hammock

I've been thinking lately that it would be nice to have a hammock. 

I own a hammock. I think. I just don't have it here. It is probably somewhere in my parents' basement, which is where everything is that I brought home from college/Rwanda/law school and dumped in the basement and then left there when I moved on to Rwanda/law school/Gone West. 

The only time I've ever hung that hammock was in Rwanda, which is funny because I bought it in 1999 in Nicaragua. It has traveled the world.

In Rwanda, I hung it (okay, my guards hung it) between two trees in front of my patio, just where the ground dropped off toward the lake. On Saturday afternoons, I would nap in it, in the shade and the bits of sunlight dappled through the leaves. Sometimes I would sit in it while I was on the phone or the computer.

One summer, I had an American college student stay with me (long story; I happened upon her at the Okapi minibus station while I was picking up a package that my office in Kigali had sent, the Okapi being both cheaper and more efficient than sending anything by mail, and offered her and the Rwandese guy with her a ride because they looked lost, and it turned out she needed a place to stay and stayed with me for most of the summer). 

I was sitting in the hammock doing something that I cannot remember at approximately lunch time. S. came out of the house with a plate of food for me, and I stood up to take it from her. Sitting back down, I forgot about the part where that type of hammock folds in on itself, and I sat down on nothing above a steep hill.

Somehow I tumbled over the folded hammock, upside down, somersaulting 180 degrees, and landed facing back up the hill, pasta and sauce splattered everywhere, the wind knocked out of me. 

That's a one time sort of mistake. One does not forget again.

memory

Ten years ago today, I was in the Big Apple, interviewing for a law school scholarship.

I should have been in Rwanda.

There is no should, of course. I got a call from the law school, and I bought a ticket, and I didn't think of the fact that I would miss the 10 year anniversary of the start of the genocide in Rwanda.

I felt like I should have been there, even though being there, the year before, felt like an intrusion into some private grief that I couldn't share.

One April or May morning in Rwanda, up on a mountainside in the mist, I thought about 100 days. 

Because it wasn't just a day of massacres all over the country. It was 100 days - more than three full months - of fear and hiding and panic.

When you go to Rwanda and sit beneath the trees with real people, it's hard to imagine that in those same emerald green hills, in that same perfect sunshine, so very many people died.

I didn't go to genocide memorials until I'd been in Rwanda for over a year and a half. I just couldn't do it. I wanted to see life before I saw what came before. 

When I finally went to a church in the east of the country, and the museum in Kigali, the guides opened mass graves and stepped down into them. One opened a casket for us to see the disintegrating body inside. The damp air smelled of death. 

Out in the garden again, the air was fresh and clean. Flowers grew bold, as they do in the tropics. Kids shouted as they played in the distance.

Rwanda is alive with memory, but it is still so alive.

This church in Kibuye was the site of a massacre. On Sundays, the church is filled with parishioners. The mass grave is outside.

The stadium in Kibuye was another massacre site. Now teams play football next to the cemetery.

useful

Sometimes I think that the most useful skill I have, cultivated in East Africa, is that of driving on unlit roads when oncoming traffic has lights so bright I can't see. 

In Rwanda and Uganda, that was because no one believes in turning off their bright beams.

In the US, it is because my car is small and many big SUVs now have extra bright headlights that shine directly down into my eyes.

Either way, I have long experience in looking down to the side, away from the light, at the edge of the road and nothing more. It doesn't even give me a headache anymore the way it did when I first moved to Rwanda and would have to go to bed early whenever I went to Kigali.

26: antibiotics

I sometimes think about whether I would be alive without modern medicine. 

Maybe.

I've had malaria several times (I remember how wonderful the cool cement floor felt to lie on), and there were a few rounds of lung illnesses (pneumonia, etc.) when I was in middle school, and I've had strep throat a number of times, and there was that sinus infection in Rwanda. 

That's just the little stuff. That doesn't even count the TB that I could have contracted from my friend in Liberia when I was very small, or the vaccines that prevented me from getting cholera, or the schiztosomiasis.

