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(October 2003: The Beginning)It’s 10am and I am bored out of my mind. The constant hum of the air conditioning and the smell of fresh paint have combined to jab my senses and provoke my restlessness. Outside, the hot sun glares off of white stucco and the streets teem with people in brightly colored clothing. Inside, here in this sterile cocoon of the United Nations (UN) headquarters for West Africa, the only stimuli is the occasional grand entrance by some well-groomed and pleasant diplomat, who checks in to make sure we’re finding everything “comfortable.” I know we’re supposed to be working and using the fine hospitality of our friend, the Ambassador to the UN for West Africa, but I am at a loss as to what to do. It is wonderful to be treated like diplomats; I have always been a backpacker. It is wonderful and it is boring. No one notices. Across from me Jack, my boss, is dozing in a comfortable chair in our pleasant surroundings.

Last Friday, I woke up bleary-eyed and with an acute sense of panic. Looking over at my clock, I realized that I was indeed going to be late for work. These sort of occurrences produce in me the same distinct feeling students get for years after they have left school but still wake up in a blind terror convinced they have overslept for an exam. Rushing around trying to get myself together, the details of why I had overslept and now felt distinctly sick began to creep into my awareness... I had broken the Golden Rule: I had gone out with Tanya the night before. Tanya, along with a few other of my friends and some close relatives, is part of the "Just One More" crowd and, frankly, I simply cannot hang with these mythical creatures anymore.

I have always had the very bad habit of taking both fiction and non-fiction much too literally. When I stumble across a book that I find entertaining or enlightening, I try to find as many parallels as possible in my own life and, when that fails, I turn to analyzing other people's lives. Granted, I assume most people have a little bit of this tendency in them but I tend to take it to extremes which normally ends up annoying the living crap out of my nearest and dearest.I come by it naturally enough, however, as I was raised by a mother who is pretty much a frustrated sociologist/anthropologist. She actually went to school for that stuff and ended up deciding that real estate was a much better use of her creative energy...and paid more. Nevertheless, she is prone to deep thought and analysis and occasionally falls victim to trying to see the world through the theories and ideas of other people's writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

It was almost a eleven months ago when I was in Washington, DC the last time.I will never forget the day.It was early January of 2010 and I was with Chas. We had traveled down from Philadelphia so I could catch my flight back to Uganda out of Dulles International Airport.At the time, Chas couldn't stop telling me how much he loved me because I was the most confident woman he had ever met. How he liked the fact that I spoke without stuttering or censoring myself. And, on that day in DC, how I walked around the city like I owned it.I remember wanting to impress him more than anything. I remember feeling like I had found love that was "real" for the first time in many years and I wanted to show him everything and everyone I knew.