Last night in bed, after a long, exhausting, day full of brushes with frostbite and incompetent tooth-X-ray-givin', Dan asked me (not out of the blue; it was totally in line with our conversation) why I preferred not to consume pot. Like, what the difference was between smoking it and consuming it, and why consuming it was worse for me.
I gave him such an involved answer, detailing how it was so easy to eat too much before it kicked in, and then ending up stuck, no way back, with a way-too-high high, the kind where you feel like your brain's become maple syrup and is undulating around in your skull knocking into things and causing different and random synapses to light up for no reason before you're entirely prepared to deal with them, that even after I'd finished explaining it and turned over to try and go to sleep, I had described it so accurately that I felt exceedingly strange. Paranoid and strange and not very unlike being, um, way too high.
But I was able to fall in an uneasy sleep by shutting my brain down completely, and it lasted for about three hours before I woke up and felt, not high, but insane.
Literally, I felt like I had woken up into another person's brain. A frantic, obsessive, possibly post-operative person's brain. I'll never argue that I don't have neuroses, but I definitely don't have these particular neuroses, and there they were. Words, phrases, rhymes, were repeating on loop through my head and as hard as I tried to stop them or make sense of them, I couldn't. One I can remember was futon, crouton, and bowl. Futon, crouton, and bowl. It went through on loop so many times that my frazzled and shattered brain tried to come up with a way to make sense of it. And what it came up with was an exercise to see if it could figure out where a cat was most likely to be. But I couldn't manage that! I couldn't even manage picturing cats and futons, cats and croutons, or cats and bowls in the same mental image. Not for a long while. I just let it loop and tried and let it loop and tried again until I finally was about to think of a cat, sitting on a futon, eating a crouton, out of a bowl. Exhausted, I expected it to go away. But it didn't. The alphabet started looping. My breathing started sounding like letters. My stomach felt like a song was dancing on it.
Eventually I woke up Dan and tried to explain this to him, and got so sleepy trying that, mercifully, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning feeling like I spent all night having seizures, but mentally, basically normal. Until now, anyway, where describing it is bringing it back.
Dan thought it was paranoid of me to guess that maybe a brain tumor was pressing on my brain and making me crazy, or that I had had a stroke. I concur, but it being paranoid of me has nothing to do with whether or not I do things.
It felt like I had a terrifying taste (another, that is; I have tastes spaced sporadically all across my life) of what it would like to be irretrievably crazy, lost amongst nonsense.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
I attended the first class of the first college course I've taken since I graduated in 2005, and there's so much that I can't believe I've forgotten about the moment to moment experience of sitting in class. It was at once both new and utterly familiar.
The majority of the class consists of slumped, splayed boys in backwards baseball caps who have slack looks on their faces and always try to sit in the back row so as to play internet Solitaire on their laptops without arousing suspicion. I know this is a common generalization about frat-boy types and isn't always true, but in this class, it is true for sure. These boys think nothing of tuning the teacher out so completely that when he stops right in front of their desk to ask him a question, they look up guiltily with their ears just recently turned on, saying 'What?' and then just sort of try to guess the answer. They don't feel guilty. They don't feel embarrassed. Their faces are the very picture of relaxedness (stonedness, possibly - I wouldn't know because I was never the type of stoner who could handle class high).
There's also that awkwardness of when to stop engaging and listening and start taking notes. For me the two are mutually exclusive. I feel weird when a teacher's going on and on animatedly and fleshing out a perspective or theory and I'm nodding and figuring and forming new ideas and I look around me and everyone is heads down and scratching away bullet points and you can tell that all that they care about is bullet points. Those are always the people who do better on tests.
I was one of those people three years ago, but apparently I'm not anymore. I'm super interested in everything that's going on and can't write about it and think about it simultaneously. I want to answer every question asked. I want to flesh out every theory on the board in more detail than I am given. In short, I have become one of those 'nontraditional students' I and everyone else used to hate because they came to class bright eyed and bushy tailed and enthusiastic, and they never stopped asking inane questions, and always talked to the teacher after class trying to show how smart they were and to expound upon every idea that had ever been brought up ever, and also wanted extra credit and recommendations for further readings.
As hard as I try not to be that person, it's really hard, in a class mostly full (mostly, I say, because there are two or three other people who are not like this) of completely indifferent slouches who are morally opposed to sounding like they actually care about stupid learning. I'll sit there, fidgeting, really WANTING to answer or ask a question but feeling weird about it because I'm the only person who's opened their mouth aside from the teacher in fifteen minutes and I don't want to look like an attention hogger or a show-off or a teacher's pet. Attempting to look bored while answering questions only serves to make the teacher sorely tempted to ask you, 'if you think you're too smart for this class, then why don't you just go ahead and take the final right now?'.
All this aside, I tremendously enjoyed being back in a classroom and exercising my brain, and if I do become that annoying nontraditional student, then I guess that's what I get in exchange for the travesty of being excited about learning.
The majority of the class consists of slumped, splayed boys in backwards baseball caps who have slack looks on their faces and always try to sit in the back row so as to play internet Solitaire on their laptops without arousing suspicion. I know this is a common generalization about frat-boy types and isn't always true, but in this class, it is true for sure. These boys think nothing of tuning the teacher out so completely that when he stops right in front of their desk to ask him a question, they look up guiltily with their ears just recently turned on, saying 'What?' and then just sort of try to guess the answer. They don't feel guilty. They don't feel embarrassed. Their faces are the very picture of relaxedness (stonedness, possibly - I wouldn't know because I was never the type of stoner who could handle class high).
There's also that awkwardness of when to stop engaging and listening and start taking notes. For me the two are mutually exclusive. I feel weird when a teacher's going on and on animatedly and fleshing out a perspective or theory and I'm nodding and figuring and forming new ideas and I look around me and everyone is heads down and scratching away bullet points and you can tell that all that they care about is bullet points. Those are always the people who do better on tests.
I was one of those people three years ago, but apparently I'm not anymore. I'm super interested in everything that's going on and can't write about it and think about it simultaneously. I want to answer every question asked. I want to flesh out every theory on the board in more detail than I am given. In short, I have become one of those 'nontraditional students' I and everyone else used to hate because they came to class bright eyed and bushy tailed and enthusiastic, and they never stopped asking inane questions, and always talked to the teacher after class trying to show how smart they were and to expound upon every idea that had ever been brought up ever, and also wanted extra credit and recommendations for further readings.
As hard as I try not to be that person, it's really hard, in a class mostly full (mostly, I say, because there are two or three other people who are not like this) of completely indifferent slouches who are morally opposed to sounding like they actually care about stupid learning. I'll sit there, fidgeting, really WANTING to answer or ask a question but feeling weird about it because I'm the only person who's opened their mouth aside from the teacher in fifteen minutes and I don't want to look like an attention hogger or a show-off or a teacher's pet. Attempting to look bored while answering questions only serves to make the teacher sorely tempted to ask you, 'if you think you're too smart for this class, then why don't you just go ahead and take the final right now?'.
All this aside, I tremendously enjoyed being back in a classroom and exercising my brain, and if I do become that annoying nontraditional student, then I guess that's what I get in exchange for the travesty of being excited about learning.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Boulder is not aware of the fact that it's January. I'm riding my bike like it's April, in a T-shirt, sweating, and everyone's motorcycles are out. Every time I look out my window into the canopy of bare branches and out, all the way out to the plains to the east, I hate my landlord even more. What a perfect summer place. It's basically a treehouse. The only things we're level with are squirrels and stranded cats and power lines and mountains. And our neighbors. But we can't see them, so they may as well not even be there.
All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.
I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).
Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:
What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:
What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:
I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.
Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.
This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.
Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.
These things are travel and cats.
I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.
Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.
So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.
All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.
I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).
Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:
What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:
What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:
I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.
Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.
This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.
Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.
These things are travel and cats.
I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.
Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.
So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Oddly enough, I was just having a conversation about whether we all (all of us bloggers) write as insurance against memory or because we have an audience in mind or what. And this particular entry of mine is definitely insurance against memory. So - warning! - this is not written for you all (but feel free to read it anyway, since it's on the internet and all).
It's sort of like that time I was in Indonesia and got my whole salary stolen. As I was writing, I was fully aware that I was whining and not writing in a manner that would hold anyone's interest, but I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget how angry I am capable of becoming. I always forget because I don't get very angry often, and I am fooled into thinking I'm not naturally a violently angry person, that I don't get so completely consumed by it that sometimes I almost pass out from the pressure inside my skull.
But I am, and I do. Although the Indonesia entry didn't reflect that. I was in such an alien environment, and so terrified of acting like a spoiled American around all the people living in poverty that I didn't dare elaborate on how angry I was - I didn't even dare FEEL how angry I was.
Yesterday Dan and I received a letter in the mail notifying us that we would not be allowed to re-lease our apartment, that we were required to move out at the end of our term. There was no reason given, but we know what the reason is, and we know why she ('she' being the owner of the property management company, who has a very distinctive idiot-style of writing where she thinks if she conjugates a verb in different ways it counts as saying something different) doesn't want to say what the reason is. It's because she would look like an idiot, saying 'The reason for our decision is that those meanies made me sign a copy of their move-in checklist so it would be on record that I received it. Also, they asked if they could get a cat when we told them they could at the lease signing and when it says clearly on the lease that cats are allowed with permission. How rude! And after that, you know what they did? They accused me of going back on my word, which is totally true! And then - this is the crowning point of it all, where I definitely knew I wouldn't want those assholes renting my property - they wrote me an email saying they disagreed with my conclusion but they were going to drop the matter and not get a cat because they loved living in this apartment so much! That's when I KNEW I wanted to kick them out. Also, they always pay their rent on time, take care of their place, and don't bother the other tenants - and we definitely can't have THAT going on in one of our properties!'
