far away is here

animal insanity

2009-07-31T17:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted, and this time I swear I've barely sat in front of a computer for two weeks. A fact, which, I'm slightly ashamed to say, seems so damn strange.

A lot has happened. My cousin Matt came and G and I took him up to Palenque and then over and further into the jungle. We also showed him all around San Cristobal, of course, and dragged him around Tuxtla some. Sadly, he is a working man and missed out on the beach trip that followed. With our Belgian neighbors, we decided to go farther than we had to to reach a beach so we could get to a really, really sweet beach. We spent four full days in Mazunte (with a delightful overnight bus trip on each end) and were back in San Cristobal just this morning. I will most likely post about the jungle and the beach in the coming days, so as not to forget.

But for now, I am lazy and will just make a list. Typified by surprise encounters like one when we got back to our casita today with the (furry and slightly less than palm-length) spider in the above picture, this summer has been rife with animals, among them:

every size and color of ant you can think of from small white ones to black flying ones,
worms for eating,
in the jungle: huge roaches, striped mosquitoes, a pet monkey we played with, plenty of dogs, tiny fish in the water nipping at my ankles, so many butterflies for some reason attracted to gravel,
crocodiles: big ones we saw in the canyon from the boat, one snapping its jaws behind a fence at a preserve, one somehow out of the mangrove and into the sea, reported sightings at the beach in mazunte,
a spider monkey i got to shake hands with,
talio, our neighbor's amazing rescued street dog, who turns up on the street still, met us once when we were having wine on the sidewalk,
chango, our other neighbors' new kitten, a tiny guy, growing by the day, climbing over, scratching up everyone,
circus animals going through the street in cages (i only saw a pic of that),
some rodent that was too quick to identify in the dark but huge and ran across the ground where we stayed at the beach, scurrying just under our beds,
and also at the beach crabs of varying size and color, especially at night and in the dark, some as big as my fist and bigger,
chickens: clucking, pecking, some in that strange phase between chick and grown, some having their necks wrung in the church at chamula,
in the pacific, a few kilos from shore: sea turtles, some swimming, one we got to swim with in the deep, deep sea, and then many turtles mating--pairs of them floating, the female's flipper flapping to keep them floating--dolphins--young and fast streaks out of and back into the water, newly dead and giant fish caught by fishermen we talked to, boat-to-boat,
birds, birds, birds,
hummingbirds in our garden,
spiders,
bats,
barking street dogs, mating street dogs, sleeping street dogs,
bees--one stinging my friend as he jumped and screamed,
huge wasps,
fleas,
fruit flies,
strange little beetles that retract their legs and turn into tiny pellets,
bright green iquanas and other lizards, including
geckos, of course.

Daytripping

2009-07-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we got up early, about seven. I remembered how much I truly am a morning person. We walked to the bus station and caught a bus to Comitan, the largest city near the Guatemalan border. There, we took a combi to Monte Bello, where we checked out four of the 59 lakes they've got there. The weather wasn't perfect lake weather, a cloud scattered sky playing hide and seek with the sun, but it was beatiful--the lakes we saw clear turquoise with the sun shining on them. They were selling all sorts of random things from Guatemala there, like cigarettes called After Hours,and cardamom gum with Arabic writing on the package, and Guatemalan beer, which I am swilling, above. (More pics here.) It's called Gallo, which means "rooster". Yup. The landscape between Monte Bello and Comitan really struck me on the way back, flat land, overed in flowered brush, cows grazing, random little shacks selling tacos and yard ornaments. And Comitan had one of the most beautiful zocalos (the inevitable square in each city) I've seen in all the cities I've gotten to see in Mexico this last year. This zocalo had amazing fountains, well-pruned trees, beautiful cobbled streets surrounding it. With all that bus-riding I was able to get 100 pages into Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", which is fantastic. And we got back to San Cristobal just in time to be the first customers at mariscos (seafood) night at this amazing quesadilla hole-in-the-wall we've recently become obsessed with. My favorite was the squid and broccoli in cream sauce. Or maybe the crab wrapped in bacon. Or...

Wormy

2009-07-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

These are the worms one of G's friends cooked up in our house last Saturday night. They brought them from Tuxtla. Apparently they're a delicacy and it's the season. (Ants, too, which we roasted over the barbecue the next night, but that's another story.) As soon as word got around they were being cooked, the party that had been next door moved mostly to our house. You could stretch the things out, joint by joint, which was what the cook did, to make them cook faster. Fried up, they didn't taste like much, but it was sort of an insane thing, and this pretty girl went around with a plate, offering them. Some people screwed up their noses, but most gave it a try. I'm not sure if eating the things was the reason, but the party got pretty insane. Shall we blame it on the worms? Or the mezcal and tequila? Or my delicious flan?

Rebels with a Damn Big Cause

2009-06-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I got to see a new side of Chiapas when we visited the headquarters of the closest one of five Zapatista Caracols, Oventic. ('Caracol' means snail and applies here to the largest groupings of Zapatista collectives in Chiapas.) In 1994, when NAFTA went into effect, groups of indigenous rebels, led by the erudite and famously non-indigenous Subcomandante Marcos and Comandantes Ramona, David and others. The Zapatistas managed to take the major cities of Ocosingo and San Cristobal, relinquishing them to army battles in later days. In peace talks, they managed to gain autonomy over their own lands and shaky control over certain natural resources. To this day, they survive without any support from the Mexican government, relying on money from NGO's and selling various handicrafts they make.

Since Oventic was established after the nineties uprisings as a new center in a swathe of agricultural lands, it is somewhat small and lacking in life. At the gate we were greeted by a small woman with a bandana covering her nose and mouth. She took our id's and came back to lead us into an office where three ski-masked men bumbled over some forms that were our "permits". We ended up behind the desk of another ski-masked man who sermonized to us about the Zapatista tenets of Marxism, and anti neo-liberalism and capitalism. It was all in Spanish, but I managed to get his gist since Spanish was his second language (after the indigenous language that was his mother tongue) and he spoke in sweeping generalities about his egalitarian and purist ideals. He got a bit muddled when we asked him specific questions about places and technology, and it became a bit creepy to be paying such rapt attention to a man whose mouth was merely a bulge under a black ski mask. Afterwards we took a walk around the village. We were not allowed to photograph people or vehicles, but I took pictures of some incredible murals decorating the buildings there.

Bird in a Bucket

2009-06-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

In Mexico, if you have hot water at all, you have to turn it on so that the gas you buy in canisters (to use for the stove and oven too) heats it up. When G was turning off the hot water this morning, he went out back to the switch, and found a bird drowned in a bucket. It's been raining a ton so the bucket kept back there was full and when I went out to see the bird, I saw a gray thing, floating, with it's little orange claw-feet curled underneath. My thought was to throw it away, but G said we should bury it. I let him do it, with a wooden spoon we use in the kitchen, and I hope he put the dead thing deep enough under the surface of our garden soil.

I have been following this whole Iran thing online. Crazy how the NYTimes has been following the blogs and posting Youtube videos. Crazy the new Google Translator. Of course it's not accurate, but damn if it's amazing they just put it up. And for this. In my mind, Tehran is something like a mix of Beirut and Damascus, but with even more rules. How must it be to live in a place where in public a woman must basically be invisible. Covered up and quiet. Or maybe that's not what it's like. And now the streets are a war-zone, with fires and clubs and people chanting their battle cries. I am intrigued by the use of such nomers as "The Supreme Leader" and "The Guardian Council." Makes it all seem a bit like Star Wars. And I can take it as ironically as I want, but of course to a good number of people it's just not. And I can barely begin to grasp whether there might be irony in the physical reality of being there.

Been away from San Cristobal for more than a week and it's good to be back "home." Why the quotes? Because this is a temporary home, because the word "home" is problematic in its definition. For me. Meeting so many new people, I have been getting asked a lot where I am from, where "home" is. And because it's most often Spanish and my Spanish is limited at best, I don't give the long explanation I would in English, but I simply say "Estados Unidos" and "Virginia" and, often "circa de Washington." That's it. Yes, we were gone to the lovely university city of Cholula, and then Mexico City, and then Cuernavaca. Since these are all G's places, I met a lot of G's people, including a drama student putting on a play that he'd worked on with poor kids in a nearby town and a group of his drama friends, one kid a drummer living in an apartment with sloppily spray-painted walls; three sisters in middle age who danced flamenco to the mariachi band that showed up as a surprise for G during a lunch in his honor--minus the dancing they reminded me of my mom and her sisters; a woman who has recently opened her own weight-loss clinic using a technique that employs body-sculpting through massage; a woman who had just come back from a landscaping job in Canada; a half-slav, half-British English teacher who has lived in Mexico for decades and made us a desert that involved berries and cointreau and chocolate and cream, as well as her translator-husband who had good stories about Obama and the Queen of Denmark and her basketball-playing daughter; an Mexican anglophile, living in an apartment with modern furniture and lounge-bar lighting; a Basque woman living with her father in a beautiful apartment in the embassy neighborhood of Mexico City; a Basque guy who just got his urban design degree in Berkeley and is about to go back and look for a job; a proudly out (kind of hard here) conservative gay man living in Mexico City's "La Zona Rosa," a neighborhood that surprisingly has a lot of Korean restaurants; a group of artists planning an arts festival in the skeleton of a house on the property where they live, south of Mexico City, in the neighborhood that claims Frida Kahlo; the woman who runs the pulqueria in San Pedro and has been selling pulque more than forty years and was going on and on about it's health properties; and many, many more.

What a varied world we live in. May the bird rest in peace. And hoping some good comes from what's going on on the streets of Tehran.

Does your sex therapist wear a veil and talk Quran?

2009-06-05T20:15:00.001-07:00

Talking about sex is taboo, haven't you heard? Especially in the Middle East. An interesting article about how that might be changing a little bit, in today's Times.

Surprize sexism

2009-06-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

So I started going to the gym last January and I got pretty serious about it, going pretty much every day. I didn't want to lose the habit so one of our first quests here in San Cristobal was to find a gym. Our first visit to the closest gym to our house ended in a yelling match. Then we walked around the city aimlessly looking for one, asking people who looked like they might patronize a gym where they go. Then we ended up at PSAS, a close bike ride on the other side of the river south of downtown. It's pretty nice, and we got a good deal. We'd have to pay a lot more money to use the cardio machines you plug in (the elliptical and treadmill) so, thrifty me, I've gotten into using the bikes, with G. Generally most of PSAS's customers stick to the weight areas, grunting and groaning away. The cardio room is on the top floor, with big windows looking out over the neighborhood, showing some lovely churches and mountains in the distance. I block out the overhead music with my ipod and go, go, go. It's an idyllic moment, but inevitably I look up at the walls around me, where there are sun-worn pin-ups of extremely muscular men and barely clad women using gym machines. It's weird and kitschy and funny and also a little demeaning. The pictures are all over the gym and apparently all over most gyms in Latin America. The pictures of the women and for the men's enjoyment and for the women to feel insecure, and the pictures of the men are somehow for the men as well, for them to idolize and perhaps feel insecure too. Today in the women's locker room I spotted a poster that breaks out of that mold. "A hard man is good to find," it says, under a black and white picture of a man with a sculpted, bare, hairless chest, his jeans suggestively unbuttoned at the bottom of the frame. No one that picture is for but the ladies.

of the millions of words

2009-06-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

One of my projects here in Mexico this summer is that I'm reading "Ulysses". I'm about a third of the way through. It's intense! There's a lot more to say but I have to save that for my own notes. Some quotes to whet your appetite:

"The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sexual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both."
--James Joyce, according to Andrew Powers

"In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and war someone is."
"Love loves to love love."
"And says he [Bloom]:
--Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God."
--James Joyce, Ulysses

Old, sad white guys

2009-05-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

So G is way more into the movie-watching thing than I am, and since I've been in Mexico with him, I've watched three movies in three weeks, which, I swear, is a record for me. Thing about those three movies is they all revolve around an old, sad white man character. It wasn't on purpose that we watched those three movies; it just happened. G had wanted to see "Grand Torino" for a while. I think I actually fell asleep on that one twice before he got me to see the whole thing. "The Visitor" had been suggested to me by a number of friends. And "Crossing Over" was a random choice; something about the movie poster and the plot description drew us in--maybe, too, something about Harrison Ford. No matter how silly his movie's get, he's hard to resist. So "Grand Torino"--directed by and starring Clint Eastwood--and "Crossing Over" had the whole aging famous leading man thing going for them. Clint Eastwood was certainly my favorite of the three movies' respective protagonists, playing the very gruff and blunt yet somehow still intriguing Walt Kowalski, a man with a wife newly dead, a family that has a hard time loving him, and also abandoned by his old neighbors to face the Hmung immigrants now living next door. Less interesting by far is Harrison Ford's character, a very sympathetic ICE officer who gets way too wrapped up in his cases. "The Visitor"'s sad old white man is a university professor played by Richard Jenkins (unknown until viewing and definitely lacks the sex appeal of Clint or Harrison). University politics force the widowed Walter Vale to leave Connecticut to attend a conference in New York City. In the apartment he keeps there he finds an illegal immigrant couple who has been living there a few months, paying rent to some fake landlord. And this gets me to the other similarity between all these movies: the abandoned, sad, old white men in them are each changed, in some way, by new immigrants. I won't get too much into the individual plots but to say that "Grand Torino" was most satisfying as a story. "Crossing Over" was sort of in the style of "Crash" or "Magnolia" in which snippets are told of vaguely intersecting lives, and so you are following a few stories as once. It's a risky story-telling strategy because it's likely that one of those stories is stronger than the others, leaving the viewer uncaring about the rest, as in a book when you skip the italicized sections or the flashbacks. "Grand Torino" was also least cheesy of all of these movies. The worst cheese-factor award goes to "Crossing Over" in which the whole proud to be an American thing is slapped at you over and over at the end. "The Visitor" was disappointingly lacking in any real substance beyond the devices of the international/hot-topic plot. And Haaz Suleiman, playing Tarek, the drumming Syrian, was definitely hot. Most of the relationship developments here were a little hard to believe, and I wanted more more more. Another similarity between the three? They all made me cry. But I'm easy like that.

Absolutely No Photos Allowed

2009-05-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we went to a town about ten kilometers from here, a Tsotsil village called San Juan Chamula, or, simply, Chamula, as was painted on the window of the van we piled into along with too many others to get there. We rode at a steady incline up a road that cuts through the hills south and west of here and sloped through some agricultural lands to arrive at a town square covered in stands set up by vendors of various produce and other food stuffs, piles of pants, leather belts in every shade of black and brown. Immediately, it was clear that town was dirtier than San Cristobal, litter scattered everywhere. As we bought condensed milk-drizzled churros I was awed by the sight of a boy start moving on his bicycle through a pile of banana peels. It wasn't an accident either, but something he did as a habit, a commonplace occurrence.

We then went to the dusty tourist office and after a young european-ly stylish blond couple, paid 20 pesos each to gain entry to the church, pictured above. As we passed through the wide, empty courtyard, we saw women and children crowded into a gazebo--getting government handouts, G said. Then two young girls followed us, trying to sell us friendship bracelets. They tugged at our hands and in the end threw a bracelet at each of us, saying it was a gift. As I was running after the little brat that had targeted me, the man taking tickets got my attention, and G and I were subsumed by the church.

The rule for the Iglesia de San Juan Chamula is that tourists can visit and gawk but absolutely no cameras allowed, as in, they will take your camera away and throw you out immediately, G explained. Something seemed odd about it. Sure, I'd been in museums and performances where there was no flash photography allowed, and maybe even places with artifacts that one was not allowed to photograph...but to be disallowed from capturing a live event? Knowing myself, I would likely be too shy to do it anyway, but the fact of the prohibition being and out and out rule was intriguing. So in lieu of the photograph (that I might have never even taken, had I the rules on my side), I made a list of my impressions as I sat inside the church:

no photos allowed
smokey air hundreds of candles burning
chattering chanting
pine needles strewn everywhere, over hard cold floor
scent of pine, the feel of it under the soles of our shoes
the room is lined with effigies of saints
each in his/her own box
each with a mirror around his/her neck
as if we could look at ourselves but they are too high
and only concrete ceiling is reflected
rows of tiny candles lit on tables in front of the saints
rows of tiny candles lit on the floor
where they have been placed melted wax
families (or groups that look like families) gathered to heal
colas and juices liquid in bottles sugar water that heals
one woman chants as she rubs green leaves over anothers skin
behind me they will kill a chicken
i look but the old lady stares back and i feel ashamed
then i look and the man in the furry woolen vest is wringing the bird's neck
but it won't die is still moving and the old woman finishes her off
feathers and flesh lay before them and they are chanting
one empty coca cola bottle and one full sit before them, and chanting
G says a healing ceremony can cost 1000 pesos
children everywhere, the smallest slung on stomachs or backs
the others play with fire, with soda, with each other
what are they saying in that strange language?
like no language i have ever in person heard?
the men drink cane liquor
a man leads a small boy around the room in circles
the child's t-shirt reads "100% Guapo"
all the women here in those heavy, black goat's hair skirts
that old one still staring at me, whenever i look her eyes
the smoke, the incense, the chanted words like liquid all around us
the thousands of tiny flickering points of light
and the smoky air around us glowing

After that, we walked to the graveyard, a litter-strewn expanse of lawn surrounding the ruins of another church, older than the first. Everywhere there were earthen mounds, as if every single grave was fresh. Each mound had at its head colored crosses, in most instances more one stacked against each other, like records, or books or plates.

G and I sat in front of it for a while, in a barely clean patch of green from where we could see the graveyard with the old church, the new church and the town in the distance behind it. To our left, there was a small bar on a side road. Outside of which a young girl in traditional dress huddled on the concrete step sang: "Life is worthless!" I am told by G it is a famous song, and the girl went on and on, singing mournfully, soulfully, off-key and slurring.

(More pics from that day and the one before here.)

About the food here

2009-05-20T16:50:00.001-07:00

For days I have been planning on writing a post about how damn good and fresh and cheap the food is here, how amazing the markets and little shops--all in walking distance, all relatively cheap--are, and then the other night G got really sick. And, most likely, the bug that kept running between bed and the bathroom for hours of attempted expurgation before we finally embarked for medical help in the middle of the night came from lettuce he’d bought at the market that day.

The central market where he went is labyrinthine and exciting and reminds me of Cairo or Damascus or maybe even parts of Beirut. There is an outdoor section, where people vend wares on blankets, under umbrellas. Then stalls, made of soft wood, set up under roofs of tarps and corrugated metal. A woman sells batteries, a man sells dried beans out of baskets, a woman sells tomatoes that she has piled in pyramids, and on and on. Then the food section, where a woman sells tamales, some women work behind ovens, scraping at piles of meat, and mysteriously brightly colored drinks in large clear plastic containers, large chunks of ice floating. And all over tiny stools to sit and eat at. Then there is the indoor part, all white ceramic tile and the smell of raw meat--a fish section, a pork section, a beef section. Any part you want. Cow head, anyone?

Besides that, there are tiny stalls a few blocks down the hill from our house, where a handful of vegetables and fruits are on display.

Then there are the special, the organic, the house-made things: a twice weekly organic market in the courtyard of an arts center just down the block where a few vendors sell healthy-looking greens, juicy berries, colorful roots, golden-yolked eggs, the handful of pink lily-looking flowers that still smell fresh after a few days on our dining room table. And a dairy shop, also down the street, where they sell all sorts of cheeses and raw yogurt, their amazing pineapple flavor in our fridge right now. Tangy and sweet and sour all at once. And a coffee place downtown, that's all fair-trade and organic and delicious, where the woman had us try raw cocoa beans when we bought our half kilo last week.

G's sickness lasted a very painful eight hours. It was the kind of sick where you feel like you might die, I think like the way I felt in Egypt that time after the koshary in the desert--or was it that time after the baba at the fancy Lebanese place? It was awful. But now after finding a decent all-night clinic, getting a shot, and taking some pills, the thing that possessed him is gone, and we're eating normally again. Big meal in the middle of the day, amazing smells coming from the kitchen now, as you see pictured above.

Meandering post, I know. Just trying to get some fluency going. Stuck on an awful short story rewrite these past couple days. It's killing me. Or at least it feels like it.

Visiting the Big City

2009-05-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we descended the 2,000 or so meters and made the 1-hour bus-ride to Tuxtla, to visit G’s family and friends. While Sancris is colorful and airy and stone-built, Tuxtla is haphazard and hot and concrete. Not to say it wasn’t fun, but, all in all, this is where I’d rather be.

While we were away, we spent an afternoon with G’s niece and nephew, taking them for the most beautiful handmade popsicles I’ve ever seen. On a galavanting, meandering night with G’s friends, we went to a couple of a certain type of party, where people our age fill the front courtyard of a house with plastic tables and chairs and serve food and drink a lot of alcohol. Pretty bad reggae-tone music at the first, awful karaoke at another.

For lunch one day, we ate what is pictured above. In a “snack” bar with impossibly loud music and then a mariachi band, and all sorts of men singing along and everyone drinking, we feasted on a plate of slow cooked meat in adobo sauce, amazing black beans and fresh, hearty flour tortillas to go with. Before that we had a plate of fresh tomatoes, cilantro, and onion, as well as dried shrimp. Too salty for my taste. All washed down with a few shared pitchers of Sol doctored with lime and chili.

At amazing restaurant, G’s friends put one of the flip-flops he’d casually slipped off his feet into a crate of beer bottles on the ground. When we realized it was missing as we got ready to go, it was nowhere to be found. Shoeless, G took me to the home of some friends of his, a married couple who have shared a house for thirty years. From the street it looks like a concrete wall with graffiti, like a forgotten place, but inside it was filled with art and plants and books. They were nice.

