill that burned in my throat for days, feeling like a neverending heart attack, or scissors ripping up and down my esophagus. That time we rode through a Papuan culture parade on our way home from a day at Skow Sae and we were riding directly in between marching Papuans with flags and musical instruments, dancing and singing their way down the middle of the road, and the Indonesian military in rows at the gutter, rifles drawn.

Yet at almost no point while I was there was I gripped with the kind of anxiety I'm prone to here, where my throat seizes up and then closes, my limbs go numb, my stomach rises into my chest, and my vision nearly blacks out. Here, it's always for no reason. Like the other day, I was sitting in my office at work, a cozy mild relatively private office with a low lamp, dispatching buses around in circles. Everyone was on time, no one had been in an accident, it was only a half hour from the time I got to go home, and my plans that night included sitting around, sitting around, and more sitting around. But I almost passed out over my desk with the force of it.

It's not coming from being at home either, as I've been on padded safe vacations where I drive around in an air-conditioned car looking at life from the windows, occasionally stopping at gourmet restaurants, and I'll lay in my four-poster hotel bed at night with my hand on my heart to make sure it's still beating, the other in front of my mouth to make sure I'm still breathing.

This never happened in Indonesia, even as I realized that if I were to get seriously ill, with bird flu, or appendicitis, or food poisoning, anything, I would likely die from lack of adequate medical care. There were a few times when that realization hit me a little hard, but as soon as I realized I had no choice in the matter, it calmed down. No choice. I'm here, there are diseases, there are crazy motorcyclists and an even crazier army, and I'm not leaving for six months. This is my reality. I have no choices other than whether to cope with the reality or to fight the reality, and that's not really a choice at all. Either way, it's still reality.

I think people are actually terrified of having to make the right decision, and of the consequences of that, and of the consequences of having to deal with knowing that they may have made the wrong one, as opposed to being terrified of the situation itself. Here, if I had unexplainable agony in my throat/chest, I would have a wealth of options before me, all with the equal likelihood of being the wrong option, or having something about them go wrong. I could just wait it out, with increasing terror, and if I waited too long, I might either die immediataly from heart failure or lung failure, or a windpipe/esophageal blockage, or do irreparable damage to whatever system the lump was busy ravaging and live the rest of my life with some kind of tube attached to me. I could choose to go to the hospital, and if so, which hospital? The city hospital, which would cost less, but maybe they wouldn't know what to do and they'd make it worse, maybe in their cost-cutting they wouldn't run the test that would make the difference. Alternatively I could go to the private hospital, and become destitute in the process, wiping through every cent of my savings, and maybe at that point it would turn out to be nothing: heartburn, a pill stuck in my throat, or, worst of all, completely psychosomatic. Then I'd be mortified, and destitute for no reason, but alive. Plus hating myself.

I wouldn't want to make that choice. I mean, I should be grateful that I have the choice to have the opportunity to make that choice, etc. But I still wouldn't want to make it. It would make me crazy, ten times sicker with anxiety. I wonder what the happy medium is in this situation.
In Papua I had no choice but to think, 'Whatever happens, happens.' Qué será, será.

And I don't remember what that feels like. I only remember that I felt it, but can't remember feeling it, if that makes any sense.

I remember very clearly this one instance when we were in the airport in Jayapura, about to board a puddle jumper to Wamena. We were sitting on our backpacks in the giant echoing waiting area, looking at all the 'Tutup' (Closed) signs on all the check-in lines, and we could see our plane hanging out behind the smoking check-in guy, and packages and luggage were riding down the loading ramp straight onto the plane. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a filthy man with dreadlocks in a ripped T-shirt come running into the airport carrying a brown cardboard package tied with string. He dumped the package onto the loading ramp and ran back out. The plane, sitting outside, ate up the package with everything else, without comment. The check-in guy kept smoking. His eyes may actually have been closed.

I watched all of this with a strange amused detachment. I thought about what would have happened if this had happened in the U.S. Total airport shutdown. FBI everywhere. Herding passengers into lines to get into more lines to evacuate. Sobbing passengers, pissed-off passengers, passengers taking advantage of the chaos to create more chaos, passengers and airport employees taking advantage of the chaos to be openly racist, etc. I imagined how scared the atmosphere would make me.

As it was, I poked Nick. "Hey."
"Mm?"
"D'you see that?"
"See what?"
"That guy with the package."
"Nope."
"He just ran up and put this package on the plane."
"Where?"
"Right there, on the plane."
"No, I mean, where's the guy."
"Oh. He ran out."
"Mm."
"Should we care about this?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter."

Then we went back to sitting on our luggage. I was reading Harry Potter 3, and I was probably more interested in Sirius Black than in the suspicious package. There was nothing I could do about it. My Indonesian wasn't good enough to explain to anyone what had happened, if it had been, in any case they wouldn't have cared, and what was I going to do? Not go to Wamena? I'd be wasting 100 bucks and not get to see Louise, probably ever again, plus, you know, it was hot and muggy and I didn't feel like walking all the way to the taxi station and listening to techno for 2 hours as I transferred taxis all the way back into the city. So I got on the tainted plane, which, incidentally, was a propeller plane rising through layers and layers of bumpy clouds right next to jagged mountain ranges, and everything was fine.

This is either apathy, a healthy way of viewing things, or totally batshit insane. Whatever it is, it was kind of nice, and I kind of want it back.

Does anyone know anything about whether birds recognize their own voices?

I had thought that they did, and I remember learning that in Animal Behavior, that to most birds, each nuance of their call was as specific as our consonants and vowels are to us.

But I've been coming more into contact with birds lately because I ride to work before 6 in the morning, and for some reason that's bird-time. Birds have control of the deserted parking lots of the malls, the fallen foliage on my street, the sidewalks up until the very second my bicycle wheels power through, the sky above the mountains, everything.

There was a bird in the Target parking lot who had a call that sounded like a toddler crying, 'Wait! Wait! Wait!' It was sitting on a lightpole facing across Pearl Street towards the other strip mall, and its voice was echoing back almost two seconds after the original call had finished. And the bird would call, listen, cock its head as its voice came back, then respond. Call, listen, cock, respond. It sounded, and looked, for all the world like it thought it was having a conversation with some phantom buddy perched on top of Barnes and Noble.

I thought: stupid bird. I thought: I hope he isn't falling in love. I thought: I hope he doesn't go over there and try to have a rendezvous.

