malaria city

I was looking through my cupboard (trying to find the non-drowsy anti-motion sickness medication that a professor named Harold gave me in Vietnam, if you must know) and happened upon some mefloquine left over from Sudan. Hm. I thought. Hm. I should take this. That would be so responsible of me. I had just enough, you see, to cover my trip to Honduras, and I am going to the Bay Islands, where there are mosquitoes galore. It would be prudent to take an anti-malarial in that context.

The mere fact that I have mefloquine left over from Sudan should tell you that I am something less than reliable about taking it. On most trips, I don't. I only took it in Sudan because my organization required it (not that it kept me from getting malaria). I took it for a few weeks in Liberia and then gave up on it. I did not take it in East Africa at all, after a few, again, weeks at the beginning.

I sat down all ready to take the first pill with dinner yesterday - how convenient is it that I found it on a Sunday! I am perfectly on schedule! - and then took a look at it. Yeah, it expired a year ago. I googled "expired mefloquine" but came up with nothing.

So much for that healthful intention. I guess I'm going malaria prophylaxis free again.

packing

I am packing for Honduras, making sure that everything fits in 3.4 ounce (100 mL) bottles so as to get through the TSA checkpoints, except that my contact lens solution claims to be TSA compliant despite its 4 ounce (118 mL) size. So I am risking two 4 ounce bottles and hoping that they don't get confiscated, because I will die without my lotion. (Even though I am exaggerating, I am not being girly and annoying. It is scentless Cetaphil, but I am prone to eczema and after swimming in the ocean, I will need it.)

I am really excited about this trip, but I am really unexcited about the process of getting down to Honduras. It is going to take me four flights on three airlines plus an overnight in San Pedro Sula to get to Tegucigalpa. I like flying, usually, but there are just too many incredibly early mornings between now and Friday. 6 am is starting to look like a positive luxury.

And I hate carrying all of my luggage with me onto planes. I like to check in as much of my crap as possible, especially on international flights for which it is usually free (I am also a silver member on D3lta now, so a bag is free), but on the crappy budget airline that charges to check a bag in, I refuse. So I'll be lugging all of my TSA compliant bottles through five airports.

It is true that I have traveled enough to know what I'm doing. The woman at the store today, as I was checking out, said, "Yeah, I don't think I've flown since they started limiting liquids," which was almost four years ago, a span of time that I cannot imagine existing without flying. (Hello there, privilege! I've been in, um, eight countries since then. And I am not including this country or Canada or the two countries - Belgium and Japan - that I flew through without leaving the airport.) So I know all about this liquid limiting. I know what to pack. I know what I will use and what I won't.

You know what, though? Even though friends and coworkers seem to think that I am the sort of person who just jets off to other countries (and I guess the evidence would support that hypothesis), I still get excited and nervous every single time. International travel never gets boring.

phones

I never had a cell phone until I moved to Rwanda. About a week after I got there, J. and E. took me to the MTN Rwandacell office (there were not yet all the stores that later sprang up, although there might have been one or two) and bought me a sturdy little M0toro1a. I liked it. I put the language on Spanish, which was helpful because it meant that no one but me could figure out how to unlock it. Not that it mattered if anyone else could unlock it. I had no friends, at that point, to do anything crazy with my phone. I had been in the country for a week and the only people I had met were J. and E. (who were leaving in three weeks) and two coworkers who, while they were nice, had families and kids and stuff. It's not like we were hanging on the weekends.

I've had a cell phone ever since. A SIM card is the first thing I pick up in most countries - Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia - anywhere I am going to be for more than a week or two. I usually walk directly to a kiosk in the Arrivals Hall of the airport and throw down the cash. I have become accustomed to the idea of being able to call someone to check in - "Ok, I'm at the restaurant. Are you already inside, or should I get a table?"

The only place, since 2002, where I have been without a cell phone for a significant period of time was Southern Sudan, and that felt strange and vulnerable. When I first arrived at the big airstrip an hour and a half from Tiny Little Town, no one came to pick me up. I stood there in the 100+ degree heat for a few minutes, looking around at the options. There were soldiers (and only soldiers) lounging about in the single hanger. There were a couple of white mercenaries in khakis and white t-shirts who rolled up in an unmarked Land Cruiser, jumped into helicopters, and took off. There were fellow passengers loading into NGO-marked Land Cruisers. And there was me, alone, with no phone. Fortunately, the other NGO-type people had satellite phones and were willing to share them (despite the $1/minute cost). Still more fortunately, the pimped-out minibus with the paper pineapples dangling from the rear-view mirror, the one that my organization had hired after our Land Cruiser broke down, arrived just before I hitched a ride to Bigger Town Three Hours Away. If I had a cell phone, though, I think I would have been much more comfortable waiting there with the soldiers and mercenaries.

