I spent last week in a remote village on the side of a mountain in Spain, visiting my friend who owns a donkey as her mountain is too steep for cars. She has a DIY approach to life beyond any aspirations I recall ever having. The donkey is agreeable despite having what can only be described as a mohawk. The ostensible goal of the week was to learn how to make natural cosmetics, although the main goal for me was to see my friend and her world and the house she built in it. She teaches groups how to make shampoos and salves and creams, which she does with plants she harvests and distills. As a person generally devoted to the grid I feel like I don't belong in this group of medicinal herb aficionados but it is pointed out to me that lots of people feel they don't belong for many reasons so I try to be present and pretend to be someone who should be where she is. 

The forests are populated with cork trees stripped of bark from the waist down, their dusty blood colored cores exposed, and when, one night in the village, a flamenco dancer lifts the frills of her skirt to reveal her staccato legs I half expect a similar shade of red. 

Information seems to float across my brain and evaporate, like the day we distilled essential oils. We picked hidden wildflowers I struggled to find and collected them in baskets, and then used various tubes and contraptions to extract byproducts and small amounts of essential oils, the overflowing baskets boiled down to tiny vials. At times information flows so quickly through me that I feel that I lose even that which is essential.

Also, despite living among them, people are intense for me, it's like drinking condensed milk, and sometimes I have to just go lie down for an hour or two, like a preschooler or a genius, whichever. 

One day we go to a nearby farm to learn about making soap, which I decide is like baking as compared to the other things we've been doing, which are more like cooking; I consider this a very insightful and interesting observation and repeat it several times. Most of my observations are witty or "witty" asides such as one makes when not paying attention to the teacher, but this one is related to the material we're learning so I feel good about it.

There are sheep lying in a field like a bargain bin of pillows; up close they are probably scratchy, but at a distance they appear as fluffy restful piles of temptation.

On soap day we learn that soap was traditionally made of animal fat and ash and that this may be connected to animal sacrifice and volcanoes which is the kind of factoid my brain can actually hang onto so that's cool. 

I spend about an hour of the soap class nearly apoplectic with the desire to make a "little white lye" joke but I don't want to be the asshole whispering in the back of class all my life. There are increasing layers to this joke as the lesson goes on, like how the use of lye has a bad reputation but can be good for you when applied correctly and how we should be careful with lyes and children should be protected, etc. I have to leave the room before erupting into volcanic ash and giggles.

We make bags using natural dyes; we try on shoes handmade from leather. We make more creams and our faces are shiny from sitting by the fire, from hard laughter, from the moisturizer left over after we've spooned it into jars. Waste not want not. Everything smells of lavender and calendula.

A flock of chickens strut by, black feathers so glossy they appear deep blue; one chicken is doing all the talking and I wonder if they also need quiet time and whether I'm the noisy chicken.

After a week I leave for the airport, proudly laden with jars and bottles of things I made, like a kid after a week at camp. If eleven-year-old me met me now, would we recognize each other? I tend to think we would.

I wanted in some part to be away from home long enough to know what things actually mattered to me as identified by their absence. So far: utter darkness for sleep. A blanket or duvet and sheets. A window or good fan in the bathroom, and heat. Good toilet paper. Small things mostly. I need a lot more silence than I imagined. I enjoy my own company more than I remembered. I don't read as much as I thought. Now I am in the mountains, breathing air that smells variously familiar (Iike California, like Greece) or new to me, and with people who are similarly familiar or new, though nothing human is alien to me, and I am the most alien. I am reminded now that I am a city mouse and an indoor cat, fond of foods that are easy for me to find and require little work, of being stroked affectionately in front of fires, of smooth floors and furniture upon which to curl; that I like a human world even when the humans populating it can baffle me. I am mostly happy, mostly sleeping, mostly nourished, mostly liking where I am.

