broke but happy

Much as I loved living in Gone West, I realize in retrospect that I did not get out of my apartment enough. I very frequently didn't have plans for an entire weekend, and all I did to fill the hours was go for long walks and drink coffee.

Admittedly, coffee and long walks are some of my favorite things, but I rather prefer to be busy doing things with other people.

I didn't realize this until after I had been in Gone West for a while - I was so shell-shocked from being depressed in New York and from being culture-stressed in South Sudan and from giving up my international dreams that I couldn't really see anything for the first year or so that I lived in Gone West - but I needed more friends and activities.

By the time I realized it, it seemed too late, sort of, and because I didn't have a car, many activities that I would otherwise have tried felt too far away, especially when it meant meeting all new people after several bus/train transfers and then trying to get back across town late at night.

These are the travails of being a shy extrovert: you want more friends, but you don't want to have to go alone to meet them.

One good thing about moving to a new city is that I had to get out and make friends. I just had to. I knew exactly zero people when I moved here, and I love my coworkers, but they all have friends and families already.

Between fighting class and getting out and doing things, I am approximately 1000 times busier in Universe City than I ever was in Gone West.

The result is that I am happy, but broke. Also sleep-deprived.

I am not just broke because doing things costs money. I probably spend less on a day of hiking than I would spend on a day of wandering around Gone West. It's just that the more hiking and fighting, especially, I do, the more I buy.

There was the sword, of course.

T-shirts to wear for summer kung fu, when the gi is too heavy.

I kept jamming my toe, so I bought kung fu mat shoes.

I kept spraining my ankle, so I finally bought good hiking boots.

My knees have been hurting, so today I bought trekking poles.

I got tired of sunburning the part of my hair, so I bought a hat.

SOMEONE (hi, S.!) ordered us to wear non-cotton trousers, so I bought some quick-drying ones (short ones, though, since no one carries trousers long enough for me).

I sent my sister my old day-and-a-half pack that always felt a little short, so I bought myself a 60L backpack that fits me well.

I am happy about all of these things. Each of them improves my life in ways that I could probably measure if I took the time.

Most of the purchases I have made in my life that have made actual, substantial differences in my comfort and fill me with gratitude every time I looked at them are outdoor items. Unlike a dress that later begins to feel too short or not cute enough or whatever, a solid pair of hiking boots keeps giving and giving.

(Until your dad possibly throws one away when compulsively cleaning and/or leaves it in the van when he sells it. Details. Or maybe he didn't throw it away, and I've been unfairly blaming him all this time. Maybe someday we will find that single missing hiking boot somewhere in my parents' house and my long-term bitterness will be alleviated. And then I will have two good pairs of hiking boots.)

Between all of this hiking and fighting and doing, and a plane ticket to Michigan (the first one, I think, that I paid for all on my own), I am broke. Broke, and also happy.

cranky

I am feeling cranky.

There is no particular reason for me to feel cranky, except that it is almost the end of July and I feel like I haven't gotten a summer at all. *&*^^%%( cold summer.

That, and I met a friend for dinner last week and spent the whole time watching his recent photos of Liberia pass on his computer screen. Curses.

I feel stuck.

Fighting class should help, but we didn't work until we wanted to fall over today. We just did some combatives and then practiced chokes from the side.

Last week, in advanced fighting class, we practiced the front choke with actual pressure. For some reason, the instructor and the guys in the class always worry that the girls will be freaked out by things like that - the choking, the hitting in the face. I am actually quite surprised myself at how un-phased I am by it all. It really doesn't bother me.

It makes me realize how very safe my life has been. I don't have a post-traumatic stress reaction to any of it, because no one but my brother has ever hit me. Oh, and that girl next door when I was growing up in Liberia who sat on my chest and told me to bang my own head against the ground. Details.

Also, I am starting to understand how people get addicted to exercise (horrors). I made a decision yesterday to give my knees a break (kung fu + running + hiking steep hills = ouch), and it was actually hard for me. I did go for a long walk, but it's not the same.

Cranky.

the pox

I am fairly certain that I have never in my life had as many mosquito bites as I do right now, not even in South Sudan* where I bundled in a raincoat in the heat at night to avoid the mosquitoes that bit me through my jeans. The mosquitoes yesterday bit me through my clothes, too, including on my butt. THROUGH MY PANTS. (The mosquitoes in South Sudan bit me through my jeans. Similarly stubborn. Although they only came out at night.)

