One of the many signs that I have been watching too much Top Model (any Top Model can probably be argued to be too much Top Model, but we'll leave that aside) is that last night I had a dream about Tyra Banks going on a murderous rampage on a city bus, which culminated in the stabbing of my boyfriend. She stood up on the bus driver's driving platform as the faceless driver cowered. I escaped out the emergency exit, a swing-out window, as she shrieked and brandished a long knife. Dan wasn't so lucky. As only one leg was out of the bus, she teetered towards the back in her ridiculous high heels and stabbed him in the throat.

The scene cut, because dream scenes can just cut, to us in someone's backyard. He was in a yard chair, bleeding from the mouth, though with no outward signs of the stabbing except that. I was reaching my hand through molasses to find my cell phone to dial 911. Although it was in my pocket, my pocket seemed light-years away, and my hand was moving not even close to light speed. And if that weren't enough, the phone, once opened, displayed only vague squigglies that darted around the keypad like tadpoles.

This is why, once I dialed what I thought was 911 and was greeted by a sarcastic guy giving me quiz questions a la bar trivia nights, I thought I might have misdialed, and hung up. But the second time dialing (a repeat, if slower, of the molasses and the space travel and the tadpoles) I got the same guy, and had to dodge his questions before getting down to the case at hand, being, of course, the stabbing, and the blood that was coursing from Dan's mouth onto the preternaturally green grass.

It took the ambulance 20 minutes to show up. I wrote this number down on a pad of paper for future reference: note to self - make sure to always allow 20 minutes before beginning death throes. Oddly enough, I don't remember if he was dead or alive by the time they got there. In the dream, it wasn't material.

Dreams tend to do that. They take things that in life would be of the utmost importance, like whether or not you are wearing clothes, or whether or not there is solid ground beneath you, or whose house you are in, or what country you are in, or whether you even know the person who's currently having sex with you, or whether or not your boyfriend has died from his stab wound, and make them secondary. At the same time, they force you to worry and obsess over the sound of the word 'orange', or whether your teeth might at any time just fall out, or the fact that your fingers are sticking together, or the dinosaur that keeps appearing and disappearing in the long distance.

I'm not sure when I became the kind of person for whom it was possible to brush off closeness. Well, not brush off exactly, but become used to it, treat it like it's old hat, not write down anything about it, and generally just not dwell on it. Reading old entries of mine (old-old entries, from high school and early college) and friends' similarly old entries reminded me of how we (not all of us, but some of us) used to totally be able to obsess over the (possibly imagined) curve of someone's neck, for example, for paragraphs and paragraphs. Entries piled upon entries went to idealizing waking up in the same bed as someone, sitting by a duck pond with someone, late night driving to the beach with someone, rubbing someone's neck or their hands, the heartbreaking form of their face, the blinding perfection or whatever of the way their hips moved when they walked or something like that. This person was only sometimes a real person, and rarely did the things I obsessed about ever happen. If they had happened, I would likely have written about them once in an over-the-moon, exclamation-point-filled way, then moved on to writing idealistically about something else... something even less likely to happen.

I know this because I have had what I used to yearn for for almost five unbroken years now. I mean five almost unbroken years. There's a difference. The difference is from February to June of '07. And in that short time I was coming close to yearning again. Not quite to the point of getting my journal involved in the mess, but a hairsbreadth away, if not closer. But just because I had someone in particular in mind. If I hadn't, I don't know that I would have been that bothered. I mean, I had just gotten out of a three year relationship where closeness had ceased to be anything special at all, and had begun to be a point of contention, a source of fighting, and certainly nothing worthy of sappy journal entries. I felt jaded and couldn't believe how 18-year-old me had once swooned at the slightest touch. I saw no contradiction between this jaded feeling and the fact that I was, at that moment, sappy-journal-entrifying the specific guy I wanted, and assuming everything would be magical and wonderful with him.

The way this is heading, I'm sure you, whoever you are, have already surmised where you think the rest is going. You're probably thinking, oh, she's about to totally whine that she doesn't appreciate touch and closeness anymore even though she got the guy she sappy-journal-entrified. You're only half right.

I don't know that there's any way to protect against becoming accustomed to something, and especially for me, a spoiled only child who's used to becoming accustomed to luxuries. I went home for Christmas and was without touch for seven days. It felt merely curious. Temporary. Like I was on hiatus from my life and whatever happened on this hiatus didn't really apply to reality, so it didn't much matter what did happen. So I didn't get to the touch-idealizing part. I would have only gotten there if there had been the threat of being physical-contactless and alone forever, or at least for a good long time.