The last few times I really needed antibiotics - for the sinus infection in Rwanda and strep throat in law school - I remember the distinct feeling of the disease responding to the antibiotics. I took the pills (amoxicillin in Rwanda and penicillin in law school) and literally felt better by the minute until I stopped feeling better and started feeling worse again before the next dose. 

My friend B., a surgeon who trained in Ethiopia, told me that it wasn't necessary to take antibiotics for 10 days in Rwanda, because there was so much less resistance to them. 7 days would be plenty, he told me. 

I suspect this is in part because, even though antibiotics are available without a prescription, very few people are educated enough to know when and how to take them. One of the guards who watched the house/office where I lived in Rwanda once came to me and said that he needed to go to the hospital because he had a headache. 

"I can give you medicine for it," I told him, and gave him 12 or so ibuprofen.

"How do I take it?" he asked, and I wrote down: two in the morning, two at midday, two at bedtime. It was a bit of culture surprise for someone who keeps a giant size bottle of ibuprofen all the time. (Although I try not to use it much anymore.)

Dr. B. also told me that he was horrified when he read US medical literature. "I do not have infection rates like that in my hospital," he told me. "It is rare that I have an infection after surgery. I don't know what is going on in hospitals in America."

What is going on is, in part, that we have been spoiled by antibiotics. When I had that sinus infection, as I got the antibiotics, I thought to myself that I could see how people died before there were antibiotics, because I wasn't sure how long I would maintain the will to live if my head hurt that badly with no hope of relief. I probably would have pulled through just fine, of course, but there is so much less risk to a life with good antibiotics: I can travel the world. I can go visit people in hospitals. I can go visit people in jail. I can go to schools. Whatever I pick up in those places, I'll probably be fine.

I can't imagine a world without antibiotics, even though I know that in my Oma's lifetime, her younger siblings died because of a lack of them.

The scariest thing is that we may end up right back there. My (potential) kids could die because of a lack of antibiotics. 

This article scared me, badly: Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future.

I've been avoiding anti-bacterial soap and hand sanitizer for a long time, but now not only am I promising myself to try to make it through any illness, even bacterial, without antibiotics, but I am also going to try to eat and drink only milk and meat produced without antibiotics. 

Because even scarier than the fact that we might be losing our antibiotics? The idea that it is our cheap, mass-produced food that is a huge source of the problem.

Go forth and avoid antibiotics.

still lit

Driving home tonight, I noticed that the lights are out to the north of us, and to the east, and to the west. There are two blocks on our street that have power: ours and one other. 

Given that I've been on the wrong end of power outages many a time (see also: 40 minutes of power per day, on average, my last few months in Rwanda), I will take it. 

I'm not even superstitious, but after I told my roommates about the power situation in our neighborhood, I rapped on the wooden frame around a doorway, just in case. 

running, again (or again, again, again)

Every summer, as we know, I take up running. 

Every summer, I end up giving it up because my knees can't take it. 

I mentioned this when I was home in April, and my brother said, "You have to start slow." 

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that he might be right. Because of my fighting class in Universe City, my running has historically been limited not by my lung capacity (I can go out and run three miles if I decide I want to do so) but by my leg muscles, which get tired because running is a different motion than everything else I do. I began to wonder whether, by starting out with a three mile run, I have been introducing my muscles to running too quickly and maybe they haven't able to stabilize my knees because they are so tired.

The last time I ran without knee pain was in and immediately after Rwanda. The way I started running that time was by walking. I walked up and around the hill above my house, and then I walked down and around the peninsula behind my house, and then I walked over and around the bay where I lived. At some point, walking got to be not quite enough exercise, and I started adding running bits. It was only a few feet at first, but eventually I ran more and more, and soon I was running 45 minutes at a time.

I'm trying that again.

Last week I went and had my stride analyzed and bought a new pair of running shoes. (I had been running in a pair of trail shoes that I bought in 2005, before I went to Tanzania. This was perhaps not the best idea ever. Before that, I had been running in a pair of Nikes that were too wide for my feet and therefore had to be laced tight to keep my foot from sliding around, only that hurt my arches, so I laced them loose and then did kung fu on concrete and did something terrible to my foot and the back of my heel hurt for a year.)