I spent my whole three months in Southern Sudan watching the progress on the cell phone tower that was, in theory, being built. I didn't see it completed, but I got a text from a friend there a few months later: cell phone coverage finally reached TLT at the beginning of 2008. It is virtually everywhere in the world now.

This is how ubiquitous cell phones have become: when I turned on my US phone in Vietnam, it had network.

I can't imagine, anymore, a world without cell phones. I feel lost when I forget mine, or when I travel without one.

I will be arriving in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Wednesday morning, and my sister is supposed to pick me up from the airport. I am so dependent on cell phones now that it makes me a little nervous to know that I won't be able to turn on my phone and call her from the airport. And yet, when I lived in Honduras before, none of us had cell phones. We simply had to meet where we said we would meet. Imagine that.

smells

Yesterday morning, stepping off the train downtown, the air smelled like Africa, so strongly that I was disoriented for a moment. Oh, I thought, wrong continent.

"What does Africa smell like?" my colleague asked.

"It smells like wood fires on clean morning air," I said.

...

On the beach, M. and S. played volleyball. I begged off, pointing out that the last thing my crippled wrists need is to spike a volleyball. I sat on a sand bank and laid my head down amidst the sharp, golden beach grass. It smelled sweet and dry, like hay.

shells

I am possibly going to have to move to the coast, because when I go there, I cannot leave. I stand on the shore, mesmerized by the waves and the light, until it gets dark and I freeze right through and everyone else is pacing at the car waiting for me.

I have concluded that there are two types of beach people: the walkers and the sitters. I am a walker through and through. I get itchy when I leave the house with a group of people and fifty meters down the beach they want to sit and, and, I don't know. What do they do? They just sit there. Meanwhile, I will walk until I run out of beach.

Everyone at the beach this weekend was a sitter except S. and me, so we left them sitting on a driftwood tree and went off walking to the end of the beach ourselves. It was a good move, because, man, we are hilarious. Surely we are funnier than those other people sitting on their silly log somewhere back on the beach.

We raced each other like five-year-olds to get to the white backs of shells sticking out of the sand, a game that S.'s mom thought up last summer on the church campout.

"I can't crush them," S. complained.

"You have to look for more rounded ones," I said. "Find the ones that stick further out of the ground. They crush better."

"I think I just don't weigh enough," she said.

"Are you saying that I'm fat?" I asked, and I shoved her into the ocean. As if we were back in college, back when everything was unbearably funny, we bent over and laughed until our stomachs were sore.

isn't spring beautiful?

My life's prevailing characteristic right now is exhaustion. It got to the point of being alarming, a week or two ago, how I could get more than enough sleep and still not find the energy to so much as get off my couch, except to get to bed early. I had my annual physical last week and I asked the doctor to check my iron and thyroid, because this just cannot be normal.

(My doctor, by the way, thinks that I am something of a hypochondriac, largely because I am, also because I save up every ailment all year long in a list in my planner and when I get to the annual physical I spew them all out in a breathless litany, leading her last year to say, after I detailed my frequent headaches and how sometimes I feel like I can't enunciate clearly anymore and I probably have a brain tumor, don't I? "Maybe you should try speaking more slowly." It's a good thing that she also likes to travel, giving us something to talk about other than my pretend diseases.)

After the lab stuck a needle into my arm to check the iron and thyroid, of course, I remembered that I get this tired at this time every year. It's the allergies, stupid. This is the first time I've managed to time my visit to the doctor with the worst of the allergy season (starts March 1st around here, like someone wrote it in the planner), and she took one look in my nose and said, "Hm. Do you have trouble breathing sometimes? Because your nasal passages are really swollen."

(Side note the second: do not ask someone if they have trouble breathing sometimes, due to a physically documentable symptom. It will result in the person periodically feeling like s/he can't breathe, whether or not said feeling is justified. I can breathe. It's just that now, sometimes, since she asked, I wonder if maybe I can't, and that's not a good path to be trodding.)