There's only one type of person that makes me spitting mad, this mad, so mad that I get an instant migraine and would, in a second, if faced with this person and a loaded gun, pull the trigger. That type of person is stupid, but conniving. This type of person will go out of their way to hurt others as badly as possible, even when it's not in the best interests of, say, their business. This type of person, when offended, never gets over it, never tries to resolve it, and thinks only of exercising power over the offender until (s)he feels better. They think only of 'winning'.
I offended our property management company's owner inadvertently at the lease signing. I'm still not sure quite how I did it. I think she was affronted by the request that she sign off on receiving a copy of our move-in checklist. She said, 'Just trust me, I received it. I'm standing here telling you I received it.' But our apartment was in terrible condition when we moved in and we had noted all of it down on the checklist and we wanted to make absolutely sure that it was ON PAPER that we had notified them of the condition within three business days, because there was a clause on the lease saying that if we didn't do that, we would be held responsible for any damage when we moved out.
I didn't want them to be able to say we hadn't turned it in, and charge us thousands of dollars upon move-out (this has happened to me before) so I asked for a signature. She was immediately enraged. Why? Because I had taken control? Because I had seen through the plan of the company to get around paying back security deposits? Who knows? After that moment, she despised me. She flat-out refused to sign the paper, and only after Dan had sweet-talked her for a while did she finally - and angrily - sign it.
When I later tried to follow through on our plan - discussed at the lease signing - of getting a cat, by calling and asking for written permission, she dismissed me right out of hand, saying that we 'had no right' to get a cat, and that she 'never said' we could.
And even though we didn't get one, and we said we would drop the subject because of how much we liked living here, she chose to terminate our lease out of spite - not for any other reason but out of spite. She terminated it because we said how much we liked living here.
Revenge out of proportion to a perceived slight, flexing of power just for the hell of it - those are the type of people - perhaps the only type of people - that can get me irrational with rage.
It's sort of like that time I was in Indonesia and got my whole salary stolen. As I was writing, I was fully aware that I was whining and not writing in a manner that would hold anyone's interest, but I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget how angry I am capable of becoming. I always forget because I don't get very angry often, and I am fooled into thinking I'm not naturally a violently angry person, that I don't get so completely consumed by it that sometimes I almost pass out from the pressure inside my skull.
But I am, and I do. Although the Indonesia entry didn't reflect that. I was in such an alien environment, and so terrified of acting like a spoiled American around all the people living in poverty that I didn't dare elaborate on how angry I was - I didn't even dare FEEL how angry I was.
Yesterday Dan and I received a letter in the mail notifying us that we would not be allowed to re-lease our apartment, that we were required to move out at the end of our term. There was no reason given, but we know what the reason is, and we know why she ('she' being the owner of the property management company, who has a very distinctive idiot-style of writing where she thinks if she conjugates a verb in different ways it counts as saying something different) doesn't want to say what the reason is. It's because she would look like an idiot, saying 'The reason for our decision is that those meanies made me sign a copy of their move-in checklist so it would be on record that I received it. Also, they asked if they could get a cat when we told them they could at the lease signing and when it says clearly on the lease that cats are allowed with permission. How rude! And after that, you know what they did? They accused me of going back on my word, which is totally true! And then - this is the crowning point of it all, where I definitely knew I wouldn't want those assholes renting my property - they wrote me an email saying they disagreed with my conclusion but they were going to drop the matter and not get a cat because they loved living in this apartment so much! That's when I KNEW I wanted to kick them out. Also, they always pay their rent on time, take care of their place, and don't bother the other tenants - and we definitely can't have THAT going on in one of our properties!'
There's only one type of person that makes me spitting mad, this mad, so mad that I get an instant migraine and would, in a second, if faced with this person and a loaded gun, pull the trigger. That type of person is stupid, but conniving. This type of person will go out of their way to hurt others as badly as possible, even when it's not in the best interests of, say, their business. This type of person, when offended, never gets over it, never tries to resolve it, and thinks only of exercising power over the offender until (s)he feels better. They think only of 'winning'.
I offended our property management company's owner inadvertently at the lease signing. I'm still not sure quite how I did it. I think she was affronted by the request that she sign off on receiving a copy of our move-in checklist. She said, 'Just trust me, I received it. I'm standing here telling you I received it.' But our apartment was in terrible condition when we moved in and we had noted all of it down on the checklist and we wanted to make absolutely sure that it was ON PAPER that we had notified them of the condition within three business days, because there was a clause on the lease saying that if we didn't do that, we would be held responsible for any damage when we moved out.
I didn't want them to be able to say we hadn't turned it in, and charge us thousands of dollars upon move-out (this has happened to me before) so I asked for a signature. She was immediately enraged. Why? Because I had taken control? Because I had seen through the plan of the company to get around paying back security deposits? Who knows? After that moment, she despised me. She flat-out refused to sign the paper, and only after Dan had sweet-talked her for a while did she finally - and angrily - sign it.
When I later tried to follow through on our plan - discussed at the lease signing - of getting a cat, by calling and asking for written permission, she dismissed me right out of hand, saying that we 'had no right' to get a cat, and that she 'never said' we could.
And even though we didn't get one, and we said we would drop the subject because of how much we liked living here, she chose to terminate our lease out of spite - not for any other reason but out of spite. She terminated it because we said how much we liked living here.
Revenge out of proportion to a perceived slight, flexing of power just for the hell of it - those are the type of people - perhaps the only type of people - that can get me irrational with rage.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
A mere sentence, or small paragraph, in the imitable Stumbling Upon Happiness (thanks, Erik!) caught my eye when last I read it (a week ago, but I'm slow at turnover, okay?) and that was the assertion that people who do not live in California think that they would be happier if they did live in California, while people who actually do live in California don't test out to be any happier than people who don't.
Not surprising, since (as the book points out and as I immediately thought right before I read it) beaches and palm trees and redwoods and sunshine don't make a person's debt disappear, or make their girlfriends love them, or make their jobs more satisfying, or keep their parents from dying. The distraction they provide is a novelty, one that becomes quickly routine, etc., etc.
But having once suddenly uprooted myself from my snowy upbringing, my windy sleet-in-the-face habitat, and thrust myself into an equatorial jungle for six months, I am going to tentatively and probably stupidly say that it DID make me happier, if only a little.
There's an indescribable freedom to being able to sweep out of the house without a thought to layering, or bringing an extra jacket because what if it gets cold, or gloves because what if it suddenly gets even colder. You don't have to have a backpack with all this what-if crap inside of it. You don't have to think, 'oh, I would LIKE to go hike in the park, but clouds are looming over the Rockies and they might contain rain or snow, which will make me cold and uncomfortable, so, here, let me put on an extra sweater, zip-up, so it won't be too hot if it doesn't get cold, and, oh, just in case I won't wear sandals because my feet would feel it first, and also, I better walk because if it gets too windy my bike will blow over and... oh, fuck it! I'll just stay home.'
Instead, you're lying in your house, which, for all intents and purposes, is the exact same thing as lying outside, because every window is open and the roof is made out of tin, and if you think, 'ooh! I want to bike up to Angkasa and sketch the view!' you just GO, because the temperature only drops below 70 when it's a)nighttime AND b)a serious, recordbreaking cold snap. (Every so often, now, sitting in my house in Boulder among the bare branches of winter, I check Jayapura's forecast on my desktop weather widget. Usually, it's 90-something. The other day, it read 68. I almost shit myself.) If it rains, it's like raining bathwater from a giant showerhead somewhere in the sky. You'll get wet, but you won't get cold. You'll almost feel like you should be shampooing your hair.
So the difference is in more than just being nice and pretty outside. The difference is in impulsiveness. Boulder makes it basically impossible and Jayapura encourages it. Being who I am, I need all the impulsiveness-encouraging factors I can get. I need as few excuses not to go out as possible.
It's the same sort of inching-up-the-scale-of-happiness factor as having a car, I think, in terms of impulsiveness. With a car, you don't have to worry about bus routes, most inclement weather, walking alone as a female at night, carrying a bunch of groceries, or going someplace that's far away. However, a car comes with a major (for me) caveat, and that is that being in a car is stifling and mind-numbing and just exactly like being inside!
What made Indonesia wonderful wasn't only the weather being welcoming and nonthreatening and predictable (though I have to say most people disagreed with me and found the heat stifling, fever-inducing, and soaked with sluggishness), but also that the mode of transportation was so exhilarating! Just the traveling part was an adventure in itself, and an outdoor one at that. Zipping around (not even zipping, I don't think I ever reached more than 40mph even on the long deserted roads, because at any moment there might be a three foot wide pothole or a runaway pig) on these crappy rough roads with the muggy sun burning your helmet and the wind smelly and hot... it was perfect.
So from this I gather the secret to at least marginal increases in happiness is living in coastal southern California... but taking L.A., throwing it in the ocean, digging up San Francisco with a bulldozer and placing it where L.A. used to be. Voila! Scooter/motorcycle/public transportation-friendly supercool city with a hot climate! (Oh yeah, and also eliminating dead parents and debt and unresponsive lovers and unsatisfying jobs.) Voila and ha! Back to you, Daniel Gilbert!
