in which I make financial professionals despair

I lost my checkbook, sometime in the last month, and I couldn't pay my student loan. (All of my payments each month are paid automatically except the one from Citibank. I do not trust The Student Loan Corporation because they have, in the past, charged me late fees for months during which I paid on time, and they never have credited that money back to me, so handwritten checks it is.)

I finally went to the bank that holds my student loan money (thank you, dear over-priced law school of mine), and asked for some checks. I explained that I moved and then I traveled for the holidays and somewhere in all of that, I lost my checkbook. "I can't pay my student loans because I can't find the checkbook, and I keep looking, but I just don't know where it is, and I have to pay the loans."

"Do you think you'll be able to find it?" the bank person asked, in a tone that said, Do we need to worry about id theft? "Is it in a box somewhere, or is it really gone?"

"I think I have it somewhere," I said. "I just don't know where. I mean, I've had it since I moved. I just lost it again in the last few weeks."

To fill the silence while he printed the new checks, I babbled. "I would have made my student loan payment with my debit card, but I had some problems with id theft last year and I got the new card, but I don't think I activated it."

"Yeeesss," he said, looking at the screen. "You've had that card since November, but it hasn't been activated."

"Yeah," I said, cheerfully, standing up, "I can't find the new card, either. It's probably with the checkbook."

He literally sank his head in his hands in despair.

But I'm sure it was not just me. It was probably the culmination of all the financially hopelessly disorganized people he sees every day.

And I am not quite as incompetent as I look, because when I got home to make myself some lunch (I haven't gotten around to making a new set of beans-and-rice dishes for the week), I had a moment of brilliance and walked directly over to my checkbook.

The new debit card wasn't with it, though. I still don't know where that sucker is.

running uphill

Yesterday I was feeling particularly energetic - by mid-afternoon I had gone to church and worked, as in work-worked for a while - so I decided to go for a run. I do a hard-core exercise class, I figured, so a nice little run on a sunny afternoon should be just the thing.

I forgot that I live on a hill.

I guess I didn't forget so much as I assumed I would be fine, fine, running up a hill for my first attempt at a run in months.

I pretty much spent the first ten minutes attempting to jog up what should have been a hike, and then the next twenty minutes recovering.

I discovered, while walking for twenty minutes to recover from my brief stint of running, that I live very very near the edge of town. Just over the hill, suddenly there is nothing but field and forest. I walked back from the edge of town on a lovely little meandering road with no curb, passing classically Universe City houses with odd shapes and funny staircases, stepping into the mud when a car came by.

Today I talked to the fighting instructor, and I'm starting the advanced fighting class this week. Perhaps the additional day of fighting class will either 1. free me from attempting to give myself a heart attack by running up mountains, or 2. get me in good enough shape to actually run up mountains. Something needs to give. The last try was a disaster.

busyness

I had a Rwandese friend who moved to Canada. We were not particularly close in Rwanda, but we were part of the same group of friends, and when he was in New York for a few months on his way to getting permission to stay in Canada, he emailed me, and we met up to talk about Rwanda and our common friends.

He invited me up to the Bronx to eat Rwandese food, to the tiny back-alley apartment where he slept on the floor of his Burundian friend's room, the other rooms full of immigrant men from other Francophone African countries, also scraping by, also far from their families. I rode the 4 train north out of Manhattan, and S. met me at the subway stop. When it was time to leave, he and his friend not only walked me back to the subway, but rode the train all the way to my stop to make sure that I was safe.

"Our neighborhood is not very good," they told me. "Not very safe. And these black American guys are so strange. They stand in front of the stores and yell at us, 'Hay, you gah-da kwah-der?'" They exaggerated the Bronx accent through their African-French accents. "You gah-da kwaaah-der."

S. moved to Canada, and I saw his friend twice more: once to pick up a bunch of presents to take to his wife and kids in Rwanda when I spent the summer there, and once to bring him the gifts that they sent back with me to him. My head hurt from speaking French. In between, in Rwanda, I spent a lovely afternoon at a craft fair with his wife and kids, wandering the booths in a shaded park I'd never really noticed in downtown Kigali.

It's like that in East Africa. Friends or friendly acquaintances you met once will email you and say, "I'm going to be in your town. Can you show me around / help me buy all the requisite gifts to bring back / take these things I have to send back to my country?" and you do, because that's just how it is, and because if you were in Khartoum / Nairobi / Kinshasa, they would do the same for you, or would find friends to do it on their behalf.

The reason I thought of this story is that months later, after S. had settled in Canada, he called, or we exchanged emails, or something, and he said, "I used to think that people in America or Canada were just making excuses when they said that they couldn't call or email because they were too busy. But now I see. People really are that busy here. I am that busy now, and I don't have time to call or email my friends at home the way I want to do."

That is exactly how I feel right now, only busier. I don't even have the time to call or email my friends down the street right now. There have been evenings - entire days in a row - when the only thing I did on the computer was work and make sure no one was in crisis. Before these last weeks, I cannot remember the last time I got home and did not turn on the computer at least to play for a little while, except on nights when I'd gone out late with friends. But these days, I'm too tired, too often.

Postscript:
A few weeks ago, S. said hello to me on f@ceb00k. We hadn't spoken in five or more years. We were both immersed in our North American lives and just too busy to keep up acquaintanceship in the East African way. He told me that he had married a Rwandese girl he met in Canada, "and we didn't even know each other before we moved here!" He posted photos of their wedding, of a lovely, happy woman and his smiling, handsome face, and the photos made me smile because they were surrounded by the Rwandese community in Montreal. I love that kind of community in a place far from home.

church music

In church, I opened the Psalter Hymnal (the gray one, the new edition, c. 1987) to number 475, and promptly put the book away. I didn't need it. I should have known just from the number that I wouldn't need it. I know all the words to that one, except that I can never remember in the second verse if it's "the same as ever" or "the same forever."

Sometimes I page through the hymnal in church in Gone West (there is no Home Dutch Denomination church in Universe City), and I estimate that I know about 1/3 of the 641 songs in there. Not all by heart, you understand, but enough to sing them without an instrument guiding the way. It's so much of my childhood, my past, in that book.

