distracting

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

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

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

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

coincidence

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

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

Coincidence.

sane

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

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

balls

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

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

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

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

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

I was happy.

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

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

camp making

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

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

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

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

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

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

fun

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

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

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

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

calcify

Did I mention that I now have a phone book against which to hit my arms and legs, to calcify the bones so I can better beat people up?

I do. One of my classmates gave it to me.

I also have bruises from it. I have given myself bruises by hitting my arms with a phone book. On purpose.

split

I am the worst at falling. "We need an entire class that just consists entirely of throwing M. on the ground," I said at advanced fighting class on Thursday, but I was working with an experienced student who patiently told me to curl up as I fell, and things got instantly better, even though my timing on the slapping the ground as you go down continues to be abysmal. (I just spelled abysmal right on the first try. Major points to me.)

I am also the worst at knife sparring, but really both worsts are understandable because I am the newest in the class, or was, this week. I don't have the first clue what I'm doing with knife sparring - am I just lunging? how am I supposed to know how to feint? - but I have learned that what this class requires is persistence and a refusal to get discouraged. That, and the willingness to drop without argument to do your pushups when you get tagged with the knife, even if your hand is burning from the good thwap it just got, even if you think you might have tagged the other person first.

"Why do you like fighting so much?" S. asked today, on the way back from walking through the woods, and I didn't really have an answer, except that from the first day I went, it was something I could do. It worked, in a way that no other sport ever has, and I keep wanting to go back. Then, too, I feel stronger and more confident now that I can defend myself. Although whether or not I could defend myself in an actual attack is questionable: I periodically fight back when we practice the scenarios, and any of the people who have been doing this for a long time beat me, regardless of whether they are bigger or smaller than me. It is problematic, but I am going to assume that someone who attacks me on the street is generally not going to be a trained fighter. Also, I can really hit them. If they are a trained fighter, though, I'm screwed.

...

So we walked through the woods today, a straggling crowd of us. Everything was green and growing, and the stream bubbled by happily. At the waterfall, I stood mesmerized. There is something about falling water that makes me feel like I am at the beginning and end of things. I have a hard time dragging myself away.

One end that did not happen, of course, was the rapture. The church I grew up in did not believe in the rapture, so I don't know that much about it, but I did work in a Christian bookstore in high school and I learned some things, mainly by reading that awful Left Behind series (I only made it through the first book; the writing was too terrible to continue, and also I did not care about the characters enough to pick up the second or third or forty-seventh one.). I do know enough to know that the rapture didn't happen today, or that if it did, so few people were taken that the rest of us have yet to notice that they are gone.

I was sitting on my porch at the appointed rapture time, talking to a friend, turning my face up toward the strange yellow object in the sky. (Some of you who see it more often may know it as the sun. We don't see it often enough here to recognize it.) We didn't even notice that the alleged rapture time had passed.

...

When I get out of Universe City, out in the trees and mosses of this beautiful state, I catch myself hoping that I never have to leave. The state, not the city. But it lasts only until I see a photo of Africa on my screensaver, no longer.

baking

I left kung fu sparring class a little early to get ready for the Church Ladies Book Group. (I had already jammed my hurt toe again, anyway, when my sparring partner blocked my kick.) I raced home to put scones (previously frozen) into the oven, sweep the floor, put away the last few dishes and the dishrack, and turn on the kettle.

Except that I forgot the kettle until the ladies had arrived. But overall it was a smashing success. The cheddar garlic scones and coconut scones received great acclamation, as did the spicy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

People apparently like the things I bake, which seems strange to me. I like them, obviously, or I wouldn't keep baking them, but when other people rave about them, I'm always somewhat surprised. "You like them, too?" I want to say. "Are you sure?" But entire boxes of cookies disappear when I put them on the counter at work, and so does the coca-cola cake. These people must be telling the truth when they say that they like them.

Or is that just what you have to say? I guess not - people have actually looked me up to tell me how wonderful things were. They could have just avoided the topic. I dunno. I like them, though, and I'm happy to feed other people. It's very satisfying, in a rushing world, to stir something with your own hands (I rarely use a mixer, even now that we have two of them in this house), and to wait for something to bake, and to share it with other people.

Cultural Events

My roommate M. works for an organization that puts on Cultural Events, and periodically she invites me to be her date for one. They tend to be on Thursday night about half an hour after advanced fighting class ends, so I take off my sweaty fighting clothes, freshen up the deodorant, throw on a dress, and head to a Cultural Event.

As I was getting into my car tonight, leaving fighting class for the Cultural Event, I mentioned to my classmate, also an M., where I was going. She said that she always feels tough after fighting class, and it might not mix well with Culture.

That is not, interestingly, a problem that I have, at all. I can shut the fighting part off like a bulb when I leave the studio. I sat in the Cultural Event and let the music flow over me. A while ago, some of M.'s friends were critiquing a prior Cultural Event and one of them asked me what I thought. "I thought it was beautiful," I said. "I really don't know enough about music to say anything more than that. I just sat back and enjoyed it." And so I did again tonight.

Segue-less return to prior topic: I also feel no less girly now that I fight for fun, which I would have thought I would. In fact, because I feel more confident in what my body can do (i.e., kick ass), I feel more feminine, because women are strong and capable.

That, and there is no way to learn to love your body like seeing it in a studio mirror four days a week. Didn't like it before? You'd better learn now.

reasons

I have lost my ability to put words on a page, and I blame Scrabble. Everything was fine as long as I was unable to download Scrabble onto my ipod touch, Winnie. (Winnie replaced Wilbur. Wilbur now lives with my sister. Wilbur replaced Wallace, the ipod whose grave is that pit latrine in Southern Sudan.) For a long time, I was unable to download Scrabble because it costs money, and my identity had been stolen by someone making purchases in New Jersey, and it took me six months to activate the new debit card the bank sent me, which I finally did a few weeks ago and now I have to spend every spare second playing Scrabble or I will get yelled at by the approximately seven people with whom I'm currently playing multiple games, at least two per person. (The only reason that doesn't make 14 games is that some games have more than two players.) Oh, I'm only playing one game with Guest 21394873948723 or whatever her/his name is, the random person who started a random game with me.

...

Also, I'm going broke on account of fighting class and kung fu. Like, my toe keeps getting jammed, right? So I had to buy mat shoes. And doing laundry to keep my single kung fu uniform clean was getting out of hand. So I had to buy another gi. I also need sparring gear for kung fu and for boxing (they are different), as well as boxing gloves. And once I have all that stuff, I need a bag to carry it around in.

I have the following gear: one mouthpiece.

My collection is not very impressive. I have to borrow gear every single time. It gets kind of embarrassing, and also a little disgusting, because gear gets sweaty over and over. I have actually put on borrowed boxing gloves that were wet on the inside from the last sweaty person.

One time was enough.

week in review

Tuesday:

The evening sun shone sideways through the window - I always forget how quickly the evenings get so very long here, come spring - and we sat talking about how to know when things are dangerous, and what you should know before you travel. S. is going to Liberia soon and so was asking me about the country, and the other S. looked at me shrewdly after a few minutes of conversation.

"You want to go back, don't you? You aren't going to last here long."

Wednesday:

Fighting class, kung fu, I don't know.

Thursday:

Advanced fighting class was canceled, and I took my bike out for the first time this spring, in that same sideways evening light. I wanted to go to rei, and I remembered how I used to use my bike for transportation instead of just for riding in circles, so I pumped up the tires and checked the lights, and off I went. It was easy on the way there, all downhill and smooth. I spent far too long studying hiking backpacks, and then finally I paid for one (it is to arrive in the mail soon) just as the store closed, so I had to ride back uphill in the dark, on the long, unending, winding road to my house. I stopped for a car. I started again, so slowly that I ran into the curb. I started again, and again. Finally, at the turn onto my street, I walked my bike for a few dozen feet, lungs and legs screaming, before climbing back on to finish the route.

Friday:

I almost made the girl cutting my hair cry. (In fairness, I almost cried myself when she chopped three or four inches off a huge chunk of my hair that I did not want cut so short, or so much of it short.)

"Um," I said, "I am kind of panicking over how much you just cut off. Didn't we say long layers?"

I made up for it by giving her an obscenely large tip.

Saturday:

I needed a kleenex, and the bathroom was full - the whole living area was full, in fact - so I darted into the K. parents' bathroom to grab one. On the way in, I slammed my knee into the footboard of the bed, and crumpled over in that can't-breath-nothing-exists-but-pain manner to which I have become rather too accustomed since beginning fighting class. (Usually it is my toe; the sensation is the same.)