Not surprising, since (as the book points out and as I immediately thought right before I read it) beaches and palm trees and redwoods and sunshine don't make a person's debt disappear, or make their girlfriends love them, or make their jobs more satisfying, or keep their parents from dying. The distraction they provide is a novelty, one that becomes quickly routine, etc., etc.
But having once suddenly uprooted myself from my snowy upbringing, my windy sleet-in-the-face habitat, and thrust myself into an equatorial jungle for six months, I am going to tentatively and probably stupidly say that it DID make me happier, if only a little.
There's an indescribable freedom to being able to sweep out of the house without a thought to layering, or bringing an extra jacket because what if it gets cold, or gloves because what if it suddenly gets even colder. You don't have to have a backpack with all this what-if crap inside of it. You don't have to think, 'oh, I would LIKE to go hike in the park, but clouds are looming over the Rockies and they might contain rain or snow, which will make me cold and uncomfortable, so, here, let me put on an extra sweater, zip-up, so it won't be too hot if it doesn't get cold, and, oh, just in case I won't wear sandals because my feet would feel it first, and also, I better walk because if it gets too windy my bike will blow over and... oh, fuck it! I'll just stay home.'
Instead, you're lying in your house, which, for all intents and purposes, is the exact same thing as lying outside, because every window is open and the roof is made out of tin, and if you think, 'ooh! I want to bike up to Angkasa and sketch the view!' you just GO, because the temperature only drops below 70 when it's a)nighttime AND b)a serious, recordbreaking cold snap. (Every so often, now, sitting in my house in Boulder among the bare branches of winter, I check Jayapura's forecast on my desktop weather widget. Usually, it's 90-something. The other day, it read 68. I almost shit myself.) If it rains, it's like raining bathwater from a giant showerhead somewhere in the sky. You'll get wet, but you won't get cold. You'll almost feel like you should be shampooing your hair.
So the difference is in more than just being nice and pretty outside. The difference is in impulsiveness. Boulder makes it basically impossible and Jayapura encourages it. Being who I am, I need all the impulsiveness-encouraging factors I can get. I need as few excuses not to go out as possible.
It's the same sort of inching-up-the-scale-of-happiness factor as having a car, I think, in terms of impulsiveness. With a car, you don't have to worry about bus routes, most inclement weather, walking alone as a female at night, carrying a bunch of groceries, or going someplace that's far away. However, a car comes with a major (for me) caveat, and that is that being in a car is stifling and mind-numbing and just exactly like being inside!
What made Indonesia wonderful wasn't only the weather being welcoming and nonthreatening and predictable (though I have to say most people disagreed with me and found the heat stifling, fever-inducing, and soaked with sluggishness), but also that the mode of transportation was so exhilarating! Just the traveling part was an adventure in itself, and an outdoor one at that. Zipping around (not even zipping, I don't think I ever reached more than 40mph even on the long deserted roads, because at any moment there might be a three foot wide pothole or a runaway pig) on these crappy rough roads with the muggy sun burning your helmet and the wind smelly and hot... it was perfect.
So from this I gather the secret to at least marginal increases in happiness is living in coastal southern California... but taking L.A., throwing it in the ocean, digging up San Francisco with a bulldozer and placing it where L.A. used to be. Voila! Scooter/motorcycle/public transportation-friendly supercool city with a hot climate! (Oh yeah, and also eliminating dead parents and debt and unresponsive lovers and unsatisfying jobs.) Voila and ha! Back to you, Daniel Gilbert!
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
This is a P.S., so, hey, read this PostScript!
I started a music Myspace. Now, I fully realize that Myspace blows - I realize this even more so now that I'm trying to have one. It won't let me customize my profile colors. (This is possibly a good thing - have you seen the shit people do to their profiles when given free reign? Let's just wander around there for a quick minute... hmm. I see. Um, I... do not get what you're going for here. [Make sure not to click on those links if you value your eyesight. Too late? Sorry.]) It also won't let me post more than six songs, or let people comment if they're not Myspace members, or keep the url of my page the same for more than seven seconds. Almost no one I know is a Myspace member (that I know of) because they're all too smart. Also, there was already a 'hannaH backwards' - and I should be the only Hannah who has ever noted the palindromic quality of her name, dammit! So I had to take off the 's' and a little piece of my heart withered up and died.
But in any case, until I can find a better arrangement for showcasing my songs, I have an 'Artist Page' on 'Myspace Music' and it is here and the public ('the public' means everyone except Dan and Nick, who have already heard it) may now for the first time hear the music I write behind closed doors only when no one's home.
If you have a comment and you are not a Myspace member (kudos to you!) you can leave them here, on this entry, or in my email, or on this journal in general.
Edit: 1/14 - The sound quality's also pretty awful... so if you think you might like a particular song but can't really tell because it sounds like it's coming out of tinny speakers on a boat in the ocean, email me and I will send you a high-quality mp3.
I started a music Myspace. Now, I fully realize that Myspace blows - I realize this even more so now that I'm trying to have one. It won't let me customize my profile colors. (This is possibly a good thing - have you seen the shit people do to their profiles when given free reign? Let's just wander around there for a quick minute... hmm. I see. Um, I... do not get what you're going for here. [Make sure not to click on those links if you value your eyesight. Too late? Sorry.]) It also won't let me post more than six songs, or let people comment if they're not Myspace members, or keep the url of my page the same for more than seven seconds. Almost no one I know is a Myspace member (that I know of) because they're all too smart. Also, there was already a 'hannaH backwards' - and I should be the only Hannah who has ever noted the palindromic quality of her name, dammit! So I had to take off the 's' and a little piece of my heart withered up and died.
But in any case, until I can find a better arrangement for showcasing my songs, I have an 'Artist Page' on 'Myspace Music' and it is here and the public ('the public' means everyone except Dan and Nick, who have already heard it) may now for the first time hear the music I write behind closed doors only when no one's home.
If you have a comment and you are not a Myspace member (kudos to you!) you can leave them here, on this entry, or in my email, or on this journal in general.
Edit: 1/14 - The sound quality's also pretty awful... so if you think you might like a particular song but can't really tell because it sounds like it's coming out of tinny speakers on a boat in the ocean, email me and I will send you a high-quality mp3.
Yesterday I received a cryptic email. A woman (whom I'd never heard of) asked me, in a very conversational and casual tone, whether I could tell her when the alewives washed up on shore in Lake Michigan. See, she was planning a trip, and needed to know.
Dan was all, "Watch out! It might be spam!"
"Spam that asks me about alewives, knows I'm from Chicago, and signs its name?" I asked him.
"You know, it could be a phisher. Phishers can request your birth certificate with only the information blah blah blah blah blah!"
Turns out she saw this entry from 2004 in my old journal when she Googled 'alewives'. And it was the most potentially helpful link. Out of everything on the internet about alewives (which is apparently essentially nothing). Out of everything Google had to offer when it scrolled through 9 billion websites, one line about a childhood memory about beaches being smelly and the lake being unswimmable showed up on the third page.
Are alewives just a product of my imagination? Did I dream all those years when I went to the beach with my summer camp and the first ten or fifteen feet of water at the shoreline was thick with slimy dead fish bodies? Did I dream waking up (in my closed house three blocks from the lake) to a smell similar to being in the thick of the fish market in Biak? Have my feet invented what it feels like to walk across thousands of sand-encrusted fish parts, warmed and hardened by the sun?
I mean, Chicago is a big city and if I'm only one out of thirty who ever thought to write about this disgustingness and post it on the internet, that's just plain bizarre. It's even more bizarre that no scientific studies or anything bothered to mention exactly when alewive season IS.
Bizarreness aside, though (and this is really why I started writing this entry - it just got totally sidetracked), random communications like that are exactly what I hope will happen as I slog away writing about minutae all the time. Always, in the back of my mind, I'm hoping someone will Google, say, 'Wamena', and email me to talk about our experiences there, or maybe, say, 'airport', and ask about the conditions of travel within Indonesia. Or smaller things, like, 'Hey, I'm in Boulder, will you tell me how to get to that portion of the creek you mentioned where icebergs float like boats and birds inhabit them like settled islands?'
Aside from my innate need to document everything in my life so I don't forget it later, and the desire to keep in touch with online friends and keep online touch with real friends, I think that's the number one reason why I continue to post a journal publicly.
Uh, hint, hint.
Just kidding. I think.
Dan was all, "Watch out! It might be spam!"
"Spam that asks me about alewives, knows I'm from Chicago, and signs its name?" I asked him.
"You know, it could be a phisher. Phishers can request your birth certificate with only the information blah blah blah blah blah!"
Turns out she saw this entry from 2004 in my old journal when she Googled 'alewives'. And it was the most potentially helpful link. Out of everything on the internet about alewives (which is apparently essentially nothing). Out of everything Google had to offer when it scrolled through 9 billion websites, one line about a childhood memory about beaches being smelly and the lake being unswimmable showed up on the third page.
Are alewives just a product of my imagination? Did I dream all those years when I went to the beach with my summer camp and the first ten or fifteen feet of water at the shoreline was thick with slimy dead fish bodies? Did I dream waking up (in my closed house three blocks from the lake) to a smell similar to being in the thick of the fish market in Biak? Have my feet invented what it feels like to walk across thousands of sand-encrusted fish parts, warmed and hardened by the sun?
