Quick question:

What do you do when you move to a new town, meet someone you immediately and effortlessly get along with, subsequently Facebook-stalk them (don't judge!) and discover that their profile picture is a photo of them posing proudly with Ann Coulter?

Each day feels like a mini-lifetime.

I wake up with strands of thought flying away into the ether, disoriented, a little cranky if there's an alarm. I'm not burdened, though, because I forget everything I'm burdened by while I'm sleeping. At the moment I awaken there is no chest pain, no trepidation, no frantic wondering about what the next 70 years will feel like. Just remnants of a nonsense language, a faint desire for nourishment, and random stretches of muscles to make sure they're there, and that they work.

All morning is, is a pleasant haze where I drink tea and think, and have my reading date with the sun - my apartment is situated in such a way that the sun comes in and hits my papasan only between 10 and 11 AM - and prepare myself for the outside world.

As the day stretches on, and I do whatever it is that I do, I start to worry about things. Will I choke on this giant piece of chicken I'm chewing? How best to swallow it? Shouldn't I be doing my pre-political-science-student readings so I'm not the class idiot when school starts? Am I getting sunburnt? I still enjoy myself, but there it is in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce.

The evening brings bigger worries: do I want to be with this person for the rest of my life? Is this chest pain going to end up being a heart attack? Do I honestly believe that I am capable of standing up in front of a classroom of students? And I go to bed tense, achy, hyperaware of my positioning under the covers and the pace of my breathing and everything else. I want to recap, so I'm talkative, but I'm irritable, so no one wants to talk to me.

And when I fall asleep, you may as well have hit the power-off/reset button.

That's the great savior of my biological/psychological makeup. The reset button. I sleep like a rock no matter what's worrying me and my dreams are mostly unrelated to reality. I'm not even myself in dreams. Even that dream I had where there had been a zombie apocalypse and I was living under an underpass in L.A. with three videogame quality animal friends from Animal Crossing who may have had dubious intentions - even that dream didn't feel like a nightmare. It was sort of fun, scavenging for leftover food and sleeping on a ripped mattress with one eye open and one hand clutching a knife. Same with the dream about tubing down a way overswollen Boulder creek with only a leaky, lopsided tube.

I wake up and everything is fuzzy and innocent and new.

Today at lunchtime I sat on the shady edge of a massive corporate park just outside the north edge of John Wayne airport, eating a goat cheese-prosciutto-asparus quesadilla, drinking a coconut juice, and watching the airplanes land.

Nobody else even looked up when these monsters roared deafeningly overhead, but it was something I couldn't look away from. Their tiny little wheels attached to their screaming enormous winged bodies reminded me of birds, but not for the normal reasons. Birds are just big fat bodies on itsy-bitsy stilts, or comically small wheels in this case. I don't know. It still seemed momentous to me every time one landed gently and in accordance with runway boundaries.

Every time I've gotten into a plane since, I don't know, around 2007, just post-Indonesia, my heart races at 130+ bpm while my throat closes up and my stomach rolls and this lasts the whole flight, which cannot in any way be healthy. My best and brightest logic cannot win this war against the physiological. So sitting around watching multitudes of planes land safely probably will not help me, but I'm spellbound by them anyway. To me it's like this.

Spending time at very rich people's homes forces me to (uncomfortably) wonder what I would be like if I were to somehow become rich. It usually happens in the same stages:

1. Shock and disgust at how many useless knick-knacks person has; righteous anger about how money could be better spent feeding the hungry/propping up charities/making poorer people happy in some way/etc.

2. Tiny little rogue thought creeps in about how I would probably be about to identify with the person better if person spent knick-knack money on travels around the world or on ridiculously pricey restaurants or gourmet food instead.

3. Realization that this is a double standard emerges. Guilt occurs. Value-questioning occurs.

4. Try to identify with the person by pretending their knick-knacks are slices of raw fish or green chile tamales or BBQ pulled pork.

5. Inability to complete analogy because of difficulty perspective-swapping.

6. Repeat.

Eventually I just force myself to stop thinking about it and content myself with platitudes about every person having the right to spend their own money in whichever way they see fit, which I don't really believe but whatever, I'm at a party. And then I enjoy their amenities and become a hypocrite but try not to do it outwardly because I am trying to socialize lightly. And I go home massively exhausted.

Because we could, yesterday we stood on a sandy stretch with the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak blowing by behind us, and in front of us, pelicans divebombing like screwdrivers into the water to catch fish. It was goosebump-raisingly cold, but that didn't stop families in bikinis and board shorts from dragging their boogie boards into the tide. Neither did the fact that the waves were breaking five feet from shore.