On Friday I went to the post office to mail the rest of the bookish artist's postcards, because I said I would. I don't generally like post offices, in part because of a catch-22 in which I don't go often and thus don't know how to behave and thus make mistakes and get reprimanded (like one Christmas, I addressed all the cards in festive red ink and stood in line forever to mail them and then was told I couldn't use red ink and so stepped out of line and quickly traced over them in black ink and then got back in line again but this was also not acceptable so I had to go and find new envelopes that fit the cards and redo them all), and thus don't like going to the post office and don't go often. But I said I would and I did. I don't mind doing things for other people half as much as I mind it for myself, and I like walking. I mapped out how to get to where google said the nearest post office was and it seemed fairly easy. I tried to take a shortcut through the medina which was my first time getting lost on the way, and which I did about ten more times before I found the post office. An interesting things about being a woman is that I spent the first 40 or so years of my life being evaluated primarily (or at least initially) on the basis of my looks, which meant a great deal of my mental space went towards that. When I lived in Japan this was my looks as a foreigner and then as a woman but it was never not about being a woman on some level and if you think it is the same for men: it is not. Anyway I've spent the past decade aging out of this evaluation and it's an interesting process. It has been weird this past month to be basically soaking in patriarchy and to be foreign and woman again after a nice break of being invisible, and to have to retrain the muscles of not making eye contact and walking down the street like I would be really happy to punch someone, which is true but not my usual face. "Striking." Every time I stood still to see if I could figure out where I was in relation to a post office, men needed to stop and talk to me and were sometimes very angry if I did not want to talk to them even if I was generally polite about it. One man who wanted to talk to me said he recognized me from the hotel which might be true but probably wasn't and he was very kind and said he'd take me to a post office but he took me to a carpet store instead which involved more men being increasingly grumpy that I wasn't being compliant even though I really wasted almost 0% of their time while a fair bit of my time had been wasted and I was no nearer a post office. I asked people in a couple shops, but they all gave me directions back the way I came, where there was no post office, though I did retrace my steps a few times to check. I wandered about a bit, looking for an unoccupied place where I could stand still for a minute and consult my phone. One particularly fun moment was turning down a street that was not empty but rather filling up rapidly with men, all walking very purposefully toward me, overflowing the sidewalks and the road, and I imagined myself about to be crushed by a herd of… wildebeest? lemmings? But then I realized I was just standing between them and the mosque, which gave me a sense of where I was on the map in relation to a post office, wondrous, and I ducked down the next street and it was fine. It is fun to say to people "sorry no English" when they are relentlessly speaking French to you, by the way, and you can seize the moment of their bafflement to stride briskly away. At the post office a man wanted to put the stamps on the postcards and wouldn't let me do it myself but he didn't think they were proper postcards and torrented opinions at me but I just smiled until he eventually took them. With luck they will reach their destinations. When I got out of the post office my phone helpfully alerted me to the fact that I had walked 15 kilometers since leaving the apartment, and while I'm pretty sure half of that was just retracing my steps, I knew I was pretty far from home, so decided to spring for a taxi, which was two dollars. I asked the driver to drop me off at the light, and he did. There was a post office on the corner.

