I lost my glasses -- the good ones -- in an ex-Soviet Pioneer camp outside Darkhan in northern Mongolia. I was dancing with the school kids on the pavement outside the dining hall, and I just had them hooked over the front of my shirt. Hopefully some child picked them up and put them on and is now stumbling around looking cool and somewhat dizzy, dealing with the bifocal effect.  That's how they worked for me, which is why they were hooked over my shirt front instead of on my face. I think the spare, not-so-good ones are in the top bunk of a sleeper car somewhere on the Trans-Mongolian railway. Those, too, had served me well, but for three bucks I came up with an identical pair at OSJL. Now it's only a matter of time before I dig out the old prescription to replace the good ones. But I'm enjoying kidding myself that I don't really need them.

Mongolia is not a place I would have chosen to visit. The circumstances that took me there are complex and emotionally charged, but it was unquestionably important for me to go. And, well, now I've been to Mongolia, right? So that's kind of a starting place, and now it's back to life as I knew it, except that life as I knew it now seems to need to be taken by the scruff of the neck and shaken a bit. Also, I think I need to learn some Mongolian. That's going to be very difficult, and the reasons why are even harder to explain. But suffice it to say that it's not an experience to be put behind me; it's more of an introduction, and there again not entirely of my choosing.

Ah, well, it's past my bedtime. I think I'm over the jet-lag, but when I close my eyes I still see those weird rock formations and the Argali skulls and the broken vodka bottles glittering in sparse greenery fighting to survive the chronic overgrazing of huge herds of goats and sheep and cattle and horses. In some ways it's romantic, and in more ways it's absurd. Perhaps, with contemplation, it will still balance.