Diving has made me a diva. My warped city eyes parse underwater beauty as the lushest fashion spreads imaginable—and Fall fashions, too, tropical island or not. Ava Gardner would wear a coat with a collar of that rich, muted, swaying anemone. Coral reefs conjure Missoni knits, where the zig-zag openings occasionally swallow matching fish. Moray eels peek out of perfect pinkish funnel necks. The purity of a sea urchin in clear water would make Phillippe Starck pant to carve out a neat salt-shaker opening. Gorgonian fans wave as languidly as a front-row couture patron, accessorized by toning and contrasting fishies. And all the muted jewel colors—very Romeo Gigli.

I wanted to peel myself out of my wetsuit and order the deep to clothe me in the richness, the softness, the weightlessness, the boldness it hides from the surface. I wanted to glide down Fifth Avenue with the grace I have underwater, where I move through breath alone. I wanted to have an entourage of angelfish and parrotfish. I wanted to be the Coco Chanel of Koh Tao.

Even at 30 meters deep, I am shallow.

The cost of Internet access is ruinous here on Koh Tao, where I’m learning to dive, so my updates are longhand for now until I transcribe them in Bangkok next week. Be patient. Much wittering about underwater splendors to come.

In the meantime, here’s my favorite email sign-off of the week. It’s from Michael, who mocked me at Vindigo, and (blessedly) mocks me still. But only when I need it.

The cost of Internet access is ruinous here on Koh Tao, where I’m learning to dive, so my updates are longhand for now until I transcribe them in Bangkok next week. Be patient. Much wittering about underwater splendors to come.

In the meantime, here’s my favorite email sign-off of the week. It’s from Michael, who mocked me at Vindigo, and (blessedly) mocks me still. But only when I need it.

‘Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we are wishing to move the stars to pity.’
— Flaubert, Madame Bovary

My notebook is filled with passages copied out of Madame Bovary, which I finished in bed last night. It wasn’t what I expected—Emma is far removed from the hopeless grandeur of Anna Karenina—but I wept for her all the same. With her discontent, her striving after gimcrack dreams of frills and trimmings and romantic love, she is the model of a modern heroine. She died not because she was an adulteress, but because she was addicted to retail therapy. Poor Charles Bovary weeps today in twenty villages in Long Island.

As Emma thrashed in arsenic agonies, a woman in the bungalow next to mine yowled at a boyfriend.
    ‘Fuckin’ piece of shit. Fuckin’ piece of worthless shit. No more. He’s bad. He’s a bad person. I take his love away from him. Take all my love back. No good. Bad. Evil, evil, evil. Take all my love back.’
She kept wailing like a drunken, potty-mouthed toddler. It was midnight already. I gave her until Emma Bovary died to sort herself out before I banged on her door. Then she started to play the flute hysterically, which I hadn’t known was possible.

Charles Bovary was plunged into despair. The flute warbled on, accompanied by further rantings. Charles Bovary discovered the letters from Emma’s lovers. Still my neighbor ranted. Charles Bovary keeled over in the garden, dead.

I think she fell asleep.

The next morning, I saw her gulping water on the porch. She was not, as I’d thought, a backpacking teenager from Ohio, rather, she was a plain fortysomething with a motorbike out front. I threw her a dirty look but my heart wasn’t in it. She’ll never move the stars to pity.

Armand served in Korea, but later became a peace activist. He smuggled draft dodgers to Canada and marched on Washington. In the Deep South, he watched his Civil Rights activist friends get beaten up as ‘nigger-lovers’. He lost academic tenure for his political activities.

Tony is English, middle fifties:
   ‘We were Marxists, a lot of us in the academic community. Sixty-eight and all of that. Vietnam was a big turning point. But my son, who’s very like me in almost every other way, has no politics. He’s very committed to his life of hedonism, but I don’t see any political engagement. Even though his degree was in politics! He’s going into Burma now, he wants to travel around to see it for himself. But he doesn’t seem to have a perspective on it, or to want to write about it in any journalistic way. ‘

They are not sure what to make of my generation and our seeming apathy, but we came of age at a very different time. When I turned eighteen, in 1990, the Berlin Wall had just fallen. Ceaucescu was overthrown. Mandela was freed; apartheid was ended. Vietnam started to open up. In Ireland, out of nowhere, a left-leaning forty-something woman was elected President. She was a Catholic married to a Protestant, and she had already drafted ground-breaking legislation that led directly to the legalization of divorce. The air felt new.

At eighteen, and part of Ireland’s largest baby boom, these events seemed like natural and fitting salutes to a new generation. Political events were happy and momentous, not cause for protest. Closer to home, we campaigned for the right to abortion information and condom vending machines. This was consistent with the scale on which my cohort conducted its political activism. My best friend Caitriona studied conflict resolution and went to document forensic evidence from the mass graves at Srebrenica. Sue, whom I met here in Thailand, went from being an anti-Apartheid activist in 1980s Johannesburg to campaigning against landmine use today. Becky works with Laotian women, teaching them basic healthcare and contraception.

