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.

I'm staying in my childhood house, and in my childhood house, you can often find me sitting exhausted and enthralled on the attic floor surrounded by invitations to 10 year olds' birthday parties from 1994, and yellowed drawings of gymnasts, and refrigerator magnets with pictures of Kermit the Frog on them, and the old notes my mom used to put in my lunch box with the hard boiled egg and the salt packet, and other such things.

The one thing I thank my parents the most for is teaching me to read and write when I was three. Most people don't have a written record of their thoughts when they were that young. I do. It's mostly incomprehensible to other people, and to me as well, a fair amount of the time, and often suggestive that bizarre and unexpected events, furniture, objects, teachers, and family friends played a gigantic part in my life. Rollerskates come up a lot. Two couches come up even more, always on opposite sides of the room. Black cats, mountains, and Christmas trees are next, followed by birds carrying letters in their beaks, angry female babysitters with long braids, and large pianos.

Three is so young it's like reading something written by a complete stranger, one with no linear thought processes. Often, once upon a time there was a little girl who lived inside her house and there was a lion outside her house ends with an ice cream truck encounter and, for good measure, a Christmas tree. (I guess not so much has changed; I still can't write stories that stay on focus beginning to end, but at least I don't... thrust ice cream everywhere, although, as I will soon prove, I do thrust sushi everywhere.)

The first nonfictional somewhat linear journal-like thing I wrote down was around my 5th birthday. Every year for my birthday we'd go get sushi at the same sushi plane we'd been getting sushi from since I was 2. I'll let my 5-year-old self tell it:

Today we went to Kuny's for sushi for my birthday. Kuny is Japanese. He always cuts my sushy into little pieces. When I grow up I want to marry Kuny, and eat sushy every night!

(And there is a drawing of Kuni and me and sushi at the bottom. We both have arms coming out of our heads and legs coming out of our arms. The sushi, however, is drawn very carefully.)

The other day my dad and I went to Kuni's. We arrived as they were just opening. Kuni was standing at the bar without his chef robes or hat on yet. He looked as naked in his T-shirt, to me, as any newborn baby, as he bowed to us and we bowed awkwardly, as always, back at him. My dad always shoots streams of friendly English at Kuni about how awesome his food is, to which he responds in streams of friendly-sounding Japanese and free noodle rolls and extra fatty tuna. He must understand English, as he's been here for at least 20 years, but he never speaks it.

There are two ways I know that he remembers me. One: if I try to order something that's not, technically, on the menu, but that I have been eating since I was a toddler, and the waitress says they don't have it, Kuni shakes his head wildly and waves his arms at her until she writes down my order as I originally said it. Two: he still cuts my sushi into tiny little toddler-sized pieces and serves it to me with a straight face. No matter where I'm sitting at the bar, even if I'm in front of another chef, Kuni prepares my sushi.

Whenever I see the gray hair poking out of Kuni's chef's hat or notice the age spots on his hands, I feel sad in a way that has no explanation, really, and no parallel. I feel the completely irrational feeling that when Kuni dies, I will be significantly more alone in the world. To feel that way about someone you've never spoken a word to is an odd thing. I hate to see him age. He has always looked about 30 to me. He's probably 60. I hope he lives to be 160. I wouldn't want to raise my children in a Chicago where they couldn't get their first taste of solid food in the form of raw yellowtail cut into a baby-sized bite. Would you?

There are certain parts of me that never get warm, no matter how many layers I cover myself with. My hands. The tips of my toes.

I guess I've been talking about Indonesia so much that someone lost their temper with me today and yelled, "I've never heard of anyone having as much culture shock as you! Wouldn't you think you'd have gotten over it by now? It's been nearly two weeks! Christ!"

It might be true. Things are starting to settle. A stranger spoke English to me on the street today and I didn't start. I turned into the right lane on a deserted street at one in the morning. Tonight, I ate creative maki; tuna and scallions, shrimp and oranges and tempura, salmon and avocado and masago and crab. When I didn't cry right there at the table it was some kind of miracle, but when I thought about the miracle and what it meant, I almost cried right there at the table.

