Newly Indonesian

2011-05-01T13:15:00.004-06:00

I love my boyfriend the most when we are hanging out with other people and hate him the most when we've been alone for awhile.

I think it's because I like him better than everyone we know, but I like him less than all the potential and idealized people that exist only in my imagination.

2011-04-12T10:50:00.003-06:00

Dear Future Self,

When you look back from your pared down world, and you bitterly think how silly and blind you were to ever complain about 'having' to travel everywhere in the car, stop.

Once or twice or ten times upon a time, you were driving at night and were suddenly struck down by awe that everyone slid around in these little living rooms on wheels, and that you were sliding around with them.

Often, when you were a passenger, you thought about how all the cars on the freeway were self-contained universes and all these universes were 10 feet away from each other, but remained wholly separate unless they threatened to collide.

Riding in someone else's car was like rummaging furtively through their bathroom cabinets. Some people kept changes of clothes in their cars. The cigarettes they couldn't smoke at home. Wrappers from the food that they wouldn't count in their diet journals, if they had them.

Riding with a stranger in a car made you very quickly not be strangers anymore, at least before the plague of texting. Sitting in silence with the world sliding by was awkward. We were wired to think time was passing when we saw forty miles of anything, even road. More time than forty minutes. We traveled forty miles, how could we not have said anything? We used to be on the beach, and now we're in the mountains, so how could we not have said anything at all?

Getting in the car with someone familiar after a long day was a sigh of relief and dozing in the passenger seat with your face pressed against the windshield was even better than doing it on the couch.

Don't worry. I appreciated them.

2010-09-10T13:55:00.004-06:00

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.

2010-08-22T18:40:00.003-06:00

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?

2010-08-22T10:14:00.003-06:00

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.

2010-08-19T10:22:00.002-06:00

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.

2010-08-15T10:31:00.003-06:00

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.

2010-08-13T08:57:00.006-06:00

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:

2010-03-06T22:12:00.004-07:00

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.

2010-02-24T09:30:00.003-07:00

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.

2010-02-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-02-14T00:41:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-02-13T17:50:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-02-12T07:53:00.004-07:00

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.

2009-11-08T00:29:00.003-07:00

I've been in complete and miserable cat withdrawal since August, when the Maine coon cat next door moved away to live on a farm. This was the sweetest cat on earth; he would place his thumbed paws on my face before he shoving his nose into my hair. He'd always sit on my deck chair and meow at me through the window all night long. He had a sort of chirp that sounded like speech. Once he leapt directly into my screen, thinking it wasn't there. I'd be all for cloning if it made me another Rocky (am I even joking? Who knows?).

Anyway, I went on a run today to blow off some steam (blowing off steam is the only time I ever run) and as I re-entered this filthy rich area of Boulder from the mountain parks area, I saw a white cat running towards me from the porch of some giant house with, like, turrets and a castle balcony or something. The cat was long-haired, but it had been shaved around the midsection so it resembled a poodle. Despite this outrageous ridiculousness, it had a serene and determined look to it. I saw, when he got closer, that he had blue eyes.

For some reason, I remember, when I was a kid, reading in (of all places) a Babysitters Club book, that white cats with blue eyes tend to be deaf. This cat seemed to be so, but all he wanted was to get neck-scratches for approximately a million hours.

This was near the Mountain Parks, so of course, dogs were walking by constantly. Whenever a dog came down the street, the cat would cease blissfully rubbing against my legs and trot over to investigate it. This thoroughly unsettled most of the dogs. The dogs were used to cats running away, if not immediately, then most certainly after being barked at. Barking had no effect on this cat, of course. The closer the cat got, the more uncertain the dogs' barks became, until finally, the dogs would stop, sort of half-rear up, and shy away, dragging their owners backwards.

Sometimes a dog and the cat would get so close as to touch noses, and only then would the dog freak out. "I just touched noses with a cat!" it would appear to be screaming. "Get me out of here!"

I had to do some serious weaving to keep the cat from following me home, and a horrible, cat-stealing part of me wanted him to follow me home. I can't wait for a cat-allowing landlord - or homeownership - whichever comes first.

2009-10-29T18:05:00.004-06:00

It has snowed four times this fall already and I'm starting to think that, this year, trees are idiots. Usually at the first snow, trees will dump their leaves because they know if they don't, their boughs will bow down uncomfortable with the weight of snow and soaking leaves, pulling the trunk into an awkward slouchy hunch, and eventually breaking, leaving the tree ever closer to death. Right? If all of that was bound to happen to you if you didn't let go of your leaves... wouldn't you just let go of the damn leaves?

Not this year. Every time it snows, the trees are like, "Well it's only September/October, so my eyes (feeling sensors) must be deceiving me. I must be hallucinating. Therefore I shall keep all my leaves! And maybe turn them red, but definitely not let them fall!"

The most recent snow, the one that hasn't really stopped yet as of right now, has dumped at least a foot of snow. The trees all look like gnarled old men, hanging onto their leaves stubbornly with old withered fingers. They dangle their branches mere feet from the sidewalk, sodden and pendulous. Anyone over 4 feet tall has to walk in the street or else become ensnared in vindictive tangles.

As the trees get dumber, squirrels get smarter. Any squirrel who's still alive must be. I was walking home from the grocery store with branches grabbing my hair and wrapping themselves around my backpack, and I saw a little rise in the snow with a big tunnel in it. I stopped to look down into the tunnel, and saw that at the bottom was (or had once been) a topless pumpkin. A squirrel was curled up in the bottom of the pumpkin, fat and sleeping. He had clearly been eating his nice warm home.

2009-10-23T11:11:00.003-06:00

There are situations in which I think I must have mild Aspergers or some similar social-misunderstanding disorder. Usually immediately after I think this, I chide myself for diagnosing myself with an easy excuse instead of simply accepting that I am socially awkward and have the capability to change it.

Do I have the capability to change it? As time goes on, I get less certain. The way people respond to me is entirely at odds with how I think they should, and how they perceive me, when asked, is entirely at odds with how I perceive myself. Up until now I sort of thought that I just had an expressionless face that tended towards looking annoyed and so people just figured I wasn't interested (in them, in anything). But lately I've been making a concerted effort. To smile longer than I think is appropriate, to look people in the eye even though it's supremely uncomfortable for me, to act excited and bubbly when the situation seems to call for it.

None of it makes a difference. I suspect that smiling becomes grimacing, eye contact becomes staring, excited becomes manically excitable, and bubbly becomes bubbling over. All without my knowledge, because I can't see myself through a normal person's eyes. I can honestly say I have no fucking clue what draws people to one another (conversely, what repels them from one another). Or even what looks merely normal and acceptable.

I had a meeting with a professor the other day and she noted that I seem 'blunt and straightforward - a scientific approach - but very impatient'. Another professor noted today that I am 'clearly introverted'. When I first started working for the graduate student I am still working for, she asked me if I was nervous about sixty times.

These attributes: quirky, yes, maybe even nerdy, but abnormal enough for most people to react as though they think I hate them?

2009-10-20T14:08:00.003-06:00

I'm sitting in a hallway with my laptop deciding my future, and knowing what I know about mood-dependent decision making, it's terrifying. You choose a graduate program when you're tired and you end up with something way easier than is necessary, that requires something like a 1.5 GPA and a recommendation letter from your mom, whose coursework consists of memorizing PowerPoint bullets and learning how to write five paragraph essays. You choose a graduate program when you've just read a scholarly paper by your very favorite genius and you'll probably overestimate how much mindbreaking research you're willing to withstand in order to get to his/her level. Then you end up with a program you, A) can't get into, if you're lucky, or B) requires the kind of critical thinking where you have to have completely unique, perfect, and experiment-ready ideas coming out of your mouth/falling onto paper constantly, or else you fail as a human being.

It's somewhat ironic that I'm considering all of this given that the chosen graduate program has to include, at least in part, the further study of mood-dependent decision making. Maybe my thesis could be on how graduate students are only in the program I'm in because they had were in X mood at the time of their application process. That'd be totally meta of me and I hope someone would metaphorically kick me in the face.

2009-10-18T00:06:00.007-06:00

Five years ago I would have said (and did say) that I would like to drop out of the unrelenting escalator march of scholarly/professional progress (be born, get educated, get more educated, get a job that may or may not have something to do with what you got educated in, have kids, get rich, get richer, still be unsatisfied, get old, get bored) and just get on a plane, go abroad, travel around, and forget about striving.

I don't know if I ever posted this here. I think I did on my old diary. But just in case, here is something I wrote in my private journal sophomore year of college, September 2003:

Don’t ever let me forget that we had this conversation.

‘I just... the hardest part about leaving would be doing it alone,’ he says.

There is silence in the back of the bus because I’m deciding whether to say it and mean it, mean it through and through.

‘Nick, if you were to actually do it,’ I say, slowly, deliberately, ‘I would go with you.’

His face is suddenly lit. ‘Would you?’

‘I...’

‘Would you really?’

My eyes are tearing up.

‘Let’s do it, then,’ he whispers.

We spend the whole rest of the day in a planning daze, a fear-purging daze... overall, it’s a harsh daze. The first few minutes are the hardest. We want to say everything at once. Our parents, and what they would think. (His dad would be angry. My dad would be disappointed, but not angry. My mother would be furious just because she never had the guts to do it herself.) We can’t leave our roommates in the lurch. We can’t waste the money already spent on tuition for the semester. We can’t...

So it’s decided; the beginning of next year. The Bound stops at Valmont. ‘Next year we’re going to have forgotten we had this conversation,’ I say to him as we stand up.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and then shakes his head. ‘No, we can’t forget.’

‘We can’t forget,’ I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.

‘We won’t,’ he says.

‘See, it’s going to be so much easier for you,’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’ve got the first step done already.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Getting rid of all your stuff.’

‘Oh.’

Silence.

‘But then the next step, what’s that?’ he asks.

‘The next step is being able to let everyone you love go.’

‘The South American jungle,’ he exclaims, walking past a field of weeds in North Boulder.

‘Not the jungle,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the jungle. We can’t survive in the jungle. We’ll die.’

‘So?’

‘When you put it that way...’

‘I’d rather die in the jungle than die in this fucking place.’

I look sideways at him. He never swears. ‘Plus,’ I say, sweeping past this, ‘I don’t want to live somewhere where there aren’t any other people.’

‘Me,’ he says.

‘Other than you.’

‘No offense,’ I rush on, seeing his face, ‘but I cannot spend that much time with anyone for that

long a period of time without killing them.’

He laughs.

‘I can’t,’ I say, shrugging.

‘I can,’ he says.

‘A boat,’ he exclaims, turning the corner from Valmont to Edgewater. ‘We’ll live on a boat in the ocean. No property taxes on the surface of the water!’

‘Oh no no no no. I can’t stand water. No water. No.’

‘What?’

‘You know that. I can’t swim. I get seasick. I hate water. No.’

‘You don’t have to swim. Plus, we’ll get all our food needs met.’

‘No we fucking won’t, we’ll...’

‘Oh yeah, I guess we can’t eat any fruit. I guess we’d probably get scurvy.’

‘I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘You don’t want to get scurvy?’ He laughs, looks askance at me.

‘No, I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘Thailand,’ he says, walking past a Thai restaurant.

‘Something my dad once told me,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘We were in London, on the subway, passing all these bums begging and no one was giving them anything... they were really in a bad way. He said, ‘You can knock Communism all you want, but they feed their people, and they medicate their people. In Beijing I saw no one begging on the streets, no one.’’

‘No beggars?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘China, then,’ he says.

‘The hardest thing would be leaving Patrick,’ he says.

‘Financially or personally?’ I ask.

‘I... financially,’ he says.

‘The thing is, I’m so scared,’ he mumbles, too quietly almost.

‘What? What of?’

‘I’m scared I won’t make it. I’m scared I won’t know how to survive.’

‘If you couldn’t survive you’d come back.’

‘...........’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about that yet.’

‘I don’t know if I’d come back,’ he says again.

We’re sitting in the fast food Japanese restaurant when the ridiculousness hits me. ‘Nick, in a year you won’t even be the same person,’ I say. ‘You know what I mean? Do you know how often you change your mind? Every two days, it’s...’

‘I know,’ he says, unexpectedly.

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. I mean, yeah. I guess.... I guess I have to find myself in a situation which is open to change.’

‘Maybe..’

‘School isn’t that situation.’

‘No.’

He spoons chopstickfuls and chopstickfuls of rice and eel into his mouth before he continues. ‘If fear of leaving school does get the best of me, at least... I’ll always know there’s something small in the back of my head telling me that school just isn’t right.’

