segue

I've met a few new friends this week and tried a few new restaurants. I am in that job stage where one minute you are thrilled with how well everything is going and how competent you are and then the next minute you feel like you've made the most amateur mistake on the planet. During the week, I'm starting to like this town.

Now is the test: the weekend.

The weekend forces me to spend time in my apartment, which means that I have to confront the truth, which is that I am living in chaos. I suspect that the stack of unpacked (but so useful!) boxes that block my route to the table and the assortment of boxes around the edge of the bedroom (but I don't have a dresser!) are not exactly helping me to feel settled here.

I am trying to hold out for the church rummage sale. One of the ladies informed me, two weeks ago, that there were several nice dressers already donated there. Plus, half the point of church is that people help each other out, and I bet someone will help me get a dresser home. I guess, now that I think about it, I am not so much holding out for the church rummage sale as I have no possible way to get a dresser home before then, so the church rummage sale and potential church members with trucks are my only possible option to get to a point where I can actually unpack.

...

I just got distracted reading through things I wrote during my international work years, and I remembered how very much there is that you can't say on a public internet site, how very much there is that maybe you can't ever say in public. I had forgotten many of them, until I saw them there in words. They were just life.

I went to a bunch of African movies earlier this year (ugh, another reason to regret leaving Gone West City), and at one of the movies, which was about a sensitive issue in one of the countries in which I have lived, one of the organizers asked me if I would be the person to respond to questions after the movie.

I said no. Call me paranoid, to think that it could ever be a problem that I talked about that particular sensitive issue (about which I actually know very little) at a movie screening in Gone West City, but I did not grow up where and when I did to grow up to underestimate exactly how sensitive these issues are. I have a lot of opinions, but I keep my mouth shut about other people's countries' politics.

Writing of opinions, have I ever explained here my hierarchy of knowledge of a country? I firmly believe that if you have been in a country longer, you get to be the explainer. It goes like this:

One month in country > one week in country
One year in country > one month in country
Ten years in country > one year in country
Lifetime in country > everyone else.

If you are on the right side of that equation, you do not explain how the country works, or what people believe, or how the politics work, no matter how much you have studied it. You shut up. At least, I shut up, and I think you should, too.* This conveniently avoids the know-it-all person who says, "But I have a B.A. in Culture-of-Country-X, even though I've never been there." That person** is required to shut up under my theory. Although they never do.

* Exceptions to shutting up are made for asking intelligent questions.
** If I am friends with you, you are not that person.

car

Addendum to Sunday's post: I had actually checked the Sunday schedule for that bus before I headed out expecting a 7:59 am bus. I was not blindly following a weekday schedule. Thus the annoyance: the bus does not even follow its own allegedly up-to-date schedule.

I need a car. I have been carless since I got back from Rwanda in 2004, due to three years in New York (car is more work than use) and three years in Gone West (car is just not really necessary).

I used to love driving, in Rwanda. I loved the tight curves on the road to Kibuye and the close brushes with huge, lumbering lorries. I loved the blinker to tell people if it was safe to pass and the hand kept poised over the horn to warn cows and kids who darted into the road.

I loved driving, but now S. says, "You are kind of a jumpy driver," when I drive on the way down to Universe City. I have lost my comfort behind the wheel, or maybe it's just that I still expect cows and kids to dart into the road, even on a smooth US American highway. I will have to earn my comfort back behind the wheel of my own car, the first one I haven't bought from my dad or been assigned at work.

weather report

I rode my bike to work today. It took 6 minutes, including waiting to get across the single busy street.

Nice, I thought. I will have to do this more often.

Then it started raining. And raining. And it continued raining. When I left work, it was actually raining. Not drizzling, like it normally does in this part of the world, nor down-pouring, but just a constant, steady rain.

I didn't exactly plan for this. It goes back to the age-old question: when the weather report says 30% chance of rain, does that mean a 30% chance that it will rain at some point during the hour, or does that mean that there is a 30% chance that it will be raining at any given point in the hour (i.e. about 20 minutes of the hour)? Or are the weather people just often wrong?

I didn't have a raincoat. But I gamely got on my bike and set off, wearing just my corduroy jacket.

I got wet and cold and wetter and colder. If there is anything I despise, it is being wet and cold.

I went looking for a store that I thought was on a particular corner, and it wasn't, and I got more wet and more cold. Then I went to the grocery store and I had a terribly difficult time locking my bike because the front tire was too big for the allotted bike space, and I got still more wet and still more cold.

I thought about being annoyed and frustrated. I thought about despairing because everything was going wrong, wrong, wrong. But then I realized that yes, I was wet. Yes, I was cold. But I was only six minutes away from a warm, dry apartment, full of warm, dry sweatshirts, and I watched unconcernedly as the rain dripped off the end of my helmet's visor. I smiled at the other biker at the corner.

And then I wheeled my bike into the kitchen so it could drip on the linoleum, and I took off all my dripping outer layers right there so that they wouldn't get the carpet wet, and I put on flannel pajama pants and a sweatshirt and socks and curled up in a fuzzy blanket.

home

I gave in and bought a train ticket to Gone West City. I felt trapped in Universe City, and I had to get out. The train left at 9 am, so I thought, to be safe, I would take the bus that passed my house at 7:59 am rather than waiting for the one at 8:29.

I was out at the bus stop at 7:56, but no bus came, neither while I was walking to it nor while I waited.

At 8:07 I started walking toward the next stop. And then the next. At the third stop, I found a schedule, which said that the first Sunday bus came by at 9:20.

I shifted my bag from one shoulder to the other, bent my head into the journey, and started walking, cursing Universe City all the way.

On the train, when I saw the first street that I could definitively say was in Gone West City, I had to fight tears. I was choked up all through the familiar streets, past the restaurant where we celebrated my new job, under the bridge on which I used to ride my bike to work. Three years ago, this was the city that gave me hope during my miserable days in the middle of nowhere in South Sudan. I was going to move here and put down roots. I was going to build a career and date boys. I was going to make friends and find a home.

And then the economy tanked. The job I wanted - the job I have - hasn't opened up here in two years, and it won't open up for at least a year or two, maybe longer if the downward plunge of funding continues. I wanted to do this job - I want to do this job - and so I moved. It is a minor thing, in the big picture, such a minor thing. There are people without any job at all. There are people afraid that they won't be able to buy school clothes for their kids. I just had to move from one city to another to do my dream job.

But all I keep thinking is, "I want to go home." Here in Gone West City, when the city train passed my apartment, I leaned against the window and thought, "I want to go home." I want this to be home.

fryer

Not long before I left Gone West City, I ended up at dinner after Sunday night church with a bunch of people from the K.'s church (but notably, none of the K.s. I can explain how that happened, but it is a long and tedious story involving bicycles and jeeps and leaving the house at 6:10 for a 6:00 service, and it is unimportant to the story at hand).

The church people and I went to a wings place. I ordered vegetarian wings, which horrified some people, and there were trivial pursuit cards on the table, so we spent the meal quizzing one another on random facts from the 1980s and before (the cards were old).

After we ate yummy chicken or soy protein wings, someone ordered a plate of fried oreos and twinkies.

This is like a bad joke, right? Everyone mocks fried oreos and twinkies. They are both unhealthy in the first place, and full of preservatives, and then you fry them? Well, oreos are delicious, I think, but I despise twinkies. They taste like chemicals. This is county fair food, and it just hurls itself at potential mockery. I myself made fun of them as the order came out.

And then I ate my words, and a lot of fried junk food, because fried oreos and twinkies are utterly delicious. Somehow the breading and frying utterly transforms them. The twinkies lose their chemical taste as the filling melts into the cake. The oreo chocolate melts into the breading and the filling seeps into the chocolate.

I should have been able to predict this. Soon after I moved to Gone West City, I went with N. and S. to a party thrown by S.'s friend. N. and I, neither of whom knew anyone else at the party, ended up spending the evening grilling double-stuf oreo after double-stuf oreo on the grill. Steaming hot oreos, with the filling all melted, are addicting. I should have expected that they would be just as addicting fried.

So now when I read about the ridiculous things that are fried at state fairs, I no longer scoff. The people frying them probably know something I don't know (yet).

moving in

The easiest way to move into a new place is to go shopping and buy all new things and start over. That is much, much easier than trying to use all the old things in a new place.

This message is brought to you by the letter F and the annoyance of washing the old shower curtain.

mental shift

I really cannot express how excited I am to go to sleep tonight, and to sleep until I wake up naturally. Sleeeeep.

I have had the best week, though, people. I mean, yes, I am in a new city. Yes, I know no one here. Yes, I miss my friends and coworkers. Yes, I am so exhausted I can hardly move. Yes, I am seriously annoyed by my lack of transportation.

(Everyone keeps telling me how great the bus system is here in Universe City, to which my (unspoken) response is, "Have you ever depended on this bus system? Because it isn't running at all on Monday. What kind of good bus system comes only every half an hour during rush hour and shuts down on holidays?" I am trapped here, ya'll. Trapped. I can't even get to a store that sells mascara without either 1. taking two buses, or 2. walking for at least half a hour. Trader Joe's would take me two buses or more than half a hour on a bike. Plus do you know how hard it is to transport milk home on a bike? Hard, very hard, unless you have the right kind of box/bag on the back of your bike.)