We had sandwiches: one of two recipes for sandwich that I'll willingly make and eat. As follows:

Sourdough bread, toasted

Brie

Ham

Spinach

Red Onion

Fig Jam

Mayo (optional)

Arrange in desired percentages and enjoy. For me it's nearly all Brie, spinach and fig jam, but that's okay because Dan likes his giant pile of meat slathered with Kewpie mayo, so it works out evenly in the end.

So we ate those and some mandarins that tasted like perfume and some triple ginger snaps from Trader Joes and then I wandered down to the water. I put my feet in and let the waves crash and foam that wonderful white foam around my ankles. Whenever I see those yards of white foam snapping around me, I always want to put my face in. I think it's good for my skin, despite having no evidence, empirical or otherwise, to support this hypothesis. Maybe back in middle school I read it in Seventeen magazine or something and internalized it without internalizing the source. I don't know. I do the same thing with the foaming jets in hot tubs.

While I was wandering around I found a baby crab no bigger than my fingernails. I resisted the urge to pop it in my mouth like popcorn, but in order to do that I had to travel forward in time and forcefully imagine eating the Japanese-style grilled mackerel and pickled cucumbers that we later cooked for dinner on our very own brand new community grill:

Flying to Irvine, I was sitting in my aisle seat in between attempted deep cleansing breaths, thoughts meant to distract myself from the realization that I was in a big metal contraption 20,000 feet in the air, and pages in the book I wasn't really reading or seeing - and I happened to look out the window and therefore saw something I really, really wasn't expecting to see.

We were very close to landing (the pilot had already told the flight attendants to prepare for it) and what looked like 500 feet away from the left wing was a big peak covered with snow and pine trees.

I mean, yeah, if I had thought about it harder I would have realized that there are snowy peaks very close to Irvine and etc etc but in the moment it seemed so out of place that I was pretty sure we were going to crash into the mountains and die. Instead of giving me a heart attack like I'd have guessed, it made me instantly calm. What it did, actually, was make me think I was dreaming. My dreams, when centered around airplanes, consistently have the plane doing something bizarre, like flying low amongst mountains, so when I saw the snowy peak I figured, oh well, I'm dreaming and so we'll just drift down into an icy creek and then me and all the passengers will wander off out the plane windows and camp out in a nearby cave until the blue-footed, polka dotted bears show up. When we landed at the Orange County airport five minutes later without incident I was fairly shocked. And disappointed at the lack of creativity that my imagination bothered to invest in my dream.

And then I went off and did Serious Prospective Graduate Student Visiting Day stuff for 2 days, which felt like even more of a dream.

I both love and hate when I win racquetball tournaments based on the fact that only one person in my gender and division bracket shows up. It's a cheap sense of accomplishment. I guess what I'm going for here is an expensive sense of accomplishment. Close enough.

Strange, though, how this is the only sport I could see myself playing long term. I used to join sports teams for half social reasons and half I-should-get-in-shape reasons, only to discover that I dreaded practice nights, where we would run long distances (horror) do drills (at which I would suck) play out in the cold (brrr!) and then go out for drinks afterwards (yawn). Even though racquetball practice follows the exact same schedule, minus the playing out in the cold part, I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays, where I kill myself running, crunch my core to death, then spend an hour hitting an evasive bouncy ball into the wall. Somehow, this has become fun. Fun enough that I will likely travel to Missouri in the spring (Missouri. By car. On I-70. Through Kansas) to play it against other colleges.

I woke up on Valentines Day to a box of Belgian chocolates sitting on top of my laptop. There were 18 in there yesterday morning and there are 18 in there now. Don't ask me how that is even possible. Sometimes my lack of sweet tooth astounds me, and other times I find myself hoovering up chocolate chip cookies desperately and without regard for my surroundings.

This time though... you know how sometimes something's so perfect and balanced that you don't want to thrust your hand in it and mess it up? That's what's happening here. I've got dark chocolate/cayenne pepper, white chocolate/hazelnut/orange peel, hazelnut seashells, crispy rice/hazelnut, sea salt/dark, candied ginger, dark chocolate ganache/orange peel, praline, and a mystery white chocolate snowman with a crack in his neck all lined up neatly in a box and I don't want to touch anything and ruin it.

What's the word for people with too much self control - so much self control that they miss out on fun adventures and irresponsible money-making decisions and therefore life lessons and instead just sit around eating healthy food, exercising, and saving money? Sticks-in-the-mud? Oh, yeah.

I met someone today who looks exactly like the male faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebook paper in middle school. These faces all had wide eyes, sparse lashes, button noses, very thick but perfectly groomed eyebrows, cheekbones to get lost in, expressive lips, and dark hair with widows' peaks.

