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.

My Indonesian is more broken than usual at the bank. I don’t know tenses. How can I say that I’m meant to have Rp. 10,000,000 ($1000) in my account, my full two-months pay, but instead have only 126,000 ($12.60)? How can I make it clear that my ATM card has obviously been stolen, that every transaction made in the past few weeks is unauthorized? Is it as obvious to them as it is to me that I couldn’t cancel my card because the bank was closed all week for Idul Fitri, and the whole time the bank was closed, this person kept withdrawing millions of rupiah per day? Most of all, how can I make them understand that I’m not rich, that without the salary I’ve earned since I arrived in Indonesia, I won’t be able to eat? In Indonesia, bules are rich; that is all there is to it. If you’re a bule, you have a lot of hardcore-porn-style sex, with anybody who asks, and you have a giant house and a fancy car and anything you do is just for amusement, because you have a cushy job your rich daddy got for you straight out of university, and any money that is stolen from you you probably deserve to have stolen, because anyone else needs it more than you do.

I won’t be getting any of it back. And this means, basically, that I’ve been working full-time in a lonely country, enjoying maybe half of it, the teaching-adults half, but dreading the teaching-children half with such intensity that there hasn’t been a night where I haven’t had nightmares about school, for a boss who demands materials-request forms for supplies as obviously necessary as sheets of white paper and whiteboard markers, and then often denies the requests, all so he can save a few pennies when he’s already quite independently wealthy, especially for Indonesia, and… I have been doing all this, and becoming ill with unexplained maladies, and eating rice for every meal, here, in Jayapura, for over two months, and my reimbursement for all of this is: $12. My salary was already somewhere around $3 an hour, but it has effectively just dropped to $.03.

It is causing me psychological turmoil, though, beyond just the initial brute rage and the temptation to loll depressively around the house, because I know that, despite this, I will live; I will not die, I will not starve, I will not lose my house – the house is free, the meals will come, somehow, from Nick’s salary, and in Indonesia, if you are poor, you get health care anyway. I am upset about the theft and I am angry with myself for being upset about the theft. I mourn the loss of the financial ability to visit other parts of Indonesia, like Hiron’s village in the highlands near Wamena, or the temple at Yogyakarta, or even just Biak, the Papuan version of a resort, at the same time that I suddenly become aware of the thousands of people who have never left Jayapura. I will miss my monthly treats to myself in the form of the expensive (by Indonesian standards; about $7 a meal) Chinese restaurant up the hill, and, but, here are people, right in front of me, every day, who eat fried rice for every single meal. It’s confusing. It’s confusing! I don’t know what I have the right to feel. While I hope that the person who took the $1000 is spending it on a lifesaving operation for their mother or something equally cliché, I know it’s infinitely more likely that they took it straight to Sip (the rich people’s mall) and bought a new surround-sound stereo system. It doesn’t matter what they did, anyway.

Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that, when I return to Boulder, I won’t have enough money saved up to even put the security deposit down on an apartment. Because of this, I probably won’t be able to return to Boulder. And Boulder is where I want to be.

Louise takes my face in her hands when I tell her. It is a perfect gesture, but maybe just to me because I know if anybody hugs me I will burst into tears. She spends the next half hour brainstorming ways to help. It quickly disintegrates into distraction, because it becomes obvious that nothing will help, and she whispers in Indonesian to Hiron what happened, and then adds in English, to me, “I know! We can just sell Hiron.”
“How much do you think you can get for him?” Nick asks.
Hiron, who understands more English than he lets on, cut in: “Duapuluh.” (Twenty.)
“Duapuluh apa? Rupiah?” She laughs. Twenty rupiah is .2 cents. “Duapuluh ribu?”
“Duapuluh juta,” Nick and I say in unison. Twenty million. Still only $2,000, though. The gears of our minds grind slowly around the translation, how cheap it turned out, and then at the same time again, we say “Duapuluh juta juta.”
Twenty million million. It’s about two billion US$. Hiron smiles and looks down. “No, no, no, no, no…”

Anyway, nasi sudah menjadi bubur. Roughly, and very roughly, nothing I can do to change anything now.