That’s not enough, I say in my head as we leave the restaurant. Because I was telling him earlier that every plan made by Camille and I in high school, every road trip, every hitchhiking jaunt to Canada, every backpacking trip around Europe, has fallen through every summer because Camille’s parents ‘won’t let her’.

‘Fuck that,’ he says, ‘just don’t tell them! Just leave! Write from an internet cafe and just say... ‘Mom, I’m in Europe.’

‘I know. I know. All I’m saying is... every summer the plans fell through because of her and her parents. Every summer I was totally ready.’

‘I...’

‘What I’m saying is this: if this falls through, it will not be because of me.’

‘It won’t?’

‘No.’

‘So what you’re saying is it’ll be because of me.’

‘Yes.’

He crunches a few leaves in his path. ‘Sweet,’ he says, after a length.

This was three years pre-Indonesia. Nick and I hadn't yet started dating. I loved him, though. It was already getting impossible to hide it. And this conversation stuck, gluelike and word for word, to my brain, long enough for me to practically transcribe it, because merely the thought of leaving the country with him and surviving on coconuts was enough to make my mind and body light up. Logic and reason were completely suppressed, my disdain for something even as wimpy as car-camping was totally wiped out, and for awhile all I dreamed about was dropping out of society with him.

And in a way, we ended up eventually doing so. We weren't as crafty and revolutionary as we'd hoped; we both got degrees first. We got jobs at retail establishments. And when we did leave the country, we made sure we had jobs lined up and housing set. By then, the novelty of his thrill-seeking personality had worn thin on me and I had returned to being the drab realist that I am naturally.

But even stepping out of the mold of career-striving was a huge step sideways, and not easy for me to do. I am happy I did it. I think. If only because now, when I get an errant thought about how I'd like to drop out of society and move abroad, I actually have a living breathing picture in my head about what that's like. I don't have an idyllic (and totally false) image of waking up every morning to swaying palms and a clear head with no worries in the world, and Nick bringing me a coconut he just climbed a palm to pick, to eat for breakfast before we began our carefree day of frolicking in the ocean.

Here is a longer diary entry from December 2007, from Indonesia.

We start out sitting half-buried in bright green beach vines. Or at least that's where it feels like we start out. Start out, finish, everything else. World without end, bright green beach vines and a measured, heavy silence.

If time had started here we would have wandered off in two separate directions and gone on to lead two entirely separate lives, and we wouldn't have thought twice about it. We, or I, at least, wouldn't have wondered what his hands would look like once I'd turned my back on them, whether they'd be clutching each other in his lap or lazily tracing sand-roads around the cities of wild dogprints. I wouldn't have wondered whether he was staring after me or already in the water, trying to surf on an old piece of driftwood. We would have just gone as if neither of us were more to the other than strangers passing on the street, heads down and feet flying, in a big city like New York or Chicago.

Time didn't start here, though. Time, this time, started somewhere further away and entirely different. And because it did, I do wonder these things, or I would if I tried to run away, so instead of moving, I stay buried.

The vines are soft and slippery in my fingers, the sun is hot, and I want to be buried in sand. "Do you want to bury each other?" I ask him.

"What do you mean, bury each other?"

"I mean bury each other. In the sand. Under that palm?"

"Well, definitely not under that palm, a coconut might fall."

"That palm's not bearing coconut. You see any coconuts up there?"

"No, but that doesn't mean there aren't any."

"Okay. Fine. Let's bury each other under some other tree. Something that's not a palm. How about over there?"

"No. Forget it."

"If you didn't want to, why didn't you just say so?"

"I think I just did."

Sometimes when he says things like this I wish his eyes were tired, that he had spent the morning throwing up, or corralling seventeen screaming children, or climbing mountains; anything to make it seem like it's not personal, that he's just exhausted, can't move to do anything strenuous. That otherwise, he would be thrilled to bury me in sand. Teach me to bodysurf. Paint designs on our bodies, orange, with spit-damp ochre.

But his eyes aren't tired; they're bright and lively and looking somewhere else. Without saying a word, he stands up and walks away.

"Where are you going?" I ask the air around me, and the humidity swallows my words down with a gurgle, spits them back at me as a thin sheen of sweat. Drops of it form on my fingertips and I look at them, my words, and then look up and see that he's already dragging a piece of driftwood into the waves.

The real pain of it is in the fact that this is the kind of landscape that makes you want to be with the love of your life, and if you happen not to be, to want to turn whoever you're with into the love of your life, even if it would never work out, or, as the case may be, if it has already worked out and then fallen badly apart. The beach is ridged and pockmarked with birds' claws and dogs' paws, with the occasional spreading surface of clam or conch shells, and the scuttle and bubble of hermit crabs surfacing and submerging with the waves. The sand is black and silver and white and completely smooth, blending into a bay on one side and a mountain on the other. Over the mountain, which is flat-topped and appears covered in thick green cotton, a thundercloud has been looming for hours, motionless and far enough away as to be effectively harmless, but still gorgeous. The sun is directly overhead and filtering through the palms, which every few minutes drop a coconut – plop! crack! – into the sand or onto a log or – splash! – into the creek. The plops and cracks and splashes, the crash of the waves, the crowing of the roosters, the shouts of the villagers calling their dogs off of someone's pigs, and the ever-present wind hissing and whistling over the ocean – this is the island's wind ensemble, its quintet.

It is best heard, I think, doing something quirky. Burying someone up to the neck in black smooth sand, then sculpting an entirely new body for them out of the surrounding sand, perhaps with shell necklaces, squiggly arms, rolls of grainy hip fat, or large froglike toes. Spending hours sitting motionless in a dry sea of hermit crabs, waiting for one to venture far enough from its hole to be captured in an impossibly swift arm scoop. Realizing that no matter how far a hermit crab travels from its hole, it can still return faster than a human arm can move. Floating in the shallow ebb of the shore and relinquishing all control, letting the ocean do with you what it pleases, whether what it pleases is a rough slam into the sand bar or a languid, dizzy turn miles down the beach to the reef.

There is time for this. The background is perfect for it, and while some people may fantasize about drinking pina coladas while laying in hammocks reading the most terrible romance novel they can get their hands on, what I'm wishing for is to be able to act like the most curious of children with my lover.

But he's in the ocean with his driftwood, tumbling over and over into the riptide, and he, I'm sure, is wishing he were entirely alone. Maybe even the only person for hundreds and hundreds of miles. That's how he is. It's not how he used to be, but it's how he is now.

I no longer think going somewhere as far away as I can fly will fundamentally change who I am. Or how my relationships go. Or make anything less complicated.

That helps.

2009-10-16T23:05:00.003-06:00

The older I get the more anhedonic I get, and I'm not just using that word because it's a GRE word; in fact, when that word popped up on my GRE Vocab Builder, I was like, sweet, I already know that one. I am that one.

Well, not completely. I shouldn't be so damn dramatic all the time and start journal entries off with sweeping proclamations that I know in the back of my brain to be at least a tiny bit untrue. I am not incapable of feeling pleasure. But I am more incapable of it than I used to be, for sure.

However, this is possibly because I spend 80% of my time doing things like the GRE Vocab Builder, or brush-up algebraic equations, or papers on actuarial decision making, or internet homework about cellular respiration. I guess we'll see how true the sweeping proclamation really is once we have a point of comparison. That point of comparison will have to be something like, let's see how I feel once I spend most of my time traveling to foreign countries, trying every expensive exotic food that exists, frolicking in ocean waves, playing with kittens, and counting my oodles and oodles of hundred dollar bills that fall in my lap from nowhere.

2009-10-16T10:18:00.004-06:00

When I dream about people I've never met, which is actually quite often, my brain never bothers to fill in their faces. It doesn't do this by having the person walk around with a blur for a face, as that might impact the quality of the dream by being really creepy (and if it was really creepy every time I dreamt about someone I've never met, I'd never meet anybody new). No, it does this by having my eyes aimed downwards, or otherwise away from them, at all times during the dream.

Last night I had one where I was in the process of falling in love with someone I'd just met, and had never met before. We stared out my living room window at the hot dog stand that filled the view, but ate leftover potato latkes. I had salted his too heavily, and he made a face when he took a bite, so I salted my side even heavier, took an even bigger bite, made an even weirder face, and started laughing. We both started laughing. And my hand, which was pretending to hand him back the fork, was really searching for an excuse to brush hands, or linger wrist to wrist.

And this whole time my line of sight only saw a hot dog stand, a plate of potato latkes, his legs in his jeans perched on a stool, and his right hand. I never saw anything above chest height.

This is odd because in waking life I often focus on people's faces to the complete exclusion of everything else. It's as though faces are so important to me that my brain doesn't feel right inventing them in case it's proven wrong later and has to painfully recalibrate every time the flesh-and-blood person walks into a real, physical room.

2009-08-23T19:59:00.003-06:00

We were at the Niwot Market today to eat Sachi Sushi after 4 hours of sleep and most of it being spent inside a 100 degree stuffy room. I wanted to get a notebook for school (tomorrow, because clearly I plan ahead) after we had already paid and walked out.

"Shit," I said, "we gotta go to Target", because 'shit' is the perfect expression for realizing that one has to go to Target the day before fall semester starts at a giant college with 30,000 students, "and our ice cream is going to melt!"

Dan told me to hang on and he'd just go get a notebook from the Niwot Market, to which I yelled at his receding back: "There isn't a notebook section at a grocery store!!" but lo and behold, there was.

I haven't had this back-to-school elementary school style feeling since, well, elementary school. Something about a new notebook. A five subject one! I used my neatest handwriting to title each section with the course name, time, and location as though my penmanship would be graded by my fifth grade teacher. I think my handwriting was actually neater in fifth grade.

Last semester I would take my laptop to class and take notes that way, but I found myself falling into the trap that I loathe in other people: surfing the net and blanking out. The prospect of net-surfing is way too instant-gratification for me to have available in class, so this semester it's pen and paper only.

Five classes + research lab + senior honors thesis = the excuse I've always wanted to totally immerse myself in learning... also known as nerd-dom... also known as paradise.

2009-03-13T09:03:00.003-06:00

The more restaurant reviews I write, the more of a strange phenomenon emerges from the fog.

As much as I've always believed and defended my position that food quality is way, way more important than ambience, service, plate decoration, the art on the wall, or whatever else some people judge restaurants on, I find myself sometimes being pulled subconsciously towards giving some restaurant with worse food better reviews that it deserves simply for the food alone, and vice versa. "I just like it better for some reason!" I'll think to myself, and then I'll have to consciously throw that thought away to try and be fair.

Then I wonder if that's the atmosphere (wall hangings, service, you get the picture) creeping in and trying to influence me under the radar without getting judged by my snobby, food-obsessed, conscious mind!

Because consciously, I will go (and have gone) back to restaurants that are gaudy and ugly with uncomfortable stools and loud patrons and just plain mean waitresses who make fun of my clothes with other waitresses behind my back, if the food is fantastic. I wouldn't want to admit doing it the other way around... going back to a place with so-so food just because there's intricate art on all the walls or the waitress and I squealed together about some shared experience or the seats were all lush, plush love seats.

But then how to explain my urge to return to somewhere like the Dushanbe Teahouse, which has consistently proved its food to be so-so at best and awful at worst? Is it just because I like the pillowy corner booths and the rush of the creek alongside the tables outdoors and the fact that 40 Tajik artists painstakingly handcrafted it in Tajikistan and as a result it looks like this? How so shallow and easily fooled, foodie brain? No matter how many times I look at my review and think 'No! This place sucks, remember?' there's a creeping desire in me that hisses, evilly, 'It can't be that bad... it's so beautiful and everyone in Boulder loves it. Look at its menu. Everything is so ethnic! You love the Teahouse. You love it. There is something wrong with you for giving it a negative review. Go on. Give it just one more try....'

Or how to explain my returning 3 times to Marie's, a mediocre greasy spoon (and what good is a greasy spoon that's mediocre??) whose waitresses gave me the sass that I so dearly missed from Chicago? Did I just think, 'ooh, that's right, Marie's waitresses, bathe me in your sweet disdain! I love it when you imply that I'm stupid! Serve me whatever crappy food you wish!' and promptly forget that the food isn't worth it?

These examples are easy enough to deconstruct, but there are little niggling feelings that tug at me when I'm trying to sort out how many stars a restaurant deserves that I can't as easily desconstruct. I sit down at a restaurant some place and just immediately for no reason think, 'This place is going to blow, I can tell!' and even if it turns out not to, I just don't want to give it a good rating. There's something trying to stop me!