Friday night, I started out in my new shoes. I walked, and then I ran, and then I walked again. I think I ran about 8 blocks. Today, I did the same. I think I ran about 10 blocks, in one or two block increments.

It was hard to stop at a block or two. The competitive side of me wants to keep going, to keep running. But I have to keep that in check, and maybe, with time, I'll be able to call myself a runner once again.

Thermos

I spent most of my late afternoon and evening yesterday trying to buy a Thermos. 

I do know that it shouldn't be that hard. 

See, I needed a Thermos for winter outdoor activities. On every winter outdoor activity I do, there are people with Thermoses who have delicious warm drinks when we stop for lunch and I instead have delicious cold drinks, which are delicious but just not the same when you are out in the snow. 

I had a winter outdoor activity planned for today, and so of course yesterday at around 4 pm I decided that I needed a Thermos now now now. 

Reviews suggested that REI had a good one, but there were also some available at T@rget that looked good, so I went there first. 

I stood in front of the Thermos section for a while, thinking, picking up various Thermos products and then setting them down again. (Thermoses are expensive, which is a fact that I did not know. $15 for a little soup Thermos that your kid takes to school? What if they lose it? What if I lose it?)

At length, I decided that I would buy the REI thermos instead of the bigger, bulkier one at T@rget, and I went off to buy some things at Trader Joe's and then to REI.

It was 6:10 when I pulled up to REI. 

It turns out that they close at 6.

Curses.

I was determined that I needed a Thermos now now now, so I went back across town to T@rget and bought the 18 oz one. 

It's amazing how easy a decision is when you only have one choice. Sometimes - many times - I think I prefer it that way. If there were not so many choices, I would not find myself standing aimlessly in T@rget for far too long. 

(T@rget is particularly bad for this. 

When I came back from Rwanda for Christmas in 2003, I remember standing in front of the snack aisle in W@lgreens while my pictures printed, mesmerized and immobilized by the row of snacks. There were so very many of them! I was used to having my snack options limited to Pringles and three types of cookies, two of which were tasteless. 

I still feel mesmerized and immobilized in T@rget, which is probably why, contrary to the rumors that circulate on the internet about never getting out of T@rget with less than $200 spent, I need either a list or my sister to get me to spend any money there. It is not uncommon for me to walk out with nothing if I do not have a list. There are just too many choices.)

[23] cars

When I had my baby Landcruiser in Rwanda, I felt like I knew it so well. I drove it non-stop for two years, and by the end, it was almost an extension of my body.

I knew its foibles (a tendency toward electrical problems that periodically made the horn not work or the gauges go crazy, an inability to keep power up the first long hill out of Kigali to the west unless I turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows because it was four cylinders instead of eight).

I knew how to get out and lock and unlock the wheels for 4-wheel drive, and what kind of mud it could handle in 2- or 4-wheel drive.

I knew exactly how much space it took up, and exactly when I could dart between those other cars.

When I moved to Universe City and bought my little Honda two years ago, I felt clumsy behind the wheel. I hadn't had a car for three years in New York and three years afterwards in wandering + Gone West, and driving no longer felt natural. 

This from a girl who started drivers training two days after her 15th birthday and proudly accepted the surprised "You are a good driver!" comments from U. in Rwanda, who didn't expect her to be able to drive through mud because 1. she was young, and 2. she was a girl. (I was, I mean. My persons are getting confusing.) I am from the Mitten, where we drive. We drive a lot. And we have snow. Of course I had no problem with mud.

This evening, after purchasing a $10 bottle of fragrance-free shampoo (available only on the other side of town and the bottle is small - duurrrrgh, my skin issues are getting even more expensive), I stopped to buy a scarf. After trying on about 15 of them and determining that acrylic, viscose, and cashmere do bother my skin, as does any texture to polyester, but that generally polyester, cotton, and silk are okay, I turned on my car and something felt weird. 

My car has once again become such an extension of me that I know immediately upon turning it on that a headlight has burned out. I know the pattern my headlights throw, and it wasn't being thrown. My Mitten training has come back, full force.

