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:

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.

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?

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)

Is it awful that the first thing I thought while overhearing the following conversation in a deli was, 'Sweet, even less sensitive people than me exist in the world!'?

We were sitting with our backs to the three guys at the counter, eating an Italian sub and a hot pastrami, drinking the first gross Izzes I've ever tried (clementine? more like watered-down fizzy orangeade) and we were talking, but after their first sentence we immediately stopped as if struck.

Guy #1: Hey, have you seen xxxxx's girlfriend?
Guy #2: I know, she must have gained like 30 pounds!
Guy #1: I know dude, I thought you're supposed to lose weight when you have cancer!
Guy #2: Well, the thing is, she's only taking like half the meds the doctor prescribed.
Guy #1: That's bad.
Guy #2: Also, she's still drinking.
Guy #3: Seriously? When I saw her I thought she was pregnant.
Guy #1: No.
Guy #2: I guess xxxxx was afraid she was pregnant.
Guy #1: Babies don't weigh 30 pounds.
Guy #2: Tumors weigh 30 pounds?
Guy #1: It's bad, they tried to stop drinking and they didn't even last, like, twelve hours. She called him, and she was supposed to be doing work stuff. She said she was at the library when she called. But like, you could hear drunk people yelling behind her and shit.
Guy #3: You know how loud and rowdy people get at the library!
Guy #1: I know. So he was super pissed when he got off the phone. He was like, let's get some shots. Let's get some tequila. He was like, want a shot? And I was like, hell yeah.

There are many gems (anti-gems? yes, anti-gems) about this conversation, such as the most important thing about a girl being her weight, regardless of cancer-having status; pregnancy being a worse fate than a giant tumor; and a guy's reaction to his cancerous girlfriend's drinking problem being to get pissed at her and then do shots of tequila.

Does a conversation need that amount of assholery to exceed my normal level of assholery? Does the fact that I even thought a good thought (I'm out-assholed by these guys!) during such an assholish conversation make me by default at least a moderately large asshole myself?

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?

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.

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.

Spent today in the market staring at dead squid eyes and cow skins. Studying how things look whole. Living in the states, I forget. I forget that fish aren’t swimming, glistening fillets, and squids aren’t disembodied legs, or naturally breaded into calamari. I caught a glimpse of what I thought was sausages, and I was excited, because sausages become available maybe once every two months, but they turned out to be tamarinds, the only fruit in the world that looks exactly like lots of little pieces of poo.

This is good for me. Not the pieces of poo. Seeing how animals look before we render them unrecognizable. I’ve always said I won’t eat anything that I would have a moral problem with killing myself. (That’s one of those confusing sentences that’s impossible to repair, so I’ll leave it.) It’s harder here. You become faced with it. Here, I’ve been offered dog. I turned it down. I couldn’t kill a dog. I’ve been offered deer. I could kill a deer. I ate it. It was delicious. And someone probably shot it wild. Not that wild means much where I live. Deep, dense jungle fades abruptly into city. The city is built right into the crannies, until it’s too steep to be built anymore. Deer emerge from behind one tree to dart to another tree, to dart to another tree, and find themselves in the middle of the main road. I never picture deer as a tropical animal. Do you?

Things I Didn’t Know One Could Eat Until Papua:
Cow backbone
Raw sea urchin

The list is short, but it’s intriguing.

Friday, January 13, 2007
Have you ever dreamt that you had been shot in the head, and then felt an enormous sense of relief that now you knew what it felt like to be shot in the head? (Like a lightning strike of terrible stinging, but at a safe distance, at maybe a memory’s distance, and then a cocoon of fading, like beginning to dream.)

Last night it was the Catholic bishop in my Level 10 class who shot me in the head. He shot me because I was gathering stolen diamonds from the common room floor to pile in his arms. He shouted through a megaphone for everyone to drop the diamonds. People were trying to make off with them. I was trying to consolidate them so that they could be easily returned. I said this to him as he approached. He shot me anyway. It must have had something to do with his English listening comprehension.

