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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was light as day in my room from around some dreamlike middle-of-the-night time to some other dreamlike middle-of-the-night time. I kept forgetting whether or not I was alone and the full, or close to full, moon was slicing across my chest like a knife. My dreams did not take this lightly.

Last night I dreamed I had to cut cats up into little pieces to make them easier to transport. Even though superglue restored them to life, I have never had a more disturbing moment in a dream than when I was trying to reassemble them and I glued a kitten's head back on and I misaligned it and she couldn't meow anymore.

Spent today in the market staring at dead squid eyes and cow skins. Studying how things look whole. Living in the states, I forget. I forget that fish aren’t swimming, glistening fillets, and squids aren’t disembodied legs, or naturally breaded into calamari. I caught a glimpse of what I thought was sausages, and I was excited, because sausages become available maybe once every two months, but they turned out to be tamarinds, the only fruit in the world that looks exactly like lots of little pieces of poo.

This is good for me. Not the pieces of poo. Seeing how animals look before we render them unrecognizable. I’ve always said I won’t eat anything that I would have a moral problem with killing myself. (That’s one of those confusing sentences that’s impossible to repair, so I’ll leave it.) It’s harder here. You become faced with it. Here, I’ve been offered dog. I turned it down. I couldn’t kill a dog. I’ve been offered deer. I could kill a deer. I ate it. It was delicious. And someone probably shot it wild. Not that wild means much where I live. Deep, dense jungle fades abruptly into city. The city is built right into the crannies, until it’s too steep to be built anymore. Deer emerge from behind one tree to dart to another tree, to dart to another tree, and find themselves in the middle of the main road. I never picture deer as a tropical animal. Do you?

Things I Didn’t Know One Could Eat Until Papua:
Cow backbone
Raw sea urchin

The list is short, but it’s intriguing.

Friday, January 13, 2007
Have you ever dreamt that you had been shot in the head, and then felt an enormous sense of relief that now you knew what it felt like to be shot in the head? (Like a lightning strike of terrible stinging, but at a safe distance, at maybe a memory’s distance, and then a cocoon of fading, like beginning to dream.)

Last night it was the Catholic bishop in my Level 10 class who shot me in the head. He shot me because I was gathering stolen diamonds from the common room floor to pile in his arms. He shouted through a megaphone for everyone to drop the diamonds. People were trying to make off with them. I was trying to consolidate them so that they could be easily returned. I said this to him as he approached. He shot me anyway. It must have had something to do with his English listening comprehension.

I woke up to someone outside blaring his car horn through the rain. He blared it for a good half hour, at unpredictable intervals. He was probably blaring it for someone to come out who most likely wasn’t even home, who most likely was unaware of any plans to pick him up. Don’t ever make plans with Indonesians. They aren’t plans. They’re vague ideas, what-ifs, and they rarely, if ever, come to fruition.

The man blared his horn anyway. He was persistent. Nick rolled over and opened his eyes.
“I dreamed that Father Y. shot me in the head,” I said.
“Mmm,” he replied, and rolled back.

A few weeks ago Dyah went into the bathroom at school to find the toilet closed and festooned with three little firecracker-shaped packages wrapped in newspaper. By the time I got there, there was a crowd of women, staring into the open bathroom door, everyone afraid to be the one to go in.
“What’s the matter, are you all in the qway-way?” I asked Dyah, because awhile ago someone’s student was late, and he wanted to impress his teacher to make up for it by using a hard word, so he used his dictionary to look up a synonym for ‘traffic jam’ and found ‘queue’. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to his teacher, “but I got caught in a qway-way in Entrop.” This has circulated. Now we say qway-way whenever possible. It never gets less funny. I don’t know why.
She didn’t laugh, though. “Look,” she said, pointing at the firecracker-shaped objects. “Maybe it’s bomb.”
Nobody touched them.
“I really have to go,” Enny said.
“So?” Dyah said, gesturing toward the bathroom and its possible bombs. “Go.”
Enny didn’t move.
“Ike?”
“Not me.”
“Hannah?”
“Never.”
The objects sat there, menacing. Students were starting to notice. Someone went to get Michael. He strode upstairs and opened one of the packages over the sink, wincing. Everyone’s hands strayed near their ears.
“BOOOM!” he shouted. The entire hallway shrieked. It was a tube of lipstick. Another. “BOOOOM!” It was a rolled up comic book. The last one. “BOOOOOM!” A plastic flute.