G’s parents took us to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, Mexican style. We were resistant but it was pretty damn good. I recall a past when I could do three or four plates at an occasion like that, but this time only managed one and a half.

Other than that, some insane cab rides, amazing street art, and finally seeing marimba park, a place full of people dancing G has always told me about. But we missed the people dancing part. We got there when they were milling about, but the gazebo in the center was cool, all the ancient benches lined up and facing it, like sun’s rays. Maybe next time.

More pics of our Tuxtla weekend here.

From the Land of Swine Flu

2009-05-14T12:30:00.001-07:00

[photo from nytimes.com, by way of Reuters]
On the birthday card my father gave me four days before I left for Mexico and two days before my actual birthday, he had pasted a carefully cut picture of Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs. “The Swine Flu welcoming committee,” he wrote beside it. We had gotten past being scared of the Swine Flu. The main problem, we decided when mankind’s newest plague began making appearances on the headline news just two weeks before my take-off date for a summer long trip that had been months in the planning, was if the airports closed. And it became quickly apparent that Obama’s approach to this would be—unlike Egypt’s slaughter of thousands of pigs, Afghanistan’s confinement of its only one, Cuba’s absolute restriction on travel to Mexico, and the decrees that I was crazy if I went by certain of my acquaintances—rational and his plan of action would not involve any sort of travel restrictions because the flu had already spread past Mexico, and far past its origins, whatever they were. Encouraging was news that the new disease was most often easily fought off by the body, that it wasn’t spreading as quickly as scientists had feared. I went to my university’s student health center, and had a nurse who, very evenly told me that I should be cautious down there but swine flu was the least of my concerns. In addition to Relenza, she prescribed Cipro and malaria pills. I only purchased the first—which comes in an odd inhaler form and is not to be taken as preventative but only when symptoms appear—and relented to a flu shot and a typhoid shot. For the latter, I was apparently three years overdue.

In the meantime, I watched CNN more intently than usual when I was at the gym and was likely one of the most frequent visitors to the CDC website. Then I got bored of all the different types of coverage—some racist, some plain fear-mongering, some interesting, some worth thinking about in relation to my own situation. Then there was meta-coverage—news reporting on the news. Was the media blowing it out of proportion? Were people who took swine flu lightly asking for it? Answers ventured for all these questions were speculative at best. My parents gave me two respirators they’d had from some previous scare. I told G they were for me and him, in case we had to face Armageddon together.

My flight from Atlanta to Mexico City was relatively full. A business man across the aisle wore a surgical mask the whole way, and a mother and son and another man, a foreigner to Mexico like me, put on masks as we landed. In the airport I was made to fill out a questionnaire asking if I’d experienced any of a list of symptoms, and there were people wearing masks here and there. Most of them were casual about it, the blue fabric often draped below their mouths. There was one woman in the restaurant where I had lunch who very gingerly removed one of two plastic gloves she wore in order to better fork her enchilada.

Before I boarded my plane to Chiapas I was approached by a couple wearing respirators (like masks but sturdier, and with some sort of breathing appendages sticking out on either side). The man was American and guessed at where I was going. He asked if I’d share a cab from the airport with his girlfriend, since it’s so expensive in Tuxtla. I agreed. He said his girlfriend was shy about her English, that she works as an epidemiologist in a town near the Guatemala border. He was on his way to another state, and asked if I wasn’t worried. It was strange to have a conversation with these people wearing their masks, so I didn’t say much. As we boarded the plane, I turned to see them pull the things away for a brief kiss.

On the ground in Tuxtla, G found one more person to share our cab all the way to San Cristobal, which would be about an hour up the mountains. I was so happy to finally be here, to see G after so long, and generally ignored the conversation the epidemiologist—who had her mask off all the way now—had with the other dude, but G said they were talking about swine flu the whole time. The state government in Chiapas had apparently just decided it was a problem, and had shut down schools longer, banned public gatherings, etc.

Since I’ve gotten to San Cristobal and been here a few days I’ve only noticed a few people wearing masks. One young guy in a jewelry boutique had a cartoon animal mouth drawn on his. A pharmacy we passed in our walk to the market this morning had a sign saying they were out of masks. We weren’t allowed to enter a wine and tapas place we went to the other night, because, a man with a mask hanging under his chin explained, they were limited to serving 18 customers inside the cozy space at the time. We took a table on the street.

first day, new world

2009-05-12T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of the street I will be living on for the next 2.5 mos. Arrived in San Cristobal last night as the sun was setting. The apartment G got for us is beautiful--full of ceramic and clay tiles, wood ceilings, airy, bright walls. The garden we share with the other houses in our complex:

Walked some around town today, saw the main squares, dipped into the market. The city is small, as far as I can tell and streets sit low under the stone sidewalks and houses that line them. There are too many cars on these ancient streets (G says about 400 years old), and so many old Beetles around, I've already revived the "punch buggy" game we used to play in Lebanon when we were younger, punching each other each time we sighted one of those fanciful-looking cars. It's actually pretty fun since G never played before and he takes their profligacy for granted.

The rest of the pics are here.

pescadillas

2009-01-12T07:36:00.000-08:00

Pescadillas might be my new favorite food. Lightly fried corn tortillas stuffed with fried fish. Bought from the most polite little kids you ever saw. They would walk around the idyllic beaches we stayed on in Micoacan for a week over the new year and call out their wares, then come by and sell them for 5 pesos (like less than 40 cents with the current exchange rate) a piece. Then we'd cut them open and generously squeeze on the hot sauce. Makes me hunger thinking about it.

So I am back in Richmond where it is cold, very very cold. The semester begins today so there's a new schedule to figure out and stories to get back to writing. So hard to move Mexico to the periphery of my mind. While away, I read two fabulous books: The Boat, a collection of stories by Nam Le and White Tiger, a new (kind of) novel about India by Aravind Adiga. And finally I started Hakawati by Rabih Allamedine. More about those next time.

new day on the horizon

2008-12-26T06:00:00.001-08:00

Overheard at the breakfast table at my parents' house today:

U.S. authorities are winning favor from various Afghani Bedouin chiefs by giving them viagra.

The shoemaker responsible for the shoes thrown at Mr. Bush in Iraq last week faces over 400,000 web orders. (I'm pretty sure I have that number right but can't be bothered to check it right now.)

Reporters covering Obama at his vacation in Hawaii are thrilled over the difference between that and Crawford, Texas.

I'm heading off for a brief but faraway trip again and excited. Be back after the New Year. 2009, here we come.

Apple Squared

2008-12-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

(the dog says "Bush" on it)

Got back last night after four days staying with friends in Astoria, Queens. Got to Manhattan most of the days but didn't set foot in Brooklyn once. Walked from Sunnyside to Astoria one day and from the Lower East Side to Columbus Circle another. Man, I miss walking a city. maybe I should try it out here in Richmond; there doesn't seem much cause to since everything I do is in a pretty small radius and it's rainy and cold today, though last night was warm, almost humid, and I could most pleasantly sit on my front porch. Trying to write today. Hard to make myself do it since the semester just ended and I got back from vacation.

Did you hear about the Iraqi reporter throwing the shoe at Bush? Pretty silly, huh? The whole thing doesn't translate into English too well. A shoe--since it walks on the ground, where scum is--is the insult of all insults, and the way he yelled at him, amazing.

With the first shoe, he yelled: "This is a good-bye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."

And with the second: "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."

Seriously, a shoe in the head is the least this loser deserves. What has he got in front of him? A life of leisure and a big pension and tons of family money, etc. Hmmm. Kind of makes me angry to think of it.

Re-vision

2008-12-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

So in my teaching writing theory class and in the Writing Center where I work and in my fiction classes, we always talk about how revision should be exactly that, re-envisioning your writing, transforming it on a large scale--not tweaking words or adding commas but really putting your mind on the thing and looking at how it is working as a piece of writing. One theorist we read made the case the level of revision done marks the difference between beginning and experienced writers and I completely agree, though, honestly, talking about it and dissecting it and demanding it is boring! What's awesome is having an honestly hands-on conversation about it and doing it and seeing it. This week in the workshop that I am taking and the one I am co-teaching, I've gotten the chance to read revisions of stories we've worked on during the semester, and I must say I have been blown away. It's a nice way to feel at the end of a long semester.

trying to focus is hard after all that food...

2008-11-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

I am trying to write a paper about what works in teaching writing, even though I've never really taught writing. Well, not to a classroom of kids, well, not for more than a little bit at a time. There are all those hours I've been putting in as a consultant at The Writing Center. And Last week I gave a little talk about paragraphing in fiction, which was actually more like a conversation. And last spring in San Francisco when I was subbing, I would try to steer kids in the right direction whenever I saw them writing things that made no sense. But I guess I've been learning that a hands off approach is better, that instead of telling them what to write and how to write it, instead of fixing every typo, it's a lot more valuable for them (and easier on me) to focus on the bigger picture, to have a conversation about what it is they are trying to say. I guess my opposite impulse was developed when I was in high school in Surabaya, one of only five native English speakers in my class, and really the only on who cared much about English class. Anyway, I was kind of a dork and sort of obsessed with getting people to like me so whenever people would ask me to fix their papers or articles, I would. I would make them perfect--no conversation, no questions asked. So I guess I've been working towards unlearning that in order to some day perhaps be a decent teacher of writing but for now I have to write this annoying paper.

thank you!

2008-11-28T05:35:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving at the Pierce house was a lot of fun, as usual. Somehow, the kids table has turned into the under 30 table, and there were more of us than the "adults." My cousin R wowed us with his knowledge of wooing women (apparently, the dim ones can really be a lot more fun), and our guest P told us some things we never quite considered about the melding of medicine and business. D and Y were visiting from Cairo/New York, and seemed to have a pretty good time. My brussels sprouts (despite boohooing from several male family members) were received so well the full pan of them disappeared. Beforehand, we talked to my absent Aunt Y by Skype for the first time. My mom and Aunt A carried a laptop around the house, showing her the tables and the food--kind of cheesy but pretty cute. Didn't have anything else to eat after the 2pm meal, but did have some coffee at the movies later. We ended up heading to the only independent theater in northern virginia to see "Slumdog Millionnaire"--a film that more than made up for the bad choice we made at Blockbuster the previous night. Where "Snow Angels" was a self-indulgent, non-sensical myriad of characters and painful scenes, "Slumdog Millionnaire" was an exciting, colorful myriad of characters and lovely scenes. It was a cavalcade of colors and sounds but nothing about it was painful or forced or overdone. Quite sad in regards to the recent Mumbai attacks, the movie was something of a bittersweet entertiainment. Not sure what I'd say if I was familiar with real-life Mumbai at all, but, as it is, I admired the storytelling acumen of the writer of the novel that inspired it and the screenplay. I guess I just feel like a good movie is hard to come by in this day and age, and this definitely is one.

the ramble, the update

2008-11-13T17:20:00.000-08:00

So it turns out I'm not too good at this blogging thing lately. A few things have happened. I've been writing and reading, a lot. Reading mostly the impressive work of my peers and students here at VCU. Seriously, I'm routinely blown away, which makes me want to be a better writer. The last story I turned into workshop was pretty disjointed but cool if only for the fact that it takes place mostly on a night train in Thailand. We will talk about it at our meeting next Wednesday and I'm frankly kind of dreading it. Also, my reading as part of our Moveable Feast monthly series went really well. I was reading some scenes from a novel I don't think I'll ever finish about a disfuctional romantic relationship. I gave the audience the choice between narrative of that relationships beginnings or of it's fall out. They chose the latter, yelling it at me, not even letting me have them vote, which was all part of my master plan. I recently had a visitor from far away for a week. It was amazing to show him what my new life in Richmond was like. For Halloween we showed up late at a grad student party full with people dressed like rockstars--from Loretta Lynn to Kurt Cobain to Rob Zombie. The two of us wore all black and kuffiahs and told people we were an obscure pro-Palestinean punk band, and they were like, oh. We biked around and sat on a sunny rock in the James River and ate amazing bbq rips like barbarians and drank beers while we watched Obama's votes come in. Could hardly believe he won, though, when I think about it, what was our alternative, really? Could you imagine what things would be like right now if McCain won? For starters, I'm pretty sure the thousands of people who took to the streets all over the world would not have been as jubilant. What else? I have been delighted by the students I see in the Writing Center at school. Each week, I have 12 random appointments, 20 minute slots with people from all over the university looking for help with what they are writing for class. At first, it freaked me out, but now I kind of enjoy it. Not to say there aren't moments when someone says something or I read something, and I think, this isn't happening. I've been going up to NoVa to see my parents quite a bit, which is a really cool thing, considering this is the closest I've lived to them in over ten years. Writing that makes me feel old. I planted some tulip bulbs in our front flower bed in honor of the first frost. I just ate some amazing tomato soup and now I have to go write.

Oh, inverted world...

2008-10-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

The link between child porn and Islamic fundamentalists. Can you believe this?

i am old news...

2008-10-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

Just found out that a 7-minute documentary made by Jana Sintschnig and starring myself and my good friend Ayman Ramadan was screened last night at the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco. Pretty f-ing cool! And probably ok that you missed it since in most of the footage Jana used of interviews with me, I look like a drowned rat. I was all sweaty that day, having gone bike riding before meeting up with Jana. Still, such a well-edited piece by her, and awesome, really, in telling a small part of Ayman's story and of some thoughts I formed on contemporary art while working in Egypt from 2004-2005.

Milan's Closet

2008-10-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

It has been revealed that as a 20-year old, Kundera outed a man living in his dormitory as a spy. He was arrested and served for years as a prison-worker in a uranium mine. Does this mean we can't take Kundera seriously when he uses his crafted fictions to denounce totalitarianism? Does it mean he will lose clout?

lovely

2008-10-18T07:25:00.001-07:00

Found at Narrative Magazine yesterday, and sublime, I think:

Slow Dance

by Matthew Dickman

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained

Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like

(continued at narrativemagazine.com)

From All American Poem

So gone...

2008-10-17T12:35:00.001-07:00

Anyone who uses this blog to keep up with me, whether you know me or not, must be wondering whether I still exist. I do, but I sorta feel like I don't. No! It's not bad. It just is. Part of it has to do with the fact that I lost my glasses (again!) and so things more than ten feet away are pretty fuzzy and at the same time my left ear is blocked up. Ew. Things should be back to normal since a new pair of specs is supposedly on the way and I've been treating my ear with some drops and trying to wash it out with water, but until then, I am the faintest tinge of deaf and blind and everything feels thrown off. I am not the me I used to be. I can't hear so well so I don't listen, and I can't see, so I walk around touching things. It's weird. I don't exist, see?

I also don't exist because Richmond has swallowed me. Well, really it's this new grad school program. Intense, I'm telling you. But it's good! Mostly. A class on theory which is seriously cramping my style with a long paper due next week and tons of reading and then another paper at the end of the semester. Then also I am writing new stories. Two so far since I've been here, one in the next couple weeks. And I'm liking them. My fiction workshops is my favorite two hours of the week--not my most exciting or funny or anything extreme like that, just favorite. I've also managed to get my schedule working so that I have good time to write in the mornings. And then there's the writing center, which I give 10 hours/week to. I sit and face students from all over the university and whatever writing assignments they have for class, for 30min a pop. As you can imagine, some intriguing stuff comes up, a random list of it as of late: dream interpretation, eating disorders, business speak, King Arthur, childhood development, discrimination against Arabs, Plato... Oh, and if you are in or near Richmond, Virginia next week you should consider coming to hear me read as part of our graduate reading series, Moveable Feast, at the Visual Arts Center on Main Street, Fri, Oct. 24, at 7pm. Free beer and wine! Come on, you know you want to.

the tricks of memory

2008-09-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Cities and Memory #5 (from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino)

"In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine old postcards that show as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits; admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannto compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through wat it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was."

An absolutely stunning paragraph brought to my attention by one of my new teachers here in Richmond. Richmond, which felt so awkward and awful, like an ill-fitting shoe, when I first came here over a month ago now. Richmond, which now feels pretty okay, even though it's been raining for the past twenty-four hours. Actually such gloom might be the perfect thing for not making me feel like a shut-in as I stay home most of the weekend, reading and writing.

Had my first short story workshopped this week. So intense! I came home and fell asleep right away--couldn't do what I always did in San Francisco and read everyone's comments on the train ride home, since I bike home here and I was too, too tired.

Our first real party in my house last night. It was actually thrown by my roommate's girlfriend to raise $$ for a great cause. Amazing though (even if I was in pajamas and avoiding direct contact with any new people) to have the house full of bodies and warm food and voices. After they left sipped overly sweet wine (like nectar) out on the porch, happily talked about nothing, about the past, and watched the incredible lightnight shock the whole world around us almost as bright as day and listened to a rumble of thunder longer than I've ever heard. Thunder is just clouds bumping into each other, right?

(The picture at the top of this post was taken in Richmond near 1900. The young boy front and center is a newsboy, who lied at first when asked his age. He said eight first and, when prodded, went down to six.)

It's Getting Hot in Here

2008-09-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

So yesterday I get to school for my really long day that starts at 1pm and ends at 10pm and I'm a little early so I have time to gawk at the thing that is happening right outside of the building I'm heading for. This man is wearing suspenders and shiny black shoes and black pants, a white button up shirt and he is holding up a bible and he is yelling.

"There are the sinners! And there are the righteous!"
"There are Christians and there are unbelievers!"
"The Mormons, the Catholics, the Muslims...they are all unbelievers! They are all going to Hell!"
"Anyone who does not except Jesus Christ as their savior is going to Hell!"

And he is surrounded by people--at least sixty, maybe one hundred people--circles of people around him and the ones standing farther away are smirking and talking amongst themselves. But I am standing in front of them. I want to hear what the ones who are closer to him are saying. The ones who are closer are yelling. They are mostly men. They are all men, actually. And there is one who is standing right in front of the preacher's face. Right in front of him, yelling, "Will you please shut up! I just have a question. One question. Close your mouth for a second!" But the preacher will not stop. He just keeps going right past the man who is yelling for him to stop and his face is turning red. And finally he says it:

"Why are you here!? Is there a population problem in Hell or something? Did the devil ask you to help him out and make some space down there by saving us?" He's laughing. And everyone laughs and is yelling, and the preacher is jumping and raising his hands.

And then I can't quite hear what is going on and then another man says: "Yes, I am homosexual. Do you have a problem with that?"

And the preacher: "Homosexuals are damned and they lack intelligence!"

And the guy: "That's interesting because I am a sophomore in college and if just because I f- men in the a- that means I'm dumb than you are a f-ing fool."

And more mixed yelling. And there is another man standing close by with a bible asking about verses and the preacher is still going and then someone else asking about the logic of Jesus dying for our sins since he died before we sinned them, and then I have to go inside.

And still going an hour and a half later when I leave the building on my way to another building and I hear him say to someone:

"I've been preaching the gospel for two hours." And he looks flushed and happy, and then later when I am moving from building to building again he is gone.

Germinate

2008-09-07T16:53:00.000-07:00

So my new roommates are three charming young men who are obsessed with seeds and soil and soul and earth. We have been eating watermelon and they save the seeds, sprinkling them on the lawn. There are drying olive pits on the kitchen table. We have water bottles and beer bottles and things set up out back with cuttings in them. We have tiny tupperware full of soil sprinkled with seeds and a compost heap started in a large green plastic pot that we've moved far away from the back door. We have a tiny little lattice made of twine and twigs snaking up one of our fences for the passion flower that has already begun sprouting tendrils and wrapping up and around it. There is a hollowed out half cantaloupe with seeds and soil inside it, cantaloupe seeds already sprouting, in the patch of earth in front of our house. There is also a pineapple top that was immediately planted there after we ate the fruit beneath it last week. All this and we've been sharing the house on Strawberry Street less than a month. I don't participate much but for gawking and they've got me all excited about what is going to grow.

I have been watering a garden though, the vegetable and herb and flower garden of a neighbor of ours who has been away this past week. I talked a bit to the plants today; I asked them to grow and tell Nancy that we've been taking good care of them.

As I report all this to you, I'm sitting in a cafe a mile away from Strawberry Street and the people sitting next to me are getting into a spirited conversation about Jesus. I've got to get out of here and back to the seeds.

Los Angeles

2008-09-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

City of Angels--what a nice name for a place, huh? I've been there mainly to visit my uncle and aunt and their daughter and her family who live in two apartments relatively near to each other in Beverly Hills--and we spend time in their living rooms and kitchens and then drive around and eat good food and go to the mall and I know it's a place I wouldn't necessarily want to live but I could because it's so big and so varied that there's certainly some neat stuff going on always and there are so many different sorts of people who live there, but there's the whole car thing, the freeway thing, which is what most people talk about when they say why they couldn't or wouldn't live there. But more than that, L.A. is a place in my imagination, thanks to movies and books, and it's had a decided resurgence on that level lately. I just finished reading Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. It is a novel primarily about Kashmir, but also perhaps about how its characters carry the weight of Kashmir to the U.S., and L.A. in particular, and Rushdie awesomely renders the metropolis, for example:

"That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view out-dated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing was to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future."

Then also I just finished plowed through Less than Zero, which I would only recommend if you are in the mood for something really fast and pretty depressing and not too well written but fascinating just the same. For those unfamiliar, the novel follows Clay as he goes back to L.A. after four months in college in New Hampshire. He revisits his friends and becomes drawn into a depressing and dehumanizing spiral of sex and drugs and disturbing family interactions that is home. And all along I wanted to know why he was so fucked up, and if he had the power to be his own salvation, and I guess the novel answered these questions but never in much of a way that satisfied me. Though, since it was published in the 80's the book serves as a historical testiment, as well as an intriguing study in first person narration. I'm going to take up American Psycho next, and a little scared about that, but hoping the writing will wow me more, and wondering if I'll have the stomach to read it.

