(written 8/6, delayed publishing due to itinerant Internet)

Up until Hefei, we were shielded from the night noises: the constant, and I do mean constant, car/bus/motorcycle horns; the hawkers hawking; the screeching brakes. In Xi'an, we stayed on the 22nd floor, and the air was so thick and the windows so few that no noise made it up; in Beijing we lived in a dank, windowless basement (which, incidentally, made it very difficult to tell when it was morning).

In Hefei, seven floors is not enough to dull it. Everyone honks like if they didn't honk, they wouldn't exist. Motorcycles honk in lieu of using their headlamps at night. Buses honk as they turn left against an oncoming flow of traffic, cutting off absolutely everyone with the right of way in the process. Cars honk as they drive through alleys they have no right driving through, alleys that are 1 or 2 centimeters wider than they are, and this honk is meant to tell pedestrians to get out of the way. Well, whither, car? Would you like me to scale the walls of this grocery?

This is a provincial capital, but one without many attractions, and so the residents are constantly surprised by us. It doesn't help that a number if them seem perpetually to be indisposed whenever we enter their domains. At the provincial museum, every exhibit we went into we surprised some attendant eating noodles out of a Tupperware. And at the Botanic Gardens, the woman selling chime-stone smashing mallets was fast asleep until I jangled some kuai down on the counter, and the woman overseeing the park water bottles and ice cream bars was doing her makeup.

Overall, though, the surprise becomes friendly, and almost everyone in Hefei is good natured, even as they scold each other. We had barely stepped off the 7am train when a beggar approached my plastic stool as I ate churro and soy milk breakfast. The woman who had sold it to me turned to him: "They are new friends to China! Why do you want to bother them?" She said it playfully, though, and the beggar wandered off grinning. Just moments later, a group of young policemen came by for what seemed to be the daily ceremonial ritual of telling the vendors their tables and chairs couldn't be in the street. One old lady vendor swatted a cop with her newspaper.

(by the way... I am writing these with the Blogger app, which has no formatting whatsoever, and Chinese Internet blocks Blogger itself. So I have no idea how any of these entries are showing up on a browser. If it's wall o' text, or worse, sorry.)

(written 8/4, posted at first wifi opportunity)

Beijing has dutifully shown me its many faces.

On arrival, the city was drenched and chilled, its residents dodging puddles via dislodged bricks. Our taxi driver craned his head out the open drivers side window to see the traffic on the freeway, since his front window was too fogged. (He was on his cell phone too, but that goes without saying.) Then, two days later, we sweated atop the temple at Jingshan Park and looked over a brilliant clear city. Beijingers, shocked at such a thing, flooded the lookout points, and even more choked the Forbidden City, which, luckily, we skipped, but could still see an aerial view from the hill.

We rushed through Houhai, a lakeside nightmare of overpriced lounges with pink velvet couches lining the 'shore' and rickshaw drivers screaming HELLO, trying to get back to Nanluogo Xiang, the 'artsy sector', so we could get some wifi, which we ended up just stealing from the backpackers hostel. Later, at the late night skewer bar down the street from our hotel (in a neighborhood with rather fewer tourists), I noted that the same price (35 RMB/US$5.50) bought either, in the touristy areas, one solitary glass of mango juice... or, in our neighborhood: 2 variously spiced chicken wing skewers, 2 shrimp skewers, 5 potato skewers, 5 eggplant skewers, 2 mantou skewers and 2 tofu skin skewers. Given that the chicken wings and shrimp especially blew the pants off any bar wings in the states, I'd say the choice is an easy one. The question of how on earth events in my life have come to lead to my traveling around Asia with someone who orders skewered BREAD in such a restaurant (as this is what mantou is) is another thing entirely.

Exhausted after a day of exploring the Terracotta Warrior Museum followed by street badminton made hilarious by a strong easterly wind, we sprawled lazily on our futon and perused a takeout menu. Julian started laboriously translating the menu line by line, and not too far down was the following choice:

"Old dry mother stir fried intestinal squares"

Too bad the restaurant turned out to be closed because that definitely would've been on order.