I spent some time contemplating the fact that I run into things constantly, my general clumsiness, as it were, and I reached a conclusion: I am rushing through life. I need to slow down.

My knee is an awfully vibrant purple with little darker dots.

Later, over cigars to celebrate B.'s graduation, F. told us how he had accidentally sent a message, intended for S., to the man he had just met with about a contract. It said, "Ask Princess to recommend a good contract lawyer."

I'm not even fighting the Princess thing anymore.

Sunday:

Just as the sermon started, I handed N. a zot in church, a pink one. It was watermelon flavored. A few moments later, he jumped nearly out of the pew, and I couldn't look at him for five minutes, because we were both laughing so hard we almost couldn't sit up.

"I knew it was going to fizz," he said after church, "but I didn't expect so much fizz so suddenly."

I tried ribs for the first time ever at lunch, and everyone watched me taking little nibbles off the forkful of meat. "Delicious?" someone asked. It actually was, as long as I could forget that it was pig on my fork.

On the drive back to Universe City, I almost missed the county line, where usually I despair over the fact that I am returning here, because of the rainbows appearing and disappearing and reappearing again over to the east as the sun set through the rain.

Monday:

I have grown accustomed to checking my car for flat tires just about every time I get in it. I live with a constant suspicion that something is wrong with one of the tires, and as they say, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Another one was flat today. Not, fortunately, the one that I just replaced three weeks ago, for there would have been swearing, but the other rear tire. I drove slowly to the tire place and once again - once again! I've only had this car for seven and a half months! - spent my lunch hour contemplating racks of tires while the tire guys fixed my tire.

Apparently it had taken on a piece of metal.

I am beginning to despise my tires.

(Random side note: in the middle of typing this post, I had to restart my computer. The v, c, and h keys had stopped working. Try typing without them. It's harder than it looks.)

The mirror at the martial arts studio informed me today of something that I had barely noticed before: I am incredibly pale. I mean, don't get me wrong, I know that I come from northern European stock, where the sun shines as little for much of the year as it does here and the people are approximately the color of the new-fallen snow (it's for camouflage in the snow, I am quite certain), but for most of my life I either 1. lived in Africa, or 2. was in school and had summers free to be outside.

I guess I didn't quite realize that my natural skin color is quite as, er, putty-like as it actually is. This is a scarily white town with very little truly warm sunshine, and most of my fighting class, and the larger kung fu class, is pretty pale, and it's barely the end of winter here, but I am quite possibly the palest of them all. The palest of them ALL. This never happened to me in the Dutch-land of West Michigan. I could always count on someone (eh-hem, my sister) to be paler than me.

I don't like it. I also, however, do not like skin cancer, not that I've had it but of course I do not want to have it, and so the pale will likely continue. Even when I go to warm places, we now all wear that cursed sunscreen paste to protect ourselves from the flaring sun, and those of us misfortunate (shut up, that's a word; because I say so) enough to be born of the people from the northern part of Europe, we stay the color of the off-white wall.

I miss my tan.

I also continue to maintain that skin this light is just not practicable for survival in the real world. The sun will kill off all the people with too little melatonin to fend off its rays. There is nothing but sunscreen we can do about it, and really, we all get sunburned despite that stuff, anyway. Pale skin = wimpy, by necessity. I am not sure what evolution was thinking.

death by flowers

I didn't make church this morning. Universe City is trying to kill me, what with the spring bursting out and the awful pollen-y flowers everywhere. (I am all the more frustrated because I love the flowers, and the spring, and I would be out in them if they did not make me want to die from the unending headache.) So when I woke up still feeling awful, I went back to sleep.

I woke up marginally refreshed two hours later, blew copious amounts of yellow snot out of my nose, took some ibuprofen, and went to an extremely woo-woo dance/yoga/tai chi class. This is the woo-woo stuff your momma warned you about, people, except maybe not my momma, because she thought it was funny when I told her about it. People talked about things like, "I am pure love. I am pure brilliance," and then we crawled on the floor and danced about throwing our hands in the air.

Pretty much the only part I was good at was the part where we did two kung fu poses and punched the air (kung fu poses to dance class by way of tai chi, I think). The rest of the time I just sort of aimlessly waved my arms about and looked kind of dumb. I am too tall for these sorts of gracefullness-requiring things. Then, too, I was wearing what I wear to fighting class, which is knee-length tight-ish exercise pants and a red racer-back tank with my martial arts school logo on it. Everyone else was wearing flowing things and pretty light colors. I might as well have carried a sign that said, "I beat people up" into a room full of pacifists.

Speaking of which, I went to kung fu sparring on Friday night, after just having done boxing sparring the night before, and nothing is more confusing to one's muscle memory than spending one evening learning combinations involving throwing a hook and then the next night being told that there is no hook in kung fu and how about you try a back fist instead?

There is no back fist in fighting class. My brain was massively confused. I'm still not sure I actually even know what a back fist is.

If I ever get in a real fight on the street, I am using that hook. I might as well practice it every chance I get.

remedial kung fu

I am frustrated with kung fu, or maybe with myself. Kung fu does not come very instinctively to me. Fighting class feels much more natural. I can punch punch punch as hard as I can, yes, fine, and go home exhausted and happy, but to stand there with my knees bent at that angle, just holding the stance, that hurts, and it doesn't feel like a position that anyone would want to be in, for any reason.

Plus, I'm in remedial kung fu. My knees hurt so badly that when the other students practice the forms the instructor calls me over to the side and gives me exercises to practice to strengthen the muscles around my knees, and between that and the fact that I just this week figured out how not to be delirious and blind with hunger by the end of kung fu when everyone is practicing the forms,* I don't know them at all. Not even the first form we were doing, and now we have partially moved on to a new one.

I am frustrated. I want to quit, sometimes, but my stubbornness kicks in, along with the knowledge that it's good for me and for my body to persist at this new, unfamiliar thing.

"Do you know how long it takes to earn a black belt?" my instructor asked me.

"No," I said.

"It takes five years, at least. [Co-owner] has been doing it for seven years, and she's a green belt. You should feel like it's not working, sometimes. That is when you are learning."

* Nature Valley Crunchy granola bars save my life again.

table

A group of us went to dinner on Friday night at a seafood place on the coast. It wasn't a fish-and-chips sort of seafood place, but a gumbo sort of seafood place. The four people at our table, a table that swung out from the wall so that we were sitting on three sides of it, all had big bowls of marinara or gumbo or cioppino in front of us when the table fell off the wall.

It was my end of the table that fell off the wall, and my marinara sauce spilled onto my leg and arm, but the bowl didn't fall. The guy next to me got a full plate of pasta right in his lap (photos were taken), and the two people at the other end of the table were fine.

We got free dessert, and the pasta-in-lap guy got his dinner for free, and later on one of the people at the table said, "That has never happened to me before, that a table just fell like that."

"You haven't gone to dinner with me enough, then," I said. "Things like that happen to me all the time."

gone

The sun was out at the coast this weekend, and S. and I sat outside at a cafe for brunch, toying with the idea of ditching our jobs and becoming beach bums, if only the paychecks would keep coming.

Instead, of course, we finished our coffee and eggs, and then walked along the beach until we found a spot where we could lay back in the grass out of the wind, and tried to soak up the light.

I felt almost alive again, until I crossed the county line coming back, and had to turn away from the water and the setting sun.

food

One experience that I am currently having that I have never before had in my life except on long hikes is this: I cannot eat enough on fighting class + kung fu days. I physically cannot put enough calories in my body (without feeling sick) to get through three hours of hard core working out. No matter what I do, I am dizzy and shaking by the end.*

It's sort of counter-intuitive for our diet obsessed society to find myself, on fighting/kung fu days, deliberately choosing the higher calorie food item. It makes a difference, I've found, even to get coffee with 2% milk in the morning instead of skim. I always used to order the full-fat coffee drinks, because I had some weird little thought that ordering the coffee drink with skim milk was like acknowledging that you wanted to weigh less than you weighed, and my pridefulness wanted not to acknowledge that. About the time I moved to Gone West, though, I got over that, and I've been a skim latte person ever since.

It feels very weird and counter-cultural to purposefully order a more fat-filled item. I'm doing it, though, because I literally can barely see due to hypoglycemia by the end of kung fu. Everyone spends the last twenty minutes or so practicing forms, and I barely know them, mostly because by the time we get to the forms, it is all I can do to stand my ground on two feet and not stumble toward the door.