I have been feeling under the weather and last night stayed in, mostly in bed watching "Short Cuts," which Robert Altman made in the late 90's, I guess, based on a few of Raymond Carver's short stories and starring a crazy cast including folks such as Juliane Moore and Robert Downey Jr and Jack Lemmon, and managing to tell the stories of more than twenty characters. I'm about halfway through the 3-hour movie so far and am caught up in all the characters but also a bit bothered by how short the scenes are, though all the shifting around and continuous building of often tenuous connections between characters certainly does paint a varied and fascinating picture of the City of Angels...

Book news of note...

2008-08-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

Random House has pulled a forthcoming novel about a famous bride of the prophet Mohammad. Crazy. Foreshadowed Muslim reaction is a force, huh? I wonder if someone else will pick it up.

And this new book on fiction by James Wood, who I am a big fan of. If anyone wants to buy me a present, this is it!

Not a book, but wanted to end with a laugh from Denver, courtesy of Fox News:

A Whole New World

2008-08-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the other day when my parents came to visit me in Richmond and we went out and about I forgot to put my battery in my camera, but here are a few photos I took on a long walk I went on last Friday, just as the sun was sinking...

This first one is of my house, or more the tree in front of my house. The house itself is incredible, with high ceilings, wood floors, two sets of stairs, very cool roommates, and a small community park and garden out back:

Many monuments dot this city, many of them having to do with the Civil War. There is a famous one of Arthur Ashe. Here is one that goes a little farther back:

Here is an artsy one. Me on one of those highway overpass things, with all the cars going past below, it sounded like the ocean:

One more, some houses with a Baptist church bus and some chairs set up for a gathering:

Yeah, so strange days, new world...

This is the kind of stuff that is contributing to my culture shock...

2008-08-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

I am ashamedly sitting in the Starbucks (I swear, I swear, it will be the only time!) that is just left of the entrance to the main library at my new school, Virginia Commonwealth University. And just now four tanned, perfect-looking under-aged girls sat down at the table next to me. The one who took the head seat of the rectangle table is evidently interviewing the other three in regards to rushing her sorority. Topics of their discussion include desperation to see the Spice Girls reunion tour, hanging out at frat houses, whether or not it's ok to shop at a thrift shop just for eighties night, and faraway boyfriends.

From Cholula to Richmond

2008-08-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was in taking this photo, overlooking Cholula, a lovely city in Mexico. We were outside a church that, in 1594, was built by the conquering Spanish on top of an ancient Aztec pyramid, which just so happens to be the "largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world." Crazy. Seriously. We also spent time in Cuernavaca and in Mexico City. The former reminded me of Lebanon and the latter of Cairo. But of course it was all completely different, too.

And now, I am in Richmond, Virginia. I haven't taken any pictures yet. It is certainly a pretty place but nothing like Mexico, or Lebanon, or Cairo. I have just moved into a room in an incredible big, old house, in a quiet, pretty neighborhood a five-minute bike ride to school. Yesterday I went to a pretty neat flea market in another neighborhood with a few galleries and cafes and warehouses and a paint ball range and a gentlemen's club and other things, I'm sure. Everyone at the market was exceedingly nice, and I bought some produce and useful junk for ridiculously cheap. Then I found a natural foods market that isn't as amazing as Rainbow but reasonably cool. Classes start next week for me, and right now I'm dealing with administrative and orientation-type stuff. Wish I was in Mexico but I'm also happy to be in Richmond since it's what is happening now.

Good Bye

2008-08-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Darwish, brilliant artist of verse, memory, and forgetting passed away Saturday in Houston. He wasn't from there, just went there because his European doctor recommended the hospital for his specific condition. Something about an enlarged artery in his heart. Darwish was a poet, well-known, perhaps, for the fact he was a Palestinian poet. He will be buried in Ramallah today or Wednesday. A one-time member of the PLO and, eventually, part of the party's executive committee, he wrote words Yasser Arafat declaring Palestinian statehood in 1988. And, famously, he penned this verse:

Identity Card

Record !
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

Record !
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks…
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself
at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Record !
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew...

But, to quote Ursula Lindsey from her awesome blog, The Arabist Review, he was not a "propogandist." Or maybe he was not merely a propagandist. Or maybe he simply got to the heart/truth/meaning of things. Because every man and woman is tied to the place they were born and the place they live and the place they have lived most. And many tie their work to those places, but maybe Darwish was the kind of artist who transcends place to reach those in all places. He also wrote lines like this, from his 1982 book, Memory for Forgetfulness:

"The dawn made of lead is still advancing from the direction of the sea, riding on sounds I haven’t heard before. The sea has been entirely packed into stray shells. It is changing its marine nature and turning into metal. Does death have all these names? We said we’d leave. Why then does this red-black-gray rain keep pouring over those leaving or staying, be they people, trees, or stones?"

Reading that really makes me want to find it in Arabic. Hmmm. Ending here for now. A post on the trip I just got back from to come...

Ya Mamma, Inshallah Yirbah Obama

2008-07-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

So my sister got my mother this shirt from Urban Outfitters. She wasn't sure my mom would be into it, but figured it was worth a try. Buying presents for my mom is tough. She's not the sort of lady that has many things or many desires, and most often she'll open a present and kindly say thanks, but you know she would be just as happy without, perhaps even more happy since she deplores the accumulation of stuff. Occasionally, however, one strikes gold and fills the sweet lady with glee, just as my father did a few years ago with a Japanese knife set (my suggestion--ahem!) and just as my sister did with this shirt. I'm not sure what it really means. Maybe that Obama would be the best presidential choice for the likes of someone's mother? I know, I'm not always down with the slang, but I'm really at a loss. My mother wore this shirt to an Arab American Institute's BBQ that we attended at a park here in Northern Virginia last weekend, and one Arab-speaker we spoke to said she liked that it reminded her of the phrase "Ya Mama," which literally means "Oh, mother," and is also used as a common exclamation, such as "Bajeezus" or "Oh, meatballs" or whatever.

Speaking of Arabs and Obama, I was intrigued to hear a story on NPR the other day discussing Arab opinion of the senator. Some were interviewed about their certainty that even if Obama is elected, nothing will change in terms of American coddling of "fortress Israel" and then some were interviewed who were delighted that a "Muslim brother" may be elected president and how dramatic a change this would be for the world. Obviously then, ignorance is universal, though of course the sort of misconception that results in blind love is far better than that which yields irrational hate. And then I keep flashing in my mind to a woman I must have seen on television during my vacation saying (regretfully) she voted for Bush because he seemed like the kind of guy she could drink a Budweiser with. Where does this leave Obama? I see him sipping cocktails on a bright, manicured lawn somewhere. I wonder if he likes Lebanese food because I'm on the falafel hunt tonight.

TERRORIST

2008-07-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

I was excited to find, on an end table in my parents' home safe in the suburbs of northern Virginia, a novel called "Terrorist" by John Updike. Now, I don't know Mr. Updike well, but I am aware that he is a preeminent man of letters, who sits stolidly--after a career I'm sure that was difficult at first, as the story often goes--with dozens of published books, in the upper echelons of American literary life. I know he's written many novels that people enjoy, a few of them have something to do with rabbits, or at least their titles do. And also I am sure that I have read essays by him in various book reviews and highbrow magazines like the New Yorker or Harper's. And I know these essays concerned the state of the written word in this day and age, and I'm sure Mr. Updike's words edified my vague but at the same time fundamental feeling that books and stories are still important, that writers still have purpose. And then to find that this man, this prophet, had written a novel about a topic that interests me greatly--9/11 and its effects on the psyches of the varied members of our nation--and that I didn't have to go to the store or the internet to get it but had this book in my hands just before a long bus ride, I was, as I said before, excited.

From the first pages, I could tell that Updike did indeed possess literary genius. His opening is in the third person but captures the voice of his main character, an 18 year-old devout Muslim named Ahmad, the son of an absent Egyptian father and an Irish mother, who was raised in a economically downtrodden town in New Jersey. He begins by observing the sin and idolatry around him in the public high school hallways, where he is finishing out his senior year. And the hate the disgust, is palpable and therefore understandable. Hell, I hated high school too--with its self-importance and its bare skin and breasts (Updike describes them again and again, once, strangely, as "blisters") that I could never compete with. Then we meet a girl who Ahmad is undeniably attracted to but concurrently repulsed by because, as we are reminded again and again, she is a sharmouta. And then Ahmad's mom who is likable and liberal, as shown by her many failed love affairs--again, sharmouta--and her painterly pursuits, but mysteriously unconcerned with her son's whereabouts. And then Ahmad's imam, his religious teacher, since he was 11 who holds office in a tiny former ballet studio above a check-cashing strip, berating Ahmad when he does not remember parts of the Koran they have discussed, concerning with correcting and perfecting Ahmad's accent in Arabic, which is irrevocably tinged by his native language. And then Ahmad's sad, sallow guidance counselor who suddenly takes an interest in the boy a month before graduating, insisting he is destined for more than the job of a truck driver as his imam has insisted he become.

Whoa--truck driver. Can you see it coming? Well, it takes forever, but a truck Ahmad eventually gets into has the potential to cause quite a ruckus, hence the book's title. My telling you this isn't much of a spoiler because the book is already spoiled. It's not the potboiler Updike perhaps intended. Moreso, it is an exercise in character development that he infuriatingly fails at. It's clear that Updike studied the Koran carefully, as he includes many verses and suras (sections) from it, often transcribed in English. It's clear he took pains with the culture as well, but I swear he was foolish about it. When Ahmad speaks English, his grammar is stilted and formal like someone schooled only recently in the language. A sample: When being approached for sex, he tells the woman, "That is a kind wish on your part, but without marriage it would go against my beliefs" (184). And, particularly as the book wears on, its characters tend to do something Lizzy and I like to call "monologuing" (as inspired by "Grey's Anatomy") where in the midst of conversation, they break out into a long diatribe about something massive, like the downfall of American society, or the rewards of undying religious faith, or the play between the pleasure and guilt of adultery. These types of speeches are okay every once in a while, especially when they are explicating something that has occurred in the plot, but one on top of the other, the speeches grow tiring, and then less credible when the story is moved along by ridiculously unbelievable coincidences. And the broken English he attempts to reproduce sounds nothing like the broken English of any Arabs I've ever spoken English with. Ugh. Sad. And then an ending that builds up to a twist that is more like a quiet belch. I can tell Updike's a good writer. He managed to describe certain things particularly well, but the overall workings of his story and the horrifyingly important and mistreated subject he very deliberately took on were way off. I think one can tell that by his preoccupation with describing each character each time s/he is reintroduced by the color of their skin, their religion, how fat or thin they are, and what they are wearing--the same descriptors again and again. I dunno. New York Times bestseller and glowing review-bits from all of our preeminent periodicals were splashed across it. I know better. And so do you. We just have to remind ourselves every once in a while.

point-and-shoot

2008-07-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

I was out of the States for a little over a month, in Thailand and Laos. I've been back less than a week and it already feels like forever. It's one of those crazy transition times of my life. I wanted to share the photos. I had visions of myself captioning each one. Visions. But reality is more like I am tired and there are so many other transition-type things to do. If you really want to know, ask me and I'll tell you.

The picture I posted above is my favorite. I took it in the bus station at Chiang Rai. I like how the king's picture is over the end of the word "toilet". I like the monk going into the bathroom and the way the genders are defined and all the colors and the folks, and, well.

I'm not really attuned to taking pictures lately, but I gave it a try, and I had a trusty assistant most of the time. There were lots of moments I wanted to take a photograph but didn't for fear of being that annoying tourist, which I sort of regret...but also it fit the situation.

Without further ado, the links:

1) Photos taken during the three times I ended up in Bangkok.
2) Photos taken during the week I spent alone on some islands down south.
3) Photos taken in Nonkhai, an amazing town in Thailand across the Mekong river from Vientiane. Most of these were taken in this incredible sculpture park we biked to through some really lovely countryside.
4) Photos taken in and around Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Laos's two largest cities.
5) Photos taken in the Luang Namtha Valley. Many of these were taken in an Akha village that we visited during the only guided tour we took over our whole vacation. It was easier for me in this situation to photograph people since we asked and everyone we were with was doing it but it still felt weird.
6) Photos taken as we came back through Thailand from the north.

Lebanese Lesbians

2008-07-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

So I got my sister this cute t-shirt last Christmas that says "Everyone Loves a Lebanese Girl" on it, and some dude at a strip mall stopped her to interview her about it, only he misread it, and then he posted the interview on Youtube. The video's been posted for months but one of our cousins found it only yesterday. Wonder what he was searching for...

Yes, I am back in Virginia and so excited. Check it out:

Home is where...

2008-06-15T03:46:00.000-07:00

It's already been almost a week since I left, and I only stayed four days but I already miss my bungalow on Hat Yao. And most of it was the brilliant bungalow I scored. Southern Thailand is a bit pricier than the north, but you can still find reasonable deals. I ended up at a place called Silver Beach where there was a bit of construction going on (since it's low season), some nice new bungalows, and the tiny building I stayed in. As soon as I got there, I used the last of my iPod charge, put on some loud music and unpacked everything I had in my bag. I really felt like I was setting up house. The bed took up most of the main room, but there were shelves on either side and that's where I put my stuff. I big clean mosquito net hung from the ceiling, and there were windows on each of three sides. The front porch had no railing but served as a good place for reading. The bathroom was amazing. The shower was, as per usual for that level of accomodation, not separate from the rest of the room. The toilet was a stand-up on a ledge, that I flushed using water I scooped from a cistern next to it. The sink had no actual drain pipe running from it to anywhere. Rather, any water that went into the sink splashed on my toes. I just looked at it as cleaning my feet, I guess. My door mat was in the shape of a dog bone. There was an amazing palm tree of foam on my front door, and two fish kissing on my bathroom mirror. Photos tk. I've moved on to bigger and better things. Met up with my dad. Stayed in a cool place in Bangkok with crazy lighting and a rooftop pool, then an overnight train to Nonkai which was straight out of the fifties or something, then a really amazing little guest house in Nonkai right on the Mekong, and now on the other side in Laos, at a pretty, modest place, full of antiques and things. I am happy and excited for all that lies ahead (two more weeks away from happy U.S. of A) but still yearn for my bungalow.

Did you know?

2008-06-07T19:39:00.001-07:00

That after Israelis serve their mandatory military service (for meager pay, of course) they are offered some lump sum of money if they agree to remain reservists in their nation's army. And they are known to take the money and make temporary escape to the hippest backpacker destinations all over the globe and party their asses off. And this is why, the other day when I was walking around Hat Rin--Koh Phangan's most developed beach, known for its full moon parties--I was given a flier in Hebrew advertising something. (I mean of course English is everywhere, but you know, that's because the USA is a superpower and all that colonialist domination stuff.)

Sexessories

2008-06-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

1) When wandering the many lanes and back alleys of the Trinket Market in Bangkok the other day, confronted by stall upon stall of tiny Buddhas carved in stone and piled in cases, I stopped at one where propped on top of the Buddhas were figurines with enlarged genitals, penises erect and taller than their heads and figurines of couples attached at the genitals, missionary and otherwise. A tourist draw, I'm sure.
2) On the tiny (touristy but not overdeveloped) island of Koh Phangan (off Thailand's southern peninsula, east side) it is debatable whether or not it is necessary to use a mosquito net. In the middle of my first night at the first bungalow operation I stayed at, I pulled the provided net down from the low rafters above me and along with the net a condom fell on me. It was thankfully in its wrapper, the English pharmacy brand "Boots" emblazoned across it. Left by some well-meaning British traveler is my guess.
3) Wandering a lonely stretch of road in Koh Phangan, I came across a regular Thai home that in the garden showcased rows and boxes of random junk of the left-behind weather-beaten variety--like cosmetics bottles half used with the labels worn by hands and the sun and old books protected from the humidity by slips of plastic and bunches of sad-looking snorkel masks and cases of flowered clothing and old shoes piled in cement blocks. All of it for sale. And a sign in front that read in painted green letters: "Before you leave this island PLEASE put everything (also broken) that you not use in this big box. I will try to recicle." (sic) And a French translation below. And a small addendum on another sign above that read: "Food is also wellllcome thanks included microbiotic food" (sic). On one of the outermost shelves, next to some dusty handheld fans in colored plastic, I spotted three dildos. Two were the hard kind and just sitting out exposed to the elements. The third was wrapped in dingy plastic and labeled so: "Soft, good for beginners." (I've since been told that this is something of a goldmine since dildos (and pornography, etc) are not legally sold in this country.

List of a fraction of the things i saw the other day from the back of a motorscooter transversing Koh Phangan

2008-06-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

*an elephant in a clearing in the jungle wearing some kind of outfit
*several large trucks crowded in back with sad-looking people wearing green (or orange?) uniforms standing
*the place in the center of the island where the paved parts of the road that bisects it don't quite meet yet (bumpy!)
*a decrepit half-sunken houseboat
*very many dogs (from mangy to cute) running out into the road
*some tourists in 4-wheelers
*so many palm trees
*3 or 4 glittering Buddhist temples in the middle of the jungle
*many signs (in English, obviously) for parties, resorts, restaurants, bars, bungalows, beauty shops, etc
*many Thais whizzing by us on their own bikes, most notably a kid that must have been 7 years old
*the gorgeous sky, like outerspace and clouds, like aliens

food log

2008-06-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

Due to the fact that I haven't posted in ages, I feel guilty. Also, a certain someone keeps complaining to me how the first thing you see when I go to my blog is a disturbing image from Lebanon. Supposedly it's all a big party there now, so I am misrepresenting. So now, with my 15 minutes remaining on my web timer at the hostel I'm staying at in Bangkok, I am going to attempt a quick post. I'm going to be here in Southeast Asia for about a month. Arrived about 36 hours ago now. Mostly been wandering around the city center, and taking an overnight bus to an island far south tomorrow. Due to some stomach issues I've been having, as well as the amazingness of the food selection here, I've decided to keep a food log. Here is Day 1:

(1 US dollar equals roughly 30 Thai baht)

*vanilla bun -- Hualampang train station -- warm, sweet but not too sweet -- 10b
*pineapple chunks w/chili salt -- Siam Square shopping mall food court -- 10b
*minced pork and kale w/white rice and bottle of pepsi -- spicey! -- canal-side stand w/tables north of Siam Square -- 40b
*small bottle of singha -- western-style bar on soi 11 in Sukumvit -- escaping the sudden rain -- 90b
*mango -- tasty white flesh -- from a tiny storefront around the corner from my hostel -- 5b
*pad thai w/shrimp and split a large singha with a really nice lady from my hostel dorm room headed back to Canada -- noodles delicious and beer refreshing -- tiny restaurant near Hualampang -- 100b
*small box of pomegranate green tea -- very sweet -- 7/11 between Hualampang and my hostel -- 10b

day one total: 270b (not quite $10)

Lebanon is Frozen/Burning

2008-05-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

I know it's been too long since I posted, but I don't really have the chance to say too much right now. Everything is happening...and nothing. I am worried I scarred the 2nd graders I subbed for yesterday by reading them a story about a butcher who put his wife in the town sausage, and I'm finishing up my thesis, working my ass off, leaving SF in three weeks for Thailand and Laos, and I just found out (since I am so much in a little bubble), that Lebanon is burning. Akh.

I carry a torch...

2008-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday morning in San Francisco. Despite the few beers I had last night and the late sleeping time, I forced myself out of bed early to come to a cafe and get a few things done--for school, for miscellaneous freelance projects. So I'm sitting in a cafe tapping away at my laptop and the guy next to me has a hospital bracelet on his wrist and I'm wondering if that's a fashion because last week when my cousin's baby was born, even after he'd left the hospital with his wife and new daughter, he kept his bracelet on and when I asked him about it he said he liked it. Which makes sense. So I wonder why this guy sitting next to me was in the hospital. Doesn't seem like a new dad since he's pretty skinny and young, wearing very fashionable jeans and a shirt that shows his flat belly. Okay, so the cafe I am at is just a few blocks from Castro Street and certainly not the place to go to meet straight available men. According to a fifty-something school teacher I substituted for last week, San Francisco is not the place to meet straight available men anyway, since the ratio of them to the women who are seeking them is so out of balance. Moreover, because of this discrepancy, the ones one does meet feel free to act like fools. Aren't we mostly all just beautiful fools, our foolishness fluxuating from one moment to the next? The teacher told me she had to move back east to meet a husband, suggested I do the same. That's why I'm moving to Richmond, didn't you hear? Find myself a husband. Make some babies. Get on with things. But first I need to get this work done. On this sunny Sunday. The weather here is so warm, last night all I needed to wear was a t-shirt. San Francisco is not supposed to be like that. No matter how warm day is, night should bring up scarves and goosebumps. It was nice. Hence the beers, I guess. On my way to the cafe just now I saw a man out jogging. He was wearing a shirt that said "Beijing 2008." And I was all, "What is he thinking?" But really, I'm confused about this whole Olympic hubbub. Can't we just acknowledge that the Olympics are a huge, corrupt, commercial institution, however international and historical? And, true, some athletes work their whole lives to be a part and that's a fine and beautiful thing, a crowning achievement, etc. But, just as the professional level of so many pursuits that start out as dreams, it is a complex thing in regards to where the money comes from and what the business points are. And yes China's human rights abuses are deplorable and disgusting, but don't we have our own abuses? Why are these torch protests more media-worthy than the anti-war and anti-torture protests of some weeks ago? And I'm sure you all know this by now, but the whole torch thing didn't start in ancient Greece but with the Berlin Olympics when Hitler was in charge, when he was not yet a villainous war criminal, though that was the year he banned Jewish athletes from the German team and also the year that some teams didn't send Jewish athletes for fear of offending his sensibilities. This was a bit of information being spouted off on NPR the other morning and woke me up and has stuck with me. And the other night there was a woman sitting at my kitchen table, idly looking at the headlines of the papers spread across it and she exclaimed, "Oh, gosh!" at a story about how the Olympic torch burned hundreds of Tibetan protesters who impeded its path. Then she realized she was reading The Onion .

