[12] incidentally

It isn't that I don't know how to drive on roads filled with things other than cars. I do. In Rwanda, the roads are filled with cows and chukudus and bikes and kids and goats and old people leaning on canes. Someone told me once that the government had told the people that the roads were for all of them, not just for the cars. (I don't know if that was a true story.)

I was just fine in Rwanda, sharing the road. I only had two leeeettle incidents in two years.

In one of them, I was making a right-hand turn in Kigali (without checking for pedestrians on the sidewalks approaching the corner) when a lady stepped out into the street (without looking - she was on a mobile phone), and walked into the side of my truck. She was fine, if startled, and a friend of mine who spoke Kinyarwanda happened to be on the opposite corner, and he translated for us, and we both went about our business. This could have happened anywhere.

The other incident was early in my time in Rwanda, before I knew what to do in a crisis. I was in Kibuye, heading home above the beach market, when two goats jumped off the little cliff on the side of the road and - I am not kidding - threw themselves in front of my truck. It was like they did it on purpose. One of them died on impact, and one of them stumbled to its feet and limped off the road.

I stopped the truck, even though I had heard all these horror stories about what can happen when you kill an animal (ok, the examples in those horror stories were cows: different). What else was I supposed to do? We were the equivalent of three blocks from my house. It's not like these people didn't know me. I came to their market every Friday. Also, it was just a goat.

"20,000 FRw," the owner told me, and I laughed.

"I buy goats for my work," I said. "I know how much a goat costs, and it is not 20,000 FRw."

I called my coworker in Kibuye, who arrived to bargain down the price of the goat, and then my boss in Kigali.

"Get a police report," he told me.

I was a little worried about going to the police station (what if they arrested me?), but I finally insisted to the goat's owner that he was only getting his francs if he came to the police station with me. "Oh, no," he kept saying. "No, that is not necessary. Just give me 10,000 FRw, and we will forget about it."

Hardened (heartened?) by his reluctance, I insisted.

When we arrived at the police station, owner and coworker and I, we stood in front of the counter and explained the situation. "Well," the officer sighed, "let me look at the vehicle."

We trooped outside and he inspected my front bumper. "Is this from the goat?"

"No," I said, "that's a smudge of bird poo."

"Is this from the goat?"

"No," I said, "that's a scratch from when I hit the gate backing out of a horrible driveway."

"So," he said, straightening up, "the goat did not damage your vehicle."

"No, it did not damage my vehicle. But the goat died."

"Do you want him arrested? Do you want to file a police report?" the officer asked me. "If you file a report, we will have to arrest the owner of the goat. He is supposed to keep his animals off the road."

"Oh, no!" I told him. "I do not want him arrested. I just wanted a record of the problem."

"We will make a note in the ledger," the officer told me, and we did.

We were all silent on the way back to the scene of the crime. When we arrived, I handed the goat's owner 5000 FRw, anyway, just to make amends among neighbors, and I made him sign a receipt. "Compensation for dead goat."

My point is that I am not unaccustomed to the idea of other moving objects on vehicle roads. Why then do the bikes in the bike lanes freak me out so very much?

I think it's because they move pretty fast, just there off to the side in your blind spot as you get ready to turn a corner. That, and I don't get to drive with one hand on the horn here.

[11] tea

One of the guys sitting at the counter pulled out a stool for me, and I sat down between people I didn't know. The shop was a tiny, golden oasis in a day of rain. All six of us at the counter chatted over our tea, almost involuntarily, because we were all sitting as close to one another as good friends. I held my warm mug in my hands, eschewing milk and sugar for once. It seemed wrong, somehow, in a shop where the owner hand-selects daily teas and steeps it to perfection before handing it to you, to amend the tea in any way. We lingered, strangers bound by the warm drinks in our hands and the article about sleep in the National Geographic, reluctant to venture back outside to errands and headlights.

[10] give up the ghost

Apparently I am not allergic to this state. At least, not to anything they test for in the usual panel. We will just say that I am "unique" and leave it at that.

Oh, except mold. I am allergic to one kind of mold.

But! I can get a dog. I can get a cat. I can take the *&&^#%#&#($&#^# allergen cover off my bed. (Mom! This is the nightmarish thing that makes my bed so stinking hot. Rest of you: no, really. You just lie in that bed and sweat, even when you are cold. Comes from lying on plastic.)

Here is what the doctor tells you when you are not allergic to things: apparently, your runny nose/headaches/itchy eyes/itchy throat/post-nasal drip/sneezing/coughing/wheezing/feeling like death are coming from air irritants rather than allergens.

I don't mean to get picky, but I have a question.

What the...?

Your body is not producing an immune response to things, but you still feel like &#^$ because the irritants, what, sit on your mucus membranes and cause, um, an immune response?

I give up.

I almost cried when she told me that I'm not allergic to things because now there is NO HOPE. I CANNOT BE FIXED. I will just feel awful, and tired, and awful. Forever.

[9] parenthetical

I have been surviving on cereal again. It's been a long time since I've survived on cereal, but after a day of work and FIGHT class and grocery shopping sometimes I am too tired to get off the couch, too tired to think of what I might possibly prepare to eat that requires more than shaking some cereal into a bowl and pouring milk over top.

(When I got back from Gone West, the milk in my fridge had gone bad. Instead of running to the store - I was too tired - I made some milk out of milk powder in a Nalgene.)

(Are the members of my family the only people who call it milk powder? I said that to someone,and they didn't know what I was talking about until I called it "powdered milk.")

(I grew up on powdered milk reconstituted into milk, but I do not at all like the skim milk stuff they sell in stores here. The brand name, full cream stuff they sell all over the rest of the world is so very much better.)

(Tonight, I was supposed to 1. move some things and 2. buy a flax seed. I have done neither, and now I cannot, because I took excedrin PM and it contains the active ingredient in dramamine. The good news is that I will not feel motion sick while, um, sleeping. The bad news is that I cannot drive anywhere, lest I fall asleep at the wheel.)

(I tried to pry a flax seed out of the microwaveable pillow I have that I used to tuck around my feet when I had a microwave that could warm it up, but the pillow was too well sewn together.)

