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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I was in the Whole Foods cafe, microwaving my organic lasagna and getting ready to settle down with my sweet library book about a missionary who goes to Central Papua and is faced with a tribe who likes to cannibalize each other's peace sacrifices (in this case, children), when the guy who I had just beaten to the microwave started talking to me. He seemed vaguely all right, despite the bizarre opening of his conversation ("Are you with her?" Me: "Who?" Him: "That girl over in the checkout line." Me: "No, why?" Him: "Because you're both tall! You're both so tall! Are you Dutch? Dutch people are so tall. In Holland, there's like these 6'4" blonde chicks walking around everywhere.") and I didn't immediately try and extricate myself.

BUT, this was a mistake:
After he had found out that I had just returned from Indonesia ("Indonesia? Are you really Indonesian? Oh, you were just working there. Were you the tallest person there?") he asked me what I was planning on doing now that I had returned. I said that I wanted to try and work in a zoo, with primates.
And he said, "Oh, those monkeys are gonna probably remind you of the people you taught in Indonesia, huh?"

WOW.

Awards to Things I Brought In My Suitcase

Most Useful:
Laptop Computer, but that’s cheating, I think, so A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Most Ridiculous:
Warm fuzzy slippers

Most Weather-Appropriate; Unfortunately, Also Most Culturally Inappropriate:
A red bikini

Most Initially Useful, But Eventually Gave Me a Painful Esophageal Infection:
8 bottles of Doxycycline malaria-preventive pills

Most Unethical:
A DVD set of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! that I forgot to return to my friend Molly before I left the States

Most Curious to the Locals:
Contact lenses

Most Regrettable:
A relatively expensive, heavy speaker system that cost me $50 in overweight baggage costs and then promptly fried the second I plugged it into the wall here, despite the presence of the appropriate voltage converter

Most Reminiscent of Home:
Blueberry body lotion, or a necklace of dried roses

Thing I Most Wish I Had Brought, However Unexpected This May Sound:
100 packets of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Mix

December 21, 2006

All my interactions with people here are accompanied, always uncomfortably, by The Smile. You know the one. It’s the fog of nonthreateningness that you wear when you know that very very few actual words are getting through. The Smile persists through every kind of encounter; with fruit vendor dudes, with chicken saté dudes, with post office dudes, with random dudes on the street who want to have conversations about where I live, etc.

The Smile is distinct from the tight-lipped half-smirk that Americans give to each other when two strangers or remote acquaintances pass each other in a place where it would be considered rude not to look up. Here we call this the bulesmile because nobody uses it except white people. I’ve seen a few white people here, and they all do it. Look up from the ground, twist the lips, look back at the ground. Like ‘I see you, and I don’t want to get into anything with you, goodbye.’

This is not at all like The Smile. The Smile is broad and toothy and involves the entire face. It puts a laugh in the voice of the person using it. The doggedness of it made itself clear to me today when I wore it all through the following encounter with the guy who works in the package room in the post office. I was picking up a package sent to me by my dad. The postal service had failed to actually deliver it, like always. Instead they hoard it in the far reaches of the post office (I’m writing it in English for obvious reasons, but it was all in Indonesian):

Post Office Guy (smiling): Okay, that’ll be Rp.10,000.
Me (smiling, pointing at the postage mark, which reads $34.15): Paid already.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes, but you must pay 10,000 to pick it up.
Me (smiling): No.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes.
Me (smiling): The people at EF told me I shouldn’t have to pay.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Oh yes, yes, of course, that’s okay. Goodbye, Merry Christmas.
Me (smiling): Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too.

Like, that’s the conversational equivalent of smiling brightly, laughing a tinkling laugh, and saying ‘Hey, you’re trying to extort money from me because I’m a bule and ostensibly don’t know better, and I totally see right through you! Tee hee! And now that you know I speak Indonesian and have actual knowledge, you’re trying to pretend that you never tried to extort it in the first place! Ha ha ha! You’re an asshole!’

But even if I could say all of that in Indonesian, which I can’t (the closest I can come would come out something like ‘You person not good’) I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to make him angry. If I make him angry, he can pretend my packages never arrived in the first place, or steal them, or do any number of things I don’t want him to do.

Another conversation inappropriately permeated with The Smile:

Guy Who’s Bothering Me While I’m Trying To Write A Song On The Beach (smiling): Do you like Indonesian men?
Me (smiling): All individual men are different.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Can I come to your house?
Me (smiling): No. Definitely not.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Am I disturbing you by sitting next to you?
Me (smiling): Yes.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling, continuing to sit next to me): Oh, okay.

