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.

Anyone ever had their nose get numb when getting cavities filled? I hadn't until last week. It's like your nose is filled with shaving cream or something, but you can breathe through it, so it feels like you're snorting shaving cream up into your brain every time you take a breath! Breathing through your mouth isn't an option because you have a bite wedge, a piece of cotton, a mirror, a sucker, a drill, a rinser, and two hands, if not three, in your mouth, and you do not want the chance, however slight, of accidentally breathing one of these things into your lungs. Having a bite wedge lodged in a lung is way, way, WAY worse than the mere sensation of snorting shaving cream. Not that I ever thought I'd have to make that choice. It's like a 'Would You Rather?' question that would never come up in real life.

But now it has.

Other 'Would You Rather?' questions I thought would never come up in real life, but did:

Would you rather, as a three-year-old, eat fried fish eyes or be ridiculed by your uncle forever for turning down the dare? (answer: eat fried fish eyes)

Would you rather, as a nine-year-old, risk cheating on a history test, or just accept the 95% you would have gotten otherwise? (answer: risk cheating, because 95% IS NOT PERFECT)

Would you rather, as a panic-attacky thirteen-year-old, play your super-exciting bass solo in a concert, or run offstage and hide behind the stairs? (answer: hide behind stairs)

Would you rather, as a twenty-four-year-old, eat a concoction with the consistency and flavor of snot mixed with quail egg, or disappoint the expectant Japanese chef who is staring at you? (answer: loudly and honestly proclaim the delectableness of everything else on your plate while shoveling sashimi into your mouth and hiding the bowl of snot behind the platter of sashimi)

And of course, the big one:

As a sixteen-year-old, would you rather live with your father or your mother? (answer: oscillate wildly until college, then ignore the question)

I was reading somewhere, probably not in a scholarly journal or anything, but somewhere nonetheless, about how people are unhappier when they perceive they have more choices. People stuck in a virtually unchangeable situation will generally simply accept it as a fact of life and move about within those parameters, while people who have all the choices in the world tend to flail around within them, get increasingly stressed out about having made the wrong choice, and end up depressed.

Immediately my mind jumped to Indonesia and how much less anxious I was when I realized that I was in a place where the dangers to my life were tenfold. At the time I couldn't explain this. Everywhere I looked there were things that might kill me. Me driving a motorcycle I'd just learned to drive, in the rain, with no visor on my helmet, practically blinded and flying down a 10% grade with a drop to the ocean on one side and crazy motorcyclists shouting 'BULEBULEBULEBULE!' on the other, Nick at my back, me probably angry and yelling at him over my shoulder. Bird flu closing in from all sides, first found only on Java, then on Bali, creeping over the string of islands slowly, hitting Papua in December, until finally, one week before I left, someone dying from it in Jayapura, in the section Dok VIII, minutes away from where I lived. Malaria buzzing around the perimeter of my mosquito net every night, and sometimes inside it when Nick or I flailed in our sleep and knocked the net askew. That pill that burned in my throat for days, feeling like a neverending heart attack, or scissors ripping up and down my esophagus. That time we rode through a Papuan culture parade on our way home from a day at Skow Sae and we were riding directly in between marching Papuans with flags and musical instruments, dancing and singing their way down the middle of the road, and the Indonesian military in rows at the gutter, rifles drawn.

Yet at almost no point while I was there was I gripped with the kind of anxiety I'm prone to here, where my throat seizes up and then closes, my limbs go numb, my stomach rises into my chest, and my vision nearly blacks out. Here, it's always for no reason. Like the other day, I was sitting in my office at work, a cozy mild relatively private office with a low lamp, dispatching buses around in circles. Everyone was on time, no one had been in an accident, it was only a half hour from the time I got to go home, and my plans that night included sitting around, sitting around, and more sitting around. But I almost passed out over my desk with the force of it.

It's not coming from being at home either, as I've been on padded safe vacations where I drive around in an air-conditioned car looking at life from the windows, occasionally stopping at gourmet restaurants, and I'll lay in my four-poster hotel bed at night with my hand on my heart to make sure it's still beating, the other in front of my mouth to make sure I'm still breathing.