But. But.

All the stuff I can't talk about on a public website? All that stuff is amazing. On a social level, I wish I hadn't had to move here, but on a professional level, on a job fulfillment level, I am straight-up excited about what I get to do every day.

neither here nor there

I am moved in but not unpacked. I cannot unpack completely until I get a dresser and some sort of storage thing for the bathroom and possibly a bookshelf and, oh dear, there is a box under my bed labeled "Random Shitola that I (almost) Wish Would Disappear" that might never get unpacked. C0mc@st bills from 2008, anyone?

The kitchen is unpacked, though, and I can cook and eat. Today I wanted popcorn, but I have no microwave, so I opened the bag of microwave popcorn into a pan and popped it that way. It worked remarkably well. I had not one un-popped kernel.

I like this town, so far. I drank good coffee yesterday, and I have wandered through several interesting neighborhoods. And yet, I keep thinking that there is something wrong with this move. It's anti-climatic to move when all you find at the other end is another town like the old one, only smaller. I am used to moving to somewhere completely different. If I'm moving, there should be a new culture at the end, and a new language. If I'm moving here, I keep thinking, I might as well move back to Michigan. Then I could at least be near my family.

Remind me why I'm not in Africa, again?

backposting

The first night camping, we slept out on the pavement, under the shooting stars. We laid our sleeping bags down in a little alcove of the path and snuggled into the depths of, in my case, two sleeping bags. (Getting the -15 degree F bag that I usually use would have required extra phoning and driving and all I could think of was getting out out out to the woods. I had to double up.) In the night, in the dark, each time I woke up, I looked up and strained to keep my eyes open long enough to see just one shooting star. I tried to remember to wish on each one.

sugar bowl

I have been looking for a sugar bowl for a long time. Not actively looking, of course, but periodically I remember how handy it would be to have the sugar out on the counter in a bowl instead of in the cupboard in a bag, and I surf etsy for a while hoping to find one, and I am disappointed, and then I forget about it for a while. Today, after running such vital errands as changing my address at the bank and getting a library card and bus pass, I began walking in the direction of the Freddy's store to buy a mattress pad (the allergy cover for the mattress is so horribly heat-trapping that I can't sleep, especially now that I don't have air conditioning).

I walked for a while through little neighborhoods, which were pretty and which cause me to think, looking at a For Sale sign, I might actually someday be able to buy a house if I stay in this town. That would not have been possible, ever, in Gone West City, but it just might be here in Universe City. Then I left the neighborhoods behind and the trees disappeared and the road was full of cars and I was getting hot and tired and lo, a bus pulled up just as I walked past a bus stop, and it was going to the very place where I needed to be.

I went to goodwill first, and there I remembered, again, how nice it would be to have a sugar bowl. This time, I found one that I actually liked, but it seemed sort of... wide and squat. I began to doubt myself.

The following conversation ensued:

Me, to Fifty-Something Motherly Woman: Excuse me. Can I ask you a question? Do you think this is a sugar bowl, or is it something else, like maybe for gravy? It has a lid like a sugar bowl but it's the size of the gravy boats.

Fifty-Something Motherly Woman: Oh, wow. People used to use those to put sugar out for tea and coffee. With those little jugs for the milk.

Me: Um, yes. That's what I want to use it for.

FSMW: I never use them myself. I just get the sugar out of the container. It looks like one, though. Little lid like that. The gravy ones have a space for a ladle. Yeah, people used to use those sugar bowls all the time.

Me: Yeah... I am planning to use it, too. I don't need a creamer, though, but I just thought this sugar bowl was pretty.

FWMW: It is pretty. I just didn't realize people still used them.

So I've spent months to years looking for something that even people my mom's age think are old-fashioned.

I wonder what she would think if she knew that I also bought a pyrex bowl with the gold pattern that my mom's corelleware had in the 80s. Oh, and? On Wednesday, I bought a tupperware canister in classic 1979 green, to match the yellow tupperware container I inherited when my grandma moved to the nursing home. That yellow container got a lot of compliments - from people my age - when I brought cupcakes in it to work.

in the end

There are layers of delicious, addicting, chocolate cake on my stovetop, and boxes everywhere, and I'm still not sure if I'll have everything packed up by nine a.m. when people arrive to load my life into a truck and cart it to Universe City. The cake is my anchor right now. I can see progress in it, while the rest of the apartment just seems like chaos. I load a box and then make some frosting, carry out some recycling and cut one layer into two. I am accomplishing something, just maybe not the something I need to accomplish.

"Get some sleep," my momma cautions me, and I mean to, but I'm not sure if it will work, here in this room of box after box surrounded by random papers and rejected bags. I don't know if I can sleep.

I moved here with two suitcases. I am leaving with too many items to count.

"When I was moving," T. said, "I tried to find this comedy sketch. The woman talks about how when you start packing, you are organized and you label things, and then by the end you are throwing things randomly into boxes and yelling, 'I HATE MY STUFF!'"

I hate my stuff. My boxes aren't quite totally random yet, though.

My friend E. moved a month ago, and when we arrived everything was neat and clean and already half loaded in the truck. We were in and out in half an hour. I was awed and inspired, and I'm trying to do that here. I will manage it, I keep telling myself, even if I don't sleep tonight.

I might not sleep tonight, or not much, and that is the worst moment: in the dark, in the night, surrounded by impossible packing, crying with no one to call because the whole world is asleep.

I feel sick, sick, sick. I know this sick feeling, too. It feels far too familiar. This sick feeling is the reason I moved to Gone West. It is the reason I promised myself that I would never change cities again if I had to do it alone.

Two years and nine months after I moved here, three years after I made myself that promise, in August of 2007, in those miserable days before I left for Sudan, I am moving alone, again.

And I'm actually pretty pissed about it.

pleasant little hike

Someone, and I really do not know who, because it happened before I arrived, had the genius idea to hike a fifteen mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail. Fifteen miles is not a problem for S. and N., who are bizarrely fit without making any kind of effort, but F. and I are slightly less naturally athletic, and I'm not sure I have ever in my life hiked fifteen miles in one go.

Of course we had to start out with a good night of sleep and pancakes and coffee, and then we had to drop the car off at the trailhead where we were going to leave the trail, so it was 1:15 pm before we actually started hiking.

Obstacles encountered:

1. 15 miles
2. Lots of uphills (these are mountains, after all)
3. Lava fields in the afternoon sun
4. Fifteen miles
   
5. F.'s bum knee and, as he said to me later, "the eighty to a hundred pounds I have on you"
   
6. Forgetting to eat/drink enough
7. All those MILES.
   

Four and a half hours and 6.5 miles into the hike, S. insisted that N. and I leave her behind with F., so that we at least could complete the entire planned trail, and hopefully see the sunset from the final lava field. She and F. would cut off a few miles and meet us at the trailhead. N. and I had been hiking far ahead anyway, and then sitting in the sparse bits of shade on the lava, throwing pebbles across the path at each others' water bottles while we waited for S. and F. to show up.

"Midnight is panic time," she said. "If we aren't out by then, start walking back up the trail to find us."

If anyone could get F. over the pass and through the trail, it would be S. She is infinitely patient with the slow people on these sorts of trips. Last year, she got a forty-something, out of shape woman who had never before climbed a mountain up a fairly large one. She cajoles and persuades and feeds and bullies, and somehow the slow people keep going.

So we set off, N. and I, with me in front to set a pace that I could maintain. It took us just over four hours to do the remaining 8.5 miles. We hiked through alpine meadows and stunted pines, over lava and obsidian, and up and down through the woods. We barely stopped to rest. I wasn't sure I could keep going once I stopped, although I didn't say that out loud.

"Do you want to climb down to that waterfall?" I asked at one point.

"Not really. Do you?"

"No," I said. "I would rather let that be a moment of beauty rather than a detour of beauty."

"Let's just keep going," N. said, and we turned our backs to the waterfall.

Even N., the invincible one, began to say that he was tired. "I've been standing on a boat for six weeks," he said, referring to his salmon fishing in Alaska. "Good," I said. "That's the only reason I am even close to keeping up with you." I tried not to complain so that I could pretend that I can hike on his level, even though I know that I can't. Not at all. He climbs mountains for fun. Not the kind we hiked last year all in a day, six miles up and six miles back, but the kind that are over 14,000 feet and that require helmets and crampons and ice axes.

We entered the final 3 mile stretch of woods just as the sunlight faded.

"What is a good hike without a need for headlamps?" I said.

After thinking for a minute, I answered myself. "Probably a better hike, actually."

"Let's not use the headlamps until one of us falls or runs into a tree," N. said, and we set off nearly blind in the almost-dark, until I said, after nearly tripping over a root, "I hope you are prepared to carry me the rest of the way down this mountain when I sprain my ankle."

I thought those woods would never end. We kept walking and walking, silent now, too tired to talk, too focused on the ground beneath our feet. Finally, I began to stumble over nearly every root, and I realized that I hadn't eaten in hours.

We sat down on a log, and N. took off his backpack and sighed. "That feels good," he said.