I think I used to draw them because I figured if I knew what my 'perfect man' looked like, I'd be more likely to notice when he walked by. As opposed, that is, to noticing what I usually noticed, which was precisely nothing - well, except for the words on the pages in books, that is.

Well, 13 year old me, he walked by today. And I noticed. And I didn't, contrary to your likely expectations, fall all over myself, turn bright red, and write him secret Valentines notes to stick in his locker. I merely appraised him, thought, "hmm, he looks exactly like those faces I used to draw!" and went on to think some more about how different my middle school tastes were to what they are now.

That's not entirely true. I thought other things, like how precisely and delicately his face was constructed, and how strange it was that something that symmetrical existed in nature. I thought about how I would like to trace his face with a pencil, or a fingertip. His eyes were the categorical definition of hazel; how curious it was that even though I used to draw my faces in penciled graphite and white, his color of hazel was exactly how I had pictured it then.

I used to be fascinated by how it might feel to have one of those nerve disorders where you don't feel pain. As I get older, I feel pain less and less (like everyone else, I assume). Or rather, it bothers me less and less. Sometimes I'll wake up, or look over, to a bruise whose origins I can't even guess about. I have a nasty one on my knuckle I could have only gotten by smacking myself in the hand with a racquetball racquet, but you'd think that's something I would remember having done.

Also, sometimes I bite Dan on the arm what I think is lightly and he'll howl in agony and so I bite myself on the arm with the same force and I can hardly feel it. But yeah, there are teeth marks, so it must have happened.

Maybe it's because I have an increased fight-or-flight response and therefore have pain-numbing endorphins released into my blood constantly. Or not!

The most worthwhile parenthetical pursuit I can think of right now is to learn to lucid dream on command. (Parenthetical meaning, you know, something that isn't choosing a graduate school, or otherwise forging life's rocky path. Something hobby-ish.) There are so many things that I will never be able to do because of time or money constraints (visit every country in the world, go on waterslides all the time) or because these things are impossible in the physical world (fly, become a deep-sea creature) or just because I wouldn't have the wherewithal (sleep with anyone I please without any pesky rejection-related consequences). It seems a waste to have the capability to learn to do these things on command while asleep, and choose not to learn to do so. Especially since I'm starting from an easier place than most people, already lucid dreaming roughly once a month or so and remembering enough of most of my dreams to fill up a few handwritten pages.

I realize that lucid dreaming instead of going out and having real life experiences is a weak substitute, because what can happen in dreams is limited to the imagination, which in turn is limited to the experiences and knowledge it has drawn from while awake. Actually visiting a different country can create new paradigms, images, and ways of thinking, while dreaming of visiting another country really only reinforces whatever stereotypes one already holds of that country. So if the aim is to broaden, rather than to bask, lucid dreaming has failed.

However, I hold the view that basking is better than nothing (even if broadening is ultimately better than basking) and after all, it's possible to live AND dream, of course. But there are so many times in life when you're trapped somewhere, you're working and saving for something else, or just working and saving for being able to survive in the moment, and there's no time or money for vacations or even daydreaming, and you waste 8 or 9 hours sleeping and a slave to whatever insane concoction your brain cooks up for you. Why be a slave to an unknown concoction if you know what you'd rather have?

Anyway, that's why I think it's a worthwhile parenthetical pursuit. Carrying it out has not been so easy. The accepted method for going about increasing lucid dream likelihood is sometimes so comical and counterintuitive that I find myself neglecting it for weeks. It's simple, though, I'll give it that. I'm meant to ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" a bunch of times a day and then do a series of reality checks to find out. These reality checks look ridiculous to any outside observer. Pinch myself to see if it hurts. Try to point my finger through my hand. Check to see if I can read digital clocks, or a page of text, without it changing on me. Flipping light switches to see if they work.

There's a second step, involving some ritual I'm supposed to do when falling asleep, but I just can't wrap my mind around these reality checks in order to get there. The concept of asking yourself whether you're dreaming when you know you're awake just feels stupid, like, why would I ask myself something I already know the unequivocal answer to? I get the point, of course, and that is to get in the habit of asking the question so that while you're dreaming you get in the habit of doing it as well, and when you're dreaming your reality checks will, of course, fail, and there you are, lucid, pinching yourself (and probably rocketing awake)!

My first couple of attempts at lucid dreaming (distinct from those times where I just do it) have been comically conventional - exactly how you'd write it if you were to write about someone trying to dream. I realize I'm dreaming and everything starts fading. I feel like things are melting and I'm moving through maple syrup. I try to fly and I hover inches from the ground, mere gliding, while half of my vision remains in dreamland and the other half sees, stubbornly, my bedroom.