[16] bumper

So I was going to go to a bar that has pool and darts and video games with my friend J., but instead J. and L. invited me over for dinner, which was a delicious cold grain and squash dish. (J. contested the description of it as "a salad" because it was more grains and seeds than vegetables.)

Then L.'s friend needed help moving a tv that apparently weighs as much as L. does, so J. handed me his computer and they left, which means that I am sitting in someone else's living room, typing on someone else's computer, just a little bit tipsy from a gin and tonic.

Sitting here after half an hour of playing online, I remember that my car was behind J.'s car. I am not exactly sure how they got the car out. When they first left, I kept expecting them to come back and say, "Uh. We just hit your car" but this hasn't happened, so I assume that the departure went smoothly. Now I wonder how they will get the car back in.

That car thing has happened. I think I once backed a car into my grandma's car in her driveway. Or maybe it was the other way around. I don't really remember. Nothing was damaged.

And once in Rwanda I was backing my Prado out of a parking spot on the main road by the post office boxes and someone else was backing his little Corolla out of a spot directly across the road and our two rear ends collided, gently. Well, gently for the Prado. It was my bumper versus the top of his trunk, and the bumper won. My car was fine. His trunk was severely dented. 

I got out of the truck and walked back to see how things were. People gathered.

The other driver took one look at the trunk, got back in his car, and drove away.

I was confused, but someone knowledgeably informed me that the other guy probably didn't have insurance and couldn't risk the police showing up. With nothing else to do, the crowd dispersed and I drove away.

[11] sameness

The other day I had a conversation about what I miss about living in places that are not Universe City, and what it comes down to is that I miss feeling like unexpected things might happen. Even in Gone West, I felt like things need not be the same every day: I rode the train to work, or biked, and there is plenty of opportunity for the unexpected when you interact with strangers every day.

Here, where I drive my car to work and home again, I feel like all the little moments are gone. No kids do cute things on the crowded dalla-dalla on my way to work. No mentally ill homeless person shouts something crazy on the train. The kids may very well be doing cute things, but they are doing them shut up in their parents' SUVs, and the mentally ill homeless people are hanging out down by the river, outside the windows of my car. I can't hear them.

I miss that. 

I miss people, I suppose. It's the extrovert in me. 

I prefer to live in a world where when I walk to the market on a Friday I am surrounded by young boys who offer to run off and find maracuja (passion fruit) for me. 

I prefer to live in a world where when my tire goes flat on the side of the road just outside Kigali, a whole crowd gathers to try to help me get the lock on the spare off and, when we are unsuccessful, two bicycle taxis load me on one and the flat tire on the other and we ride off to the Toyota dealership.

I prefer to live in a world where when I sit in a downtown park, someone will talk to me.

I prefer to live in a world where some guy gets on the train and preaches, or some kid gets on the bus and sings, and we all applaud together.

None of that ever happens here. We just get into our individual cars and go our individual ways, and so every day is so very much the same.

fairly

The fair came to town, and because I had a party to go to later, I went a little earlier than the people I was meeting. I haven't been to a fair in a really long time, not a proper county fair with animals. 

I wandered through the goat stable just to see. The smell of goats makes me think of Rwanda. Not only did I spend about one day a week climbing up and down mountains to check out goat stables, but soon after I moved to Rwanda, we imported these goats from South Africa. They came 42 or 43 to a pallet, two pallets loaded in the back of a DC-10. The plane was full of different crates and pallets, almost to the ceiling, and we walked back between them to the space where 85 goats had been crammed almost immobile in cages for about 12 hours as the plane skipped from African capital to African capital. The smell of 85 scared, tired, hungry, cramped goats in the back of a plane was horrifying. I have not quite recovered, even now. Still, I wanted to see them. There were very few familiar-looking goats. Goats in central Africa have ears that stand up (it's sheep that have floppy ears there), and many breeds of goats here seem to have floppy ears. They look all wrong to me.

My friends eventually arrived. I tracked them over to the pig races. Pig races. Seriously. We watched one heat. I have no idea how they got those pigs to run, but I am assuming that the pigs expected some kind of reward. We did not see the reward. 

A bunch of big cats (tigers, lions, panthers) were lying listlessly in too-small cages. We left that as quickly as possible and headed for the rides.

