There's really no correct answer to the question, "What do you want to do with your life?" but an especially super-un-correct answer is "I don't know." Actually, there are a lot of questions that I think up on walks, and in the shower, and as I'm falling asleep, were I to take the time to answer them, for which my answer would probably be wrong.

Why do I choose to take buses instead of walking or biking when experience clearly shows that I am exhilarated by exercise? Why do I have this perverse need to get to where I am going faster, only to have that perverse need clash with my perverse fear of too much free time? What is this rushing around only to languish at home wishing I was still outside? What makes me spend my days inside surfing the internet for useless information when experience clearly shows that this gives me a headache and makes me depressed? It's not like heroin; it isn't even that fun while I'm doing it. I'm not euphoric, high-energy and babbling to anyone about how excited I am, and I'm not slumped in a narcotic daze of perfection; what I am is hunched, tense, and slightly spellbound, but only slightly, at things that will not matter in the next second. Yet I will submit myself to this every day at the cost of the headache, and the depression, and, long-term, the complete waste of life it will make up, viewed as a whole. This is a question I would almost like to go into neurology just to be able to answer. Why we would evolve to have our base instincts be so dead, dead wrong.

Our instinct is to eat fatty, empty-calorie food, and it eventually kills us. Why? Well, I know the answer to that one. We haven't evolved past the human - nay, animal - drive to gorge, to stockpile, to be prepared for famine. I guess the question we don't know the answer to is, is is even possible to evolve past that.

Historically, the reason we have evolved to avoid certain things, or to embrace certain things, or to behave certain ways, is to make it at least past reproductive age, and to have greater reproductive success. We avoid poisonous food because it immediately kills us. And, to simplify this criminally, we perform certain social behaviors because it makes us more likely to reproduce. But our diseases now - depression, heart disease, diabetes - they don't kill us until we're old. They let us reproduce, before we feel the effects, and then they kill us, past the point where evolution has any hope of intervening. Sure, certain acute stress related things that result from severe, severe stressors can keep a young kid from making it, or at least from being fertile. But merely sitting around being lazy, unhealthy, depressed, and unproductive isn't making the human race any less prolific.

And on that note (being questions with no correct answer), why do bookstores make me so sad?

That's where I just came from. A Barnes and Noble, which, for some reason that may be worth noting later, makes me way sadder than libraries. I go to bookstores mostly when I'm in a wandering mode, and thumb through every section. It takes me hours. And I get sadder and sadder until I'm thisclose to crying and I have to leave because it's not socially acceptable to cry in a Barnes and Noble. One day I should just do it. Then I could write about it. Because the secret to happiness appears to be to do something unconventional and then write about it and happily be lauded as the expert on whatever unconventional thing it was that you did.
The only thing I'm an expert on is uncertainty. I guess I'm an expert at observation too. I can observe the hell out of anything. I can write about a girl eating and have her fork's journey to her mouth take paragraphs and paragraphs, mostly consisting of tangents.

But I am a record-speed-reader and a record-speed-forgetter. I estimate that in my life I have read about five thousand books. I have read, and been briefly fascinated by, completely obscure things that I immediately forget. The trajectory of asteroids. What scientists predict will happen when the volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts. Multiverses and how they would be stacked together in spacetime. How an aye-aye makes an omelet out of his dinner of bird eggs. The history of lesbian relationshops in feudal China. Do I remember any of these things? No. Do I wholeheartedly regret that I don't? Emphatically yes.

I would love to be a walking encyclopaedia. Going back to the beginning, my most accurate answer to the 'what do you want to do with your life' question would be, 'I would like to travel wherever my fancy takes me and keenly observe and record everything that I see.' And since I am a member of this culture, I of course cannot be satisfied with simply observation and recording; I must draw conclusions! I must come up with hypotheses and test them through stringent and rigidly controlled experiments! Having come up with a conclusion, I must now relate it somehow to the vast moving living library of human knowledge, find a niche for it, tuck it in there, hold it up somehow as a way for improving the human race.

And if I am to do that, the more things I can pull out of that squishy, lunging library to relate my observations to, the better.

Of course, for me, that isn't the real reason, or at least not the only reason. The primary thing, for me, is that it's fucking fun to know things. It is eminently enjoyable to sit back and let ideas and knowledge flood your synapses, even - especially - if the knowledge isn't originally your own. It's less tiring if it isn't. You get to bask in some stranger's knowledge, their epiphanies, without having to lift a finger or a synapse to do all the work that led to it.

That's why bookstores make me sad. I don't have time to know all this stuff. I don't have time to sit down and become acquainted with it all, and even if I did, the second I put the first book down to pick up the second, I'd forget the first. And even if I did remember everything I read, by the time I put down the last book I'd be an old woman, ready to die, without having fulfilled the crazy social pressure to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING! I would have just spent my life sitting around reading about everyone else's accomplishments, and that would be all the time I was given.

I've forgotten already all the names of the books that I grabbed for hungrily, only to stuff back on the shelf in my thirst for another one. I don't carry a notebook with me even though I keep telling myself I should. Instincts again. Wrong again. It is not easy to do the 'right' things. I don't have an answer for the questions that I ask myself because it is not easy to answer them.

I was about three or four and in a group music lesson. We were taking a five minute break and another kid caught me in the corner picking my nose and sampling the contents. Between her 'EWWW!!!' (she was about nine - I was the youngest kid there by a good four years) and her inevitable tattling on me to the teacher and all the other kids, I was able to convince her that my family came from Russia and in my family (and all over Russia, presumably) it was a ritual we did for good luck.

I discovered a new sensation walking to the bus stop this morning: thick snowflakes falling on sunburned skin.

It's a Midwestern rainy day in the desert. I've got a glove with a coat hanger twisted through the fingers making the 'rock on' sign in the corner, and a wasteland of chocolate wrappers surrounding me. I have a surprise birthday party coming up that, yes, I am supposed to know about, but not the details, and the details being a surprise is enough for me. I also have a surprise birthday dinner coming up that was wholly a surprise until I figured out the clues in a burst and rush of lucky guesses this morning.

It occurs to me that if this were a story, trying to 'illustrate' my happiness, to 'show and not tell' the details that made me that way, it would probably sound forced, but since it's real, and I'm not trying to write, and this is a fleeting feeling, it reads real, at least to me.

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?

Every Tuesday I sort of wish it will snow so there won't be a softball game. This, after I spent all my time looking up a softball league that would have me after ten years of not playing at all. I wanted something that would get me into shape in a nonthreatening way (rugby, my last try two years ago, turned out to be a threatening way indeeed; the warmup mile run alone was too much to start with, and the fact that I was the lightest person there at 150 pounds was practically a guarantee that I would be in the hospital before the end of the season) and would shape my week a little bit, force me to compartmentalize my time.

But now I just wish it would snow. Snow or be warm. As much as I want to have something to do when I'm alone in my house, when I do have something to do, and it's stressful, I wish it were optional. Actually, it's probably simpler than that; softball, for me, means biking four or five miles down to the fields on the outskirts of town, and when the game's over and I'm exhausted, either biking back (all uphill) or going out to the main road and waiting a half hour for a bus - this all when it's at or around freezing and the wind is howling. For everyone else, they just have to jump in their cars, drive there, play, jump in their cars, drive back. Simple as that.

It's a sacrifice I make, not having a car, and I like to think it's for the good of the environment, so I can gloat, and not just because I don't have the money, which is probably much closer to the truth. I oscillate between liking it and not. Sometimes when I'm struggling against the wind with both handlebars wobbling with the weight of my groceries and it's starting to snow and cars are sweeping by me at close range and sometimes honking, I get frustrated and angry to the point where it's not even in line anymore with the situation. But later, thinking about it, I think, what do I not have that these people in their cars do?

