http://whenwechange.blogspot.com/

is where I am currently writing instead. It's not just that I am no longer newly Indonesian, or even Indonesian at all, but rather that I'm not really in a journalling mood lately. I am in a snobby scholar mood, and would rather write an interactive research paper.

I will continue to write here when I am not in a snobby scholar mood, or have things to write that are not related to change, which I'm sure will start happening often once I realize my other blog constrains me.

Whenever I go on an extended trip like the one I just took, I vow to keep a daily diary, because I know that as soon as things start happening I will immediately become blinded to the fact that I won't remember these things later.

This vow is hardly kept. It was not kept this time. It would flash through my mind and, blinded, I would ask myself, how is it possible that what I want to write down could ever slip from my mind? How is it possible that I could ever become separated from these words? I actually wrote paragraphs in my head, thinking I would be able to recall them easy as reading a book. Despite years of this not working, I wholeheartedly believed it would work this time, there not usually being pen or paper or time to commit them to ink.

Only two days back, and I feel like I never left. Nor do I remember any stories I wanted to tell, or atmospheres I wanted to portray. It feels betraying and a bit silly to be surprised, but I'm surprised anyway. This should not keep me from trying, even if the trying turns out to be in snippets.

My favorite part of the trip, shared by, I think, no one, was Bean Hollow beach a few miles south of Half Moon Bay. The beach is violent and jagged, presided over by a sign with no less than five strong reasons why one should not swim or surf: sleeper tides, contaminated water, unexpected currents, hidden rocks, sharks. It could hardly be mistaken for a swimming beach, anyway. Mostly, it's foggy and cool, with the waves rolling in and breaking inches from the shore, suggesting a cruel ground dropoff. When the water sucks back into the ocean, it pulls at tiny pebbles and throws them in the air when another wave hits.

On the way over to the volcanic cliffs at the south side, we found a purple starfish with one long leg on the beach. Thinking of that cheesy inspirational starfish story, I threw it back in, even though I don't know how to tell if a starfish is alive or dead. This one was pretty dry and sandy. It was probably dead. Just in case, I threw it out of reach of the waves breaking.

On the cliffs themselves, the rock is a slippery, reddish yellow color that looks almost plastic, except that there are barnacles clinging to every surface and deep grooves cut by water. The deepest grooves have become tidepools, filled with mussels and sea anemones and (presumably) live starfish. The watery end of the cliffs that get pounded at both low and high tide is blanketed in little sea plants with long skinny trunks that look as though a strong wind would crack them, but they are buffeted every five seconds by crashing waves and show no signs of breaking.

I remember once letting sea anemones suck on my fingers when I camped outside of Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving a few years ago, but the ones in these tidepool looked meaner and spikier, almost sea urchin-like, so I refrained, but we did try to feed one a blade of sea grass, which it eagerly accepted, then spit out.

I could have spent all day on this beach (would have camped on it happily despite hating camping) but we were en route to San Francisco and had to sort of hurry. Luckily, a few days earlier, we camped just above another beach in Big Sur, from which whale/seal sightings, rock clamberings, steppings on gross seaweed detritus that felt like corpses under my sneakers, and hysterical runnings from unpredictable waves abounded. There's something I like about the terrifying possibility of getting marooned on a tiny beach by the tide, so we leapt across wet rocks along the coast as foam from the waves splashed us. I saw a tiny orange grip over the top of a slimy rock and thought for a moment it was a lobster, but it was a starfish.

For the next two weeks, I'll be posting, if I'm posting at all, from somewhere along the coast of California, anywhere from Los Angeles all the way up to Eureka. Maybe we will play a game where I will describe something that happened to me and give lots of place details, and then you guys will have to guess where I'm posting from! Or else maybe we'll play another game, called 'Hannah has no internet on extended road trips and will not be posting at all'. Both games sound equally fun! How shall we ever choose?

If you have ever found yourself wondering why Bear Peak is called Bear Peak, and why Bear Canyon is called Bear Canyon, wonder no more: it is because they are both inhabited by bears. Bears rustling in the trees just out of sight, bears drinking by the river just out of sight, and at least one bear WALKING ON THE HIKING TRAIL, very much within sight!

Climbing Bear Peak, elevation 8461 (3000+ vertical feet from the starting point) and 11 miles roundtrip, has been Dan's and my hiking goal for the summer. Every hike we did was supposed to lead up to this one. Yes, it is a weakling goal and yes, I have 60 year old coworkers who do twice that every weekend carrying 50 pound backpacks with snowshoes on and raging windstorms around their heads, but for us, it is a big deal. And this weekend, we hadn't really planned on doing it. Not yet. It was a lofty, eventual goal, one to be mulled over and planned for and possibly never actually done. Instead, we had planned just to walk up Bear Canyon trail and walk down, itself nearly a 5 mile hike. But when we got to what would have been the end, the peak looked so close and tantalizing, we just couldn't resist. "Climb me," it purred from what looked like ten feet away, but was really like ten thousand. "Walk on my soft, gently rolling west ridge. Enjoy my slopes and curves. I'm right here! You can nearly reach out and touch me! Look how flat my trails are! Sure, at the end I'm a steep pointed monster of a cascade of boulders, that will necessitate nearly climbing, and falling often, but never mind that! I am worth it! Look how close I am!"

Well, we succumbed to its charms, soft slopes and insane rock scrambles all, and enjoyed a breathtaking view of Boulder and the Indian Peaks, whilst eating salami-mozzarella-spinach rolls and listening to the hardcore hikers around us, not even sweating (sample statement: 'Okay, let's get out of here and hit South Boulder!' [South Boulder Peak is the next peak south, 60 feet higher])

On the way down, right at the junction where we could choose between going down Bear Canyon the way we came, or going up another insane peak, Dan suddenly stopped in his tracks and pointed at Bear Canyon trail, saying in a low monotone that I almost mistook for joking, "Thatisafuckingbear."

And it was a fucking bear, ambling down the trail for all the world as if he were human, following the set path and not deviating from it for a second, not even to skip the cumbersome switchbacks. He followed the switchbacks, pausing briefly to look around. Luckily, he didn't notice us up at the overlook, clinging to each other like children and staring at him as though he were an alien from another planet, and not an animal wandering through his natural habitat.

My surprise surprised me, hitting me as indignance. Like it was my right to walk on the trail without a bear on it, when we've taken away so much of the bear's land already. It was only a flash, motivated by fear, and it passed - I would give up my weekends of hiking in a second if it meant the bear could have its land back - but I saw the same thing on the faces of everyone we told.

The people we walked with on the way down - we figured walking together and talking loudly would alert the bear to our presence without scaring him - we said we had seen a bear and their hands flew to their mouths like we had just told them a child had died. And the people we ran into a little later, on the way up, when we told them, the guy in the front immediately turned around, as if to go back the way he had came - no way was he going to go up a trail on which a BEAR had been seen! A BEAR!

I would venture to guess that that whole area is teeming with bears, just that most of them don't use the trails. All the rustling we heard on the way up... I'm sure lots of it came from bears. But it's easy to rationalize those things when you're in the city, and not so easy when you are looking at a bear's claws in detail and realizing that bears can rip into cars to get food if they want to.

I think I've had it about up to the ceiling with chirpy receptionist voices. Not that it's limited to receptionists. Oh, no. Wandering salesgirls who want to know if there's anything you need help finding today, or checkout girls who want to know if you found everything okay today. Girls at the register in restaurants who ask if that'll be all for me today, girls who answer the phones at my insurance company and tell me first that they have changed their policy on paying for my composite tooth fillings, refuse to engage in a discussion, and at the end thank me for choosing MetLife for my dental insurance needs and tell me to have a very nice day today.

(And why do they always tack 'today' onto the end of their sentences as if it might be possible they were talking about tomorrow, or next month, or 2054?)

I don't want to be sexist but there's just no guy equivalent. Not that there aren't annoying guys in these positions, but at least they're annoying in their own individual ways. Like the pompous guy in the shoe store, for example, who has become a running joke ever since I was trying on some Chacos and my feet are skinny so the straps were too long and dragged on the ground, and he said, "True Chaco enthusiasts, the ones who climb fourteeners, say that the strap dragging just won't make a difference. The soles are so rugged that you won't slip."

