Last night in bed, after a long, exhausting, day full of brushes with frostbite and incompetent tooth-X-ray-givin', Dan asked me (not out of the blue; it was totally in line with our conversation) why I preferred not to consume pot. Like, what the difference was between smoking it and consuming it, and why consuming it was worse for me.

I gave him such an involved answer, detailing how it was so easy to eat too much before it kicked in, and then ending up stuck, no way back, with a way-too-high high, the kind where you feel like your brain's become maple syrup and is undulating around in your skull knocking into things and causing different and random synapses to light up for no reason before you're entirely prepared to deal with them, that even after I'd finished explaining it and turned over to try and go to sleep, I had described it so accurately that I felt exceedingly strange. Paranoid and strange and not very unlike being, um, way too high.

But I was able to fall in an uneasy sleep by shutting my brain down completely, and it lasted for about three hours before I woke up and felt, not high, but insane.

Literally, I felt like I had woken up into another person's brain. A frantic, obsessive, possibly post-operative person's brain. I'll never argue that I don't have neuroses, but I definitely don't have these particular neuroses, and there they were. Words, phrases, rhymes, were repeating on loop through my head and as hard as I tried to stop them or make sense of them, I couldn't. One I can remember was futon, crouton, and bowl. Futon, crouton, and bowl. It went through on loop so many times that my frazzled and shattered brain tried to come up with a way to make sense of it. And what it came up with was an exercise to see if it could figure out where a cat was most likely to be. But I couldn't manage that! I couldn't even manage picturing cats and futons, cats and croutons, or cats and bowls in the same mental image. Not for a long while. I just let it loop and tried and let it loop and tried again until I finally was about to think of a cat, sitting on a futon, eating a crouton, out of a bowl. Exhausted, I expected it to go away. But it didn't. The alphabet started looping. My breathing started sounding like letters. My stomach felt like a song was dancing on it.

Eventually I woke up Dan and tried to explain this to him, and got so sleepy trying that, mercifully, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning feeling like I spent all night having seizures, but mentally, basically normal. Until now, anyway, where describing it is bringing it back.

Dan thought it was paranoid of me to guess that maybe a brain tumor was pressing on my brain and making me crazy, or that I had had a stroke. I concur, but it being paranoid of me has nothing to do with whether or not I do things.

It felt like I had a terrifying taste (another, that is; I have tastes spaced sporadically all across my life) of what it would like to be irretrievably crazy, lost amongst nonsense.

I attended the first class of the first college course I've taken since I graduated in 2005, and there's so much that I can't believe I've forgotten about the moment to moment experience of sitting in class. It was at once both new and utterly familiar.

The majority of the class consists of slumped, splayed boys in backwards baseball caps who have slack looks on their faces and always try to sit in the back row so as to play internet Solitaire on their laptops without arousing suspicion. I know this is a common generalization about frat-boy types and isn't always true, but in this class, it is true for sure. These boys think nothing of tuning the teacher out so completely that when he stops right in front of their desk to ask him a question, they look up guiltily with their ears just recently turned on, saying 'What?' and then just sort of try to guess the answer. They don't feel guilty. They don't feel embarrassed. Their faces are the very picture of relaxedness (stonedness, possibly - I wouldn't know because I was never the type of stoner who could handle class high).

There's also that awkwardness of when to stop engaging and listening and start taking notes. For me the two are mutually exclusive. I feel weird when a teacher's going on and on animatedly and fleshing out a perspective or theory and I'm nodding and figuring and forming new ideas and I look around me and everyone is heads down and scratching away bullet points and you can tell that all that they care about is bullet points. Those are always the people who do better on tests.

I was one of those people three years ago, but apparently I'm not anymore. I'm super interested in everything that's going on and can't write about it and think about it simultaneously. I want to answer every question asked. I want to flesh out every theory on the board in more detail than I am given. In short, I have become one of those 'nontraditional students' I and everyone else used to hate because they came to class bright eyed and bushy tailed and enthusiastic, and they never stopped asking inane questions, and always talked to the teacher after class trying to show how smart they were and to expound upon every idea that had ever been brought up ever, and also wanted extra credit and recommendations for further readings.