I used to think nothing. I used to think I had nothing less, and that I was actually gaining something - exercise, and time spent outdoors. Things like that. I disagree with myself now. I'm definitely short on something these people have, and that's the freedom to just go out at a whim and have fun without getting weighed down with the consequences of when's the bus running, what are the intervals, how cold is it, will it snow, which way is the wind blowing, can I ride my bike into it, has someone stolen my bike light, how long will this take, will I be able to get any sleep tonight once I get home?

Because of all these questions running through my head, I often decide just not to go anywhere because it's too much trouble, and my life becomes more monotonous instead of more colorful. And yes, I realize that this is ridiculously whiny and specific about a problem that's not a problem at all, compared to the rest of the problems of the world, and yes, I realize that I could just not think about all those things and go anyway and deal with the consequences as they happen, but that's not who I am, and these are the consequences that riding a bike has, for me, and this is how it's been and now I go nowhere more often than I go somewhere. It makes me sad.

Since many of my 'injuries' over the course of my life have been faked, or at least exaggerated mightily, I discovered last week that I don't actually know how to respond when something is actually wrong with me. I'm not used to it. What I am used to is swallowing my malaria pill wrong, suffering throat and chest pain, and thinking 'oh my god I have bird flu/am having a heart attack/my lungs are collapsing... I better not talk or move or do anything except lay around whining, faintly and dramatically whisper out my last words, or secretly do Sudoku puzzles when no one is looking/is around to whine to'. What I am used to is ditching my crutches when no one is looking, because, man, my armpits hurt and I can actually walk on this thing. What I am used to is pinching my cheeks until I'm flushed and lidding my eyes... Mom, I can't go to school. It is an impossibility. Really - an impossibility.

But my only real injuries have been either when I was too young to remember much (broken finger, age 4, broken arm, age 5, my only real sprained ankle, age 12). So when I got a softball slammed into my leg straight from the bat during practice, I kept playing. I figured that even though it hurt like hell, it would probably be better if I played through it. I walked on it all week like nothing had happened. I played catch. I played pool. I played in a softball game. I played in two softball games. Three triples among them. Sprinting. All the while the bruise was getting worse, and blood, under my skin, was filling my foot. After the last run around the bases, my foot looked up at me, tears filling its eyes, and said 'No more.'

I thought I'd been subconsciously making up the pain, exaggerating it even to myself, making it out to be more than it was. I thought I could make up for my past by staunchly NOT acknowledging it, refusing coddling, refusing help.

Wrong. Now I'm on crutches for real. It sucks.

Is there anything that kills these squirming remnants of creativity quite like the blink-blink, blink-blink of tiny vertical line on a blank screen?

So nobody figured that one out, huh (or else nobody cared)? Those bolded words were Scrabble words. Scrabble words! I attempted to curb my addiction by making the threat to myself that if I chose to play Scrabble instead of doing something creative, then I would be forced to write a story using every single word on the finished gameboard. But instead of working for me, it worked against me; I played Scrabble anyway, and I ended up actually having to do it. Thus the wonderful, convoluted, cheesy story you see before you that morphed into disgust and reader challenges that no one took.

Anyway, I've been having apocalyptic nightmares lately, all right in a row, like some sort of sign - if I believed in signs. The string ended (hopefully; it might not actually be over since this one was just last night) with my stealing a bus from my job to go on a road trip, crashing it, worrying about how I was going to return it without anyone noticing, and then realizing it didn't matter because (a) I was awake and (b) the world would probably end before I got fired or reprimanded.

Notice that I had been having so many apocalyptic dreams lately that my being awake (and I was awake) didn't in any way dim the certainty that the world was going to end. I've just been taking that as a given in the mornings. Fireballs, nuclear war, asteroids, zombies taking over. All in a night's work.

When I entered her room, it was dark except for the weak flame of a mandarin candle burning by her bedside. The room smelled, unsurprisingly, like mandarin, but under that, something sour. "Pardon me," she yawned, "but I feel as though I've got a touch of the ague."

"The ague?" I asked. "God, it's been so long since I've heard anyone say that. So long that it was probably before I was born. I didn't think people got the ague anymore. I thought it was eradicated... whatever it is."

"Uh, I don't know," she mumbled as she turned over and half rose. "I just woke up. I was just talking. I was just using it as a general term for being sick. Like men is sometimes a generic term for humans, even though it doesn't mean the same thing at all."

"You're cute, jo." I smiled and walked over to her bedside. Her frocks were all crumpled up in a heap at the foot of her bed and spilling in a fat pile into her closet.

For some reason, that sight had me riveted. As my feet beg(a)n to drum unconsciously against the lines of her wooden floorboards, I started remembering fruit vendors in Mexico in their fancy dresses with beads of sweat rolling down their faces as they sold slices of flan and children freed themselves from the impossible folds. They never got their dresses dirty. Never. They were always as clean and shiny as the day they were made. Eons and eons of dirt falling on their dresses wouldn't have even smudged the fabric.

The thought made me want to jot something ridiculous on the dresses on the floor with a marker, like Greek letters - mu or xi or something - just to see if they would make a mark. But then, I knew, she would hate me.

As if to make up for the mere thought, I quickly mustered up an offer. "Would you like some rye toast with butter?" I asked. But she was asleep. I couldn't have given it to her if I had tried. She wouldn't have et it, anyway, with her stomach that ailed her. So I exit quietly.

The qi in the room was blocked from her illness, and the awkwardness that we had, and from my unkind thoughts, so I went back downstairs. The qats in the yard bent under the weight of the sun. They couldn't win, either; their future was rigged. They weren't meant to be in a yard in the hot, wet South. They were meant to be in the Middle East, just as the faux wats in yuppie towns across the country probably felt far from home when they thought of their native Thailand.

No od here, no escape, just like the endless march of numbers in pi, or an el car when the tracks are broken. Okay, that was just terrible. Possibly the worst metaphor I've ever written in my life. Zap this before it gets any worse. And for what? No idea yet, eh? Un-believable. How about by now? Is it obvious yet? Must I hit you over the head with it, like maybe with a bat? Or a bucket of hot aa? Ha!

And lo! It has hit you! Or, has it?

Anecdote. Seemingly profound thought. Another anecdote that has nothing to do with said profound thought. Aimless wanderings capped off by offensive statement. Apology for offensive statement. Explanation of apology for offensive statement that nullifies apology.

Paragraph break.

Sentence that is meant to be deep, so probably has some superfluous alliteration. Pregnant pause. Several sentences written while being talked to by someone who has no idea that I am not listening. Second pregnant pause while I consider whether to include this in my diatribe. Awkward sentence that results from me deciding not to include it.

Paragraph break.

Attempt at summation. Awkward sentence that does not belong at the end of an entry. Second attempt at summation, this time including awkward sentence. Second awkward sentence that is so awkward that the summation won't even deign to include it.

Maybe the reason I seem like such a jerk to ethics professors is that I tend to look at things from an entire-earth point of view, instead of from a human point of view.

The first thing anyone does when they're trying to convince you that you're not really a moral relativist, that there's no such thing as moral relativism, is ask you how the Holocaust could possibly be viewed as morally OK.

This is not a hard question to answer, in my opinion. It not being a hard question to answer has nothing to do with me not thinking, personally, that the Holocaust was horrible. I do think it was horrible, which is so obvious as to almost be unnecessary to say. I would have lost relatives in it had they not very recently immigrated to the U.S.

But it's still easy to answer, even though the questioner will think you're dodging the question and must therefore be anti-Semitic, homophobic, gypsyphobic or whatever the word for hating gypsies may be, etc.

Anything that so drastically lowers the number of humans on this earth is of direct benefit for virtually all species of animal and plant. Our system of ethics is based on humans. We don't think of it in a big enough picture to notice this; we think we're being objective and all-encompassing. We're not. The death of the entire human race would be such good news for everything else on the planet, that upon hearing it, they should all burst into their version of celebrating and getting wasted.