I think I had kind of forgotten how motion-sick I get. I can handle going upside down. I can handle rollercoasters. It's that circular motion that gets me. And the only non-circular ride was one that just went up and around in a loop of steel, but the operator had stopped that one and climbed part-way up the inside track and was hitting at something with a hammer. 

We went on a circular ride that spun you sideways and upside down (I could scarcely enjoy it because half-way through I realized that I needed to be hanging onto my earrings if I didn't want to lose them - one girl lost her sunglasses, and two people lost phones). I still felt sick when we got on the high swing that swings you in a circle high above the ground. I might have enjoyed the view if I hadn't been trying to figure out whether I felt more sick with my eyes open or closed. That jolt of almost falling near the beginning wasn't so fun, either. (You know you are a boring grownup when you start to worry about the safety of the fair rides. I catch myself imagining that they are maintained by bored roadies whose only diversion is drugs and alcohol. And I may not be wrong.)

I had ginger chews in my car, though, and I went straight for those on the way to my other party. Sweet relief.

back when

The first time I ever started running was in Rwanda. I didn't actually intend to start running. Every day around 5 pm I would lay off work and go for a walk.

I walked up the road behind my house and along the little dead end road that led to the high point of the peninsula on which I lived. 

Then I walked back down and around the long part of the peninsula out to the end where I would sit on the rocks and watch the sun lower itself into the hills of Congo, or the smoke rise from Mount Nyiragongo to the north. 

Little boys swam back from the island off the end of the peninsula holding the horns of the cows they had been tending.

Fishermen set off in their outrigger canoes.

Sometimes I would walk toward the bay instead, toward the birthday-cake hotel, where little kids would shout "Muzungu!" from the hillsides and run down to hold my hand as I walked.

"Si ni twa muzungu," I would tell them, "Ni twa M-a," and by the time I left it was my (Kinyarwand-ized) name they called from the hillsides.

Eventually, walking was not enough exercise, and one day I ran a little part of the trail along the peninsula, and soon I was running more and more without stopping.

I never set out to run. I set out to enjoy the evening. If there was something interesting to see, I would stop. If a storm was rolling in, I would sit on the rocks and let the fury of the storm kicking up waves frighten and thrill me. If I needed to think, I would sit somewhere pretty and think. If I had a guest, I would walk with them. S. and some other random muzungu - I can't remember who - and I once swam out to the island at the end of the peninsula. It was never about the running, and there was no pressure.

I am trying to keep that feeling of the absence of pressure as I add running to my life here. If I have only a little time, I run a little. If I have more time and I feel okay, I run more. I think I've forgotten until just now, though, writing this, that it is possible to stop and walk and watch the sky. I need to remember that.

(This whole story has been told in this spot before, but I do so love to reminisce.)

I feel like I've told this story before

I used to send my chips back in Rwanda. Fries, to US Americans. 

I was totally That Girl. (I hate That Girl.)

Rwanda has some of the best chips/fries in the world, when they are made correctly. Not for nothing were they colonized by Belgium, Homeland of Chips. (I don't know that I've ever been to Belgium, other than the Brussels Airport. But the chips thing is well rumored.)

The problem with chips is that they must be fried twice. They simply must. And sometimes people skimp on the frying and do it only once, and disaster ensues. Once-cooked chips are soggy and mushy and taste like stale potato. 

And so three or so times a week when I lived in Rwanda I ate at the Kibuye Guesthouse, and three or so times a week I ordered chips and grated carrots (you never knew what you were going to get if you ordered a straight salad), and three or so times a week I sent my chips back to be well-cooked, and three or so times a week the chips came back a few minutes later steaming and crisp.

I was totally That Girl, but it was totally worth it for those delicious bits of fried potato eaten with American Greenland Ketchup (made in the UAE. I note that tomatoes do not grow in the desert. I have no idea how this ketchup gets made, but it has a hint of spice and it is amazing).

Tonight I had to turn into That Girl again. 

We were sitting on a deck in the sunlight at a crappy campus bar, and I ordered mac and cheese because I needed comfort food.

