animal insanity

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.

Home is where...

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?

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.)

Very many much

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?

catastrophic days

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.

vacation blues

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.

Maya

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")

Orientalism in English Class

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.