I didn't bring insect repellent, of course. Only wimps bring insect repellent. I don't even bring it to Africa, except to South Sudan, because when I was in Nairobi on the way there, my coworker told me that it was an absolute necessity.

I bought some 100% DEET in Nairobi and took it with me to South Sudan, where I applied it on several occasions and found that mosquitoes seemed to view it primarily as a marinade for the delicacy of my blood. Yum. Literally the only thing that worked was to have a mosquito-impermeable barrier between me and the blood-thirsty little suckers.

The mosquitoes on the trail yesterday had the same persistence. My friend T. and I ran into exactly one other person on the entire 5+ mile hike (I think everyone else had gotten the memo about the strange fact of hordes of mosquitoes in the normally insect-free Pacific Northwest), and that person had insect repellent and shared it with us. It didn't help. The mosquitoes feasted, unnoticing. Or perhaps enjoying the extra flavoring.

Only wimps bring insect repellent, but yesterday I was (metaphorically) curled up in a little ball on the trail, sobbing for some insect repellent.

Not actually, of course. What do you think I am?

We climbed up a snow-slope until it got too steep and slippery (I dropped both of my water bottles half-way up, when they fell out of the side pockets of my new backpack, and watched them slide faster and faster down the hill until they hit rocks; we rescued them on the way down), and then we climbed through the trees to the left, the slope so steep that I clung to bushes and trees to pull myself up.

From the top, we could see mountains:

(Hey! It's me! I have no photo of the mountain without me, and this one is at least somewhat identity-obscuring. Unless you know me. I think I am trying not to fall into the crevices between sharp rocks. Not visible: hundreds of chomping mosquitoes.)

On the way down, I hurled myself downward, over and over, in the direction of stable-looking trees that could break my fall. The only other option was to slide all the way down on my ass, and that seemed like a painful proposition. Too many splinters.

But it was this bad, mosquito-wise: we sat down for lunch at the top, were driven off by mosquitoes, and ended up sitting on the rocks in the middle of the snow field to get away from them. They still followed us there, but once we killed off all the ones that had migrated with us, no new ones seemed to be able to find us in the middle of the snow. So we sat there in the snow, in July, eating lunch.

The snow was actually much easier to descend than the mud, and after we ate lunch on it, I put on my rain pants and slid down the snow.

Plus: my brand new hiking boots made it the entire trip without pain or raw skin (I rarely get blisters - it goes straight to raw).

Minus: hundreds of mosquito bites.

Plus: mosquito bites don't itch me as much as they do some people.

Minus: I look like I have the pox.

(I didn't worry overly much about the mosquitoes because the bonus of living this far north is the lack of malaria and dengue fever, until my dad asked this afternoon, "Do the mosquitoes there carry West Nile virus or anything?" There is always something.)

* Interesting tidbit: with the split between Sudan and South Sudan, I have added a new country to my list without going to a new country. I was in Sudan, when South Sudan was part of it, and I was in South Sudan, except that at the time it happened to be part of Sudan. Obviously there are many far greater ramifications to South Sudan becoming an independent country, but I do find it kind of interesting that I can now put both Sudan and South Sudan on my list of countries visited, while actually only having been, back in 2007, to one country.

sit a while

You cannot be particularly picky, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, about the weather on your hiking days. You have to just pick a day and go hiking. The weather will do what it pleases.

When you go hiking in July, however, you expect... something. I guess you sort of expect, at the very least, that the day will clear up a little.

Or not, thanks to the weirdest July ever. The weather did not clear up, and I ended up hiking in puddles masquerading as shoes. Cold. Also wet. IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE SUMMER.

I sort of miss living in a place where it actually gets hot (ducks flying rotten tomatoes cast by all those who despise the heat and love this place for its lack of it). It's just, you see, that it is never actually warm enough to swim here, and I do like to swim.

After hiking to the point of being soggy and chilled through, people came over to my house.

I love this. I love that I have a house that is big enough to have people over and (generally) clean enough that I can invite them over on a whim.

I threw some cookies together, and I had mojito ingredients and par-baked bread, and people brought fruit salad and burgers, and it was just generally so nice to have people over, at my house, in my dining room, talking and eating.

