if at first...

of hippies and hipsters...

2011-06-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

arriving into toronto pearson, standing in the long line to go through customs, i conjured up one of my father's growing-up exhortations, "you need an attitude adjustment." why? i was, have been feeling sad about coming up to toronto. yes, it'll be a great growing/learning experience. but i still couldn't help but feel a sense of loss... for my life, the familiar. easy to dwell in the love this love that coulda shoulda done xyz while i was still in amrika. nonetheless as the line snaked around and around (x10, not hyperbole) i tried to get into the excitement of the whole thing. i had these various anxieties about the step-by-step of getting myself taken care of.

first was getting my bags onto a cart. wtf was i thinking bringing two big-ass bags, in addition to a carry-on (and personal item, of the cumbersome variety.) there is nothing like lugging hella shit around to make you realize, no i didn't need to bring this sweatshirt AND this jacket. or 5 pairs of earrings. it's really the little things. as i'm walking out of the airport, i'm reminded of going to korea on my own. a flurry of faces and signs w/ names on them as you pass through the final customs door. thinking about how - in korea - my anxiety mounts as i scan for my family's faces.... except this time, i'm not greeted by anyone, but luckily most everyone speaks in english. the feeling of foreigness is only very slight - the signs are in both english and french. i wonder if i would be more excited about being "abroad" if i was someplace more "foreign."

second, get taxi. done, fine. third, find place, 1128A college. taxi shoots a little past the place, so i awkwardly lug two bags past several babushkas, then run back to get the third one. babushkas (i guess portuguese?) fully complete w/ headscarves and stare at me w/out reservation as i schlep my shit half a block down. thanks for the help.

fourth, get myself settled. i find the apartment door - right next to the thai video store, just like the lady said - and ring the yellow doorbell, which the lady specified i ring. nothing. i push it a little harder. nothing. wait a second, cuz i can see a door up the stairs, hoping person is coming down. waiting, waiting, push again, loooonger. nothing. push aggressively like 7 times, followed by several long pushes. nothing nothing. i'm not getting panicked, but this was def the step that was worrisome to me b/c the lady never actually CONFIRMED w/ me about she'll be home when i get there, etc. i'm thinking... okay, okay, what are my options. need to find payphone. no that's a paid-parking ticket dispenser. lug my shit over to this thai-vietnamese restaurant, and they have one of those annoying loud door bell rings as i open the door. so one as i enter w/ a bag. another as i open to grab the other bag. three times as i go back out to retrieve the last bag. schlep that shit in, another bell. at this point, everyone is staring at me. i order some food, and for just a moment, break down. quietly, behind a napkin. write out a note to lady - really hoping she didn't flake/ditch me - signal to the older asian guy working there that i was leaving but coming back (duh all my bags are there) as he somewhat suspiciously and confusedly stares at me. walk back over to lady's place, and in a last ditch effort, press the door bell again. w/out hope, i start folding the note to stuff into the door. as i'm doing so, an older woman (w/ a young spirit), barefoot opens the door. there's an exchange of how she's been waiting, how she never heard the doorbell, was wondering when i was going to get in, where's your stuff, so sorry about all that, are you okay, you're not going to cry are you? the relief washes over me, and i do cry just a little as she gives me a hug, and i exclaim i'm fine i'm fine, it's okay, no worries.

cheryl is the barefoot hippie type, (barefoot as she walks down the street w/ me to the restaurant to grab some of my stuff), and works as a bike courier. her place is a little grungier than i expected w/ not a lot of common space. and my room is hella small (but w/ a big bed) especially since i have these (recurring kvetch only can blame myself) three large f-ing bags. but she's so nice and friendly. recycles, works on a community garden in an abandoned lot, only gets organic food from farmers' market. she introduces me to a neighboor - a young, attractive girl named sophie, w/ a rat on her shoulder... totally missed the rat, and mistook the tail for a strand of hair (a rat's tail if you will). chit-chatted w/ them about bikes (there's a bike coop down the way they both highly recommend -- cheryl will let me use a cannondale frame recovered from "evil igor" the local bike thief, if i get parts and put it together), and finally finally excused myself to get online b/c "i should check in w/ my family, they're probably getting a little worried."

yeah right. no one is online, doesn't answer my calls, or plaintive vms or emails... at least for a little bit. that's when i start this blog post, having some stuff to get out. and i continue it today (thursday), in a total hipster coffee shop, the common. i feel like i could be in brooklyn. you know, all these kinda slobby chic white people and the token asian (not me) also rocking the currently fashionable "i don't care look" consisting of a short flowered dress/jumper, w/ a denim shirt on top. it's like a seventeen magazine spread from my youth. my mom's closet from the 80's. it's a wonder anyone can take themselves seriously, their various funky hats. totally possible the barista is high... shouting from the back, omg! i dropped the sugar! oh nooo! there's sugar EVERYWHERE! it's ALL OVER THE FLOOR!! no one bats an eye, all engrossed in our laptops as we are.

i could be anywhere.

The Weirdzies of the Dying Young Circus

2011-02-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

i feel incredibly sad. an old college friend, meghan murphy, just passed away on saturday. her family and friends helped maintain a blog for her, and reading about the last couple of months leading up to her death from cancer has been very emotional. her mom posted this on one of her very last days:

... Meg, of course, was making us laugh. ...Meg did sleep last night but not a peaceful rest for every breath is a struggle. We spoke this morning about her being ready to go. (She said to post "Whoa, dying.....weird!) She is so tired. I told her it is alright. We all love her and know she is going someplace wonderful. So many friends and relatives are waiting to greet her and welcome her with open arms. I'm sure they can't wait to be with her. She made a list of all those who she wants to see as soon as she arrives. She doesn't want any of us to be sad. She loves us all beyond measure. I do believe Meghan has loved everyone even those of us she only had a brief opportunity to spend time with.

it's not like I was close with Meghan... not at all. I'm not even sure the last time I saw or spoke with her. But she was a force of nature. I haven't dealt w/ death so often in my life, especially for people that are so young. about four years ago, another friend passed away... Nyles Fitzgerald. He died in a freak accident - he was passing between subway cars and fell off. I wasn't close to him either, but his death hit me hard as well. At first, I was just kind of shocked. Then months later, at reunion, it really hit me. Nyles was just one of those guys that is a positive force in the world, a musician, following his own self-created path... I was talking to another Cornell friend today about Meghan's passing -- he didn't know her, but he did know Nyles... "the heartthrob" was how Tarik referred to him. Meghan is also one of those people that it just doesn't seem right that she died so young. Both Meghan and Nyles were people who were in similar circles as myself... we were all in the same dorm (JAM) first year, and all part of the alterna-crowd. they definitely knew each other. I remember her as being hella fun, funny, always had a smile... just an awesome woman who handled her situation with so much grace and courage. She was on increasing doses of pain killer cocktails, and wrote about some of her experiences, hallucinations. She was staying in a hospice in Florida for her last days, and she prefaced a post about her perceptions of social interactions: "Also, my memory is a bit wacky so the world is a bit ...... How do you say ....... fresh." Meghan (via the transcription of her mother and I believe a friend) expanded on her street cred and her resultant thoughts:

I feel I can get away with a little possibly inappropriate for a hospice chipperness because of my robe and lovely/pathetic IV pole (which is not an official IV just subcu which doesn't involve my poor vein-i-poos).

I know what you are going to say why WHY why on earth do you care what others are thinking? My very best answer would have to be, "Well, I certainly don't know!" But the thoughts run through my head so lets talk it out?

I flash the robe or people check out the group looking for the patient finally landing on me and people's energy changes. It isn't all to pity, which seems to be popular. Then it often goes to curiosity, which encourages my energy to run away because being friendly and explaining is strenuous. Anyway, I get noticed and people treat me differently energetically, just as a natural course of things.

I maintain my awkwardness and have that feeling of not wanting to upset anyone. But, I also want to size them up, know what they are thinking, where I stand in their social hierarchy. So, I imagine their thoughts which go a little something like this:

"Whoa she is young" or

"I'm glad I'm not her"or

"her poor family" or

"I guess my loved one was lucky he/she lived to see his/her grandchildren."

There is one that I especially enjoy, which I hope is there and I am not making it up to make myself feel better:

"Why am I worrying about getting old?"

I would love to remind folks that getting old is rad.

And it might be especially needed in here in Florida. We spend so much time, effort, money, mental processing power on turning back the clock, but participating in the Possibly Dying Young Circus has made me feel jealous of 40-50 somethings and 80s whoa, ok, now you are just showing off!

Tragic. But classic Meghan.

We all know that we are going to die. That other people are going to die... they do die. It's hard to wrap my head around the idea of basically finding out you only have a few months left to live. It's more complicated than that because she had this roller coaster of deadlines she was given... first it was bad... then she had successful chemo the doctors were surprised and happy... she gets to go home (back to I-town), but then she coughs up blood and finds out the cancer has traveled to her lungs. Then more ups and downs of the uncertainty of living or dying. The complexity of "trying to fight it" versus living the rest of your life in peace, but still hoping and believing that things will turn around. The flood of emotions... guilt and struggle for trying to hold on... guilt and struggle for wanting to let go. At some point in the last week or so, she said... "I don't want to be anticlimactic about not dying...." And yet, we all die. irrespective of when, it is a known fact. it will happen.

Part of my despair is knowing that I can't conceive of the pain that her family and close friends are going through. I am heartbroken, but jesus, what if one of my closest friends was in her shoes? It's entirely conceivable, though obviously not something one ever wants to conceive of just for the hell of it. hellacious conceptions part two, what if I was in her shoes? A big part of the narrative of these last few months has been the difficulty with finances. Not only affording various health treatments (which was a big one), but also, Meghan didn't want to leave her mom in debt. (I guess her mom co-signed on her school loans and so forth). The length to which her family and friends rallied for her moves the soul. It seemed like Meghan struggled w/ how expensive some of these various treatments costed, that she didn't want to "waste" people's money for some alternative treatment or approach. I could imagine the deep desire to "give up." She and her family were very vigilant about her diet... at a treatment center she was at, she was doing the whole greens/juice thing. wheatgrass til the very end.

The end of life, at which point what? I've never been particularly terrified of death (or the idea of dying), I suppose in part because of some vague sense that "stuff" goes on... somehow. Someone like Meghan... at thirty... I don't want to think of her expiring, poof, done, and that was that. Heaven may be a coping mechanism, but it sure seems like a good one.

All of this is to say, . Generic conclusions aren't so reconcilable with feeling sadness.

what was i thinking...

2011-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

i went to msa, and had delicious lamb shank, chicken tikka masala, just total normal eating. whipped cream on that sugary caffeinated concoction, yes please.

then i came back and started getting on the boat. let me rephrase. i started walking towards the dock. with a quick sprint back onto land to have meat and copious amounts of cheetos. man, i love cheetos. then this past week, i've fully been on the dock - being vegetarian, but kinda cutting out the grains and dairy. then yesterday i was ON IT. (i had a few corn chips and a little hummus at a MEMSA - Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian - meeting. and a little 7-up. whatevs.) today, i am too. i've thought about breaking about 5 times. in the last five minutes. the thing is, i'm not even on the boat. no, i'm on it, but i have NOT left the dock. i can't do it. it's too much. i apparently have very little will power when it comes to food.

ben asked me, as i was chopping up whatever, green peppers and onions, if i would ever consider being a full-time vegan. before he even finished the question, i was like hell no. at this point, i'm barely on a raw diet. or rather, i'm not on a raw diet at all. what i am doing is only eat fruits and vegetables (no grains), but a lot of sauteeing with olive oil (skipping out on the salt lasted about 30 seconds). yesterday i had two artichokes (one big, one medium) with a lemon olive oil (garlic powder, salt, pepper, cayenne) dipping sauce. fruit. fruit leather. taro. mashed potatoes. (i made these previously and used up the last bit of yogurt we had. ben doesn't want to eat them, and i don't want them to go to waste, so screw it.) clearly i haven't been hungry enough, because i really can't imagine days upon days of only eating raw vegetables.

some realizations:

i think about food a LOT. yesterday morning i woke up at like 6 am and boiled myself some taro. i was so freaking hungry. all i think about is food. and what's interesting is that, since i'm officially restraining myself from having most of the things that i think about, i realize how much i just give in to whatever i want without really thinking about it. yesterday i was thinking... mmm, a cheeseburger and fries sounds SO good. 2010 tamera would have procured it in less than 24 hours. there's some haagen daaz in the freezer -- i thought about eating it several times yesterday, and again, realized, that with the exception of me feeling like i need to save some for ben, i usually just eat it whenever i want. (ben always accuses me of "eating all the good stuff." i tell him... you had your chance.)

i'm pretty sure i'm getting enough calories and so forth doing this "cleanse" thing - i feel like i'm constantly eating... but in general, i think that i've been lucky to have a pretty good metabolism. thinking about all the stuff that i normally eat, without reservation, i really should be more of a porker than i am. (goddess knows that i would be if i could eat wheat products.) a small part of me trying to re-think my eating habits is that i've noticed that my metabolism isn't quite as good as it used to be. in the past, if my clothes were getting a little tight, i would just eat sensibly for several days, maybe go to the gym once or twice, and i would be all good. now, that's not quite true. "eating sensibly" for me has basically entailed, not eating ice cream every day. or something like that. this whole cleanse thing makes me appreciate how many people in the us probably do need to not eat ice cream or cheese much of the time. self-deprivation is really freaking hard. and i've appreciated in starker relief how often in the past i would just mindlessly eat whatever and pretty much whenever i wanted.