This says nothing about my personal opinion of whether it should be worth it. You can't ask a living being to discuss the morality of the obliteration of its species, no matter the benefits for anything else. Biology precludes it. But I do think it funny that ethics professors think there is no way around the 'Holocaust Question'. All you have to do is love animals more than humans. And though I'm not one of those people (close, but not quite), there should be more than enough 13-year-old girls and angsty farm boys on this earth to pretty much tip the balance the animals' way.

Maybe it isn't a serious issue now, but when our population reaches the point that the death of millions, perhaps billions, will save OUR species (all other species aside) from extinction, this is going to have ethicists' underwear all in a bundle.

There is too much music in here to write. There is too much music in here to write. It’s too hipstery to play Scrabble in with friends and I want to say it’s too crowded, or it’s trying too hard, or the kids have much too contrived haircuts, or are too snobby, to hang out in by yourself, but really, except for the music, I like it, and I only don’t like the music because it’s too amazing for me not to feel bad that I didn’t create it. I have this problem often. Any music that isn't good hurts my ears, literally hurts them, and as for the music that is good, I get jealous of the artist and can't enjoy it. My favorite music is music that somehow escapes either of these two extremes. I realize that this is not healthy.

I've been sick, which serves me right since all I've been doing lately is pompously bragging to anyone who'll listen about how awesome my immune system is. How my parents didn't make me wash my hands after every time some kid sneezed in the next block somewhere, how I ate everything served to me, sometimes off the ground, how I flew in planes all the time and was therefore exposed to every airborne, foodborne, sandborne, dirtborne virus known to man. How now I snigger at people who carry moist wipes everywhere they go, open doorknobs with towels draped over their hands, won't use public restrooms, won't eat uncooked fish or any food that hasn't been blasted to the FDA-recommended stage of burnt, and still manage (unsurprisingly) to contract every bug that blows by in the wind.

But even though I generally do still agree with myself that it's healthier to get your hands into everything, run around barefoot, and eat whatever you please (and do also agree with general society that you shouldn't go around LOOKING for illnesses by eating month-old yogurt and using Port-a-Potties willy-nilly) a healthy immune system doesn't always work, and sometimes you get slapped with the stomach flu AND a cold at the same time right after you've finished bragging about how you never get sick. And when that happens, everyone you've bragged to has every right to make fun of you and make faux-puking noises and waft rich, nauseating foods under your nose, and make goose honks behind handkerchiefs.

Instead, upon whining my plaintive whine, I was brought Saltines, grapes, and soda water, and got my back and legs rubbed and cold washcloths placed on my forehead. I always crack about how life is unfair, but forget all those times it is unfair in my favor.

I do think I would be satisfied if I spent the next two years getting on planes and jumping in cars or on boats at the slightest of whims to follow my taste buds around the world. I know that there is a term for this, and it's called a super-mega-important-sought-after restaurant reviewer (also known as: in your dreams). But really. If I were to suddenly become a gazillionaire, after I gave away 80% of it or more, depending on how much a gazillion dollars really is, that's what I would do. And yes, I know that if I suddenly craved Tibetan momos, the craving, and my good temper with it, would probably be gone after 18 hours on an international flight, three different customs forms from three different countries, a tiny wobbling plane struggling through the high winds around the Himalayas, and the crazy long-ass nap I would take upon finding a place to stay. Still. It would be a good jumping point for all sorts of adventure that I wouldn't know how to look for if I just sat here and thought, 'Now, where shall I go look for adventure?

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.

Guest posted over at Nora's place today with my miraculous weekend internet that only pokes its head from his shell on very special weekends.

I started typing and it started transliterating into Malayalim! Oh my God! I had to figure out how to make it stop and while I was doing that everything I wanted to say just flew right out my ears. I have a fever and I'm at work and I have a terrible haircut. This is all that's left. I've been trying to decide whether to cut my losses and just cut the stupid haircut all off, which would leave my hair chin length, which I KNOW looks terrible on me, but it's tempting because I think that the current cut looks more terrible. For awhile now I've just been going to Great Clips and everyone keep telling me Great Clips sucks, but they've been so good to me, and the second I betray them by going somewhere else, God suddenly goes completely insane and gives me a Haircut-Specific Smite in the form of an Middle-Aged-Woman Haircut. God and Great Clips are apparently friends. I don't think 'smite' is a noun. I don't know if I have the appropriate writer credentials to just force it to be a noun.

Speaking of forcing words to be different parts of speeches than they're used to, I was in a friend's car coming out from a Chinese restaurant, and a car honked, or didn't honk, or something happened that involved either honking or the conspicuous lack of honking (see... this is what happens when I don't allow myself to embellish, and my memory isn't exact) and he said something like, 'Should I have horned at him?'

'Horn' should definitely be used as a verb all the time. 'Did you see that guy? He cut right across five lanes of traffic to get to the on-ramp, and everyone was horning at him, and he just flipped everyone off!' 'Should I horn at that hot woman in the Kia, or would that be crass?' (Do guys ever consider that, just maybe, it might be just a LITTLE bit crass to horn at women from cars?!)

The innuendo of sexual advance just makes it better. But I supposed there's no innuendal benefit to changing 'smite' into a noun. Scratch 'smite'. But we'll consider 'innuendal'.

Every time I get a massage (not often, but enough to remember that this happens), the pleasure turns my brain to mush and I lay there thinking ridiculous thoughts:

In the future, when we're all engineered, genetically or otherwise, to conform better to our jobs, will massage therapists have hands that automatically generate massage oil with the right nerve twinge from the brain, or, primitively, a touch of a craftily hidden button? Will employers pay for their employees to have this feature installed, and if so, will it be somehow tweaked so that the feature will automatically disable ouside of work hours? Will male employees then pay chip hackers the big bucks to come retweak the chip so it works all the time, and therefore makes masturbation easier? Would the employer somehow have the chip's activity tracked, and then fire the employee for using work materials for personal use? Then could the employee sue the employer for invasion of privacy?

I lay there, I think these things, I think, I love the future. I love massages. And then I get a little panicked and hope that my concentrating so hard on ridiculous future scenarios didn't keep me from feeling the strokes of her hand.

Inadvertently I reminded my mom that I used to lie to her all the time by bringing up corn on the cob.

"What do you think he'll really like me to cook, though?" she asked me, referring to my boyfriend, and dinner.

"Well," I said, "his mom's allergic to corn, so I guess he's never really gotten to eat corn on the cob very often. You could make that."

"We could eat it with chopsticks, just like what's-her-name's family, that girl you were friends with back in... middle school? Elementary school?"

"What girl? You mean Yexin?"

"Yeah, Yexin."

"Her family didn't eat corn on the cob with chopsticks. What are you talking about?"

"You told me they did."

"I did? When?"

"When you were a kid. You came back from dinner at their place once and said that they made corn on the cob and ate it one kernel at a time with chopsticks. You were really excited about it."

"Ummm... I made that up."

"No, you didn't! I remember you telling me."

"And I remember making it up. How could you eat corn on the cob with chopsticks, anyway?"

"I don't know. I guess you couldn't. Why would you make something like that up?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know??"

"No."

It always really bothered my mom that I did that. Once, I guess (this is all via her, because I don't remember) I came home from kindergarten and wove her a long, complex yarn about some kind of kindergarten drama that unfolded all over me that day - it had kids making fun of me, and teachers yelling, and construction paper everywhere, and crying - and when she went in to talk to my teacher about it she found that it had never happened. Not only that, nothing close to it had happened. The day in question was an especially normal day.

