Our last week in the rainforest was pretty miserable. It rained a lot. Everyone spent a lot of time in the lab, frantically trying to get papers written before we returned to Quito, where a month stood before us, free of class, free for travel. The final exam was a nailchewing one-on-one practical identifying the plants and animals to which Kelly pointed with a mustache-tilting grin and the peak of a furry white eyebrow. Breathless with nerves, I sprinted off into the understorey to investigate a bromeliad, then dived into the patch of smooth-leaved Gesnardaceae he pointed out, frothing at the mouth with desperation until I clasped a furry bud and triumphantly shouted out its name in an impressive French accent. I spent the last day shaking dead spiders and millipedes out of equipment in the lab, beating the mold out of luggage and paper money, and hunting down stray panties that had migrated to other rooms. The return to Quito was a mad dash to the Coca airport after our boat ran out of gas on the river. I spent two days in the city, patching up edited papers and analyzing data, then I packed my bags again and set off for Cuenca.

I’ve spent a lot of time on buses lately. My friends and I met in the bus terminal on the morning of our Cuenca trip a raggedy bunch. Laura Le came with sunglasses over a pirate’s eye patch, nursing a sty we had promised to get lanced in Cuenca. Rachel dragged herself in an hour past our rendezvous time, with a headache, leaving Bita and Amanda behind to nurse hangovers, while Lauren stayed in Quito to entertain a member of her Galapagos boat crew. Linsey, Kate and Emily were in reasonably good moods, and humored me while I limped around, favoring a painful pair of wounds on my inner thighs (from running, I swear).

The bus ride was ten hours long. It took us on long flat highways with a steady backdrop of Andean peaks and cloud-filled valleys. We ran through bleak brown paramo, where agave stalks curled upward like the beckoning fingers of some curious Dr. Seuss creature. We passed some farmers scrambling to collect the load of bright orange carrots that had spilled from their truck bed when the back door fell open, as one old lady in bright indigenous dress laughed raucously at the mess. Little towns of cement-block houses burst out along the road, faded layers of graffiti and advertisements painted on walls and homes, beneath coats of dirt and more paint. “Dale Correa!” “Nunka te olvido Dani.” “Los politicos…desvias del cañar y son una mierda.” Pigs lolled, fat and dirty, in ditches inches from the road. Patches of vibrant green corn glowed next to faded shacks of crumbling brick with tin roofs, broken doors and boarded windows. Once in a while a bright white multi-story with a vast veranda and climbing vines on a wrought iron fence appeared inexplicably among empty dirt lots and small castles abandoned mid-construction. The bus rumbled on; things whizzed by. Dogs screwing. Children laughing. Men pissing. Rivers flowing. A town appeared, nestled among rolling hills, each roof bright with an enormous blue plastic bucket piping rainwater down through the roof for cool showers. Below a long clothesline strung heavy with the day’s bright wash, I saw a huge angry turkey fluff out its feathers and give chase to a terrified cat that stepped too close in a rocky dirt yard. And the world spins madly on.

Our first night in Cuenca was uneventful, but I stepped out of our hostel bright and early the next morning. I jogged through the historic city center, then down along the river, reminded of the picturesque segments of the Charles in Boston. But Cuenca is much better. Cuenca is breathtakingly beautiful – the coolest city I’ve ever seen. It is sparkling clean with clear, fresh air along the four rivers, which run under old bridges and along running paths lined with grass and trees and parks. Restaurants and businesses are nestled among historical buildings. Everywhere there are green parks where you can stretch under wandering tree roses and sit all day reading and gossiping with your friends or total strangers on mossy fountains until the sky clouds over and rain patters in the late afternoon.

We saw a screamo rock concert in a small park, packed with kids in their death metal rebel uniforms: black jeans with black converse and black t-shirts, hair dyed black and metal piercings and studded belts, so misunderstood. We wandered into an open-air modern art museum, admiring huge panorama photos of farming families and indigenous life. In the city center we visited a flower market, then practiced ninja rolls next to a fountain in a plaza where a small symphony was playing the Mission Impossible theme song. We visited mossy Incan ruins, bought Panama hats, ate cheap food and drank incredible Chilean wine.

One night after Mexican food and too much sangria, we wandered the streets in search of dancing: even the main street in Cuenca has no discotheques, and we were running down the Lonely Planet guide, finding all the clubs were closed or useless for dancing. Rachel gripped my arm, insisting that we must find somewhere to dance: “Caitlin, we are the best-looking and only people out on the street tonight.” As if by magic, we heard bass pumping and saw neon lights. We were the only white people in the club, and clearly the worst dancers, but we took turns braving the reggaeton and dodging the salsaing couples until one of the young club owners grabbed me off a couch as I sipped my drink. He grilled me until I let slip that Emily loves techno music, and five minutes later I was spinning on the dance floor to techno remixes with ‘80’s pop songs, while all but two of the latin couples took a dance break at the bar to laugh at the gringos. I woke up the next morning still dizzy, with raccoon eyes, no voice and sore legs. It was a great night.

I spent more than a week in Cuenca, eating banana splits for lunch, reading Tropic of Capricorn (sexy) and Dharma Bums (lazy hippie copout crap), playing pool at night with gap year tourists from Australia, Holland and Sweden, flirting with beautiful waiters, and getting caught in tension-filled dates I hadn’t planned, and in puddle-filled cobblestone streets or dark cathedral corners in the afternoons. We fell so in love with Cuenca that we never took the bus to Guayaquil. We got back to Quito a few days ago and took a bus to Otavalo the next day, where my girlfriends and I all loaded up on gifts for our families. We wandered the market stalls like old hands. I got Emily to bargain down on alpaca gloves and strings of beads. As I picked out souvenirs for my roommates, a handsome pair of tourists complimented my Spanish and my shopping, then begged my phone number and a promise to meet in Quito.

These bus rides get to me as much as the places they bring me to. I sit at the windows listening to M. Ward, listening to Sonic Youth, listening to Teenage Fanclub. The green flashes past the windows with the falling-down buildings and the brown farmers in their crop squares and the cows on the hillsides. The aisle seat in front of me reclines and I see three small kids giggling and squirming and wrestling, playing peek-a-boo through the gap as their moms laugh across the aisle. The bus rumbles to random halts and eventually putters on: traffic jams, landslides, police searches. I always thought the country I would cross would be California to Boston, with a sugar high and Shannon’s long brown hair flowing out the passenger side window with her John Lennon sunglasses flashing in the sun, or Bob Dylan blasting out of car speakers, Eric grabbing the wheel to gun it down the left side of the highway and Dave singing softly with a joint in the backseat. I didn’t see myself alone with my thoughts in this foreign green, with the fog rolling over thick cloud forest and these friendly scenes plucked from the pages of National Geographic, but I guess the great American road trip will have to wait, and it’ll probably have to be by bike, if I want to die with a clear conscience.

On these road trips, country is certainly different, but the company is the truly foreign thing. I never saw myself sucked into these café conversations, dark eyes in dim light pouring out desperate intimacies to me, hungry hands in half light and life quandaries satisfied by my shrugs and trite quips as if the ponderer sought to fill some quota for movie-scene wisdom gleaned from a mysterious stranger. I never wanted to be anyone’s Before Sunrise revelation, but it’s as if priveledged youth the world over seek life’s answers in hostels and coffeehouses across the sea. It’s funny how people seem to think a warm body halfway across the world brings you closer to finding yourself.

This morning I woke up and walked into the jungle. It was about 6:35 and most of the camp was at the dining hall eating breakfast, which I’ve been skipping for most of our stay, trying to limit my contact with the other students as much as possible. I started out walking fast on the Harpia trail, occasionally breaking into a run on the flatter stretches, dodging fallen branches and hanging lianas that swung into the path after the onslaught of this week’s storms: I skipped to the left when the trail met Guacamayo, skirted a tree fall across the path, and walked to the canopy tower, which I climbed eagerly, happy to feel the light burning in my thighs – my muscles’ protest against nearly a month without strenuous exercise. At the top of the moldy tower, I leaned far over the edge, drinking in the surrounding sea of green and watching drops of sweat fall from my sodden bangs and fall, sparkling, to the lower layers of the canopy as I searched the crevices of the top tower for a friendly brown gecko that can usually be found crouching in a moist corner where the wooden beams meet.

            Soon I gave up and collapsed onto the tower deck. I lay on my back and looked up at the sky as the clouds from the all-night thunderstorm melted and dispersed, revealing a vibrant blue, start-of-summer sky. For the first time I worried momentarily that someone at camp would realize I was on the trail alone (triple X safety disaster for which students get kicked out of camp and shipped back home to the states shackled in their panties and a t-shirt to a lead pipe in the holding deck of a cattle tanker, kinda like Black Snake Moan, but less anorexic and without any mothaf’in snakes) – but these days, most everyone’s in the lab all day or farting around camp, trying to get all their papers written up so they can travel when we return to Quito…so if I were missed for a few hours, everyone would probably assume I was reading a book in someone’s bed somewhere.