(I was supposed to buy a flax seed so they could allergy test me for it tomorrow.)

(The unmedicated allergies in anticipation of the testing might very possibly be why I am so tired that I am resorting to surviving on cereal. I wish my body would stop thinking that this state is a disease it needs to kill off.)

[8] ?

This is November.

Why, why, why is there a flying insect pestering the life out of me in my apartment? Not only that, but it is a huge fly.

SHOULDN'T IT BE DEAD BY NOW?

[8] movement

I moved the first few boxes into my new apartment last night. It was strange to be starting a move all over again. I was so settled in my shoebox in Gone West, and I expected to be similarly settled here, but only three months later I am packing again.

It's good. I am crunched in this tiny apartment that was once a garage. I wander around my new apartment with the three bedrooms and the spacious living room and imagine how it will be to have space enough to add a bookshelf or closets enough to put the broom away. And I need to have people around, I know that. It was lovely last week to arrive at the K.s to noise and TV and people.

And yet. When I moved to Gone West, I knew that I needed to live alone. I had been living in team housing in Southern Sudan, and I couldn't bear the idea of sharing living space with someone else. I'm ready to share an apartment again, I think, but I have gotten very used to living alone. I like having people around, but I also like living alone, and change is scary.

[7] game day

So I went to my first NBA game. It was nice, except for the 9-year-olds on the dance team dancing to songs about rocking your body, which made me want to screech and throw myself between them and the camera for the jumbo-tron, because seriously, you are 9. There should be no rocking of the body, let alone rocking of the body magnified on a huge screen. I was horrified.

I watched the game, but you really go to a sporting event to chat and watch the people, right? I mean, that's what women do. This is possibly why men should go to sporting events with men and women should go with women.

Now it is raining, hard, just in time for my drive back to Universe City. After six years without a car, I'm not exactly the most confident driver ("You are so jumpy!" S. says when she rides with me), and I hate driving in the dark and rain. Still, it's hard to leave the friendly warmth of the K.'s living room for the 100 freeway miles to Universe City, and so I delay, even though it means that I will have to drive in the dark.

[6] skates

I finally learned how to turn on the gas fireplace. It turns out all you have to do it flip a switch, and even I can manage that. I was afraid there was some trick involving an ignition and a clicking noise. Aren't there some gas fireplaces that have those? I distinctly remember shivering in T.'s parents' back porch, fighting with the gas fireplace on so we would not turn into popsicles when we got out of the hot tub in the winter.

But this one turns on instantly, in a whoosh of orange flame, and I have a crocheted blanket over my legs and there is a blue jay in the bird feeder outside the window. The sky is cloudy. I can't tell if it has rained or will rain or no such thing - this is Gone West, and here rain falls slow and gentle, almost more a crystallized fog than actual raindrops. In the next yard, a man is working under the hood of his Volvo.

I am thinking about a nap, even though I've done nothing today but wake up and eat breakfast.

...

Last night, we went rollerskating with the junior high kids. I tried to remember how to skate, and then how to explain the motion to a 13-year old who had never before skated. "Step, a little, and push out," I said. Her legs went flying in all directions, and I could only soften her fall, not hold her up. I am not that strong nor that steady on skates. I tried to tell her to lean forward, like a speed skater. You don't see them flailing backwards like all of us.

It was fun, though, to skate in the big loop. Rollerskating is the same as ever. The same young teenagers circled one another, like they did when I was thirteen. The same little kids clung to the edges and their parents. The same awkward grownups infringed on the fun and/or the misery.

Except now, the grownups are us. Me.

[5] late

Placeholder: It's late, and I want to sleep, not blog.

Also, to T: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! (Even though your birthday is already over in MI, and I am too late to say it in real-time chat due to having been in a computer-less training all day. xoxo.)

[4] days

I went back to my old job today, and everything was the same except that someone else was sitting at my desk and doing my job. It was strange. I felt like I could slot myself right back in, if I removed the new person sitting where I should be.

Then I went to visit A., and we walked around her neighborhood with F. in a sling. When you are carrying a baby (particularly if the baby is 1. happy or 2. sleeping), people look at the baby with the same kindness that they look at adorable puppies. I remember once in New York, when I was carrying Baby T., how two women said scathing things about how young I was to have a child after I passed them. (I was 26.) Now people look at me as if it's natural that I have a small person strapped to my chest.

Meanwhile, my allergist decided that I need to take a week off zyrtec so that I can have allergy tests next week. I am not enjoying my un-medicated week. My head hurts.

Here in Gone West, I am staying with the K.s. It is remarkably nice - I had forgotten how nice - to live among people. It's nice to have noise in the house, and to smell food cooking, and to sit down at dinner together. It's nice to have a place to go home, warm and bright.

[3] back here

I walked around downtown Gone West City today, through the familiar busy streets, and I kept thinking that yes, I like Universe City, but I really do like Gone West more. It didn't hurt that the sun was out, and the streets were bustling (Universe City streets do not bustle), and I stopped at my favorite food and coffee places. I went into an office where everyone knew me, and we went out to Ethiopian, where the owner said, "Hey! Did they send you back?" Hrmph. I miss this town.

My tire got fixed, though. Also, I lost a game of darts quite dramatically.

[2] tire

When I got back to Universe City on Sunday night, my tire was making strange flopping noises. (It is, by the way, a brand new tire.) I ignored the flopping noises, because there didn't seem to be much I could do in the dark of night. Monday morning, I looked at the flat. Then I called my dad. Then I ditched the car and rode my bike to work.

At lunch, I rode home, called my dad, changed the tire, took the car in, got the tire looked at, and went back to work. (Classic quote from my dad when I worried about how long I had driving on a flat tire: "That car is so light, it probably doesn't matter.") The tire store said that there was no leak, but they had checked the seal, and everything should be fine.

Tell that to the ten PSI the tire had lost by halfway back up the road to Gone West City. And why don't fuel stations sell air pressure gauges?

I am seriously considering buying a new tire, even though this one still has the little hairs on it. It's really not worth the multiple fuel stations required to find a functional air machine, nor the fretting when the car bumbles around on the horrible grooved cement: is it the road, or is it the car? One never knows.