"It would feel a lot better if I didn't have a splinter in my ass," I said, picking out the offending bit of wood. I realized that I felt sick. I took out a granola bar, but I was too nauseous to eat it. It was too sickly sweet. I settled for choking down a coconut scone and some water.

Half an hour later, we finally stumbled into the parking lot. I have never been so happy to see a pit latrine.

Two hours later still, after checking four campgrounds, one youth camp, and a resort for water, we filled up the water jugs at a spigot in the parking lot at the resort, and screamed around corners all the way back up to the pass, trying to get back to S. and F. "Are you scared?" N. kept asking, as I clutched at the door and laughed.

"Um... no," I said, as calmly as I could, as we skidded around a 15 mph turn at 35 miles an hour. "It's like a roller coaster."

S. and F. had been waiting for an hour and twenty minutes. We felt bad. But we had water!

We all took ibuprofen, except S., who said that she felt fine. F. went straight to bed. N. heated up chili, and N., S., and I sat huddled in silence over warm bowls of it, each with our headlamps glowing down on the food. A more pathetic bunch of hikers you never did see. This morning, N. said only his feet hurt, and S. still said that she felt fine, and F. said he felt fine but was afraid that tomorrow would be that much worse.

I tried to pretend that I wasn't limping.

red-eye

Around 7:30 p.m., I started realizing that I felt weird. My head felt a little floaty. My stomach felt icky.

I really do have to remember that two large cups of cold-brewed coffee on a nearly empty stomach is not a good plan for me.

I was drinking lots of coffee at dinnertime in an attempt to make my red-eye flight to Michigan slightly less awful. If I'm not sleepy, I can't be tired, right?

Lie. Coffee doesn't actually keep me awake (except for the whole psychological aspect), but it does make me have to pee, a lot. Getting up to go to the bathroom is going to be what keeps me awake. The people sitting in seats 34E and 34 D are going to LOVE me.

"Can I just... squeeze past you one more time?"

Yeah. Not so good.

Happy

The mountain glowed purple on Monday night as I went to bring N.'s car back, and for the first time I thought, I am going to lose that when I move. It happened again today as I sat in my favorite park, watching the kids play in the waterworks. I am going to lose this when I move.

It's a process, letting go of a place, and I am glad to have a whole month to do it, because this place, in particular, is going to be nearly as hard to leave as was Rwanda. Rwanda was harder, of course, because I had no idea when I would be able to go back, and now I haven't been back there in five years and everything has changed and I have missed it all. Universe City, on the other hand, is a few hours away from here. I can come back pretty much any weekend I want. I have friends here, and my Family No. 2 is here. In fact, I will virtually have to come back here if ever I want to fly anywhere.

Still, it is going to be hard to leave. This is the first place where I have ever been happy. HAPPY. Are you happy? Can you imagine it? I don't think I could, really, before I lived in Gone West.

There are all sorts of Happy, of course. There is the Big Exciting Event Happy and the Hope For New Things Happy and the Favorite People Ever Happy. This is a different Happy. This is the kind of Happy where you sit in a park all alone, or on a mountain with a new friend, or just at your desk, and you are still perfectly happy with all that you have and don't have. I hope I can keep that kind of Happy after I move. I think I can.

(If you write happy a bunch of times, it starts to look like it is spelled wrong.)

rocks

I have big plans for this evening. BIG PLANS. Pretty much, my goal is to be in bed by 9 p.m. Maybe 8:30.

I don't know what is going on here, other than a cup'la late nights in a row, but last night I fell asleep on the couch. At 6:40 p.m. It did not make for a pleasant rest of the evening when I had to get up at 7:40 and drop some stuff off at goodwill and clean out the car I had been borrowing. I spent the rest of the evening counting the minutes until I could go back to sleep, but by the time I got to go back to sleep there were fewer than seven hours left before I had to get up again.

I have a... thing about getting eight hours of sleep. T. used to mock me for it in college, because I get very upset when someone disturbs the eight hours. I know in my head that seven hours and forty five minutes is functionally not that much different than eight hours and five minutes, but I have a mental block in my head there. I think I've gotten a little less neurotic about it, but I still need my sleep. I need my lots of sleep.

This week, I seem to need it more. Having found a job - a job I want to do, no less - brings a whole new set of stresses (moving, the actual work, learning a new town), but it also relieves one huge chunk of stress: I no longer have to look for a job. I was really worried about that. I was beginning to think that this recession/depression would change the entire course of my career. There are so few jobs available, and my law school's loan assistance program has conditions that mandated that I start a new job by September 8 or lose a whole lot of help. I needed a job, quickly.

I decided that if, on average, a job receives 100 applications, interviews 8 people, and hires one, I needed to do 8 interviews to get a job. Surely my resume and cover letter could get me some interviews, I thought (I've seen what passes for a resume in some parts), so then I just had to plug on through eight interviews until it was my turn to get a job.

I did three (four if you include a second interview). I know that my job search could have been many, many times longer and harder, but I have been carrying the weight of knowing that I should be applying for a job for a year or more, now, and actually getting a job feels like someone took a basket of rocks off my head, a basket that I didn't even know I was carrying.

And now, in the relief, the only thing I want to do is sleep, to sleep real, restful, relaxed sleep, for several days or weeks, possibly months, straight.

whiplash

Nearly three weeks ago, I got a call asking if I was still interested in interviewing for a job in a town I'd never even visited. It was a job I applied for on a whim, kind of, because it was the perfect job but obviously, obviously, I couldn't move.

Three weeks later, I have been to that town three times. I am beginning to know where things are, vaguely. I have a job scheduled to start there this month, and I have an apartment there (I think; pending the lady checking with my current building). This is what the mysterious person called they always says: when changes come, they come quickly. Life changes so fast you can't keep up.

I am a little bit scared and a little bit excited and a little bit overwhelmed. I'm in shock, I think. It needs a little time to settle in.

When I moved to Gone West, I promised myself that I would never again move to a new town and start over alone. I'm breaking that promise, and it is the economy's fault. In a good economy, the perfect job would be available here, but it's not, and I have to work. I want to work. I want to put this degree to use. So I'm breaking my promise to myself. I'm starting over again in a new town, alone. All manner of exciting things feel possible, and yet I'm already dreading that first night in my cute new apartment when I realize how utterly alone I am in Universe City. I know that feeling too well.

Here we go again.

on the dance floor

There is a DJ in the living room, blasting West African dance music, and in the back yard little kids with their hair in poofs are being ignored and protected by every adult whose legs they dart around. I ditch my piece of birthday cake for kallah, little round fried balls of dough, and a crowd of us are handed shot glasses of some indeterminate alcohol from a bottle full of sticks. It burns as it goes down. I gasp and ask, "What WAS that?"

"Didn't you have that in Liberia?" C. asks.

"I was ten!" I said.

"I guess not, then," he said. "They say it is medicinal. It's made of vodka and some parts of trees. Well, it's supposed to be medicinal for men, actually."

"What is it for women?"

He just laughed, and T. and I looked at one another and said, "We are going to have to watch out."

Inside, we dance in an oval between the living room and the dining room, and when A. tries to turn on the airconditioner, everything electric goes off. This is the only time I dance: when the music is from somewhere in Africa. I need the strength of the beat to keep me grounded. This song is in French, and now another with bits that might be Swahili.

The truth is that I can't dance, not like these Liberians can, not like the girl now down in the center of the group. But I wouldn't give it up for anything, to be celebrating A.'s birthday and her return to Liberia, to be in this crowd. Every face looks so familiar.

dresses

I decided a while ago that this would be the summer of the dress. I like dresses, but my enjoyment of them is a new thing. As of a week before my law school graduation three years ago, I owned exactly zero of them. I had to go shopping for them all whirl-windy so that I would have something to wear for graduation.

(Then, on graduation day, while I was wearing my new dress, we went out to a bar with S. and her family - it was the first and only time I have done shots with my father - and afterward, as I was walking up Seventh Avenue, I walked over a subway grate just as the train blew past underneath, and my skirt flew up over my head, exposing my bare, er, toosh. (Yes, I was wearing underw3@r, and no, there was not that much too it. What? I didn't want lines!) Fortunately, there were neither cars nor people anywhere near us, and even my parents didn't notice.)

After I moved to Gone West, I started buying dresses. Well, first I started actually wearing the two graduation dresses. Then I bought two more that fit me better at my post-Sudan weight (Yes, there was food in Sudan, and no, I did not eat much of it. I had an amoeba, remember? Plus plain rice for every meal gets tedious.). I've been adding to my dress collection ever since.

When my momma came to visit, the first thing we did, after hanging out with the K.s, of course, was go shopping. We went directly to the sale rack, as cheap Dutch-Americans are wont to do, and happened upon the world's most perfect-for-me dress. It was black, and cotton, and comfy, and work-appropriate due to little capped sleeves. I wanted it and wanted it, but money was lacking, so my momma (and my dad, but he wasn't here) bought it for my birthday. Which is... two and a half months from now. Whatever. We are flexible. I heart this dress. It is my new go-to for everything.

THEN, we went to a store closing sale, and I ended up with a slightly-too-big party dress that had a collar falling off. It was originally $448 and I got it for $17.89 plus $1.75 for a spool of thread and a whole lot of my mom's effort. She spent the rest of her vacation pinning and basting and making me try it on and re-pinning and re-basting and generally working instead of relaxing. (Take note, people: come visit me at your own peril. Last year my dad fixed my chairs. This year my mom whipped me up a dress, practically.)