I'm putting on my clothes with my back to the world in the rec center locker room and behind me, up on a bench so high, to her, that it would have been a freefall to the ground, is a toddler singing one line from 'Cecilia':

"Cecilia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily..."

over and over again, while struggling to tie her shoes.

After awhile I notice that she is screwing up her shoe-tying on purpose; she's tying the laces in triple, quadruple knots, then picking them loose with her fingernails, combing them straight, and doing it all over again, just so she can continue to crouch on her bench absorbed in her own voice, her own Cecilia world.

Sometimes when she gets to the end of the line she'll say it in a normal speaking voice a couple of times, then turn it into a dialogue between the singer and Cecilia, who, in her mind, seems to be a fancy lady who only wants to go to dinner parties. Cecilia keeps ardently defending herself against the song, saying over and over that she didn't mean to break anyone's heart, and the singer keeps saying back that she did anyway, and then the song starts again, that one line, over and over and over again as the laces are intently picked and combed.

She doesn't notice me and I am trying hard not to change that, because when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in these nonsensical worlds, talking to myself about them, imagining, really, that this dialogue, this scene, was happening, and I would sing the soundtrack, go through the body motions, be the man or the woman or the cat or whoever this world needed me to be. I would be doing this, completely unaware of my surroundings - I might have been on the playground, or at the beach, or even, once, in class - and people would come up to me, tap me on the shoulder, say 'hello, honey...' or even just pass right through my line of vision and smile ingratiatingly, and the cuter or more curious they thought I was, the more mortified I would be, and the more silent I would fall.

I hated it when people saw me being creative in general. I remember picking on a banjo when I was about seven, not knowing how to play, but this song was tumbling through my head and it had a banjo accompaniment, so I was sitting on the couch picking this one phrase over and over and singing over the top of it to try and flesh it out. I had thought my mom was in the backyard, and so I was singing loudly, and talking to myself between phrases - it was easier to talk than think - but right after a particularly high twirl of the voice my mom came floating down the stairs, which meant that she had been in the house the whole time.

I can still feel the sickening thump my stomach made against my ribs, and how softly I put the banjo down, and the rest of the day that I spent at the playground, hiding, trying to shove the song back down my throat so I wouldn't accidentally enter that same reverie at the playground.

The girl in the locker room, though, sees me just as I am trying, impossibly, to put on my backpack without jingling loudly right in her ear, and I hear her surprised intake of breath as she stops her singing, and I'm thinking, oh shit, waiting for the wail, or worse, the retreat, as I peer over my shoulder at her, trying to make only nonthreatening eye contact and a timid smile.

But when she catches my eye she just grins openly, says, "Hi!" and goes back to singing without barely missing a beat.

That girl is my hero.

I got interviewed recently by Mazur (of Transmissions from Wintermute fame), and I'm fairly certain he included in his question that part about the steak knife just so he could add the blurb at the the beginning: "Read on to hear her thoughts on [...] stabbing Richard Brautigan in the heart with a steak knife." I'm sorry, Richard Brautigan. I love you. Honest! But, well played, Mazur.
Here's the transcript, and if you would like me to interview you, leave me a comment and I would be more than happy to oblige!

You are very well versed in music and were briefly a music major in college. Who would win in a fight between Steve Reich and Philip Glass (optional follow-up: what if Philip Glass had a wooden spear)?

I wouldn't call myself well-versed in music so much as hyper-tuned to the few bands/musicians that I really love while ignoring the rest of the music world, but from the little that I know about those two guys, I'd have to say Philip Glass. Not because I like his music better. I don't. But Philip Glass, I think, relies on repetition to drive his listeners slightly crazy. When you listen to Philip Glass, you feel like you're in an alternate, robotic universe where things go on forever and at the same time if they go on one second longer you're going to scream. Making people feel like that is dangerous. Steve Reich captures reality very well (especially in 'City Life I-IV), but what's more potentially lethal, reflecting reality precisely or making people feel insane? Exactly. After Glass added 13 more minutes of identical 'Ahh-eee-ooo's' to the 14 minutes he had already, and Reich lay writhing and insane on the ground, the wooden spear would only be a nail in the coffin.

On your recent visit to Madison, you were debating between moving to Chicago or back to the town of our Alma Mater, Boulder. Now Boulder has officially won out. Why do you hate the midwest, a.k.a., America (optional follow up: Why do you love terrorism)?

Weather and landscapes. What a boring answer. I chose nicer weather and landscapes over actually knowing people in the location, which is never a smart choice, as I've found! Too late though, I got a good job and I'm staying here for probably at least two years. I hate the Midwest because it's flat and brown and humid and freezing in turns, and smelly, and every June Lake Michigan sends thousands of pounds of dead fish to shore right in Chicago, and this year is the 17-year locust cycle, and there's no nature except for cornfields and if you want to rock climb you have to drive 4 hours to Devil's Lake, and if you happen to want to day trip out of Chicago, too bad, because all there is for hours surrounding is depressing suburbs. I love Chicago because it has excellent food and a wonderful variety of people, but that just can't beat out all of the above. And that is coming from someone for whom food is life. I hope that the CIA ends up having to read my entire journal because of that last sentence in your question. No really, I do. I just love the idea of some agent sitting at work being forced to read about Indonesian post office employees and strange tropical ailments and tales of stubborn schoolchildren and people who hit on other people by being racist.

You are a very avid reader, even more so that DJ, making you the most avid reader I know. What was your favorite of everything you've read in the last six months and why?

Animals In Translation by Temple Grandin. It's by an autistic woman who, among other things, designs humane slaughterhouses for a living. Her theory is that since both autistic people and animals think in pictures, she is able to see their environment through their eyes and design everything so they're happy and calm right up until the end. It's difficult to explain the subject matter to people without them looking at you like, 'are you saying autistic people are like animals?' but what she's getting at is more complicated than that. There are all sorts of anecdotes and insights in there that make your brain turn completely around for a split second. Those low metal slats they put across the roads to keep cows in pasture? Cows' hooves can't fit through there. That's not why they don't walk right across. The reason they don't walk across is because a cow's vision is such that the contrast of color makes the slats look like a straight drop-off into the abyss. That's a bad example of an anecdote that makes your brain turn completely around. But as avid of a reader as I am, information goes straight through my brain and out my ears. While I'm reading, I am enthralled and tuned out to the world, but when I put the book down it's gone. So maybe DJ should still hold the title.