it's going to be difficult, after today or tomorrow, whenever i get back on the dock, not to go back to old habits. but some of this reflection will be helpful in trying not to do so. if i feel like it's hard now to change my habits, it'd probably be insanely harder ten years from now to try and do so. shedding that eat-all-the-time mentality, but over and above that, identity is going to be challenging, and i prob need to try and remain vigilant about doing that.

finally, i have mad respect for people who can actually eat raw stuff for days on end. inconceivable.

juice monster... (or not)

2011-01-13T21:28:00.000-08:00

my "cleanse" has been - while i wouldn't go so far as to say an epic fail - not very successful. basically what makes it difficult is having a social life. i was trying to cut down on sugar, salt, eat more raw stuff, and hotpot w/ veggies and mushrooms and such, and feeling pretty good! then... dinner with friends. then girls night out. then meeting up w/ issc crew. ben and i don't want to cook, we get pizza from downstairs. then dimsum date. in each situation i start moving the line in the sand and at a certain point, i pretty much forget it's there. last night i ordered a glass of wine without even thinking. b/c it's fairly common practice to, obvs, get a drink when you're out! not that i need to drink. certainly not. but it's like this: wendy took me ice skating, super fun, and suggests we get hot chocolate afterwards. i hedge... well, for my cleanse i'm trying to cut down on sugar and chocolate... but you should get some! her eyes widen, no chocolate? a small gasp escapes as she ever so slightly slumps her shoulders. i say, but you should get some! she responds, well, if you're not going to get any then i don't want to be drinking hot chocolate by myself. i break. what can i do? and then, hell, i'm getting hot chocolate - why NOT get whipped cream? is there any other way to have it? (never mind trying to cut out dairy as well.) there's a lot to be said about that camaraderie of having a food or drink together. people feel less inclined to drink or whatever if someone's not. they are disappointed. and i hate being a party pooper.

this weekend i'm heading down to la for the muslim students association conference (aka msa west). the theme is "taking back our narrative." since i want to try and figure out the slippages between a muslim and pakistani identity, it seems like a good time to do some ethnographic work, problematic as it is. anyway. they're feeding us and i already know what kind of food is going to be there. it'll be delicious meats. it'll be difficult for this weekend to not add to the wash that is my cleanse. (double entendre doesn't work here.) nevertheless, i am drinking a smoothie as i write. banana, orange, lemon, yogurt, two kiwis, and KALE. and then three big frozen strawberries for added measure. it's tasty! actually a bit too sweet for my taste. i think it was the kiwis were you know kinda mushy excessively sweet. i kept adding kale. blended that jank. it is green, has a lot of bits, and looks like mint chutney served at indian restaurants.

remarkably few people have been supportive of me dropping 250 bones to get my masticating juicer. and by few i mean no one i talk to. those peoples on the internets are all about it though. as soon as i start reciting the differences between centrifugal and masticating, brah brah brah, people's eyebrows go up, and then when i talk about vitamins breaking down from the oxidation, their lips curl, a small to full on smirk scowl. of course my mother was totally impatient and kept scoffing and sighing in pissed off exasperation when i told her about my plan. so whatever. i'm going to do my best this weekend, and then try to get back on the boat.

the thing about the boat is this: if the boat is the actual cleanse - only eating fruits and veggies (juiced or not, and emphasis on the veggies) - then there are a lot of steps to actually getting on the boat, if say, normal eating is land. there's walking down the dock: cutting out meat, animal products, processed food, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt. there's untying the boat: getting down to only the raw and cutting out grains, beans, soy. and then you're on the boat. you sail around. you cleanse, your eyes turn yellow or your tongue gets funky b/c your body is "eliminating toxins," you have some good/disturbing shits. then when you're done being on the boat - which i only plan to do for 3 - 5 days - then you go through the steps in reverse. tie the boat up, walk back up the dock, and then hopefully, when you're on land, you're not back to old habits, and you're like, oh man i felt so goood when i was juicing i'm gonna eat freaking kale man, yeah! the dude abides!

over the past few days, i've been reminded of another reason i want to do this cleanse: my stomach has a general malaise and even wakes me up in the morning. and keeps me up. it sucks. so that's been motivation to try to get on the boat.... thus far i've really only walked down the dock and maybe unlooped the rope once. before cheating and eating meat and drinking and mmm chocolate covered raisins handfuls of them for breakfast and just because! i mean before retreating from the boat. at this point, i will prob skip the juicer and just try to make due w/ my blender, then in the future maybe i'll go more full on. as my issc friend nathan put it, it's a good reason to get married! riiiiight....

JUICY CULTure

2011-01-06T02:47:00.000-08:00

This is what ~$60 of fresh produce looks like (including a couple detox teas). apples, kale, bananas, taro, red and green peppers, onions, artichokes, pomegranate, kobocha, carrots, lemons, heirloom tomatoes, small watermelon, bananas, avocados, tangelos.

I've been reading a BUNCH about juice cleanses... flirted briefly w/ the master cleanse, you know the maple syrup, lemons, cayenne thing. Ben thinks I've gone all culty. obsessed was another word he used. you'd think i was planning to do some sort of juice cleanse for like a month or something. (<-- that lady was so hardcore, she was doing three colonics a week. black tar shite, really?? fascinating.) i'm thinking something more like 3-5 days. but even then, not sure how much pure JUICE-ing solamente i'm going to be doing. i found what i think is a reasonable approach to "detox" diets... korean-canadian homeboy basically advocates a raw-ish diet. the "cleanse" is essentially only fruits and vegetables, with an emphasis on dark green veggies. he's fine w/ them steamed. leading up to and following the only juice days (tbd, if they are to happen at all), you're supposed to skip grains, nuts, meats, eggs, dairy, and soy. he's a big fan of avocados, so that helps allay fears that i won't be able to do it.

but i still want a juicer. an omega 8004 i *think* is the best option. it's masticating which is better than centrifugal b/c it doesn't whip up the juice (oxidizing it and thus causing vitamins to break down or something and the juice to go bad faster), and it can handle greens. which as far as i can tell, is the big reason one would choose to juice in the first place. this video review made me get excited about juicing possibilities. the idea of just straight-up eating, as my mom crankily suggested, veggies like kale, celery, spinach... kinda makes me gag. maybe i'm buying into the hype, but you can make these supposedly health-packed, supposedly delicious combos. furthering my excitement, my trip to berkeley bowl today... the vast cornucopia that is their produce section! (as per the photo above) for example, that radratjuicer lady uses this combo called the "italian stallion" a lot. it includes celery, carrot, collards, cucumber, scallions, alfalfa sprouts, endive, dill, lime, tomato, yellow squash, fennel, cayenne, sea salt, kelp granules. Or the "dew drop" has honey dew melon, green apple, pear, ginger, mint, parsley, lime.

sounds delicious and nutritious! the big thing holding me back right now is the cost. these masticating juicers are hella expensive. at least for a poor grad student. the one i'm looking at is $250. that's a big commitment to juice. or a juicing lifestyle. italian stallion has a long list of stuff, presumably it'd take awhile not just to gather and wash everything, but then to actually juice it. the amazon reviewer lady said it took her about 5-6 min to make two cups of juice. well. i guess it takes that long to make oatmeal. i suppose that's reasonable. if i were to try to prepare all those veggies to eat in some palatable way, it would take longer than that.

taking several steps back, the reason i want to do this juice thing in the first place, is to jump start a healthier approach to eating and food. i'm prob being a little extreme. certainly, i could, as i have been the past few days in prep for the cleanse, just eat healthier. but i find that this intense focus on how to do this ultimate health thing makes the transition easier. b/c the way i was eating the last year was something that did need to be, um, drastically changed, not just transitioned from. everyone assumes that i'm fit... i'm kinda not. luckily, i think my metabolism is pretty good, b/c i should be a lot chubbier than i am. but... i'm 31. over the past few years, i've put on a couple few pounds a year. not much... but over the course of ten years, that's twenty to thirty lbs. i want to nip this trend in the butt. plus i have a lot of cute clothes that i've grown out of it, but would still like to wear. i can't afford to replace everything, nor do i want to. but more than that, is just long term health. not only in terms of weight... but i was just so overly permissive w/ myself about everything. i've just been feeling kind of gross... sluggish and luggish, i have spent way too much time on the couch, not wanting to move and eating pizza for every meal several days in a row. especially gross the past month, where i've also had this nagging cold which won't go away, or just when i think it's gone, shows up again.

apparently doing the detox cleanse can actually instigate some issues b/c your body is getting rid of various toxins. phlegm, gross breath, general funkiness. when i start talking about this sort of stuff w/ ben, he starts lecturing me about quack new age hippie dippy science. for sure. i get that. even just being focused on consumption and how to detox and stuff is strange b/c it feels very selfish. it is selfish. there is an aspect of it that's culty. i def don't want to be one of those sanctimonious types when it comes to food or goddess forbid, juicing. i had this coworker who would snack on celery and carrots and claim she "didn't like potato chips" and would never eat anything good... just very little nibbles. seriously, who doesn't like potato chips. it's impossible to not like potato chips. while i am going to try to be healthier this year and into the future, i can't really imagine giving up cheese. thinking about butter still makes me long for it. ahhh, i can't really think about such things when i'm trying to get on the vegan/raw train.

i've often had judgmental moments in the grocery store line, when someone before or after me (usually a white woman) lays down the kind of cartload of groceries that i had today. meanwhile, i'll have some fruit, sure, and maybe even a vegetable or two, but will also have soda, chips, cheese, candy/sugary stuff. it's easy to have an almost badass attitude, like, yeah, what i'm eating chips... you know what? i also watch tv. while i have as many root beer floats as i want. it's a rebellious, imagined or not, counter to what i imagine/know the bay area healthster thinks in their mind. "oh, i don't eat processed foods." or "i only eat organic." my food approach has tended towards the hedonistic. i have mixed feelings about, yes, actually trying to not eat processed foods, but at the same time not manifesting that annoying demeanor of thinking that i possess superior taste.

the obsession w/ health and organic food, while i don't think it's a bad thing per say, (especially as it does lead to improved environmental practices) i do have problems with. take for instance the master cleanse. people are super adamant about only using organic lemons, organic maple syrup, organic cayenne pepper, and bottled water. fuji if possible. b/c that's the only way you can ensure that additional toxins aren't being added to your diet, as you're going through a detoxification. i can appreciate the attention to detail, but at the same time, i feel mad and sad about such privilege. tap water isn't clean? omfg. compared to what everyone else in the world is drinking? being so concerned about the pesticides you could possibly consume, yet not acknowledging all of the people who work day in and day out in said toxicity with few rights or benefits, much less trying to do anything to enact some sort of change. it's what i find problematic about the green movement in the us... the nimby attitude that results in environmental racism and a lack of recognition that choosing organic is a huge marker of class privilege.

as such, i am extremely privileged to be able to do a juice cleanse. even having access to such a wide variety of produce! it's incredibly time consuming and attention absorbing to be planning all this stuff out. total diversion and distraction. it almost makes me feel guilty... b/c, so what i spend a paragraph talking about farm workers or global water conditions. that's also a means of claiming a specific class status and asserting superiority to others. would it be less so if i lost the critical attitude? i just hope that, if i can justify this selfishness as 'watering the tree,' i can actually do something to help right inequality w/ my detoxed tree self.

year of the spaceship: 2010 in review

2011-01-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

wow, i haven't updated this sucker since march.

although typically i am *not* ready for the new year, this 01-01-2011 i'm seeking to fully embrace the opportunity for personal reflection on my life direction, and as such, change.

if 2010 was a year for me, i suppose it would be year of the cocoon. or year of the spaceship. either way, this past year i feel like i have continued a trend developed in the last few years... that of self-cloistering. over the past decade, i might say this has been the biggest change that I've manifested - becoming much more introverted, whereas before i was full-on hella extroverted.

i find it helps preserve my sanity. a lack of heavy social interaction, remaining close to only a small number of people. letting the details of my life sway in a cradling hammock, close to my heart. facebook status updates... not really seeing the point. firstly, i don't super want to share my shit. secondly, i don't like how the status update is literally an update on status: oh marvel at the cosmopolitan privilege of my luxurious life! behold my cultural and social capital! i partied with jane f-ing fonda last night, what. (alice waters and a bunch of other white n. berkeley fogies -- lame.)

of course, copious amounts of sleep does help keep a life rather uneventful, at least on a behavioral and conscious plane. i have also been watching a fuq-ton of tv. not commercials, i hate commercials. battlestar galactica has been the show rounding out 2010, and increased consumption of all things dystopic and sci-fi. the road, oryx and crake, year of the flood, asimov, brave new world, the crazies, all sorts of stuff. it's nice to develop a new past time. (what was that phrase we learned in spanish so many years ago? que son tu favoritas divertidas y pasatiempos? i always loved that phrase, though i'm so rusty i'm surely mangling that in at least three ways.) though these habits reflect an escapism from reality that is all too comfortable, and not exactly a catalyst for productivity. (not that i want to get too caught up on the neoliberal tsunami of filtering the meaning of life through a capitalist frame. f that, man.)

