No Direction Home

I'm a big believer in positive thinking, so I'll start with this: I'm good at many things. Like acquiring totally useless skills (coughBraillecough), or whistling loudly, or sleeping. Yes, that's right, sleeping. I'm an amazing sleeper--I can sleep anytime, anywhere, through anything. In the middle of the afternoon? Check. On my floor? Check. While my computer is blasting loud music at me? Check.

I clearly get sleeping skills from my father.

So does Klement.

Luckily, we don't get this from him.

But this isn't about sleeping, much as I would like it to be. This is about things I don't do well. So let's start with the biggest one of all: directions. I am functionally retarded at directions. Roughly half my personal anecdotes start with "so this one time I was really lost," and there's good reason for that. I can't tell left from right without looking at my hands, I can't visualize directions that people are giving to me (though I can read a map, for the record, if I rotate it enough), and I can't for the life of me remember paths I have taken before. It's like other people have in their heads a video of a certain route, where I only have a series of poorly-lit Polaroids, not necessarily ordered correctly, and not necessarily covering the entire route. This means I can remember what certain locations look like--usually based on the signs in the area, since I, as ever, am most drawn to words--but the connections between those locations are beyond me. My family used to make fun of me because one of my most commonly said phrases--besides, of course, "I've read a book about that"--was "hey, what is that doing here?"

I could go on forever about times I have been lost--the time I couldn't direct my grandmother to the library and my three-year-old brother could, the time I went running and ended up two towns away, the time I took a wrong highway exit three times in a row--but I'll spare you that. I will say, though, that my graduate department is housed in the world's most confusing building, period, and that that has caused me a lot of grief. Or, more specifically, a lot of being late to class. For those who went to BYU and remember the JKHB, let me tell you, it's got nothing on Dwinelle. It seems like two buildings stuck together, one of them with four floors, labeled 1-4, and lots of classrooms, labeled with two- and three-digit numbers, and one of the with seven floor, labeled A-G, and lots of offices, labeled with four-digit numbers. Of course, four floors and seven floors do not match up, so to get to floor 3 you have to take the elevator to either floor F and walk down a flight of stairs, or floor E and walk up a flight of stairs. What's more, both sections of the building are squares that only connect in one corner, so when you take the elevator to floor F, good luck finding the flight of stairs. Plus random hallways shoot off each side of the square, and they all look the same. Plus the building is set on a slope, so each entrance from the outside leads to a different inside level. Plus I deeply suspect that, like Hogwarts, rooms and staircases move around at night.

All this means that I spent much of last semester comically confused about where my classes were. I mostly just showed up in my department, whose outside door I finally managed to find, hidden behind the service truck unloading area, and waited for one of my classmates to walk through on their way to class. When nobody walked through, I was in trouble. In fact, I had two of my classes, each meeting once a week, in the same classroom, and I didn't realize it until about a month after school started. All classrooms look the same, you know, and I came at it each day from a different direction, and left each day through a different door, which I think excuses me. At least a little.

So you can imagine how things went the other day when an undergrad approached me in the hallway of my department and asked how to get to room 86. I knew enough to know that room was in the other half of the building, on another floor, and to know that I'd never be able to just tell her how to get there: after a few seconds of me going, "Um, I think you walk straight, and then maybe up some stairs? And then you turn? Left? Or maybe right?" I finally just said, "Let me take you." So we set off on a Dwinelle adventure, with me pretending to be confident and the undergrad sweetly following along, not getting annoyed when I, first, walked us right into the backstage of the theater; second, took us to a dead-end door leading into the courtyard; third, found a set of stairs that didn't lead to the level we wanted; fourth, walked us around the square of the French department, twice; and fifth, gave up.

"You want to know how I find my way around this building?" I asked. She nodded. "I find my way around this building," I said. So, together, we found the nearest exit, walked around the outside of the building, and entered through the door on the level she wanted. For future reference, I told her, she should just memorize that door and never enter through any other one. Or she should find an older grad student, or one with a sense of direction. I'd be much more useful, after all, if she needed someone to take an emergency nap.

Adventures in Hiking

Yosemite National Park is, as it turns out, in California. That came as a surprise to me, since I had always confused Yosemite and Yellowstone (look, they both start with Y, they’re both in the west, and they both have bears; how can an East Coaster be expected to keep track of the difference?) and therefore assumed that Yosemite was also in Idaho. (We won’t even talk about how disappointed I was to learn, a year ago, that Yellowstone is only barely in Idaho.)