I guess that when I came home that day and she asked me that omnipresent question: "How was school today?" I didn't want to say 'Fine' like every other day. I would have rather had a story. Even now the act of saying 'Fine' as a response to anything puts me in a bad mood - 'How are you', 'How's your day going', etc. It's boring. It's small talk and it means absolutely nothing. Not just something shallow, even, but literally nothing. Nobody ever says 'it's going terrible' or 'I'm feeling a bit off today' (even my officemate, who's British, just responds with 'fair to middling' no matter what the situation is). People are always saying 'How are ya!' to me by the water cooler and it makes me visibly cringe, because obviously I am a complete sociopath.

Now that I'm not in kindergarten, I obviously know that I have more than those two options (saying 'Fine' or making up a long, complicated, and completely untrue story). There is always the option of taking the truth and telling it like a story. This isn't hard for me; I've never had a day in my life that I felt could be summed up by 'Fine' - there's always the tiny victories, like a bus coming as soon as you round the corner to the stop, or a man yelling 'you dropped your wallet!' after you as you pedal away from a stop sign, instead of just stealing it and leaving, or the weather warming to 68 in the middle of winter - or the tiny battles, like locking yourself out of your house on the day you have to rush home and get ready for a fancy dinner. These are all true and have happened, and have story-worthy details that I've forgotten only because it's been awhile (except for the fancy dinner one, which happened on Valentines Day). I try to stick to these kinds of true stories now that I am 23 and should know better than to constantly lie to people I love.

But sometimes you just want an explosion, you know? Sometimes you want to have run into your favorite celebrity at the beach. It's not even the attention - I can live without attention; in fact, I prefer it - but rather the thrill of telling it, of inventing it convincingly as I go along.

My mom used to tell me - she said my kindergarten teacher told her to say it - that if I wanted to tell her a story like that, it was okay, as long as at the end I said 'just kidding' or something similar. I remember very clearly having none of that. It sucked all the fun out of it. I said, 'okay,' and just kept doing it my way. My mom, rather than recognizing me as the lying little brat I most certainly was, took me at my word, and believed my stories from there on out. Because of this, we're constantly running into things like the corn on the cob story where I have to, once again, remind my mother that hardly anything I said to her as a kid had any basis in reality. It's sad. More accurately, in a detached way it's sort of sad. I don't feel it myself at all, because it's how my reality has always been, and hard as I try, I can't feel anything wrong about it, even though I can recognize it objectively as something that's probably sad for her. Strange.

So it might be a symptom of Munchausen syndrome to suggest that I think I may have had a mild version of Munchausen syndrome during a large part of my childhood, but I'm okay with letting it stand that way. In seventh grade I sprained my ankle playing rugby with the boys, right after I told them they didn't have to be scared of tackling me. The ensuing emergency room-visiting, parent-coddling, crutch-sizing, aircast-wearing, teacher-sympathizing experience made me desperately want to go through it again. I faked it twice more during middle school. I'm not sure if anyone knew up until now that those were fake; now you know. People looked at me in crutches, asked me about them. It was middle school. The only questions I was getting asked regularly otherwise were snide ones from the popular crowd about whether I shaved my legs yet or whether I was anorexic. Getting asked about crutches was a step up. One experience stands out especially vividly for some reason; if you asked me to describe the tile pattern in the bathroom, the molding on the windows, the temperature of the tap water of that day in the bathroom, I'd be able to do it.

I was waiting my turn in line for the sink, leaning and swinging a bit on my crutches. My foot in its air cast rested lightly on the floor without any real weight on it. I actually don't remember if this was the real sprain or one of the fake ones; I sometimes lied so well I even forgot back then. Anyway, I was next in line and the girl washing her hands was a girl who'd made her fair share of fun of me. I was close to her, mere inches away, as the bathroom was tiny, and when she stepped back from the sink, she stepped on - merely brushed, really - my casted foot.

Though I didn't say anything, I must have made a tiny noise, because she turned around to see what she'd stepped on, and when she turned around, her eyes... I'll never forget her eyes. They were dinner plates, alien spaceships, planets. They took up her whole face. For a second, she was speechless, and then she exploded in a string of apologies that must have taken her five minutes to complete. Girls came in and out of the bathroom, the bell rang, girls squealed and ran for their classes, and she was still apologizing. The solar system shriveled and poured into a black hole, never to return, she was still apologizing, etc., etc. I stood frozen. I couldn't extract myself! Everyone who came in, she exclaimed, like she couldn't believe it, 'I stepped on her broken foot! I stepped on her broken foot!' I had no idea what to do with my hands while this was happening. Some mumbled 'it's okay's must have escaped my mouth at some point, but I honestly don't know. I was too mesmerized.

And even though it was supremely uncomfortable and awkward, I have remembered that occurrence right up until the moment I write this. It stands out as something I must have tried to duplicate. It wasn't the first time I had invented an illness (stomach problems in fourth grade to escape the possibility of participating in a fire drill; eventually turned into real stomach problems from anxiety - a dislike of vegetables in first grade to 'see what it felt like to not like something' - a high fever, always, to avoid that horrible clique of fifth-grade girls) but it was the first time I'd done it deliberately knowing what I was going for.

There are things I faked because of my possible-faux-Munchausen-resulting-from-Munchausen syndrome (this circle of logic really is vicious; try thinking about it) that I will never reveal because they are too terrible. Even writing it like that sounds like an excuse - that I wouldn't have done it unless I had had some kind of medical condition. The truth is, I probably would have. Anyone would. Everybody with this 'syndrome' probably has. I hate to go out on a limb I know practically nothing about, but I don't know about this whole 'name a disorder after every slightly undesirable personality trait' thing. People just go through periods where they are selfish, or where they like to be alone, or where they can't sleep for awhile. When there is a biological basis, an observable difference, in the brains of people with these syndromes and the people without, I'd like to read the paper on it. And if there already is, can anyone direct me towards it?

I went into Petco yesterday to wait for Camille to buy catfood. As always in Petco there were two tiny sad cages by the front door with two large sad cats in them who could barely move. And as usual they were both turned so their butts faced the outside. They were probably sick of being poked through the bar by index fingers, maybe even scratched, and then abandoned. Nothing makes me sadder than housecats in cages, for some reason. I mean, I know why it makes me sad but I have no idea when or how it became the saddest thing possible. Formative experiences, I guess. I'm not being very romantic about it. Anyway, if I ever get arrested, it will be because I'll have been an undercover cat-freer for years, sneaking around under the cover of dark, jimmying the locks of pet stores everywhere and lifting the cats out with my special patented upside-down combination neck scratch calming lift.

(This lift is not to be attempted at home; serious scratching could occur, and has, if you don't have the cat at the precise degree of upside-down-ness required.)

Anyway, they'd be set free. I'm not a cat, so I don't know, but I think I'd rather live in the worst free conditions, alleys, scraps, backyards, fighting for territory with other cats, than live in a 2x3 foot cage in a Petco, or anywhere. Those shelters that require adopters to adopt two cats at once, that is so, so stupid. I haven't adopted cats from those shelters because of that rule. Almost everyone I know has chosen not to adopt cats from those shelters because of that rule. Sometimes you just can't adopt two cats. How can shelters set guidelines on adoption that result in less cats being adopted and more cats being put to death, and justify it at all?

Those would be released too. If I ever found out where Death Row for cats was, I'd be an outlaw immediately, probably so recklessly that I'd be caught. That breaking news that PETA was killing animals in the back of their van right outside animal shelters after they'd promise to make a 'good-faith effort' to find them homes severed any tenuous moral ties I ever had to PETA. I'm not sure how anything could be more antithetical to anything. Anger makes me not articulate.

Anyway, one of the cats, the one in the bottom cage, had his neck craned the tiniest bit so he could see out, but it wasn't immediately obvious that he was. I started to reach my finger out so he could smell it, but stopped. I read the sign on the outside of the cage, written, as always, in pleading language with smiley faces and cat cartoons and 'Adopt Me!' balloons all over it. Name: Arthur. Sex: Male, Spayed. Age: 4.5. Description: Sweet as can be!