But I'm determined to do this and I will do this - bruises on my arm from constant pinching or no bruises on my arm from constant pinching.

I've been in complete and miserable cat withdrawal since August, when the Maine coon cat next door moved away to live on a farm. This was the sweetest cat on earth; he would place his thumbed paws on my face before he shoving his nose into my hair. He'd always sit on my deck chair and meow at me through the window all night long. He had a sort of chirp that sounded like speech. Once he leapt directly into my screen, thinking it wasn't there. I'd be all for cloning if it made me another Rocky (am I even joking? Who knows?).

Anyway, I went on a run today to blow off some steam (blowing off steam is the only time I ever run) and as I re-entered this filthy rich area of Boulder from the mountain parks area, I saw a white cat running towards me from the porch of some giant house with, like, turrets and a castle balcony or something. The cat was long-haired, but it had been shaved around the midsection so it resembled a poodle. Despite this outrageous ridiculousness, it had a serene and determined look to it. I saw, when he got closer, that he had blue eyes.

For some reason, I remember, when I was a kid, reading in (of all places) a Babysitters Club book, that white cats with blue eyes tend to be deaf. This cat seemed to be so, but all he wanted was to get neck-scratches for approximately a million hours.

This was near the Mountain Parks, so of course, dogs were walking by constantly. Whenever a dog came down the street, the cat would cease blissfully rubbing against my legs and trot over to investigate it. This thoroughly unsettled most of the dogs. The dogs were used to cats running away, if not immediately, then most certainly after being barked at. Barking had no effect on this cat, of course. The closer the cat got, the more uncertain the dogs' barks became, until finally, the dogs would stop, sort of half-rear up, and shy away, dragging their owners backwards.

Sometimes a dog and the cat would get so close as to touch noses, and only then would the dog freak out. "I just touched noses with a cat!" it would appear to be screaming. "Get me out of here!"

I had to do some serious weaving to keep the cat from following me home, and a horrible, cat-stealing part of me wanted him to follow me home. I can't wait for a cat-allowing landlord - or homeownership - whichever comes first.

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

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

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

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

There are situations in which I think I must have mild Aspergers or some similar social-misunderstanding disorder. Usually immediately after I think this, I chide myself for diagnosing myself with an easy excuse instead of simply accepting that I am socially awkward and have the capability to change it.

Do I have the capability to change it? As time goes on, I get less certain. The way people respond to me is entirely at odds with how I think they should, and how they perceive me, when asked, is entirely at odds with how I perceive myself. Up until now I sort of thought that I just had an expressionless face that tended towards looking annoyed and so people just figured I wasn't interested (in them, in anything). But lately I've been making a concerted effort. To smile longer than I think is appropriate, to look people in the eye even though it's supremely uncomfortable for me, to act excited and bubbly when the situation seems to call for it.

None of it makes a difference. I suspect that smiling becomes grimacing, eye contact becomes staring, excited becomes manically excitable, and bubbly becomes bubbling over. All without my knowledge, because I can't see myself through a normal person's eyes. I can honestly say I have no fucking clue what draws people to one another (conversely, what repels them from one another). Or even what looks merely normal and acceptable.

I had a meeting with a professor the other day and she noted that I seem 'blunt and straightforward - a scientific approach - but very impatient'. Another professor noted today that I am 'clearly introverted'. When I first started working for the graduate student I am still working for, she asked me if I was nervous about sixty times.

These attributes: quirky, yes, maybe even nerdy, but abnormal enough for most people to react as though they think I hate them?

I'm sitting in a hallway with my laptop deciding my future, and knowing what I know about mood-dependent decision making, it's terrifying. You choose a graduate program when you're tired and you end up with something way easier than is necessary, that requires something like a 1.5 GPA and a recommendation letter from your mom, whose coursework consists of memorizing PowerPoint bullets and learning how to write five paragraph essays. You choose a graduate program when you've just read a scholarly paper by your very favorite genius and you'll probably overestimate how much mindbreaking research you're willing to withstand in order to get to his/her level. Then you end up with a program you, A) can't get into, if you're lucky, or B) requires the kind of critical thinking where you have to have completely unique, perfect, and experiment-ready ideas coming out of your mouth/falling onto paper constantly, or else you fail as a human being.

It's somewhat ironic that I'm considering all of this given that the chosen graduate program has to include, at least in part, the further study of mood-dependent decision making. Maybe my thesis could be on how graduate students are only in the program I'm in because they had were in X mood at the time of their application process. That'd be totally meta of me and I hope someone would metaphorically kick me in the face.

