I'm dirty and I look like shit and feel worse, from the past 3 days and the all night bus ride. It's too air-conditioned here so I'm wearing jeans and my hoodie and jean jacket -- it's strange to be cold. This is a taste of what I'll feel for the next however many months. Except right now I'm still wearing flip flops. I was going to put on my yellow "long live the king" shirt for the flight home, to be as Thai as possible when I leave Thailand, but I'm too dirty. At some point I'm going to try to take a shower with the bidet things in the bathrooms, though I don't think I'll be able to manage washing my hair, so I've got my red cowboy bandana on.

Basically, I look like a homeless person (a homeless person with a laptop) but I can come to the Sky Lounge where elegantly dressed waiters serve me real espresso and a good breakfast and hand me cloth napkins and treat me like royalty, all for about $7. I started talking to this South African man who manages some media company in Beijing. He's stuck here until midnight. He said the last time he was here, he hung out in the Sky Lounge for a whole day, and no one cared. But I'll still have to sleep on a bench tonight. Staying in an airport for 24 hours is an interesting experiment. Maybe it's one of those things that I have to do at least once in my life.

I'm too tired to think clearly, but I was still very upset last night. I cried a lot on the bus. I left with the tenuous agreement that I would try to save money and at some point Brian would come back and we would live... somewhere... None of this would have been different if we had talked it over first, because the main problem is that we're broke, but I bought a plane ticket before I told him I was leaving, and that is the part that he can't get over.

It's a catch-22, because if I hadn't bought the ticket first, he would have made me back down. I've told him how unhappy I was before and he either yelled at me or ignored it, but suddenly when I have a ticket, he realizes I'm serious. So he's mad because I didn't talk it over with him first, and claims he would have gone with me. But the only reason he's so understanding is that I'm leaving. I've thought it over a million times and I can't think of any way I could have done it better.

The only thing that really makes me feel awful is that if we had been able to talk about it, I could have at least stayed until my visa runs out on January 11th and we could have spent Christmas together. But at the time I made the decision, I wanted to get away from him as soon as possible, and I wanted to see my family. He's so good at being manipulative. I don't know how he made me go from hate to love in a matter of days, but it makes me suspicious. I don't know if it hurts worse to remember the good times or the bad times, or which is more "real."

Even if I could have gotten a job at a high school and gotten a visa and if he had stopped being a dick all the time... would I have been happy? What if I went through all that and it still didn't work? With every hour the plan to stay with Brian seems more and more unrealistic. When he's not here he can't pull his mind tricks. I'll have to see how I feel when I've had enough sleep that I can think straight.

I'm not looking forward to the future... I'm looking forward to being in America. But I wish I could go anywhere, anywhere but my parents' house. I'm so tired of going there when I'm broke and have nowhere to go. My only other option would be to go to Portland, because I have some friends there I could stay with, and I could get a job... but even that would require more money than I have. I'd rather go somewhere new, somewhere I've never lived before, so I don't have so many memories. I have friends all over the place but not the kind of friends that I could stay with for a month until I had a job and enough money for an apartment.

I could be a wandering hitchhiker like before. Hitchhiking sucks in the winter, though, even in California. And the whole dumpster diving, Safeway deli food, Food Not Bombs, sleeping in parks lifestyle doesn't sound that great anymore. I suppose, really, I could go ANYWHERE. Plenty of people do. I was looking at the flights here and saw one to Yangon, Myanmar (Burma). I was thinking, I could send my luggage home on the United flight, and take my backpack to Burma and disappear. That would be a hell of a lot of money to spend to ship some useless crap to the US, and I'm sure my parents would not be happy.

But maybe I will stop feeling this way about Brian, if I could forget the good parts... and once I save up enough, I really could go ANYWHERE in America, and live somewhere for longer than a few months. I haven't done that for years. I don't know why I always dream of a simple, stable, ritualistic life, but I always end up being a nomad and I experience a seismic shift at least three times a year.

Whenever things are almost stable, something happens -- either I choose to change my life, or some outside force changes it -- and suddenly everything is uncertain again. That suggests I don't *really* want a stable life, that I enjoy this insanity. I hope that changes soon. I hope I can convince every cell of my being that I don't want to be a nomad anymore, so these unconscious parts won't keep rising up and making me travel 9,000 miles on the spur of the moment.