I try my hardest to ignore this feeling and be fair to the poor restaurant, and I think that I usually succeed. It's just obnoxious that I can't put my finger on what it is that's trying to influence me. Something subtle about the smell? That it reminds me on some level of someplace I had an anxiety attack in when I was in high school? Did I just happen to feel sick that day? Was I mad at my boyfriend?

It makes me question the validity of all the reviews I read, not just my own. As Ryan pointed out in the comments on my last entry, my reviews roughly follow a bell curve. I didn't do it on purpose. That's just how I feel about most places - most places are average. More are a little bit to one side or another. And only a few are exceptional, whether exceptionally good or exceptionally puke-inducing.

I am the only Yelp reviewer I've come across, though, whose reviews fall like that. Most everyone else has tons of 5 and 4 star reviews and they fall off as the stars get lower. Is this just because I tend sort of towards melancholy and judgment, and the rest of these people are happy-go-lucky and tends towards enjoyment and fun? Or is it because I see a three star review as a place worth going back to and they see it as a horrible, unforgivable smite upon some hardworking small business? Or is it, perhaps, because they take into account the decoration, the service, the ambience, and notice all these small pleasures I'd never think to find because I'm too busy staring with a critical eye at my plate?

2009-02-27T08:59:00.004-07:00

In case you were worried about my red X's, people, worry no more, because I have been keeping the red X's at bay by reviewing practically every business establishment in Boulder over at Yelp.com. A link to my reviews can be found on my left sidebar all the way at the bottom, in case you are the type of person who enjoys reading a snobby judgmental person hurl thorns at helpless small business owners.

2009-02-18T12:10:00.001-07:00

I trust most of you are aware of the Milgram experiment (or the most well known thereof), but if you haven't, there's a Wikipedia link right there, just ripe for clicking! It's a pretty oft-cited defense of the power of authority/peer pressure/obedience etc., but the more I read about it, the more it seems like we're all missing the point. Hasn't anyone taken into consideration that the people subjected to this experiment have no doubt noticed that their experimenter is himself willing to subject other subjects to 45o volt shocks?

I think it may have been pure brute selfish fear, a better-him-than-me thing, that motivated these poor subjects, way more than just the human desire to acquiesce to authority. I mean, the experimenter clearly thinks it's okay to dangerously shock people. There's nothing that would suggest he would stop at dangerously shocking any dissenter in the experiment.

My psychology text has cleverly anticipated my excuse response by citing predictions, percentages, studies, surveys, and basically good hard raw facts and proof, that prove that no matter how much people deny that they would have done it, they would have definitely done it.

Though my text has discredited me before I even opened my mouth, I do think I would have refused to administer any more shocks until the experimenter at least made a threatening move or comment. And threatening means... threatening. Not, 'you have no choice but to continue'. That isn't a threat, it's an arguable statement that begs to be asked for clarification. But while this may be just my gut reaction/excuse for disassociating myself from these subjects, I feel like, yes, I would have done it in that case, but it wouldn't have been out of fear of disobeying authority. It would have been out of a fear OF GETTING SHOCKED WITH 450 VOLTS OF ELECTRICITY.

2009-02-17T09:32:00.002-07:00

Half An Interview

: I'm sorry I'm late.

: They don't? I'm surprised. Who? No, no, don't actually tell me. I mean, I'm at least 45 minutes late and we're not Spain, or, I don't know, Thailand, so... that's rude, right? That's rude.

: ::laughs:: It's just how my family raised me.

: I don't know if it's all that unusual. Just because these freakishly talented families who just squirt out one after another after another are so high profile, doesn't mean that the majority of us just sort of come out of nowhere. I don't mean to call them nowhere, of course. But as you said, my mom's a dentist and my dad's a kindergarten teacher. We didn't even have a TV in the house, actually. The first movie I saw was 'Home Alone', I was 6, it was at a friend's house, and I stopped watching it after the kid threw up pizza. That was just gross. You remember that scene? Almost on grossness par with Tom Hanks puking into his astronaut helmet in Apollo 13. Oh God, I'm sure it's not actually called an astronaut helmet. I just can't remember the right term. But the splattering like it was going to come out of the screen... anyway, I walked out of that one too. Right out of the theatre and sank to my knees in the hallway.

: No, I obviously have a serious phobia of throwing up.

: In Ladies? That was a body double.

: Yes.

: Yes, I really got a body double to puke for me. Why would I lie about that? Actually - am I allowed to say this? I'm sure I am - it wasn't real, anyway. It was oatmeal. With honey and egg or something. Just spitting it up while fake gagging. But still. Couldn't do it. In fact, I don't watch that scene in the movie.

: Okay, good idea. I agree.

: I didn't. I wasn't one of those kids who declares they want to act from, I don't know, straight out of the womb, and then joins all the theater groups in school and gets to play Macbeth or the equivalent thereof for the rest of their secondary school career. I didn't actually act until college.

: No, I should amend that, actually. I didn't act formally until college. When I was a kid I pretended I was different people all the time. My longest standing character, created, I think, when I was four, had emigrated from Russia, played the xylophone proficiently, and spoke an invented-on-the-spot language that sounded nothing like Russian. But I think they don't call that acting. I think they call that lying.

: Of course I didn't! That was the fun of it. But you're good. My mother said that to me once. She said, 'if you want to tell stories, that's fine, but just make sure to tell us they're stories afterwards so we don't worry.' Of course, I listened, and nodded, and then ran off and did not listen to her advice because seriously, what's the point in telling stories if people know they're fake so they can relax? You want to draw people in. You want their real emotions and their real reactions. Or else it's 'that's a great story, sweetie!' instead of 'Holy $#!&, you saw WHAT? Are you okay?' There's a difference. There's a huge difference. Especially to a kid and especially to an actor. Oh, can you write 'holy $#!&' in this magazine? Oh well, too late if you can't.

: In fictional movies? We do the exact opposite. I mean, yes, of course, it's a movie and it's classified as fiction or nonfiction, so its packaging is an inherent caveat. Sort of like saying, 'Mom, this is going to be a lie.' But as soon as people are past the packaging, once they're in the theatre or at home in front of their televisions with the DVD inserted, our very first goal, our first and most important goal, is to make people forget the packaging, and forget the label. Forget we ever said 'Mom, this is a lie.' We want them to believe with every synapse in their brain that this is reality, that it's actually happening. That every occurrence on the screen will impact their world. If Yellowstone does erupt, for example, you know, onscreen, we want people rushing to their underground shelters with Saltines in hand before they realize what they're doing.

: I would. I would absolutely support the idea of people running in droves out of the theatre to take shelter. And not just because they'd have to buy another ticket later when they realized what they'd done. ::laughs::

: No, I think any director's ideal is to achieve that level of realism. Maybe I'm wrong.

: Well, I'm grown up now, but more to the point, everyone knows who I am. I can't make up pasts for myself. I can't say that something happened to me when it didn't. There'd be hundreds - thousands - of people who knew me at some point in my life stepping forward and testifying against me. Well, not testifying. I don't mean to infuse this with such unnecessary gravity. Because obviously, it's not like it's a human right to have the freedom to lie to people whenever you want.

: On the contrary, actually. Sometimes, after acting in scenes where everything's so carefully scripted to be clever, or momentous, or hilarious - real life starts failing to measure up. I mean, no conversation can possibly match a placed plot point in a story. Not every time I talk to a man in a coffeeshop is going to end in a night full of whimsical adventure and mystery. Not any time will. But at the same time, not every time I walk to the bus stop is going to end with my getting pulled, unwillingly, into a murder scheme which puts my life in danger and, ultimately, gets my organs harvested in a bathtub. Not any time will. Hopefully.

: But do you know what I mean? Everything you do when you're not acting starts seeming flat. It starts to seem like it's the unreal part. That it's filler. And that's not a good feeling. Because even though it doesn't feel like it sometimes, the filler is the majority. I mean, I'm sitting here, calling real life filler, instead of, you know... real life.

: No, I wouldn't call it depressed, per se. I might call it dread, but that's being extremely pessimistic about it, and you sort of pointed me in that direction. See, as I get older, the filler may slowly become everything. Because no one can maintain the same level of frenetic working as they age. Even though of course, I'd prefer to. I'd prefer to always be speaking some perfect line of script, or else, at least, to always be a pawn in someone else's grand scheme. But right now... you know, most people who would refer to their real life as 'filler' have nothing else to escape into. Real life is real life and that's their everyday experience, every second of every day. And yeah, I'd call them depressed.

: You mean it's not immediately obvious?

: Of course. Well, the reason I'm different is because my real life also consists of these scripted moments and schemes. Just because it's meant to be a fabricated story doesn't mean I'm not physically doing it. A great percentage of my life actually is spent contributing to these fantastic stories and feeling for all the world like I'm influencing them. I don't have that 'every second of my life having to be my own life' thing going on. If that makes sense.

: I don't know if dramatic scenes are something that someone can stop expecting to just happen. I don't know that I'll ever shake the feeling that my words, the way they come out naturally, will never be as good as a sentence some screenplay writer agonized over for weeks. And why should they, anyway? Why should they?

2009-02-10T11:09:00.001-07:00

One of the many signs that I have been watching too much Top Model (any Top Model can probably be argued to be too much Top Model, but we'll leave that aside) is that last night I had a dream about Tyra Banks going on a murderous rampage on a city bus, which culminated in the stabbing of my boyfriend. She stood up on the bus driver's driving platform as the faceless driver cowered. I escaped out the emergency exit, a swing-out window, as she shrieked and brandished a long knife. Dan wasn't so lucky. As only one leg was out of the bus, she teetered towards the back in her ridiculous high heels and stabbed him in the throat.

The scene cut, because dream scenes can just cut, to us in someone's backyard. He was in a yard chair, bleeding from the mouth, though with no outward signs of the stabbing except that. I was reaching my hand through molasses to find my cell phone to dial 911. Although it was in my pocket, my pocket seemed light-years away, and my hand was moving not even close to light speed. And if that weren't enough, the phone, once opened, displayed only vague squigglies that darted around the keypad like tadpoles.

This is why, once I dialed what I thought was 911 and was greeted by a sarcastic guy giving me quiz questions a la bar trivia nights, I thought I might have misdialed, and hung up. But the second time dialing (a repeat, if slower, of the molasses and the space travel and the tadpoles) I got the same guy, and had to dodge his questions before getting down to the case at hand, being, of course, the stabbing, and the blood that was coursing from Dan's mouth onto the preternaturally green grass.

It took the ambulance 20 minutes to show up. I wrote this number down on a pad of paper for future reference: note to self - make sure to always allow 20 minutes before beginning death throes. Oddly enough, I don't remember if he was dead or alive by the time they got there. In the dream, it wasn't material.

Dreams tend to do that. They take things that in life would be of the utmost importance, like whether or not you are wearing clothes, or whether or not there is solid ground beneath you, or whose house you are in, or what country you are in, or whether you even know the person who's currently having sex with you, or whether or not your boyfriend has died from his stab wound, and make them secondary. At the same time, they force you to worry and obsess over the sound of the word 'orange', or whether your teeth might at any time just fall out, or the fact that your fingers are sticking together, or the dinosaur that keeps appearing and disappearing in the long distance.

2009-02-06T13:12:00.001-07:00

Honestly, sometimes I just write here out of a fear of a big red X, and sometimes I suspect it's becoming crystal-clear. See, I've been Excel-charting my 5 chart-able New Years resolutions - despite my messy room and unorganized stuff, I like to make pie charts and lists and promises -and the best way for me to ensure that I feel guilty when I don't keep my promises is to have the failure recorded somewhere. (Negative reinforcement, people! The anti-gold star! It works! Screw what those evil child psychologists tell you!) For the last four weeks, I've failed at least one of the five. Usually two. And next to each failed week I insert a ClipArt GIANT RED X. And I have to look at them every time I check up on myself.

Living in fear of more red X's drives me to this page five days a week, and I am not afraid to admit it. But today something else drove me here, and that something is Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a big tease. He wrote a compelling novel full of dripping imagery and believable, intense relationships. He filled it full of well-placed objects that I THOUGHT would come to be of importance later in the story. He weaved three stories together seamlessly and set the stage up for what I THOUGHT was going to be a climactic symbol crash of all these well-placed objects, relationships, and storylines.