Apologies and such for the long absence; they were doing porn-based repair at the internet café for a few weeks, or at least that’s what I gathered from the repeated denials of the front desk guy that they were open even though there were 6 guys inside downloading porn.

(Oh, and incidentally, who keeps posting comments and then deleting them? That drives me insane. Like, I’m ‘blessed’ with an overactive imagination that keeps conjuring up images of lovelorn secret admirers when the truth is probably closer to people getting drunk and typing rambling comments which they delete the next morning. Either way, I need to know.)

The entries I had had written follow:

Thursday, December 14

Things are looking up. Whenever I use that idiom after four months of teaching English I picture all the animate and inanimate components of the improved situation literally looking up. Scanning the sky. Getting a suntan. Desks, students, cheesy posters, the EF building in general. Although most of it, actually, is still looking down, the small part of it that I mean is that I was looking at the teachers’ schedule the other day and realized how insanely better my schedule is than everyone else’s. Better for me, anyway… meaning that when everyone else is teaching loud obnoxious misbehaving children, I tend to be teaching Pre-Advanced Level 10 adults. Loud obnoxious children still figure significantly into my schedule – there’s really no avoiding it – but definitely not to the degree that they figure into everyone else’s. I salute you, fate. I salute you, Director of Studies.

Friday, December 8

I’m struck sometimes by how inaccurate of a portrayal of everyday everydays this blog, or any blog, is. I wonder if it’s possible to depict an atmosphere, a general feeling, in words. I’m struck by inconsequential things too, though - I’m struck by the location of my commas, and not in a complimentary way – so don’t attach too much gravity to it or anything.

How many times must I impress upon cyberspace the lingering odor of durian in the open market before I feel vindicated? Is there an upper limit to the number of entries in which I can mention the many ways in which being a bule sucks? How about the hundreds of beautiful beaches? Does it ever end? It’s repetitive because my life here is repetitive. Remember that and you will have something of a grasp on what my entries are failing to communicate.

To attempt not to whine in the midst of something crushing is fruitless. The last sentence I said aloud was ‘Stay the hell out of the Mody chocolate paste – I mean it.’ Before you ask, it’s basically icing in a glass mug, but it’s the cheapest form of chocolate there is.

The enormity sometimes hits me right around the times when I’m giving a Papuan Catholic bishop (the same one who was present when I had to explain was a cock was) his final speaking test, and the question is on fears and phobias, and I’m expecting spiders, I’m expecting cockroaches or maybe crocodiles, but I get the Indonesian Army; I get that he and other local religious leaders – Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims – are traveling to Yogyakarta to meet with the Indonesian President about the problem of violent clashes between the military and the people. I ask a sixteen-year-old girl about a stressful day in her life expecting too much homework or a breakup with a boyfriend, and instead I get that her mother sold her pet dog to people who made it into dog stew for a feast, and they killed it in her living room where she could hear its screams.

There are these times, where I’m captivated and saddened, and I think it will last forever. I think it will last forever until I step out into the evening heat of the marketplace and insert the hum of complaints about being treated like a celebrity here. Actually, don’t. There’s nothing I can say after the image of the girl’s pet dog being killed for stew that won’t sound, that won’t BE, trite.

Wednesday, December 6

There’s one pitted lychee on each finger. One finger on each letterkey. Typing still feels alien to me. When I look at my hands, I remember why. If I squint right they look like a frog’s, the finger pads splayed and glistening.