It's your birthday and you have a magical dinner party, to which you can invite 3 nonfictional people, living or dead. The catch; at the end of the night you have to stab one of them in the heart with a steak knife. Who are your choices. Please elaborate.

Richard Brautigan (if your previous question had included books I've read ever, one of his would definitely have beaten out Animals in Translation, if it were not immediately usurped by something by Paul Krassner or The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down [see how I'm insiduously slipping more books in under the radar despite your only asking me about one?]), Ze Frank (of zefrank.com, and zefrank.com/theshow), and Sylvia Plath. The first two get to come because they have wildly unique worldviews not only in writing, but in speech, and have the capability to transform moods, or entire perspectives, in seconds. Sylvia Plath is there so that when she hears these two speak, it changes her life. If you've ever read The Bell Jar, I'm sure you would use your magical dinner party - or anything within your power - to cheer her up too. And I guess I could use some worldview-shaking as well. Since Brautigan and Plath are already dead, I'd stab one of them. Brautigan, I guess. He committed suicide even WITH his brilliant perspective, so I expect that if I brought him back to life he'd be angry and want to go back to his grave.

You've met most of my cobloggers several times, with the sad exception of Laz (because I think you two would be bestest friends, if it wasn't for the damn Pacific). Who do you think could do more clap-pushups, me or OMGIMike?

Politeness dictates that I say you. Also, though politeness does not dictate that I am allowed to say that I don't remember what OMGIMike looks like, I'm going to say it anyway, because it's the truth. [Mike looks buff, and would actually win...for the record. -ED]

I was sitting on a bench mostly hidden by thigh-high grass, blowing the white seeds off dandelion puffs, and I looked at the yellow dandelions surrounding me and I thought 'I'm surrounded by wishes that have grown up."

Funny I should think that while my head was whirling from work. All work is, is packing massage creams and lotions and complexion masks, and translating my boss's stream-of-conscious into polite email form, and looking interestedly at malfunctioning yard tools, but it doesn't take much for my head to whirl. Everything holds so much gravity for me, even when it doesn't deserve to. I dream about screw-on black capped soap dispensers.

This is what I write with my eyes closed. This is what I think early in the morning. I think, write with my eyes closed. I think that writing with my eyes closed will give me the kind of delicious words and nonsense that slide lazily through my head, under the covers, under the pillow, in the mornings. Sometimes I think about the word farmer. I think the word farmer is so profound. Maybe not profound, because there isn't that depth that early. That depth that early: delicious.

Like lyrics.

I've decided to stop smothering everything with meta.

Ovals burn behind my eyelids.

They remind me of open eyes, wide-open cartoon eyes, and I can’t sleep. Open eyes behind my closed ones. They make me think that I can still see, even with my eyes closed. This is unsettling.

So I open my own eyes and stare at other things. The square release tab of my tray table. My igloo-shaped purple fingernails. My seatmate’s blunt haircut. Anything stark. Anything with a definite shape. Anything that might be stronger than the ovals of the windows, and might edge them out, over-burn them.

Until then, fourteen hours of the ovals in the windows.

Open eyes.

My seatmate is tiny and Chinese. When I sat down and saw her, all four foot eight of her, sitting minutely with miles of chair yawning out from all sides, arms yards from the rests, feet yards from hitting the ground, I clenched my fist in my pocket and muttered victory. A muted victory; a quiet plane-appropriate victory. No more three-hundred pound American businessmen spilling their fat into my lap! No mothers with squirmy babies spewing their milk down my shirt! Just this. You are perfect, I said silently to her.

But fast-forward. She is horizontal. Her feet are in my lap, her hands clutching at my sleeve. I don’t know whether to feel uncomfortable about this. She’s asleep. Right? She’s breathing like she is, but her eyes are just the tiniest bit open. I don’t know. I’ve been away too long. I don’t have a culture anymore, any norms to be offended. I don’t attach any significance to feet in laps, or to kisses on both cheeks or dipping one’s left hand in the cookpot. I wouldn’t know how to react if someone stroked my arm and cried.

Someone did stroke my arm and cry recently. I don’t know if anyone has a set reaction for that one.

Groaning and rocking in the street. Spinning until you fall down. Bare feet, pointing straight out. Crosses. The fingers-intertwined clasping of hands. These are all things I would just walk by and ignore, because I have lost my gut reaction.

I sit here and think about how my tiny seatmate could do anything to me and I would just sit here, thinking about how my tiny seatmate could do anything to me, and I would just sit here and freeze, thinking.

And burning plane window ovals into my eyes from lack of sleep. Her hands could knead me anywhere, and as long as she kept her breathing steady and her eyes some semblance of closed, I wouldn’t do anything.

She didn’t wake up when I threw up lamb chops into my tiny airsick bag. I guess that’s a good sign that she’s really asleep.
Then again, maybe in China throwing up in public is routine. Either that or so socially awkward that mentioning it would be extremely crass. I don’t know, because I haven’t been there. I read, though, that everyone spits in the street, and they’re trying to stop it before the Olympics come to Beijing.

Or maybe she just doesn’t care.

I threw up lamb chops because my body had forgotten what they were. I’ve been away too long.

----

Airplanes.

Every time there’s turbulence my heart jumps. Every time my heart jumps it’s like a paragraph break in my thoughts.
I have an airplane mantra. I thought my mantra would have become useless and redundant after spending 40 hours in flight. I figured I’d be like everyone else by then. Asleep and with a pendulum of drool brushing my collar, head bobbing. Earphones drooping, limbs slack and in embarrassing locations. My blanket in a sad puddle around my feet.

No.

Paragraph break.

I recite my mantra: ‘Relinquish control. Pilots know how to fly airplanes, and they would know if something was wrong. Relinquish control. Pilots know how to fly airplanes, and they would know...’

It’s an obtuse mantra, but it’s my mantra.

My lips move. Socially awkward. Well, socially awkward anywhere but here.

Things are somehow okay on planes that aren’t okay anywhere else. Like telling your seatmate about your messy divorce, and crying into your airline napkin while simultaneously calling your ex-wife a bitch and moaning that you still love her. This has happened. Not by me, but to me.

Like slamming back 5 dollar glass after 5 dollar glass of wine and passing out over a tiny bag of pretzels, the salt crumbling off in your fingers. Come to think of it, that one is acceptable outside of planes, too.