Arthur peered at me over his shoulder, looking wary. I stood still, peering back. Unconsciously, I shuffled one of my feet, and, suddenly on guard, Arthur circled, crouched by the door of his cage, and sat tense and facing me, his nose between the bars. I shuffled again, and realized what had him so interested... the drawstrings on my cargo pants.

For the rest of the time I was waiting I walked back and forth, danced, dragged, in front of his cage, and the whole time he was entranced. I made sure not to let him know I was looking at him. I just let him, in his mind, stalk that mouse, that rabbit, that bug, around trees and under fences and through stalks of corn, his paws eventually batting through the bars of the cage, and, finally, let him catch it, bring it up onto the metal floor of his prison and gnaw a hole right through. He had such a grip on it that when Camille was finished and came to get me so that we could go, I had to kneel down and disentangle it from his claws, extended all the way out as they were. As I was replacing it around my ankle, my face level with his, he meowed at me. In my mind I had a flash of lifting him out of the cage, bringing him to the counter, adopting him, taking him home, hiding him from my landlord, letting him out to be friends with the cats from the other building and chase real mice, real bugs. It was a quick flash. My body killed it by walking out. But if I had endless money and endless time I would buy a giant fenced in mansion and as many cats as I could love.

I remember the singular, frightening concentration of a three day juice fast. Food. Food. Foodfoodfoodfood. Juice ceases to be food. Juice ceases to be satisfying or nutritional, it ceases even to seem to have mass, except of course when it forces me to run to the bathroom to pee thirty times a day. It has mass on its way out. But inside, it's nothing. Less than nothing. I take a deep breath the second morning and my stomach stays the same. There is nothing to pooch it out. The air is tiny enough by itself, without any food, that it makes no difference in what it looks like. This makes me feel as though I am suffocating.

It is just like me, I think, to be so dramatic about three days of juice when this is in no way life threatening and millions of people are suffering much worse as I write. It is just like me, but it does make sense, when you think about it, because one's own suffocating is immediate and the rest of the world's suffering, even if it were every single other human being on the planet, is not. To consider it makes me feel redundant and selfish. Anyone else would feel this way, or they should, but it's impossible to change.

Last time I did this I was still in school. I took my container of grape juice up to the anthropology lounge, along with Nick, his container of grape juice, and things to play hangman with. In the kitchen, someone was microwaving some kind of frozen Italian dinner. I say this now, 'some kind', but back then, I knew all its ingredients from the instant I stepped into the stairwell. Butter, parmesan, tomatoes, basil, pepper, all thick as mustard gas in the stairwell. It almost laid me out along the banister. I would have punched the woman in in the kitchen in the face for her lunch. One bite of her lunch, even. Her permission to sit in the hallway and smell it as she microwaved it until it sizzled and burned.

Normally, I hate frozen dinners. I spent my last two years of high school eating potato chips, grapes, and frozen dinnners, and the smell of a Lean Cuisine still takes away my appetite instantly. I never thought I'd find an exception, but apparently all it takes is about 40 hours of grape juice and lemonade. How long would it take for me to find celery, my taste nemesis, mouthwatering? 1 day of nothing? Less?

Probably less before I became so singularly minded that I couldn't concentrate on anything else. It's been about 12 hours now and this entry speaks for itself.

Rebellion before office life, rebellion after office life.

Behold, 2006:

"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."

(taken from my 10/26/06 entry)

And behold, by contrast, 1/31/08:

Just now I walked to the coffeemaker to fill my teacup with hot water from the side spigot. I have a big mug that officemates are always trying to steal and put their soup in, and the trickle of hot water is always meager, so I had awhile to stand and think as it filled. Suddenly I had this massive inexplicable urge to keep my finger on the tap and take my cup away, watch the boiling water spilling in a perfect line onto the counter, under the coffeemaker, spreading under the disgusting trash can full of spoiled berries and across to the refrigerator that always has someone's moldy old lunch in it. I could picture standing there with my hand on the tap and not moving a muscle if someone were to see me. Standing there acting like this is what's supposed to be happening over here, and how is this your business? Move along. Move along. I'm just drenching the floor here and the water's creeping along the cracks in the countertop and soaking the communal cutting board and the box of free bagels.

I could see myself doing that so clearly that I left with my mug only half full. Unlike flashing a bunch of teenagers a chest not my own while zooming past on a motorcycle, wearing a sorry excuse for a helmet, this would have repercussions.

It was suddenly 65 after a winter of ice and the creek was a mass of floating icebergs. The edges were filled with cracks and sinkholes from people who tried to walk on the ice and crunched right through. Where it looked thin, it took the chunks of rock I threw and bounced them right off onto the opposite bank. Where it looked thick, in broke off in razor-sharp layers that we threw at a tennis ball marooned in ice.

Swirling in circles in one of the waterfall eddies was a perfect circular iceberg. Its surface was covered with rocks and logs people had thrown at it to try and break it, all in vain. It was clearly thicker than it looked, because it looked like it would break at the touch of a bird's feet. We sat on the rocks at the edge of the creek as the iceberg swirled and sloshed towards us. When it reached us I put out my foot to kick at it, thinking it would be solid. It wasn't. A whole side broke off and left me ankle deep in water that would have been ice if it hadn't been moving.

It was my inclination to worrywart around about how cold it was, how dangerous it was for my foot, etc., etc., even though it didn't really hurt, but we had just finished watching something we'd never seen before. A little black bird, maybe the size of a sparrow but fatter, was bathing in the creek. Not just wading in a half centimeter and fluttering around, but actually diving in at the tops of falls and flailing about underwater, struggling against a current that's strong for most humans, then surfacing, smacking his beak, doing a little knee-bend dance, and diving back in. Every time he emerged, he was fatter.

We couldn't get enough of him and followed him up the creek almost to the point of being late to where we were going. We speculated that maybe he was a fairy-tale-like bird leading away from (or to) our dooms, like if he hadn't made us late we would have been hit by a truck at the intersection we should have been at at that certain time, or if we had ignored our commitments and followed him all the way up, we would have found ten million dollars in gold, but... we don't come from enough of a fairytale world that we paid any heed to this idea. When it was time to turn around and make our meeting, we turned around and made our meeting. If we lived in fairytale land, we'd probably be dead. Or else hopelessly lost in a tangle of brambles. As it was, we forgot about the little black bird almost as soon as he was out of sight. If you were supposed to lead us to our fortune, bird, then I'm sorry.

None of this has yet passed through the mosquito netting, the wire screen door, the curled mesh, the colander, the flour sifter, the cilia, the metal detector, the water filter, the sieve, the burly security men, the face, fingerprint, barcode, iris scanner, the popup blocker of my brain.

There are flashes, sometimes, where I think that I have gone crazy, that this is it and from now on I won’t know where I am or what’s really happening to me, that life from now on is a daydream and nothing else, that I might think I’m in bed with a lover, but really, I’m in a straitjacket and in a morphine drip, or that I may think I’m studying law, but I’m babbling somewhere on the ground. In a hospital. In a coma. Severely schizophrenic.

I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.

Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.

In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.

When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?

Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.

I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.

Until I was old enough to know that something was wrong with it, I read four, five hours a day. Every inch of free time (yes, I measured my free time in inches), every moment I wasn't at school or asleep or eating dinner or in the car (I got carsick if I did anything in cars besides stare out the window, reciting streets - I guess that's sort of reading, too). I learned early, at about 3, so there was more time for me to read in blissful ignorance before the awareness of social norms came up on me and I realized that people were supposed to do other things sometimes, too.

