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?)