So I don't idealize touch now, that's true. I welcome it, and I like it, and I think that it is a good thing, to be as simplistic as humanly possible. But I would like to say that reading through past entries from a time when I was scared that it would never come has made me vow, at least, to appreciate it more than I already do.

Here's a story from Indonesia that never made it into this blog. (Lots of stories didn't, actually, because of the chronic electrical outages, my bouts of apathy where I felt like writing down absolutely nothing in hopes that it would all go away, etc.)

This one didn't make it because it comes across heavy and sad no matter how I rewrite and rewrite it. It's the story of my last day spent there, a day mostly spent alone while Nick spent the afternoon in the air en route to Jakarta.

Our mornings were always chaotic and it would have been odd if our last one hadn't been. Six months of waking up entangled in the mosquito net, green mesh monsterifying our hands and faces... or being bolted from sleep by karaoke Michael Jackson blasting through our floor, complete with soft Indonesian vowels and inflections that suggest the singer has no idea of the meaning of the words... or having our ears buzzed in by mouse-sized, flying cockroaches. It would have been crazy and somehow wrong if our last morning had been spent lying quietly in bed, eating jackfruit, rambutan, mango, and papaya salad and listening to the twittering of tropical birds.

Knowing all of that, though, didn't make it any easier when we slept through the dying-battery alarm beep of my iPod and I ended up having exactly 8 minutes to say goodbye to Nick as he threw on his clothes and shoved things haphazardly in his duffel bag, all to the tune of the frantic honking of the taxi in the driveway.

With my body inexplicably barricading the door, I watched him put his clothes on. I watched the cloth settle and each button snap into place. When he had finished, he grabbed his duffel bag and, in the same motion, turned to leave. He actually walked into me, he was so determined to keep moving. My big toe under his big toe, we stared at each other for a collection of the most awkward moments that maybe we’d ever shared

We didn't know how to say goodbye to each other. There was at once everything and nothing to say, and maybe the 8 minutes made it easier, so we didn't have time to fumble and make it worse. The problem was that we went radically opposite ways. While he chose the pretend-it's-not-a-big-deal-and-do-it-quick method, I couldn't let go of him once I hugged him, even though I'd spent the last six months hating him. And when he finally peeled me off and went downstairs to say the rest of his goodbyes, I kept thinking, no one but me is appreciating the rough canvassy feel of his shirt or the way his wrists poke out awkwardly from the too-short sleeves. They don't see that one of his eyes is heavily lidded and drifts towards other things as the other eye fixes on you, squinty, focused, and bright. They don't deserve to be the last people to touch him. They don’t deserve to be the last people to hug him.

They were the last people to see him, though, because I didn't watch him get in the taxi. I turned before the front door had even closed and walked blindly back up the stairs to our room, where I sat in his empty closet for I still don't know how long, but it was long enough that I got hungry for breakfast, which eventually morphed into the kind of hunger that's been around so long that the thought of food is slightly nauseating.

It is strange both to write this and to remember it, because I rarely make dramatic, storybook-like gestures like that automatically. When I was a kid I could never throw a good tantrum because I would start thinking of all the times in books and movies kids lay on the floor throwing tantrums, and I'd worry about being a conformist. And whenever something dramatic happens, like I find myself suddenly in love, I'm only in that euphoric mindspace for a moment before I start wondering how many times I've read a book where someone falls in some kind of terrible false love that comes back and bites them in the ass.

That kind of meta-awareness and self-consciousness only serves to thrust me far from the present moment, which is exactly the opposite of what I wish would happen. But it stands; I can't be dramatic without thinking about how dramatic I'm being.

This particular time, though, I fell more into the present than I think I ever have. I didn't think about how absurd and overdone it was that I would actually sit in my now ex-boyfriend's empty closet and cry and ignore the leg cramps and hunger pains and the slowly growing dehydration headache and cry and cry. I had not one thought about how it was so teenage novellish of me to do so, not until the end, hours and hours later, when I finally thought, 'Look at me, sitting in this closet... just look at me... LOOK AT ME' in a rage and forced myself out with thoughts of how embarrassing it would be to think back on later.