Oh, what's that, you want me to dedicate more than a brief reference to the Terracotta warriors rather than breeze by it on the way to an anecdote about food?

Well, the warriors are imposing in parts, piled willy nilly and cracked in others, and surrounded by the strangest touristy village filled with things like KFC and foofy pomegranate breweries right next door to one another, all housed in buildings crafted superficially to look village-like.

Probably the strangest part of the whole place, though, is in a corner of the gift shop where they're selling books telling the story of the farmer who inadvertently first stumbled upon the warriors while sowing his crops or whatever. They literally have the actual farmer, an old bemused looking guy, signing copies of his book and posing for pictures with cheesing families at the edge of the table.

I mean, has he had, and does he have, to do this every day the museum is and has been open since the 1970s? Doesn't that get incredibly tiresome? Does he have some kind of government contract? Does he have a choice? I guess his farm suddenly became a sprawling tourist attraction crawling with archaeologists, so it's not like he could just keep farming. But it just seems strange.

'Tchhh,' the foot masseuse clucked at me when I flinched my foot away from her roughly 10,000 pounds worth of pressure concentrated on my toe joint, like it was weird that this would cause me to flinch, and turned to Julian. 'If she slept more, maybe she wouldn't be so sensitive to pain,' she said in Chinese.

This was an off the cuff statement if I'd ever heard one, since I do have tons of problems, I'm sure, but none of them involve sleeping. And nobody has ever accused me of being sensitive to pain.

As she beat up my feet, she and the other masseur gossiped about Americans.

'Americans like to drive big cars,' they said.

'Americans want to invade Iraq,' they said.

'Americans always are coming in here wanting to know how to get to the Drum Tower,' they said.

'You should be careful what you say about Americans because Americans are listening,' cut in Julian, and luckily, even though China is the least sarcastic society on the planet, they took it as a joke instead of a threat.

Flinch by flinch, whimper by whimper, she also diagnosed me with heart and intestine problems before briskly punching me in the heels and sending me on my way.

Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom. In the back, there was a small bunk, a hot plate, and a squat toilet in about a 4x10 space - I was for some reason surprised to find they lived there, in the back of a five seat foot spa, even though almost every bathroom I've asked to use, restaurants and all, has revealed a similar setup.

In the body massage place today, for example, an off-duty masseur snored gently on the bed next to mine as a child ran between the beds and the owner's cell phone exploded into Disney knockoffs. My neck and lower back had clearly offended the girl massaging me in a past life because she elbowed and wrenched them into submission. I learned my lesson; I didn't fight her or yell even when she started trying to pry my skull off like a baseball cap from the nape of my neck or when she took her fists and aggressively knuckled my forehead from eyebrows to ears along the hairline until my face skin felt detached from my skeleton.

That said, when I was face down in the circular head pillow, I was also powerless to stop a torrent of snot (or some kind of miscellaneous head fluid) from flooding out of my nose onto the floor after all her kneading suddenly released something in my sinuses, as my arms were being pinned by her thighs, so I guess I got my twisted revenge in a way.

There is a lot to like about Chinese massage places, not the least being the price: if an hourlong massage cost between $4 and $10 in the States, I would certainly get one more often. But beyond that, I actually like the frenetic atmosphere. It's convivial. I don't need to be ensconced in some velvet-curtained shakuhachi den. It's not that serious. I feel a lot less... catered to when everyone's just massaging and chatting away the day together rather than me having to feel like I'm enslaving someone in my relaxation enforcing cave. That's all I'm saying.

Before the massage today, we all found some pool tables just hanging out in an alley along with a bunch of noodle stands, a dumpster, and someone's laundry. We had to go for a little bit of a search to discover who the keepers of the cues were (the phone store proprietors, of course, who else?) but at a comfortable dollar an hour, we played away the hottest part of the day. The sight of three foreigners playing pool in a residential alley was way too crazy for passersby to ignore, so we had a silent but swelling audience for all four games. I won some favors when I found that there was a tree in the way of my pool cue for a particular shot, but I tilted the cue near-vertically and made it anyway. The sweat pooling in my thumb crook in the 95 degree heat made all my shots smooth. Clearly I've been missing out on the secret to being a pool shark all these years: extreme heat.