As hard as I try not to be that person, it's really hard, in a class mostly full (mostly, I say, because there are two or three other people who are not like this) of completely indifferent slouches who are morally opposed to sounding like they actually care about stupid learning. I'll sit there, fidgeting, really WANTING to answer or ask a question but feeling weird about it because I'm the only person who's opened their mouth aside from the teacher in fifteen minutes and I don't want to look like an attention hogger or a show-off or a teacher's pet. Attempting to look bored while answering questions only serves to make the teacher sorely tempted to ask you, 'if you think you're too smart for this class, then why don't you just go ahead and take the final right now?'.

All this aside, I tremendously enjoyed being back in a classroom and exercising my brain, and if I do become that annoying nontraditional student, then I guess that's what I get in exchange for the travesty of being excited about learning.

Boulder is not aware of the fact that it's January. I'm riding my bike like it's April, in a T-shirt, sweating, and everyone's motorcycles are out. Every time I look out my window into the canopy of bare branches and out, all the way out to the plains to the east, I hate my landlord even more. What a perfect summer place. It's basically a treehouse. The only things we're level with are squirrels and stranded cats and power lines and mountains. And our neighbors. But we can't see them, so they may as well not even be there.

All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.

I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).

Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:

What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:

What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:

I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.

Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.

This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.

Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.

These things are travel and cats.

I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.

Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.

So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.

Oddly enough, I was just having a conversation about whether we all (all of us bloggers) write as insurance against memory or because we have an audience in mind or what. And this particular entry of mine is definitely insurance against memory. So - warning! - this is not written for you all (but feel free to read it anyway, since it's on the internet and all).

It's sort of like that time I was in Indonesia and got my whole salary stolen. As I was writing, I was fully aware that I was whining and not writing in a manner that would hold anyone's interest, but I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget how angry I am capable of becoming. I always forget because I don't get very angry often, and I am fooled into thinking I'm not naturally a violently angry person, that I don't get so completely consumed by it that sometimes I almost pass out from the pressure inside my skull.

But I am, and I do. Although the Indonesia entry didn't reflect that. I was in such an alien environment, and so terrified of acting like a spoiled American around all the people living in poverty that I didn't dare elaborate on how angry I was - I didn't even dare FEEL how angry I was.

Yesterday Dan and I received a letter in the mail notifying us that we would not be allowed to re-lease our apartment, that we were required to move out at the end of our term. There was no reason given, but we know what the reason is, and we know why she ('she' being the owner of the property management company, who has a very distinctive idiot-style of writing where she thinks if she conjugates a verb in different ways it counts as saying something different) doesn't want to say what the reason is. It's because she would look like an idiot, saying 'The reason for our decision is that those meanies made me sign a copy of their move-in checklist so it would be on record that I received it. Also, they asked if they could get a cat when we told them they could at the lease signing and when it says clearly on the lease that cats are allowed with permission. How rude! And after that, you know what they did? They accused me of going back on my word, which is totally true! And then - this is the crowning point of it all, where I definitely knew I wouldn't want those assholes renting my property - they wrote me an email saying they disagreed with my conclusion but they were going to drop the matter and not get a cat because they loved living in this apartment so much! That's when I KNEW I wanted to kick them out. Also, they always pay their rent on time, take care of their place, and don't bother the other tenants - and we definitely can't have THAT going on in one of our properties!'

There's only one type of person that makes me spitting mad, this mad, so mad that I get an instant migraine and would, in a second, if faced with this person and a loaded gun, pull the trigger. That type of person is stupid, but conniving. This type of person will go out of their way to hurt others as badly as possible, even when it's not in the best interests of, say, their business. This type of person, when offended, never gets over it, never tries to resolve it, and thinks only of exercising power over the offender until (s)he feels better. They think only of 'winning'.

I offended our property management company's owner inadvertently at the lease signing. I'm still not sure quite how I did it. I think she was affronted by the request that she sign off on receiving a copy of our move-in checklist. She said, 'Just trust me, I received it. I'm standing here telling you I received it.' But our apartment was in terrible condition when we moved in and we had noted all of it down on the checklist and we wanted to make absolutely sure that it was ON PAPER that we had notified them of the condition within three business days, because there was a clause on the lease saying that if we didn't do that, we would be held responsible for any damage when we moved out.

