I'm growing my hair out, but it's not really as deliberate as that sounds. I don't really know why I'm doing it, even though I can toss off a few legitimate-sounding reasons at the mildest prompting, as though I have to justify what I'm doing.

There is a photograph of myself that I love. I'm in navy cords and a t-shirt with blue daisies all over it, standing on my bed against a wall papered over with my childish drawings. My arms are flung wide and I am grinning. I am maybe four years old and my hair is golden blonde and tumbles over my shoulders. I look like the child of hippies, which I am, but never so obviously unmistakably so. I love this photo of myself but I don't actually see myself in it. I don't remember it being taken, I don't remember wearing that hilariously period-perfect shirt with the daisies. The photograph doesn't match the picture in my head. That picture was formed a few years later, when my hair was much shorter and quite a bit darker, and I was routinely mistaken for a boy. I don't mean that I got double-takes or prompted confusion, I mean that people looked at me and saw a boy, basically, all the time unless I wore clothes that explicitly marked me as a girl. During those years I would practice femininity in compensatory over-the-top fits - a sincerely-loved pink satin ruffly dress, for instance - but never in a sustained way. That is the picture that has endured, so much so that I am still a little surprised that people can look at me and know definitively from my appearance that I am a woman.

I did this once before, about 6 years ago, and it was strange. I didn't know then why I was doing it either, but I did, and I look at photographs from that time now and don't see myself in them either. I didn't do much with my longish hair, neglecting to trim for split ends or treat the damage I did to it in chlorinated pools, and mostly slotting it away in one of those hinged plastic claws. I gave myself Pippi Longstocking-ish braids once, and took a picture of the results. In the photo I am frowning. I recall feeling uncomfortable about my looks most of the time, wondering when I would be past 'awkward stage' length, stripped of my normal baseline level of self-confidence* and unfamiliar with the face in the mirror. And yet I was, unmistakably, for the first time in my life, turning actual heads. It was subtle. There were longer looks and more eye contact from people I passed on the street. An uptick in the general friendliness of strangers. And by 'people' and 'strangers' I mean men. It happened gradually, as my hair got longer, and it took me a while to recognize for what it was. It was like high heels, or makeup, but it was just there on my head all the time, sending an unmistakeable message, even in a sweaty ponytail. And that message made me really uncomfortable.

This happens a lot, I understand, to people who are overweight, and then are not. People respond to them as they are - as not-fat people - but the reactions seem wrong, both because they're so at odds with that mental photograph, but also, I think, because of what it says about us collectively. We treat thin people better, we treat pretty people better, and we treat people better when they conform to all sorts of hard-to-articulate norms, and we do a lot of that stuff without totally realizing it. I sort of knew on some level that I was resisting a norm by keeping my hair short all that time, but I didn't actually keep it short as an act of resistance. I just thought long hair was too much of a pain in the ass, and I looked better with short hair anyway. Occasionally I wondered why people assumed I was a lesbian as often as they did. Long hair is actually less of a pain in the ass in some ways than short hair, it turns out, but I still got most of it cut off just before going to my 10th high school reunion. Andy joked afterwards that I did it to "live up or down" to someone's expectations of me (possibly my own) and I didn't bother to contradict him. And the weird stuff stopped like I'd flicked a switch. Walking out of the place where I got the cut, I kept checking myself out in windows and feeling a familiar bit of swagger. I looked good. And the only people who spoke to me all day were women.

So anyway, I'm doing it again, not sure why again. And the other stuff is starting again and there's a part of me that likes it. Another part of me hates that first part. That's maybe the part that doesn't exactly like what I see in the mirror.

Except when it's in pigtails. I love wearing pigtails.

* This is getting pretty deep into the muck of self image and beauty standards and eye of the beholder crap, and I don't intend this to be a compliment fishing expedition, but look: I know that I'm not attractive in the consistent external-validation-from-perfect-strangers sort of way. I don't get a lot of compliments on my appearance from strangers. That said, I generally feel okay about the way I look, and certain things can boost that all the way up into feeling really good. One of them is clothes that fit well and flatter the many peculiarities of my body, and another is hair that is either "daringly" short or some sort of bob with the longest bits landing just below my cheekbones that is behaving well at the moment.