Summary: dresses. Hearts. Flowers. I wear them everywhere these days. I have work dresses and flouncy I-should-be-doing-traditional-Mexican-dances dresses and cute little party dresses and this new one, which is going to be my wear-to-weddings dress. If I can find any weddings in close proximity to which to wear it (I cannot afford to travel). Anyone want to get married here in Gone West? I have a great dress to wear to your wedding.

At least, I will have a great dress to wear to your wedding. After my mom actually sews it, in Michigan, and gives it back to me.

i'm not as dumb as i look

I wrote the letter to my building and printed it, and hit save, and panicked.

I used another letter as a template for this one. That other letter was one I need on Monday. And in one click of the little diskette in the corner of the screen, it was gone. I had a hard copy, but retyping the whole thing leaves a lot of room for error.

I panicked. I googled. I searched. I panicked. I gave up.

I only gave up because I had to make it home to my building in time to deliver the notice of vacating premises letter.

As I was unlocking my bike to ride home, I remembered that just before I called up that letter to edit it into an "I'm leaving" letter, I had emailed it to myself.

Sweet, sweet relief.

here, there, everywhere

My momma is arriving tomorrow afternoon, to spend a week with me, and I have not done one single thing to get ready. My apartment is mired in filth, I neglected to arrange that bike I was (am) going to borrow for her, and I hope she likes grocery stores, because we are going to have to visit one.

Also, I think I killed my mint plant. Again. I hate how you have to remember to water plants over and over. It's so tedious.

At some point, I am going to drag myself off this couch and clean. Well, first I am going to go for a jog, because I'm trying (again) to be a jogger, and then I'm going to clean. Probably. I might leave it for the morning, because what gets an apartment clean faster than the pressure of knowing that you only have two hours before you have to go to the airport to pick up your momma?

It isn't that my momma is particularly picky about cleanliness. It's more that no one should be expected to live in this level of someone else's filth, even if they changed that person's diapers 30 years ago. (Side note: ew.)

I also need to start packing up this apartment, because I intend to move. So I said, anyway, in the letter that I raced home to give to the apartment office before it closed at 6. Blah, blah, effective August 15, blah.

Delivering that letter to the office has been immediately followed by that "oh, crap" feeling so common to having set in motion things you cannot stop. Will not stop, I suppose, is more accurate, because I suspect that the building manager will be offering me such inducements as waiving the month-to-month fee. I will not stop it, though, even though I hate moving. I just cannot save enough, living here, paying this rent, to make a down payment somewhere else.

Somewhere else is, of course, the key. Where else? Here, there, everywhere. My entire life feels suspended right now.

tears

There was a girl walking down the street as I came out of work. She was looking straight ahead, but there were tears on her cheeks, and her eyes were red. I wanted to walk up to her and put my arm around her and say, "Oh, honey, I know. I've been there, fighting tears in the most awkward place. It's going to be okay," but I was fighting to get my bike out onto the street, and she was trying hard not to be noticed.

It's lonely, there. A stranger's words might help.

in which i ramble for a while

I was seriously tempted to label the week just past the Worst Week Ever, but then I realized that I should probably save that label for a week when actual bad things happen instead of just too little sleep and several annoying incidents and lots of emotional turmoil. I will say this, though: it takes quite a bit to make me snap at people, but I did it this Friday. Thrice. One person I snapped at twice, and he deserved it for not doing the job he knew he was supposed to do and thereby making my job harder. He knew that he deserved it, both times, and he apologized and all was well. The other person... well, I think he's scared of me now. He was new, and I snapped at him for an institutional problem over which he had no power, so I feel bad about that. Sorry, person.

Fortunately, there are weekends in which I can catch up on my sleep.

One of my first friends in Gone West left today. She moved to Other PNW City. We went over to her apartment early this morning to pack up the U-Haul, and she was astonishingly ready. I don't think I've ever moved someone who was quite that prepared. Everything was packed and organized and five of us carried everything out to the truck in an hour flat. Including coffee breaks. There was none of that familiar throwing of the clothes still on the hangers on top of everything else. There was none of that familiar tossing of last minute items into laundry baskets.

After everything was in the truck, we stood around talking, the four of us who first met in the bar study class, and I wondered if I will be the next to move. Which is more important to me, I keep asking myself, the type of job or the location of the job? I am beginning to think that the type of job is more important than the location.

I'm not going to lie: the fact that this city is trying to kill me via allergies might have something to do with my sudden willingness to move. I am now using eye drops twice a day, the neti pot twice a day, a nasal spray once a day, zyrtec (okay, wal-zyr) once a day, real sud@fed as needed if I can stand it, and excessive quantities of ibuprofen in between. It's ridiculous. I actually have to set my alarm earlier to deal with the allergy-prevention regimen. And it's not helping. I still have the headaches and the total exhaustion. It gets a little better when the sun stays out, though, leading me to my newest conclusion: my problem is not the pollen, it's the mold. To get away from it, I'm going to have to get away from the rain. I knew there was a logical reason why I love the sunshine so excessively much. Suddenly the far side of the mountains doesn't look so bad, even with the snow and lack of big cities.

Real sud@fed, by the way, is incredibly (this is not going to surprise anyone) drying. Um, yes, that would be the point. It is so drying that it makes me cough, painfully. It does help with my allergies, but I can hardly ever stand to take it. I seriously do not understand people who do meth, if meth maintains the drying properties of sud@fed. (It does, right? That's why methy people get the little sores, from dry skin? And the bad teeth, from dry mouth? Since I started the job I do now, I have become very good at recognizing the methy people. I see so many of them.)

Now I am going to bed, to sleep some more, even though I took a nap after coming back from the moving. I have to be rested for the World Cup final tomorrow. My people are playing.

Go Orange!

4

In the morning, we met S.'s dad, D., on a suspiciously subdivision-looking street in their little town. He was the first one there, other than one kid in a motorized kid-car and an Army Humvee with some associated soldiers in desert fatigues. We festooned* the old fire truck with garland and balloons and ribbon while wearing plastic tiaras, and kids gathered in front of us on bikes and wagons and carts pulled behind lawn mowers.

When the parade started moving, the kids went first, in one messy, chaotic mass, and the dozen or so cars and floats trailed along behind. S. threw candy in big scoops until halfway down the eight-block parade route she had thrown it all and just had to stand on the back, waving. I turned the crank for the siren, gleefully watching the faces of the parade goers as they figured out that the siren was actually turned by hand. As we pulled into the parking lot at the end, a new fire truck was heading out. "Need some help?" D. asked the driver cheerfully, but the driver didn't get it. "Uh, no," he said flatly, and we laughed fit to bust.

The fire truck took 2nd place in the cars category, second only to the Army Humvee, which won out of pure patriotic duty. We should have gotten first. We were robbed.

Back at the house, kids ran around and through the grownups. I made lifelong friends with T. and D. by handing them each a SunChip as I passed. After eating, everyone sat around wishing it was warm enough to swim in the pool, but I felt myself nodding, and I crept off to nap on the couch.

Story from S. concerning the period after I fell asleep: "Why is she lying down?" H. asked S.

"She's tired. She wants to take a nap." S. said.

H. looked at me in confusion. It was clear on her face that this adult concept of napping for fun does not yet make sense to her.

End story.

We exclaimed, "Beyoooutiiful!" at the fireworks in honor of some guy who sat behind us last year and said that about every single flare, and all around the valley around and behind us the smaller fireworks popped up in competition with the big show.

At the end of the day, after the fireworks, we did as any patriotic 'Merkins would do: we got out the shotgun and shot at the sky above the hay field across the road. "I think I got a bat," D. said.

That sucker has quite a kick. My shoulder is bruised right along the nerve that leads to my golf elbow problem. "I don't think," I said, raising my arm experimentally on the drive home, "that I'm going to be able to move my arm tomorrow."

...

* I might possibly have written this entire post solely for the opportunity to use the word "festooned." It's been floating through my head ever since we, you know, festooned the fire truck.

drama

One of the myriad blogs I read mentioned something about Kdrama, i.e. Korean tv shows, and now I am oddly addicted. I have never been to Korea, of course, and I don't know much about Korea, so I can't even tell you if the shows I am watching are supposed to be funny or dramatic. Maybe both?

I think they are hilarious, and I lean toward thinking they are intended to be, because there is so much slapstick in them. Girl gets hair stuck to new asphalt, for example, or women stand there shrieking and running in circles instead of away while a fake shaman beats them 30 times with a split stick. Then, too, there are the freeze frames on ridiculous, exaggerated expressions. I can almost see them written in the script: ACT REALLY SURPRISED.

The only series I have watched so far is The Woman Who Still Wants to Get Married (I am on episode 9). This is my new favorite tv show ever. I am probably going to weep when it's over. It's essentially the story of the why-aren't-you-married-don't-you-want-to-be-married-have-you-met-anyone-nice-lately-how-is-your-love-life-is-it-because-you-are-too-focused-on-your-career bullshit that single women get everywhere in the world. Perhaps it is more intense than the version single women get here in the US, but it's certainly less than we get in some places. (I haven't quite reached the age in the US where older people ask me "Why aren't you married?" but my single women friends five years older than me tell me it's coming. And in Rwanda I got that crap when I was 23.)