Until she said that, I kinda sorta thought I had made up the allergies, all symptoms aside. I was exposed to plenty of diseases growing up: malaria, parasites, worms, bacteria... come on. I grew up in Liberia. I played in rivers and I ate dirt. I was exposed to enough diseases to last me a lifetime. Isn't that supposed to prevent your immune system from going bonkers and attacking innocent pollen? But the miserable fact is that Gone West makes me sicker than Liberia and Sudan put together. And I speak as someone who allegedly had malaria in Sudan.

Regardless, apparently allergies are real. I really don't know that I believed in them, but my pounding head every time I venture outside this time of year convinces me otherwise (not that it stops me from going outside).

So the doctor gave me some nasal spray that is supposed to help, after a week or two of buildup, but even then it's an experiment! And if it doesn't work we'll try something else!

You won't tell that I'm supplementing with over-the-counter allergy meds, right? A little fake Zyrtec takes the edge right off the headache.

Nasal spray. Puh-lease.

happy people

The bus driver on my bus last night was possibly the happiest person I have ever encountered. It was almost eerie, how happy she was.

She was happy through the drunken guy swearing at the young woman who dared to call him out for his lecherous staring. ("I'm not hating, ya'll. This is my least favorite part of my job. But you cannot use that kind of language. It makes other people uncomfortable.")

She was happy through helping some incompetent woman flip down the bike rack and load her bike on it. ("I love showing people how to do this! Praise the Lord!")

She was happy through finding an old woman sitting forlornly on a bench at a bus stop and calling her to come on to the bus without fare. ("Are you ***? Praise the Lord! Someone loves you. They've had us all looking for you. You don't need any money. Just get on the bus. Here's a day pass. Praise the Lord!" [Getting on the radio.] "I found ***! Yes, ma'am, praise the Lord, she was sitting at my bus stop. I found her. She is on my bus.")

Sometimes, it's just nice to be around happy people.

total panic

Just as a general rule, in the future, I need to remember to check my bank balance before I, oh, BUY A PLANE TICKET TO HONDURAS. Um, oops? I am now slightly panicking about the fact that my bills will take up the entirety of what is left in my bank account this month. Ok, really panicking. Draining of savings account will occur. Not good. Not good.

The stupidest part is that I just found out today that I actually could have gone in April. I could have waited to buy the ticket. But that didn't occur to me when I booked the ticket just now, did it? Dumb, dumb, dumb. The ticket is nonrefundable.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Broke. So broke.

I feel sick.

my own pea

We all know the story of the princess and the pea, right? In the story, a princess shows up at the door of a castle. She tells the inhabitants that she is a princess, and the queen in the castle tests her by putting a pea under 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds. The princess is so sensitive that she cannot sleep. The pea, under all those mattresses and feathers, bothers her.

I have never gotten that fairy tale. In fact, I've always thought it was silly. Who wants such a sensitive princess? I want that princess who is grabbing her sword and leading the troops, not the one who has to be coddled.

That may be partly because I'm not at all sensitive to such things. I can sleep almost-but-not-quite anywhere. I can sleep through morning noise in the tropics. I can sleep on foam mattresses with slats poking through. I can sleep in rooms that smell bad. I am not sensitive enough to be a princess. Then again, I've never claimed to be one.

Last night, I washed my sheets and I was making my bed, when I lifted the mattress higher than normal and pulled out... my arm brace.

I've been looking for that thing for months, but it never occurred to me that it could actually be under my mattress. I knew that I might have put it along the side of my mattress (the frame is bigger than the mattress), and I've checked along the edge of the mattress several times, but I did not imagine that it could be all the way under my mattress without me noticing. After all, it is made of hard plastic. It is almost a meter long. It is probably two inches high, when lying on its side. How could I not feel it under my mattress?

I've been sleeping on a hard plastic object for months, and I never noticed.

I am so clearly not a princess.

fragile stomachs beware

There was a black plastic bag blowing across the street today, as I walked back to work in the sunshine, and I started thinking. The drive between Kigali and Kibuye in Rwanda is two and a half hours of tight curves, and people regularly get sick and throw up on the minibuses. When I lived there, people would throw up into black plastic bags just like that one, tie the opening shut, and throw them out the window. (I had to be careful not to hit them while driving, because an explosion of vomit is just gross.)