I mean, Chicago is a big city and if I'm only one out of thirty who ever thought to write about this disgustingness and post it on the internet, that's just plain bizarre. It's even more bizarre that no scientific studies or anything bothered to mention exactly when alewive season IS.
Bizarreness aside, though (and this is really why I started writing this entry - it just got totally sidetracked), random communications like that are exactly what I hope will happen as I slog away writing about minutae all the time. Always, in the back of my mind, I'm hoping someone will Google, say, 'Wamena', and email me to talk about our experiences there, or maybe, say, 'airport', and ask about the conditions of travel within Indonesia. Or smaller things, like, 'Hey, I'm in Boulder, will you tell me how to get to that portion of the creek you mentioned where icebergs float like boats and birds inhabit them like settled islands?'
Aside from my innate need to document everything in my life so I don't forget it later, and the desire to keep in touch with online friends and keep online touch with real friends, I think that's the number one reason why I continue to post a journal publicly.
Uh, hint, hint.
Just kidding. I think.
Monday, January 12, 2009
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?
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?
Friday, January 09, 2009
I can't remember if I've written about this before - I probably have, sometime like, oh, I don't know, right after it happened. When I had nothing but free time and a computer was like a blazing beacon of modernity amongst everything else. However, often just the sight of my computer sitting on our our flowered saggy mattress, which itself sat starkly in the center of a white tile floor, jarred me out of whatever third-world reverie I had been in. I would constantly be coming home wanting to write about this or that: the sheer number of perfect seashells I would unavoidably run over with my motorcycle on the beach; how the jungle would look blue in a certain kind of sunlight; how it felt to get a sea urchin spine out of a finger joint - and then I'd walk in the door, go up the stairs, hit my head on the landing ceiling that was obviously built by and for midgets, and see my computer. And everything would rush out of my head. Jungles and sea urchins and seashells could not peacably coexist in my brain with Macintosh G4 laptops.
Well, if I wrote about it once, I'll just write about it again. This time it will be colored by time and memory and everyone can have fun comparing the two stories to see how my unintentional lies build and build as I get further and further from them. I mean, if sea urchins and G4s can't coexist in my brain, how is this story going to fare against an office full of two-way radios, first-aid kits, and giant flatscreen computers? Probably not well.
But in any case, it was sometime in the one season that Jayapura has, indistinguishable from all the other hot, humid days full of posturing distant clouds. All I know is that it wasn't during our massive water shortage (Christmas, roughly). It was a Saturday. Or a Sunday. I wanted to go up to the Jayapura City sign (imagine the Hollywood sign, but neon [is the Hollywood sign neon? I've seen it probably thousands of times and still can't remember] and up on one of the jungled cliffs that surround the bay, faced outward, to welcome boats, not cars) and draw the view in pastel. I'd done it a few times before, but it was one of those blue jungle days and I wanted to take advantage of that.
Nick didn't want to go. Lately he hadn't really wanted to go anywhere, unless it was out of the country or at least to another province. He wanted to 'relax', which to him meant playing the guitar horizontally on the couch in the living room until he felt hungry, and then eating eggs and Indomie, and then maybe fixing his vegetable garden that everyone kept running over with motorcycles.
I never did feel completely at ease traveling by myself around Jayapura. I did it, because I had to, but I never felt 100% safe. As I think I've mentioned before,
(A quick interjection: I'm at work and was just offered a plate of 'Chinese noodles'. I microwaved them, took a bite, and... MIE GORENG. Exactly. Spices and everything. Now there is something that can peacably coexist with this story. If I had ever grown to like mie goreng, I'd ask where he got it, but as it happens, after a six month period of having it every day, once every year or so is quite enough mie goreng for me, thanks.)
my anxiety was muffled there. Lots of potentially super dangerous things happened to me, or went on around me, while I was there, and I never really felt it. But I also never really didn't feel it. I preferred to have Nick with me to diffuse potentially creepy situations, which bothered me the most out of any other 'danger' there. Malaria, whatever, bird flu, fine, Indonesian army marching in the streets with guns aloft, okay, border guards in PNG deigning only to let us in when they felt like it, sure. But getting into harmless confrontations with men on hills who were trying to make me pay them Rp. 30,000 for parking in a public lot? No. I did not like this. It was personal. I had to look someone in the face while they were looking me in the face, trying to dupe me. Such things unsettled me.
So I usually preferred to take Nick (despite the fact that he was actually worse at dealing with these kinds of situations than I was. More often than not, his wallet would open and out would fall Rp. 30,000 before I could open my mouth to argue or raise my hand to snatch the wallet away). But this time I couldn't, and I really wanted to draw this blue-jungled view (blue-jungling was an oddity, as it required a precise percentage of cloud cover) and so I went alone. I got on the motorcycle and navigated the winding, steep, muddy roads that led to the cliff, passing families frying rice in their yards, countless makeshift ping-pong tables, chained up dogs, and pickup trucks full of vegetables. It was a difficult road; steep, and hairpin turns that were especially threatening with someone on the back. I enjoyed the freedom that came with not having to worry if I was going to tip a passenger off the back every time I turned the wheels.
At the top, I parked my bike in the lot outside the chain-link fence of whatever high-ranking government official lived up there (we never did figure that one out). There was one other bike there, and the owners were over on the other side of the sign: Indonesian teenagers holding hands and comparing school notebooks. I waved to them and climbed over to the front of the sign, sitting just below the spread of the 'Y' in 'CITY'. (Here you can see the backwards 'CIT' of city as it appears from up there. For the life of me I cannot find any pictures on the internet of what the sign looks like from the actual city.)
I'd been drawing for awhile, had about half the bay done, when a Papuan man came and sat down next to me, which wasn't unusual - people would just come sit next to us and start talking all the time. Although I miss that now, and wish it wasn't so socially unacceptable to just start talking to people you find interesting, back then I was just extremely in I-need-to-be-alone mode. He wanted to see what I was drawing. I showed him. Delighted, he pointed to my paper, pointed to the view, pointed to the paper again, all the while chattering excitedly and way too fast for me to pick out more than a few words at a time. Then he pointed at my notebook in such an insistent fashion that I realized he wanted me to give it to him. When I did, he flipped to a new page, grabbed up a few pastels, and started tentatively drawing what looked first like a crescent moon, then like a horseshoe with nails sticking out of it, and then like a bracelet with horns, and then a bracelet without horns, and then, finally, it looked like what it was, which was an illustration of his home island of Biak with some (relatively) giant boats sticking out of the port!
By this time I was pretty delighted as well, his mood being contagious, and mostly by gestures we talked about the different things there were to do on Biak (fishing, eating, fishing and fishing, as far as I could gather). As we were flailing our arms madly about, footsteps approached, we looked up, and there were... bules!
Aside from the teachers at our school I think I had seen two bules in Jayapura since I'd arrived, and this was towards the end of our trip. Once was in passing, on a motorcycle, and another was coming out of a bookstore. So this bule encounter - two bules! At once! A couple! Standing right next to me! - fully doubled my bule count, and thus totally shocked me. I froze, and the man next to me kept talking and gesturing and laughing - I mean, one bule, three bules, what's the difference, right?
They were British or something. "Hello," they said.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," said the Papuan man.
"Hello," said the three Indonesian men who had appeared around us a few minutes earlier to watch us draw.
The next thing out of the British couple's mouth was not at all something I expected. I expected, like, 'How are you?' or 'Where are you from?' or 'Enjoying the view?' or something similar, but what I got was, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"
"What?"
"Are. You. Okay?"
"Uh... yes?"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes?"
"Can we help you out?"
"Um... no." The question mark had now disappeared from my voice. It had taken me that long to realize that they were asking because it looked like I was being threatened by a bunch of big bad locals.
"Okay, then, if you're sure," they said... and turned around and left! They didn't even stay to enjoy the view - which, by the way, was stunning, blue and bright, and it didn't even smell like burning trash up there! I'm not trying to knock them too much. I mean, they probably really thought that I was in danger and they wanted to help me. But, shit, the men could have shown some signs of menace at least. As it was, we were all just having a big hippie art circle.
Now, none of the men around me understood English, as far as I knew then or know now, but they weren't stupid, and the couple hadn't addressed them at all. And after they left, it wasn't the same anymore. Everyone kept turning around to see if the couple was coming back, and sort of looking sideways at me like maybe I had wanted to be saved.
Well, if I wrote about it once, I'll just write about it again. This time it will be colored by time and memory and everyone can have fun comparing the two stories to see how my unintentional lies build and build as I get further and further from them. I mean, if sea urchins and G4s can't coexist in my brain, how is this story going to fare against an office full of two-way radios, first-aid kits, and giant flatscreen computers? Probably not well.
But in any case, it was sometime in the one season that Jayapura has, indistinguishable from all the other hot, humid days full of posturing distant clouds. All I know is that it wasn't during our massive water shortage (Christmas, roughly). It was a Saturday. Or a Sunday. I wanted to go up to the Jayapura City sign (imagine the Hollywood sign, but neon [is the Hollywood sign neon? I've seen it probably thousands of times and still can't remember] and up on one of the jungled cliffs that surround the bay, faced outward, to welcome boats, not cars) and draw the view in pastel. I'd done it a few times before, but it was one of those blue jungle days and I wanted to take advantage of that.
