I had a day yesterday that manages to effortlessly paint a clear picture of life in Orange County without even trying.

So I'm dropping my car off to get an oil change, which is supposed to take two hours. The guy behind the counter is like, 'Will you be waiting here for it?' and I'm all like, 'um, no, I'm going to walk to Mitsuwa' and his face is all like ''walk'?? What is this this 'walk' of which you speak??'

I had passed Mitsuwa roughly three minutes earlier while driving over there, so I figured it was walkable, and that I could use my awesome Japanese market homing skills/ramen-smelling nose to find my way back there in a reasonable amount of time.

Whoops! I guess I forgot I was in Irvine (Costa Mesa really, but close enough)! As I began my journey, I realized two things. One: no sidewalks. Two: stupid landscaping. Walking down the street, I was going up and down these manmade mounds of bright green, overwatered grass, tripping on the tree roots that snaked everywhere without ever actually going underground, and weaving around office park buildings that had their own mazes of bushes meant to be pleasing to the eye, not to be walked through.

I jumped fences. I went through one-way courtyards. I climbed through bushes. I trespassed on more private property than has ever been trespassed upon before. And then I realized that the street was turning. It was curving around and starting to go the other way. THEN I saw a plane landing directly in front of me - the street had done a full 90 degree turn and dead-ended at the airport.

OK, I thought, I really want some unadon right now, and I will not let OfficeParkVille defeat me and my previously impeccable sense of direction. I'm just going to pretend that did not just happen, and go back the other way.

Long story short, half hour later, I'm at Mitsuwa, fighting millions of other lunch-hour-goers for a table, finally getting one (across from a baby who refused to be fed her rice, instead preferring to stare at me unblinkingly for 45 minutes). And immediately getting all prickly memories of my walk erased by my unbelievably delicious $6 unadon/zaru soba combination meal.

Quick question:

What do you do when you move to a new town, meet someone you immediately and effortlessly get along with, subsequently Facebook-stalk them (don't judge!) and discover that their profile picture is a photo of them posing proudly with Ann Coulter?

Each day feels like a mini-lifetime.

I wake up with strands of thought flying away into the ether, disoriented, a little cranky if there's an alarm. I'm not burdened, though, because I forget everything I'm burdened by while I'm sleeping. At the moment I awaken there is no chest pain, no trepidation, no frantic wondering about what the next 70 years will feel like. Just remnants of a nonsense language, a faint desire for nourishment, and random stretches of muscles to make sure they're there, and that they work.

All morning is, is a pleasant haze where I drink tea and think, and have my reading date with the sun - my apartment is situated in such a way that the sun comes in and hits my papasan only between 10 and 11 AM - and prepare myself for the outside world.

As the day stretches on, and I do whatever it is that I do, I start to worry about things. Will I choke on this giant piece of chicken I'm chewing? How best to swallow it? Shouldn't I be doing my pre-political-science-student readings so I'm not the class idiot when school starts? Am I getting sunburnt? I still enjoy myself, but there it is in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce.

The evening brings bigger worries: do I want to be with this person for the rest of my life? Is this chest pain going to end up being a heart attack? Do I honestly believe that I am capable of standing up in front of a classroom of students? And I go to bed tense, achy, hyperaware of my positioning under the covers and the pace of my breathing and everything else. I want to recap, so I'm talkative, but I'm irritable, so no one wants to talk to me.

And when I fall asleep, you may as well have hit the power-off/reset button.

That's the great savior of my biological/psychological makeup. The reset button. I sleep like a rock no matter what's worrying me and my dreams are mostly unrelated to reality. I'm not even myself in dreams. Even that dream I had where there had been a zombie apocalypse and I was living under an underpass in L.A. with three videogame quality animal friends from Animal Crossing who may have had dubious intentions - even that dream didn't feel like a nightmare. It was sort of fun, scavenging for leftover food and sleeping on a ripped mattress with one eye open and one hand clutching a knife. Same with the dream about tubing down a way overswollen Boulder creek with only a leaky, lopsided tube.

