burst my bubble

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

...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

...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

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

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

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

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