I complained about the exhaustion at the end of the 3 hours of workout and how I can barely push through it to the ex-Marine today (he also does both classes), and he said, "That's the point."

There are reasons why I never even attempted anything like the Marines.

He did proceed to show me the forms, on this, a Thursday, the easy day, when we just do a one hour class. It's amazing what being able to hold your head upright does for your ability to learn them.


* Let us not, however, think that this means that I am losing weight. If anything, the opposite. I am gaining muscle, yes I am, but I think my body is still in shock from adding kung fu. It is still clinging to every little calorie I throw its way.

littlest bit

I'm still surprised by how much easier things are with a car. On Saturday, after paying my hard-earned money for a new tire, I decided to stop at Target. I drove over to Target, parked, and went in, and the whole time I was marveling at how easy it is to get to that Target in a car. When I lived in Gone West, I would have to take an entire afternoon or evening to get there: the train to the nearest stop, a ten or so minute walk, and then all the way across the parking lot, still. And when I was done, I had to make the trip in reverse, carrying whatever I had purchased. Owning a car still feels the littlest bit miraculous.

tire problem noises

I was driving merrily up to Gone West on Friday, talking to my momma on the phone on the occasion of her birthday, and when I hung up the phone, I noticed a certain suspicious noise.

I am, by now, very familiar with the tire-problem noises of my car. That valve issue last fall has been resolved, but my tire went flat enough times back then that I recognize a problem when I hear it. I pulled off the highway in a suburb of Gone West known for its hoityness, and drove for miles without seeing anything resembling a fuel station. (It seemed nearly pointless to stop without a fuel station, since my dad tells me that my car is light enough to drive on a flat for a while without destroying the wheel, and I couldn't fill it up without the air at a station.)

After several miles, I finally ended up in downtown Hoity Town, where I stopped at a fuel station and found my tire still fully inflated. I checked the pressure of both rear tires, which were perfectly at 32 PSI, so I got back in my car, confused, and drove a little slower than normal the rest of the way to the K.s'.

My car, though, had a distinct... problem. It limped. Every time the wheels went around, it made a little lurch. When I drove slowly in traffic and sang along with a slow song, my voice oscillated and I warbled "ahAHahAHahAHahAH" on purpose just to hear it. (Warbled is possibly generous for my singing ability. This is my blog. On here, I have a fantastic singing voice.)

I almost forgot about my car's little limp, but right before I was going to head downtown the next morning, I recalled it and decided to figure it out before I hit the highway. I enlisted N. to the endeavor. He jogged alongside the car while I drove on their little road. Sure enough, still limping.

"Your tire," N. said when I parked it back in front of the shop, "is not a circle. It is shaped like an egg."

Perfect for Easter!

The lady at the tire place took one look and said, "You need a new tire. I wouldn't even have driven it here like that."

Well, thanks for that. That was helpful. Apparently the metal mesh in tires can separate due to potholes and such. Considering that I live in Pothole Central, with roads that literally have tracks out of which you sometimes cannot steer your car, I suppose that was inevitable, eventually.

I did not make it downtown, and I was considerably less endowed with money by the end of the afternoon.

After the tire fiasco, I met S. for a hike, and she asked me if I wanted a cat.

"I cannot afford a pet animal," I told her. "I have a pet car, and it's costing me too much already."

If only it would stop eating.

so much for that

Advanced fighting class was canceled tonight, which was unfortunately because 1. I wanted to beat someone up (if only I had known about fighting class during high school. I could have saved myself those twitching-on-the-floor-on-purpose sessions if I'd had somewhere else to feed my can't-sit-still.), and 2. without fighting class to propel me out the door, I stayed at work well into the evening. Oops. Boundaries I do not have. I'm working on that.

Instead I came home and ate too many malted milk eggs, and then I felt sick. You know how when you are young the older people are all, "That candy is going to make you feel sick," and you are all, "Seriously, what on earth are you talking about?" because candy does not make you feel any sicker than Nacho Cheesier Doritos and Mountain Dew at 5:30 am in the back seat of the van on the way down to your service project. You feel fine, GREAT, after eating a whole box of candy.

And then one day you wake up and you are 31 and a few too many malted milk eggs eaten while you wait for your salad dressing to warm up (homemade; it was in the fridge) make you feel sick, and you realize that you are old. Officially.

Fighting class, you are all that stands between me and too much Easter candy. Come back to me.

P.S. I may be the only person who noticed, but malted milk eggs have chocolate in them, and I ate them anyway. The only thing I can say about that is that yesterday, in all its horror, beat down my will, and I took, and I ate. Lenten fail.

night

You know how some days you would just totally erase if you could, and by the way, does anyone have a rock? Because the underside of a rock looks pleasant to stare up at like a ceiling right now, could I crawl under that one you have there? Please? And possibly never come out?

The only solution, I have found, is to go to bed. Things really do look better after some sleep. Nothing is really fixed by sleep, but I can handle it all so much better in the brilliance of morning than I can at night.

I was late to fighting class yesterday due to finishing my taxes. (I never do feel like I've done them right, even after literally googling revised statutes to try to figure out what on earth things mean. It's all so complicated, and written in such convoluted language that I want to shake someone and say, "We are not all accountants, people! Use English!" But, I finished them, such as they were, with only the bare minimum required amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth (the bare minimum is still significantly large), and I mailed them, at 5:50 pm. The last pick-up from the downtown post office in this I-no-longer-live-in-anything-resembling-a-city-curse-it-all is 6:00 pm. How I do miss trundling downtown in Gone West at 10:30 to catch the midnight pickup.)

I went to fighting class anyway, half an hour late, because 1. I might as well, and 2. kung fu is immediately afterward. I got there just in time to be changing in the bathroom as the class did the last 25 of their 100 push-ups. One of the two instructors is on a 100 push-ups per day binge. We did 100 push-ups during the advanced class last week, right before trying to throw people off of ourselves. My arms were a little shaky, and I almost dropped my partner on my head again, but I managed not to drop him, out of sheer willpower, mostly because I know how badly that hurts.

But, having escaped 100 push-ups yesterday, I somehow decided to do 100 push-ups today.

I have ten to go. Hold on.

Done.

Yeah, I don't know who I am anymore, either. I am reassured by the fact that my self-discipline to do anything exercise-like still comes and goes (mostly goes) and the days when I actually do working out that does not involve someone else correcting my stance are as few as they ever were. Probably fewer. So that's a relief.

volcano

This awesome series of photos on Boston.com was taken by Olivier Grunewald inside the crater of Mt. Nyiragongo, the volcano on the header of this blog, the one I could see smoking from the hill above my house in Rwanda: Nyiragongo Crater.

(more: here.)

damage

I fully intended to wear a skirt and heels for Work Thing Day 1 on Thursday, but on Wednesday night at fighting class I was running across the mat and caught my toe and jammed it, hard. I only managed not to fall flat down on my face because I was almost to the row of people waiting to run, and I grabbed at them and thus held myself up.

By the next morning, my toe was swollen and painful. This isn't the first time this has happened on the studio's mats, and I know that it takes a while before I can wear heels. I wore trousers, instead, and flats, against every rule I've read, but I didn't care. I was comfortable, thanks to the flats and some ibuprofen, and when I was in front of the crowd, I didn't feel the least bit self-conscious about any of it, including the fact that I was also wearing big earrings, against every rule I've read.

...

Between Work Thing Day 1 and Work Thing Day 2, I went to advanced fighting class, where we are still doing ground survival. I love ground survival. I especially love it when I get to work against someone who knows what they are doing and therefore does not damage me. I am instead the damager, unfortunately, due to clumsiness, but the experienced student went and got a mouth guard after about the fifth time I hit him in the mouth by accident, and then all was well.

I need to find a way to do more grappeling (I might actually have to take jiu jitsu at some point), because I love it when I work against a more experienced person and we actually grappel rather than just practicing the motions over and over. What I mean is that with the experienced people, if you pause for too long and they know you can handle it, they fight back instead of just lying there as a practice tool.

Most of the time, this devolves into me tucking my head and trying not to end up squashed like a bug, and it ends with me being squashed like a bug. It's so much fun. I just wish I were better at reacting with the correct response, immediately. I might get squashed less often and possibly even be the squasher on occasion. (The whole upper body strength factor in being a girl, though, and being shorter and lighter than these guys makes it likely that I will probably usually be the one who is squashed unless I actually do employ some of the shock and awe hits that we practice. We generally try not to actively hurt our practice partners.)