Singing Praise My Soul the King of Heaven on Sunday night, I wished that I knew how to play the piano. When I was little, in Liberia, my mom would play the piano on Sunday nights, and we would sing our way through the Psalter Hymnal. When it was my turn to pick, I always chose the militaristic songs, for some unknown reason, but now I'm grateful for the majestic ones, the beautiful ones. I wish I knew how to play them myself.

When I first moved to Rwanda, when J. and E. were there for a month showing me around, E. and I spent several days trying to remember all the words to By the Sea of Crystal. When I sing it now, I can see those mountains and valleys of northern Rwanda, between Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, passing in my mind.

oil

"I don't think I brought the right kind of clothes to change my oil," I said.

"That's fine," N. said. "My dad has plenty of overalls in the shop."

"You might have to help me," I said.

"Nope," N. said. "You are doing it by yourself. There are only three steps."

"Drain the oil," I said. "I have actually done this before, just not since 2002 and never on this particular kind of car."

"Right," he said, "and then change the filter, and then put the new oil in."

"I don't mean that you have to do it for me," I explained. "Just maybe you could at least come out to the shop and supervise?"

"Nope. I am very busy. I have to sleep, and rest, and relax, and read the paper."

But of course he did come and direct. He held the light while I crawled under the car.

Waiting for the oil to drain, I stood there next to the car and started laughing. I laughed and laughed.

"What's so funny?" N. asked, and I just kept laughing.

"What?" he asked again, now starting to laugh himself, helplessly, as one does when someone else is laughing.

"Just look at me!" I said, holding out my arms. I was wearing coveralls that zipped up the front, with the hood of a ratty old sweatshirt (also not mine) over my head to protect my hair, covered pretty much from head to toe with oil and goo. Taking the plug out of the oil tank did not go well.

But my car did not overheat on the drive back to Universe City, nor did the oil light come on, so I proclaimed operation oil change a success.

surreality

Yesterday I saw a fire truck, the long kind with a hinge in the middle, pulling into a small corner fuel station. It barely fit under the canopy, and it didn't fit at all in my head.

back there

People are voting in Southern Sudan today. Every one predicts that South Sudan will vote to secede from North Sudan, and everything I know of South Sudan, the few months I spent there, leads me to predict the same.

For once, South Sudan is in the news, and I look at the pictures, and I want to go back. I know, insane, right? I was so unhappy when I was in Southern Sudan. But you cannot blame a country, or even a semi-autonomous region, for where you are in your head.

If I didn't have to go alone, I would go back right now.

round and round

I woke up late and still stupid with the exhaustion of the week that I couldn't shake off. By 4:30, I was beginning to worry that I might not leave my house today, and that would have been unacceptably slothful and boring, not because I think it is unacceptably slothful and boring not to leave your house all day, but because all I was doing was staring at my computer at a level of slothful and boring that was giving me a headache.

Someone had mentioned rollerskating in the last few days, and so I asked A. if she wanted to join me for open skate in Adjacent City. She did, and we went skating with all the little kids and flirting teenagers and overly-enthusiastic men and one determined young boy who fell and hurt himself repeatedly but still joined every race. "That is one brave little kid," we said several times, watching him fight back involuntary tears of pain as he got up and started forward again, arms out for balance.

A. and I are both constitutionally incapable of talking about un-intense things, and so we talked about faith and church and insecurities as we circled the floor, sometimes speaking louder over the music, trying to drown out like a G6 and watch me burn and in my skintight jeans with our discussions.

softie

I reached to open the drawer for a knife, but there was a little ladybug on the edge of the counter. I picked it up in my hand and washed it into the sink to get rid of it, imagining a house full of crawling little critters all winter long.

But I looked down and saw it struggling in the bottom of the rubbermaid container, deep under water, and I felt bad. I dumped the water out of the container, picked up the ladybug again, and blew it off my hand outside. It probably died that way, too, I realized later, but at least I didn't have to watch.

orion

I drove home on Sunday night on a windy little road through the hills. The cars behind me passed me the first chance they got because, frankly, I am annoying on a dark, windy, unfamiliar road. I drive much more slowly than the trucks of the people who live in those hills. I crept along, refusing to drive faster for their sakes, needing to feel in control of the car.

Orion hung low in the southeastern sky in front of me. I followed him all the way home.

I can tell my cardinal directions from Orion's orientation in the night sky. He was straight up above our house in Liberia, and all I have to do imagine him there, in the Liberian sky, to know which way is west.

One of my favorite things about living in Africa is the fact that Orion is visible all the time. I miss him, here in the Northern Hemisphere, where he only appears in winter, in the southern sky.

Whenever I can see Orion, I feel like I'm home.

princess

"We think it was J.," S. and N. said, of their cousin's new girlfriend, the person who they suspect brought the breast tape to their grandparents' white elephant gift exchange.

"It was her first Christmas with your family, wasn't it?" I said. "It took some ovaries to bring that to her boyfriend's grandparents' Christmas party."

"See?" S.'s boyfriend F. said. "This is why I want to call you Princess. You just totally flipped that gendered phrase on its head. That was awesome. That's something a princess would do."

"Fine," I said. "That is an ok reason."

(True confessions: I've read the ovaries thing on a feminist blog somewhere. Or something like it, anyway. I think.)

I bundled myself in more layers than one would think possible for the walk down to the beach, and F. said, "Always being cold is another princess trait."

"No," I said. "A princess would wear something cute, regardless of the cold. Or stay inside. Not an ok reason to call me Princess."

Near the perfect little square fire that N. built a dozen feet away from the highest surf, I laid on my back, head on the sand, to look at the stars.

"I bet you were one of those kids who was always filthy from head to toe," N. said from what looked, at that angle, like miles above me.

"I was," I said comfortably. "My brother and I once stripped to our underwear and covered ourselves in mud from head to toe. My mom didn't even get upset. She thought it was cute, and took a picture."

(Side note: always being filthy is not a princessy trait.)