one change for the new year: not stuffing my face. getting physical. doing a juice cleanse (previously pretty unfathomable) to jump start a healthier relationship to food. less processed shiznit and sugar. i'm a sugar-holic. and goddess i love butter. in the last month alone, i've singlehandedly consumed at least three sticks of butter. that's going to be a tough one. and exercise! kickboxing round two. looking forward to hitting and kicking things again. maybe i'll even try to kick my meds to the curb. carefully, and with a physician's supervision. nobody likes an insane person.

another resolution, one that i make every year and every time i think about my life: more creativity! art and creative output needs to be a way of life for me. gradually i think i have been overcoming my fear about my talent or "ability to contribute." (grad school can be such a mind job on how we evaluate ourselves. this fear i more importantly need to overcome in my "work," my so-called chosen career path.) screw it, just put some color on a page. slap some paint on a canvas. i would love a studio but... well, i'd need to give up the oh-so-comfortable (expensive and bourgeois) spaceship type of lifestyle.

the ever present not-so-silver lining to these resolutions is definitely dinero. though i'm still too temerious to actually designate financial responsibility as a resolution. it's so banal. but money is definitely something to think about. recently, both my mom and my boyfriend have expressed discontent with, what i personally would call unequal wealth distribution, but more generally, why those joneses got that and i don't? my mom was toying with the idea of joining a book club, but she's not doing it b/c she doesn't want to go over to those various doctors' bling-ass houses. she said, "it makes me feel like, why do they have that and i don't? i want to have those things too."

sure, who doesn't want a bimmer, for realz. though having a car (thanks mom!) makes me feel like, dude, why you want that fancy ass shit? i'll just be stressing about scraping the rims. ha ha, rims. my imaginary disposable income. in addition to film fest trips, art and design (including but not limited to the clothing variety), international travel, and blah blah blah.

so. while it worries me to hear these kinds of laments from my loved ones, i'm personally not too hung up on it. i like my life, it's good. does living paycheck to paycheck blow? yeah, but see if you're kinda flippant to the whole financial system, whatever, loans schmoans, late fees, yadda yadda. it's all a social construct anyways, and who don't got debt. at least mine is to the gov't for the most part.

i am however - such of sign of maturity - repressing my flippancy for authority in the realm of safety. living dangerously, and especially, putting other people at risk (pedestrians, other drivers) has got.to.go. save my need for speed for racetrack time. (also on my "if i was fabulously loaded i would blow it on..." list.)

big lessons for me are the benefits of life in the slow lane. it's not a race. following cartman, whatever i do what i want.

and the balance of sharing with people. i still play the tough grrrl, but don't want hackles to be my immediate response to threat. people are injurious, hurtful, untrustworthy, petty, mean, competitive, selfish. but not always and usually not through and through. it's unlikely i'll forget those that have trespassed against me, what with being a scorpio and all, but very few of those fornicators are truly evil. everyone needs a little twist of secretly evil anyways, just to stay interesting. eeeeevil, $1 million dollars hold the world for ransom, evil, bwhahaha bwahahahaa!

and on that note, cheers to 2011. to not being evil, being happy and having fun.

Same, same, but different. Confusion and Dawdling are the king and queen of my perception.

2010-03-11T14:49:00.001-08:00

Corporate hippie or hippie corporateer? same different, worse better?

Another sleep-deprived day, amped up artificially w/ caffeine. A little bit of the shakes and many moments of blank. Forgetting people's name in class, or even what you were just talking about. And also oddly, I have these moments when I'm very tired of just blanking on, not just how to spell things, but things like... what is "3"? This experience came when receiving a text at lunch. Juan, running late, surprise. A bunch of squiggles and a momentary lapse of comprehension and ability. It made me think about how fantastically amazing it is that we even have such things as letters and numbers and you learn them and they become such background. It's like, when you're learning a foreign language and you see a bunch of text (esp if it's in a different script) in a flash, for example an introduction to a soap on tv, driving past a shop of some sort w/ abstract text, passing a poster that has Arabic on it.... For me, I start sounding out the words slowly, some recognition at times of meaning, but then it's gone... it seems it is *impossibly fast* for anyone to be able to read it. Seriously. Who can read that fast. And yet, there are many times where there are flashes of English and the comprehension barely breaks the surface. It really is amazing sometimes, wow, I just somehow magically understood all those lines on the screen and I now know... whatever, ads, intros to movies.

When comprehension does break to the surface, feeling towards English like I do towards Urdu or Korean... panic jumps up as I consciously start thinking, curvy. bumpy. half of a heart. boobs turned sideways. almost an 8. E upside down. Wait, what's "E" or "8"? And then the tide breaks as I remember, oh yes, this is 3. 3 is three. It's a number. whew. Almost lost it there. Then I continue, a little stream of amazement as I tap out a message in return, being able to think and write at the same time. Crazy. Go humans.

Which leads to this very random question of the difference (or not) between a corporate hippie and/or a hippie corporateer. (think mouseketeer but corporate.) (mouskateer? that seems wrong. anyway, like micky mouse club kids, britney justin, christina, and the rest of them. but corporate.) The chain linking being a space cadet and distinguishing between adjectives... is probably winding and loose. But one of the links was this guy who had shaved all his hair except two strips, that he had gelled out to appear as alien antenna. these horn creations were perfectly straight, sticking out about three inches from his head, and they were fluorescent orange. impossible to summarize the rest of the links in a sentence, but there was some cognitive flow between one and the other.

randomness while writing...

2009-12-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

when you're tired and concentrating, words start seeming very strange.

i misspelled savvy as saavy (thank you red squiggle) and had to re-look it up to remember how to spell it. savvy is a fun word. sav-vy. business and tech-savvy in this instance of editing. anything to save a little bit more white space.

~~~~~~~

my wrists, hands, fingers, and arm hurt. recently i suspect i've been suffering from some sort of carpal tunnel, but i think i might have pulled a muscle when attempting to do finger stretches. what's it called? oh, yes. an occupational health hazard.

~~~~~~~

is the change that teaching or publishing research could possibly make, worth the pain and suffering of the phd?

~~~~~~~

it's not tito's finest, but there may not be many other styles other than a bob one could do for the growing hair out stage.

~~~~~~

sometimes it's hard to edit things down not because you have an attachment to what you've written, but b/c you don't. the trick is finding and keeping the baby. (you know bath water, yadda yadda.) 10 whole pages of confusion to sort through, reduce, make more clear.... it makes sense in it's current state b/c it's got some sort of narrative flow to it. i guess that means i need to reorganize the story. fraking-krill.

2009-12-10T04:46:00.000-08:00

There is nothing like writing a paper to get the pulse pumping. Ben's been very excited about how fit his muay-thai training is making him and decided to take his resting heart rate. It's low, at like 55. Mine? The first time, 80. I managed to finally get it down to 72 by lying on the bed. Maybe it's high b/c you're stressed, suggested Ben... while most likely it points to me being out of shape, I'll take the anxiety explanation.

Nothing like writing a paper to conjure up THE WORST procrastination ever. It doesn't help xmas is on the way and I'm kinda stressing about what to get people. Firstly, xmas sucks if you're poor. Secondly, xmas isn't fun if you read about commodity fetishism all the time. Third, xmas is depressing without a tree, but as Tina Fey put it, "let's get a tree and watch it DIE." Right, catch 22.

Every time I find myself in this situation, I think about how painful it is, how I won't subject myself to it in the future... and yet, here I am again, surfing the internet for random presents (mimobots - cute!) and all too consciously waiting til ... the. last. second.

The last second is technically 8 AM, ie EOB in Norway... this paper being due Dec. 10th. Yeah.... I'm gonna go ahead and just try and get it done on Cali time....

I think I made a big mistake when I looked up everyone else who is going to be participating in this workshop. Man, is it just 50 times easier to publish your face off in Europe, or are these some highly accomplished folks? Likely the latter, of which I am going to be little shrimp egg-baby.

Being krill-spawn wouldn't be so bad except that academia really just induces a paralyzing insecurity about everything that supposedly matters in this warped world. Putting your work out there is slightly terrifying. Constantly inadequate, going to be cut to pieces, being laughed out of sociology. There's this bottomless abyss of failure haunting your every edit.

sometimes a small series of events makes you think...

2009-08-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

this morning i had a breakfast meeting with the prof and fellow GSIs that I will be working with this semester. Before eating, one of the women pulled out some hand sanitizer to use. It was a only brief attention getter, /c I thought to myself about my hands being relatively clean, having not touched too much en route to the faculty club dining hall. And after my summer in India last summer, I honestly feel like most things in the US are just hella clean and sterile -- that I could eat off the ground in most places without worrying too much. But considering one of my best friends carried around a large pump dispenser of hand sanitizer in his backpack in college, I just thought, enh, Americans.

But then my attention was piqued slightly more when given the opportunity for GSI questions, she asked "should we be talking to the students about swine flu and not coming to class if they're sick?" Not exactly the first question I had in my mind.... She went on to kind of laugh about not wanting them to cough and class and joked she was going to make putting on hand sanitizer a part of her section requirements. The kicker is that this woman studies the relationship b/t animals and humans in India, specifically packs of dogs. What???

Then lastly, the course lectures are held in one of the Haas (b-school) buildings, and before hand I was doing some reading in the library. Cush to the power of cush. Haas is not like the rest of Berkeley, especially places like Barrows or Dwinelle (social sciences and humanities). It's very new and spotless. Went to the bathroom, and upon exiting, noticed a sign giving directions to "open the door with your paper towel and deposit it outside the bathroom." I had already tossed my paper towel, so opened the door with my hand (in fact didn't even SEE the sign until I was half way out) and saw, indeed, a wastebasket to the left of the door with paper towels in it.

This issue -- the US' obsession with cleanliness and sterility -- while mundane, is worthy of some (hopefully not too didactic) commentary. In particular, I think about the ways that clean and dirty are used to classify places and people, how it's a marker of class and color, and a means of creating between ourselves and the rest of the world. Firstly, as it has oft been noted, the culture in the US is one of hyperbolic fear and the need for security. Much has been written (though not had widespread exposure) about the ways that third world countries and in particular, people of color, become attached to the idea of being dirty. Sad stories about kids of color trying to "wash the black/brown off so they can be clean and white." More than dirty, they are infected and infecting. Hence the necessity for containment and detainment, for "our protection." Secondly, the fear and insecurity Americans feel is a privileged one. The types of things we are "afraid" of... germs, disease, dying, bombs... these are things that so many others in the world do not have the luxury to fear in the same capacity that we do. That is to say, sooo many people die of freaking dysentery... lack of clean water. People fear bombs not just from terrorists, but nations -- in particular, ours. Lastly, the fact that there is this division b/t clean and dirty, that there is such aversion to anything "dirty" not only limits people's lives and experiences, it is blinding to the true realities in the world. Examples of this are high class resorts in Latin America, with slums and ridiculous poverty right outside the gates. Being so sensitive to the relatively small threats of germs or whatever, is INsensitive to the plight and position of so many others, dirty others, in the world.

I sense the pensiveness of pedantry coming on, so it's time to move on... readings for the undergrads, woowie.

Chop from the Top! A Leadership Crisis, not a Financial Crisis.