Like I said, Sunday morning at a cafe in San Francisco, and I've got work to do.

like moths, moments flitting in and out and back and forth...

2008-04-01T20:26:00.000-07:00

Standing on a sidewalk in Boston the other night, alone, waiting, sorta tipsy, around 1:30am, I realized it was snowing. Not soft, white, fluffy, but small, hard shining--"wintry mix," they call it? No matter, it was lovely. I haven't seen snow in three years I guess, and I was already really happy anyway, and so it made me even more happy, punctuated that moment as perfect, etc. And I heard a young lady leaning up against the pizza place I was standing in front of complain loudly to her friend: "When is this f-ing snow sh-t gonna give up?" Ha. They proceeded to have a rather inane conversation with a guy who came up to them wearing a fluorescent safety vest. I can't recall it now but I was stuck to every word, distracted from my snow.

Maha is a common Arabic name and the name of the female character in the Arabic textbook I have been studying from for the past year. Maha is dour and sullen. She feels lonely as an Arab college student living in New York with her parents, who, although they let her dress like all her friends, do not permit her to stay out late or have a boyfriend. Maha is sort of pretty but it's hard to tell since she always looks sad or bewildered in the black and white photos in our textbook or the short monologues on our DVD. Today our new Arabic teacher told us that Maha means "cow's eye" in Arabic, so cow eyes are assumed to be beautiful things. I can't specifically remember ever looking a cow in the eye but I do suppose it would be beautiful, all big and glossy. It's still a sort of strange thing though.

Until today I had not known that there is ample evidence that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad was a staged event. Thanks, P.

What else? Since I flew Jetblue this past weekend, I watched that personal Satellite tv they have. I watched probably ten times more tv than I have in the past three months combined. I want to know if there is any situation now where a camera crew is not present to record people's lives. I want to know why I was so hooked by "Intervention", a horrid show on A&E where a drug addict is followed through their days and then in the end surprised by an intervention of his loved ones. I watched this woman shoot meth, like, five times, and I swear the two men who were sitting around me watched it too. I could feel them both turn their heads to my screen as it happened.

And there is a woman unpacking an entire houseful of ikea-looking furniture into the floor level flat of the house in front of mine. I wonder if she knows how many transients have slept on her new stoop in the years the house has been worked on and I wonder if she fully understands that most of the windows look out onto a tiny passageway that allows home access to me and the 16 other people who live in the two houses behind hers. Or maybe it doesn't matter to her. Maybe she's just the assistant or the shopper or the realtor or the mistress or the whatever.

Weak entry. Tired girl.

What is it good for?

2008-03-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

As of today, the current U.S. war in Iraq has gone on for five years. To mark the horrendous occasion, I woke up at 6am, packed up some food, got on my bike, met friends at 7 and headed to downtown San Francisco, where we met up with even more bikers. We took a series of rides together, to give support to various acts of civil disobedience, lockdowns at the Federal Reserve Building, the Chevron corporate office, and the UCSF campus at Mission Bay. Then we joined a festive march going down Market Street and helped stir up some hubbub at various Market Street intersections, two where die-ins were taking place and protesters laid down in the intersection. The second die-in drew a large crowd and we stood on the sidewalk for two hours as those trapped by policemen in the intersection were arrested. Here are some photos I took. Those are the basics and all I have the energy for right now. (Check out Lizzy's current post for more on our day.)

AND for the past few weeks, I had tuned out on Barack Obama. But, after hearing about it from many folks, I decided I should actually listen to his recent speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia:

Yes, it is a good piece of rhetoric, but more than that it makes me feel like maybe this man should be president. He seems to have good reasons for wanting it.

AND I was telling a friend the other day that I am sad aboumoving to Richmond, Va. in the fall because there will be no Rainbow there. And he said I should grow a garden. That's something I'd have to learn but I think it might be a very good idea.

AND I have nearly finished The Road. Damn, Cormac McCarthy can certainly compose a tension-wrought and bleak future for the last few of our human race, a time in which co-ops and politicians and wars are blackened wisps of haunting memory. I had it on the table in the cafe when I met my professor there yesterday, and he said, "Oh, God, you're reading that." (Not as in "why?" but as in "what a trip!") So, yeah, I've got to go finish it now. Sweet dreams to me.

Friends and Strangers

2008-02-28T23:27:00.000-08:00

"...there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is random, not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known--yet unacknowledged--selves that summons the ripple of alarm. That makes us reject the figure and the emotions it provokes--especially when those emotions are profound," wrote Toni Morrison.

"We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a convenient social convention which sometimes must be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger," wrote T.S. Elliot.

"...our social personality is a creation in the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call 'seeing a person we know' is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy a greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear," wrote Marcel Proust.

letters make words make strings of words which may or may not have meaning depending on the reader or the writer or the world

2008-02-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

(This bird and this tree are made of Arabic words and come from a book I'll talk about at the end of this post.)

I have been fixating on this idea:

"There is, they said, a good deal of evidence suggesting that at the deepest level of reality, time as we are accustomed to it does not actually exist, that we live in an eternal present. If I can comprehend it at all, this idea is not a very comfortable one."

This is a quote from Lydia Davis, paraphrasing a radio show she heard in her preface to The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal (New York Review Books, 2002), a brick of a book I have been carrying around for a few weeks and finally finished. Davis is trying to say that through his "strangely fragmented, digressive, and yet beautifully structured psuedonymous memoir" Stendhal achieves a sort of eternal present. Maybe she's right. He certainly approaches something unique and wonderful and strange. But I am fixated on the idea that the future and the past do not exist, that we live in an eternal present. I mean, I know carpe deim and all that but really who doesn't spend their days thinking about things that have happened and looking forward to things that may, or planning for them or deciding how to avoid them? But this isn't the point I see Davis nearing here. Rather, to my mind at least, she is saying that everything is the present moment, including those memories and those future plans. And the physical, actually-happening world is merely part of all that. Then how to account for change and the piling of days, one after the next? I'm not sure. Perhaps something like: a new present moment every infinite moment and no definitive way to order or define so go at it if you need to. I'd suggest art. Or other actions that make time feel different, like falling, or cooking, or talking, or sex, or skipping, or going to a new place, or tether ball, or substitute teaching. Anyway, it's really about letting go (of ego) and the dissolution (of structure) or something.

But I digress. I was trying to somehow get to Cairo, an earth-shattering city where I was fortunate enough to live for about nine months between 2004 and 2005. I met some life-altering folk through a job I had at a gallery there. I was a stranger in a strange place among people who thoroughly delighted and also comforted me. Two of those people were young German graphic artists Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma. Those months I had the pleasure of sharing the eternal present with them in Cairo they began a project which seems to have come to some fruition presently. They've been working intensely on and are soon releasing Arabesque, a book about modern graphic design, illustration, and typography in the Middle East. I'd encourage you to check out the Arabic-inspired Latin fonts they created (click on "the fonts"), as well as some photographs (click on "gallery") they took in Cairo, which give a clue as to their inspiration. I'm damn impressed.

circling home

2008-02-18T17:26:00.000-08:00

Don't I look bad-as$ in my full green ensemble through the mirror? Yes, say yes. You know I do. I was intrigued by the uneven floors in the ferry bathroom. That would be the ferry that we took back from Tiburon, after we biked out there, over that bridge some refer to as the Golden Gate, and eastwards, edging the water, until we got to downtown Tiburon, pretty much like any quaint "old" downtown in a western city by the water, with wood and stone walkways that lead one to small boutiques and overpriced restaurants. It was certainly very nice, and I have Lizzy to thank. She has become obsessed with the Tiburon bike trip and told me about it a lot and finally gotten me to go with her. We passed many interesting things, like a man unicycling on the bridge, the spot Lizzy had her awful accident when she got rear-ended by a car last fall (she on bike), some fountains, lots of adorable kids and then finally an ugly one, etc, etc. Here's Lizzy making blood rush to her head as we relaxed in the sun and waited for the ferry:

And also rather nice today I got to hang out with some dogs and their charming shepherd among ridiculously gorgeous layers of greens and yellows coating sandy cliffs and looking out at the ridiculously gorgeous layers of blues and purples and whites that were the Pacific Ocean and the sky from there.

And so I got some sun on my nose and sand in my shoes, and feel a bit more in my body again. And it's President's Day so my roommates are around and cleaning and cooking and making noise which is pleasant (as long as they don't scream and smash things) because they are cool and I like sharing a home with them, and I am about to really get down to the business of working on my thesis. I swear my life on it. I already ate and did my weekly chores and everything.

One last thing before I go: Listening to Lebanese women talk the other night after grilled meat and tabbouli in Walnut Creek and my ears perked and my heart fell when they said their hopes and dreams of going back home, of living in Lebanon again at some point are vanished now. It took a lot (trust me, I have been around the talk all my life) but now they see life is much more fortunate and secure here. Especially after what has been going on and what there may be to come. But I guess only time will tell, unless, of course, I take matters into my own hands, which is highly unlikely since I need to work on my thesis (which is coming along very well, thank you).

Happy-ness

2008-02-11T19:42:00.000-08:00

What is it to be happy? What is it to be good? I have come to believe the two are intertwined. They intersect and play off of each other, fuel each other.

I was pretty moody this past weekend. All stuck up in my own thoughts, and thoughts that weren't taking me anywhere but made my mind spin in circles. A few things made the spinning stop. First, was alcohol. A wine-tasting Friday night, more wine on Saturday, then by two beers while playing pool at a fun birthday gathering, and then mimosas Sunday morning at a lovely backyard brunch in Cole Valley. The dozen or so people gathered at this brunch directly discussed the nature of goodness in our world, and whether being good or seeking to be so somehow works against you, of whether it should be such a conscious quest. The champagne and the lovely garden we were sitting in made it a light and lovely exploration and certainly an interesting one to have with people who were mostly strangers to me. But then I came down off the alcohol later, right back into my stormy mood.

Other shocks of happy this weekend included:

--hanging out with my little cousin Maya, who immediately took my hand when I got to her house and insisted, over and over, on being tickled, and then laughing her guts out each time. When she was getting ready for bed, she insisted we play with her kitchen set and when I asked her for a(n imaginary) milkshake, she said "tikram 'aynik", an Arabic phrase which literally means "bless your eye." In English, I guess we would say, "your wish is my command" or something of the sort, basically a sweet response to "Please..." It was very warming since she's not even two and a half and has never said that to me before. And the exchange itself is something of a role reversal, since it's usually she who is asking for something.

--in a cafe, listening to mother explain to her young daughter, who must have been four years old or so, the following: "I read a news story the other day about a book someone wrote recently where he claims that the key to happiness is to do something that scares you every single day. Makes you brave and happy, he said." The girl solemnly nodded. I hope she remembers. I think it's good advice.

Happy today, too, when subbing for the fourth day at a tiny middle school near downtown where kids who had been terrors to me last week finally started to treat me like a human being, or at least listen to me. I had them all write letters to their new science teacher, introducing themselves to her, and then had the pleasure of reading each one. Some pretty fantastic stuff, and now I feel like I've learned a few more of their names and a lot more about them.

What else happy can I tell you? I've just begun cooking with kale, and it's pretty amazing. Favorite form so far: sauteed with garlic and oil and then sandwiched inside a grilled cheese with juicy, red California tomatoes.

And one last happy/good bit is that my old friend Lee Cohen has just started what promises to be a neat blog. A post on education caught my attention today, and has left me eager for the continuation of the story it begins.

in between asleep and awake...

2008-02-09T09:56:00.000-08:00

In the past couple of weeks, I have started to remember my dreams. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that a couple of weeks ago I went through the box T. left in my closet nearly a year ago now, and I found that he had left in it his old, paint-splattered clock radio. For a while, I have been using my cell phone as an alarm clock. It's pretty convenient after all, but when I found the clock radio, I thought it might be cool to wake up to the news. So that's what I've been doing lately--remembering my dreams and waking up to the news, on npr, of course. As opposed to my previous muddy morning consciousness interrupted by a cell phone ring tone, I now have a splintered morning consciousness of my own dreamscapes spliced in with whatever npr is broadcasting at 6:30 or 7:30 or whenever I set the alarm for. It's kind of neat. I can't remember what was on the news this morning, but my dreams involved flying on some spaceship-like plane to Australia for a funeral and Argentina with my family, and then acting in a movie on the plane, and being filmed in a sex scene and then criticized for my performance, and a strange resort in Argentina and shopping with my mom at a Trader Joe's (in what was supposedly Buenos Aires but doesn't seem like it in remembering it) where she stocked up our shopping cart like we were staying for weeks when in fact it was simply an overnight layover, and the plane tickets were around $9,000, and that was supposed to be a deal. What is up with dreams? There is a scene I wrote forever ago now but I am using it in a new story, about a character waking up in a semi-dark room, and I'm stuck on the following passage:

"The dogs howl and bark before the sun, their desperate chorus tugging at the sheet of night shrouding the city. The sound invades her dreams, the thrum of animals creeping into the neverland that she will only know wakefully in pieces. Pieces of people she’s known and hasn’t known and still knows. Pieces recurring in nonexistent places: a war-torn pier in Brooklyn, a school in a skyscraper on the Mall in D.C., a swirling ship docked in a coastal city that she has seen from the sky, that she has always lived in and will always live in. Dream-pieces that the dogs tear into smaller pieces and tear and tear again until they are the dust that settles finally here in the room where they fell asleep."

I've gotten the comment from a few readers that they don't understand the part about Brooklyn and D.C. and the coastal city. And I'm curious as to whether other people besides myself have dreams that take place in settings that don't exist in the non-dream world but that are amalgamations of places that do exist in the non-dream world, and are places they dream about again and again. Anyway, that's what happens with me, and I haven't yet figured out the best way to explain it I guess.

In other news, our funny/sexy/sad reading went really awesomely well on Thursday night. Click here to read what Lizzy had to say.

And I found a decent article about Obama's shifting consciousness regarding Palestine and Israel. It is disheartening but also I guess we'd have a better chance of Obama changing his tune once he got in office than Hillary. But there will never, not ever, be a guarantee for that, and that's the problem I'm having today. The American presidential machine sure does make me feel nauseous.

Hysteria

2008-02-05T00:09:00.000-08:00

I was subbing at a school today where a few kids had lice. It hit the fan while I was trying to remember what happens with negative and positive numbers when solving inequalities. And all of a sudden everyone was freaked they had it. Someone was telling someone else off for giving it to her. Someone came back to the room crying because she had it, and asked for the homework. Kids screamed, one kid claimed there was "A LICE ON THE FLOOR!" Girls gathered around and checked each other. I pretty much gave up then. Everyone got to go get their heads checked in the teacher's lounge.

I had lice once, when we lived in Sudan, I think. I was young, younger than five, too young to be freaked out, I guess. (I remember my mother taking a special comb to my head...) But also I'm thinking hysteria wasn't such a big thing back in those days?

Very many much

2008-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

There are very many things occurring in my head and around me. I'm not sure where to begin or what to say. Coolest, maybe, is that I discovered my poem published on the International Museum of Women was translated into Arabic. My mother was delighted and claims she will carefully read through and make sure that I have been accurately represented in her tongue. My own study of Arabic has been going slowly but steadily, but I'm not so far along that it would be something I could take on myself with any sort of efficiency. Something else that's pretty exciting, if not a little nervous-making for me, is that this Thursday at 7:30 a couple of compatriots and I will be staging the very first funny/sexy/sad reading at the cafe I frequent on a corner close to my house. Check us out on myspace. Become our friend! This weekend has been uber-busy; I've done most of my Arabic homework (a task more difficult each week), finished a major revision on a key story in the collection I'll be turning in for my MA culminating project this spring, written my first review for Kirkus Discoveries, and gotten through a good chunk of The Life of Henry Brulard. This reading is for a course on autobiography that I've just begun, the last course of my MA, and I must say I am much intrigued by the things that Stendhal demonstrates, through the amusing and careless listing of the major events of his life that stick out in his memory, a few truths about the reality of memory, as well as the fundamental influence of sex and the sexual on the development of a human psyche. (Boy, that was a long sentence! Now I'll give you a short one:) Spoiled brat that he seems to have been. And now I'm trying to slog through a particularly theoretic article by Paul DeMan, tracing the development and conception of allegory and symbol and irony in European literature. I knew there was a reason I went back to school to focus on writing instead of lit. There's so much more but I've got to go. I'm having dinner at a friend's house. There will be mussels gathered today at a beach south of here, and mushrooms foraged from, among other places such as highway medians, Golden Gate Park. I'm not bragging or anything. Okay, maybe I am. Oh, and my favorite quote from Stendhal:

"The fact is I have no company in the evenings to distract me from my thoughts of the morning."
A distinction nicely drawn, no?

death and movies

2008-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

As I left work today, the sky was darkening. I walked the few downtown blocks between my office and my Arabic school, relieved that a long, intense day of dentistry was behind me, happy to be free and alive and all those good things. Just before an intersection, a woman who was walking by me turned to me. She smiled. I can't remember what exactly she was wearing, but know it was tailored, masculine. In contrast she had a very feminine, beautiful face, fresh. She wore a small hat, cocked stylishly to the side. She had some sort of asymmetrical, perfectly coiffed hair cut. There were some soft curls to one side and the other was cut close to her head. Cool but not hipster. Made-up but not overdone.

I met her look and smiled back.

"You look like a character in a movie," she said.

"So do you," I answered. She smiled bigger and kept walking, further ahead.

Weird, huh? I was wearing a sweater, a purple skirt, brown tights, my hair haphazardly up. She seemed much more character-like to me, but I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder, and a comment made to a stranger is all the more fascinating for its randomness.

I'm glad I looked like a movie character and not a celebrity. Speaking of which, what is this business with hot, young actors dying of drug overdoses? Last week Brad Renfro, who is more like a memory at this point that anything. And today Heath Ledger. How could Heath Ledger die? He was in glossy colors across the gossip mags in the last couple of months. He was in Brokeback Mountain. Of all the folks we see in the People and US magazines we get for the waiting room at work and pour over during our lunches, he seemed like someone worth having a conversation with maybe. Not like it would have ever happened. But now it's definite. It won't. That's what death means.

The Australian news piece I just read said Heath was paying $23,000/mo for his Manhattan apartment. I hope that's wrong. Now I'm rambling. And yesterday I found myself having a very serious conversation with a friend over some Ethiopian food and beer. We touched on the Iraq War, the upcoming elections, the impending recession, and Tom Cruise. Where did that come from? We seriously dissed the man for the weird rumors surrounding his religion and his identity. That's right...he came up because I was talking about my thoughts after seeing There Will be Blood which got us to Paul Thomas Anderson which got us to Magnolia and then Tom Cruise's excellent role in that movie. Apparently the character Cruise plays in Magnolia is most like him in real life, or at least very much like him in a recently recorded interview about Scientology. Creepy. What does this all say about characters and celebrities and movies and life? You tell me.

for your consideration...

2008-01-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

A piece from Time Magazine my mother sent me about food purchases in specific households around the world.

A recipe for a flour-less chocolate cake posted by my good friend, Belle, recently on her blog. Yes, beets are a main ingredient.

And, last but not least, the following clip from Persepolis, the best movie I've seen in a while. It just opened in San Francisco yesterday:

(Don't be thrown by the French or put off by the cuteness. The movie is subtitled, dynamic, and intense.)

good bye to seven

2007-12-31T22:33:00.000-08:00

Eight is a good number. It used to be my favorite number because, on its side, the "8" stands for infinity. I don't have a favorite number anymore. I was having a conversation with a 3 year-old I'd just met the other day and when we ran out of things to say I just asked her what all her favorite things were: color? animal? food? And then I asked her what she wants to be when she grows up. "Princess," she said, looking down. She might just find a way. I'm leaving the east coast tomorrow, after two weeks visiting family and friends. Feels like I've been away from San Francisco forever, seen so many people out here I don't ordinarily see. One of the best things about this is they remind me about things I've forgotten. Things that I remind them of, like a pair of toe socks a friend I brought to visit from California wore at my parents' house, or stupid things I did to boys and boys did to me, or the time I tried to make cranberry white-chocolate cookies.... I've made a few resolutions but I don't want to tell you about them. I've got to get up in less than four hours to fly back to California, fly into 2008. My mom and I watched Dick Clark count down as the ball dropped in Times Square. It was absurd but also touching. The man had a stroke this year and had a bit of trouble getting the words out, and the young, fresh-faced correspondents helping him out kept repeating the same lines over and over again, such emptinesses as: "There's no place to be but right here, right now. If you haven't been, you should make it a point to come, at least once in your life. There's nothing like it." There's nothing quite like anything and everything is everything but also nothing. One foot in front of the other, here's to leaving 2007 behind.

jingle!

2007-12-25T20:18:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas to all. It'll be over in 40 minutes. Fell asleep last night thinking of falling asleep Christmas eves when I was little and how impossible it was. My sister and I were always so excited. She reminded me yesterday we used to play Chinese checkers into the wee hours to make ourselves fall asleep. Greedy little girls. Ha! And I remembered myself that we'd wait eagerly at the top of the stairs until the time we'd agreed on with our parents when we were allowed to rush the tree and all our gifts. Today was nice: slept in late, exchanged gifts with immediate family, ate amazing meal prepared by mother and father with cousins, aunt, family friends, went to see Juno (which was pretty good), beat mother and sister at scrabble, worked on grad school applications, read. I am reading a book I got today, a book I asked for, someday this pain will be useful to you by Peter Cameron. I was intrigued when I read a review for it in the NYT that lauded Cameron for writing such an insightful, complex young narrator for this book, which has been labeled "YA". The review said adults might even get more out of it than "young adults". A passage I just read that I liked:

"I am disturbed," I said. I thought about what the word meant, what it really means to be disturbed, like how a pond is disturbed when you throw a rock into it or how you disturb the peace. Or how you can be disturbed by a book or movie or the burning rain forest or the melting ice caps. Or the war in Iraq. It was one of those moments when you feel you have never heard the word before, and you cannot believe it means what it means, and you think how did this word come to mean that? It seemed like a bell or something, shining and pure, disturbed, disturbed, disturbed, I could hear it pealing with its true meaning, and I said, as if I had just realized it, "I am disturbed."