I watched a star shoot across the sky. "Do you get one wish per shooting star?" I asked. "I mean, each time you see one, do you get a different wish?"

"I would assume so," S. said.

"There's another one," I said, and later, quietly, "Three."

I wish for the same thing on every star.

2011

It was ten minutes to midnight by the time we piled on our layers ("You actually do look like a puffalump," N. said, laughing at me as I put on my fourth and fifth and possibly sixth layers) and made it down to the beach. We huddled over the cell phones until they flipped from 11:59 to 12:00, and then we said, in normal voices, "Happy New Year!" and turned to watch the fireworks down the beach.

S. and I walked along the water in the dark, with the sound of the waves and the popping of the fireworks. I wrapped my headlamp around my wrist, and then I took my mittens off to loosen my scarf, and the headlamp must have fallen off. S. and I retraced our steps one way and then back, but there was no headlamp to be found in the dark, and by daylight the next day the tide had come and gone, and the headlamp was no more. This is why I should not be allowed to have nice things. See also, this.

caroling

On Christmas Day, in the evening, we went to visit my grandma at the independent living center, on the same floor where Oma died in May. We sat with Grandma in her room, trying to talk, repeating ourselves, and then we started singing carols. After a while, we went into the hallway and sang there. Old men and women began to peek out of their rooms and shuffle out to stand near us with their walkers. They joined their voices with ours, and we filled the hallway with song.

chronic delays

I was going to try to leave earlier in the day, but I had to do [work task] at [place] (WHAT GOOD IS HAVING AN INTERESTING JOB IF YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT THE MOST INTERESTING PARTS OF IT?), and so I was stuck in Universe City until 2:30 pm, and then I needed to deal with a [work task] that needed an interpreter who was only available at 2:30 pm, and so I was stuck in Universe City until 3:30 pm, and then I had about 100 phone calls to return (not all of them got returned, by the way; it was an impossibility), and so I was stuck in Universe City until 5:00 pm, and then I realized that I had forgotten some things at home, and so I was stuck in Universe City until 6:00 pm, and then I spent 35 minutes searching my entire house for my old iPod to bring to my sister, and so now it is 6:55 pm and I still have to load up the car and get fuel and check the pressure in my tires and go back to work to print my boarding pass and drive two hours to Gone West.

My flight tomorrow morning is at 5:45 am.

fighting

Only three of us made it to our fighting class today, and we worked hard. The instructor was there alone, with no backup at the desk, so when people came in to ask about subscriptions and gear to give as Christmas gifts, he set us to push-ups and agility drills and crunches and went to deal with the customers. One of the three of us had his sister and her friend visiting, and as they watched from the sidelines, as we lunged at each other trying to tap shoulders, as sweat dripped off of our faces, I wanted to say to them, "I know it looks impossibly miserable, but this class is so. much. fun."

It really is. Even on days like today, when I can't leave work until five minutes before class is to start, when I am exhausted and have so much to do, I still go. I have not missed a single day except the ones where I was in Gone West. I go, and I do the 210 crunches. I run,* and I punch, and I kick. I was vindicated today when the instructor said, "You are really dedicated. Keep this up, and I'll be inviting you to the advanced class soon."

I feel approximately the excitement about being invited to the advanced class that one would feel about, I don't even know. Being upgraded to the varsity team as a freshman? There just really isn't much in life that results in that much satisfaction in one's hard work anymore. I mean, getting a job, fine. But there is so much chance involved. And there isn't much room for promotion in my line of work. This is the beauty of sports: you work hard, and you earn something. I am going to be pretty ridiculously, excessively excited on the day I get invited to the advanced class.

* On the running: I think I might be in the best shape I've been since I played soccer in high school, and I credit Singul@ir. Did you know that it is possible to run without painful gasping for breath? Yeah, me neither. Asthma: another fake disease not to make fun of.

grown up

Sometimes, I just really don't want to be an adult. It seems like being a grown-up is just one annoying thing after another: bills and insurance and bank accounts and stolen IDs and credit reports and I'm noticing a theme here that everything seems to involve money. I would like to ban money and all of the associated anxiety. The thing I would most like to get rid of is that sinking sensation when you know that something is about to cost you way more than you can afford, like a car accident or a medical procedure.

When I was 25 or so, I used to wonder how my parents managed to be grown up at 25, which is how old they were when I was born. I felt very far from being grown up at 25. I wondered how they managed to seem like they knew what they were doing, even when there was no way they possibly could have known, like at checkpoints in Liberia.

Now, though, I have it figured out: you fake it. You just do. I don't have kids, so I don't have to fake it quite as well, not yet, but I still fake it. I pretend that I'm calm about making that phone call. I pretend that I know what questions to ask when the bank calls to tell me that my debit card was used at an electronics store in New Jersey (New Jersey?!? I haven't been in New Jersey since 2006, and I didn't have this bank account then). You just keep doing the next thing that has to be done and somehow, hopefully, it all gets done.

I guess I thought there was more to being a grown-up. I thought someday I would feel like one, but now I'm not sure that day will ever arrive. Maybe being grown up is more about what you do than about what you feel.

one for the money

On Friday, we sat around in the living room throwing dice. Every roll, it seemed, there were new rules. "No, you don't get those points, because blah blah blah," "No, not those points, either," but somehow the explainers weren't getting points either, so they must not have been making them up solely to spite us. Long after I went downstairs to get ready for bed, I could hear my roommate M. upstairs throwing the dice and then simply saying, "What do I have?" since the rules were too complicated to be deciphered.

On Saturday, we sat around the K.'s dining room table up in Gone West playing Texas Hold 'Em until 1 am. It only took a few minutes to start to enjoy the feel of the chips clicking as I threw them into the middle. I came in second, but there may have been some accusations of cheating.

"I didn't cheat," I told N. this morning, defending myself when he told S. that I had cheated. "In fact, you were the one who said that I shouldn't have folded right then, so I picked the cards back up. So really, you were the reason for my win. Thank you."

