July 18th: Banjuwedang and the West Bali National Park

Friday was more recovery for the both of us. My fever came down from the overnight highs, but didn’t go completely away. We spent most of the morning relaxing in bed, consuming content. During 18 hours of my primary “oof I feel awful”, I read two mystery books (A Line to Kill and The Twist of a Knife). They’re both relatively short (350 ish pages?) and are pretty good summer fare. That is to say: not great, but page turners. I got the murderer correct in both cases, but I got some of the ancillary stuff wrong. I continue to be frustrated with the Anthony Horowitz of the books (the author, who writes himself into this particular series of books). I only hope the real life Anthony Horowitz isn’t quite such a dunderhead. Twice stabbed when confronting the murderer. Usually clueless.

By late afternoon, we were feeling well enough to do something, so we did an outing to the national park and a mangrove .. grove? Swamp probably. High tide, so not too swampy at the moment. Our guide (Nono) told us that the local name for the bay we were in is “muddy bay”, and I believe it- most of it seems to disappear at low tide.

Nono approved of our HydroFlasks; he wore a shirt about banning plastic on Bali, and really disliked plastic water bottles. I feel that; everywhere that’s not actively maintained around Bali has plastic detritus just piling up. It’s not like mounds, but if you just look at the side of some road, there’ll be some bottles or straws or lids. Later, when we snorkel, all our guides will go out of their way to collect plastic trash from the reef and carry it back to shore.

We floated around on the boat for a couple of hours, during which time we saw a lot of birds. I remember two of them, mostly because I went through the trouble of flagging them as “seen” in merlin. I now have a life list. With two birds on it. I love looking at birds, but I have this mental block about wanting to memorize names of birds. I mean, the birds don’t care what we call them; I am more interested in what they call themselves. Probably usually “chirp chirp”.

All of that is kind of a lie. I love knowing things. I’m awful at remembering names of things (including people) - my brain just doesn’t work this way. I remember all kinds of things about who a person is (if an actor, like all the movies they were in) but the thing that always falls right out of my brain is the name. Our guides, I have to remember to rehearse the name five times and then write it down in obsidian, because otherwise it’ll go right out. If I don’t rehearse it, I’ll forget before I get to type it into obsidian.

When I was a kid, my parents made the mistake (?) great decision (?) of subscribing to these animal cards; you’d get a batch of like twenty animals in convenient file-card format each month, and I just read and remembered everything. I’ve always been like this; stuff I read tends to stick in my brain (mostly except for names of people). They told stories about needing to deal with me in shifts when we went to a zoo, I would just non-stop tell everyone all the things I knew about these animals. When you’re autistic, engaging with your special interest brings such pleasure and joy, you feel the need to share it with everyone around you. So if I talk a bunch about Formula One or Steven Universe or any other thing, I’m doing it because I like you so much I feel comfortable letting my special interest out of the box, and also because I want to share the fun.

So the real reason I don’t want to get into cameras or birding (like real birding) is kind of a combination of fears: I can see how cameras or CAD or birding or astrophotography or fly fishing would provide endless deep wells of things to know and find out and be excited about, and if I engaged I probably would like it a lot. But it would displace one of my other interests (mostly for reasons of available time) and shift up my mental balance. And another thing I like is things to remain kind of the same. It is why watching the same shows over and over (my double secret special interest is a random new zeland murder show I’ve seen each episode of at least three times by now) and reading books over and over and playing the same video games… you get the point.

So that was Friday. Pretty chill, in large part required because we were still recovering. It was actually while watching the clouds in the photo above that my hunger finally came back (i’d had to force myself to eat for the prior 48h or so). Later, over dinner, I’d say something really embarrassing about the state of my recovery, vis-a-vis some poo stuff, loud enough that Chrissy would look at me and say “you’re really excited enough about this to say it that loud, here, in the restaurant.” I mean, I was, but also I forgot myself. Americans cannot have private conversations in English, the way other folks might.