One of the things that I forget, here in the US, is hospitality. It's much easier to invite people over when you live in a place where there are not so many restaurants and coffee shops and bars. Here, it is simplest just to meet someone out somewhere, but it's also less fun, because there is not the cooking and improvising and clattering about.

I need to remember how much fun it is to invite people over. In Rwanda, I would invite people over to stay a few nights, just because they didn't have a place to go. People would stop by to pick something up, and I would offer them a soda, and we'd sit a while. It was nice. I miss that.

on a saturday

In the entire 2.7 years I lived in Gone West, I only made it to the weekend farmers' market twice - once alone and once when my friend picked me up. I don't know why, really, except that it was basically closing down by noon, and I am quite emotionally attached to sleeping as much as possible on weekends. Exceptions to the all-sleep plan are made for activities that involve meeting other people, but when I'm on my own, I just don't tend to get up and out of the house very quickly.

This morning, though, I was determined to get up in time to go to the farmers' market in Universe City. I even went to bed early so that I would get plenty of sleep before the appointed hour for getting up.

Of course, I left my house 40 minutes after I planned to, but I did leave, and that counts for something.

True confessions: I got sucked in by a jewelry booth first, and delicious fruits and vegetables were therefore not the only things I purchased at the market. But eventually I found the farmers' market headquarters and bought a handful of little wooden tokens in lieu of cash. I wandered about blissfully, as one does at a farmers' market, and bought raspberries and sugar snap peas and coffee and some plants. There was a woman taking a picture of the colorful root vegetables, and little kids eating (actually eating!) samples of salad greens, and a woman handing out stalks of lavender.

"The best way to like a town is to wander around the farmers' market," I said to T., in a text. And it's kind of true, even when it's raining in July.

raspberries

Last week, my momma and I bought raspberries and blackberries and bread and coffee (me) at the farmers' market, and we sat in the sunshine and serious mowed through the raspberries. Yum.

"Just think," my momma said. "If someone tried to make these, with all these little cells filled with juice, they would be incredibly expensive."

This week, I was driving past the farmers' market for the third time that day when I noticed bitterly that they were closing down and I was on my way to a work location, and I wasn't going to get any raspberries.

And then I stopped myself, and I turned the car around, and I went back, because I had already eaten lunch at my desk while working, and I realized that the five minutes it would take to buy some raspberries, my favorite part of summer, was worth it.

I bought two boxes of raspberries and two boxes of sugar snap peas, and I put them carefully in my trunk. I went to my work location, and I went back to work, and I sat there with a mound of raspberries, eating the ripest ones first and saving the lighter ones for the next day.

I needed that.

7/4/11 or 4/7/11. whatever.

I can hear fireworks but not see them, here in my treehouse. I think the fireworks in town might be behind the trees, and I might miss them all together.

...

Just as I wrote that, I began to see fireworks. They are not the big, professional fireworks. They are the expensive, illegal, individual kind. They spark off in all directions.

Once before, in this country, I missed a professional fireworks display on July 4th. That was three years ago, and we rode the bucket truck up, in turns, to watch the individual kind go off at random almost 360 degrees around.

We rode the bucket truck up again today, at the K.s', just to see. To see the Mountain Visible from Gone West, and the other one, those two that I miss so much. To see the hills curling round protectively. To see the house below, and to wave down to the people.

"Grandma!" Little J. called, as his grandma rode up and up. "Grandma! Do I look like a toy?"

My momma is here, and the drive back down to Universe City, still painful when there is grilling and swimming going on back there, at home, was slightly less awful than usual. (I called the K.s' house home today, to my momma, as we were sitting under a tree after I threw candy from the back of D.'s fire truck in the parade. "I want to go home," I said, and she said, "To [Universe City]?" "No," I said, "to the K.s' house.") But at least with a passenger there was conversation and I could point things out: the town where R. lived for a year, the highway where a high speed chase went on, the turn toward downtown.

I love having my momma around.

like he wants his rodeo

This ain't my first rodeo, ya'll.