This never happened in Indonesia, even as I realized that if I were to get seriously ill, with bird flu, or appendicitis, or food poisoning, anything, I would likely die from lack of adequate medical care. There were a few times when that realization hit me a little hard, but as soon as I realized I had no choice in the matter, it calmed down. No choice. I'm here, there are diseases, there are crazy motorcyclists and an even crazier army, and I'm not leaving for six months. This is my reality. I have no choices other than whether to cope with the reality or to fight the reality, and that's not really a choice at all. Either way, it's still reality.

I think people are actually terrified of having to make the right decision, and of the consequences of that, and of the consequences of having to deal with knowing that they may have made the wrong one, as opposed to being terrified of the situation itself. Here, if I had unexplainable agony in my throat/chest, I would have a wealth of options before me, all with the equal likelihood of being the wrong option, or having something about them go wrong. I could just wait it out, with increasing terror, and if I waited too long, I might either die immediataly from heart failure or lung failure, or a windpipe/esophageal blockage, or do irreparable damage to whatever system the lump was busy ravaging and live the rest of my life with some kind of tube attached to me. I could choose to go to the hospital, and if so, which hospital? The city hospital, which would cost less, but maybe they wouldn't know what to do and they'd make it worse, maybe in their cost-cutting they wouldn't run the test that would make the difference. Alternatively I could go to the private hospital, and become destitute in the process, wiping through every cent of my savings, and maybe at that point it would turn out to be nothing: heartburn, a pill stuck in my throat, or, worst of all, completely psychosomatic. Then I'd be mortified, and destitute for no reason, but alive. Plus hating myself.

I wouldn't want to make that choice. I mean, I should be grateful that I have the choice to have the opportunity to make that choice, etc. But I still wouldn't want to make it. It would make me crazy, ten times sicker with anxiety. I wonder what the happy medium is in this situation.
In Papua I had no choice but to think, 'Whatever happens, happens.' Qué será, será.

And I don't remember what that feels like. I only remember that I felt it, but can't remember feeling it, if that makes any sense.

I remember very clearly this one instance when we were in the airport in Jayapura, about to board a puddle jumper to Wamena. We were sitting on our backpacks in the giant echoing waiting area, looking at all the 'Tutup' (Closed) signs on all the check-in lines, and we could see our plane hanging out behind the smoking check-in guy, and packages and luggage were riding down the loading ramp straight onto the plane. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a filthy man with dreadlocks in a ripped T-shirt come running into the airport carrying a brown cardboard package tied with string. He dumped the package onto the loading ramp and ran back out. The plane, sitting outside, ate up the package with everything else, without comment. The check-in guy kept smoking. His eyes may actually have been closed.

I watched all of this with a strange amused detachment. I thought about what would have happened if this had happened in the U.S. Total airport shutdown. FBI everywhere. Herding passengers into lines to get into more lines to evacuate. Sobbing passengers, pissed-off passengers, passengers taking advantage of the chaos to create more chaos, passengers and airport employees taking advantage of the chaos to be openly racist, etc. I imagined how scared the atmosphere would make me.

As it was, I poked Nick. "Hey."
"Mm?"
"D'you see that?"
"See what?"
"That guy with the package."
"Nope."
"He just ran up and put this package on the plane."
"Where?"
"Right there, on the plane."
"No, I mean, where's the guy."
"Oh. He ran out."
"Mm."
"Should we care about this?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter."

Then we went back to sitting on our luggage. I was reading Harry Potter 3, and I was probably more interested in Sirius Black than in the suspicious package. There was nothing I could do about it. My Indonesian wasn't good enough to explain to anyone what had happened, if it had been, in any case they wouldn't have cared, and what was I going to do? Not go to Wamena? I'd be wasting 100 bucks and not get to see Louise, probably ever again, plus, you know, it was hot and muggy and I didn't feel like walking all the way to the taxi station and listening to techno for 2 hours as I transferred taxis all the way back into the city. So I got on the tainted plane, which, incidentally, was a propeller plane rising through layers and layers of bumpy clouds right next to jagged mountain ranges, and everything was fine.

This is either apathy, a healthy way of viewing things, or totally batshit insane. Whatever it is, it was kind of nice, and I kind of want it back.