I wake up and everything is fuzzy and innocent and new.

Today at lunchtime I sat on the shady edge of a massive corporate park just outside the north edge of John Wayne airport, eating a goat cheese-prosciutto-asparus quesadilla, drinking a coconut juice, and watching the airplanes land.

Nobody else even looked up when these monsters roared deafeningly overhead, but it was something I couldn't look away from. Their tiny little wheels attached to their screaming enormous winged bodies reminded me of birds, but not for the normal reasons. Birds are just big fat bodies on itsy-bitsy stilts, or comically small wheels in this case. I don't know. It still seemed momentous to me every time one landed gently and in accordance with runway boundaries.

Every time I've gotten into a plane since, I don't know, around 2007, just post-Indonesia, my heart races at 130+ bpm while my throat closes up and my stomach rolls and this lasts the whole flight, which cannot in any way be healthy. My best and brightest logic cannot win this war against the physiological. So sitting around watching multitudes of planes land safely probably will not help me, but I'm spellbound by them anyway. To me it's like this.

Spending time at very rich people's homes forces me to (uncomfortably) wonder what I would be like if I were to somehow become rich. It usually happens in the same stages:

1. Shock and disgust at how many useless knick-knacks person has; righteous anger about how money could be better spent feeding the hungry/propping up charities/making poorer people happy in some way/etc.

2. Tiny little rogue thought creeps in about how I would probably be about to identify with the person better if person spent knick-knack money on travels around the world or on ridiculously pricey restaurants or gourmet food instead.

3. Realization that this is a double standard emerges. Guilt occurs. Value-questioning occurs.

4. Try to identify with the person by pretending their knick-knacks are slices of raw fish or green chile tamales or BBQ pulled pork.

5. Inability to complete analogy because of difficulty perspective-swapping.

6. Repeat.

Eventually I just force myself to stop thinking about it and content myself with platitudes about every person having the right to spend their own money in whichever way they see fit, which I don't really believe but whatever, I'm at a party. And then I enjoy their amenities and become a hypocrite but try not to do it outwardly because I am trying to socialize lightly. And I go home massively exhausted.

Because we could, yesterday we stood on a sandy stretch with the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak blowing by behind us, and in front of us, pelicans divebombing like screwdrivers into the water to catch fish. It was goosebump-raisingly cold, but that didn't stop families in bikinis and board shorts from dragging their boogie boards into the tide. Neither did the fact that the waves were breaking five feet from shore.

We had sandwiches: one of two recipes for sandwich that I'll willingly make and eat. As follows:

Sourdough bread, toasted

Brie

Ham

Spinach

Red Onion

Fig Jam

Mayo (optional)

Arrange in desired percentages and enjoy. For me it's nearly all Brie, spinach and fig jam, but that's okay because Dan likes his giant pile of meat slathered with Kewpie mayo, so it works out evenly in the end.

So we ate those and some mandarins that tasted like perfume and some triple ginger snaps from Trader Joes and then I wandered down to the water. I put my feet in and let the waves crash and foam that wonderful white foam around my ankles. Whenever I see those yards of white foam snapping around me, I always want to put my face in. I think it's good for my skin, despite having no evidence, empirical or otherwise, to support this hypothesis. Maybe back in middle school I read it in Seventeen magazine or something and internalized it without internalizing the source. I don't know. I do the same thing with the foaming jets in hot tubs.

While I was wandering around I found a baby crab no bigger than my fingernails. I resisted the urge to pop it in my mouth like popcorn, but in order to do that I had to travel forward in time and forcefully imagine eating the Japanese-style grilled mackerel and pickled cucumbers that we later cooked for dinner on our very own brand new community grill:

Flying to Irvine, I was sitting in my aisle seat in between attempted deep cleansing breaths, thoughts meant to distract myself from the realization that I was in a big metal contraption 20,000 feet in the air, and pages in the book I wasn't really reading or seeing - and I happened to look out the window and therefore saw something I really, really wasn't expecting to see.

