It's Monday, so it's brown bag lunch day on the quad with my advisee, Priscilla. Today we talked about how much she loves to write. Her passion began with sending letters and stories to her middle school pen pal -Madison from Missouri -from her home in Malawi. Madison, your name is so funny. If you make it a nickname it is like you are MAD!

An avid blogger, she offered the amateur over here some tips. "Write when it's raw. Don't wait so long to think about it and package it up. It's better when it first comes out before you lose what it really feels like." So that's what I'm going to work on. Capturing the little things of life in Joburg. Otherwise, it's far too overwhelming.

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Joburg is complex. I spent Friday night surrounded by new pan-African friends learning Arabic and practicing my Xhosa clicks over monkeygland-sauced steaks. I am surrounding myself with people so different from me.

But just as I begin to pat myself on the back for embracing diversity, I get sidetracked while running Saturday morning errands and find myself at Edgar's juggling strips of Chanel No. 5 and Chance, trying to decide whether I prefer floral or fruity fragrances. On my way from Melrose Arch to the nearest Post Office I take a turn and my tightened shoulders tell me I shouldn't stop at this one. GPS doesn't show you which streets are carpeted with violet Jacaranda petals and which are pitted with potholes apparently. Do I still get credit for "diversity" if I'm afraid of it sometimes?

When I leave work after sunset I've started playing this game to see if I can drive the whole way home without stopping. I call it the "red-light-roll." A little Blink 182 peppered with some Neil Young mixed into Flo Rida and the Joburg radio has me entertained the whole 0:29 minutes home. A week here and I can't even remember San Francisco where I would skip home down Fillmore any time of night. I feel like I've always lived here in some ways. My brain just can't seem to even connect the dots.