Fine, it was my second. That made me something of an expert, at least compared to my Bostonian friend. I am not sure she enjoyed the rodeo. I did, though, enough that I am now listening to Garth Brook's song Rodeo. I suspect that the facts that: 1. I grew up - partly - in a smallish city in the Midwest, and 2. I listen(ed) to country music, make me much more able to get the rodeo world. In fact, I like it. It feels like a fair, and what is not to love about a fair? I have only two words to say about a fair: elephant ears. And the same goes for a rodeo.

So yes, the rodeo. I like a good rodeo. I like the cowboys in their Wranglers and chaps. (All men should wear chaps now and then, yum. That is actually how my friend sold me on the rodeo idea the first time I went: "Wrangler butts," she said. "That's why we go to rodeos.") And it's funny, because going to a rodeo, as opposed to hanging out with overly-educated, quasi-urban people exactly like me, made me really miss that world.

"I've been missing Michigan lately," I told my rodeo 2 friend.

"Yes, but if you moved back there, you would miss [this state] too much," she said. "[Gone West], at least."

"My whole life is missing places," I said. "I will never be able to live anywhere without missing other places."

Every place forms you, but it takes a part of you, too. I wouldn't take those parts of myself back, not even if the places were offering, but I wish I could visit the pieces more often.

Nothing makes me feel more longing than fireworks, and this is a bad weekend for that.

I have a sword.

I've always wanted a sword. When we were kids, my cousins and brother and I would make swords, and I still have the last one I used in the closet at my parents' house: two pieces of 1"x 2" wood nailed together to form a hilt. We used to run around in the woods behind Oma and Pops' house building forts and planning battles and generally creating mayhem. When I needed a few minutes of quiet, I would climb the tree in the middle of the fort, up and up until I was alone in the high branches, very possibly with my sword.

So, yeah, I've always wanted a sword, and now I have one. It is shiny. It has a hilt wrapped in fabric and a red silk square tied to the hilt end.

I have a sword for kung fu. In the summer, we do a weapons form on the top of a hill in Universe City. So far, I have learned how to hold the sword, and about ten stances of the form. The exciting part is whipping the sword around, which is also the scary part, because I am not exactly the most coordinated person ever, and I am a little bit afraid that at some point I am going to lose my grip on the sword and it’s going to go flying through the air. Hopefully not then landing on some person’s head.

The one minor problem with my sword is that using it involves holding an object of weight in my right hand like a tennis racket, and waving it about. I might possibly have mentioned, back when I was going to occupational therapy for my wrists, how my occupational therapist once told me that if I ever took up tennis again, I should never come back to her, because she would refuse to see me if I wasted her work that way. Good news! She is back in New York and cannot stop me. (Bad news: I have to sleep in my wooden arm again after kung fu.) I am not giving up my sword for some measly little nerve problem.

I HAVE A SWORD.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit exactly how many photos I have of myself with this sword, because there are a lot, and most of them do not depict me in any actual kung fu sword stance. Okay, no. I am not actually embarrassed to admit how many photos I have of myself with the sword (because nothing, seriously, is cooler than owning a sword). I am embarrassed to admit on how many occasions I have randomly said to people, “I have a sword,” and that comment has resulted in the taking of photographs. (Hint: more than twice.)

Oh, please. If you had a sword, you’d want to tell people, too. It’s amazingly cool.

I wish I had known that you could get a sword for only $38. WITH SCABBARD. I probably would have bought one years ago, and then my brother and I could have killed each other with it. Or I could at least have beaten him with the flat of it. What good is a sword you can’t hit someone with? And once you outgrow beating up your siblings, there really is no one left who it is acceptable to actually beat up.

Possibly this is why I take fighting classes. That, and, obviously, the chance to own a SWORD!

...

Yesterday at fighting class an experienced student told the girl I was working with to strike my arm forcefully when she did the block. “Won’t that hurt her?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “she conditions for that.”

Which is true. Not only do I beat myself with a phone book (not often enough), but in kung fu we do drills of hitting our forearms together to strengthen them.

I was amused.

I was even more amused at the end of class when a woman I had worked with on Monday, a brand new student, talked about how she had thrown me around while practicing how to get out of headlocks from behind.

“She wouldn’t even take a turn to practice!” she told the kung fu students. (I had already practiced, on someone taller and stronger than me, which is much more what I need than to practice on someone shorter than me. Plus the practice I need is on the falls.)