I didn't want them to be able to say we hadn't turned it in, and charge us thousands of dollars upon move-out (this has happened to me before) so I asked for a signature. She was immediately enraged. Why? Because I had taken control? Because I had seen through the plan of the company to get around paying back security deposits? Who knows? After that moment, she despised me. She flat-out refused to sign the paper, and only after Dan had sweet-talked her for a while did she finally - and angrily - sign it.

When I later tried to follow through on our plan - discussed at the lease signing - of getting a cat, by calling and asking for written permission, she dismissed me right out of hand, saying that we 'had no right' to get a cat, and that she 'never said' we could.

And even though we didn't get one, and we said we would drop the subject because of how much we liked living here, she chose to terminate our lease out of spite - not for any other reason but out of spite. She terminated it because we said how much we liked living here.

Revenge out of proportion to a perceived slight, flexing of power just for the hell of it - those are the type of people - perhaps the only type of people - that can get me irrational with rage.

A mere sentence, or small paragraph, in the imitable Stumbling Upon Happiness (thanks, Erik!) caught my eye when last I read it (a week ago, but I'm slow at turnover, okay?) and that was the assertion that people who do not live in California think that they would be happier if they did live in California, while people who actually do live in California don't test out to be any happier than people who don't.

Not surprising, since (as the book points out and as I immediately thought right before I read it) beaches and palm trees and redwoods and sunshine don't make a person's debt disappear, or make their girlfriends love them, or make their jobs more satisfying, or keep their parents from dying. The distraction they provide is a novelty, one that becomes quickly routine, etc., etc.

But having once suddenly uprooted myself from my snowy upbringing, my windy sleet-in-the-face habitat, and thrust myself into an equatorial jungle for six months, I am going to tentatively and probably stupidly say that it DID make me happier, if only a little.

There's an indescribable freedom to being able to sweep out of the house without a thought to layering, or bringing an extra jacket because what if it gets cold, or gloves because what if it suddenly gets even colder. You don't have to have a backpack with all this what-if crap inside of it. You don't have to think, 'oh, I would LIKE to go hike in the park, but clouds are looming over the Rockies and they might contain rain or snow, which will make me cold and uncomfortable, so, here, let me put on an extra sweater, zip-up, so it won't be too hot if it doesn't get cold, and, oh, just in case I won't wear sandals because my feet would feel it first, and also, I better walk because if it gets too windy my bike will blow over and... oh, fuck it! I'll just stay home.'

Instead, you're lying in your house, which, for all intents and purposes, is the exact same thing as lying outside, because every window is open and the roof is made out of tin, and if you think, 'ooh! I want to bike up to Angkasa and sketch the view!' you just GO, because the temperature only drops below 70 when it's a)nighttime AND b)a serious, recordbreaking cold snap. (Every so often, now, sitting in my house in Boulder among the bare branches of winter, I check Jayapura's forecast on my desktop weather widget. Usually, it's 90-something. The other day, it read 68. I almost shit myself.) If it rains, it's like raining bathwater from a giant showerhead somewhere in the sky. You'll get wet, but you won't get cold. You'll almost feel like you should be shampooing your hair.

So the difference is in more than just being nice and pretty outside. The difference is in impulsiveness. Boulder makes it basically impossible and Jayapura encourages it. Being who I am, I need all the impulsiveness-encouraging factors I can get. I need as few excuses not to go out as possible.

It's the same sort of inching-up-the-scale-of-happiness factor as having a car, I think, in terms of impulsiveness. With a car, you don't have to worry about bus routes, most inclement weather, walking alone as a female at night, carrying a bunch of groceries, or going someplace that's far away. However, a car comes with a major (for me) caveat, and that is that being in a car is stifling and mind-numbing and just exactly like being inside!

What made Indonesia wonderful wasn't only the weather being welcoming and nonthreatening and predictable (though I have to say most people disagreed with me and found the heat stifling, fever-inducing, and soaked with sluggishness), but also that the mode of transportation was so exhilarating! Just the traveling part was an adventure in itself, and an outdoor one at that. Zipping around (not even zipping, I don't think I ever reached more than 40mph even on the long deserted roads, because at any moment there might be a three foot wide pothole or a runaway pig) on these crappy rough roads with the muggy sun burning your helmet and the wind smelly and hot... it was perfect.