I also can't quite tell if the main character is supposed to be pretty and stylish or a little bit nerdy. Her one friend is the fashionable one, and her other friend the pretty one, and of course the main character actually is pretty, but I can't tell if she is supposed to be popular or just the regular girl next door.

I think I might have a crush on the main guy character, even though he is, I am not kidding, twenty years old. Sheesh. I'm thirty years old and already the cute guys are too young for me. Like all good actors, his talent is in his eyes. I can't even understand what he's saying, and still I believe him. And seriously, that smile. THAT SMILE.

The only problem is that they are subtitled, so I cannot multi-task while watching them. I actually have to pay attention. I am learning some Korean, though, by default. So far, I can answer the phone. "Yob-say-oh?"

human connection

I have been using a neti pot to clear out my sinuses in the morning and evening, and I read somewhere online that adding a drop of glycerin to the saline solution can keep your nose from getting dried out, so I went to W@lgreens yesterday to try to buy some.

The woman who usually helps me at the cosmetics checkout (I go straight there because there is almost never a line) was straightening hair products in an aisle. I went over and asked her if they sold glycerin.

"No," she said, and I thanked her and started to walk away. "Wait!" she said, "I have some glycerin from Africa. I can bring it tomorrow if you want. You will come back for it?"

Never one to say no to gifts from Africa, I agreed.

"I will be here from 4 p.m. up to..." she looked at her watch, "up to about now. You are sure you will come for it?"

I assured her that I would, and asked where she was from.

She said, "Ghana," and beamed at me, "the country that beat the US this morning."

Today I went back with some coconut scones in hand, and we traded glycerin for coconut scones, and now I have glycerin made in Tema, and a warm glow of human friendship.

"hell," apparently

I was randomly clicking around on the internet the other day when I came across this photo essay in Foreign Policy. The link that I clicked was something about the Failed States Index, which is the sort of thing that interests me. But lo! I had stumbled upon the perfect example of how the U.S. media turns the Rest of the World into Bad and Scary.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? The title of this photo essay is Postcards from Hell. Postcards from Hell. You're kidding me, right? This cannot be real. Who let this article go to press with such a pejorative title? I can tell already, from the title, that the person who wrote this 1. doesn't travel much, and 2. buys into every stereotype of the Rest of the World.

At this point, I've mentally mostly discarded any words that are going to appear in the essay, because they are clearly going to be ridiculous, but I did read the first caption, below a picture of smoke in, probably, Sudan. Smoke! Where there is smoke there is fire! Fire means death and destruction, right?


Or, you know, that people need to cook food. There are both children and adults in that photo, and they all seem to be going calmly about their lives. They don't look particularly pained or upset. If that is hell, it doesn't look so bad. Am I to assume that every time someone lights a fire, they are in hell? Because we build a fire every time we go camping, and it's pretty great.

Here's my favorite line in the entire thing, right underneath that photo: "...as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You'll only know a failed state when you see it." My mouth gaped open in astonishment. Apparently you can tell, from one single photo, selected by a person whose biases are pretty glaringly obvious, that a country is hell. An entire country. (I am so irritated that I am overusing italics.)

I looked through about half of the essay, just for the pictures. Let's see a few examples of what "hell" looks like, according to Foreign Policy:

1. Somalia:

Apparently, hell looks like a beach, and a boat with a big motor. OOOh, you mean you are worried about the guns? If you haven't noticed, those men are not pointing those guns at anyone or shooting anything. Presumably, in hell, they would be. Hell depiction? No.

2. Chad:

Apparently now hell is... getting old? That seems mean. This woman actually might be laughing, if you look closely, and the people behind her don't seem at all upset. So maybe hell is sitting on the ground? Getting old and sitting on the ground? Doesn't seem so bad to me. Hell depiction? No.

8. Central African Republic:

This one wins for sheer stereotypicality. The CAF has had a civil war and some rebels from Uganda have hidden there. But no, the photo is of FIRE. A fire, I might add, that was set intentionally to get rid of snakes and scorpions. It has nothing to do with the war. But it looks like hell, right? So let's use it! Even though it's a perfectly legitimate use of fire. Hell depiction? No.

I could go on, but I will illustrate with just one more, my personal favorite, for many reasons -

33. Liberia:

So, we have a market street, with things for sale. We have healthy kids wearing nice clothes, with their hair braided and one of them even carrying a school bag.* This is supposed to be... hell?

No. I refuse to accept it.

Other pictures show: A man pushing a bicycle of bananas to market! Kids drinking from a water pump! A man with blood on his clothes! (That looks, frankly, like he works as a butcher, not like he is hurt.) A kid next to an abandoned mud house! The sign for a national park! Women lined up to vote! So scary.

I have been sarcastic throughout this entire post, but I am actually pretty disturbed, because this article told me that I was supposed to see hell in these pictures, and all I saw was people going about their lives. Is it far too cynical to say that I worry that the only thing that makes them "hell" in the minds of the people who chose them is the fact that, well, the people in so many of them are black?

...

* I should say, regarding this picture of Liberia, which I love, that it was taken by Glenna Gordan, who keeps this blog: Scarlett Lion, which I also love. Her pictures are beautiful and real, and nothing I am saying should be taken as a reflection on her work. I am only annoyed that FP chose to use her lovely photo as a depiction of hell.

Photo credits:
First photo - Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Somalia - Mohamed Dahir/AFP/Getty Images
Chad - Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images
CAF - Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Liberia - Glenna Gordan/AFP/Getty Images

berries

Did you know that if you eat an entire pint of raspberries fresh from the no-spray stand, your mouth will start to hurt just like if you eat too much sour candy? I discovered that today. I just couldn't stop myself. I spent $3.75 of the $4 that I had in my purse on a green box of juicy red raspberries that left little red droplets of juice on my fingers. I ate some in the sunshine outside, enjoying the first beginnings of summer.

When I went inside, I offered some to my colleague, but she declined, so I set them on the corner of my desk. And then I ate a few of them. And then I ate a few more. And then I could see the bottom of the box and I figured I might as well finish them. And then my tongue hurt. It was worth it. They were delicious.

happy place

On Saturday morning, I woke up drained and exhausted, from conversations filled with words no one meant to say. I woke up late, in a condo whose fee someone else had paid, and I packed up someone else's car, and I drove. I drove through beautiful, barren hills, for hours. I tried not to think, and I barely managed to slam on the brakes in time to avoid hitting the deer that paused, alert, in the middle of my lane.

When I got to Ye Little Town in the Middle of Nowhere, Northwest, I found my way to the B.'s house by sense of direction and visual memory, but no one was home. I hiked up through the orchard and stood on a hill in the sunshine, and then walked back down to read and write on the patio.

I felt as completely alone as ever I've been. I felt empty, rinsed by tears. It wasn't a bad feeling, save to our happy-skippy-jumpy culture. It was peaceful there, looking out over the valley at the setting sun, and I felt peace.

I plotted what to do if the B.'s and S. didn't come back. The camper was open, I noticed, and I could go into town for water. I would be fine.

Then suddenly they were all back, in a rush, filling the house with affection and tired kids. We sat in the new kitchen and ate and laughed and problem-solved about how to add to the sleeping arrangements. I beamed uncontrollably at everyone, delighted to see them, delighted to be in YLT, delighted.

violence

I really don't deal very well with violence. I went to this movie last fall with a group of friends, and I came out shaken and drained. "Why would such violence be entertainment?" I asked. I couldn't sleep that night. I do fine, though, with real photos of an actual murder scene. I can look at real autopsy photos, even of babies.

I do not do fine with the violence of the war in Liberia. I used to. I used to read every book, watch every tv show, while the war was still ongoing. But lately, I have watched a couple of videos of Liberia that included footage from the war, and I can hardly make it through them. I watch them - how can I not? they are of Liberia, oh Liberia - but it takes me weeks, sometimes, to watch a twenty minute video in thirty second intervals.

It's different, somehow, here, to see an individual person making a choice, however tragic, to kill another person. To see little kids, probably high on drugs, shooting indiscriminately in Monrovia, all those years ago, is a completely different thing. And maybe that's it: I can interact with people, on both sides of violence, as individuals, but I cannot deal with the anonymous violence or the entertainment violence.

One might wonder - and I have - whether it is Liberia and Rwanda that have given me this abhorrence for violence, or whether the fact that I keep ending up in pre-, current and post-conflict zones is just some awful joke the universe is playing on me.

swearwords!

When I was little, in Liberia, ships dumped oil off the coast, or spilled it. There was usually a line of black gunk at the high tide line, and every time we went to the beach, we played in the waves and dug in the sand, and then we sat in the car with our feet sticking out so our parents could wash our tarry feet with kerosene.

I've been thinking of that as I see pictures of the Gulf Coast. Looking at pictures of the gooey brown water and the suffocating animals makes me feel sick to my stomach.

Then it makes me furious.

[Warning: swearing upcoming. I am too mad to do otherwise.]

Have you seen the charts of BP's violations of safety violations? If not, you can see them here: Center for Public Integrity. We should all be raging. We should be up in arms. This oil spill is going to affect the oceans of the entire world. How can it just go on and on?