Like explaining in detail why you have to clamber over people to use the bathroom every five minutes, going into digestive detail. Like clipping your toenails with your foot over your lap. Like smearing on a watermelon cucumber face mask and discussing the astringent properties of watermelon and the pore-clearing properties of cucumber. Again, not by me, but to me.

Next to these, reciting an airplane mantra is almost exceedingly normal. The airplane equivalent of a businessman hoisting his briefcase into the trunk. The flawless smile of a saleswoman.

On this scale, I can’t figure out where sleep-foot-groping comes in.

Paragraph break. Pilots know how to fly airplanes, and...

This counts as a foreign country all on its own. One where every bump is a badly aimed bullet. Hours of heightened heartbeat. I get panicked ideas every time the plane falls in the air, like my descending stomach shoots them up, haphazard, into my brain.

Write your will. That’s the most common one.

Find out all you can find out about the Branch Davidians.

Track down all your friends from preschool.

Talk to strangers. I mean really. Not just attractive strangers. Crazy strangers, unkempt screaming strangers, threatening strangers. Strangers.

Write down how you feel right now.

Done.

And all through this, at any point, this could happen.

You’re going to die. No. No. Relinquish control. Pilots know...

Knowledge is addictive. Or, at least, I am addicted to knowledge. This may be me. It may be me who has an addictive personality, and can turn even the most non-addictive things addictive. I don’t know. It also may be that even though I read and read and read; anthropological case studies, and memoirs of terrible illnesses, and analyses of the perceptions of animals, and sarcastic political blogs and lengthy self-reflective, or should I say masturbatory semi-autobiographical novels, and lists made by fourteen year old girls about how to make themselves better, and fashion police blogs, and biographies of dead musicians, and satirical essays that I don’t realize are satirical until the end, and allegorical essays that I don’t realize are allegorical until someone else tells me they are, and short stories that end on quizzical, faintly looming notes, and pregnant pauses, and every word of warning signs on buses, and this, and that, and this over again, to see if I’ve put down enough, even though I definitely haven’t put down them all, I don’t retain anything.

A little like that. There’s so much paragraph, so much run-on sentence, that the point of it all, a little tag on the end, is lost. I don’t retain anything. It’s worth repeating.

Wake up in the morning. Make a list of things you will not do. You will not spend more than an hour on the internet, clicking on links and soaking up random useless knowledge only to leak it out two seconds later, like a particularly old, holey sponge. Actually, it’s not a list, because that’s the only thing on it.

I was born with a particularly manic mind, though my body moves slowly and lazily. Thoughts fly through it. Not into it, but through it. If I do not have a notebook with me, everything that I think will be lost. Sometimes, even if I do have a notebook with me, the motion of reaching into my bag for it, or the thought required to locate my pen, causes my brain to shift imperceptibly and even though I remember what I was thinking, I can’t remember why it mattered.

Or I can’t remember how to say it. Or how to write it. Or how to put it so my later, even more shifted self will find it important enough to act on.

This essay itself is a result of a notebook scribbling. I don’t even know why it’s important to do this. But I said it was, so it must be. We’ll see. Are you still here? I am. Hello.

There is an imbalance in me, I feel. Too much knowledge entering and exiting my head at high speeds. Too much manic energy, directed out in a classic firework shape; everywhere and nowhere, and certainly nowhere organized, or worse, back into finding out how to find out more stuff. I must know things! I must know everything!! In order to...!!!

Meanwhile, my body aches from inactivity, or rather, the position my back makes as it crouches over the keyboard/books/a pad of paper/a screen. I bought a basketball today. After I finish this self-indulgent reflection that I am forcing other people to read, therefore contributing to their giant knowledge orgy, thus feeding the cycle, I’m going to go play basketball.

Perhaps I should have done that first. It’s a funny thing. A good general definition of happiness for me has always been ‘do what you want’, but lately I’ve come to notice that that’s so completely and utterly wrong if you happen to be lazy, or have an addictive personality, or tend towards simple observation. Do what you want in that case and you’ll end up never leaving your house, on heroin, and watching youtube videos, and I won’t say that can’t make one happy, but I will say that it certainly can’t make most people happy. People need people. It is not easy to find good people. It requires some forcing, and occasionally doing things you absolutely do not want to do, like making a fool of yourself.

I hate making a fool of myself. I especially hate starting things if I have a feeling the end result is going to suck. Ergo: I hate this essay. But I’m doing it, because it’s good for me. And because it’s going somewhere. What? you say? Yes. It is.

There is a reason this is up on my blog instead of in the deep recesses of some black lace-bound journal with a ribbon around it in a velvet case surrounded by, I don’t know, things that goth people keep in their dresser drawers. Spiderwebs. Clove cigarettes. Red corsets tight enough to leave marks. I’m not going there.

And that is that I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to write here anymore. What was newlyindonesian but me taking in my surroundings, the holey sponge again, and simply spitting them out, intact, onto the internet? I don’t like intact anymore. I’m tired of it. Intact is other people, intact is nature, intact is everything, everything except me. I would like to put myself into the things I spit back out from now on. I don’t mean all my stories have to be about me. I mean the exact opposite.

Things that happen to me are good to record, to remember. But not if they edge out something new I could be creating. A short story – a fictional short story, not me thinly veiled. Piano etudes. I used to sit at the piano for hours without a thought in the world of recording anything, and compose. I used to go to elementary school early – I had a key to the auditorium given to me by my fourth grade music teacher – and compose away the hour before school in the empty, echoing curtained auditorium. This was for no one else to hear. Songs, vocal experimentations. The freedom to sing ridiculously so the ridiculousness would edge into song. These are the best kinds. I miss my piano like I’ve missed hardly anything before.

The only thing I miss more is the guaranteed solitude of a one-bedroom apartment. Somewhere I can scatter paints and warp decoration and do cartwheels in the space without furniture. But it doesn’t matter.

If I come back, I’ll be different. I might post a story. Or a link to a song. Or an essay. And maybe I won’t be different, too. Maybe I’ll find other outlets and can come back slowly to observation, phase it in – as an aspect, not as a lifestyle. Don’t take this too seriously. I make big dramatic promises all the time, and go back in a heartbeat. Like New Years resolutions. No one ever keeps those. So maybe tomorrow I’ll write about the stranger I saw making music with pennies and wine glasses and stream water. This didn’t happen. But I’m going to try. That’s all I can say.