            I breathed quietly for a while, listening to early morning bird calls and watching some insects come to life around me: a few canopy wasps diligently scraping the wooden boards of the tower for nesting pulp; some scurrying termites that will bring this puppy crashing back home to the forest floor in a few years; wandering ants looking for fallen moths to carry back to their queen. Compact black sweat bees had started to gather on the triangle of sweat on my upper chest, gratefully vacuuming up the potassium and sodium my pores had carelessly discarded as if the faint steam rising off my sweaty forearms were insect runes, signaling a barely concealed but priceless treasure. As the sun rose higher and the bees became more active, I rose and took my leave, thundering down the steps of the tower and gazelle-jumping the final flight, landing in a bone-crunching crouch, badass but with fluttering jazz hands, like some crazed X-games skater punk whose spare time obsessions are top hats and Fred Astair.

            I wandered back into the forest on the Anaconda trail, watching closely for the turnoff onto Lago as the trail meandered back toward the swollen Tiputini river. Finally I hit the Lago trail, and at the first rope bridge I was overcome. Abandoning my rubber boots on a mossy tree stump I hopped, one-footed to the middle of the bridge and plonked down on the slippery wooden slats, slipping my legs through the rope handholds so my feet swung free over the edge, where the normally calm tributary below me had bloated to three times its normal size and was running, high and fast and muddy, in a gurgling milk-chocolate rush to meet its likewise engorged big-sister stream, the Rio Tiputini, still only a branch that feeds the enormous Napo river. Sweaty and mud-covered, lightly bleeding from the scratchy branches I had thrashed through in my giddy flight through the forest, slick-footed and dangling over this bulging stream, I finally did what I had been anticipating for three weeks.

            The first song was like the prick of a thin needle, because George Michael’s “Faith” starts off quiet and works its way up to awesome. I watched my feet as they started bouncing to the beat of their own accord, and gradually realized that the bridge was shaking as I got more and more into the music, dancing while still sitting down. As the song faded out, I realized I was breathing hard. And then the next thing I knew I was Egyptian walking back and forth along the bridge, popping my head side to side, squiggling down to a low crouch then shooting back up, doing brief robot dance moves and jumping hard in the middle of the bridge, headbanging as I clung to the rope handles and tried not to pitch over the edge, throwing my head back and screaming, “WELL I BET THAT YOU LOOK GOOD ON THE DANCE FLOORdon’tknowif you’relookingforromanceordon’tknowwhatyou’relooking for!!!” Then the Backstreet Boys came on, and it was all over. I was choreographing the next hottest music video in the middle of the Amazon, with interpretive hand motions at that part in “It’s Gotta Be You” where there are sound effects of a ticking clock (you know you love it). I was strutting across the bridge full of attitude, jumping barefoot into muddy puddles and leaning brokenhearted against trees, pushing off a thick trunk for dramatic pause as I moved tentatively forward, crooning into the camera.

            Don’t get me wrong – the jungle is amazing. But it’s been nearly a month without any pop songs generated by an enormous media conglomerate, not to mention that even Quito is disappointingly devoid of any impromptu dance parties. In Boston, I live with my three best girlfriends at BU. I miss cranking up my speakers while we’re dressing for a party, running into each others’ rooms half-dressed and panicking about outfits. I miss singing at the top of my lungs while I’m doing homework, which I haven’t done once while in Ecuador for fear of terrifying my host brother and sister or whoever else I’m sharing a temporary room with.

            I’m not a high-maintenance girl. I can and have lived for months in cotton shorts and filthy t-shirts stained with blood, mud and fecal matter, my nails torn, my hands reeking of latex and covered in cuts. I can take cold showers, wash with camp soap and leave my hair unconditioned and uncombed. I can survive on peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches: actually, these are all things I love to do. But I can’t live without N’Sync. I need a healthy dose of synthesizers, voice modulation and generic beats in order to survive. I can’t live without 80’s montage dance sounds, the memory of a gorgeous gay man with feathered hair in skin-tight jeans and a leather jacket gyrating his hips behind a shiny black guitar. I can’t live without working up to an electric guitar crescendo in time with lyrics in perfect rhyme, rocking out so hard I collapse exhausted at the end of the song.

            If you’re a good person, you don’t take your ipod to the rainforest: you spend every day with a clear head, listening to the music in the nature around you: the yipping of the white-throated toucans, the clicking pops of white-lipped peccaries as they go barreling and squealing and squelching into a mud pit, the buzzing chirp of cicadas and the roaring of the Howler monkeys whose call, like caricature wind, belongs in some cartoon of a stormy night on the purple English moors. But you can be a good person, and still slightly flawed. Flawed enough to borrow your friend’s MP3 player and sneak off to an old rope bridge for some musical therapy. Besides, I ended contemplating the extraordinary diversity of the rainforest, listening to Chopin and staring up at the dappled sunlight shining through a golden orb-weaver’s web. It hung like a mobile, because someone had decorated it with leaves and flowers from 30 different plant species they had found on the ground on either side of the bridge. In the rainforest, common things are rare and rare things are common.

The canopy tower. I loved to climb this in the morning, as the nighttime mist still hung thick over the forest and all the animals woke up around me.

I was walking in the forest with Emily and Linsey the other evening, coming back to camp after a double shift, eight hours in the mineral lick. We were trading gossip and stories, giddy to be up and moving again after an uneventful observation period, giggling ecstatically as our rubber boots squelched in the mud and as Emily slipped repeatedly. I was surprised to hear Linsey’s sudden, angry opinion about one of the boys in our group, someone who is generally well-liked, because he’s funny and nice. I’d never had a problem with him until recently – he seemed harmless, although oversolicitous in his attentions: he’s funny and he’s always been good to me, but he loves to play the hero, and he becomes underperceptive and doggedly patronizing in his attentions, because he does not perceive when a girl doesn’t feel like the damsel in distress he’s making her out to be. Linsey had a bigger problem.

            “He’s a jerk!” She spat out, “Everyone thinks he’s a nice guy, but he’s really not. He was talking to Becky once and told her that he would never talk to me.” “What? Why” Emily and I asked, surprised. “Well, Becky and I are both religious, but he found that out about her after they had already become friends I guess. He somehow knew I was a Christian before we even met, and he told Becky that he wouldn’t talk to me because he knew we would just be too different! That we would never see things in the same way.”

            She expressed regret that they hadn’t gotten a chance to interact before he found out she was Christian, explaining that at BU she tries to keep quiet about her religion as much as possible until after people get to know her. Hearing this, I was disturbed, but not much surprised. The first thing I learned about Linsey was that she was a “huge Christian:” one of my friends warned me about her before we met, certain that heads would roll the first time we came into contact, since I’m outspoken about my feelings on organized religion and how much influence it has in American social policy, domestic politics and world events. The original warning irked me, but I dismissed it: according to what Linsey heard, which I hope was not true, the boy in question had received similar information and taken the warning quite to heart. The hypocrisy of his misjudgment was a thorn in my side.

            BU holds a “great debate” every year, bringing in professional speakers for a televised dissection of one of the great issues of the day. When Linsey and I were freshmen, the subject was the clash between intelligent design and evolution in the pre-collegiate curriculum – whether intelligent design should be presented as scientific theory, introduced and discussed in a scientific setting. The debate was preposterous – not only was the subject as false and wrong-footed as the “question” of whether or not carbon dioxide pollution is causing global climate change, but any pretense of debate deteriorated immediately. Without evidence to present testifying that intelligent design is a valid scientific theory, the proponents of I.D. were left protesting endlessly that the “designer” their dogma describes is not God per se. What stung was the boiling hostility and scorn evident in even the audio recording of the debate – the triumphant sniggering and haughty tones as the scientific community dug its claws in to draw out as much religious indignation as they could, launching increasingly aggressive questions against the other side. Not that it wasn’t sort of gratifying to see such a thorough shut-down of a religious group trying to infiltrate the scientific curricula of high school students, but the façade of an academic debate BU slapped on it was highly indicative of the way its physical sciences department confronts ideas about religion.

            I love studying biology, and I am an atheist who fervently believes that organized religion has played a decisive role in the tragedies of human history. But I’m frequently appalled at the cavalier attitude BU’s biology and chemistry departments take toward religion. Namely, they bring it up during science classes, which if I’m not mistaken was the primary object of their disapproval in that heated debate three years ago. What’s more, several of my BU professors have ridiculed religious people in large lecture classes where discussion is not an option. Ironically when they poke fun (mostly at Christianity because it is a large enough sect that people are not likely to accuse them of bigotry) they are always pointing out the same thing: that if you’re religious, you only hold your beliefs because you were brainwashed by your parents.