So from this I gather the secret to at least marginal increases in happiness is living in coastal southern California... but taking L.A., throwing it in the ocean, digging up San Francisco with a bulldozer and placing it where L.A. used to be. Voila! Scooter/motorcycle/public transportation-friendly supercool city with a hot climate! (Oh yeah, and also eliminating dead parents and debt and unresponsive lovers and unsatisfying jobs.) Voila and ha! Back to you, Daniel Gilbert!

This is a P.S., so, hey, read this PostScript!

I started a music Myspace. Now, I fully realize that Myspace blows - I realize this even more so now that I'm trying to have one. It won't let me customize my profile colors. (This is possibly a good thing - have you seen the shit people do to their profiles when given free reign? Let's just wander around there for a quick minute... hmm. I see. Um, I... do not get what you're going for here. [Make sure not to click on those links if you value your eyesight. Too late? Sorry.]) It also won't let me post more than six songs, or let people comment if they're not Myspace members, or keep the url of my page the same for more than seven seconds. Almost no one I know is a Myspace member (that I know of) because they're all too smart. Also, there was already a 'hannaH backwards' - and I should be the only Hannah who has ever noted the palindromic quality of her name, dammit! So I had to take off the 's' and a little piece of my heart withered up and died.

But in any case, until I can find a better arrangement for showcasing my songs, I have an 'Artist Page' on 'Myspace Music' and it is here and the public ('the public' means everyone except Dan and Nick, who have already heard it) may now for the first time hear the music I write behind closed doors only when no one's home.

If you have a comment and you are not a Myspace member (kudos to you!) you can leave them here, on this entry, or in my email, or on this journal in general.

Edit: 1/14 - The sound quality's also pretty awful... so if you think you might like a particular song but can't really tell because it sounds like it's coming out of tinny speakers on a boat in the ocean, email me and I will send you a high-quality mp3.

Yesterday I received a cryptic email. A woman (whom I'd never heard of) asked me, in a very conversational and casual tone, whether I could tell her when the alewives washed up on shore in Lake Michigan. See, she was planning a trip, and needed to know.

Dan was all, "Watch out! It might be spam!"

"Spam that asks me about alewives, knows I'm from Chicago, and signs its name?" I asked him.

"You know, it could be a phisher. Phishers can request your birth certificate with only the information blah blah blah blah blah!"

Turns out she saw this entry from 2004 in my old journal when she Googled 'alewives'. And it was the most potentially helpful link. Out of everything on the internet about alewives (which is apparently essentially nothing). Out of everything Google had to offer when it scrolled through 9 billion websites, one line about a childhood memory about beaches being smelly and the lake being unswimmable showed up on the third page.

Are alewives just a product of my imagination? Did I dream all those years when I went to the beach with my summer camp and the first ten or fifteen feet of water at the shoreline was thick with slimy dead fish bodies? Did I dream waking up (in my closed house three blocks from the lake) to a smell similar to being in the thick of the fish market in Biak? Have my feet invented what it feels like to walk across thousands of sand-encrusted fish parts, warmed and hardened by the sun?

I mean, Chicago is a big city and if I'm only one out of thirty who ever thought to write about this disgustingness and post it on the internet, that's just plain bizarre. It's even more bizarre that no scientific studies or anything bothered to mention exactly when alewive season IS.

Bizarreness aside, though (and this is really why I started writing this entry - it just got totally sidetracked), random communications like that are exactly what I hope will happen as I slog away writing about minutae all the time. Always, in the back of my mind, I'm hoping someone will Google, say, 'Wamena', and email me to talk about our experiences there, or maybe, say, 'airport', and ask about the conditions of travel within Indonesia. Or smaller things, like, 'Hey, I'm in Boulder, will you tell me how to get to that portion of the creek you mentioned where icebergs float like boats and birds inhabit them like settled islands?'

Aside from my innate need to document everything in my life so I don't forget it later, and the desire to keep in touch with online friends and keep online touch with real friends, I think that's the number one reason why I continue to post a journal publicly.

Uh, hint, hint.

Just kidding. I think.

Is it awful that the first thing I thought while overhearing the following conversation in a deli was, 'Sweet, even less sensitive people than me exist in the world!'?