"I meant," he said, "that next time you shouldn't fold in that situation. I didn't mean that you could take the cards back on that turn."

push-up

For the record, I did a whole push-up today. Ok, a whole GIRL push-up, but still. My nose touched the ground. For someone with gimpy ulnar nerves who has used their arms as little as possible for the last six years, that is quite an accomplishment. Someday, if I keep up this fighting class thing, I am going to do a whole real push-up.

You have to have goals in life, you know, small though they may be.

phones

When I stopped for coffee this morning, there was an older African man discussing science at a table with an Asian college student. I kept straining to listen to him, trying to figure out where he was from. After a while, the girl went to the bathroom, and the man pulled out a cell phone and there was something about the way he held the phone that he could have been Pastor B. in Rwanda, and then I realized that the way an older man holds a mobile phone in Africa, the way it is somehow the same across the continent, the same slight skepticism of it and the same way he peers through his bifocals, all of that is so familiar to me that I felt a pang of homesickness there in the coffee shop. And then I thought how strange it is that my dad wouldn't even recognize it.

When I was last in Liberia, I called him from Buchanan and let him talk on my mobile phone to Pastor K., and when I got the phone back, my dad and I were chatting and he said, "Well, I'll let you go. I want you to still have money on your phone in case something goes wrong," and I realized what a different world Liberia is now, with little telephone airtime kiosks on every corner, communication available anywhere, how very much more connected to the rest of the world and yet, somehow, four years ago when I was there, Buchanan was still without one single restaurant that served anything but chicken and chips and/or was open on Sunday.

They say that Africa has leapfrogged past land-lines and dial-up internet and gone straight to wireless, and this is mostly true. (I did have a land-line and dial-up internet in Rwanda, along with a mobile phone. Wireless internet was just beginning in some big hotels around the time I left, but my laptop didn't have a wireless card.)

Someone who had lived in Liberia in the 1960s asked me the other day about logistics there now, and I explained how, if you are wealthy, you have a generator for lights and air-conditioners, and an electric pump for water, and you buy drinking water. "But what about communication?" she asked, and I almost laughed, because communication is almost the easy part. Everyone around the world is desperate for communication. There are cell phones, I explained, and you buy a little receiver and get wireless internet from towers, or, I suppose, if you were far out in the bush, you would have a satellite receiver for internet.

The world is so very much smaller than it was when my parents waited in line for the phone at the telecommunications building in Buchanan, or when the photos of my sister's birth never made it by mail to the US.

wandering loop around western Uganda

One weekend near the end of the two years I lived in Rwanda, I needed a break. I decided to take my break by driving to Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. I didn't have a guidebook for Uganda, but some Canadian friends did, so I borrowed it and called the lodge at the park and made a reservation for two nights, and I set off across the border.

I am fairly certain that this was the first and so far only time I ever crossed a land border, with a vehicle, by myself. I've done it other times when I was by far the most knowledgeable person and I was the one responsible for the car, but I think that was the only time I've ever done it completely alone. I crossed the border without incident, drove up the tarmac road toward for a while, and then turned off onto a dirt road per the sketch map in the Lonely Planet.

The story I am about to tell is why I do not trust Lonely Planet maps.

After I drove up this wide, smooth dirt road for a while, I stopped to look at the guidebook and discovered that the overpowering smell of rotting bananas in my truck was due to a bag of, well, rotting bananas that were under the driver's seat. I had not put them there. I do not generally choose bananas as sustenance. They had been put there by someone else using my truck. Yuck. I threw them out on the side of the road.

I studied the guidebook for a while, trying to decide if I was to continue straight on the wide, smooth road, or turn off on the tiny, bumpy road that went off to the right. The guidebook showed no turns at all, all the way to the next big town, Ishaka.

I carried on. They were working on widening and improving the road, but soon I had passed all the construction equipment. The road got smaller and smaller. After a while, I was choosing my turns at each fork in the road based on the sun: I tried to go north, toward the park, rather than west, toward Congo, where there happened to be some fighting at the time. Periodically I stopped and asked someone. "Ishaka?" I asked, and they nodded and pointed ahead, so I kept going.

I might get stuck out here, I started to think, and wondered where I would spend the night, until I remembered that I was in Uganda and I could probably stop anywhere and stay at someone's house and be perfectly safe. So that was my plan, if it got dark: stop, befriend people, sleep in their house, thank them with money and words. I felt as safe as I've ever felt in my life.

Eventually I got to a town, and someone at the petrol station spoke English and told me which way to go, and after a while longer I suddenly came to a corner and hit a normal sized road, and a few miles later I bumped up onto tarmac again. (If you would like to see the round-about road I took, here is the google map. That nice yellow line straight up the screen is the road I was supposed to take. That squiggly line that makes a big loop off to the left is the road I actually took, including the tiny gray line.)

I got to the park right around dark and barely made it through the gate before it closed. I had a lovely time at the park and then, on the way home, the road was much clearer and I popped out onto the wide, smooth road just exactly where that tiny, bumpy road had gone off to the right, despite there having been no turn whatsoever in the Lonely Planet map.

Moral of the story: Lonely Planet maps, do not trust.

(Note: the exact same thing happened to S. and me on Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam, except on a motorbike. Anecdote number two in support of my moral of the story.)

almost Christmas

My tiny little bright green Christmas tree is up on the side table and the room is warm from the gas fireplace that we finally got working yesterday. The gas guy came out and turned on the gas and showed me how to clean the glass. I got out the vacuum and he vacuumed the white powder from the inside of the fireplace.

Then I wondered if I should tip him, but he said goodbye and left while I was packing up the vacuum, so it wasn't like he lingered as if he was expecting a tip. I never know what to do in these situations. When do you tip and when not? I regret not having tipped him. He seemed like he could use one, like he had a family at home depending on him, and it's almost Christmas, after all. Sigh. It's hard being a grown up.