2009-07-20T05:21:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to remember what it was that motivated me, at five-something am, to get up, turn my computer on and write something to share. it was not this blossoming idea of taking a year off after i advance to candidacy. no, not that. much too personal.

i got distracted reading my previous post, and i specifically remember thinking, this new post will not be about age.

oh, i remember. it's about labor and executive salaries.

the other day i went to a protest at the UC regents meeting. forgive me if i don't know the exact details about their agenda. i do know however that they are/were coming up on big votes about furloughs and pay cuts for uc workers. their suggestion is a progressive cut, wherein anyone making over hmm... $200K (?) receives an 8% pay cut (or more?) and if you make less, then a smaller percentage. their logic is that it's better for everyone to keep their jobs and just make less money, to share the burden, rather than actually lay people off.

i had heard from my colleague and friend, elif, (who withstood the antics of loic wacquant with me this past semester) about the protest being co-organized by the major unions i guess related to the california system: upte, cue, uaw, and, others. my expectation, when i rolled in at 6:45 in the AM ( i know, shocking, right) was to see a lot of other grad students. au contraire. granted, it's summer. but the majority of people there were the bread and butter staff of the uc system.

there were a handful of professors, and they were somewhat segregated (self and otherwise) from the "rabble," but otherwise, well, it's hard to say exactly what the rest of the demographics were, but there definitely appeared to be large-ish contingent of people who were closing to working class than upper class. (keeping in mind upper class would be the top 10% of earners, something like that.) (also keep in mind that the spectrum of income within that 10% is quite the tangent curve, so the top 1% baaaaasically own more than you and everyone you know combined.) (i mean, unless you're hella tight with the waltons or something.) i would say this based on appearance, types of emotional response to what the rally/press conference speakers said, and the types of things they shouted at the regents. things like, "how am i going to feed my kids?!" that sort of thing.

a huge part of the outrage is that the regents make a ton of cash. so president yudoff, who unfortunately bears a striking resemblance in appearance and demeanor to dick cheney, (really dude? you should not be slumped over in your chair smirking when people are telling you about the hardships in their life, and why the regents needs to be more creative about finding cash,) makes over $1M/year.

add insult to injury, and "public commentary" on these massive votes is limited to 30 minutes. total. 1 minute a person, or 3 people can pool their minutes for 2.5 minutes for one person. seriously? and oh yeah, there were actually a ton of people who wanted to be in the room where the meeting was, but there were only about 150 seats, despite always having more people than seats. aaaaand... the regents were waay, way up in front, cordoned off. you could barely see their faces they were so far away.

okay, here's where i get didactic, so go twiddle your thumbs if you don't like it.

the whole executive compensation argument is bullshit.

the argument for executive salaries is that you need to attract people who have a certain skill set and social networks. this completely ignores the fact that those with the right skill sets and social networks teeeend to be comprised nearly entirely of wealthy wasp dudes. of course you've got your token woman and/or minority. (see ceos of fortune 500 companies. that p value is probably through the roof.) however, it's a fairly blatant, in my eyes, attempt to maintain control and power in the hands of a select group of people and maintain the status quo (if not increase the inequity in the us, which has been happening in recent decades). moreover, it's completely narcissitic. really? you really think that no one else could do your job for less than what you make. really.

of course, maybe they wouldn't be able to do the job exactly like you, or exactly what your peers and/or shareholders want, but that's b/c they're just like you, and have a skewed understanding of values and priorities. that's a pretty moralistic judgment, but if you consider that there are many people in fact starving in the us (and not from anorexia), i'm not sure how you could argue otherwise. goddess forbid, if you think in the global context, it's just greedy and wrong.

in respect to the uc chancellors, i'm not saying that they don't have a lot of experience and/or are not good at what they do. however, as many of the speakers pointed out, they are getting paid corporate wages in a not-for-profit educational institution, the mission statement of which is to ultimately provide free, high quality education for all - especially minority and disadvantaged - californians. the regents say that their salaries comprise a very small percentage of the uc's overall budget. but irrespective, it's money that could be saved, and i think it's the symbolics that matter more than the accounting figure.

to be fair, i'm sure they have mortgages to pay on their condos in vail, not to mention, that new swath of land in (insert warm destination near ocean). and car payments. do you know how expensive those new (insert luxury car brand, and take it up to the higher end of the series line) are? and education. sheesh. try sending 1.8 kids to private school, pre-school thru college, and ensuring they have private (insert bougie past time) lessons. it's just hard to keep up!

they support the economy too you know. probably more than the asian and latino janitors who clean up in barrows at 8 pm.

(end snark) --> (you know what's funny, i put this in <> initially, and it won't post cuz it reads it as html. i mean, i was trying to make an html joke, cuz i'm dorky like that, snort snort.)

consider that you could make $200 K, and take the other $800 K and support 20 workers at $40K/year. (not even sure if that's a living wage in the bay area.) is your job and life so much more important than those 20 people? your skills and experiences that much more valuable that the trade off in wages should be that different?

i don't know. i mean, i am, as my dad says, a bleeding heart liberal (i prefer progressive). but i really fail to understand the ethics of these types of situations.

for f's sake...

2009-05-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

maybe one of these days i'll stop being so obsessed with age.

At My Age...

2009-05-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

one's "market value" decreases... so says my mother. (or rather, so she has said. you can't get too outraged, b/c it's, well my mom, and she tends to say ridiculous things that i am more easily able to let go of, than comments from... pretty much anyone else.) to be fair, she said more specifically "after thirty, your market value decreases." and i'm totally not thirty yet. i've got like a good five months left on this withering vine!

irrespective, there is this thing, compelling force if you will, that makes women my age very aware of this big, looming (or loomed), dirty thirty - and all the crap that that entails.

of course, there's the whole baby-kid thing... the awareness that, like bananas spotting, we could become fertilizer rather than fertilized. the discussions amongst ourselves about what age women in our respective families had their various babies, and for those lucky ones who have mothers or aunts or whomever who conceived in their late thirties or (gasp) in their forties -- (for the first time, obviously) -- a self-assured justification for not worrying or being worried. discussions about ticking clock, what age we want to get the bun out, what sort of circumstances we will tolerate for said multi-stage procedure ("a studio apt on a graduate student salary? shit..."), and of course career path. always career path. at least for the majority of women i roll with. who happen to be, for the most part, strong independent types. scratch that. exclusively. i don't know.. birds of a feather....

you know what the best is? that i've been told by three different professors (at least) that the best time to have a kid is while writing your diss. great. note to self, get knocked up fall 2010? AND THEN. telling other women this and seeing the whirling wheels and calculator buttons being pushed. stupid ass discussions about tenure, women faculty we know -- a nervous chuckle about all the twins for the older female faculty, and an anxious, hand-wringing horror about the robotron-ness of the young female faculty with kids. there are some quite disturbing stats about how men with kids are actually perceived as MORE responsible and more employable compared to women with kids (whom tend to be perceived as uncommitted, unreliable, and that whole shit bag).

attached or not to the baby thing is an acute awareness of decreasing hotness, and a constant checking in with each other (and especially the (often male?) public) about how old we look. stories about other women who were told they look older than they are and a sort of wide-eyed look that's exchanged, "boy that sucks, glad it didn't happen to me." the scarlet letter of appearing older. (eye roll please.)

during the bay-to-breakers "run" (parade), i asked young random ryder (surprised to find out he was but a wee 21) how old he thought I was, 25 or 26 he replied, to which, when told my reaaal age, the eyebrow raiser: "oh, i'm glad women can still look so good when they're your age." lovely.

stuck between a rock and a hard place, the solution is that those things change. hook me up with some state-funded day care, socialism yes please. this whole ranking on racing and being macho shit about who has the biggest, hardest working dick is clearly not going to fly for women who are unwilling to transform themselves into men or be totally dependent ON men (leaving aside how much of the government is run by men - see wendy brown 'finding the man in the state'). the trick is to learn how to see value in being human, being healthy, being caring... none of these things are particularly wow-worthy in testosterone-fueled indices of production in the current capitalist hierarchy.

i could go on... but maybe it's time to work on paper or go to bed.

uh, slid into late-late twenties...

2009-05-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Today I got carded, and I've got what must be an annoying habit of, before handing my id over, asking people how old i look. the guy this evening says, "not a day over 25..." and when he saw how old i reeeeaaally am, told me i'm doing really well. hopefully he's telling some sort of truth. i think though, that he's 25 years old, in which case, it's possible that his mind hasn't stretched yet, that maybe he thinks that 29 is old. i think when i was 25 i thought that was old.

so... existential train continues chugging along, mostly b/c, as i told a 2nd year tonite, that i'm the kind of grad student that i didn't want to be. when i was a second year, i always thought about those in my position -- why can't they get normative time, sheesh. so perhaps i have a little bit of... not regret, but just... thinking about how i came to end up where i am. and whether i'm happy about it. i'm definitely okay with it. my life is pretty good, i can't complain too much.

grass is always greener, right?

i may not have an M5 or even an A4, but i do create for the most part, my schedule. which isn't to say that there wouldn't be some other job wherein i could do that....

life feels a little blase and slightly passionless. it might be fair to say that grad school sucks the passion out of you.

trying to decide between two jobs for next semester/year: teaching or being a student affairs officer for the social sciences grad diversity office. the latter job would involve informal counseling (listening) to other grad students, possibly going to weekly meetings with other diversity officers (who actually do this job full time - i would just be doing it 50%, or 49% rather, while the woman who really holds this position goes to italy for a year) and a dean or chancellor, generating stats for different depts (big surprise, poli sci is not the hottest at getting students of color into their program), doing lots of recruitment stuff (at least 2-3 traveling trips), and database upkeep (so i can generate those stats!)

teaching is with a media studies prof, teaching effects of the media. since i've taught before, i have a pretty good idea of what to expect and how i would handle the situation.

my co-worker at the crg, who has a history phd, told me being a student affairs officer SUCKS, he was very anti the job, said there was lots of drama, a ton of work, and i'd be doing all sorts of things that weren't in my job description. that if i wanted to work on my dissertation that i should

there's also the issue that the sao job would be 9-1 everyday. morning person i am not exactly (exactly not, might be more appropriate). teaching, of course i would need to go to 6-8 hours of class every week, but much of the other work would be when (and where) i decide to do it.

blah blah blah.

i think it's time for mint-chocolate chip icecream.

happy cinco de mayo... it's been a long time

2009-05-05T23:48:00.000-07:00

hooooola! well, i'm waiting for my bf to get off the phone with his sister and thought that, running on the stream of consciousness due to many a drink/shot of tequila, i'd update this son-of-a-gun, if for no one else than for me. (and future anthropologists.) (...right....)

recently i've been thinking a lot about life choices and how we end up where we are. so, i've chosen to be a... graduate student, and thus my role in life is ... yet to be determined. but others of us choose to be actors/actresses (provided you were born into hollywood royalty), termite exterminators, hair cutters, dental hygienists, etc... all of these different ROLES that we serve in society.

after college, people always used to ask "so what are you going to do?" and i would joke, "well, i'm not going to be a calvin klein underwear model..." and continue to list off somewhat, what seemed to me, ridiculous possible occupations.

now things seem less jokey, and i think the seriousness comes from, not only seeing people have these various lives, with different material realities, but that, i don't really feel like i'm doing anything.

obviously i'm doing things, but not a huge lot of things that i feel like are particularly meaningful. i work for the center for race and gender and organize the bi-weekly forum, which involves stalking professors and asking them to tell me if and when they can present and give me your abstract etc. i take classes. i try and finish my MA paper. i try and finish my other requirements. i try and maintain various relationships, be a decent sister/daughter/housemate/girlfriend/friend/etc.

but in respect to contributing to society, i don't feel like i do that, all that much. i obviously and certainly don't make much money, so i see things like nice cars driving around, or fancy clothes wherever, and have a tug of longing, desiring, but realize... b/c i am privileged enough to have had a choice, these are not the things that i have chosen. not the things that i have prioritized.

and, dumbly, i think, wait, really? why? how? who, what, donkey? it takes me back to years ago and months ago and all these micro decisions i make all the time that have led me to where i am, the decisions i continue to make that maintain this stasis of "training" that i have chosen to engage in.

i think, training to...

think better, analyze better, write better, teach better (maybe not)...

"contribute something original to theory..."

sometimes graduate school starts to feel like this void of action without meaning. and i wonder if and when i will ever have some sort of meaningful action, that if any action is really ever very meaningful, but that... at least some people provide services to others...

i...

well, given that i won't be on fellowship next year, will be "earning" some sort of keep...

oy, off to shower

second hand smoke makes me choke...

2008-08-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

last night rebecca and i went to zero gravity, the "it" club here in lucknow (out of... two or three). i had been once before, on a friday night, with a bunch of other students in our program -- it ended up being a lot of fun, dancing, met some other cool visitors (pole, canadian, dutch). last night was fun in the more eyebrow raising variety. i suppose the best place to start would be with the prostitute jo.

saturday nights require one to pay a 1,000 r cover (per couple), or 500/person. (About $12/person). With that, you get a coupon book for 500 r/drinks and 500 for dinner. and as far as we could tell, that meant that meant there would be more couples and less single guys, and the male-female ration wouldn't be so out of whack. our theory was slightly borne out b/c there was a roomful of guys who were waiting outside. in any case, we got there at about 9:30 and the place was dead (b/c people don't come until closer til 11:00 says the manager) and took a spot where we could get some maximum scopage on in the corner.

as people start trickling in, we noticed a couple of things. one -- there was a suspicious age difference between some of the male-female pairs. (rebecca also pointed out, and has some theory about, men who wear all white (polyester?).) two -- there were a lot of families that came in. one family that stood out to me, a family of three... so their daughter had to have been a teenager, but was wearing a short red dress, bright red lipstick, and black thigh highs, held up with garters. personally - and clearly i'm becoming old - i would not let my daughter out of the house like that. it was most shocking, b/c it is india after all, the land where women don't really show any skin. as she initially came in, with whom we later determined was her father (also wearing all white), there was questions about what their relationship was. but no, not the sex worker of the story.

one of the groups that ended up sharing our sectional was a group including a questionable relationship b/t a woman and the main guy, but also including a couple of other slightly shady fellows. at some point, this woman winds her way over to us, and introduces herself to us as "jo". she was leaning in so close, it almost felt like a lesbian encounter. the type of closeness that you share with your really really good grrl friends when you've been maybe drinking a lot. of course i realize that americans require more personal space than others, but seriously, as she was leaning across me to chat with rebecca, had i stuck out my tongue i would have licked her.

the music was so loud that i had a hard time making out everything she was saying. what i thought was "harvard medicine" (happily shattering rebecca's assumption) was actually "herbal medicine", and at the time i thought i heard "medical student at st. george" (the prestigious medical college(s) across india). what i did hear correctly was her askance that we go dance, but that "it can only be the three of us, no one else just us three, b/c my guardian won't care for that". okay, so i was a bit confused b/c ... her guardian? like her uncle? if she was from out of town to go to school, makes sense. the way we were sitting, i hadn't been privy to her interactions with her guardian as rebecca had and was just... confused.