It doesn't hurt, the squashing, but I did notice, when I took off my suit jacket the next day, that I had bruises up and down my arms.

All that beating people up was the perfect stress reliever between two very stressful days.

hippos

I am having the sort of day in which you leave work at 7 pm, stop at two stores to find some Sweetarts (neither store had the chewy kind. harumph.), and then come home and put some rice on to cook, only to find 30 minutes later that you forgot to turn the heat on under the rice.

Genius.

...

I was reading this blog post just now about some national park somewhere, involving hippos. I am not so much an animal person. I like them and all, but I am not fascinated like some people are. (Tell that to the 7 rolls of film I took while on the Masai-Mara in Kenya in 2000, however.)

When I took a break from my frantic working in Rwanda and took this trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, I didn't really do the animals thing. I hired a guide, but I asked him to take me to the salt farm in the park instead. I was interested in the development side of things, not the animals. (Now that I think about it, this made it not really a break in the way that it should have been, since development work was exactly what I was doing every day. Oops. I did a lot of reading and sleeping, too.)

I also took a hippo tour. A hippo tour involves trawling about in a flat-bottomed boat in the shallows of the lake, looking at hippos, naturally. Hippos are weirdly awesome. They are lumbering and awkward and flat-headed, and they have this tendency to pop out of the water without looking up, which means that you need the flat bottom of the boat because they are liable to come up right underneath you with a thud. You (ok, I) just have to love an animal that is so clumsy that it will ram its head into boats. That's like me, in animal form.

There be hippos.

road

I barely scraped the edge of the international aid world when I was in Rwanda/Tanzania/Liberia/Sudan, but I know enough people involved in that industry that I feel a little flutter of worry when I check a list of people who died in the plane crash in DR Congo last week. (Update: one or two names that could be that guy who worked with ______, but no one I actually know. So far.)

The next thing I did, because what else is one to do after checking to see if anyone you know died in a plane crash, is start checking reliefweb for international jobs. UN planes are crashing in DR Congo? Look for a job that would allow you to fly on UN planes!

It comes in waves, the desire to move back overseas, but it never quite recedes into invisibility.

One cold winter day in late 2001 or early 2002, the winter before I moved to Rwanda, I remember walking through a slushy parking lot in Michigan and thinking to myself, "Someday, I will be living in a warm, tropical place, and when I do, I will remember this miserable, gray, soupy day." When I drag myself through yet another dark winter day here, I think that again. Someday, my life will be warmer and more interesting than this. This is a necessary step, but it is not the end of the road.

Thing

I lived for 2.67 years in Gone West without any drawers but those in the kitchen and bathroom. The closet was really full. I used a laundry basket for socks and underwear, and dirty clothes I threw straight into the washing machine. Papers went on the shelf of my desk, and the stack of them grew greater and greater.

Today I got on some sort of organizing kick. It was as if, after eight months in Universe City, I just suddenly could no longer handle feeling half-moved in.

Okay, that wasn't it.

I was supposed to be getting ready for a Thing at work next week, and my reaction to the need to knuckle down and get ready for the Thing, eerily similarly to my reaction to the need to knuckle down and write a paper while in school, was to find other things to do, things that would generally top my Boring Ways to Spend a Saturday list but suddenly seemed downright cheery in comparison to working on getting ready for the Thing. (Was that sentence even comprehensible?)

Instead of getting ready for the Thing, I painted the dresser that I bought last fall that has been sitting in our garage since I moved into this house. Sanded, and TSP'd, and painted, and then painted a second coat. I went furniture shopping. I bought a bookshelf and a shoe rack and a filing cabinet, and I spent a good couple of hours putting the filing cabinet together. (People speak of 1ke@ as if its instructions for assembling things are the worst. I assure you, they are not. At least the 1ke@ people know how to draw. The filing cabinet people do not.) I unloaded the dishwasher. I organized things in my room. I brought out the recycling.

I had an extraordinarily productive Saturday. I just didn't get anything done that actually had to be done. Things are not looking good for Sunday.

cool people clothes

I opened my suitcase in the middle of the night at the K.s' house, secure in the knowledge that I had planned my packing perfectly for traveling with only a carry-on, only to find that I had planned my packing perfectly but I had not executed it perfectly. I had forgotten my sweater and zip-up inside-out fleece. I had no sweatshirt type layer. I cursed and kicked the suitcase, and then resigned myself to buying a sweatshirt in the airport.

(Side note: how much do I love Gone West? When I went into the outdoor apparel store in the airport - first of all, there is an outdoor apparel store in the airport - the salesmen nodded and one said solemnly, "Oh, yes, you need your mid-weight layer." These are my people, ya'lls, and I do love the whole self-conscious, outdoorsy, organic, recycling lot of them.)

It was 80 degrees F and sunny when my plane landed in Denver, and I (metaphorically) cursed and (metaphorically) kicked my suitcase again over the wasted money on the mid-weight layer.

Good thing it snowed eight inches the next day in Ski City, where my sister now lives, and I was vindicated in my purchase of a full-price mid-weight layer with hood.

Also, it is orange. And it has thumb holes. That means I am officially one of the cool people. Me! I am one of the cool people! With thumb holes in my clothing! I may never take this thing off again, just so everyone can see how cool I am.

What?

Yes, I do get this excited about new items of clothing. Frequently.

Blame it on how I was a missionary kid.

falling right

One of the things at which I am supposed to be good but am not is falling. We practice falling all the time in fighting class, particularly in advanced fighting class, but I still suck at it.

When we do the scenarios, we are supposed to pretend to hurt the person by elbowing and kneeing them in specified places, and then take them down. Most of the time, though, we don't take the person down. It's the last stage and probably not the most important, because if the person is already incapacitated, you have the time to run.

Last night, I was working with a brand new student, and one of the longest-standing students was quasi-instructing. He came by to show the newbie and me what to do, with me as the demonstratee, and as he finished the scenario, he said, "I'm going to do the take-down," and he dropped me to the ground.

I do know how to fall. You keep your head tucked and you slap the ground with your hands at a 45 degree angle. I practice falling on an almost weekly basis.

I still fell directly on my ass. Tailbones, may I say, hurt a lot when you land on them.

Then today, one of the newer - and possibly overly-exuberant - students in advanced fighting class was flipping me in a grappling drill and tried to do it at a speed beyond his skill and got it wrong. He wrenched my back as he tried to scissor his legs, and I felt my back go pop-pop-pop along the left side.

"Are you okay?" the instructor asked, and when I said, "yes," from the floor, he calmly continued showing the guy how to do it right, while I, squashed underneath, wondered if I actually was okay, since I hadn't yet tried to move.

I was okay.

But I again feel like I've been beaten up. This is possibly because I have been, practically.

I crowed a bit when I got a knife away from an experienced student, and seconds later I was on my face on the mat, startled but unhurt. I have a lot to learn.

white

I got my white belt in kung fu today.

I do accept applause.

You don't actually have to do anything to get a white belt, other than come to class and buy a uniform, so it isn't like there is a whole lot to be proud of, but somehow I do feel proud, all out of proportion with the fact that getting a white belt is not earned but given. (The bursting of pride I will feel when I test for my yellow belt will be probably unbearable. You will want to look away.)

The instructor ties on the new belt in front of the class, and as he did it, he gave me a little talk about the road to a black belt. I am a long, long way from a black belt, but for a moment it felt possible.

There are also a few new people, which means that I don't stand way at the end of the seniority line anymore.

Plus, the kicks and stances look about a million times better when you are wearing the uniform.

radioactive rain

I went into the video store last night wearing my kung fu pants with my high heeled work boots. I was also drenched with sweat. It was a good look.

...

It's pouring down radioactive rain these days, more like midwinter than new spring. I try to use my umbrella in this state where umbrellas are practically sacrilege, to keep the minute levels of radioactivity off my skin, but I can't help looking at it and thinking, "it's just rain," just like I looked out at Liberia at night and thought, "it's just Liberia," when people told me it was unsafe in 2006. Sometimes it's hard to believe that something so familiar could even possibly be dangerous.

That, and everyone seems to die of cancer eventually, and I can think of toxins aplenty that will probably start my cells mutating before the tiny traces of radioactivity that is blowing across the Pacific Ocean.

put together

I wrestled a 47 pound, 76 inch long box into my car yesterday, my new bed frame in about fifty pieces. When I got it downstairs to my bedroom, M. said, "Are you really going to put that together tonight?"

"Of course," I said. "I've put this bed frame together many times. It won't take me more than an hour."