Wrong! Just as I was gearing up to cover my ears and be blown away, THE BOOK ENDED. I spent 7/8 of the book buried in it, ignoring my drivers at work, putting off using the bathroom, making my already too late bedtime later and later. I was spellbound, but also I was reading extra carefully to catch all the details so I wouldn't be confused when everything came together. It read like a detective novel - everything of the utmost importance. Since I'm not used to reading detective novels, I had to teach my brain to read that way.

And then what does Murakami do? He (spoiler, if you can count this ending as a spoiler) ends the book by putting a phone that keeps spewing murderous threats on the shelves of a 7-11, its murderous threats un-carried out. The main character goes home and sleeps next to her sister as the day breaks. Many of the major characters just sort of disappear and we never find out what THEY'RE doing.

Now, I'm actually not a climax junkie. I am perfectly happy with books having no discernable point as long as they're fun to read. But this book was set up like the most climaxy thriller ever. It had the creepy foreboding feeling. The seemingly pointless alternate storylines that you figure must be eventually relevant when they smash into the main storyline at the end. The lurking Chinese mafia (WHO NEVER ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING). All the characters having extremely creepy backstories.

And then... nothing. My cultural parameters have failed to expand wide enough for the Japanese style of storytelling, I imagine many Japanese majors would tell me. Maybe true. But he (Murakami) is still a giant tease.

2009-02-05T10:34:00.002-07:00

Yesterday was one of those conflicted days where, hey, it's 67 degrees in early February and you've got three hours to kill. You have your bike. You have your book. But you're really tired. You have a class from 6:30 until 9:30 and then have to work at 6:00 the next morning. What do you do? Bike-ride or nap? Read in the lounge chair of the sunny quadrangle, or nap?

I napped with my window wide open and felt that was a fair compromise. What does Boulder reward me with? A next day even sunnier and warmer than that one, with no obligations to meet and no naps to take! I might go out on a limb here and say that this is the first time that nature has ever rewarded me for being lazy. (Or global warming has just gone on a total rampage with no regard either way for my laziness.)

In non-weather-related blog news (ah, if only ALL blog news could be such!) I am currently having an awkward etiquette problem that I'm pretty sure couldn't even exist until last year at the earliest. See, I'm a Scrabulous junkie (and I continue to call it Scrabulous despite the whole legal kerfluffle with Hasbro, etc) and I've been known to carry on 10 or 12 games at a time, playing them at work while my buses circle placidly around town, evenly spaced and happy.

Now, our network has always blocked Youtube and celebrity gossip rags and porn sites and things of that nature, but never bothered to block Facebook or any of its applications, probably figuring that it was OK if its employees wasted time in innocuous ways. Yesterday, though, Scrabulous (and Facebook) suddenly became blocked. Solidly blocked. Neither switching browsers nor going through tunnel sites nor adding s' to the http's worked at all.

The day before yesterday, I played an exciting, extremely evenly matched game with a stranger. She asked me for a rematch. I accepted and started the game, saying I'd play consistently the following day. Following day comes, Scrabulous is blocked. I can't even get ahold of her via Facebook to tell her what's going on. Having had this happen (players disappearing on me suddenly after starting a game), I know how frustrating this is.

Now my quandary has several solutions, but Miss Manners not having covered Scrabulous etiquette in any of her manuals yet, I can't decide which is the best:

a) Using the Scrabulous chatbox when I get home to apologize for my situation and offer to gallantly resign the game if she chooses not to play a one-move-a-day game;
b) Using the Scrabulous chatbox to apologize for my situation, but expect her to keep playing;
c) Decide to not care because this is the internet and there are assholes on the internet and everyone expects assholes on the internet and besides, Scrabulous games aren't promises signed in gold so I should just play when I wander by my computer and to hell with what she thinks about me because we will never meet; or
d) Demand that our IT guy unblock Scrabulous because my work is on-demand and rare, and the nature of it is that there cannot be extra work, really, so Scrabulous couldn't possibly be affecting my output, and risk being laughed at and having Blogger blocked as well.

Ideas?

2009-02-04T10:26:00.004-07:00

Unfortunately, Nora, I am not at all eloquent enough to avoid the virulent '25 Things' list that's catching Facebook and blogs by storm. I simply hadn't been tagged yet. However, I am going to take your comment as a challenge AND a tag, just so I have an excuse to drop the, um, dressing room curtains of propriety or something, and instead fulfill my weekly writing quota by doing something that takes no organizational thought. Thanks for that, by the way! Organizational thought is my Achilles heel!

1. I love to sleep and look forward to it every night. I rarely have nightmares and often have lucid dreams, so closing my eyes in bed at night is usually the start of some great adventure.

2. Having even moderately acceptable posture is a daily struggle.

3. I haven't yet found my massage tolerance limit. That is, I've been massaged for 2 or 3 hours straight, possibly longer, and never stopped wanting more.

4. In my line of work I often encounter people who just wander out to any old random city bus stop and just start asking the driver about how to get to their desired location. The bus is never the correct bus. And they never ever know the address or cross streets of where they're going. They just wander out and expect Providence and kind people to guide them. I do not understand these people. I can't imagine doing that. I am the kind of person who carries bus schedule printouts and writes the addresses of places on my hand as well as on sheets of paper in my pocket.

5. It's easy for me to handle most types of pain. Broken limbs, ear-stretching, cuts, falls. But I can't handle dentist-related tooth nerve pain.

6. I am the only person in my family to have stayed blond past childhood.

7. Everyone who looks at me thinks I'm Swedish, and barring that, some kind of Scandinavian at least. I am not actually Swedish at all. Mostly, I am Russian. Also German and English. but not Swedish.

8. I have a lot of tiny things wrong with me that I should probably go to the doctor for, but never have. My jaw pops when I eat chewy food. My right ear clogs up when I exercise. I've had a cough for 6 months. Sometimes my heart skips beats. Taken individually, they never seem important enough to get checked out.

9. Sushi has been my favorite food ever since I was old enough to eat solid food.

10. I don't like soda. My favorite things to drink are fruit juices and smoothies; the weirder they're combined, the better. My current bizarre favorite is honeydew/avocado with boba.

11. There's never been a time when I haven't liked school. Not even in middle school.

12. I used to be able to improvise on the piano for hours without interruption. Now I'm too self-conscious about it, and too apt to want to record what I'm playing, to be able to do it anymore.

13. Any space I live or work in is guaranteed to be a total mess.

14. My least favorite household chore is doing dishes. I would rather scrub toilets.

15. I like to think I'm awesome at Scrabble, but any time I get too up on my high horse I go to the near-tournament level practice session by my house on Wednesdays. This one guy I teamed up with once literally looked at his tiles, which read 'IWCSEO_', for about half a second, and went, 'Shall we play 'COWRIES', or 'COWIEST'? I am not at this level and don't understand how one even gets there.

16. I am a terrible swimmer and can barely do two laps without feeling like I'm going to drown. But I love beaches and cavorting around in waves in the ocean.

17. I get sad when I have to be inside during an unseasonably warm day, but sadder when I inexplicably choose to be inside on an unseasonably warm day.

18. I hardly ever wake up feeling like I want to spring out of bed and greet the day, no matter how long I sleep or how sound of sleep I get.

19. No matter how much money I have saved up, I never stop thinking I'm totally bankrupt and on the verge of financial ruin.

20. I value experiences more than possessions, and will spend money on the former but not the latter, so much that others are sometimes offended by the things that I don't own. ("Oh my God, you don't HAVE a HAIRDRYER?" "Seriously, you don't have HIGH HEELS to wear tonight?" "Why don't you CARE about getting a new computer? Yours is SLOW!")

21. I am never quite warm enough when it's cold outside, no matter how many layers I wear. My ideal room temperature is 80. My ideal outdoor temperature is 85-90. If I get into bed cold, I won't warm up, no matter the number of blankets, unless one is electric.

22. Most video games produced after the 2-D era make me dizzy and nauseous to play or watch. So do IMAX theatres.

23. My dream job is a restaurant critic and my nightmare job is a preschool teacher. My dream job is a reclusive singer who makes all her money on CD releases and small gatherings, and my nightmare job is an astronaut.

24. I have bitten my nails all my life and I don't really see any reason to stop.

25. I need to be forced to do most kind of physical activity other than walking and biking to places I need to go. Once I'm forced, I'm glad I did it. But I'll never make the effort myself.

2009-02-03T07:13:00.001-07:00

Anyone ever had their nose get numb when getting cavities filled? I hadn't until last week. It's like your nose is filled with shaving cream or something, but you can breathe through it, so it feels like you're snorting shaving cream up into your brain every time you take a breath! Breathing through your mouth isn't an option because you have a bite wedge, a piece of cotton, a mirror, a sucker, a drill, a rinser, and two hands, if not three, in your mouth, and you do not want the chance, however slight, of accidentally breathing one of these things into your lungs. Having a bite wedge lodged in a lung is way, way, WAY worse than the mere sensation of snorting shaving cream. Not that I ever thought I'd have to make that choice. It's like a 'Would You Rather?' question that would never come up in real life.

But now it has.

Other 'Would You Rather?' questions I thought would never come up in real life, but did:

Would you rather, as a three-year-old, eat fried fish eyes or be ridiculed by your uncle forever for turning down the dare? (answer: eat fried fish eyes)

Would you rather, as a nine-year-old, risk cheating on a history test, or just accept the 95% you would have gotten otherwise? (answer: risk cheating, because 95% IS NOT PERFECT)

Would you rather, as a panic-attacky thirteen-year-old, play your super-exciting bass solo in a concert, or run offstage and hide behind the stairs? (answer: hide behind stairs)

Would you rather, as a twenty-four-year-old, eat a concoction with the consistency and flavor of snot mixed with quail egg, or disappoint the expectant Japanese chef who is staring at you? (answer: loudly and honestly proclaim the delectableness of everything else on your plate while shoveling sashimi into your mouth and hiding the bowl of snot behind the platter of sashimi)

And of course, the big one:

As a sixteen-year-old, would you rather live with your father or your mother? (answer: oscillate wildly until college, then ignore the question)

2009-02-02T07:48:00.002-07:00

I am simultaneously playing 10 games of Scrabble and completing an application to be formally readmitted to school. Playing Scrabble at the same time enables me to not totally freak out about having just chosen a career path essentially at random. I mean, it's not as though I chose it out of a hat; if I had done that I could just as well have chosen physics (the only class in which I've ever tried as hard as I can and still gotten a D) or, I don't know, accounting or journalism or something.

I chose psychology, because all the way through my anthropology degree, I was reading psychology books, asking psychology-related questions, and generally unsuccesfully trying to tug my degree towards another one without realizing what I was doing. I was spread-eagled between zoology and psychology, and instead of choosing one or the other, I just chose the middle.

And honestly, it's not like I chose an actual career yet, because there's thousands of ways you can go with psychology. And most of those ways, thankfully and contrary to popular belief, do not involve me sitting in a cramped office with a stranger on my couch pouring every tiny detail of his life out to me while I sit there with my clipboard out trying to be engaging and sympathetic, and also writing at the same time.

Whenever anyone at work has asked me what I'm studying and I tell them, they sort of grimace. It's a familiar grimace. Yuck. Therapy. Couches. Repressed memories. Dream-telling. Oedipal complexes. Hundred dollars a session. Recalling child abuse. Icky.

And I have to explain to them that not only is that not what I'm going for, but that's hardly what anyone's going for anymore (except for the hundred dollars a session, I guess). Hasn't the Freudian wave been out for decades now? Aren't we through with everything, sticks to snakes to pencils, representing penises? And dreams being expression of secretly repressed desires?

If I were to be a therapist at all, I'd want to be a problem-solver, but mostly I'm interested in how people behave when they have more or fewer choices, and also in psychosomatic (idiopathic, as they say in some medical circles) pain and disease. These two lines of thought don't cross, but I'm sure I could make them cross. You can make anything cross.

2009-01-27T06:50:00.002-07:00

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.

2009-01-22T08:25:00.003-07:00

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.

2009-01-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-01-16T07:19:00.006-07:00

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.

2009-01-15T07:23:00.007-07:00

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!

2009-01-13T08:56:00.007-07:00

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.

2009-01-13T08:05:00.007-07:00

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.

2009-01-12T12:08:00.006-07:00

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?

2009-01-09T13:08:00.006-07:00

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.

2009-01-07T13:37:00.004-07:00

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.

2009-01-07T06:59:00.004-07:00

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.

2008-09-17T10:22:00.004-06:00

http://whenwechange.blogspot.com/

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

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

2008-08-19T06:53:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-08-01T17:58:00.004-06:00

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

2008-07-29T07:10:00.005-06:00

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.

