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.

This transmission is coming to you from Savannah, Georgia, where the view from Mike's window looks quite disturbingly like Green Bay Road in Evanston. There's a little tiger-gray kitten in my lap who thinks that she can type this blog better than I can; I will leave vhe gr hy h jmmmmmm bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbhnrrrrkm,k dddddddddddd5vmko9lui666o88888888888888888888888888888
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99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999iou5621jklnm 8uui============== her prose in, so you can see what a terrific writer she is. I guess that effort tired her out, because she's lost interest.

I indulged in a love of mine the other night, while I was still in Evanston: sitting in the back of a car, late at night, nearly asleep and concentrating on the neon scenery while ignoring banal chit-chat. The thing I love best about banal chit-chat is ignoring it. Sometimes I prefer it as a background to silence. They were talking about their children and how naughty they weren't. I had nothing to offer. I am getting away with this only lately because people excuse my rudeness for culture shock. Before I went to Indonesia, my rudeness was just rudeness, and I was that person that made people uncomfortable, because I didn't like to talk to 100 adults in a row about what I was going to do with my life, and laugh about how, ha ha, my anthropology degree will qualify me for, ha ha, absolutely nothing. I didn't like to talk about their kids and how they were way naughtier at college than I was, or, conversely, how they came out of it with a triple doctorate in the-richest-possible-sort-of medicine. But now, people just nod uncomfortably in awe and think: she just came back from a third-world country. She must have seen all sorts of... things. She's just got to get used to the country again.

What they do not realize is that I will never get used to the country again. I wasn't used to it when I had never left it. I will always rather read neon sighs and shadows in bushes than listen to people ask me about things that make me slightly nauseous to repeat.