A few years ago, the government of Rwanda outlawed plastic bags. I guess this was because they were unsightly and polluting. But I wonder: into what type of receptacle do people now throw up on the road from Kigali to Kibuye? And how do they get rid of the barf?

anyone? anyone?

Is it just my warped little mind, or does everyone, whenever they see the Olympic flame, wonder how many times it has gone out and the people in charge of taking care of it have said, "Oh, crap!" and secretly re-lit it, meaning that the current flame is actually not at all the same as the original one?

winter/Olympics

I might actually survive another winter in the Northwest, I concluded this afternoon. I went for a long ramble, for the first time in months, and saw the first crocuses of the year. A few trees have their first leaf buds. I saw two bushes with big pink flowers. It was good to be in the sun again. If there is one thing I have learned in three winters in Gone West, it is that one must take every opportunity to soak in the sunshine when the sun deigns to show its face. I sat on a rock in the sunshine talking to my mom on the phone, and an odd car of guys drove by and asked me if I had a headache (?). I am totally confused. The only two possibilities I can imagine are 1. that they were flirting with me, or 2. that they were trying to sell me drugs (they said "You should take some pills!" after asking if I had a headache).

Other than the occasional walk, I am on a diet of all Olympics all the time at the moment. It's a good thing I got a functional tv. I love the winter sports: skiing, skating, snowboarding. They are so much better than the summer sports. Skiing especially - I could watch it forever. The best part is the athletes crying on the podium. It makes me want to cry, too. I just watched the medals ceremony for the freestyle moguls and immediately had to google the lyrics to Oh, Canada. How embarrassing is it that I have lived half my life within a few hours of the Canadian border but I don't ever recall hearing the words of the Canadian national anthem?

bearded

N. came over to carry out my huge, crappy tv. I can hardly wiggle that tv over a few inches, but he picked it right up and carried it, while I trailed along carrying a small package of shower curtain rings that I have long been intending to bring to goodwill (they don't work on the type of pole from which my shower curtain hangs). I felt fully useless.

When we got to goodwill, it took a long time for someone to answer the doorbell, long enough for N. to go back to the car, get the tv, and bring it over to set it on the large tv that had been sitting there for a while and was soaking wet. When the goodwill guy came, he was tall and dark-haired, wearing safety glasses. He told us to step inside and then he said that the tv was ruined because it was raining (it's always raining here) and rain had fallen into the little slots in the back and the tv would have to be recycled.

We protested. "We just got here! The other one has been here for a long time, but we just got here with this one. I'm sure it is fine. The rain hasn't gotten into it yet." (All this protest, it occurs to me now, for a tv that doesn't actually work very well - the picture is bright pink.)

The employee, whose name began with an M., looked at us gravely. "I am very sorry to have upset you so greatly," he said. "Please accept my apologies."

More protesting. "No, no! It's fine! We aren't upset at all."

"Good," M. said. "If I may say so, you two have a very positive spirit. I can feel it when I speak to you. Is that all right? Do you mind that I say that?"

"That's fine," we said. "Thank you."

"I like your beard, sir," he said to N., who reached up to rub his stubble and said, slightly confused, "Well, I don't have much of one right now. Yours is nice, though."

"If you don't shave for a few days, you will have one like me," M. said, clearly proud of his own beard (which was, truly, a very nice beard). "Lots of people in this town have beards. They are very popular."

"Yes," N. said, "I guess they are. I have one sometimes."

We donated the tv, and when I got home I was delighted by all the free floor space in my apartment. My bike is no longer pinned behind my bed by a huge immovable television that I never turn on. I am sure that will be even more delightful when the weather clears up and I can actually take my bike out from behind my bed without fighting the tv, but for now I am just enjoying the open space, and the fact that I can get to my bedside lamp without flopping all the way over my bed.

And pretty much every time I see N. from now on, I am going to have to tell him how great his beard is. Whether he has one or not.

self

I got my hair cut today, where I always do, where the students cut my hair and it only costs $12. I am not extremely picky about my haircut, so the students are perfect for me. I don't even request a senior unless I am getting my hair colored. The only thing about which I am picky is that the lengths line up in front. My hair has a tendency to be slightly longer on the right side than the left, no matter how precisely they cut it.

I have never liked the way I look in mirrors when I am getting my hair cut. It is something about the wet hair drowned rat look and the harsh fluorescent lights. I'm pretty much over it, though, because I have learned through long experience that once my hair is back down and trimmed, I will be delighted. The drowned rat look is just something one has to go through to get to the nice haircut, I suppose.