I learned this because my (extremely athletic) ward had planned an overnight hiking and camping trip at Yosemite, which also explains why I found myself, late Friday night, or, to be more accurate, early Saturday morning, after classes and informal syntax gatherings, after a rushed packing job and dinner, and after a trip on BART and four hours in a car, sleeping in a tent, trying not to roll downhill onto the three girls crammed next to me. I mostly succeeded.

Early Saturday morning, around four, the ward activities coordinator walked around the campsite, shining his flashlight into tents and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for which I’m sure he will get bonus points in heaven, depending of course on how God feels about the U.S. flag. I know I will get bonus points for not strangling him.

We were at the trailhead by six, loaded down with water, and, in my case, everything a girl could need hiking, from moleskin for blisters to a whistle to a deck of cards. (My hyper-responsible uncle packed for me. Though, um, not entirely.) We set off in a group, about forty of us, determined to make it to the top of Half Dome.

My quest for Half Dome went wrong about three miles in. I was somewhere in the middle of the pack, hiking together with this guy from the ward, keeping a safe distance from the dating couple ahead of us, but when the four of us came to a fork in the path, we couldn’t see the others up ahead, and couldn’t see Half Dome listed on any of the signs, and so, entirely on accident, chose the path less traveled by.

(I would like to state here, for the record, that I did not choose our path. That’s right: I got lost and it wasn’t my fault. I’m still excited about that.)

By the time we figured out we had taken a wrong turn, we had climbed a mile of steep switchbacks, and had probably fallen behind the last people in our group, so we decided to continue on our new hike. Another few miles along the path, we ran into a pair of girls hiking the same trail from the opposite direction, who were tired and blistered, and resting from their with heavy backpacks, and convinced them to turn around and join us. (I like to think my deck of cards was a draw for them, but, come to think of it, it was probably the moleskin for their blisters.)

But our path less traveled by made all the difference. Sure, the new hike was eight miles uphill, but so was Half Dome, and the new hike didn’t require hiking those eight miles down to the group’s designated meeting spot, just hitchhiking down, which is a lot easier. (Advice to females: ask around while waiting in line for the bathroom.) And sure, there was no shade on our new hike, and sure, I exhausted myself by volunteering to carry another backpack, but at least I didn’t have to pull myself up a bare rock face with cables. (Plus, hey, bonus points in heaven.) And I may have missed out on bonding with the whole ward, but This Guy and The Couple were very pleasant, even funny, and so were our new hiking friends, once we agreed to disagree about whether Mormons are Christian. I don't think I've ever enjoyed getting lost so much. And in the end, the view from Glacier Point, with the sun shining on Half Dome across the valley, was worth any number of sleepless nights, national anthems, wrong turns, heavy backpacks, heat, and evangelical Christians, all of which is a very convoluted way to reach my real point: I'm glad Yosemite is in California.

Do these things happen to other people too?

Having finished the search for housing—a story I’ll tell later—I’ve been searching for cheap furniture small enough to fit into my future space. My aunt’s best friend’s son was moving out, so she sent me down to his apartment to scavenge his desk and, possibly, bed. (I feel like such a vulture.)

After determining that both the desk and bed were too large for my place, at least if I want to move around, I said goodbye and headed out, only realizing once he had shut the door behind me that I had no idea how to leave his apartment building.

Luckily, there were lighted EXIT signs, so, like any rational person, I followed those, only to find that they spat me out into a locked parking lot. I looked around the gate for an open button of some kind, but found nothing. Shrugging my shoulders, I turned around to the door I came from, only to find that, of course, it was locked.

Crap. I wandered around the back of the parking lot into an open courtyard, only to find that all the doors there were locked too. There was a set of stairs, though, leading to a balcony off the first-floor apartments, so I went to try the doors up there.

Again, no luck: all the doors were locked, and my situation was increasing in awkwardness, as to reach those doors I had to pass by not only a couple loudly having sex in their first-floor bedroom, but also an Indian woman standing at her sliding door and suspiciously watching me pass. Oh, and did I mention that the setup required me to walk by her door three times? Yep. I’m sure she was delighted.

(But not as delighted as the girl having sex, at least by the sound of it.)