Five years ago I would have said (and did say) that I would like to drop out of the unrelenting escalator march of scholarly/professional progress (be born, get educated, get more educated, get a job that may or may not have something to do with what you got educated in, have kids, get rich, get richer, still be unsatisfied, get old, get bored) and just get on a plane, go abroad, travel around, and forget about striving.

I don't know if I ever posted this here. I think I did on my old diary. But just in case, here is something I wrote in my private journal sophomore year of college, September 2003:

Don’t ever let me forget that we had this conversation.

‘I just... the hardest part about leaving would be doing it alone,’ he says.

There is silence in the back of the bus because I’m deciding whether to say it and mean it, mean it through and through.

‘Nick, if you were to actually do it,’ I say, slowly, deliberately, ‘I would go with you.’

His face is suddenly lit. ‘Would you?’

‘I...’

‘Would you really?’

My eyes are tearing up.

‘Let’s do it, then,’ he whispers.

We spend the whole rest of the day in a planning daze, a fear-purging daze... overall, it’s a harsh daze. The first few minutes are the hardest. We want to say everything at once. Our parents, and what they would think. (His dad would be angry. My dad would be disappointed, but not angry. My mother would be furious just because she never had the guts to do it herself.) We can’t leave our roommates in the lurch. We can’t waste the money already spent on tuition for the semester. We can’t...

So it’s decided; the beginning of next year. The Bound stops at Valmont. ‘Next year we’re going to have forgotten we had this conversation,’ I say to him as we stand up.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and then shakes his head. ‘No, we can’t forget.’

‘We can’t forget,’ I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.

‘We won’t,’ he says.

‘See, it’s going to be so much easier for you,’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’ve got the first step done already.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Getting rid of all your stuff.’

‘Oh.’

Silence.

‘But then the next step, what’s that?’ he asks.

‘The next step is being able to let everyone you love go.’

‘The South American jungle,’ he exclaims, walking past a field of weeds in North Boulder.

‘Not the jungle,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the jungle. We can’t survive in the jungle. We’ll die.’

‘So?’

‘When you put it that way...’

‘I’d rather die in the jungle than die in this fucking place.’

I look sideways at him. He never swears. ‘Plus,’ I say, sweeping past this, ‘I don’t want to live somewhere where there aren’t any other people.’

‘Me,’ he says.

‘Other than you.’

‘No offense,’ I rush on, seeing his face, ‘but I cannot spend that much time with anyone for that

long a period of time without killing them.’

He laughs.

‘I can’t,’ I say, shrugging.

‘I can,’ he says.

‘A boat,’ he exclaims, turning the corner from Valmont to Edgewater. ‘We’ll live on a boat in the ocean. No property taxes on the surface of the water!’

‘Oh no no no no. I can’t stand water. No water. No.’

‘What?’

‘You know that. I can’t swim. I get seasick. I hate water. No.’

‘You don’t have to swim. Plus, we’ll get all our food needs met.’

‘No we fucking won’t, we’ll...’

‘Oh yeah, I guess we can’t eat any fruit. I guess we’d probably get scurvy.’

‘I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘You don’t want to get scurvy?’ He laughs, looks askance at me.

‘No, I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘Thailand,’ he says, walking past a Thai restaurant.

‘Something my dad once told me,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘We were in London, on the subway, passing all these bums begging and no one was giving them anything... they were really in a bad way. He said, ‘You can knock Communism all you want, but they feed their people, and they medicate their people. In Beijing I saw no one begging on the streets, no one.’’

‘No beggars?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘China, then,’ he says.

‘The hardest thing would be leaving Patrick,’ he says.

‘Financially or personally?’ I ask.

‘I... financially,’ he says.

‘The thing is, I’m so scared,’ he mumbles, too quietly almost.

‘What? What of?’

‘I’m scared I won’t make it. I’m scared I won’t know how to survive.’

‘If you couldn’t survive you’d come back.’

‘...........’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about that yet.’

‘I don’t know if I’d come back,’ he says again.

We’re sitting in the fast food Japanese restaurant when the ridiculousness hits me. ‘Nick, in a year you won’t even be the same person,’ I say. ‘You know what I mean? Do you know how often you change your mind? Every two days, it’s...’

‘I know,’ he says, unexpectedly.

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. I mean, yeah. I guess.... I guess I have to find myself in a situation which is open to change.’

‘Maybe..’

‘School isn’t that situation.’

‘No.’

He spoons chopstickfuls and chopstickfuls of rice and eel into his mouth before he continues. ‘If fear of leaving school does get the best of me, at least... I’ll always know there’s something small in the back of my head telling me that school just isn’t right.’