Two chairs down from me, a girl came in with her mom. The girl was an early teenager. She was not the confident, popular kind of early teenager depicted on television. She was the kind of early teenager I remember being: awkward, uncomfortable, miserable. (Sometimes I think that I was miserable for 19 years straight: from 1990 when we left Liberia until 2009 when I found myself suddenly, surprisingly happy in Gone West. Not that I didn't have happy moments, but I think the general arch was misery.)

I remember being this girl, and I saw from the moment she sat down that she would not like her haircut. I saw it in the way she looked at herself in the mirror. I saw it in the way she held her hair out from her head. Halfway through the haircut, watching her face as the stylist feathered short pieces on the back of her head, I knew, too, that the haircut was all wrong for her. Not for her face - it looked darling - but for her moment in life. I could see on her face that she wanted something that turned her into those confident, popular girls. Instead, she got something that required confidence that she did not have.

The instructor finally came over and talked to her about it. "I don't want to do anything that will make you even less happy," she said, and the girl and her mother left. When the stylist came back upstairs, she sat down in the same chair and cried. The instructor told her not to worry about it, that the haircut was perfectly done and she could not have changed anything, and then got called away. A few other stylists and another instructor gathered around her, trying to comfort her. They were still there when the first instructor came back to check my hair.

"I'm sure you saw what happened there," she said.

"Yeah, I did," I told her. "The problem wasn't that she didn't like the haircut. The problem was that she didn't like herself."

"Yes," she said, "that's the nature of being thirteen."

As I left, I saw the instructor go back to the crying stylist and I hear her say, "The problem wasn't that she didn't like the haircut. The problem was that she didn't like herself," and I smiled to myself.

It's true. I remember that feeling, the desperate hope that this time, this haircut, this outfit would make me beautiful, popular, confident. I remember the disappointment when I was still myself and no one noticed my new outfit but my few closest friends. I hadn't changed at all.

I am so incredibly thankful to be 30 instead of 13. It's so lovely to like yourself.

the gloomy days of feb

It's February. It is very definitely February. When I leave my house in the morning, I nearly universally forget to bring an umbrella. By lunch, it is nearly universally raining. I borrow an umbrella from a colleague or beg one from the lost and found, and it barely covers my head. Its spindles poke out beyond the sagging plastic.

I tromp through the rain to my favorite coffee place, the one with the espresso so perfectly pulled that I almost can no longer drink coffee elsewhere. A. has a tiny new shop, and I stand there in a willing row with all the other addicts, waiting for my little mug of cappuccino with the perfect foam lid.

"It's so small!" my colleague says when, occasionally, I get it to go and come back to the office bearing a white cup wrapped in my reusable coffee sleeve. "You go all that way for something so small? Why don't you just get a bigger cup at the place across the street?"

"Cappuccino is supposed to be small," I tell her, sipping my six ounces of coffee perfection. "And this coffee is worth it."

When I'm done with my little cup of cappuccino, there is nowhere to go but back to the office. It's raining and cold. The parks are dreary. During the summer, I try to keep my coffee consumption to a few times a week, but here in the winter, I get it every day. If nothing else, I need the walk to get me out of the office.

Winter feels unending, in February. Last winter, I was hibernating at this time. This year, I have promised myself that I will get out more, be more social. I am trying to fight the winter weariness instead of succumbing to it. It's been working fairly well, but this week my strategy has failed me. It could keep up with the weather, but it couldn't keep up with life's random onslaught of difficult things.

This week, I switched to quieter music. The music I usually love hurt my heart. I updated my status across the internet to reflect my crankiness. I am writing a lot. The notebook I bought two weeks ago is nearly half full.

If you had asked me when I was 20, I would have said that by 30 I would know myself. I would have said that by 30 I would be able to just live, without needing to think about why I did or said what I did. I would have said that by 30 life would be easy. Indeed, I have learned a great deal about myself. I know many reasons why I do what I do. I am mostly happy. But I don't know everything, and some weeks I wonder why I said that, or why life is sometimes so hard.

The best thing that I have learned in 30 years is that even the worst moments usually end. This is not the worst moment, but I still need to remind myself, sometimes, that this will end, too.

television

For a long time, I have not had a functional television. I had one, and then it stopped working because it stopped accepting instructions from the remote control and without a remote control it would not go to channel 3 and without channel 3 the cable couldn't get through, so the tv was worthless.

