I carry a torch...

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...

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?

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

"...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

(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

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

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.