Nick didn't want to go. Lately he hadn't really wanted to go anywhere, unless it was out of the country or at least to another province. He wanted to 'relax', which to him meant playing the guitar horizontally on the couch in the living room until he felt hungry, and then eating eggs and Indomie, and then maybe fixing his vegetable garden that everyone kept running over with motorcycles.
I never did feel completely at ease traveling by myself around Jayapura. I did it, because I had to, but I never felt 100% safe. As I think I've mentioned before,
(A quick interjection: I'm at work and was just offered a plate of 'Chinese noodles'. I microwaved them, took a bite, and... MIE GORENG. Exactly. Spices and everything. Now there is something that can peacably coexist with this story. If I had ever grown to like mie goreng, I'd ask where he got it, but as it happens, after a six month period of having it every day, once every year or so is quite enough mie goreng for me, thanks.)
my anxiety was muffled there. Lots of potentially super dangerous things happened to me, or went on around me, while I was there, and I never really felt it. But I also never really didn't feel it. I preferred to have Nick with me to diffuse potentially creepy situations, which bothered me the most out of any other 'danger' there. Malaria, whatever, bird flu, fine, Indonesian army marching in the streets with guns aloft, okay, border guards in PNG deigning only to let us in when they felt like it, sure. But getting into harmless confrontations with men on hills who were trying to make me pay them Rp. 30,000 for parking in a public lot? No. I did not like this. It was personal. I had to look someone in the face while they were looking me in the face, trying to dupe me. Such things unsettled me.
So I usually preferred to take Nick (despite the fact that he was actually worse at dealing with these kinds of situations than I was. More often than not, his wallet would open and out would fall Rp. 30,000 before I could open my mouth to argue or raise my hand to snatch the wallet away). But this time I couldn't, and I really wanted to draw this blue-jungled view (blue-jungling was an oddity, as it required a precise percentage of cloud cover) and so I went alone. I got on the motorcycle and navigated the winding, steep, muddy roads that led to the cliff, passing families frying rice in their yards, countless makeshift ping-pong tables, chained up dogs, and pickup trucks full of vegetables. It was a difficult road; steep, and hairpin turns that were especially threatening with someone on the back. I enjoyed the freedom that came with not having to worry if I was going to tip a passenger off the back every time I turned the wheels.
At the top, I parked my bike in the lot outside the chain-link fence of whatever high-ranking government official lived up there (we never did figure that one out). There was one other bike there, and the owners were over on the other side of the sign: Indonesian teenagers holding hands and comparing school notebooks. I waved to them and climbed over to the front of the sign, sitting just below the spread of the 'Y' in 'CITY'. (Here you can see the backwards 'CIT' of city as it appears from up there. For the life of me I cannot find any pictures on the internet of what the sign looks like from the actual city.)
I'd been drawing for awhile, had about half the bay done, when a Papuan man came and sat down next to me, which wasn't unusual - people would just come sit next to us and start talking all the time. Although I miss that now, and wish it wasn't so socially unacceptable to just start talking to people you find interesting, back then I was just extremely in I-need-to-be-alone mode. He wanted to see what I was drawing. I showed him. Delighted, he pointed to my paper, pointed to the view, pointed to the paper again, all the while chattering excitedly and way too fast for me to pick out more than a few words at a time. Then he pointed at my notebook in such an insistent fashion that I realized he wanted me to give it to him. When I did, he flipped to a new page, grabbed up a few pastels, and started tentatively drawing what looked first like a crescent moon, then like a horseshoe with nails sticking out of it, and then like a bracelet with horns, and then a bracelet without horns, and then, finally, it looked like what it was, which was an illustration of his home island of Biak with some (relatively) giant boats sticking out of the port!
By this time I was pretty delighted as well, his mood being contagious, and mostly by gestures we talked about the different things there were to do on Biak (fishing, eating, fishing and fishing, as far as I could gather). As we were flailing our arms madly about, footsteps approached, we looked up, and there were... bules!
Aside from the teachers at our school I think I had seen two bules in Jayapura since I'd arrived, and this was towards the end of our trip. Once was in passing, on a motorcycle, and another was coming out of a bookstore. So this bule encounter - two bules! At once! A couple! Standing right next to me! - fully doubled my bule count, and thus totally shocked me. I froze, and the man next to me kept talking and gesturing and laughing - I mean, one bule, three bules, what's the difference, right?
They were British or something. "Hello," they said.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," said the Papuan man.
"Hello," said the three Indonesian men who had appeared around us a few minutes earlier to watch us draw.
The next thing out of the British couple's mouth was not at all something I expected. I expected, like, 'How are you?' or 'Where are you from?' or 'Enjoying the view?' or something similar, but what I got was, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"
"What?"
"Are. You. Okay?"
"Uh... yes?"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes?"
"Can we help you out?"
"Um... no." The question mark had now disappeared from my voice. It had taken me that long to realize that they were asking because it looked like I was being threatened by a bunch of big bad locals.
"Okay, then, if you're sure," they said... and turned around and left! They didn't even stay to enjoy the view - which, by the way, was stunning, blue and bright, and it didn't even smell like burning trash up there! I'm not trying to knock them too much. I mean, they probably really thought that I was in danger and they wanted to help me. But, shit, the men could have shown some signs of menace at least. As it was, we were all just having a big hippie art circle.
Now, none of the men around me understood English, as far as I knew then or know now, but they weren't stupid, and the couple hadn't addressed them at all. And after they left, it wasn't the same anymore. Everyone kept turning around to see if the couple was coming back, and sort of looking sideways at me like maybe I had wanted to be saved.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
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.
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.
Reading an article about animal liberation (in this case, whale/shark/fish/sea cucumber liberation) started becoming a little awkward when I began noting the author's and the interviewees' struggles with pronouns. Here I was, sprawled nearly upside-down on my couch (head on the butt cushion, legs over the back cushions), meant to have my heart breaking for these poor sea creatures. I mean, these guys - these volunteers who had sacrificed whatever they left back in their normal lives to come out here on what were essentially pirate ships for all the protection they got from any government - were describing the bloody struggling fin-thumping sharks on the decks of boats, and tuna dangling by the roofs of their mouths, and so forth, and I was going along, heart in my own mouth, wishing I hadn't been raised on sushi so I didn't love it so much, when suddenly the pronouns started becoming palpably forced, or else noticeably omitted.
Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.
Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.
The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.
So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.
A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.
And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.
Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.
Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.
The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.
So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.
A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.
And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
http://whenwechange.blogspot.com/
is where I am currently writing instead. It's not just that I am no longer newly Indonesian, or even Indonesian at all, but rather that I'm not really in a journalling mood lately. I am in a snobby scholar mood, and would rather write an interactive research paper.
I will continue to write here when I am not in a snobby scholar mood, or have things to write that are not related to change, which I'm sure will start happening often once I realize my other blog constrains me.
is where I am currently writing instead. It's not just that I am no longer newly Indonesian, or even Indonesian at all, but rather that I'm not really in a journalling mood lately. I am in a snobby scholar mood, and would rather write an interactive research paper.
I will continue to write here when I am not in a snobby scholar mood, or have things to write that are not related to change, which I'm sure will start happening often once I realize my other blog constrains me.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Whenever I go on an extended trip like the one I just took, I vow to keep a daily diary, because I know that as soon as things start happening I will immediately become blinded to the fact that I won't remember these things later.
This vow is hardly kept. It was not kept this time. It would flash through my mind and, blinded, I would ask myself, how is it possible that what I want to write down could ever slip from my mind? How is it possible that I could ever become separated from these words? I actually wrote paragraphs in my head, thinking I would be able to recall them easy as reading a book. Despite years of this not working, I wholeheartedly believed it would work this time, there not usually being pen or paper or time to commit them to ink.
Only two days back, and I feel like I never left. Nor do I remember any stories I wanted to tell, or atmospheres I wanted to portray. It feels betraying and a bit silly to be surprised, but I'm surprised anyway. This should not keep me from trying, even if the trying turns out to be in snippets.
My favorite part of the trip, shared by, I think, no one, was Bean Hollow beach a few miles south of Half Moon Bay. The beach is violent and jagged, presided over by a sign with no less than five strong reasons why one should not swim or surf: sleeper tides, contaminated water, unexpected currents, hidden rocks, sharks. It could hardly be mistaken for a swimming beach, anyway. Mostly, it's foggy and cool, with the waves rolling in and breaking inches from the shore, suggesting a cruel ground dropoff. When the water sucks back into the ocean, it pulls at tiny pebbles and throws them in the air when another wave hits.
On the way over to the volcanic cliffs at the south side, we found a purple starfish with one long leg on the beach. Thinking of that cheesy inspirational starfish story, I threw it back in, even though I don't know how to tell if a starfish is alive or dead. This one was pretty dry and sandy. It was probably dead. Just in case, I threw it out of reach of the waves breaking.
On the cliffs themselves, the rock is a slippery, reddish yellow color that looks almost plastic, except that there are barnacles clinging to every surface and deep grooves cut by water. The deepest grooves have become tidepools, filled with mussels and sea anemones and (presumably) live starfish. The watery end of the cliffs that get pounded at both low and high tide is blanketed in little sea plants with long skinny trunks that look as though a strong wind would crack them, but they are buffeted every five seconds by crashing waves and show no signs of breaking.