Ever since then, every time I have a problem with my Chacos (which I bought, by the way, from another store) it's, 'True Chaco enthusiasts don't mind when rocks get stuck in the rubber and scrape their feet!'... 'true Chaco enthusiasts know that the toe strap randomly tightening and cutting off circulation is just another wonderful feature that keeps your foot snug!'

I know that these positions are mind numbing and the way most people deal with that is to become robotic and detached. It must work for them, to just switch off their personality entirely and become an automaton until it's clock-out time. It's never worked for me. Even though I have to say the same thing into the phone approximately 20 times a day, I never say it the same way twice. It isn't a script. It's the answer to a question that some individual called up to ask, and they didn't call to ask the question to an automated answer machine. If you take the time to read the customer's mood, you can have a few laughs and make a temporary phone friend. I've done this. It makes the day brighter - it doesn't make it go longer - and it puts me in a better mood than chirping, 'Our service runs from 7AM to 10PM. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Thank you for calling the HOP and have a nice daaaay!'

Plus, I know most girls' voices aren't doll-like and squeaky naturally. No one sounds like that outside their job. But as soon as they put on their uniform, they become indistinguishable from one another. The salesgirl singsong. Almost as ubiquitous as the sorority girl smokers' rasp or the frat boy bellow, the tour group twitter or the ingratiating whine of an underling.

It's the sound of the absence of a person and the presence of a utility. Personhood has nothing to do with the goal of selling shirts, so it's phased out. I disagree with that conclusion, actually; for me personhood has a lot to do with the goal of selling. The most I've ever spent on clothes, and the happiest I've been in a clothes store, has been in a tall girls shop after having a friendly bitch-session with the two saleswomen about how clothing for women is woefully inadequately sized for anyone not between 5'3" and 5'7", and how clothing manufacturers seem to think that, say, '4' is a perfectly descriptive size tag for women, but men get to have their waist size and inseam size in inches and have a tag of, say, '32x34'. It had an effect on how much I spent, definitely. The products had to be good, obviously, but that conversation was the difference between one and two pairs of pants.

And being an automaton just contributes to this sprawling sense of automaton-ness you get when you spend a day out and about. Go to the coffeeshop and you'll find legions of people glued to laptops sipping drinks and ignoring each other, to the bank and you'll find a person behind the counter who has less personality than the ATMs, there solely to serve you, and it creates a strange sensation, reducing yourselves to 'one who wants to deposit money' and 'one who's there for the purpose of depositing your money'. Etc.

My local grocery store seems to be exempt from this, strangely enough. The woman behind the fish counter always shares her disapproval of the marinade I choose for my salmon, which I find funny. Someone's always ringing up something wrong or the scanner starts malfunctioning and the 'section leaders' know absolutely nothing about their section, to the point where the condiment guy didn't know what oyster sauce was, but I love it there and so does everyone in the neighborhood, because their food is great and organic and costs half as much as Whole Foods.
But me and my neighborhood must be the exception and everyone else must enjoy the automatons, because that's what businesses are choosing and so it must be turning profit. Maybe someone will need to explain that to me someday.

There's a fox who lives, or hunts, or both, in the area around my workplace. She's always emerging out of the tall grass that borders Goose Creek, or trotting out from under a tow truck in the city towing lot, her mouth full of fresh rabbit or mouse, and nearly making me wreck on my bike. Today she was on the bike path, following it, as if she were human. When the path turned, she turned; when it went under a bridge, she went under the bridge with it. Due to it being 6AM when I'm riding, and not wearing my contacts, at first glance I thought she was a human - maybe a super short human, but a human nonetheless - taking a morning jog on the wrong side of the bike path. My first reaction was actually to be annoyed that some idiot would be jogging on the left side.

The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.

We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.

Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.

Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.

Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.

And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.

I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.

Having lived in a studio apartment for a year, I fear I have become a complete psycho who is now unfit to cohabitate with any other living being. However, beginning in August, I will no longer be able to:

-use my dresser as a dirty clothes hamper and my floor as a closet
-hang resolutions (exercise-wise and otherwise) and notes to myself all over the walls
-perfect vocal tracks by singing the same 4 second line into the microphone at top volume over and over and over again for 3 hours
-flesh out article ideas in the shower by having a two-sided conversation with myself
-justify not being able to cook by protesting that I live in an efficiency and only have two burners and no oven
-justify not doing dishes by protesting that my sink is practically too small to fit my hands in, let alone days of dirty dishes
-ride out bad moods by hiding from everyone I know for a week
-watch America's Next Top Model at top volume... that's just too embarrassing
-walk around naked, of course

Most bullets on that list are invisible, because they are too embarrassing to list, just as they would be too embarrassing to perform in a house with another person, rendering this entry sort of pointless.

Re-reading some entries from that most grinding of times, winter (or should I say 'winter', since it was 95 degrees every day) of 2006, it occurs to me that I should supply some positive experiences that I remember from around then. To read the archives, one would think I spent all my time getting endlessly harassed by corrupt and pushy locals, eating MSG straight from the carton, bringing Pocari Sweat to Nick when he threw up, which was all the time, running out of drinking water, and wearing sweaty old moldy clothes.

This was not the case. Really. Despite what my past self is screaming at me to let you believe. She was angry at her bosses, homesick, hungry, hated half of her job, and had been hopelessly spoiled all her life up until that point. Boiling her drinking water, eating the same thing two days in a row, having to walk up the road to get gas to use for the stove, hand-washing clothes at the outdoor faucet - these things all deeply disturbed her, though she hated to admit that it was as simple as that (as simple as being that lazy). Instead, she struggled to find an elaborate on everything that bothered her about Jayapura, and that's what came out in this journal. Instead of this:

One day, it may have actually been the first time, Nick and I decided to bike over to Skow Sae, a beach about an hour and a half away by motorcycle (the same place I was coming from when I accidentally felt up my fellow English teacher). Skow Sae was the only beach we ever found that resembled the beaches here - sand bottom, a slow deepening, a white, clean beach, and waves fit for bodysurfing. Every other beach, most especially the ones in the city, were covered in coral, sea urchins, rocks, etc, and had tiny, steeply sloping, often rocky beaches. They were impossible to swim in without heavy duty shoes on and an alert mind, ever ready for an urchin to shoot you in the finger with one of its spines.

But Skow Sae was perfect. The Australian teachers all compared it to the famous beaches of the Australian east coast. And bordering the beach was a little Papuan village with a dirt road running through it, full of ever-cackling chickens, half-wild dogs, and flowers bursting out of every jungle corridor. We always parked our bike at the end of the road, where the road turned into a carefully crafted soccer field next to a little house.

This day was especially hot and mercilessly sunny, and there was no shade to park our bike in, so we parked it in the usual place and walked over to the beach. I don't remember which visit this was - could have been the one where I unwittingly demonstrated my box of pastels to a group of staring women and children, or the one where Nick tried to surf on various pieces of driftwood, or the one where we spent three hours trying to open a coconut that had just fallen from a tree, finally got it, and spent the most blissful time gulping down the milk and chewing on the meat, or perhaps even the one where we went on a walk through the jungle at the end of the beach and saw all kinds of terrifying spiders. But the worry was always in the back of our minds that when we got back to our bike, the (black) seat was going to be hot as a frying pan and it would be a very uncomfortable ride back home that would unavoidably end in bright red asses.

When we eventually returned to our bike to make the trip back to Jayapura, we almost, for a panicky second, thought that our bike was gone, because there was nothing resembling it around the little house at the end of the road. But upon closer inspection, we saw what looked like a little cave made out of leaves sitting where our bike had been... and upon closer inspection, we saw our bike peeking out of both ends. Someone had built a banana leaf shelter to protect our bike from the heat!

We walked in circles around the structure, reluctant to tear it down to get our bike out. We looked around for the benevolent stranger so that we could thank him but saw nobody. It was almost the time that we had to get on our bike so we'd get home before dark, when a man stepped onto the porch of the little house and waved to us, then began lecturing us in very broken Indonesian about the dangers of leaving our bike in the sun! He waved his hands around and made sun-shining motions and burning motions clearly enough that there was no doubt he had made the shelter.