Two hairs into our beverages and appetizers (one hair in the straw of a water cup, one hair in the hush puppies), my mac and cheese arrived, freezing cold in the middle.

I sent it back and they microwaved it (literally - she said, as she brought it back, "We put it in for two minutes"). 

Then it was luke-warm in the middle, and I sent it back again.

It came back hot and mushy, like all bad campus bar food, but I piled on the black pepper and it was tolerable. 

And possibly contained spittle, after the annoyance I caused the kitchen.

stranger danger

Over there, beyond the mountains, it is reliably sunny this time of year. Gloriously, reliably sunny. 

Every time I go over the mountains, I expect my allergies to go away, because after all, it is just this area where the pollen/pollution/everything gets trapped over us by the mountains that is the problem, right? RIGHT? 

Every time I go over the mountains, I am disappointed, because I am just as allergic to the dry side of the mountains (over there) as I am to the wet side of the mountains (over here). I suppose I should expect this, given that there are literally waves of yellow pollen blowing around over there in June.

Pollen or no, there is glorious, reliable sunshine over there, and I was stuck inside at a conference. 

Curses.

 This morning, I listened to speeches by two of my favorite lawyers in this state, and then meandered around Beautiful City Beyond [the Mountains] finding reasons not to start out on a hike.

There was coffee, drunk while perusing the hiking guide. 

There was lunch, eaten in the sunshine. 

There was wandering to find snacks for hiking, which turned into fighting for a parking spot downtown and then waiting for the bubble tea I decided I must have. (This particular bubble tea is really only available in Gone West and Beautiful City Beyond [The Mountains]. What was I to do but wait for the bubbles to be cooked?)

I almost canceled the hiking because, well, I'm afraid of hiking alone, as we all know. I didn't really hike until I moved to State of Happiness, except on vacations in Colorado and such, and when I moved to this state, I started hiking, but only recently have I ventured out alone. Occasionally. In non-secluded places.

I had mentioned the hiking to T., though, and she made me go hiking. Insofar as someone can make you go hiking from across the country. It's called accountability. You (I) feel reeeeally stupid when you (I) say you (I) are (am) going on a hike and then bail because you (I) are (am) fluttering helplessly about a city looking for snacks.

The hike that I picked was 4.7 miles long, just outside Beautiful City Beyond [The Mountains]. It was perfect. There were just many enough people on the trail that if I were attacked by a cougar or a rattlesnake, someone would come upon my mauled and/or convulsing body within a reasonable time span. There were just few enough people on the trail that I was alone for the entire trip.

I wore cotton.

The trail ran up one side of a creek and down the other, mostly through that scrubby mix of underbrush and Douglas Fir that marks the east side of the Cascades. The air smelled good. It was all so pretty, and the air was so warm, and it felt so good to be moving, and I was so proud to be out on my own. I got some good thinking and journaling done.

There is something about a dusty trail through mountains that reminds me of Rwanda. It reminds me of all the long walks through the mountains to visit people who had received goats through our goat project, or evening walks along the peninsula, or Sunday afternoon walks with S. 

To make sense of the following story, you need to know that, in Kinyarwanda, a white person is a muzungu (mzungu in Swahili). More than one white people are abazungu (wazungu in Swahili). 

S. and I were walking through the hills behind her house one afternoon when a little girl, probably three years old, came barreling down the trail at us, calling "Abazuuuungu!" in the most delighted voice, as if we were an exciting gift that the universe had delivered to her door.

And then she just didn't stop. She ran full tilt directly into me. 

Which was fine, because she was only three, and I caught her and swung her around and set her down again, but it was hilarious. I kept thinking she would stop, but then she just didn't. She ran directly into the arms of a stranger.  On purpose. Apparently stranger-danger had not hit Rwanda, c. 2003.

Kids make me laugh.

knife-less

One day not long ago, I bought a loaf of delicious cheese and onion bread. I brought it home and opened the drawer to take out the serrated knife, only to discover that the serrated knife was gone.

My roommate had returned to the house long enough to remove her good knives and bring them to her boyfriend's house, where she spends nearly all of her time. (She hasn't slept here since before Christmas.)