We were sitting with our backs to the three guys at the counter, eating an Italian sub and a hot pastrami, drinking the first gross Izzes I've ever tried (clementine? more like watered-down fizzy orangeade) and we were talking, but after their first sentence we immediately stopped as if struck.

Guy #1: Hey, have you seen xxxxx's girlfriend?
Guy #2: I know, she must have gained like 30 pounds!
Guy #1: I know dude, I thought you're supposed to lose weight when you have cancer!
Guy #2: Well, the thing is, she's only taking like half the meds the doctor prescribed.
Guy #1: That's bad.
Guy #2: Also, she's still drinking.
Guy #3: Seriously? When I saw her I thought she was pregnant.
Guy #1: No.
Guy #2: I guess xxxxx was afraid she was pregnant.
Guy #1: Babies don't weigh 30 pounds.
Guy #2: Tumors weigh 30 pounds?
Guy #1: It's bad, they tried to stop drinking and they didn't even last, like, twelve hours. She called him, and she was supposed to be doing work stuff. She said she was at the library when she called. But like, you could hear drunk people yelling behind her and shit.
Guy #3: You know how loud and rowdy people get at the library!
Guy #1: I know. So he was super pissed when he got off the phone. He was like, let's get some shots. Let's get some tequila. He was like, want a shot? And I was like, hell yeah.

There are many gems (anti-gems? yes, anti-gems) about this conversation, such as the most important thing about a girl being her weight, regardless of cancer-having status; pregnancy being a worse fate than a giant tumor; and a guy's reaction to his cancerous girlfriend's drinking problem being to get pissed at her and then do shots of tequila.

Does a conversation need that amount of assholery to exceed my normal level of assholery? Does the fact that I even thought a good thought (I'm out-assholed by these guys!) during such an assholish conversation make me by default at least a moderately large asshole myself?

I can't remember if I've written about this before - I probably have, sometime like, oh, I don't know, right after it happened. When I had nothing but free time and a computer was like a blazing beacon of modernity amongst everything else. However, often just the sight of my computer sitting on our our flowered saggy mattress, which itself sat starkly in the center of a white tile floor, jarred me out of whatever third-world reverie I had been in. I would constantly be coming home wanting to write about this or that: the sheer number of perfect seashells I would unavoidably run over with my motorcycle on the beach; how the jungle would look blue in a certain kind of sunlight; how it felt to get a sea urchin spine out of a finger joint - and then I'd walk in the door, go up the stairs, hit my head on the landing ceiling that was obviously built by and for midgets, and see my computer. And everything would rush out of my head. Jungles and sea urchins and seashells could not peacably coexist in my brain with Macintosh G4 laptops.

Well, if I wrote about it once, I'll just write about it again. This time it will be colored by time and memory and everyone can have fun comparing the two stories to see how my unintentional lies build and build as I get further and further from them. I mean, if sea urchins and G4s can't coexist in my brain, how is this story going to fare against an office full of two-way radios, first-aid kits, and giant flatscreen computers? Probably not well.

But in any case, it was sometime in the one season that Jayapura has, indistinguishable from all the other hot, humid days full of posturing distant clouds. All I know is that it wasn't during our massive water shortage (Christmas, roughly). It was a Saturday. Or a Sunday. I wanted to go up to the Jayapura City sign (imagine the Hollywood sign, but neon [is the Hollywood sign neon? I've seen it probably thousands of times and still can't remember] and up on one of the jungled cliffs that surround the bay, faced outward, to welcome boats, not cars) and draw the view in pastel. I'd done it a few times before, but it was one of those blue jungle days and I wanted to take advantage of that.

Nick didn't want to go. Lately he hadn't really wanted to go anywhere, unless it was out of the country or at least to another province. He wanted to 'relax', which to him meant playing the guitar horizontally on the couch in the living room until he felt hungry, and then eating eggs and Indomie, and then maybe fixing his vegetable garden that everyone kept running over with motorcycles.