2008-07-18T08:20:00.005-06:00

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.

2008-07-15T09:00:00.005-06:00

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.

2008-07-14T07:55:00.004-06:00

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.

2008-07-11T18:08:00.004-06:00

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.

2008-07-10T08:11:00.005-06:00

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?'

2008-07-08T08:12:00.004-06:00

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.

2008-07-07T12:45:00.004-06:00

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.

2008-07-03T13:12:00.002-06:00

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.

2008-07-02T07:58:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Spent Our Childhoods Being Told

2008-06-20T12:32:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boulder's Boulders

2008-06-04T07:52:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At which the woman exclaimed, “No!”

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

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

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

2008-05-30T16:55:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-04-18T08:53:00.004-06:00

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

2008-04-07T06:50:00.002-06:00

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

2008-04-03T13:34:00.003-06:00

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

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

2008-04-02T06:47:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

2008-04-01T12:23:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

2008-03-20T11:36:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

2008-03-17T11:41:00.004-06:00

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

2008-03-11T10:17:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

2008-03-06T13:32:00.002-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-03-04T13:46:00.003-07:00

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

Paragraph break.

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

Paragraph break.

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

2008-03-03T13:11:00.003-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-03-02T12:50:00.004-07:00

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

2008-02-29T10:41:00.003-07:00

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

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

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

2008-02-26T11:27:00.003-07:00

I do think I would be satisfied if I spent the next two years getting on planes and jumping in cars or on boats at the slightest of whims to follow my taste buds around the world. I know that there is a term for this, and it's called a super-mega-important-sought-after restaurant reviewer (also known as: in your dreams). But really. If I were to suddenly become a gazillionaire, after I gave away 80% of it or more, depending on how much a gazillion dollars really is, that's what I would do. And yes, I know that if I suddenly craved Tibetan momos, the craving, and my good temper with it, would probably be gone after 18 hours on an international flight, three different customs forms from three different countries, a tiny wobbling plane struggling through the high winds around the Himalayas, and the crazy long-ass nap I would take upon finding a place to stay. Still. It would be a good jumping point for all sorts of adventure that I wouldn't know how to look for if I just sat here and thought, 'Now, where shall I go look for adventure?

2008-02-25T07:38:00.003-07:00

Last time I was down at the creek, four weeks ago, maybe, I happened to be by myself, and the creek happened to be just teeming with ducks: ducks sliding down waterfalls with little bobs, ducks ruffling their feathers as they righted themselves after hitting the bottom or those waterfalls, ducks standing up on rocks stretching their necks and displaying, ducks pecking at other ducks' tail feathers, ducks attempting rape indiscriminately. (If you know me in person, and most of you do, you'll have already heard my 'ducks are the major brutal rapists in the avian kingdom' speech, so I'll spare you hearing it again.) This description, so you know, doesn't even become to come close to making it clear to you just how many damn ducks there were. There were so many, the water was hardly visible. Ducks were coming down waterfalls three, four at a time. Territorial disputes, nay, wars, were going on over three-inch-square patches of sand, or tiny slivers of rock poking out from the water.

Although I called people frantically to get them to come share in this freak-of-nature event, nobody showed up fast enough. I sat on a bench shivering and staring at the quacking, flapping duck quilt until clouds came out and covered the sun. By the time Chris and Eugene showed up, the duck covering was merely patchy, almost a normal level of ducks (if ducks came in levels, like humidity or temperature), and they thought I had been dreaming, or making it up or something.

Anyway, I was down there again yesterday, with Dan this time, and there were still straggler ducks hanging out in the part by the library. They were pretty much done raping each other by now, and were more interested in pulling who-knows-what from between the icy rocks of the bottom. We sat down to watch them, and presently a man with headphones showed up with an entire loaf of freshly bought Safeway bread and started throwing whole slices into the water.

We actually hadn't seen the man at first, but when a slice of wheat bread landed lightly like a Frisbee on the surface of the water and fifty ducks dove wildly into the middle of it and started frantically pecking each other's feathers out for the mere chance at a sliver of the bread, we saw him, nearly next to us, preparing to throw another slice.

There's really no story here. He split the rest of his bread evenly between himself, a man with a dog who wanted nothing more than to have a duck lunch (the dog, not the man [probably]), and Dan and I. We spent some time feeding the ducks and it was good. I hadn't done it for years. The last time I did was probably close to the time I was about seven and fell into Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles trying to crouch down on a mossy rock to get closer to my target duck. Echo Park Lake is more used syringe than water, or was at that time. My whole body itched for days.

2008-02-23T10:50:00.003-07:00

Guest posted over at Nora's place today with my miraculous weekend internet that only pokes its head from his shell on very special weekends.

2008-02-22T12:17:00.003-07:00

I started typing and it started transliterating into Malayalim! Oh my God! I had to figure out how to make it stop and while I was doing that everything I wanted to say just flew right out my ears. I have a fever and I'm at work and I have a terrible haircut. This is all that's left. I've been trying to decide whether to cut my losses and just cut the stupid haircut all off, which would leave my hair chin length, which I KNOW looks terrible on me, but it's tempting because I think that the current cut looks more terrible. For awhile now I've just been going to Great Clips and everyone keep telling me Great Clips sucks, but they've been so good to me, and the second I betray them by going somewhere else, God suddenly goes completely insane and gives me a Haircut-Specific Smite in the form of an Middle-Aged-Woman Haircut. God and Great Clips are apparently friends. I don't think 'smite' is a noun. I don't know if I have the appropriate writer credentials to just force it to be a noun.

Speaking of forcing words to be different parts of speeches than they're used to, I was in a friend's car coming out from a Chinese restaurant, and a car honked, or didn't honk, or something happened that involved either honking or the conspicuous lack of honking (see... this is what happens when I don't allow myself to embellish, and my memory isn't exact) and he said something like, 'Should I have horned at him?'

'Horn' should definitely be used as a verb all the time. 'Did you see that guy? He cut right across five lanes of traffic to get to the on-ramp, and everyone was horning at him, and he just flipped everyone off!' 'Should I horn at that hot woman in the Kia, or would that be crass?' (Do guys ever consider that, just maybe, it might be just a LITTLE bit crass to horn at women from cars?!)

The innuendo of sexual advance just makes it better. But I supposed there's no innuendal benefit to changing 'smite' into a noun. Scratch 'smite'. But we'll consider 'innuendal'.

2008-02-21T07:27:00.004-07:00

Every time I get a massage (not often, but enough to remember that this happens), the pleasure turns my brain to mush and I lay there thinking ridiculous thoughts:

In the future, when we're all engineered, genetically or otherwise, to conform better to our jobs, will massage therapists have hands that automatically generate massage oil with the right nerve twinge from the brain, or, primitively, a touch of a craftily hidden button? Will employers pay for their employees to have this feature installed, and if so, will it be somehow tweaked so that the feature will automatically disable ouside of work hours? Will male employees then pay chip hackers the big bucks to come retweak the chip so it works all the time, and therefore makes masturbation easier? Would the employer somehow have the chip's activity tracked, and then fire the employee for using work materials for personal use? Then could the employee sue the employer for invasion of privacy?

I lay there, I think these things, I think, I love the future. I love massages. And then I get a little panicked and hope that my concentrating so hard on ridiculous future scenarios didn't keep me from feeling the strokes of her hand.

2008-02-20T07:50:00.004-07:00

Inadvertently I reminded my mom that I used to lie to her all the time by bringing up corn on the cob.

"What do you think he'll really like me to cook, though?" she asked me, referring to my boyfriend, and dinner.

"Well," I said, "his mom's allergic to corn, so I guess he's never really gotten to eat corn on the cob very often. You could make that."

"We could eat it with chopsticks, just like what's-her-name's family, that girl you were friends with back in... middle school? Elementary school?"

"What girl? You mean Yexin?"

"Yeah, Yexin."

"Her family didn't eat corn on the cob with chopsticks. What are you talking about?"

"You told me they did."

"I did? When?"

"When you were a kid. You came back from dinner at their place once and said that they made corn on the cob and ate it one kernel at a time with chopsticks. You were really excited about it."

"Ummm... I made that up."

"No, you didn't! I remember you telling me."

"And I remember making it up. How could you eat corn on the cob with chopsticks, anyway?"

"I don't know. I guess you couldn't. Why would you make something like that up?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know??"

"No."

It always really bothered my mom that I did that. Once, I guess (this is all via her, because I don't remember) I came home from kindergarten and wove her a long, complex yarn about some kind of kindergarten drama that unfolded all over me that day - it had kids making fun of me, and teachers yelling, and construction paper everywhere, and crying - and when she went in to talk to my teacher about it she found that it had never happened. Not only that, nothing close to it had happened. The day in question was an especially normal day.

I guess that when I came home that day and she asked me that omnipresent question: "How was school today?" I didn't want to say 'Fine' like every other day. I would have rather had a story. Even now the act of saying 'Fine' as a response to anything puts me in a bad mood - 'How are you', 'How's your day going', etc. It's boring. It's small talk and it means absolutely nothing. Not just something shallow, even, but literally nothing. Nobody ever says 'it's going terrible' or 'I'm feeling a bit off today' (even my officemate, who's British, just responds with 'fair to middling' no matter what the situation is). People are always saying 'How are ya!' to me by the water cooler and it makes me visibly cringe, because obviously I am a complete sociopath.

Now that I'm not in kindergarten, I obviously know that I have more than those two options (saying 'Fine' or making up a long, complicated, and completely untrue story). There is always the option of taking the truth and telling it like a story. This isn't hard for me; I've never had a day in my life that I felt could be summed up by 'Fine' - there's always the tiny victories, like a bus coming as soon as you round the corner to the stop, or a man yelling 'you dropped your wallet!' after you as you pedal away from a stop sign, instead of just stealing it and leaving, or the weather warming to 68 in the middle of winter - or the tiny battles, like locking yourself out of your house on the day you have to rush home and get ready for a fancy dinner. These are all true and have happened, and have story-worthy details that I've forgotten only because it's been awhile (except for the fancy dinner one, which happened on Valentines Day). I try to stick to these kinds of true stories now that I am 23 and should know better than to constantly lie to people I love.

But sometimes you just want an explosion, you know? Sometimes you want to have run into your favorite celebrity at the beach. It's not even the attention - I can live without attention; in fact, I prefer it - but rather the thrill of telling it, of inventing it convincingly as I go along.

My mom used to tell me - she said my kindergarten teacher told her to say it - that if I wanted to tell her a story like that, it was okay, as long as at the end I said 'just kidding' or something similar. I remember very clearly having none of that. It sucked all the fun out of it. I said, 'okay,' and just kept doing it my way. My mom, rather than recognizing me as the lying little brat I most certainly was, took me at my word, and believed my stories from there on out. Because of this, we're constantly running into things like the corn on the cob story where I have to, once again, remind my mother that hardly anything I said to her as a kid had any basis in reality. It's sad. More accurately, in a detached way it's sort of sad. I don't feel it myself at all, because it's how my reality has always been, and hard as I try, I can't feel anything wrong about it, even though I can recognize it objectively as something that's probably sad for her. Strange.

2008-02-15T10:54:00.003-07:00

So it might be a symptom of Munchausen syndrome to suggest that I think I may have had a mild version of Munchausen syndrome during a large part of my childhood, but I'm okay with letting it stand that way. In seventh grade I sprained my ankle playing rugby with the boys, right after I told them they didn't have to be scared of tackling me. The ensuing emergency room-visiting, parent-coddling, crutch-sizing, aircast-wearing, teacher-sympathizing experience made me desperately want to go through it again. I faked it twice more during middle school. I'm not sure if anyone knew up until now that those were fake; now you know. People looked at me in crutches, asked me about them. It was middle school. The only questions I was getting asked regularly otherwise were snide ones from the popular crowd about whether I shaved my legs yet or whether I was anorexic. Getting asked about crutches was a step up. One experience stands out especially vividly for some reason; if you asked me to describe the tile pattern in the bathroom, the molding on the windows, the temperature of the tap water of that day in the bathroom, I'd be able to do it.

I was waiting my turn in line for the sink, leaning and swinging a bit on my crutches. My foot in its air cast rested lightly on the floor without any real weight on it. I actually don't remember if this was the real sprain or one of the fake ones; I sometimes lied so well I even forgot back then. Anyway, I was next in line and the girl washing her hands was a girl who'd made her fair share of fun of me. I was close to her, mere inches away, as the bathroom was tiny, and when she stepped back from the sink, she stepped on - merely brushed, really - my casted foot.