It is a sad, sad thing to go back to one little paring knife for every type of cutting. I lived this way for nearly three years in Gone West, I know, but the mangled chunks of cheese and onion bread seem less tolerable after a year and a half with good knives.

This from a girl who lived for two years in Rwanda with a two-burner gas hot plate in lieu of stove/oven/microwave/toaster and never once bothered to find a way to replace the knobs that had fallen off, which I'm sure would not have been hard. I just pushed and twisted the little metal pieces to turn the burners on.

(Parents! I see a birthday/Christmas gift opportunity! Because I doubt that I will ever get around to buying my own knives. Ever.)

snowed in

It snowed about six inches two nights ago, and I woke up to a delightful world of white. It was pretty.

Then the power went out, which was fine. I don't mind getting ready for work in the dark. I have a headlamp.

(I know no power. I am familiar with no power. I had power about 40 minutes a day for the last few months I lived in Rwanda. I would leave the light on in my room so that when the power went on at, say, 2:10 am, I could get up and plug in all my electronics to take advantage of every minute I had power. And remember these days?)

So I got ready in the dark, thinking, "Adventure!" Life is so boring here, sometimes.

I had smartly started parking my car in the garage the last few weeks so that it would not be snowed/sleeted upon. We live just high enough in the hills that a sprinkling of snow or ice on a winter morning is not uncommon.

When I was all ready for the day, I piled things into my arms, hit the garage door button, and stepped outside.

Oh, ha. Ha and ha.

My house, I may have mentioned, is built into a steep hill. It is on stilts, essentially, and it goes down so fast from the road that even the driveway is a deck out over nothing. The garage is detached from the house, and the only door to it is the car-sized door, on the garage door opener.

"Just detach the chain!" people told me all day, and I had to explain again and again that the problem was not that I couldn't get the car out of the garage. I know how to detach the garage door opener. The problem was that I couldn't get into the garage. My car and I were parted by the garage door.

As I layered on my rain pants and gaiters and skiing gloves, I was infinitely grateful for the privilege of having spent money on waterproof gear. SHO and/or I commented earlier this week that money does not buy happiness, but not having it can make you miserable. On cold days, being warm and dry can feel a whole lot like happiness.

I set out by foot through a maze of snow and downed tree branches. It took me a while of walking to figure out that this warm, wet snow is heavy, and the trees here are not accustomed to snow, and so the pieces break off much more easily than they would in the Mitten.

A little girl showed me her snow child and snow animals in her driveway. A guy came snowboarding past me, all the way down the long hill. A wire hung low over the road in one spot, and the snowboarder, after offering me a chance at his snowboard, told me that the road had been blocked by a fallen tree on the longer, less steep route out of the neighborhood.

My coworker with traction tires and all-wheel drive (people in this part of the world have no idea how to handle snow) picked me up exactly 1.1 miles into my walk in the direction of work. We arrived almost two hours late. Most people didn't make it at all.

At 9 pm, after I'd gone home to pick up the stuff I would need to stay at a friend's house, my neighbor called me to tell me that the lights were back.

I haven't been that excited about lights since Liberia c. 2006, when Ma Ellen turned the streetlights on. Admittedly, it isn't so much about the lights here as it is about 1. sleeping in my own bed instead of someone's futon, 2. accessing my vehicle and being once again independent, and 3. warm water in the middle of winter. Cold showers in Liberia are not a problem. Cold showers in a house without heat while there is snow on the ground are an entirely different prospect.

following the law

Yeah, hi. I've been busy. Living and stuff. Whatever. As I say every time this happens, blogging about blogging is boring.

You know what I do when I start in on a blog post about blogging or the art of blogging or search engine optimization or anything of that sort? One of two things: I pretend to skim and then click away, or my eyes immediately glaze over and I click away.

I currently am having my morning tea in a town that I describe as one of the two armpits of State of Happiness (the other is Universe City's neighboring town). I came up here for a little work thingee, and now I am procrastinating beginning the 1.5 hour drive back. It seems awfully unfair that even one of the armpits has a better downtown than Universe City.