Holes all over the place: the pulled teeth of trees or cables or maybe another emptiness altogether. Skies that are blue or dappled or overcast but never dull. It's cold in the morning but by noon we're carrying our sweaters. Cafes with all the chairs facing out, making a parade of the sidewalk. The chairs are all occupied by men. It is impossible to tell the difference between networking and not working but I have opinions. Sometimes women can sit inside, upstairs. In one medina the men are so aggressive that it's almost scary, come and look come and look. There are chickens in cages, slabs of meat on hooks, rainbows of caftans. In another market the sales pitches are prerecorded and played through tinny megaphones, like and unlike the call to prayers. We hesitate outside one bar and the waiter comes out and tells us we can come in, yes yes just dessert is okay, and we have creme brulee and chocolate mousse upstairs in peace. It is hard to make myself understood to a degree that pulls me back to the clowning of my youth, and I feel that I do an excellent job of enacting effervescence, although the water is sometimes still despite my efforts. In the pharmacy buying magnesium is oddly easier than most other purchases. Crossing the street requires a whole new kind of bravery and faith in my immortality such as I have not felt since my teens. On the trams, young women stand in the doorways on their phones, oblivious. There are women in hijab and not, and I get used to it so quickly that when I see a woman in short cap sleeves it seems like a lot of skin. We learn the word zebiba. I generally give up on orientation in both space and culture. We walk about 10 kilometers every day which is not a fraction of it. We eat couscous on Friday. The churches are new and white as chalk, barely used  and often locked, though we smuggle ourselves into one with a tour group; the stained glass is lovely and on our level. The similarly recent mosque is equally clean and described in terms of how Moroccan it is except this piece and that piece and the other piece, but otherwise entirely. The ocean fades into a gray horizon and is occupied with waves in the foreground; the wide beach is occupied with soccer games farther than the eye can see. Nearer us are abandoned beachfront hotels that reek of the sixties, images of abandoned bygone eras, like casinos or horror film sets. There is no way to capture it all and I haven't even mentioned the cats yet. I pick up my camera and know it's impossible and set it down, then pick it up again and try to remember something with it.

The increasingly atrocious facebook still has the "memories" feature, which I enjoy. I treat it kind of like a horoscope: a few years ago on this day I was thinking about this or that, so maybe today will also be a this or that day. Sometimes it is. 

Four years ago I went to Vienna to do standup, my first time out of town. I was very excited, 7 whole minutes! I invited some of my friends to come — I was doing this relatively new (to me) thing and I wanted very much to have the support of people who already liked me there, one friend from Brno and a few locals as well. Despite not being from Vienna I was a "bringer" and a good one at that, and still am I guess. I think there were six other performers, five men and one woman. They talked about dating, girlfriends, living in their parents' basements, masturbating, fast food, shit. It was… not different from most of the folks doing the central Europe comedy loop. They passed a hat and my friends put in money like the supportive pals they are. At the end of the show the other performers (just the men, if I remember correctly) divided up the money in the hat, and I watched them split it. I stood there awkwardly for a bit, and then left, because I had a bus to catch. My Brno friend told me, as we ran for the bus: Never let that happen again, that they don't pay you.

At the time I tried to justify it to myself: I was new, maybe they thought I wasn't that good. Thinking back on that night, a lot is unclear to me because I've come really quite far since then but what I do hasn't changed much. I was trying, and I am still trying, to do the kind of comedy I think is funny, which is the kind that makes me think. I don't think jokes are bad; I just don't generally like them as much as stories. I'm pretty simple: I like comedy that doesn't make me feel bad (unless I should), that connects ideas in ways that surprise me, and that makes me laugh. I am better at articulating what I want to do and I hope I am better at doing it. But in retrospect, I don't think I was bad back then, not so bad that I shouldn't be paid when people are paid. I was, though, and still am (though in waves, rather than consistently) really uncertain of how others see me and sometimes I'm not sure when it's a situation where I'm supposed to walk away or speak up. 

I am sometimes so angry about how unfair things are in performance and specifically in comedy, but also in life, and that's not new. Sometimes I think about how hard it is for me to ask for what I want, and sometimes I ask and I still don't get it, and I watch the same hands drop what I asked for in the lap of someone else and I have to bite entire holes in my tongue. Sometimes I think that's how the world works and I just want to stay home and never go out again. Sometimes I think that if that's how it is then I have to work harder, so that whoever comes after me will get to keep their tongues intact and be stronger, funnier, happier. 

It was nice, though, to have that memory pop up and think: I get paid pretty well in Vienna now. And I will bet that even if I haven't changed what I'm doing much, I have improved considerably more over the last four years than the rest of the people who performed that night. I think I'm funnier. I might even be having more fun.