Sunday

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Pre-Script: this was supposed to be posted on Sunday night, but I haven't had internet at my house - an issue which has been solved in a theoretical sense but not a practical one (i.e. I know what the problem is, I just haven't been able to fix it yet). So, sorry for the lack of bloggage - and put yourself in the mindset of "Sunday night" when you're reading this.

Today was a weird day.

I woke up with a brutally sore throat, which came as a total shock. Usually, I can feel a sore throat coming several days in advance; it starts as a tickle in the back of my throat, and gets progressively worse until the 3rd or 4th day when it reaches an apex. In other cases (particularly after nights when beer is on the menu), I wake up with a sore throat that gradually dissipates throughout the day, never to be heard from again. Today's seems to be the natural, non-alcohol-induced kind (I did have some beer over at J's house on Friday night, but I've never encountered any sort of delayed alcohol-induced sore throat, that seems unlikely), but there was no lead-up.

I suppose it could have been something I ate - I ate a lot of crackers yesterday, maybe the salt? It's not like I ate a whole package, though. I had sushi for dinner, and at the end I had a couple bites of straight wasabi, because I love the wasabi spiciness - the brief but powerful rush of tingling in your mouth and nose, and the fact that it doesn't linger like "regular" spiciness - so I suppose that could have been it. Maybe the salt of the soy sauce contributed too. But that's never happened with sushi before, so I'm skeptical.

(By the way, side note about sushi last night. The entrance to the sushi restaurant was inside the deli next door. When we arrived, they didn't have any tables, but they had extra tables set up inside the deli. So for the first 20 minutes or so, we sat there at our plastic table and chairs, studying the menu as customers filed in and out, picking up their groceries, before being ushered into the very posh sushi restaurant.)

It's no Sushi Kan... Deli Kan?

So, as is often the case when I feel even the slightest bit sick, I resolved to stay home and take it easy today. I tell myself this is so that I can nip whatever may be coming in the bud, but in reality it's just an easy excuse to be lazy.

Of course, this led me to stay home all day, and aside from stepping onto my balcony for a few brief moments, I haven't been outside. This is something I've been trying not to do while in Colombia, so hopefully I'll at least muster the energy to take the garbage out to keep the streak going (ed: I didn't. The streak is over). But so far, most of what I've seen today has been the inside of my apartment, and since I'm nicely settled in and used to the place (pictures soon, I promise), when I'm inside it doesn't feel like I'm in some exotic new country.

At some point today, I decided to listen to an album by the Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (that's the one with Do You Realize on it). I hadn't listened to it much before; I just downloaded it shortly before leaving the other continent, so apart from the aforementioned state song of Louisiana (or Oklahoma? I forget), I wasn't particularly familiar with the music. But as I was sitting at my desk, either doing some schoolwork or reading, the music made me stop what I was doing, close my eyes, and enjoy the moment. This is not a common occurrence for me; even though I'm constantly listening to or playing music, it's not often that I get totally absorbed in it. I think this has something to do with the logical and mathematical nature of my brain; whether I try to or not, I'm always simultaneously listening to the music and analyzing it. Concerts are never the superlative, life-changing experiences they seem to be for other people. But it does happen every now and then.

Sometime in the evening I started getting hungry (this, on the other hand, is a common occurrence), and I decided to make something large for dinner so I could take the rest for lunch tomorrow. Since my fridge isn't yet fully re-stocked, and I'm still accumulating kitchen equipment, my cooking possibilities for this type of meal are limited: basically, rice or pasta. Last time I made rice, so I went the pasta route, and the sauce was a very traditional (for me) mix of onions, green peppers, broccoli, tomatoes and a bit of tomato sauce.

So it was that I sat down to dinner, excitedly awaiting the first bite of a nostalgic dish, listening to the same Flaming Lips album (it had been put on repeat by this point). And it seems like all of these things - the mild sickness-induced drowsiness, the lack of outside reality, the tastes-like-home food, the affective music - conflated to sweep me away in a wave of emotion. What emotion that was, I cannot tell you. I wouldn't call it homesickness, because I wasn't particularly sad. And also, as mentioned, I feel at home here. Maybe home-wistfulness?

Or maybe it was simply living on another continent setting in. I've been in Colombia for three and a half weeks now, and I've bathed in a mud volcano, eaten lots of interesting, new food, and been immersed in a totally different culture, but I never got an overwhelming sense of I'm here now. Now, I didn't really get that sense tonight, either, but it was something close. Something like the feeling you get on a cold autumn night - a general warmth and sleepiness, the summer over and a long winter about to set in.

I don't know what that means, since the closest thing I'm getting to winter around here are the trade winds that come around in November for a few months, and give the 32˚ air a bit of a breeze to cool us off. Not exactly snowball fight weather. I suppose the significance is that it was something that felt like home, a feeling I've had every year of my life up til now. But this is home - for the next 10 months, at least.

Sorry to get all meditative on you guys. It's back to silliness and things being lost in translation tomorrow, I promise. Maybe I'll even get around to posting pictures of the school and my apartment.