Two hours later, after various stages of annoyance, frustration, cursing, and hammering (despite the late hour, and the kids on the other side of the wall), I finally had the bed set up. It's miraculous how much more space I have with a bed that actually fits the room, but it becomes clear how very much there is left to do. Like, for example, something in which to store my clothes. The laundry basket and a suitcase and the floor no longer look quite as practical a clothing storage site now that they cannot hide over there behind the bed.

I lived out of a suitcase for three months in South Sudan, and I promised myself I wasn't going to do that again.

Ha.

long

Gone West has never seemed quite so far away as it did tonight, maybe because I needed it so badly. I kept passing signs and thinking, "How can it possibly only be ten miles since that last sign?"

It really was only the same two hours it always is.

And now I'm in the K.s' living room, feeling the tension drain out of me and out through the door. What it leaves behind is exhaustion.

circle

I came back from advanced fighting class tonight (this week featuring how to break someone's elbow when they've wrestled you to the ground and how to tear all the ligaments in their ankle when they have you trapped between their legs), and I came down to my room because my roommate was having a party and the attendees all shared a single interest which is an interest that I do not have, and I thought about how much I love fighting class, and I wished that I had discovered martial arts much younger.

It isn't that I regret my lack of skill. You can only do what you can do, and nowhere is that more accepted and acceptable than in a martial arts class, where you all line up in the order that you started the class, but the belt colors do not necessarily go in the same order. I feel like I am progressing acceptably quickly. I am satisfied, anyway, and that is all that matters. Fighting class comes more naturally to me than any sort of sport I've ever tried, which isn't saying much, since I have been universally abysmal at anything requiring hand-eye coordination. But I work hard, and I get better.

The reason I wish I had started martial arts long ago is because of the people. I went to school when I was young, and I was good at school, but everything was stratified there. There were groups, and you knew yours. There were sports, but you had to be good at them to fit in on a team. I've never attended anything where everyone was as quickly and surely helpful and friendly as a martial arts class. It's a place where anyone fits, without really needing to do anything but work hard. I think I would have been a different person back then if I knew that one could interact so comfortably with such different people.

There is a teenager in my kung fu class who is probably fifteen or so, maybe younger. He is tall and gangly, and he seems to balance impossibly low in his stances on his spider legs. He is also just about the nicest kid I've ever met. I base this primarily on the fact that he says, every single time I end up near him after doing some ridiculous kick or movement that I can't actually do, "Good job!" with such enthusiasm that I can't help bursting into smile.

Today I was the only woman in the advanced class, again. We do this warm-up where one person lies on their back and the other person lays sideways over them, with their elbows on one side and knees on the other. The person on their back gets their arms under the top person, lifts their torso, and flips the top person over their head, then scrambles over to be the top person. (This is the drill during which I dropped the instructor on my head two weeks ago.) The flipping is very hard to do when you are smaller and weaker than the top person. The guy I was practicing with today practically threw me across the room, but I could barely heave him over my head, and all of me hurts now.

"This is especially important for women," the instructor said. "You have got to be able to get your attacker off you. You have just got to have the core strength." And as we finished the drill, as I hauled the guy over my head once again, I heard the female half of the owner couple and the top woman from the kung fu class cheering for me.

purple

I went to the symphony last week, and watching all the musicians in their uniform black outfits (women get much more flexibility than men, who all wear suits), I thought about junior high. Logical leap, no, but junior high was the last time I played in a band.

I played the coronet. I liked the coronet almost as much as I liked the violin, which is to say that I liked the idea of playing it a great deal, but I despised practicing and I was therefore never very good.

Our junior high band played in competitions every once in a while, and one Saturday morning my dad got up early to drive me to the school to get on the bus for a competition.

It wasn't until I was on the bus that I remembered that I was supposed to wear white on top and black on the bottom. I was, in fact, wearing light jeans and a purple sweatshirt. (This was the early 1990s.)

I had a fun day, anyway, even though I was 12 and wearing something totally wrong. I liked the band people. We played pretty well.

When we got the tape of the judges' comments, though, one of them said something about, "the girl in the back wearing purple," when talking about our appearance.

The funny thing is that I don't really remember being embarrassed. I should have been mortified, and I probably was, but it doesn't really stick out as The Most Embarrassing Moment of My Life. Maybe I didn't know enough to be embarrassed. I've either blocked out the embarrassment or I was still protected by the third culture kid obliviousness, and I don't know which.

sunshine

It was brilliantly sunny when I woke up (I don't even want to admit what time this was), and it seemed like a good day for a hike. The only problem was the weather forecast. Clear at 2, clear at 3, thunderstorms at 4. A short, close hike, then, seeing as it was already 1:15 by the time I started seriously contemplating getting out of the house.

A. met me at the trail-head just south of town, and the rain started just as I pulled into the parking lot.

We started out anyway. It rained for a while, and then it started hailing. Hail is one of those odd things that I never actually seem to see. The very first time I remember hail during my lifetime was in Nigeria in 1985. I was six years old, and I fell asleep and slept through the hail. I only heard about it later. That seems to have been my entire experience with hail up until today: I always just missed it.

Today it hailed right down on my head. I caught some of it in my hand, and it looked like tiny balls of snow.

Right as we got to the top of the little mountain, the sun came out. We took off our coats and sat on the rocks. I laid back, closed my eyes, and tried to soak up enough sunshine to stave off that frantic feeling that I get this time of year, the feeling that I will never be warm and happy again, because the sun is too often absent. I want to clutch at the sunshine. I want to keep it.

quiet

Because I am a dork, I belong to a book group. Because I am an even bigger dork, I belong to a book group that meets on Friday nights, when the cool people are out partying or drinking or some such. I stayed late at work today, because I was behind on returning phone calls, and when I got done, I went straight to book group (minus a brief stop at Trader Joe's for some almonds and a sample of gnocchi with meat sauce, which I ate, including the meat. Lamb, check. Pork, check. Beef, check. I am officially off the wagon.).

The book group hostess had water boiling for tea. We sat down in a cozy family room with tea and snacks and books and conversation, and it was exactly what I needed after a week of running about putting out fires. After a few minutes, I could breathe again. I could have, had I not been interested in the discussion, laid my head down right there amongst friends and gone to sleep.

inanimate objects reach out and attack me

I think this world is trying to kill me.

I just reached into the fridge and a vase fell off the top of it onto my wrist. For a few minutes, hopping around and tearing up, I thought it was broken, and I was not at all sure how I was going to get to the hospital on my own.

It's not broken. I don't think. It is just a very painful lump that hurts when I move my hand.

See also: knee pain from kung fu (I'm doing it wrong), general not-over-a-cold, non-allergies that feel like allergies, the massive hole I grated in my thumb with the cheese grater the other day that keeps oozing.

floor

I'm sleeping on the floor again. Not the very floor itself, but on my mattress, which is once again on the floor. It feels familiar, this floor sleeping, largely because I slept on the floor for about nine months when I moved to Gone West, although that was on an air mattress and now I have a Real Mattress.

How I ended up on the floor when two days ago I had a real bed goes like this: I bought a bedframe before I had a mattress because I was sick of sleeping on the floor and I could not afford both. I had some prospects for free beds, and one of them was a queen, so I bought a queen-sized bedframe, but I ended up with a full-sized mattress, courtesy of the K.s. This was all very well in my old place - I just used the extra space around the mattress (the bottom was slatted) to store things like my old long arm brace and my flax seed warming pillow.

My new place does not have enough space to play around with a bedframe that is six inches too long and six inches too wide. I need one that fits, so I can fit a dresser into my room. Being me, of course, I have been living here for five months and have not gotten around to this. I am literally still living out of a suitcase. I have an embarrassing tolerance for things like that.

Serendipitously, this weekend I found out that my friends needed a new queen-sized bedframe, preferably with open slats. Magic.

It's just that I had forgotten how annoying it is to have your mattress on the floor. I mean, where do you set things?

This is definitely going to drive me to the purchase of a new bedframe the very next time I get up to Gone West, the location of everything awesome, including 1ke@. (Hearts, flowers.)

clean

I washed my hands between fighting class and kung fu so that I could eat some almonds. There was only a half-sheet of paper towel left, and my hands were still dripping when I walked out of the bathroom. Just for a moment, I thought that I shouldn't eat with my hands until they were dry.

