I am not going to go chronologically through my days in India. I thought I would do that, then was felled by a post-air travel cold, then got to thinking chronological order is a boring way to think about my trip anyway.

You can't borrow anybody else's life. I've tried more than once to sluff mine off, tribute to my reptile brain, the idea that I could just slump out of my too-small dead carapace and grow myself a new one. Those resolution types of incremental growth type changes are difficult, require diligence and discipline and drudgery, that is, day to day adherence to what I said I would do. This is the only way to get anywhere I've wanted to get myself, but I still dislike it.

Poetry, I, too, dislike it. Marianne Moore.

I'm wearing the new fragrance from the small hovelly perfume store in Cochin. They keep the fragrances under a glass counter in quart size stainless steel thermoses and fill a vial only when you order one. The fragrances are of the essential oil persuasion, not perfumes per se. I don't know very much about perfume, but I like the smell of this one: "green orchid." I also bought "Kerala flower." The last perfume I bought, a few years ago, was in Paris. "Jaipur" - and now it strikes me that Jaipur is in India. I stopped buying the perfume when they started the s/m bondage ad campaign. Obviously I am not in that company's demographic. The first perfume I bought was when I was in high school. "Wind Song". It went so well with Jim's "Jade East."

Kerala was hot and humid, a challenge for NW native me. I went up to the tea estates in the Western Ghats partly to see them and partly to wake up one morning with dry skin. The first week I was in India there were times at night I almost couldn't breathe, heat and humidity weighted my chest and my lungs got a little panicky.