When I wake, I find myself on a knoll above rolling hills of tawny gold. Dark green trees spindle their way across the landscape, like candy from a party piñata. I feel the closest civilization must be a hundred miles away, for I cannot see it, and yet, there is Laly’s incredible camp all around me. This sensation persists throughout the day. ( Read more... )

This morning it is not light but sound that heaves me into wakefulness, a hymenopteric thrum that goes on, desolate and uneven, until I lever myself out of bed and go see the fuss. Shock sharpens me. Stuck between my curtain and the windows is a wasp of Paleozoic proportion, her palm-length bulk rising again and again as her head mows the glass and ( Read more... )

Today I sat down and backed up 10 years of LiveJournal entries, one month at a time (the only way LJ allows you to do it). When I finished, my feeling of distress came not from the time consuming nature of the task, but the discovery that a number of months were completely empty. What happened then? I found myself wondering ( Read more... )

I don’t know how many people told me how cool my summer would be. Saving tigers! Living next to the Russia-North Korea border! Being different! But there is a seething gulf between being labeled cool, and living in a way that makes it actually cool. And right now, I am far from the edge of living. In fact, I am turning into the worst kind of ( Read more... )