[1] pumpkin falling

I did it again: I carved a pumpkin and I forgot how quickly they go bad. When I left for the weekend, I left my carved pumpkin sitting proudly on a chair. I came back to find that it had just... crumpled in the middle, like a fallen souffle. The top was still perfectly round, but the sides had gotten substantially shorter. The pumpkin was about 2/3 its original height.

The dripping goo was mostly contained (I carried the entire chair out to the trash very, very carefully, tipped the pumpkin into the trash, and then washed the seat off when I brought the chair back inside), but my flipflop was under the chair and when I put it on this evening it was sticky. Ew.

fall

This fall has been unusually beautiful, or I am unusually appreciative of it. The trees in Universe City are pink-red and yellow-orange and golden-yellow and, still, warm green, all together on a street, and I could crash my new car watching them above me, sometimes. It hasn't rained much, yet, so the leaves aren't battered off the trees and beaten into the ground, not yet. I walk around sometimes just staring at them, saying, "It's so beautiful! It's so beautiful!" to anyone who will listen.

I drove up to Gone West City last night, as the sun set, and there were low clouds hovering over the hills on either side of the road, and I wanted to bottle up the view and keep it so I could put my eye to the opening and savor it on dark, rainy evenings all winter.

But then it got dark, and I wanted to grumble like an old person about cars these days, their headlights are so bright, why can't they make them like they used to, and why can't these drivers just pass when they want to pass, why do they sit there just behind you for miles so their headlights shine right in your eyes through the side mirror until you have to drive with your hand against the window to block the reflection of those blasted new-fangled headlights.

The kids at the youth group ran screaming through the dark church, with B. racing behind them in his ninja costume, arms waving, trying to tag them. I watched the girls try to dip their heads in the bobbing bucket without messing up their hair, fretting when it took too long to get an apple, because ah! everyone is looking at me! and I was indescribably grateful to be 31 instead of 12. I do not miss the days of that paralyzing self-consciousness. It's so much nicer to like yourself.

I practiced my FIGHT moves on N. and B. in the church gym, demonstrating how to disarm someone with a gun to your back. "But I can get away," N. kept saying, and I said, "Yes, that is because I am not actually kicking you in the balls, nor am I elbowing you in the neck, because that would be mean."

car car car!

I am infatuated with my car. I want to caress it every time I walk out to it. Only someone who hasn't had a car for an extended period of time can possibly understand how incredible it is, when you need something, just to get in a car and go get it. Or, OR! I can offer to drive. Or, OR! I can meet people for things in the evening when public transportation is done, and if I want to leave and go home, I JUST DO IT.

I'm not sure I can convey how truly exciting this is.

Tonight, I was at a store, buying things, and I heard a college student asking the cashier where he could catch the bus. "There is a stop just across the street," she said, "but you'll have to check when the next bus is coming."

I so clearly remember those cold, rainy nights, standing at a bus stop, wondering if the bus will ever come, and what you will do if it doesn't, that I stopped outside the door, hesitating, ready to offer him a ride, but he walked out the other way, purposefully, as if it would not discourage him as much to stand in the cold and dark alone as it always did me.

It's strange, and maybe not rational, but when I drive home in a warm dry car and go into my warm dry house, I feel less lonely than I used to feel walking in the cold wet night, waiting in a windy bus stop, watching the people in their comfortable living rooms.

inevitable

What usually happens is this: I start getting sick. I gargle and neti pot morning and evening. I take lots of ibuprofen. I get sicker. Finally, I pick a day when there is nothing much going on, and I determine that I will spend that day getting better. I will wake up late. I will do nothing but rest and drink tea.

Then I wake up that morning feeling fine, and so I get up, and I go to work or church, but by evening I feel terrible again. The next day is inevitably something I can't skip, and so I just plod on through.

here and now/there and then

Every once in a while, I look around at my life and wonder, How did this happen? It isn't that I don't like my life. While I do miss Gone West City - the downtown parks (the downtown, period), the coffee and restaurants, my favorite people - I am building a life here in Universe City, and it is already fuller than the life I had there. I am filling it with the things I need and love.

And yet, every once in a while I read a blog post, I pick up a book, I pass a corner, I catch a smell on the breeze, I see a plane in the perfect blue arc of sky, and it transports me, and I wonder, How did I get here?

This wasn't supposed to be my life, you know. I was supposed to be traveling the world, feeling that ache of excitement that keeps you awake the night before a big trip. I was supposed to be living in warm, tropical places. I was supposed to be going to towns that have the sternest travel warnings from the State Department. I was supposed to be learning new languages and cultures. I was supposed to be far, far away from the boredom of life in a typical US American town.

If this wasn't supposed to be my life, if I miss that other life so much, why am I so happy here? And how is it that I'm happy here, now, and simultaneously I know that I have to go back to that life, that I will go back to it, someday?

You can't escape yourself, but there can be many homes that call you.

discos compactos

You know what I had sort of forgotten?

CDs.

Remember those?

I carried a whole book of them around under the seat of my truck in Rwanda, and I had an ever-revolving set of Philips portable CD players that I hooked up through the tape deck so I could have music in the mountains as I drove. (The CD players kept breaking because apparently they are not made for driving over rocky dirt roads. Oops.) On the curves between Kibuye and Kigali, I would automatically reach out to catch the CD player sliding over the passenger seat after I downshifted, to keep it from falling down between the door and the seat. This is why we have two hands: one for the steering wheel, one for the music.

One year later, when I went to Tanzania, I carried all my music on Wallace, the iPod that eventually met his doom in a pit latrine in Southern Sudan.

I'm on my third iPod now (her name is Winifred), and I couldn't really think of a reason to use CDs when you can carry around a universe of music on one little rectangle that fits in your pocket, until I realized something miraculous: you can get entire albums of new music on them, without paying $1.49 or whatever per song on iTunes. I haven't listened to an entire album in years, except the ones that T. gives me at Christmas.