I cannot believe that BP is doing everything they can to fix it. I just can't. Because they are doing nothing. If you ask me, it is time for the US government to step in and fix that shit. Someone knows how to fix it. Someone can get it done. Take the well away from that irresponsible company and fix it.

BP? Clearly isn't going to bother.

F&#$ers.

the day I came to appreciate antibiotics

When I was living in Rwanda, I got a severe cold. I toughed it out, as one is supposed to do with a virus. I drank tea. I drank water. I got lots of sleep. I toughed it out until a day when I was supposed to be running errands in Kigali and instead was moaning on the couch at my boss's house, with his wife bringing me tea every few minutes. I could feel every heartbeat reverberating through my pounding head. I have a feeling that even now, seven years later, the smell of that vinyl couch would make my head hurt.

I finally called my friend B., who is a doctor, and asked him what to do. Since he was the one who normally lectured us about things just being viruses, I didn't expect much, but I was at the point where I genuinely started to think dying might be a relief because it would stop the pain. I was pleasantly surprised when he telephone-diagnosed me with a sinus infection and gave me permission to buy and take amoxicillin. The idea that the pain might go away made me think I might live. Within 24 hours, I felt like a human being again and was all dressed up, out on the town with friends.

I think of this almost every time I get sick, because it was the first time I ever really thought about what life was like before antibiotics. It was the first time that I understood how people died without them: they just could not go on. The disease won. And it still happens now, even in the rich world - we are not immortal, after all - but it is so, so rare, compared to the centuries past, compared to the poorer parts of the world, for a young, healthy person to die for lack of medication.

A few months later, while scouting out some goat pasture locations, I met a little girl with bloody pus dripping out of her ear. She was still trailing after the bigger kids, but clearly less energetic, and the ear obviously hurt. I talked my friend A., a nurse, into going to the pharmacy with me, and we collected the necessary antibiotics and took them out to the little girl's house. A. was from Malawi, but her medical Kinyarwanda was good enough to explain to the girl's mom how to administer the medication, and the next time I saw the little girl, she was running, laughing, up the path in front of me.

bedding

In person my doctor (who is actually generally not at all patronizing, but treats me like an equal, which was why I was so annoyed last Friday) managed to convince me to allergy-proof my apartment. Her theory was that my immune system is overloaded enough dealing with the outdoor allergens, and if I can eliminate even the tiniest source of allergens, it will help. Mostly, this consisted of two things: stop using my down duvet (weep, sob), and put a protective cover on my mattress (dust mites: fair point. I got this mattress out of a garage). I bought a mattress cover and put it on, easy-peasy. Then I had to figure out how not to freeze to death without my duvet.

The only thing I own that could possibly replace my duvet is a quilt that I bought from a women's cooperative in Rwanda. It is made of squares of lapa/kitenge fabric, all blues and greens and yellows. It is really beautiful, if rather a different look than the reds and oranges of my apartment. I can cover it with the empty duvet cover, if I want a uniform look. Unfortunately, it smelled like basement. It was stored in my parents' basement for a year or two after law school. Clearly, it needed to be washed.

There are no laundromats within walking distance, and the washer in my apartment is economy-sized (the washer-dryer stacked atop one another kind). The quilt is huge. It is king-sized, because I had a king-sized bed in Rwanda, and not only is it two layers of fabric, but they actually did put a layer of some sort of stiff white stuff in the middle (batting?). So, big. Heavy.

This is why we have moms, so when we move out on our own and do not yet have confidence in our housekeeping abilities, we can call them and ask them the crucial questions: "Mom, do you think I can wash this huge, heavy quilt in my little tiny washer?"

"Well," she said, "how full is the washer with the quilt in it?" She raised the prospect of burning out the motor, and when I said that my building managers would kill me, she said, "Why? You've been a great tenant."

We decided I should go for it.

As it turns out, drying such a huge quilt in a little dryer is a much more trying proposition than washing it in a little washer. I spent my entire evening taking the quilt out at ten minute intervals and turning it so that the inside parts would be on the outside and exposed to the warm air. Now I think it is dry, although it's hard to tell for certain. I took it out and draped it over my bicycle, more because I was tired of turning it than because I was sure it was completely dry. So... here's hoping.

actually, the opposite

It isn't that I'm exactly glad that my doctor spent a long time looking up my nose with her little light and then said, "Yeah, it's really swollen in there. I can't see much. You're going to need a CT scan so I can make sure that all the swelling hasn't trapped bacteria in your sinuses," but it was sort of gratifying to know that I'M NOT CRAZY. OR A WHINER. (I mean, obviously I am a whiner. Why else do I have a blog but to whine? I am not a needless whiner, is all.)

It turns out that it is really easy to make your doctor think you are drug-seeking. First, she tells you that she is prescribing you an allergy medication with a decongestant. "Is that going to make me sleepy?" you ask. "Can I take it in the morning and still be awake for work?"

Then she says, "Yes, actually, it's the same ingredient as Sud@fed, so it generally has the opposite effect. It tends to amp people up."

Then - and this part is KEY - you just say, "Oh, right, that's what they use to make meth, isn't it?"

Mission accomplished! Now she thinks you are a meth-head.

"Uh," she said, "do you use meth?" (Subtext: because how else would you know what meth does?)

"No," I said, oblivious, having not even realized that she would take it that way, "but at work I see a whole lot of people high on meth." It wasn't until later that I realized exactly how my comment had sounded.

She gave me the prescription anyway. Seriously, though, she has no idea how many stories I have heard in a professional capacity that start with, "Well, I hadn't slept for three days because I was on a meth binge..."

unmade plans

I fully intended to go to the beach yesterday. I was going to get up early and take the bus or train to S.'s work to pick up her car and drive to the beach by myself. And I woke up in time, but of course it took me too long to get out of the apartment, and of course I decided to take a different bus route, and of course the bus was running on a Sunday schedule and I waited for over 30 minutes for the next bus to arrive, and of course I had overdressed for the day, expecting cold rain at the beach, and so I arrived at S.'s work huffing and sweating, overheated and annoyed, muttering under my breath and wearing rain pants while the sun peeped out of the clouds.

Instead, I went to the outlet mall (I gave up nature for shopping. heh) and got a baby shower present and the new colorful sneakers I've been wanting (the last pair they had). I got lost on the back roads trying to get to the K.'s house, and then I gnashed my teeth with frustration and drove in circles. When I got there at long last, we sat around chatting with church people. We took rides on the old fire truck. And then, when everyone had left, I sat in the (cooled) hot tub with a book, like a warm bath, and read until I absolutely had to go give S. her car back.

to go somewhere useful

I am trying to change my attitude toward walking. I love walking, and I often do it for fun and exercise, but I am trying to look at walking as one of my legitimate transportation options. I have lived in Gone West for nearly two and a half years. I've never had a car here, so I've gotten quite adept at the bus and train lines, but I am only now starting to see that many of the places where I go by train or bus could be easily reached on foot. For example, I sometimes wait fifteen minutes for a train to take me two stops across the bridge so I can walk to one of the trendy new neighborhoods. It takes me ten minutes to walk those two train stops.

And so, I've started walking for the purpose of actually getting somewhere. I walk to Trader Joe's, forty blocks from here (although I do take the train back when I'm loaded down with a gallon of milk and sundry other heavy items). I walk home from work, thirty-five minutes along the water. I walk to my friend's apartment across the bridge. I walk down over the highway to a new coffeeshop.

It's a whole different way of looking at things. Instead of wondering how many bus transfers I would have to make, I'm starting to ask how long it would take to walk (and sometimes, now that I have a new tire pump, to bike). I like looking at walking this way. It is much more satisfying to arrive somewhere with tired legs than it is to hop off a bus, slightly motion sick. It is much more satisfying to walk when I have a purpose. I can feel my legs growing strong as they carry me. I can feel my blood flowing. Walking to get somewhere makes me feel alive and strong. My body feels useful. My bag gets heavier as I go, as I make stops to pick up things I need for my life.

That, and I see the flowers as I walk. I say hello to the woman working in her front yard. The man walking his dog nods to me as the dog sniffs my open hand. I can see life as I walk, and I can be a part of it.

helium baloon

Soon after I came back to Gone West in January, after Christmas in Michigan, I went to the eye doctor. "My eyes just cry and cry and cry here," I said. "Is there anything I can do about it?"

In a most incredibly patronizing tone, he said, "It's winter. The air is dry, and the dry wind makes your eyes water."

I wanted to stomp on his foot. Why is it that health care professionals so often treat us like we are stupid? "I just came from MICHIGAN," I wanted to tell him, "where it is about 30 degrees colder and much windier. Don't TELL me about dry air. My eyes don't water there like they do here. It is not the cold, dry air. It's raining here, see? That means there there is, in fact, some moisture in the air. Have you, in fact, ever been to a dry place? Because this place? Is not dry."

I had a similar experience today. I actually left work early because I had such an awful sinus headache. My eyes are red and puffy from constant watering. I have been taking @llegr@ religiously, but to no avail. I know that the cause is something in Gone West, because last week in Michigan, I felt great. As soon as I left the airport here Sunday morning, my eyes started watering again.