I bought my courier bag like a week after I moved to Central Square in 1998. It seemed like a necessary thing at the time, me being a newly-minted Cantabridgian and all. I had just quit my job at Starbucks to work at 1369, and the Courierware store was practically right in my neighborhood. I wanted very much not to be a backpack person anymore. It cost seventy dollars. I skimped on pockets to buy sheer cubic inches and have never regretted that choice. The label wore away to nothing years ago, and the black parts are gray-brown now, bleached by sun. I've carried it on five continents and shoved it under seats on more flights trains and buses than I could ever remember. Every once in a while I do some quick math to amortize the cost of the bag for the years I have owned it, trying to talk myself into replacing it. It always ends up having the opposite effect, prodding me to keep it even longer, to get the cost-per-year down to five dollars, or four, or one. One dollar per year is roughly when I can expect to be dead.

Today, an exceptional but not extraordinary day, I carried the following home in the bag:
A laptop
Three issues of the New York Times Sunday magazine, two of the Sunday book review. (I'm hoarding them for air travel next week.)
A red file folder of documents to read
Two spiral notebooks
A Kindle
9 CDs in jewel cases
2 DVDs
Footprint guide to Peru
An apple
A full jar of peanut butter
And the usual day-to-day stuff - wallet, keys, pens, various things that go into USB ports, a camera, tampons, and a thing of lip balm that smells like clove.

1. If I hadn't stupidly left my ipod sitting on top of a treadmill at the gym, I would still have my ipod. I wouldn't have to re-rip a bunch of CDs to load up and otherwise configure a new one, and I'd be about $250 richer.

2. If I hadn't stupidly left my ipod sitting on top of a treadmill at the gym, I would not have taken a nice long walk to and from the Apple store on Newbury to get a new one, under a sky that is actually honest-to-gosh blue and a sun that made it honest-to-gosh warm out for the first time in what seems like forever. I would not have run into an acquaintance and his wife-who-I-hadn't-met-yet, I would not have seen the goofy spectacle of OMGRapture megaphone trolls being studiously ignored by every single person in or passing through Copley Square, and I would not have a shiny new iPod with a larger storage capacity than my old one and the optimism that a blank slate always inspires. No scratches on the screen, no dust in the crevices, no mis-tagged files mucking things up.

But if I get home and there's a message from the nice lady at the gym saying somebody turned my ipod in? I'm totally selling the new one.

I've never been much for New Year's Resolutions. January is hard, cold dark and usually pretty snowy. Simply getting through it, at least in this part of the world,* should be counted as a victory, and it doesn't make much sense to me to up the degree of difficulty by trying to tack on new good habits or strip away old bad ones. January, especially the first probably-hungover day of the month, always seemed like a really bad time to be ambitious, despite the temptation of fresh calendars and other tabula rasa gestures. I save the bold plans for my birthday, near the solstice and exactly half a year removed from Christmas, when I genuinely crave fresh healthy foods and the long twilight makes it seem like there's time for one more project. Or September which, thanks to my profession, has never lost its new-pencil-case sense of possibility and optimism. This year, I will start working on papers when they are assigned, not the night before they are due. This year I will empty my email inbox on a regular basis. This year I will dress like a vaguely professional lady and stop buying hoodies with animals on them.

January is not a time for dressing like a professional lady, or even bothering to shave my legs. January is for getting over with, preferably by sleeping a lot, wearing the polar fleece pajama pants and self-medicating with comfort foods.** January is for admiring the strange purple color of the night sky while it snows and emailing your boss to say that you'll be working from home the next day for your safety.

Except that on New Year's Eve, I ran a little errand. I biked over to the bookstore at the mall because I had a coupon and got a tiny, discounted page-a-day moleskine notebook. The proportions are strange, oddly fat and it doesn't quite fit neatly into any pocket or spot. A guy at work asked, sincerely, if it was my Bible, and he should really know better. It's awkward. But it's starting to take. For a normal person, there's room for maybe two sentences per page, which was part of the appeal. I can cram in way way more, though, and often I do. The idea is that there's something worth remembering about every day, even if it's just that January is dull and it snowed a lot and there were a lot of Shackleton jokes tossed around and gosh, I do leave the house on a pretty regular basis to do things other than buy groceries and cups of coffee that a person more committed to Calendar-Inspired Self Improvement would probably have started making at home on the first of the year. I won't front that this is writing that I'm doing "for me," like it's particularly deep or private. It's more that I'm sparing you. So, you're welcome. Happy New Year.