Then I remembered that the water is safe to drink here.

anywhere

I read a book this week that seemed to be full of very familiar stories. I thought it was just that they are the same stories that I have read over and over, namely African Tragedies of the 1990s, but then I happened to see the opening quote and I remembered that, hm, I have used that quote on my blog before, and then it came back to me that I have read this exact book before, not just many books about the same era.

When I was in college and law school, I read book after book about Africa, and since most of the books were written between 1998 and 2005, most of them dealt with the 1990s, and most of them chose to write about some combination of Liberia, Rwanda, and the DRC. Having lived in two of the three of those places and visited the third (only for a couple of hours), I'm always interested to read the stories, even if I've read it before.

Lately, when I read the stories of Liberia, of Rwanda, of the DRC, I can't help but feel this sinking in my stomach at the thought of all the people living their lives, trying to improve their countries, who were about to be in the middle of war. I want to go back in time and warn them so maybe a few of them can escape.

One lasting result of having lived in both Liberia and Rwanda is that there is no place on earth of which I think: it couldn't happen here.

When I was in Liberia in 2000, I was talking with one of my mom's former students, who had lived in Liberia all through the then-ten years of the war. "I used to think people couldn't do those things to each other," he told me, "but now I know that there is no human being who will not do terrible things to other people."

It's easy to pretend that such things can only happen in other parts of the world. We like to think they happen only in places like Africa, which as the book I just re-read pointed out, is a comforting and racist delusion.

But it could happen here. It could happen anywhere.

the sight of stars

We are doing ground survival in advanced fighting class. Ground survival involves someone attacking you while you are lying on the ground, and you have to get very close to people you barely know. You have to put your nose in someone's sweaty neck, and however suggestive that might sound, it's quite gross. I think I mentioned that you barely know these people. It's good incentive to make you learn to throw them off and damage them.

Also, ground survival involves the instructor using phrases like "full mount," which, I may be about 12, but I find hilarious. You can't react to those phrases, though, because someone is about to attack you.

I seem to damage myself more than anyone else while practicing ground survival. I am not, of course, actually attempting to damage anyone. But last week I left with three large bruises and a sore neck. This week, I dropped the instructor on my head. It really, really hurts to drop a person on your head. I saw stars.

That was most probably the fastest possible way to learn how not to flip him. I did it right the next time.

puddle

I took my morning break at a coffee shop. It took a while. I stood there, leaning against the counter, waiting, thinking, happy for the break.

Two middle-aged men in work clothes came in and ordered their coffee.

"You are so patient," one of them said to me, just before I finally got my coffee.

I smiled, but inside I was thinking, "This five minute wait for delicious hand-pulled espresso is nothing. In some places, you can wait an hour for a thermos of hot water and a tin of instant coffee. Ya'll haven't even seen patience."

I took my coffee outside, into the sunshine, and pulled a chair out near the road by the bike rack. I took out my journal and a pen.

A couple came out to unlock their bikes.

"That's so cool!" the guy said. I looked around.

This is the sort of coffee shop full of hipsters in skinny jeans and women in dreads holding babies. I am near the bottom of the list of cool people who frequent that coffee shop. I'm the boring one. He could not be talking to me.

But he was. "No one does that anymore! Everyone has switched to the internet."

"That's not the same at all," I said.

"Oh, I know. I used to fill notebooks like that all the time."

"The internet doesn't feel the same," I said. "It doesn't even smell the same." I gestured with my hand, as the guy said, "I have my old journals somewhere. I should go dig out one that is half-finished and start writing in them again."

I spoke, I gestured, and the journal went flying. It bounced off the curb, eerily reminiscently of the way Wallace bounced into that pit latrine in South Sudan, and it landed in the puddle on the side of the road.

"Except that things like that happen," I said. I got up and fished it out of the puddle, laughing at myself. "Oh, well. It adds character."

"Don't forget to burn the edges, now," the girl said, "to complete the look."

It recovered remarkably well, though. You'd never know that it had been in a puddle unless, you know, you knew.

attempt

I think I'm going to give up chocolate for Lent. Never in my life have I given up anything for Lent, but I seem to have become far too dependent on chocolate. It's the first thing I reach for when I get home, like a security blanket.

It all started with mochi. Specifically, it started with the chocolate version of this mochi. That stuff is massively addicting. It's the brownie chunks. I cannot resist them. It's gotten to the point where I do not feel like my meal is complete until I have a mochi. This is a problem.

So I'm going to give this a try. We'll see how it goes.

When I was in South Sudan, my colleague from Central Asia was fasting for Ramadan when I was passing out chocolate and gave her a piece without thinking. She, also without thinking, took it and ate it. She told me later that accidental eating or drinking doesn't count. You don't have to fast for another day later if you don't realize that you are eating until after it's done.

That's my basic plan for chocolate: attempt to avoid, shrug and move on if I fail.

carnivore

I've been a mostly-vegetarian for a decade. I eat chicken, periodically, but I stopped eating any pig by college, and I think the last beef I ate was in Rwanda. So was the last goat. I've never quite been able to make myself eat lamb. The vegetarian concept started with ham when I was 8 or 9, when I figured out where it came from. We were still in Liberia, I know, because I remember which house was my school when I figured it out. For some reason, meat just seemed gross to me, and the longer I went without it, the grosser it seemed.

Then, a week or two ago, I went to Trader Joe's after work. I was so hungry when I got there that I went straight to the sample table, only to find that the sample was some sort of lamb... thing.

And suddenly I decided that I just didn't care. I took the lamb sample, and I ate it.

Last night, I met my friend L. for dinner in Gone West at a gourmet pizza place. "You're a vegetarian, right?" she said, as we perused the menu.

"I was," I said, "but I think I'm ready to eat meat again."

We ordered a pizza covered in house-made sausage with fennel. It was probably a bad place to start with the return to meat, though, because that sausage was so delicious that I am very likely ruined for factory-farmed ground chuck. When I was a vegetarian, I never missed meat, because I never liked it that much in the first place, but last night I caught myself forking up the pieces that fell off the pizza and eating them on their own.

Sausage is pig. I really cannot say what came over me. It's like I don't even know myself.

Further evidence: after the pizza, we went out for dessert. As we all know, I believe that mixing fruit, particularly cooked fruit, with anything else, is just unacceptable. Why would you mix disgusting cooked fruit with perfectly good chocolate?

As we looked at the menu, one man up by now, picking out three desserts to share, I was suddenly tired of that food prejudice, too. We ordered two fruit desserts and one chocolate, and I ate of all three of them.

I don't know why, but some switch has been flipped in my head, and now I feel willing to try whatever food is put in front of me.

gracefulness

I've been doing fighting class + kung fu for a month or so now, and I'm starting to get to the point where, as long as I eat enough before I go, I'm still mobile at the end of the night, rather than wanting to collapse into a heap.

Doing fighting class and then kung fu right in a row is like listening to an ipod on shuffle: one song is metal and the next is soothing pipes. I mean that literally. The actual music goes from one to the other.

The movements do, too. Fighting class is immensely practical. We stand like boxers. We block with whatever we can. We keep our shoulders up and our elbows in* and we punch and kick and fight dirty if we have to. (One of the instructors loves to say, "Ladies, don't be afraid to gouge the eyes. Also, if you can manage to grab in the right area, grab, pull, and turn." He demonstrates, and we practice the motion, and all the guys hunch over in imagined agony.) We pummel the tombstone pads. We hold people's heads down and knee them. We kick low and hard.

Kung fu is probably practical, too, once you really know how to do it, but for now, for me, it is all stances and poses and mechanics. The poses have purposes, I know - that hand over the head is a block, and so is the angle of the knee - but for now they are just movements. I can't get into them fast enough to make any use of them. I can't lift my leg high enough to get any force in that kick. They are beautiful, though. When the whole class moves through the poses as I stand off to the side trying to figure out the most basic stances, it all looks like a dance. Everyone's heads are up. Their shoulders are straight but relaxed. Their hands are held gracefully. It's a far cry from the gritty street fighting of the other class, right now, since I haven't yet made it to the sparring class.

That is why, despite it taking up my entire evening on Monday and Wednesday and nearly my entire evening on Thursday (I haven't exactly figured out when I'm going to do things like, say, clean the house), I keep going to both. I like both of them. I have this fantasy that someday I will be good at both, that my body will figure out how to be both graceful and strong, even though I've never before in my entire life managed to be graceful.

...