            Don’t get me wrong, I entirely agree with that statement. Luckily I have the insight to turn that logic on myself. I was brainwashed by my parents. I share their same tendency to scoff at the idea of a higher power and to fully enjoy certainty in what will follow my death: a wooden box and hungry insect larvae. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it. They never harped on religion until after I had made up my mind, and I can’t remember my mom ever questioning me when I wanted to go to church activities with my friends other than to ask how I was getting there and back, and to make sure I had a good time. Even at her most objective, correcting questions I asked about what “we” thought on some subject by explaining her personal beliefs – there was some other brainwashing I got from my mother – maybe the way she solves problems or finds answers was more ingrained in my habits, so that I just reasoned the same when it came to religion, just as I now tend to argue in the same way she does, read endless amounts of books, love to play rock music so loud it shakes the window panes, and spank people when they walk past me. Just because it wasn’t spoken indoctrination, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t brainwashed. Somehow, without any articulation of the idea, I mysteriously contracted my parents’ utter inability to believe in some higher power. I love the astonishing, haunting beauty of cathedrals, the constancy of a small-town church with its endless friendly faces, loving neighbors and pastors who know the entire congregation by name. But when everyone closes their eyes, and their hands float to the ceiling or silent tears of joy run down their cheeks or watch people shake with the fervor of their faith, I always feel oddly distant. Like I’m touring some club that relentlessly offers me a membership I can’t accept.

            So, I was brainwashed, just like the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews and the Huarani and the Jihadi and the Israelis and the Palestines and the North Koreans. I’m not sure how anyone could escape. And every single scientist out there who uses the brainwashing excuse to dismiss Christians as hopeless cases who will always err on the side of conservatism, seven-day creation and, let’s face it, the Bush monster, has not only been brainwashed, but has so mutated their own dogmas by the strength of their faith that their criticisms betray the very cause they champion.

            Science, like religion, is dogma. But here’s the great thing about scientific dogma: it admits the whole dogma thing from the get-go. That thing they tell you in high school biology is true, and don’t let anyone tell you different: there is no such thing as a scientific fact. There are theories – beautifully simple explanations for complicated phenomena that are supported by overwhelming evidence. The point of science is to investigate uncertainty, and to nail down answers to questions…but the answers are only quantifiable: a big pile of evidence in numbers that we call data, or some fuzz on a computer screen that we call radiation from the big bang. Hopefully the evidence pile is so big that it leaves no room for reasonable doubt. But there might be unreasonable doubt. There might be considerable doubt, but pretty good evidence and we might have a real debate on our hands. As scientists, we pick and choose. We cast aside the small doubts and consecrate some highly visible piles of evidence obtained from replicable experiment or observation as “facts,” but we shouldn’t forget that we, too, are counting on nothing more than faith – the faith that no one will ask a better question tomorrow and their evidence will blow ours to smithereens like a hand grenade in a lean-to filled with tiny porcelain figurines. Any scientist who needs a reminder of that should take a fresh look at dark matter, or particle entanglement. Science is asking questions, and then answering them, and then asking more questions, or asking other people to ask more questions to make sure you were right. You keep asking, keep revolutionizing because you want insight into the world.

            So what does that have to do with heaven? A hell of a lot. We as scientists scoff at religion for two reasons: it is based on dogma and faith. But faith is integral to what we do. We have faith that there are answers, so we ask questions. We build evidence to build a dogma – a set of beliefs in which we insist so heartily that they pass for truth. We can generalize about Christianity, but as ecologists we are trying to preserve diversity on earth, and we can’t grow blind to the diversity in our own species. Linsey, for example, is not a conservative seven-day creationist Christian who has never read the Bible. She is a fair-minded, nature-loving scientist, enthusiastic about morality and God and the Counting Crows. She is also rather gassy, which might be a better reason not to hang around her all the time.

            I am an ecologist and a conservationist. Moreover, I am a human. I am trying to understand how nature and the modern world fit together: how I can offer the rest of the world an overwhelming pile of evidence that what’s left of the natural earth is worth saving. I am trying to understand the world. The people around me. We are different, but we are alike. To be frank, my complaints are also hypocritical. I’m no angel: people piss me off easily, especially when they can’t represent themselves well. I have trouble connecting with people who aren’t honest about their beliefs, people who don’t come forward with their opinions because they don’t like to argue. I believe that argument is a great way to connect with others because it lets you see what people are really passionate about. The thing that bothered me most about what “Becky said” this boy had said (more hearsay) was that he solved the potential of conflict between them by ignoring her, and that she meets this attitude so often – abrupt dismissal of her intellectual and personal worth based on her faith – that she hides her religion. Religious persecution by scientists. Like I said, that’s disturbing.

            I want to understand the liberal-minded Christian, the megachurch Christian, the scary cultist Christian who lives in the mountains, the weird Mormon who doesn’t drink coffee and wants to marry seven wives, the Muslim, the Israeli, the Palestine, the Jihadi, the atheist, the Buddhist, the North Korean, the corporate lawyer and all the rest. I probably can’t understand them. But if I try, I might be able to find something in them that we share, both for science, and for my own peace of mind. If we return to brainwashing, there’s the comforting fallback of DNA: the drive to pass down this god-forsaken, crumbling, evaporating, melting excuse for nature, to pass down the suffering and the trials and travails of life to our squalling, squirming offspring. But that’s just the dogma of my academia. There’s always a question in my mind that there’s something beyond that need…maybe a desire to pass down the breathtaking joy and simplicity and confidence of faith? Maybe the desire to pass down an untrod path and a question mark.

Get lost. This is what the forest looks like on the interior. So when you go charging off the path to find whatever animal just made a weird growling hoot noise at you from the forest floor, you’ve lost the path by the time you’re three meters away. Haha, talk about a path and a question mark!

Emily and Linsey. The three of us are the only people who did the 11k hike, stringing five of the longest trails together. Two kilometers from home, we dragged ourselves up to the canopy tower and I took some high fashion shots. Now if that’s not the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.

Okay, I’m sorry. I’ve been a horrible blogger lately. Like really horrible. I just can’t concentrate. I’m so distracted. But there’s so damn much to do…

I started my first rainforest project, which is investigating animal activity at a nearby salt lick. I thought it was going to be boring at first – we would just see toucans and macaws, but then we changed our project design: 3 replicates of six shifts that make up a 24-hour period, which means I would spend a total of 3 nights and 3 days in the rainforest with two of my good friends, sharing a cramped raised platform made of moldy, termite-infested two-by-fours, some PVC pipe, walls of camouflage netting big enough to stop only insects larger than hummingbirds (as long as they’re of gentle constitution and don’t have strong mouthparts), and a nice overhanging roof of plastic garbage bags, full of holes so it doesn’t stop the rain. Awesome, we thought! We’ll see so much stuff! Three shifts in we realized we were mistaken. We weren’t going to see any jaguars mating in the mud at midnight, and despite the fact that we were spraying ourselves down with 100% DEET every 30 minutes, we still had mosquito bites piercing our jeans, stretch pants, long sleeves and knee-high socks (I’ve studied species of mosquitoes, flies, ticks and ants here that all have mandibular adaptations that allow them to bite through turtles’ shells). Still, after settling down into our observation platform and hearing the forest resume life around us in all its bird-singing, insect-buzzing, monkey-crashing glory at the beginning of our first 8-hour shift, we knew that 72 hours of pooled blood and itchy backsides would be incredible…and it is. Ridiculous, perhaps, since my idiot friends spend half the time farting and bursting into suffocated peals of unscientific laughter, and because we have to slog across a giant quicksand-consistency mudslick each morning to check our plots for footprints, and we reek of peccary shit all day long, but still awesome. Besides, over the first four shifts I read Wuthering Heights, Persuasion, Hard Times, Tropical Nature, and The Fig Eater, because I can position my books so I can see the salt lick while I read. So there’s that.

And everything else. Projects are taking up most of my time. Besides the salt lick, I’m studying limb autotomy, which is a form of regeneration seen in some families of spiders. I love spiders. I’ve loved them since grade school, when my mom came home exhausted from work one day and found a Tupperware bowl taped against the wall, where me and my two siblings had trapped a wolf spider as big as my thumb. We had been too scared to do anything else. “What is this?” she asked brusquely. When we told her, she raised her right eyebrow and took her high heel in her right hand, ripping the Tupperware off the wall with her left. A swing, a splat, and the spider was dead before it had time to so much as viciously spring off the wall to devour our terrified faces. She tossed me her shoe, handed my sister the Tupperware to wash, and told my brother to clean the wall. Since that day, spiders haven’t scared me, and I’ve been fascinated by them, especially venomous ones, like the black widows that occupy every dark corner in a California home, and which can withstand more than ten minutes of spraying with roach raid (haha, dead widows also mail well; try sending a pair in an unmarked envelope to your sister in New York sometime – they arrive intact.)