Then I managed to get rid of that tv (dropped it off at goodwill), but S. promptly gave me another, which she had gotten for free somewhere. It is huge, and it sits on my floor. This one works, but the color is... unusual. Everything is very pink. I turned it on twice, I think, and then I got annoyed with the cord that ran across the room and took it off and stashed it somewhere and then the next time I tried to turn it on, I could not figure out why the tv would not work.

I gave up on tv.

A week ago last Sunday, I read in the Washington Post online that Masterpiece Theatre was showing Emma that night. I suddenly had incentive to make that tv work.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the cord to plug in the cable box. After searching on and off all day, I finally found it. On my kitchen table. Yeah, I dunno. I managed, victoriously, to get it to work about four minutes before Emma started. I watched a very pink Emma, but I did manage to watch it, in my own apartment.

This Saturday, I was at goodwill and happened upon little, functional tvs for only $15. I was delighted. A tv that does not take up half the floor space in my apartment! A tv with normal colors! A tv that I can move from place to place without calling reinforcements!

The new little tv works amazingly, but I have no way to get rid of the big tv. Right now, I have the ever-so-classic pile o' tv look going on here: the little tv sits on top of the big one. I really have to do something about that.

But this new, functional tv acquisition means that I can watch the Olympics! I love the Winter Olympics. Skiing, snowboarding, luge, skating, even curling. It is 7.3432 million times more interesting than the Summer Olympics.

Um. When do the Olympics start?

eggs

I have three egg cartons sitting next to me. I have had all three cartons in the fridge for considerably longer than one should have any egg cartons, but on Saturday, when I came back from the store and put the fourth egg carton in the fridge, I realized things had gone too far. I emptied all the eggs out of these three into the trash on Sunday, but I kept the cartons so that I could take note of the expiration dates.

Jan 5
Oct 18
Jul 23

I don't actually know if that first one was this Jan 5 or last Jan 5. I think, I hope, it was the Jan 5 we just had.

I don't eat eggs alone very often. I bake things with them, which is how I ended up with three cartons of expired eggs in my fridge. Most things I bake only need an egg or two, but once a carton is a month or so expired, I usually give up on it. I would be more casual about using expired eggs except that I had some bad experiences with old eggs the last time I was in Liberia.

Apparently there were worries about avian flu or something not long before I went to Liberia in 2006, so they killed all the chickens. I am basing this completely on rumor that I heard four years ago, so it's very likely that I have it all wrong. And surely I would remember if Liberia were chickenless? I didn't spend that much time on farms while I was there, but a Liberian farm inherently has chickens. So I don't actually know. All I know is that the eggs that were sold in Monrovia tasted weird.

When I asked, someone told me that the eggs were imported from India or Indonesia, I forget which one. (Yes, I know that they are very different and very far from one another. I just remember that it was a country that started with an Ind.) It must have taken a very long time for them to reach Liberia, because again, weird.

To me, the eggs tasted like metal. I could not stomach an omelet made with those eggs (omelets are usually my backup plan in countries/restaurants where it is hard to find vegetarian food; lots of salt makes almost any omelet palatable). I could not even eat the cake we made with those eggs. I could taste the metallic taste through the chocolate (no one else could taste it, though, oddly).

The result is that, while I will merrily throw moldy yogurt or curdled milk into my baked goods, I will not do the same with expired eggs. I know, in my head, that eggs are still good after the date on the carton, but when I think of it, I think of that metallic taste in the ancient eggs in Liberia, and I buy a new carton. And then I add it to the collection of half-empty cartons in my fridge, apparently.

um...

Um...

Um...

Um...

Yeah, my life is about like that right now.

This is how fascinating my life is right now:

I spent far too large a percentage of last weekend looking up recipes for things to bake on my new favorite baking blog. I ended up baking coconut bread and coconut scones. I really never do get sick of coconut.

Yesterday I looked up the sunrise and sunset times for the next six months, hoping desperately that the days would get longer faster if I did. Needless to say, they won't. We did have two minutes more of sunlight today than yesterday, though.

Pretty much every day I have to explain the blue light that suffices for my own personal sunlight to one or more people. The general reaction is, "Does that really work?" YES, it does. I promise. This light is the reason I am not routinely enraged by people.