* Sometimes we are required to just stand there with our elbows together and our hands up in front of our faces to train our muscles. At first, my arms ached when I did it for more than a few seconds, but now I am fairly certain I could do it all night. Many of us in the class keep our arms like that the whole time we do squats, etc.

safe, part 2

Every once in a while it occurs to me that there are things that I do not worry about, in my safe suburban North American life. Today, for example, I was sitting in my car after dark, in a parking lot. The door was unlocked. I was looking for something in my bag when suddenly I realized that I was not worried.

I was not worried.

Ok, maybe I should have been worried.

But I wasn't.

People in this country worry so much about crime, about those isolated incidents that they read about in the paper (exceptions made if you actually live in a place with frequent, violent, stranger-to-stranger crime), but I am more and more struck by how safe people's lives are here.

We were talking about roadblocks, earlier, and I said, "Sometimes it still surprises me how long you can drive in this country without being stopped at a roadblock."

"Yeah," the other person joked, "it's been a while since you had an AK-47 stuck in your face, huh?"

I've never actually had an AK-47 stuck in my face. But the general idea, yes. It's been a while since someone with a big gun stood in front of my car and made me stop to answer his questions.

It feels weirder that it's been a while than it ever did to stop at roadblocks on a regular basis.

moments

I was obsessively watching Prison Break last night when my computer started its screen saver. The first photo that pops up is always the same one, for some unknown reason, and it is a rather bad photo of T., an Italian-Swiss guy who worked in Rwanda, and me. The photo is fuzzy and from a terrible angle, and we both have red eyes. We had birthdays right close together, and so we celebrated both of them at the Kibuye Guest House. T. and M., his girlfriend, gave me a Swiss chocolate bar wrapped in kitenge fabric and tied with bright pink string, and I took the cloth and tied it around my head flower-child style, and someone snapped a photo, with my camera, of the two birthday people.

Watching the photos go by, starting, as always, with that one, I thought about the two years I spent in Rwanda. I was 23 when I moved to Rwanda. Thinking about it now, I realize how much I missed during those years. I was there, but I was always waiting for something.

Is this just a factor of being young? When I was 23, I thought my life was going to turn into something big, and everything until then was just waiting time. Now I wish that I had just been able to enjoy it. I wish I had known that life is nothing more or less than a string of moments, and there is no use wishing them away.

If I could do it again, I would spend those walks out the peninsula just enjoying the sunset instead of wishing for the big things to happen. I would stop at E.'s shop more often, just to sit with her. I would let playing with little Zu be my only goal for the hour. I would play tennis (badly) without worrying if anyone was watching, for the pure joy of hitting the ball. I would wake up early to listen to the fishermen sing as they rowed their canoes back in.

If I could do it again, I would brush my fingers gently along each moment as it came. I would try my best not to wish for anything but what I had there, in those beautiful moments that are fading away now.

But I cannot regret that time. That is what it means to be 23: to rush madly into what life sends, believing that your life is going to be something great, hoping for the great things to come as soon as possible. I don't think I could have gotten here without there.

Now I can hold moments lightly in my hand, but the moments I'm missing are on a whole different continent, seven years away, and I can't regret them because they made me who I am.

tv

I had grand plans to go up to Gone West this afternoon to go to a movie that is playing at one of Gone West's many special events for indie movies (I seriously cannot even think about that city without being sad that I don't live there), but my plans were felled by two things: 1. the guest room at the K.s' house was taken (taken!), and 2. all of my attention is required for breathing through the phlegm that has installed itself in my sinuses. I couldn't face the idea of sleeping on S.'s couch. I either can be sick or I can sleep on the couch in the middle of the living room to be interrupted by every person who gets up early for any reason and the cat that starts bustling around at 6 am wanting to be fed and petted. The two concepts cannot coexist.

And so I'm at my house in Universe City, loading up on ginger-honey tea (I added lemon until my mouth started hurting) and Season One of Prison Break. ("I don't watch tv," I often say, and it's true that we don't get any channels in our house, but in the last month or so I have rediscovered dvds and Bl0ckbuster and the library, and I'm catching up on tv shows that I didn't really know existed. This one could become as much of an obsession as the Pretender was a decade ago. And, if you do not know, I was thus obsessed with the Pretender: I videotaped every episode on Saturday nights and watched it repeatedly. I own all four seasons on dvd. I like the escaping and running shows.)

After watching ridiculous numbers of episodes of Prison Break, I'm going to sleep in my own bed. Hmm, yum. My own bed. Going to bed sounds blissful, except for that horrible head-full-of-snot feeling that keeps one from sleeping when infected by a bad cold.

soup

I got everything ready so that things will run smoothly if I am too sick to go to work tomorrow. That's pretty much a guarantee that I will feel fine when I wake up.

When I came home, armed with lemon and ginger and honey, my lovely roommate was here, ready to start a movie, and she put off pressing play until she had whipped up a nice pot of chicken noodle soup for me. Everyone should have such a roommate.

cafe sua da

I ordered the Vietnamese coffee and the teenage girl selling it said, "You are brave. Not very many people are willing to try it."

"I love Vietnamese coffee!" I said.

"We made it just like in Vietnam," she told me, and she was right. I could have gone through several glasses of it, but I settled for sipping one slowly, waiting for the ice to melt.

that person

Tonight in advanced fighting class, we sparred with rubber knives. I pretty much love that class.

I had to stop referring to fighting class as "my self-defense class" and start referring to it as "my fighting class" because people kept assuming that a self-defense class was all women learning multiple ways to kick a guy in the balls and yell help.

I think it should go without saying that we do not yell help in my fighting class. Instead, we learn to temper the deadly moves. There is a former Marine and a current law enforcement person in my fighting class. And yesterday I was the only girl.

That would have intimidated me the first couple of weeks, but now that I am one of the longer-term students, I don't mind at all. I just beat up the nearest guy. One day I was practicing some scenario on the former Marine (former makes him sound old - I think he's actually younger than me - he seems to be studying at the university, anyway), and he kept saying, "I am going to have bruises from your bony arms tomorrow."

"That's fine," I said. "Just tell everyone that a girl beat you up."

"Oh," he said, "I do. Often."

I'm sure he does, too, because the other women who have taken the class for a while are tough.

This is a prime opportunity for me to do exactly what I promised not to do yesterday: brag about my muscles. People. I am not going to go on about this, except to say that I can now see the muscles in my arms, both above and below the elbow. That is all.

Now I'm going to go do some guy push-ups before I go to bed, because I am, in fact, that person. How annoying.

bored

There is possibly nothing more boring in the world than a blog that becomes an exercise blog (except possibly blogging about blogging, which I am now doing). I myself have been known to unsubscribe from blogs that are suddenly all about the person's exercise regime and how skinny and fit said person is becoming. No normal human being, sitting slothfully on their couch as normal human beings do, wants to read about some insane person whose new idea of fun is running marathons or showing off their six-pack abs. (Also: no one should have six-pack abs. It's not right.)

Except, uh, I can't really think of anything else to write about. Life is so boring when you have a car and a job. Going to the store is no longer an adventure, because there are no people to jump out in front of you (and if they did, there would be a much bigger story, like, "Woman Strikes, Kills Man With Car." Not good.) There are no little interactions with the woman collecting cans or the firemen sitting in the garage of the station. There are no shared human moments on the bus. You just get in your car and go, and then you come home.

This is what has always bothered me about living in this country: the sheer tedium. I do not mean that life is more interesting in other countries because oooh, exotic. That is not it at all. What I mean is that most parts of the world involve more interaction with other people than we get here in suburbia, and people are interesting.

Meanwhile, all I do is drive to work, drive to fighting class/kung fu, and drive home.

I'm getting bored here. Other than work, which I can't really talk about and I make a deliberate practice of forgetting as soon as I walk out the door, things are really very dull in Universe City.

The good news is that this blog post has veered away from discussion of exercise.

Now I can save that for another day when I can't think of anything to say.

radio

I don't want to know what it says about me that it took me more than a month to notice that the reason the radio station was coming in so fuzzily from one town north of here was that the antenna on my car was pushed in. For some reason, I was ready to blame it on the station changing the strength of their signal rather than the logical explanation that it was my car.

boxing gloves

Kung fu is still kicking my @ss. I can hardly move. After fighting class today, I seriously considered leaving, just to have the evening free instead of full of punches and kicks. I didn't, though. I stayed, and I stood in ma bu and xu bu and crane stance. I jabbed and crossed and hooked and round kicked. "You've gotten a lot better," the instructor said, "just in the last week."

It turns out that the advanced fighting class is more like a boxing class, and last week I spent the whole class practicing my stance and then jab-jab-jabbing at a dummy. I jabbed until I could no longer lift my arm, and then I cross-cross-crossed until the end of class. My left arm feels bruised from all the jabbing. I need to buy boxing gloves, and headgear, and a mouth guard.