To thank him we shared some of our Whole Foods trail mix with him (so it must have been early in our trip, if we still had Whole Foods trail mix from home). He gingerly tried every individual item in the trail mix, acting as though any given piece might poison him any second. As I recall, he ate one cranberry, one raisin, one sesame stick, one seed, one peanut, and every single coconut-rolled date he could find. As soon as he bit into his first coconut rolled date (after much convincing; those things look exactly like pieces of human poo rolled in rocks) a huge smile spread across his face and he immediately thrust his hands inside the bag to find as many more of them as he could. I don't know if it was the coconut or what - it occurred to me only later that those were the only soft things in the trail mix, and he had pretty worn down teeth - but I was happy enough to give them up even though they were my favorite, too.

I just love the phrase, "What am I doing?" It's the simplest and least insane way to imply that you feel like you are more than one person, and the other half of you is disobeying somehow.

Most often, it comes out of someone driving, as they turn onto the wrong street. Or someone who absentminded lights a cigarette, having forgotten that they're supposed to have quit. Or out of someone who's had a nasty attack of nostalgia. Well, nostalgia's not right - that feeling when, well -

I worked at NightRide for two years. It was a service that drove students home (or, as it happened, from party to party to party to party...) after dark. I started in September of '04, right after I moved into a new place, and biked home using the same route every time, so as not to be surprised by anything unexpected at 2:00AM, when my shift ended.

One night, I clocked out, found my bike, and rode straight to a place I had lived in for just two months, two years ago. I tied my bike outside and was halfway to opening the back door when I realized what I was doing. "What I am doing?" I said, out loud, before the annoyance set in that now I had to ride four miles uphill to my real house.

That feeling. It's not nostalgia, because I wasn't longing for or feeling the presence of my old home. I just ended up there accidentally. And it wasn't out of habit, because I had never made that particular ride before. It wasn't even exhaustion making my actions random... I had my 2AM burst of post-work energy.

So what's that feeling called, Wikipedia? Huh? That feeling when your body does something without your brain's approval? Where your brain is on, it's alert, but distracted, maybe, and your body goes and does completely way unexpected and inexplicable? You don't feel like two people, not quite, but you do sort of wonder what's driving the body, if you're not driving it. You're split, sort of, and you keep your brain focused for the next few days, worrying that if you don't, your body might decide to buy a plane ticket and fly to another country. Before you know it you'll wake up in a hostel in Estonia and say, with conviction this time, 'WHAT AM I DOING?'

And another:

Nick and I had just come back from our trip to Biak. Funny - I was just reading my archives and realized I said almost nothing about Biak itself, only truncated bullet points that said basically squat. Let me be very late in telling you: our trip was crazy. The snorkeling trip was insane; we were half-mad from hunger and there was a storm on our way back which threatened to overturn our speedboat multiple times and flooded us so severely that two people were bailing water out nonstop for the entire two-hour trip. As for the fireworks, we both were still recovering from food poisoning at the time, but tried to eat goat satay anyway, for the celebratory feeling and all. It did not work. Nick locked me in our hotel room by accident when he went out to see the fireworks, and by the time he realized what he'd done and came back, I was beyond consoling. So what do you do when you're that worked up? You step outside, dodge bottle rockets, hope your head doesn't get shot off by fireworks gone askew, and offer your uneaten goat satay to fellow firework-dodgers (although no one else but us was actually dodging. They all had an admirable stoicness [stoicity? nah..] about them that suggested that whether or not a firecracker decapitated them was God's business and God's business alone). Surprisingly enough, someone took the satay.

Anyway, we arrived at the Sentani Airport from Biak and had a hell of a time getting on the right taxis, so our trip back home took way longer than it should have - longer than the plane flight itself, actually. By the time we got downtown, we were starving and Nick in particular was in a terrible mood. We got out of the taxi at Gelael, the indoor market, and it was mostly deserted, in fitting with the Indonesian habit of taking off not only the main holiday (New Years) but a few days surrounding it as well. The mostly ancient Papuan women who set up their vegetables in neat rows on blankets in the parking lot weren't there, except for one who sat hopefully gesturing at her three scraggly carrots and pile of shaved cassava.

She was either gesturing for our benefit or for the benefit of an extremely drunk and weaving Indonesian guy who was mumbling and tossing firecrackers at random into the street. We were the only people in the lot. Nick and I, lugging our suitcases and our bad moods and our empty stomachs, were headed towards the main entrance of Gelael when the drunk guy suddenly appeared in front of us and tossed a firecracker right at my foot. It (ear-splittingly) exploded about an inch away.

For some reason, this incensed Nick to a degree I've never seen in him before or since. His anger provoked the oddest series of responses - he was so angry he had no idea where to vent it. After twitching and shaking for a a fraction of a second, he eventually lunged at the man, shouting in a mongrel Indo-glish about how screwed up it was to throw fireworks at people. And he slapped the man's hand. Slapped it! His hand! More than once! For a few seconds, I thought Nick was going to chase him around the parking lot, slapping his hand and lecturing him on firework etiquette, and actually he sort of did, but he was thrown off his rampage a little by the man's outpouring of heartfelt apologies in his own version of Indo-glish. Nick backed up, refused to accept any apologies, and kept backing up until he was inside Gelael. Once inside, he yelled a little bit more while peeking out from behind the door, as if Gelael was some sort of passcoded labyrinth that only bules could enter. And sure enough, the drunk guy, for some reason, acted the same way. As we turned and began to do our shopping (me incredulously questioning Nick about what had gotten into him, him still to angry to answer) the drunk guy pressed up against the window shouting his apologies ever louder, but would not set one foot inside.

Here's a story from Indonesia that never made it into this blog. (Lots of stories didn't, actually, because of the chronic electrical outages, my bouts of apathy where I felt like writing down absolutely nothing in hopes that it would all go away, etc.)

This one didn't make it because it comes across heavy and sad no matter how I rewrite and rewrite it. It's the story of my last day spent there, a day mostly spent alone while Nick spent the afternoon in the air en route to Jakarta.

Our mornings were always chaotic and it would have been odd if our last one hadn't been. Six months of waking up entangled in the mosquito net, green mesh monsterifying our hands and faces... or being bolted from sleep by karaoke Michael Jackson blasting through our floor, complete with soft Indonesian vowels and inflections that suggest the singer has no idea of the meaning of the words... or having our ears buzzed in by mouse-sized, flying cockroaches. It would have been crazy and somehow wrong if our last morning had been spent lying quietly in bed, eating jackfruit, rambutan, mango, and papaya salad and listening to the twittering of tropical birds.

Knowing all of that, though, didn't make it any easier when we slept through the dying-battery alarm beep of my iPod and I ended up having exactly 8 minutes to say goodbye to Nick as he threw on his clothes and shoved things haphazardly in his duffel bag, all to the tune of the frantic honking of the taxi in the driveway.

With my body inexplicably barricading the door, I watched him put his clothes on. I watched the cloth settle and each button snap into place. When he had finished, he grabbed his duffel bag and, in the same motion, turned to leave. He actually walked into me, he was so determined to keep moving. My big toe under his big toe, we stared at each other for a collection of the most awkward moments that maybe we’d ever shared

We didn't know how to say goodbye to each other. There was at once everything and nothing to say, and maybe the 8 minutes made it easier, so we didn't have time to fumble and make it worse. The problem was that we went radically opposite ways. While he chose the pretend-it's-not-a-big-deal-and-do-it-quick method, I couldn't let go of him once I hugged him, even though I'd spent the last six months hating him. And when he finally peeled me off and went downstairs to say the rest of his goodbyes, I kept thinking, no one but me is appreciating the rough canvassy feel of his shirt or the way his wrists poke out awkwardly from the too-short sleeves. They don't see that one of his eyes is heavily lidded and drifts towards other things as the other eye fixes on you, squinty, focused, and bright. They don't deserve to be the last people to touch him. They don’t deserve to be the last people to hug him.

They were the last people to see him, though, because I didn't watch him get in the taxi. I turned before the front door had even closed and walked blindly back up the stairs to our room, where I sat in his empty closet for I still don't know how long, but it was long enough that I got hungry for breakfast, which eventually morphed into the kind of hunger that's been around so long that the thought of food is slightly nauseating.

It is strange both to write this and to remember it, because I rarely make dramatic, storybook-like gestures like that automatically. When I was a kid I could never throw a good tantrum because I would start thinking of all the times in books and movies kids lay on the floor throwing tantrums, and I'd worry about being a conformist. And whenever something dramatic happens, like I find myself suddenly in love, I'm only in that euphoric mindspace for a moment before I start wondering how many times I've read a book where someone falls in some kind of terrible false love that comes back and bites them in the ass.

