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.