Not for us grand, utopian philosophies to impose from above. We are practical in our politics: our real romance was with the potential of connecting technologies. What happens, say, when Iranian women start underground weblogs? And what happens when you combine Internet access with explosive demographics—in Iran’s case, a population where more than 50% is under 25?

We came of age in a fat, sleek decade of good news. The new, bleaker order may engage us politically beyond the woolly cause of anti-globalization, or it may skip us altogether and take its activists from the Baby On Board generation coming up behind us. But don’t think we didn’t bring change.

Armand introduced me to Bharat, and they’re a wonderful pair. Armand has the wiriness of a former gymnast. He’s a psychologist, nutritionist, and Vipassana teacher. At 67, he bounds around, taking true delight in sharing food, stories, friends, advice, and joy. Bharat is more fragile. He likes to deal with people one to one, and he likes silence. They met in India, where they’ve both mostly lived for thirty years, following the teachings Ramana Maharshi.

We’ve become a happy little band here. On Tuesday, we took a ferry to the National Marine Park at Ang Thong. I climbed to the lookout point while they snorkelled, and on the way back we lined three deckchairs in a row and nodded off to head-bobbing sleep like old friends.

Bharat read my palm yesterday. This was a master reading—his book on palmistry comes out in the autumn. I spread both palms flat on a sunny table in the restaurant while he examined them through a magnifying glass, muttering at my ‘electric’ hands, my strong heart line, my weak life line. We were quiet afterwards. Today, I wrote down what I could remember of the reading, amazed that my hands could confess such secrets to a near-stranger.

It’s an odd adjustment to come from the excessively rational environment of Manhattan software engineering to the slightly skewed world of fasting, Advaita, and palmistry. When I meditate, the faces of my engineer friends float up with raised eyebrows and we mock it together. Dervala’s Magical Mystery Tour.

But a girl gets tired of logic, you know. In Southeast Asia, projects and algorithms seem more illusory than prana and souls.

— Shirley MacLaine

I always thought Shirley MacLaine spoke for all of us on this one, but that was before I discovered my new mantra.
Rambutan. Durian. Mangosteen. Papaya. Lychee. Mango. Coconut. ’10-baht-one-kilo-you-come-back-tomorrow-thank you.’

I mean, the fruit here even looks cool. The rambutan, for one, ought to win a few design awards for innovative packaging. Bright red skin covered in rubbery lime green spikes, opening cleanly to reveal a glistening white egg of sweet, gelatinous fruit. And a nice little seed in the middle to suck.

I just ate a kilo of them. Life is sweet.

On my last visit to Central Park, there was a small patch of mud just inside the entrance gate to the Sheep Meadow. People hopped over it or walked around the edge. As I was leaving, a pair of toddlers approached. She was about three and a half, he was two. Their matching navy-blue outfits were immaculate. At the patch of mud, they stopped dead. Alien substance. Bad?

Mom followed, pushing a huge sports-utility stroller. She was as blondely, blandly perfect as they were.
    ‘Ewwwwwww!’ she said, as though they were forced to ford a twenty-foot latrine. ‘Get in the stroller! Now!’

I felt sorry for these kids who didn’t know what mud was for. I remember making mud pies with my friend Danielle, stirring them with sticks and fingers and singing ‘Shit-ty, shit-ty, shit-ty’ until our mothers came out to explain that that wasn’t a nice word for little girls to say.

Thai kids have a very different life. Ton picked me up in a jeep yesterday as I walked back to my bungalow. There was a borrowed three-year-old in his lap (no seatbelt, of course). He belonged to one of the kitchen staff.
    ‘He like to drive. When I go in jeep, he come.’
Ton’s hands were by his side. The little boy flicked the turn signal at the bottom of the road, and Ton helped him haul the steering wheel around to the left. The kid steered us home single-handed while Ton worked the pedals and the gears. They chattered the whole way. Bear in mind that Koh Samui has the highest rate of traffic accidents in all of Thailand, which chills my heart as I walk to the fruit market every morning, flinching at the onslaught of 18-wheelers driven by toddlers.

Thai kids run naked on the beach. They clamber over guests at beach huts and shout ‘Hallo! Spiderman!’ They sing and chase skinny chickens. They are tickled half to death and folded into deckchairs at Bangkok market stalls. On the buses, adults stand up to give them seats. They are so free that’s it’s never quite clear who their parents are. I would like to be reborn as a Thai child. And I swear I’ll never raise a Manhattan veal calf of a kid.

Meet Simon, who suffers the distinction of being the first person I’ve ever met through this website. We had a fun night out in London last month, confirming my newfound bonhomie towards all things English. It helped that he’s handsome in a violent way) and that his website, to which he didn’t ‘fess up until afterwards, is a delight.

I think this ‘Internet’ thing might just catch on.