“I spent the class throwing her around, and she wouldn't even let me help her up."

"Of course I wouldn't let you help me up!" I said. "The last thing you want to do after you take someone down is help them up. You shouldn't get into that habit."

"I hit her in the ear, accidentally. But even though she was the one being thrown around, it was pretty clear who was the badass.”

Only the new students think that of me.

supreme running goal of all time

I glanced out my window just now, and the sky is so very beautiful and strange. The upper part is periwinkle, heading toward indigo. Then there is a long, dark cloud, and below it the remaining sky, toward the sun, is bright yellow. I can't stop staring.

I went out for another run tonight. I am determined to build my endurance for fighting and hiking, and also to be a runner. Who runs. A runner who runs. As runners do. I get so excited by the fact that look! I'm a runner! that I want to announce it to everyone, but I have to keep it quiet around my martial arts studio, because my instructor, er, well, kind of forbade me to run, at least until my knees started not being a mess because of kung fu.

(My knees are a little better now, thanks to, I am not kidding, all of the following things: being careful about my stances, glucosamine with chondroitin, massaging Blue Emu into them twice a day, daily ice packs, fairly regular ibuprofen when they hurt, and an ancient Chinese way of sitting back on them that is supposed to fix arthritis. Life becomes so high maintenance once you pass 25. The running doesn't seem to be doing them any harm, though, as long as I run on the wood-chip dirt path.)

So, I ran. I told myself that I would run 3 miles, however slowly I needed to run them. I would not rush. But! But! But! It only took me 34.5 minutes! I could almost run with my dad!

That's pretty much my supreme running goal of all time: run three miles with my dad, and not want to die the entire time.

over and over... (fill in the blank)

I have stayed up too late every single day this week. This is probably why the fact that the closest coffee place made my tea too weak AGAIN made me so mad I could have cried. (This silly place believes that having expensive tea is a substitute for putting enough tea leaves in your cup to give it flavor. I vowed never to get tea there again, but it was close, and my throat hurt... bah.)

Fortunately, I did not take my exhaustion out on any people. I just fumed about the tea all the walk back to the office, and then drank my too-weak tea while dealing perfectly nicely with actual people. Go me.

And now I'm up too late again, for the same reason as Tuesday night and last night: too much kung fu. I am furiously determined to learn the entire 72-stance form by next week, and this meant staying an extra hour and 10 minutes after advanced fighting class today, getting patient lessons from a classmate, and then I came home and did it for another hour. The good news is that I finally got it right, here at home, and did it right at least half a dozen times in the little space of our living room. (My roommate, sitting on the couch, kept worrying that I would hit my foot on the coffee table, but I kept my kicks short, and all was well.)

I think I have earned my bed, tonight.

But man, I have a lot left to do this week.

(The title of this post would make sense if you were in my fighting or kung fu classes, where the instructor constantly says, "Over and over... that's how we learn," until I'm not sure I know any other way to follow up on that phrase.)

runner, again

I celebrated the longest day of the year by going jogging. I probably shouldn't be jogging - kung fu is doing enough of a number on my knees - but I have yet to give up my fantasy of being a runner, and I need to work on my endurance so that I can hold out longer in fighting class. So when I realized that there is a dirt track in a park right behind my fighting studio, dirt tracks being easier on knees, I made my way over there tonight.

I was pleasantly surprised, actually, at how well I did. I only ran two miles, with a 2 minute break in between to find the map and figure out if I'd been running the right track, but I ran them in a comfortable 11 minutes each. That won't win any prizes, but considering that I normally have to literally jog as slowly as my legs will go in order to keep moving, I consider it a win. It is much, much better than I did the last time I tried to run, last fall, soon after I started fighting class. Five minutes of running wiped me out then. Tonight, I could have kept running for quite a while, had I not needed to come back to my house and work on learning xiao hong chuan, the form that I have to know if I ever want to test for a yellow belt in kung fu.

(I have a coworker who claims that a real martial art for adults only has three belts: white, brown, and black. I, however, need the instant gratification of the colored belts, thank you very much.)

...

Friday last, I drove over the mountains with my window open to the sun and breeze, singing along to the radio until I lost all stations but public radio, which played folky sorts of songs that perfectly fit the sky and the pines and the river. As the last of the music faded to static, I put my hand against the radio so it could use my body as an antenna, and then I turned the radio off and propped my ipod up on the dashboard, below the speedometer, to provide my driving soundtrack.