That’s not enough, I say in my head as we leave the restaurant. Because I was telling him earlier that every plan made by Camille and I in high school, every road trip, every hitchhiking jaunt to Canada, every backpacking trip around Europe, has fallen through every summer because Camille’s parents ‘won’t let her’.

‘Fuck that,’ he says, ‘just don’t tell them! Just leave! Write from an internet cafe and just say... ‘Mom, I’m in Europe.’

‘I know. I know. All I’m saying is... every summer the plans fell through because of her and her parents. Every summer I was totally ready.’

‘I...’

‘What I’m saying is this: if this falls through, it will not be because of me.’

‘It won’t?’

‘No.’

‘So what you’re saying is it’ll be because of me.’

‘Yes.’

He crunches a few leaves in his path. ‘Sweet,’ he says, after a length.

This was three years pre-Indonesia. Nick and I hadn't yet started dating. I loved him, though. It was already getting impossible to hide it. And this conversation stuck, gluelike and word for word, to my brain, long enough for me to practically transcribe it, because merely the thought of leaving the country with him and surviving on coconuts was enough to make my mind and body light up. Logic and reason were completely suppressed, my disdain for something even as wimpy as car-camping was totally wiped out, and for awhile all I dreamed about was dropping out of society with him.

And in a way, we ended up eventually doing so. We weren't as crafty and revolutionary as we'd hoped; we both got degrees first. We got jobs at retail establishments. And when we did leave the country, we made sure we had jobs lined up and housing set. By then, the novelty of his thrill-seeking personality had worn thin on me and I had returned to being the drab realist that I am naturally.

But even stepping out of the mold of career-striving was a huge step sideways, and not easy for me to do. I am happy I did it. I think. If only because now, when I get an errant thought about how I'd like to drop out of society and move abroad, I actually have a living breathing picture in my head about what that's like. I don't have an idyllic (and totally false) image of waking up every morning to swaying palms and a clear head with no worries in the world, and Nick bringing me a coconut he just climbed a palm to pick, to eat for breakfast before we began our carefree day of frolicking in the ocean.

Here is a longer diary entry from December 2007, from Indonesia.

We start out sitting half-buried in bright green beach vines. Or at least that's where it feels like we start out. Start out, finish, everything else. World without end, bright green beach vines and a measured, heavy silence.

If time had started here we would have wandered off in two separate directions and gone on to lead two entirely separate lives, and we wouldn't have thought twice about it. We, or I, at least, wouldn't have wondered what his hands would look like once I'd turned my back on them, whether they'd be clutching each other in his lap or lazily tracing sand-roads around the cities of wild dogprints. I wouldn't have wondered whether he was staring after me or already in the water, trying to surf on an old piece of driftwood. We would have just gone as if neither of us were more to the other than strangers passing on the street, heads down and feet flying, in a big city like New York or Chicago.

Time didn't start here, though. Time, this time, started somewhere further away and entirely different. And because it did, I do wonder these things, or I would if I tried to run away, so instead of moving, I stay buried.

The vines are soft and slippery in my fingers, the sun is hot, and I want to be buried in sand. "Do you want to bury each other?" I ask him.

"What do you mean, bury each other?"

"I mean bury each other. In the sand. Under that palm?"

"Well, definitely not under that palm, a coconut might fall."

"That palm's not bearing coconut. You see any coconuts up there?"

"No, but that doesn't mean there aren't any."

"Okay. Fine. Let's bury each other under some other tree. Something that's not a palm. How about over there?"

"No. Forget it."

"If you didn't want to, why didn't you just say so?"

"I think I just did."

Sometimes when he says things like this I wish his eyes were tired, that he had spent the morning throwing up, or corralling seventeen screaming children, or climbing mountains; anything to make it seem like it's not personal, that he's just exhausted, can't move to do anything strenuous. That otherwise, he would be thrilled to bury me in sand. Teach me to bodysurf. Paint designs on our bodies, orange, with spit-damp ochre.

But his eyes aren't tired; they're bright and lively and looking somewhere else. Without saying a word, he stands up and walks away.

"Where are you going?" I ask the air around me, and the humidity swallows my words down with a gurgle, spits them back at me as a thin sheen of sweat. Drops of it form on my fingertips and I look at them, my words, and then look up and see that he's already dragging a piece of driftwood into the waves.