Ecuador spiders are bloody brilliant. There are deadly banana spiders, which are inconspicuous, medium-sized and light brown, and known for their fatal bites when surprised by banana pickers in the rainforest. There are orb weavers, which have either gold or silver silk. They make beautiful, classic spiderman webs, and have large, slender oval bodies and long, slender legs (five inches long was my biggest so far), usually black, with stripes or patches of fire-engine yellow, iridescent ruby red, or glowing toxic green. Sexual dimorphism is ridiculous in orb weavers: the males are smaller than a joint of the females’ legs: just large enough to hatch and produce sperm, most males don’t even feed during their lifetime, just offer their reproductive fluids and their protein for the next generation. The tarantulas and wolf spiders are amazing, and they’re everywhere you look after dark, just sitting in wait on a heliconia or on the trail or on the screen of your window. Huge and hairy in the case of tarantulas (some indigenous tribes catch them and eat them because they’re meaty enough to resemble crabs), or huge and sleek in the case of the wolf spiders: both are incredible hunters, which becomes obvious when you release a moth in their vicinity - when a flying insect strikes their fancy, they leap from absolute motionlessness and grab it with huge, powerful pedipalps, impaling it on the hollow fangs at the ends of their chelicerae and injecting digestive enzymes so its insides dissolve into a delicious buggy milkshake. (Venomous spider bites hurt a lot because your flesh is being digested from the inside and all your blood vessels are dissolving into their constituent proteins and all the coagulants your immune system is pumping to the bite site are doing likewise. And the neurotoxin’s not even taking effect yet! Just wait until your muscles seize up!!! So when you get mysterious bug bites in the night, that “Oh, you probably just got bit by a grumpy spider” thing was just another lie mommy and daddy told you. You’ve probably got bed bugs, you filthy beast.) Anyway, orb weavers and wolf spiders are also cool because they can regenerate their limbs: if they’re stung by an insect with lethal venom, they will drop that limb before the poison circulates, then adjust their walking pattern and hunting strategies until they regenerate the missing leg. Can you do that? I didn’t think so.

And then there are frogs, the major amphibian group in Ecuador. As a tip next time you go bullfrog hunting in the rushes right before you eat a slice of juicy watermelon: wash your hands in between. Not only do herps pee as a defense mechanism, but all amphibians have neurotoxin glands associated with their skin, and that stuff is not something you want to mix with your saliva or rub in your eyes, unless you like losing consciousness for four days, or maybe dying. There’s a frog here at Tiputini that can localize its poison to one of the oversize poison glands on its neck and squirt it UP TO TEN FEET, with the accuracy to bull’s eye a concentric circle target nearby. What does that mean? It means it aims for eyeballs. That’s a last resort, after a warning where this bright yellow toxin starts to ooze out of its pores. The reason it’s a last resort is because if the frog aims right, you’ll be dead in 20 minutes. I’m not sure what to study about frogs yet: their hunting strategies, or toxicity or what. I find the thing I’m most interested in here is taking the most lethal animals I find and setting them off against one another to see who wins in a fight to the death. Suffice it to say most science journals wouldn’t really jump on that paper. I’m drifting further and further away from the scientific ethic.

The past two days, I’ve been venturing out across the river into Hoarani territory to find bats at salt licks over there, where the milk-chocolate brown mud literally sucks us in knee-deep: last night I dragged a fallen tree branch to a soft spot where my friend Lauren was stuck in the mud. She stood on it in her socks while I dug her boots out with my bare hands: my arms were covered in silty mud and pig feces to my biceps. We use mist nets to catch the bats: black, vertical, thin mesh nets about 6 feet high and 12 meters long. The bats strike the nets, which are too fine to register in their radar, and they fall into tiered pockets in the netting, getting completely tangled so they hang suspended, screeching and terrified and jerking spastically to bite you when you come to release them. It’s a pretty horrible experience. This summer I worked with two species of bats in Texas, and we caught more than 300 bats a night, but we used a harp trap, which has lines of nylon strung down into a plastic bag: the bats hit the nylon and softly land in the bag, instead of getting tangled. I processed 25 bats every ten minutes, assessing age, sex and reproductive status, and getting bitten at least once by every other bat, but the bats were tiny, scarcely 15 grams, and the majority didn’t have teeth that could pierce a latex glove.

This is different: I’m seeing more than ten species of bats in two hours, and at least half these species weigh 65 grams or more. They have fierce faces and huge, vicious incisors that bite through heavy duty leather carpenters’ gloves. I get bitten by every bat at least once, bites hard enough to make me swear out loud steadily until I can pry the teeth loose with plastic calipers – the bats bite hard and hold on, and they have an excellent sense of how to twist and wrench their little bodies to get their faces close to your fingers. I spent the past two nights racing among four nets, disentangling and bagging bats and handing them off to a team taking notes – I would stop now and then to demonstrate age and reproductive status identifications, pointing out the distended nipples and swollen mammaries of a lactating female or how to palpate a pregnant belly to find a baby’s skull, the pronounced genitals of a scrotal male compared with a nonreproductive male, or the translucent epiphyseal gap in the fourth finger of a juvenile bat. After four long hours the quiet boat rides back to camp were unforgettable – a couple camp guys drifting up to the riverbank, silent in the longboat; stepping in with my gear and the help of Maier’s strong forearm; drops of my blood splashing the wooden boat rim as I sat down exhausted and pinched off the cuts on my hands; pushing away from the riverbank into the heavy current as lightning lit up the cool nights. We float upriver against an incredible breeze, and the late-night thunderstorms flash lightning every few seconds, giving sudden glimpses of the nighttime forest. Diego in the prow of the boat sweeps a spotlight along the banks, casting a yellow glow on caimans lounging in the wet mud along the river. Spooked by the light, they slip quietly into the water. They are broad-backed and deadly looking, with fat black-and-white-striped tails. The nighttime river’s edge is much different from the daytime, much different from the forest interior after dark: the only sounds are the quiet thrum of our tiny motor, the low rumble of the thunder nearby – no bugs, no birds – just the quiet breeze sweeping away our whispered voices.

And there’s this deathly slow romantic drama running in my head, tangled up with Victorian love letters and Cinderella endings, teased out and teased out with no suddenly satisfying dénouement, no climax confrontation where the truth comes out in all its passionate glory and everyone pairs off happily ever after. I feel so unsatisfied with the whimpering disintegration of my imagination – why does everything get so pale and realistic when you know yourself: you’re constantly checked back to bland believability by the knowledge that you wouldn’t do this or say that, or the judgment or solicitousness of your peers. Not just in imagination, but in action as well, you stop yourself before you play out anything out of the ordinary, except when some fiery spark of vengeance spurs you to break the rules. It’s looking forward to outcomes that gets you here: scooping up the sand to make a sandcastle, instead of just to scoop up the sand. I wish I could stop thinking about projects and stop projecting myself into the month before me – the packing, the flying, the T tracks and Commonwealth Avenue. I want to wander in the jungle covered in sweat and mosquitoes and forget that anyone knows me and forget that I know myself and that I owe people the things I do. I can’t believe people read Conrad and conjecture that the jungle was the heart of darkness: did they only read the bits about that throbbing green, and skip all the parts about the man?

Tailless whip scorpion. During night hikes to find spiders, we found these suckers crouched on tree trunks at face level. Intermediates between spiders and scorpions, they’ve got modified front legs that are held folded when they use the other three pairs of legs to walk. To catch insects, they unfold those front legs, which are lined with this deadly booby-trap of black spikes and snatch their prey in a horrible web of spiky death.

Poison dart frog. I caught it! I DID! MEEE! Okay, so it was one of the smallest deadly things I’ve ever seen, but if I’d rubbed it in my eye I could have died.

I walked a trail in varzea forest in Ecuador today in rubber boots and steamy jeans, a Gerber knives baseball cap and my trusty pair of plastic tortoiseshell glasses. We set off on a mud path behind our cabin clearing into a dense forest: I’ll have to ask Kelly to tell me again how the interior of the rain forest is “open enough to run around in…” Haha, actually, that open zone isn’t supposed to begin until about 10 km away from river edges, since the river can swell that much during the rainy season. So I guess that means I’ll have to do a little trail-forging on my own. I never liked the don’t-color-outside-the-lines rules anyway.

We saw pygmy marmosets today, the smallest monkeys in the world. They were on a large ceiba tree, about 30 meters above the ground: a family of three. The baby I saw weighed less than a quarter of a pound: the large male was no more than a half-pound. They were small and light brown, covered in thick fur, with a mantle around their faces. Later on a troupe of red howlers swung overhead, the largest of them were 20 pounds, and they loped along tree branches silent in the sunlight, their beautiful maroon fur shining rich against algae-covered bark. We saw a group of wooly monkeys crashing through the trees as well, with a few spider monkeys among their number, long and lanky and large, over 20 pounds. And then there are the squirrel monkeys: 10 pounds at the most, but they look more like six pounds at the largest. They have big eyes in small faces, and are covered with golden beige fur. They are so curious, and when Emily, Linsey and I paused on the trail to watch them lope through the trees in search of fruit, they came closer and closer, down from the canopy to the lowest branches of the trees on the left edge of the trail: they looked around the leaves at us, sliding and jumping among the low branches, cocking their heads to the left and right, coming closer for a better look. They seemed curious more than scared, and we watched them and they watched us, both of us reluctant to move on.