I’m writing this for you, so pay attention.

This morning there was a thin beaded mask of sweat on every surface that I touched. A band around my upper lip and the back of my neck like a slipped bandanna. I was dreaming about stretching out on my classroom floor. Seven-year-olds shuffled flash-cards by my feet, chorusing mixed vocabulary and screams. Sun-browned teenagers with ankle-sock tans furrowed their brows and questioned me telepathically about relative clauses. They whispered to each other and their faces faded when I tried approaching. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it unequivocally here or what, but I kind of hate my job.

Coasting on perfectly placed dialogues with strangers, or between strangers, sends sparks to a halt when everything is in Indonesian. I’m clinging to the tail of intonation now. The sun on the tile when I unstick one eyelid. My school dream this morning was centered entirely within a cubist painting. Waking up, my feet and their shadows rippled living rectangles onto the mattress. Eight o’clock. His grandpa’s pocket watch has sand in the winding mechanism. Waking up, capsizing to ‘Fuck!’s.

At this rate, will anyone be able to understand me when I return?

This exchange slid softly into my head:

Someone says something perfect.
“Be careful of saying that… you’re going to make me fall in love with you.”
Someone says something perfect.
She laughs, and behind her laugh is something starting, finally, to distill.
Someone. Says. Something. Perfect. Deliberately.

Has this ever happened to anyone? I hope so.

Thursday, November 30

Here is the true face of everyday Jayapura: me about to stuff my face with rambutan. I’m having second thoughts about moving back to the states, knowing that they don’t have rambutan – I mean, what other fruit looks like a pod alien and tastes like a cross between a grape and a coconut?! You tell me.

Strange things keep happening. If this wants to become the wacky cultural anecdotes blog, so be it. It’s itching to do so, and I don’t have the energy to try and derail it, at least not right now.

We bought a box of green tea awhile ago, and when we got home and opened it, there was an rp. 5000 bill folded up inside – exactly the cost of the tea. Apparently when Indonesian advertisements claim that if you buy their product you might get a rebate, they mean that there is actually hard cash inside some of their products. No clipping coupons or sending in a self-addressed stamped envelope – just money, already put inside the product. I find this amazing. Since then, I have found empty decorated Idul Fitri envelopes inside my buckets of Sari Kelapa, stickers buried in my palm sugar, a plastic tiger in my oatmeal, and a 500 coin wrapped in Christmas paper in my motorcycle helmet.

There’s also this thing here among 10-13 year old boys where, if there’s a fat boy in the class, every other boy will try to be his partner or otherwise sit near him. Can you guess why? It’s so they can climb all over him and intermittently spank him. I have a class with three fat boys (nearly unheard of in Jayapura) and it’s… really awkward to teach a class when all the boys are spanking each other. I think they actually just see fat boys as jungle gyms, because when they’re partners for group work, they don’t sit next to each other – the fat boy lounges on his stomach and the skinny boy lounges too - on top of the fat boy. Double decker. This makes the fat boys very, very popular and sought after.

Nick’s parents’ Christmas package arrived today, nearly a month early. It smells of spiced tea. There isn’t a ‘Do Not Open Until Christmas’ sign anywhere on it, but there may as well be for all the fuss Nick is making about not opening it until Christmas. From the looks of it (and by ‘from the looks of it’ I mean the ever-increasing greedy-looking trails of ants) there are pfeffernous cookies somewhere hidden inside. Over Christmas we might be on Biak. It will be hot. This will be strange. It’s already strange. Jayapura has badly dubbed versions of Christmas songs playing all over town, with, like… MIDI keyboard instrumentation and techno backbeats, and they’re either in Indonesian, in which case the words don’t fit to the song because Indonesian hardly uses any words to convey the same meaning that English would need at least a paragraph for (Indonesians could have written that sentence better), or else they’re in English, with an accent that renders the lyrics indecipherable.