I've been thinking about whitening soap. Louise’s boyfriend gesturing at her face with its undissolved sunscreen, saying ‘Bagus, bagus.’ The shoe salesman trying to stroke the tiny hairs on my arm: ‘Bagus.’ Rambutan – deep red hair-fruit – the seller choosing the two most withered stalks and assuring me: ‘Bagus – limabelas ribu.’ Here, any arm hair on a woman shows that she satisfies her lovers. People want to touch it. People think I am exotic and wild. People think I am unworthy of respect. People think things that I am unable to put into words because my words are wasted and racing, trapped inside my head, pounding to come out. Pounding to come out, but coming out changed; coming out as the definition of a relative clause and how to express ability. My mind is rotting.

And my language center is beginning to transform; Spanish and Indonesian are starting to melt together. Tidak ada gente que bisa habla español, pues, puedo decirles que saya bicara eso. When Indonesians march up to me now and I am trying to relax and they start asking me the usual list of questions – where do you come from? where do you live? can I come to your house? do you want an Indonesian boyfriend? – I pretend I speak Spanish, and do, rapidly. They have never heard Spanish – when would they have? – and they don’t know how to follow up. Can bules be from Spanish-speaking countries? They don’t think so, but they don’t want to venture a possibly incorrect declaration.

This is all nothing, though, without someone to break it down with. Where have all my articulate friends gone? That’s right, I left them all behind, choosing instead to jet off halfway around the world seeking… something… and I took – who could I have taken?! and I took someone who would be just as contented with his mouth and his brain sewn shut, gardening among the cassava. This is not an insult. Believe me, it isn’t. But I… here is an excerpt:

-

I said this: “Make sure you have a lot of fun with your pickaxes for me. I’ll be dreaming about sushi.”

I said this last night, before I knew what I would dream about, but I did dream about sushi: mostly spider rolls, fresh toro, and seaweed salad. I held onto these things, especially, in my mind, because he wants to be a farmer, and farmers grow potatoes and vegetables. You can’t make sushi with potatoes and vegetables. Not even if you’re a Japanese farmer, which he… it’s fuzzy and uncertain, what type of farmer he wants to be, but genetics predispose him towards not being a Japanese one.

“Tell him,” he said last night, indicating the Papuan farmer in our driveway, “that I want to be a farmer. Tell him that being a farmer is my dream. Tell him…”

She was already translating, eliciting the vague, yet impatient smile the man wears when he already understands something in English, but is still working it out, or working out a reply. “Yes, yes,” he nodded, but what else could he say? He comes from a place where, if you are not a farmer, you do not eat. Dreaming about being a farmer, to him, is like dreaming about knowing how to fart.

“We’ll tear up the driveway with pickaxes tomorrow, expose the soil,” he says, eliciting... you know what it elicited. You read it already.

-

What could this be like alone? I spend my mornings imagining. And reality keeps happening:
-
“Cassava. Fields of it! Cashew trees! Red dust! I wonder if it is paint?”
He spits on a crumbling rust-colored rock in his hand. “Hold still,” he says. “Roll up your sleeve.” Spits and smears. Scribbling in ochre on my upper arm. I turn brown; finally, two square inches of my skin are sufficiently Indonesian.
“Maybe if you do my whole body, I’ll be able to walk the streets in peace,” I suggest, half-joking; mostly joking, really. “Let’s draw designs on each other.”
“I’m getting tired, actually,” he says.
“Do you want to take some home?”
“Not really.”
“………..”
“………..”
“Would you make Zen paintings with it?”
“It’s too colorful. But maybe… yeah, maybe.”
Maybe.

-

Like I said, reality keeps happening, and I’m too far behind. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I think about how I feel, and I especially don’t know how I feel about my change in thinking.