But here I am, with a gas fire and a bright Christmas tree and a cup of peppermint hot chocolate and it's nearly Christmas. Except that I haven't really gotten into Christmas music this year. I continue to linger on the Patty Griffin station. Still, it's cozy and festive here in my living room, if by festive you mean that colored lights are twinkling and fiddles are fiddling in folk music, because that's what I mean by festive, and that's what it is.

defense

Someone left a set of keys at the fighting class studio (how do you leave your car keys?) and I set off for the parking lot to see if any cars would beep when I pushed the button on the key ring. My instructor sent one of the gangly teenagers from the next class, a martial arts class, with me. "I'll be fine," I said. "Isn't this why I'm taking this class?"

"The whole point is that you don't have to use it," the instructor said.

So I was back to being escorted by a boy in order to stay safe. A skinny, awkward 16-year old, no less, who is probably some sort of martial arts whiz. My 16-year old self would have been thrilled. Now? Not so much.

bargaining

Did you know that you can bargain at the MAC store? Last night the guy offered me 20% off a $30 item and I said, "Will you take $20 for it?" and he said yes and I said, "I think that's the first time I have ever bargained for something in the mall," and he laughed and said, "We have a lot of freedom on that kind of thing," and I paid my $20 and left.

It was weird.

safe

I have never been one of those girls who feels particularly vulnerable. I am pretty tall, and I don't seem to give off the vulnerable vibe that screams ROB ME, ATTACK ME! At the same time, I am a girl, and so there are times, on a dark street at night when someone seems to be lurking near me, when I do get nervous.

After nearly three months of fighting class (I just call it fighting class now, when people ask. It makes me seem tough), I feel less nervous. It wasn't even a conscious thing until I realized it tonight.

But now, driving home tonight, it didn't scare me to have that car following me for three turns. It doesn't scare me to walk past that group of drunk kids on the corner. I am not unwary, now, just more confident. A whole lot of practice punching and kicking people, not to mention taking them down, will do that to you.

It's a very strange feeling, in a really good way, not to feel the vulnerability of being female.

headset

Last night I got in the car and, as usual, got out my headset to get ready to chat on the phone all through the drive down to Universe City. (It is illegal to talk on the phone while driving without a hands-free device here.) It is a long drive, and boring, especially in the dark, so I usually call my mom or my sister and blather to them for two hours. I put the headset on my lap, planning to get some gas first and then make the first call.

The gas station was closed. I pulled in and found only darkness. By then I had realized that I needed to get something out of the trunk, though, so I parked in a space, got out, got the stuff out of the trunk, and got back in the car.

Right around the on-ramp to the freeway, I realized that I couldn't find the headset. Disaster. I thought about turning around, but surely it was in the car somewhere? And driving the couple of miles back to the gas station would take a while, and be a pain, and I might as well keep driving. Surely it could not have just fallen off my lap as I got out of the car back at the gas station.

Thirty minutes later, having wanted but been unable to talk to someone on the phone because I could not find that headset anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, I stopped at the outlet mall for fuel and please, please, let them have a cell phone store.

They did, but they didn't have the right kind of headset for my phone. They had the kind with two earphones (annoying) and the bluetooth kind (my dad has one, and I cannot stand the way it picks up background noise). The girls at the counter told me there was another cell phone store twenty minutes down the road.

By the time I got off the highway and drove circles around through the shopping center and found the store and got out of the car and discovered that the store was closed, let me assure you that I was very, very annoyed with myself for not just turning around and driving the two miles back to the first gas station.

So I called my sister and we talked on speakerphone. Except I had to hold it up to my face to hear her over the sound of the road, and I'm pretty sure that makes it not hands-free. I put it down whenever I passed someone.

And now I have to buy a new headset.

Curses.

brrr

I almost bought a very expensive coat today, just because I was freezing. I did the same thing the day after I moved to Gone West. It was raining, back then, and I stopped at REI, feet soaked through, shivering, and came out wearing a softshell and boots that are good down to -15 degrees. Today it was just cold and windy, and I was severely tempted to buy that ski jacket I've been eying, but I ended up with just a warm layer at 1/4 the price. I really, really despise being cold. Really.

pass

My Universe City coworker D. and I were eating lunch, sitting in a park in Gone West, the same park where I used to spend all my (non-rainy) lunch hours when I lived here. A group of kids came by and I said, "There are always school groups in this park."

"Those are Boy Scouts," he said.

"There is a girl, though," I said.

"Oh, yeah, there is. But they are doing some sort of service project," he said.

We watched the Boy Scouts (more accurately: the Boy Scouts' leaders) take scarves out of an old-lady type grocery pull cart and give them to a group of young possibly-homeless* guys sitting in a park across the way. The most prominent scarf was baby blue and white, more a receiving blanket than a scarf by its color.

"A friend of mine was once waiting for a bus in downtown [Gone West]," D. said, "and a project like that came by. They gave him some gloves, and he just said thank you and put them on."

We watched the kids and their leaders make a circle and then come past us. I was hoping they would offer us scarves, but I guess our dress coats and clean shoes, not to mention our non-scavenged restaurant lunches, gave us away.

* This would be my biggest concern if I were doing this type of project. How would you know who would appreciate it and who would be offended? It involves making assumptions that people need your help, and I don't like assuming that.

thoughtless

Driving back to work today, I realized, for the second time in two days, that I hadn't had to think about where to turn. I didn't check street signs. I didn't watch for that one store. I just turned, without thought, onto the right street.

I think I do that automatically in my hometown in Michigan. Very rarely do I have to look for street signs. I did it automatically in Rwanda. Most of the time, I even do it automatically when I'm driving back in Gone West, except for those three streets downtown whose order I never will get right, no matter how many years I spend here. But in Universe City, a new town and one in which so much of the town is made up of neighborhoods, just house after house after house, I still have to check the signs, even on a couple of the turns on my drive to work.

I felt almost affectionate about Universe City for a few minutes after that. I don't mind the place, really. It's only when I come to Gone West, when I remember what I'm missing, that I want to leave it. Mostly it's work and FIGHT class and friends and home, and actually I haven't spent a weekend there alone since the weekend that I moved and then three weeks before that. I'm too busy not to like the place where I live.

bar fight

I went out to a fundraiser drinks do after FIGHT class, and I ended up beating people up in the bar. Ok, not beating people up. More just demonstrating. Yes, I will disable you if you come at me with a knife. Next.