Something happened to me (not just to me, but to everyone around me, as well) that's probably never happened to anyone before. Not even close. Do you ever have those moments where you realize that? And do you think it's sad that those moments come so few and far between, even though it probably happens all the time; nobody's probably written this exact sentence before, have they? There's a moment right there. But I don't feel anything. I felt it yesterday, though:

We were hiding Easter eggs. I was looking for a hiding place that was right in plain sight, but where nobody would think to look. Preferably somewhere eye level or transparent. I chose the hole in one of the speakers. Not shoved all the way in there or anything, but with the green-dyed end poking out, so all it would take to dislodge it would be a slight tip forward.

It took awhile to find, but when Nick found it, I was looking the other way. I didn't see him start to poke his fingers in, pushing the egg the wrong way; through the tube and down into the interior of the speaker, where it alternately lodged, rattled, cracked and rolled while he looked on and panicked.

So I spent the time after Easter brunch watching/helping with speaker disconnecting, shaking, poking, and egg pinching, skewering, and rolling. The egg was in a terrible position, since it would only come out lengthwise. We stuck radio antenna in the hole. We tried to trap it with rolled up newspapers. We played the opposite of that game where you roll the box around to try and not get a little silver ball to fall through any number of holes. Finally, Nick pierced the egg with a chopstick and dragged it at least halfway out, where we had to cradle the egg's end with our fingers like pincers as it bulged out the hole, looking exactly like a baby being born.

Then we had to vacuum the pieces of shell out. Happy Easter, Patrick's family! You feed me delicious ham and potato salad and I put egg in your speakers!

It's raining in Madison, Wisconsin. It doesn't matter what time I am writing this, or even if I am writing it after the fact. It's still raining. And tornadoing in the shady places surrounding. Gusting wind and mist and loose branches everywhere. It's oddly beautiful. I never thought I'd say this, but there is more to satisfying weather than heat so hot it pulsates and a sea breeze.

Mazur of Wintermute has a house with a semi-skylight where, if you are so inclined and have the time, which I am, but don't, you can lay on the floor underneath and test the brain-challenge of keeping your eyes open as the heavy drops fall towards you. I choose instead to shiver, flip through photos, and kick ass at cards. I think the whole time about how many games of Egyptian Ratscrew I played when I went to Mexico two years ago. We would sit in our beach hut with geckos flying up the clay walls around us, and eat rolls of expensive imported chocolate cookies. I have a peculiar penchant for holing up inside when I'm in exotic places and then feeling bad about it. In Mexico, we only played cards at night, though, after stuffing ourselves with shrimp. In Madison, I play in between creative pizzas and peanut butter ice cream. It's the Midwest for sure.

We save worms who have been flooded out of their dirt homes by the lake. When touched, the squinch up and help us get our fingers under their bodies. I toss them in the dirt and wonder how come bugs and worms can fall from such great relative heights and not die, but we can't. I'm sure it has something to do with the weight of air. When I write sentences like this I become painfully aware of how stupid I am capable of sounding.

I'd move to Madison if the only thing I'd give up the mountains for wasn't Chicago. Just read it again if it doesn't make immediate sense. I need sentences like that thrown in the books I read to keep me from skimming and/or being lazy by not attempting to understand complicated sentences. But maybe I'm the only one and this aside was just personal.

Chicago, Savannah, the entire southeast, Madison. A birthday spent with a stranger.* Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong. One week until Boulder, Colorado. I don't really have a home anymore. It's kind of nice.


* My mom called me at 12:03, my birth minute. "What are you doing? Did I get the time right?" I have a tradition where I have to write down what is happening at the anniversary of the moment that I was born, as a strict, unexaggeratable record of the general feel of my life, and I won't stick this likely long, rambling aside in the center of my sentence flow. This year I was checking for updates at something positive and waiting for my car to return so I could meet Mike for lunch. I was thinking about how to best make a song in a major key sound sad but not sappy. I was also thinking about how people's faces change when they're photographed.

Last night I dreamed I had to cut cats up into little pieces to make them easier to transport. Even though superglue restored them to life, I have never had a more disturbing moment in a dream than when I was trying to reassemble them and I glued a kitten's head back on and I misaligned it and she couldn't meow anymore.

Cold water from a 'hot' tub, hot only in name, waterfalls into colder water. The sun isn't hot enough for this. My swimsuit is the wrong size. At the slightest hint that anybody may be looking at it, I contort myself into ridiculous shapes to keep myself from falling out of it. I still feel odd in a swimsuit, because I know that in Jayapura I could, and would, have been arrested immediately for wearing it. So when a friendly man appears in the door of the clubhouse and asks if I want a mat for my deck chair, my mind processes it as gibberish. Quick Indonesian, maybe. I yank my towel up over my body. He laughs because he thinks I am shy. Shy is... perhaps the wrong word for it. Running away from my social issues into the pool is not an option, because it is freezing. Truly freezing, despite the sun having warmed it all day. Why would you air-condition an outdoor pool in Georgia in springtime?

I used to think people who could just sprint into freezing water just didn't feel temperatures as much as I did. I used to think people who could get cavities filled without novocaine had a higher pain threshold than me. I used to think people who could dance in clubs didn't have to practice; that they just automatically knew how to move. I used to think people who could party-hop for hours - days! - didn't ever get lonely, or overwhelmed. One or the other. I used to think that people who could get on airplanes, on stage, go to work, to school, while vomiting with the stomach flu just didn't feel as sick as I did when I had it. I used to think that other people didn't feel overwhelmed and exhausted when they climbed mountains.

I was wrong. People can just handle things. I've never been great at handling things - it's an only child thing. Only children don't have to handle. Their families revolve around them. Their preferences are the only ones taken into account. They don't have to do things they don't want to, or share their possessions with people. If they hedge and consider and take forever to make decisions, their families will wait. It's a bad way to grow up. No, actually, it's a great way to grow up. But it's a bad thing to take away with you when you have to become a grown-up.

Thinking about all of this is strangely relevant with my big toe trembling on the pool steps. Just jump in. Just jump in. It will be cold and that's okay.

Inching forward and willing myself to keep going, steady, not hesitating or rising up on my toes or yanking my hands out of the water or, worse, retreating. I do it. Make no noise. Distorted just under the surface, my goosebumped forearms look like Popeye's.