And my fortune of the tag of my Yogi tea bag:

To learn, read.
To know, write.
To master, teach.

Hm.

Home again, home again

2007-12-18T18:59:00.000-08:00

welcome home
to semi-urban fantasies
of overwhelming noodles
and undercooked rice
or mice
like cars, crawling
like ants

or whatever it was

and it is the same thing for everyone
the same

my appendix is shaped
like a heart, a human heart,
not a valentine's day heart

this is a problem
the doctors say
that the thing they didn't say before
isn't true because they didn't say it

and all the cars are bigger now, braver
and how can i miss california?
but i do

east is east
east is cold
is bold is hard is stick-to-it is die-hard

basement floor kisses drench
radio-recycled christmas carols and the things
that happen to television when the writers
drop out

i drop out
the thing i want the most is
to run away
to chiang mai or shanghai or apple pie or mai tai
or

you get it
take me on a vacation
an actual vacation

and i will lose it so hard i actually forget
and it never comes back
ever

i'll buy you a laptop
you'll tell me a story
we'll share a bottle
of the cheapest red wine
i can possibly find

or if you steal it i'll drink it
you can always tear me out
but i don't lie

i do stretch out flat
i do remember
i do drown

i do

All of a sudden my bike is bad-ass (and other exciting news)

2007-12-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

My most exciting thing to report is that I switched out my drop-down handlebars on my happy bicycle for cruiser-type bars, and so now I sit more upright and feel taller instead of crouching down over the slightly-too-small frame. Such a huge change, let me tell you! AND! My friend A brought me the incredible gift of a Brooks Saddle, which is this cool leather seat that will, like a pair of leather shoes, mold to me. Got some Bike Kitchen and some Critical Mass this past week, which is without-fail-always fun.

And what else? All anyone seems to be able to talk about is how cold it is in San Francisco these days and yes it is cold but seriously 50 degrees is nothing to go on and on about. I'm kind of into the bundling up, not so into the numb fingers and toes.

And last night I went to dinner with my friend K. Hadn't gone out to a special restaurant for a while and so we treated ourselves to Weird Fish, and hipster-y little spot on a somewhat desolate stretch of Mission Street. We split a coupla things: spicy, flavorful tortilla soup; edamame salad with sesame and cold noodles; an appetizer layered with spinach, tofu, goat cheese, and grilled yam; and fish and chips (fried tilapia with almost-perfect french fries including three kinds of potatoes, as far as I could tell). The fried stuff was done in such a way that didn't make us feel coated with oil and everything was delish! Our charming/cool waiter even brought us a forkful of the dessert special (some kind of banana cream decadence) because we were too full to order it. Then we went to a bar we always go to because it's chill and nice, and it started out that way but soon enough got packed with a crowd of coiffed saturday-night-blazer-wearing people that seemed Marina-ish. Then we left.

Christmas Ramble

2007-11-29T00:51:00.001-08:00

Today I sat at Union Square waiting for a friend, who was late, so I sat there longer than I wanted to. He told me to meet him at the Christmas tree, which I agreed to, being the agreeable person that I am. It was sunny, so it was nice enough, and I read my book, which is a rather a good book. Still, the tree was distracting, all big and strange-looking in front of me. There were signs all around it saying "Macy's gift to the City of San Francisco", as if Macy's was so charitable and wonderful and giving and not a mega department store that has survived and flourished because people like to buy things they don't need. Also, the weather seemed all wrong for Christmas, even though I know that's is just some engrained East Coast thing. And then there's this: do we really deserve Christmas? Oh, I dunno. I really didn't feel like we do, sitting there at Union Square, among the Dior and the Levi's and the Victoria's Secret in the San Francisco sun. This consumer, shopping-mall aspect of it is just painful that's all. I look forward to spending time with my family and taking pause from these busy past few months, but I will not stop complaining about the Christmas carol hold music at the insurance companies I call at work, the constant wishes of happly holidays from people who don't even know me, the barage of sales and holiday gift ideas. Argh. Yuck. I know you agree with me, but I'm wondering what we are to do about it. Or maybe it's just me. I don't deserve Christmas. I've been naughty this year, and I'm not even Christian for crying out loud, but I still get giddy each year as we unwrap the ornaments my father's mother gave us when I was little and all the ones we've collected around the world. And the day itself. The waking up late and leisurely breakfast and big dinner, the nothing much else going on, and of course the presents that we've belly-ached over for weeks. Especially my father...without fail each year he begs me and my sister for advice about getting a gift for my mom. It's cute, but annoying, especially since he rejects 95% of my suggestions. Where am I going with all this? Christmas is what I want it to be! Not you, Macy's and your ugly Christmas tree! Me, me, me!

Disturbing Christmas facts from Harper's Index this month:

Estimated amount that Americans lose every year by not redeeming gift cards: $8,000,000,000

(Dude! Why? Maybe the gift cards were to places the receivers didn't care to go.)

Percentage of shopping-mall and party Santas who believe that children "lie when they say they have been good": 54

Number of golf clubs a Phoenix tourism group is sending to troops overseas as part of its "Operation White Christmas": 14,000

(Wondering where troops play golf overseas...)

Number of Christmas trees FedExed last year to U.S. troops: 11,854

Number of seconds it takes a synthetic Christmas tree to burn: 32

Allah Yirhamuha

2007-11-19T21:10:00.001-08:00

This is a photograph that I took of my grandmother three years ago, sitting at a cafe up the mountain from her home. She passed away this morning in Beirut. (It was still night in San Francisco.) Her spirit will live on in those she loved.

let's go whaling!

2007-11-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

One of my regular stops on this wide web is Rob Brezny's Free Will Astrology. Ok, ok, so horoscopes are often silly and open-ended. Susan Miller's can be somewhat enlightening, but more often way too heavy. And is it worth taking any of that stuff seriously anyway? So many answers to this question but I guess it all boils down to us looking for ways to define our uncertain futures. Still, Rob Brezny isn't as irreverent as The Onion or as painfully pointless as Cosmo, but he manages to convey a message and pack in some intriguing info about the bigger world out there. So my horoscope on Free Will this week, made me do a little googling, and I found out that last June some Inuit fishermen killed a whale off Alaska somewhere and in its blubber found a harpoon that has been traced back to the 1800's. Which means the whale was over 100 years old when it died! And according to Rob Brezny, that harpoon symbolizes old wounds that I've had since my youth (and this goes for all you Tauruses out there), wounds that I actively need to work on healing, especially THIS WEEK! But I'm not sure how this all applies to the reality that the whale died and the harpoon has been dug out of its fat more than a century after the fact is accounted for in the horoscope. Am I metaphorically a hundred years old? Maybe I need to embody the hunter. Huh, Rob? What am I supposed to do?!

catastrophic days

2007-11-10T12:51:00.000-08:00

That is a photo of a dead, somewhat flattened pigeon shoved into a grate, headfirst. Encountered FRIDAY night at the corner of something and Valencia. Pretty devastating. And yesterday (SATURDAY) I saw two more, as I was biking around. Those two were much flatter, small raised discs of pigeon that I rolled by on the asphalt as I rode home from the grocery store.

On MONDAY I went to my cousin's house where they have satellite tv, and on the news there were stock market line graphs flashing downwards across the screen. Seems the market "has an upset stomach," as my father described it yesterday on the phone. And last night I was sitting in front of the same television again. We were watching something called "No Comment" on Euronews, a show that consisted of video coverage with no commentary, not even in a language I can't understand, not even scrolling across the bottom of the screen. There was footage of a mob of black-hoodied people in Prague, beating each other up, against grey walls. And then the cops showed up and then it switched to somewhere in the boondocks of Turkey, where peasants set up camp and hauled things against a stark desert. In the distance behind their tents, there were dunes of dark pebbles, what might have been coal? And all this as my little cousins expended energy at our feet:

On TUESDAY I woke up early and voted. Off-year, so there were like six propositions and of course Gavin Newsom won for mayor, perhaps because, as someone told me later that day, "He's just so damn good-looking," and the roster of people he was running against read like a variety show line-up. The volunteers were sweet, but seemed a little incompetent, and I wondered how voting could be more powerful than certain conversations.

On WEDNESDAY, this happened, but I didn't hear about it until THURSDAY, and even then I was too busy getting painfully drunk with the best coworkers a girl could ask for. And so I started to process it on FRIDAY. 36,000 gallons of oil fuel (which is somewhere in between gasoline and straight-up crude oil) spilled in San Francisco Bay. Unforgivably slow response and the poison spread quickly and far, closing down more than a dozen beaches, seriously the most amazing gems of our city and surrounds. But then this fine SUNDAY morning I happened to click on this. 1,300 tons of oil fuel spilled in the Black Sea after an oil tanker split in half?!

Still the thing that gets me most is that after a nice walk with a friend in yesterday's grey drizzle, about a half a block from my house I encountered a man I often see hanging out on the streets of my neighborhood. He was standing still right in the middle of the sidewalk, facing east, underneath one of those huge black umbrellas, the kind my dad used to have. And as I slowly walked by him, I realized his head was bowed towards his chest and he was sleeping.

scars are sexy

2007-11-04T13:49:00.001-08:00

So I got a forward from my good friend D in NYC the other day telling me that a novel called The Scar of David by Susan Abulhawa won a national award. The synopsis that followed said the book traces the lives in a Palestinian family through the major wars and massacres of the second half of the 20th century, starting with the Naqbe in 1948 through to the Jenin massacres in 2002. And I was excited. A novel about Palestine and by a Palestinian-American awarded the National Book Award? In a country like this? With the whitewashed, privileged literary establishment we have? Amazing! But, no. Upon closer inspection of D's email I realized it wasn't the esteemed National Book Award that Ms. Abulhawa won but something called the National "Best Books" Award, which, from what I can tell, isn't quite so esteemed. And in an email exchange with D, I realized The Scar of David had crossed my desk last spring. D sent it to me asking me to review it for an academic journal about the Middle East she's involved with. I remember getting 34 pages into it, trying to like it, wanting to at least be interested by it, but so bored by the limpid prose, the repetitive description, and the predictable, slow storyline that I had to stop. It would have been too painful to go on. I even remember being offended at the way Ms. Abulhawa represented her own people! When I told D how I felt, she had agreed I should stop. It seemed obvious it was a waste of time.

So why did the book win an award? There are many possible reasons. Maybe after page 34 it got really amazing. Maybe I am close-minded about prose and not fit to review anything that I don't consider up to a certain level that is completely arbitrary, some standard I've established in my mind that can't ever apply to the world at large, even though I might feel like it does. More likely, perhaps, the topic of Palestine is "sexy" lately (you know, Arabs and terrorists and shit) and gets little novelistic treatment on American bookshelves, so Ms. Abulhawa fulfilled some need, found some pocket of interest. And perhaps her prose, which I found limpid, to some is quite readable, easy, understandable, clear. Ms. Abulhawa's website says she was the speaker at some Wisconsin book event, and that she just sold Dutch rights with 10,000 copies pre-sold (a decent number if you who don't know from publishing). Where am I going with all this? Oh, you know, to a pessimistic place... where art and cultural exposure don't necessarily coincide. I'd love it if a good novel about Palestine or Lebanon or Egypt won an American award. But the fact that a bad (ok so I'm not 100% sure it's bad but at this point I'm going with it) one did, and that this bad novel is primarily a topical novel, riles me for a bevy of complicated reasons I can't disentangle for you right here and now. Maybe I should just shut up and go work on my own book already. (Incidentally, I do think scars are sexy.)

burst my bubble

2007-10-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

It is day 2 of my 3-day weekend ("weekend" being defined as a period of time without having to go to work or school) and I felt a little guilty for having spent day 1 galavanting around town and not doing an ounce of writing, reading, or studying. So today I woke up early and besides some necessary trips to the kitchen and the bathroom, stayed at my desk. But I could tell from looking out the windows and from how happy my roommates were on coming in from the outside world that it was a pretty, sunny day out there. And so around four I gathered a pile of books, papers, and my laptop under my arm and ventured as far as the corner and found myself a little table at Maxfield's, my favorite cafe. So I got myself a nice warm cup of tea and cracked open my Arabic book to begin conjugating some new verbs. Halfway through the first set, I noticed a man coming up to me in my periphery.

Man: What's that? Hebrew?

Me: No. Arabic.

He wore jeans splattered in white paint and a similarly stained hat. He had a pencil behind his ear, and the skin on his face was red, splotched, scarred. He had a blond mustache and the idea that he was an angry person grew and grew as he continued to talk to me. Picture it: I am sitting at a small table just next to but facing away from the counter where the cafe people have put all the different kinds of sweeteners and creamers and utensils and this man is doctoring up his cup of coffee and continuing to talk at me and I vacillate between ignoring him to get back to my conjugation and turning to look at him because it seems like he wants to have a conversation but also it seems like he thinks he already knows who I am and he is angry at that person.

Man: What are you going to do with that? [Meaning, I suppose, the Arabic.] Be an interpreter for the U.S. government?

Me: No.

Man: You got student loans?

Me: Not for this. [I motion to my Arabic notebook.]

Man: You know, if you work for the government ten years they'll forgive your student loans, all of 'em.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: That's the problem with you kids nowadays. [I swear, these are the exact words that came from his lips.] You all want to be freelancers. Don't want to be managed. Just want to manage.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: You know what's going to happen? [No pause.] Our whole country's going to be run by [he might have said "illegal" here] immigrants.

Me: [Look up at him and feel a bit frightened by what I interpret as a hateful sneer and begin to have the urge to tell him to shut up.]

Man: You know where all this comes from? [No pause.] Lack of religion. No one wants to be told what to do.

And then he walks out of the cafe.

I've been thinking a lot lately how San Francisco, especially my 'hood, is like a bubble. It's all preaching to the choir. Everyone agrees. And as a result, people don't go deep, which leads me to judge them as ignorant and boring, which upsets me because I'm really working at being non-judgemental, but it's hard.

Maybe god sent me this guy to interrupt that recurrent thought.

i'm from the east

2007-10-12T21:47:00.000-07:00

...the east coast is where my parents (and some cousins and an aunt I am honored to be named after) live, northern Virginia, to be exact. And its where I spent seven years of my childhood, not all at once but in spurts. I have friends there I've returned to, again and again. And places--shopping malls, schools, highways, museums--that I've revisited over and over. It happened again last weekend. I flew home and spent a few days with family and friends, who, in my everyday, are faraway people I know through telephone calls and photos posted on the internet. And it was great. I baked a raspberry-peach crumble with my sister, a finale to one of my mother's famous dinners. I got a good haircut at a cheap Vietnamese place, and my mom bought me a pair of sweet shoes. Took a drive south with my family, meandered some back roads, ate a satisfying yet unimaginative lunch at an old downtown inn. We are cosmopolitan folk, not overly impressed by ranch dressing and ice burg lettuce. I was jealous of my mom who ordered the crab cake. Lumps of amazing fresh meat smashed together on a toasty bun. The weather there was humid, and hot, strangely so for mid-October. The humidity made my hair curl and frizz, and my face broke out in a constellation of unsightly pimples. I felt like a teenager, which is inevitably how I feel when I am in my parents' house. Not necessarily a bad thing, I think. None of the leaves on the trees had turned color, as they normally do this time of year. They told me they heard that the drought means there will be none of that this year. The leaves will immediately turn a crisp brown and fall away crackling. A warm winter is in store. What is a warm winter? My mom and I saw an incredible film for free at the Smithsonian, a documentary about women in Afghanistan that followed the lives of three very different women from that country over a number of recent years. Amazing lens with which to look at the insanely unfortunate history of that country, as well as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. "View from a Grain of Sand." Watch it if you can. I drank sangrias and ate amazing sandwiches with three friends I've known since kindergarten. I visited another friend who has been very sick. It was late on Sunday and we couldn't/didn't want to drink and so sat outside a 24-hour Taco Bell sipping sodas and talking about how much cooler it is in San Francisco. And at my house, eating fruit after dinner as we've always done, I complained to my mother the orange she peeled for me (my mom loves me!) was dry and she had a piece and said it was fine. "But they are so much better in California!" And the strawberries were pinkish and were Driscoll's, the same brand name and farm as the juicy, red ones I buy here. And then I flew back to San Francisco.

i am absent

2007-09-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

...from this page but things keep on keeping on. the weather in san francisco is gorgeous again this weekend, though days end earlier and there is a nip in the air that sneaks up on you. and a man just walked into the cafe i am sitting in wearing a full leather ensemble--black leather pants, black leather button up shirt. i wonder if he's on his way to the folsom street fair, which is today. yesterday was lovefest. san francisco is all about the street parties lately. i went to one the other night. the 15th anniversary of critical mass here. enough for me for a while. so i am absent, sitting in a cafe, thinking about street parties and attempting to write.

Massacre

2007-09-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

I invite you to consider the events at Sabra and Chatila. Ok, so maybe wikipedia isn't the best source for info, but it's at least a starting point, a brief and arrayed sketch of what happened in the Palestinian camps south of Beirut 25 years ago this week. If you are into Robert Fisk, you'd be into what he says about the event. Here's what he wrote on the 19th anniversary. And if you aren't into him or don't know him, you should consider it anyway. After all, he was one of the first foreign journalists admitted to the blood-drenched, corpse-strewn area after the attack finally stopped. Promise me you won't take the things Bernard Lewis says about the fateful day seriously.

Anyway, it was a quarter century ago...who cares, right? I know that you know that things are still pretty bad and these sorts of scenes don't seem so far-fetched or far off or unlikely, particularly in places outside North America and Western Europe, and maybe Japan and Australia. Even though, it's true. We have our own problems, our own devastations. But I think I better sign off for now, leave all this to the experts.

Days of the Week

2007-09-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

In my Arabic class, we have just learned the day s of the week, which is pretty cool since they basically correspond with the numbers. Can you imagine that? What if we had One-Day and Two-Day. Well, I guess we do have Tuesday. Um. So today is Tuesday but I wish it was Wednesday because Tuesday is super-busy at my work and Wednesday is my day off when I spend all day alone writing and reading (and often doing laundry) and then have class from 4pm to 10pm. I was expressing this wish to my friend and she told me not to worry, that it would be Wednesday soon enough, like tomorrow. And it touched me that she had that thought and expressed it to me in order to soften the pain of Tuesday. For real, I was touched, even though of course Wednesday comes after Tuesday, just as surely as four comes after three. And it'll happen again next week, until Apocalypse or Armageddon or something like that.

modern ruins

2007-09-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

In the past week, I have had the pleasure of going to two fascinating places just outside San Francisco--Angel Island:

and Jack London Park:

They are both sites of incredible natural beauty--respectively: an island in the Bay with gorgeous views of the city, and a redwood and eucalyptus forest nestled in some hills above the wineries of Sonoma County. But the thing about each place that most touched my imagination were the modern ruins, pictured above. On Angel Island, in various states of disrepair, the buildings of that island's most recent history as an immigration checkpoint and army base still stand, eerily. And, in Jack London Park, we marveled at and wandered through Jack London's dream home, which burned to the remaining stone foundation just a few weeks before he was to move in. For additional and assorted photos of both of my excursions, go here and here. Better yet, visit the ruins yourself.

Jonas Update

2007-08-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Yet more unfortunate events for my friend Jonas Moffat, whose recent expulsion from Israel I posted on July 8:

[following by Jonas]

Hello my dear friends. I know my last dispatch was entitled "Final Dispatch." But this is the Epilogue. And it is an unbelievable epilogue for sure. The severity and unbelievability of it is still setting in.In my "Final Dispatch," I informed you of how I was on my way to Jerusalemwith Katie to do story on the Pride Parade In Jerusalem. (See Katie'saccount here: http://moomin13.livejournal.com/71737.html). But I wasp icked up at the Qalandia checkpoint, thrown in jail for a week, and then deported to Egypt, only after much work from friends and lawyers convincing the Israeli Ministry of Interior not to send me back to the US.And like that, my life in Palestine was over. I was forced to leave my work and my friends. My apartment and rooms were left as if I was just going out for a stroll. But I was not to come back. I was prohibited from bringing most of my belongings with me, including my laptop. That was the "Get Out" part of the story. So now I sit in Egypt. I took the time since my deportation to be with friends and to heal after a pretty traumatizing experience. My wonderful friends from San Francisco helped to fund my way to Indonesia to be with them and clear my mind from the worst week of my life and re-energize and re-focus. And this I did. Then I boarded a flight back to Egypt to get back to work, to work remotely from Palestine for the ISM. But first, I needed the rest of my belongings that were stuck in Palestine. Katie boarded a bus from Jerusalem around the same time my friend Ahmed and I boarded a bus from Cairo. Destination: Sinai Peninsula. Number One: to see Katie whom I hadn't seen since the Israeli authorities kicked me out of Palestine. And Number Two: to retrieve my things, especially my laptop, so I could get back to working for the non-violent resistance. Through text messages, Katie and I corresponded. Her from Israel, and me from Egypt."On bus, see you in 7 hours." "Okay, see you soon, insha'allah. I miss you." Etc. Etc. Time passed. Eventually I received a text message from Katie: "I am detained at the border." This was expected of course. More time passed. "Still detained," read another text. An hour later, I receive this text: "I can't believe what they just did. I don't know how to tell you." This brings us to the "and Stay Out" part of the story…

(written by Katie)

"Friday morning I left Ramallah for Egypt to see Jonas in Sinai and to give him some of his stuff. I road a bus from Jerusalem to Eilat and was going to cross the border from Eilat, Israel into Taba, Egypt. I gave Jonas a ballpark time of when I would be there, because you never can tell what will happen at these border crossings. The first time I ever crossed the border from Israel to Jordan, I was delayed there for 3 hours because of a bomb scare. That was back in 2001, my first Israeli "security"experience. I was simultaneously scared and intrigued at the same time. "What kind of god-forsaken place is this?" my 25 year-old-self wondered. So there I was at the Eilat border crossing, wondering how long I would be detained this time. The border policewoman punched my passport number into the computer and I watched her face turn from almost-pleasant to suspicious and hostile. She made phone calls and I waited for the stone-faced security to arrive and tell me "Please come with us."