That kind of meta-awareness and self-consciousness only serves to thrust me far from the present moment, which is exactly the opposite of what I wish would happen. But it stands; I can't be dramatic without thinking about how dramatic I'm being.

This particular time, though, I fell more into the present than I think I ever have. I didn't think about how absurd and overdone it was that I would actually sit in my now ex-boyfriend's empty closet and cry and ignore the leg cramps and hunger pains and the slowly growing dehydration headache and cry and cry. I had not one thought about how it was so teenage novellish of me to do so, not until the end, hours and hours later, when I finally thought, 'Look at me, sitting in this closet... just look at me... LOOK AT ME' in a rage and forced myself out with thoughts of how embarrassing it would be to think back on later.

The other teachers took me out to Black Sands beach later that day. Our motorcycle was already sold, so we took a taxi there and back, and I didn't even stop to think about how much it would cost to have the driver detour us all the way to the village. I had extra trouble with the slippery red sand by the first cliff, and fell more often in the trees on the way down, and was colder, less tired, less cautious and generally in a daze. We saw my favorite village girl, Naomi, (who often dammed up the creek with us and whirlpooled in it with us, even though it was obvious she found it strange and pointless) and I hardly even spoke to her. I smiled for lots of 'last day' pictures and in all of them, I look very bubbly. Nothing looks amiss in my face. To everyone else, I probably looked not one mark off of normal, even though mostly I felt like I was half-dreaming, half-dreading my flight the next day

A companion will not be able to save you if you slip in the red dirt of a path and tumble to your death on the cliffs and the waves below. In fact, he'll mock you by being able to do it perfectly himself. He won't make it any easier to ride your bike without crashing it; in fact, he'll throw it off balance by shifting on the back. He will not be of any help when you're being hassled for money; in fact, he's always the one that whips your wallet out for all to see and pays the fake tariffs ('sitting-on-the-beach tax', 'picking-up-a-package-tax', etc). He will always want to stay home when you want to go out, and vice versa.

He will not make any difference if your plane crashes, or if it's delayed to the point that you miss your connecting one. He won't make it any less embarrassing when your anxiety leads you to have to pee every 20 minutes and have to wake up the guy on the aisle seat to clamber over him every time you do it. And he won't make it any more comfortable to sleep in a 3x3 square box as you are jostled and tumbled around in a storm over Vancouver.

But all these things aside, and the fact that we fought all the time aside, that last day was enough to make me realize that this experience would have been another animal entirely if I had done it alone.

It has come time to share the three most awkward/embarrassing moments/periods of my life with the world. Why? Because I have no other inspirations for articles/entries/random babblings besides (choose one) A) How service people in Indonesia were still just as automatonish as here, if not more, and how surprising and disappointing that was, given I thought that was limited to the so-called First World, B) The trials and tribulations of trying to be a restaurant critic when my teeth keep falling apart and sending me excruciating pain signals whenever I try to eat anything crunchier than yogurt, or C) an impassioned plea for an a cappella group that needs an alto. These will come later! Right now I feel like debasing myself in front of my audience of millions... I mean three.

3. Number three just has to be a collection, an eye-covering, wildly blushing overview of how I handled crushes, relationships, and men in general in middle and high school. I obviously had not emotionally matured enough to even consider having a boyfriend, but at the time, of course, I considered myself an accomplished woman of substance and remarkable composure. To wit:

a) Boy in my 7th grade cooking class who I otherwise did not know at all: I wrote secret heart-shaped notes and proclamations of undying love that I would drop through his locker grates, or (I cannot believe that I was EVER this stupid) gave to my best friend to give to him. (My best friend and I were inseparable, and went everywhere together, so much so that many people from middle school believe to this day that we were a lesbian couple that came out really early.) Hmm, if she gives him a secret valentine, I wonder who it could possibly be from?? Anyway, despite this, I chose to believe he would never find out it was me, and when one of my friends/worst enemies (you know how those tend to exist in middle school) walked up to him one day and spilled the beans, I was speechless and unprepared for anything except staring down at my hands folded on my desk as he waved my valentines angrily around my head and demanded answers.

b) Hot drummer in marching band: I picnicked outside his house with my best friend even though there was no park there, hoping he would emerge; went in early to school to listen to him practice the marimba (mulled around the percussion room in what I thought was an eminently subtle way; it obviously wasn't); talked about other boys in front of him hoping he would hear and realized what a woman of experience I was, pretended to fall accidentally into the pool on our trip to Disneyworld so he would come to my rescue, etc. What is the notable missing link in this list? That's right, actually asking him out. Once, it must have gotten so obvious that he dragged me into the sheet music closet to question me about my crushes. Even when confronted so directly, I chose to evade the obvious answer and made up stories about some guy in my history class.

c) Guy I liked who kept dating everyone in our group of friends except me: this is a short one; I pretended I hated all his good qualities while simultaneously clinging to him and when he didn't want me to call every night I held a grudge against him for a year.

d) This one I found threatening suicide in the back room at a party. I thought that comforting him and making out with him would be essentially the same thing and serve essentially the same purpose. This resulted in a week-long relationship that ended after I discovered that every date would be spent watching anime and moaning about his ex-girlfriend.

e) Guy who I dated for a month or two even though I knew I wasn't attracted to him: I pretended I was attracted to him right up until the end and then dumped him right before his prom. This was actually an accident. I didn't think of it that way at the time. Then I got all stroppy because he didn't want to go to prom as friends. What an asshole, right?

f) This last one is actually only embarrassing because I'm choosing to share it, which makes it decidedly odd of me to want to. At the time, no one witnessed the awkwardness and because of that, I didn't realize that it was awkward. I thought that it made me cool and mature, with a sophisticated secret. It didn't, as you shall see.

I was about sixteen, old enough to know better, and in some sort of AOL chat room when some college guy from Northwestern University started IMing me. We somehow got onto the topic of crazy things that we had done, and the tone started subtly changing to challenging. "If you're so crazy," he said, or something, "why don't you prove it?"

"How would I prove something that like that?" I asked, stupidly not saying something like "and why do I have to prove anything to you?"

"By meeting me," he said. "Come over and meet me right now. I live at the corner of blah blah blah street and blah blah et cetera. Most girls wouldn't just meet a strange guy off the internet. If you do, I'll believe you're really crazy."

What did I do? I did it. Writing those three words embarrasses me beyond belief. I can't imagine my mindset at the time that craved acceptance from some creep I didn't know. But I went over there - he lived in a frat house - and he led me like some kind of serial killer down the back hallways - I could hear the other frat brothers shooting pool on the other side of the thin walls - to his room, where luckily the first thing he did was call me a frigid, scared bitch when I wouldn't reach under his scuzzy blanket and feel his penis. Even whatever mindset I was in at the time didn't prevent me from indignantly stomping out and slamming the door on his feeble 'how about a hug?' It should have also not prevented me from slapping him, screaming, reporting him for pedophilia, etc., but, unfortunately, it did. Fortunately, he was sluggish and vaguely apathetic and didn't bother chasing me. I went down the front stairs and the brothers playing pool saw me, but didn't blink an eye, not even a collective eye.

2. At a slightly more appropriage age to be doing stupid things (four) I was at a diner with my parents and a couple of friends of theirs. I remember there being two player pinball machines and arcade games everywhere around, but none of the adults would play them with me. Thus, I was bored, and also inherently a very naughty child. Not the kind of naughty that screamed and cried and threw things and beat up other children, but the kind that plotted and schemed and always found a way to get what it wanted without appearing the least bit naughty.

In fitting with that, I thought up something provocative to say that would create drama. I knew it had to be something that could be attributed to childlike innocence and wouldn't get me in trouble. So in the middle of one of my mom's sentences, I looked up and announced to the table, "I WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT!"

My parents' friends were both fairly fat people, with 'fairly' being a nice and totally inaccurate adjective. They were, in actuality, both really fat.

My mom grabbed my arm and half hissed, half laughed (she hadn't decided whether to let her anger out or pretend it was a light admonishing) "We don't say things like that to people!"

"Why?" I responded sweetly - calculated sweetly enough to push her over the edge.

"BECAUSE WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT? YOU DON'T WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT? THAT MAKES NO SENSE!"

So inadvertently my mom had let her anti-fat prejudice show in front of her fat friends and she has probably never forgotten it, to the point that when I bring it up to her she insists that it never happened.