We saw millipedes scrabbling around in the soil at our feet, and picked them up, their dozens of tickly feet pattering over our arms. Bull-horn spiders in awesome greens and yellows build orb webs across the path, so you walk right through them and stumble, spitting and twisting blind for a few steps and slapping your face and your bare skin wherever you can reach: “Whereisit? Isitonme? Getitgetitgetit! Eww! Pthth!” We saw big toucans, hooting like a scared puppy, its big black beak showing yellow and blue stripes in the profile, its bright white chest fading to a burnished orange-red, with another patch of the same color under its black tail. We climbed to the top of a canopy tower, a winding, rotten wooden staircase twisting around the trunk of a 60-meter tree.

On the forest floor, nearly every tree you see is less than 10 cm at breast height, with smooth trunks shaped by evolution to shed or discourage epiphytic growth. As you climb in the canopy on an emergent tree, you rise above the main canopies, where most of the trees spread their branches, fighting for sunlight. You pass layers of fruiting bodies, and fat crusty termite nests clinging to tree trunks, with rain vents spreading off at downward angles all along their lengths and fat tunnels leading from the main nest all the way down to the forest floor. At the top of the tower, the forest spreads out before you in a continuous canopy, sometimes forming low swells on the gentle rises of the flat Amazonian lowlands. Rain mists off in the distance, and thunder growls gently on the horizon, but overhead for miles the sky is blue, and you gaze at the low misty dips and the heavy humidity blanketing everthing. The oxygen is thick and pure.

The rainforest is sick.

Squirrel monkey. These are really curious monkeys. These squirrel monkeys are the ones that descended from the canopy to come check us out, and stuck around for more than half an hour, swinging in the low branches of the tree directly across our path.

Jaimecito holding a centipede. Jaime is our only native Ecuadorian professor, and he ran Tiputini for nine years. He’s worked with bats with the same professor I worked for this past summer, and he likes Konitos strawberry cookies, which taste like acetone and mouldering paint. He took me and my friends across the river for bat studies twice a week while we made dirty jokes and giggled endlessly. By the end, he had nicknamed us “terrible girls.”

Champagne cup fungus. This is my favorite fungus, other than dead mans’ fingers, which look like the fingers of a dead man.

I sat in the Quito airport at 7 am, clutching a package of newspaper clippings from my dad, marveling at people’s ability to socialize in the light of the early morning, and giggling at Mike’s luggage stash: an enormous trekker’s backpacking pack filled to bursting, and another huge duffel he could barely carry which resembled a body bag easily big enough for two of me to fit into, with room to spare – this huge duffel was ¾ filled with food. I watched as Matt raised his eyebrows behind my silver aviators, which he had stolen a few minutes before, the shiny red band of my Baywatch Hawaii-style red croakies gleaming against his shoulder-length dark brown hair. “Yeah,” he said to Rachel, “We’ll be there soon. We just have to take a plane ‘n then a bus ‘n then a boat ‘n then a bus ‘n then a boat and we’re there.” Despite my early-morning grumpies, I was ridiculously excited. I was going to the rainforest.

And now I’m here. After a 30-minute plane ride we touched down in Coca, the heart city of Ecuador’s oil operations. We loaded our stuff onto a bus to take a five-minute ride to a small harbor where we caught a long boat up the Napo river. The Napo is huge, nearly a kilometer wide. Our boat wove back and forth across it, navigating the most recently deposited sand bars, small islands, branches and dead tree trunks: the river is muddy and chocolate-brown with heavy sediment, and the constant downpours cause it to swell and shrink as it traverses the continent on an infinitesimal downward gradient toward the sea. The geography of the river changes each day because of the rich continental runoff that fills the water with color and forms ever-changing islands of sand that are molded and changed as the water runs across them.

The enormous river was bordered by thick forest along the edge: heavy understorey of palms and heliconias, low figs and the occasional emergent ceiba tree towering above the canopy. Once in a while the heavily obscured face of a wooden hut peeked out from among the branches. Everything was covered in moss and epiphytic growth: vines and lianas hung down from every branch, flowers winked in brilliant oranges and soft purples from behind the fringe of green in every conceivable shade. Our trip down the Napo ended at a large metal platform, where we hauled our bags up a few flights of green-painted stairs on a gangway over the river, still wearing our tattered orange life vests, as per Repsol/YPF (the Spanish-Argentine oil company that regulates the national park zone in which the Tiputini nature reserve is located) regulations. We took another bus through more thick forest, an hour’s ride until we arrived at the Tiputini river.

I was practically drooling as I gazed out at all the green, all the moss, the tangled, winding vines, the slender spine-covered trees. Once we passed a small one-building elementary school, where a naked Huarani couple laughed and waved at us as they washed their clothes in a large plastic rain vat and a pair of tiny boys hid their bare bodies behind a few plastic crates, giggling wildly as they watched our bus go by. Hoarani have been taught by rainforest missionaries that the essentially naked state in which they roam the jungle is a cause for shame and the impetus for sin. They also have no sense of gender-appropriate clothing, so it is not uncommon to see the fiercest of male warriors – a many who may have killed 20 other tribesmen using a wooden spear or his bare hands – wearing a flowered mumu, or nothing more than an XXL pair of control-top panties to cover his nakedness. Traditional Hoarani dress consists of a single string that encircles the waist: men tuck their foreskin into this string, and if a man or woman is seen without it, the incident is as scandalizing as if you had been caught dancing to George Michael wearing only your birthday suit and a feather hat.

Our bus passed more small shacks mostly hidden by the forest, a little girl in a small clearing, sunlight streaming down to shine off her long dark hair and brown skin, her dirty pink t-shirt and her baggy grey shorts and her glossy dog wagging his tail in the background. We caught sight of a few clear-cut areas, where patches of forest about 100 square meters had been taken out, the trees left to rot in the intense sunlight that baked the land. The sun is speeding the loss of organic material in these areas and baking away all the fungi that recycle organic waste, so decomposed material will be washed into nearby rivers instead of going to new growth or sinking into the soil. The iron-heavy, nutrient-poor forest soil in these patches will bake into a hard iron crust a few centimeters deep, and since there are no trees to catch the rain that falls over these patches and help it evaporate back into the atmosphere, the weather will even change over these spots, setting reforestation back…maybe 3 million years, accomplishing the same phenomenon as a fresh lava coat on the Galapagos islands.

Finally the last boat, down the slow-moving Tiputini river. Two hours with the forest pressing close around us. Turtles basked in rows of 14 along submerged branches in the sun off the bank. The forest canopy was obscured by the sheer height of the trees on either side of us. Macaws screamed like demons in the darkness. Tanagers and manakins flitted in and out of the forest edges, skimming the water or calling from nearby branches. Then the camp came into view, barely visible except for a long wooden staircase leading into the forest shade. We hauled our stuff up steep stairs for the second time and collapsed in the big open-air dining hall, where Diego, our main guide, told us all the camp rules while we listened to the birds and monkeys calling in the thick trees that pressed around all four walls.

We got our cabins: I’m rooming with Lauren, Emily and Laura in a cabana with walls of mesh, in a tiny clearing in the jungle where we are constantly surrounded by calling insects, frogs and birds. It feels a lot like summer camp, with everyone’s cabins right nearby, and the smell of sunscreen and bug spray heavy in the air: lights off and cabins quiet by 9:30, panty raids and frog hunts in the dark. Our shoes are lined up outside the door, a row of flip-flops and knee-high rubber boots covered in mud. But I keep looking up at the dinner table when someone makes a “that’s what she said” joke after the frenzied squawk of a macaw, or struggle to keep a straight face when a Superbad quote sparks a fit of dancing in our cabin, or hoot with laughter when Matt turns to me with a raised eyebrow and a grin on the boat or on the trail and I realize – God, this is better than summer camp. This is one of those times in your life when you’re lucky enough to be doing something that makes you happier than you’ve ever been – and you realize it, in the heat of the moment, and you don’t take it for granted.

Here I am, in Ecuador. Here I am, in the middle of the Amazon. If I get lost in the forest and I go east I’ll hit the intersect between the Napo and the Tiputini rivers: I’ll find oil pipelines and I’ll be fine. If I go north I’ll hit the Napo and find more pipeline. If I go west I’ll hit an oil road. But if I go South I’ll hit Hoarani territory, and they kill outsiders, especially blonde blue-eyed ones that look like Church of Christ posterchildren. I am in a place it took a full day of traveling to reach. I am surrounded by more species diversity per unit area than any other place in the world. I am writing blogs as I watch monkeys in the rainforest. I’ll be back later.

Boat float. After a plane, then a bus, then a boat, then a truck, we were on our last boat ride down the Tiputini camp. That’s a lot of sitting.

Soil decomposition. Jaimecito demonstrates soil decomposition: the transition from whole leaves to the nutrient-leached soil of the rainforest floor. No agriculture can grow for very long on this soil, which is why indigenous and other colonists who settle homes by the oil roads are responsible for so much clear-cutting: they try to grow food but have to move on after a year or so.

