I had a day yesterday that manages to effortlessly paint a clear picture of life in Orange County without even trying.

So I'm dropping my car off to get an oil change, which is supposed to take two hours. The guy behind the counter is like, 'Will you be waiting here for it?' and I'm all like, 'um, no, I'm going to walk to Mitsuwa' and his face is all like ''walk'?? What is this this 'walk' of which you speak??'

I had passed Mitsuwa roughly three minutes earlier while driving over there, so I figured it was walkable, and that I could use my awesome Japanese market homing skills/ramen-smelling nose to find my way back there in a reasonable amount of time.

Whoops! I guess I forgot I was in Irvine (Costa Mesa really, but close enough)! As I began my journey, I realized two things. One: no sidewalks. Two: stupid landscaping. Walking down the street, I was going up and down these manmade mounds of bright green, overwatered grass, tripping on the tree roots that snaked everywhere without ever actually going underground, and weaving around office park buildings that had their own mazes of bushes meant to be pleasing to the eye, not to be walked through.

I jumped fences. I went through one-way courtyards. I climbed through bushes. I trespassed on more private property than has ever been trespassed upon before. And then I realized that the street was turning. It was curving around and starting to go the other way. THEN I saw a plane landing directly in front of me - the street had done a full 90 degree turn and dead-ended at the airport.

OK, I thought, I really want some unadon right now, and I will not let OfficeParkVille defeat me and my previously impeccable sense of direction. I'm just going to pretend that did not just happen, and go back the other way.

Long story short, half hour later, I'm at Mitsuwa, fighting millions of other lunch-hour-goers for a table, finally getting one (across from a baby who refused to be fed her rice, instead preferring to stare at me unblinkingly for 45 minutes). And immediately getting all prickly memories of my walk erased by my unbelievably delicious $6 unadon/zaru soba combination meal.

It has snowed four times this fall already and I'm starting to think that, this year, trees are idiots. Usually at the first snow, trees will dump their leaves because they know if they don't, their boughs will bow down uncomfortable with the weight of snow and soaking leaves, pulling the trunk into an awkward slouchy hunch, and eventually breaking, leaving the tree ever closer to death. Right? If all of that was bound to happen to you if you didn't let go of your leaves... wouldn't you just let go of the damn leaves?

Not this year. Every time it snows, the trees are like, "Well it's only September/October, so my eyes (feeling sensors) must be deceiving me. I must be hallucinating. Therefore I shall keep all my leaves! And maybe turn them red, but definitely not let them fall!"

The most recent snow, the one that hasn't really stopped yet as of right now, has dumped at least a foot of snow. The trees all look like gnarled old men, hanging onto their leaves stubbornly with old withered fingers. They dangle their branches mere feet from the sidewalk, sodden and pendulous. Anyone over 4 feet tall has to walk in the street or else become ensnared in vindictive tangles.

As the trees get dumber, squirrels get smarter. Any squirrel who's still alive must be. I was walking home from the grocery store with branches grabbing my hair and wrapping themselves around my backpack, and I saw a little rise in the snow with a big tunnel in it. I stopped to look down into the tunnel, and saw that at the bottom was (or had once been) a topless pumpkin. A squirrel was curled up in the bottom of the pumpkin, fat and sleeping. He had clearly been eating his nice warm home.

During the time I'm not trying madly to think of a lesson plan for 8 5-year-olds who like only to singsong laki-laki-perempuan (boy-girl) songs at each other from across the room while halfheartedly doing their color-by-number worksheets and kicking each other in the butt, I am reading the Onion's Volume 15 archives (October 2003 - November 2004, roughly). How this got the teachers' house in Indonesia along with mostly Charles Dickens and Arthur C. Clarke, I have no idea. But as a result, when I'm not dreaming about teaching, I dream in Onion headlines:

Inside:
Girl Brags About Perfect Health, Gets Food Poisoning
see page 4B

Boy Yells at Girl For Holding On Too Tightly To Motorcycle, Crashes Into Pickup
see page 6C

News In Brief:
EFL Student Asks Teacher If Pregnant
Jayapura - Unaware of the connotations that go along with such a question, local EFL student K.P., 15, asked his teacher Wednesday if she was pregnant. When given the gracious opportunity to save face by his teacher asking 'Why? Do I look pregnant?' he didn't seize the opportunity and say 'No! Of course not! I was just kidding.' but instead responded 'Yes.' The teacher was unavailable for comment as she is believed to be frantically in the process of becoming anorexic.

And so forth.
Lately, I am happier, with a few lapses allowed for when I realize I won't taste anything other than what I have been tasting for the next 11 months, food-wise and human-wise. But mostly it's okay. Biking is nice for that. It's beautiful here, really beautiful, and you can't tell from inside a low-ceilinged taxi with 90's music blasting bass and stuffed with sweating men and girls with their hijabs hitting you in the face, and you definitely can't tell from the heart of downtown, which just smells like motorcycle exhaust and looks like the cutouts from the cliffs are about to crumble down onto the Hotel Yasmin. But from a bike, you can see everything. You can see it panoramically. A beautiful day in a car feels like a beautiful day wasted, but on a bike, you're out in it, and you can go out of the city, up into the hills and out past the airport, to Sentani, to waterfalls and cooler jungle and thatched houses. You can bring a picnic and while you're eating it, you won't be surrounded by people with camera phones demanding that you sit on their pay-bench.
The other thing that contributes to my being happier is we found a raw-fish market about ten minutes from our house (previously, we could only buy cooked fish, and then only tuna, and then only cooked boringly), where there is a long strip of tables filled with freshly caught fish of every type, and you point to your fish and the man who caught it takes it back to a chopping block, guts it, and chops it into steaks, then gives you all of it in a bag (along with the head, in case you want to make soup). People around Dok9 have not grown used to us, as the people in Dok5, where we live, have, so while we buy fish, people point and stare and whoop at the 'bule' (foreigners, roughly, but a little more derogatory). But it's worth it. Tonight, we will have fish, corn, and mashed potatoes (!!!!) for dinner. Maybe this time I won't even cry when the mashed potatoes hit me.