Though I didn't say anything, I must have made a tiny noise, because she turned around to see what she'd stepped on, and when she turned around, her eyes... I'll never forget her eyes. They were dinner plates, alien spaceships, planets. They took up her whole face. For a second, she was speechless, and then she exploded in a string of apologies that must have taken her five minutes to complete. Girls came in and out of the bathroom, the bell rang, girls squealed and ran for their classes, and she was still apologizing. The solar system shriveled and poured into a black hole, never to return, she was still apologizing, etc., etc. I stood frozen. I couldn't extract myself! Everyone who came in, she exclaimed, like she couldn't believe it, 'I stepped on her broken foot! I stepped on her broken foot!' I had no idea what to do with my hands while this was happening. Some mumbled 'it's okay's must have escaped my mouth at some point, but I honestly don't know. I was too mesmerized.

And even though it was supremely uncomfortable and awkward, I have remembered that occurrence right up until the moment I write this. It stands out as something I must have tried to duplicate. It wasn't the first time I had invented an illness (stomach problems in fourth grade to escape the possibility of participating in a fire drill; eventually turned into real stomach problems from anxiety - a dislike of vegetables in first grade to 'see what it felt like to not like something' - a high fever, always, to avoid that horrible clique of fifth-grade girls) but it was the first time I'd done it deliberately knowing what I was going for.

There are things I faked because of my possible-faux-Munchausen-resulting-from-Munchausen syndrome (this circle of logic really is vicious; try thinking about it) that I will never reveal because they are too terrible. Even writing it like that sounds like an excuse - that I wouldn't have done it unless I had had some kind of medical condition. The truth is, I probably would have. Anyone would. Everybody with this 'syndrome' probably has. I hate to go out on a limb I know practically nothing about, but I don't know about this whole 'name a disorder after every slightly undesirable personality trait' thing. People just go through periods where they are selfish, or where they like to be alone, or where they can't sleep for awhile. When there is a biological basis, an observable difference, in the brains of people with these syndromes and the people without, I'd like to read the paper on it. And if there already is, can anyone direct me towards it?

2008-02-14T08:31:00.005-07:00

I went into Petco yesterday to wait for Camille to buy catfood. As always in Petco there were two tiny sad cages by the front door with two large sad cats in them who could barely move. And as usual they were both turned so their butts faced the outside. They were probably sick of being poked through the bar by index fingers, maybe even scratched, and then abandoned. Nothing makes me sadder than housecats in cages, for some reason. I mean, I know why it makes me sad but I have no idea when or how it became the saddest thing possible. Formative experiences, I guess. I'm not being very romantic about it. Anyway, if I ever get arrested, it will be because I'll have been an undercover cat-freer for years, sneaking around under the cover of dark, jimmying the locks of pet stores everywhere and lifting the cats out with my special patented upside-down combination neck scratch calming lift.

(This lift is not to be attempted at home; serious scratching could occur, and has, if you don't have the cat at the precise degree of upside-down-ness required.)

Anyway, they'd be set free. I'm not a cat, so I don't know, but I think I'd rather live in the worst free conditions, alleys, scraps, backyards, fighting for territory with other cats, than live in a 2x3 foot cage in a Petco, or anywhere. Those shelters that require adopters to adopt two cats at once, that is so, so stupid. I haven't adopted cats from those shelters because of that rule. Almost everyone I know has chosen not to adopt cats from those shelters because of that rule. Sometimes you just can't adopt two cats. How can shelters set guidelines on adoption that result in less cats being adopted and more cats being put to death, and justify it at all?

Those would be released too. If I ever found out where Death Row for cats was, I'd be an outlaw immediately, probably so recklessly that I'd be caught. That breaking news that PETA was killing animals in the back of their van right outside animal shelters after they'd promise to make a 'good-faith effort' to find them homes severed any tenuous moral ties I ever had to PETA. I'm not sure how anything could be more antithetical to anything. Anger makes me not articulate.

Anyway, one of the cats, the one in the bottom cage, had his neck craned the tiniest bit so he could see out, but it wasn't immediately obvious that he was. I started to reach my finger out so he could smell it, but stopped. I read the sign on the outside of the cage, written, as always, in pleading language with smiley faces and cat cartoons and 'Adopt Me!' balloons all over it. Name: Arthur. Sex: Male, Spayed. Age: 4.5. Description: Sweet as can be!

Arthur peered at me over his shoulder, looking wary. I stood still, peering back. Unconsciously, I shuffled one of my feet, and, suddenly on guard, Arthur circled, crouched by the door of his cage, and sat tense and facing me, his nose between the bars. I shuffled again, and realized what had him so interested... the drawstrings on my cargo pants.

For the rest of the time I was waiting I walked back and forth, danced, dragged, in front of his cage, and the whole time he was entranced. I made sure not to let him know I was looking at him. I just let him, in his mind, stalk that mouse, that rabbit, that bug, around trees and under fences and through stalks of corn, his paws eventually batting through the bars of the cage, and, finally, let him catch it, bring it up onto the metal floor of his prison and gnaw a hole right through. He had such a grip on it that when Camille was finished and came to get me so that we could go, I had to kneel down and disentangle it from his claws, extended all the way out as they were. As I was replacing it around my ankle, my face level with his, he meowed at me. In my mind I had a flash of lifting him out of the cage, bringing him to the counter, adopting him, taking him home, hiding him from my landlord, letting him out to be friends with the cats from the other building and chase real mice, real bugs. It was a quick flash. My body killed it by walking out. But if I had endless money and endless time I would buy a giant fenced in mansion and as many cats as I could love.

2008-02-04T06:30:00.001-07:00

I remember the singular, frightening concentration of a three day juice fast. Food. Food. Foodfoodfoodfood. Juice ceases to be food. Juice ceases to be satisfying or nutritional, it ceases even to seem to have mass, except of course when it forces me to run to the bathroom to pee thirty times a day. It has mass on its way out. But inside, it's nothing. Less than nothing. I take a deep breath the second morning and my stomach stays the same. There is nothing to pooch it out. The air is tiny enough by itself, without any food, that it makes no difference in what it looks like. This makes me feel as though I am suffocating.

It is just like me, I think, to be so dramatic about three days of juice when this is in no way life threatening and millions of people are suffering much worse as I write. It is just like me, but it does make sense, when you think about it, because one's own suffocating is immediate and the rest of the world's suffering, even if it were every single other human being on the planet, is not. To consider it makes me feel redundant and selfish. Anyone else would feel this way, or they should, but it's impossible to change.

Last time I did this I was still in school. I took my container of grape juice up to the anthropology lounge, along with Nick, his container of grape juice, and things to play hangman with. In the kitchen, someone was microwaving some kind of frozen Italian dinner. I say this now, 'some kind', but back then, I knew all its ingredients from the instant I stepped into the stairwell. Butter, parmesan, tomatoes, basil, pepper, all thick as mustard gas in the stairwell. It almost laid me out along the banister. I would have punched the woman in in the kitchen in the face for her lunch. One bite of her lunch, even. Her permission to sit in the hallway and smell it as she microwaved it until it sizzled and burned.

Normally, I hate frozen dinners. I spent my last two years of high school eating potato chips, grapes, and frozen dinnners, and the smell of a Lean Cuisine still takes away my appetite instantly. I never thought I'd find an exception, but apparently all it takes is about 40 hours of grape juice and lemonade. How long would it take for me to find celery, my taste nemesis, mouthwatering? 1 day of nothing? Less?

Probably less before I became so singularly minded that I couldn't concentrate on anything else. It's been about 12 hours now and this entry speaks for itself.

2008-01-31T12:01:00.001-07:00

Rebellion before office life, rebellion after office life.

Behold, 2006:

"We raced our engine up and down cliffs and our motorcycle is a quiet one so we had to scream the engine noises instead.
“BURRRRRRRRR!” Nick yelled as we downshifted for a steep climb and passed a pickup full of Papuans*.
“BA-BAP! BA-BAP!” I shrieked with the gearshift as Nick kicked it down, down, down, down, one for each gear, to stop at a stoplight.
‘REOOOOOH! REOOOOOOOOHRHRHRHHHRH! REEeeeeoooooHHEHEHRHRH!” we shouted together at bikers without mufflers as their exhaust pipes shot out blipblipblips of smoke and we went flying past them.
“Hey, QUIT holding onto my shirt!” Nick spat back at me, so I threatened to pull it up and flash passersby his tits. “Do it!” he said, so I did, as we flew around a corner and through a little cluster of warungs and markets screaming girls-gone-wild style all the way.
People don’t stare, or at least they don’t stare anymore than they do already just because we’re bules (Westerners, but slightly more offensive), which is always and hard, so I guess they do stare, but we’re past caring. I pull his shirt back down just as we pass a traffic cop, blowing his whistle in vain at every single driver on the road, because every single driver on the road is doing something illegal.
Road rules here are more like suggestions, anyway. "One Way Street" means "don't go the wrong way on this street, unless of course you're in a big hurry to get somewhere, or you are learning to ride your bike and don't want to make a bunch of right turns unnecessarily, or are going to speed down it so fast the police won't care about catching you." The other day Nick weaved around some blocking cones that were meant to control rush hour traffic and shot down a one way shortcut street the wrong way, and right at the corner was a police campout. One of the policemen yelled 'Hey!' and then went on chewing his betelnut. The others hadn't noticed because they were watching an attractive woman coming out of the marketplace."

(taken from my 10/26/06 entry)

And behold, by contrast, 1/31/08:

Just now I walked to the coffeemaker to fill my teacup with hot water from the side spigot. I have a big mug that officemates are always trying to steal and put their soup in, and the trickle of hot water is always meager, so I had awhile to stand and think as it filled. Suddenly I had this massive inexplicable urge to keep my finger on the tap and take my cup away, watch the boiling water spilling in a perfect line onto the counter, under the coffeemaker, spreading under the disgusting trash can full of spoiled berries and across to the refrigerator that always has someone's moldy old lunch in it. I could picture standing there with my hand on the tap and not moving a muscle if someone were to see me. Standing there acting like this is what's supposed to be happening over here, and how is this your business? Move along. Move along. I'm just drenching the floor here and the water's creeping along the cracks in the countertop and soaking the communal cutting board and the box of free bagels.

I could see myself doing that so clearly that I left with my mug only half full. Unlike flashing a bunch of teenagers a chest not my own while zooming past on a motorcycle, wearing a sorry excuse for a helmet, this would have repercussions.

2008-01-28T11:00:00.001-07:00

It was suddenly 65 after a winter of ice and the creek was a mass of floating icebergs. The edges were filled with cracks and sinkholes from people who tried to walk on the ice and crunched right through. Where it looked thin, it took the chunks of rock I threw and bounced them right off onto the opposite bank. Where it looked thick, in broke off in razor-sharp layers that we threw at a tennis ball marooned in ice.

Swirling in circles in one of the waterfall eddies was a perfect circular iceberg. Its surface was covered with rocks and logs people had thrown at it to try and break it, all in vain. It was clearly thicker than it looked, because it looked like it would break at the touch of a bird's feet. We sat on the rocks at the edge of the creek as the iceberg swirled and sloshed towards us. When it reached us I put out my foot to kick at it, thinking it would be solid. It wasn't. A whole side broke off and left me ankle deep in water that would have been ice if it hadn't been moving.

It was my inclination to worrywart around about how cold it was, how dangerous it was for my foot, etc., etc., even though it didn't really hurt, but we had just finished watching something we'd never seen before. A little black bird, maybe the size of a sparrow but fatter, was bathing in the creek. Not just wading in a half centimeter and fluttering around, but actually diving in at the tops of falls and flailing about underwater, struggling against a current that's strong for most humans, then surfacing, smacking his beak, doing a little knee-bend dance, and diving back in. Every time he emerged, he was fatter.

We couldn't get enough of him and followed him up the creek almost to the point of being late to where we were going. We speculated that maybe he was a fairy-tale-like bird leading away from (or to) our dooms, like if he hadn't made us late we would have been hit by a truck at the intersection we should have been at at that certain time, or if we had ignored our commitments and followed him all the way up, we would have found ten million dollars in gold, but... we don't come from enough of a fairytale world that we paid any heed to this idea. When it was time to turn around and make our meeting, we turned around and made our meeting. If we lived in fairytale land, we'd probably be dead. Or else hopelessly lost in a tangle of brambles. As it was, we forgot about the little black bird almost as soon as he was out of sight. If you were supposed to lead us to our fortune, bird, then I'm sorry.