The real pain of it is in the fact that this is the kind of landscape that makes you want to be with the love of your life, and if you happen not to be, to want to turn whoever you're with into the love of your life, even if it would never work out, or, as the case may be, if it has already worked out and then fallen badly apart. The beach is ridged and pockmarked with birds' claws and dogs' paws, with the occasional spreading surface of clam or conch shells, and the scuttle and bubble of hermit crabs surfacing and submerging with the waves. The sand is black and silver and white and completely smooth, blending into a bay on one side and a mountain on the other. Over the mountain, which is flat-topped and appears covered in thick green cotton, a thundercloud has been looming for hours, motionless and far enough away as to be effectively harmless, but still gorgeous. The sun is directly overhead and filtering through the palms, which every few minutes drop a coconut – plop! crack! – into the sand or onto a log or – splash! – into the creek. The plops and cracks and splashes, the crash of the waves, the crowing of the roosters, the shouts of the villagers calling their dogs off of someone's pigs, and the ever-present wind hissing and whistling over the ocean – this is the island's wind ensemble, its quintet.

It is best heard, I think, doing something quirky. Burying someone up to the neck in black smooth sand, then sculpting an entirely new body for them out of the surrounding sand, perhaps with shell necklaces, squiggly arms, rolls of grainy hip fat, or large froglike toes. Spending hours sitting motionless in a dry sea of hermit crabs, waiting for one to venture far enough from its hole to be captured in an impossibly swift arm scoop. Realizing that no matter how far a hermit crab travels from its hole, it can still return faster than a human arm can move. Floating in the shallow ebb of the shore and relinquishing all control, letting the ocean do with you what it pleases, whether what it pleases is a rough slam into the sand bar or a languid, dizzy turn miles down the beach to the reef.

There is time for this. The background is perfect for it, and while some people may fantasize about drinking pina coladas while laying in hammocks reading the most terrible romance novel they can get their hands on, what I'm wishing for is to be able to act like the most curious of children with my lover.

But he's in the ocean with his driftwood, tumbling over and over into the riptide, and he, I'm sure, is wishing he were entirely alone. Maybe even the only person for hundreds and hundreds of miles. That's how he is. It's not how he used to be, but it's how he is now.

I no longer think going somewhere as far away as I can fly will fundamentally change who I am. Or how my relationships go. Or make anything less complicated.

That helps.

The older I get the more anhedonic I get, and I'm not just using that word because it's a GRE word; in fact, when that word popped up on my GRE Vocab Builder, I was like, sweet, I already know that one. I am that one.

Well, not completely. I shouldn't be so damn dramatic all the time and start journal entries off with sweeping proclamations that I know in the back of my brain to be at least a tiny bit untrue. I am not incapable of feeling pleasure. But I am more incapable of it than I used to be, for sure.

However, this is possibly because I spend 80% of my time doing things like the GRE Vocab Builder, or brush-up algebraic equations, or papers on actuarial decision making, or internet homework about cellular respiration. I guess we'll see how true the sweeping proclamation really is once we have a point of comparison. That point of comparison will have to be something like, let's see how I feel once I spend most of my time traveling to foreign countries, trying every expensive exotic food that exists, frolicking in ocean waves, playing with kittens, and counting my oodles and oodles of hundred dollar bills that fall in my lap from nowhere.

When I dream about people I've never met, which is actually quite often, my brain never bothers to fill in their faces. It doesn't do this by having the person walk around with a blur for a face, as that might impact the quality of the dream by being really creepy (and if it was really creepy every time I dreamt about someone I've never met, I'd never meet anybody new). No, it does this by having my eyes aimed downwards, or otherwise away from them, at all times during the dream.

Last night I had one where I was in the process of falling in love with someone I'd just met, and had never met before. We stared out my living room window at the hot dog stand that filled the view, but ate leftover potato latkes. I had salted his too heavily, and he made a face when he took a bite, so I salted my side even heavier, took an even bigger bite, made an even weirder face, and started laughing. We both started laughing. And my hand, which was pretending to hand him back the fork, was really searching for an excuse to brush hands, or linger wrist to wrist.

And this whole time my line of sight only saw a hot dog stand, a plate of potato latkes, his legs in his jeans perched on a stool, and his right hand. I never saw anything above chest height.

This is odd because in waking life I often focus on people's faces to the complete exclusion of everything else. It's as though faces are so important to me that my brain doesn't feel right inventing them in case it's proven wrong later and has to painfully recalibrate every time the flesh-and-blood person walks into a real, physical room.

We were at the Niwot Market today to eat Sachi Sushi after 4 hours of sleep and most of it being spent inside a 100 degree stuffy room. I wanted to get a notebook for school (tomorrow, because clearly I plan ahead) after we had already paid and walked out.

"Shit," I said, "we gotta go to Target", because 'shit' is the perfect expression for realizing that one has to go to Target the day before fall semester starts at a giant college with 30,000 students, "and our ice cream is going to melt!"