Going on the fourth day in China, I have to admit that people are right: Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese food in America - even the supposedly authentic places like the ones up in the San Gabriel Valley.  This may have more to do with the regional differences in immigrants' origins than with a generalization about a giant country gleaned from experience with the old imperial capital only, but I'm going to go with the generalization here for the sake of making a point.

Sometimes the difference is a good thing - the noodles are a billion times better and fresher here.  My noodles yesterday were hand-tossed from a pile of dough three feet from my table before being tossed in the wok and fried up with some pork, mushrooms, and red sauce.  The omnipresent mutton skewers and their curious cumin rub are all but absent in the US so far as I know, apart from a mere shadow at Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in LA.  The yogurt here is outrageously tangy and delicious, sold out of stalls in the heat, but somehow not spoiled, straws puncturing the foil tops of their bottles.  

Sometimes it's not so good.  The baoze here have been disappointing - bitter bread and a droopy filling of sad boiled vegetables.  Tales of exotic fruits have proven to be inaccurate, as mushy apricots and rock hard kiwis have been the norm.  There is a mystery vegetable that the cooks in the Muslim Quarter of Xi'an put in just about everything - pancakes, buns, soups - that numbs the sides of your tongue, up and down, and is very disconcerting.

In both Korea and China, I've had much more luck with street food than with restaurants, possibly because my preferred method of dining is grazing.  I'd much rather wander through a market popping fried quail eggs off the stick in my right hand while gnawing on the carrot-sesame pastry in the other than sit down in a restaurant and try to finish an entire bowl of mutton and wheat noodles in broth with absolutely no help from my stubbornly vegetarian companion.  Food trucks in the US do nothing to compare to that grazing experience.  The Taste of Chicago comes closer if you ignore the overpricedness of it all.

I am now in Xi'an, China, after a series of both extremely unlucky and lucky events at various Chinese airports, opposing but equally dramatic.  Suffice it to say that telling passengers to retrieve their baggage from a baggage check, go through customs and immigration, re-check in for a new flight, and go through security again during an hour layover is not really feasible.  To successfully complete this task required some cajoling in Mandarin and an all-out sprint through the terminal, in addition to the wholesale ignoring of the long security line.  Basically, had anything - an untied shoelace, a line at the toilet, the security guy choosing to scold me for the full bottle of water in my carry-on rather than just shaking an admonishing finger - gone wrong, we would still be in Dalian right now.  I mean, lots of things DID go wrong.  I just mean, anything in addition to the things that already went wrong.  Like the fact that the 'Transfers' sign at the airport pointed down a dark deserted dead-end hallway with a piece of paper taped over it saying 'CLOSED'.  Or the fact that the 'Departures' sign at the airport pointed out onto the highway.

But my reward for all the airport sprinting and sign-ignoring was worth it.  Julian's choice of shady airport cab actually got us home.  (There was a line of identical official-looking green cabs and he went straight for the seedy black car, of course.)  And in Xi'an there were the most delicious mutton skewers I've ever had the pleasure of closing my teeth upon, and some deep-fried winter melon with some delicious and hotly garlicky spices piled on top.  Also, mangosteen on the street!

It's really hot here (it was really hot in Korea too, but the bad air in China makes it more palpable) and I am loving every sweaty droplet of it.  Cold fruit juice and smoking street food on a steaming hot day is what my body begs me for (for no evolutionarily sensical reason at all).  People shuffle languidly by with parasols, fanning themselves, being less physically pushy than usual just to avoid brushing body heat.  They cluster under the sparse trees and the more widespread bank awnings.  Even the hawkers don't get off their shaded benches to yell at you that their buns cost less than their competitors' buns.  The A/C here gives a lukewarm breeze and not much more.