A few months ago, at my annual physical, I told the doctor that allergies were really bothering me. She suggested a nasal spray, which I duly used for several months, to no effect whatsoever, and I finally reverted to last year's prescription of the @llegr@. It helps, a little, but my head feels like a filling balloon that might just pop off and float away. I have a sinus headache almost every day. I am constantly exhausted. I did not feel this way in Michigan, or even here in January and February. The headaches and exhaustion start, every year, on March 1, the beginning of spring, and they continue through December.

I called the doctor, and her assistant called me back to say that the doctor suggested:

1. a neti pot (I've tried that. Repeatedly. Doesn't help.)
2. CHECKING MY APARTMENT FOR ALLERGENS. (Does NO ONE listen? I SPECIFICALLY said in my message that I feel ok until I leave my apartment in the morning. Then by the time I get to the train (1.5 blocks), I have a pounding headache. I told the assistant so again. She blew me off.)
3. eye drops (if I get to the pharmacy and these eye drops are incompatible with contacts, I am going to drop kick someone).
   

My head is still pounding, despite taking extra medication (I am sure I am not supposed to mix @llegr@ and other allergy medication, but desperate times...), and now I'm furious, too. I want to call back and yell at my doctor, who I generally love, "STOP TREATING ME LIKE I'M STUPID. I could BE you." And I could.

For the first time in quite a while, I am wondering if I should leave Gone West. I don't know if I can live this way.

funeraling

We loitered in the room, but not next to the coffin, mostly, except at the beginning, when we gathered around and said, "That doesn't look like her at all." For a moment, I thought they had the wrong old lady.

But of course it was her. It's always like that, at the funeral home, and it was her.

"She was so sick," my mom said. "She was so sick."

I coaxed my Aunt Lisa to try to fix Oma's mouth. "See if you can get her mouth to turn up," I urged, and she did try.

"It doesn't move. It's like a stiff sponge, or foam."

...

"You really need a baby in situations like that," my friend A. said when I came back and we were talking about it all.

"Oh, my brother's little girl was there. I spent a lot of time sniffing her head."

"Yeah, there's nothing like huffing a baby's head to help with grief."

...

I looked back from my seat in the church to watch the funeral home staff take off Oma's jewelry and close the coffin, and I had teared up by the time they wheeled her into the sanctuary. A. and I both started crying during Abide With Me. I don't know why A. started crying, but I was crying because the last time we sang that song was at Oma's birthday party, and I kept thinking that she should be there. If we were singing that song, she should be there.
...

By some convention, it's always the men who carry the coffin, but my mom reversed it. We seven granddaughters were pallbearers. It looked so smooth when my uncles did it for my grandpas - had they done it before? - but we girls in our heels and skirts fumbled through putting the coffin in the hearse.

We had it down at the cemetery, where the sun was shining on spring flowers and bright grass as we carried the pretty blue box to the grave. "Don't trip on the headstone," several people warned us, and we didn't. We placed it carefully on the rollers.

...

We ate black bean burgers on the deck in the sunshine with my great-aunt H. from the Netherlands, and A. walked in graduation, and we took pictures on the green, green lawn.

"Oma would love this," I kept wanting to say.

"Oma should be here," I kept wanting to say.

DTW

6:31 am. Observation from DTW: those U-shaped neck pillows are one of the most helpful traveling tools, however painfully geeky they seem. I bought one on my forever-long journey to Michigan on Christmas Eve, and it has been revolutionary in my plane- and bus-sleeping habits. A. thought it was funny, in Honduras, until she tried it on the bus, and then she, too, was a convert. They are brilliant.

That being said, it is not acceptable to walk through the Detroit Airport with the neck pillow around your neck. Not ever.

I am sitting in Detroit next to the fountain. Detroit’s airport, as I am sure I have complained before, is a long tube. Gate A1 is at one end, and Gate A80 is about a mile away down an incredibly long hallway. If you have a short connection and you come in at Gate A3 and are supposed to fly out from Gate A78, well, good luck with that. Do not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking, “But they are in the same terminal!” They might as well be on different planets. See you at the rebooking desk.

(This is not even getting into the horrors of Terminals B and C. If you have to go to Terminal B or Terminal C from the main terminal, you will pass through a long underground tunnel filled with creepy moving lights and eerie music. It’s like you are trapped under the sea, drowning. I am sitting here working up the courage to go through it right now.)

There are three redeeming qualities: first, it is bright and airy. Second, birds get caught in the rafters and you can hear them cheeping of a morning, as if you were pleasantly outside (which, um, might not be good for the birds; if so, I take this one back). Third, there is this fountain.

The fountain is a huge black marble disc, about twenty feet across and maybe two feet tall (I am terrible at estimation). There are a whole bunch of jets in the smooth surface of the disc, and they all, at various times, shoot streams of water toward the middle. My favorites are the short little streams, because they seem to be leaping like fish out of their jets and diving into the middle, unattached to water before or behind. All the water runs off the side of the disc like a constant, barely discernable waterfall. You can reach out and touch it. Nothing separates you from the marble – not a pool, not a wall.

Kids are mesmerized by it. I am mesmerized by it. I have sat in this very place, staring at it, for more hours than I could count, caught somewhere between my hometown and Liberia, Rwanda, New York, and Gone West.

6:50 am. I flew the red-eye to get here, but somehow in the brilliance of having flown to Southeast Asia last year, I managed to be a Medallion member of SkyMiles, and so they upgraded me to First Class. Not only did I actually get some sleep, sprawled out in seat 1A, but in the last half hour, after they announced that service was finished, when the flight attendant noticed that I was awake, he came over and asked if I wanted juice, water, coffee? And so I sat there, legs comfortably crossed, holding a little cup of warm coffee and watching the red morning sky over Michigan.

If flying were always so comfortable, I would do it for fun. It’s so nice not to feel like the flight attendant hates you (see: coach class, all the time).

Random funny moment: I reached down under my seat to see if there was a footrest, halfway through the flight, for some reason, and accidentally grabbed the toes of the guy behind me. Oops.

time

Last fall, I finally destroyed my watch. I destroyed it by slamming it against the knob on a door, if you must know, and the crystal, which I'm sure was not a real crystal, shattered. It had actually been cracked since about three weeks after I bought it, two years earlier, and it had periodically gotten more cracked when I slammed it against various things. (Clumsy is a trait of mine.) This was just the final shattering. It broke into a whole lot of hazardous little slivers of glass, which I of course put into a ziploc bag and carried around for weeks in a pocket of my bag, until the little slivers of glass started to work their way out of the ziploc and into the bottom of the pocket and every time I stuck my hand in there I got stabbed.

I finally took the ziploc out of my bag and put it, uh, on the counter, where it remains to this day, I think. I thought vaguely about buying a new watch, and I looked at a couple of stores when I was in the mall anyway, but then I decided to try going watch-less. I could be one of those people who doesn't care what time it is! I could be one of those carefree people!

Unfortunately, you either are one of those people or you aren't. I get along fine without a watch most of the time, but only because I check my phone incessantly for the time. It worked, for a while, but I ran through the battery on my phone a whole lot faster. And then I started traveling: to Vietnam, to Michigan, to Honduras. And, I don't know about anyone else, but I find being on a plane with no idea how long you have been flying is just utterly infuriating. I started leaving my phone on, in airplane mode.

And yeah, I know, they tell you that airplane mode is not good enough and it has to be all the way off until you are over 10,000 feet and blah, blah, blah, but I have flown in Africa, where pilots are texting while they fly and where mobile phones routinely ring and are answered as you are lifting off, so I wasn't that worried about airplane mode. Anyway, if you turn your phone all the way off and then turn it back on in airplane mode, it has no idea what time it is. It isn't communicating with whatever magical thing it communicates with to tell you the time, because the entire point of airplane mode is that your phone will not communicate with anything so that it does not "interfere with airplane navigation systems." The only way the phone will continue to know the time is if you leave it on. So, YES, I broke the FAA rules. And my planes were fine.

But, at last, one day, a week and a half ago, my coworker mentioned that she has seen lots of nice watches at M@cy's, and I went over there on my lunch break. I came within dangerous seconds of buying a $200 Citizen watch (because they last! forever!) and then pulled myself back from the brink and had the guy point me to the cheaper watches (he sort sniffed as he directed me to "Fashion Watches" - so much for lack of snobbery at stores in Gone West, huh?).

In Fashion Watches, I finally found a watch that meets all of my exacting criteria:

1. Silver and only silver band (I do not like the silver/gold combination).
2. No fake bling. Ugh.
3. No white face. I prefer blue, silver, or black.
4. A round face.
5. Not too small and wimpy.
   

I bought the watch (this particular one has a black face, and I love it)* and part of the thought in the back of my mind was that I would soon have to fly to Michigan, again, for my Oma's funeral.

This morning, my momma called me at 5 am to tell me that my Oma died. (The journalist types call that burying the lead. Seven paragraphs in.) Tonight, I am getting on a flight to Michigan. I've thought a lot of things in the hours since five am, but one of them is that I have been getting ready for this for a while, we all knew it was coming, and that buying the watch for the flight home was one way that I was preparing myself. It's impossible to be prepared. But at least, when I fly overnight to Detroit, unable to sleep on a flight taking me home to my family, I won't have to wonder how much longer? How much longer?