Speaking of. One of my punishments for late students (it’s sort of universal EF punishment, actually) is having them sing a song in front of everybody. It’s the only way to kind of keep people from being late, because this is a culture of extreme lateness – two hours or more. Anyway, someone in Level 2 was late recently. Level 2, even though their English is necessarily pretty bad, is one of my favorite classes because they’re essentially self-governing. Virtually all of them really want to learn, so they tolerate no disobedience from their peers. If someone starts speaking Indonesian, I don’t even have the chance to open my mouth (and anyway, usually in a level this low I let them speak Indonesian) before there’s a chorus of ‘Eyyyyyy, speak Inglees!’ and indignant looks and, often, reprimanding slaps. And if anyone is late, the entire class takes up a chant: ‘Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing! Come on, sing!’ If the person hesitates, the class dissolves into: ‘Eyy, ma’am say!’ and ‘Hurry upppp!’ and ‘Time is finissed, do it!’ The last time this happened, the late girl, a talkative 14-year-old Muslim in a veil, immediately broke out into “My humps, my humps, my humps! My lovely lady lumps!” – and the entire first verse - to a round of genuine applause and ‘Her English so goooood’s echoing around the room.

Something that is either a fruit cart or a strange bird starts beeping/calling every morning just about when the sun starts coming up. Because of this, my dreams always end with squeaking machinery.

I am teaching the alphabet on the back of a pumpkin harvest cart.
I am playing Sudoku and a garbage truck starts backing up onto my bare feet.
I am trying to explain comparative adjectives to a group full of apathetic teenagers, just a sea of dark eyes, in dreams, at least, and their whispers in bahasa Indonesia begin to hum, blur, into an alarm clock...

I don't have an alarm, but I don't need one. As it gets too hot to sleep, as birds/fruit carts start beeping, as churches fire up their choirs, as something that sounds like migrating geese, but isn't, starts honking, I roll over, and maybe Nick is opening the door, quietly, but still creaking a little, and Daniel and Lucia are out on the floor mat playing cards, speaking a mixture of German, Mandarin, English, and Indonesian, and Louise is carrying her mattress out onto the balcony to air out, and Rani, downstairs, is starting to crank up the Michael Jackson karaoke.

Nick is making breakfast. There are two choices for breakfast: scrambled eggs or oatmeal, both with sliced banana and papaya, and mango nectar. Sometimes, there is no running water. Sometimes, our gas tank will have run low, and someone will have to walk up the street and buy another one. Sometimes there is a note. Don't forget to pay Imelda. Imelda's the cleaning lady. The house is divided on whether we really need her or not, but everyone's friends with her by now, so we keep her.

I run outside, check if the sun has dried my laundry yet. Our whole downstairs balcony is strung with drying line, but only some of it is in the sun. Clothes fight each other. Lately, it has been raining at night and re-soaking everyone's clothes. What we need is five or more hours of uninterrupted sunlight, which isn't happening - not even close - which is good if you plan to be outside at all, but bad if you're out of underwear and have no more than one towel and your one good teaching outfit is dripping dirty water onto the ant colonies on the porch.

At 11:30, we start walking up the road to the main road to catch a taxi to school. Each taxi driver has decorated his own taxi, and we see taxis covered with hanging Jesuses (Jesi?) on crosses, along with posters of sad Jesuses with crowns of thorns, and taxis with pictures of sweating soccer players, and taxies with posters of Britney Spears, and taxis with posters of 13-year-old Japanese pop stars. One day, we climb into a taxi and it is bare except for a worn brown teddy bear perched on the dashboard.

At this point, my written day is catching up with my real day and I need to go across the street to school, but maybe the other half will come soon.

Oh, and Nick's blog - http://adventuresinpapua.blogspot.com - is more day-to-day details than mine, so if that's what you crave, head on over. He doesn't get distracted by details so much as I do, or have his writing style altered for the worse by bad Indonesian pop music playing in the fucking Internet cafes, like some people I could think of off the top of my head.