"Please come with us," they told me.

I followed them to the metal detector where they ran both my bags through the x-ray machine and made me walk through the metal detector twice. On the other side of the x-ray machine they began opening one of my bags. My sketchbook with my cartoons and drawings was in this bag. I had debated taking this with me or not, knowing it might cause a problem. But hey, Israel is a country of freedom of speech, right? I should be able to draw as I please without being a threat to security, right? So I took it, and now I was watching a bunch of pissed off border police flip through and ask me why do I draw like this? After they thoroughly searched one bag, they asked me if all of the stuff with me was mine. "Some of it is my friend's stuff that I am taking to him in Egypt." The border police looked at each other with raised eyebrows. "But don't worry; it's all been with me, at my house, for the last 3 months. I know what all of it is and I can show it to you. He stayed with me, left some of his stuff and now I am taking it to him."

At that point they took me away from my possessions and put me in the strip search room. I was thoroughly strip-searched and when I was allowed back out, I began to realize something was very wrong. All at once, after being alerted to something, about 8 of the security people all freaked out and ran off somewhere, quite an unsettling thing to see. I asked one who was still me what was going on. He told me not to worry and that everything was ok. "How can you tell me not to worry when 8 of your people just freaked out like that?" I asked. No answer. I waited for a while and then I was given one of my backpacks and my passport. At this point, if I had wanted to, I could have just left the terminal and gone to Egypt. Nothing and nobody was preventing me. But they had the other bag and I wanted to wait for it, of course.

I was made to wait inside the entrance to the Israeli side of theterminal. There were about 8 border police blocking the door. They would not let anyone in or out. I asked one of them about my other bag, he said the police had to come and check it but I could have it back after they checked it.

I waited.

Other people crossing from Egypt to Israel were lining up to leave inside. The border police would not let them leave. I saw a police van outside. At first there were maybe 15 people waiting inside. Then 30,then 100. There was a public announcement in Hebrew and English saying there was suspicious package that the police were checking out and that this was the cause of the delay. I heard an explosion. I began to feel uneasy. Then I heard another one.

Neta called me. I told her "Neta, the police have one of my bags. They aren't letting anyone leave the terminal, there's a police van parked outside and I just heard two explosions, I'm afraid they exploded my bag.

"Don't worry," she reassured me, "if they really thought you had a bomb, they would have arrested you by now." She's right, I thought… I have my passport; I could just leave if I wanted to. No one spoke to me; no one asked me a single question about where I was going or what was in my bag.

After about an hour, a police officer informed me they had exploded my bag.

"YOU WHAT ? YOU DIDN'T ASK ME ANYTHING, I WOULD HAVE OPENED THE BAG ANDSHOWED YOU EVERYTHING INSIDE IT, ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS ASK. INSTEAD YOU WASTED THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF AMERICAN TAXPAYER MONEY TO EXPLODE MYGODDAMED BAG WITHOUT EVEN ASKING ME WHAT WAS IN IT. YOU RAN IT THROUGH THE X-RAY MACHINE YOU CAN SEE EXACTLY WHAT WAS IN IT"

I was crying at this point. Some of the female border police began laughing at me. The officer told me I would be reimbursed for the cost of the stuff that had been exploded.

"How do you know how much it was worth??? You EXPLODED It BEFORE YOU EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO LOOK"

"Don't worry," he told me, "Just go to the Eilat police station and they will give you a report and you can get money back."

Well there was nothing I could do at that point. There was some of mineand some of Jonas's stuff in that bag. Some of my original artwork too that I was giving him as a gift.

I made a list of everything:
Laptop
Ipod
Original art
Rainbow kuffiya
Watch
3 books
Tea
Fire poi
Bike light
3 shirts
Cds
Lens cap for camera
Sandals

I'm sure they feel like they thwarted a terrorist plot. All they did was waste a lot of people's time and money. Maybe it was because they didn't like my cartoons? I don't know. "

(end Katie's story)

So, as if it couldn't get any worse, now I am without about 1200 dollars worth of my belongings. My plan was to get back right away to Egypt and sit down at the computer and do some of the tasks I was doing in Palestine but from Cairo: sending e-mails, updating the website, compiling digests, editing reports, uploading photos and video… anything I could do to help. But it all went up in smoke, with the Israeli border authorities giving new meaning to: Your Hard Drive is Fried.

So I will try and start again. Subdue my frustration. Breathe deep. Like a kidney stone, just Let it pass.

**If anyone out there would like to help me get a new laptop to continueworking, please let me know.I am accepting PayPal donations at this email: joeskillet@riseup.net. Or contact me for other donation methods.**

Thanks to everyone out there who has been so supportive thus far! This is just another twist in the road. But I have anti-lock breaks and I know how to use them!

From Egypt with Love,
Jonas

Bookshelves

2007-08-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

I would like to take a moment to thank shelves of books...

...for providing a way of getting to know someone.

...for being one of the best ways to wile away time at house parties when you don't feel like talking to anyone.

...for evidencing the things we have known and the things we want to know.

(Oh, and goodreads.com doesn't even hold a candle.)

Overheard

2007-08-12T17:13:00.001-07:00

"Well, I mean...I've loved books forever, and so I love words, and so this makes sense. And it's just paper. I live in San Francisco, so dealing with glass is really out of the question--all those stacks of plates and saucers and things. Dealing with glass really freaks me out, even just getting near it, really. And furniture's too heavy. Anyway, this stuff [gesturing around her at bins full of filed, celo-covered pieces of paper] is so much more interesting than glass or wood. The thing about paper is that it is supposed to be ephemeral but I've got pieces here that are more than 120 years old and they look brand new. It's magical."

--one of the dealers at Hal Lutsky's Vintage Paper Fair, which, this past weekend, was visiting the County Fair Building in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park

9/11 Research

2007-08-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a short story about 9/11 right now which is kind of weird for many reasons--not the story but the working on it--particularly because 9/11 isn't entirely the focus of the story and also because in my procrastination as I work, I've been finding things like this image to the left. I also found this, which I'm not posting directly since it seems a little tasteless--still fascinating, though. I've also been watching clips from that morning on youtube, an activity which has proved more disturbing than originally anticipated.

Early and cold (blurt #2)

2007-07-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

i am over the crippling need
to know your name and she is under
my heart and the reason is clear
there is no god but he is behind
the purple velvet scarred with burn
holes from a cigarette smoked
on a sunday morning in june
when we could see the moon against
the pale blue air around us and they
talked about representing the sky
and seeing the sky and knowing the sky

Fact of the Day

2007-07-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

A dentist invented the electric chair. A patient told us this today, all gleeful, as she got into the chair (which all of a sudden signaled death) for her cleaning. Not that I would ever wish death on anyone, but just that it made sense. It does. I looked it up on wikipedia, and it's true.

The idea, at least, came from a dentist, one Alfred P. Southwick, who thought of it while witnessing a wet, drunk man being hit by lightning on a fateful night.

How did the dentists in my office today react to the niblet of trivia? They both smiled. One said, "Oh," and barely rolled his eyes, which I think he meant to sound like: "Who cares?" but actually seemed more like: "Hmmm. Interesting." And the other said, "See? Dentists are creative people."

What am I doing?

2007-07-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

This is a question that graduate students of creative writing ask ourselves all the time.

Very unhelpful and disconcerting are internet posts like this, which highlight every possible anxiety we might have about the practicality and ultimate feasability of our writerly pursuits.

Much more heartening is an article like this, which reviews a newly released debut by a recent sfsu grad. Thanks to Lizzy for the tip.

If my life is mine and I have the privilege to spend it following a thing I love, I choose to stay hopeful.

(Lizzy has inspired me to proclaim this. She is a splendid soul.)

Palestine Story

2007-07-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

In the miasma of all the stories coming out of the middle east, particularly lately, I have a hard time paying attention. It's hard to know who to listen to, sometimes, and what to think. A good adviser on such matters is a previous roommate and dear friend, Jonas. Jonas was living in Palestine, working with the ISM, up until two weeks ago, when he was taken off a bus at a border-crossing for having a "fake" passport. He had recently changed his name and the passport bore his new name, which he obtained since his old name was on a list of people the Israeli government did not want in their country. Jonas was jailed, tried, and deported. Being Jonas, he somehow managed to make it Cairo, instead of back to the States. And now he is on a tropical getaway far, far away from America and the Middle East.

Below, I'm posting his most recent dispatch from his blog, followed by an entry from his "partner-in-crime" Katie about the day he was arrested. Of course Jonas is a million times more fortunate than the thousands of Palestinians who are confined to the borders Jonas was expelled from, but I think Jonas's story is an important one to pay attention to since it shows, not only how unjustly the Israeli authority treats the citizens of Palestine, but, on top of that, how the Israeli authority thwarts outside attempts to help those citizens.

What Jonas wrote:

"Battling Billions, Final Dispatch (for now)"

Well, they did it again. Another refugee to add to the ante. Of course, I
have a 'home' to return to in the States. I can go back if I choose and
continue to contribute to the fascist continuation of Occupation by paying
those tax dollars--watch them manifest themselves into a panel of the
Apartheid Wall, maybe morph into one of those atrocious watchtowers or
into a rubber-coated steel bullet to be shot at the non-violent
demonstrators in Bil'in. Sure, I have that dreadful home to return to.

But my home is in Palestine. My life is there. Those who favor and work
for human rights, however, have no place in an Apartheid State, and the
Israeli government does everything in their "God-given" power to eliminate
this problem, through intimidation or by placing them on a plane and
exporting them.

That scene of a field of apricot trees being ripped from the Earth by an
Israeli bulldozer has been on replay ever since I lay in the Israeli
prison bed. Israeli soliders and police throwing men and women to the
ground as they pray to Allah for this moment in time to cease. Sons are
handcuffed. Activists are seen like rag dolls being tossed from here to
there. Hundreds of years of livelihood dismantled by the Middle East's
only democracy. And soon I find myself forced onto a plane by Israeli
security because I bared witness, video-taped and photographed all that
this democracy had to offer. I saw this democracy bare its teeth with its
unpleasant smile, seeping through a stench of death, a 60 year old rotting
lie of innocense.

And I am sent elsewhere. "Go back to your own country--aren't there enough
problems with your own government," sneers the judge. God, if she only
knew. Those problems with my government brought me here in the first
place.

I wonder if when Oprah makes her solidarity visit for those "terrorized
Israelis" she will see what's happening across the "border," listening to
my or the thousands of other e-mails pleading that America's #1 talk show
host experience the Palestinian plight, to see what terrorism means at 2am
when an entourage of soldiers invades your village and practices a war
games scenario, wreaking havoc on the inhabitants. Somehow I doubt it.

Israel wouldn't deport a high-profile Amercian woman like Oprah because
she reported on Israeli settlers attacking an 8-year old Palestinian boy
in Hebron, would they?

You know, I wouldn't put anything past the Middle East's only democracy.

So, I am taking six weeks to redirect this anger, sadness, emptiness, and
frustration, and hoping to manifest these emotions into something
beautiful. A regime of ugliness has no defense against this kind of
beauty.

But can this beauty battle billions of American tax dollars?

One can only hope.

Signing off until further notice...

Salamaat,
Jonas

What Katie wrote:

Thursday Jonas and I were on our way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. It
was the evening of the gay pride parade. Jonas was composing the
opening sentence of his future report outloud.. it was something
along the lines of "what brings Jews, Muslims and Christians together
in Jerusalem like nothing else..." except it was more clever than
that and I'm feeling more depressed than clever at the moment so I
can't recall the exact line. As some of you know, the only thing that
unified all faiths was their violent opposition to the gay pride
parade this past week. The previous week the Haredi Jews had a
counter demonstration. The police were going to be out in full force
because last year there were some serious injuries.

Jonas's visa was expired but he had an appointment slip from the
ministry of the interior to renew his visa on July 2nd. This means it
is still legal for him to be in the country. We approached Qalandia
checkpoint in a service. The driver stopped and a soldier boarded the
bus to check our passports. I showed mine and Jonas showed his and
the appointment slip. The soldier took his passport and exited the
bus. He returned and told Jonas to get off the bus and come with him.
I followed to see what was going on. In less than 4 minutes, they'd
handcuffed Jonas and started taking him over to the police terminal
at Qalandia, accusing him of having a fake passport. Not sure whether
it was better to try to get away myself and start calling the lawyer,
or go with him, I wavered for a few minutes, initially refusing to go
with the police officers who insisted I come as well. In the end I
decided it would be better to be with him and quickly sent off some
text messages saying what was happening. They took us into a police
trailer and told us Jonas's passport was fake and that he was under
arrest and they wanted to ask me some questions. I ignored their
questions and continued text messaging the peeps telling them what
was happening and what Jonas needed. The cop told me to give him my
phone. I refused because I know that that police have no authority to
take my possessions unless they arrest me. He tried to grab my phone
out of my hand, I jerked my hand away. He threatened to use force, I
told him if he wanted any of my possessions, he'd have to arrest me.
I tried to resume text messaging and he grabbed the phone. I twisted
it out of his hand. (Thanks for that, Sifu Phil) He said if I didn't
give him the phone, he'd arrest me. "Fuck you," I replied. Then he
called a female cop in who put me in handcuffs and they took my phone
away. But it's all good cuz by then all of our peeps knew and could
get the ball rolling on getting us out of there and I'd be with
Jonas, at least for the time being.

Jonas and I waited in that room for about an hour while the cops went
through our stuff and filled out my arrest paperwork.

I've always been afraid that when I was interrogated or arrested, I
would end up talking and saying something I shouldn't because of the
way they pressure you in an interrogation. Somehow though I was able
to just withdraw into my head and I didn't say a single word to the
the whole time except to tell Jonas I loved him.

After an hour they took both of us out of the trailer, they put me in
the back of a police vehicle and that was the last I saw of Jonas
that day. I was taken to the police station at the Giv'at Ze'ev
settlement and told by a bitchy policewoman that I had been arrested
for resisting a police officer. She wanted to hear my side of the
story but I refused to answer any questions until I could talk to my
lawyer. (television is good for something, right ?) When I was
finally able to call Yael, she said that Gaby Lasky was working on
Jonas's situation and that I should just tell the police officer what
happened, say I was sorry, and that I should be released and the
charges against me would be dropped. I'm not very good at ass-kissing
because I feel it is undignified, but I was able to do a sufficient
enough job to get un-arrested.

The most interesting part of my conversation with this police officer
was the lecture I got about being in Ramallah.

"Why were you in Ramallah ?" she asked me.

For those of you reading who haven't been to Palestine I will explain
some of the political/geographic situation. Ramallah is a part of the
West Bank that is classified as Area A. This means it is under
control of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli civilians are
prohibited from entering. "For their own safety" is the standard
line. The Israeli army can, and does still invade. I tried to picture
the look on the cop's face if I told her that actually, I live there.

"I was picking up something from a friend," I said.

"Where were you ?" she asked.

"Al Manara square."

"Did you know it is illegal for you, as an Israeli citizen, to be in
Ramallah ?"

"Yes."

She began the lecture, "I know you are new here so I need to explain
some things to you. It is very VERY dangerous for you to be in
Ramallah. Those people will kill and mutilate you if they find out
you are Jewish. They kill each other all the time. I hope for your
own good that you never go back there. If they see you have this
Israeli ID on you, they will kill you."

At this point I was picturing my nice apartment on the edge of the
wadi and my nice friends who live in Ramallah and know I have an
Israeli ID. I don't hide it, if someone asks how I am able to stay in
the West Bank for so long, I tell them. When I open my wallet to buy
something, anyone can see my ID. I feel very safe in Ramallah. My
Israeli friend Neta walks down the street in Ramallah speaking Hebrew
on the phone. I tried to imagine what would happen if I told the cop
these things, if I said to her, "Listen, either you're wrong or I'm
crazy. Take your pick."

But that's a conversation for another time and another place. I just
wanted to get the hell out of there and see what was going on with
Jonas.

I called him immediately and found out the bad news that he was
already at Ben Gurion airport and was likely to be deported. Jonas is
my partner in (non-violent) crime. We've been beaten by settlers
together, gotten sick from poisoned water (courtesy of the Israeli
army) together, given 11 speeches together, done the fire circus
together, lived together, worked together, been arrested together,
discussed the benefits and drawbacks of doing a fire circus at
Huwarra checkpoint at night (we both decided we'd probably get killed
so we shelved that plan), and been subjected to all kinds of threats
and intimidation from police, soldiers, settlers, and Hillel students
etc.. Jonas is my home boy. We even used to live on the same street
in San Francisco before we knew each other back when I was a blue-
haired art student and he was the bitchy waiter who served me and my
goth krew at Sparky's Diner in San Francisco. Yeah I remember Jonas
back then, I thought he was a prick because it took him an hour to
bring me my veggie burger at 2am and I'm sure he thought I was some
stuck-up goth bitch. We were both right.

Turns out "They" had found out that Jonas had been here last year
under a different name and passport. Which is not illegal, but it
means he got back in the country without "Them" knowing and that's a
bruise to the ego of the security-conscious, paranoid Israeli
intelligence.

I decided to try to go to the airport and at least see him, not
really sure if it would help. Unfortunately getting there turned out
being pretty difficult because of the parade. Jerusalem was more or
less locked down and few busses were running. I managed to convince
an Israeli girl to let me follow her to the central bus station by
foot. She said we couldn't get a bus there and she was on her way to
the area anyway. It took us 45 minutes to reach the bus station on
foot. There were police EVERYWHERE. She pointed out some special
police on motorcycles and told me they carry huge clubs and their
only job is to beat people with them. We walked through some Haredi
neighborhoods and found the that the residents had already begun to
wind themselves up for the parade. In a show of displeasure, they'd
overturned dumpsters in the middle of the street and set the trash on
fire. I asked the girl if the parade was going through this
neighborhood. She said no. In a different situation I probably would
have enjoyed the walk through Jerusalem, you can learn lot about
human nature if pay attention to the way people behave when they're
gearing up for some violent confrontation, but I spent the entire
time on the phone trying to figure out what was going on with Jonas.

By the time I actually got to the central bus station to get a bus to
the airport, I learned from Kobi, one of the Israeli anarchists who
was trying help Jonas, that going to the airport would be useless
because they had transferred him to the immigration prison in Lod. I
sat down in the bus station and had a tearful conversation with Jonas
on the phone. There's something about being in Israeli bus stations
that really magnifies one's despair. Maybe it's the fact that every
other person in the bus station is carrying a gun, or maybe it's just
the bitchy lady at the entrance to the bathroom who won't let you
relieve yourself unless you give her a shekel.

Since there was nothing I could do but wait until his hearing before
a judge on Sunday, I decided to go back to Jerusalem and stay the
night at the Faisal. I left the bus station and flagged down a cab. I
asked the driver how much would it be to go to Damascus Gate. He told
me 40 shekels. He drove me to Jaffa Gate and said "here we are, this
is Jaffa Gate." Jaffa Gate is in Jewish West Jerusalem and is about a
20 minute walk from Damascus Gate in Arab East Jerusalem, the place I
had asked him to bring me.

"I told you to take me to Damascus Gate," I reminded him.

"I can't take you there, you can get out here and walk."

"Why can't you take me there ?" I asked. (This is a rhetorical
question because I know what he's going to say)

"Because of the Arabs," he answered. (I was right !!!)

"Are you afraid of the Arabs ?" (What about the Haredim on the other
side of town who have practically declared war on the gay population
of Israel ?) "Look," I told him, "I asked you how much it was to
Damascus Gate, you said it was 40 shekels, you agreed to take me
there and I'm not getting out of this taxi until you take me there."

"It'll be 50 shekels if you want me to take you to Damascus Gate."

"No, you are going to take me to Damascus Gate and I am going to pay
you 40 shekels."

He took me there and let me off. I paid him 40 shekels.

Walking back to the Faisal I realized that the Holy Land is pretty
close to Hell on Earth. Everyone here hates everyone else. Everyone
is trying their best to make everyone else's lives miserable. What
differentiates it from the US, is that all of these different people,
Palestinians, gays, Haredis, Fatah, settler hilltop youth,
anarchists, international solidarity workers, Sudanees refugees,
Hamas, secular Jews, Zionists, Islamic Jihad, Kahanists, the JDL,
communists, Ethiopians, non-Jewish Russian immigrants, Bedouins,
Druze, Armenians, Christian Palestinians, and loud-mouthed new
immigrants from New York City staking claim to their G*d-given
territory in the middle of the old city of Hebron have to live
together in an area 1/19th the size of California and all of us,
depending on our religion or ethnicity, have some form of travel
restrictions placed upon us. West Bankers and Gazan's of course can't
enter "Israel," Israelis can't be in Area A, refugees are restricted
to their moshavs, Israeli anarchists are forbidden (just like
Palestinians) from going anywhere near the settlements, Jerusalem
Palestinians can't be in Area A. It's enough to make your head spin
and democracy it ain't.