But the library has CDs, it turns out, and it's brilliant how you can actually listen to new music without paying for it. Entirely new songs! Entirely new albums! Entirely new artists! I mean, sure, I might buy a song or two of a new artist on iTunes after I've watched it a million times on youTube to make sure I like it, but this is like stumbling upon a room full of gold bullion. I've been so bored with my old music, and I'm so excited about all these shiny new songs that I hardly know which one to put on first.

party on

There are a lot of apples in my apartment now, yes, and I have nothing to do with them, really. One can only eat so many apples, unless they are fresh in the fall sunlight, and many of the ones on my counter are cooking apples.

I really do not like cooked fruit. I think it is an abomination. You have a perfectly good fruit, and you heat it until it gets mushy and then you mix it with sugar until it is sickeningly sweet, and then one is expected to eat the syrupy mush? This should be outlawed, along with mayonnaise and all other sour-tasting white substances: yogurt, cream cheese, sour cream - such things should exist only as moistening agents in baking of otherly-flavored baked goods.

Still, what is there to do with cooking apples but cook them? And baking apples at least smell delicious, with the cinnamon and the nutmeg and all.

I am seriously considering a party, for which I will bake pies that I do not eat. My apartment is too small, though. I might have to borrow my future apartment.

I have not thrown a party in six years, since I left Rwanda. In August of 2004, I laid out candles along the edge of the stone patio and dragged out the living room chairs and a single bed to supplement the seating. I bought beer and sodas, and Q. cooked vats of Vietnamese food. Nearly all my Rwandese and ex-pat friends gathered on the patio in the dark, with the candles the only light because, as always, the power was out.

I suspect my next party will be a little different.

apples

A. and I like to joke that whenever the two of us are in the same place, everything goes wrong: we take the wrong turn on the trail, we end up an hour further down the road than we need to be for the u-pick orchard, the wifi doesn't work in the cafe, the apple trees are picked over or the apples are spotted.

I looked up u-pick orchards on the internet, and it told me that the nearest one was north of Next City to the North, only that was a lie. There was one much closer, but finding it required internet (my new ipod touch failed me) and a phone call and then re-tracing our steps many miles back south.

We were spoiled in Michigan, A. and I, where the apple orchards are plentiful and bounteous. I suspect there was a frost here this spring, this long, cold spring, because nearly every apple had brown spots on it where the skin seemed to have been rumpled up. A. dug through the brown rumpled part and reached apparently normal apple flesh underneath, so we picked some of the ones with fewer spots and mocked ourselves for being wimpy modern North Americans. A hundred and fifty years ago, we would have been thrilled with those rumply apples.

"I'm going to make applesauce!" A. said, "and apple pie!"

"Let's make apple pie next Saturday afternoon," I said.

"I thought you didn't like cooked fruit," she said.

"Well, yes. That is true. But let's bake apple pie and then invite people over to eat it!"

the haunting

It was supposed to be haunted and terrifying, but the scariest thing was the 12 year old girls shrieking behind us. We just laughed, and when a bony lunatic in a cage reached toward my forehead, I flicked his hand gently, chuckling at him. He patted my head as I passed the end of the cage, but I didn't even flinch.

Then I tried to get the zombie in the corner to move, but he wouldn't, so we hid around corners and jumped out at strangers.

It's disappointing how quickly people figure out that you are not a monster when you have no mask, blast it all.

still more

I gave notice on my apartment today. I never fully settled into this apartment - there are boxes still full, and I never worked out systems for where things go. First I was waiting until I got a dresser, and then no sooner had I gotten the dresser at the church yard sale than my friend M. and I started talking about the possibility of living together. She has a big, expensive apartment with three bedrooms, and she needs a roommate, and I have a too-small apartment, and I'm ready to have a roommate again.

I think.

I've lived alone for about five years of my adult life: two years in Rwanda and nearly three years in Gone West. I loved it and I hated it. I loved the feeling that it didn't matter if I didn't wash those dishes in the sink for the third day in a row, and I hated the feeling that it didn't matter if I didn't clean, ever. Sometimes I just want to be alone, but other times I wish that there was someone watching tv when I walk in the door so that things aren't so dark and quiet.

And so, I will be moving again.

In honor of moving, or just because I wanted to get out of my apartment and had nothing to do tonight save sit around and go to bed early so I can get up for a 5K thingie (I will be walking, not running), I decided to go get some paint for the dresser.

After driving a 14-mile loop around the northern part of Universe City, I returned home, paint-less. One home improvement store was closed and the other two I somehow... missed. I don't know. I am new here. But at least I know where that one highway is that everyone talks about, and also that other road. So that is good.

The other things I needed were moisturizer and contact solution, and I stopped at an everything store to get them and somehow ended up with moisturizer and a new ipod touch (what?), but no contact solution, leading me to spend a frantic half hour just now looking for any left-over contact solution in my bags and backpacks, to no avail, and finally resorting to opening an old contact case or two and carefully decanting the tiny amount left in them into the current case so my contacts don't dry out overnight.

It's always a good day when I get to use the word decant in a sentence. It might be my favorite word, possibly.

adjusting

I've been in Universe City for over six weeks now, and I'm beginning to like it. I have more going on here than ever I did in Gone West City, between FIGHT class and my new-found penchant to just up and say, "Hey, I'm new here. We should be friends, and you should call me whenever there is something interesting going on." Also, I am working on being the instigator myself. It's amazing how well these things work. You just plan things, and ask people to do them, and if you are friends with the right sort of people, they show up. Even better, they also plan things, and they ask you if you want to do them.

Every time I move somewhere, I think hopefully that this time it will be different. This time, I will be surrounded by cool people who will all like me and I'll never have to spend a Saturday evening alone ever again, unless I want to. At some point, though, I figured out that I have to change in order to change my life, and with this move, I was ready. I knew what I needed. I knew what kind of life I wanted to build, and that I would have to do the work of building it.