Periodically, about every other day or so, I think that I am in the wrong profession. If I win the lottery ever (difficult, when you buy a ticket almost never), I am going to go back to school in something more helping profession-y and less fighting-y. (Shut up. Those are words. I just made them words, upon my decree.)

This work thingee reminded me of that again. I did a social work type job before I moved to Rwanda, and this morning I felt for a moment that I might be back in that world, just with grown ups instead of kids. I miss it.

Having a law degree is clearly a great privilege. Part of the reason i went to law school, at the final moment, instead of finding a way to do relief work in Darfur, was because I realized that being able to go and not going would be a slap in the face of all the people I knew in Rwanda who so desperately wanted an education but couldn't afford it.

But it is also a burden, sometimes. Once you have taken out well over $100,000 in student loans, you can never just go back to some low-paying job you love. You are stuck in this profession, for money or loan repayment help, and you can't get out. (And it seems to me now that spending that much money on schooling is also a slap in the face of all the people I knew in Rwanda who could not afford even the relatively low school fees there.)

Some of my most panicked moments in the last few years have been when I realized again that I don't have the option of leaving law, not for quite a while.

time

And so, I am back, and this is a new year. Or something. I'm never really sure about this time thing, even though I like the numbers that repeat (11:11 is my favorite).

It's just all so arbitrary, though. Who says that this particular moment in the middle of the night means something? Someone just decided it, but there is nothing to differentiate it from the moment before or after, not if you don't have a clock.

Even with a clock, if you don't have the tv on to Times Square, the moment means very little.

...

For some reason, I started thinking about New Year's Eve 2003, when I'd been in Rwanda for two months. I spent the evening at the hotel that I always stayed at, in Kigali, and somehow I fell into sitting out in the grassy courtyard with a Lebanese guy who spent the evening telling me how he got a girl pregnant when she was 15 and he was 25, because it was the only way her dad would let them get married.

It was, to say the least, a strange evening, but at least I was too busy deciding whether or not he was creepy to be lonely.

eggs

I was just talking to my friend D. about eggs. She likes them. I don't.

Well-cooked is the only way I can handle eggs. They gross me out a little.

Eggs are useful. They are great in baking. I like them as a contributing factor to things. It isn't that I can't touch them, or that I don't use them.

And when I lived in Rwanda, omeletes were one of the few non-goat foods I could reliably get, and they had protein, too. I ate an omelete "bien cui" many a day.

Then I went to Liberia in 2006, and the eggs tasted off. Many people said they could not taste this, but I could. They tasted tinny. I could even taste it in baked goods.

But my slight distaste for egg goes back well before 2006. It may, in fact, be directly related to that one time as a kid in Liberia when we took an egg out of the fridge, broke it, and found inside a perfectly formed dead little chick.

Did you know that eggs turn into chickens?

Well, obviously.

Yet my mom, all through my teenaged years, told me over and over that THESE eggs, the ones we buy in the States, cannot turn into chickens, due to lack of fertilization.

But it turns out that once a kid has buried an unborn baby chick in the back yard after it died in the cold of the fridge, it is hard to convince that kid, or the woman she becomes, that eggs do not turn into chickens.

on the fringe

I am voraciously watching Season 3 of Fringe, gobbling up two or three episodes a night. I love this show.

There is only one problem, which is that I can't handle scary things. I certainly can't handle ghost stories (I have walked out of movies before), and it turns out that I can't handle the paranormal very well, either. Even when the paranormal is, as in Fringe, generally explained by tv-science.

One day a few weeks ago, I was afraid to walk out to my car from work at night because my car might have been affected.

Another day, I was walking toward my front door at night when I thought the fog was coalescing to chase me.

The episode I watched today involved re-animation of a corpse, and I may not sleep tonight.

I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to scary stuff. I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to the paranormal. I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to dead bodies.

(Again with the irony! - if I'm right about what irony is; I am never sure - that I ended up in Rwanda eight years after a million people were killed in a tiny country. You know they haven't found all the bodies. It's just impossible. I swam in that lake. But never alone. Oh, no, never alone. You know what bothers me the most about bodies? There used to be people in them, and now the people are gone. There is just something spooky about a body that no longer is a person.)