It's a completely different headspace moving from traveling in a country where neither me nor my companion knows the language and bumble through gestures and confusion together, to traveling in a country where I don't know the language, and would certainly be bumbling if not for my utter reliance on him.   I actually know much less Chinese than I do Korean - Chinese sounds like complete nonsense peppered with the occasional xiexie (thank you) and that's it.  Whenever something puzzles me (which is always), I just summon his aid and the befuddlement evaporates.  I even summon him preemptively now.  It's certainly more comfortable, but much less of an exciting challenge.  I feel like I'm one step removed from everybody we see. 

Last night at Gwangjang market, I found myself being hand-fed by two different old ladies.  The first one had boxes of kimbap and samples ready on toothpicks.  When we tried to take the toothpicks, she shook her head, pointed at us, and said, 'ahhhh!'

'Ahhh?' we responded, really more inquiringly than acquiescent, but in the kimbap went.  Her tactic worked, and we walked away $3 poorer with a bulging plastic container of rice, seaweed, pickled ginger, carrots, and a mystery yellow sauce.

The second one was serving what I guess you'd call Korean-style sashimi out of portable tank.  I had my slight doubts about eating raw fish served out of a tank on an 85 degree day in a bustling, dusty, dirty market full of display platters of raw chicken, buckets of flopping sole, motorcycles rigged with about 100 extra pounds of support structure, and old drunken men with platters of blood sausage, chicken feet, and soju - but my doubts were much slighter than my desire for sashimi.  Plus, a Korean-Australian couple sitting at the stand's benches heartily recommended this lady's fish.  Starved for English,it probably wouldn't have mattered what they said - I would have sat next to them anyway.

The fish came out on a bed of either noodles or a very starchy and crunchy vegetable, flanked by both chili sauce and a soy/wasabi mix (but pre-mixed, and mostly wasabi - after all, this is Korea, the land of spice).  There was salmon, a variety of white fish, some hamachi-like yellow fish, conch, octopus, squid, and scallops.  I started out eating it the way I knew how, the Japanese way: chopstick up a slice, dip the edge in soy/wasabi, pop it in mouth.  But apparently this was incorrect, because the lady actually came out from behind her stall, shaking her head.  Opening the package of roasted seaweed slices I hadn't noticed next to me, she came up next to me, speared a fish, rolled it in sauce, plunked it in the seaweed, wrapped it up, dumped it in her hand, and shoved it into my mouth before it (my mouth) was even all the way open.  Then, satisfied, she marched away.

At the end of the meal, I couldn't really chew my octopus, so I had to hide it under a pile of noodles and mystery leaf (shiso, mint, citrus... if something could be all of the above, that's what this would have been), pay her, and lose myself in the bustle of the market before she noticed I had left it, lest she chase after me and shove it in my mouth.

There's nothing better than collapsing into a king-sized bed after two days of totally sleepless travel, and then waking up twelve hours later to a kindly hostess placing a foil-wrapped tuna kimbap on the kitchen table. This particular hostess, Julian's great aunt, speaks little English, but doesn't let a minor thing like the inability to communicate stop her from doting on us in every way possible. This morning we actually had to escape the house early lest more peanuts and yogurt and mochi and eggs kept finding their way into our hands. She also likes to speak to us in almost entirely Korean sentences, just peppering them with an English noun every so often when one comes to her.

Thus, opportunities for awkwardness have certainly abounded (tonight she thought we threw our forks in the trash) but one bullet we dodged was with the house bidet toilet. I thought not going to Japan would relieve us from having to deal with overly complicated robot toilets with hundreds of buttons and descriptions in indecipherable script, but apparently not. Julian spent about ten minutes trying in vain to find the button for 'flush', only to, embarrassingly, have me come over at the end of it and find the flush knob exactly where it is on Western toilets – it wasn't a button at all. I still feel pretty lucky that it ended like that and not with us having to explain in pantomime to an old lady that we couldn't manage to flush our own toilet.