I wish I knew how to swim, that someone would show up and teach me. My form is spectacularly bad. It takes me minutes to do the pool crosswise, and I arrive out of breath and - oddly - vertical. My stroke is unrecognizable as anything with a name. I would have drowned had I swum in the ocean more than 5 times in Indonesia. But I love water. Even cold water. Even cold, boring, chlorine-choked pool water, or red-tinged scary stormy tropical water, or muddy brown sluggish water possibly containing crocodiles, or early-June Lake Michigan water clogged with alewive. Once a fortune teller told me I would never be happy unless I lived by water. Of course, she also told me I'd be dead by age 21.

This transmission is coming to you from Savannah, Georgia, where the view from Mike's window looks quite disturbingly like Green Bay Road in Evanston. There's a little tiger-gray kitten in my lap who thinks that she can type this blog better than I can; I will leave vhe gr hy h jmmmmmm bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbhnrrrrkm,k dddddddddddd5vmko9lui666o88888888888888888888888888888
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
ooo888888888888888888888889999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999iou5621jklnm 8uui============== her prose in, so you can see what a terrific writer she is. I guess that effort tired her out, because she's lost interest.

I indulged in a love of mine the other night, while I was still in Evanston: sitting in the back of a car, late at night, nearly asleep and concentrating on the neon scenery while ignoring banal chit-chat. The thing I love best about banal chit-chat is ignoring it. Sometimes I prefer it as a background to silence. They were talking about their children and how naughty they weren't. I had nothing to offer. I am getting away with this only lately because people excuse my rudeness for culture shock. Before I went to Indonesia, my rudeness was just rudeness, and I was that person that made people uncomfortable, because I didn't like to talk to 100 adults in a row about what I was going to do with my life, and laugh about how, ha ha, my anthropology degree will qualify me for, ha ha, absolutely nothing. I didn't like to talk about their kids and how they were way naughtier at college than I was, or, conversely, how they came out of it with a triple doctorate in the-richest-possible-sort-of medicine. But now, people just nod uncomfortably in awe and think: she just came back from a third-world country. She must have seen all sorts of... things. She's just got to get used to the country again.

What they do not realize is that I will never get used to the country again. I wasn't used to it when I had never left it. I will always rather read neon sighs and shadows in bushes than listen to people ask me about things that make me slightly nauseous to repeat.

In third grade, I was really popular. It was a fluke, of course. I was not popular in second grade and I was not popular in fourth grade. But in third, I was a princess. I could do no wrong, which was lucky since I wore turquoise stirrup leggings, giant T-shirts, and star-sparklies in my fluffed-up hair to school every day. I guess that was supposed to be hot in 1993. What else must have been hot?
Knowing my multiplication tables faster than anyone else in class, saying the answers too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the linoleum.
Doing real gymnastics on the bars in the playground, even mid-winter, and ignoring everyone else.
Having two best friends who constantly fought over me and wrote notes like: "You are my best friend. Am I your best friend? Check yes or no. Be honest and you can't say maybe I don't know or anything like that."
Not being able to run the mile, or even walk it, to be honest, even though I could do about a hundred cartwheels or backbends on command.
Being really, really tall and skinny and knobbly and pale and awkward.

The point of all this is to say that nobody has any idea what the hell is supposed to be hot at any given time, least of all me. Usually, I am routinely taken in as a human being by other human beings, and either discarded or given more thought. In Indonesia, everybody gave me more thought. I was a bule, and that merited LOTS of thought. I was probably the only one they were going to see for a few years. So, okay. I understand that.

But occasionally I am in the States, looking the same as always, acting the same as always, gangling awkwardly around town and talking really quietly and unassumingly acting rude just by having an expressionless face, and people suddenly start being really interested in me. All at the same time. People start asking me out. And having asked me out, they immediately attempt to make out with me.

I find this situation extremely uncomfortable. I expect that girls who somehow manage to be attractive to people all the time, and not just randomly placed occasional times, know how to deal with this smoothly and effectively, and escape the situation still friends with the attempted maker-outer. I do not. As sexually liberal as I think I am, I just hardly ever particularly want to make out with strangers I just met, and, even worse, I find it amusing as hell when they try, and I have to escape, snickering like some kind of overgrown mutant 7-year-old and making impossible all possible future contact in the process.

This isn't entirely true. I probably would be more receptive to strangers if I thought that they had even the slightest interest in my personality. Who in the world has ever succeeded in impressing a girl by greeting every story she has to tell, everything she has to say, with a prolonged silence and then either a 'this happened to ME' or a 'Hey, do you wanna make out?' Has anyone ever succeeded by doing this? If so, I'd like to hear about it. Do other girls just get magically more and more receptive the more ways you underhandedly try to make out with them without possessing any conversational skills - or any sort of communicative skills, unspoken or otherwise - or any sort of PERSONALITY - whatsoever? No, I want to know. Perhaps they just give up trying to fight the onslaught.

Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm raving, and that I'm likely just suffering from American-dating-practices-culture shock or something. But sometimes I wish I were dumber, and couldn't see through people as well. How do those girls who are in-demand all the time handle knowing that everyone is plotting anything - anything! - to get them into bed? It's a very fucking disconcerting feeling!

Soon, though, I will randomly become not-hot again, through no effort or realization on my part, and this will cease.

I'm staying in my childhood house, and in my childhood house, you can often find me sitting exhausted and enthralled on the attic floor surrounded by invitations to 10 year olds' birthday parties from 1994, and yellowed drawings of gymnasts, and refrigerator magnets with pictures of Kermit the Frog on them, and the old notes my mom used to put in my lunch box with the hard boiled egg and the salt packet, and other such things.

The one thing I thank my parents the most for is teaching me to read and write when I was three. Most people don't have a written record of their thoughts when they were that young. I do. It's mostly incomprehensible to other people, and to me as well, a fair amount of the time, and often suggestive that bizarre and unexpected events, furniture, objects, teachers, and family friends played a gigantic part in my life. Rollerskates come up a lot. Two couches come up even more, always on opposite sides of the room. Black cats, mountains, and Christmas trees are next, followed by birds carrying letters in their beaks, angry female babysitters with long braids, and large pianos.

Three is so young it's like reading something written by a complete stranger, one with no linear thought processes. Often, once upon a time there was a little girl who lived inside her house and there was a lion outside her house ends with an ice cream truck encounter and, for good measure, a Christmas tree. (I guess not so much has changed; I still can't write stories that stay on focus beginning to end, but at least I don't... thrust ice cream everywhere, although, as I will soon prove, I do thrust sushi everywhere.)

