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
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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.