It's bizarrely fascinating to girls and boys. I might also be the best advertisement my FIGHT instructors have ever had. I get so excited about it (it's seriously one of my favorite parts of the week) that I end up convincing people that they might even want to try it. Today, for example, I had a 7-weeks-postpartum woman (possibly) talked into trying it. That, my friends, is contagious enjoyment of a class.

I do the same thing with Africa. At a law school function once, I convinced two people that they just had to go there, by expounding on its beauties. I wasn't even trying to convince them to go there. I was just talking about how great Africa is, and suddenly they were saying, "It has never even occurred to me to go to Africa, but now I really want to go." (I brushed my hands together and said, "My work here is done," in my head. And then I walked out into the snow.)

[30] resemblance

One of the strange things about Universe City is how it resembles, say, Kigali. Or Nairobi. Some East African city.

Ok, it doesn't resemble it specifically, because the houses here are not behind walls, and they are winterized and such. It's just that there are these little dirt lanes, in some places, and extra little rooms pieced together out of scraps dangling off of houses and, most of all, I think, there are office buildings that look like the tropics: they have outdoor walkways around them (despite the unending rain and, last week, the inch of snow I found on my car in the morning), and they have rows of doors facing out that lead to small offices. The offices tend, though, to be for random things that would not survive in a less hippie town. There are innumerable chiropractors, and massage therapists, and nutritionists, and naturalists, and acupuncturists, and therapists, and they all just open their little tiny offices and make a living, apparently. How, I do not know.

This is pretty much a hippie town, up and down. When he heard that I was moving here, F. said, "You are going to love the hippies. Get ready to be hugged all the time. The hippies will just up and hug you." and I scowled and said, "I don't like being hugged by people I don't know." Fortunately, no one has tried to hug me at random yet. Whew.

[29] stew-mack

In the middle of FIGHT class, I realized that I didn't feel all that great. I felt kind of like someone had punched me in the stomach and I might barf, except that no one had punched me in the stomach. So that was unpleasant.

When my stomach is iffy, I pretty much only want to eat cereal. I really like cereal. In college, I ate Lucky Charms three times a day in the dining hall. In law school one time, I felt sick-ish and so I ate cereal and then I actually did barf. (Surmise: it was the milk.)

Today I was smarter and had my evening cereal with a new gallon of milk. Let it not be said that I learn nothing from my mistakes.

Then I ate some chocolate and felt sick again.

Perhaps I ought just to go to bed. Some days you just can't win.

[28] road work

I went to the K.s' church by myself, because everyone else was leading a retreat/at a school meeting/studying/elsewhere. It was strange to sit there without any one of the pieces that normally connects me to the people in that sanctuary, and yet I have been there so many times that I felt safe and familiar there.

I was the only person clapping for Go Tell It on the Mountain, though. I am really not sure how anyone can possibly get through that song without clapping. It seems just totally wrong. This is what comes of Dutch-American churches.

On the drive home, there were accidents and bottlenecks, and it seemed that half the state or more was driving down the one single highway. Slowly. I drove lurchingly (stop-and-go traffic is the one time when a manual transmission is not a boon), and A. and I talked about life and boys and the impossibility of not caring too much.

[27] skate

Frosting cookies by yourself is boring. I miss my sister as I sit at the counter frosting endless supplies of cookies. I inevitably mix up some horrible color that wastes a whole lot of color and powdered sugar and then feel obligated to use it to frost cookies because it would be wasteful otherwise. That is how I ended up with purple cookies today. "Easter cookies are fine for Christmas," N. said, watching me try to make the color slightly less spring-like. (It didn't work.)

Every year, I use these silver ball decorations from the K.s' cupboard on the cookies. They are tasty and pretty, but I'm not completely certain that I'm not poisoning myself and everyone else who eats them. I think they date to approximately 1976, and I'm sure food safety standards were different then. Oh, well. Pretty!

...

We went ice skating, A. and S. and I. A. used to ice skate in school, and I went a few times when I was a kid with my Uncle Ed, and S. said she has gone maybe two or three times. It came back to me pretty quickly, and I tucked myself forward (falling on butt = bad) and swung my arms and managed to stay upright. I even enjoyed it, when I wasn't trying to avoid slicing off the fingers of small children who tumbled directly in front of me. &#^$ family skate time.

[26] and, again

Once again, it is early the next day before I get here, or to bed. We went to my favorite Ethiopian restaurant tonight, but I was too full from Christmas cookie dough to do it justice. Still, it was delicious. I miss that, in Universe City. There is no Ethiopian restaurant there, and even if there was one, it very likely wouldn't be as good. Few places are.

Then we sat around at a pub playing hearts and telephone pictionary. I lost at hearts, dramatically, but it possibly would have been less dramatically if certain people had not cheated.

In the grocery store this morning, I caught a smell of candles, spicy ones all mixed together, and it was almost exactly the smell of the box that T. decorated to send with me to Rwanda. I kept all my precious little luxuries in there, including nice-smelling candles, and still, if I open that box at my parents' house, it smells exactly like that.

My friend S. posted a photo of my house in Rwanda online, and I commented how much I miss it. It seems abandoned, she said. We should buy it! And oh, I want to buy it. It's too bad I would be buying a house I could never afford to visit. It's kind of one or the other, right now. But I miss it.

[25] tardy

Does it count as the 25th if I am still awake for the sleep-wake-sleep cycle of the 25th? I am going to say yes, mostly because if I don't say yes I will likely give up on the rest of the month, and that would be sad. I was, frankly, having too much fun even to think about writing anything today, as I always do when I spend holidays with the K.s. The big event today was the Punkin Chunkin, which we watched between rounds of card games. I think A., my friend who I invited along to Gone West, was slightly horrified by the way we all raced over to the tv to watch the throwing of the pumpkins and then when a commercial started we all raced back to the table to get in one quick round of cards, and then we all raced back to the tv and told our scores to N. while glued to the next set of catapults throwing pumpkins across a field in Delaware. Weird, yes, but sometimes participating in the weirdness is the greater part of happiness.