What’s especially perverse about it is that it’s the exact same Smile I use when I’m having pleasant conversations with nice people (contrary to what my blog may have you believe, these people do exist):

Woman in the Back of a Taxi (smiling): Hey, hey! You dropped your motorcycle helmet out the window!
Me (smiling, relieved because I would have lost my helmet): Thank you SO much!

or

Fruit Vendor Dude (smiling): You buy rambutan so often, today you get half free.
Me (smiling): That’s nice of you!
FVD (smiling): You must watch out for that man – he is trying to touch your butt.
Me (smiling): Thank you, I will.

So it’s an indiscriminate Smile, which makes it even stranger. By looking at me, you would never be able to tell what kind of conversation I’m having, or how I feel about the person I’m having it with.

The Smile is also often accompanied by the Awkward Southeast Asian Half-Bow of Acquiescence, but we won’t get into that. Let’s just leave it at the fact that it’s mostly used for everything except acquiescing.

This entry is actually two entries. (And this, hopefully, is a picture of Jayapura Bay from the top of a lighthouse at the beach). I have (finally) found a way to connect my computer at the internet cafés, so I can type my entries at home, where there is no SHITTY DISTRACTING MUSIC, and then post them in a lump later. And incidentally, everyone should use AIM more.

10/25
Idul Fitri. I find myself on a long, skinny speedboat with skids on the side, weaving in and out of of heavily jungled islands, with a family that is only tangentially mine – the family of a fellow teacher’s fiancé. Everyone is shy and they pretend we aren’t there. Where did they get the boat? I don’t know. Whose house is this that I’m standing in? Could be anyone’s. Why is there a Canada plate mounted on the wall? Why are we taking the baby parrot on a boat ride? Now we’re in another house. Whose house? Beats me. There’s an entire village built on sticks sticking out of the shallow bay. The roads are wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across… what? Does anybody know why our motorcycle isn’t falling through into the bay filled with Pocari Sweat cans and black plastic bags and sickly looking fish? Whose porch are we parking on? Why is that guy taking all our shoes and throwing them in a plastic bag? Why do biscuits exist that are flavored with salt, butter, and artificial grape syrup?

We maroon ourselves on a tiny beach at dusk that only gets tinier as the tide rolls in. I’ve been there before; it’s the one that takes the two hour long terrifying hike to get to. I prefer the boat, even with all the uncertainty and the fact that no one seems to notice that we’re going to have to eventually navigate our way back home on the open ocean around random rocks and coral reefs and treacherous cliffs’ edges in the pitch black night. I ask Nick if this is such a great idea, to which he replies, “No big deal, dinghies have pretty powerful lights.” Except ours doesn’t, because it’s made out of logs. But, you know, it’s all the same to him.

The anticipation of the night to come makes me slightly insane, and as I’m struggling in my soft, bare feet after the group as they clamber up the slippery, steep rocks of a mountain stream to see what is promised to be an amazing waterfall, I’m silently muttering in my head: “Myeh myeh myeh, I’m Indonesian! The soles of my feet are like leather! I can walk on volcanic rock that has sharp points sticking out of it everywhere! I like running across narrow logs balanced precariously on mysterious chunks of dirt that are suspended over hundreds of feet of nothingness! I can relax anywhere because I grew up without chairs so I can squat on absolutely any surface for hours without looking awkward and falling over! I can selflessly help the stupid American move maddeningly slowly for hours and hours without showing the least bit of impatience! Myeh myeh myeh!”

But, to tell you the truth, I loved them the entire time I was muttering, and after, when we all showered together under the waterfall, and before, when they fed everyone fish barbecued over a fire on the beach. “Hey, our people have custom,” Daniel, Ike’s fiancé, says. “Custom is, we must eat all we have brought, or else we not allowed to leave. It’s your responsibility.”

What it is is an excuse to get us to eat our eighth slice of fish without feeling guilty, and it works. “This is my favorite kind of responsibility,” I reply, pouring peanut and chili sambal over the fish and the rice. I have a pile of pink and purple and green and cream shells around my feet. Nick is trying to surf on a piece of driftwood. Hiron has the parrot riding around on his head like some kind of pirate. Daniel is telling me how bad he feels for us that we don’t have any family in Papua, and how, if we want, he can be our family. It’s a pretty perfect day as perfect days go, even with the bleeding feet and a cashew chocolate bar melting all over my backpack. Even with that.

10/20
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.

*Is it clear what I mean when I say Papuans, as opposed to Indonesians? In Indonesia, there is, and was, a resettlement effort, to try and shuffle the population so it would get more evenly distributed. Papua has only recently become part of Indonesia, so the native Papuans look entirely different and have an entirely different culture than the Indonesians who have recently moved here. When I say 'Papuans', I mean the natives, even though they are also Indonesian, technically. They, however, are much much more polite, helpful, and friendly than Indonesians from other parts of the archipelago, and I know that this is a generalization, but everything I've observed so far holds it to be true. Every time I have spoken in this blog of someone helping me through the jungle or up and down cliffs or someone cooking me food for no reason, it's been Papuans who have done it.