so for example, the girl that i mentioned earlier, the daughter in red. my second observation of interest was the number of families that came in. most of which included daughters. actually, now that i think about it, it was exclusively daughters. unless their sons were completely avoiding of being anywhere near said families. anyway, for a large part of the evening, the dance floor was pretty dead, except for a pair of sisters (rotating in combination amongst a set of three). in age, they were probably teens to mid-to-late twenties. the young grrl was super fly, high-tops and a baby-doll type of dress, fro-y hair. more bad-ass. reminded me of myself in high school. the second sister was wearing tight tight jeans and was dancing uber provocatively, especially -- from my cultural pov -- since her parents were there, especially since she was the only one out on the dance floor. so these girls and families... it was just kind of confusing (but an educational experience) for me.

the daughter & red... by the end of the night, i became quite fond of her family, especially the mother. who was middle-aged, ripe-pear shaped, dressed in a very respectable and appropriately conservative but tasteful long kurta with sleeves down to the elbow. (i think i see myself more as this type of mother, not a madonna or demi-esque mom, rivaling my daughter in skin baring.) she was just sooo enthusiastically dancing! i loved it! singing along with all the words, often pointing for emphasis on certain lyrics, clapping her hands, more elaborate foot steps.... love, love, loved it.

but back to jo. jo, rebecca and i made our way out to the dance floor, joining two of the sisters, and really got the party started. after we went out there, it was only a few short minutes before more and more people came out to dance. but listen... jo was wild! all up on us, swinging her waist-long (if not longer) hair all around, grabbing my waist and grinding up on me with her breasts (okay, not quite grinding, but again, stuff that def doesn't happen with anyone at the outset of dancing at a party or club). she was super up on rebecca, and it was funny, b/c rebecca kept backing away and what with all the hair flying, didn't quite know what to do it seemed... whether and how to hold her ground. eventually one of the honcho-guys, black shirt with a big ole paunch, came out and jo was kind of dancing with him. so again, confused! if it's only the three of us... then...? and so just these dance-floor dynamics of who you dance with and how you dance with them... like, these kind of games of dancing but not dancing with someone (?) there were a couple guys that she kiiind of danced with for a split second or three, but there was always an eye being paid to the men in the corner, if they were watching and if they could see what was going on from their vantage point. she got pulled off a couple of times (not literally) but these guys kind of came up and... were, yes, one could say kind of guardian-esque. or possessive. watching to see if she stayed in-line. a moderating of who she shared her sexuality with.

so this guy who had goofily been hanging around, dance-saunters over and is like "do you remember me?" name drops a couple of my friends. as it turns out, i did remember him... but only b/c his teeth were slightly stained in a particular pattern -- people spit tobacco juice out through their front teeth, so there's kind of a reddish stain there. the time before i had seen him, he was wearing a sikh's turban, so again, thrown off, confused about who he is. it was so loud, but he's trying to talk to me and i don't hear much except for him trying to establish our mutual knowing of each other and "she's a prostitute".

i was just confused confused. didn't know what to believe, who to trust, concerned about my reputation and personal space in all cases. didn't want to seem to be dancing with some guy i didn't know, as by then, it had seemed like you don't reeeeaaaally dance with guys unless you are married to that particular guy, or you are under your parents supervision. and didn't want to be confused as a sex-worker, which is kind of a problem for foreign women as it is. that is... there has been a consistent amount of harassment that women on my program have faced. some of my classmates regularly get called ... something beginning with "r"... that means slut or whore... whenever they leave their house. even when they go to school. zuberdust.

it didn't help that, after jo left with her guardian, one of the honchos, the one with the paunch (AS IF!), was being master-and-commander of sketch and eyeing rebecca and me and following us around. we went to go sit down back in our corner. he followed us there, and pretty much crawled over three guys to edge his way nearer to us (pretty much right on top of our dabuttas) and stare suggestively. we escaped to the bathroom (women's sanctuary) to get away from him. then sat on the other side of the room next to a family to get away from him again. then finally, i told one of the many "security" guards - (themselves a story) - and the manager "that guy keeps following us" (and since "super sketchy" didn't quite translate) "and we don't like it". after that, he stayed away, since the tattling resulted in a crowd of like five guys discussing the matter -- (this happens no matter what you do in india, five or more guys conferring... how much your rickshaw fare should be, the directions somewhere, how to install a lightbulb, which glasses you should pick out). those guys were really nice, so we felt a lot better after that. and since the food got served at midnight, and we had hired a driver for the evening which expired at one, we ate our faces off and left.

so was the evening fun? not exactly, but it was interesting. and what to make of jo? she desperately wanted to call and hang out with us, and tried to make an appt to hang out the next day. as it turns out she lives in a hostel near st. george... the emerging theory is that she's probably from a village or a family with less resources and just doing the best that she can.

magic masala: tales of missing

2008-08-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

Since I can't sleep, i'm just gonna speed on thru some posts and do some catch-up. The power is off (happens a lot, very randomly) which means my fan isn't going, and the generator for the apt upstairs IS going and is hella loud. and i had some thumbs-up soda (like coke) and old monk rum drinks tonight, so the caffeine (in addition to two nights of staying up past 3) are also contributing to the sleeplessness. man i love sleeping. too bad it's not happening right now. i desperately want to skip school. it's like... yeah, clearly going to class is good blah blah, but sometimes it's just really slow and kind of painful for the take away point. and i like having more time for myself. but really, i know that once i do fall asleep, getting up in time to make it to class is going to be paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiin on a platter. served up scalding-hot to the brain-face.

i feel bad that i haven't called my friends this weekend. i was going to do it via skype but then the power went out. i was kind of procrastinating by reading about wes clark since i advocated him as the vp for obama during a political discussion tonight, and some people shot that down (unnecessarily imho). and since i'm on the topic of politics, i just want to say that i am so f-ing sick and tired of all the hillary bashing and i want to smash things against the f-ing wall whenever people HATE on her. (smash! smash! smaaaaash!!!) this paragraph was supposed to be about my friends. i have been so so so depressed about missing roger's wedding. and me not calling them... you know, i feel like a bad friend for not calling, but i just feel like i would have started crying on the phone out of misery. the tears i have shed have been viciously bitter. it was jaclyn's birthday party tonight so we had some folks over for drinks, junk food (masala magic! lays potato chips), pizza, cake and icecream, etc. (since the freezer doesn't work, the ice cream spilled all over the refrigerator and floor when i pulled it out. yes, spilled.... we didn't have ice either (omg life is like so hard here it's like so gross and dirty and can you believe these people, the men just like piss on the side of the road, hello eww?)) aaaand... you know, being there was fun in its own way, but this whole weekend i've had this strange time-warpy feeling, the whatsit zone, twilight, of me inhabiting... well, myself, and this space... and all the while knowing there is momentous magic happening on the other side of the planet, and so much love and wonderfulness and connection and just beauty to the power of super-duper-lot... and MISSING IT!!!!!!

sigh.

well, since i am here for "career reasons" (and of course personal development blah blah), i have learned a decent amount of urdu. definitely enough to get myself around (along with gesticulations and bossy-i won't be f-ed with tones, and cute concilatory smiles), and! in some excitement, i have most of an informed consent statement translated into urdu (which i have TYPED UP, check me out hot shit). the fact i have personal tutorial on mondays, and an interview scheduled with a guy after class is pretty much the main motivation for going to class. and seeing my grrrls ebony and justine and coming up with scandalous sentences and dialogue together.

they have to keep me in line, but then whip out their own amazingness when you least expect it... like, how we were doing a skit about "family" and after i accused my wife of sleeping with my mother's servant, she (justine) accused me of sleeping with our servant (we were married in the skit) and when i said our servant was male (with emphasis on the masculine ending), she replied that the servant was a hijura.... which is basically a "third gender" person, sometimes a what we might call a transvestite, some are eunuchs (if they can afford the surgery, i guess)... this caused our teacher to diiie of laughter, and then we got into a long conversation about hiruras and the culture surrounding them (like they come to birth parties of boys and demand money from the parents, otherwise the parents/son will get cursed, and what is the interaction like, and how do they know about these parties, and do people want them there, are they "good luck" etc etc). which then led to zeba (my favorite teacher) asking us what a metrosexual was, then a very jam-packed discussion of what being "metro" is, the concept of being "out" and the closet and gaydar and the diana ross song "i'm comin' out! i want the world to knooow..." being the theme song of gay pride parades, and what pride is, and the degree to which people PDA in the states.... ebony then follows up with, okay, zeba... so if someone asks you what metrosexual is, what would you say... and zeba says "they don't like women"... to which we reply nooooo! bahot entertainment.

since apparently people ARE reading my blog - (i lost hope for awhile that anyone was interested, since my own mother "doesn't have time") (thanks for leaving comments JAN or KEMI!) i am happy to pander towards my audience, so please feel free to ask me questions or ask me to write about more specific things besides my emotional problems manifested in stream-of-consciousness blither blather with a little bit of masala magic tossed in....

i have some more fun pictures to upload -- of a field trip to the crocodile conservatory and the bara imambara (basically palace/tomb), which was, yes amazing :-) and had this awesome labyrinth in the ceiling with over 1,200 doors (a little scary, and not just cuz we were barefoot).... i'll try and

blue shimmer shammer

2008-08-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

In stark contrast to my previous post (and quite self-indicting), I am going to write about some of my experiences in the quest to get things tailored. Justine, a fellow fashionista, and I started by looking through fashion magazines for ideas of things to get ripped off. one little lesson I've learned so far is that, there's a reason that some things cost a lot. Stitches are done by computer, patterns are complicated and time-consuming, and fabric quality is directly correlated to cost, being chief among them. I've dropped a lot of stuff off at two different tailors, but have few results yet to speak of. There's one shirt - a simple plain white short-sleeved button-down - I got knocked off, and I am very pleased with the results.

Other things currently dropped off:

a man's kurta shirt
a kurta / mini-dress
an elegant knee length dress with collar (raw silk)
a linen summer dress (modeled after a dress i already own)
a knock-off of my favorite shirt-jacket (in dark purple) --> this is still under discussion, b/c the tailor isn't sure it can happen (b/c of special stitching)

Things that are planned to be dropped off:

a trendy grecian type of dress
a bohemian long summer dress in bright yellow with gray print
some silk blend fabric to have pants made (to go with elegant dress / kurta -- east meets west type of design gag)
blue shimmery with cooper and gold print raw silk for... a dress? (it was originally going to be the lining of previously mentioned jacket, but tailor said, nah)
cheapo (or cheaper) purple fabric for... uh... a shirt dress? (this was to be part of gray grecian dress, but tailors and fabric store owners have resisted to a very large degree the color combo. justine pointed out that attitudes towards color combos are also cultural....)
Knock-off of some linen pants I have

Okay, I think that's it. That's actually kind of a long list, now that I write it all out. But i honestly haven't been able to help myself. After I went to this particular fabric shop in Junpaut market (off of hazratgange), that night my head literally popped off of my body. besides the fantasy of starting my own clothing line (you know, "on the side" while i have a baby and write my dissertation... if paris, those twins, lohan and j-lo can do it....), i just was soooo excited by all the fabric opportunities. it's been so fun looking at all the fabrics (understanding more about grade and blends), imagining the shape they can (and cannot) carry, the fantasy of being off the chain fly on a theoretical dime (cuz all this experimentation hasn't been... less than $60 so far.)

one of the things that it is hard (stopping myself from the p-word) about the whole clothes thing, is that oooobbviously i have a problem with the whole consumerism, capitalist, sneaky means of women's oppression nature of fashion. obviously. i can find lots of ways to justify it, rationalization-station. but i'll spare all us and just say that, while it's a good outlet for creativity, i think that trying to harness that creativity into other more permanent means of communication is a worthy goal. so... i have the goal of having an exhibition in the next year or so. it will prob be small and possibly slightly disturbing, but a good goal i think and a nice compromise for myself.

where to begin...