I demonstrated today that I have magical culinary honing powers! Reading my guidebook, I decided I wanted to try soondae – a blood sausage with noodles stuffed into pig intestine. When I was actually in the city, however, I couldn't manage to hold the characters in my head long enough to look for them on a restaurant sign, so eventually I just gave up in exasperation and hunger and chose the ramshackliest looking restaurant possible in an out of the way corner with no customers just because the old ladies inside were friendly and smiling and the plastic chairs reminded me of warungs in Indonesia. Then, I couldn't read the menu, and the ladies spoke no English, and we didn't know what we were going to do, but just at the right time, a customer came in and asked us in heavily accented English if he could help us. When we asked him what the restaurant served, he said something that initially sounded like 'folk balls dish' but turned out to be 'pork blood dish' – soondae! And it was delicious. It came in a big bowl of soup with pork ears and fat and tendon and green onions and regular onions and a side plate of salty shrimp that I spooned into my broth until the waitress shook her head at me and said what I'm sure meant 'stop!'. I was just trying to rescue Julian, who was trying to subtly not eat meat as the waitress vigorously gestured for him to add shrimp to his soup full of pork slices. Needless to say, this rescue mission failed.  Being a vegetarian in Korea has been a futile endeavor for him.

Bragging time!... because this is my blog and I can brag if I want to, brag if I want to, brag if I want to.

I managed to fit everything I needed for two months into one little rolling suitcase and a purse!  Goodbye, slogging around foreign countries weighed down like a beast of burden with strap marks on my shoulders.  Conversely, hello, skipping spryly... or something.

The most vivid memory of my whole drooping life being on my back is from Mexico, setting bravely off on a journey of undetermined length in a direction we thought was the ocean, oozing with sweat, camping backpack so piled with towels and books and bathing suits that it reached above my head.

Luckily, some teenagers came by and gave us a ride in their pickup, so I was able to soon toss my life-in-a-bag onto a mosquito-netted hotel bed.  But I wasn't looking forward to repeating that feeling in August in tropical climes.  And now I don't have to. 

Julian is another story, with his Travel Scrabble and his computer and his PSP and his actual physical stacks of physical CD's.  Oh yes, there is one person left in the world who still listens to a discman and that person is Julian.

But that reminds me that, really, I shouldn't be attributing my amazing packing talents to anything but the wonders of smartphones, seeing as how my iPhone encompasses my music, my camera, my books, my computer, my games, and my notebook.  What else is there after that?  Clothes, shoes, the toothbrush family, a passport or two...

Since I didn't document my experience getting vaccinations last time I went abroad except to refer indirectly and sarcastically to the fear of death that travel clinics pound you over the head with, I failed to recall my previous adverse reaction to the Hepatitis A vaccine, round 1, and thus failed to report this to the nurses at the UCI clinic, and thus got blindsided with a fainting fit in round 2 yesterday.

It was embarrassing because in the middle of a sentence in which I was bragging to the needle-wielding nurse about how I don't mind shots or needles and hardly ever have adverse reactions to anything, I started feeling very strange.  Namely, my lips started tingling.  In a vain (and somewhat random) attempt to counter this, I asked her a question about the nursing school she attended.  In the middle of her answer, I interrupted: "I'm sorry, I'm dizzy, I'm going to put my head down.  Go on, sorry for interrupting."

And then in the middle of her repeating herself, I suddenly realized that I was going to pass out.  I don't remember too much after that except that suddenly four nurses were in the room trying to cajole me into transferring myself into a wheelchair before I lost it completely, and I was mumblingly arguing with them that moving meant vomiting and vomiting was out of the question.

Have you ever greyed out?  It's very distinctive.  Your eyes are open but everything is turning white.  Your ears are open but everything is turning tinny.  I didn't actually go all the way, possibly out of sheer stubbornness.  I made it onto a cot and lay there until the world came back.

I am told I spent the whole time apologizing for being rude.

In happier vaccination-related news, being vaccinated against typhoid fever means street food is a go!  It's too bad that they only serve silkworm larvae in the cold months in Korea, because any food that 100% of the people I've asked describe as something along the lines of "the most taste-bud-unfriendly and olfactorily insulting snack imaginable" deserves a hearty try.  

