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.