Dan told me to hang on and he'd just go get a notebook from the Niwot Market, to which I yelled at his receding back: "There isn't a notebook section at a grocery store!!" but lo and behold, there was.

I haven't had this back-to-school elementary school style feeling since, well, elementary school. Something about a new notebook. A five subject one! I used my neatest handwriting to title each section with the course name, time, and location as though my penmanship would be graded by my fifth grade teacher. I think my handwriting was actually neater in fifth grade.

Last semester I would take my laptop to class and take notes that way, but I found myself falling into the trap that I loathe in other people: surfing the net and blanking out. The prospect of net-surfing is way too instant-gratification for me to have available in class, so this semester it's pen and paper only.

Five classes + research lab + senior honors thesis = the excuse I've always wanted to totally immerse myself in learning... also known as nerd-dom... also known as paradise.

The more restaurant reviews I write, the more of a strange phenomenon emerges from the fog.

As much as I've always believed and defended my position that food quality is way, way more important than ambience, service, plate decoration, the art on the wall, or whatever else some people judge restaurants on, I find myself sometimes being pulled subconsciously towards giving some restaurant with worse food better reviews that it deserves simply for the food alone, and vice versa. "I just like it better for some reason!" I'll think to myself, and then I'll have to consciously throw that thought away to try and be fair.

Then I wonder if that's the atmosphere (wall hangings, service, you get the picture) creeping in and trying to influence me under the radar without getting judged by my snobby, food-obsessed, conscious mind!

Because consciously, I will go (and have gone) back to restaurants that are gaudy and ugly with uncomfortable stools and loud patrons and just plain mean waitresses who make fun of my clothes with other waitresses behind my back, if the food is fantastic. I wouldn't want to admit doing it the other way around... going back to a place with so-so food just because there's intricate art on all the walls or the waitress and I squealed together about some shared experience or the seats were all lush, plush love seats.

But then how to explain my urge to return to somewhere like the Dushanbe Teahouse, which has consistently proved its food to be so-so at best and awful at worst? Is it just because I like the pillowy corner booths and the rush of the creek alongside the tables outdoors and the fact that 40 Tajik artists painstakingly handcrafted it in Tajikistan and as a result it looks like this? How so shallow and easily fooled, foodie brain? No matter how many times I look at my review and think 'No! This place sucks, remember?' there's a creeping desire in me that hisses, evilly, 'It can't be that bad... it's so beautiful and everyone in Boulder loves it. Look at its menu. Everything is so ethnic! You love the Teahouse. You love it. There is something wrong with you for giving it a negative review. Go on. Give it just one more try....'

Or how to explain my returning 3 times to Marie's, a mediocre greasy spoon (and what good is a greasy spoon that's mediocre??) whose waitresses gave me the sass that I so dearly missed from Chicago? Did I just think, 'ooh, that's right, Marie's waitresses, bathe me in your sweet disdain! I love it when you imply that I'm stupid! Serve me whatever crappy food you wish!' and promptly forget that the food isn't worth it?

These examples are easy enough to deconstruct, but there are little niggling feelings that tug at me when I'm trying to sort out how many stars a restaurant deserves that I can't as easily desconstruct. I sit down at a restaurant some place and just immediately for no reason think, 'This place is going to blow, I can tell!' and even if it turns out not to, I just don't want to give it a good rating. There's something trying to stop me!

I try my hardest to ignore this feeling and be fair to the poor restaurant, and I think that I usually succeed. It's just obnoxious that I can't put my finger on what it is that's trying to influence me. Something subtle about the smell? That it reminds me on some level of someplace I had an anxiety attack in when I was in high school? Did I just happen to feel sick that day? Was I mad at my boyfriend?

It makes me question the validity of all the reviews I read, not just my own. As Ryan pointed out in the comments on my last entry, my reviews roughly follow a bell curve. I didn't do it on purpose. That's just how I feel about most places - most places are average. More are a little bit to one side or another. And only a few are exceptional, whether exceptionally good or exceptionally puke-inducing.

I am the only Yelp reviewer I've come across, though, whose reviews fall like that. Most everyone else has tons of 5 and 4 star reviews and they fall off as the stars get lower. Is this just because I tend sort of towards melancholy and judgment, and the rest of these people are happy-go-lucky and tends towards enjoyment and fun? Or is it because I see a three star review as a place worth going back to and they see it as a horrible, unforgivable smite upon some hardworking small business? Or is it, perhaps, because they take into account the decoration, the service, the ambience, and notice all these small pleasures I'd never think to find because I'm too busy staring with a critical eye at my plate?