Blaaaaih can’t think of anything to write. Just diary entries. I’m going to the jungle on Monday. Jungle is an incorrect term, though. Comes from the sanskrit word describing Indian thorn forest. It means “impenetrable,” and was inappropriately applied by Spanish explorers whose idea of penetrating the jungle was to float down it on rafts, lying about panting in their heavy armor and woolen clothes. They saw the heavily forested edge effects created by river openings, where sunlight penetrates and allows plants to grow, and assumed that the whole rainforest had thick, heavy understorey, when in fact it’s mostly quite open. Idiots. Did you ever see The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons that came out a few years ago? I love that movie. “I shall have my bond!!!” Anyway, here’s something.

That’s me in your bushes…

            There’s this hideously awkward boy on the BU water polo team. He’s really good-looking, and smart enough to be potentially clever and funny. He rocks that wannabe-punk dress that can sometimes slide for cool, depending on the personality: skater shoes and not-too-tight-because-I’m-homophobic-but-still-tighter-than-normal jeans and Zoo York hoodies. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the personality to slide for cool. He listens to screamo, for one thing. And he falls for any girl who so much as learns his name, then follows said girl around with bowed shoulders and a defeated, droopy expression, shining these watery peepers at her, using tired lines that seem intentionally chosen to make her uncomfortable and make him look pathetic. He cornered me at a party once when I made the mistake of collapsing on a couch for a dancing break. I was looking around the room at everyone, giggling at all my tipsy friends. Ryan sat half on my lap and slung a Danny Zuko arm behind my shoulders and leaned into my neck to whisper, “Don’t you love watching people?” He selected a drunk fellow we didn’t know, who was dancing with the refrigerator; a girl whose thick eyeliner was smeared around her right eye; a couple so drunk they looked like they had fallen asleep in each other’s arms as they slow-danced to gangster rap and kissed with unmoving lips. He told me a story about each of them, so contrived and uninteresting I struggled with a plastic smile to stay awake, then finally patted his knee, told him I’d see him a little later, and made my escape.

            I do love people-watching. The bus is a great place to do it – but people don’t need a story told about them. The details of their expressions, their surroundings and their movements are interesting enough. Paused at a traffic light on the way to school this morning, I watched a girl mixing syrups together at a drink cart by the side of the road. She was of medium height and slender build, with wide Indian cheekbones and a flat forehead and beautiful almond eyes. She wore a humble brown flowered frock under a ruffly dress apron of cornflower blue. She stood behind her drink cart, a peeling-paint wooden contraption with bicycle wheels, with its 14 separate sections for syrups of different flavors, and a compartment below for ice and cups. She worked automatically to fill two cups, her hands shooting out to take up well-worn bottles whose position she knew by muscle memory: at least a half-dozen ingredients went into each mixing cup, dashes of pink and blood-red liquid, a little green and a lot of blue, thin flowing orange and a thick golden syrup, then something dark and slow and molasses-colored to finish it off. She lifted one cup high above the other and tipped its slightly steaming contents through the air into the other cup waiting below, then lifted the lower cup above her shoulder and poured the combined concoction back and forth. The colors changed every time the liquid flowed through the air. The men standing around her cart grinned at her through squinting eyes. The sun glinted off the gate behind her, off her brown hair. The peanut and sweets vendors who solicit the buses at every stop sat at her feet, shooting the shit in their Panama hats. She smiled at me. The bus pulled away.

            On the way home I sat at the window, listening to Jack Johnson (I know, I know) and watching the girl next to me out of the corner of my eye. She was petite, with almost black hair in a thick braid over her right shoulder. She wore light blue scrubs and white nurse/cheerleader sneakers. She was eating Konitos, vanilla sandwich cookies with chocolate cream. I listened as she talked on her cell phone. “Ya, ya,” she said, “Ah-ah. Okay, lo hago pronto. Si, te amo mi amorcito. Gracias por todo. Si, te veo luego. Si, un besito.” She kept rummaging in her purse and grazing my bare arm with her ridiculously soft right elbow. She took her bus fare out of a tiny green change purse, like the ones the Quito men carry around for their coins. She carried a folded newspaper, and crossed her ankles.

            I watched a boy on the street eat spaghetti and meatballs from a yellow Styrofoam plate. He sat on a plastic crate. He had the teenage-boy feeding posture, hunched over his plate and shoveling food into his mouth as if it were his last worldly meal, elbows akimbo, protecting his prize, suspicious eyes watching people pass from under his ducked forehead. The plastic fork looked like tiny dollhouse silverware in his huge hand, and he had that awkward look of a boy who will be handsome when he grows into his man’s hands and his man’s ears and his man’s feet, but for now has small shoulders and a goofy grin and red sauce in a lipstick stain around his mouth.

            I walked behind a young couple on the sidewalk with their friend, talking and joking around. They held hands and laughed, mouths open, eyes locked, bumping shoulders with each other and bumping into their friend. She wore red jeans and a light pink pullover, and had long ringlets of light auburn hair to her waist. He wore jeans and a hoodie, and kept pulling her hand around his hips to stick it in his back pocket.

            I hooked my headphones into the ears of a young man and pressed play as the sun went down. I watched him listen to “Ziggy Stardust,” with the fading scratch of his sandpaper stubble on my palms, as he exhaled smoke in flat sheets and rippling rings. He sat on a concrete verandah over the city and took long drags off a self-rolled cigarette. He leaned back on one hand and let his head drop back and he stared at me through half-closed green eyes. He was made of bare feet and a clenched jaw and faded jeans and a thin white t-shirt on tan skin. He bit his lower lip and the muscle on his forearm stood tense as the sun dropped behind him and the blue day faded to dusk. His brown, worn wallet lay open at his feet, his silver keys to his right, his black lighter to his left, his skateboard behind him.

            So. Do you ever feel like someone’s watching you? Well. You’re right.

Okay, everyone. Breathe a sigh of relief: crises have been averted, terror alert is back down from hot pink to only day-glo yellow. Ecuador and Colombia have signed a peace accord: they’re friends again, on paper at least. We can all go back to eating our empanadas and gassing up our Hummers and snorting our coke…phew!

            In case you missed it, about a week and a half ago a big scandal erupted when Colombia bombed a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) base inside Ecuadorian borders, then sent in ground troops to eliminate the survivors. That’s a territorial breach, to put it lightly – when you drop explosives and send armed militia onto the soil of a sovereign country. It’s not exactly good manners, even if you claim the bomb’s trajectories were enough to slip them right under Ecuador’s door without Colombia’s air force entering Ecuadorian air space (those were American helicopters, by the way).

            So what’s the big deal, you ask? FARC represents a drug-funded terrorist guerilla organization that’s torn Colombia apart for more than 40 years. Colombians were eliminating a terrorist threat: they had definite coordinates of a cell leader – how could they not take advantage of that intelligence? And by the way, FARC’s been leaking into Ecuador for ages, which Ecuador very well knows and hasn’t taken any pains to prevent. Colombia had the right – no, the obligation to take care of those criminals. And the US should be proud to be backing anti-terrorist efforts all over the world, because that’s our moral obligation.

            Mmm-hmm. I know that America certainly wouldn’t offer asylum or diplomatic immunity to suspect persons from other countries. And it would certainly suffer with ease the penetration of its borders by Russia or Ireland or Italy if, say, America’s major cities were found to be harboring the international extensions of organized crime units originally based out of those countries, or if American weapons were found to be the main source of ammunition for terrorist organizations in those countries. I’m sure we’d be happy to help, happy to provide intelligence and air support and even weapons to those countries, just like we did for Colombia.

            Let’s be realistic for a moment. America doesn’t feel morally obligated to stop the Colombian drug market: it feels materially obligated to keep a few greedy fingers in the South American pie, nice and close to those delicious oil deposits in nearby Amazonia. If America wanted to stop the drug trade between America and Colombia, it would fix all the things in America that make people want to do drugs. After all, as a capitalist nation well knows, as long as there is a demand – for drugs, for Che T-shirts, for blonde pop stars – there will be a supply. Necessity is the mother of invention, and that invention for FARC is another chopped-down hectare of rainforest land, another off-the-grid field of coca, and a little thing called the black market. The reason FARC is leaking into Ecuador is because America’s big stick is squashing the drug cells in Colombia proper, which doesn’t stop the drug market, but rather pushes it underground and outward to countries that don’t care to be involved.

            Should countries like Ecuador and Colombia’s other neighbors grow a pair and tend to their borders? Sure, they should. But quite frankly, that’s a mess that they don’t want to get all tangled up in. Countries like Ecuador don’t want a 18,000-man-strong terrorist army pissed off on their borders, especially when they’ve got poor people to feed and an infrastructure to build. Especially when they’ve got a lot more rainforest to cut down, just waiting for desperate native peasants to realize that the drug life is lucrative and it would be easy to give law and order the finger and take up the revolutionary banner, because between long, arduous effort for representative government, or a little anarchy mixed with quick cash and food for your family tonight, there’s an easy choice.