The only place I draw the line is at that live baby octopus dish.  You know, the one where people die every year because the still living tentacles grasp at their esophagi while trying to escape.  First of all, octopi are too smart to be eaten alive without massive amounts of totally justifiable guilt.  Second of all, death by tentacle-grabbing-esophagus.

New impending Asia travel means dusting off the old Asia travel blog, I guess.

Never mind that this new trip has nothing to do with Indonesia, or being newly anything... well, apart from the fact that all the countries I visit will be new to me.  Not that this blog had much to do with Indonesia after 2007, anyway, but that didn't stop me from continuing to write in it about office water coolers, the sociology of being hit on, and the terrors of domestic plane rides!

For those who prefer specifics:
I will be in South Korea from July 18 to roughly July 23, in China from then to roughly August 20, in Vietnam from then to roughly September 4, then back to South Korea until September 14.

For those who prefer official reasons to specifics:
I will be doing research on how Chinese people conceptualize free choice and whether it is at all in line with how the World Values Survey implies it.

For those who prefer underlying motivations to official reasons:
It has always been odd to me that there is a globe full of wonders (in the 'I wonder at all I am seeing!' sense, not the 'everything around the world is fantastic and beautiful!' sense) that I can acquire the means to travel around, but have not yet done so.  In other words, I have not done anywhere near as much traveling as my brain tells me I should.

For those who prefer unchecked emotions to underlying motivations:
Holy shit!

I love my boyfriend the most when we are hanging out with other people and hate him the most when we've been alone for awhile.

I think it's because I like him better than everyone we know, but I like him less than all the potential and idealized people that exist only in my imagination.

Dear Future Self,

When you look back from your pared down world, and you bitterly think how silly and blind you were to ever complain about 'having' to travel everywhere in the car, stop.

Once or twice or ten times upon a time, you were driving at night and were suddenly struck down by awe that everyone slid around in these little living rooms on wheels, and that you were sliding around with them.

Often, when you were a passenger, you thought about how all the cars on the freeway were self-contained universes and all these universes were 10 feet away from each other, but remained wholly separate unless they threatened to collide.

Riding in someone else's car was like rummaging furtively through their bathroom cabinets. Some people kept changes of clothes in their cars. The cigarettes they couldn't smoke at home. Wrappers from the food that they wouldn't count in their diet journals, if they had them.

Riding with a stranger in a car made you very quickly not be strangers anymore, at least before the plague of texting. Sitting in silence with the world sliding by was awkward. We were wired to think time was passing when we saw forty miles of anything, even road. More time than forty minutes. We traveled forty miles, how could we not have said anything? We used to be on the beach, and now we're in the mountains, so how could we not have said anything at all?

Getting in the car with someone familiar after a long day was a sigh of relief and dozing in the passenger seat with your face pressed against the windshield was even better than doing it on the couch.

Don't worry. I appreciated them.

I had a day yesterday that manages to effortlessly paint a clear picture of life in Orange County without even trying.

So I'm dropping my car off to get an oil change, which is supposed to take two hours. The guy behind the counter is like, 'Will you be waiting here for it?' and I'm all like, 'um, no, I'm going to walk to Mitsuwa' and his face is all like ''walk'?? What is this this 'walk' of which you speak??'

I had passed Mitsuwa roughly three minutes earlier while driving over there, so I figured it was walkable, and that I could use my awesome Japanese market homing skills/ramen-smelling nose to find my way back there in a reasonable amount of time.

Whoops! I guess I forgot I was in Irvine (Costa Mesa really, but close enough)! As I began my journey, I realized two things. One: no sidewalks. Two: stupid landscaping. Walking down the street, I was going up and down these manmade mounds of bright green, overwatered grass, tripping on the tree roots that snaked everywhere without ever actually going underground, and weaving around office park buildings that had their own mazes of bushes meant to be pleasing to the eye, not to be walked through.