I woke up to someone outside blaring his car horn through the rain. He blared it for a good half hour, at unpredictable intervals. He was probably blaring it for someone to come out who most likely wasn’t even home, who most likely was unaware of any plans to pick him up. Don’t ever make plans with Indonesians. They aren’t plans. They’re vague ideas, what-ifs, and they rarely, if ever, come to fruition.

The man blared his horn anyway. He was persistent. Nick rolled over and opened his eyes.
“I dreamed that Father Y. shot me in the head,” I said.
“Mmm,” he replied, and rolled back.

A few weeks ago Dyah went into the bathroom at school to find the toilet closed and festooned with three little firecracker-shaped packages wrapped in newspaper. By the time I got there, there was a crowd of women, staring into the open bathroom door, everyone afraid to be the one to go in.
“What’s the matter, are you all in the qway-way?” I asked Dyah, because awhile ago someone’s student was late, and he wanted to impress his teacher to make up for it by using a hard word, so he used his dictionary to look up a synonym for ‘traffic jam’ and found ‘queue’. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to his teacher, “but I got caught in a qway-way in Entrop.” This has circulated. Now we say qway-way whenever possible. It never gets less funny. I don’t know why.
She didn’t laugh, though. “Look,” she said, pointing at the firecracker-shaped objects. “Maybe it’s bomb.”
Nobody touched them.
“I really have to go,” Enny said.
“So?” Dyah said, gesturing toward the bathroom and its possible bombs. “Go.”
Enny didn’t move.
“Ike?”
“Not me.”
“Hannah?”
“Never.”
The objects sat there, menacing. Students were starting to notice. Someone went to get Michael. He strode upstairs and opened one of the packages over the sink, wincing. Everyone’s hands strayed near their ears.
“BOOOM!” he shouted. The entire hallway shrieked. It was a tube of lipstick. Another. “BOOOOM!” It was a rolled up comic book. The last one. “BOOOOOM!” A plastic flute.

Update: the police are taking prints from my PIN card, and polling the pool of people who could possibly have perused my purse, but my pity party will only pollute one post, so don’t panic.

Although there are countless types of food I yearn for every day that I am here, there is now one food that I will yearn for every day when I return to the States, and I am not sure how I will deal with the loss of it. It’s called Sari Kelapa – Coconut Fibre. It’s… all it is, is cubes of coconut flesh soaking in sugar-honey water, in a little green squishy bag, but it tastes marvelous for some reason. You take it home and I think you’re supposed to put it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, but I just slice open the top of the bag and squeeze all the cubes right into my mouth. Each one has a different texture, but all of them have a texture never imagined before by man. Gelatin meets coconut meets carrot meets chicken. Amazing. Amazing and 25 U.S. cents. I thought they might be sneaking cocaine into the Sari Kelapa, because it has now come to pass that I can’t go a day without eating at least a bag, even though the recommended serving size is 1/3 of a bag, but then I realized that cocaine would make it a little more expensive than 25 cents. You know what else I realized? That I won’t physically be able to go shopping for food when I return without having a mild heart attack every time I see the price of anything. “Ten dollars for a fish for dinner for 1 person??!! That’s like a hundred thousand rupiah! I could live on that for three or four days! I could totally bribe a police officer with that!!” And then I’ll try to go out to dinner and fail, because 25 bucks for a meal, even sushi, is just… unthinkable. Actually, it was unthinkable before, but now…

Come to think of it, I am writing like the Sari Kelapa does contain cocaine. Every time I go out on the motorbike by myself, that happens. I am straddling this monstrous machine, and if I drive it wrong, it falls on me! If I stop too short, I go over the handlebars! It’s great! It wouldn’t be great if it happened, but that fact just makes it even better when it doesn’t happen. I don’t know that I would get the same feeling driving on the highway. The highway would just be terror, and terror is different. Terror is different from veering around jungled cliffs and having to brake to avoid chickens and dogs and goats that are wandering around in the road, trying to find the Pasar Dua beach and instead ending up on a road that appears to be paved with banana fronds, large rocks, and cats, constantly having to pass taxis driving 15 km/hr, three motorcycles deep, in no passing zones, finally finding the Pasar Dua beach road and suddenly noticing, one second away from too late, that the road ends abruptly and immediately becomes STONE STAIRS.