            Should countries like Ecuador be grateful for America’s great fiery favor? Maybe, if you’re totally naïve, you might feel warm and fuzzy that the USA saved the day again…but think about it. Sovereignty means independence: autonomy. Did America grin and cheer when Hugo Chavez offered free oil to Alaska during those price hikes last year, when barrel prices started soaring and Inuits were freezing in their igloos? No. Why? Because unasked for “foreign aid” is insidious. You give a mouse a cookie and pretty soon he’ll charge in while you’re asleep, duct tape you to the bed, set your carpet on fire and eat all the fava beans and Chianti you’ve been saving for a rainy day. Remember what happened in the New World when the Indians let those Portuguese get off the boat without scalping them at first sight? That’s right, a whole lot of syphilis and dead buffalo and rape and missionaries and the Trail of Tears: America happened. I’m telling you, things snowball.

            Anyway, after a week of dire warnings and war predictions and letters from my concerned loved ones telling me to change my name to Paige Parker, take up with a sympathetic Ecuadorian man and flee south, after more of Chavez’s angry shouting and warmongering, the withdrawal of Ecuadorian and Venezuelan ambassadors in Colombia, and several curt letters among the four sovereign countries involved (What? I thought it was just Colombia and Ecuador?), everything’s back to normal. We can all calm down. I’m disappointed because I didn’t get tear gassed or kidnapped or get to riot in the city center and maybe score a free American flag when protestors tore down the American Embassy, but life goes on. I guess I’ll have to get my kicks some other way…Whaddya think? Bag of powdered sugar in my carry-on on the way back to Miami? Or eat as many beetles as I can in the Amazon before I get sick, then analyze my gut contents when they come back up in a cascade of partly digested, shimmery wings and spiky legs? One can never be bored in Ecuador.

Oh man, worst weekend ever. I keep thanking Moses I’m not one of those girls who carries around one of those yappy ankle biters in her handbag, because if I’d had anything small and fluffy with me this weekend, I would have strangled it to death early on, then spent the next few days stroking it’s limp, bedraggled body like George and the casualties of his affection in Of Mice and Men. This weekend Emily and I ventured to Riobamba with our cousin Jeremy. Big mistake. Like denying Julia Roberts shopping rights on Rodeo Drive. Huge mistake.

Originally the plan had been to drive south with Victor and Fanny, our host grandparents, and stay at the house of Elenita, Fanny’s sister, so we could share gas money, hang out with family, and get around to see the sights nearby: an allegedly fantastic indigenous outdoor market, the fabulous views of Chimborazo (whose peak is the furthest point from the center of the earth, thanks to the boost given by the earth’s fat equatorial belly), and the apparently unforgettable experience of riding the historical Devil’s Nose railway. The plan quickly fell apart, though: Fanny and Victor couldn’t go, Elenita didn’t want to host us…Emily’s and my interest rapidly faded, but Jeremy remained ardent about the plan, so when last Thursday rolled around, we caved to his insistence, not wanting to ruin his perfect trip, despite the fact that bad-weather reports were flooding in about landslides on the roads and the train tracks.

So on Friday, we loaded onto a bus after school and commenced the four-hour ride to Riobamba: the last two hours of the train ride, which I spent pressed into the crotch of the spike-fingernailed, apparently unshowered floozy who was giving my chair a lap dance, foreshadowed the tone of the rest of the weekend. When Elenita picked us up from the bus station, she seemed the opposite of delighted to greet us: she had been coerced into hosting us despite her preferences by Sonja, Jeremy’s host mom, just as Emily and I had been obligated to take the trip. Of course, whatever she thought of us originally was much improved when we arrived at our house and she served us coffee with meat sandwiches. I took the liberty of informing her that unfortunately Emily and I were vegetarians; Emily had the good manners to swallow her preferences and choke down her bologna and cheese; Elenita had the wit and delicacy to flip my sandwich open, peel the meat away, dump it on her own plate, and glare at me reprovingly until I had dutifully swallowed the rest of what I had been generously served. From the way she looked at me, you would have thought I had foregone a choice filet mignon and elected to rip her cat open and consume its steaming entrails at the dinner table instead. You can imagine how impressed she was a few minutes later when her son Javier prodded me about my religion and I announced that I don’t worship God. That went over real well, believe you me. I need to learn to lie.

Emily and I shared a bed and she fell asleep listening to me chomping on cinnamon buns from a Quito bakery as I comforted myself with sugar and the suffocating tensions of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse. We rose early the next morning to argue with a cabbie about a ride up Chimborazo. Upon Jeremy’s blind insistence, we agreed to split a $30 cab ride, and were admitted to the park for an additional $5 park fee. Best $15 pictures of snow I’ve ever taken, let me tell you, but what made it all especially worthwhile was breaking the battery chamber catch on my camera and suffering the impotence of being on the highest mountain in the world and without means to climb it. After our pointless assessment of the mountain, we returned to Riobamba to wander the city for three hours as we waited for the train station’s ticket office to open up.

Riobamba was the best event of the weekend: we wandered through a small indigenous market thick with the smell of raw potatoes and swarming with tiny brown women in Panama hats and bright traditional dress: skirts of solid color in primary red, green and blue, intricate belts, flowing blouses and capes. We walked down market corridors with walls made entirely of fresh fruit in every variety, glowing in soft banana yellow, bright strawberry red, cool pear green. We tumbled into butcher zones with tables laid out with varieties of fresh meat, the lines of plucked chickens swinging gently as saleswomen slapped down steaks on the makeshift counters, dozens of purple crabs strapped together in rows, the smell of clams and the air rich with the iron tang of the blood that trickled underfoot.

At 4 pm we bought our tickets for a bus, which would take us to a mini version of the Devil’s Nose train ride on Sunday at 6 am. The landslides had taken out various parts of the train tracks, so a trip that should last all day would be shortened to two hours. When we arrived at Alaúsi, the departure point for the train ride at 8 am on Sunday morning, we found that the traditional train ride we expected was to be replaced by a bus perched on train tracks. Our entire ride took 40 minutes, because along the way we encountered 2 additional unexpected landslides, the clearing of which took an hour and a half to realize.

By the time we got to Quito on Sunday evening, we had spent 10 hours sitting on our asses in various forms of transportation. I was exhausted, angry at myself for taking the trip against my better judgment, angry at Jeremy and sick of his constant need for approval before making even the most minor of decisions, from buying a snack to crossing a street. I had spent $50 on a weekend trip I hadn’t wanted to take, and which had been a steady stream of impositions and disappointments. More importantly, despite my efforts to contain myself, I had become increasingly short-tempered and far exceeded my bitch budget for at least the next several months, not to mention developing a crush on Elenita’s divorcee son, who has a son of his own and eyes like chocolate swimming pools.

Well, this just goes to show me that trying to please other people and ignoring my better instincts is a misguided effort, since I’m always right. I should have stayed in Quito and enjoyed the rain, worked on my grant proposal and sat in the park on Sunday reading Jack Kerouac and watching beautiful men kick around a black-patched ball. I should have let that yuppie, money-hungry fool Diego take me to the hot springs in Baños and meet his parents and his friends so he would stop harassing my cell phone. I should have bought a rope and an ice pick and just climbed the damn mountain myself. Oh well, there’s always next weekend…

Toto, we’re not in Boston anymore. This is in Riobamba: a Boston Pharmacy. Don’t ask me why. They may hate Americans around here, but you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll take any English insignia and paste it proudly like a quality guarantee. If you’ve got American names or slogans, you’re cool. Attested to by the fact that I saw one of USFQ’s fashionistas wearing a green t-shirt the other day with “I’m cool” splashed across the chest in pink ink. And don’t get me started on the guys with the “Freaky soul maijer” sweatshirts. Outta sight.

These indigenous ladies in their capes and their Panama hats are doing their daily shopping at the colorful Riobamba market. They don’t like it when you take their picture, unless you giggle awkwardly and tell them they’re beautiful, you couldn’t help yourself.

Fruit ladies. Walls of fruit miles high. Good lord, if only my sisters had been here. Panic, desctruction, devastation would have ensued. This guy I worked with, Nick, one ate three pineapples in one sitting, ignoring his bleeding mouth (pineapple has flesh-digesting enzymes). He would have been in heaven here.

Virgin snow. You haven’t eaten snow until you’ve eaten snow on the highest mountain in the world.

La Nariz del Diablo. The view from the Devil’s Nose train ride. Guess what those are? Mountains. Whee! A bus on train tracks!

What does it mean when you say you’re in love? Does it mean you don’t mind when he puts his hand on the small of your back as you walk down the street, even though your better instincts say he’s guiding you like a blind old lady? What sound does love make? Is it the high-pitched chirp of changing chords on an acoustic guitar, and the surge from a nervous whisper to a broken lyric as he stares into your eyes? The uncontrollable tapping of your foot on the cheap plastic footboards of his car, as you grip the door handle, try not to sweat, and pray he can’t hear your anxiety over the mix tape? What does love feel like? The consonants of a trite love song whispered onto your neck at 2 am, as you lie out on a blanket under the stars and watch your heart beat through your t-shirt? The fabric of his favorite sweatshirt against your forearms as you slowdance to Chris Isaac in the glow of his fog lights somewhere in the middle of a field? Does it feel like an automatic lock on all four doors, and the impossible pressure of raised eyebrows, as he awaits acceptance for a date you can’t escape, because he won’t let you leave? God, god, god, what an awful cliché it always is, no matter what, and what a welcome one.