The first nonfictional somewhat linear journal-like thing I wrote down was around my 5th birthday. Every year for my birthday we'd go get sushi at the same sushi plane we'd been getting sushi from since I was 2. I'll let my 5-year-old self tell it:

Today we went to Kuny's for sushi for my birthday. Kuny is Japanese. He always cuts my sushy into little pieces. When I grow up I want to marry Kuny, and eat sushy every night!

(And there is a drawing of Kuni and me and sushi at the bottom. We both have arms coming out of our heads and legs coming out of our arms. The sushi, however, is drawn very carefully.)

The other day my dad and I went to Kuni's. We arrived as they were just opening. Kuni was standing at the bar without his chef robes or hat on yet. He looked as naked in his T-shirt, to me, as any newborn baby, as he bowed to us and we bowed awkwardly, as always, back at him. My dad always shoots streams of friendly English at Kuni about how awesome his food is, to which he responds in streams of friendly-sounding Japanese and free noodle rolls and extra fatty tuna. He must understand English, as he's been here for at least 20 years, but he never speaks it.

There are two ways I know that he remembers me. One: if I try to order something that's not, technically, on the menu, but that I have been eating since I was a toddler, and the waitress says they don't have it, Kuni shakes his head wildly and waves his arms at her until she writes down my order as I originally said it. Two: he still cuts my sushi into tiny little toddler-sized pieces and serves it to me with a straight face. No matter where I'm sitting at the bar, even if I'm in front of another chef, Kuni prepares my sushi.

Whenever I see the gray hair poking out of Kuni's chef's hat or notice the age spots on his hands, I feel sad in a way that has no explanation, really, and no parallel. I feel the completely irrational feeling that when Kuni dies, I will be significantly more alone in the world. To feel that way about someone you've never spoken a word to is an odd thing. I hate to see him age. He has always looked about 30 to me. He's probably 60. I hope he lives to be 160. I wouldn't want to raise my children in a Chicago where they couldn't get their first taste of solid food in the form of raw yellowtail cut into a baby-sized bite. Would you?

I was in the Whole Foods cafe, microwaving my organic lasagna and getting ready to settle down with my sweet library book about a missionary who goes to Central Papua and is faced with a tribe who likes to cannibalize each other's peace sacrifices (in this case, children), when the guy who I had just beaten to the microwave started talking to me. He seemed vaguely all right, despite the bizarre opening of his conversation ("Are you with her?" Me: "Who?" Him: "That girl over in the checkout line." Me: "No, why?" Him: "Because you're both tall! You're both so tall! Are you Dutch? Dutch people are so tall. In Holland, there's like these 6'4" blonde chicks walking around everywhere.") and I didn't immediately try and extricate myself.

BUT, this was a mistake:
After he had found out that I had just returned from Indonesia ("Indonesia? Are you really Indonesian? Oh, you were just working there. Were you the tallest person there?") he asked me what I was planning on doing now that I had returned. I said that I wanted to try and work in a zoo, with primates.
And he said, "Oh, those monkeys are gonna probably remind you of the people you taught in Indonesia, huh?"

WOW.

There are certain parts of me that never get warm, no matter how many layers I cover myself with. My hands. The tips of my toes.

I guess I've been talking about Indonesia so much that someone lost their temper with me today and yelled, "I've never heard of anyone having as much culture shock as you! Wouldn't you think you'd have gotten over it by now? It's been nearly two weeks! Christ!"

It might be true. Things are starting to settle. A stranger spoke English to me on the street today and I didn't start. I turned into the right lane on a deserted street at one in the morning. Tonight, I ate creative maki; tuna and scallions, shrimp and oranges and tempura, salmon and avocado and masago and crab. When I didn't cry right there at the table it was some kind of miracle, but when I thought about the miracle and what it meant, I almost cried right there at the table.

There's one for yes, continue this, there's one for yes, continue this, and there's one for write about other people at a brand-new location God-knows-where, so I think I'm going to continue this, though maybe with interludes about other people such as this one:

No, actually, I haven't seen any other people for awhile. Chicago is big and cold and lonely. There's just something about a climate that prohibits sitting out on the lawn that makes people seem rude. They rush past you to get to their warm car, and who can blame them? but it still stands that they rush past you.

There's something about the sky being darker than the ground. Snow and a constantly threatening storm. I rush past people, too. I rush past them to get to Potbelly Sandwich Works, which, in my opinion, is a better destination than a warm car (even). I want everything on mine. The sub guys on the line behind the counter smile like they're welcoming you to their home, like they're inviting you to come sit by the fire and eat their homemade rabbit stew. If there's one thing I'll miss when I leave here again, it's the pride Chicagoans have in their food, and the concurrent fact, somehow, that they sell it for cheap. Maybe they feel guilty charging their honored guests. Who knows?

Okay, I was in Victoria's Secret, and I was there for two reasons: one, to buy a bra, and two, to give myself the most massive amount of culture shock possible all at once. The windows reared in front of me like giant horses with posters taped to their bellies, posters of stretched out women showing me ALL of their skin and tiny, wavy, shiny triangles of material in bright orange, bright pink, bright, bright, and the eyeshadow and their legs that were taller than me and curled around other women's legs that were also taller and me and I thought... how is this legal?

I didn't think this because I think it shouldn't be - legal, I mean - but because I've spent so long being the sluttiest person in Jayapura just by occasionally wearing V-neck T-shirts, and I'm so used to looking down at myself every 20 seconds to make sure that no part of my armpit is showing, because that would be provocative...

A girl next to me holding an armful of lacy, flowery bras started talking to me about how she wanted to buy ten of them, but... 'all of them seem to show up under my clothes! Look at the butterflies. The butterflies are definitely going to be popping out under something white. And under black? Do you think this lace beige pattern's going to come out under black?'

'I think so, I mean, look at it,' I said on complete autopilot, because nobody in Indonesia would ever talk about their bras showing under their clothes, or wear something that might threaten to be thin enough to show a bra. It occurred to me right about then that I don't remember how women are supposed to talk to each other, and it occurred to me stronger later when an employee insisted upon measuring me before I bought anything, at which point I fled in terror. I think I need more time.