I remember once letting sea anemones suck on my fingers when I camped outside of Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving a few years ago, but the ones in these tidepool looked meaner and spikier, almost sea urchin-like, so I refrained, but we did try to feed one a blade of sea grass, which it eagerly accepted, then spit out.
I could have spent all day on this beach (would have camped on it happily despite hating camping) but we were en route to San Francisco and had to sort of hurry. Luckily, a few days earlier, we camped just above another beach in Big Sur, from which whale/seal sightings, rock clamberings, steppings on gross seaweed detritus that felt like corpses under my sneakers, and hysterical runnings from unpredictable waves abounded. There's something I like about the terrifying possibility of getting marooned on a tiny beach by the tide, so we leapt across wet rocks along the coast as foam from the waves splashed us. I saw a tiny orange grip over the top of a slimy rock and thought for a moment it was a lobster, but it was a starfish.
This vow is hardly kept. It was not kept this time. It would flash through my mind and, blinded, I would ask myself, how is it possible that what I want to write down could ever slip from my mind? How is it possible that I could ever become separated from these words? I actually wrote paragraphs in my head, thinking I would be able to recall them easy as reading a book. Despite years of this not working, I wholeheartedly believed it would work this time, there not usually being pen or paper or time to commit them to ink.
Only two days back, and I feel like I never left. Nor do I remember any stories I wanted to tell, or atmospheres I wanted to portray. It feels betraying and a bit silly to be surprised, but I'm surprised anyway. This should not keep me from trying, even if the trying turns out to be in snippets.
My favorite part of the trip, shared by, I think, no one, was Bean Hollow beach a few miles south of Half Moon Bay. The beach is violent and jagged, presided over by a sign with no less than five strong reasons why one should not swim or surf: sleeper tides, contaminated water, unexpected currents, hidden rocks, sharks. It could hardly be mistaken for a swimming beach, anyway. Mostly, it's foggy and cool, with the waves rolling in and breaking inches from the shore, suggesting a cruel ground dropoff. When the water sucks back into the ocean, it pulls at tiny pebbles and throws them in the air when another wave hits.
On the way over to the volcanic cliffs at the south side, we found a purple starfish with one long leg on the beach. Thinking of that cheesy inspirational starfish story, I threw it back in, even though I don't know how to tell if a starfish is alive or dead. This one was pretty dry and sandy. It was probably dead. Just in case, I threw it out of reach of the waves breaking.
On the cliffs themselves, the rock is a slippery, reddish yellow color that looks almost plastic, except that there are barnacles clinging to every surface and deep grooves cut by water. The deepest grooves have become tidepools, filled with mussels and sea anemones and (presumably) live starfish. The watery end of the cliffs that get pounded at both low and high tide is blanketed in little sea plants with long skinny trunks that look as though a strong wind would crack them, but they are buffeted every five seconds by crashing waves and show no signs of breaking.
I remember once letting sea anemones suck on my fingers when I camped outside of Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving a few years ago, but the ones in these tidepool looked meaner and spikier, almost sea urchin-like, so I refrained, but we did try to feed one a blade of sea grass, which it eagerly accepted, then spit out.
I could have spent all day on this beach (would have camped on it happily despite hating camping) but we were en route to San Francisco and had to sort of hurry. Luckily, a few days earlier, we camped just above another beach in Big Sur, from which whale/seal sightings, rock clamberings, steppings on gross seaweed detritus that felt like corpses under my sneakers, and hysterical runnings from unpredictable waves abounded. There's something I like about the terrifying possibility of getting marooned on a tiny beach by the tide, so we leapt across wet rocks along the coast as foam from the waves splashed us. I saw a tiny orange grip over the top of a slimy rock and thought for a moment it was a lobster, but it was a starfish.
Friday, August 01, 2008
For the next two weeks, I'll be posting, if I'm posting at all, from somewhere along the coast of California, anywhere from Los Angeles all the way up to Eureka. Maybe we will play a game where I will describe something that happened to me and give lots of place details, and then you guys will have to guess where I'm posting from! Or else maybe we'll play another game, called 'Hannah has no internet on extended road trips and will not be posting at all'. Both games sound equally fun! How shall we ever choose?
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
If you have ever found yourself wondering why Bear Peak is called Bear Peak, and why Bear Canyon is called Bear Canyon, wonder no more: it is because they are both inhabited by bears. Bears rustling in the trees just out of sight, bears drinking by the river just out of sight, and at least one bear WALKING ON THE HIKING TRAIL, very much within sight!
Climbing Bear Peak, elevation 8461 (3000+ vertical feet from the starting point) and 11 miles roundtrip, has been Dan's and my hiking goal for the summer. Every hike we did was supposed to lead up to this one. Yes, it is a weakling goal and yes, I have 60 year old coworkers who do twice that every weekend carrying 50 pound backpacks with snowshoes on and raging windstorms around their heads, but for us, it is a big deal. And this weekend, we hadn't really planned on doing it. Not yet. It was a lofty, eventual goal, one to be mulled over and planned for and possibly never actually done. Instead, we had planned just to walk up Bear Canyon trail and walk down, itself nearly a 5 mile hike. But when we got to what would have been the end, the peak looked so close and tantalizing, we just couldn't resist. "Climb me," it purred from what looked like ten feet away, but was really like ten thousand. "Walk on my soft, gently rolling west ridge. Enjoy my slopes and curves. I'm right here! You can nearly reach out and touch me! Look how flat my trails are! Sure, at the end I'm a steep pointed monster of a cascade of boulders, that will necessitate nearly climbing, and falling often, but never mind that! I am worth it! Look how close I am!"
Well, we succumbed to its charms, soft slopes and insane rock scrambles all, and enjoyed a breathtaking view of Boulder and the Indian Peaks, whilst eating salami-mozzarella-spinach rolls and listening to the hardcore hikers around us, not even sweating (sample statement: 'Okay, let's get out of here and hit South Boulder!' [South Boulder Peak is the next peak south, 60 feet higher])
On the way down, right at the junction where we could choose between going down Bear Canyon the way we came, or going up another insane peak, Dan suddenly stopped in his tracks and pointed at Bear Canyon trail, saying in a low monotone that I almost mistook for joking, "Thatisafuckingbear."
And it was a fucking bear, ambling down the trail for all the world as if he were human, following the set path and not deviating from it for a second, not even to skip the cumbersome switchbacks. He followed the switchbacks, pausing briefly to look around. Luckily, he didn't notice us up at the overlook, clinging to each other like children and staring at him as though he were an alien from another planet, and not an animal wandering through his natural habitat.
My surprise surprised me, hitting me as indignance. Like it was my right to walk on the trail without a bear on it, when we've taken away so much of the bear's land already. It was only a flash, motivated by fear, and it passed - I would give up my weekends of hiking in a second if it meant the bear could have its land back - but I saw the same thing on the faces of everyone we told.
The people we walked with on the way down - we figured walking together and talking loudly would alert the bear to our presence without scaring him - we said we had seen a bear and their hands flew to their mouths like we had just told them a child had died. And the people we ran into a little later, on the way up, when we told them, the guy in the front immediately turned around, as if to go back the way he had came - no way was he going to go up a trail on which a BEAR had been seen! A BEAR!
I would venture to guess that that whole area is teeming with bears, just that most of them don't use the trails. All the rustling we heard on the way up... I'm sure lots of it came from bears. But it's easy to rationalize those things when you're in the city, and not so easy when you are looking at a bear's claws in detail and realizing that bears can rip into cars to get food if they want to.
Climbing Bear Peak, elevation 8461 (3000+ vertical feet from the starting point) and 11 miles roundtrip, has been Dan's and my hiking goal for the summer. Every hike we did was supposed to lead up to this one. Yes, it is a weakling goal and yes, I have 60 year old coworkers who do twice that every weekend carrying 50 pound backpacks with snowshoes on and raging windstorms around their heads, but for us, it is a big deal. And this weekend, we hadn't really planned on doing it. Not yet. It was a lofty, eventual goal, one to be mulled over and planned for and possibly never actually done. Instead, we had planned just to walk up Bear Canyon trail and walk down, itself nearly a 5 mile hike. But when we got to what would have been the end, the peak looked so close and tantalizing, we just couldn't resist. "Climb me," it purred from what looked like ten feet away, but was really like ten thousand. "Walk on my soft, gently rolling west ridge. Enjoy my slopes and curves. I'm right here! You can nearly reach out and touch me! Look how flat my trails are! Sure, at the end I'm a steep pointed monster of a cascade of boulders, that will necessitate nearly climbing, and falling often, but never mind that! I am worth it! Look how close I am!"
Well, we succumbed to its charms, soft slopes and insane rock scrambles all, and enjoyed a breathtaking view of Boulder and the Indian Peaks, whilst eating salami-mozzarella-spinach rolls and listening to the hardcore hikers around us, not even sweating (sample statement: 'Okay, let's get out of here and hit South Boulder!' [South Boulder Peak is the next peak south, 60 feet higher])
On the way down, right at the junction where we could choose between going down Bear Canyon the way we came, or going up another insane peak, Dan suddenly stopped in his tracks and pointed at Bear Canyon trail, saying in a low monotone that I almost mistook for joking, "Thatisafuckingbear."
And it was a fucking bear, ambling down the trail for all the world as if he were human, following the set path and not deviating from it for a second, not even to skip the cumbersome switchbacks. He followed the switchbacks, pausing briefly to look around. Luckily, he didn't notice us up at the overlook, clinging to each other like children and staring at him as though he were an alien from another planet, and not an animal wandering through his natural habitat.