I jumped fences. I went through one-way courtyards. I climbed through bushes. I trespassed on more private property than has ever been trespassed upon before. And then I realized that the street was turning. It was curving around and starting to go the other way. THEN I saw a plane landing directly in front of me - the street had done a full 90 degree turn and dead-ended at the airport.

OK, I thought, I really want some unadon right now, and I will not let OfficeParkVille defeat me and my previously impeccable sense of direction. I'm just going to pretend that did not just happen, and go back the other way.

Long story short, half hour later, I'm at Mitsuwa, fighting millions of other lunch-hour-goers for a table, finally getting one (across from a baby who refused to be fed her rice, instead preferring to stare at me unblinkingly for 45 minutes). And immediately getting all prickly memories of my walk erased by my unbelievably delicious $6 unadon/zaru soba combination meal.

Quick question:

What do you do when you move to a new town, meet someone you immediately and effortlessly get along with, subsequently Facebook-stalk them (don't judge!) and discover that their profile picture is a photo of them posing proudly with Ann Coulter?

Each day feels like a mini-lifetime.

I wake up with strands of thought flying away into the ether, disoriented, a little cranky if there's an alarm. I'm not burdened, though, because I forget everything I'm burdened by while I'm sleeping. At the moment I awaken there is no chest pain, no trepidation, no frantic wondering about what the next 70 years will feel like. Just remnants of a nonsense language, a faint desire for nourishment, and random stretches of muscles to make sure they're there, and that they work.

All morning is, is a pleasant haze where I drink tea and think, and have my reading date with the sun - my apartment is situated in such a way that the sun comes in and hits my papasan only between 10 and 11 AM - and prepare myself for the outside world.

As the day stretches on, and I do whatever it is that I do, I start to worry about things. Will I choke on this giant piece of chicken I'm chewing? How best to swallow it? Shouldn't I be doing my pre-political-science-student readings so I'm not the class idiot when school starts? Am I getting sunburnt? I still enjoy myself, but there it is in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce.

The evening brings bigger worries: do I want to be with this person for the rest of my life? Is this chest pain going to end up being a heart attack? Do I honestly believe that I am capable of standing up in front of a classroom of students? And I go to bed tense, achy, hyperaware of my positioning under the covers and the pace of my breathing and everything else. I want to recap, so I'm talkative, but I'm irritable, so no one wants to talk to me.

And when I fall asleep, you may as well have hit the power-off/reset button.

That's the great savior of my biological/psychological makeup. The reset button. I sleep like a rock no matter what's worrying me and my dreams are mostly unrelated to reality. I'm not even myself in dreams. Even that dream I had where there had been a zombie apocalypse and I was living under an underpass in L.A. with three videogame quality animal friends from Animal Crossing who may have had dubious intentions - even that dream didn't feel like a nightmare. It was sort of fun, scavenging for leftover food and sleeping on a ripped mattress with one eye open and one hand clutching a knife. Same with the dream about tubing down a way overswollen Boulder creek with only a leaky, lopsided tube.

I wake up and everything is fuzzy and innocent and new.

Today at lunchtime I sat on the shady edge of a massive corporate park just outside the north edge of John Wayne airport, eating a goat cheese-prosciutto-asparus quesadilla, drinking a coconut juice, and watching the airplanes land.

Nobody else even looked up when these monsters roared deafeningly overhead, but it was something I couldn't look away from. Their tiny little wheels attached to their screaming enormous winged bodies reminded me of birds, but not for the normal reasons. Birds are just big fat bodies on itsy-bitsy stilts, or comically small wheels in this case. I don't know. It still seemed momentous to me every time one landed gently and in accordance with runway boundaries.

Every time I've gotten into a plane since, I don't know, around 2007, just post-Indonesia, my heart races at 130+ bpm while my throat closes up and my stomach rolls and this lasts the whole flight, which cannot in any way be healthy. My best and brightest logic cannot win this war against the physiological. So sitting around watching multitudes of planes land safely probably will not help me, but I'm spellbound by them anyway. To me it's like this.