Yeah, anyway. This is all a part of my realization, sometime in my last few months in Gone West City, that I am actually an extrovert. I like having activities going on. I just happen to be a shy extrovert. No one would call me shy after talking to me for a few minutes, but I am not the bravest at approaching new people and making conversation and asking people if they want to do things. I am working on that. I have made a couple of friends that way here in Universe City. It's hard to walk up to people and say, "Hey, can I talk to you guys? I don't know anyone here and I don't want to stand alone in the corner," but surprisingly often, I meet people that way, and surprisingly often, they too want new friends.

peace

Nearly twenty years ago, I woke up one night because one of my parents was putting a little girl into my bed. My sister and I shared a room at the time, but I had a full bed and she had only a single, so I was the one who had to share my bed whenever someone at church had a crisis and their daughter stayed with us.

A. stayed with us for a few days, and then went back with her mom, but we continued to pick her up for school in the morning at one of the apartment complexes that my middle class friends would have been afraid to enter. She was almost my second little sister for a while.

Years later, after things had begun to look up for her mom - a better house, a better job - I rode with them to a nearby town every morning one summer. I didn't really look forward to the ride. It bothered me that A. knew all the words to the dirty songs, and I didn't like it when her mom asked me for advice about parenting. I was only 18, and A. was 13. "Should I put her on birth control?" her mom asked, and I didn't know what to say.

I saw A. a few more times, after that summer. I saw her at church, and once in the pool at the Y.

I went to Rwanda, and then to law school. My parents moved to a suburban neighborhood, and a suburban church. I nearly forgot that we once lived in a world where people threw guns into our backyard while they ran from the police. I nearly forgot that we once lived in a world where a (different) girl with blood dripping of her face after an encounter with drug dealers might knock on our door at 4 am.

And then, one day, I heard that A. had been arrested for the shaking death of her baby girl, and then convicted and sentenced. I can only imagine how alone she was with a drug problem. I can only imagine how alone she was with a crying baby, the only one of her three daughters still in her custody. I can only imagine how alone she was with the men who paid her for sex with money or drugs.

That was two years ago. Every few months I have thought to myself, "I should send a letter to A," but I never knew what to say. How do you say, "I'm a lawyer, with a happy life," to someone who was once almost a sister but whose path went a different way those many years ago?

Today I heard that she committed suicide in prison.

Guilt doesn't change anything, nor apologies, now, but A., I am sorry. I wish I had talked to you that summer instead of trying to tune out on every car ride. I wish I had been there for you those years after your mom gave up on you. I wish I had sent that letter.

I wish you peace.

those days

I took a new friend hiking today, a friend who is new to this state. Most of the hiking I have done so far in Gone West has been either 1. with someone who knows more about the state than I do, 2. with someone who knows more about hiking than I do, or 3. a trail I have done before. Today I figured out why.

There are authoritative books on the hikes of each part of the state, and yesterday I bought the book that includes Universe City. I looked up some hikes, and my new friend A. and I picked one of them on the drive out of town. We were excited. It looked like a beautiful hike.

We found the road, parked the car, and set off blithely down the left-hand trail. We left the book in the car, because it was raining.

Three hours later, we got back to the car, having not found the place we were looking for, which was supposed to be just down the trail. I took out the book and found the right page.

"Oh," I said. "We were supposed to go right out of the parking lot."

This is why they don't let me go hiking alone.

Back in town, I drove from the pizza place to the dessert place, wondering why people kept darting out in front of my car, until one guy screamed at me, "Turn your lights on, you *#&$ *#$&!"

Oh, right. You are supposed to turn those on, aren't you? Even in a city? It's been 8 years since I drove in this country on a regular basis.

"People do not use that sort of language where I am from," A. said. "In the South, men are supposed to be gentlemen, or at least pretend that they are."

I just laughed, because here the words have lost all their meaning.

Wrong trails and no lights: I am having one of those days.

longish exercise post

I have never really understood the concept of a gym. This is partly because I dislike the stagnant indoor air, but it may very possibly mostly be because I have been broke pretty much my entire life and could not pay for a gym, except for those two years in Rwanda, when I was making virtually no money and still had plenty of money to spend but nowhere to spend it. I have always been in school or underemployed or underpaid. Now, though, I could actually pay for a gym. I am not quite broke.

Oh, who am I kidding? There is only one possible legal career I could have chosen that would pay less than the one I do. I am going to be broke forever.

I downgraded my cost of living, however, by moving to Universe City, and upgraded my salary. I feel rich. For the moment, until I start buying all those things that I've been putting off buying for three years while broke in Gone West.

Meanwhile, I have started to discover this gym concept. I have my FIGHT class, of course, and tonight I went to a Zumba class. I was utterly, totally out of my league. I cannot move my body like that, not at all. Thanks to FIGHT and my bike, though, I can at least keep moving the whole time without expiring in the middle of the floor from lack of lung capacity.

But I'm starting to realize why people pay money for a gym. It isn't the treadmill and the elliptical. Even a membership will not get you into a building to run on a conveyor belt like a rat in a cage if you are not gifted with natural willpower to exercise. It's the classes. The classes are the reason to pay for a gym membership. I have never once not wanted to go to FIGHT class. I look forward to it. Zumba could quickly become the same. And it's totally worth the cost if you actually move, especially in the middle of winter.

I want to be one of those people who runs. Exercise should be cheap, or free, right? We have bodies, and we just need to use them. I want to be a runner, who needs only shoes and an open space and will just head out and run, wherever she is.

I'm not. I need the structure. I need the warm, dry air. (Have you seen how much it rains here? Rain in winter is really, bone-crushingly cold.)

I'm glad, though, for the classes and the gym. It feels so good to exercise. This happens to me whenever I exercise: I like my body better. I'm not talking about the shape of it, because despite societal messages I have somehow managed to fall into a pretty good body image. It's the usefulness. I don't even think of my body most of the time, but when I come out of FIGHT class or Zumba, or finish a good bike ride, I look down at it and feel so very pleased with how well this body works for me. It breaks down every now and again (golf elbow, I glare at you) but it is strong when I use it.

(Speaking of breaking down, the gargling of salt water is no longer fending off my horrible sore throat. I hope I don't have to cancel my (free exercise!) hike tomorrow.)

ugh

I finally used my new car tonight, for the exact purpose for which the Good Lord made cars: to run to the corner store four blocks away when I got half-way through making pumpkin muffins and realized that I had no eggs.