I'm still fighting the loan people about my law school loans. STILL. I have been out of law school for nearly three years. I pay the loans every month. And still.

Today I bought the biggest bottle of ibuprofen that W@lgreens sells. 1000 tabs. I pretty much think ibuprofen solves everything.

I need to go to bed.

...

Somehow, I got off the blogging bandwagon between the trip to Vietnam and the brokenness of computer, and it is proving incredibly hard to clamber back on the moving wagon.

i am here

I am here.

When I moved to Gone West two years ago, I had a networking meeting at which the networkee asked me how long I planned to live here. I (mentally) took a deep breath. I had been on the move since college, since I figured out that I could go back to the tropics in general and Africa more specifically and Liberia even more specifically. I was either going or wishing to go.

"Five years, at least," I said. "I have a five year plan here. After that, we'll see how it's going."

I had never committed to five years anywhere. When I moved to Rwanda in 2002, I was overwhelmed by the year for which I had signed up, and then by the second year when I signed that contract. When I left Rwanda in 2004, the thought of three years in law school, even with summers in Africa, terrified me. Saying that I planned to live in Gone West for five years - which was, frankly, a number that I pulled out of the recesses of my brain without really thinking about it - was positively immobilizing.

This is, after all, a city to which I moved on a whim. One day in law school, when yet another person asked me what I was going to do when I graduated, I didn't say, "I'm going to get a job in international law," as I had always done before. Instead, I said, "I'm either going to get a job in international law or I'm going to move to Gone West, Northwest." I didn't have a reason for saying it. I had never been to Gone West. I liked the sound of it, or I'd read an article about it recently in the New York Times, or it was completely different than anything I had done before.

I had never been here before Boxing Day, 2007, when I got on a 6 a.m. flight and flew across the country. It was raining and cold, and as we drove through town, I looked out at the low clouds and the gloom, and I wondered if this had been an even bigger mistake than law school or those three months in Southern Sudan.

When I moved here, I'm not sure that I knew that I had a choice. It felt like the only thing I could do. I could no longer live with comings and goings that were required in my previous life and so, almost against my will, I moved to Gone West. It seemed like the only place where I could have stability of home and friends.

I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to be here. I am happy here. More than five years, I can imagine a lifetime here. Every once in a while, someone sends me an email that says, "I keep expecting to hear that you have moved somewhere exciting," and I am relieved to remember that I am here, and I don't have to go anywhere.

I am here.

this week

On Monday, my friend D. and I climbed a little mountain. "I've done this hike before," I said, "in the winter last year."

Hiking through the trees near the bottom of the mountain, I suddenly said, "In fact, I think I climbed this mountain on this exact day last year." I checked when I got home, and yes, I had.

It was colder and windier this time. Several times we had to stop and brace ourselves against the wind. A few times we even fell against the cables that some kind person had installed at just the exact points where the wind hits hardest. We clung to them and turned our backs to the wind and laughed.

We didn't plan to make it to the top. The car had been virtually oil-free when we got to the parking lot, which we discovered quite by accident. We managed to refill it with oil from a random guy who had extra oil in his truck (love guys, they are so prepared and useful), but we were planning to head back early to deal with the possible engine damage situation. Every few minutes, particularly when the wind caught us, we would say, "What do you think?" and debate turning back, but then suddenly the top was in view, and it seemed silly to stop.

It was too cold on the top to eat, too cloudy to take pictures. We stood for a few minutes looking out at the water and the mountains, and then we turned around and went down. We raced faster and faster, trying to stave off the cold that hit us on the easy downhill.

...

I slammed my knee against my desk this morning. Someone said, "Don't you sit there every day? You'd think you would know better by now."

Hopping on one leg, clutching my knee, I gasped, "Ow. Drawer. Accidentally left partway open. Owwww."

My knee was bruised by the time I pulled my trouser leg up to investigate the damage.

...

At the doctor's office, the nurse told me to sit in the waiting room for 15 minutes after my H1N1 vaccine.

"Why?" I asked.

"In case you have a reaction."

"Um," I said, "Is that completely necessary?"

"Well, I am required to tell you that," she said, "but we can't make you."

"Good," I said, "because I've never had a reaction to any vaccine."

On the train on the way back to work, I kept wondering, Am I short of breath now? Am I going to pass out? Is a severe reaction going to be payback for my flouting of medical advice?

I was fine.