2008-08-02T05:57:00.001-07:00

it's been a long while since i've updated this sucker, and for that i apologize. there are a couple of excuses. it started with the photo updates, then i got obsessed with getting tailored clothes, and then i was in a funk of depression about missing roger's wedding, and have admittedly been homesick. it's officially the day after the actual wedding event, and i watched i am legend last night to make myself feel better. i know, it's twisted. then i had scary dreams about hiding from various scary creatures with my friends. (we needed to keep up curtains all the time, so no one could see us....)

anyhoo, india! i have less than three weeks here, and have mixed feelings about it. on one hand, i will be very happy to be home. on the other, i feel a little bit like a failure for being happy to go home, and feel this ambiguous "pressure" to have all this amazingness to report. i think b/c i've been in school, and haven't had so many opportunities to travel, said amazing experiences are a little less frequent than the "india" label purports to carry with it. it's funny, b/c in comparison to pakistan (duh), there are a lot more westerners here (even tho that's not really *that* many here in lucknow). and by westerners, i primarily mean goras (white people), many of whom have been to india before, travelled here before, study (or aspire to study) the region and peoples, and embody a familiarity and expertise about indian culture, politics, history, international relations, etc.

india is such a destination for westerners, and b/t the people here, and those americans that have gone to india before, i would say that... it's hard to explain, but... there is a certain attitude of entitlement about being here, studying here, travelling here... that in comparison to pakistan - which has all sorts of state dept restrictions and of course all the stereotypes of danger and hostility towards westerners - is allusive to an undercurrent of ugly american characteristics within the more "considerate and knowledgeable of culture" persona.

but then again, i think that persona (and i'm not pardoning myself) is omnipresent in most americans that travel, esp since they/we hold ourselves against the even fuglier americans who "don't know anything" about India (or wherever), whereas weeee are so cosmopolitan and in the know. there is scoffing that most americans don't know anything about the N-deal, different languages and states of india, or the history of partition. but there is also a worried exasperation about indian sanitation, corruption, treatment of women, inequity etc. but that positionality - of commentary - is just so fraught with privilege that is acknowledged but not examined.

so... i don't know if i can say that my india summer was "amazing". more aptly, at the moment, i would characterize it as problematic. but then again as , i suppose most sociologists are little debbie downers, and what isn't problematic. isn't it problematic that i'm sitting here in my air conditioned room writing this post and doing everything that i'm doing? ig-zisting...

where to begin...

2008-08-02T05:57:00.000-07:00

only a month left!

2008-07-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

i haven't written much recently, but what i have been doing is being better about posting pictures on my picasa web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/tameralee

so if you're still super bored at work or whatever and/or stalking me b/c i'm just that hott, then voila... i've been trying to write some comments in to make the excessive pictures of trees more explainable. and looking thru some of my pics... well, they don't do ranikhet justice. it was truly gorgeous and i can understand why the prices are 4 x higher during the "on" season (ie when it's not monsooning and when you can see the himalayas). anytime you see clouds, imagine the largest mountains in the world!!!! (not counting those in the ocean, i think they're supposed to be pretty big.)

twisted motivation - not about india...

2008-07-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

since i have been staring at these notes for about an hour (or rather screwing around on internet and not focusing), i'm going to post them to see what reactions people have. readability, clarity, does it make sense, and etc...

============To kick off my methods section...

Silicon Valley inhabits most of the South Bay of northern California, which is hilly and tree covered, a serene and generously-spaced suburban landscape. A confluence of crisp highways are interrupted with signs for Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose. Driving through and among these towns, one sees the sparkle of modern glass and steel constructions peeking above the pine trees. Winding roads such as Inspiration Drive or Java Avenue circle corporate campuses with gated entrances that require permission to enter the expanse of well-manicured grounds dotted with art installations and fountains in addition to buildings A, B, C, D….

Cafes, dining halls, and game rooms populate many of the larger corporate offices, and the theme and construction reflects the corporate culture. For example, while Yahoo sports funky purple and yellow accents to its sidewalks and building, and brightly colored furniture and big flat screen tvs in their foyers; Sun Microsystems has colonial architecture and a plantation-villa feel with a visitor center off to the side of a tree-lined avenue that leads up to the clock tower building. These are the spaces through which 14 percent of the world’s venture capital flows (equal in size to the UK), where some of the most highly educated work, where one of the largest foreign-born populations in the country lives (SV Index, 2007). Over half of the region’s science and engineering positions are filled with foreign-born individuals, fourteen percent of science and engineering employees are South Asian (2000 Census).

The area has a large percentage of the US’ Pakistanis , though they are hardly representative of the Pakistani population writ large – these immigrants are wealthy, educated and cosmopolitan -- making them more emphatically “transnational”(F) . My observations of the Silicon Valley based Pakistanis have shown these individuals to be at an epicenter of transnational activity, and there is of course a healthy amount of “brain circulation” (F) , however, people are connected to Pakistan for reasons beyond kin, outsourcing or entrepreneurial aspirations. Cultivating an identity based on the connection with Pakistan and its peoples helps show the different processes of the phenomenon of transnationalism and its implications. I argue, that ultimately, it is these identities and the loyalties and actions they inspire that.... (dun dun dun....). transition transition...

The space of SV defines the community’s actions – contours of both possibility and confinement. The space is entrepreneurial, sky is the limit, expansive, and rewarding of hard work and brilliance; but it also a confined space, where discrimination exists as an opaque glass ceiling because of brown skin and Muslim affiliation. Both the macro and micro must be considered in conceptualizing how space interacts with identity formation. As alluded to above, it is the architecture and design of the spaces Pakistanis work and live that simultaneously allow their community organizing to thrive, but also, it is the limitations on mobility, boardroom discrimination, that compels and constrains the way Pakistanis do organize. SV Pakistanis also point to the diversity, education, and liberal-nature of the west coast as a big reason why they have not had to face psychological or physical threats in the same way their peers elsewhere have.

anything else about space & self-definition here? Transition to discussion of PK comm. groups...

finally posted some pics!

2008-07-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

some pics (captions and comments coming) posted on my picasa web album.

while there is always so much to write about, the sensations, thoughts and experiences often new, a choice must be made at some point. so this post, had it not been a picture announcement, would may otherwise be called rickshaw-wallah

the rain poured down, soaking my legs, even as the tight carriage cover kept most of the monsoon at bay from my body. it poured down your back, drenching you, dripping off your calves - a sight that is associated with seeing the city, as you bicycle my weight through curving streets in lucknow. on this occasion, you were taking my roommate and me home after dinner in huzragange. dropped friend off at his house near the subji-munde (vegetable market), down a very dark street, through the intersection where we should have made a right instead of going straight, you pedaled as it sprinkled and then outright rained.

the previously negotiated price was 20 r (about $0.50), but I easily succumbed to my desire to give more (what's another fifty cents to me?) and gave 40 (the equivalent of a dollar). i don't know, maybe i should have given more, but i just grabbed what i could out of my backpack. my payment usually is correlated with age -- the older the man, the more i give. one very thin grandfather, clearly had parkinsons, and was shaking as he slowly hauled me to shree-ram tower - mobile phone mecca. i gave him a little more than a dollar, though the "true cost" according to my friends would be ten, five rupees or less - depending on one's hindi speaking ability, brown-ness of skin, and passion for haggling.

the rickshaws are generally one-speed bicycles, and the wallahs often have to throw their weight down onto every pedal stroke, so inefficient is this mode of transportation. that and, well, americans aaaare a little bit bigger and heavier than the average indian, that's for sure. one of the men in the aiis (american institute for indian studies) program is, i think the medical term is "grossly obese", but quite round, if you will. sometimes when he and his roommate are trying to go home from school, the wallahs will demand extra payment or insist that he be in his own rickshaw. it's admittedly a funny sight seeing two rickshaws go by at once: one with a thin effeminate mediterranean-colored man; the other holding a very large, curly headed and bearded white man; and every indian on the road stopping what they are doing to stare.

i've been told that rickshaw wallahs are typically some of the poorest of the poor. to be honest, i don't really know what that means. when i told my roommates i gave grandpa parkinsons 50 rupees, they guffawed and said - that's more than he'll make all day. some graphic representation of wealth distribution in the world that mary sent out once, depicted a fairly linear curve from poorest to richest. i thought it was misleading, b/c the guy was arguing that "hey look how equal things are now", but the middle of the line was set at surviving on $1/day.

and of course, i just read an article entitled "neomillionaries" in frontline that said "the number of the super rich - defined as people with more than $30 million - increased by 8.8% to 103,320." other info, gleaned from teaching soc 1:

the top 1% of wealth owners nearly 40% of net worth, and nearly 50% of financial
assets in thelate 1980's and 1990's. During this same period, the top 1% enjoyed
two thirds of all increases in household financial wealth, and movement into the
top segments of the distribution was nearly nonexistent. Moreover, while
inequalities of wealth were consistently more extreme throughout Europe for
many decades, by the early 1990s,the United States had surpassed
all industrial societies in the extent of inequality of family wealth.

Presumably India is not classified as an industrial society, so who knows how it stacks up in the inequality rankings. It's deceiving though, because India's increasing millionaire class, has been profiting from neoliberal market expansion, as well as access to work in the entrepreneurial and uber-corporate west. that is to say, while there is an extreme wealth differential in Indians, it's particularly stark as an American, how the average American stacks up to (at least the median?) Indian subsisting on $1/day. (am i considered average in terms of american income? questions i should know the answer to....) when i nearly everyday ride a rickshaw, and count my rupees to not get "ripped off" or "taken advantage of b/c we're foreigners", i think about these types of things, and allow for random change lying between couch cushions back home to make up for whatever "extra" i spend on transportation and services.

rickshaw wallah,
weaving in between speeding motorcycles,
green and yellow auto-rickshaws,
small suzuki mini-vehicles,
and the occasional
high-class white (type of car to be inserted later)...

a handmotion signalling a turn,
into
.......what feels like for my western-trained highway line abiding self,
sure death or disaster.

the honking ceaseless
no pattern to discern
except it's always always ongoing,
frequently held down into a screeeching
whiz pasing you by
at times, i feel the need to plug my ears

rickshaw wallah
where do you sleep
besides on your own two-person laminated cushion?
where do you go to
escape the rain

the rain that always comes
knocks down trees (right in front of my building blocking the entire road)
and makes electricity outages
that much more frequent

what does the rickshaw wallah think pulling indulged westerners
riding around no worries apparent

what's up besharaams!!!

2008-06-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

internet has arriveth. slooow 64 kb split between 3 web-hungry amazonians... of amrikan cloth. i would love love love to share some pictures (got some great puppy ones, in addition to amaaazing fruit salad that - ahem - yours truly cut up.) aren't my procrastination techniques grand?

cuz uh... yah, i have a "journal entry" due tomorrow. given that we've been learning vocabulary related to fairs, zoos, and things involving shields, javelins, and blood... I will be writing my journal entry... in free verse poetry.

re: vocab glad to be getting that really crucial stuff out of the way, all at once.

today was wonderful, sad, amazing, and tiring. sad was getting the mean teacher for my personal tutor, and having to take some personal time in the bathroom afterwards to wipe up some stray tears. sad was also seeing very cute, starving, destined to die puppies. i wonder if that's how angelina feels when she looks at orphans in the "global south".

"oh how cute! it'll go so well with the last one i got! i'll just make sure to take the chota to the doctor, and get him a designer lamb wardrobe...".

wonderful and amazing is my bbff, who sent me not ONLY the best care package, seriously, this side of the ganges, but whom also wrote a letter to barbara boxer about the necessity for more legislative support for male birth control. .... ... sigh... ... ....... i'm so in loooove! thoughtful, caring and beautiful... is my benji....

tiring is the ridiculous amount of things i did today, and well... journal entry still needs to be written... Mooje Gur-meh sekti hoo... (?) (did that make sense to any Urdu speakers??)

The complications of inequity – 22 June

2008-06-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday and the day before a different cleaner teen came – Pintu – the servant that works for Vishal-ji’s family, very sweet and smiley. We were waiting for, amongst other things, desks and cooking utensils, but by 2:00 PM were a little stir crazy (stuff was to be delivered at 11:30 AM), and decided to go to the mall, Sahara-ganj (ganj meaning treasure). Walking towards our western mecca of consumption, Rebecca remarked , “I feel like such a cliché going to the mall after sitting and watching someone clean up after us”. Jaclyn in protest says, half seriously, “We don’t have pillows! Okay? We need pillows, don’t’ we? My neck is killing me!” Of course, most servants sleep on the floor, which is where, had we chosen to have a live-in cleaner/cook, ours (Pintu?) would have slept (if not on the porch).

We went to Big Bazaar, the Indian Walmart of sorts, multiple floors of stuff, stuff and more stuff. But only after having lunch on the top floor of the mall… the food court. Not unlike the typical Amrikan food court, just more Indian food (though not so much you have tons of choices). Ridiculously, McDonalds is not only on the first floor (the only restaurant on the first floor), it’s also on the top floor. And ridiculously, because of some miscommunication issues at the kebab place, I turned to McDonalds to get some fries for carbs ~ 30 rupees, or a little less than a dollar for fries that aren’t fried in cow fat and sprinkled with beef dust. (Remember that whole controversy the other year?)

This post was supposed to transition into, I guess, some sort of polemic about… not sure what, though it’s becoming clear to me, what I really want to write is an essay. Not having interpoop at my apt is making the whole blog endeavor and format especially a little difficult as this post was started the 22nd… and re-picked up the 24th (now), but probably won’t be posted til.. maybe the 25th?

I went to Ram Advan (sp) books yesterday, after getting 10 passport pictures for what would be about $2.50 US (without even asking me, they photoshopped a zit right out.. .niiiice….) (Just a note, if and when you travel to India, bring no less than 10 passport photos, since everyone and everyone needs a passport photo. Of these ten, four are going to the police, one is going to cell phone company.) The bookstore, in Hazragange (neighborhood), is very famous for… I guess being a sort of academic meeting place. No wait, I think the man himself is very famous. More information on that to come when I become more knowledgable. (But as it turned out, the store was definitely a magnet for AIIS folks, of which there were at least seven of us crowding the room?) In any case, I picked up a fiction book involving the first War of Independence, and Edward Said’s book Culture & Imperialism. About forty pages in (including preface), ahhh! The guilt. Aforementioned conflicts of inequity are only part and parcel of, and pale in comparison to the contradictions of being an imperial emissary. I’m on a state department scholarship (tho slightly less cush than promised)… living in an air conditioned apartment – (no, air conditioned room, apt is not air conditioned – big difference) – and working on a PhD in sociology. Sociology is more or less a … tool of counting, categorizing and controlling… if not outright subjugation?