[24] thanks

I am behind on a thank you that I really need to say. My Aunt Lisa, back when I was living in my converted garage in Universe City, sent me a Happy Honda card, with a gift card for fuel inside.

(Happy Honda! It was the cutest card ever.)

So thank you, Aunt Lisa. Your card made me smile in the middle of packing, which is a great accomplishment indeed. I loved it!

[23] belonging

The night before I moved my stuff to Universe City, I put my p@ndora station on Patty Griffin, and I haven't moved it since. In the car, I listen to country, these days. I don't feel up for anything more. The Top 40 stations feel so harsh. I flip to them occasionally and then shudder and flip away, because I can't handle yet another song about, I don't even know, girls in bikini tops and Daisy Dukes or whatever else Top 40 songs are about these days.

I find the country music world reassuring right now, even though I am bothered by the all-whiteness of it, because it is full of people who do what they say they will do, people who fall in love and stay that way, even when their hearts are broken. Or maybe that isn't even it. Maybe it is that it idealizes doing what you say you will do and falling in love and staying that way.

Is it weird to say that it seems like the Top 40 songs skew younger? So many of the songs seem to forever be stuck at the college-age post-modern ideal of nightclubs and drinking and looking hot and getting laid, and it just makes me tired. I deal with the craziness every day at work, and I just moved, and I feel this craving for stability and affection, for friendship and truth.

And so I keep listening to music that I don't like so much musically for the sake of the feeling it evokes, the same feeling that I get sitting down to dinner at my parents' house, with the kiddos underfoot, the same feeling that I get looking around at a group of good friends who I have known for a while, the same feeling that I get swapping pieces of the newspaper at the kitchen island at the K.'s house: the feeling of having a place to belong.

[22] dos cosas

I've been taking FIGHT class for over two months now, and I still hurt sometimes when I get done. It seems that they devise ways to use new muscles each week. And then there is the fact that I just get hurt a lot, regardless of what I'm doing, but worse when I'm fighting. Currently, I have a jammed thumb, a sprained toe, and a growing, painful puddle of blood under the skin on the top of my foot. I feel like a real martial arts person.

Back in Gone West, there was this girl who I saw once a week at a Farmers' Market who very frequently would have a black eye or two. At first I worried about her, that she was in an abusive relationship, but then eventually A. and I figured out that she must do some martial art and just get punched a lot during sparring. I am not quite at that point yet.

...

One of the things I least like about blogging is blogging about blogging, but I am about to do it. After posting yesterday, I realized that I have posted very nearly that same post over and over. I repeat myself a lot. It's still true, though. I am here. I am trying to live each day here. But I have not, and probably never will, fully let go of there. I miss it. Someday, hopefully not too far away, I will be there again, for a short time or long.

[21] in place

I invited myself along to dinner with N.'s classmates, and they were all the sort of cool, interesting people that I wish I had around me all the time. I need to meet more cool people in Universe City, so my normal life can be filled with evenings like this. One of them actually turned out to be a lawyer who several other lawyers had told me I should track down: he has worked in Liberia. And so, today, I met N. and J. for lunch, and N. and I watched J.'s photos and videos of Liberia.

"That's my whole childhood," I said, as a man on the screen called people to attention and started speaking, "sitting there listening to speeches."

The faces in the photos were familiar. No, I don't know them, most of them, but they look familiar, like someone I could have passed on the street growing up, or the last time I was in Monrovia.

"What about you?" J. asked. "Do you miss it? Do you want to go back to Africa?"

"I'm fine until I see something like that," I said, "and then I want to go back." Sometimes, some moments, the fact that I am not there, that half of my home is 6977 miles and more away from here burns into me. How can I live this way? How can I be happy without at least traveling back there? I feel trapped by my interesting job and my comfortable house. They keep me here, when there are so many places that I haven't yet been. There are so very many interesting places to live, so why am I here?

"Sometimes I miss it so much that I even catch myself missing Southern Sudan," I said, and grinned at N. "N. heard those stories right after I came back, so he knows what a huge step that is."

"Uh, yes. It definitely is." N. said. He probably remembers an evening that was almost completely full of me telling stories about the worst of my experience in Southern Sudan, those days when I wanted to go home every night and then every morning I would wake up to sunlight and think maybe I could survive another day, only to spend the next evening cursing myself for not having yet booked a flight out of there.

We sat there in a crummy little Chinese restaurant in Universe City, with Liberia on the screen, and my worlds collided violently. I wanted it all: these people, this job, this moment, this happiness, but also those people, that place, that moment, that feeling of possibility. I love what I have here, but I regret having given up that place.

I still miss the life I had there, and I still know that I can't go back to live there as long as I am going back there to live alone. I know that I need friends who stay instead of friends who leave after three months or six months or a year. I can list a million ifs, any of which would make it possible for me to go back to live in Africa, but I can't force any of them to happen.

And yet, I am happy here, happier than ever I was there. The very fact that I can turn to N. and refer to something that happened three years ago and he was here then, and he is here now... well, that is why I moved to Gone West in the first place, and I am so very thankful to be exactly where I need to be, even if part of me is thousands of miles away.

[20] short

My roommate M. has a tiny little dog. He doesn't live here all the time, but when he is here he runs around on his tiny paws and curls up on my lap like a cat, and then he tries to lick my face and I have to push him away.

I sat in front of the happy light for an hour today, but it was not enough. It still gets dark too early, and light too late.

[19] new

I am not as adventurous as I seem, as I have mentioned many a time, but today I tried something new: sushi with raw fish. Normally (and by normally, I mean: the other three times I've gotten sushi), I get the veggie stuff. Sweet potato, yum. Today, though, I had to get over it. It's fine to be all vegetarian when you are meeting a group of new people - "I'm vegeTARian" - or other vegetarian people, but N. is down from Gone West for a training and sometimes you just have to woman up and try something new. "Because you know the other people won't mock you over it quite as badly?" N. said.