* I understand that it's pretty much what the entire enterprise is meant for, but sweet jesus am I tired of reading complaints about things like low temperatures and snow in Boston, of all places, on Facebook. Especially when recent transplants feel the need to weigh in by musing on the relative pleasantness of California weather.
** I decided on Monday that I wanted Frito Pie for dinner, so that's what we had. On Monday I also received a copy of Michael Pollan's book Food Rules from my employer, which published the book. I'd have read the gesture as kinda patronizing if I didn't actually want to read the book, which told me that the soy-based fake ground beef I use in my chili recipe (to say nothing of the actual Fritos) is emphatically against the rules. Michael Pollan, it should be noted, lives in California. He can lay off me for another week or so. I'm usually in a much better mood come February, even though it's just a date on the calendar and it's still usually cold out. Ahem.

I think the screenwriter of The Film Formerly Known As "Fuck Buddies" had our living room bugged.

from a totally seat-of-the-pants trip to New York last weekend.

Boots! Boots! Coveted and bookmarked and fretted over for long enough to be stupid, but never purchased because my feet are small and my calves are not and that's always tricky. They fit, I bought them, they make me want to wear a-line miniskirts and colorful tights all the time and Andy thinks they look silly. Success!

In the back of a mostly-ridiculous occasionally-cool-but-still-nerdy pop-up store-cum-gallery you can stand between a couple of digital projectors and look at a shadowy version of yourself on a wall. Birds reel and flock on the wall above your head, responding to your movements. I stood behind the installation and watched a girl jump and wave a hat above her head to scatter the birds.

Just enough time and proximity to squeeze in a stop for coffee and chatter about travel and work travel and how they are not the same thing but sometimes they are enough alike to make the latter one a bit of a temptation-laden balancing act, a thing unto itself.

A row of pictures on the wall, where the table used to be, in the eyeline of the high chair that used to be next to the table. My friends hold their one-year-old daughter in front of the row of pictures, and they say goodnight to each of the pictures. Some are of babies, one is of a Scottish woman notable enough to be on a postcard sent by the one-year-old's grandparents but not notable enough for me to remember why. The one-year-old has an enormous stuffed dinosaur toy, somewhat bigger than she is, and she grunts like a weightlifter when she lifts it off the ground. Her t-shirt has robots all over it.

In the basement of a bigger venue is a just-my-speed vinyl-only dance night that involves almost no ass-grinding and one tuneless shouty rendition of "Happy Birthday" for one of the DJs. A girl feeds me orange slices and a guy I recognize from TV borrows another girl's slouchy white hat and dances with her, grinning. A German dude asks if I am from New York City and then, when I say no, guesses "Brooklyn?"

I keep adding to a list of addresses and nearby subway stops, and in the middle of the list is a string of four different Turkish places serving gozleme, which I've been more-or-less consistently craving for 3-plus years now. One of them is convenient and, it turns out, celebrating an anniversary with an across-the-board discount that just about covers the price of a glass of raki. I add water to the glass, partly because raki is strong and served straight, and partly because adding water turns the clear liquor a cloudy white and the chemical reaction amuses me. This gesture draws the approving nod of an older guy at the next table over who laughs explosively when I greet him in Turkish.

I'd stayed in the hotel before, but must have used the shared bathroom at the other end of the hallway last time, because I didn't notice before that you can look at the Statue of Liberty from the window while you are brushing your teeth.

At 4 AM, while walking from the subway to my hotel after the obligatory post-dancing late-night slice, a well-dressed guy in the general vicinity of the Standard approaches me, asking for directions to Scores. "I know this is a bad idea," is his lead-in, and I am expecting something more obnoxious. I tell him, sincerely, that I'd help if I could. He looks like he could stand to redistribute a little wealth. I have no guidance to offer, though, other than a general wave in the uptown direction. He may have doubted my sincerity because I was laughing at the time. My laughter attracts the attention of another guy who offers that he likes my stockings. "Fuck the stockings!" I say. "What about the boots?!" and get a mumbled response.

Dear New York,

I am coming to see you this weekend. Thanks for opening up a cheap room at the Jane for me at nearly the last minute!

Love,
Ann

Dear San Francisco,

I am coming to see you, too, next month, and bringing Andy. Please don't rain the entire week.