2008-01-23T16:27:00.001-07:00

None of this has yet passed through the mosquito netting, the wire screen door, the curled mesh, the colander, the flour sifter, the cilia, the metal detector, the water filter, the sieve, the burly security men, the face, fingerprint, barcode, iris scanner, the popup blocker of my brain.

2008-01-19T15:54:00.001-07:00

There are flashes, sometimes, where I think that I have gone crazy, that this is it and from now on I won’t know where I am or what’s really happening to me, that life from now on is a daydream and nothing else, that I might think I’m in bed with a lover, but really, I’m in a straitjacket and in a morphine drip, or that I may think I’m studying law, but I’m babbling somewhere on the ground. In a hospital. In a coma. Severely schizophrenic.

I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.

Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.

In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.

When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?

Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.

I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.

2008-01-17T07:26:00.001-07:00

Until I was old enough to know that something was wrong with it, I read four, five hours a day. Every inch of free time (yes, I measured my free time in inches), every moment I wasn't at school or asleep or eating dinner or in the car (I got carsick if I did anything in cars besides stare out the window, reciting streets - I guess that's sort of reading, too). I learned early, at about 3, so there was more time for me to read in blissful ignorance before the awareness of social norms came up on me and I realized that people were supposed to do other things sometimes, too.

Before I realized that, I don't remember a time when I felt bored or unsatisfied while reading. I think the boredom and the drive to do other things came from outside. As I realized other kids played Nintendo. (Once I tried Nintendo, I was immediately hooked - I can still beat anyone at any of the original Marios - try me.) As I realized other kids were in softball leagues, or went camping with their parents. Everyone has a drive to fit in, so as soon as I figured out I didn't, I wanted to - even though, left alone, I probably could have read, and played the piano, and drawn forever.

Sometimes I wish society had laid off. Now, when I write music, I feel this push to record it. And when I record it, I get frustrated, because it doesn't sound the way my voice sounds in my head - the music isn't as easy to play as it is for me to write, and hear and organize in my brain, and it comes out clumsy, stunted by my inability to understand recording/mixing technology. If I hadn't come to know that people record what's in their heads, make money off it, compare it to what comes from other peoples' heads, stress over deadlines, stress over accomplishing something - I might have just been able to be happy sitting down at the piano at my leisure, playing in that creative dreamworld I used to occupy, until I felt finished, and then I could move on, and not have to feel like it needed to be more than that.

I can't read anymore either, without either thinking that I need to be doing something more productive or that I need to be making 'something' out of my reading, like turning it into a job: book reviewer, novelist, professional insufferable literary snob, whatever. Writing this blog even makes me feel sick sometimes when I read other people's blogs and think, this person lives a more exciting life than I do. This person writes down their experiences more accurately than I do. Competition. Achievement. Blah blah blah.

It has become confusing because I'm not sure if I can escape the cycle, so I think, I might as well dive into it. I think this a lot when I'm around my family, who imply in a myriad of ways, intentional and not, that I am wasting my talent (whatever that talent may be). As I write this, I don't see how enjoying myself without putting pressure on is a waste of anything at all, but mired in my family, who are all doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and teachers and other such things, and who get really huge fake grins on their faces when I say I'm a bus dispatcher, I start thinking, yeah, I AM wasting this as-yet-unnamed talent. I should go to grad school! I should write lots of papers to compete with other students' papers and go into a challenging field somewhere and think about work all the time, even when I'm sleeping, and make a lot of money and buy a lot of things that I slowly become unable to live without, and if I lose my job I will think back on how much I made in 2008 and think, how the fuck is it possible to live on such little money?

I may sound like I'm exaggerating and/or being sarcastic, and I am, but at the same time, I think that's probably what I'll end up doing. All of the above things are true, and aren't ideal, but at the same time, society is here, its presence is there in my brain, and it's not leaving. I do feel like I need a 'challenge', like I need to 'make something' of myself, like I need to 'exercise my brain' and have a 'purpose', and yes, even though I know somewhere deep in my brain that these things are silly enough to merit quotes, I also know that the need to fulfill them isn't going away, and probably will never go away.

2008-01-14T09:07:00.001-07:00

In high school it was a lot easier to write. In high school everything was do-or-die, everything was of utmost importance, it could make or break me. I would have experiences that I thought if people misinterpreted, it would color the entire rest of my life. I used people's initials in online diary entries and thought that it was enough, that people somehow wouldn't pick out their initial from the alphabet and hundreds of identifying details from the sidelines of my entries. It was astonishingly naive of me. Luckily, I was also pretty unpopular and no one really cared about my online diary. I could have, you know, been really popular and thrown it all away through passive-aggressive online gossiping instead. The horrors.

Actually, my sneakiness factor hasn't gotten any better. I am still as stark and obvious as a bloodstain on a white couch. When I was a kid I would pick my nose sitting next to someone on a couch if we were watching TV, working under the assumption that their peripheral vision couldn't possibly be operative. And now I seem to think that just because I'm six feet tall and crowned by fiery blonde hair doesn't mean that I can't blend into a crowd (it does mean that. It absolutely does, and just because it's unfair doesn't make it untrue.).

The same goes for gossip. I can be talking about someone right in front of them and I think they somehow won't hear me. I can tell a secret about someone to their best friend and think that their best friend bond will temporarily break, especially for me, and the secret won't be passed. I'm just incredibly socially immature like that, and I'm starting to think it's permanent. My solution to this problem thus far has been to talk about everybody to everybody, to put everything out there in the most blatant terms possible, and to disclose this before someone tells me a secret, in case the secret-teller doesn't like the way I handle information. I see this as honest and egalitarian and I don't think anybody in the world agrees with this sentiment. What say you, internet?

2008-01-10T11:27:00.001-07:00

How planes actually crash is not how I always dream them crashing; being in an unrealistic plane crash is more often than not how I discover that I'm dreaming. I will be in a plane, usually with some kind of magical X-ray vision that allows me to see 360 degrees out my tiny bubble-window, and I'll feel some turbulence. Instead of a wing blowing violently off, though, or an engine dying and the plane tilting, or a sudden wind gust causing a nosedive, in the dream we'll gently land, just as if we were landing at the airport, except we'll be landing on a highway, or a winding country road, or even, laughably, at the wrong airport.

I've had this dream, or some variation on it, so many times that every time I have it I jump out the plane window and start flying, or doing complicated gymnastics, or burrowing into quicksand, or any of the myriad things I'm unable to do in real life. I've always been able to lucid dream easily, and I'm thankful for that. Most of the people I know tell me that as soon as they know they're dreaming, they'll instantly awaken. Kicking and screaming and holding onto the fabric of their dream world. Or something.

Last night was different. I was in a plane crash, the dream drifting kind, like always. We landed gently on a country road lined with snow-coated maple trees. There was a gentle sort of urgency to getting out of the plane, because we knew it would explode, so I took none of my luggage, and followed my dad sprinting across a swamp, which was slightly perturbing because I was sinking and running at the same time, but I turned around just as the plane started burning, and then, with one muffled bang, exploded (which consisted of the flames being snuffed out and the plane becoming a perfectly preserved skeleton of itself). After the brief interest of watching that, I was ready to fly, so I jumped off and spread my arms.

The same thing happened when I tried to fly as what happens when I try to fly while awake. The more I tried it, the more I fell on my face... and the more it hurt. Actually hurt, like dreams usually don't. So I had a second thought, thought maybe I wasn't dreaming, but then shrugged it off. I had floated in an airplane into a winter glade, exited peacefully, and watched it blow up practically soundlessly. I was definitely dreaming.

I tried everything I can do in dreams, everything, one thing after another, with failure after failure, until I had managed to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. It was an odd, unsettling feeling. Everything that my logic told me was wrong based on my experience. Usually, experience and logic go at least mostly together, or at least together enough that you can see where they connect. This time, they were worlds apart. Logic: gentle plan crash in absurd circumstance: dreaming. Experience: falling on my face trying to fly, flopping on my head trying to do backflips, meeting only with stubborn dirt when trying to burrow into the ground like a mole: not dreaming. I didn't know what to think, so I chose experience.

The longer the dream went on, the more I felt I had found the truth. We all holed up in a shelter against the cold, waited for rescue helicopters, took turns using the bathroom to get ready for bed. One particular incident I remember that racked up lots of points for the not-dreaming side was my very real fear that I would lose my possessions and not be able to pay for new ones. I sidled up to my dad, who was quietly unpacking his stereo in the corner. 'You think flight insurance will pay for all my lost stuff?' I asked him.
'Oh, yeah,' he said.
'Because I'll need at least $5,000.'
'You know how much they give you?' He lowered his voice, leaned in to whisper. '$27,000.'
'$27,000?'
That was enough.

When I picked up my cell phone to call Dan and tell him the story of what had happened to me, the numbers were all warped and I couldn't seem to dial straight. Every time I pushed an 8, it came out as a 9 (if I was lucky; if I wasn't lucky, it came out as a squiggle, or a Chinese character, or a squashed bug). Do you remember the swirling alarm clock in Waking Life?

Once I got the numbers right, and he picked up, I found myself in my bed, cradling my hipbone like a cell phone. I was absolutely shocked. Experience had failed me! How come I hadn't been able to fly? Was this the beginning of the end of swooping lucid dreams?!

2008-01-08T07:23:00.001-07:00

I've been playing ridiculous amounts of Scrabble lately. Upwards of three games a day, average, and two as I write this. Some may think that this is a relatively intellectual way to pass the time, but I don't know; the effect of such huge amounts of noncontextual (uncontextual?) language flying at me is somewhat disconcerting. I find myself putting words in strange places in sentences, forgetting how the plural works, or a particular tense. Using archaic words in live sentences with friends. Writing down a word just because of its high score without bothering to look up its meaning.

I read a book* once (all in one sitting in the bookstore, one of my forays into forcing myself to be a public presence while still being allowed to bury my face in a book) about a journalist who got crazy into the National Scrabble Association tournaments for a book he was writing. He ended up not being able to detach. He memorized every two letter word in existence, recited it like a mantra. Rearranged anagrams with friends as a social activity. Dreamt about letter formations and board patterns in hotel rooms at night.

I heard once that mathematical people are better at Scrabble than English major types. It wouldn't surprise me. I am an English major type and because I see the anagrams on my rack as logic puzzles, and not language, it's difficult for me to unscramble them. Letters alone and puzzled mean nothing to me. Their probabilities don't interest me, the sound of them all jumbled together is sometimes funny* but ultimately nonsensical, and the more I look at them the less potential sense they make, sort of like when you say words over and over and over until they just sound like a noise you can't believe anyone would actually make in front of other people. (Try 'sketch' or 'doorknob' or your own name sometime.)

Anyway, the point is I should feel smarter playing Scrabble all the time than if I just sat around reading my weakness, celebrity blogs, all day, but I don't, I just feel slightly like I've heard being on mushrooms feels. Words are morphing and taking on meanings beyond their normal ones, so every time I speak or write there's an underlying weirdness going on that feels oddly like... math. It's not unlike what happens to me when I try to listen to music while falling asleep. There's a mood there, and it can be the most relaxing music in the world, but my brain is still calculating the harmonic progression, and I won't go to sleep no matter how many hours I lay there. I feel now like I'm not sure if I'll ever make sense now, no matter how many hours I spend forming words.

1
2

2007-11-24T12:08:00.003-07:00

I’ll admit it, right away; I used to surf craiglist like crazy, and not just a tiny part of it. I surfed the personals, especially those that didn’t apply to me. m4m is especially intriguing, and then especially those that post short sharp blurbs, sometimes consisting of less than a sentence, and attached is a giant .jpg of their penis, made horrific by its closeup detail, zoomed in, sometimes grainy, rarely with body attached, and almost never with a face. This must work... right?... because people haven’t stopped doing it. It amuses me to think of two bodyless penises meeting up for a drink. Knocking on doors, sticking through holes. And they would recognize each other immediately.

m4m may be the most prolific section, but the personals in general never have a blank day. Women who bemoan the lack of a lesbian ‘scene’, who want to find one, but don’t really want to start one. Men who longwindedly list the requirements for an ideal ad respondent - my favorite ones are the ones who list clearly intellectual/habitual/ emotional bullet points, then at the end sign off with a warning: no pic, no response. My favorite of those favorites, because that’s a surprisingly big subsection, is those in which the poster does not include a photo. People who admit to being lonely, even people who beg, shyly bring up depression, past lost loves, the cruel bare walls of their apartments. On the other side of it, people who shun craigslist, shun the people who use it – these are the people who will invariably start their ads with ‘I would normally never do something like this, but...’ or ‘my friends dared me to...’ – and then act throughout like they couldn’t care less whether someone responds. That or they act like they’re expecting so many responses that they’ll have to screen them.