I never did feel completely at ease traveling by myself around Jayapura. I did it, because I had to, but I never felt 100% safe. As I think I've mentioned before,

(A quick interjection: I'm at work and was just offered a plate of 'Chinese noodles'. I microwaved them, took a bite, and... MIE GORENG. Exactly. Spices and everything. Now there is something that can peacably coexist with this story. If I had ever grown to like mie goreng, I'd ask where he got it, but as it happens, after a six month period of having it every day, once every year or so is quite enough mie goreng for me, thanks.)

my anxiety was muffled there. Lots of potentially super dangerous things happened to me, or went on around me, while I was there, and I never really felt it. But I also never really didn't feel it. I preferred to have Nick with me to diffuse potentially creepy situations, which bothered me the most out of any other 'danger' there. Malaria, whatever, bird flu, fine, Indonesian army marching in the streets with guns aloft, okay, border guards in PNG deigning only to let us in when they felt like it, sure. But getting into harmless confrontations with men on hills who were trying to make me pay them Rp. 30,000 for parking in a public lot? No. I did not like this. It was personal. I had to look someone in the face while they were looking me in the face, trying to dupe me. Such things unsettled me.

So I usually preferred to take Nick (despite the fact that he was actually worse at dealing with these kinds of situations than I was. More often than not, his wallet would open and out would fall Rp. 30,000 before I could open my mouth to argue or raise my hand to snatch the wallet away). But this time I couldn't, and I really wanted to draw this blue-jungled view (blue-jungling was an oddity, as it required a precise percentage of cloud cover) and so I went alone. I got on the motorcycle and navigated the winding, steep, muddy roads that led to the cliff, passing families frying rice in their yards, countless makeshift ping-pong tables, chained up dogs, and pickup trucks full of vegetables. It was a difficult road; steep, and hairpin turns that were especially threatening with someone on the back. I enjoyed the freedom that came with not having to worry if I was going to tip a passenger off the back every time I turned the wheels.

At the top, I parked my bike in the lot outside the chain-link fence of whatever high-ranking government official lived up there (we never did figure that one out). There was one other bike there, and the owners were over on the other side of the sign: Indonesian teenagers holding hands and comparing school notebooks. I waved to them and climbed over to the front of the sign, sitting just below the spread of the 'Y' in 'CITY'. (Here you can see the backwards 'CIT' of city as it appears from up there. For the life of me I cannot find any pictures on the internet of what the sign looks like from the actual city.)

I'd been drawing for awhile, had about half the bay done, when a Papuan man came and sat down next to me, which wasn't unusual - people would just come sit next to us and start talking all the time. Although I miss that now, and wish it wasn't so socially unacceptable to just start talking to people you find interesting, back then I was just extremely in I-need-to-be-alone mode. He wanted to see what I was drawing. I showed him. Delighted, he pointed to my paper, pointed to the view, pointed to the paper again, all the while chattering excitedly and way too fast for me to pick out more than a few words at a time. Then he pointed at my notebook in such an insistent fashion that I realized he wanted me to give it to him. When I did, he flipped to a new page, grabbed up a few pastels, and started tentatively drawing what looked first like a crescent moon, then like a horseshoe with nails sticking out of it, and then like a bracelet with horns, and then a bracelet without horns, and then, finally, it looked like what it was, which was an illustration of his home island of Biak with some (relatively) giant boats sticking out of the port!

By this time I was pretty delighted as well, his mood being contagious, and mostly by gestures we talked about the different things there were to do on Biak (fishing, eating, fishing and fishing, as far as I could gather). As we were flailing our arms madly about, footsteps approached, we looked up, and there were... bules!

Aside from the teachers at our school I think I had seen two bules in Jayapura since I'd arrived, and this was towards the end of our trip. Once was in passing, on a motorcycle, and another was coming out of a bookstore. So this bule encounter - two bules! At once! A couple! Standing right next to me! - fully doubled my bule count, and thus totally shocked me. I froze, and the man next to me kept talking and gesturing and laughing - I mean, one bule, three bules, what's the difference, right?

They were British or something. "Hello," they said.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," said the Papuan man.

"Hello," said the three Indonesian men who had appeared around us a few minutes earlier to watch us draw.

The next thing out of the British couple's mouth was not at all something I expected. I expected, like, 'How are you?' or 'Where are you from?' or 'Enjoying the view?' or something similar, but what I got was, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

"What?"

"Are. You. Okay?"

"Uh... yes?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes?"

"Can we help you out?"

"Um... no." The question mark had now disappeared from my voice. It had taken me that long to realize that they were asking because it looked like I was being threatened by a bunch of big bad locals.