They were long blocks.

It was dark.

I needed to get the muffins baked fast in order to go to bed on time.

And it would have been a waste to throw away the ingredients I'd already mixed.

Still.

I knew this was going to happen.

not different

I drove my car to Universe City on Sunday night and parked it nice and close to the curb in front of my house and...

I haven't gotten into it since.

"You are probably going to want to change your oil every six months, even if you don't drive 2000 miles in that time," someone said to me today. And right now it seems possible that I won't. (Other than those pesky trips to Gone West City to regain sanity.)

I had left my bike at work over the weekend, and so I walked to work on Monday morning, and I rode my bike to FIGHT class and home, and then I rode my bike to work today. My life hasn't really changed that much, except that I know I can escape when I need to get out of town. I know that I can go to that concert that will get out late on Thursday night. I know that I can stop at the fabric store that someone recommended to get the thread to fix my sweater. I know that I can go to the hardware store for paint. I know that if it rains, I can get in the car and drive to work without getting soaked.

This particular photo is for A.L.:

The color of the car, which I did not choose, being that it was second-hand, is remarkably similar to the color of my office, which I did choose. My life is full of the blue of underwater in the tropics. I like it.

just sayin'

cake and candles

S. made me a birthday cake on Sunday. "No fruit and no cream cheese," I said, as she looked at recipes on the internet.

"Hey!" she said, "I'm the one making this cake."

So I shut up and lay down on the couch to nap in the sunlight while she puttered through the kitchen and N. watched Heroes on his laptop in the recliner.

I woke up 90 minutes later to the delicious smell of chocolate cake, that turned out to be frosted in chocolate coconut frosting, with no fruit or cream cheese in sight.

"I am going to videotape singing!" I said, getting out my camera.

"You are not going to videotape singing," S. said.

"Yes, I am!" I said, "and I'm going to post it on the internet someday if I need to."

She brought out the cake with candles in an M shape, and I turned on the camera.

"Blow out the candles," she said, and I refused. "Sing the birthday song," I commanded. "I am videotaping the birthday song."

"Apparently you are not," N. said, putting the computer away, "because I don't hear any singing."

"Blow out the candles before they burn the cake," he said.

S. said. "One of the candles is really short."

"I am not blowing out any candles until you sing the birthday song," I insisted, and finally N. started in with "Happy Birthday toooooo yooooou," dirge-like, and S. joined in, and I videotaped it while laughing in the background.

"This will be on the internet," I warned them, but of course I am not posting it. Yet. I need to keep some ammunition in reserve.

birthday weekend

I bought a car on Friday afternoon. It was the first car I looked at, but it was clean and it purred, and I could not imagine a more annoying way to spend a weekend than looking at crappy car after crappy car. The oil was clean. The car didn't smoke. I drove it up to 70 mph and it still hummed, and N. stuck his head under the hood and tapped/flipped some things and pronounced it sound.

I liked it, and I made an offer, and then I walked out over $200. N. and I were back in his car before the salesman ran out and said, "Don't leave over $200. We can do your price." And so I signed my name approximately four hundred thirty seven times, and drove away in a new little sedan.

I drove home to Universe City in it tonight, and I love it. It scares me to say that, lest the engine fall out of it tomorrow, but so far it feels steady and solid.

...

We played darts on Friday night, boys against girls, and although there were three of us to two of them, they blew us away the first game. Between games, I practiced over and over, getting instruction from N., while C. and S. were off waiting in line at the bar, and the second game was closer and then, at the end, I won it for the girls with a double bulls-eye.

There was rejoicing.

I'm guessing the boys regretted telling me how a dart is actually supposed to be thrown.

...

We learned to salsa and chacha in a barn, one wall open to the cow pen. We swung around with people we knew and people we had just met, and my partner for much of the lesson was a surly 20 year old who said, when I needed a break for a minute, "Oh, good. Then I can go smoke."

I swung on a swing above the stack of hay, and it only took two people to break the pinata. I didn't go scrambling for the candy, but B. threw candy up to C., who passed half of hers on to me, and I sat back, contented, with starburst and a caramel apple lollipop, the taste of October.

When most people had left, we turned off all the main lights and went back to the dance floor in the glow of white Christmas lights. We tried swing and East African rap and ended up back with chacha, but with the wrong music, because the instructor had long left with the cd. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was getting the hang of a dance, twirling in breathless swing dance circles with C., spinning a chacha circle under N.'s hand. We took off our sweaters and I wished for a hairtie, but I was having too much fun to stop.

contrast

How Returning to Universe City Goes With No Car:

Take train to downtown Gone West City. Wait for bus. Line up to get on bus. Sit on overly-airfreshened bus for two and a half hours, listening to iPod because reading makes me sick, as if the overly-airfreshened air did not already make everyone sick. Watch little towns go by, resenting them for causing the bus to get off the highway and detour through them to their bus stations. Get off bus in Universe City. Get a cab because the buses either 1. aren't running or 2. are too far away to walk to in the dark alone. Pay cabbie $11. Lug everything into house. Realize I have no milk for breakfast tomorrow. Curse this town.

How Returning to Universe City Goes With A Car:

Hug S. and N. Get in car. Drive two hours while talking on phone with sister and/or listening to music. Get off highway. Stop at Trader Joe's to pick up milk and butter. Drive home in the warm car. Take everything out of the car and carry it inside. Feel surprisingly charitable toward this town.

ouch

Since I put the milk crate on my bike, I cannot swing my leg over the back anymore (I have a boy bike, with the high bar), and I have developed a bad habit of swinging my leg over the front, so both legs are on one side while I'm still moving. Every time I do it, I think, this is a mistake, but I do it anyway, because it's so convenient to just jump off. Literally.

Tonight, as I pulled into my driveway, I did exactly the same, and I wobbled, somehow, to the right and then over-corrected to the left and then back right, and my foot wasn't all the way over yet, and the bike and I went crashing in to the potted plants. It hurt. Badly. I scraped all the skin off the lower part of my shin, and my other foot is already a big bump.