I guess that's more of an embarrassing moment for my mom than for me. But I'll let it stand.

1. This one was only about a year and a half ago. I was in Indonesia, teaching one of the newer teachers how to ride our motorcycle. I never quite forgot that, when Nick and I were learning, we'd done crazy, stupid things that should have killed us, but for some reason didn't. Like once when I was driving on a gravel road I swerved to avoid a lizard - A LIZARD! - and of course skidded out on the gravel and dumped me, Nick, and the motorcycle right into the sand at the edge of the beach. Or the time Nick was driving into downtown and was tailgating a truck. The truck stopped suddenly at a traffic circle. Nick pulled desperately on the clutch, screamed 'the BRAKE ISN'T WORKING!!' and plowed into the back of the truck. (Left handle: clutch. Right handle: brake. Not the same thing.)

Anyway, I remembered all this when I was teaching the new teacher to ride, and was jittery and uncertain when after only about a half hour she said that she felt okay driving on the main road home from Skow Sae (a beach about an hour and a half away), but I climbed on the back anyway and let her go for it. On one of the first deep turns on the road, she didn't lean enough and went driving straight over the shoulder, bouncing but in remarkable control, into a field of tall, waving grass. I screamed and unstinctively clutched her right where I always clutched Nick when he did something scary. Around the chest. On Nick, that was totally appropriate because a) he was my boyfriend and b) he was male. On her, however, when ended up happening was that I squished her breasts over and over with my wildly panicking and grabbing hands.

We did not die - we didn't even tip over. She just rode through the grass and out the other side. I had just completely and inappropriately overreacted, and now I had accidentally felt her up. We eventually switched places and I spent the entire ride back awkwardly trying to explain myself and trying to look back and gauge her facial expressions without losing my balance and driving us off a cliff.

In case you were wondering, here is the complete list of human emotions as listed by Wikipedia:

Acceptance · Affection · Alertness · Ambivalence · Anger · Angst · Annoyance · Anticipation · Anxiety · Apathy · Awe · Resentment · Boredom · Calmness · Compassion · Contempt · Contentment · Confusion · Curiosity · Desire · Depression · Disappointment · Disgust · Doubt · Ecstasy · Embarrassment · Empathy · Emptiness · Enthusiasm · Envy · Epiphany · Euphoria · Fanaticism · Fear · Frustration · Gratification · Gratitude · Grief · Guilt · Happiness · Hatred · Homesickness · Hope · Hopelessness · Horror · Hostility · Humiliation · Hysteria · Interest · Inspiration · Jealousy · Kindness · Limerence · Loneliness · Love · Lust · Melancholia · Panic · Patience · Pity · Pride · Rage · Regret · Remorse · Repentance · Righteous indignation · Sadness · Schadenfreude · Self-pity · Shame · Shyness · Sympathy · Suffering · Surprise · Wonder · Worry

I've been sitting here at my desk trying to think of an emotion they've missed (as if the millions of people who obsessively check Wikipedia for mistakes haven't already covered that) and of course, it's difficult. I've only come up with synonyms or approximations, which makes me feel strangely reduced. Malaise... boredom. Joy... happiness. That odd and silly feeling teenage girls get for a pop star they've never met (okay, the feeling I got for Taylor Hanson in middle school... okay, high school)... limerence. (Also embarrassment.) Everything I've ever felt is neatly covered in that 3x10" box. Wonderful. (Self-pity.)

I use the term 'strangely reduced' in not necessarily a negative way, if that's possible. (Emptiness, doubt.) How can we have the right to feel that what we feel is unique, if they've been experienced by everyone else well enough to sum it all up in a Wikipedia category footer? (Angst.) But of course it's wonderful in a way. Within that snug, straightforward list are the tools that should be sufficient to feel empathy for everyone else on the globe. (Wonder, inspiration.) Instead, we put up walls between us that in effect make the enemy inhuman and incapable of feeling the same emotions we do. (Apathy. [Hey, where's denial?])

Scrolling through their links, though, I find that some of these emotions require pages and pages of descriptive prose, examples, footnotes, links, controversy, and thousands of edits to describe themselves properly (hope). If something so simple as a single emotion, by itself, unmarred by other, often inappropriate emotions mixing in, can merit so much thought, then the complex mixing of emotions that often accompany the simplest things must make up an entirely personal soup of an experience. (Euphoria.)

If the fractions of emotions are so carefully measured as to be proprietary, then statistically it is unlikely two people will ever meet who have felt exactly the same way. (Loneliness.) And when a person does find another person whom they connect with in a statistically improbable way, they may call it (Love). And what a sciency, dull way to define love. What a thing to ruminate on, these columns and rows that claim to define human experience. (Emptiness, depression.)

And yet, what a thing to take so seriously and drily! Take this excerpt from the page for 'envy':

The book of Exodus (20:17) states: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house; neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his."

Perhaps today the donkey (ass) corresponds to a car, but it could represent anything desirable owned by another. The donkey cannot be readily stolen as it would be obvious.

That's why I'm not supposed to be envious of my neighbor's donkey? Because it would be obvious if I stole it? Ohhh.

Maybe the only word we're missing is a word for the sense of belonging to a global human community, even if that community is made up of people whose experiences can be reduced to 76 definitive entries in a community-contributed encyclopedia. (Premature epiphany?)

We Spent Our Childhoods Being Told

We spent our childhoods being told by books and by movies and by cartoons that if we were just good enough, true of heart enough, curious and eager enough, bright-eyed enough – everything that children in storybooks are and everything that’s overlooked in real children – we would stumble across lands populated entirely by talking animals, discover underground caves full of treasure, have our cuts and bruises healed by magicians, fly through the air on the back of softly scaled dragons, and maybe, just maybe, become the ruler or leader of a land full of tiny thankful creatures; elves, maybe, or gnomes.

We tried to be true of heart, and curious, and eager, and all those things; we looked in the unlikeliest of places, hoping for magic. Mysterious doors set in the sides of buildings without porches – only invisible flying people must use these! Rabbit-sized holes in the sand at the city beach – must be sandcrabs who’ve eaten growth powder! Dog-shaped clouds – some very tall giant must be up there shaping them!

And as for the good enough part, and the true of heart part – we even did these, though more grudgingly, and certainly in private. No kid wants another kid to see him being a goody-goody, so I don’t know what anyone else did, but I would go outside after rainstorms and move the worms from the sidewalk so they wouldn’t dry out in the sun. It must have been years before the inkling slipped from my head that someday, while I was sleeping, the Worm King (complete with crown) would appear on my bed, awaken me, and proclaim me savior of WormLand. I would travel down into the dirt with the Worm King and pass vast chambers of bowing worms on my way to the throne they’d been saving just for me.

Then I would be shown a feast of feasts – a sumptuous, mind-boggling feast of foods never before seen by man (but somehow suitable for his digestive system) and let alone to sleep the rest of the night on a mattress made from layers and layers of the finest silkworm’s silk.

What did I get, though? What did we all get? Silk mattresses from the worm king? Dragon rides over the South Pacific? A gift of our very own invisible wings? Sumptuous feasts and cross-species storytelling?

No. We got adulthood. We got our parents telling us there was no Santa Claus once we were deemed too old for him. We got our stuffed animals being stuffed into plastic bags and given to the Salvation Army. And being true of heart, being eager, being curious, suddenly became being idle, being lazy, wasting time. Digging holes in the sand to find sandcrabs just wasn’t cute anymore, and it wasn’t tolerated until we had finished our math homework.

What kind of child-rearing philosophy is this, anyway? Whose idea was it to use magical creatures and stories as bait to create good, giving, open-hearted children, and then whisk them away and hope that the goodness would remain on its own? Did no one think bitterness and disillusionment would go along with the whisking away? That they would blame the world for misrepresenting itself? Did no one wonder how the children would feel as thirty-year-olds when they went to a beach and realized there was no reason to dig down into the sand? These thirty-year-olds will drink instead; down their piña coladas and doze and try to tan and think about swimming but only that, think, because there’s so many reasons not to, you know? Wet hair, wet clothes, sand sticking wetly to skin, and then sandy clothes. You’d have to take a shower or something. Too much trouble.