Before I realized that, I don't remember a time when I felt bored or unsatisfied while reading. I think the boredom and the drive to do other things came from outside. As I realized other kids played Nintendo. (Once I tried Nintendo, I was immediately hooked - I can still beat anyone at any of the original Marios - try me.) As I realized other kids were in softball leagues, or went camping with their parents. Everyone has a drive to fit in, so as soon as I figured out I didn't, I wanted to - even though, left alone, I probably could have read, and played the piano, and drawn forever.

Sometimes I wish society had laid off. Now, when I write music, I feel this push to record it. And when I record it, I get frustrated, because it doesn't sound the way my voice sounds in my head - the music isn't as easy to play as it is for me to write, and hear and organize in my brain, and it comes out clumsy, stunted by my inability to understand recording/mixing technology. If I hadn't come to know that people record what's in their heads, make money off it, compare it to what comes from other peoples' heads, stress over deadlines, stress over accomplishing something - I might have just been able to be happy sitting down at the piano at my leisure, playing in that creative dreamworld I used to occupy, until I felt finished, and then I could move on, and not have to feel like it needed to be more than that.

I can't read anymore either, without either thinking that I need to be doing something more productive or that I need to be making 'something' out of my reading, like turning it into a job: book reviewer, novelist, professional insufferable literary snob, whatever. Writing this blog even makes me feel sick sometimes when I read other people's blogs and think, this person lives a more exciting life than I do. This person writes down their experiences more accurately than I do. Competition. Achievement. Blah blah blah.

It has become confusing because I'm not sure if I can escape the cycle, so I think, I might as well dive into it. I think this a lot when I'm around my family, who imply in a myriad of ways, intentional and not, that I am wasting my talent (whatever that talent may be). As I write this, I don't see how enjoying myself without putting pressure on is a waste of anything at all, but mired in my family, who are all doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and teachers and other such things, and who get really huge fake grins on their faces when I say I'm a bus dispatcher, I start thinking, yeah, I AM wasting this as-yet-unnamed talent. I should go to grad school! I should write lots of papers to compete with other students' papers and go into a challenging field somewhere and think about work all the time, even when I'm sleeping, and make a lot of money and buy a lot of things that I slowly become unable to live without, and if I lose my job I will think back on how much I made in 2008 and think, how the fuck is it possible to live on such little money?

I may sound like I'm exaggerating and/or being sarcastic, and I am, but at the same time, I think that's probably what I'll end up doing. All of the above things are true, and aren't ideal, but at the same time, society is here, its presence is there in my brain, and it's not leaving. I do feel like I need a 'challenge', like I need to 'make something' of myself, like I need to 'exercise my brain' and have a 'purpose', and yes, even though I know somewhere deep in my brain that these things are silly enough to merit quotes, I also know that the need to fulfill them isn't going away, and probably will never go away.

In high school it was a lot easier to write. In high school everything was do-or-die, everything was of utmost importance, it could make or break me. I would have experiences that I thought if people misinterpreted, it would color the entire rest of my life. I used people's initials in online diary entries and thought that it was enough, that people somehow wouldn't pick out their initial from the alphabet and hundreds of identifying details from the sidelines of my entries. It was astonishingly naive of me. Luckily, I was also pretty unpopular and no one really cared about my online diary. I could have, you know, been really popular and thrown it all away through passive-aggressive online gossiping instead. The horrors.

Actually, my sneakiness factor hasn't gotten any better. I am still as stark and obvious as a bloodstain on a white couch. When I was a kid I would pick my nose sitting next to someone on a couch if we were watching TV, working under the assumption that their peripheral vision couldn't possibly be operative. And now I seem to think that just because I'm six feet tall and crowned by fiery blonde hair doesn't mean that I can't blend into a crowd (it does mean that. It absolutely does, and just because it's unfair doesn't make it untrue.).

The same goes for gossip. I can be talking about someone right in front of them and I think they somehow won't hear me. I can tell a secret about someone to their best friend and think that their best friend bond will temporarily break, especially for me, and the secret won't be passed. I'm just incredibly socially immature like that, and I'm starting to think it's permanent. My solution to this problem thus far has been to talk about everybody to everybody, to put everything out there in the most blatant terms possible, and to disclose this before someone tells me a secret, in case the secret-teller doesn't like the way I handle information. I see this as honest and egalitarian and I don't think anybody in the world agrees with this sentiment. What say you, internet?

How planes actually crash is not how I always dream them crashing; being in an unrealistic plane crash is more often than not how I discover that I'm dreaming. I will be in a plane, usually with some kind of magical X-ray vision that allows me to see 360 degrees out my tiny bubble-window, and I'll feel some turbulence. Instead of a wing blowing violently off, though, or an engine dying and the plane tilting, or a sudden wind gust causing a nosedive, in the dream we'll gently land, just as if we were landing at the airport, except we'll be landing on a highway, or a winding country road, or even, laughably, at the wrong airport.

I've had this dream, or some variation on it, so many times that every time I have it I jump out the plane window and start flying, or doing complicated gymnastics, or burrowing into quicksand, or any of the myriad things I'm unable to do in real life. I've always been able to lucid dream easily, and I'm thankful for that. Most of the people I know tell me that as soon as they know they're dreaming, they'll instantly awaken. Kicking and screaming and holding onto the fabric of their dream world. Or something.

Last night was different. I was in a plane crash, the dream drifting kind, like always. We landed gently on a country road lined with snow-coated maple trees. There was a gentle sort of urgency to getting out of the plane, because we knew it would explode, so I took none of my luggage, and followed my dad sprinting across a swamp, which was slightly perturbing because I was sinking and running at the same time, but I turned around just as the plane started burning, and then, with one muffled bang, exploded (which consisted of the flames being snuffed out and the plane becoming a perfectly preserved skeleton of itself). After the brief interest of watching that, I was ready to fly, so I jumped off and spread my arms.

The same thing happened when I tried to fly as what happens when I try to fly while awake. The more I tried it, the more I fell on my face... and the more it hurt. Actually hurt, like dreams usually don't. So I had a second thought, thought maybe I wasn't dreaming, but then shrugged it off. I had floated in an airplane into a winter glade, exited peacefully, and watched it blow up practically soundlessly. I was definitely dreaming.

I tried everything I can do in dreams, everything, one thing after another, with failure after failure, until I had managed to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. It was an odd, unsettling feeling. Everything that my logic told me was wrong based on my experience. Usually, experience and logic go at least mostly together, or at least together enough that you can see where they connect. This time, they were worlds apart. Logic: gentle plan crash in absurd circumstance: dreaming. Experience: falling on my face trying to fly, flopping on my head trying to do backflips, meeting only with stubborn dirt when trying to burrow into the ground like a mole: not dreaming. I didn't know what to think, so I chose experience.

The longer the dream went on, the more I felt I had found the truth. We all holed up in a shelter against the cold, waited for rescue helicopters, took turns using the bathroom to get ready for bed. One particular incident I remember that racked up lots of points for the not-dreaming side was my very real fear that I would lose my possessions and not be able to pay for new ones. I sidled up to my dad, who was quietly unpacking his stereo in the corner. 'You think flight insurance will pay for all my lost stuff?' I asked him.
'Oh, yeah,' he said.
'Because I'll need at least $5,000.'
'You know how much they give you?' He lowered his voice, leaned in to whisper. '$27,000.'
'$27,000?'
That was enough.

When I picked up my cell phone to call Dan and tell him the story of what had happened to me, the numbers were all warped and I couldn't seem to dial straight. Every time I pushed an 8, it came out as a 9 (if I was lucky; if I wasn't lucky, it came out as a squiggle, or a Chinese character, or a squashed bug). Do you remember the swirling alarm clock in Waking Life?

Once I got the numbers right, and he picked up, I found myself in my bed, cradling my hipbone like a cell phone. I was absolutely shocked. Experience had failed me! How come I hadn't been able to fly? Was this the beginning of the end of swooping lucid dreams?!