The good news is that I did not destroy one of my landlady's precious plants. Just myself.

Liberia for the win!

World Giving Index:

"The “World Giving Index” is the first report of its kind looking at charitable behaviour across the world. Using data from Gallup’s Worldview World Poll CAF looked at three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger and used the results to produce the “World Giving Index”.

Australia and New Zealand topped the Index. Malta was found to be the country with the largest percentage of the population (83%) giving money, the people of Turkmenistan are the most generous with their time with 61% having given time to charity and Liberia was top of the list for helping a stranger (76%).

The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy."

I love that country.

(This might explain why it physically pained me to pass by the tourists who were lost and confused, clearly looking for a hotel far from any area of town that might have a hotel, even though 1. I was on a bike, 2. I was late for FIGHT class, 3. I don't know this town well enough to direct them anywhere, and 4. I watched to make sure they stopped the nearest pedestrian to get advice from someone who actually knows how to direct them correctly.)

here

I didn't want to move here. I mean, I really didn't want to move here. It isn't that I was weeping and gnashing my teeth about it. I just didn't feel any excitement at all. I got an apartment and packed up my stuff and said goodbyes all very routinely, as if I had said goodbye many times before, which I suppose I have, and then I moved down here and started my new job and activities, very routinely, as if I had started over many times before, which I suppose I have, too.

Someone asked me yesterday if I was glad that I moved to Universe City and I said something diplomatic about how I am starting to see the city's good points, and M. laughed and said, "That's a no."

And yeah, that is a no.

It is probably good for me to be here. I know myself better now than I did when I moved to Gone West, and I'm being much more deliberate about building the friendships I know I need to be happy. I have the job I want. I may someday be very glad that I moved here.

But now? I'm not glad, now. I'm okay with the fact that I live in Universe City instead of Gone West. I am resigned to it. But I am not glad. I could have been deliberate about adding to my friends in Gone West. I would have loved to do this job with procedures I know, surrounded by people who already know and respect me, instead of starting back at the beginning.

I am fine, here. I am not weeping and gnashing my teeth. My life is filling with good things and people. It's just that, still, I feel no excitement about this place. It just is.

day

After I woke up but before I decided that yes, I probably did need to get out of bed to go back to pick up my stuff from the church yard sale, I thought of the waiting room at the Toyota dealership in Kigali. I don't know why. It's not a place where I spent that much time, nor one that I have any need to think about, but suddenly there it was, with its darkened glass and sample sets of tires. It's funny how things come back to you when you don't even need them, when you may never need them again.

When E. came to Rwanda in 2004 to help me out for a few weeks, we were on our way to the Toyota dealership when the baby Land Cruiser's tire deflated. A person in a passing vehicle on the road to the dealership and further to Uganda waved out the window at us, and finally I figured out what he was trying to convey and pulled off to the side of the road.

People gathered, as they do, and I tried to change the tire, with a lot of assistance from the gathered men, in particular, but it was to no avail for an embarrassingly long time. I do know how to change a tire, but there was some complication that I cannot actually remember. Perhaps E. would remember it. I need a key for... something. To unlock the spare? Yes, I think that was it. I could take off the old, deflated tire but I had the wrong set of keys with me, and the spare was locked onto the back of the truck. The key to unlock it was back in Kibuye.

We scratched our heads for a while, and then I left E., on her first day in the country, along the side of the road with the truck and all of our stuff. I hired two bicycle taxis, one for the deflated tire and one for me, and we set off, the tire balanced precariously on the back of the bicycle in front of me, and me balanced precariously sideways on the back of the second bicycle, the mile or two down the road to get the tire repaired at the Toyota dealership.

...

Today, I got up and went back to the yard sale, where I bought still more, an ironing board and a fan and a jewelry box and a stand mixer and a dishrack and a saw and a little box of tiny drawers full of nails and washers and nuts and bolts and screws, and a couple of men from the church threw everything in a trailer and brought it to my house.

I need most of those things. The recipe for the last cake I baked, the night before I left Gone West City, called for "beat[ing] eggs until thickened slightly and lemon colored." Try doing that with a wooden spoon. It takes quite some time, and it does not do well for the golf elbow.

Still, I begin to see the need for a garage.

Not for the future car.

For the (useful) stuff.


...

We drove out of the city to a vineyard on a hill.

"Are those the vines the wine comes from?" J. asked, gesturing outside the tasting room and the proprietor laughed.

"No, those are basically dead. They are just there for show. Our vineyards are further out."

Later, after a girl and her date left, he told us that she's come there with three or four different guys. "This time, she looked at me with a worried look, like she thought I would say something wrong."

We took a bottle of rosé out to the picnic table and ate chunks of baguette with cheese and tomato and roasted peppers and avocado falling out of them.

At the next winery, a man played an accordion and I took M.'s big fancy camera and snapped picture after picture of the blue grapes* and the rows of green vines meeting the darker green of the hills and then of M. singing Edelweiss along with the accordion man and M. and S.K. dancing around in circles.

* M. handed me some grapes from a bunch she got off the ground, telling me how delicious they were, and they looked so much like blueberries that I kept chewing straight into the pit and then making faces and spitting out the whole thing and I thought they just tasted bad until a few minutes later when I remembered that you don't eat the seeds with the grapes, and I ate a few grapes without the seeds. They were delicious.

car thoughts

Much of the time since I moved to Universe City, it hasn't really mattered that I don't have a car. It doesn't change things that much. I mostly get to the places I need to be, by bike or by foot or by bus. People offer me rides all the time.

Every occasionally, though, like tonight, when I've dropped $100 (am a big spender, very big) at a church yard sale on an assortment of odds and ends like tiny footstool, orange velvet curtain, orange outdoor blanket, antique photo of lake and mountain in landscape frame, dresser, four-drawer old wooden library card catalog, approximately 8 nice wooden hangers, I really wish I had a car. Or a truck.

Because if I had one of those, I would not have been trudging down the street just to get to my bike to ride home, lugging more than I can carry, with still more left behind, and planning to get up earlier than I want to so that I can go back to the church and lug even more stuff home.