No, I get the original idea. I understand the motivation and I can understand how whoever thought it up thought it would go. As our minds matured, we were supposed to transfer our imaginations into something more honed and practical. We were supposed to appreciate the value of ordinary things without sticking long, trailing tale tails on them. They expected us to think: ‘I wonder what made that burrow under the roots of that tree. Hey! I should become a naturalist!’ Or, ‘That door that’s half-underground sure is bizarre… hey, I should become an architect and find out why anyone would build such a thing!’ Our thoughts were supposed to start gravitating towards what we will spend our practical adult life doing. They were not supposed to continue in the ‘perhaps that large burrow leads to an underground kingdom or a parallel universe’ vein.

The jump, though, seemed jarring to us. There’s nowhere that feels right for the sudden jump to straight logic and no lingering doubts. When I was fourteen I still winced at handling my stuffed animals in such a way that, were they alive, would kill them. I didn’t drop them on their heads, I didn’t throw them, I didn’t stuff them into suitcases, and I didn’t roll over on them in my sleep. I didn’t launder them or allow anyone else to launder them. Sometimes I would try, because my adult’s mind was butting in, telling me that I should be able to do these things without cringing, but my hands, my body, wouldn’t obey. There was still an off chance in my heart that they were alive and they were begging me mutely, like a pet, to take care of them and not to hurt them.

Even when we were children, eight or nine, we would have to psych ourselves up with a healthy dose of group insanity to be able to play the game where we toss our dolls into a moving ceiling fan to see where they’d be flung. And afterwards, we would all be depressed, preoccupied. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was waiting for them to leave so I could apologize to my dolls.

I miss having that now, that intense unconditional respect for helpless creatures or invisible kings. I miss it being revered as a quality and I think it still should. We’re not really supposed to have respect for anything intangible, with the notable exception of God. It’s not frowned upon, exactly, but it’s seen as kooky and a little bit stupid to be superstitious or to expect to find unknown magic everywhere we look.

To have respect for people and things, not in spite of, but because of the fact that we have absolute power over them – this fades in adulthood, and must be engineered to fade in adulthood. If it didn’t, where would we find our slaughterhouse workers? How would we make our engineers designing oil lines to slash through old-growth forests?

We wouldn’t. The slaughterhouse workers would secretly pardon animals whenever they could; pigs and cows would constantly be found running free in nearby forests. They might only do it because they thought the pigs and cows might come back with their friends and provide them with lifelong meat and milk, but they would still do it, because that’s what happens in fairy tales: save someone’s life and they’ll reward you handsomely. Whether that someone is an animal or a human or even an inanimate object, you will be rewarded.

The engineers assigned to the pipeline task would see agonized faces on all the trees, all the animals fleeing their habitat, and they would up and quit, only to be scarcely seen from then on. Well, of course! They’d have a cozy mansion sky-high in the highest branches of the redwoods and millions of sparrow and squirrel friends to cater to their every need.

And, tell me, what good would that do society?

Boulder's Boulders

During this last impromptu Weekend ‘o’ Fitness (Flagstaff Mountain and a 23 mile bike ride in the same weekend! Sorry, feet! Sorry, legs! I hope you regain feeling soon) Dan and I came upon a strange phenomenon: tourists. We had just started our descent down Flagstaff Mountain, and had come to the first portion where the trail intersects with the road. A car with Colorado plates pulled up to us, and inside were two people, a man and a woman, that looked almost precisely like the stereotype of Boulderites: the man was all slender muscle and khakis, and the woman was casually dressed with messed-up hair, but with perfectly plucked eyebrows and expensive sunglasses. So we were not expecting what came out when they opened their mouths.

“Hi! We were wondering how to get to some good boulders.”

Now, the Front Range of the Rockies is hardly anything BUT boulders. We were, at that moment, standing in front of a bunch of boulders; down the canyon, clearly visible from the car, was the back of the first Flatiron, Saddle Rock, and, maybe two minutes by car away, Crown Rock, a major bouldering destination. Boulders were literally everywhere.

Confused, I asked, “So you want to go bouldering?”

Their faces turned to the edges of panic. “No! No! Not… go…bouldering… what’s bouldering?”

Dan had to explain to them what bouldering was, only he inadvertently made it sound easy. Something like, “well, it’s like climbing, but you don’t need any rope or anything and the rocks are only about ten feet high.”

“Oh, wow, that sounds fun!” exclaimed the man. “Wouldn’t you like to go bouldering, honey?”

At which the woman exclaimed, “No!”

Now everybody was confused; if they didn’t want to go bouldering or even know what it was, then what kind of boulders were they looking for and why were they not seeing the boulders surrounding them at every turn?

I directed them down the road about a mile to Crown Rock, but as we came down the trail, I saw their car shoot right by it, as if Crown Rock weren’t a GIANT, OBVIOUS OUTCROPPING OF ROCKS WITH BOULDERING CHALK ALL OVER THEM, FLANKED BY A PARKING LOT THAT SAYS ‘CROWN ROCK’ ON IT. At the bottom of the road I wouldn’t be surprised if they also flew past Gregory Canyon (walls made of beautiful striated rock) or the Flatirons (huge park with jillions of hiking trails flanked by rocks leading to the most famous giant rocks in town) or, if they turned north, Red Rocks (tall spires of red boulders randomly shooting out of the top of a hill) and the Hogback Ridge (boulders that form spines on a mountain ridge like the hair-raising of threatened pigs).

Perhaps tourists are told that the boulders in Boulder are made from gold, or that they emit a soothing glow, or that they are bluish green in color, or that in some other way they look like no other boulders on earth.

There's really no correct answer to the question, "What do you want to do with your life?" but an especially super-un-correct answer is "I don't know." Actually, there are a lot of questions that I think up on walks, and in the shower, and as I'm falling asleep, were I to take the time to answer them, for which my answer would probably be wrong.

Why do I choose to take buses instead of walking or biking when experience clearly shows that I am exhilarated by exercise? Why do I have this perverse need to get to where I am going faster, only to have that perverse need clash with my perverse fear of too much free time? What is this rushing around only to languish at home wishing I was still outside? What makes me spend my days inside surfing the internet for useless information when experience clearly shows that this gives me a headache and makes me depressed? It's not like heroin; it isn't even that fun while I'm doing it. I'm not euphoric, high-energy and babbling to anyone about how excited I am, and I'm not slumped in a narcotic daze of perfection; what I am is hunched, tense, and slightly spellbound, but only slightly, at things that will not matter in the next second. Yet I will submit myself to this every day at the cost of the headache, and the depression, and, long-term, the complete waste of life it will make up, viewed as a whole. This is a question I would almost like to go into neurology just to be able to answer. Why we would evolve to have our base instincts be so dead, dead wrong.

Our instinct is to eat fatty, empty-calorie food, and it eventually kills us. Why? Well, I know the answer to that one. We haven't evolved past the human - nay, animal - drive to gorge, to stockpile, to be prepared for famine. I guess the question we don't know the answer to is, is is even possible to evolve past that.

Historically, the reason we have evolved to avoid certain things, or to embrace certain things, or to behave certain ways, is to make it at least past reproductive age, and to have greater reproductive success. We avoid poisonous food because it immediately kills us. And, to simplify this criminally, we perform certain social behaviors because it makes us more likely to reproduce. But our diseases now - depression, heart disease, diabetes - they don't kill us until we're old. They let us reproduce, before we feel the effects, and then they kill us, past the point where evolution has any hope of intervening. Sure, certain acute stress related things that result from severe, severe stressors can keep a young kid from making it, or at least from being fertile. But merely sitting around being lazy, unhealthy, depressed, and unproductive isn't making the human race any less prolific.

And on that note (being questions with no correct answer), why do bookstores make me so sad?

That's where I just came from. A Barnes and Noble, which, for some reason that may be worth noting later, makes me way sadder than libraries. I go to bookstores mostly when I'm in a wandering mode, and thumb through every section. It takes me hours. And I get sadder and sadder until I'm thisclose to crying and I have to leave because it's not socially acceptable to cry in a Barnes and Noble. One day I should just do it. Then I could write about it. Because the secret to happiness appears to be to do something unconventional and then write about it and happily be lauded as the expert on whatever unconventional thing it was that you did.
The only thing I'm an expert on is uncertainty. I guess I'm an expert at observation too. I can observe the hell out of anything. I can write about a girl eating and have her fork's journey to her mouth take paragraphs and paragraphs, mostly consisting of tangents.