"Okay, then, if you're sure," they said... and turned around and left! They didn't even stay to enjoy the view - which, by the way, was stunning, blue and bright, and it didn't even smell like burning trash up there! I'm not trying to knock them too much. I mean, they probably really thought that I was in danger and they wanted to help me. But, shit, the men could have shown some signs of menace at least. As it was, we were all just having a big hippie art circle.

Now, none of the men around me understood English, as far as I knew then or know now, but they weren't stupid, and the couple hadn't addressed them at all. And after they left, it wasn't the same anymore. Everyone kept turning around to see if the couple was coming back, and sort of looking sideways at me like maybe I had wanted to be saved.

I'm not sure when I became the kind of person for whom it was possible to brush off closeness. Well, not brush off exactly, but become used to it, treat it like it's old hat, not write down anything about it, and generally just not dwell on it. Reading old entries of mine (old-old entries, from high school and early college) and friends' similarly old entries reminded me of how we (not all of us, but some of us) used to totally be able to obsess over the (possibly imagined) curve of someone's neck, for example, for paragraphs and paragraphs. Entries piled upon entries went to idealizing waking up in the same bed as someone, sitting by a duck pond with someone, late night driving to the beach with someone, rubbing someone's neck or their hands, the heartbreaking form of their face, the blinding perfection or whatever of the way their hips moved when they walked or something like that. This person was only sometimes a real person, and rarely did the things I obsessed about ever happen. If they had happened, I would likely have written about them once in an over-the-moon, exclamation-point-filled way, then moved on to writing idealistically about something else... something even less likely to happen.

I know this because I have had what I used to yearn for for almost five unbroken years now. I mean five almost unbroken years. There's a difference. The difference is from February to June of '07. And in that short time I was coming close to yearning again. Not quite to the point of getting my journal involved in the mess, but a hairsbreadth away, if not closer. But just because I had someone in particular in mind. If I hadn't, I don't know that I would have been that bothered. I mean, I had just gotten out of a three year relationship where closeness had ceased to be anything special at all, and had begun to be a point of contention, a source of fighting, and certainly nothing worthy of sappy journal entries. I felt jaded and couldn't believe how 18-year-old me had once swooned at the slightest touch. I saw no contradiction between this jaded feeling and the fact that I was, at that moment, sappy-journal-entrifying the specific guy I wanted, and assuming everything would be magical and wonderful with him.

The way this is heading, I'm sure you, whoever you are, have already surmised where you think the rest is going. You're probably thinking, oh, she's about to totally whine that she doesn't appreciate touch and closeness anymore even though she got the guy she sappy-journal-entrified. You're only half right.

I don't know that there's any way to protect against becoming accustomed to something, and especially for me, a spoiled only child who's used to becoming accustomed to luxuries. I went home for Christmas and was without touch for seven days. It felt merely curious. Temporary. Like I was on hiatus from my life and whatever happened on this hiatus didn't really apply to reality, so it didn't much matter what did happen. So I didn't get to the touch-idealizing part. I would have only gotten there if there had been the threat of being physical-contactless and alone forever, or at least for a good long time.

So I don't idealize touch now, that's true. I welcome it, and I like it, and I think that it is a good thing, to be as simplistic as humanly possible. But I would like to say that reading through past entries from a time when I was scared that it would never come has made me vow, at least, to appreciate it more than I already do.

Reading an article about animal liberation (in this case, whale/shark/fish/sea cucumber liberation) started becoming a little awkward when I began noting the author's and the interviewees' struggles with pronouns. Here I was, sprawled nearly upside-down on my couch (head on the butt cushion, legs over the back cushions), meant to have my heart breaking for these poor sea creatures. I mean, these guys - these volunteers who had sacrificed whatever they left back in their normal lives to come out here on what were essentially pirate ships for all the protection they got from any government - were describing the bloody struggling fin-thumping sharks on the decks of boats, and tuna dangling by the roofs of their mouths, and so forth, and I was going along, heart in my own mouth, wishing I hadn't been raised on sushi so I didn't love it so much, when suddenly the pronouns started becoming palpably forced, or else noticeably omitted.

Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.

Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.

The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.

So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.

A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.

And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.