Over there, the days were utterly perfect: clear and sunny, cooling in the evening. We all spent more time outside or in the 91-degree heated pool than we did inside, soaking up the Vitamin D that we do not get for so much of the year on the sheltered side of the mountains. I got a little bit of sunburn on my legs and the part of my hair, just enough to feel like summer was about to fall, and then I drove up the long, desolate road through the high desert to Ye Little Town, Northwest, where I reveled in a night and day with the B.s, whose house feels like yet another home. It's good to have some homes, especially when the town where you live doesn't feel like one.

ninja or not

Because kung fu is not as easy as fighting class, and because fighting class is mostly boxing and low kicks, I rarely feel like a ninja.

Come to think of it, I don't actually even know what a ninja is. Is kung fu generally associated with real ninjas? (Answer, according to wikipedia, source of all knowledge: No.)

So being a ninja is altogether out, then, since I am doing a martial art from the wrong country.

But you know that thing, that I guess I was associating with ninjas but maybe I should actually associate with kung fu, where a person does a nice high kick and then spins around and backfists a person from the other side? That thing. We were practicing that in kung fu yesterday (it was really more like: round kick, three punches, front kick, round kick, backfist, low kick, backfist, three punches, if you really want to know, which you don't), and there is something about whipping around like that, ponytail flying, that made me feel like I actually knew what I was doing, for perhaps the first time in kung fu.

Although not like a ninja, apparently, even though that is what my ignorant North American mind was thinking.

still life with poppies

I sat outside Saturday afternoon, at the tea shop I used to walk to when I lived in Gone West. The sun was out, the restaurant across the street had live music in their courtyard, and a horde of naked bicyclists rode by. I felt the way I do in the afternoon on a sunny day in Gone West, as if the world is so perfect that it is impossible to be unhappy.

I even walked past my favorite poppies, and they were there, just like last year.

It stayed warm into the evening. S. and F. and N. and I went to a soccer game, frankly the only sport in which I actually understand all that is going on, and I had not yet put on my coat by the end of it.

I really need to live only in cities big enough to have major league sports teams.

In the end, there were creative drinks and gooey mac and cheese, late into the night, and a drive back to a familiar bed in a cozy house, the house where I feel so relaxed that I cannot quite remember that I have to get up early and work at the end of the weekend.

distracting

One of the instructors accidentally elbowed me in the nose today in fighting class. It hurt. It hurt quite a lot, actually, and it took a few minutes before I was sure that I was going to be able to keep the involuntary tears to the few that collected in my eyes.

I am having one of those weeks of being overwhelmed. My reaction to being overwhelmed generally goes like this: Panic. Spend some time trying to breathe and focus. Realize that it's not working and give up on the overwhelming stuff and get some extra sleep. Come back and be super extra productive for a while. Panic. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The good news is that I can sleep even when I am overwhelmed. It is, in fact, the best way to forget the overwhelmedness. The other good news is that I have been super extra productive, even though there is that much more to be done. The final good news is that it's almost the weekend.

I can see the sunset from my living room, and it's distractingly beautiful.

coincidence

At a stoplight today, a Land Rover pulled up next to me. I caught sight of it, as one does, out of the corner of my eye, and it seemed perfectly normal until suddenly my head snapped back around to look at it, because it was white and it had a roof rack and an extra front bumper and really, it should have belonged to some aid agency in Africa.

I saw today that the organization I worked for in Rwanda has a job opening in South Sudan.

Coincidence.

sane

Sometimes, when you have to deliberately stop yourself and remember how to breathe because the list of things to do, people to call, papers to file is so overwhelmingly long, it feels really good to beat the shit out of a pad, even - especially - when your lungs start screaming.

I have no idea how I would survive if I did not have fighting class to get me out of the office and doing something physical nearly every day. It keeps me sane.

balls

I go bowling approximately once every five years, which is to say that I think I last went during law school.

"What is a good score?" asked R., the Kiwi in the group.

"300 is a perfect score," I told him, "if you get all the pins down every time, but I am thrilled with anything over 70."

And I would have been thrilled with a 70, too, especially after bowling a 36 on the first game.