But I am a record-speed-reader and a record-speed-forgetter. I estimate that in my life I have read about five thousand books. I have read, and been briefly fascinated by, completely obscure things that I immediately forget. The trajectory of asteroids. What scientists predict will happen when the volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts. Multiverses and how they would be stacked together in spacetime. How an aye-aye makes an omelet out of his dinner of bird eggs. The history of lesbian relationshops in feudal China. Do I remember any of these things? No. Do I wholeheartedly regret that I don't? Emphatically yes.

I would love to be a walking encyclopaedia. Going back to the beginning, my most accurate answer to the 'what do you want to do with your life' question would be, 'I would like to travel wherever my fancy takes me and keenly observe and record everything that I see.' And since I am a member of this culture, I of course cannot be satisfied with simply observation and recording; I must draw conclusions! I must come up with hypotheses and test them through stringent and rigidly controlled experiments! Having come up with a conclusion, I must now relate it somehow to the vast moving living library of human knowledge, find a niche for it, tuck it in there, hold it up somehow as a way for improving the human race.

And if I am to do that, the more things I can pull out of that squishy, lunging library to relate my observations to, the better.

Of course, for me, that isn't the real reason, or at least not the only reason. The primary thing, for me, is that it's fucking fun to know things. It is eminently enjoyable to sit back and let ideas and knowledge flood your synapses, even - especially - if the knowledge isn't originally your own. It's less tiring if it isn't. You get to bask in some stranger's knowledge, their epiphanies, without having to lift a finger or a synapse to do all the work that led to it.

That's why bookstores make me sad. I don't have time to know all this stuff. I don't have time to sit down and become acquainted with it all, and even if I did, the second I put the first book down to pick up the second, I'd forget the first. And even if I did remember everything I read, by the time I put down the last book I'd be an old woman, ready to die, without having fulfilled the crazy social pressure to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING! I would have just spent my life sitting around reading about everyone else's accomplishments, and that would be all the time I was given.

I've forgotten already all the names of the books that I grabbed for hungrily, only to stuff back on the shelf in my thirst for another one. I don't carry a notebook with me even though I keep telling myself I should. Instincts again. Wrong again. It is not easy to do the 'right' things. I don't have an answer for the questions that I ask myself because it is not easy to answer them.

I was about three or four and in a group music lesson. We were taking a five minute break and another kid caught me in the corner picking my nose and sampling the contents. Between her 'EWWW!!!' (she was about nine - I was the youngest kid there by a good four years) and her inevitable tattling on me to the teacher and all the other kids, I was able to convince her that my family came from Russia and in my family (and all over Russia, presumably) it was a ritual we did for good luck.

I discovered a new sensation walking to the bus stop this morning: thick snowflakes falling on sunburned skin.

It's a Midwestern rainy day in the desert. I've got a glove with a coat hanger twisted through the fingers making the 'rock on' sign in the corner, and a wasteland of chocolate wrappers surrounding me. I have a surprise birthday party coming up that, yes, I am supposed to know about, but not the details, and the details being a surprise is enough for me. I also have a surprise birthday dinner coming up that was wholly a surprise until I figured out the clues in a burst and rush of lucky guesses this morning.

It occurs to me that if this were a story, trying to 'illustrate' my happiness, to 'show and not tell' the details that made me that way, it would probably sound forced, but since it's real, and I'm not trying to write, and this is a fleeting feeling, it reads real, at least to me.

We, this stranger and I, were using the Scrabulous chatbox to chat to each other about rambutan and its availability in the United States versus its availability in Canada, which is of course the best possible use for a Scrabulous chatbox. I told him it was near-impossible to get them here unless it was June, and he assured me that the stores were crawling with them in Vancouver, that they were just as prolific there as pineapples or grapes. I was distracted by this beautiful spectre, plus had racks like either 'AUUNOII' or 'CCRZBVX' but never mixed together, so he was winning for most of the game, and was friendly as could be while he was doing so, even bordering on flirting, which skeezed me out a little but was innocuous enough if I just sidestepped it.

Until I started to win. As I got closer and closer to his score he got more and more stroppy. His compliments became sort of backhanded; his comments more guarded. And when I had just one tile left, and was leading by just fifteen points, he probably knew he was going to lose, and so typed 'wow so why do your turns take so long when it's obvious you're using a [Scrabble solver] program' and then left, only to return the next day to finish out his loss with only silence.

What a classy gentleman! I love playing games with those who think that if they don't win, the other person must be cheating. But there is a bigger issue at stake, and that is that the rambutan availability in Vancouver has been thrown into question. I can't trust the claims of someone who turns into a five year old at the first available opportunity! What if Vancouver ISN'T really a fruitful paradise spilling over with rambutan? What if it turns out it's just a cold, rainy, grey city with only oranges and apples to offer?

Every Tuesday I sort of wish it will snow so there won't be a softball game. This, after I spent all my time looking up a softball league that would have me after ten years of not playing at all. I wanted something that would get me into shape in a nonthreatening way (rugby, my last try two years ago, turned out to be a threatening way indeeed; the warmup mile run alone was too much to start with, and the fact that I was the lightest person there at 150 pounds was practically a guarantee that I would be in the hospital before the end of the season) and would shape my week a little bit, force me to compartmentalize my time.

But now I just wish it would snow. Snow or be warm. As much as I want to have something to do when I'm alone in my house, when I do have something to do, and it's stressful, I wish it were optional. Actually, it's probably simpler than that; softball, for me, means biking four or five miles down to the fields on the outskirts of town, and when the game's over and I'm exhausted, either biking back (all uphill) or going out to the main road and waiting a half hour for a bus - this all when it's at or around freezing and the wind is howling. For everyone else, they just have to jump in their cars, drive there, play, jump in their cars, drive back. Simple as that.

It's a sacrifice I make, not having a car, and I like to think it's for the good of the environment, so I can gloat, and not just because I don't have the money, which is probably much closer to the truth. I oscillate between liking it and not. Sometimes when I'm struggling against the wind with both handlebars wobbling with the weight of my groceries and it's starting to snow and cars are sweeping by me at close range and sometimes honking, I get frustrated and angry to the point where it's not even in line anymore with the situation. But later, thinking about it, I think, what do I not have that these people in their cars do?

I used to think nothing. I used to think I had nothing less, and that I was actually gaining something - exercise, and time spent outdoors. Things like that. I disagree with myself now. I'm definitely short on something these people have, and that's the freedom to just go out at a whim and have fun without getting weighed down with the consequences of when's the bus running, what are the intervals, how cold is it, will it snow, which way is the wind blowing, can I ride my bike into it, has someone stolen my bike light, how long will this take, will I be able to get any sleep tonight once I get home?

Because of all these questions running through my head, I often decide just not to go anywhere because it's too much trouble, and my life becomes more monotonous instead of more colorful. And yes, I realize that this is ridiculously whiny and specific about a problem that's not a problem at all, compared to the rest of the problems of the world, and yes, I realize that I could just not think about all those things and go anyway and deal with the consequences as they happen, but that's not who I am, and these are the consequences that riding a bike has, for me, and this is how it's been and now I go nowhere more often than I go somewhere. It makes me sad.

Since many of my 'injuries' over the course of my life have been faked, or at least exaggerated mightily, I discovered last week that I don't actually know how to respond when something is actually wrong with me. I'm not used to it. What I am used to is swallowing my malaria pill wrong, suffering throat and chest pain, and thinking 'oh my god I have bird flu/am having a heart attack/my lungs are collapsing... I better not talk or move or do anything except lay around whining, faintly and dramatically whisper out my last words, or secretly do Sudoku puzzles when no one is looking/is around to whine to'. What I am used to is ditching my crutches when no one is looking, because, man, my armpits hurt and I can actually walk on this thing. What I am used to is pinching my cheeks until I'm flushed and lidding my eyes... Mom, I can't go to school. It is an impossibility. Really - an impossibility.

But my only real injuries have been either when I was too young to remember much (broken finger, age 4, broken arm, age 5, my only real sprained ankle, age 12). So when I got a softball slammed into my leg straight from the bat during practice, I kept playing. I figured that even though it hurt like hell, it would probably be better if I played through it. I walked on it all week like nothing had happened. I played catch. I played pool. I played in a softball game. I played in two softball games. Three triples among them. Sprinting. All the while the bruise was getting worse, and blood, under my skin, was filling my foot. After the last run around the bases, my foot looked up at me, tears filling its eyes, and said 'No more.'