We were very close to landing (the pilot had already told the flight attendants to prepare for it) and what looked like 500 feet away from the left wing was a big peak covered with snow and pine trees.

I mean, yeah, if I had thought about it harder I would have realized that there are snowy peaks very close to Irvine and etc etc but in the moment it seemed so out of place that I was pretty sure we were going to crash into the mountains and die. Instead of giving me a heart attack like I'd have guessed, it made me instantly calm. What it did, actually, was make me think I was dreaming. My dreams, when centered around airplanes, consistently have the plane doing something bizarre, like flying low amongst mountains, so when I saw the snowy peak I figured, oh well, I'm dreaming and so we'll just drift down into an icy creek and then me and all the passengers will wander off out the plane windows and camp out in a nearby cave until the blue-footed, polka dotted bears show up. When we landed at the Orange County airport five minutes later without incident I was fairly shocked. And disappointed at the lack of creativity that my imagination bothered to invest in my dream.

And then I went off and did Serious Prospective Graduate Student Visiting Day stuff for 2 days, which felt like even more of a dream.

I both love and hate when I win racquetball tournaments based on the fact that only one person in my gender and division bracket shows up. It's a cheap sense of accomplishment. I guess what I'm going for here is an expensive sense of accomplishment. Close enough.

Strange, though, how this is the only sport I could see myself playing long term. I used to join sports teams for half social reasons and half I-should-get-in-shape reasons, only to discover that I dreaded practice nights, where we would run long distances (horror) do drills (at which I would suck) play out in the cold (brrr!) and then go out for drinks afterwards (yawn). Even though racquetball practice follows the exact same schedule, minus the playing out in the cold part, I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays, where I kill myself running, crunch my core to death, then spend an hour hitting an evasive bouncy ball into the wall. Somehow, this has become fun. Fun enough that I will likely travel to Missouri in the spring (Missouri. By car. On I-70. Through Kansas) to play it against other colleges.

I woke up on Valentines Day to a box of Belgian chocolates sitting on top of my laptop. There were 18 in there yesterday morning and there are 18 in there now. Don't ask me how that is even possible. Sometimes my lack of sweet tooth astounds me, and other times I find myself hoovering up chocolate chip cookies desperately and without regard for my surroundings.

This time though... you know how sometimes something's so perfect and balanced that you don't want to thrust your hand in it and mess it up? That's what's happening here. I've got dark chocolate/cayenne pepper, white chocolate/hazelnut/orange peel, hazelnut seashells, crispy rice/hazelnut, sea salt/dark, candied ginger, dark chocolate ganache/orange peel, praline, and a mystery white chocolate snowman with a crack in his neck all lined up neatly in a box and I don't want to touch anything and ruin it.

What's the word for people with too much self control - so much self control that they miss out on fun adventures and irresponsible money-making decisions and therefore life lessons and instead just sit around eating healthy food, exercising, and saving money? Sticks-in-the-mud? Oh, yeah.

I met someone today who looks exactly like the male faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebook paper in middle school. These faces all had wide eyes, sparse lashes, button noses, very thick but perfectly groomed eyebrows, cheekbones to get lost in, expressive lips, and dark hair with widows' peaks.

I think I used to draw them because I figured if I knew what my 'perfect man' looked like, I'd be more likely to notice when he walked by. As opposed, that is, to noticing what I usually noticed, which was precisely nothing - well, except for the words on the pages in books, that is.

Well, 13 year old me, he walked by today. And I noticed. And I didn't, contrary to your likely expectations, fall all over myself, turn bright red, and write him secret Valentines notes to stick in his locker. I merely appraised him, thought, "hmm, he looks exactly like those faces I used to draw!" and went on to think some more about how different my middle school tastes were to what they are now.

That's not entirely true. I thought other things, like how precisely and delicately his face was constructed, and how strange it was that something that symmetrical existed in nature. I thought about how I would like to trace his face with a pencil, or a fingertip. His eyes were the categorical definition of hazel; how curious it was that even though I used to draw my faces in penciled graphite and white, his color of hazel was exactly how I had pictured it then.