My surprise surprised me, hitting me as indignance. Like it was my right to walk on the trail without a bear on it, when we've taken away so much of the bear's land already. It was only a flash, motivated by fear, and it passed - I would give up my weekends of hiking in a second if it meant the bear could have its land back - but I saw the same thing on the faces of everyone we told.
The people we walked with on the way down - we figured walking together and talking loudly would alert the bear to our presence without scaring him - we said we had seen a bear and their hands flew to their mouths like we had just told them a child had died. And the people we ran into a little later, on the way up, when we told them, the guy in the front immediately turned around, as if to go back the way he had came - no way was he going to go up a trail on which a BEAR had been seen! A BEAR!
I would venture to guess that that whole area is teeming with bears, just that most of them don't use the trails. All the rustling we heard on the way up... I'm sure lots of it came from bears. But it's easy to rationalize those things when you're in the city, and not so easy when you are looking at a bear's claws in detail and realizing that bears can rip into cars to get food if they want to.
Friday, July 18, 2008
I think I've had it about up to the ceiling with chirpy receptionist voices. Not that it's limited to receptionists. Oh, no. Wandering salesgirls who want to know if there's anything you need help finding today, or checkout girls who want to know if you found everything okay today. Girls at the register in restaurants who ask if that'll be all for me today, girls who answer the phones at my insurance company and tell me first that they have changed their policy on paying for my composite tooth fillings, refuse to engage in a discussion, and at the end thank me for choosing MetLife for my dental insurance needs and tell me to have a very nice day today.
(And why do they always tack 'today' onto the end of their sentences as if it might be possible they were talking about tomorrow, or next month, or 2054?)
I don't want to be sexist but there's just no guy equivalent. Not that there aren't annoying guys in these positions, but at least they're annoying in their own individual ways. Like the pompous guy in the shoe store, for example, who has become a running joke ever since I was trying on some Chacos and my feet are skinny so the straps were too long and dragged on the ground, and he said, "True Chaco enthusiasts, the ones who climb fourteeners, say that the strap dragging just won't make a difference. The soles are so rugged that you won't slip."
Ever since then, every time I have a problem with my Chacos (which I bought, by the way, from another store) it's, 'True Chaco enthusiasts don't mind when rocks get stuck in the rubber and scrape their feet!'... 'true Chaco enthusiasts know that the toe strap randomly tightening and cutting off circulation is just another wonderful feature that keeps your foot snug!'
I know that these positions are mind numbing and the way most people deal with that is to become robotic and detached. It must work for them, to just switch off their personality entirely and become an automaton until it's clock-out time. It's never worked for me. Even though I have to say the same thing into the phone approximately 20 times a day, I never say it the same way twice. It isn't a script. It's the answer to a question that some individual called up to ask, and they didn't call to ask the question to an automated answer machine. If you take the time to read the customer's mood, you can have a few laughs and make a temporary phone friend. I've done this. It makes the day brighter - it doesn't make it go longer - and it puts me in a better mood than chirping, 'Our service runs from 7AM to 10PM. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Thank you for calling the HOP and have a nice daaaay!'
Plus, I know most girls' voices aren't doll-like and squeaky naturally. No one sounds like that outside their job. But as soon as they put on their uniform, they become indistinguishable from one another. The salesgirl singsong. Almost as ubiquitous as the sorority girl smokers' rasp or the frat boy bellow, the tour group twitter or the ingratiating whine of an underling.
It's the sound of the absence of a person and the presence of a utility. Personhood has nothing to do with the goal of selling shirts, so it's phased out. I disagree with that conclusion, actually; for me personhood has a lot to do with the goal of selling. The most I've ever spent on clothes, and the happiest I've been in a clothes store, has been in a tall girls shop after having a friendly bitch-session with the two saleswomen about how clothing for women is woefully inadequately sized for anyone not between 5'3" and 5'7", and how clothing manufacturers seem to think that, say, '4' is a perfectly descriptive size tag for women, but men get to have their waist size and inseam size in inches and have a tag of, say, '32x34'. It had an effect on how much I spent, definitely. The products had to be good, obviously, but that conversation was the difference between one and two pairs of pants.
And being an automaton just contributes to this sprawling sense of automaton-ness you get when you spend a day out and about. Go to the coffeeshop and you'll find legions of people glued to laptops sipping drinks and ignoring each other, to the bank and you'll find a person behind the counter who has less personality than the ATMs, there solely to serve you, and it creates a strange sensation, reducing yourselves to 'one who wants to deposit money' and 'one who's there for the purpose of depositing your money'. Etc.
My local grocery store seems to be exempt from this, strangely enough. The woman behind the fish counter always shares her disapproval of the marinade I choose for my salmon, which I find funny. Someone's always ringing up something wrong or the scanner starts malfunctioning and the 'section leaders' know absolutely nothing about their section, to the point where the condiment guy didn't know what oyster sauce was, but I love it there and so does everyone in the neighborhood, because their food is great and organic and costs half as much as Whole Foods.
But me and my neighborhood must be the exception and everyone else must enjoy the automatons, because that's what businesses are choosing and so it must be turning profit. Maybe someone will need to explain that to me someday.
(And why do they always tack 'today' onto the end of their sentences as if it might be possible they were talking about tomorrow, or next month, or 2054?)
I don't want to be sexist but there's just no guy equivalent. Not that there aren't annoying guys in these positions, but at least they're annoying in their own individual ways. Like the pompous guy in the shoe store, for example, who has become a running joke ever since I was trying on some Chacos and my feet are skinny so the straps were too long and dragged on the ground, and he said, "True Chaco enthusiasts, the ones who climb fourteeners, say that the strap dragging just won't make a difference. The soles are so rugged that you won't slip."
Ever since then, every time I have a problem with my Chacos (which I bought, by the way, from another store) it's, 'True Chaco enthusiasts don't mind when rocks get stuck in the rubber and scrape their feet!'... 'true Chaco enthusiasts know that the toe strap randomly tightening and cutting off circulation is just another wonderful feature that keeps your foot snug!'
I know that these positions are mind numbing and the way most people deal with that is to become robotic and detached. It must work for them, to just switch off their personality entirely and become an automaton until it's clock-out time. It's never worked for me. Even though I have to say the same thing into the phone approximately 20 times a day, I never say it the same way twice. It isn't a script. It's the answer to a question that some individual called up to ask, and they didn't call to ask the question to an automated answer machine. If you take the time to read the customer's mood, you can have a few laughs and make a temporary phone friend. I've done this. It makes the day brighter - it doesn't make it go longer - and it puts me in a better mood than chirping, 'Our service runs from 7AM to 10PM. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Thank you for calling the HOP and have a nice daaaay!'
Plus, I know most girls' voices aren't doll-like and squeaky naturally. No one sounds like that outside their job. But as soon as they put on their uniform, they become indistinguishable from one another. The salesgirl singsong. Almost as ubiquitous as the sorority girl smokers' rasp or the frat boy bellow, the tour group twitter or the ingratiating whine of an underling.
It's the sound of the absence of a person and the presence of a utility. Personhood has nothing to do with the goal of selling shirts, so it's phased out. I disagree with that conclusion, actually; for me personhood has a lot to do with the goal of selling. The most I've ever spent on clothes, and the happiest I've been in a clothes store, has been in a tall girls shop after having a friendly bitch-session with the two saleswomen about how clothing for women is woefully inadequately sized for anyone not between 5'3" and 5'7", and how clothing manufacturers seem to think that, say, '4' is a perfectly descriptive size tag for women, but men get to have their waist size and inseam size in inches and have a tag of, say, '32x34'. It had an effect on how much I spent, definitely. The products had to be good, obviously, but that conversation was the difference between one and two pairs of pants.
And being an automaton just contributes to this sprawling sense of automaton-ness you get when you spend a day out and about. Go to the coffeeshop and you'll find legions of people glued to laptops sipping drinks and ignoring each other, to the bank and you'll find a person behind the counter who has less personality than the ATMs, there solely to serve you, and it creates a strange sensation, reducing yourselves to 'one who wants to deposit money' and 'one who's there for the purpose of depositing your money'. Etc.
My local grocery store seems to be exempt from this, strangely enough. The woman behind the fish counter always shares her disapproval of the marinade I choose for my salmon, which I find funny. Someone's always ringing up something wrong or the scanner starts malfunctioning and the 'section leaders' know absolutely nothing about their section, to the point where the condiment guy didn't know what oyster sauce was, but I love it there and so does everyone in the neighborhood, because their food is great and organic and costs half as much as Whole Foods.
But me and my neighborhood must be the exception and everyone else must enjoy the automatons, because that's what businesses are choosing and so it must be turning profit. Maybe someone will need to explain that to me someday.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
There's a fox who lives, or hunts, or both, in the area around my workplace. She's always emerging out of the tall grass that borders Goose Creek, or trotting out from under a tow truck in the city towing lot, her mouth full of fresh rabbit or mouse, and nearly making me wreck on my bike. Today she was on the bike path, following it, as if she were human. When the path turned, she turned; when it went under a bridge, she went under the bridge with it. Due to it being 6AM when I'm riding, and not wearing my contacts, at first glance I thought she was a human - maybe a super short human, but a human nonetheless - taking a morning jog on the wrong side of the bike path. My first reaction was actually to be annoyed that some idiot would be jogging on the left side.