Spending time at very rich people's homes forces me to (uncomfortably) wonder what I would be like if I were to somehow become rich. It usually happens in the same stages:

1. Shock and disgust at how many useless knick-knacks person has; righteous anger about how money could be better spent feeding the hungry/propping up charities/making poorer people happy in some way/etc.

2. Tiny little rogue thought creeps in about how I would probably be about to identify with the person better if person spent knick-knack money on travels around the world or on ridiculously pricey restaurants or gourmet food instead.

3. Realization that this is a double standard emerges. Guilt occurs. Value-questioning occurs.

4. Try to identify with the person by pretending their knick-knacks are slices of raw fish or green chile tamales or BBQ pulled pork.

5. Inability to complete analogy because of difficulty perspective-swapping.

6. Repeat.

Eventually I just force myself to stop thinking about it and content myself with platitudes about every person having the right to spend their own money in whichever way they see fit, which I don't really believe but whatever, I'm at a party. And then I enjoy their amenities and become a hypocrite but try not to do it outwardly because I am trying to socialize lightly. And I go home massively exhausted.

Because we could, yesterday we stood on a sandy stretch with the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak blowing by behind us, and in front of us, pelicans divebombing like screwdrivers into the water to catch fish. It was goosebump-raisingly cold, but that didn't stop families in bikinis and board shorts from dragging their boogie boards into the tide. Neither did the fact that the waves were breaking five feet from shore.

We had sandwiches: one of two recipes for sandwich that I'll willingly make and eat. As follows:

Sourdough bread, toasted

Brie

Ham

Spinach

Red Onion

Fig Jam

Mayo (optional)

Arrange in desired percentages and enjoy. For me it's nearly all Brie, spinach and fig jam, but that's okay because Dan likes his giant pile of meat slathered with Kewpie mayo, so it works out evenly in the end.

So we ate those and some mandarins that tasted like perfume and some triple ginger snaps from Trader Joes and then I wandered down to the water. I put my feet in and let the waves crash and foam that wonderful white foam around my ankles. Whenever I see those yards of white foam snapping around me, I always want to put my face in. I think it's good for my skin, despite having no evidence, empirical or otherwise, to support this hypothesis. Maybe back in middle school I read it in Seventeen magazine or something and internalized it without internalizing the source. I don't know. I do the same thing with the foaming jets in hot tubs.

While I was wandering around I found a baby crab no bigger than my fingernails. I resisted the urge to pop it in my mouth like popcorn, but in order to do that I had to travel forward in time and forcefully imagine eating the Japanese-style grilled mackerel and pickled cucumbers that we later cooked for dinner on our very own brand new community grill:

Flying to Irvine, I was sitting in my aisle seat in between attempted deep cleansing breaths, thoughts meant to distract myself from the realization that I was in a big metal contraption 20,000 feet in the air, and pages in the book I wasn't really reading or seeing - and I happened to look out the window and therefore saw something I really, really wasn't expecting to see.

We were very close to landing (the pilot had already told the flight attendants to prepare for it) and what looked like 500 feet away from the left wing was a big peak covered with snow and pine trees.

I mean, yeah, if I had thought about it harder I would have realized that there are snowy peaks very close to Irvine and etc etc but in the moment it seemed so out of place that I was pretty sure we were going to crash into the mountains and die. Instead of giving me a heart attack like I'd have guessed, it made me instantly calm. What it did, actually, was make me think I was dreaming. My dreams, when centered around airplanes, consistently have the plane doing something bizarre, like flying low amongst mountains, so when I saw the snowy peak I figured, oh well, I'm dreaming and so we'll just drift down into an icy creek and then me and all the passengers will wander off out the plane windows and camp out in a nearby cave until the blue-footed, polka dotted bears show up. When we landed at the Orange County airport five minutes later without incident I was fairly shocked. And disappointed at the lack of creativity that my imagination bothered to invest in my dream.

And then I went off and did Serious Prospective Graduate Student Visiting Day stuff for 2 days, which felt like even more of a dream.