I've been playing ridiculous amounts of Scrabble lately. Upwards of three games a day, average, and two as I write this. Some may think that this is a relatively intellectual way to pass the time, but I don't know; the effect of such huge amounts of noncontextual (uncontextual?) language flying at me is somewhat disconcerting. I find myself putting words in strange places in sentences, forgetting how the plural works, or a particular tense. Using archaic words in live sentences with friends. Writing down a word just because of its high score without bothering to look up its meaning.

I read a book* once (all in one sitting in the bookstore, one of my forays into forcing myself to be a public presence while still being allowed to bury my face in a book) about a journalist who got crazy into the National Scrabble Association tournaments for a book he was writing. He ended up not being able to detach. He memorized every two letter word in existence, recited it like a mantra. Rearranged anagrams with friends as a social activity. Dreamt about letter formations and board patterns in hotel rooms at night.

I heard once that mathematical people are better at Scrabble than English major types. It wouldn't surprise me. I am an English major type and because I see the anagrams on my rack as logic puzzles, and not language, it's difficult for me to unscramble them. Letters alone and puzzled mean nothing to me. Their probabilities don't interest me, the sound of them all jumbled together is sometimes funny* but ultimately nonsensical, and the more I look at them the less potential sense they make, sort of like when you say words over and over and over until they just sound like a noise you can't believe anyone would actually make in front of other people. (Try 'sketch' or 'doorknob' or your own name sometime.)

Anyway, the point is I should feel smarter playing Scrabble all the time than if I just sat around reading my weakness, celebrity blogs, all day, but I don't, I just feel slightly like I've heard being on mushrooms feels. Words are morphing and taking on meanings beyond their normal ones, so every time I speak or write there's an underlying weirdness going on that feels oddly like... math. It's not unlike what happens to me when I try to listen to music while falling asleep. There's a mood there, and it can be the most relaxing music in the world, but my brain is still calculating the harmonic progression, and I won't go to sleep no matter how many hours I lay there. I feel now like I'm not sure if I'll ever make sense now, no matter how many hours I spend forming words.

1
2

I’ll admit it, right away; I used to surf craiglist like crazy, and not just a tiny part of it. I surfed the personals, especially those that didn’t apply to me. m4m is especially intriguing, and then especially those that post short sharp blurbs, sometimes consisting of less than a sentence, and attached is a giant .jpg of their penis, made horrific by its closeup detail, zoomed in, sometimes grainy, rarely with body attached, and almost never with a face. This must work... right?... because people haven’t stopped doing it. It amuses me to think of two bodyless penises meeting up for a drink. Knocking on doors, sticking through holes. And they would recognize each other immediately.

m4m may be the most prolific section, but the personals in general never have a blank day. Women who bemoan the lack of a lesbian ‘scene’, who want to find one, but don’t really want to start one. Men who longwindedly list the requirements for an ideal ad respondent - my favorite ones are the ones who list clearly intellectual/habitual/ emotional bullet points, then at the end sign off with a warning: no pic, no response. My favorite of those favorites, because that’s a surprisingly big subsection, is those in which the poster does not include a photo. People who admit to being lonely, even people who beg, shyly bring up depression, past lost loves, the cruel bare walls of their apartments. On the other side of it, people who shun craigslist, shun the people who use it – these are the people who will invariably start their ads with ‘I would normally never do something like this, but...’ or ‘my friends dared me to...’ – and then act throughout like they couldn’t care less whether someone responds. That or they act like they’re expecting so many responses that they’ll have to screen them.

All these people, lounging in their boxes somewhere, thousands of other people in their little boxes within less than a square mile, probably less than half a square mile, and they’re typing these pleas onto a screen in order to try and entice the right person into the fresh air. Why do we have so much trouble with this? Humanity teems, seethes, around us, and we shun it, try to leave buffer seats on the bus and the train, keep our eyes studiously averted from people we pass on the street... we actively do these things!

I see this, I do this, I write about this as if it’s far removed from me, but it isn’t, and though I can’t explain it, it’s knee-jerk. You’re walking along a fairly empty sidewalk in the afternoon, alone. In the distance, you see someone walking alone as well, in the opposite direction as you. You’re getting closer. You think, when is the right moment to acknowledge this person? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Less? Maybe four? You obsess over it, fail to come up with an acceptable norm... how should you put your face? Toothy smiles, close mouthed smile? Words, no words?... and you decide, fuck it, I’ll just look at the ground as if some extremely fascinating caterpillar is crawling along in the shrubbery beside me, and keep looking until they have passed. Then there are no bizarre social decisions to make. But, oh, wait. Wait. Is this person a different race than me? Shit, because now... if I don’t acknowledge them, they might think I’m racist! Am I racist? If I weren’t racist, I wouldn’t have even thought about their race, would I have? I would have just registered them as just another human being... right? Shit.

And maybe they’re ugly, and if I don’t look at them, they’ll think I’m averting my eyes to be kind. Or maybe they’re drop-dead gorgeous and if I look at them they’ll think I’m checking them out, hitting on them, flirting with them, ogling them, and they’ll think I’m some sort of rapist.

Racist, rapist – all the terrible things it’s so easy to be wrongly perceived as when you pass a stranger on the sidewalk!

So, as a compromise, and as a safeguard, you pass the person and you make that tight little anus of a smile that every normal American makes in this situation, a barely perceptible upturn of the lips, although ‘upturn’ may be a generous word for the kind of grimacing that I’ve seen go on. (I called it the ‘bule smile’ in Indonesia, because Indonesians don’t do it.) The other person does the same. pass, and you think, ‘was that awkward? That was awkward.

You shiver yourself free of this feeling and are suddenly overcome with a crushing loneliness. And you go home and write an ad. People, please, please, people. Strangers, even. So long as you’re people. I’ll be nonchalant, I’ll pretend I don’t need you, I’ll pretend this is frivolous. I’ll make up engagements, time constraints, an inflated schedule. “Oh, I can only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of dance class.” “Oh, weekends are tight for me, usually I’ve got friends coming up to the city.” You have nothing, actually, but you can’t admit that, or this stranger that you’ve managed to entice from their box might think you’re pathetic and reject you.

When people like this meet other people like this, how does anything at all of substance bubble to the surface? You can’t mix nothing and nothing and get something. There are probably a couple of dates to be spent making fun of society. But society can’t be made fun of forever. (Okay, it can. But bitterness can’t be sustained as attractive for that long, I don’t think.) And if either person were the type to subvert the dominant paradigm, no matter how likely it is that that person is the type to use phrases like ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ in everyday conversation, they’d be out subverting it, and not in a bland, safe-meeting-place coffeehouse talking about it. And not in their house using craigslist to try and find subverting partners either.

No, dominant paradigm-subverting comes from, when you pass that stranger on the sidewalk, pasting on the most giant smile that your jaw can handle, grabbing their hand, pumping it up and down, and introducing yourself. Maybe inviting them out for a fun-filled day of shopping-cart racing down at the Safeway, or a night of dumpster diving. And even this is a relatively mild paradigm shift – people do have the context to understand you if you do this, even if they will almost always think you’re drunk or on LSD or ectasy – but it happens rarely enough that I can’t believe anyone would expect to find that perfect, quirky, lifesaving person on a network of people who spend all of their time on that network.

That’s what we want, right? For the heavens to somehow align and to find someone who will assimilate us into their full, satisfying, perfect life, and we won’t have to make an effort to build that life ourselves. Because someone leading a full satisfying life will surely, SURELY, be posting ads on craigslist. There are hundreds of people in your city who have everything they want – a wonderful group of friends, enriching hobbies – but just lack that ‘someone special’ to share it with.
There are if you believe all of those qualifying first sentences: ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but...’ Do you believe these sentences? Have you ever looked at the other ‘social’ sections of craigslist? Activities. Community. Events. Nobody’s posting there. Because everyone who already has a community won’t bother with craigslist unless there’s money/publicity to be had. Why would they? Their circle is complete. Their needs are met. And if they’re not, and I’m sure that, sometimes, they’re not, well, then they seek help from their living, breathing social circle. That’s what social circles are for.