I will never make it as a watchless person, and I've accepted that. I like to know what time it is. It grounds me. And having a watch saves me a whole lot of cell phone battery.

* A friend of a friend said, as I was showing my friend the watch the day I bought it, "That is the watch version of a boring executive in the Midwest." Apparently my idea of classic is another person's idea of boring. He can have the obnoxious fake bling, then, on his watch.

sorrow

walk-by

For someone who will get on a plane to any country in the world, I am not very good at going to new stores or restaurants. There is always a little part of me that thinks, "But... is this a store where they allow people like me?" And that's funny, because I pretty much top the world in ridiculous levels of privilege (class, race, nationality, education; everything but gender, and even there I have some privilege: I comfortably conform, in appearance and behavior, to the gender I appear to be). The only place I have ever lived that might have stores that do not welcome people like me is New York, and that is only because New York has Old Money.

We don't really do Old Money in the Midwest or the Northwest. We are pretty firmly egalitarian: we all worked service jobs in high school. We all pump our own gas/petrol. We all shop at the same stores. If you can pay for it, you can have it, out here. It's the snobbery of the middle class of Middle America: we are more likely to look down on you for being a snob than we are to look down on you for not having money.

And yet, I still feel shy about walking into a new store. So I heard about this coffee shop that I wanted to try, and today I went for a walk-by. I just wanted to see what it was I would be facing when I braved walking in. I felt shy even walking along the row of shops where it was supposed to be. I felt shy asking an employee of one of the stores about it. It turns out, though, that the person who told me the location was all wrong, and tomorrow I will have to brave a whole new corner in search of it.

I read about it online, though, and I am pretty sure that it was intended for people just like me, namely, coffee snobs. It helps to have a mental picture of this place I am going.

On my walk home from the unsuccessful walk-by of the coffee shop, I passed a woman who held flowers in each hand. "Here!" she said, as she approached me, "Smell this!" and she stuck a bunch of lilac into my face.

walking

On my way to the coffee shop this morning, I saw one of the employees leaving the store carrying a big paper bag with colorful things sticking out of the top. For just a moment, it seemed like a picture of a morning in a small town in France, with a woman carrying her bag of bread and flowers home from the shops. It was really just tall piles of cups, it turned out, but the lovely picture stayed with me.

I have taken to walking home from work. On rainy days, it is pleasant to be out walking along the river, holding my bright blue umbrella over my head. On sunny days, it is glorious. The whole world turns out, it seems, on sunny days. People walk and run and bike and rollerblade. They lounge and snuggle. They throw frisbees and footballs. Boats race through the water. Yesterday, a man stood on some sort of surfboard-like thing, paddling with a long paddle. Gross, I kept thinking, watching him, what if he fell in? That river is disgusting. Today, two families of geese were out, paddling through the water. One family had seven little goslings, and they were visibly working harder than their parents to move through the water. Their whole little bodies wobbled from side to side as they swam.

As I crossed the bridge, talking on the phone to my mom, a guy in his twenties, carrying his world in an old backpack, called to me, "Hey, can I get a high-five for peeing off this bridge?" His friend, sitting on the ground on the other side of the walking path, laughed. I tried to finish the sentence I was in the middle of speaking to my mom, but I was horribly distracted.

anger

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday - this article, in fact - that made me gnash my teeth and want to move back to Africa. I mean, okay, yes, the last time I lived in Central Africa, c. 2005, people were dying of AIDS. I know this. But somehow I had the (apparently delusional) hope that things were getting better. I thought anti-retrovirals were, I don't know, reducing transmission rates? It was depressing to hear in the accompanying video that for every 1000 people who start anti-retrovirals, 2500 people are newly infected. That's... not good.

I made five lunches this morning, five little containers of beans and rice and cheese. I had made too much rice, and I stared at the extra rice morosely. What bothers me the most about the AIDS crisis in Central and Southern Africa, sometimes, is not that it is happening, but that we can ignore it. What bothers me is that I can waste rice here in my happy little North American life while people I met in Rwanda in 2004 could not take anti-retrovirals because they couldn't afford the food they needed to take with the pills. I find it less depressing, actually, to live in a place where people are dying of AIDS than to live here, where AIDS is invisible, and to know that I can live my merry life without ever thinking of the people living and dying across the world.

I remember, when I first moved to Rwanda, being surprised at the casual way that my educated friends and colleagues, both African and Western, spoke of being tested for HIV. "Every year," they said, even the married monogamous ones. They know too well what AIDS looks liked. They have seen friends and coworkers and neighbors die of it. Contrast: a few weeks ago, I was talking with a couple of friends about the transmission of HIV. One friend said that despite her party days in college, she has never been tested for HIV. It doesn't feel like it applies to her. Another, an over-educated lawyer like me, said that he understood that HIV could only be transmitted through blood.

Something is seriously wrong. This is someone with decades of education who does not know that HIV can be transmitted through bodily fluids other than blood (s3m3n? v@g1nal fluid? bre@st mi1k? hello? how did you think transmission was happening? it's not some stereotypical primitive blood-sharing tradition we are talking about). If my over-educated friends here don't even know how HIV is transmitted, what then do we expect in Bwindi, Uganda, where hardly anyone makes it to secondary school?

It costs $11,000 for life-long anti-retrovirals for one person in Uganda. Apparently, a life is not worth that much to us. The war on HIV/AIDS? It was the one war I thought we could win. I guess we don't care enough. It's not happening to US, right?

Eff.

party

Everything smells like campfire: my hair, my clothes, my coat, my bag. I rinsed my hair (I refuse to change my hair-washing schedule for a little thing like the smell of smoke), but I can still smell it, faintly, when my hair falls in front of my face.

It was warm yesterday, and clear, and I brazenly declared it summer and wore a flippy dress to S.'s birthday party. I baked, first, and then when the party started, I got a drink and a sombrero and sat in the hammock.

After a few minutes, I abandoned the hammock because it was stiff and too small, and I gave the sombrero to S., who needed it to cover up the scab on her forehead where she had impaled herself on a branch riding her bike home in the dark. The scab was variously described, as people peered at it straight on, then sideways, as a cat, a flamingo, and an unidentifiable country. A while later, I changed back into jeans and my softshell. "That's better. It's not summer just because you want it to be," someone said as I came back outside.

There was grilling and talking and drinking (I make a mean berry lemonade vodka). There were yard games and glow bracelets and cupcakes (I also make a mean coconut chocolate cupcake). "I don't like chocolate," L. said. "But I will try one." A few minutes later, she said, "I don't like chocolate, but this might be the best cupcake I've ever had."

"You have to say that!" someone else said, and L. said, "No, I have no problem telling people when things are bad. This is an incredible cupcake."

In the end, we huddled near the outdoor fireplace and looked up at the few visible stars beyond the city lights. Planes flew over low and close to land at the airport. "I want to grab my sleeping bag and throw it down here," N. said, "and fall asleep outside, listening to the crackling of the fire."

But instead we cleaned, and then we all went home to our own cozy beds, inside.

afternoon

I went for a long tromp in a big square around this side of Gone West this afternoon, twenty or so blocks north, twenty or so blocks east, twenty or so blocks south, and then twenty or so blocks back west to get home. I left in the middle of the afternoon, but it was very nearly completely dark by the time I got back to my apartment and walked into the oddly-sweltering lobby.

I walked through the neighborhood of big old houses where the churches still say Missionary Baptist, even though the white people are moving in. I walked past the crumbling storefronts on a street that used to be booming. I walked along a gentrifying thoroughfare. I walked past an old mossy wall. I walked through perfect manicured front lawns. I walked through the mall.

At approximately each corner of the square, I stopped. At the first corner, I drank a cappuccino while sitting in the sun that turned to gloom that turned to sun that turned to gloom. Each time the sun disappeared, I got a little bit colder, until I had to move or lose the feeling in my fingers.

At the second corner, I bought rose hips and echinacea at the co-op, and had a big warm cup of Assam tea at the tea shop. People played games at the tables around me: Uno at one ("Is there a strategy to this game?" the guy asked), canasta at another, and Guess Who? at at a third. At the canasta table, the girl explained to the guy how to play Guess Who? when they saw the other table beginning it. I sipped the malty, sweet tea, and then left with it. I finished it a few blocks in, but there was no trash can for miles, so I carried the paper cup a very long way.

At the third corner, I tried on pair after pair of sunglasses. My old pair is scratched, and the tiny screw keeps falling out of the hinge. It is unpleasant to pull out sunglasses and find them missing one of the earpieces. It looks weird when you wear them that way. I bought a new pair a few weeks ago, but they pinch my nose. So now I have two more pairs, tested extensively for comfort, and I'll have to donate the pinchy pair. S. can have them. Hers were stolen a while ago, and she replaced them with a bright yellow pair. She looks strikingly like a toddler when she wears them. Who else has plastic yellow sunglasses?

I ran my hands over the journals in the bookstore. Lined paper is my Waterloo. I cannot resist it. I picked up a leather one and smelled it. Ah. Leather and paper. I plotted which one will be my next constant companion. And then, reluctantly, I left them all there, and walked the last side of the square home without them, through the chilly night air.