The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.
We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.
Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.
Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.
Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.
And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.
I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.
The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.
We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.
Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.
Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.
Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.
And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.
I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Having lived in a studio apartment for a year, I fear I have become a complete psycho who is now unfit to cohabitate with any other living being. However, beginning in August, I will no longer be able to:
-use my dresser as a dirty clothes hamper and my floor as a closet
-hang resolutions (exercise-wise and otherwise) and notes to myself all over the walls
-perfect vocal tracks by singing the same 4 second line into the microphone at top volume over and over and over again for 3 hours
-flesh out article ideas in the shower by having a two-sided conversation with myself
-justify not being able to cook by protesting that I live in an efficiency and only have two burners and no oven
-justify not doing dishes by protesting that my sink is practically too small to fit my hands in, let alone days of dirty dishes
-ride out bad moods by hiding from everyone I know for a week
-watch America's Next Top Model at top volume... that's just too embarrassing
-walk around naked, of course
Most bullets on that list are invisible, because they are too embarrassing to list, just as they would be too embarrassing to perform in a house with another person, rendering this entry sort of pointless.
-use my dresser as a dirty clothes hamper and my floor as a closet
-hang resolutions (exercise-wise and otherwise) and notes to myself all over the walls
-perfect vocal tracks by singing the same 4 second line into the microphone at top volume over and over and over again for 3 hours
-flesh out article ideas in the shower by having a two-sided conversation with myself
-justify not being able to cook by protesting that I live in an efficiency and only have two burners and no oven
-justify not doing dishes by protesting that my sink is practically too small to fit my hands in, let alone days of dirty dishes
-ride out bad moods by hiding from everyone I know for a week
-watch America's Next Top Model at top volume... that's just too embarrassing
-walk around naked, of course
Most bullets on that list are invisible, because they are too embarrassing to list, just as they would be too embarrassing to perform in a house with another person, rendering this entry sort of pointless.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Re-reading some entries from that most grinding of times, winter (or should I say 'winter', since it was 95 degrees every day) of 2006, it occurs to me that I should supply some positive experiences that I remember from around then. To read the archives, one would think I spent all my time getting endlessly harassed by corrupt and pushy locals, eating MSG straight from the carton, bringing Pocari Sweat to Nick when he threw up, which was all the time, running out of drinking water, and wearing sweaty old moldy clothes.
This was not the case. Really. Despite what my past self is screaming at me to let you believe. She was angry at her bosses, homesick, hungry, hated half of her job, and had been hopelessly spoiled all her life up until that point. Boiling her drinking water, eating the same thing two days in a row, having to walk up the road to get gas to use for the stove, hand-washing clothes at the outdoor faucet - these things all deeply disturbed her, though she hated to admit that it was as simple as that (as simple as being that lazy). Instead, she struggled to find an elaborate on everything that bothered her about Jayapura, and that's what came out in this journal. Instead of this:
One day, it may have actually been the first time, Nick and I decided to bike over to Skow Sae, a beach about an hour and a half away by motorcycle (the same place I was coming from when I accidentally felt up my fellow English teacher). Skow Sae was the only beach we ever found that resembled the beaches here - sand bottom, a slow deepening, a white, clean beach, and waves fit for bodysurfing. Every other beach, most especially the ones in the city, were covered in coral, sea urchins, rocks, etc, and had tiny, steeply sloping, often rocky beaches. They were impossible to swim in without heavy duty shoes on and an alert mind, ever ready for an urchin to shoot you in the finger with one of its spines.
But Skow Sae was perfect. The Australian teachers all compared it to the famous beaches of the Australian east coast. And bordering the beach was a little Papuan village with a dirt road running through it, full of ever-cackling chickens, half-wild dogs, and flowers bursting out of every jungle corridor. We always parked our bike at the end of the road, where the road turned into a carefully crafted soccer field next to a little house.
This day was especially hot and mercilessly sunny, and there was no shade to park our bike in, so we parked it in the usual place and walked over to the beach. I don't remember which visit this was - could have been the one where I unwittingly demonstrated my box of pastels to a group of staring women and children, or the one where Nick tried to surf on various pieces of driftwood, or the one where we spent three hours trying to open a coconut that had just fallen from a tree, finally got it, and spent the most blissful time gulping down the milk and chewing on the meat, or perhaps even the one where we went on a walk through the jungle at the end of the beach and saw all kinds of terrifying spiders. But the worry was always in the back of our minds that when we got back to our bike, the (black) seat was going to be hot as a frying pan and it would be a very uncomfortable ride back home that would unavoidably end in bright red asses.
When we eventually returned to our bike to make the trip back to Jayapura, we almost, for a panicky second, thought that our bike was gone, because there was nothing resembling it around the little house at the end of the road. But upon closer inspection, we saw what looked like a little cave made out of leaves sitting where our bike had been... and upon closer inspection, we saw our bike peeking out of both ends. Someone had built a banana leaf shelter to protect our bike from the heat!
We walked in circles around the structure, reluctant to tear it down to get our bike out. We looked around for the benevolent stranger so that we could thank him but saw nobody. It was almost the time that we had to get on our bike so we'd get home before dark, when a man stepped onto the porch of the little house and waved to us, then began lecturing us in very broken Indonesian about the dangers of leaving our bike in the sun! He waved his hands around and made sun-shining motions and burning motions clearly enough that there was no doubt he had made the shelter.
To thank him we shared some of our Whole Foods trail mix with him (so it must have been early in our trip, if we still had Whole Foods trail mix from home). He gingerly tried every individual item in the trail mix, acting as though any given piece might poison him any second. As I recall, he ate one cranberry, one raisin, one sesame stick, one seed, one peanut, and every single coconut-rolled date he could find. As soon as he bit into his first coconut rolled date (after much convincing; those things look exactly like pieces of human poo rolled in rocks) a huge smile spread across his face and he immediately thrust his hands inside the bag to find as many more of them as he could. I don't know if it was the coconut or what - it occurred to me only later that those were the only soft things in the trail mix, and he had pretty worn down teeth - but I was happy enough to give them up even though they were my favorite, too.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
I just love the phrase, "What am I doing?" It's the simplest and least insane way to imply that you feel like you are more than one person, and the other half of you is disobeying somehow.
Most often, it comes out of someone driving, as they turn onto the wrong street. Or someone who absentminded lights a cigarette, having forgotten that they're supposed to have quit. Or out of someone who's had a nasty attack of nostalgia. Well, nostalgia's not right - that feeling when, well -
I worked at NightRide for two years. It was a service that drove students home (or, as it happened, from party to party to party to party...) after dark. I started in September of '04, right after I moved into a new place, and biked home using the same route every time, so as not to be surprised by anything unexpected at 2:00AM, when my shift ended.
One night, I clocked out, found my bike, and rode straight to a place I had lived in for just two months, two years ago. I tied my bike outside and was halfway to opening the back door when I realized what I was doing. "What I am doing?" I said, out loud, before the annoyance set in that now I had to ride four miles uphill to my real house.
That feeling. It's not nostalgia, because I wasn't longing for or feeling the presence of my old home. I just ended up there accidentally. And it wasn't out of habit, because I had never made that particular ride before. It wasn't even exhaustion making my actions random... I had my 2AM burst of post-work energy.
So what's that feeling called, Wikipedia? Huh? That feeling when your body does something without your brain's approval? Where your brain is on, it's alert, but distracted, maybe, and your body goes and does completely way unexpected and inexplicable? You don't feel like two people, not quite, but you do sort of wonder what's driving the body, if you're not driving it. You're split, sort of, and you keep your brain focused for the next few days, worrying that if you don't, your body might decide to buy a plane ticket and fly to another country. Before you know it you'll wake up in a hostel in Estonia and say, with conviction this time, 'WHAT AM I DOING?'
Most often, it comes out of someone driving, as they turn onto the wrong street. Or someone who absentminded lights a cigarette, having forgotten that they're supposed to have quit. Or out of someone who's had a nasty attack of nostalgia. Well, nostalgia's not right - that feeling when, well -
I worked at NightRide for two years. It was a service that drove students home (or, as it happened, from party to party to party to party...) after dark. I started in September of '04, right after I moved into a new place, and biked home using the same route every time, so as not to be surprised by anything unexpected at 2:00AM, when my shift ended.
One night, I clocked out, found my bike, and rode straight to a place I had lived in for just two months, two years ago. I tied my bike outside and was halfway to opening the back door when I realized what I was doing. "What I am doing?" I said, out loud, before the annoyance set in that now I had to ride four miles uphill to my real house.
That feeling. It's not nostalgia, because I wasn't longing for or feeling the presence of my old home. I just ended up there accidentally. And it wasn't out of habit, because I had never made that particular ride before. It wasn't even exhaustion making my actions random... I had my 2AM burst of post-work energy.
So what's that feeling called, Wikipedia? Huh? That feeling when your body does something without your brain's approval? Where your brain is on, it's alert, but distracted, maybe, and your body goes and does completely way unexpected and inexplicable? You don't feel like two people, not quite, but you do sort of wonder what's driving the body, if you're not driving it. You're split, sort of, and you keep your brain focused for the next few days, worrying that if you don't, your body might decide to buy a plane ticket and fly to another country. Before you know it you'll wake up in a hostel in Estonia and say, with conviction this time, 'WHAT AM I DOING?'
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