In the US, the neo-Nazis can happily snort meth in their isolated
bunkers in Idaho and no one really has to think about them very much.

Jonas was given a deportation order on Sunday. He wanted to go to
Egypt to stay with a friend and figure out what he would do from
there. He's also supposed to go to Bali next month and leave from
Amman Jordan. But "They" had other plans for him and were threatening
to fly him back to the United States. This would have been a
disaster. Luckily Kobi was able to handle the bitchy immigration
police and arrange for him to be sent to Cairo. While talking to
Jonas the phone, he told me "They" "accused" him of being Muslim
because of his beard. When he pointed out that Jews have beards too
and told them he prays to Jesus, they laughed in his face.

We brought his things to the airport and were only able to see him
for about two minutes, long enough to give him his stuff and some
food because he hadn't eaten since his arrest on Thursday, and
understandably so.

I miss Jonas. I can't wait to see him again. I don't know what is
going to happen now. There are so many things here I cannot imagine
doing without him.

celebration

2007-07-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

Beautiful, right? This was the setting for my good friend Darren's wedding last weekend. After the ceremony (pictured here), everyone took their seats at the ten or so tables set up on the lawn, had a tasty dinner as the sun set. There was plenty of California wine to go around to fuel all the dancing that came after. This all happened in the back garden at the home of the lovely bride's grandmother in Los Gatos.

I feel over-stimulated by celebration lately, partly guilty, partly wondering if we deserve all the indulgence, the time off... And yesterday was July 4, on a Wednesday, of all days. Smack dab in the middle of our American work week, a majority of workers got the day off. In San Francisco, we had one of the record hottest days in history and everyone seemed to be aimlessly wandering about. I made it out to Berkeley to visit a friend before her bbq got under way. We sat in her shady back garden and chatted. I got back to SF a few hours before sunset, checked out the insane party that was going on in Dolores Park. Among the hundreds gathered, my roommate organized a bbq that consisted of many kinds of meat and beer and an actual arcade game that they had somehow transported to the park and were running off a gasoline motor. There were immense piles of trash around all the trashcans and scattered on the lawn. I high-tailed it home where I met some friends for dinner and then up to my friend's roof where we had a 360-degree view of the city and surrounds. We watched fireworks shoot into the sky from different neighborhoods and rooftops, spinning on our feet, ooh-ing and aah-ing. The night was balmy and the lights and sounds were stimulating--sometimes warlike and of course we jokes about the ones set off by the city that we were seeing our tax dollars at work. Afterwards, we headed over to Dolores Park. We walked against the leaving hordes and now the trash just seemed like it was everywhere. We sat at the edge of a hill and listened to some pretty bad hippy "campfire" music.

For a few more photographs from the wedding weekend, go here. I didn't take any photos on July 4. Firework photographs are pretty tough to make interesting anyway, right?

vacation blues

2007-06-22T23:29:00.001-07:00

Ok, so it's weird. I've been back from my trip (to Lebanon, Damascus, and Istanbul) for a little over a week now and for most of that week I've been stricken by an ailment I've dubbed "the vacation blues." I'm probably not the first to come up with this term. I'm sure you can sympathize. You leave your daily routine of life and head somewhere completely different from where you are for a little while (2.5 weeks, in this case). You fly away; you turn your phone off. And time feels like it's moving so slow when you get there and begin spending time at that faraway place; you get sucked the new world that exists at the coordinates of your escape. Everything is new and therefore you tend to savor the passing moments, so that they don't so much feel like they are passing but that they will last forever. Sure, you talk about your old life in your vacation place, think about it even, but it is not really real, not something you feel and breathe. Occasionally you count the days until you have to go back, and each time you are happy because you still have time. But eventually, the last day comes, the last walk to the beach, the last sit on the balcony, the last dinner, the last night you dream here, the last morning you wake up. The last car ride on vacation is to the airport and you look out the window and the vacation still exists.

And then you fly home.

BAM!

Back to your life. Everyone and everything is happy to see you. You look at photos, tell stories about airports and night clubs and ferries and cobbled alleys. You tell them about the sarcophagi of 3000 year old mummies, and the corpses themselves, blackened skin that didn't look like skin, clinging in pieces to brown bones. But you also want to know, and they also want to tell you, how they're doing, how home has been without you. And it's almost like you weren't even gone.

Not to be a downer. I realized today--standing on my cousin's roof, a delicious meal beginning to digest inside me and the weekend ahead of me, the sun disappearing slowly below the rainbow sky, the buildings down the hills around us like colored tiles--that it's nice to be back.

vacation photos

2007-06-13T11:06:00.001-07:00

So I have been home a few days and after too many computer-related tribulations, have managed to make my photos from the trip I took to Lebanon, Damascus, and Istanbul available
to you in three parts--here, here and here.

Why Facebook, you ask? Well, I was very resistant, but finally joined the other day, and thank the good lord I did; as I began uploading the photos on my old photoblog page, I was immediately faced with a dialogue box telling me I was out of storage space. After a bit of fumbling, I figured out that it's about a million times easier to load pics onto Facebook, which, unlike the old photoblog, is free of charge and has unlimited space.

The only problem? I've run out of patience and not been able to label the photos, which are in a random order. So, if you have any questions about where any were taken, feel free to ask. The one I've posted here is my sister still asleep on one of the mornings we spent in Ghazieh, the town where my mother grew up in southern Lebanon.

Also, if you want the full-size version of any, ask for that too.

Alone in Istanbul: A Journal Entry

2007-06-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

Mom, Dad, Lara left this morning. Alone and Luti (the owner of our hotel) gave me a ride to my hostel at the other side of Sultanahmet in his white Mercedes. "Relax. Don't worry. I want you to have a good time here." He also told me that he doesn't think Turkey will become part of the E.U., that even Istanbul is not ready. That ten years ago, when he bought what would become the Ambassador Hotel, there were folks shooting up in that currently cafe-and-souvenir-shop-studded alley. He has two others and is considering buying another now, near the Four Seasons (in the shadow of the Hagia Sofia) but it is for $5 million, and "that is a lot of money." He looked sad when he said it. I finally had my fish sandwich--grilled fillet stuffed in white fluffy bread with onions, tomato and lettuce eaten sitting on a concrete wall by the water, near the Galata Bridge. It was tasty but made me feel sick. Then I found my way to the Istanbul Modern where I saw some great photos--the encyclopedic dreamscapes of Andreas Gursky (an amazing aeriel chaotic Cairo street scene froze me) and a series of stunning black-and-whites by a Dutch Turk, Ahmet Polat. Also imaginative/disturbing/lovely videos by four international artists and a permanent collection not worth writing home (where's that?) about. Now I sit in the outermost cafe of a strip of sheesha bars at Tophane. Tea to settle my stomach. Sunlight striping the shade. An airplane passes overhead. Youth everywhere and their mixed music. Unsure why I'm anxious about returning home.

Istanbul is Absurd

2007-06-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

...but in a (mostly) good way. Here is a list of the top absurdities I've encountered since arriving last Monday.

TRAINS
We were the first people standing on an empty tram platform our first afternoon here. Within five minutes, hundreds of people swarmed around us and there was no where to move. As people negotiated their way on and off trains, they did what they had to do. Not a single frustrated word or angry look...

TRASH
I was stunned by our first walk on Istiklal Street. The street is lined with eateries, small shops, and international retailers. At parts, cars run across it and a "nostalgic" streetcar runs down it, but otherwise it's a pedestrian thoroughfare. And you see every kind of person you could imagine. I had just finished drinking a bottle of water and eating a simit (a kind of sesame coated bread ring they sell on the street here) and so had an empty bottle and paper wrapper to throw away, but could not find a trashcan anywhere. I was even more perplexed that I didn't see any trash on the street either. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. I got rid of my trash by leaving it on the table of an excellent pudding shop we had coffee and dessert at. And later that night as we walked around some back streets, we found all the trash. There were horrific piles of it at the edges of the empty streets and the occasional passerby would go on without a second glance. I guess somebody or something comes along in the night and deals with it. I saw a man sweeping a pile out of an alley, a cat going through some, and last night there was a young man rapidly sorting a pile almost as tall as he was into a big plastic sack.

RICE IN A MUSSEL
Walking by the water near the Galata Bridge one evening, I was excited by all the food vendors
since dinner was a few hours away and I was hungry. I went towards a man selling mussels out of a box and pointed at the big ones, paying one lira (70 cents) for two. He made a show of popping each one open, and as I ate I realized there was spiced rice stuffed inside the tasty bites of meat. How did that happen?

SHOE SHINE
Getting off the tram one day, my dad picked up the fallen brush of the shoe shine man who was walking in front of him. Upon exiting the station, my dad told us to hold up since the shoe shine man said he wanted to do him a favor for giving him his brush and proceeded to give my dad a quick shoe shine. My father asked us all if we had any small change and we managed to scare up a few coins. In the meantime, the shoe shine guy was quickly working on someone else who promptly gave him twenty lira (18 dollars). My dad produced his three lira, and the guy got upset and then regaled him with a story about how his daughter was in the hospital and asked for twenty, indicating his previous customer. We all walked away and the shoe shine man exclaimed into the air, probably cursing.

DUSTBUSTER
Our first dinner here was at a restaurant we'd wandered to after many twists and turns. It was an alright place, with padded chairs, cold beer, mediocre food, and terrible though charming service. After all our plates had been cleared, I saw the (hot) busboy coming towards our table with a dustbuster in hand. I knew what was going to happen next but couldn't believe it when he stopped at our table, turned the thing on, and dragged it across our table cloth, specifically targeting a pile of rice that had fallen off of my sister's plate. I couldn't believe it, but I looked across the table at her and she kept a straight face. When he came around the table and dustbusted a little bit more, my sister finally began to laugh and then of course I had to laugh too, and my dad, stoic that he is, kept a straight face.

CLEANING ME
Istanbul is currently packed with tourists and, consequently, at most restaurants, bazaars, and stores that cater to them/us there are men standing outside trying to tempt them/us in. A lot of times they are young and/or attractive and they say the damnedest things. They call us angels, ask if we are married, and constantly ask where we are from, try to shake our hands. It's unnerving to a certain extent and only fun when a certain element of the insincerity of these gestures is obvious. Last night, we walked back to our hotel down a street where most of the stores were closed. We passed by one shopkeeper who was moving some wares from the sidewalk into his store. I made eye contact and he enthusiastically said, "Hi!" We were waiting for the requisite follow-up but instead got: "I will clean you with this!" and he smiled, indicating the duster in his hand.

State of Affairs

2007-06-02T03:03:00.000-07:00

It's vacation time and so I've been bad about posting things as they come to me. So, right now, I'm throwing out a haphazard bunch of entries all at once. I've also been taking a lot of photos, and those will have to await their Internet debut until I get back to San Francisco.

Rainbow Wreckage of Dinner

2007-06-02T02:58:00.000-07:00

Last night was delicious again, and bright. Looking down at the table as they began to clear things away, the colors called:

Glistening milky orange chunks of mango.
Clear, bright orange of Crush in a forgotten glass.
Vibrant yellow lemon halves, squeezed and resting in a pale blue dish.
Another dish with a bite left of m'hammara—which literally means "reddened"—a bright red paste of tomatoes, nuts, onions, peppers topped with brown bits of walnut.
The two remaining sardines, a lightly fried brown, and one last brown-yellow of home-fried potato on a white plate near a puddle of ketchup red.
A dark brown platter with remains of salad shades of green and the pale red of a mountain tomato.
A brimming bowl of orange and purple spheres, apricots and plums.
And a small crystal glass showing pink liquid yet for me to drink, rose wine made from grapes grown less than a couple hour's drive from here, in the Beka'a Valley.

Bashar's Party

2007-06-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

This year, American Memorial Day fell on the day of Syria's presidential election. Bashar al-Asad was elected to another 7-year presidential term, selected by a resounding 99.9% of the electorate. We arrive in Damascus the following day. Our Lebanese driver finds us a Syrian taxi on the highway. As we drive into the city and are swallowed into the traffic of tiny Eastern European cars and ramshackle micro-buses, we stat to notice pictures of Bashar everywhere. Small portraits on car windows--often two or three per car--larger ones in storefronts, and billboards hanging on the sides of buildings. We get stuck at a traffic light. It changes three times from green to red three times and our driver tells us there is a parade, for Bashar. Later we are walking near our hotel and encounter another parade. There are people dancing in the streets and playing instruments, and holding up posters of Bashar. Even away from the dreary Cold War-era architecture of modern Damascus, in the shaded, twisty, cobbled lanes of the Old City, Bashar is everywhere. He is hanging near ancient roman columns, declaring his love for his people from the sides of food carts, and smiling at us above the doorways of quaint little cafes. The man is good-looking in a shirt-and-tie-and-moustache kind of way and in these portraits he's got eyes that follow you everywhere you go. Heading back to our hotel that first night, we hear nearby explosions. They are fireworks and all of a sudden they are all around us and light up the sky. We pass a busy street corner where fireworks are being launched in a small patch of grass. The colors explode dangerously low to the ground and we can't help but turn towards them, watch the colors explode and the light reflect of the largest portrait we've seen of Bashar yet. We walk on under a concrete awning with ten uniform pillars, each pasted with a photo of Bashar. We flip to Syrian tv in our hotel the next morning and there is Bashar, walking through various crowds of various people in various places. There he is followed by his pretty wife. There he is, holding up a baby, dripping medicine into the baby's eyes. Over dinner, Dad tells us he was trained as a dentist or an eye doctor, or something. We are the only ones in the restaurant, happily feasting on the many plates of savories in front of us, and we only notice after it's been going on for nearly half an hour that we are listening to a song, which must be on repeat. It has an electric rock beat and in constant repetition, with minor variation, a chorus of male voices sings, "We love you." They love Bashar, of course. And we joke about if one of us had our face everywhere, like that. And we wonder the same then for our own president, the infamous George W. Bush. But this isn't as funny because we almost think it would somehow be a more honest reality than the one he has created for our country now.

(Or at least it would be a more straightforward dishonesty, or something...But don't get us wrong, we are happy to be American and we enjoyed getting to know Bashar.)

Syrian Border Blues

2007-06-02T01:57:00.000-07:00

Lebanon is small—about four hour's drive from bottom to top, maybe two or three across. Briefly, in the early nineties, people were allowed to walk up to the fence at the southern border and look across at Israeli occupied lands. Our mother took us one day and we talked through the metal links to an Arab couple on the other side. But then there was a commotion, as some orthodox Jews came up behind them and some men standing behind us got angry, threw things.

That was the day we visited the old Israeli prison, which had recently become a tourist attraction. The place is hazy in my memory and as we were driving towards what seemed to be nothing but more brownish fields and forgotten trees, the gray buildings materialized from nothing. And we got out of our car and walked into them, from cell to cell and office to field. There was nothing there and no one, but us. That place is not open to the public any more, either. (And might have even been bombed by Israel last summer, according to bits and pieces of information on the 'net.)

Lebanon's western border is the Mediterranean, much of the coastline devastatingly polluted by sewage and by oil spills that occurred during last summer's war.

North and east, Lebanon is surrounded by Syria. There are a few roads that can take you into that much larger country. But, because of various tensions, highlighted recently by fighting going on at the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, only one road into Syria is open, the Beirut-Damascus highway.

Just a few days ago, my father, my cousin, my sister, and I--all U.S. passport holders--were flying across it, in a decrepitly beautiful 70's Chrysler, navigated by a driver we hired in Beirut. We didn't have visas to get into Syria yet and were not sure whether we would make it to our intended destination.

The visas—for our intended purpose of 48 hours of tourism—would have cost us $100 a piece in America. I had gone on my own two years ago and it had taken 10 minutes and $12 to get me across the border. We were hoping for a similar scenario, but we had heard since arriving in Lebanon a few days prior that it wasn't that easy any more. We were told that the border officers would have to send a request to Damascus and wait for a response as to whether we were allowed in their country—and this could take two hours…five hours…seven hours. No way of knowing. We tried to get at why this was only true of U.S. passport holders. Most people said they didn't know, but it seemed that the situation had changed after last summer's war with Israel. Syria ultimately blamed America for that event, and, as repudiation, Syria would treat Americans trying to get into their country with some small degree of the bureaucracy that Americans treat Syrians in the opposite situation.

We exited Lebanon with no difficulty and breezed through the no-man's-land before Syria's border with hopes of being in Syria in time for an early lunch. At the Syrian side, the driver asked me to head into the office with him to talk to the Syrian officers. I answered a few questions:

"We are tourists."

"We are Americans, born Americans."

"My mother is Lebanese."

"I am a student."

"My father is retired. He was a diplomat."

They smiled at me, tapped at the keyboards of their dusty computers and told us to wait. I went back outside to the car and reported what little happened. We sat, reading, talking, and then a couple of hours had gone by. I willed away the thought that we might not get through, that we'd go back to Beirut and my mom and her sisters would titter over us:

"Oh, my gosh! They didn't let you in. Oh, you didn't want to go to dusty, dirty, old Damascus anyway…"

And then we got restless. My sister led me out of the car and across a bulldozer's path into a tiny concrete building to a fly-infested key-hole toilet. I can't tell you much about the stink because I only breathed through my nose for a split second and it was too harrowing to describe. Then we wandered back in the direction of Lebanon,towards a duty free complex that I'd made fun of on the drive in, and certainly not expected to visit. Two Syrian guards whistled at us, called out to us as we walked towards them:

"Where are you going?" "Where are your passports?" All gruff and official.

I grinned, flirtatious: "Our passports are in the border office. We are waiting. We want to eat."

"Oh, you are students, oh, Americans, oh, yes." Easing.

"Yes."

The duty-free had a spotless bathroom and walls of cheap imported liquor and cigarettes. In the restaurant a woman made up to the Elvira-point-of-looking-scary served me an expertly grilled sandwich. As I bit into the cheese and tomato, I hoped that at that moment our visa request was being approved. We got back to the car and they were still waiting.

After three and a half hours, the car got pretty hot, and we stood outside in the shade. A man in fatigues and black shiny boots struck up a conversation with my father. I stayed away, not interested in interacting with a soldier, but when my dad hit his spoken language barrier, he called me over. The man was handsome and affable. He was Lebanese. He asked me why we wanted to go to Damascus.

To see it, I said.

He didn't quite get it, but offered: I wish we had some pull here and could help you out, but...

Don't worry, I said.

And he told me he was getting his service years out of the way, that it kind of sucked, but...

And then a similarly dressed man came up to him and dragged him away and back into the dark gray armored truck they had come in. He came back out of it with a gun--a big black thing that somehow looked like a toy on him, though of course it wasn't. He was followed by eight dour-looking men, handcuffed in pairs. He led them into the visa office with the help of his friend. Illegal Syrian workers, my dad and I guessed. They all came back out a few minutes later and got back into the truck. Our soldier glanced at us and wished us luck.

My dad and I went inside and sat on an uncomfortable wooden bench for a few minutes. We talked and decided to give up. I went to tell our driver and he flat-out refused. I agreed we'd wait another hour.

Five hours after we parked, our request went through, Lebanon became smaller and smaller behind us and we were finally on our way to Damascus.

Heroes are Ordinary People and War is Everywhere

2007-06-02T01:24:00.000-07:00

"You are heroes!"

We were outside our family houses in southern Lebanon and walking away from a relative as she exclaimed this after us. My dad, my cousin and I looked at each other and then looked back at her.

"What?" I called.

"Well, you are here," she gesticulated, in barely accented English.

We smiled and headed upstairs, to my grandmother's house where my mom and aunts were waiting. We were decidedly not heroes, we agreed, walking up the stone steps I've walked up on visits here my whole life.

Towards the end of May, fighting broke out between the Lebanese Army and militants in the northern Palestinian refugee camp, Nahr al-Bared. The incidents continue into the present and the most current headline I can find online states, "At Least 14 Die in Lebanon Clash."

And three (or is it four?) bombs went off in or near Beirut in the few days before I got here--one in a prominent shopping district that I often go to, even. No one died.

And Hezbollah protesters have been camped in front of Rafik al-Hariri's mosque and grave for weeks, and that whole area of downtown, which I remember two years ago as being rather open and vibrant, has turned into a maze of barbed wire and quiet cafes where uniformed men insist on searching your purse every 100 meters or so.

Finally the other day, in celebration of some anniversary of something, the stretch of road that has been closed since Rafik al-Hariri was killed more than three years ago has been reopened, and a contingency of the Lebanese government is insisting that international findings regarding that murder be presented to an international judicial body, much to the chagrin of Syria and Hezbollah.

The situation here isn't good, everyone seems to agree. From drivers and shopkeepers, I've heard: bad, mixed, sad, hard.

Our first few nights in Lebanon this time around, there was no one out in Beirut at night. Walking from my aunt's apartment down to Hamra Street was like walking through a ghost town. We are talking about Beirut, a city, that doesn't sleep, or, at least, stays up very, very late, partying. And sidewalks of main streets are blocked off with yellow plastic tape which reads, "No Parking."

And driving to different parts of the country in the last week, we've seen a number of bridges destroyed by last year's war, reminders of that bizarre and brief atrocity. In places, wooden platforms have simply been placed over the damaged parts, or slipshod roads have been paved around them. Most dramatic was a bridge going over a substantial gorge that was missing half of it, bent metal rods extending from it's center and out into the air. We all looked out the windows of the car then and up, silent.

I'm having trouble getting at what I'm trying to say about all this.

There has been a little bird on my shoulder telling me that it's not a big deal, that I personally have nothing to be scared of and everything to learn from, that these things ebb and flow here.