I used to be fascinated by how it might feel to have one of those nerve disorders where you don't feel pain. As I get older, I feel pain less and less (like everyone else, I assume). Or rather, it bothers me less and less. Sometimes I'll wake up, or look over, to a bruise whose origins I can't even guess about. I have a nasty one on my knuckle I could have only gotten by smacking myself in the hand with a racquetball racquet, but you'd think that's something I would remember having done.

Also, sometimes I bite Dan on the arm what I think is lightly and he'll howl in agony and so I bite myself on the arm with the same force and I can hardly feel it. But yeah, there are teeth marks, so it must have happened.

Maybe it's because I have an increased fight-or-flight response and therefore have pain-numbing endorphins released into my blood constantly. Or not!

The most worthwhile parenthetical pursuit I can think of right now is to learn to lucid dream on command. (Parenthetical meaning, you know, something that isn't choosing a graduate school, or otherwise forging life's rocky path. Something hobby-ish.) There are so many things that I will never be able to do because of time or money constraints (visit every country in the world, go on waterslides all the time) or because these things are impossible in the physical world (fly, become a deep-sea creature) or just because I wouldn't have the wherewithal (sleep with anyone I please without any pesky rejection-related consequences). It seems a waste to have the capability to learn to do these things on command while asleep, and choose not to learn to do so. Especially since I'm starting from an easier place than most people, already lucid dreaming roughly once a month or so and remembering enough of most of my dreams to fill up a few handwritten pages.

I realize that lucid dreaming instead of going out and having real life experiences is a weak substitute, because what can happen in dreams is limited to the imagination, which in turn is limited to the experiences and knowledge it has drawn from while awake. Actually visiting a different country can create new paradigms, images, and ways of thinking, while dreaming of visiting another country really only reinforces whatever stereotypes one already holds of that country. So if the aim is to broaden, rather than to bask, lucid dreaming has failed.

However, I hold the view that basking is better than nothing (even if broadening is ultimately better than basking) and after all, it's possible to live AND dream, of course. But there are so many times in life when you're trapped somewhere, you're working and saving for something else, or just working and saving for being able to survive in the moment, and there's no time or money for vacations or even daydreaming, and you waste 8 or 9 hours sleeping and a slave to whatever insane concoction your brain cooks up for you. Why be a slave to an unknown concoction if you know what you'd rather have?

Anyway, that's why I think it's a worthwhile parenthetical pursuit. Carrying it out has not been so easy. The accepted method for going about increasing lucid dream likelihood is sometimes so comical and counterintuitive that I find myself neglecting it for weeks. It's simple, though, I'll give it that. I'm meant to ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" a bunch of times a day and then do a series of reality checks to find out. These reality checks look ridiculous to any outside observer. Pinch myself to see if it hurts. Try to point my finger through my hand. Check to see if I can read digital clocks, or a page of text, without it changing on me. Flipping light switches to see if they work.

There's a second step, involving some ritual I'm supposed to do when falling asleep, but I just can't wrap my mind around these reality checks in order to get there. The concept of asking yourself whether you're dreaming when you know you're awake just feels stupid, like, why would I ask myself something I already know the unequivocal answer to? I get the point, of course, and that is to get in the habit of asking the question so that while you're dreaming you get in the habit of doing it as well, and when you're dreaming your reality checks will, of course, fail, and there you are, lucid, pinching yourself (and probably rocketing awake)!

My first couple of attempts at lucid dreaming (distinct from those times where I just do it) have been comically conventional - exactly how you'd write it if you were to write about someone trying to dream. I realize I'm dreaming and everything starts fading. I feel like things are melting and I'm moving through maple syrup. I try to fly and I hover inches from the ground, mere gliding, while half of my vision remains in dreamland and the other half sees, stubbornly, my bedroom.

But I'm determined to do this and I will do this - bruises on my arm from constant pinching or no bruises on my arm from constant pinching.