It's raining in Madison, Wisconsin. It doesn't matter what time I am writing this, or even if I am writing it after the fact. It's still raining. And tornadoing in the shady places surrounding. Gusting wind and mist and loose branches everywhere. It's oddly beautiful. I never thought I'd say this, but there is more to satisfying weather than heat so hot it pulsates and a sea breeze.

Mazur of Wintermute has a house with a semi-skylight where, if you are so inclined and have the time, which I am, but don't, you can lay on the floor underneath and test the brain-challenge of keeping your eyes open as the heavy drops fall towards you. I choose instead to shiver, flip through photos, and kick ass at cards. I think the whole time about how many games of Egyptian Ratscrew I played when I went to Mexico two years ago. We would sit in our beach hut with geckos flying up the clay walls around us, and eat rolls of expensive imported chocolate cookies. I have a peculiar penchant for holing up inside when I'm in exotic places and then feeling bad about it. In Mexico, we only played cards at night, though, after stuffing ourselves with shrimp. In Madison, I play in between creative pizzas and peanut butter ice cream. It's the Midwest for sure.

We save worms who have been flooded out of their dirt homes by the lake. When touched, the squinch up and help us get our fingers under their bodies. I toss them in the dirt and wonder how come bugs and worms can fall from such great relative heights and not die, but we can't. I'm sure it has something to do with the weight of air. When I write sentences like this I become painfully aware of how stupid I am capable of sounding.

I'd move to Madison if the only thing I'd give up the mountains for wasn't Chicago. Just read it again if it doesn't make immediate sense. I need sentences like that thrown in the books I read to keep me from skimming and/or being lazy by not attempting to understand complicated sentences. But maybe I'm the only one and this aside was just personal.

Chicago, Savannah, the entire southeast, Madison. A birthday spent with a stranger.* Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong. One week until Boulder, Colorado. I don't really have a home anymore. It's kind of nice.


* My mom called me at 12:03, my birth minute. "What are you doing? Did I get the time right?" I have a tradition where I have to write down what is happening at the anniversary of the moment that I was born, as a strict, unexaggeratable record of the general feel of my life, and I won't stick this likely long, rambling aside in the center of my sentence flow. This year I was checking for updates at something positive and waiting for my car to return so I could meet Mike for lunch. I was thinking about how to best make a song in a major key sound sad but not sappy. I was also thinking about how people's faces change when they're photographed.

I lay in bed thinking about this.

It’s raining, finally. It has been raining for days. I need sheets to cover myself at night for the first time in months. Outside, my laundry is streaming soap and rainwater into the gutter, which is streaming soap, rainwater, sand, and orange leaves into the neighbors’ fish pond. A cream-and-white cat crouches on the tin roof overlooking this stream; its ribs loop painfully under its skin. It jumps in our kitchen window at night and eats our rats. Sometimes Ibu shoos it away with well-aimed kicks. I can’t understand this. Just because it washes the rats down with some of our trash.

I think about this, and how it relates to what I want. Mostly I think about how it doesn’t. I think about how I grew up. I think about my conviction that every only child is spoiled. I still believe this to be almost always true. It’s definitely true in my case. I’ve never denied that.

Louise was adamant, always, in her declaration that happy people will be happy regardless of changes to their environment, and unhappy people, the same thing. I believe her, even though I don’t want to. It makes wanting to go home irrelevant. It makes my now strong and pervasive desire for good food irrelevant – and when is that ever a good thing? What has the world come to when there’s no difference in happiness between masses of MSG soaked rice with a tiny, soggy cut of bay-caught, filthy-from-the-barge-traffic-tuna, and a wood platter stacked with an immaculate, perfectly cut variety of raw fish adorned with daikon, carrot, and seaweed?

It’s not that, though. I know this journal has tired of bearing longing-laden descriptions of faraway food, and I’m trying to quit, but at this point, it’s an addiction. Every thought train is derailed there.

Nothing really makes me happier, though, to wish for, than good food and an endlessly thorough back massage. And after that, a nap. In the sun. But not the equatorial sun, not this sun that’s impossible to cower under for longer than five minutes without beginning to feel faint. Somewhere Californian in June. And a swim in the ocean, at the kind of beach where there’s a slow, steady dropaway and bodysurfing waves. And more good food when I emerge. And then a soundproof music studio, equipped only with a great touch-sensitive electric keyboard and a microphone and no other human being for miles, just for good measure. Hours and hours of that, with snacks at hand, more hours until my voice is hoarse. And then a party. But a party with only my closest friends, and maybe their guests, and nobody who I felt I had to invite just to be polite or to keep up appearances. Getting drunk would be okay, but not getting drunk would not be prohibitive to having fun, and if the alcohol happened to run out, half the party would not take off for another party with a keg, nor want to. Everyone would take forever to get sleepy, and there would be a long period where everyone wavered in their minds between being asleep and being awake, and spoke with that dreamy quality that, if heard in the morning, wouldn’t seem to be following any thread. Everything would be uproariously funny – everything would hold gravity – everything would seem to hinge upon everything else. And everybody would fall asleep at different times and the conversations of the people remaining awake would drift into the dreams of the people who had fallen asleep.

I woke up this morning with the sudden, sickening awareness that I couldn't remember which side of my body my heart was on. The realization paralyzed me briefly, and I stared at the blue curtains pulled tight across de-molding towels and pajama pants, at the magnetic monkey and frog clinging to each other and to the doorknob, as I wildly tried to think, to remember. I wanted to put my hand to my chest and feel, but my hand wouldn't move, so I had to lay there, on my back, as quietly as I could and listen. My chest was strangely silent. The room, too, was strangely silent; it had rained all night and the combination of the pounding on the tin roof, the rumbling of the fan switching on and off with the power outages, and the gurgling of the roosters' strangled crows made the sudden silence feel especially alien. In the distance, a ship's horn blew a long low note across the bay. My heart fluttered, skipped, and began again.

I'm sitting outside the police station, having just been fingerprinted for the second time. Every finger - twice - plus the palm and the print of all four non-thumb fingers together, like a stamp, at the bottom. It's standard procedure for foreign residents. I'm sitting out by the drainage canals, writing this by hand, peeling a salak, and tossing the peels into the canal by my feet. My shoes are off, but from a distance, even the distance from my eyes to my feet without my contact lenses, it looks like I'm wearing white flip flops. My tan lines are that deeply etched by now, or is it the lines of dirt? A skinny black and white cat comes wandering through the outdoor hallways. I am still quashing my urge to unconditionally love every cat that I see, to rush them and scratch their necks. Cats aren't like that here. They're not treated like that. A cat wouldn't know what to do with my hand other than bite it.