I just went to buy a notebook from the bookstore under my aunt's building, and the lady who sold it to me struck up a conversation, asked how long I'd be here. I told her I was leaving in a few days. "Before the war comes," she responded. She was almost casual, but a curtain fell in her eyes, as she said it.

Awake at 4am today

2007-05-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

In Beirut today and I woke up at 4am. Brain and body awake. Ready. And when I was sick of lying there I fumbled around our hotel room in the dark and came to sit in the still lobby with the concierge with bloodshot eyes, silent but for the Lebanese diva quietly wailing from the flatscreen tv on the far wall.

Leaving San Francisco, I had meant to wake up at 4am but accidentally managed to stay up all night. And the airport extended the chaos in my head (from all the drinking). There was a ridiculous line at the Delta gate and I, of course, was standing in front of the most annoying woman in the universe, who felt, for some reason that 5:30am was a good time to make business calls and she ended up leaving all of these annoying voice mails. Justine. And then I got yelled at by an attendant and told her not to yell at me and made feel bad and then I got selected for a security search. And probably it was the lack of sleep but I really felt sick to my stomach at being treated that way, all my belongings rooted through as I sat there and my eyes were brimming. But the guy who searched me turned out to be cool--whispered to me "you should have kept it" when I called out to him after he walked away, leaving a lighter he found in my bag on the table.

And Cincinnati was five hours of wandering from one end of the concourse to the other, debating what to eat and where to sit and when to pee. And then I watched CNN. Buttafuco. George W. Bush. Alito. Bombings in Lebanon. Lebanon. War at the refuge camp in the north. My ears perked and it was gone before they really said anything.

In Paris, the warm, bright air made it feel like we were closer to Lebanon--and chaos regarding the buses and the buildings, and Arabic and French drifting around me. People speaking French to me... After we got off the plane, we walked down a blank hall and came to a big room where we first faced a big screen with the letters and numbers that were our connections racing across it. A uniformed man stood in front of the screen, taking requests. There was no order to it, just people walking up to him and declaring their destinations. Some asked it like a question: "Helsinki?" Some said it directly: "Lyons." "Moscow!" "Beirut???" And for each of us, he would point and it was as if we sailed off the ends of his fingertips, to our flights, to those other worlds.

On my way out of the airport in Beirut, I wanted to take a picture of my family, in my mind I saw the bunch of them waiting for me, their expressions changing almost in uniform as they saw me. But instead they were here and there, spread one-by-one across the throng. And my sister ran to me first, grabbing my bag and we all piled into the car.

Beirut felt like a ghost town last night when we walked to our hotel. And this morning I was walking the streets around 6am when it began to wake up.

Is Redeption Possible?

2007-05-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

It might have been the good company I watched it with and the amazing dinner my roommate C made for dinner that we gobbled down as we started watching it, but, last night, Grey's Anatomy somehow managed to redeem itself. I was so close to not watching ever again. There was no way things could get better.

The previous week's two-hour mess was painful, to say the least. It focused primarily on a new setting and characters as testing grounds for Addison's L.A./private practice spin-off. And all that was merely the tip of a ridiculously large iceberg. The last few weeks on Grey's Anatomy, ever since the ferry accident and Meredith almost dying, have been a hell of painfully contrived pot twists. Like: Meredith and Derek--finally together and boring as ever. When McDreamy stopped being an asshole, he lost his McD-ness. (Maybe it's just me; maybe I have personal issues.) And now all of a sudden they are on the rocks and I have no idea why (again, maybe me). And...George and Izzy insanely in love? Puh-lease...! Those two look like Bert and Ernie when they kiss. Anyway, George is gay! And: Addison and Kurev finally hooked up after teasing us and each other for most of the season, but it was such a freakin' let down. All we saw was rumpled clothes, mussed hair and the pair of them entering and then leaving a closet in Seattle Grace. And in the end, he comes up to her and tells her he's not looking for a girlfriend, a conclusion he came to after hearing the nurse-station gossip from Ava, his up-until-that-point faceless and memory-less patient. And Addison walks away sad. A battered yet beautiful Ally McBeal-like vision in the Seattle night. It made me stop liking her.

Are Ava and Kurev gonna get together, or what? Why is she still hanging around? I'm convinced they will. C (who has a lot more faith in Grey's Anatomy than I do) says it's not going to happen, that it would be too much like what happened last season with Denny. If it does, I hope the writers do a good job with it.

Ava brings me back to the redeption that was this week's episode. They finally fixed her teeth! First she had a mask of scars for a face, and then Sloan made her a new face but her teeth were these black-ish, uneven nubs, but as of yesterday, the woman had full-on pearly whites. Man, was I relieved! Maybe more satisfied by that even than the revelation of her true identity.

Other good things about last night: Miranda was feisty-vicious like we like her. Callie had a bad-ass surgery-room-bone-setting monologue about glacier-climbing. Burke had some interesting realizations about marrying Cristina. (Will it all be worth it when he walks her down the aisle?) McDreamy put on his McD-ness to flirt with a woman at Joe's. The chief's ex-wife showed up at the hospital and nearly got out with out him seeing her until he found her in a pool of her own blood at the end.

I'm not saying last night was perfect. The worst line had to be: "I am a married man!" which George said very seriously to Izzy during their first conversation where she was trying to convince him to stay at Seattle Grace instead of transferring to that other hospital so that he wouldn't have to deal with his love for her, since he is a married man now and all. And the lamest plot point (brought to my attention by my fellow Grey's lover/hater, Lizzy) was the whole thing with Meredith's father, who came to the hospital in a rage and told her not to come to his wife's funeral, that she killed her, etc etc. It was more fun to watch him slap her last week after she gave him the news. Poor Meredith. I miss her. Ever since she drowned, things haven't been the same...

The show last night ended in a series of incredibly jaw-dropping cliff-hangers. At each one, I turned towards my fellow-viewers to see their tv-lit faces with eyes wide in astonishment. Can't hardly wait until next Thursday. (It's the only tv show I watch, OK? It's all I have...)

books on the middle east

2007-05-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

So I'm going on this trip very soon and I'm very excited about it. It'll be my first time out of America since I got back from all that time I spent in Egypt and Lebanon and I'm heading to Lebanon, Syria and Turkey with my family for two and a half weeks. Great! Yay!

I will hang out with my family and go to the beach and eat amazing home-cooked meals in Lebanon. I will smell the jasmines and walk up and down Hamra and look out the window at the Mediterranean as we zip here and there. In Aleppo, I will go the Turkish baths and have all the dirt scrubbed off of me, I will let my father lead me to sites of historical significance, and I'll stock up on olive oil soap at the old market. In Istanbul, I will wander the markets and mosques, and I will read books in cafes. Ok, so carefree Middle East vacation, right? Well, yes...but I think it might be nice to know some more before I go, especially since the Middle East is a hotbed and such. So I asked a bunch of people I know--or wrote an email and bcc'ed a bunch of people I know who I thought might be of help--what books they might recommend. The subject of the email was "the quintessential middle east book?", a query that prompted one friend to respond:

"One book? To explain the past few years? In the whole ME? You craaaazy, man. You might want to narrow your scope a li'l..."

That made me send out an addendum, which said:

"it doesn't have to be one book about the whole thing...but one book
that captures something big about part of it...it could even be a
novel..."

And that initial crazy-calling friend has yet to respond.

Other replies I've received so far include:

"Per your request, I'd recommend Tom Segev's ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE which is
about Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. Though it's not about
recent events per se, the book, which is quite engagingly written (put out
by Metropolitan about seven years ago) takes a complex and sweeping look at
some of the roots of what's going on today in the region. Hell, it's so
sweeping I haven't even finished yet--but I'm planning to, soon."

"K and i suggest lonely planet. rough guide is probably the better
one to find though."

"hi, both are mainly about iraq. you should recall Ajami is a master stylist but can get tedious. he is also considered an apologist for the US, but i think he represents one pole of historical thought among shia (he is one). shia across history are the more imaginative, flexible among major islamic communtities. he's trying to tell the US audeince to get used to them and accept their potential for democracy in iraq, they are not part nor will they become, unless p[erhaps the US messes up, an adjunct of iran, but rather will put their imprint implacably on iraq which the others (kurds and sunnis) can and of necessity will have to accept the space made for them as second bananas. nasr on the other hand argues a more expansive shia revival, which ajami would strongly contest (i dont know how well nasr writes). i havent read either, so i could be missing the mark. you as a reader of nyrb should already be aware of more reflective personal writings in lebanese settings and elsewhere, im just trying to point out political stuff that largely tends away from the polemic.
1)The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami
2)The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future, by Vali Nasr"

"well a good book is
no god but god , i swear by that book
it talks about current events in the last 2 chapters i guess."

"i dont think i can think of the quintessential book. i dont read
many of these "sweep across the region" books i am afraid.

two i can recommend on palestine though:

ali abunimah's "one country" where he beautifully outlines his
argument for a one-state solution.

joseph massad's "the persistence of the palestinian question" which
is a collection of essays that trace the intellectual history of
zionism and its effects on both jews and palestinians.

i dont know if this helps. i know that neither of these are about
your destination spots. but still they are good. ali's book is a
short and readable. joseph's book is much denser but super smart in
both the arguments it makes and the range of material it draws on."

If anyone has additional thoughts, I'd love to hear them. I plan to get started just as soon as I can pull myself out from under this semester.

Pending post: the downfall of Grey's Anatomy (that doctor show on ABC), but before you have to pay for it, I urge you to check out this article in the NYT, which really hits the nail on the head about all that.

Maya

2007-04-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is a photograph of my cousin, a girl named Maya. She is one and half years old, approximately, which is the age, it seems, when human beings begin to notice things around them in the world, begin to be interested in how things work in terms of form and symbol and function.

Maya has a some picture books she is entirely devoted to. Whenever I visit her at home, she brings me one or two to read. She crawls up into my lap and follows along, enthusiastically turning pages and pointing out the things she knows:

"Baher!"

The "H" is hard; this is the word for beach and ocean in Arabic. Maya has seen the baher in her picture books; she knows each fish and bird and Dora represented in those pages. She knows sand, too, playing almost daily in the sandbox at the playground near her house. Maya's already been swimming. Her mother takes her to mommy-baby lessons at the Y, calling the pool "baher" whenever she names it for Maya.

Maya's been to the beach before--here in SF and in Lebanon--but this past Friday, when I accompanied her and her parents to Crissy Field, Maya understood something about the beach for the first time. As we got out of the car and walked up to the trail and alongside the sand, she turned and said, "Baher!", loud and pointing. And then we tried to get her to walk on the sand, but she wouldn't have it, would rather stand between her parents, holding a hand of each and walk along the cement sidewalk, chanting the word. Then finally her dad grabbed her, lifting up into the air and pulling her against him, and I took my shoes off and we all walked towards the Pacific.

When we all sat down on the sand, Maya stayed in the of her father's lap, until he put her down next to him. She was stiff at first, but then we pulled out some plastic molds and shovels and began playing with the sand, encouraging her to join. And then her mom walked out to the water and Maya began to call out to her, who was becoming smaller and smaller, a colorful dot against the brown and blue expanse and I reached my hand out to Maya and got up and we walked towards her. At the water, Maya's mom took her hand and I walked into the edge of the surf. It was cold! Maya came towards the water, too, and when the water touched her she shrieked and then cried. She was devastated for about ten seconds.

We walked back towards her father then and sat down, beginning to play again. Maya curiously removed her shoes, pointing out the sand on her tiny baby feet. We helped her wipe some off and explained to her that it was alright, getting sand in you and on you was part of visiting the beach. "Ees Okay!" she echoed, pointing at her sullied feet. "Ees Okay!"

We spent about two hours sitting out. Maya's dad went for a jog. Her mom told me a story about coming to the same beach right before Maya was born. It was her idea and she loved the smell of the water and walking there even though it was cold and windy that day. Her own mother had been with her and mentioned a few times the possibility of her giving birth right there, at Crissy Field.

Maya began to realize that the whole beach was her sandbox and she wandered off from us in many directions, following pigeons and falling over her own feet, uncertain in the sand. She seemed like a crazy drunk. I guess she was drunk on the beach. On the way home she passed out in her car seat, her head slumped forward. I pushed it back, noticing her cheeks had gotten sun despite all the spf applied. She just slumped forward again, snoring her soft baby snore.

It's been a while since I've posted here. The weather has been lovely. I've been enjoying my new bike. And writing a bit and reading a lot. Today so far a coupla things stick out:

"A passive understanding of linguistic meaning is no understanding at all, it is only the abstract aspect of meaning." (M.M. Bakhtin (who I am officially in love with, btw), from "Discourse in the Novel")

"I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader....In the rapid eye movement of the poet's night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover's name." (Harryette Mullen, the beginning and end of "Sleeping with the Dictionary")

New Wheels

2007-04-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

Actually, the wheels aren't new but off a bike I bought off Craig's List a few months ago now. None of the parts are new, really, all dug up at the Bike Kitchen, an amazing resource here in San Francisco. I don't have much to say since I've already gushed to most of you reading this about it. Here's a shoddy picture of my results. The bumble bee handlebar tape was the final piece. Funny that the Bike Kitchen's volunteer mechanics (who are all very awesome) were all eager to get in on showing me how to wrap it right, and three of them demonstrated different techniques, jumping in on each other, and forgetting about little old me. I guess there are worse ways to demonstrate your worth in the world.

all-nighter?

2007-04-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

Upon being scooted out of a cafe at closing after sitting for three hours furiously reading and thinking, I find myself back in my room, contemplating an all-nighter.

I find myself standing in the doorway of my bedroom, trying to decide whether to work in bed or at my desk. Desk would be wiser, of course, but it's so cold over there near the window and the wooden surface of the work table is in its own special chaos. Bed...is so much more comfortable, and it seems to be what I've opted for, but would someone please save me and bring me a nice armchair? I have a space for it, in the corner near all my books...

Oh, someone please save me! (Prince Charming? You out there?)

I have fantasies of an army of helpers coming along. I would parcel out bits of my work to be done to each one, asking how much time they'd like to put in, tailoring their assignments accordingly. It would be fun (and fun is first!). I could set up a get-Amira's-homework-done factory right here in my room. I'd even provide snacks!

Oh, woeful procrastination, how did you get me to this point? Yes, and now I'm blogging, procrastinating still, high on caffeine, as the hour of my fate draws nearer and nearer...

blurt

2007-04-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

oh my god is there no there other way than operating platform nightmares past midnight in april? and i want a land where passion drips from lips and paranoia is banished but we hold it oh so close, this need to wonder to question to interrogate. i'm full. and there is laughter echoing through the house, like nice music, like keeping me awake. and a stare across the darkened doorway pierces the dusky air, allows a flutter gut, a truth lull.

Lebanese food for infidels

2007-04-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

I live with five other people in a house and tonight we had a potluck. We each invited a few friends. Only one of the five of us avoids eating animal products, and the potluck was entirely vegetarian and mostly even vegan. Of course this made our vegan (who doesn’t entirely like that word) very happy. And it made everyone else happy too, because it was some damn good food. Let’s see if I can list most of it: spicy Thai noodles with vegetables and tofu, fried tofu skins stuffed with rice, meatless sushi (mango, pickles, tofu, avocado, sweet potato), seaweed salad, tasty carrot/broccoli/and-lots-of-other-tasty-vegetables soup, braised golden beets, fake fried chicken in a teriyaki-like sauce, roasted vegetable ravioli with pesto and artichokes, amarinth with veggies…and I feel like there was something else, but I’m just not sure. Oh, amazing berry pie, all tart and gooey and purpley and sweet. And really rich chocolate cake. As everyone was getting their delicious creations in order, I laid out a few simple Lebanese-inspired appetizers to whet our palates. Below, you’ll find a photograph of the ingredients, the “before” picture, if you will:I went to Queen of Sheba market for the canned beans and the tahini when I was in the neighborhood yesterday and then stopped by a little place near my house, in the shadow of Safeway, called Golden Produce for, well, the produce. I had the labneh from a recent trip to Walnut Creek, purchased from the Afghani Market where my uncle and I stopped to pick up kebabs for dinner. The za’atar has been sitting in my cabinet for months, since I stole some from my cousin’s wife’s kitchen cabinet.

Whenever people ask me about cooking Lebanese food, I tell them to remember three basic ingredients: lemon, garlic, and olive oil. This is the simple triumvirate that will get you through any Lebanese meal. Those, and of course your beans, your starches. And there’s usually a pile of meat, too, but, truth be told, there are plenty of dishes to eat without it.

So I’ll start with the bread. Pita is brilliant because you can use it to eat with; it’s the ultimate edible utensil. I bought a bag of wheat pita that I warmed up and cut into halves just before dinner. And tonight, for an added crowd-pleaser, I made pita chips from a bag of white pita. For this, cut each pita loaf into six slices, like a pie and separate each slice into to triangles. Lay the slices flat on a cookie sheet, so that no pieces overlap. Dab each with some olive oil and sprinkle in za’atar. (Za’atar is a Middle Eastern spice mix that varies in its constitution by country; the Lebanese version has sesame seeds and thyme among its ingredients.) Bake until golden brown and cool before serving.

Next, labneh. This labneh was store-bought, like I said, and I just spread it into a bowl and drizzled with olive oil and za’atar and garnished with parsley and black olives. You can also make labneh at home by draining yogurt (skim, low-fat, or full fat) in a cheese cloth in the fridge for a few days.

Okay, hummus. I’ll never forget when I was living in New York after college and somehow I received the knowledge from my mother of how to make hummus and when I served it to friends they were all totally wowed by this dish that I didn’t even really like, that was super-simple to make. But then I started liking it more when and began to realize that the main thing with hummus is that you really have to get a feel for the proportioning the ingredients as you like them according to flavor and texture. I usually roughly go by the can of chic peas. For each can you use, drain about half the water and reserve the rest to dump in your bowl with the chic peas. Than add about a clove of garlic, a big pinch of salt and the juice of one small lemon or half a large one. Also add a big spoon of tahini. Blend until smooth. I just got a hand-blender for Christmas and it works all right and is super-convenient for clean up. Hummus is often traditionally garnished with radishes and paprika. Tonight, I used parsley, olive oil, and olives.

Now, baba ghanoush. This is exactly the same as the hummus, except you use eggplants instead of chic peas, which makes it entirely different. All I could find at Golden Produce were Chinese eggplants—skinny, light-colored little things. I prepared them as I always do, by roasting over the gas range, blackening the outsides as the insides soften. Then after they cool, I peel off the outside layer of skin. Today I had trouble roasting them all the way through, so I saved the hard parts, and threw them into a skillet with a little bit of oil to soften and cook them more. It all turned out pretty good. I had half of an onion I’d caramelized last night, which I threw in for flavor, along with a dash of crushed red pepper. I was using the last of a jar of tahini, so I let it sit in a few tablespoons of hot water a few minutes to get all the paste off the glass.

And, finally, foul. Foul, which just means fava beans, was a big part of my life in Egypt. Heck, it’s a big part of everyone’s lives there. But I still like the Lebanese version better, which is what I made tonight. Now of course with all these canned beans, you can really do it, and buy them dried and soak and boil them and all that, but of course I went for the easy way out and bought a big can of favas. I drained just a little bit of the water and saved the rest, dumping it all out into a pot. I added lemon, garlic, and salt and then heated the whole thing until simmering slightly. Then I turned off the fire, added minced parsley and tomatoes, and put it in bowls.

B aided me by very skillfully cutting up a cucumber into small, round slices to serve as a refresher and a dipping alternative to the pita chips. Yum. Here is the “after.”

And I didn’t take the “after after,” but it would have been a picture of a bunch of very satisfied looking people, sitting slumped in a haphazard ring of chairs in our living room with smiles on their faces, and my Lebanese mezzas were an essential precursor to that bliss.

Orientalism Denied

2007-04-10T23:36:00.000-07:00

And two hours after I posted the below, I find out A's computer died after I left his house. And we didn't save our work!

Orientalism in English Class

2007-04-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

So I have this friend, A, who just moved here from Egypt, where I met him, right? And he's going to school and of course he has to take English, since they need to assimilate him into the system and he needs to get by in this country, or whatever. Well, from all he's told me, his teacher is an idiot and super hands-off and doesn't take much time to help and explain how our insane language works, and does odd things like taking the class to a park near school and says, "Well, now you're here, it's a beautiful place, a beautiful day, no homeless people around, go have fun," and then he leaves. And he makes them write papers without going too deep into how a paper works, doesn't even give them the dreaded five-paragraph essay model, or anything. Instead, he pushes A to go to something called the writing lab where there are people who will supposedly help him.

Okay, moving on. A is writing a paper about Dahab, this beautiful, somewhat forgotten outpost on the middle of the eastern coast of the Sinai, frequented not by out-of-country tourists but moreso by Egyptians and expats living in Egypt and a few Israelis. Dahab's got little hotels on the beach with tents and carpets set up right by the water. It's relaxing...and incredible. Amazing fresh fish dinners to be had on those carpets. There's also snorkeling and horseriding and bedouin treks into the inland desert. It's paradise and it's cheap. You should go. But back to A. Tonight, I was helping him with his final draft since he's ailing in bed and I take a look at what the guy at the writing lab did, which was basically just add a few commas and some sort of fancy sentences, but really miss a lot of other pretty basic grammar stuff and A tells me that his teacher read only the first few broken sentences of his first draft and then the guy went off on how he wants to see! and feel! and hear! and smell! and taste! the place! How he doesn't even care if it exists like that, how he wants a picture of this foreign paradise. So, I'm like, damn, A, let's give this guy his Orientalist wet dream. And we do. We give him bedouin boys on horses and camels frolicking in the sand and men smoking sheeshas under palm trees and the calm waters of the Red Sea. And all those things exist in Dahab...but so many other things exist in Dahab, too. Oh well. Maybe A can write something more interesting and true for his next story. I hope he gets a good grade.