Benji has informed me that I need to write a happy post, so perhaps subjugation and imperialism isn’t the best means of accomplishing that. I’ll save it for the essay, and in conclusion say that the chicken tikka I had this evening was sooo amazing! We ate at… Princess Continental Restaurant, which is on the top floor of Saagar Hotel (right around the corner from where I live – counted about 17 stray dogs, to and fro), and they have a Princess Cruise Line theme going on. The menu was pretty hilarious (stuff about voyages and feeling the luxury of being pampered on board a Princess cruise ship, really cheesy with not quite right English), and offered Chinese and American food, in addition to Indian food.

The chicken was so moist and succulent. And there was the faintest hint of cinnamon, maybe cardamom? So flavorful. Spicy. And the mint chutney on rice was hello, uhmmaaaazing! Especially since we’ve been eating vegetarian everyday at institute, and in general, it’s a veg, non-veg world here, my vociferous-carnivorous taste buds haven’t had their fill, and the chicken was woooonderful!! (The pineapple yogurt, and fresh lime sweet soda were both delicious as well. Yay food! Crossing fingers for solid poo sometime soon….)

Reliance on technology… 20 - June

2008-06-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve become cognizant and a little flabbergasted how dependent we all are on technology and being connected. Since getting here, everyone’s been all in a tizzy about getting cell phones. Part of it is of course wanting to talk to loved ones back home, but a large amount of the fuss is just… expectation. Expectation to have a phone, to text and be texted, to perform these random acts of communication we often take for granted in the states.

A second order priority has been internet at home. The institute has spotty wireless, but you should see all of us whenever there’s some downtime. We’re like crack babies… suckling at the teat of technological telepathy. As far as I can tell, gmail and facebook are the one and two tabs on mozilla. Click clacking away to keep in touch, keep in touch.

Vishal-ji has been growing on me – no security deposit, after all; bathrooms and kitchen has been cleaned; desks, trash cans, hangers, plumber and cleaner teen are on their way. Oh, and get this: his wife is getting her PhD at Lucknow University in… Women’s Studies! I think we’ll be good friends by the end of it. Dissipating dirt, our flat is almost luxurious, just the way we “amrikan”s want it. Marble floors, new and modern bathroom sink and showers, spacious rooms, new ac’s in every bedroom. The sectional couches are nice but suffer from an unfortunate choice in upholstery fabric (tho look twenty times better since they’ve been vacuumed). And the beds are plastic covered brand new, distinctly summer camp grade, with loud-ass coverings instead of those blue stripes.

The CLS Stipend Increase 08 (CLSSI) project is well on its way, and I couldn’t help my sociological self wrote an action plan. I guess I should post my letter to the program coordinators on here, since I spent all afternoon yesterday writing it. If the mustache post wasn’t transparent enough, yeah, the whole lack of stipend thing is hella stressing me out. Though lying in bed for an hour or so earlier (one of the first few hours I’ve had to myself outside of the bathroom), I decided that stressing about this whole money thing is a choice (subconscious that it was). Since the CLSSI ball is rolling, I should try to take a step back, wash my hands of it, and focus on what I really want to focus on.

Which, as it stands, is apparently a longstanding technique and vice of mine: overfilling my plate and procrastinating on what “really matters”. What really matters is working on my research and learning Urdu. But I think this whole pre-fab blog thing is lame, and I’ve had my mind on jamming out some sweet html and flash and creating an aesthetic and organized personal website that has blog entries and portals to my photos, research, interests, blahbitty blah, waste some time, fart fart. And today I asked the AIIS coordinators if they had any hookups with artists or documentary filmmakers that I could spend some time with. Oh, and I got the contact info for a woman who teaches dance classes. (Her husband teaches tabla in case I want to do that, too.) And there’s early morning yoga at the botanical gardens. And I want to get tailored clothes, perhaps of my own design.

Say out loud, all together now: “RE-RE! What’s wrong with meee?”

This was a rambling post, but I do want to pick back up on the themes of standards of living, gaps between rich and poor, and the feelings associated with being so privileged. (Access to technology being one indicator of privilege, having time to f around and write about it a big other.) I feel some carpal tunnel coming on (stevejobssucks), so I best go putter some other way while I wait for the cleaner teen to come….

the cows are baying, the birds are singing...

2008-06-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

there are monkey's and many other animals to report on.

captain macattack is being lame and shutting down, so several posts are just sitting there, not being uploaded until... maybe tomorrow. but in the meantime, stories about animals in india...

so these monkeys! how cool is that. we haven't seen them actually do anything besides adjust themselves in their sleeping-ness on the branches. (there's two, moto1 and moto2 - moto means "fat" - jaclyn named them, since they're outside her window.) jaclyn says, "they're resting so they can go terrorize the neighborhood tonight", and is in all seriousness kind of afraid of them. my feelings about the monkeys is juvenile excitement, and luckily for everyone, rabies will be avoided because my ever burgeoning adult-ness keeps me from doing something stupid like feeding them. admittedly, if i were a child, i would be very hardpressed not to do something to that effect and would very possibly disobey what my parents told me about not feeding them or opening the window/screen to have any sort of interaction with them.

there are also... parrots! or large, green parakeet type birds. i spotted some one of the first couple days of school, hanging out on the telephone (or whatever, there's so many) wire. of course cows, many many many cows. everywhere. not so much on the more busy roads, but sometimes. they're like part of the landscape. as is their poo. they eat the trash a lot, which is generally in loose piles on the street. my neighborhood, i think a little nicer than other areas, have them in piles. other places it's just alll over. get the trash, throw it on the ground. have to pee? (if you're a man) do it in the gutter. which there are also some children playing in.

i haven't seen so many calves. i think one i saw, a healthy sized one, though still hella cute... but it was when i was speeding by in an auto-rickshaw. (which is basically like a little shell over a motorcycle, with a couple back wheels.) it may have been that same rickshaw ride, or some other one - definitely auto tho - where i saw the only puppy here. THAT puppy was sooo cute. but steven, one of the guys on the program, (who's been here before on the same scholarship actually) informed me, "well, it's not going to last long". maybe why there is a disproportionate amount of puppies for the numer of stray dogs on the street. a lot of them, well, most of them are flea bitten, and have scars and are pretty mangy. some are healthier looking, and at least one or two or full on pets with collars and clearly human parents that feed them enough to have lustrous fur, which they obviously brush. they're all mid-sized dogs. none of that accessory dog action here.

and then finally cats. there are very few cats here. i saw one street cat, only one, taking bicycle ricksaw back from hazragange a couple days ago. it was chilling on the roof of some shack. s/he looked pretty healthy. steven informs me that cats are pets here. the OTHER cat i saw here, which was a pet, belongs to the girl who lives a floor below me. Reportedly, she loooooooves Americans (she's 15), can't wait to go to America, and has named her cat Nancy. I find never-ending mirth in the cat named Nancy. Her mom is going to hook us up with some guy who will cook for us three or four times a week... .

okay, off to give a passport photo to cell phone people and get more rupees on that sucker....

2008-06-24T00:41:00.000-07:00

i wrote a post the other day, buuut, the sherpage (the act of sherpa-ing) of my apparently dead mac from home to school for the purpose of uploading it (and skype) was for nay. instead, i can kvetch about the displeasure I am feeling towards the state department for their misrepresentation of what exactly the scholarship they gave was about. The short story is that they basically promised to pay for everything. PLUS a stipend. But as it turns out, the stipend is covering everything (as per semi-hysterical freak-out on actually very nice landlord post indicated) which means things are tight.

soo... i'm posting some of the correspondence i had with cls (critical languages scholarship) so far, as well as what the groupy-group is trying to put into action. for your enjoyment...

=================
Dear Julia and Liz,

Adab from Lucknow! Hopefully things have calmed down for the two of you and you've been able to enjoy your summer. I wanted to drop a line letting you know a little bit about what's going on – my experiences and also a bit about the group.To be honest, things have been rather stressful. The way things have worked out, we (Jaclyn Michael, Rebecca Grapevine and myself) didn't move in to our permanent summer housing until 10:00 PM last night (Wednesday), and there are still a lot of household things and related tasks to do before we will be settled. For example, we still need our landlord to bring us desks and have our apartment thoroughly cleaned, we need to purchase Indian clothes, and do our laundry. Thus part of the stress has been dealing with issues we didn't anticipate coming up.

However, another big part of the stress, certainly related to the first, is that all expenses – housing and meals are coming out of our "stipend". The apartment I'm staying at, not including food or internet, will cost about $350 for the summer. Last night we bought sheets, towels, hand soap and the like, and spent another $30. Housing alone (and associated costs) will be about $400 for the summer. Because the three of us are concerned about costs (our housing being on the more costly end ,) we have foregone regularly prepared meals, though they would have costed about 2,000 rupees/month (so about $50). Lunch at the institute costs 600 rupees/month ($30 for the summer). Including those meals – but not clothing (necessary for women in particular), random bottles of water or medicine, already $550 of the stipend is spent, leaving us with $350 for the remainder of the summer.

When we had some downtime in Delhi, several of us visited a Sufi shrine and a Mogul's tomb, and between ticket admission and rickshaw costs, I spent $6 (people who bought water or mangos spent more) – and this was low because Rebecca spent a considerable amount of time haggling to get our admission price from 250 (foreigner rate) to 10 rupees (local rate). Hopefully this type of detail helps demonstrate why I have been stressed out; I had been expecting a relatively easy summer where I could concentrate on Urdu and my research, but instead of studying and practicing, I've been running numbers.

There has been a lot of talk amongst the students, and the consensus in general is that folks aren't pleased. Drafts of a group letter are being written, and the plan was for all of us to sign our names to send to the CAORC. Some of us wanted to write more personal notes letting you know what's going on, and I hope my letter helps paint a picture of life thus far in Lucknow and I'd ask you to consider increasing our stipend to make life more comfortable and amenable to study.

Most sincerely,
Tamera

=====================
and then to group.... (i don't think bullets are working on here... please stand by for my lazy butt to do some cleaning up. or maybe i'll just delete....)

Hi All,As per announcement... ... After talking with folks, I'm pasting a suggested list of things some of us thought we'll need to (collectively) do to get the stipend increase 08 project off the ground and finished. Maybe we could form a committee of folks interested in helping and/or taking a leadership role (?), so please email the group about whether you'd be interested as well as your thoughts on whatever. Interested folks can sort through, do and delegate the tasks as seen necessary by the group. Anyone who doesn't want to participate obviously doesn't have to, though we'll have strength in numbers, so the degree to which we can work in consensus would be great.Below my email sig, I have a copy of the email I sent to the CLS administrators, if you wanted some inspiration….Best,Tamera Budget• Come up with budgets for incidentals • Ask Sandeep for letter – OR – come up with budgets based on actual housing & food expenses (the things that CLS was supposed to cover?) - TIFFANIDraft Letter (Tasks and points to include)• Write initial draft and circulate - SARA• Suggest specific amount for increase (based on budget findings)• Include quotes from correspondence o Collect appropriate quotes about stipend not including housing• Find addresses of appropriate people to send letter to (CAORC Higher Ups)• Take ownership for incorporating all suggested changesIndividual• Write emails• Read and suggest for group letter• Write testimonial o At the end of the letter to CAORC, we could provide anonymous testimonials about your/our feelings about the stipend. This will help protect people who want to pursue government jobs, as well as let us be completely honest about how we feel. This will come AFTER our signatures o For example, I might write something about how excited I was about getting the scholarship and talking it up to anyone who would listen. However, my feelings have changed, and I'm quite displeased and unless they increase the stipend, will not encourage others to take it. Also, that there were missed opportunities based on my understanding of what this fellowship was.

Today’s poop report is brought to you by the letter L (or maybe F?)

2008-06-19T01:17:00.001-07:00

Lucky in lucknow not to have explosive shits. (At least not to the degree my compadres are… though, had I been in their shoes pepto and cipro would have been down the hatch much sooner). I’ve finally moved (kind of) into mysterious #14, a three bedroom apt in (neighborhood) that’s only a ten or fifteen minute walk to school (including a stop for ice cream ~10 rupees). However, there is much to be said about the extensive drama leading up to this move in. It is a story laden with sighs (of the frustrated rather than relieved genre).

The appropriate place to begin, and central area of frustration, is Vishal Jain our (caste) landlord. A thin, mustachioed man, he carries two cell phones, and has two different landlines at which he can be reached. He wants us to pay the entire summer’s rent up front, another 5,000 rupees for an electricity deposit (and pay for electricity this month and next), and another 5,000 security deposit (each) for his dusty ass furniture and sketchy ass washing machine. If we want tikkens (breakfast boxes), that’s another 2,000. And he wants us to agree that if anything goes wrong, that we’ll pay for it. Then he tried to tell us we needed to buy gas, hook it up to the stove, and we’d have to pay for whatever gas we use. The man has caused me to snap more than once today, the gas bit being the last straw for snap #1.