I wonder if, at this point, I should just call the guy whose furniture I was seeing. Does the embarrassment of having to ask a stranger to come get me outweigh the embarrassment of being late for FHE because I was locked inside an apartment complex? I decide that yes, it does, and I look around the courtyard for another means of escape. There’s a small storage area in back, and I scramble up onto a pile of cinderblocks, thinking maybe I can escape over the fence. Unfortunately, that path would only drop me down into the locked courtyard next door. I return to the courtyard to find the Indian woman standing outside now, openly staring at me.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m trapped inside this apartment complex and need a way out. Can I walk through your apartment to get back inside the building and use the doors from in there?"

She stares at me. “I…no…speak…English,” she says.

Just my luck. I ask a few more questions and find she’s not even a north Indian; she’s a Telugu speaker from Andra Pradesh. I test out her Indian language education anyway: “Kya ap hindi bol sakte hain?” Can you speak Hindi?

Her eyes widen and she nods, eagerly. I’ve forgotten most of my Hindi but can still understand some; her English production is poor but she has some comprehension. In the next few minutes, we manage, with her speaking Hindi and me speaking English pantomime, to communicate a few basic facts: I’m trapped in this apartment building and would like a way out. She’s just visiting her sister in America for a few months. I would like to walk through her apartment. Not into! Through! She would like to guard her sister’s apartment well. Not into! Not through! I would like to know if she has keys to any of these doors. Her sister, who is the building manager, has all the keys and will be home in an hour. An hour? I can’t wait that long! Well, then, she says, call your friend.

I sigh and dial the phone, knowing that this has only been made more embarrassing by the fact that I left the guy’s apartment roughly twenty minutes ago. I don’t know whether I am disappointed or elated when he doesn’t pick up.

So then I’m really stuck. FHE has started ten minutes before, and I’m looking at waiting another hour for the building manager to return. I eye the fence surrounding the courtyard, which is only seven or eight feet high, and I decide that maybe I can scale it and jump down on the other side. I find a plastic chair, set it up in front of the fence, and am standing on it contemplating how best to hop the fence when a large white van pulls up and Building Manager Sister steps out. She wants to be polite, I can tell, but her face clearly asks, What the hell is this white girl doing on my fence?

I explain the situation to her, hopefully clearly enough that she can fill her sister in later, and she tells me where the emergency exit button is in the garage, hidden in a dark corner I never would have spotted on my own. Oh. Problem solved. I press the button and walk free, arriving at FHE just in time, unfortunately, for kickball. At least I had a good story to tell while trying to avoid my turn to kick.

Ikea'd

I’ve spent the last few days doing nothing at my parents’ rented condo in Mountain View, mainly to take a break from all the nothing I was doing at my uncle’s house in Piedmont. (Forty-five percent of me loves spending entire days refreshing the Craigslist rentals page; the sane fifty-five really wishes school would hurry up and start already.) Yesterday’s program of activities included a long swim, dinner at Google, and a pint of ice cream while watching TV. Today’s program included a long walk through a county park, dinner at a sushi restaurant, and a pint of ice cream while watching TV.

(Side note: what is TV coming to these days? My parents and I stumbled upon a program that followed real estate assessors doing their jobs at various houses and provided pre-commercial break dramatic tension with questions like “Will their equity offset their expenses?” We nearly died laughing. And then we actually stuck around through the commercials to find out. I guess I should ask what my family is coming to nowadays.)

(Oh, and their equity didn’t offset their expenses. It so rarely does.)

Before watching TV—okay, full disclosure, maybe it was sometime in between episodes of Really Gross Medical Surgeries on Live TV and Boring Reality Show #784—my parents and I went out to, as they put it, “pre-shop” for their new home in the Boston area. They didn’t want to buy furniture, just to fondle it. So we spent about a half hour in Crate and Barrel, my mom and I still dressed in the T-shirts and sweat pants we had worn on our walk that morning, and entertained ourselves by sitting on the couches and reading the display books, picking up random kitchen equipment—a tiny scale, an adjustable measuring spoon, a $5.95 cake tester—and chucking throw blankets at each other. (Hey, we were just following directions.) We are among this nation’s elite, you know. Take a minute and think about that.