The other teachers took me out to Black Sands beach later that day. Our motorcycle was already sold, so we took a taxi there and back, and I didn't even stop to think about how much it would cost to have the driver detour us all the way to the village. I had extra trouble with the slippery red sand by the first cliff, and fell more often in the trees on the way down, and was colder, less tired, less cautious and generally in a daze. We saw my favorite village girl, Naomi, (who often dammed up the creek with us and whirlpooled in it with us, even though it was obvious she found it strange and pointless) and I hardly even spoke to her. I smiled for lots of 'last day' pictures and in all of them, I look very bubbly. Nothing looks amiss in my face. To everyone else, I probably looked not one mark off of normal, even though mostly I felt like I was half-dreaming, half-dreading my flight the next day

A companion will not be able to save you if you slip in the red dirt of a path and tumble to your death on the cliffs and the waves below. In fact, he'll mock you by being able to do it perfectly himself. He won't make it any easier to ride your bike without crashing it; in fact, he'll throw it off balance by shifting on the back. He will not be of any help when you're being hassled for money; in fact, he's always the one that whips your wallet out for all to see and pays the fake tariffs ('sitting-on-the-beach tax', 'picking-up-a-package-tax', etc). He will always want to stay home when you want to go out, and vice versa.

He will not make any difference if your plane crashes, or if it's delayed to the point that you miss your connecting one. He won't make it any less embarrassing when your anxiety leads you to have to pee every 20 minutes and have to wake up the guy on the aisle seat to clamber over him every time you do it. And he won't make it any more comfortable to sleep in a 3x3 square box as you are jostled and tumbled around in a storm over Vancouver.

But all these things aside, and the fact that we fought all the time aside, that last day was enough to make me realize that this experience would have been another animal entirely if I had done it alone.

It has come time to share the three most awkward/embarrassing moments/periods of my life with the world. Why? Because I have no other inspirations for articles/entries/random babblings besides (choose one) A) How service people in Indonesia were still just as automatonish as here, if not more, and how surprising and disappointing that was, given I thought that was limited to the so-called First World, B) The trials and tribulations of trying to be a restaurant critic when my teeth keep falling apart and sending me excruciating pain signals whenever I try to eat anything crunchier than yogurt, or C) an impassioned plea for an a cappella group that needs an alto. These will come later! Right now I feel like debasing myself in front of my audience of millions... I mean three.

3. Number three just has to be a collection, an eye-covering, wildly blushing overview of how I handled crushes, relationships, and men in general in middle and high school. I obviously had not emotionally matured enough to even consider having a boyfriend, but at the time, of course, I considered myself an accomplished woman of substance and remarkable composure. To wit:

a) Boy in my 7th grade cooking class who I otherwise did not know at all: I wrote secret heart-shaped notes and proclamations of undying love that I would drop through his locker grates, or (I cannot believe that I was EVER this stupid) gave to my best friend to give to him. (My best friend and I were inseparable, and went everywhere together, so much so that many people from middle school believe to this day that we were a lesbian couple that came out really early.) Hmm, if she gives him a secret valentine, I wonder who it could possibly be from?? Anyway, despite this, I chose to believe he would never find out it was me, and when one of my friends/worst enemies (you know how those tend to exist in middle school) walked up to him one day and spilled the beans, I was speechless and unprepared for anything except staring down at my hands folded on my desk as he waved my valentines angrily around my head and demanded answers.

b) Hot drummer in marching band: I picnicked outside his house with my best friend even though there was no park there, hoping he would emerge; went in early to school to listen to him practice the marimba (mulled around the percussion room in what I thought was an eminently subtle way; it obviously wasn't); talked about other boys in front of him hoping he would hear and realized what a woman of experience I was, pretended to fall accidentally into the pool on our trip to Disneyworld so he would come to my rescue, etc. What is the notable missing link in this list? That's right, actually asking him out. Once, it must have gotten so obvious that he dragged me into the sheet music closet to question me about my crushes. Even when confronted so directly, I chose to evade the obvious answer and made up stories about some guy in my history class.

c) Guy I liked who kept dating everyone in our group of friends except me: this is a short one; I pretended I hated all his good qualities while simultaneously clinging to him and when he didn't want me to call every night I held a grudge against him for a year.

d) This one I found threatening suicide in the back room at a party. I thought that comforting him and making out with him would be essentially the same thing and serve essentially the same purpose. This resulted in a week-long relationship that ended after I discovered that every date would be spent watching anime and moaning about his ex-girlfriend.

e) Guy who I dated for a month or two even though I knew I wasn't attracted to him: I pretended I was attracted to him right up until the end and then dumped him right before his prom. This was actually an accident. I didn't think of it that way at the time. Then I got all stroppy because he didn't want to go to prom as friends. What an asshole, right?

f) This last one is actually only embarrassing because I'm choosing to share it, which makes it decidedly odd of me to want to. At the time, no one witnessed the awkwardness and because of that, I didn't realize that it was awkward. I thought that it made me cool and mature, with a sophisticated secret. It didn't, as you shall see.