My fingers squish in the avocado, over the cream cheese, under the lox. I stare at what I'm holding because I can't believe that it's actually there. 'Crusty bread' was the number one food named among my Western coworkers in Indonesia as the food they missed most. Does a toasted garlic and onion bagel count?

Yes.

I think about a flooding Makassar and its rice field puzzle pieces overflowing into each other. When I see something beautiful I stare, entranced, while the back of my mind throbs something dull about a camera. Nobody will ever see the most beautiful sights I've seen because I have never taken a picture when I'm thoroughly spellbound. Maybe, in someone's worldview somewhere, that's good. I guess it is in mine.

What should I be in my free time, a writer or a musician? My perenially cheesy lyrics point me back to writing, even though I'm never happier than when I sing, but then I realize I have way, way too much to write about, and way, way too much of it is about me, me, me, and I am bored with me.
Should I continue this blog even though I am no longer anywhere exotic, and it may be in danger of becoming an 'what i ate today omg lol' blog? Or should I retreat back to my old high school haunt, http://singingcamel.diaryland.com, even though, shit, I cringe every time I hit the random button and see what kind of absolute word-vomit came out of the tips of my fingers in high school, and even college? Take a vote in the comments. Please. I need guidance.

And. I'm home... and. I'm home, and I'm. Home, and I'm home. That sounds like a Bright Eyes song title. It isn't. I wish it were. Then I could listen to it, and maybe it would shake my experiences out of my ears, like water, and maybe the droplets would land in a line and then I could write about them. But my timeline is all jumbled. Six plane flights in the mist. Six.

The 747's wings are flapping like a bird's, 10 meters up, 10 meters down, and sideways, and the purple starred seats in the cabin pipe shakuhachi music from the speakers in the armrests and five effeminate Singaporeans are saying, in turn, 'Ma'am, would you like lamb chops and mashed potatoes or Chinese stir-fry?' and 'Please be careful with that hot tea, it is a bit turbulent outside', which is an understatement since we are flying through a lightning storm. This is one of a series of storms that has flooded Jakarta, but the Singaporeans are still pouring hot tea, and displaying images of lotus flowers on the seatback videoscreens. Their hands, holding the teapots, stay remarkably steady as the floor tosses their feet. I am too dumbfounded to be terrified. I am too enamored with the lamb chops, anyway.

In Hong Kong a Chinese man is screaming at people boarding the plane to get into two lanes, in English, but in such terribly accented English that nobody understands him. In response, he screams louder. If this was America he could just deny them entry onto the plane for 'security reasons'. It isn't America. He screams louder and louder until flecks of spit fly out of his mouth, and he stomps off in a rage to join the other men who are hand-searching carry-on luggage with rubber gloves. One of them unscrews my body lotion. "What this?" he asks me. "Body lotion?" I ask him, meaning can I take it? but he has already made a face and handed it back. He misses the jeruk manis in the bottom. I am (accidentally) crafty. I also smuggled in some nata de coco. I am going to get preserved coconut disease culture ALL OVER AMERICA, HAHAHAHA. Did you know, they ask you that on customs arrival cards? Like so:

Are you or any member of your family planning to bring into the U.S.A. any of the following items: fruit, vegetables, plants, disease cultures, pests, or snails? Yes/No

Disease cultures? Snails? I sit with my pen hovering over 'Yes' for a good two minutes, but then decide that my desire to be able to have a nice conversation in English for the first time with an immigration official ("Why? Well... I just, like, thought it would make a nice souvenir for my boyfriend, this snail smeared with bird flu culture... don't you think?") doesn't override my desire to not go to jail. Then, later, it doesn't matter, because I get my first desire anyway:

"What's 'PNG'? Punnngggg? Where's that?"
"Pee Enn Jee."
"Punngggg?"
"No, Papua New Guinea."
"Where's that?"
"....." (But... you're an immigration official!)
"Well?"
"It's... on the island of Papua, near, like Australia... and..."
"Oh, Australia... well, Australia's OK. Next!"

and later, at the bank:

"Do you guys change Swiss Francs?"
"Do we change whatsawhoozees?"
"Swiss Francs."
"What?"
"Swiss. Francs."
"Where they from?"
"Switzerland. Switzerland. Francs."
"Oh. Okay... WHAT they called?"
"Swiss Francs."
"Okay... I think I see em, but... this gotta be wrong, 'cuz it say it trading at about 150,000 of 'em to the dolla... oh no, wait, awright. Okay. No. This gotta be wrong. Now it say it give you $150 for your 200 switch francs."
"Yeah. That's what it's trading at. That's right."
"You say Switch Francs?"
"Um.... yes."
"Okay, here you go."

I'll finish later. I'm too tired to move my frozen fingers.

This is the last post in which I will be newly, or at least, relatively newly, Indonesian. Maybe I’ll be able to send a lack-of-sleep-addled update from Hong Kong. Maybe I’ll have just finished careening with the tip of my plane wing over a blown-up volcanic island full of skyscrapers. Maybe. I’ve heard that, in Hong Kong, this is how it happens. 28 hours of flying, but this time, alone. I’ll have to climb over two strangers to use the bathroom instead of one stranger and a rather less obliging Nick. We’re separating, but most of you already know this.

I leave the Hong Kong airport on Tuesday, 11:36 a.m. I get into Chicago O’Hare on Tuesday, 11:45 a.m. My flight takes nine minutes. I will see the sun streak at double speed overhead, as opposed to landing in Taipei, when we chased it, and it took hours to rise. Literally hours.

Goodbye:
riding on the left front side of cars without driving
spatters of red spit everywhere from betel-nut-chewers, looking like people have been slaughtering cows in the road
the immediate threat of bird flu
filthy, beautiful, distanced presence of the ocean
11-year-old students who have crushes on me
being called 'mister'
MSG in everything
14 dollar blocks of Kraft-quality cheese
grumpy photocopy ladies
driving a motorcycle at what feels like 80 miles an hour, but is actually only about 30
random requests for money for everything from sitting on a hill to picking up a letter at the post office
taxis with pictures of Britney Spears on the seats
people who can't comprehend not having a religion
strangers nervously whispering 'good evening' to me at 10 a.m.
red rambutan, yellow rambutan, brown rambutan, green rambutan, and the man who sells it
having absurd roleplays with supremely religious students in which they have to pretend to be cheating on their wife/husband
students saying 'God damn it' and, when questioned, explaining that in English this is a more polite way of saying 'oh no'
mango trees