Love,
Ann

Too many things were too much up in the air for me to have a real itinerary this trip. I knew I'd start in Jogjakarta and head east from there, roughly, but that was about it. So now my trip is a bit more than half over, and I've just arrived in Kuta, Bali, which is sort of delightfully tacky and an easy place to serve as a temporary home base for some of the more absurd activities I still want to tick off my list (Surfing lessons! Ride a bike down a volcano!) but I don't imagine it'll hold my interest for more than a few days, which is a new experience for me, travel-wise. I know I have to be back in Jakarta next Saturday to catch my flight home, and that's all. I'm getting crazy ideas now, including leaving Indonesia altogether, or playing random throw-a-dart-at-a-route-map games at a travel shop. I could go see orangutans! I could go see elaborate cremation ceremonies! I could take a berth on a Pelni cargo ship to wherever-the-fuck!

The last few days were spent in the company of some friends who are just getting into the meaty part of a 3-month trip through Southeast Asia. I'm jealous of their leisure time (and they, I imagine, are in turn maybe a teeny bit envious of the fact that I don't have to limit myself to a budget as strict as theirs owing to the brevity of my trip and, you know, having a job). But if I ever did a truly lengthy stint of traveling, I might find myself a bit paralyzed trying to decide where to go and what to see. I could go anywhere, and that's actually kind of scary because I pretty much want to go almost everywhere. This mode of thinking makes the hunker-down habits of some backpacker types very very understandable. You have no sense of urgency, and probably a great deal of comfort to take in not moving, in deferring decisions about where to go next, because each choice requires exclusion, and there's nothing more seductive than possibility.

Meantime I'm toying, for this five minutes anyway, with the idea of a coffee plantation at a high elevation somewhere in Sumatra. With a hammock. There definitely needs to be a hammock.

I bought these pants in a Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store* at the Mall of America on the advice of a friend who loved them so much she got multiple pairs in every available color, and she was right, they're great, especially for wearing over a wet swimsuit, or in a kayak because they're so thin and dry so fast. I don't always think about that trip when I wear them, especially since it's been so long since the actual trip - 10 years, I think - but sometimes I do. There was the house we stayed in, owned by a minor rock star and rented by my friend who loved the pants and her girlfriend, where every room was painted a different color. There was a high-concept fusion restaurant with mean fortune cookies and cocktail monkeys, and there was a slightly terrifying flash flood that totaled a nearly-brand-new car and forced us to walk I-forget-how-far through what I remember as more-than-knee-high water after the engine cut out and we noticed water rising from the floorboards. Or maybe that was another trip to Minneapolis; I think there were three altogether. One of them was a frigid spring break, cosmic payback for the time the friend who loved the pants visited me in Boston on her spring break just in time for the April Fool's Day blizzard of 1997. Anyway, it was a long time ago that I bought these pants, and I wear them a lot, especially over wet swimsuits and in kayaks. The fly is not a zipper, or buttons, it is velcro, which is a tiny bit of absurdity in public restrooms that only add to the charm of the pants.

I wore them last year on a  hike on Cat Ba island, which is mostly limestone with a glaze of topsoil and vegetation and people. At some point during the hike I banged my thigh against some exposed rock. I didn't notice the scraped-up bruise until that night, and I didn't notice the small rip in the fabric of the pants until days later, when it took some thinking to figure out how it might have gotten there. The rip is hard to spot, just barely large enough for a finger to fit through, and I keep meaning to sew it shut, but I haven't gotten around to it, and I still keep wearing them. I wore them on a pack-in-your-own-water-but-sleep-under-a-real-roof camping trip last month, and I'll pack them for this next trip. Probably while I'm away I'll buy some other article of clothing or useful object that will fit itself into my wardrobe or my habits and I'll think about where it came from for a while, but maybe I'll keep it for so long, or use it for so often that it's just there, and every once in a while I'll remember where it came from while packing it up to take on another trip and lament that some day it will fall apart completely. In the meantime, I'm gonna wear these pants. But I should really sew up that fucking rip.

* I happened to be in a location of the same Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store last night, trying on pants. Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store is particularly guilty of vanity sizing to the point where I now habitually pull clothes from the kids section to try on. According to Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store, I am a boys size 12 or 14 and that is fucking ridiculous, especially because Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store has this totally obnoxious policy where they don't carry plus sizes in their physical stores because they, I dunno, want to keep fat customers hidden, but sell dudes pants with an advertised waist size of, like, 36" that are actually 41". You are weirdly hypocritical, Crappy Fast Fashion Chain Store!

While packing up to move earlier this year, I found the business card I wrote about in this entry. It had been serving as a bookmark in a paperback I took to one of the local shops to sell for credit. I have no idea how long it had been there. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away, though I no longer want to carry it around with me all the time. It's sitting on my desk. I'm not sure what I will do with it.