"I don't like white sauces," I told him over the smoked salmon/cream cheese/avocado rolls, "but sometimes you just have to trust that even if you don't like one ingredient, a culture puts the flavors together for a reason."

And they were delicious.

[18] pieces

I am still learning this town, and today I happened upon a whole new part of it just by missing my turn into the gas/petrol station and trying to drive around the block but the block turned out to be really really big and then suddenly I saw a street sign and the name on it was one that I had heard but never before located. The pieces are coming together.

I remember how, when I first moved to Gone West, I had all these little snapshots in my head of different streets and restaurants, but they didn't fit together. Sometimes, years later, standing on a corner, I would look down a street and remember that I had seen that view before, long ago, before I knew how it fit with the rest of my city, and I would think of how familiar it all is now, a big grid in my head full of sunny spots and favorite shops.

I had coffee again today at the place where I sat with my mom before my first interview for this job. We shared a burrito at that table over by the door, and she asked me possible interview questions. I changed into my interview suit in that bathroom where now I run to wash my hands before I touch my coffee. Now that coffee shop is across the street from a building where I go almost every day for work. It is no longer the center of the town, the way it felt before my interviews, but just ancillary to the places I go all the time.

[17] thin blue glow

It hit me today, all-of-a-sudden (that should really be a word of its own, because it wants to be said faster than the rest of the sentence - what? doesn't everyone hear the words in their head as they write them?), that I need to start using the happy light. It's later this year than it hit me last year, maybe because this has been a long, sunny fall, but there it was, today: I need the happy light.

Last year, it arrived at the end of October, the week before I left for Vietnam. One day, everything was just Too Much. Today, the same. I had three conversations in a row that were frustrating, and suddenly I wanted to put my head down and give up, and it wasn't until later, driving home after FIGHT class, that I realized why I wanted to give up, why everything was just Too Much.

Happy light, I welcome you.

FIGHT class, though, was as amazing as always. I think FIGHT class might be the best part of my week. Admittedly, the instructors have been working us extra hard lately, and I start to wonder if my allergist was right about the asthma (another fake disease!). "I call this the gift that keeps on giving!" one of the instructors said. "Now through Christmas, I am going to give you the gift of hard work." We were not exactly leaping for joy, although we did do a lot of leaping. FIGHT instructors think it is fun to have someone grab your leg, pull it up to waist level and hit you with their other hand while you hop and try to block their blows.

Normal people disagree.

Nonetheless, that class is one of my favorite things. I feel so strong and not-helpless after I'm done, because the same things keep repeating and so, after a few months of class, I find that disarming someone with a gun to my head is almost natural, even though I've never done it before. Last week, I was practicing disarming the instructor, and I kept not even getting to the stage where you snap the gun out of the person's hand, because it practically flew out of his hand and into mine just from the way I pulled him off balance.

That made no sense if you don't know the disarming techniques. Just trust me: I was almost too good. It's nice to feel good at something sports-like, for a girl who sat the bench all three years of high school soccer. (Loved it; sucked at it. Story of my sporting life.)

[16] attach

I get ridiculously attached to things. I mean, ridiculously.

Here is how ridiculously: I am delaying going to goodwill to donate things, because one of the things I need to donate is a bar stool that I originally bought at goodwill that I have been using as a bedside table. Yes, the top of it is too small. Yes, things fall off of it all the time. And yes, I feel guilty about getting rid of it.

Even more ridiculously: I have this box that I used two, maybe three times, going back and forth to Rwanda, and then again moving to Gone West. It is one of the boxes that my organization sold: the perfect dimensions to maximize your luggage allowance. It has my name and Michigan address on it, and my sister's name and Michigan address, and my name and Rwanda address, and my name and Gone West address, and I cannot bear to get rid of it.

I am now clinging to cardboard boxes because they have some meaning to me. I think they have medication for this.

[15] tree house

Now I live in a tree house. It is not built in one single tree, merely among them. When I look out the windows, I am amongst treetops.

As I left my house yesterday, there was a wild turkey crossing the road. This morning, a row of pheasants was parading down the sidewalk.

And it still only takes ten minutes to drive to work.

I was actually eager to get home tonight. Not just because I was severely hypoglycemic to the point where the road was blurring, although that helped (ffoooood), but because I wanted to be here, in the quiet open spaciousness of my living room, snuggled in a blanket, listening to the quiet. It felt like coming home, not just escaping the rest of the world.

I also am surrounded by unpacked boxes, and I should be at work right now.

Sleeeeeep. I can't remember what a whole night of sleep feels like.

[14] cleaning

There are few things quite as annoying as spending a day cleaning the place out of which you have just moved. You want to be in the new place, hanging pictures and finding the best place for the bookshelf, and instead you are scrubbing floors of a place you are, frankly, totally over.

[13] moved

The last time I moved, in August, I was almost completely ready to go when N. and S. arrived at my 4th floor studio. The boxes were packed, and the gooey chocolate birthday cake was on the counter. The only thing left was taking the bed apart. The single flaw was the elevator: it took us many, many trips down the elevator and through the parking garage to get everything into the truck and trailer.

When everything was loaded up, we drove two hours down the highway and took everything out in under thirty minutes. We had plenty of time to eat cake and stop at the go-karts on the way back. (N. and S. raced around the track, while my car... putted. Slowly. I could not get it to speed up, even with the pedal to the floor while S. and N. lapped me. Near the end, it went slower and slower and started sputtering. I think it was out of fuel.)

This time, all was chaos when A. and M. arrived at my tiny used-to-be-a-garage apartment. Virtually nothing was packed, but there was a sour cream coffee cake on the counter. We made trek after trek with M.'s mom's truck, and even more with just the cars. We took the bed apart, again, and tried to stuff the dresser into the trunk of an aged Honda. We carried boxes jammed with random objects that tilted off precariously as we walked.

It's almost done, though. I have a bed set up here, and the cleaning started there, and A. and I got a movie and sprawled out in the living room, the new living room, the one that has enough space to move and breathe and have guests.

Guests! Come on over!

[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.