And that’s what craigslist is trying to be to people. It’s succeeding, I think, in the sense that people are using it as such. There’s no doubt that there is a new virtual social circle emerging, where online personas can replace proximity of physical bodies, where discussions can be had, discoveries collectively made, without the participants ever having actually met. I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore about that. But are online social circles enough to keep the loneliness that comes from physical isolation at bay? I don’t think so, or else the personals section would be obsolete. Which it most certainly is not.

People who claim to be fulfilled in every other way are still pleading online for contact while ignoring strangers on the street. This is what comes from this bizarre mishmosh of virtual and real contact, where social mores are completely different in each. If you sit next to a stranger on the bus and start talking about how lonely you are, that’s crazy, that’s unacceptable, that’s pathetic. Post it in a personal, though, and it’s fine. Countless sympathetic comments and emails will appear in your inbox. From this perspective, it seems like online contact would be enough... you’re getting responses, feedback, validation. It’s warm and fuzzy, or seems that way, anyway.

But have you noticed that it’s never enough? Angsty 14-year-olds with livejournals who whine about the most mundane things are only encouraged, when given sympathy, to do it more, and seek more, and more, as if sympathy were a drug. It’s expected, that you’ll get frowny faces and emoticon hugs and a virtual outpouring of virtual support. It’s expected.
If you were to whine like that to a stranger on the bus, however, and got the same response? That would be a landmark day. You’d be driven to tears, unable to believe your luck. Fate. Destiny! You’ve met one of those kind strangers you read about in books but never thought existed in real life! Your life has been forever changed!

A comment, though, an email – even if the exact same words were written/uttered – that’s just normal. That’s just online. It doesn’t count. If it did count, online sympathy would be enough. But it’s not.

That’s why people use craigslist. It’s an attempt to use the world with the less threatening, less nerve-wracking social mores, to get a companion in the world where companionship actually feels like it means something. Does that work? Can you really take the easy way out like that? I don’t think so, but I’d welcome argument.

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 job tends, essentially, to involve me sitting very still in an office chair for eight hours monitoring electronic representations of buses and listening to electronic approximations of voices poke unorthodox fun at each other, while random people (real ones, flesh and blood) constantly wander in and out offering me some of their food. My station is always surrounded by things like Hersheys wrappers, lasagna-sauce stained plates, grape stalks, trail mix crumbs, fake nacho cheese, crumbles from raspberry chocolate cake, burrito wrappings. If I could have begun to imagine the opposite of what working in Indonesia was like, this would be second only to being a restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. My current life is a health coach's reverse wet dream. (There must be an actual phrase for that, but that isn't what came to mind.) Sitting still. Stuffing my face. I sort of (wickedly) love it.

Wickedly not because of my cheating on my nonexistent diet or anything, but because I don't like feeling like the stereotypical gluttonous, wasteful American. But there's only so much one can say about that: but I bike, but I recycle, but I never buy new things, but this, but that.

I used to believe these excuses until I had to shower out of a bucket. Now I have the "luxury" of knowing that I could still choose to shower out of a bucket, and save untold gallons of water, but I also know that I won't. I believed these excuses until I had to walk up the street to pick up drums of gasoline and lug them back to the house to hook up to the stove.

How can you blame people for not changing if they can't forcibly feel the difference between what change isn't, and what change actually would be?

But I didn't mean to start writing about this. It's been said, and it's been said, and it's been said.

It is difficult, but necessary, I think, to wake up every day and think, 'How lucky I am to be in a position where I can express inflammatory, dangerous ideas, present theories with the possibility of changing society forever, put forth crazy, outlandish opinions, and the worst thing that could happen to me would be a whole bunch of people telling me I'm an idiot.'

My hope is that that morning incantation is the first step along the road to actually seeking and fleshing out those ideas, theories, and opinions. But one never knows.

You think when you're at the L station about that experiment where they planted the world's best violinist in a subway somewhere, on a train, in an alcove; the details are fuzzy, but it was somewhere where street musicians sit, and nobody bothered to stop and listen to him.

How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…

At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.

He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.

Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.

How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"

The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.

She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.

When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.

The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.

That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.

The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.

The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?

People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?

You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.

Sometimes when I look at the maze of buses in front of me I start seeing them not as dots and arrows and trailing tails, or as frustrating pixels that won't go when I tell them to, or stop when I tell them to, but the road as it is as the driver sees it. At this moment every driver is scanning the road, listening to their bus whine and hiss out its air brakes. The drivers are bouncing in their seats as they speed over potholes and bob to their music. This is all happening right now. HOP 15, who's that, it's P., is about to climb Folsom Hill. This is his reality, leaning over his wheel, spinning it, listening to his gears shifting under his feet. R. on 18 is starting the long quick ascent up Pearl Street, and maybe he's got a crazy passenger, because R. always does, and he has to try and figure out how to respond to this guy's random sputterings of rage as he scans the road, trucks, bikes, the rising sun shining in his rearview. This is his reality. D. on 13. How does his speeding feel to him? I see his tail stretching all the way down 9th, but he's in his bus feeling something else, abandon maybe, or maybe just eagerness to finish his shift, even though it's only 7:20 am, and his foot heavy on the accelerator. This is his reality. All of this, all of these realities, at the same moment.

I lose myself in thoughts of 'this is someone's reality' a lot, and can spend hours with my cheek propped in my hands, thinking, someone is giving birth right now, they're screaming and in the most indescribable pain and they are thinking, this is the most important moment of my life. Somewhere this is happening and it's so all-consuming that everything else is shut out, and I'm sitting here with my face in my hands feeling nothing. Somewhere someone is throwing up, and their throat is seizing, their breath catching on the uptake and heaving, and they're crying out of sheer misery, thinking only, over and over, make it stop make it stop make it stop. And I am sitting here with my face in my hands, feeling nothing.

I listen to hippies say 'everyone is connected' and I think of this and think, no, they're not. We'd be getting twinges all the time, or terror, of pain, of bliss, of shame, we'd see masses of humanity moving, on the streets of New York maybe, and have to push through everyone's issues along with their bodies. It would be unbearable. And I know that it's more complicated than that, collective knowledge and such, all those studies about a handful of people coming up with the exact same unprecedented theory at the exact same time. And also that connected doesn't have to mean tuning into everybody in the world, it can also mean something as simple as talking to someone and being able to feel what they feel based on having the same physical experiences of something emotional. Your throat narrowing, closing up, the resulting tightness in your chest. Something whirling behind your eyes, a clenching at your temples. Anxiety. We share these physical effects and we can put them together into a word, and then we think we feel what someone else feels, though of course we never really know. The corners of your mouth tug upwards and you feel flooded with buoyancy, a feeling not unlike being in water, and we call it happiness and we laugh together. We think we're feeling the same thing, but we don't know. And with happiness, we really don't care. It's obvious that we want to keep it going, and that's enough.

But it still doesn't help me stop being overwhelmed by the six and a half billion people in the world, all having experiences, right now, at this moment, feelings all over the spectrum, most of them more intense that I have ever felt or probably will ever feel, and I think, how can this fit, how can we all fit, not just space-wise, or food-wise, not how can we feed this many people, house this many people, clothe this many people, of course that too, but most of all, how can the world squeeze in so much intensity of emotion without bursting?

The earth's crust could crack and the atmosphere tighten and shoot out of puncture holes in the ozone made by the knives of this anguish, this joy, this drivel, and I think I can honestly say that I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. I would watch it and be relieved that this actually existed, every time I would lose myself for hours thinking about it, it was happening. Everyone was bursting at the seams at the same time and it was too much for the world, just like it was often too much for me.