All these people, lounging in their boxes somewhere, thousands of other people in their little boxes within less than a square mile, probably less than half a square mile, and they’re typing these pleas onto a screen in order to try and entice the right person into the fresh air. Why do we have so much trouble with this? Humanity teems, seethes, around us, and we shun it, try to leave buffer seats on the bus and the train, keep our eyes studiously averted from people we pass on the street... we actively do these things!

I see this, I do this, I write about this as if it’s far removed from me, but it isn’t, and though I can’t explain it, it’s knee-jerk. You’re walking along a fairly empty sidewalk in the afternoon, alone. In the distance, you see someone walking alone as well, in the opposite direction as you. You’re getting closer. You think, when is the right moment to acknowledge this person? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Less? Maybe four? You obsess over it, fail to come up with an acceptable norm... how should you put your face? Toothy smiles, close mouthed smile? Words, no words?... and you decide, fuck it, I’ll just look at the ground as if some extremely fascinating caterpillar is crawling along in the shrubbery beside me, and keep looking until they have passed. Then there are no bizarre social decisions to make. But, oh, wait. Wait. Is this person a different race than me? Shit, because now... if I don’t acknowledge them, they might think I’m racist! Am I racist? If I weren’t racist, I wouldn’t have even thought about their race, would I have? I would have just registered them as just another human being... right? Shit.

And maybe they’re ugly, and if I don’t look at them, they’ll think I’m averting my eyes to be kind. Or maybe they’re drop-dead gorgeous and if I look at them they’ll think I’m checking them out, hitting on them, flirting with them, ogling them, and they’ll think I’m some sort of rapist.

Racist, rapist – all the terrible things it’s so easy to be wrongly perceived as when you pass a stranger on the sidewalk!

So, as a compromise, and as a safeguard, you pass the person and you make that tight little anus of a smile that every normal American makes in this situation, a barely perceptible upturn of the lips, although ‘upturn’ may be a generous word for the kind of grimacing that I’ve seen go on. (I called it the ‘bule smile’ in Indonesia, because Indonesians don’t do it.) The other person does the same. pass, and you think, ‘was that awkward? That was awkward.

You shiver yourself free of this feeling and are suddenly overcome with a crushing loneliness. And you go home and write an ad. People, please, please, people. Strangers, even. So long as you’re people. I’ll be nonchalant, I’ll pretend I don’t need you, I’ll pretend this is frivolous. I’ll make up engagements, time constraints, an inflated schedule. “Oh, I can only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of dance class.” “Oh, weekends are tight for me, usually I’ve got friends coming up to the city.” You have nothing, actually, but you can’t admit that, or this stranger that you’ve managed to entice from their box might think you’re pathetic and reject you.

When people like this meet other people like this, how does anything at all of substance bubble to the surface? You can’t mix nothing and nothing and get something. There are probably a couple of dates to be spent making fun of society. But society can’t be made fun of forever. (Okay, it can. But bitterness can’t be sustained as attractive for that long, I don’t think.) And if either person were the type to subvert the dominant paradigm, no matter how likely it is that that person is the type to use phrases like ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ in everyday conversation, they’d be out subverting it, and not in a bland, safe-meeting-place coffeehouse talking about it. And not in their house using craigslist to try and find subverting partners either.

No, dominant paradigm-subverting comes from, when you pass that stranger on the sidewalk, pasting on the most giant smile that your jaw can handle, grabbing their hand, pumping it up and down, and introducing yourself. Maybe inviting them out for a fun-filled day of shopping-cart racing down at the Safeway, or a night of dumpster diving. And even this is a relatively mild paradigm shift – people do have the context to understand you if you do this, even if they will almost always think you’re drunk or on LSD or ectasy – but it happens rarely enough that I can’t believe anyone would expect to find that perfect, quirky, lifesaving person on a network of people who spend all of their time on that network.

That’s what we want, right? For the heavens to somehow align and to find someone who will assimilate us into their full, satisfying, perfect life, and we won’t have to make an effort to build that life ourselves. Because someone leading a full satisfying life will surely, SURELY, be posting ads on craigslist. There are hundreds of people in your city who have everything they want – a wonderful group of friends, enriching hobbies – but just lack that ‘someone special’ to share it with.
There are if you believe all of those qualifying first sentences: ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but...’ Do you believe these sentences? Have you ever looked at the other ‘social’ sections of craigslist? Activities. Community. Events. Nobody’s posting there. Because everyone who already has a community won’t bother with craigslist unless there’s money/publicity to be had. Why would they? Their circle is complete. Their needs are met. And if they’re not, and I’m sure that, sometimes, they’re not, well, then they seek help from their living, breathing social circle. That’s what social circles are for.

And that’s what craigslist is trying to be to people. It’s succeeding, I think, in the sense that people are using it as such. There’s no doubt that there is a new virtual social circle emerging, where online personas can replace proximity of physical bodies, where discussions can be had, discoveries collectively made, without the participants ever having actually met. I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore about that. But are online social circles enough to keep the loneliness that comes from physical isolation at bay? I don’t think so, or else the personals section would be obsolete. Which it most certainly is not.

People who claim to be fulfilled in every other way are still pleading online for contact while ignoring strangers on the street. This is what comes from this bizarre mishmosh of virtual and real contact, where social mores are completely different in each. If you sit next to a stranger on the bus and start talking about how lonely you are, that’s crazy, that’s unacceptable, that’s pathetic. Post it in a personal, though, and it’s fine. Countless sympathetic comments and emails will appear in your inbox. From this perspective, it seems like online contact would be enough... you’re getting responses, feedback, validation. It’s warm and fuzzy, or seems that way, anyway.

But have you noticed that it’s never enough? Angsty 14-year-olds with livejournals who whine about the most mundane things are only encouraged, when given sympathy, to do it more, and seek more, and more, as if sympathy were a drug. It’s expected, that you’ll get frowny faces and emoticon hugs and a virtual outpouring of virtual support. It’s expected.
If you were to whine like that to a stranger on the bus, however, and got the same response? That would be a landmark day. You’d be driven to tears, unable to believe your luck. Fate. Destiny! You’ve met one of those kind strangers you read about in books but never thought existed in real life! Your life has been forever changed!

A comment, though, an email – even if the exact same words were written/uttered – that’s just normal. That’s just online. It doesn’t count. If it did count, online sympathy would be enough. But it’s not.

That’s why people use craigslist. It’s an attempt to use the world with the less threatening, less nerve-wracking social mores, to get a companion in the world where companionship actually feels like it means something. Does that work? Can you really take the easy way out like that? I don’t think so, but I’d welcome argument.

2007-11-13T07:10:00.001-07:00

We went to the zoo this past weekend. I have a conflict about zoos. I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals.

Sometimes I write sentences like that and think that it would be stupid to explain them because their meaning is completely obvious. I think this because I've got a thread going in my head, something like background music, and with that thread, it would be impossible not to. But then I look back objectively at 'I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals' and snap back into (out of, actually) context.

What I mean is, I'm not sure if the sum of (1) the joy I get from being able to observe animal behavior, (2) the species who are being saved from extinction by zoo breeding programs, and (3) the awareness of the plight of different species, and by proxy, the earth, given by the plaques, is quite enough to make up for the feeling I get when I see a cheetah pacing a 10x10 enclosure. It's easiest to see with the cheetah - big cats always seem restless, they don't put on even the slightest hint of a happy face. They look as though they have one objective: getting out, and running, and running, and running, and running. It's never as obvious anywhere else, and of course neither I nor anyone else can say what a tiger is feeling even as it paces. The less obvious ones, too... what the lorises think as they creep up and down the same skinny branches over and over. The elephants must know they don't need to hold one another's tails with their trunks to navigate the total distance of a hundred feet, right? Who knows what they know? While we were watching the elephants, some keepers came out with what looked like nightsticks and tapped the elephants' knees. The elephants lay down. They raised their giant feet onto tree stumps. They received treats, put on their necks, and they reached their trunks around to pick them off. Elephants always have what looks like a humongous soppy grin on their faces, with the droopy lower lip and the tuck of the mouth under the trunk. It's hard to imagine them being sad. Maybe they're not.

I know a lot about animal behavior from school, but I don't know this. I felt a lot better about zoos after reading Life of Pi, even though it was a work of fiction. It gave me an excuse, but I knew that it was just an excuse. The truth is, I don't know the truth. I would work in a zoo in a second, even to be the person who shovels hippo poop, because it would give me an opportunity to develop my own observations, and work towards knowing the truth, and using the truth to make better habitats. I always want to jump into the lion cage and pet the lions, and it's almost a drive to make them feel cared for, even though I know that's enormously stupid and not at all the outcome that would result. Lions don't need to be petted to be cared for, but they need something, and if I can channel the ridiculous lion-petting compulsion into something that achieves the effect I'm going for, then I think I'd be satisfied.

We were standing at some kind of bird pond, and one bird, a bird with a giant beak, was swimming in fast circles around this pond as a skinny woman in huge boots threw dead fish at him. He couldn't have cared less about the dead fish; in fact, he seemed like he was trying to dodge them. They sank to the bottom of the pond as he swam faster and faster, and as the woman on the island in the middle tried to hone her aim. It looked more like target practice than like feeding time as the zoo. And she looked angrier and angrier the less and less the bird paid attention to her efforts.

Despite the placing of that anecdote, it wasn't supposed to be representative of anything, or have a moral, or anything like that. I'm just remembering things, and that's what I remember. I remember thinking that despite the bird's disdain, I'd still fight that angry woman for her job. Animals that have great disdain for me only make me fight harder for their affection. That's why I'm a cat person. How is someone supposed to enjoy the challenge of making an animal happy if it's already happy, drooling, bouncing, fetching balls, pooping in people's flowerbeds, and needs nothing from anyone to go on being happy indefinitely? That has nothing to do with the human condition. Being happy despite everything. I can't relate to that.

2007-10-26T11:29:00.001-06:00

My job tends, essentially, to involve me sitting very still in an office chair for eight hours monitoring electronic representations of buses and listening to electronic approximations of voices poke unorthodox fun at each other, while random people (real ones, flesh and blood) constantly wander in and out offering me some of their food. My station is always surrounded by things like Hersheys wrappers, lasagna-sauce stained plates, grape stalks, trail mix crumbs, fake nacho cheese, crumbles from raspberry chocolate cake, burrito wrappings. If I could have begun to imagine the opposite of what working in Indonesia was like, this would be second only to being a restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. My current life is a health coach's reverse wet dream. (There must be an actual phrase for that, but that isn't what came to mind.) Sitting still. Stuffing my face. I sort of (wickedly) love it.

Wickedly not because of my cheating on my nonexistent diet or anything, but because I don't like feeling like the stereotypical gluttonous, wasteful American. But there's only so much one can say about that: but I bike, but I recycle, but I never buy new things, but this, but that.

I used to believe these excuses until I had to shower out of a bucket. Now I have the "luxury" of knowing that I could still choose to shower out of a bucket, and save untold gallons of water, but I also know that I won't. I believed these excuses until I had to walk up the street to pick up drums of gasoline and lug them back to the house to hook up to the stove.

How can you blame people for not changing if they can't forcibly feel the difference between what change isn't, and what change actually would be?

But I didn't mean to start writing about this. It's been said, and it's been said, and it's been said.

2007-10-22T13:23:00.001-06:00

It is difficult, but necessary, I think, to wake up every day and think, 'How lucky I am to be in a position where I can express inflammatory, dangerous ideas, present theories with the possibility of changing society forever, put forth crazy, outlandish opinions, and the worst thing that could happen to me would be a whole bunch of people telling me I'm an idiot.'

My hope is that that morning incantation is the first step along the road to actually seeking and fleshing out those ideas, theories, and opinions. But one never knows.

2007-10-06T17:56:00.001-06:00

You think when you're at the L station about that experiment where they planted the world's best violinist in a subway somewhere, on a train, in an alcove; the details are fuzzy, but it was somewhere where street musicians sit, and nobody bothered to stop and listen to him.

How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…

At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.

He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.

Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.

How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"

The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.

She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.

When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.

The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.

That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.

The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.

The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?

People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?

You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.