I was about sixteen, old enough to know better, and in some sort of AOL chat room when some college guy from Northwestern University started IMing me. We somehow got onto the topic of crazy things that we had done, and the tone started subtly changing to challenging. "If you're so crazy," he said, or something, "why don't you prove it?"

"How would I prove something that like that?" I asked, stupidly not saying something like "and why do I have to prove anything to you?"

"By meeting me," he said. "Come over and meet me right now. I live at the corner of blah blah blah street and blah blah et cetera. Most girls wouldn't just meet a strange guy off the internet. If you do, I'll believe you're really crazy."

What did I do? I did it. Writing those three words embarrasses me beyond belief. I can't imagine my mindset at the time that craved acceptance from some creep I didn't know. But I went over there - he lived in a frat house - and he led me like some kind of serial killer down the back hallways - I could hear the other frat brothers shooting pool on the other side of the thin walls - to his room, where luckily the first thing he did was call me a frigid, scared bitch when I wouldn't reach under his scuzzy blanket and feel his penis. Even whatever mindset I was in at the time didn't prevent me from indignantly stomping out and slamming the door on his feeble 'how about a hug?' It should have also not prevented me from slapping him, screaming, reporting him for pedophilia, etc., but, unfortunately, it did. Fortunately, he was sluggish and vaguely apathetic and didn't bother chasing me. I went down the front stairs and the brothers playing pool saw me, but didn't blink an eye, not even a collective eye.

2. At a slightly more appropriage age to be doing stupid things (four) I was at a diner with my parents and a couple of friends of theirs. I remember there being two player pinball machines and arcade games everywhere around, but none of the adults would play them with me. Thus, I was bored, and also inherently a very naughty child. Not the kind of naughty that screamed and cried and threw things and beat up other children, but the kind that plotted and schemed and always found a way to get what it wanted without appearing the least bit naughty.

In fitting with that, I thought up something provocative to say that would create drama. I knew it had to be something that could be attributed to childlike innocence and wouldn't get me in trouble. So in the middle of one of my mom's sentences, I looked up and announced to the table, "I WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT!"

My parents' friends were both fairly fat people, with 'fairly' being a nice and totally inaccurate adjective. They were, in actuality, both really fat.

My mom grabbed my arm and half hissed, half laughed (she hadn't decided whether to let her anger out or pretend it was a light admonishing) "We don't say things like that to people!"

"Why?" I responded sweetly - calculated sweetly enough to push her over the edge.

"BECAUSE WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT? YOU DON'T WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GROW UP TO BE FAT? THAT MAKES NO SENSE!"

So inadvertently my mom had let her anti-fat prejudice show in front of her fat friends and she has probably never forgotten it, to the point that when I bring it up to her she insists that it never happened.

I guess that's more of an embarrassing moment for my mom than for me. But I'll let it stand.

1. This one was only about a year and a half ago. I was in Indonesia, teaching one of the newer teachers how to ride our motorcycle. I never quite forgot that, when Nick and I were learning, we'd done crazy, stupid things that should have killed us, but for some reason didn't. Like once when I was driving on a gravel road I swerved to avoid a lizard - A LIZARD! - and of course skidded out on the gravel and dumped me, Nick, and the motorcycle right into the sand at the edge of the beach. Or the time Nick was driving into downtown and was tailgating a truck. The truck stopped suddenly at a traffic circle. Nick pulled desperately on the clutch, screamed 'the BRAKE ISN'T WORKING!!' and plowed into the back of the truck. (Left handle: clutch. Right handle: brake. Not the same thing.)

Anyway, I remembered all this when I was teaching the new teacher to ride, and was jittery and uncertain when after only about a half hour she said that she felt okay driving on the main road home from Skow Sae (a beach about an hour and a half away), but I climbed on the back anyway and let her go for it. On one of the first deep turns on the road, she didn't lean enough and went driving straight over the shoulder, bouncing but in remarkable control, into a field of tall, waving grass. I screamed and unstinctively clutched her right where I always clutched Nick when he did something scary. Around the chest. On Nick, that was totally appropriate because a) he was my boyfriend and b) he was male. On her, however, when ended up happening was that I squished her breasts over and over with my wildly panicking and grabbing hands.

We did not die - we didn't even tip over. She just rode through the grass and out the other side. I had just completely and inappropriately overreacted, and now I had accidentally felt her up. We eventually switched places and I spent the entire ride back awkwardly trying to explain myself and trying to look back and gauge her facial expressions without losing my balance and driving us off a cliff.