Stone stairs and a pair of talkative Indonesians, who talk to me about Arnold Schwarzenegger, religion, Papuan noses, short people, tall people, waterfalls, and American boyfriends for two hours. Sometimes, usually when I just want to quietly study shells and put my feet in things, this happens. But I have to be nice; I am the representative of buledom. I alone have to undo decades of damage done by imported porn, sitcoms, condescending tourists, and American foreign policy. This obviously trumps any desire I might have to spend a quiet reflective day at the ocean’s edge.

Sorry for the scatter. It might get better. It might get worse.

It's human nature to crave routine, and I suppose I can make the excuse that it's human nature to crave flush toilets, but a good debater could probably talk me down from that. I miss my cat, and sushi, of course, and the neighborly feeling of everyone speaking English, and even the daily incessant flow of internet information, even though that's what spoiled me. What do I do now to distract myself? I sleep. It's easy. It's hot, but not hot like you expect. You sweat, but it cools you. You breathe perfectly. What it feels like is exactly your own body temperature, and your body welcomes it. How can I explain it better? I can't.

On my east wall there is an unfinished mural of a red squid and a blue fish. The rest is done with pencil lines, and geckos trace them with their bellies when they wiggle up. My windows frame Papua New Guinea, which contains all the clouds in the world at any given moment, and throughout the day they advance, growing taller and grayer, until sunset at 5:30. They frame the bay, and two islands, and papaya trees and banana trees and cats, which I already think of exclusively as kucing, because it's such a perfect word for a cat, and dirt roads with chickens pecking their way along them and everyone on scooters and everyone singing gospel karaoke and everyone staring, staring, staring at me all the time. 'Mister, Mister!' they call at Nick and I, because women and men both are 'Mister'. The roosters here only crow at dawn, unlike any roosters I've heard before (or probably will ever hear). They leave out the last doodle-doo.

Yesterday we took first a taksi, and then a ojek (motorcycle taxi) down to a beach with black sands a few miles west of here. The ocean is fed with a smattering of tiny waterfalls and rivers rolling down from the village above, which is in turn scattered with traditional Papuan houses and children who, when you express curiosity or bemusement at a new fruit tree, climb it with sticks, bang the fruit out, and hand
it to you. Of course, you can't understand what they tell you it is, but you get home and crack it and it's (can you guess?) a cashew.

One river is filled with little waterfalls and we are taken to one where they've built a little dam out of rocks beneath. We stretch out in a shallow pool - 3 feet, maybe - and let the waterfall give us the shower that we can't take at home. (Showers at home consist of a bucket and a squeaky faucet.) All I can keep thinking is that if we were in the States there's no way you would ever be able to find a space in the waterfall pool.

We relax and we slowly get hungry and we pick our way down the river until it empties out at the ocean, where naked Papuan children run shrieking and barefoot across the rocks and their older relatives fish and dive. We have Tupperware stir-fry lunches of rice noodles, chicken, green beans, spinach, bean sprouts, garlic, and sea salt, and we sit next to the shore and let ourselves be knocked around by the waves.

In a way, it's paradise, and in another, I want to go home. I didn't know it until I knocked my head on the too-low ceiling, carrying some genmaicha up to my balcony, and burst into floods of completely irrational tears that lasted the better part of an hour. My dreams are a gumbo made with everything and everyone from home, but with Indonesian words thrown in as seasoning. I dreamed I was in the shower, bathing-suited, with every friend I have from home, and my mom was calling up the stairs 'Brownies are ready!' and, oh, brownies.

Wade, from Missouri, says he still dreams about biscuits and gravy, and he's been here two years. I expect I won't easily forget sushi. I expect I won't easily forget too much.