I know what hate is. My mom told me in sixth grade. It’s when you leave someone at school without offering them a ride, even though it’s drizzling and the sun’s gone down, and you know they’ve been waiting for too long. You don’t offer them help, even though you know they’ll suffer when you leave them there, whether because you don’t care, or because you wish them to suffer…the scary thing about hate is that it starts with apathy. In sixth grade, I didn’t hate anyone, and I never could have left someone stranded like that, but the more evil I see in the world, it becomes easier to wish evil upon some truly evil people. It’s easy to recognize hate, in others or in myself.

I know what lust is. It’s when your eyes are locked on someone as they lick cheesecake off a spoon, and your skin burns like it’s on fire and your insides go numb. Lust you know because all the blood leaves your brain and you suddenly stop caring about just about everything…just about.

But love is tricky. Especially with these crazy kids nowadays, who mistake “I love” and “I’m in love” the same way they switch “itch” for “scratch” or “bring” for “take.” Especially with the way people always look for more meaning in the things you say: you have to keep explaining, you have to clarify, to pacify, to insist. Especially with the way people expect you to lie, or to tell a half-truth, or to want something in return, when all you really want is to say how you feel and leave it out there and be honest and transparent and done with it.

Being in love must be scary. Heart-pounding and earth-shaking and world-changing…it can be the best thing in the world, but it’s also a lot more dangerous, because when you feel that passionate that fast, you pledge all your rights and all your secrets to someone, give them your heart and expect them to take care of it: when they disappoint you, you can’t forgive them, because you ceased thinking they were human a long time ago. In their mistake you see betrayal, and worse you see your own failure, your humiliation, and you have to cut them out of you all together, but they’ve become a part of you, so your surgery is inept, and when you try to rid yourself of them, you lose parts you didn’t bargain for, like going under the mask for an appendectomy and waking up in a bathtub covered in ice, missing your liver and short a kidney.

I’ve never been in love. But I’ve seen it be selfish and blind on one side, self-sacrificing and farsighted on the other. I’ve seen it tear best friends apart, and seen it try to glue up the tattered bits of a relationship that’s changed forever. I believe in true love with foolish disregard for my own better instincts, my own more logical cynicism. I believe in it despite the fact that every marriage I know of save two has ended in sudden heartbreak or the slow dissolution of passion like the fizzing away of seltzer tablets in plain tap water.

I don’t see how some people can scoff at the idea of a soul mate. I have so many: they are what I miss about home. At some point, the phrase “home” stopped meaning anything to me, which is something I realized this past summer when, in the space of four days, I used the same phrase to describe five places where I ate and worked and slept: 1) a small, overly air-conditioned suburban rental in the small town of Fredericksburg, TX; 2) a sweaty three-person tent pitched under the guano-showering skies right outside of Frio Cave; 3) a stone-floored, scorpion-infested hunting cabin occupied by two strangers from the University of Tennessee; 4) the room my sister rented in Austin for the summer, in a house with 3 bleached plastic flamingoes in the front lawn and an constantly self-renewing carpet of dog fur on the interior and 5) the city of Boston in general.

Home, a physical construct with a cement foundation and fiberglass insulation and four or more solid walls, a uniform place where my family resides and my friends are frequently found, no longer exists for me. It hasn’t, in fact, since my eldest sister left for college on the east coast several years ago. It was around that time that the big family pasta dinners disappeared and there were no more nights of chaos and loud classic rock, my mom burning her hands and spanking us with wooden spoons, my brother dancing and singing to Whitney Houston, and my sisters alternating between vicious bickering, laughing hysterically and ordering me to chop every vegetable they lobbed to me from the fridge. Everyone started leaving for school, and getting boyfriends and getting busy, and home kind of petered out a while ago. But soul mates are forever.

I have these friends. And they are my home. And they are always there, and they are all there is. I have never been in love, but these people are my soul mates, because they’re the people whose personality and thoughts are so inexplicably, inextricably intertwined with my being that I can’t imagine how I stayed sane before I knew them.

I know these three girls who were my constant companions in high school. They share my addiction to movies like “You Got Served,” my compulsion to learn the lyrics to horrible hip-hop jams, my propensity to sit around in my pajamas eating entire bowls of cookie dough whenever possible. Kristen is competitive and tight-fisted, and has been known to call the cops up to three times a month because she’s paranoid beyond belief that the world after midnight is plagued with ninjas and robbers prepped to raid her home and is constantly waking up at 2 am, mistaking raccoons in the garbage cans for a black-ops kidnapping attempt.

Kirsten has Nike-swoosh eyebrows and her uncompromising love for John Mayer overlooks the fact that he has to make his face look like a blob of raw biscuit dough in order to excrete those strings of shivery murmurs he calls music. If you ever need to shut her down in ruthless, vicious argument, you just tell her a good joke: when she laughs too hard, she pees. Of course, when she gets too drunk, she also pees. I think it’s a testament to our friendship that I once carried her seven blocks through the streets of San Francisco, loaded her onto a train, and nursed her through the night, ignoring the fact that she was covered in her own urine and had puked multiple times on my pink converse and all down the front of my jeans.

And then there’s Maggles, the self-proclaimed “fat, ugly kid,” of our group. It is Maggie, I think, who is best-loved. She’s one of those acidly sarcastic geniuses with perfect comedic timing, and her caustic pessimism and obsessive compulsivity make you want to tackle her into a mud pit, then cover her with slobbery kisses. She also likes to talk like a bored transsexual, and owns a dog that once had intestinal surgery because it had eaten too many of her thongs out of the dryer.

I know this girl named Laura, who fits my mental image of a hippie Eve. When I hear her laugh I know that whatever she does will make the world a better place.

I know this boy, who dresses up in drag whenever he rocks out, but breaks the heart of every gay man who meets him, because girls are the only thing he loves and hates more than drugs and rock’n'roll. He looks like a young Bob Dylan, but more handsome. He dances like a dying spider, and is effortlessly cool and endlessly creative. He’s the person who taught me that brutal honesty is the best law to live by, and that you shouldn’t be embarrassed about the freakish things you do or say, the times you feel stupid or inadequate or the times you feel sexy and on top of the world. He taught me to be absolutely comfortable, in situations that should be absolutely awkward. He taught me to go after what I want and try anything once because life is short, and shouldn’t be wasted with excuses and cowardice and better judgment.

I know this girl who shares my name, who is totally blind to how incredibly compelling she is. Despite her piercings, her foreign lovers, and her years of silent rebellion, she will always be…just…good and pure. Besides, she’s my first partner in crime when it comes to scaling chain-link fences to do illegal naked swimming in public pools.

And then there’s Shannon, my best friend from third grade, who used to drag me to Sunday school and youth groups and church retreats which we both well knew her family attended for the religion and the community, and which I attended for the dirty jokes and free candy. After 12 years of friendship, we’re still the same girls who read at the dinner table, who idiotically giggle for hours about the same ridiculous pun, who stay up all night at sleepovers talking until sunrise, maybe taking a break at 3 am to wake everyone up by licking their ears.

I have three roommates at BU, and they are my best girl friends in college and my fellow water polo jocks. Genna and Liz are total messballs: the room they share is perpetually strewn with discarded clothes, camera equipment and Amanda Bynes movies. Genna is a fantastically photogenic insomniac who communicates best in the words of Dane Cook. She gives excellent head rubs. Liz was a T-rex at some point in a past life. She is too tall to responsibly control the movement of her limbs, especially when dancing. Gillian is a terror of a Jersey girl: a spitfire if you ever met one, with a tongue sharp as a whip and the tenacity of an angry octopus.

There’s this boy I love, who I miss every day, who argues with me constantly and who I can’t be around for more than ten minutes without going insane with frustration. He makes me laugh slightly more often than he makes me cry, and that’s usually just enough to make me want him around. He’s handsome and interesting and smart and I love the idiotic things he says and the fact that he doesn’t understand me. I sometimes wonder how we can possibly be friends, and then I think of sitting next to him on a rainy day, watching movies from the library and poking each other in the ribs, and I remember.

This is what I talk about when I talk about love.

This is hands-down our favorite pool deck rules sign, but it means we have to be very careful about which lifeguards see us at the Bates water polo tournament every year. Liz was unfortunately in Belize studying archaeology the semester this was taken, so Genna took the liberty of photoshopping her in.

More immature pranks. We accidentaly did this to a car parked outside BU’s Hillel House, where BU’s Jewish community lives and eats and gathers for seminars and religious events. I really hope I didn’t deface the car of some pious rabbi. Bad karma.

Liz is the messball with the flour all down her shirt: Gillian is trying to help her out, and wearing the shirt that started the famous “Tenafly grab,” an awesome attention-getting move executed by grabbing the front of someone’s T-shirt and yanking them towards you so your faces are mere centimeters apart. Best executed if you can get a handful right where the annoying slogans are written.

Eric’s taco scream.

Eric puts gender-appropriate clothing to shame.