After talking to a few friends I may have realized somethings . . . The first thing I may have realized is that somewhere along the way I have forgotten where my tongue is. Weird. I sit down with people and, as Kathleen Kelly would say b-l-a-n-k. I don't know if it has to do with the time of day or what but it is like I have lost all memory of my life. It is all a closed box. You say "Potato" and I say . . . NOTHING! I sit stare blankly and think to myself, "come on you've gotta have SOMETHING to say, anything please!" But no, blank. It is really weird. I use to be able to go on and on but . . .

I wonder though . . . I go through phases of eating a TON and not eating hardly at all. Well right now I'm in the not eating hardly at all and a lot of what I'm eating probably isn't the world healthiest food (not that it is junk food), but I think I'm allergic to something. I'm like tired all the time. All the time. I need to see a doctor.

So I have a close friend who . . . well gives me a hard time every time I open my mouth about PNG. She does so in good fun. She doesn't mean anything by it--she is just laughing at how I repeat the same mini speech over and over and over again. And she is right it is funny, and we are close enough to where we make fun of each other a lot. But still . . .

When I first came back from PNG I was always saying "well in PNG . . ." "In PNG . . ." "The food in PNG . . ." "Back home in PNG . . ." Needless to say my friends didn't like it and I came off as a decent sized ass because of it, even though I was just feeling homesick, insecure, and just trying to validate a life that I felt (or that I felt others felt) was unvalid. How else do you fit in when you don't know all the memories and good ol' times they are talking about?

Now I don't open my mouth much about home. If you ask me where I'm from I'll say "I live in Denver." When before I would say "I grew up in Papua New Guinea". Now if you say "Nice bag" I'll say "Thank you" instead of "Thanks, it's actually a Bilum. It's from Papua New Guinea . . ." I no longer open my mouth to tell someone how absolutely perfect the weather is, or how it would rain and it would be the best thing in the world, or how they would burn mountains and it would rain ash, or how the ditches would flood, or how good Beef Crackers taste, or how every Christmas we would get Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew in from America and we would all go crazy over it, or how I would walk up and down the dirt streets for hours, or how I would throw stones at my best friends window and she would come out and talk to me late at night, or how there were earthquakes that I'm petrified of, or how I road BMX bikes and the kicked my ass half the time, or how we would go gumiing on the river, or how we would hang out in the haus win, or how the fog sets in on the valley, or how you could hear the rain on the roofs all the way across center, or how our water was gravity fed and the water pump was right outside my window and I loved falling asleep to that sound . . .

I don't talk about those things any more. If you ask me my mind will freeze, go blank, and I won't know what to tell you. I'll probably just stutter around and quickly change the subject. Consequently I don't talk about anything any more. I guess I'm just out of words.