Because if I had one of those, there would be milk in my fridge, because I would have been able to stop on the way home and get milk, instead of realizing that I would have to park my bike, lock the bike, take all of the stuff off of it that I cannot very well carry, take off the seat and put it in the bag I keep for that purpose, drag everything into the store, pick up the milk, drag everything back out of the store, and try to figure out a way to fit the milk into the crate which is already full of stool, purse, curtain, and blanket.

Because if I had one of those, I would not dread the weather forecast. I would not dread the cold mornings when my ears want to fall off as the wind passes them. I would not dread the dark, because I would not be quite so trapped in my apartment.

The thing is, I feel guilty for wanting a car. I feel like I should be able to manage without one. Not every person on the planet can have a car if we want to keep this planet functional, and I don't really see why I should be one of the people who have a car, and yet I want one so badly some days, and I am trying to put it off, to wait for the right car and the right time, but I know I'm going to end up buying one, probably very soon.

amusement

I went into a sporting goods store to look for gloves to wear at my FIGHT class. I opened a bunch of boxes and tried on a bunch of them, but none was quite right. In between, I chatted with the guy who worked there.

"It's a really fun class," I said, as we concluded that there were no workable gloves there. "If you ever think about taking some sort of martial arts or self-defense class, this is a good one."

"Oh, NO," he said, primly, "I don't like hitting, or being hit."

"Well, it's really more about what to do if someone comes at you with a gun..." I trailed off, and he found a reason to go off to run the register at the front of the store.

It was very, very hard not to laugh out loud. Does he think I'm planning to go find people to hold me at gunpoint? The whole point is what to do in situations in which you did not choose to be.

I am, however, that person who, after class, asks the nearest instructor, "So, what about, say, a machine gun? What do you suggest for disarming that person? Because there is the strap over the shoulder, which would make it harder."

"I suggest," she said, "taking cover."

I guess this FIGHT stuff is still going to be no use in much of the world, then.

brellie

"You can't hike through the woods with an umbrella," S. told me, as we got out of the car.

"I don't have a hood on my raincoat," I said, "I need the umbrella."

"No real [Gone Wester] would use an umbrella on a hike," she said.

"You told me I can't be a real [Gone Wester] for at least 20 years. I have 17 more years to use an umbrella," I said, and resolutely started off through the woods with a big blue umbrella over my head.

fight

I am not in pain.

Yet.

I will be, though.

Right now, I am just a little tired and stiff, but I can feel the beginnings of "I can't get out of bed in the morning" coming on.

I started taking this class. I dripped sweat. I used muscles I did not know existed. My poor golf elbows... well, they will get used to punching and push-uping and disarming people with guns. They will have to get used to it.

Now I am going to try to stand up. Very slowly and carefully.

tomato

I like tomatoes, but I'm not one of those people who eats them for fun. I have never been excited to put a tomato into my mouth. I like them in fresh salsa, and as a salad, and even on a good sandwich, but I don't eat them on their own. Just before I moved to Universe City, though, I was staying at S.'s house, and she sent me out to the pots in the driveway to pick some tomatoes for a salad.

I came back inside to report that there were no ripe tomatoes.

"Let me look," S. said, and pointed out to me all the ripe tomatoes. Dudes, they were orange. How was I supposed to know that orange tomatoes were ripe?

Then I ate one, and there was no going back. Orange cherry tomatoes are a whole new tomato.

One of my favorite things about this part of the country is the many, many farmers' markets. In bigger cities (curses on my need to leave Gone West City), there are farmers' markets every day, somewhere in the city. In Universe City there are... fewer. Maybe two. Or three. I don't actually know. I am new here, you know.

There are rows and rows of little green boxes at the farmers' market, full of small globes of yellow and red and orange, and on a whim or a craving (because, as I said, I don't even really like tomatoes that particularly much unless they are drenched in balsamic vinegar and eaten with mozzarella) I bought a box of orange ones and started popping them into my mouth one after another. They burst like berries when you bite them.

They taste like warmth, like summer.

moment by moment

Yesterday, I sat at the top of a tiny little mountain, looking out over Universe City. A little ladybug crawled past, and my new friend said, "It's good luck." I held out my finger and the ladybug crawled on to it and lingered around the fingernail while we talked about life and its unexpectedness, how you move to a city on a whim or for work and your entire life becomes something different than ever you guessed it might be.

...

Today, I wore a pair of new shoes and immediately after work I went to the pharmacy and bought all of the following: triple-antibiotic ointment, thick foam bandaids, and heel-liners. So you can guess how well the new shoes worked, on their first day.

bike

One thing I love about Universe City: whenever a salesperson finds out that I am riding my bike (usually because I say something like, "No, I don't need that double-bagged. I have a super bootleg crate on the back of my bike"), they say, "Ride safe!" as I leave.

I rode my bike to a shopping center, over the river and through the woods, and learned something very important: google maps bicycle instructions: do not trust them. They will lead you astray. It took me an hour to ride something that google maps claimed would take 20 minutes. Most of the extra time was backtracking and experimenting with various streets that turned into freeway on-ramps.

(Another thing in favor of Universe City, though: the buses may suck, but the bike paths are fantastic. Most streets seem to have bike lanes, unless they are residential and not busy or there is some nearly parallel bike path. A bike is far more useful than the buses. Until it starts raining.)

This is one of those evenings when I feel vaguely sick about how much money I spent today, regardless of how badly I needed to spend it. Jeans: replacement for every-pair-I-own-has-holes -in-it. Shoes: replacement for foot pain and/or wet feet from shoes that have holes. Present for mom and dad for Christmas: brilliant genius thinking ahead. Food: self-explanatory.

(Apparently I am obsessed with the : today.)

On the way back home, I trusted my own sense of direction rather than google maps and it worked out much, much better. I'm still a little scared of riding my bike at night, though. Not for myself, but, you know, there are those cars. They cannot be trusted, especially on a Saturday night. I saw a BMW careen around a corner, slam into the curb, and keep going, which was not exactly comforting for someone on a bike, lacking all the protections of a metal box on wheels.

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.