In the tone of, are you f-ing crazy, with adamant hand gesticulations…

“What?! No. No, no, no. We are not getting gas, and installing it ourselves. No. That’s your responsibility, and the job of professionals. We are not going to lug a tank of gas around and then try to hook it up. We are graduate students here to study….”

Okay, so just to make it clear per month per person…

Rent 5,000
Food 2,000
Elec. ~1,000
Total 8,000

(I should note though that he said electricity would likely be at least 5,000 a month….)

So, times 2.5, that’s 20,000 rupees. Rough estimation of US $, that’s 500.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. “$500? That’s nothing! What’s she bitching about.” HOWEVER. We have a $900 stipend for the summer from the masters and commanders at el state dept – suppoooosedly for incidentals and travel. So unfortunately for everyone, me especially, $900 is what I’ve got to live on for the summer excluding additional credit card debt. (Yes, sadly, additional.) So Mr. Mustache then wants another 10,000 rupees? That’s another $250. Which, just by looking at his washing machine, I’m not willing to risk on something going wrong with it.

Anyway, blah blah blah, I’m a little stressed about the cash situation, and letters will be written to the CL Scholarship people by all of us in the Urdu program at the very least. Roomie Rebecca laughingly suggested we take it to the press. Okay, you go grrl.

So to close off this entry, things are still unsettled, and unhappily, the place is totally very ridiculously dirty – though of course he said it would be cleaned before we moved in. (In 2 hours after we saw it! Oh no, try more like 7.) The man is sooo slim shady. All I want to do is be settled and study Urdu and work on my research (paper writing, transcribing, tracking down old versions of papers lost in the rain/hard drive crash) and explore India. How many hours of my life will be dealing with loser landlords?

Oh yes, and before I forget, snap #2….

After we finally get into our place, sweaty from schlepping our bags up the three flights of stairs and exhausted from shopping for sheets and towels, soap and toilet paper (and eating at McDonalds of all places for dinner – Jaclyn got a Maharaja Mac or something), Mustache Jain hands us a contract of sorts. He had been a little loath to have one during the afternoon negotiation session, but apparently changed his mind and typed one up in lieu of cleaning the apt. He says we meet in the morning and we can sign it and give him his money, we say we have school can we do it in the afternoon, he says no no let’s meet before school.

You saw it coming.

“No. We are not meeting tomorrow morning. We need time to look this over and discuss. We are totally exhausted from traveling around the past week, all over the US and Lucknow, and we are not going to look at this tonight when we need to get settled, get rest, and try to do some studying. After we look it over, then we can meet with you tomorrow afternoon.”

By this point, Rebecca is uncontrollably giggling behind her dabutta (shawl), and the teachers are chuckling. Even Slim and his friends start smiling – clearly (and thankfully) it was game over. Shookria, shookria, shookria. The random 8 men (our posse of teachers, Slim’s posse of other Indian mafiosos) fiiiiinally left (but not after reminding us, literally, for the twentieth time that the door would lock behind us so to not forget the key).

Time to go to bed on our mattresses on the ground in the one bedroom that has ac, covered with a random assortment of sheets from (store name), another place that requires one to be pushy. Sigh… hopefully it won’t be that long till there’s something of excitement to write about. Because the only other story I could tell about today is getting my ass kicked by the Urdu alphabet….

Day Three

2008-06-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

hard to believe that it's only been two days, going on three. after various flight delays (including on Kingfisher, whose sole existence, as far as anyone can tell, is to get around the prohibitions on alcohol advertising and exists ) we finally arrived in lucknow yesterday late morning. We spent the day before (Sunday) in Delhi doing an AIIS orientation, where we had more speakers from the state department. Perhaps I should mention now that the program I'm here on - the Critical Languages Scholarship - is part of the "National Security Language Initiative" for the purposes of expanding America's understanding of languages and cultures to increase understanding blah blah blah and... catch them terrorists. (or something.) Further back stepping, at our DC orientation, we had a lot of blahbitty-blah from various state department representatives, and while this group isn't going to necessarily be a feeder group, it sounds like - if you waaanted to work for the gov't - this would be a good opp to start moving down that path.

i guess i'll have a full-on post about the state dept and the various politics (my read) at some later date so i can think and write a little more systematically (as opposed to off the cuff writing in between conversations with folks milling about), and since i have fun pics of nizummadin (a sufi shrine) and humayun's tomb - both in delhi - to be posted at a later date, i'll write instead about the current housing drama which is mildly stresing me out. i keep trying to tell myself that i'm not anxious about it, but i kinda am. Imagine this -- a caravan of 7 vehicles (most of which are suvs) filled with americans -- driving all the f around lucknow, looking at various apts. uh-parently, in the past, aiis would just assign folks to housing, people complained and now they subject us to this very horrible trying process of total and utter drama. but. maybe there won't be drama. i keep wanting to believe that, but based on how some people have been acting/talking, there may very well be. anyway. so. we looked at about 8 apts yesterday (there are 40+ of us keep in mind, ranging from college juniors to folks in their early 30s) and have another 10 or so to look at today. then, we will meet in some sort of group to try and figure out who is going to live where.

this might not be so much of a problem except that there are pretty large variations in the housing options available, but for the same price (~5000 rupees/month). squat toilets and concrete vs porcelain and shiny, shiny marble. not so many home stay options. one of which (marked "authentic?" in my notes) is a little rough - cow dung spattered cobblestone on the way to the house, super super small living quarters where you are right on top of the family. or vice versa rather. sooo... we'll see what happens. i'm hoping to live with a laid back group of grad students, of which there has been some off line conversation about. unsure about my willingness to be in a double or not. at this point, bringing captain purple seems like a total waste.

comparing my experiences thus far to pakistan, one thing that strikes me as interesting is the degree to which i am (will be) sheltered. there is talk here of "don't stay out late", "always have a male accompanying you, esp after dark", "be careful about your supposed virginal status" etc. this is generally a given in pk, but more so - and granted, i've not been there all thaat much time -- you're just driven around, always in groups, never alone. here, once we are living in our "home stays", we will more or less be on our own. so the presumed safety and the expectation of westerners being here (and being kind of on my/their own here) is different than pk.

other commentary, hopefully of some interest, is in the vein of smells. wow, the smells have been amazing. especially at the sufi shrine, where there were tons of flowers and incense, the smell was glorious. i really should take notes on the different smells i've encountered, b/c they are complex, not so simple as to say "hmm smells like cinnamon", and deserving of more than descriptors like "spicy-sweet". there are food smells, and also fragrant flower smells, spice-ish smells, a little bit o dung smells, surprisingly little sweat smell, tho a little eaux de foot. and the slow creep of mildew smell waiting for its chance.

aaaand, here i go on another paragraph. man, if i weren't writing this, i wouldn't read it. kudos to anyone who does. so at the moment, i'm at the institute for the first time (first time i've had internet since getting here!) actually on my laptop (wireless oh yeah) and just hanging out b/c people have been taking tests all morning. my tests have lasted approximately .74 seconds, which has been slightly embarrassing, but c'est la vie. i'll learn, and at the moment, am fairly motivated to really take advantage of the program and kick some serious urdu ass. again, we'll see. it's hard to say how much i can leave up to theoretical natural ability and how much will come from studying. anyhoo... 10-4 over and out.

all the live long day

2008-06-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

writing feels alternatively exciting and utterly dehabilitating, and is mostly the latter, multiplied times a kerjillion and slog. writing a sentence, let alone a paragraph… so painfully long it takes, searching for exactly the right verb to try and describe complicated things. why can’t we just use pictures and lots of hand gesticulations, perhaps even some interpretive dance, to make what we mean clear? seriously, you want me to write completely inaccessibly (even to my poor self) to get tenure and then I can think about (you say) “writing for the masses” or (I think) making fun videos involving animation and dramatic re-enactment?

pish-posh.

Last eve Christen and I got some dinner at Penang, which I was chagrined to find out later (thanks Ben) is a chain. We had some yummy mango tofu, and decided to give our leftovers to a homeless person. This was harder than we expected. The first homeless guy (maybe he wasn’t homeless and was just resting on the ground with a bunch of bundles?) rejected us, then we wandered around dupont circle in search of, I guess someone who was going to ask us for change or something. We finally offered the food to an older black woman, who had big bruises under her eyes. She told us a sad and disturbing story about how in the recent storm, a branch hit her on the head, and she got a huge knot and blacked out in the middle of the street, slumped over her shopping cart. When she finally got some help from passers by and went to the hospital, she said that she and another Latino woman did not get help and were “discharged” without any sort of check-up. Running through my mind was the thought, “maybe when Obama gets in office, there will be some change”, though after nearly a decade of horribleness, I’m conditioned to be cynical and blue, nothing I can do.

This type of thing always happens to Christen and me when we get together. I think it’s probably just Christen, a quintessential magnet for stories – she is after all, the woman who found a whole human molar (roots and all) on the (Potomac?) riverbanks. We walked silently to the Metro (not BART, not BART) contemplating the encounter, which despite its sadness, was miles better than the time (racist?) hicks in a pick-up truck threatened us when we avoided their churlish come-ons, and started pounding on the car window. Talk about an adrenaline-fueled peel out and speed away.

As the intro alluded to, I’m working in my second Fartbucks for the day, writing my blog entry as a means of – some would say procrastination or avoidance – coping with the throbbing despair. (Coping I say!) I went to the cult (new and improved, with space age technology and hella governmentality) for lunch which was a freaking trip and a half. Much more could be said about that, but I’ll save my thousand words and present a picture when I get a chance to post them up.

cologne deux khaki

2008-06-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

talking to roger the other eve, he mentioned to me how one of the things he always pays attention to when he travels is the smell. what does ghana smell like? i forget what he said exactly, but there was a punchline. so when i arrived at DCA this early afternoon (ronnie reagan airport), i took a deep breath of the hot, humid air and tried to identify the smell. there's a "clean-ness" to it, though maybe it was the moisture - something missing from the denver air during most of the time i was there. the essence of concrete, and buildings but not industry, lingered as a note. it's like supposedly clean khakis, crisp and fresh out of the packaging. menswear, obviously. that at times pungent, chemically smell straight from the factory.

got here, and (to jump right into the politics since it's dc) went to malcolm x park. which they keep insisting on trying to re-name meridian hill park. if you haven't been, it's gorgeous. they had the fountains (perhaps not the same "they") running, which i've actually never seen and always always wanted to. this is the park that jen, erin, leigh, jen and i protested bush's inauguration. or at least, this is where that protest began....

i guess the take away point here, besides the awesomeness of MALCOLM X PARK on 16th st, is that the renaming the park is a political act that marginalizes the history of the civil rights movement. By erasing from the public consciousness the central people and actions that brought about positive social change, we shroud the hope and possibility that we so desperately need today and for the future.

off the soapbox, after the walk, we went to tryst for some lunch and cool-down. the people were so preppy! no surprise really i guess. drove thru the park back to va, hung out with shehryar and some of his friends (one of whom lives in dubai, and this is random, is the boss of a grrl i know from cornell) watching olympic trials, then met up with nina and lauren in china-block. really great catching up with them and reminiscing about old times - and old guys, like the guy who set fire to nina's bedding - and having new fun times involving potatoes and guys who didn't get how much hotness there was at that table. this waiter guy at chop house stops over and says to me "you must get told all the time that you look like shania twain?" wow, that's a stretch. shania? i've never gotten that one before, is what i say. after some back and forth about me really only having humanness and perhaps hair color in common re: looks, lauren then says, "but you know what does hapen all the time, is guys who are hitting on her bring her baked potatoes." riotous...

then some very very serious randomness, three older women walking in chi-block... i ask them to take a photo of us, and it turns out they're all college friends visiting dc. nina mentions we're all college friends who went to cornell, the woman who took our photo, her son went to cornell, and this turns to that, and not only does nina know this fellow, but went skiing with him as a child, and had actually BEEN to this woman's ski chalet or whatever in vermont back in a former decade! craziness.

now that it's nearly two pm ca time (and 5:00 pm here), i should probably move my ass and leave to go meet christen at dupont...

procrastination station (let's all blame melinda)

2008-06-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

well, here i am, about an hour later, and there's this kind of fugly pre-fab blog here to keep track 'o my whereabouts and whatnots.

meeeeelllliiiiinda suggested or asked (very nicely) if i was going to blog, put up pictures or anything of that nature while i was in india, perhaps believing that my exhibitionist-leaning self would be eager to not write my paper (the paper that keeps needing to be written) and set said fugliness up. yes, here's the fugliness. may many more hours not be spent de-fuglifying it.

truly my exhibitionist side has been quelled since that mid-century mark, and there are times i feel, dare i say, introverted even. i suppose it's that 'protect myself with an armored shield that will not be broken' thing that somehow emerged with age. oh yeah, you know it's not just me. when people get older the glow leaves their eyes (and wrinkles and bags replace), their openness wanes, and bored suspicion and smirks become all the rage.