After that dismal showing, I began to remember something, vaguely, about needing a heavier ball. I upgraded from my measly 8 pound ball to a 10 and then a 12 and finally a 14, until of the six guys and three women, I was using the heaviest ball. Somehow I need the heft. I just sort of toss the lighter ball all over the lane, but a heavier ball has enough inertia of its own to roll slowly down the middle of the lane. This bowling alley shows your speed as well as your score, and mine was consistently lowest, but my scores went up with the heavier ball, to an 86, and then a 73.

I was happy.

(Side note: a group of 30-somethings should not be allowed to do any activity involving balls. The innuendo is far too easy.)

...

I left church early today to go to a martial arts seminar, but I did that thing where you think you know where something is and then when you get there the something that is in the place you thought you would find the something you need is not the right something, and then you drive around for a while looking for the right something but 1. you do not find the right something, and 2. the class you wanted to take has already long started.

So instead I went back to a coffee shop and sat outside until I remembered that I was right by church and people from church were probably going to drive by and wonder why I wasn't at the class I said I was going to be at when I was chatting at the pre-church breakfast.

And just at that moment, someone from church drove by.

I retreated home, and added some milk to my bizarrely chocolately mocha to tone it down. (If it's too chocolately for me, there is probably scarcely a person in the world who can handle the chocolatiness.)

...

The sky is occasionally blue again, here, and I feel homesick. Blue sky does that to me, because in the blue sky I can see the jet trails and I know that somewhere up there are people who are going somewhere, while I'm stuck here.

camp making

When I heard the weather forecast, I most definitely was not planning to camp for the whole weekend. I had M.'s tent and N.'s sleeping bag - good to -15 degrees F - and I'd forked out the cash for my own thermarest (which is not actually called a sleeping pad, being too thick, but a camp bed; yes, I had taken mockery for the wimpiness of owning such a cushy pad), but I did not actually intend to stay anywhere cold and wet. I had nefarious plans, you see, to bolt back to the K.s' house at the first sign of rain.

Except that it was sunny, that first day, and there were water droplets raining down from the cliffs over the trail, and who can resist that? And then there was this awesome salad dressing/everything sauce, made of sesame oil and soy sauce, and who can resist that? And then it was late, and dark, and I had a sleeping bag good down to -15 degrees F and a 2.5 inch camp bed, so I climbed into my little tent and fell asleep.

In the morning, we climbed up to look down on the world like birds do, and then further up and in through the woods, until we came down again into a tourist attraction so busy that I felt dizzy, after the silence and the emptiness.

It was strange to camp so close to Gone West. At the end of each day, I wanted to suggest a pub or pizza place in Gone West, since that's what you do after a day of hiking in that area, when you live in Gone West, but instead we retreated to a strangely idyllic campground close to the city.

The K.s had made bets on whether I would last the weekend, and although I came home with a wet tent and sleeping bag, I did. I even slept in a tent by myself. This is a feat, since I fear the woods. Seriously. I am far more nervous in my parents' house with that backyard of trees (anything could be hiding in them! anything!) than in a house on almost any city street (exceptions, I know, blahblahblah. noted.).

Since I got home, wet sleeping bag and tent in tow, I have done nothing but run about frantically. So badly have I exhausted myself that today I fell asleep on the couch over lunch. I curled up facing the light from the window, set an alarm, and fell immediately and deeply asleep. When the alarm went off, I was slow and disoriented, and also far from recovered from my shorter and shorter nights of sleep.

fun

I know that it seems like I talk about nothing but fighting class lately, but the fact is that I scarcely have time for anything else, between work and getting ready for camping and more work. And I love it. Today we did multiple attacker scenarios, with kickboxing and then gun disarms and choke holds, and then all three together. The instructor spun us around and around and then had people choke us from one side and then the other while we were dizzy, and we had to fight each of them off. We left, as always, exhilarated and unsure which sweat was ours and which belonged to other people.

On the way out the door, I said, "If I had known this was so much fun, I would have started it years ago."

"I know, right?" my classmate said. "Me, too."

Oh, and: I managed to break-fall correctly, twice, even being thrown onto the ground fast and hard. Admittedly, I screwed it up once and my head hit the ground and reverberated for a while. Details. I'm getting better.