I never really pictured myself as a boxing kind of girl.

One of the girls in my kung fu class has pink boxing gloves. And one thing I can tell you: it looks like I actually may be a boxing kind of girl, but my gloves will be black, not pink.

mornings

I walked out the door in the morning, a few days ago, and the walkway to the road was covered in what looked like tiny yellow flowers. I looked closer, and they were little gold stars scattered all over the wooden path out to the street. The people from the other half of our duplex must have had a party, because there was a balloon on the mailbox, too.

...

The sky this morning was blue in the middle and white around the edges, and the air smelled of smoke, and I couldn't place it, for a moment, until I realized that it was Rwanda, just forty degrees colder. In dry season in Rwanda, the sky is light blue like that in the middle and hazy on the edges. It's the time of year when the volcanoes are never visible, because the rain never clears off the haze on the horizon.

cars

Now that I am the proud owner of a fourteen year old Honda, I pay attention to the cars around me. I am no better at recognizing models than before, but now I see how expensive they all seem to be. Considering how little the people of this country are capable of saving, surely the majority of them are paying on loans for those cars. All those thousands and millions of people, all paying every month on car loans.

It's strange, when you think of it, all those un-owned cars swarming around. I mean, those cars don't belong to the people driving them around, not really. They belong to the bank, with nothing binding them to the person using them but a whole lot of obligation. Even I don't really own my car. (Here I want to insert my explanations: I have a loan, but it's not that much, and I'm paying it off fast, and I need the credit score. But. While that all makes me feel better, it is hardly relevant, except for the part where it makes me just one of those people who has a loan.)

It makes me think how disingenuous it is to say, "This is my new car," for most of the country, including me. And yet, everyone thinks of those cars as belonging to them. Even I do. And we are all, mostly, wrong.

travel

I stood in front of the map after church, just looking at all the countries in their pastel colors. They look so uniform, flat there on the wall. There is nothing real about them.

And yet, I run my fingers over them, remembering. There are people there, in those little flat blocks of color, people living and dying. There are mountains and rainforests. There are cities and beaches.

A woman from the church came over to talk to me, and then introduced me to the Church Traveler, a retired dentist. He showed me interesting itineraries all over Asia and Latin America.

"You can do all the traveling you want," he said. "You are young and single, and it's cheap once you buy the ticket."

His wife came over to chat. "When he proposed, I said, 'But you've been to Europe already, and I want to go.'"

"And I said, 'Well, I can go again,'" the Church Traveler laughed.

"All of my parents' friends planned for five years for their retirement trips to Europe," his wife told me, "and then they talked about it for years afterward. I had no idea that you could just travel."

"Yes, we've had some adventures," the Church Traveler said, smiling at her.

lawyers

Periodically I do something law-related and I realize again how very many men there are in this profession. The funny thing is that in my law school, and in the kind of law I do, there are about equal numbers of men and women (although the women in my kind of law skew younger than the men). But when I go to a training and they split us up into small groups and I am the only woman in mine, it comes back to me.

Maybe it isn't even so much that there are so many men, but more that the differences between men and women become evident in a small group that is all men except me. I have to interrupt and stand up and say that I want to go next, unless I want to be last. I don't think I ever feel quite that need in a mixed group, where things seem to sift out a little more evenly.

In a group of women and men, when each person has to stand up and talk individually do the men tend to go first? Because what I kept noticing was how entitled the men seemed to feel, how they had no problem interrupting one another to go next.

At least, I attributed this to the group being all men, but now that I think about it, I wonder whether it is the because they are all men and I am a woman, or if it is because lawyers tend to be so type A and I have some distinct slacker-ish tendencies, or if it is because lawyers tend to be assertive people and I, while I can be assertive one-on-one with people I know, am a little shy in groups or with people I don't know.

eating

When I was in law school, I was at the health center for some reason, and a doctor asked me something about food or nutrition, I forget, and I said, "Well, I'm not very good at eating."

She gave me that very careful look that health personnel at big universities cultivate and said, "Tell me what you mean by that."

What I meant, and what I told her, is that I'm not very good at knowing that I'm hungry until I'm so hungry that I'm shaky, and once I'm shaky it's impossible to think about what I'm eating. I just need to eat something, anything, immediately.

I might have wanted to remember this before I went to fighting class plus kung fu on a handful of almonds and two peppermint joe-joes.

The thing is that it doesn't happen that often, and so I forget about it. Most of the time, I eat on a fairly regular schedule, before things get to the point of shakiness. But then I climb a mountain or spend a whole morning and afternoon getting my hair cut or go to 2.5 hours of exercise in a row, and when I hold out my normally steady hand, it trembles.

Tonight, a very nice lady in my kung fu class gave me a little packet of almonds, and I sat and ate them before getting in my car, driving home, and stuffing everything I could find into my mouth.

Once again, not that good at eating.

madness

I really do not know what is wrong with me. I cannot bring myself to do so much as a 25 minute pilates video on Sunday, but on Monday I think it's a good idea to do 75 minutes of kung fu immediately after 60 minutes of fighting class.

Now when I stand up, I stagger instead of walking. Kung fu is a whole new concept, and it requires moving your body in ways I did not know bodies could move.

Furthermore, I need to learn to count to ten in Mandarin.

on up

We had a hardcore fighting class yesterday.

(Have I mentioned blackjack? It goes like this: 20 push-ups, 1 sit-up. Run across the floor. 19 push-ups, 2 sit-ups. Run across the floor. It goes on until you are doing 10 push-ups, 11 sit-ups, then finally to 1 push-up, 20 sit-ups. I was sore today.)

Then I went to the advanced class.









Yeah.

You know that saying about muscles you didn't know you had? Usually people are talking about, I don't know, their legs. We all know that we have muscles in our legs, even if we don't use all of them all the time.

I am sore in the muscle that runs down the side of my back. How does that happen? I would not know how to work that muscle if you asked me, but somehow I did it.

The boxing gloves I borrowed were 18 oz each, and dropping them from the sides of your face meant 50 push-ups. I literally could barely lift my arm to the steering wheel as I was driving home.

"I knew you would end up here," one of my classmates said. "You like to hit things. So do the rest of us." She turned to the other woman in the class. "Right after she started, she asked me about defending against automatic assault rifles."

"Oh," the other woman said, "we should get some practice rifles. That would be good to learn."

I fit right in. Or I will, when I can move again without groaning.

myself

When I went out to the car this morning, it was covered in a thin layer of ice, and so I got out my very large ice scraper and scraped it off. (Gone Westians mock me for this ice scraper, but I grew up in the Mitten State. I know the importance of a good ice scraper. And the one time a year that it snows, I'm the one laughing as I quickly clean off my car while they scrape the windshield with their frozen fingernails.)

Around the front of my car, I noticed that one of my headlights was out. It was early and foggy, and I really couldn't not have my headlights on, but I was embarrassed all the way to work. What kind of person has only one headlight?

Surely, I thought, I can replace some headlights.

On my lunch hour, I went to an auto parts store and bought two headlights. Not just headlights. Ecologically friendlier headlights. The guy behind the counter advised changing both headlights at once (because they are likely to burn out at similar times), which I did, but now I regret it, because the two lights that were in there already were not the same.

Then I went home and parked in my driveway and began trying to change my headlights.

Um.

First of all, who writes the instructions in the owner's manual? "Push on both sides of the connector to disengage it from the bulb and pull straight back to remove the connector." The situation is made worse by the fact that the "both sides" of which they speak are buried in the rubber piece that protects the bulb, so you can't actually reach them, and that the driver's side connector is further buried beneath some little power steering reservoir that you have to twist out of the way while hoping that you aren't severing some important cable.

About thirty minutes after I started, I had the passenger side changed but was still fighting with the driver's side light (no idea why! it wasn't even burned out! madness!). An older guy who was working on the water heater next door came by and said, "You swearing at that thing yet?"

"Yes, yes, I am," I said, and he tried to pull on the stupid connector but soon had to leave lest his boss yell at him. I just could not get a grip on the connector while reaching around the power steering fluid reservoir.

By the time I got done, my hands were ground in with grease. My fingers ached from pressing so hard on the little connector tabs. The backs of my hands were red and scraped from the power steering reservoir. I don't really mind that, though. The tomboy in me prefers grease in my fingernails over a perfect manicure. That, and my headlights are perfect.