I thought I'd been subconsciously making up the pain, exaggerating it even to myself, making it out to be more than it was. I thought I could make up for my past by staunchly NOT acknowledging it, refusing coddling, refusing help.

Wrong. Now I'm on crutches for real. It sucks.

Is there anything that kills these squirming remnants of creativity quite like the blink-blink, blink-blink of tiny vertical line on a blank screen?

So nobody figured that one out, huh (or else nobody cared)? Those bolded words were Scrabble words. Scrabble words! I attempted to curb my addiction by making the threat to myself that if I chose to play Scrabble instead of doing something creative, then I would be forced to write a story using every single word on the finished gameboard. But instead of working for me, it worked against me; I played Scrabble anyway, and I ended up actually having to do it. Thus the wonderful, convoluted, cheesy story you see before you that morphed into disgust and reader challenges that no one took.

Anyway, I've been having apocalyptic nightmares lately, all right in a row, like some sort of sign - if I believed in signs. The string ended (hopefully; it might not actually be over since this one was just last night) with my stealing a bus from my job to go on a road trip, crashing it, worrying about how I was going to return it without anyone noticing, and then realizing it didn't matter because (a) I was awake and (b) the world would probably end before I got fired or reprimanded.

Notice that I had been having so many apocalyptic dreams lately that my being awake (and I was awake) didn't in any way dim the certainty that the world was going to end. I've just been taking that as a given in the mornings. Fireballs, nuclear war, asteroids, zombies taking over. All in a night's work.

When I entered her room, it was dark except for the weak flame of a mandarin candle burning by her bedside. The room smelled, unsurprisingly, like mandarin, but under that, something sour. "Pardon me," she yawned, "but I feel as though I've got a touch of the ague."

"The ague?" I asked. "God, it's been so long since I've heard anyone say that. So long that it was probably before I was born. I didn't think people got the ague anymore. I thought it was eradicated... whatever it is."

"Uh, I don't know," she mumbled as she turned over and half rose. "I just woke up. I was just talking. I was just using it as a general term for being sick. Like men is sometimes a generic term for humans, even though it doesn't mean the same thing at all."

"You're cute, jo." I smiled and walked over to her bedside. Her frocks were all crumpled up in a heap at the foot of her bed and spilling in a fat pile into her closet.

For some reason, that sight had me riveted. As my feet beg(a)n to drum unconsciously against the lines of her wooden floorboards, I started remembering fruit vendors in Mexico in their fancy dresses with beads of sweat rolling down their faces as they sold slices of flan and children freed themselves from the impossible folds. They never got their dresses dirty. Never. They were always as clean and shiny as the day they were made. Eons and eons of dirt falling on their dresses wouldn't have even smudged the fabric.

The thought made me want to jot something ridiculous on the dresses on the floor with a marker, like Greek letters - mu or xi or something - just to see if they would make a mark. But then, I knew, she would hate me.

As if to make up for the mere thought, I quickly mustered up an offer. "Would you like some rye toast with butter?" I asked. But she was asleep. I couldn't have given it to her if I had tried. She wouldn't have et it, anyway, with her stomach that ailed her. So I exit quietly.

The qi in the room was blocked from her illness, and the awkwardness that we had, and from my unkind thoughts, so I went back downstairs. The qats in the yard bent under the weight of the sun. They couldn't win, either; their future was rigged. They weren't meant to be in a yard in the hot, wet South. They were meant to be in the Middle East, just as the faux wats in yuppie towns across the country probably felt far from home when they thought of their native Thailand.

No od here, no escape, just like the endless march of numbers in pi, or an el car when the tracks are broken. Okay, that was just terrible. Possibly the worst metaphor I've ever written in my life. Zap this before it gets any worse. And for what? No idea yet, eh? Un-believable. How about by now? Is it obvious yet? Must I hit you over the head with it, like maybe with a bat? Or a bucket of hot aa? Ha!

And lo! It has hit you! Or, has it?

Anecdote. Seemingly profound thought. Another anecdote that has nothing to do with said profound thought. Aimless wanderings capped off by offensive statement. Apology for offensive statement. Explanation of apology for offensive statement that nullifies apology.

Paragraph break.

Sentence that is meant to be deep, so probably has some superfluous alliteration. Pregnant pause. Several sentences written while being talked to by someone who has no idea that I am not listening. Second pregnant pause while I consider whether to include this in my diatribe. Awkward sentence that results from me deciding not to include it.

Paragraph break.

Attempt at summation. Awkward sentence that does not belong at the end of an entry. Second attempt at summation, this time including awkward sentence. Second awkward sentence that is so awkward that the summation won't even deign to include it.

Maybe the reason I seem like such a jerk to ethics professors is that I tend to look at things from an entire-earth point of view, instead of from a human point of view.

The first thing anyone does when they're trying to convince you that you're not really a moral relativist, that there's no such thing as moral relativism, is ask you how the Holocaust could possibly be viewed as morally OK.

This is not a hard question to answer, in my opinion. It not being a hard question to answer has nothing to do with me not thinking, personally, that the Holocaust was horrible. I do think it was horrible, which is so obvious as to almost be unnecessary to say. I would have lost relatives in it had they not very recently immigrated to the U.S.

But it's still easy to answer, even though the questioner will think you're dodging the question and must therefore be anti-Semitic, homophobic, gypsyphobic or whatever the word for hating gypsies may be, etc.

Anything that so drastically lowers the number of humans on this earth is of direct benefit for virtually all species of animal and plant. Our system of ethics is based on humans. We don't think of it in a big enough picture to notice this; we think we're being objective and all-encompassing. We're not. The death of the entire human race would be such good news for everything else on the planet, that upon hearing it, they should all burst into their version of celebrating and getting wasted.

This says nothing about my personal opinion of whether it should be worth it. You can't ask a living being to discuss the morality of the obliteration of its species, no matter the benefits for anything else. Biology precludes it. But I do think it funny that ethics professors think there is no way around the 'Holocaust Question'. All you have to do is love animals more than humans. And though I'm not one of those people (close, but not quite), there should be more than enough 13-year-old girls and angsty farm boys on this earth to pretty much tip the balance the animals' way.

Maybe it isn't a serious issue now, but when our population reaches the point that the death of millions, perhaps billions, will save OUR species (all other species aside) from extinction, this is going to have ethicists' underwear all in a bundle.

There is too much music in here to write. There is too much music in here to write. It’s too hipstery to play Scrabble in with friends and I want to say it’s too crowded, or it’s trying too hard, or the kids have much too contrived haircuts, or are too snobby, to hang out in by yourself, but really, except for the music, I like it, and I only don’t like the music because it’s too amazing for me not to feel bad that I didn’t create it. I have this problem often. Any music that isn't good hurts my ears, literally hurts them, and as for the music that is good, I get jealous of the artist and can't enjoy it. My favorite music is music that somehow escapes either of these two extremes. I realize that this is not healthy.

I've been sick, which serves me right since all I've been doing lately is pompously bragging to anyone who'll listen about how awesome my immune system is. How my parents didn't make me wash my hands after every time some kid sneezed in the next block somewhere, how I ate everything served to me, sometimes off the ground, how I flew in planes all the time and was therefore exposed to every airborne, foodborne, sandborne, dirtborne virus known to man. How now I snigger at people who carry moist wipes everywhere they go, open doorknobs with towels draped over their hands, won't use public restrooms, won't eat uncooked fish or any food that hasn't been blasted to the FDA-recommended stage of burnt, and still manage (unsurprisingly) to contract every bug that blows by in the wind.

But even though I generally do still agree with myself that it's healthier to get your hands into everything, run around barefoot, and eat whatever you please (and do also agree with general society that you shouldn't go around LOOKING for illnesses by eating month-old yogurt and using Port-a-Potties willy-nilly) a healthy immune system doesn't always work, and sometimes you get slapped with the stomach flu AND a cold at the same time right after you've finished bragging about how you never get sick. And when that happens, everyone you've bragged to has every right to make fun of you and make faux-puking noises and waft rich, nauseating foods under your nose, and make goose honks behind handkerchiefs.

Instead, upon whining my plaintive whine, I was brought Saltines, grapes, and soda water, and got my back and legs rubbed and cold washcloths placed on my forehead. I always crack about how life is unfair, but forget all those times it is unfair in my favor.