And then we went to Ikea. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and it was a revelation to me that stores like that exist. I wandered through, wide-eyed and excited by all the cheap bookshelves filled with Swedish-language books and the neat computer desks that transform into cabinets. (Take that, Michael Bay!) I was turning the pages of a translated Stephen Fry book when my parents called to tell me they had already left the store, and then, suddenly, my carefree walk through fantasy living rooms had turned into a kind of cruel endurance maze in a Scandinavian modern style furniture warehouse roughly the size of Rhode Island. I couldn’t find the door I had come in, and the other door was on the floor below, after about a half-mile (I’m not kidding; I timed it) of affordable home accessories, and then upon exiting through that door all I could find was a parking lot exit, which took walking from parking area 2A down to parking area 2V, easily another half-mile, by which point my parents had called three times to laugh at me, and then lost patience and simply driven over to pick me up.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, or even why I’m telling it, but there are a few salient points that stand out: there are a lot of low-cost utilitarian home products in this world, and also a few high-cost useless ones; time spent watching TV with my parents beats time spent alone teaching myself to program computers to guess the number; I have absolutely no sense of direction, though that should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever driven with me; and I have a lot fewer interesting things to blog about now that I live in the First World. I mean, I could live-blog each refreshing of the Craigslist page, but, hey, watching TV is so much easier. Besides, that way I might actually learn what “equity” means.

It's a Jungle Out There

Or, Into the Woods

On my first day in Sumatra, in the small town of Bukittinggi, a man walked up to me on the street and started chatting. His Indonesian was clear and easy to understand, and he was funny and knew a lot about the area, so I played along and let myself get taken to the town’s clock tower, traditional dance hall, and night market. The next morning, as I was touring a particularly scenic spot, he walked up and claimed he had been looking for me all morning: where had I been? I was planning on walking to a nearby town famous for its silver production, about an hour’s walk away, so he offered to accompany me and show me some sights along the way, such as his ganja farm and, right next door, his childhood home. I’m far more naïve than you’d expect, so of course I accepted his offer and we set out. It was only a half-hour later, well-entangled in what I would call a jungle but what he adamantly insisted was only the woods, that the various dangers of my situation occurred to me. By that time, however, I was far too lost to go back on my own, so I shrugged and put thoughts of rape and murder out of my head.

I’m glad I did. The hike took about four hours, and, no matter what my guide claimed, we were definitely not on the path that Lonely Planet had mentioned—Lonely Planet didn’t warn me about fording a thigh-deep river four times, or climbing up rock walls, or walking through mud to my ankles--but it was fantastic. The night before, my guide had claimed to be an orang hutan*, or "man of the forest," and in the clear light of day, this turned out to be true. He knew everything about the forest, and showed me which plants are good for toothache and which ones were good for getting high. (I suspect he had a lot of experience with the latter.) He knew which plants would fold up delicately if you touched them—“Check it out!” he said, “It’s a Muslim plant!”—and which plants would hurt you if you even thought about touching them. He cut raw cinnamon from its tree and gave me unripe coffee beans, plucked straight from the bush, as souvenirs. He shushed me as a snake crossed the path, pointed out a gigantic elephant beetle sleeping on a tree branch, and noticed when an eagle was soaring far overhead. He also, of course, taunted me for my city-girl ways, clumsy about stepping over fallen tree branches, laughed uproariously at my nervousness when several of the free-range water buffaloes we encountered took a strong interest in me and trotted over to say hello, and made it overwhelmingly obvious that he expected me to sleep with him in exchange for the tour.

For the record, I did not, but it was equally obvious that most Western tourists would, and did. My guide had a whole collection of amazing stories—“when I was young and the water buffaloes were my best friends”; “the time I got bitten by a snake and my dog saved my life”; “when I lived on the streets of Jakarta”; “how I visited all 31 provinces of Indonesia without any money”—that were, I think, about 30% true and 70% cleverly calculated to seduce impressionable young white girls. He also had a whole litany of easy-conquest stories: the Dutch girl, the French girl, the Australian girl, the British girl. I told him pretty plainly that no, I was not his girlfriend-to-be and he should stop introducing me as such, and no, I was not going to go home with him, and no, I was not going to be "the American girl" on his list. To his credit, he didn't immediately leave me in the wilderness, but continued being friendly, though I did have to work to keep his hand off my knee. Hope springs eternal, I guess. I was not sorry to disappoint him, and that evening, after returning to civilization, such as it was, I politely thanked him, gave him a fake phone number, and promptly skipped town.

So here’s to you, King of the Swingers. May you live out many more happy days as a jungle VIP, and may you, next time, find a girl who will fall for the snake bite story. Thanks for the great day.

*whence the English "orangutan," for the interested